ABSTRACT
The crisis of Marxism as an intellectual and political project has been brought to a head by the collapse of the regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. These events were overwhelmingly interpreted as entailing the end of the significance not only of ‘Communism’ but also of Karl Marx’s thought. More important is to ask whether Marx could have accepted the sort of ‘spin’ put on his work by the theorists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The assertion of a unifying theme itself is controversial, entailing a denial of the interpretation of Louis Althusser who insists on an epistemological break in Marx between a humanist and a scientific problematic. The chapter argues that for a critical integration of Marx’s writing seen through the prism of his selective appropriation of aspects of the Aristotelian tradition. Marx’s belief in the eventual supercession of capitalist society by a socialist form is also grounded in Aristotelian assumptions.
