“A ghost is haunting Europe. The ghost of communism.” This was written about one hundred and sixty years ago by Marx and Engels. Their observation seems to have been disproven! Today, over Europe float the ghosts of the dead from the wars of the New Order and the ghosts of those who are dying of hunger in the capitalist paradise.

A new era, new prophets: Marxism is dead! Marx is dead! Communism is dead! The end of the "grand narratives"! The end of the Ideological End of History! Humanity will now live in the age of capitalistic peace (or in the cemetery of ideas and humanism, if you prefer).

The hasty prophecies of the apologists have already been disproven. History continues to be written in blood, and "capitalistic peace" is nothing other than the globalization of capital and its planetary, endogenous contradictions. So what do we do, living in a world that is rapidly moving toward destruction?

Let us not cunningly avoid the problem: The collapse of the socialist camp has dramatically posed the question of the scientific value of Marxism, both as philosophy and as social theory, as well as the question of the possibility of building a socialist society due to the assumed selfish human nature.

So what are those who fought for a socialist society doing? What are the intellectuals and politicians doing in particular? The former rushed to integrate themselves. To mutate into ideologues of the world they once fought against. Others, in the ruins of the lost Jerusalem, are babbling about "democratic socialism" (socialism is by definition democratic) and are fighting for small victories without a strategy for the future.

And finally, some pretend not to understand what has happened. Theoretically unarmed, having turned Marxism into a collection of "quotes," having forgotten the most effective weapon, dialectics, they turn back to the past, while History moves forward with giant steps, toward where?

We are not finished. There is a fourth category: Those who dare to face the grim reality. To understand the causes of destruction. To reclaim the scientific achievements of Marxism and to develop theory to correspond to the tragic realities as well as to the unprecedented possibilities of today's world.

Kiniou, with this book, dares to challenge the current "accepted ideas" that are spread as self-evident truths by the propaganda and manipulation media of the (currently) victorious capitalism. What are these "obvious" ideas? Kiniou attempts to refute nineteen of the total arsenal of capitalism.

These are some of the "self-evident" ideas that the ideologues of late crisis capitalism attribute to Marx, to Marxism, and to the ideal of communism. In what way, then, does Kiniou refute these ideological propaganda? First, without making an apology for Marxism. Without utilizing Marx. Without hiding weaknesses, gaps, mistakes, and outdated ideas of Marxism.

At the same time, highlighting specifically the real views of Marxism that are distorted, absolutized, or concealed by the "organic intellectuals" of capitalism. And this with clarity, with knowledge of the texts, with a concise, sharp style, with understandable language, in contrast to the ornate ramblings that occasionally come to us from France and that some accept as the essence of wisdom or even revolutionary theory.

Kiniou's book, accessible to the general public, while losing nothing of the rigor of philosophical discourse, is an excellent "initiation" into fundamental issues of Marxism, useful both for the beginner and for those who are re-examining their philosophical views critically.

(from the preface in the Greek edition by Eftychis Bitsakis)

The book was published in France in 2007, before the global capitalist crisis, became a publishing success, and was reissued in 2009. Reading it, one realizes that Marx's thought, free from the prejudices that obscure it, has an astonishing relevance today.