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For Marx is a milestone in the development of Western Marxism since the Second World War. The book, first published in France in 1965, has come to be regarded as the founding text of the school of 'structuralist Marxism' which was presided over by the fascinating and enigmatic figure of Louis Althusser. Structuralism constituted an intellectual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s and radically transformed the way philosophy, political and social theory, history, science, and aesthetics were discussed and thought about. For Marx was a key contribution to that process and it fundamentally recast the way in which many people understood Marx and Marxism. This book contains the classic statements of Althusser's analysis of the young Marx and the importance of Feuerbach during this formative period, of his thesis of the 'epistemological break' between the early and the late Marx, and of his conception of dialectics, contradiction, and 'overdetermination'. Also included is a study of the materialist theatre of Bertolazzi and Brecht and the critique of humanist readings of Marxism. Since his death in 1990, Althusser's legacy has come under renewed examination and it is increasingly recognized that the influence of his ideas has been wider and deeper than previously thought: reading For Marx, in its audacity, originality and rigour, will explain why this impact was so significant.
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George Allen
reviewed For Marx on January 26, 2017
For Marx
'Each science, as science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them.' - Gadamer, Truth and Method
'If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life and feels like telling himself that everything is quite easy now, he can see that he is wrong just by recalling that there was a time when this "solution" had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too.'- Wittgenstein, stray remarks
Gadamer was not claiming hermeneutics as a science. Just the opposite, he was affirming that it's profoundly misguided to ever expect to find a 'science' of human meaning along the lines of the physical sciences.
By contrast, Althusser is extremely insistent that Marxism is a science. What exactly does he mean by that? At least in this collection he has rather little to say about the actual content of Marxism - history, the economy, the workers' movement, etc. He seems to define 'science' in totally formal, non-empirical terms. Somewhat like Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; but then Kuhn's great book did serious damage to the prestige of science, for suggesting science was more a series of semi-random mutations than cumulative progress towards the truth. Althusser appears to have a similar conception. However, he then wants to have it both ways by insisting on the absolute sanctity of the precious 'epistemological break' in Marx's writing; that is, the point at which Marx passed from ideology to science.
Anyway, my own feeling is that Marxism doesn't stand or fall with being a science. If you do claim it as a science you're setting yourself up to have it called a pseudo-science or one that's already been falsified. Obviously much that Marx wrote did not come to pass in exactly the manner he thought it would. And yet he was probably the greatest western thinker to ever attempt a global critique of capitalism. Given that capitalism surely remains the chief adversary of humanity in the 21st century, his continued relevance should be obvious.
However, I'm not sure the same can be said of Althusser. I enjoyed this book. I'd recommend it to other philosophy nerds, but that's about it. Althusser's concerns seem quite remote from our present situation.
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