Description du livre
I begin with a « personal note : I first read Marx when I was 20 years of age and then reread him every twenty years at moments that corresponded to major changes in the course of history. In 1950, hidden behind the East-West conflict, was taking shape the first Southern awakening--which was to be revealed in the 1955 Bandung Conference; in 1970, as director of the IDEP in Dakar, I formed the project of making it a center for training and discussion that would contribute to radicalization of the way forward opened by the African and Asian peoples' reconquests of their independences; in 1990 the problem was to know what could be salvaged from the shipwreck of the twentieth century's historic socialism; in 2010 the implosion of the system that had declared itself « the end of history » opens new possibilities for new ways forward whose outcomes are yet to be discovered.
My readings at each of those moments were directed by my concern to respond to the current challenge. And every time I discovered that Marx was coming to our aid with incomparable power. Obviously, on condition of extending the radical social critique that he had begun, rather than to be content with exegesis of his texts.(...)