Benjamin Britton’s Reviews > Reading Capital: The Complete Edition > Status Update

“remains essential that mankind has an exact consciousness of the relationship between these tasks and its capacities ... If not, even in the ‘transparency’ of its new economic relations it will risk, as it has already discovered in the silences of the terror – and may do so again in the velleities of humanism – it will risk entering a future still charged with dangers and shades, with a virgin conscience.”

“They were a hundred miles away from being able to think it, since neither... had ever imagined that a ‘fact’ might be the existence of a relation of ‘combination’ ... determining as the law of its structure the entire economic reality, down to the visible detail of the empirical phenomena – while remaining invisible even in their blinding obviousness.”

“This shows that certain relations of production presuppose the existence of a legal-political and ideological superstructure as a condition of their peculiar existence, and why this superstructure is necessarily specific (since it is a function of the specific relations of production that call for it).”

“This determination of the labour process by these material conditions is at its own level a denial of every ‘humanist’ conception of human labour as pure creativity. As we know, this idealism has not remained in the state of a myth, but has reigned in political economy itself, and from there, in the economic utopias...”

“Let us leave this point in which we can see well enough that there can never be a given on the fore-stage of obviousnesses, except by means of a giving ideology which stays behind, with which we keep no accounts and which gives us what it wants.”

“Here, too, we can see the content of the ‘inversion’: this ‘change of terrain’ identical with the ‘change of terms’, and therefore the change in the theoretical basis from which the questions are formulated and the problems posed”

“This historicist humanism may, for example, serve as a theoretical warning to intellectuals of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois origin, who ask themselves, sometimes in genuinely tragic terms, whether they really have a right to be members of a history which is made, as they know or fear, outside them.”

“But what do we find if we examine the history of political economy? We find thinkers who have merely thought within the limits of their present, unable to run ahead of their times.”


Louis Althusser

“The most serious of these misconstructions is the blinding effect of the question: it has sometimes prevented any perception that Capital really does contain a theory of history which is indispensable for any understanding of the theory of the economy.”