For Marx (Radical Thinkers)

Very intellectual and heady. Not for the beginner nor the political radical. You're much better off buying his "On the Reproduction of Capitalism." That's not to say it isn't interesting, because it is, but it is largely a book for the academic and not for someone trying to learn more about Leftist politics and theory.

I bought this book because it's considered the more important of Althusser's essential "texts" (formerly known as "books").For starters, it's a collection of reprinted essays, and I immediately ask myself: which other great modern thinker's magnum opus is a collection of brief occasional pieces?Marx in later life referred to CAPITAL as "economic s***". I can't help feeling he would have used the same epithet (minus "economic") to describe this blague.How many murderers have written philosophical masterpieces? Althusser certainly stands out in that respect.Lest you feel my argument is ad hominem to the nth degree, I'll simply say that theoretical Marxism of any kind has hold of the wrong end of the stick. Althusser was rightly attacked by E.P. Thompson, but since I think Thompson was wrong-headed, I can't agree with his argument.I'll just take advantage of my readerly rights and dismiss Althusser, Thompson, and all the other misguided French Marxist 'philosophers" as a gaggle gone into the wild blue yonder.Sartrei is the worst case scenario. A brilliant thinker and novelist until his guilty conscience made him a soi-disant Marxist theoretician.Ugh!

Although often characterized as 'structuralist' Marxism, this crucial work of textual analysis represents the major turning point in Althusser's Marxian project. Through a radical re-reading of Marx's corpus, Althusser posits an 'epistemological break' which splits Marx's corpus into the humanist and scientific division. Althusser provides us with brilliant critical assessments of the U.S.S.R.'s later appropriation of the humanist Marx to obscure it's own totalitarian impulses. 'Contradiction and Overdetermination' is an absolute tour-de-force of Marxian thought; Althusser scrutinizes the minute particulars of the ruptural force inherent in revolutionary transitions, as well as the nuances of levels of affectivity within the superstructure. Althusser wanted to steer us clear of Stalinist reductions regarding 'dialectical materialism,' and to see the radically complex and sophisticated achievement of Marxian science for what it is. This little text is a remarkable contribution to that effort.

In For Marx, Louis Althusser thought that far too many Marxists had misunderstood what Karl Marx wrote and believed. Althusser was especially incensed by the post-structuralist theories that had but recently arisen all of which garbled what Althusser held as Marx's original intent. There was in Althusser's mind even a question as to how much of Marx should be viewed under a structuralist prism. Prior to 1845, Althusser notes that Marx was essentially a humanist who warmly accepted the Hegelian concept that was consonant with the likelihood that human freedom was achievable via dialectical historical change. Further, Althusser felt it necessary to set the record straight that Marx's entire political and economic system of thought could be grasped as a single coherent entity. Beginning some time around 1845, Althusser describes an "epistemological break" that would account for the conversion of Marx from a humanist to a historical materialist that is one who terms history not as a subjective record of human achievement but rather as a science of that achievement. This "break" given post-Althusserian access to many hitherto unpublished Marxist texts is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words since the break was less a rupture than a hairline fissure. Althusser thinks that Marx himself failed to grasp the deeply buried ramifications of his own texts and that it was necessary to drag out of these texts their unspoken premises. Althusser called this dragging out process "symptomatic reading." The break or rupture or fissure extended itself often in contradictory ways for several years. Essentially, according to Althusser, Marx implied but was not explicit that the then accepted empiricist view of a direct link between a subject's thought and its object in the "real" world had to be discarded. The "new" Marx meant that the entire process of ratiocination of an object need never have direct relation with that external object at all. This novel paradigm was unprecedented since it placed the science of the proof outside the realm of reality and inside the realm of the observer. Just a few years later, Louis Althusser would expand on this startling thesis in Reading Capital. For Marx then can be seen as a bridge linking the Marx that Althusser says never existed to the Marx that he now insists was there all along.