Malcolm Read offers an overview and critical assessment of the work of Spanish Marxist Juan Carlos Rodríguez read through his most recent book, De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de marxismo. Ranging over the work of Poulantzas, Roy Bhaskar, Marx, Althusser, and Brecht, Read seeks to substantiate the claim that any Marxist analysis worthy of its name should start from the notion of exploitation; to depart from the characteristically bourgeois opposition between subject/object, agent/structure, and so on is, in effect, to “sink (...) Marxism.”. (shrink)