When we reread Marx nowadays, that reading has to address two salient and related features of our recent experience. The internal collapse of the Communist state apparatus in so many countries has left behind a variety of groups in those countries struggling to attain or rather to reattain the standpoint of civil society. At the same time the distinctively contemporary social theorizing of our own political culture, theorizing which gives a voice to the now dominant forms of power, either asserts or presupposes that the standpoint of civil society cannot be transcended. What then was and is the standpoint of civil society?