In 1976, the English philosopher Perry Anderson invited "Western Marxism" to declare its distance and independence from the caricature of Marxism represented by the officially Marxist and socialist countries of the East. For its part, in the middle of the Cold War and the success of communism as the guiding force of the anti-colonial revolutions, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wondered where the communism that the "western proletariat" had been built, which aspired to the dissolution of the State apparatus. Was it not rather that Western Marxism had missed its appointment with anti-colonial struggles?
The split between Western Marxism and Eastern Marxism may not be due, as Anderson argued, to the Stalinist autocracy, but could be traced back to the decisive days of 1917, despite the apparent unity of both in the face of the carnage of world war and in against the capitalist-imperialist system. What if this gap obeyed the theoretical and political limits of Western Marxism, despite being so well equipped on the academic plane? The study of its political and philosophical history allows us to propose the perspectives of a rebirth on new bases of Marxism in the West.