Reading Capital

Reading Capital
	Cover of the 1966 edition
Authors	Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey
Original title	Lire le Capital
Translators	Ben Brewster; David Fernbach
Language	French
Subject	Das Kapital
Publisher	François Maspero, New Left Books
Publication date	1965
Publication place	France
Published in English	1970
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	340 (abridged English translation); 565 (complete English translation)
ISBN	978-1-78478-141-5

Reading Capital (French: Lire le 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.

Summary

The philosopher Louis Althusser and his co-authors — the philosopher Étienne Balibar, the sociologist Roger Establet, the philosopher Jacques Rancière, and the critic Pierre Macherey — discuss Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867–1883) and subjects such as the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism. Rancière notes that his contribution builds on Althusser's For Marx (1965).^[1]He explores the dynamics of capital accumulation, exploitation of workers, and the resulting class struggles. Marx critiques the capitalist mode of production, highlighting its inherent contradictions and tendency toward crises. He predicts that these contradictions will eventually lead to the overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat, paving the way for a classless, communist society. The work is foundational for Marxist theory and socialist movements.

Publication history

Reading Capital was first published in French by François Maspero in 1965. An abridged French François Maspero edition followed in 1968. An abridged Italian translation was also published. An abridged English translation by Ben Brewster was published in 1970 by New Left Books. An unabridged English translation by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach was published in 2015 by Verso Books.^[2]^[3]

Reception

Together with Althusser's For Marx (1965), Reading Capital drew Althusser to the attention of French intellectuals and attracted a significant international readership. The appearance of Reading Capital and For Marx in English translation influenced the development of Marxist thought in the Anglophone world throughout the 1970s.^[4]

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.^[5]

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."^[6]

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,^[7] it also obscured and censored the first chapter of Das Kapital, in which Marx analyzed the relationship of commodity and money.^[8]

References

^ Althusser et al. 2015, pp. 1–549.
^ Althusser & Balibar 1977, pp. iv–8.
^ Althusser et al. 2015, p. iv.
^ Levine 2017, p. 27.
^ Cleaver 2000, pp. 47, 49–51.
^ Lewis 2005, pp. 158, 163, 189.
^ Lipietz 1993, pp. 99–138.
^ Kremers & Izuta 2017, p. 724.

Bibliography

Books

Althusser, Louis; Balibar, Étienne (1977). Reading Capital. London: New Left Books.
Althusser, Louis; Balibar, Étienne; Establet, Roger; Macherey, Pierre; Rancière, Jacques (2015). Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. London: Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-78478-141-5.
Backer, Davud I. (2019). The Gold and the Dross: Althusser for Educators. Boston, Maryland: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-394681.
Cleaver, Harry (2000). Reading Capital Politically. Leeds: AK Press. ISBN 190259329-4.
Levine, Andrew (2017). "Althusser, Louis". In Audi, Robert (ed.). The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Third Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-64379-6.
Lewis, William S. (2005). Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. ISBN 0-7391-1307-0.
Lipietz, Alain (1993). "From Althusserianism to "Regulation Theory"". In Kaplan, E. Ann; Sprinker, Michael (eds.). The Althusserian Legacy. London: Verso. ISBN 9780860915942.