Louis Althusser - Reading Capital

For the conjuncture in which this text was prepared (1965), for its character as a theoretico-ideological intervention in that conjuncture, and for its theoretical limits, lacunae and errors, the reader should refer to the presentation, To My English Readers, in For Marx.

Louis Althusser, 17 May 1970
To the citizen Maurice La Chtre
Dear Citizen,

I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of Das Kapital as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working-class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.

This is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connection between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.

This is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

Believe me,
dear citizen
Your devoted,
KARL MARX
London, 18 March 1872.

The following papers were delivered in the course of a seminar on Capital held at the cole Normale Suprieure early in 1965. They bear the mark of these circumstances: not only in their construction, their rhythm, their didactic or oral style, but also and above all in their discrepancies, the repetitions, hesitations and uncertain steps in their investigations. We could, of course, have gone over them at our leisure, corrected them one against the other, reduced the margin of variation between them, unified their terminology, their hypotheses and their conclusions to the best of our ability, and set out their contents in the systematic framework of a single discourse in other words, we could have tried to make a finished work out of them. But rather than pretending they are what they should have been, we prefer to present them for what they are: precisely, incomplete texts, the mere beginnings of a reading.

Of course, we have all read, and all do read Capital. For almost a century, we have been able to read it every day, transparently, in the dramas and dreams of our history, in its disputes and conflicts, in the defeats and victories of the workers movement which is our only hope and our destiny. Since we came into the world, we have read Capital constantly in the writings and speeches of those who have read it for us, well or ill, both the dead and the living, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, Gramsci, the leaders of the workers organizations, their supporters and opponents: philosophers, economists, politicians. We have read bits of it, the fragments which the conjuncture had selected for us. We have even all, more or less, read Volume One, from commodities to the expropriation of the expropriators.

But some day it is essential to read Capital to the letter. To read the text itself, complete, all four volumes, line by line, to return ten times to the first chapters, or to the schemes of simple reproduction and reproduction on an enlarged scale, before coming down from the arid table-lands and plateaus of Volume Two into the promised land of profit, interest and rent. And it is essential to read Capital not only in its French translation (even Volume One in Roys translation, which Marx revised, or rather, rewrote), but also in the German original, at least for the fundamental theoretical chapters and all the passages where Marxs key concepts come to the surface.