For Marx

About “For Marx”

For Marx is a 1965 book by Louis Althusser, a leading theoretician of the French Communist Party. In the book, Althusser reinterprets Karl Marx's work, arguing for an epistemological break between Marx's early, Hegelian phase and his later, mature writings, particularly Das Kapital. The book was published by François Maspero and helped establish Althusser's reputation. It was written as a theoretical intervention aimed at guiding the French Communist Party after the Stalinist period. Althusser promoted theoretical antihumanism and rejected historical teleology, asserting that history is a process without a subject and with an open end. He argued that history can be understood through the science of history developed by Marx, and that society is a complex system where the economy plays a central role, while other social practices have relative autonomy. He introduced the concept of overdetermination to describe how different levels of social life interact. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.)