In this collection of essays Althusser travels an arc of reflection that extends from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s. Its ground of historical possibility is defined by the 1968 world revolution, the crisis of liberal Eurocentric thinking and the Liberation of Marx's theoretical revolution from the Stalinist ballast: these three lines of escape formed the exciting triangle in which the richest perspectives of Marxist theory operated as a destabilizing vector of theories and conceptual models inherited from the past. Marxism then began a new creative phase of epistemological and theoretical growth and innovation: the theoretical diagram that starts from Althusser passes through the Italian operasimo and leads to French post-structuralism, decolonial thinking and contemporary feminism finds in these essays an exuberant nursery of proposals and counterproposals, which have not ceased to inspire their reflection. In them we see how Althusser sought to provide Marxist theory with materialist credentials appropriate to the complexity of his theoretical object - the class struggle policy of proletarian subjects - and scientific and rigorous protocols suitable for thinking about social reality and the reproduction of domination in contemporary capitalism. Both tasks were conceived to make possible a revolutionary policy capable of articulating practically the power of the productive subjects exploited in globalized capitalism and capable of transforming current social structures at the root. Althusser also thinks of the red thread of modernity in its most powerful subversive elements, tracing points of the parable that, starting from Machiavelli, passes through Spinoza to reach Marx and Lenin.