Shanin's work on communalism, cooperation, the commons, his critique of evolutionism, issues of decolonization, modernization, development/degrowth, informal economy, and more, serves as a reference point that cannot be ignored by Marxist or libertarian approaches.

Marx's work in his later period seeks to understand the global system that arises from the expansion of capitalist dominance across the planet; a system where, in contradiction and/or complementarity, elements of social formations that have originated from different historical paths coexist, reflecting a great variety of modes of production. In short, the focus of late Marx is on the "peripheries of capitalism."

Shanin, with his text on eccentric economies, takes an additional step: Starting from Chayanov's theory of peasant societies, he attempts to study phenomena such as the informal economy, self-employment, and others, within the capitalist metropolises themselves.

Shanin radically challenges the theory of progress, now defining with greater clarity the object of his challenge: Progress is titled as a multiple rise in which the inevitable, the rational, and the good are identified, and all societies move from the heterogeneity of inadequacies and irrationalities towards the true, the logical, and the uniform.

Socialism, according to Shanin, conveyed a message of communalism, which however degenerated into state collectivism. Socialism collapsed because it was drained into economy and science; because it lost its moral and humanitarian content and replaced it with an ideology of development, with the increase of economic and other indicators.

Unfortunately, not only Shanin's work but also the discussion about late Marx remained unknown for entire decades to the educated public of the Greek Left. At least since the 1980s and beyond, communalism, cooperation, self-management, as well as informal economy, self-employment, peasants and their world, were essentially outside of its interests.