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Standard historical materialism, evolutionary and progressive, having the modes of production succeed to one another at the level of societies – a simple inversion of Hegelianism – is today totally abandoned, discredited by the failure of the countries of real socialism. However, two Marxist philosophers, Jacques Bidet and Kojin Karatani, have recently sought to reconstruct philosophies of history on a Marxist basis, by drawing on the work of world-systems analysis, which had produced world histories of capitalism critical of the Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism of developmental Marxism. What conceptual rearrangements have been necessary to achieve this articulation? In both cases, the integration of the concepts and historical results of the analysis of world-systems has been conditioned to a deconstruction of the structure/superstructure dualism which constituted the core of historical materialism. However, when it comes the historical roots of the perspectives to embody communism, the two authors diverge on the role that Europe played in it.