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In their recent book, Marx, prénom: Karl (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval put forward the idea of a contradictory Marx. They argue that his work attempted to bring together two heterogeneous elements: a particularly bleak vision of capitalism as a powerful system endowed with the capacity to reproduce itself and extend its hegemony interminably, and a conception of revolutionary will focused on the purportedly emancipatory action of the working class. The article examines the difficulties inherent in such an interpretation and it seeks to demonstrate that what we can understand as Marx’s reservations concerning such a view of the question renders his work somewhat less strange and less contradictory than Dardot and Laval would seem to suggest.