Reading Capital: The Complete Edition

by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar (Introduction), Roger Establet (Contributor)

A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first time

Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, maintained that Marx’s project could only be revived if its scientific and revolutionary novelty was thoroughly divested of all traces of humanism, idealism, Hegelianism and historicism. In order to complete this critical rereading, Althusser and his students at the École normale supérieure ran a seminar on Capital , re-examining its arguments, strengths and weaknesses in detail, and it was out of those discussions that this book was born.

Previously only available in English in highly abridged form, this edition, appearing fifty years after its original publication in France, restores chapters by Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière. It includes a major new introduction by Étienne Balibar.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, Sociology, History

576 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) was one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th Century. As they seemed to offer a renewal of Marxist thought as well as to render Marxism philosophically respectable, the claims he advanced in the 1960s about Marxist philosophy were discussed and debated worldwide. Due to apparent reversals in his theoretical positions, to the ill-fated facts of his life, and to the historical fortunes of Marxism in the late twentieth century, this intense interest in Althusser's reading of Marx did not survive the 1970s. Despite the comparative indifference shown to his work as a whole after these events, the theory of ideology Althusser developed within it has been broadly deployed in the social sciences and humanities and has provided a foundation for much “post-Marxist” philosophy. In addition, aspects of Althusser's project have served as inspiration for Analytic Marxism as well as for Critical Realism. Though this influence is not always explicit, Althusser's work and that of his students continues to inform the research programs of literary studies, political philosophy, history, economics, and sociology. In addition, his autobiography has been subject to much critical attention over the last decade. At present, Althusser's philosophy as a whole is undergoing a critical reevaluation by scholars who have benefited from the anthologization of hard-to-find and previously unpublished texts and who have begun to engage with the great mass of writings that remain in his archives.

Reviews

[Gerald Sigmund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fine I'll read the 3million pages of capital

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a frustrating read because while there were certainly some interesting insights they were nearly always obscured by so much needlessly jargon-y, pretentious fluff as to come off as intentionally unclear. So maybe my biggest gripe with it is stylistic but even a lot of the substance I didn’t find very illuminating because of how off-base it seemed from what Marx was doing in Capital. I’m pretty confident if Marx read Reading Capital, he wouldn’t recognize much of his own project in it. So if you want to understand Capital better, I don’t recommend this one but if you want to become familiar with an admittedly important strain in Western Marxism or you’re interested in Marxian critical theory, sure give it a go.

That being said, I could get on board with some of the broader overarching arguments of the book. Eg. that there is a major break in Marx’s thought between his earlier “humanist” (here termed: “anthropological”) works and his mature political economy (which Althusser et. al. consider “structuralist”); that Marx himself may not have fully appreciated or conceptualized this break; that the dialectical transition between modes of production does not unfold according to the Hegelian logic of an “expressive totality”; or that Marx provides a new criteria for an old problem in the theory of history: how to “periodize” it…

There are a few more but often times the authors of the essays in this collection take these important insights into such crazy directions described in such arcane verbiage that I’d lose the thread of the argument. I’ll just note some of the more interesting/useful points discussed in the individual essays:

Althusser’s first essay “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy” argues for a “symptomatic reading” of Capital which examines what the text doesn’t say as much as what it does and asks ‘what are the presuppositions of the text which lead to the relevant omissions?’ Althusser feels this is in line with Marx’s own method of reading the classical economists, particularly Smith and Ricardo. Marx identified a lacunae in the classical system (the lack of a distinction between labor and labor-power) precisely because he read those authors symptomatically. When the classicals dissected value, they talked about the costs of reproducing the worker, correctly explaining it in terms of a subsistence wage determined by non-market forces but because they lacked a distinction between the ‘potential to work’ and the ‘work itself’, they called this cost the ‘value of labor’ when really it was the value of labor-power. Thus, by filling this gap, Marx makes explicit a theory of exploitation already implicit in the discoveries of the classical economists.

Althusser also explains Marx’s epistemology as a “production” of theoretical objects. That is, the Marxian theory of knowledge is that thought never crosses the boundary between some ideal and real realms. Thought is always ideal and the progress towards thought’s correspondence to the world is a process of indeterminate abstractions to determinate (concrete) ones.

Ranciere’s essay further develops the argument that there is a veritable epistemological break between the young and mature Marx corresponding to a change from an anthropological theory to a structuralist one. The main idea is that the young Marx’s Hegelian vestiges committed him to a theory of alienation in which the determining element in society is some kind of collective subject whereas, in later Marx, this is displaced by a non-subjective “structure”--a social relation whose effectivity determines the agents of production, who are no longer subjects but merely “bearers” of certain social functions. This leads to Macherey’s extremely difficult essay which, as far as I can tell, posits “value” as the name of a certain problem, not thing, in capitalism: the problem of the incommensurability of use-value and exchange-value which are nevertheless equalized in exchange.

Althusser’s second essay “The Object of Capital” is not any easier. The main point is that we cannot think the object of capital in either empiricist or Hegelian terms because both confuse the “real” and the “thought about the real” in a way which reproduces the dualistic impasses present in traditional philosophy. I think Balibar’s essay may have been the most intelligible and while I don’t agree with his formulation, I at least understand it. Balibar wants to say that an enduring question in any theory of history is how to periodize it and Marx’s contribution is to posit the mode of production as the proper criteria. But he also wants to say this contribution was so revolutionary as to upend the entire problematic of historiography—of what it means to periodize at all. And there he loses me.

Likewise, in the latter parts of the essay he argues that Marx’s theory of the transition between modes of production, while dialectical, is not a Hegelian transition of “expression”. In Hegel the transition between categories is effected by a prior form merely expressing its own contradictions revealing that what comes next was always already implied by (or within) what came before. When applied to history, this becomes deterministic and Balibar wants to maintain a role for contingency, yet I’m never convinced he resolves the dilemma of avoiding a deterministic Hegelian dialectic without lapsing into a history in which brute facts remain causally unconnected from each other. Nevertheless, his analysis of relations of production and productive forces and their relation to the categories of property, real appropriation, formal and real subsumption were extremely interesting. I will have to go back and review them. I think they were the highlight of the book for me.

Finally, Establet’s concluding essay traces the transitions in the text of Capital between different levels of analysis. These comments were also valuable for the most part. He relies on relevant textual examples from all three volumes to highlight the moves Marx makes from production to circulation, or from production’s immediate process to the process in context of the whole, or from a rhetorical presentation to a scientific presentation of ideas.

So overall, this book is a mixed bag for me. If you can weed through the obscure style and occasionally bizarre interpretations of an already difficult book, there’s something worthwhile here.

[Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Althusser and friends are finally back in full English translation and ready to save Marxist theory from the scourges of humanism and bourgeois ideology. Reading Capital combines Kantian epistemology with French structuralism to provide a new view on Marxism and historical materialism. The foundation of this Kantian project is the reassertion of the distinction between phenomena and noumena as a materialist distinction between “knowledge” and the “real”. The failure to make this distinction between knowledge and the real is the basis of the authors’ critique of empiricism, historicism, and more. The majority of this very repetitive text is an elaboration and restatement of this distinction between knowledge and reality.

Althusser's Scientificity:
Althusser’s first concern is the production of knowledge or what he also refers to as a “knowledge-effect.” The production of knowledge takes place by taking the raw material of intuition and representation (Anschauung und Vorstellung) and forming them into concepts (Begriffe) through which we understand the real. The difference between the concepts through which we understand the world and the world as it really is (in Kantian terms, the noumena or the Ding an sich) is the primary distinction between knowledge and the real that I earlier referred to. If we do not acknowledge this distinction, then we are incapable of knowing whether or not we understand the world ideologically and whether our study of capitalism is ideological. Thus, for Althusser, the significance and role of science is to produce the correct concepts (Begriffe) by which we can grasp (begreifen) the real.

The way we produce these scientific concepts is through what Althusser calls “symptomatic reading.” For Althusser, all knowledge is produced within a certain “theoretical field” or “theoretical problematic.” This theoretical problematic is the space in which all knowledge is produced and the framework that gives form to all produced knowledge. Therefore, this field sets limits to what kinds of knowledge can possibly be produced. The only way to break through these limits and create new theoretical fields from which we can produce new knowledge is through symptomatic reading. Symptomatic reading means reading the second level of discourse that lies within the first obvious reading we make. For Althusser, this means reading the “lacunae” in the texts, the gaps that open us up to developing new concepts and opening up new theoretical fields for science. Althusser uses the example of Marx’s reading of Adam Smith and claims that Marx read through the gaps of Smith’s discourse on labour to create the new concept of labour-power, founding a new scientific theoretical field along with it. These gaps are so important for Althusser because ideology is about the closure of these gaps while science is committed to their opening. Althusser's structuralist take on ideology is fundamentally about limits. While ideology closes the gaps to keep the borders of the theoretical field intact, science looks for the gaps to go beyond the ideology and find new theoretical fields beyond the boundaries of the previous one. In finding this new theoretical field, science can produce knowledge that could not arise in the previous theoretical field. These new concepts and theoretical fields are so precious to Althusser’s notion of science because they provide new knowledge (what he also refers to as “Generality III”). If we aren't constructing new knowledge, then we are simply mirroring the dominant ideology that we are always-already immersed in and reproducing the existing relations of production without finding new ways to escape them. (This notion of ideology as a trap within a mirror relation is one of the many moments where Althusser shows his substantial debt to Lacan, which cannot be explored here).

Structuralist Marxism:
What I just explained was Althusser as a scientific Marxist. Although much of this book is focused on this scientificity, his more important theoretical contribution to Marxism is his development of structuralist Marxism. Orthodox Marxism has normally relied on the “base-superstructure” model of society. In this model, the base includes everything related to material production (means of production, relations of production, capital, etc.) while superstructure includes all other aspects of society such as culture, ideology, the state, religion, and more. In the Orthodox Marxist conception of this model, the base has a strictly one-way causal relationship in determining the superstructure. In other words, all features of a society are determined by its material conditions. Therefore, according to Orthodox Marxism, leftists have no need to worry themselves about the state or culture and only have to wage class war on the level of material production. Once the proper material conditions have been achieved, everything else impeding the development of communist society will figure itself out.

Althusser challenges the use of this mechanistic causality in Marxism. Borrowing from Saussure and the structuralist tradition that the linguist spawned, Althusser conceives of capitalism as a structure which includes a vast multiplicity of elements all mutually acting on each other. The economic no longer has a linear causal effect on the political, ideological, and cultural – instead, they all effect each other and these elements cannot even be strictly defined as “economic” or “political.” This causality, just like in Saussurean linguistics, is metonymic. In other words, the constitution of the structure and the elements themselves exist through a causality of contiguity; elements themselves are constructed by their existence in relation to the other elements within the structure. We do not taken a set of given elements and then organize them, but instead the elements are themselves are constituted by the way they are organized (what the authors refer to as the structure's “articulation” (Gliederung)). If any element in the structure shifts or changes, then this results in a change in the overall articulation of the structure and thus changes all the other elements of the structure as well.

This new way of conceiving of a mode of production has important implications that upend the usual Orthodox Marxist model. In that model, action on the level of economic base was the only imperative because it was the original “cause” that led to all the other “effects” in society. But structuralism refuses this kind of linear causality and sees every “effect” as something important and related in the constitution of a mode of production. A revolutionary practice aimed towards the ends of socialism cannot simply be a class struggle on the level of economic. Instituting socialism means class struggle on a vast array of societal levels, and we must analyze all of the political, ideological, and cultural aspects necessary for a new egalitarian mode of production.

In addition, Althusser's structuralism offers the best formulation for anti-subjectivism and anti-psychology in Marxist theory: the concept of bearers (Träger). Althusser borrows this from the 1857 Introduction (which the authors cite more often than Capital itself!) and expands upon it through a structuralist reading. If elements of the structure of the mode of production can never be neutrally isolated outside their position within the structure, then this also means that human individuals cannot be considered isolated monadic psychological subjects. Instead, these subjects are actually formed by their position in the mode of production and “bear” (tragen) the economic function that has been assigned to them within the social relations of the mode of production. This rejection of the given human subject not only rids us of the myth of homo economicus, but also dispenses with bourgeois ideologies of the richness”of the individual's “inner life.” Although Marxist theory will always plagued with bourgeois values due to the limitedness of the means of theoretical production (i.e. who has access to education and free time to produce theory), Althusser makes a great accomplishment here by placing anti-psychology as a result that naturally follows from his objective theory of a mode of production.

Although Althusser mostly sticks to a typical structuralist formula, he does challenge it by breaking down the duality of synchrony and diachrony. As Saussure initially laid out, synchrony is the analysis of a structure at a given state in time while diachrony is the analysis of the temporal progression of these structures. Althusser rejects this dualism for a theory of history because it excludes temporality from a synchronic analysis. Althusser collapses diachrony into synchrony, thus embedding temporality within the synchronic structure itself. Although this is conceptually very cool and difficult to disagree with, this is one of the several moments in the book where I came across an intellectually convincing and interesting idea, but found it so abstract that I didn't know what to do with it. Balibar integrates this idea into his theory of transitions between modes of production, claiming that during periods of transition, several modes of production coexist and their elements do not correspond to each other. Again, this is abstractly quite cool, but this seems pretty similar to what we would call “mixed economies” in common parlance and I think this would still be possible to theorize this without putting subsuming diachrony under synchrony. Regardless, I won't put this forward as a serious criticism given that there clearly are smarter people than I who found plenty of value in this formulations and did useful analyses from them.

My larger question for structuralist Marxism is directed towards its politics, a topic that Marxism may never neglect. Even though Althusser's structuralism opens up new sites for potential class struggle, I fail to see how this class struggle can be effective if we discard class consciousness. In other words, Althusser shows us new places to engage in class conflict, but takes out the motor force that fuels the proletariat in this conflict. Although in other texts Althusser has said that “it is the masses who make history,” he doesn't seem to provide any ideas as to how these masses are supposed to mobilized. This leads to another more general complaint I have about his structuralist theory in general. Althusser's theory of a mode of production in which every sphere of life is constantly involved with all the others leads to such insane levels of complexity that one must wonder how constructing concepts can even be possible. Although this is the explicit goal of Althusser's scientificism, the idea of producing concepts when there are a million things to be accounted for sounds near impossible.

One final remark on the difficulty (because if you've made it this far into the review, you probably have some actual interest in reading this): Althusser's introduction is at times near unreadable, but I'd suggest you push through after giving the words a little contemplation. The introduction is far too compact, but begins to make sense as the following sections elaborate on it. In fact, at a point this elaboration hits repetition and the text becomes completely readable – albeit rather tedious.

In conclusion, Reading Capital has offered many possibilities for Marxist theory in its new formulation of a mode of production as a complex structure of interlocking systems and its rejection of an analysis that sees elements in isolation. My main issue with this work was that it offered possibilities without something more tangible that I felt could truly deepen my understanding of Marx. Given Althusser's dominance during this book's publication and the following decades, I can probably only blame this on my own lack of imagination, but Reading Capital, despite its 530 pages, ultimately left me wanting something more.

[William West · Rating 3 out of 5]

This extremely influential text has aged poorly exactly because of how influential its been in Marxist discourse. Many of its key claims, which were eye-brow raising in 1965, are generally accepted by interpreters of Marx today. What makes this book a somewhat frustrating read is that Althusser's writing style is far denser here even than in his other key works, and yet there seems to be less ideas to sink one's teeth into than in, say, the author's “For Marx.”

First off its most influential, and today least interesting suggestion is that Marx, in Das Kapital, proposes a new way of examining society not as a relation between individuals or even classes, but as a structure shaped by class domination, which has many distinct and complex levels but is brought together not by one overriding power, such as the brute force of any one class, but by many factors, the most significant of which is the economy. Althusser sometimes referred to this conception of society as a "topography"- suggesting a layering of complex levels, like shifting tectonic plates, independently following their own laws, yet in doing so collectively shaping a world to which they all belong and which, even if that world is pre-supposed by the levels that form it, shapes the levels' relation to one another. This conception of society and history Althusser opposed to the Hegelian and Hegelian-Marxist notion of history as an unfolding totality, the inevitable end result of which is Knowledge itself.

Thus, Althusser was labeled a “Marxist Structuralist” although the author did not consider himself a Structuralist. In the near-fifty years since the book's publication, the discourses of Marxism and Structuralism, in no small part due to this book's influence, have become so intertwined that almost noone who is familiar with these lines of thought would not have come to think of Marx and Das Kapital as forerunners of the work of thinkers such as Saussure and Levi-Strauss.

Today the book's most interesting, if least clearly proposed, ideas concern the ways in which a new form of knowledge, which Althusser thinks Das Kapital constitutes, comes into being. Any new form of knowledge, or affect of knowledge, is born from older forms of knowledge, and thus that the thinker who discovers a new knowledge affect can never entirely understand this knowledge, can not truly speak in the language of the new understanding that the thinker has discovered.

In “For Marx” Althusser suggested that the work of the young Marx was not Marxist but Hegelian idealist. Only Marx's late work, such as Das Kapital, constituted Marxist thought, a new way to understand social relations. In Reading Capital, Althusser proposes that Marx, in discovering a new knowledge affect, could not himself fully understand his own discovery. It is for this reason that Marx proposes, at the end of Volume 1, that communism will constitute a negation of negation which is, as Mao had previously pointed out, a wholly idealist notion that proposes an inevitable “end of history.” This idea can lead a “Marxist” to the counter-revolutionary notion that struggle is unnecessary and that one can simply wait for the class consciousness of the masses to catch up to that of the “vanguard”.

Marx must be forgiven for this indiscrepancy, Althusser writes, because he was all alone with his discovery. His momentary relapse into idealism was simply the all-too-human response of working with a knowledge affect that noone, including Marx himself, fully understood yet. Althusser closes by saluting Marx's courage and solitude. Marx was all alone with his discovery right until the end of his life, when he was still trying to complete Das Kapital.

These two branches of thought in the book- the suggestion that Kapital represents a new, structural way to understand society, and the ways that a new thought emerges from an old one, are only seemingly disparate. The "new world" of Marxist thought that Kapital represents still contains an idealist "plate" operating under its own laws, yet transformed and transforming by and of its new materialist world.

[Tiarnán · Rating 2 out of 5]

98% of this book is irrelevant for contemporary Marxists, with Althusser merely using Marx as a platform for showcasing Canguilhem/Bachelard's materialist conception of epistemology, which isn't as interesting an insight as it was when first outlined in 'For Marx'. Balibar joins in with a heroic but doomed attempt to offer an Althusserian (or structuralist) notion of temporal dynamics and change/transition, without the use of the sullied Hegelian/humanist categories of 'history', 'the subject', 'man', etc. Yeah, good luck with that (at one point he seriously recommends Lenin's understanding of revolutionary Russia as encompassing five modes of production simultaneously as a theoretical model - this is literally the opposite of the scientific ideal of parsimony).

The relevant 2% however lies in Balibar's section on 'Modes of Production and Periodisation', and the couple of interesting pages where he lays out some useful and rigorous terms for how to think about relations of appropriation within different historical modes of production, drawing on Marx's actual categories in the various volumes of Capital + the Grundrisse. This short section became quite influential among Marxist sociologists and historians of the late 60s and 70s, in debates over 'development', modes of production, and the transition controversy, and it still holds up today.

To summarise: this book is mostly esoteric, dry, and theoretically dated (in its structuralism and its quasi-positivist epistemology), and it includes an awful lot of waffling. Only recommended for completists of French Theory and/or Marxist social theory debates (aka nerds, like myself).

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

To think that this is a transcription of a seminar... Balibar was 22. Of this period Badiou later wrote that Paris in the 1960s was like Athens 5th century BC.

[Ike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Althusser is an absolute nut. Sound and fury signifying nothing.

[Medicinefckdream]

the, uh, fuckin, uh profit motive is like the sole motor of the development of production in capitalism, man. fucking, shit.

[Sajid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both Althusser and Balibar's anti-humanist readings of Marx are quite succesful in decoding some of the theoretical problems of our time. Identifying the traditional readings of Marxism as many versions of Ideological readings of Marxism,they explore how theory is much more than all the chatter about praxis versus theory. Rather theory itself is a practice, a theoretical practice. So from these theoretical Marxist analysis we get structural revision of concepts like mode of production, reproduction, means of production, labour-power,surplus value etc. What fascinated me most is the concept of 'theory of history'--where history as we see it is itself seen as ideological and how a Marxist theoretical approach can guage out these ideological bindings off it and show how the time of different mode of production follow its own peculiar form of temporality. For example,the capitalist mode of production is a rupture or a dislocation from the earliest mode of production, and it maintains its own form of temporality(like creating and solving crisis or contradiction). Even the social relations of production of this mode of production provide a hint on its nature. And in this structural relation notions of human subject,alienation and historical agents are quite irrelevant and unnecessary,as they are the effects of structure, rather than the genesis of it.

[B. H.]

I only read half of this book (the Althusser chapters) but I am going to count it all for all the other 300-page-a-week readings I am doing but can't count towards my reading goal.

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
Karl Marx
London, 18 March 1872

“Of course, we have all read, and all do read Capital. For almost a century, we have been able to read it every day, transparently, in the dramas and dreams of our history, in its disputes and conflicts, in the defeats and victories of the workers’ movement which is our only hope and our destiny. Since we ‘came into the world’, we have read Capital constantly in the writings and speeches of those who have read it for us, well or ill, both the dead and the living, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, Gramsci, the leaders of the workers’ organizations, their supporters and opponents: philosophers, economists, politicians. We have read bits of it, the ‘fragments’ which the conjuncture had ‘selected’ for us. We have even all, more or less, read Volume One, from ‘commodities’ to the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’.
But some day it is essential to read Capital to the letter. To read the text itself, complete, all four volumes, line by line, to return ten times to the first chapters, or to the schemas of simple reproduction and reproduction on an expanded scale, before coming down from the arid table-lands and plateaus of Volume Two into the promised land of profit, interest and rent. And it is essential to read Capital not only in its French translation (even Volume One in Roy’s translation, which Marx revised, or rather, rewrote), but also in the German original, at least for the fundamental theoretical chapters and all the passages where Marx’s key concepts come to the surface.
That is how we decided to read Capital. The studies that emerged from this project are no more than the various individual protocols of this reading: each having cut the peculiar oblique path that suited him through the immense forest of this Book. And we present them in their immediate form without making any alterations so that all the risks and advantages of this adventure are reproduced; so that the reader will be able to find in them new-born the experience of a reading; and so that he in turn will be dragged in the wake of this first reading into a second one which will take us still further.But as there is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of.
We were all philosophers. We did not read Capital as economists, as historians or as philologists. We did not pose Capital the question of its economic or historical content, nor of its mere internal ‘logic’. We read Capital as philosophers, and therefore posed it a different question. To go straight to the point, let us admit: we posed it the question of its relation to its object, hence both the question of the specificity of its object, and the question of the specificity of its relation to that object, i.e., the question of the nature of the type of discourse set to work to handle this object, the question of scientific discourse.”

“The Young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts read the human essence at sight, immediately, in the transparency of its alienation. Capital, on the contrary, exactly measures a distance and an internal dislocation (décalage) in the real, inscribed in its structure, a distance and a dislocation such as to make their own effects themselves illegible, and the illusion of an immediate reading of them the ultimate apex of their effects: fetishism.”

“Such is Marx’s second reading: a reading which might well be called ‘symptomatic’ (symptomale), in so far as it divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same movement relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first. Like his first reading, Marx’s second reading presupposes the existence of two texts, and the measurement of the first against the second. But what distinguishes this new reading from the old one is the fact that in the new one the second text is articulated with the lapses in the first text.”

“However imperfect and provisional it may have been, my ‘reading’ of Lenin’s texts was only possible on condition that it posed these texts the theoretical question whose active answer they represented, although their level of existence was far from purely theoretical (since these texts describe, for practical purposes, the structure of the conjuncture in which the Soviet Revolution exploded). This ‘reading’ enabled me to sharpen the question, and then to pose the question thus transformed to other, equally symptomatic texts existing at a different level, to Mao Zedong’s text, and also to a methodological text like Marx’s 1857 Introduction.”

“Knowledge working on its ‘object’, then, does not work on the real object but on the peculiar raw material, which constitutes, in the strict sense of the term, its ‘object’ (of knowledge), and which, even in the most rudimentary forms of knowledge, is distinct from the real object.”

“But we have gone far enough in this work for a return to the difference between the order of the object of knowledge and that of the real object to enable us to approach the problem whose index this difference is: the problem of the relation between these two objects (the object of knowledge and the real object), a relation which constitutes the very existence of knowledge.”

“I say that this posing of the ‘problem’ of knowledge is ideological in so far as this problem has been formulated on the basis of its ‘answer’, as the exact reflection of that answer, i.e., not as a real problem but as the problem that had to be posed if the desired ideological solution was to be the solution to this problem.”

“As Marx put it so profoundly in The German Ideology, ‘Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification.”

“This expression knowledge effect constitutes a generic object which includes at least two sub-objects: the ideological knowledge effect and the scientific knowledge effect.”

Louis Althusser, June 1965

“Impoverishment is the economic fact from which Marx begins.”

“This equation indicates to us in fact the principle of the contradiction, the separation of the human essence from the human subject.”

“The absent cause to which we are referred is the social relations of production.”

“Here we see that strictly speaking there is not a commodity-object but a commodity-form.”

“The thingness of commodities is a social thingness, their objectivity an objectivity of value. Elsewhere Marx says that they have a phantasmagoric objectivity.”

“The substitution of the relationship sensuous/supersensuous → social, for the relationship human/sensuous, is fundamental for an understanding of what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities.”

“It means that the commodity is theological in the sense the concept of theology has in the anthropology of Feuerbach and the young Marx.”

“What radically differentiates Marx from classical economics is his analysis of the value-form of the commodity (or the commodity-form of the product of labour).”

“Contradiction’ could thus well designate precisely the structure’s peculiar mode of effectivity.”

“We are confronted with the following contradiction: labour appears as a commodity whereas it cannot ever be a commodity.”

“The agent of production is thus defined as a personification or bearer of the relations of production.”

“The capitalist believes that his calculation determines the movement of value whereas the former is determined by the latter.”

“We find distortions of the same kind almost every time Marx uses schemata borrowed from the anthropological critique.”

“Here we return to our starting-point, namely, the fact that the relations which determine the capitalist system can only exist in the form of their concealment.”

“The analysis of fetishism confirms that the mystification is a mystification of the structure, that it is its very existence.”

“It may be asked whether this link between crisis and critique is not a leftover from the historicist ideology characteristic of The German Ideology.”

“The possibility of this science is then linked to a sort of breathing space in history.”

“Thus we see that the theoretical difficulties raised by the answer lie in the very way the question has been posed.”


JACQUES RANCIÈRE


“Philosophy is nothing other than knowledge of the history of sciences.”

“With Marx, something essential happens in the history of sciences and in the theory of this history.”

“The Hegelian maxim is not reversed, but rather eclipsed into this other one:
The real is real: dialectical materialism
The rational is rational: materialist dialectic”

“Science as such is a process of thought.”

“A particular science is defined by its objects and its methods, which reciprocally delimit one another.”

“Wealth is an ideological notion, from which at first sight nothing can be drawn.”

“This evocative function well shows that the concept does not owe its first place to its rigour, but on the contrary to its arbitrary character.”

“The analysis, therefore, no longer produces material, empirical elements (commodities), but factors.”

“The use-value, or again the thing, is therefore the form of the commodity.”

“The study of an apparent formal contradiction gives way to that of the real contradictions that constitute the capitalist mode of production.”

“The critique of empiricism and the critique of speculative idealism go together.”

“the concepts do not keep an immutable meaning in the course of the analysis.”

“The text of Capital, as we have seen at the start, is written on two levels: that of scientific theory in general (form of reasoning) and that of the practice of a particular science.”

PIERRE MACHEREY

“what image did Marx have and give of the nature of his undertaking? With what concepts did he think his innovations, and hence the distinctions between himself and the Classical Economists?”

“Marx’s methodological reflections in Capital do not give us a developed concept, nor even an explicit concept of the object of Marxist philosophy.”

“This apparent circle should not surprise us: all ‘production’ of knowledge implies it in its process.”

“It is not possible to read Capital properly without the help of Marxist philosophy, which must itself be read, and simultaneously, in Capital itself.”

“The answer to the question: what is Marx’s object? what is the object of Capital?”

“Marx’s object is no more than Ricardo’s object.”

“Everything therefore depends on the dialectic, which is thus conceived as a method in itself, imported from Hegel, and applied to an object in itself, already present in Ricardo.”

“A ‘symptomatic’ reading is necessary to make these lacunae perceptible, and to identify behind the spoken words the discourse of the silence, which, emerging in the verbal discourse, induces these blanks in it, blanks which are failures in its rigour, or the outer limits of its effort: its absence, once these limits are reached, but in a space which it has opened.”

“That is how a silence can be extended into an explicit or implicit discourse.”

“As we shall see, this critique is not the last word of Marx’s real critique. It remains superficial and ambiguous, whereas his real critique is infinitely more profound.”

“All these misunderstandings can be grouped round one central misunderstanding of the theoretical relationship between Marxism and history, of the so-called radical historicism of Marxism.”

“Two essential characteristics of Hegelian historical time can be isolated: its homogeneous continuity and its contemporaneity.”

“That is why no Hegelian politics is possible strictly speaking, and in fact there has never been a Hegelian politician.”

“This is the principle on which is based the possibility and necessity of different histories corresponding respectively to each of the ‘levels’.”

“The time of the capitalist economic production that Marx analysed must be constructed in its concept.”

“The present of one level is, so to speak, the absence of another, and this co-existence of a ‘presence’ and absences is simply the effect of the structure of the whole in its articulated decentricity.”

“To put it crudely, history lives in the illusion that it can do without theory in the strong sense, without a theory of its object and therefore without a definition of its theoretical object.”

“It could even be said that this misunderstanding itself produces ideological concepts, whose function it is to fill in the gap, i.e., the vacuum, between the theoretical part of existing history on the one hand and empirical history on the other (which only too often is existing history).”

“Of course, even here, the mode of historical existence of individuality in a given mode of production is not legible to the naked eye in ‘history’; its concept, too, must therefore be constructed, and like every concept it contains a number of surprises, the most striking of which is the fact that it is nothing like the false obviousnesses of the ‘given’ – which is merely the mask of the current ideology.”

“As all science and all philosophy are at bottom real history, real history itself can be called philosophy and science”

“Science can no more be ranged within the category ‘superstructure’ than can language, which as Stalin showed escapes it.”

“But even in Marxist theory we read that ideologies may survive the structure that gave them birth”

“The model may, for example, be that of experimental practice, borrowed not so much from the reality of modern science as from a certain ideology of modern science.”

“The result is to flatten even scientific knowledge or philosophy, and at any rate Marxist theory, down to the unity of politico-economic practice, to the heart of ‘historical’ practice, to ‘real’ history.”

“It is child’s play to reduce Capital to an ethical inspiration, whether or no one relies on the radical anthropology of the 1844 Manuscripts. But, inversely, it is just as easy to imagine a historicist but non-humanist reading of Marx”

“unlike a science, an ideology is both theoretically closed and politically supple and adaptable. It bends to the interests of the times, but without any apparent movement, being content to reflect the historical changes which it is its mission to assimilate and master by some imperceptible modification of its peculiar internal relations.”

“Ideology changes therefore, but imperceptibly, conserving its ideological form; it moves, but with an immobile motion which maintains it where it is, in its place and its ideological role.”

“Only a critical reading of Marx’s Early Works and a thorough study of Capital can enlighten us as to the significance and risks involved in a theoretical humanism and historicism, for they are foreign to Marx’s problematic.”

“in revolutionizing classical economic theory, Marx necessarily had to revolutionize its terminology;”

“the sensitive point in this revolution concerns precisely surplus-value.”

“Lenin understood this essential condition of scientific practice perfectly – it is one of the major themes of Materialism and Empirico-Criticism: the theme of the incessant deepening of the knowledge of a real object by incessantly reorganizing the object of knowledge.”

“Marx’s critique of Political Economy is therefore a very radical one: it queries not only the object of Political Economy, but also Political Economy itself as an object.”

“This point is the object of an interminable polemic of Marx’s against Smith, which he returns to several times in Volumes Two and Three and which is echoed in Lenin’s critique of the populists and their teacher, the ‘romantic’ economist Sismondi.”

“But here, too, we find that anthropology’s theoretical pretensions have been shattered by Marx’s analysis.”

“The reader will have recognized one of Marx’s basic theses in this second result: it is production that governs consumption and distribution, not the reverse.”

“This analysis brings out two essential features which we shall examine in succession: the material nature of the conditions of the labour process, and the dominant role of the means of production in the labour process.”

“How did Marx think these relations? He thought them as a ‘distribution’ or ‘combination’ (Verbindung).”

“In no sense is this a formal demand; it is the absolute theoretical condition governing the definition of the economic itself.”

“We can now go back to the past and assess the distance between Marx and his predecessors – and between his object and theirs.”

“Mathematical formalization must be subordinate to conceptual formalization.”

“As Hobbes put it, geometry unites men, social science divides them.”

“Perhaps it is too soon to suggest that the birth of every new science inevitably poses theoretical (philosophical) problems of this kind: Engels thought so – and we have every reason to believe him…”

“the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.”

“As for us, we can thank Marx for the fact that we are not alone: our solitude only lies in our ignorance of what he said. We should accuse this ignorance in us and in all those who think they have forestalled him, and I only include the best of them – when they were only on the threshold of the land he discovered and opened for us. We even owe it to him that we can see his weaknesses, his lacunae, his omissions: they concur with his greatness, for, in returning to them we are only returning to the beginnings of a discourse interrupted by death. The reader will know how Volume Three ends. A title: Classes. Forty lines, then silence”


LOUIS ALTHUSSER

“Althusser however, in his paper, has shown us that the explicit formulation (and therefore recognition) of an abstract theory of history is surrounded by difficulties and ambiguities.”

“So despite the malicious critical intentions that inspire those readers of Marx who have asked ‘Where precisely did Marx set out his conception of history?’, they have not been completely unfair.
The reader will be familiar with the young Lenin’s answer in ‘What the Friends of the People Really Are’: this theory is everywhere, but in two forms; the Preface to A Contribution presents the hypothesis of historical materialism’; Capital sets this hypothesis to work and verifies it against the example of the capitalist social formation. These concepts enable Lenin to formulate what is for us a decisive commentary; in the expression ‘historical materialism’, ‘materialism’ means no more than science, and the expression is strictly synonymous with that of ‘science of history’.”

ÉTIENNE BALIBAR

[Leo46 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Althusser’s definitive magnum opus. No Marxist alive right now has truly studied Marx without studying Althusser. [Full Review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z...] (This is only as much as goodreads let me enter). In memory of Fredric Jameson (rest in power on the day I completed this review… 9/22/24)

One helpful disclaimer is that reading just Capital is not enough and not even that necessary for this lecture, but having a great grasp of Modern Philosophy (1600s-1800s rationalism, idealism, but mainly Kant) and as much Marxism in its broader sense as possible (Mao’s On Practice and Contradiction are indispensable here, especially considering his references to Mao’s On Contradiction in “On Marxism” from Spectre of Hegel and “Contradiction and Overdetermination” from For Marx) is very helpful since it more about ‘Reading’ Capital than reading ‘Capital.’ I urge readers with less background to read For Marx instead as a primer, going through similar concepts in a simpler fashion. However, undoubtedly, Althusser is the sharpest and most philosophically revolutionary here, waging guerilla warfare on the terrain of philosophy, i.e., crushing idealism with the hammer that is materialism.

The Object of Capital
I believe this to be the defining lecture of this work, that is Althusser’s magnum opus, so I will counter-intuitively start with this lecture instead of the first, which is more about the epistemological break of Marx, symptomatic reading, and theoretical practice. Likely Althusser’s most organized work, including 9 chapters and an appendix, the lecture format forced the Spinozan-Lacanian-Marxist-Leninist master to compile a fully refined work as opposed to his sporadic essays, unfinished manuscripts, and the famous “notes towards an investigation” that commonly defines him. Here his most important notions of the Symptomatic Reading is fully finished, Marxism (Historical Materialism specifically) is a definitive science against historicism, and the overdetermination of structure as the fundamental lacunae of Marx that can only be found in his radical silence on the matter.

1&2 - Introduction & Marx and his Discoveries: Funnily similar to Adorno, here Althusser calls for a recourse into theory in which the future of historical materialism depends on the sharpening of dialectical materialism. The symptomatic reading of Marx’s Capital is the way to do this--since Marx couldn’t do it all (the very reason he wrote Capital at the end of his life), one must critically read his SILENCE and its overdetermined factors and conditions. This aporia is a radically negative opening that can only be both filled and negated by political, Marxist militants, says he--Lenin the most extraordinary in taking up the task left for those after Capital: the tactics and strategy to achieve and build socialism (other militants included by Althusser are Labriola, Plekhanov, the ‘Austro-Marxists,’ Framsci, Rosenthal and Il’ienkov (USSR), and the School of Della Volpe in Italy)
3 - The Merits of Classical Economics: “The ‘silent content’ he extracted was from Marx’s two methods of Political Economy—that of the concrete analysis of the concrete conditions (real people, ‘the living whole’) and abstract relations (“division of labor, money, value, etc.”)—in which the abstract relations are where one starts for a true science of Political Economy. The silence is that Marx never poses why he proposes this method while accepting the continuity of the object from classical economists; this is because the ideology of empiricism presupposes those economists, meaning they start only from the concrete and thus, end only at the abstract relations derived. It is rather the nonidentity between the concrete and the abstract that emphasizes the importance of the abstract as a negative form of critique, i.e., only through starting with abstraction can we produce new knowledge of the object (knowledge is an abstraction) in which a critique of capitalism can emerge (that’s why the classical economists can’t escape a stale, ideological empiricist view of economics where abstraction of the concrete leads to the limit of ‘relations’)” (cited from my own paper titled: Silent Marxism, or a Marxism of Negativity). Here is a beautiful Althusser footnote to finish this chapter off: “There must be no misunderstanding of the meaning of this silence [italicized]. It is part of a determinate discourse, whose object was… to establish the [methodological rules (italicized)] indispensable to a treatment of Political Economy… The fact that this methodological text leads us to the threshold of the requirement that we constitute that theory of the production of knowledge which is the same thing as Marxist philosophy… A limit: the furthest point to which Marx took his thought; but then this limit, far from returning us to the old field of empiricist philosophy, opens anew field before us” (235f, the Complete edition). This sets out an open, or negative dialectics in relation to the science of historical materialism--2 years before Adorno’s text--where Empiricism’s ideological nature of confusing the concept with its object (and vice versa) is rejected with Lenin’s text Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
4 - The Errors of Classical Economics (Outline of a Concept of Historical Time): This is definitely the most difficult chapter in this lecture because of the theoretical rigor, and it funnily enough has little to do with classical economics except as a beginning towards a concept of historical time. Here, his influence on one of his famous students Foucault becomes clear: a discontinuous time to replace a Hegelian continuous time necessitates the rigorous explication and critique of the latter’s ‘contemporaneity.’ For Hegel, Historical Time is the existence of the social totality (Geist) with its potency as the historical present (the contemporaneity of time). Ultimately this conception of time is ideological because it borrows from the ‘most vulgar empiricism’ of the ‘false obviousness’ of duration in everyday life. There’s a radically ideological equality given to the moments of the continuum when in actuality variations of ruptures must be analyzed in relation to the structure of the whole. Thus, historical moments are not stale non-subjective objects to be reflected upon by historians; on the contrary, it is the structure of the totality that needs to be conceived first before evaluating the ruptures of history—the breaks between one event and the next (see how this is the precondition to Foucuault’s genealogy of discontinuity and disruptions?). In Marxist fashion, this structure, in the last instance, must be of the economic as that is the very tracing of how matter is mediated through man and affects man in a material, transformative way. This would be the specialty of the Marxist totality. Then, Althusser presents a huge comparative analysis of production time, labor time, biological time, and invisible time that I won’t get into for it is far too detailed. He additionally discusses Spinoza’s rupture that will be the kernel of his late concept of Aleatory Materialism, that Spinoza was the only true philosophical predecessor to Marx, hinting at the (materialist) monism that collapses subject and object being absolutely repressed by the contemporaries of his time (much like Marx’s thinking). Marx “in Capital, calls the type of intertwining of the different times (and here he only mentions the economic level), i.e., the time of ‘dislocation’ (décalage) and torsion of the different temporalities produced by the different levels of the structure, the complex combination of which constitutes the peculiar time of the process’s development” (252, Complete Edition). Lastly, one of the most important notions in his philosophy of science is that Althusser distinguishes between the object of knowledge and the real object. This is most important for the science of history (historical materialism) and thus, he ardently continues Lenin’s project by saying that “history can no longer be empirical” (253 & see Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) through the Spinozan example that “the concept of a ‘dog’ cannot bark” (ibid). Quite simply, the object of knowledge is that which a science is dealing with (e.g., history), and the real object is the actual concrete events that occurred which are never completely graspable in their totalities by humans--for Fredric Jameson explains most concisely that history is always conceived partially, i.e., qua concepts of the concrete events and not the events themselves. “The theory of political economy only considers one relatively autonomous component of the social totality, whereas the theory of history in principle takes the complex totality as such for its object” (257-8). “We must take seriously the fact that the theory of history, in the strong sense, does not exist, or hardly exists as far as historians are concerned, that the concepts of existing history are therefore nearly always ‘empirical’ concepts… cross-bred with a powerful strain of an ideology concealed behind its ‘obviousness’” (258). He then goes into an intricate discussion of diachrony/synchrony as fallacious in empiricis ideology, rupturing a new mode of a science of history that never once existed. He elaborates on very similar themes in more detail and ends with this beautiful line: “the superiority of the world’s imagination and the green leaves of action over the poverty of grey theory, contains a serious lesson in intellectual modesty, healthy for the right (presumptuous and dogmatic) ears” (266). Only those who can read this without getting mad can see that this is a defense of theory precisely because of its subordination to concrete reality and praxis.
5 - “Marxism is not a Historicism”: The thesis of this most famous chapter is simple, despite the title: Marxism is a science, not a historicism. This might’ve been a better title, but we all know that people take titles as the thesis without reading any argument, so obscuring it is sometimes necessary, and the very negation of the ideological faults of empiricist historicism is precisely the enemy here. This is the most well-rounded critique of Gramsci’s humanism (“Revolution against Capital”) as still falling into the temptation of empiricist ideology, collapsing the object of knowledge and the real object (as Sartre does, too, separately). This humanist emphasis on historical materialism makes the Hegelian mistake of philosophy of history being the same as history of philosophy. However, Althusser makes sure to give due credit (precisely because he is also indebted to him) to Gramsci’s humanism that neglected Capital because of the Second International’s thesis of ultra-imperialism and proto-capitalist realism (more of a pessimism here) that they wrongly made by reading Capital in a revisionist fashion. This is why Gramsci wanted to revolt against Capital and focus on Marx’s other works, emphasizing the agency of the masses to gain hegemony over the imperialists and fascists of his time. In this sense, Althusser is more Marxist than Marx (or re-emphasizing the true nature of Marx) as the robust fortification of Marxism as a science and never a historicism that lags behind reality--it is precisely more dialectical than Gramsci’s neglect of regressive analysis: the scientific socialism that points openly towards the future (progressive) and always requiring the (regressive) concrete analysis of the concrete conditions (here, he is more Leninist than Lenin). Beginning with the discussion of the dialectic of historical materialism (exemplified by Capital) and dialectical materialism (Marxist Philosophy), he critiques Marx’s own oeuvre for not sharpening the concept of the distinction of this dialectic to the degree that he has (of course, Marx could not have done everything, Althusser notes again). The historicism (humanism) latent in the Early works and work of the Break (epistemological break of Marx, referring to the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, that propel Marx into scientific inquiry) can easily be explained for why they have historicism readings by successors of the Marxist tradition. Thus, Capital and the 1857 Introduction need to be probed for any inkling of historicism to see the mistakes of the Marxists humanists. The critique of the latter and empiricist scientists of all stripes cannot think beyond the limits of their present—to change the world one must be able to make a science that is aware of its present and critique it by the past and into the future; in other words, self-criticism is necessary for a true science as is formulated in Capital. The example Marx uses of the limited philosopher/scientist is the genius Aristotle, who could not think the labor theory of value because of the slave-labor mode of production he could not ontologically get out of (272). This is the heart and soul of Althusser’s “anti-humanism,” especially in the fact that humanism reduces the crucial relations of production (the “real stage-directors of history”(291)) to mere human relations, when in fact the reproduction of the economy and society is what needs to be intervened in order to overhaul the system. “Unlike a science, an ideology is both theoretically closed and politically supple and adaptable. It bends to the interests of the times, but without apparent movement” (293). He ends it with the solution to the humanist problem as the thorough ‘symptomatic reading’ of Marx’s early work with Capital, one the reveals the silences but also the most important silence he filled: the creation of the concept ‘surplus-value.’
6 - The Epistemological Propositions of Capital (Marx, Engels)
In his continued philosophy of science that poses a question without an answer, a question that has a real object, Althusser traverses Engels’s prefaces and Marx’s writings in Capital to discover the novel significance of surplus-value. Not only is it a revolutionary distinction from rent and profit, it came with the most advanced formulation of money and its circulation. This is presented in the critique of Adam smith’s denigration of James Steuart’s, now obvious, claim that when one profits another must lose, ushering the even more elaborate concepts of absolute and relative surplus-value in volumes 2 and 3 of Capital. He believes Marx DISCOVERED the concept while Smith and Ricardo merely PRODUCED it. Here is the heart of Althusser’s philosophy of science, that a concept cannot be useful until we are aware of it (DISCOVERED) even if it has exists behind appearances (PRODUCED). He shows the great example that Engels gives: that chemists who found a substance that was oxygen could only call it ‘fire-air’ in relation to the phlogiston theory that they knew (they presupposed a solution in relation to the limits of already-existing knowledge). It was only Lavoisier who posed the gas as a problem that wasn’t binded to a ‘necessary meaning or significance’ that he could DISCOVER the concept of oxygen with all its novelty in attributes unrelated to a mere theory of combustion. The production of a finding is still confined to ideological empiricism, while discovery breaks the limits of past ideology with a rupture (echoing Bachelard’s ‘epistemological break’). In the same vein, Althusser discovers the concept of what Engels is doing with the ‘theoretical problematic,’ and what Lenin sharpened in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism with his “theme of the incessant deepening of the knowledge of a real object by incessantly reorganizing the object of knowledge” (308).
7 - The Object of Political Economy
Now revealing his Spinozan-influenced philosophy of science, this object-oriented theory is applied to Marx’s Capital: a question without an answer is influenced by Spinoza’s claim that there can be no ‘Science of conclusions’ for that would mean its dependence on sheer ignorance of its premises. Science as true inquiry is the novelty of Althusser, distinct from the (‘natural,’ ‘hard’) science of anglophones, and the knowledge-craft (wissenschaft) of Germans. He begins by analyzing the structure of the object of political economy, taking Lalande’s definition of political economy and superimposing it with Marx’s critique of Smith neglecting the value-form (but succeeding in the quantification of economic fact). Then, the lack of the real relations of labor and fellow men in classical economics is revealed (thus, the importance of exchange vs. use value); they could “only think economic facts as belonging to the homogenous space of their positivity and measurability on condition that it accepts a ‘naive’ anthropology” (314). This naive anthropology is the Hegelian idealist theory of the state that is utterly obliterated by Lenin’s State and Revolution.
8 - Marx’s Critique

(See link for full review!!!) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z...

[Alex Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Althusser and Balibar here demonstrate that Marx's genius lay not with communism but with recognizing that Capital is its own domain (off the work of David Ricardo). Marx however eventually did something wrong; in finding the immanence of Capital's logic, he then swallowed his own poison pill. He attempted to read the totality of all of history through this immanent logic, and found no way out. Balibar in particular takes great pains to show that at each turn an analysis of history yields again the invariant relations of capital, demonstrating that Marx was no longer in fact analyzing history but only providing a re-reading of his own definitions. This too is the flaw with communism or understanding production through Marx's Capital: the means by which the categorizations are realized are dependent on one another. From one position of proletariat, you automatically create the position of bourgeois and so on... Marx's analysis is too rigid in that its view produces only itself.

Neither Althusser nor Balibar really pursue why this happen or what it means, they only mean to show the self necessity of Marx's Capital in its failure to utilize its techno-rationality beyond its self-wrapping envelope. There are historic reasons for what Foucault calls the episteme split of the 19th century. This goes hand in hand with Hegelian twists and Absolute knowledge, of which Marx borrowed in order to wrap Capital as its own complete worldview, but these two thoughts goes beyond the analysis both Althusser and Balibar present.

All the same, if you are interested in an in depth view of Marx, or you want to see what Althusser (or Balibar) can do, here is a text for you. The writing is sometimes obscure, difficult and circumlocutus. Their explanations would have been helped if they had sought to differentiate what they wanted to say from how they were saying it. Often the move was to use Marx's internal logic and twist it around itself, so as to demonstrate the very realization they wish to impart. This makes for a confusing reading if you aren't familiar with what they are doing or if you don't read it closely. I can imagine many people often draw the complete opposite conclusion both Balibar and Althusser wished to demonstrate because of this bad technique. So if you read it, be warned that you must read closely and carefully, keeping in mind what Marx says and what these authors want to show you about how Marx says what he says and why he says it.

[Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, after reading Capital volume one I thought this text would be a breeze, or at the very least, illuminate some of the darker, more opaque passages in Marx's Magnum Opus. Boy, was I wrong. In fact, this text is so much harder I had to put it down after only about 20-25 pages in. Will probably pick it up again (I own it after all), but sheesh - those Frenchies sure love to prognosticate in the realm of abstractions. Would take a lifetime to truly understand this text, and other scholars such as Slavoj Zizek and Antonio Negri, have made a career out of living in this space. For Zizek his project for me was about fusing Althusserian conceptions of ideology with Lacanian conceptions of subjectivity, but Zizek makes this drudgework somewhat fun and interesting to read. On second thought, I am starting to see why Althusser had some of the most brilliant students (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Balibar, Ranciere, among others), none of whom turned out to be Althusserians (ironically)...and I am also starting to see why he went mad and strangled his wife! His work lives in the liminal space between brilliance and madness...this book is a French Philosophers wet dream come true! The Opacities are brilliant, confusing, and completely original. Marxism will never be the same again. Down with Marxism, up with Reading Capital (the one thing Stalinists never bothered to do).

[Bernard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging, engulfing and enthralling. In some parts a challenging read, in others an adventure with Althusser and his entourage of philosophical and sociological surgeons unearthing and trying to demistify the core text as best as they can. To an extent, there is a particular philosophical current running throughout the whole text, one pervasive, albeit set out from the beginning by Louis himself. Whilst some essays may serve as just more ammunition to add to the rationalist stockpile using Marx as gunpowder, the variety of perspectives, and often, in their similarity and repetition of analysis both invigorates the study of science, history and philosophy as well as lending a romantic and enlightening quality to Marx's body of work. Despite all of this, this is anything but a hermeneutics and a serious body of Marxist study in its own right, but if there's one particular sensation left after reading this, its a burning desire to get stuck into big Karl myself.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Althusser and student Balibar offer a symptomatic reading of Marx's Capital and read him as definitively anti-humanist and anti-historian. It is not humans who are the engine of history, but the various "levels" of society (political, theological, and-in the last order-economic) that create social conditions. Each of these levels also shifts along its own temporal frame, and wile the levels are articulated, this relationship prohibits a description of history as a single teleological line.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

are dadsh!ine!khastam bedooni maam ye vaghti si khodemoo ademi boodim,azi ketaba mikhoondim.haaa!louis althosser:)

[Iben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read the first section, but that was enough for me. I enjoy any French philosopher who mentions "poached baby elephant."

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Science wins! (Sorry ideology).

Materialism wins! (Sorry idealism).

"Well grubbed, old mole." KM is the mole. Capitalism is the mud. Once you grab that grub, don't let it go!

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense, difficult read, more about the intellectual politics of French Marxism and the philosophical scene of the 1960s than about Marx, but essential for understanding French intellectual history.

[Seth · Rating 2 out of 5]

sometimes interesting but mostly incomprehensible

[Samantha Dancey · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was one of the most incomprehensible pieces of text I’ve ever read. I thank every single god I’m not a social theorist.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this tremendous work, Althusser (and Etienne Balibar) argues that Marx's "Capital" marks the emergence of a new "science of history," a new mode of knowledge that sprang out of the author's encounters with his philosophical predecessors but which couldn't be recognized as such precisely because the answer that it provides is directed towards a question not available in his empiricist philosophical antecedents. Key to Althusser's recuperation of this new science in Marx is the manner in which MArx's thought fundamentally restructures the field through two recognitions: the rejection of the separation between subject and object in empiricist thought, and his understanding of knowledge as production, as that which both adheres to the essence of its object (always-already-there) and which itself produces that object.
"Reading Capital" is not only a wonderful reading of "Capital" itself, attending to its nuances with admirable rigor and sustantial pay-off, but the symptomatic method of reading that Althusser identifies in Marxist praxis is an essential articulation of duty and complicity for any student of inquiry, Marxist or otherwise.

[A YOGAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louis Althusser – Lire le Capital (Band 1)
I. Historische Einordnung und intellektueller Kontext
„Lire le Capital“ (1965) gilt als das Gründungsdokument des strukturalen Marxismus. Hervorgegangen aus einem Seminar an der École Normale Supérieure, interveniert das Werk in eine präzise bestimmte theoretische Konstellation der 1960er Jahre und bezieht dabei mehrfach klar Stellung:
* Frontstellung gegen den Ökonomismus:
Althusser kritisiert eine mechanische Geschichtsauffassung, die gesellschaftliche Entwicklung als zwangsläufige Abfolge vorgegebener Stadien missversteht.
* Frontstellung gegen den humanistischen Marxismus:
Ebenso wendet er sich gegen Lesarten, die Marx primär über seine Frühschriften (Entfremdung, Gattungswesen) deuten – prominent vertreten etwa durch Sartre.
* Der epistemologische Bruch:
Zentral ist Althussers These einer mutation épistémologique: einer radikalen Zäsur zwischen dem frühen, ideologisch-philosophischen Marx und dem späten, wissenschaftlichen Marx des Kapitals.

II. Philosophische Grundlegung: Die Produktion von Erkenntnis
Althussers eigentliches Hauptanliegen ist die Neubestimmung dessen, was wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis überhaupt bedeutet – und wie Texte zu lesen sind.
1. Die symptomatische Lektüre (lecture symptomale)
* Wissenschaftliche Texte enthalten Antworten auf Fragen, die sie selbst nicht explizit formulieren.
* Die symptomatische Lektüre richtet den Blick auf Auslassungen, Schweigestellen und innere Spannungen, um die implizite Problematik eines Textes freizulegen.
2. Erkenntnis als theoretische Praxis
* Abgrenzung vom Empirismus:
Althusser verwirft die Vorstellung, Wissen entstehe durch bloße Abstraktion eines Wesenskerns aus der Realität.
* Objekttrennung:
Er unterscheidet strikt zwischen dem realen Objekt (der Wirklichkeit) und dem Erkenntnisobjekt (einem theoretischen Konstrukt).
Wissenschaft ist damit eine theoretische Praxis, die ihre Wahrheit nicht abbildet, sondern gemäß eigener Kriterien produziert.
3. Kritik des Historismus
* Althusser bricht mit der Idee einer linearen, homogenen historischen Zeit.
* Die verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Ebenen – Ökonomie, Politik, Ideologie – besitzen jeweils eine relative Autonomie und eigene Zeitlichkeiten.
Geschichte erscheint so als komplexe Überlagerung unterschiedlicher Rhythmen, nicht als einheitlicher Fluss.

III. Ökonomische Neubestimmung: Die Spezifik des Gegenstands
Trotz seines philosophischen Ausgangspunkts formuliert „Lire le Capital“ eine radikal neue Bestimmung dessen, was politische Ökonomie überhaupt untersucht.
1. Revolutionierung des theoretischen Feldes
* Marx korrigiert die klassische Ökonomie (Smith, Ricardo) nicht – er verlässt ihr Terrain.
* Für Althusser markieren insbesondere zwei Entdeckungen den wissenschaftlichen Durchbruch:
* den Doppelcharakter der Arbeit (konkret/abstrakt),
* die Isolierung des Mehrwerts als allgemeine Kategorie.
2. Synchronie vor Diachronie
* Problem der traditionellen Ökonomie:
Die klassische Analyse konzentriert sich vornehmlich auf zeitliche Abfolgen (Diachronie) und rekonstruiert Entwicklung als lineare Geschichte von Stadien und Übergängen.
* Althussers Korrektur:
Um die Entwicklung eines Systems zu verstehen, muss zunächst dessen Struktur (Synchronie) begriffen werden; die Diachronie ist lediglich die Existenzform dieser Struktur.
Althusser übernimmt diese begriffliche Unterscheidung bewusst aus der Linguistik Ferdinand de Saussures, der „Diachronie“ als die Betrachtung sprachlicher Veränderungen im Zeitverlauf dem Begriff der „Synchronie“ gegenüberstellte, der den Zustand einer Sprache und ihre systemischen Zusammenhänge innerhalb eines eng begrenzten Zeitraums analysiert.
Übertragen auf die politische Ökonomie bedeutet dies: Die kapitalistische Produktionsweise ist zunächst als strukturiertes System von Relationen zu analysieren, bevor ihre historische Entwicklung sinnvoll beschrieben werden kann. Geschichte erscheint damit nicht als Ursache der Struktur, sondern als deren konkrete Erscheinungsweise.
3. Produktionsverhältnisse als unsichtbares Objekt
* Der Gegenstand der Ökonomie sind nicht Dinge (Waren, Geld, Rohstoffe), sondern gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse.
* Strukturelle Kausalität:
Die ökonomische Struktur wirkt nicht als greifbare Ursache, sondern als „abwesende Ursache“, die sich nur in ihren Effekten im gesamten gesellschaftlichen Gefüge zeigt (effet de société).

IV. Die Rolle der Philosophie – Selbstkritik (1973)
In der Ausgabe von 1973 reflektiert Althusser im Avertissement kritisch seine Positionen von 1965:
* Kritik am Theoretizismus:
Er räumt ein, Philosophie zu stark als reine „Wissenschaft der Wissenschaften“ konzipiert zu haben.
* Klassenkampf in der Theorie:
Philosophie erscheint nun explizit als Kampfplatz: Hier entscheidet sich, ob der Marxismus als bloßes Wissen verwaltet oder als Instrument gesellschaftlicher Transformation eingesetzt wird.

Band 1 von „Lire le Capital“ ist eine erkenntnistheoretische Grundlegung des Marxismus. Althusser zeigt, dass „Das Kapital“ kein Lehrbuch der Nationalökonomie ist, sondern die Entdeckung eines neuen theoretischen Kontinents. Marx erscheint hier nicht als klassischer Ökonom, sondern als Analytiker der strukturellen Logik der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise. Diese Lektüre stellt unsere Begriffe von Zeit, Geschichte und Realität radikal infrage – und zwingt dazu, Marx neu, präziser und zugleich politischer zu lesen.

[Karl Schapper · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't waste your time.

[Tomás · Rating 4 out of 5]

El título puede parecer engañoso, por lo que de una vez lo aclaro: cualquiera que suponga que se trata de un texto de introducción a la obra cumbre de Marx, «El capital», se llevará una profunda decepción. Más aún: seguramente lo abandonará sin haber pasado de las primeras 100 páginas. Y es que, por el contrario, se trata de un texto —o de una serie de textos— que plantean distintas ‘problemáticas’, derivadas del contenido y la forma de la producción teórica de Marx y de la práctica del marxismo en general. En ese sentido, se inscriben en un extenso debate con múltiples aristas del que conviene estar enterado.
Ahora bien, esta versión castellana no se parece mucho a la original en francés, dado que suprime el trabajo de varios autores, entre los que resalta Jacques Rancière. Sin duda, eso es un problema muy delicado, pues los únicos dos autores que figuran en este volumen llegan a referir el trabajo de sus colegas que se incluye en el original. Cabe agregar que, como la mayoría de las ediciones de Siglo XXI, el libro adolece de un aparato crítico riguroso: un índice onomástico, un glosario, una buena introducción, etcétera. Pese a lo hasta aquí expuesto, tanto lo escrito por Louis Althusser como por Étienne Balibar basta para suscitar un montón de temas para reflexionar; de ahí que leerlo o, en el mejor de los casos, estudiarlo, resulte en sumo provechoso.

Sobre el contenido, y centrándome en Althusser (sin contar los primeros textos del libro, es decir, la entrevista y la carta sobre Gramsci que abunda en el capítulo dedicado al «historicismo»), es recomendable leerlo después de haber leído «Pour Marx» o, en español, «La revolución teórica de Marx». Esto porque se retoma, al menos, un asunto muy importante, a saber: la tentativa de delimitar y esbozar una meditación de carácter epistemológico que alcance a dar cuenta de la especificidad de la producción teórica de Marx. Para esto, Althusser comienza precisando lo que significa leer a Marx como filósofo, esto es, interpelándolo en función de su objeto de estudio. Esto implica establecer las líneas directrices de tal lectura a la que Althusser no duda en llamar «sintomática» (cosa fascinante, pues extrae del psicoanálisis un recurso metodológico y heurístico que le permite buscar el contenido latente en el manifiesto. A propósito de esto, y con un anacronismo que obvia la herencia heideggeriana de Derrida, me atrevo a pensar que en este texto Althusser sienta algunos elementos que, por su cercanía con el mismo Derrida, pudieron haber abonado bastante en el proyecto de la deconstrucción).
Tal lectura, permite el despliegue de un estudio sobre Marx que socava las bases de su producción. Althusser va mostrando, por ejemplo: la herencia de los economistas clásicos en Marx; la forma en que Marx tomó de ellos ciertas cosas, no sin reconocérselos abiertamente; las objeciones que le planteó a estos pensadores; la crítica que hizo de ellos; la naturaleza de esta crítica… entre tanto, retoma conceptos como el de la ‘sobredeterminación’ y construye una manera de pensar el marxismo en términos complejos. Sin entrar en detalles, me contento con recomendarlo y animar a que se lea y se discuta, sin importar el sesgo «teoricista» (como dice Sánchez Vázquez).

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But the protocols for a reading of Capital which we have inherited from the history of the interpretation of Marxism, as well as the experiments in reading Capital we can make ourselves, confront us with real difficulties inherent in Marx’s text itself. I shall assemble them under two headings, and these two headings will constitute the object of my study.

(1) Contrary to certain appearances, or at any rate, to my expectations, Marx’s methodological reflections in Capital do not give us a developed concept, nor even an explicit concept of the object of Marxist philosophy. They always provide the means with which to recognize, identify and focus on it, and finally to think it, but often at the end of a long investigation, and only after piercing the enigma contained in certain expressions. Our question therefore demands more than a mere literal reading, even an attentive one: it demands a truly critical reading, one which applies to Marx’s text precisely the principles of the Marxist philosophy which is, however, what we are looking for in Capital. This critical reading seems to constitute a circle, since we appear to be expecting to obtain Marxist philosophy from its own application. We should therefore clarify: we expect from the theoretical work of the philosophical principles Marx has explicitly given us or which can be disengaged from his Works of the Break, and Transitional Works – we expect from the theoretical work of these principles applied to Capital their development and enrichment as well as refinements in their rigour. This apparent circle should not surprise us: all ‘production’ of knowledge implies it in its process.

(2) But this philosophical investigation runs into another real difficulty, one which no longer involves the presence and distinction of the object of Marxist philosophy in Capital, but the presence and distinction of the scientific object of Capital itself. Restricting myself to a single, simple symptomatic question around which turn most of the interpretations and criticism of Capital, what, strictly speaking, is the nature of the object whose theory we get from Capital ? Is it Economics or History? And specifying this question, if the object of Capital is Economics, precisely what distinguishes this object in its concept from the object of classical Economics? If the object of Capital is History, what is this History, what place does Economics have in History, etc.? Here again, a merely literal reading of Marx’s text, even an attentive one, will leave us unsatisfied or even make us miss the question altogether, dispensing us from the task of posing this question, even though it is essential to an understanding of Marx – and depriving us of an exact consciousness of the theoretical revolution induced by Marx’s discovery and of the scope of its consequences. Without doubt, in Capital Marx does give us, in an extremely explicit form, the means with which to identify and announce the concept of his object – what am I saying? – he announces it himself in perfectly clear terms. But if he did formulate the concept of his object without ambiguity, Marx did not always define with the same precision the concept of its distinction, i.e., the concept of the specific difference between it and the object of Classical Economics. There can be no doubt that Marx was acutely conscious of the existence of this distinction: his whole critique of Classical Economics proves it. But the formulae in which he gives us this distinction, this specific difference, are sometimes disconcerting, as we shall see. They do guide us onto the road to the concept of this distinction, but often only at the end of a long investigation and, once again, after piercing the enigma contained in some of his expressions. But how can we establish the differential specificity of the object of Capital with any precision without a critical and epistemological reading which assigns the site where Marx separates himself theoretically from his predecessors, and determines the meaning of this break. How can we aim to achieve this result without recourse precisely to a theory of the history of the production of knowledges, applied to the relations between Marx and his pre-history, i.e., without recourse to the principles of Marxist philosophy ? As we shall see, a second question must be added to this one: does not the difficulty Marx seems to have felt in thinking in (penser dans) a rigorous concept the difference which distinguishes his object from the object of Classical Economics, lie in the nature of his discovery, in particular in its fantastically innovatory character ? in the fact that this discovery happened to be theoretically very much in advance of the philosophical concepts then available? And in this case, does not Marx’s scientific discovery imperiously demand that we pose the new philosophical problems required by the disconcerting nature of its new object ? This last argument calls on philosophy to participate in any depth reading of Capital in order to answer the astonishing questions asked of philosophy in its pages: unprecedented questions which are decisive for the future of philosophy itself.

Such is the double object of this study, which is only possible given a constant and double reference: the identification and knowledge of the object of Marxist philosophy at work in Capital presupposes the identification and knowledge of the specific difference of the object of Capital itself – which in turn presupposes the recourse to Marxist philosophy and demands Its development. It is not possible to read Capital properly without the help of Marxist philosophy, which must itself be read, and simultaneously, in Capital itself. If this double reading and constant reference from the scientific reading to the philosophical reading, and from the philosophical reading to the scientific reading, are necessary and fruitful, we shall surely be able to recognize in them the peculiarity of the philosophical revolution carried in Marx’s scientific discovery: a revolution which inaugurates an authentically new mode of philosophical thought."
Althusser

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely challenging read, the highlight of which is Althusser's essay "The Object of Capital". Makes the case for a scientific reading of Capital opposed to the traditional humanist and empiricist/historicist readings.

I recommend On the Reproduction of Capitalism by Althusser by anyone who wants to really get into Marxist theory because the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses is very important. Then if you like that I recommend For Marx where he really digs into dialectics and the break between Marx and Hegel. Then if you like that and still want more Heady French Structuralism, then I'd say check out Reading Capital.

[Arjun · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOUIS ALTHUSSER explains MARXISM to the non MARXIST in us all.

[Raoul · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stalinist reduction of Marx's thought. Absurd and useless.