فلسفهٔ مارکس

by Étienne Balibar, عباس ارض‌پیما (Translator)

فلسفه‌ی مارکس نوشته‌ی فیلسوف و نظریه‌پرداز فرانسوی، اتین بالیبار، اثری است که می‌کوشد توضیحی جامع و در عین حال موجز از مهم‌ترین جنبه‌های فلسفی اندیشه‌های مارکس ارائه دهد. نیت او روشن ساختن این نکته است که چرا به رغم تاریخ یک‌صد ساله‌ای که به اضمحلال مارکسیسم حزبی و دولتی منجر شد، ما هم‌چنان نیازمند مارکس و مشخصا شیوه‌ی کار فلسفی او هستیم. به بیان دیگر، این که با رها گشتن از ایدئولوژی‌های مارکسیستی قرن بیستم، اکنون چگونه باید به خود مارکس در مقام یک فیلسوف روی آورده و او را بسان متفکری معاصر بخوانیم که همچنان، و حتی شاید بیش از گذشته، می‌تواند امکاناتی نو برای مواجه شدن با وضعیت کنونی عرضه کند. برای نائل آمدن به این مقصود، بالیبار حیات فکری مارکس را بر بستری گسترده‌تر قرار داده و هم به ریشه‌های شکل‌گیری مقولات و مفاهیم مارکسی در اندیشه‌های فیلسوفان سلف او می‌پردازد و هم به سیر تطور آن‌ها نزد متفکران خلف او، از جمله گرامشی، لوکاچ و آلتوسر. در نهایت، کار بالیبار را در یک کلام چنین می‌توان خلاصه کرد: جستجوی مسیرهایی برای فراتر رفتن از مارکس، دقیقا با یاری گرفتن از خود مارکس.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Politics, Nonfiction, France, 20th Century, History

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Étienne Balibar is emeritus professor of philosophy at Paris X Nanterre and emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is also professor of modern European philosophy at Kingston University, London, and professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University. His books include Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (Columbia, 2015).

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-entering the world of studying socialist, anarchist, and other leftist thought one often ends up reading French texts released by Verso press quite a bit. This is a slim volume and ostensibly designed to be an introduction to the philosophy of Marx. Verso has given a slick red-tape Marx profile cover, and it stood out on a book shelf as I pursued the standard texts from Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Robert Service, V. I. Lenin, and Leszek Kołakowski. I have also recently read Das Kapital while listening to David Harvey's lectures on the topic.

So this brings me to Etienne Balibar, student of the infamous anti-humanist and structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser. Like Althusser's students Charles Bettelheim, Alian Badiou, and Jacques Rancière, Balibar stayed in the Marxist tradition unlike his compatriot Michel Foucault. Balibar largely became involved with Marxism from Althusser's lectures on Das Kapital. Balibar is not just a critical theorist, he was directly involved French immigrants rights and the Maoist activism of many of Althusser's students.

So far so good, right? You may say, "Slim volume written by a prominent thinker who is also actually an activist. So your implying its obtuse? It's French."

Slow down, gentle reader. This book while marked as an introduction to the Philosophy of Marx has two functions: one, it is an attempt at an introduction of Marx's philosophy. It is vital, however, to notice that philosophy is specific here. It is not an introduction to Marx's sociology or his economics. While it does touch on this points as each element is intertwined with the others, it is specifically about philosophy in the narrow sense. Secondly, Balibar is not just introducing the material, he is making a sustained argument about Marxist philosophy itself.

The book is quite excellent in discussing the background of the Marx especially in compared to a lot of what you would get in a dismissive general theory textbook. The section on ideology-not surprisingly given Balibar's relationship to Althusser, is very lucid and powerful in explaining how Marx attempted to account for the limits and basis of human thought without the aid of advanced sociology, which arguably Marx is one of the several founders, or modern neurology. Furthermore, the block inserts on Gramsci, Althusser, Lenin, Benjamin,etc are all excellent in their concision and aid to the controversies of Marxist philosophy..

Yet one must not ignore that this is all written under the guise of Balibar's thesis: "there is no Marxist philosophy and there will never be; . . . Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before." In this Balibar has placed Marx as vital to the academic philosophy and its relationship to praxis, but completely outside practical application by socialists. Furthermore, he makes this almost argument entirely on conflict between dialectics of history and critical theory being at an aporia. This is particularly true in the last section, which, despite the clear and generally readable translation of Chris Turner, comes off as muddled.

What is even not interesting is that Balibar makes this claim without any reference to Marxist historical practice. He is only concerned with the abstractions that emerge from Marx's own development. So Balibar does seek to place Marx in his own historical context but denies the importance of practiced Marxism: "The events which marked the end of the great cycle during which Marxism functioned as an organizational doctrince (1890-1990), have added nothing new to the discussion itself, but have swept away the interests which opposed its being opened up."

His thesis is also predicated on the claim that while Marx's attempt to make philosophy cause action and also place it in a sociological context makes him a truly original thinker, Balibar says that Marx is a dogmatist that falls short of fully exploring his claims. This kind of argument has been made in far less obtuse ways by Isaiah Berlin or even Noam Chomsky. I suspect because this is sort of a liner-notes form of Baliber's developed critique in Masses, Classes and Idea that there is no reason to assume that class structures will because consistent because "the emergence of a revolutionary form of subjectivity (or identity)... is never a specific property of nature, and therefore brings with it no guarantees, but obliges us to search for the conditions in a conjuncture that can precipitate class struggles into mass movements..." (Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, Routledge. Trans. James Swenson.)

Still let us return to a structured critique of the book instead of jumping to the Balibar's other works that inform it. The second chapter focuses on the praxis/poiesis dialectic (or, in non-philosopher speak, "theory/action" divide). Balibar reads this as an aporia:

"it is not difficult to derive the following hypothesis from Marx's aphorisms: just as traditional materialism in reality conceals an idealist foundation (representation, contemplation), so modern idealism in reality conceals a materialist orientation in the function it attributes to the acting subject, at least if one accepts that there is a latent conflict between the idea of representation (interpretation, contemplation) and of activity (labour, practice, transformation, change). And what he proposes is quite simply to explode the contradiction to dissociate representation and subjectivity and allow the category of practical activity to emerge in its own right"

Yet, even if I agree with Marx, can we say that there is actually a real dialectic there? What if the problem that Marx was trying to reconcile resolves itself in practice. Belief is acted upon and created through action. There is a lot of modern psychological studies to confirm this. This means that philosophy that is not enacted is not operating in good faith. This seems to be consistent with Marx's intention and his economics but removes the problem Balibar is placing on him by accepting an essentially Hegelian dialectical problem.

In discussing ideology Balibar seems to indicate that it is conflict with fetishism in Marx's work. That this is a hard division between Marx's early and later thought. However, he admits that fetishism is concerned with economic mystification and ideology is concerned with state/cultural mystification. He see these as opposed, perhaps because Balibar accept's Althusser's conception that ideology is totalizing.
On this, I am not sure if I agree, but it seems to be that the difference between ideology and fetishism is descriptive focus. Fetishism calls attention to an element of commodity value that is ideological and mystifying but is in no way in conflict with the larger analysis of capital and class emergence.

Furthermore, Balibar talks about Marx's having an "evolutionary" or "Darwinian" view. He is accusing Marx of having somehow sublimated a theory of progress. I think this is a misunderstanding of what an evolutionary view is. It is a common mistake made from Herbert Spenser onward that evolution implies teleological process towards some absolute goal. Indeed, Hegel also has this latent teleology. Marx, however, seems to indicate unsure of this: capitalism contradictions make impossible to be self-sustaining, but in very little of Marxist writings does he seem to say that the outcome of this dialectical impasse has a specific ending. It seems many of the historical problems of the Paris Commune may have complicated Marx's view, something that Balibar himself suggests.

This critique aside, I find Balibar's book to be challenging and engaging when it is clear. Balibar's discussion of Marx's revolution of the idea of "subject" is worth the 140 pages. It's introductory elements are sound, but this text is NOT an introduction to Marxist philosophy as you can tell by the my critique. Indeed, you would have to familiar with the primary texts and a good bit of post-structuralist and post-Marxist jargon to get past parts of the last chapter.

For a better introduction to Marxist thought, read Marx. Then watch the David Harvey lectures I posted, and if you still need some supplements--don't feel bad about it, Marx combines economics, philosophy and nascent sociology in a way that few people can handle from every aspect.

For those more textually inclined: David Harvey's Companion to Capital, The Cambridge Companion to Marx, and Terry Eagleton's Marx Was Right are all more introductory in a (slightly in the case of Eagleton) less polemic and obtuse way.

If you want a ready an interesting and provocation, but brief philosophical treatise on Marx, do read Balibar.Also I can suggest reading his work on Kapital with Althusser and some of his reflections on Dictatorship of the Proletariat. For similar critiques, Derrida's The Spectre of Marx and the reaction against it, Ghostly Demarcations, are quite good.

[Ciro · Rating 3 out of 5]

As others have said this definitely isn't an introduction, and it's also unfortunately short.

Another thing to note is that this is a work of Philosophy (of the kind that is found in university departments), and therefore comes with its limitations as well as advantages. It serves as a good introduction to academic debates within Marxism (e.g. between ideology and fetishism, humanism and structuralism, etc), but nothing nothing on Marxism as a revolutionary weapon, in spite of Althusser being Balibar's main intellectual source. In fact, Balibar denies the possibility of Marxism playing any important role in both society and academia because of "the long and difficult process of separation from 'historical Marxism'"; in other words, he succumbs to anti-communist ideology and IMO therefore accepts an idealist conception of society, despite his pretensions earlier in the book.

Another example of its political worthlessness is his acceptance of the usual 'Lenin was an elitist who didn't have faith in the working class' by citing the 1902 pamphlet 'What is to be Done?", as if Lenin's thought crystallized in that moment years before the Russian revolutions. I'm being a bit pedantic here since it's not a subject he spends more than two lines on, but it serves as an example of what kind of tradition Balibar is coming from.

[Campbell Rider]

expropriate the expropriators
negate the negation ;)

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

Balibar presents this small book as it were simply an introductory exegesis of Marx’s work. In fact, it offers a very original interpretation of Marx’s philosophy. Balibar’s writing is so admirably clear that the complexity of the book’s interpretive argument almost catches the reader off guard. For Balibar, Marx is a thinker frequently switching back and forth from anti-philosophy to philosophy and in so doing arriving at a meta-critique of philosophy that changed the western tradition forever. This project, Balibar argues, ultimately results in a philosophical model of the materiality of time.


At the end of the book, Balibar identifies three main paths one can take to understand the flow of Marx’s thought. The first is a critique of the western tradition that oscillates between a flat out rejection of the tradition in the Thesis on Feurerbach to a more nuanced balance between theory and action in The German Ideology, in which philosophy is, perhaps unintentionally, reimbraced.



Marx was at his most anti-philosophical, perhaps predictably, upon immediately turning away from philosophical academia. The Thesis on Feuerbach proclaims that philosophy is a pointless attempt to describe the world as if it were a static thing. Marx makes the (dangerously philosophical) point that the world is ever-changing, so the attempt to describe reality is a pointless celebration of individualistic interpretations of the world. The point, of course, is to change the world and this can only be done through political praxis. This is, Balibar contends, Marx, the former scholar of pre-Socratic Greek thought, forbidding himself from ever “regressing” to the practice of philosophy.


Was the Marx of the Thesis, then, proclaiming that there could only be The Revolution- monolithic and uninterpretable- and silence? (Balibar’s phrasing seems designed to invite comparisons between this early work by Marx and Wittgenstein’s equally anti-philosophical Tractatus.) Whether or not the young Marx was thinking this way, Balibar contends, he fortunately soon changed his mind. In Marx’s subsequent writings, reality is not shaped by a Revolutionary Transformation, but rather a constant multitude of little transformations, all transforming each other.


Balibar makes the striking claim that Marx was not at any point in his career a materialist in the sense that the term has been used in the history of western philosophy. The tradition known as “materialism” simply claims that meaning is inspired by matter. This is, of course, an interpretation of the world. Materialism, as historically understood, was just another form of dreamy, foppish idealism.


The term “materialism” was, nonetheless, the term Marx chose, perhaps clumsily, for his inversion of idealism. If “old materialism” had been a disguised idealism, then perhaps post-Kantian idealism disguised another impulse. For Kant and his disciples, universal categories have two sides; representation and subjectivity. Indeed, for Kant, representation, a type of interpretation, is constituted by subjectivity. In other words, stressed Marx, for post-Kantian thought, the world is actively constituted by subjectivity(ies) that can then recreate that world. This is, Balibar contends, in no way a carrying on of the tradition known as materialism, but the germ of a whole new concept of philosophy.


In Balibar’s narrative, the next evolution in Marx’s thought came as a response to a criticism by rival radical Max Stirner. Stirner critiqued the “proletarian revolution” that Marx dreamed of as just another abstract universal, such as humanism or Christ, that would ultimately oppress the creative power of the individual. Deeply offended, Marx responded with “The German Ideology”. As vehemently as he had renounced philosophy in the Thesis, Balibar contends, Marx was already reverting to it with this new work. Indeed, at the heart of this work was a turn back to the ancient Greeks who distinguished “praxis”, the attempts of the master class to be the most perfect citizens and individual they could be, from “poiesis”, the attempts by slaves, the working class of the ancient world, to perfect the creation of items of utility. Praxis was made possible by “theoria” the detached contemplation that led the thinker to the Ideal.


It is at this point in Marx’s thinking that the first “path” through Marx’s thought identified by Balibar spins off into the second, a path that begins with a critique of of the classical, meaning bestowing subject of western thought and proceeds to two competing theories of the constitution of subjectivity. Marx argues, according to Balibar, that in the post-Kantian thought-world praxis and poiesis had been subtly merged together. Subjectivity perfects its own representation through social action or practice. To put it in terminology that is more immediately recognizable as Marxist, history is the process by which humanity produces its own means of existence which in turn transforms humanity and nature itself. What the ancient Greeks defined as theoria, individualistic, detached contemplation, Marx reimagined as the collective production of consciousness in a given society, or that society’s ideology. Ideology is produced by society, but itself also produces the ideas through which members of a society collectively understand a reality. Social change didn’t thwart the creative ambitions of the individual, as Stirner proposed, but rather the individual was a byproduct of social change and the current dominant ideology.


The fact remained for Marx, however, that successive social regimes, from the slave societies of the ancient world to the nascent European capitalism of his time, had maintained the distinction between praxis and poesis- intellectual and physical labor. Marx’s notion that under communism there would be no such division of labor is often dismissed as one of his most utopian fantasies. But, Balibar insists, the annihilation of the distinction between physical and intellectual labor is central to Marx’s thinking. This division, in Marx’s mind, divided all people from themselves, both the oppressed workers and the reified capitalists of his time.


In the proletariat, Marx saw a social group so utterly deprived of all status and essence that they might be able to potentially absorb all essence. For Marx, writes Balibar, the proletariat was not really a class at all. It had been too disenfranchised by capitalism to have any class-interest of its own, and therefore any consciousness shaped by that narrow interest. These were humans so devoid of values that they might, ironically, be the first people in history of realizing genuinely universal values, not class interests but mass interests.


The failed revolutions of 1848 greatly shook and disappointed Marx. He felt that the proletariat had allowed itself to be led astray and had abandoned their historic goal… for now. In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx was forced to admit that the economic realities of the working class created class unity but also competition between workers for resources. He had to rethink his notions about the proletariat being a “universal class” because they were not really a class at all. As a result, he also had to reexamine his theory of ideology.


Marx set about trying in his philosophical work to redefine social objectivity. At least since Kant, western philosophy has not accepted any theories of objectivity that did not also offer a theory of subjectivity. Marx therefore had to redefine one to redefine the other. For both Kant and Hegel, the subjective constitution of the world remains central, even if the latter complicated things a bit with his notion of the historical evolution of subjective consciousness. In Marx’s later writings, by contrast, it is fetishism that constitutes the social world. Reality was constituted by relations of exchange. With this, Balibar writes, the last vestiges of the transcendental subject were purged from Marx’s thought. If the ideologically defined subject was a byproduct of society, rather than the other way around, this subject was still born of ideas. Rather, according to Marx’s new theory of fetishism, the subject was simply the result of the objects of production and the norms of behavior that went into using them.


By the time he wrote Capital, Volume 1, the center of the social world for Marx was not humanity at all, but the commodity, the eternally exchangeable object. Subjectivity was founded in relation to this object and was itself exchangeable. Ideology had been a theory of the constitution of the state’s power, in which the separation of mental and physical labor alienated humanity from itself in the name of a grand, fake idea such as God, Right or Nation. Fetishism, by contrast, was a theory of subjection to the market in which productive human activity was alienated from itself via its subordination to the reproduction of exchange value. Everything and everyone becomes an exchangeable, and thus replaceable, commodity.


Marx’s competing theories of ideology and fetishism had at least one important factor in common. In both theories the state seeks to extract itself from time. If there was change and historical evolution, the capitalist state assures us, it took place in the past and is now at an end. Fukiyama was utterly unoriginal in declaring the end of history. Bourgeois theorists of capitalism have always done so, since the most nascent days of capitalism. It is Marx’s breaking with such thought that will eventually inform Balibar’s thesis that Marx’s ultimate project was, intentionally or not, to provide a model for the materiality of time. This also brings us to Balibar’s third great path through Marx: one that starts from a radical theory of causality and proceeds to a dialectic of temporality in which historical forces create a multitude of times.


Capital was, Balibar reminds us, written in the aftermath of both the revolutionary disappointments of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. The book is, Balibar believes, more of a critique of notions of progress than a work of positivist progressivism. Indeed, if there is an idea that Capital embraces, rather than critiques, it is not progress but process as a logical (in that it concerns the irreconcilability of contradiction) and political (in that it bases it’s analysis on the real conditions of the labor struggle) concept.



The fact that the proletariat was able to collectively resist commodification on any level fascinated Marx. As labor power is continuously transformed into a commodity, a capitalist collective subject to capitalist time, the process of such transformation leaves a residue, an unintended remainder: it creates a proletarian collective subject to proletarian time. In his late thought, instead of proposing a temporal totality, such as “progress”, Marx thought reality could only be understood by studying problems of forces acting on each other in the present. And this present is itself constantly transforming in ways determined not by consciousness but by the process of production.


Capitalism being necessarily transformative, it is necessarily true that society will evolve in the future and revolutionary practice will evolve along with it. Perhaps a socialist practice will develop in the future that is far more potent than were those that Marx lived to see. The only constant that Balibar’s Marx saw in historical time was that it was always non-contemporaneous with itself. Rather, it was always transforming and in doing so creating new means for its own transformation. The future always presents a multiplicity of paths of development because within any one epoch there are always a multiplicity of times at work, as capitalist time engenders proletarian time and so forth. But the path that will be historically taken is contingent and provisional on contingency.


To support his interpretation of Marx’s late thought as more concerned with process than mechanical progress, Balibar points to a letter Marx wrote late in life to the then leaders of the nascent Russian socialist movement. These leaders then believed that the traditional communal farming communities that characterized Russian society would have to be abolished along with all vestiges of feudalism so that capitalism could wholly take hold in Russia before any move towards socialism could begin. Marx rejected this notion, and specifically wrote to the Russians that historical development as he had outlined it in his work was a tendency, not an absolute law. Indeed, Marx advised his Russian followers to embrace the peasants’ collective communities and that perhaps in the strange case of Russia, aspects of feudal life could lead to a more natural transition to socialism and ultimately communism.


After the fall of the Paris Commune, old Marx understood once and for all that he would not live to see a successful proletarian revolution. His work would never be complete, his thought would be one that would never reach an absolute conclusion. In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx famously made his distinction between socialism and communism. Balibar understands socialism, the transitional stage between capitalism and communism, not as a type of state, as it has historically been understood, Rather, for Balibar, socialism designates the temporal space between (Marx’s? Our?) present and a future in which revolutionary politics, seemingly a lost cause in the years after the Commune (much like our own time) could return.


This work of Balibar’s was written in the early 1990s, when the fall of the Soviet Union was still a recent development and the joyous cries of capitalist triumphalism were everywhere and deafening. Like in the years after the fall of the Paris Commune, revolutionary victory, or even progressive reform, felt very far away, even historically impossible. Writing this book was I think a way for Balibar to imagine even that historical time as a socialist one- that is one between a terrible present and a potential future where thoughts of revolution could again be uttered.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Billed as an accessible introduction to the philosophy of Marx (Balibar was approached to write this volume in the 90s as a means of getting students to engage with Marx's writings instead of "Marxist" theory), this was a hell of a mixed bag.
On the one hand, there are a few specific philosophical concepts from Marx that get detailed explanations (fetishism, progression of history, etc.) that are actually helpful. Additionally, Balibar doing a close reading of Marx means that he is constantly situating writings in their historical and philosophical context, which gives readers a clearer understanding of the purpose of different pieces.
However, this book is not an introduction by any stretch of the imagination. You don't get much, if any, introduction to the economic and historical theories that make Marx most compelling to read. Balibar goes into the weeds of the philosophical discussions in such a way that is way more difficult than actually reading Marx himself.
I found this to be a helpful refresher of the language Marx uses, but I couldn't recommend this to someone as the first thing they read to get them acquainted to Marx and his philosophies.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

Balibar's attempt to demystify the image of Marx as an audacious theoretician-scientist who, like Hegel before him, reads totality into history also doubles as a hard [re]introduction to the sort of philosophical themes any sober, self respecting 'marxist' today should be concerned about.
Yes, the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is not so much a death knell of philosophy as a clarion call to philosophers to face up to the fact of the entwinement of thinking and acting--action affords thought to realize alternatives that would otherwise remain unconceived.
If Baliber is to be believed, this is why Marx had to let history intervene in his theorizing in the wake of the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 and again in the 1870 (Franco Prussian war and the crushing of the Paris Commune), prompting him to develop the notorious concept of 'ideology' to account for the persistence of the value-form.
We also see Marx admitting that the trajectory of the Russian communes at the dusk of the 19th century could potentially short-circuit the crises and antagonisms in the West and segue directly into the construction of a Communist society, a far cry from the image of Marx as a supra-historical thinker.
Baliber situates Marx's originality between the 'old' materialism and idealism as pursing the third option of transformation of nature that is also the same time the transformation of spirit or self-consciousness: "There is never any effective freedom which is not also a material transformation, which is not registered historically in exteriority, But nor is there any work which is not a transformation of the self, as though human beings could change their conditions of existence while maintaining an invariant 'essence'. " pg. 41
Ultimately, Baliber makes a convincing case that Marx has indeed inflicted a wound on philosophy. And precisely because Marxism failed in the 20th century that philosophy still hasn't recovered from this wound. Only by realizing a classless society where humans beings as free producers have acquired a collective self-mastery of productive forces to fulfill the needs of living labor, not to valorize dead, accumulated labor can the radical dream of the formal equality of minds posited by philosophy be fulfilled.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Marx's philosophy is improbable".

[paper0r0ss0 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marx oltre il marxismo. Oltre la vulgata che per piu' di un secolo e mezzo lo ha letto, interpretato e capito in tanti modi differenti, spesso sbagliati. Riprendere Marx nel XXI secolo significa apprezzare e non nascondere le tante contraddizioni, le inversioni di rotta, gli errori e la straordinaria modernita' filosofica di un autore che non ha mai voltato le spalle alla realta' ma che ha sempre ribattuto colpo su colpo per cercare di cambiarla in meglio. Piu' nello specifico, alcuni passi sono piuttosto ostici se non si possiedono gli strumenti dell'analisi filosofica, ma la lettura complessiva e' davvero notevole.

[Parsa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm into Balibar's radical thinking but this book is confusing. If you expect a short book that explains Marx you're dead wrong. The reader needs to know most of the preconditions behind Marxism, and to be honest if you know that much there is no need to read this book because it won't add ANYTHING to it. On the other hand, if you're looking for Balibar's and his fellow's view on Marx the book would describe accurately what they're looking for.

[Bernard · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting effort. I quite enjoyed Balibar's writings in RC, and in many ways this book is complementary both to his thought on that project and a semi-continuation of Althusser's reading of Marx itself. The key issue remains that, where Althusser would deliberately sidestep a lot of the issues and contradictions in Marx's thought described here, to engage upon a more militant and aggressive perspective ('waging war in theory'), Balibar seeks to express and ruminate on these empty spaces. I'd hazard to point to a specific section as a whole that I'd find more difficult to navigate than any other, but it was chiefly section three (or its transition from section two) that seemed to slip away more than any other part of the book. I'd wager that Balibar's concluding remarks on this transition were meant to be deliberate, but the questions I have lingering at the end of the project remind me of my feelings towards Jameson's conclusion in Postmodernism, in that in doing so, Balibar makes a point about the non-philosophy qualities of Marx (as opposed to an anti-philosophy, which Marx never totally abandons, or the 'limits of his thought' never fully preclude) and in how the amalgalm of categories at the intersection of history, class struggle, philosophical and theoretical don't so much collide so much as churn and crash constantly. In contrast to a 'materialist' Marx, the contours of Balibar's thought about Marx are both a serious oeuvre of scholarship in a philosophical vein (though with a notable paucity of references outside of Marxism) and a secularisation of the rupture that Althusser insisted on as part of an anti-teleological materialist history. I think, in the end, it doesn't fully work, but it succeeds excellently in trying to think through Marx, in problematising Marxism itself, though arguably at the cost that comes with a Marxism-of-Marx, failing to sufficiently describe the extent of those problematics in the sphere of combat that would arguably be the ultimate determination of Marxism itself, that of class struggle (though it is possible this was Balibar's intent after all).

[Andreas Chari · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting first taste of Balibar. Enjoyed him tackling the legacy of Althusser and building beyond him - the concept of transindividuality will be something I will be revising - in addition to read Marx outside of stagism and evolutionist readings. As with every philosophy book I read, especially post-Marxist ones, my one complaint is the need for the authors to write in a way that makes it a pain to read (which, tbf might be my lack of systematic exposure to philosophical writings).

[Grinjo · Rating 5 out of 5]

balibar looks at Marx as a philosopher of sorts, beginning by cautioning that Marx himself drew swords with philosophy (german idealism). looking at his major works, proposing that philosophy was never the same after marx, balibar (himself an althusserian) discusses influences, inconsistencies and later developments of marx's works.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book of 224 pages with an 8-page bibliography and 20+ pages of Notes gives the reader some insight into the depths of Balibar's theoretical investigations into Marx and Marxism. This is definitely not a book for any casual reading of any aspect touched on by Balibar in its pages. An updated version of an earlier work, but one would be hard-pressed to find intellectual comfort in this re-presentation, with its 2 Appendices. Wow. Having never read anything by Marx or Engels besides 'The Communist Manifesto', quite a lot of what Balibar references is outside my reading about Marx and/or Marxism. A book that doubles down on serious thinking, and then redoubles that, often. Be prepared to maintain focus, else you'll find you "read" an extended sentence, paragraph, or entire page and missed just about everything Balibar meant to say, explain, of question. Balibar tells us early on he won't summarize or dumb-down (my term) what he is writing, though he will try to explain some of the more complicated terms, ideas, and concepts. Huh. One wonders how opaque this could have been had he not. Most assuredy a book for academics, classrooms, syllabi, and those who have already taken a deep dive into Marx, Marxism, and related topics. I can say much of this was too thorough, but I did at least understand the bigger ideas.

[K]

A tough but enlightening cover of some of Marx’s philosophical ideas - certainly no introduction; I’m quite familiar with some of Marx’s work discussed here (namely the German ideology and the theses on Feuerbach) but I was and remain quite lost regarding parts of this book. Thinking with Balibar is tough but I think re-reading this will definitely be rewarding at some… indefinite point in the future.

Balibar typically refuses to treat a philosophers oeuvre as a unified whole but rather points to the problems and inconsistencies that appear - which there is a lot of in Marx considering how much of his work was unpublished/unfinished. He does something very similar in his first book on Spinoza. This sometimes makes for difficult reading as he is literally saying ‘one way of reading this is this, another is this, but neither are quite right or should be read together or this secret third way is more accurate’. It’s not that I think he’s wrong for saying this, but it can be hard to follow.

A particular highlight for me was probably the analysis of Marx’s rejection of human nature in favour of humans as an ‘ensemble of social relations’, and tensions that come from giving labour relations a primary position in Marx’s later work

[Martin Hare Michno · Rating 2 out of 5]

As the title suggests, this book is more about the philosophy of Marx than his politics, whatever that may mean. The author seems to explain the contrast between Marx's own writings and Marxist writings. It was honestly a tedious book. I started reading it in summer and even now I didn't bother reading the Afterword or Appendix because of how long, dry and complicated they are.

At times Balibar can be insightful and authoritative, and his writing is clear. But this book is for people comfortable in philosophy and philosophical terms, familiar with the Frankfurt School and already read Marx and even Hegel. I'm not those people so I definitely struggled to follow many parts of the book.

I really don't know what to rate this book, because it isn't necessarily bad or difficult, just tedious and at times dry/boring.

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy read, but all the more rewarding for it. This is not an introduction in any sense of the word, but a close analysis of Marx's key philosophical themes, written from a perspective with a history of its own. Balibar keeps the lid down on the early/late Marx controversy and, perhaps surprisingly, focuses on the former. The most interesting discussion is the ideology/fetish continuum (or break, however you want to read it), but lots of genuinely fresh perspectives even for seasoned Marx readers.

[Mattia Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty good but advertises itself as an introduction but is defo not intro level reading into Marx

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5;

[Peter Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a useful discussion of some aspects of Marx as a philosopher from a leading French academic on the subject. It isn't I think however a comprehensive dissection of Marx's philosophy. Nor is it an elementary introduction for someone who has no background in Marx's thinking. It is a book which is probably best suited to someone who already has an understanding of the basics and is looking for a more in depth analysis of the philosophical elements of Marx, including how they impact his approach to politics, history, and economics.

There are some very insightful sections. In particular that on Time and Progress. This covers Marx's use of dialectics and how a sense of motion pervades his thinking. Materialism for Marx is not something based on independent static material objects interacting with each through external links. Rather it is a question of dynamic processes organically linked together as an inherent part of their make up. There is a sense of progress in history, but rather than towards on ontological end point it is driven by the conflict of opposing forces. Nothing is predetermined.

Balibar proposes that there isn't truly either a single consistent "philosophy of Marx" nor a "Marxist philosophy" which forms a unified whole with it. His analysis takes an approach similar to Althusser in reviewing the Marx's writings themselves and showing the development in his thought. Balibar is less determined than Althusser to identify a single "epistemological break", focusing rather on the process of growth and change.

The language is detailed and often unfortunately opaque. The need for a basic introduction to Marx's thinking is probably better served by the first volume of Leszek Kolakowski's "Main Currents of Marxism", while Bertell Ollman's "Dance of the Dialectic" is a good introduction to key concepts such as abstraction and contradiction.

Nevertheless this is a useful and interesting book from a key figure in the development of the structuralist study of Marx.

[Drenda]

One of the best known truisms about Marx is that he turned Hegel upside down by replacing the latter's idealism with a materialist base. Certainly this is true, but one of Balibar's achievements is to show what a break this was in the philosophical tradition and just how complex this flip to materialism made of the whole idea of process. It was not just that the superstructure was based on the means of production, but that the flow between them was so unbound that there is no beginning and no end. Marx is actually pivotal in eliminating foundations, which in Western philosophy is essentially Mind, the basis from which growth and development proceeds, to thinking in terms of open-ended interdependencies, say, points in a matrix. In this, Marx was way before his time in anticipating some of the main tenets of what we call Modernism(1): the subject is eliminated as constituting his world, rather (s)he is constituted in the flow of her activities. Marx's subject is never transcendental, sensing and evaluating a world, but an intersection of relationships. A favorite Balibar line- ' Contrary to what Max Weber would later assert, the modern world is not "disenchanted" but enchanted, precisely insofar as it is the world of objects of value and objectified values.' p. 60 Our total sense of reality is based in the activities we are immersed in and the ideas that accompany them, so to be totally disenchanted would mean the end of social relations. At least, I am assuming, until a true communism is realized and commodity fetishes no longer hold sway.

How inevitable is the the realization of true communism for Marx? Like almost everything in Marx's purview, his relationship to this question changed over time. The young Marx proposed a history of evolutionary schemes, social formulations based on their mode of production, that was intended to be evaluative of a society's economic development. Thus came the debates on where the revolution could take place-in only the most advanced capitalist societies? History burdened Marx with any number of crises in maintaining this belief. He truly believed the 1848 uprisings in Europe were the start of revolutionary change; they not only failed but moreover the proletariate showed itself to be far from immune to other ideologies of the time- nationalism, religion. And it was Marx's starting point that the proletariate was without ideology, being simply too trodden to have any, and so were the triggers to change and the classless society. The failures of the 1871 revolts furthered his disappoints. Balibar suggest that Marx, in coping with the internal confusions and external crises of his time, simply discarded general trends and applied the rationality of the class struggle to specific problems. Labor and capital must clash, but how they do so involves the investigation of each evolving interplay of forces: 'what interests him (Marx) is not so much the general form of the graph of history takes-the integral, as it were- but the differential, the acceleration-effect, and hence the relation of forces in play at any particular moment, determining the direction of its advance. What interests him, then, is the way that labor-power-individually and, above all, collectively-resists and tends to elude the status of pure commodity imposed on it by the logic of capital.' p. 100-101

(1) See, for instance, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative by Thomas Vargish and Delo Book

[Tahta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely not "The only guide to Marx that the student and scholar will need," as advertised in the book description. (If you need some introductory guidance on Marx, I'd recommend Collier's excellent "Marx: A Beginner's Guide" instead.) This is because 1) this book is simply not a "guide" or "introduction" and 2) it is not comprehensive in the sense that it aims to provide a general, even if brief, survey on the "philosophy of Marx." The book never seems to intend to serve to that purpose. In fact, I think it would be fair to say that it strictly focuses on some select areas which are apparently of special interest to Balibar: the tensed connection of Marx to philosophy (in the context of the Theses); the problematicity of the concept of ideology; commodity fetishism and the constitution of the subject; and the theoretical ambiguities around and variations in Marx's conceptions of progress and formulations of historical materialism.

Balibar is a careful and erudite philosopher: You won't be finding easy and convenient conclusions, far-fetched speculations and outright sophisms in this book, and he definitely "knows his Marx and Marxism." Even if you're well read up on Marxist literature you might come across some new bit of important factual information in the book. What I especially liked about this work is that it does not shy away from the challenge of investigating the major philosophical difficulties and aporias with which Marx has grappled. It is not an attempt to "save" Marx and fuse every idea of him into a superficially coherent whole. Plus, Balibar's analysis of the Theses, and his emphasis on the sophisticated divergence of Marx's qualified materialism from both "old materialism" and idealism is really good.

The main problem I had with this book was that there are too many points which are left underanalysed, and sometimes the author takes refuge in an elusive style. It feels as though Balibar had many interesting things to say but did not have the time to go into them with the depth they required. Having decided to include these ideas anyway, he feeds you many sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs with very little effort to help you follow the reasoning. Some section transitions seemed rushed and a little forced as well. The text tries to give the impression that "this logically entails the next section," but does not succeed in filling the gaps every time, it's often as if the bell has rung for the lecture of the day and it's just time to move on to the next item on the syllabus.

If you're looking for an introduction or guide to Marx, this book is not it. But it does deliver, even if too dense at times, concise critical analyses of some crucial philosophical problems in Marx's corpus with the accuracy and scholarly attention you would expect from a Marxist philosopher of Balibar's calibre.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite a short book, mainly offering an overview of Marx’s philosophy, but with two appendices which are more focused and intensive. There are difficult sections, which is inevitable since the topic of the book is, after all, Marx and Marxism, but Balibar handles the difficult material very fluently so that I personally found it interesting and informative. [Anyone hoping for a handy summary of Marx's philosophy in this review will be disappointed!]

Like some other writers, Marx appeared to have announced his exit from philosophy in pursuit of something more useful. In the eleventh and last of the Theses on Feuerbach, we read: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Iris Murdoch made quite a career out of lampooning people thinking they could get away with such notions. In reality Marx did nothing of the kind, since without the tools of metaphysics he could not have begun to define and resolve the relevant issues. And indeed, Marx can be located very much within philosophical tradition; for example: All these formulations, different in content or opposed in intent as they may be, share a common concern with the question of the relation between theory and practice, consciousness and life. This is true from Parmenides’s ‘Thinking and being are one’ to Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, via Spinoza (‘God is nature’), Kant (‘I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’), and Hegel (‘The rational is real and the real is rational’). And here is Marx ensconced not just at the heart of philosophy, but at the heart of its most speculative turn, in which it strives to think its own limits, whether to abolish them or to establish itself on the basis of a recognition of those limits.[p45]

Having planted Marx squarely “at the heart of philosophy,” Balibar explains that Marx himself did not, in point of fact, leave behind a finished system of philosophy which we can refer to as “Marx’s Philosophy.” The fact is that, as I have sought to show in the wake of many others, Marxism and Marx’s Marxism... – from which, as is well known, he sought to extricate himself by quipping ‘all I know is that I am not a Marxist’ – never managed to find a language that articulated theory and practice,...[p217]

Balibar himself argues that we must virtually excavate the philosophy of Marx from deep within the written words, and sometimes indeed from material he never intended to publish. So we have the right then to interpret the implications of what Marx wrote. Not to consider the fragments of his discourse as cards to be infinitely reshuffled at will, but, nonetheless, to take a foothold in his ‘problematics’ and ‘axiomatics’ – in other words, in his ‘philosophies’ – and push these to their conclusions (to find the contradictions, limits and openings to which they lead)

He emphasizes that Marx wrote fluently in a number of languages (German, French, English), well aware of the significant differences between languages in the meaning and connotations of key words, and aware of the philosophical connotations attached to them, their histories in the literature of philosophy. Hence, in his first appendix, he analyses the text in Marx’s 1845 Theses on Feuerbach in order to pin down just where Marx stood, paying special attention when Marx inserts a French word into a sentence written in German. [He learns a great deal from this text, writing ” Today, these Theses are regarded as one of the most iconic documents of Western philosophy [p169] which may be the case, but he seems to me overly grandiose when he compares it to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.]

Balibar explains that Marx developed his thinking over the course of a lifetime, that this was not a linear process and that there were some radical changes of direction. Major breaks occurred with the failure of the 1848 revolutions and then the Franco Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1871. I am tempted, rather, to believe that he never, in fact, had the time to construct a doctrine because the process of rectification went faster [p162] He was too much the theorist to ‘botch’ his conclusions, too much the revolutionary either to bow to reverses of fortune or to ignore catastrophes and carry on as though nothing had happened. And too much the scientist and the revolutionary to surrender to the hope for a messiah [p162]

At his death, his work was still incomplete; Engels had to edit and complete some of it according to Engels’ own understanding and many other key works – not all intended for publication - did not even come into print before the 1930s. Consequently, Balibar makes clear that what we can refer to as Marxist philosophy often only exists in the work of later interpreters who started from different aspects of Marx’s thought, selected different elements and transformed them in very diverse philosophical directions.

Balibar is nevertheless cheerful about the implications of this. He believes that the development of Marxism between 1890 and 1990 was a failure and it is indeed jarring when an interesting analysis of the concept of the withering away of the state reaches its conclusion with Stalin executing the theorist. However, events have freed us from commitment to the past and we can tackle Marx in new ways. Here is how he expresses this suggestion: We do, nevertheless, have to recognize that Marxism is an improbable philosophy today. This has to do with the fact that Marx’s philosophy is engaged in the long and difficult process of separation from ‘historical Marxism’, a process in which the obstacles accumulated by a century of ideological utilization have to be surmounted. It cannot, however, be right for that philosophy to seek to return to its starting-point; it must, rather, learn from its own history and transform itself as it surmounts those obstacles. Those who wish today to philosophize in Marx not only come after him, but come after Marxism: they cannot be content merely to register the caesura Marx created, but must also think on the ambivalence of the effects that caesura produced – both in its proponents and its opponents[p162]

Now to be honest I have no idea what Balibar is really saying there. If Marx himself considered that the failure of the 1848 revolutions invalidated what he had written in the Communist Manifesto of 1847, so that a radical change of direction was necessary, and he reacted similarly to the manifest deficiencies of the 1871 Paris Commune, it seems pretty hard to imagine that the same Marx – or any serious student of his work – would be unperturbed by any of the subsequent events between 1890 and 1990.

So why is Marxism an improbable philosophy today? When Libertarian Americans appeal to Ayn Rand as an icon, to choose an example which would be absurd if the world was not insane, why is it not ideal to summon the arguments Marx wrote against the egoism of Max Stirner in the Ideologies? Why is discussion of the ontological status of the individual in society less critical today than in 1845? I prefer to conclude with a more succinct remark by Balibar: Let us say that humanity cannot abandon a problem which it has not yet solved. [p164]

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

An impressively lucid (if rather lofty) examination of Marx and philosophy-or Philosophy with a capital "P" more accurately. Balibar is more concerned here with situating Marx and his (anti- or non-) philosophy within the canon of Philosophy than he is with critical theory or even structures of capitalism.

NOT, as I keep seeing it referred to as, a useful first introduction to Marx or Marxism; more a way to restructure an existing understanding from a different conceptual direction.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Billed as an introduction to Marx, The Philosophy of Marx by Etienne Balibar is a little too complicated to be a beginner text and too short to provide any great insights. It is helpful to situate some of the debates in Marxist philosophy. Balibar presents the book as an undogmatic interpretation of Marx's writings without the baggage of Marxism proper. What he is really doing is reinforcing Althusser's interpretations of Marx, as well as incorporating many Western marxist positions, there are citations from Adorno, Habermas, Negri, Benjamin, etc. Balibar emphasizes throughout the text the Epistemological Break that Althusser proposed, a split between 'humanist' and 'scientific' Marx, using 1848 as the main divider.
After an introduction of Marx's life and career, Chapter 2 discusses Marx's context within philosophy, his position on the spectrum of idealism and materialism and the influence of Hegel, Kant and Feuerbach. It is useful if you care about metaphysical questions.
Chapter 3 is on ideology. Balibar presents ideology as Marx's main misstep, he sees Marx's early definition of ideology from The German Ideology as a failure, proven so by the failure of the 1848 revolutions. Marx defined ideology as mystification of social relations, and claimed the proletariat had access to the objective truth and so were without ideology. After they failed to act in their own interests and free themselves from exploitation it became clear this was untrue. Balibar shows how Marx mostly abandoned the concept of ideology and instead focused on commodity fetishism. Fetishism is no longer a false perception of reality, like ideology was defined, but the way reality must appear given the historical conditions and social relations. Balibar describes it like this: "ideology is fundamentally a theory of the state, where fetishism is a theory of the market." Ideology is applied generally to civil society, to a historical trajectory, whereas fetishism is present in socialization, in the daily economic production of capitalist life. Fetishism is a more well rounded concept that remains useful. Balibar shows the trajectory of ideology as a term, promoting Gramsci's (and of course Althusser's) improvements on the concept. He also shits on Lukacs' reification a bit.
Chapter 4 was the best one on historicity and teleology in Marx. Again Balibar blames Marxists, especially Engels and the 2nd international, on dogmatizing Marx and relying too heavily on TGI, the Manifesto and the Theses. Balibar shows how the early Marx is more straightforwardly following the Hegelian view of history but secularized. Capital Vol 1 shows a much more nuanced development of history as process. Marx's dialectic formula is one of immanent process, real contradictions present in the historical moment that are without schema or even conclusion. Balibar does all this to prove Althusser's reading of overdetermination in Marx to be correct. Marx's writing itself can be seen as a dialectic process building from an early determinist history in early Marx to the supra-historical structures of late Marx.
The last chapter is not great. Balibar admits the ambiguity of his reading and the lack of conclusion that can be gained from it. He critiques himself better than I could:
"You have not really provided an account of Marx's doctrine: if we did not know it from elsewhere, we have not learned how he defined the class struggle, how he justified the thesis of its universality and its role as the motor of history, ... etc. Nor have you provided us with any way of knowing where and in what ways he went wrong, whether anything in Marxism can be salvaged, whether it is incompatible with democracy , ecology, bioethics, etc."
The afterword and appendix confirm this. Balibar says he is focused only on philosophy and he refuses to accept the idea of doctrine, that Marx can be formulized. The purpose of all this interpretation and uncertainty is that the dialectic is action in the present, an infinitely open question of the conjunction between science and rebellion.
Is this all useless? Politically, probably yes. But I think it is helpful for understanding the process behind Marx's thinking, some of his vocabulary, the way he frames certain concepts as well as creating some space for critique of Marx. It also made me more aware that many of the fundamental concepts we associate with him, like historical materialism and scientific socialism, in fact came later from Marxist interpretation.

[Leo46 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice little introduction and summary of Marx's general project from a true Althusserian point of view (Balibar's being his student is so clear in his writings and formulations here). He goes through all the seminal ideas of Marx in a fairly intuitive, chronological, and accessible fashion. I recall the one short example of commodity fetishism that definitively made me understand the idea in one single sweep--"just as a car weighs 500 kg., so it is worth £10,000," i.e., that people in capitalism treat the price/money-value of a commodity at the same level of OBJECTIVITY as the weight of it (58). In a world where luxury goods/commodities exist, this example was particularly great at revealing the absurdity of our situation--of how far the real abstraction that is money has gone in its manipulation for ingenious methods of profit. Also, Balibar's framing of the main two defining aspects of Marx's Philosophy being that of fetishism and ideology really helped me remember what Marx's focus necessarily had to be on--the constant unity between the development of the productive forces and that of social relations/site for the emergence of praxis. Balibar does an excellent job at emphasizing social relations by the concept of the 'transindividual,' i.e., in Marx's rejecting both individualist and organicist perspectives, the holistic perspective of the transindividual is an 'ensemble' (not totality, notably) in which to think humanity as the interaction BETWEEN individuals (not just within the self or outside the self). Lastly, the blocked-out sections defining concepts or other thinkers were a nice inclusion, simultaneously functioning like a refreshing fun fact but also relevant and helpful (especially for beginners) in contextualizing the myriad of Marxisms by the time he wrote this book in 1995. However, the book really doesn't do anything MORE, so I can't give it a perfect score--it's just very decent and gets the job done (signified by its title). I highly recommend it to beginners but it's not really useful for those who've read a good amount of Marx.

[Asaad Mahmood · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the process of reading Capital, Understanding Capital by Foley, and the Companion by David Harvey, this book definitely does point out some of the nuances that perhaps can easily be overlooked while studying Marx, especially looking at his work from a modern lens only looking at his work as a critique of Capitalism, rather than a restructuring of thought, history, and philosophy in general.

What however this book does not deliver is its promise of the nuances that it highlights. Firstly, the book is contains quite rigid and unaccessible scholastic jargon, furthermore, some of the points highlighted are characteristically left unexplored.

Additionally, this book requires substantial knowledge of the various strands Marx looked at, and neo-marxists that followed. It was very hard to follow the arguments made with reference to figures such as Hegel, Benjamin, or Lenin without substantial introduction of these figures.

The thesis on Feuerbach were aptly explored (though obviously there is always room for improvement), and I felt like the different portions should have been explored to a similar extend.

In conclusion, this perhaps is a text that one needs to come back to later on in his life, but this definitely does not serve as an introduction for me, and I find it hard to see how this could be an introductory resource for young critics of either strand.

[Soph Nova · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book because it was advertised as an easy, accessible introduction to the core philosophical concepts in Marx’s writings - that was false advertising! Although there were some pieces digging into the underlying concepts at the heart of Marx’s work, they were all framed around (and much of Balibar’s ink is spilled on) very in-depth readings and explication on debates about the interpretation of Marxist (Marxian?) concepts. So, even though I’ve read some Marx and Marxist philosophy, I felt pretty befuddled, and I couldn’t tell you whether I agree at heart with Balibar’s orientation towards Marx. So, worth reading if you’re well versed in the texts he is referencing and want to dive deep into some post-Marxist discourse on German idealism vs materialism - probably not worth reading if you are looking to develop a better Marxist analysis on the political trajectory we find ourselves on. Also, in the updated introduction, Balibar says that he wanted to call the book “The Philosophies of Marx” - and it should have been that! Would have made me research more before buying it.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Philosophy of Marx is a short book about, not the philosophy of Marxism (which Balibar states has none and never will), but the philosophy of Marx the person.

In truth Marx did not consider himself a philosopher, but of course his antiphilosophy is nothing but. Like Marx's philosophy, antiphilosophy is about action. The action it consists of is reimagining, breaking open, and seeking new possibilities. And the story of Marx's philosophy follows a similar trajectory, according to Balibar, being reimagined and transformed over time, both from challenges of his contemporaries (such as Max Stirner) and from exogenous events, such as the revolts of '48 and the Paris Commune.

I give it five stars because this book actually changed my mind about Marx, and I wasn't expecting anything like that. His philosophy, as Balibar outlines, gives a lot of insight into his political and economic thought. Though it was possibly flawed, and possibly never finished (he was more focused on changing the world, after all), one thing that is certain is Marx's contribution is quite far from being exhausted.

[Billy Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

As others have rightly noted, this certainly isn't an introduction into Marx's thought. In fact, there is very little in the way of introduction to the theories and concepts that have become synonymous with Marx and Marxism. Familiarity with Marx's work is definitely a prerequisite for this. What makes this text compelling is Balibar's situating of Marx within his broader philosophical and theoretical context. It also goes into detail on the mutual problematising between Marxism and 'traditional' philosophy, the ways in which Marx's philosophy challenged the traditional and vice-versa. Balibar definitely has a tendency however to go into these discussions in a way that make understanding them more difficult than need be.

[Dato Samniashvili · Rating 4 out of 5]

წიგნს აქვს ძლიერი მხარე და სუსტიც. ყველაზე კარგად უფრო ინდივიდის და საზოგადოებრივი ურთიეთობის ერთობლივობის მხარეა გაშლილი, მაგრამ ყოველ თავში თითქოს რაღაცა გაკლდება. არის გარკვეული ფილოსოფიური საკითხები რაც სრულად იგნორირებულია. ასევე, შეიძლება პრობლემა ჩემშია, როგორც მკითხველში, მაგრამ მგონია, რომ იყო თემები რისი გაშლაც უფრო მარტივი ენით შეიძლებოდა. ერთი სიტყვით, უფრო 3.5 თუმცა თემით დაინტერესებული მკითხველისთვის წიგნი "წვალებად" ღირს...

"მაგრამ ადამიანის არსი განა ცალკეულ ინდივიდში მობინადრე აბსტრაქციაა? თავის სინამდვილეში ის საზოგადოებრივ ურთიერთობათა ერთობლიობაა."