Reading Capital Author:Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar Reading Capital consists of two essays, one by Althusser, the other by Balibar, which were presented as papers to a seminar on Marx's Capital at the Ecole Normal Superieure in 1965, with an introduction by Althusser himself. They are less polemical than the studies in For Marx, the first of Althusser's books to be translated into English, which ... more »consisted of a number of articles directed against certain currents in contemporary Marxist thought.
Reading Capital is concerned more with the problem of reading and understanding Marx's writings, with constructing Althusser's key concepts -- overdetermination, structure in dominance, structural causality, differential historical time--and with elucidating in their light the basic concepts of historical materialism: the social formation, mode of production, productive forces and relations of production, contradiction, and the transition from one mode of production to another. In the course of these analyses there are detailed discussions of the ideas of Gramsci, Della Volpe, Sartre and Levi-Strauss. The text is accompanied by a preface by Althusser explaining his attitude to the essays in this volume, and a glossary by the translator.« less