First, Nikos Dimou formulated in this essay of 1985 the position that the misery of Greece is not due to the bourgeoisie (as the Left used to say at the time) but to the complete absence of an organized bourgeois class. The opinion about the weakness and almost non-existence of our bourgeois class was developed a few years later by the significant and prematurely lost Panagiotis Kondylis.

This essay has been reprinted many times (this is the ninth edition) because it not only preserved its significance, but today, thanks to the crisis, it has gained even greater relevance.