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Reading Capital (The Verso Classics Series)

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It's almost impossible to understand Marx's specific theoretical and methodological positions 150 years after. Not because they're exceptionally difficult, rather that they've been obfuscated by generations of pro- and anti- ideologues. Althusser's project is to reconstruct Marx's theoretical practices at a very high level of rigor, clarifying, for example, the specific differences between Hegel's understanding of "dialectics" and Marx's. In doing so he produces a series of new concepts: "structure in dominance", "overdetermination", "problematic", "epistemological break", "combinatory" and others. While none of these *terms* is present in Marx's writing, the things they refer to definitely are. In turn, this labor makes it possible to clearly understand the theoretical differences between Marx's early works and his mature ones; that is, between his "Feuerbachian" youth and his Marxist maturity. This is a difficult work, but a profoundly rewarding one for those interested in what it is that makes Marx Marx.

Louis Althusser/ Etienne Balibar- Reading Capital

This, alongside his momentous For Marx, has always been my favorite text from Althusser. It is so rigorous, so precise and so keen that one is often astonished by the attention devoted to seemingly trivial minutiae. Yet these subtleties make all the difference when reading Marx, and Althusser makes one feel like a bit of an idiot for being so careless in one's reading habits. What makes this text so stunning is the fact that it never veers into pedantry, despite its stringent meticulousness. Hobsbawm remarks on the back cover that "one reads him with excitement", and I would have to concur- if you have struggled through Das Kapital as many times as I have, marveling at its stirring lyricism and Promethean poetry, it is likely that you have missed the `epistemological break' that distinguishes it from its Western heritage. The understated elegance of Althusser's exposition contrasts with the impact that it registers upon even the most seasoned readers of Marx. In classically French style, the iconoclastic force of its content is dissimulated by its sober, clinical language.

Of course, the weaknesses of Althusserian Marxism have been revealed by luminaries like Badiou (in his earliest essays, in the Theory of the Subject and in Metapolitics), Laclau/Mouffe and Zizek (Sublime Object of Ideology). Laclau and Mouffe are, perhaps, right in saying that Althusser is incapable of taking his leave of economistic idealism altogether, holding as he does to his hypothesis of `economic in the last instance'. This lacuna prevents Althusser from elaborating a truly materialist dialectic (yet is it really the case that the Marxist fixation on 'political economy' should be dismissed as a retrograde essentialism? Read Zizek's fiery defense of Althusser in his 'In Defense Of Lost Causes'). Still, the innovations of these thinkers would be unthinkable without Althusser- he transposed the study of Marx onto a different ground, `changing elements' and devising a new problematic for philosophical practice. To get a tentative grasp on Althusser, I would suggest that you read, as preliminary preparation, the entirety of For Marx, especially his discussions on overdetermined contradiction and the Marxist dialectic. Badiou's typology of situations, which attempts to break with every sort of naturalism and metaphysics altogether (even the Spinozist vitalism of Deleuze), would be altogether unthinkable without Althusser's retrieval of Mao and Lenin. Althusser's greatest contribution to Marxism, I think was his concerted, unflinching effort to purge it of every trace of idealism and historicism. More importantly, he tried to develop a consummately materialist dialectic, one that would require unsparing scientific effort and analysis on the part of militant intellectuals. We may not agree with Althusser's conclusions, but we cannot help but thank him for his conscientiousness.

Oh, Balibar's section is brilliant too, and of great import for sociology in particular. However, I wanted to dedicate this review to Louis Althusser, one of the great thinkers of the 20th Century.

The Verso 2009 version of this book (the "Radical Thinkers" paperback) is teeming with typographical errors. It seems like the manuscript has been prepared by use of an OCR machine reading of the older 1970/1997 edition. The machine, as is to be expected, has made various mistakes. These have largely not been corrected by Verso's editor. This is incredibly sloppy work on the publisher's behalf and makes for a very serious shortcoming of this book. Some of the errors are relatively harmless, but others create ambiguities (e.g. missing quotation marks). For this reason, I would not recommend using this edition of the book as a reference or for serious study purposes.

Reading Capital is often credited with giving rise to a renaissance in Marx scholarship. It does introduce new concepts, but I found them to be of dubious value.

Structural Marxism appeals to me precisely because it places a heavy emphasis on determinism, treating free will as a convenient fiction. But that was Marx's view, too. Furthermore, Reading Capital dispenses with the sort of instrumentalist thinking that would have us believe that merely by replacing people in key positions, needed social structural changes will occur. But that was Marx's view, as well. In truth, with the exception of a collection of gratuitously obscure and sometimes ambiguous concepts for which established substitutes already seem to exist (even the glossary is virtually unreadable), I can't see the contribution.

Althusser is often lauded for his fundamental notion of a "problematic," referring to questions that are and are not raised by a conceptual framework. However, the concept "problematic" is nearly identical to Thomas Kuhn's earlier notion of a "paradigm," as introduced in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

In the same vein, Althusser's oft-cited concept "interpellation" is really just an instance of typification. As such, if Reading Capital were readable, anyone who has read Berger's Invitation to Sociology or Berger and Luckmann's widely used The Social Construction of Reality would immediately recognize it for what it is, good but commonplace textbook sociology. There is nothing new here. Marx uses the term interpellation in The Eighteentb Bruamire of Louis Bonaparte, but it is not at all clear that its meaning is not quite different from that given it by Althusser.

Similarly, is there really anything new in the notion that economic, political, and ideological factors are mutually reinforcing and implicative? Even the functionalist Talcott Parsons referred to social entities as ensembles of multi-dimensional relationships. Or about economic determinism in the last instance? Certainly not in the extraordinarily abstract way in which these ideas are presented in Reading Capital.

A recurring idea in Reading Capital is an "epistemological break" in Marx's thinking between The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. Ostensibly, Marx the philosophical idealist became Marx the scientific materialist. However, while Marx productively developed his critique of political economy throughout his life, his earlier and later works seem to me to be consistent and complementary rather than contradictory. In fact, as early as the Manuscripts Marx recognized that what passed for realism in Nineteenth Century political economy was the adoration of an ideal, namely capitalism. Thus, as a thoroughgoing materialist, he parted company with his contemporaries.

Althusser's judgment that all thought is ideology is interesting. But is this really any different from the commonplace assertions that all thinking is socially determined, and that all truth is relational?

I spent a lot of time trying to understand what Althusser wanted his readers to learn. Unfashionable though it may be, I think there is a great deal less here than meets the eye. I may be entirely wrong in making the foregoing judgment, but the willfully, needlessly, gratuitously convoluted prose style that characterizes this entire book is, for me, impenetrable.

Textual exegesis has its place, but entirely too much of what passes for research among structural Marxists, particularly Althusser, presents textual exegesis as an end in itself. See, for example, his tedious and excruciatingly pedantic effort to explain what Marx must have meant by standing the dialectic on its feet and finding the rational kernel in the mystical shell in For Marx. This is precisely the arid, self-absorbed, and for-my-clique-only rendering that leads intelligent readers away from Marx and recent Marx scholarship.

One of the virtues of Marx's work is its concreteness. There is seldom any doubt as to the real world referents with which he is dealing. Althusser and his colleagues, however, are content to engage in abstract exercises, manipulating concepts, with seldom a clue as to the empirical reality that one imagines is their concern. If this is a manifestation of their rejection of empiricism, it's wrong-headed. A knowledgeable reader of this review was kind enough to point out that it bespeaks misunderstanding of Althusser's intentions in Reading Capital, failing to acknowledge that the book is about theory as such. I agree with the critic, but am leaving this misplaced observation stand as evidence of my level of confusion in trying to understand this material.)

I have had my share of frustrating experiences trying to master ostensibly brilliant books. The only one that tried my patience more and ultimately led to greater disappointment was Foucault's The Archaelogy of knowledge. Both books are simply unreadable. In his recent book After Theory, Terry Eagleton argues that we should expect specialized material such as this to be difficult. I don't think, however, that this is what he had in mind.

Yes, actually reading Capital provides a very different experience from reading Marx's earlier work, but not for the reasons given by Althusser. In any case, I don't know what to do about Foucault. But if you're going to read Marx, then read Marx.

As a final thought, autodidacts who are are trying to make some sort of sense out of our current political and economic plutocratic mess may sometimes turn to Marx as a possible alternative. If they mistakenly start with Reading Capital, a promising title that suggests an instructive aim, they may generalize their inability to make sense of this self-indulgent and willfully convoluted concept mongering as typical of Marx and Marx scholarship, and conclude that commonest of commonsense appraisals of Marx were correct all along. And an ally will be lost.

This is Althusser's and Balibar's unique interpretation of key methodological features of Marx's 'Capital'. The book launched a school of thought within Marxism, sometimes labeled Althusserian Marxism and sometimes Structuralist Marxism. Althusser was to later engage in self-criticism of some of its key concepts, such as the demarcation bewteen science and ideology, but much of its epistemology (esp. a division between theoretical and real objects, and scientific practice being a process of 'knowledge-production') and ontology (esp. multi-dimensional causality) remain valuable, interesting and fresh. That said, this is a difficult work not only because it requires extensive background knowledge of Marx and philosophy of science, and not only because the arguments are long and involved, but also because of the annoying use of neologisms (e.g. 'overdetermination') and unusual definitions of common words (e.g. 'empiricism').

Althusser's reading of Capital is a theoretical exegesis of the act of reading a body of work itself. Althusser deals with the complexity of the Marxian project with all the tools of the structuralist tool-box, arguing in favor of a synchronic analysis of the array of concepts. Additionally, Althusser makes significant epistemological contributions to the our understanding of the fetishism of the commodity; he argues that there is an epistemological block inherent to capital, that the system by its nature obscures itself. However, Althusser establishes his own epistemology which identifies two worlds-the object and the object of knowledge-which he is never able to adequately resolve. Still, this remains a crucial text in the reception of Marx's philosophical status.