For the past hundred years the marxists have posed the chief political alternative for capitalistic societies. They have been the successful revolutionaries of Russia, China, and Yugoslavia. They are now the technicians and philosophers whose appeals to the underdeveloped nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America may be decisive.

Here they speak for themselves—in documents by the leading theorists from young Marx to Mao Tse-tung and Khrushchev.

As a guide through these theories, C. Wright Mills, author of such classic and best-selling studies as The Power Elite, maps out the essential ideas of marxism, which he then examines critically. He sketches their historical development—the divisions and revisions, the successes and failures—and points to their implications for the present, and the future.

This book is “a primer,” a primer on marxisms, written mainly for those who do not really know these philosophies, and who do not pretend to know them. It is also written (hopefully, I suppose) for those who are already familiar with marxism but who believe that marxism as a whole has been “gobbled up by the communists” and accordingly is not for them; for those who hold to the notion that after all it is “merely ideology,” and that, nowadays especially, ideology is at an end—or ought to be. It is also for those who are bored with politics and political philosophy, who have withdrawn to or never emerged from a strictly private life. If this book does no more than push such people a bit closer to the experience of being full citizens, it will have fulfilled its central purpose.