Product Code Database
Reading Capital () is a 1965 book about the philosopher Karl Marx's Das Kapital by the philosophers Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière, the sociologist Roger Establet, and the critic Pierre Macherey. The book was first published in France by François Maspero. An abridged English translation was published in 1970, and an unabridged translation in 2015. The book was influential among intellectuals.
The Marxian economist Harry Cleaver wrote that Althusser and his co-authors provided one of the most politically influential of the philosophical reinterpretations of Das Kapital that were made by Marxists in the 1960s and 1970s. However, he considered their influence regrettable, writing that in For Marx and Reading Capital, Althusser's aim was to revitalize dialectical materialism "as an ideology to mediate the widely discredited political practices of the French Communist Party." He accused Althusser of ignoring working class struggles in favor of an abstract "science of history", and noted that Althusser himself admitted that Reading Capital largely ignored the class struggle.
William S. Lewis described Reading Capital as the culmination of the rereading of Marx that Althusser began in 1953. He considered it a theoretically sophisticated text. However, he suggested that the difficulty of the work supported the charge that Althusser aspired to "Leninist vanguardism" and wanted "a small, theoretically sophisticated cadre" to "direct the revolution", and expressed agreement with the historian Eric Hobsbawm's view that the book showed that Althusser was an "extremely selective reader of Marx."
The economist Alain Lipietz further pointed out that, while Reading Capital helped to disengage French Marxism from an oversimplification, determinism and mechanism inherited from the Stalinist period, it also obscured and censored the first chapter of Das Kapital, in which Marx analyzed the relationship of commodity and money.
Journals
|
|
