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Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic

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 Historical Materialism
Book Series

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 Reading Capital’s
Materialist Dialectic
Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians

By

Nick Nesbitt

leiden | boston

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This book was written as part of the grant project ga19–20319s “From Bolzano to Badiou. An Investigation
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Contents

Preface: The Limits of Capital vii

Acknowledgements xix
Abbreviations xx

1 Introduction: Reading Capital Beyond Its Limits 1

1 The Limits of Reading Capital 5
2 An Act of Theoretical Repression 17
3 For Marx in Its Limits 21
4 Reading Capital’s Process of Exposition 28
5 Hallucinatory Empiricism 35
6 Reading Capital’s Apodictic Structure 38
7 The Topography of the Attributes 42
8 The Theoretical Danger of Monism 48
9 Against Monism, the Return of Substance 53
10 The Theoretical Basis of Theoreticism 57

2 What Is Materialist Analysis? Pierre Macherey’s Spinozist

Epistemology 62
1 Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic 62
2 A Theoretical Prolegomenon to the Materialist Analysis of Texts 68
3 Textual Production in a Materialist Mode 69
4 On the Inadequacy of the Structuralist Combinatory 72
5 Toward a Materialist Analysis of Form 75
6 Against Materialism, en matérialiste 76
7 Reading Capital as a Theory of Literary Production 77
8 Materialism in a Spinozist Way 80
9 On Telling Stories 84
10 The Persistent Problem of the Attributes 89
11 Reading Capital in a Materialist Way 100

3 The Positive Logics of Capital: On Spinoza and the Elimination of the

Negative Dialectic of Totality from Marx’s Revisions to Capital,
1857–1875 107
1 The Discontinuity of the Attributes 109
2 Totality, Negation, Contradiction 112
3 Totality 114
4 The Imaginary Presuppositions of Systematic Dialectics 119

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vi contents

5 The Problem with Totality 126

6 The Systematic Dissonance of Capital 136
7 Negation and Contradiction 144
8 Constituting the Commodity 149
9 From Dialectical Contradiction to Additive Synthesis 153
10 Toward an Additive Demonstration, Without Contradiction 157
11 When Does Socially Necessary Labour Exist? 176
12 The Raw Materials of Marx’s Additive Synthetic Method 189
13 On Ignorance and Common Notions 193
14 Marx’s Spinozist Theory of Knowledge 198

4 Toward an Axiomatic Analysis of the Commodity in Badiou and

Marx 209
1 1968: Logical Materialism 213
2 Bolzano and the Formalisation of Axiomatic Thought 217
3 Ontological Materialism in Its Limits 223
4 The Displacement of Capital 228
5 A Materialist Axiomatic 229

5 Capital, Logic of the World 232

1 Badiou’s Lacan, Badiou’s (Marx) 235
2 ‘Qu’en est-il de la logique?’: Reading Logics of Worlds After
Capital 242
3 Logics of (Capitalist) Worlds 247
4 Reading Capital as the Logic of a World 257

Conclusion: Theory and Practice Today 261

References 267
Index 281

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 preface

The Limits of Capital

Is capitalism dead?1 If corporate persons like McDonald’s or Walmart – nodal

points for the global enclosure and commodification of working class food, the
most basic necessity – could reveal their thoughts in a language with which we
are familiar, they would surely shrug their shoulders and reply with a hearty
laugh that such reports of the death of capitalism have been greatly exagger-
ated.2 This book proceeds from the contrary presupposition that we still do, in
fact, live in the capitalist social form as Marx defined it over a century and a
half ago. This is so despite the many real and consequential transformations to
its functioning since that time. It may well be the case, for example, that social
domination is no longer primarily determined through ownership of the means
of production, but instead via the control of information. It is most certainly the
case that there now exist novel, technological procedures for the extraction of
surplus information from individual workers and consumers, procedures that
may allow for the tendential subsumption of all activity within an information-
based political economy.3
However much importance one grants to such increasingly-familiar claims,
the insufficiency of trying prove this assertion with the criteria inherited from
traditional, Stalinist Marxism – whether ownership of the means of produc-
tion, the nature of class antagonism and the forces of production, or the dom-
inant mode of production (as opposed to Marx’s more capacious category of
social form) – is patent.4 Instead, the question of capitalism’s continued exis-
tence and the specific limits governing this singular social form should simply
be measured by the minimal, true idea of its nature that we always already pos-
sess.
We, subjects of capital across the planet, do indeed have a true – if minimal
and inadequate – idea of what capitalism is, an idea Marx formulated as the
starting point for his critique of political economy, a minimal, materialist def-
inition of the form of appearance of the capitalist social form as ‘an immense

1 Wark 2019.
2 Walmart made $11.68B profit and McDonalds $6.88B profit in 2023 (Forbes “The Global 2000”,
June 8, 2023).
3 Wark 2019, pp. 5, 11, 48.
4 Wark 2019, p. 41.

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viii preface

accumulation of commodities’, as what I would rephrase as the general, ten-

dential commodification of all things and relations of value.5
On the opening page of Jacques Stephen Alexis’s magnificent proletarian
novel Compère Général Soleil, his protagonist Hilarion wanders ‘naked’ in the
night, possessing nothing but his bodily suffering and visions, driven ‘crazy’
from hunger.6 For a succulent breakfast of corn boullie d’acassan, he cries out,
‘you’d cut off your finger!’ Instead, lying in the dark, Hilarion has only his cut-
ting hunger for company: ‘His gut. His stomach where his guts were marching
like a twisted knot of snakes’. This is the ravenous hunger that drives Hilarion
to crime, to steal in the night, to end up in jail, the jail that will unexpectedly be
his salvation from this misery, through his encounter with his cellmate Roumel,
who holds out to him the promise of communism.
Among the questions Alexis’s narrative of hunger and social injustice forces
us to ask is this one: is it the case, in fact, that we no longer live in a social
form in which it makes sense, when one is driven mad with starvation as is
Hilarion, either to steal a wallet (which one cannot eat) or to set off in desper-
ate search of a job that pays wages (which one also cannot eat)? The simple
answer is that it makes sense only in a social form (which we call capitalism)
in which the means of survival, food and shelter take the monetary form of
commodities, and, captured by capitalist property relations, remain otherwise
unavailable; a social form in which food, as a commodity, can only be obtained
by those without accumulated wealth through monetary exchange for another
commodity (labour power); a social form in which a dispossessed proletarian
class remains subject to primitive accumulation, subject to the dispossession of
the traditional property holdings of the rural moun andeyò, unable to respond
to hunger in the most obvious way: to farm the land.7
Ellen Meiksins Wood argued compellingly that it is the general enclosure
and commodification of biological necessities – above all food and shelter –
that historically initiates the capitalist social form, in the sense that it is this
transformation alone that forces formerly feudal subjects, on pain of death
by exposure or starvation, to agree to the sale of their labour power to capi-
tal.8 While Marx’s monetary labour theory of value presupposes the general, as
opposed to specific and limited, commodification of all things and relations,

5 ‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an
“immense collection of commodities”’ (Marx 1976, p. 125).
6 Alexis 1955/1982, pp. 8, 10, 11, my translation. All further translations are my own unless oth-
erwise indicated.
7 Nesbitt 2022, p. 265.
8 Wood 2002.

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the limits of capital ix

Wood argues that the commodification of food is nonetheless the crucial fac-
tor that forces the sale of labour power, the only commodity, Marx shows, that
can produce and accumulate surplus value.9
We can, however, repurpose the historicist argument of Wood’s Political
Marxism to indicate as well a general limit of the capitalist social form, in the
sense of its endpoint, beyond which some other social form would exist: when
it is no longer the case that we require a general equivalent – whether paper,
metal coin, or its onscreen cipher – to purchase commodified food and shelter
and other commodities essential to life, then, and despite all the intervening,
subsidiary modifications to its functioning, capital will be a thing of the past,
and something else, whether communism or catastrophe, will have replaced
it. The social production, distribution, and exchange of food and shelter, in this
view, thus indicates more than a mere transhistorical human right; in addition,
it constitutes a specific neuralgic point at which the capitalist social form finds
both its weakest links and real limit.
To theorise such limits, this book remains faithful to Althusser’s rejection of
a general, even universal concept of practice as such, to investigate instead the
singular category of Marx’s theoretical practice, developing a position I will call
political epistemology.10 While the political stakes of the adequacy or inade-
quacy of knowledge are no doubt immediately familiar and compelling in this
age of fake news, gaslighting, and Trumpist populism, to grasp the limits of
capitalism more specifically, to know, in other words, when, how, and under
what conditions we might exit from the capitalist social form, requires the

9 On Capital as a monetary labour theory of value, see Murray 2017.

10 The corollary being that this is not a book about political practice, Marxist or otherwise.
Even less will the reader find a rehearsal of the debates over Althusserianism from the
1970s. So, for instance, the short-lived British journal Theoretical Practice (1971–73), which
mounted one of the rare defences of Althusserian theoreticism, published virtually no
articles on Marx’s theoretical practice in Capital (the topic of this book). The sole excep-
tion to this disinterest in the journal’s seven issues is Athar Hussain’s ‘Marx’s “Notes on
Adolph Wagner”: An Introduction’, which underscores the importance of this late text for
Marx’s method of demonstration in Capital (Hussain 1972). Otherwise, the journal focused
almost exclusively on debates regarding the relation of Althusser and Balibar’s theoretical
practice to Marxist-Leninist politics, the editors insisting that the journal’s ‘philosophical
practice is a political and partisan practice, [… a] political intervention in politics from the
position of a politics, Marxism-Leninism’ (Theoretical Practice 1971, p. 2). I will discuss in
Chapter 1 the journal’s spirited defence of Althusser’s theory of theoretical practice against
what its editors saw as the revisionism of Althusser’s post-1967 redefinition of philosophy.
Thanks to Panagiotis Sotiris for kindly sharing his manuscript ‘The Strange Fate of British
Althusserianism: The Theoretical Practice Group’. I discuss Althusser’s concept of theoret-
ical practice in this book’s Conclusion.

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x preface

deployment of a politics of epistemology in the specific sense in which French

philosophy implemented the concept in the twentieth century.11
Épistémologie must in this sense be defined in distinction from both the
Kantianism of German Erkenntnistheorie and the English ‘epistemology’, the
latter two indicating broadly general, psychologistic theories of knowledge and
the processes governing the objectification of phenomena, including the acts
of mental objectification and their transcendental conditions performed by a
knowing subject.12 In French, these are instead indicated by the more general
term gnoséologie.13 In contrast, André Lalande’s concise definition in the Vocab-
ulaire technique et critique de la philosophie – not incidentally the reference
work Althusser himself repeatedly turned to – defines épistémologie as the cri-
tique of the principles governing the sciences, which in the case of Marx would
of course include the science of political economy.14
Lire le Capital was above all and most obviously such an epistemological
intervention meant to change how we read Marx’s Capital, in order more ade-
quately to conceptualise the capitalist social form. Yet the secondary litera-
ture on Reading Capital has tended to address the many concepts Althusser
introduced only in the context of Marxist philosophy in general, ignoring the
specific object of the book’s intervention. Kaplan and Sprinker’s The Althusse-
rian Legacy, for example, contains not a single reference to Capital; and while
Diefenbach, Farris, Kirn, and Thomas’s Encountering Althusser contains many
passing nominal references to Capital, Michele Cangiani’s chapter ‘Althusser

11 In redeploying here Althusser’s concept of theoretical practice, I am indebted to Alain

Badiou’s probing critique of the concept in his article ‘The Althusserian Definition of
Theory.’ I agree in particular with his critique of the latent psychologism inherent in
Althusser’s text – theoretical practice as, in Althusser’s words, ‘a process that takes place
entirely within thought’ (cited at Nesbitt 2017: 26). The threat Badiou identifies of a return
of idealism in Althusser’s absolute distinction between thought and the Real is no doubt
the price Althusser pays for refusing to identify Spinozist Substance as the materialist
unity of the attributes of thought and extension, as I will discuss below.
12 This is the case for example with Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour: though
subtitled A Critique of Epistemology [zur Epistemologie der abendländischen Geschichte],
it is explicitly a phenomenological critique of ‘the socially necessary forms of thinking of
an epoch’ (2021, p. 4).
13 Cassin 2014, ‘Epistemology’, p. 274.
14 Here is Lalande: L’Épistémologie ‘designates the philosophy of the sciences, but in a quite
precise sense. It is neither the specific study of various scientific methods, which is the
object of la Méthodologie, and pertains to Logic. Nor is it a synthesis or conjectural antic-
ipation of scientific laws …. It is instead, essentially, the critical study of the principles,
hypotheses, and results of the various sciences, destined to determine their logical (as
opposed to psychological [i.e., as opposed to a theory of knowledge or Erkenntnistheorie])
origin, their value, and their objective scope’. Lalande 1996, p. 293.

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the limits of capital xi

and Political Economy’ in that volume is the lone exception that, in its explicit
engagement with Marx’s critique of political economy, proves the rule of this
general tendency. On a more personal note, when in 2017 I edited a volume ded-
icated to assessing the legacy of Reading Capital, I was quite surprised when
not one of the distinguished contributions to that volume elected to discuss
the reading of Marx’s Capital after Althusser.15 This is to say that while there
continues to be no shortage of readers of both Capital and Althusser, few and
far between are those who since 1965 have pursued the epistemological project
of Reading Capital.
In contrast to this long-standing disregard for the specificity of Reading Cap-
ital’s object, when reading Capital with (and beyond) Althusser, epistemology
becomes political in the preliminary but consequential sense that Marx’s the-
oretical practice, in its capacity to produce adequate – as opposed to merely
imaginary or ideological – knowledge of the real complexity of the capitalist
social form, consequently produces subjects of that knowledge.16
To read Capital in the terms Althusser first proposed, refusing ontological
guarantees, presuppositions, and imaginary assertions of monism and totality,
is to assume only the single presupposition that initiates Marx’s demonstration:
that we, subjects of capital, always already have a true idea of the nature of cap-
italism – a minimal, raw, merely apparent idea, but a true one nonetheless: that
the capitalist social form is characterised by the accumulation of commodities
and the generalisation of their exchange.17 From this single, immanent starting

15 Nesbitt 2017. Robert J.C. Young’s chapter in that volume does briefly review the com-
plex publication history of the first volume of Capital in its implications for the concept
of symptomatic reading, but without engaging an explicit reading of Marx’s text per se
(Young 2017, pp. 36–9).
16 This is the general thesis Jean Matthys argues in Althusser lecteur de Spinoza: Genèse et
enjeux d’une éthico-politique de la théorie (Matthys 2023, p. 343).
17 In the 1975 ‘Soutenance d’Amiens’, Althusser underlines the crucial importance of the
Spinozist presupposition Habemus enim ideam veram for the entirety of a theoretical posi-
tion dedicated to the rejection of any and all a priori methodological guarantees: ‘Que veut
dire en substance Spinoza, quand il écrit la phrase célèbre : “Habemus enim ideam veram
?” … C’est en effet parce que, et seulement parce que nous détenons une idée vraie, que
nous pouvons en produire d’autres, selon sa norme. … C’est un fait, que nous la détenons
(habemus), et de quoi que ce soit que ce fait soit le résultat, il inscrit d’avance toute thé-
orie de la connaissance … sous la dépendance du fait de la connaissance détenue. Par là
toutes questions d’Origine, de Sujet ou de Droit de la connaissance, qui soutiennent les
théories de la connaissance sont récusées’ (Althusser 1998a, p. 218). Althusser refers to the
Emendation of the Intellect, where Spinoza writes: ‘A true idea (for we do have a true idea)
is something different from its object (ideatum). A circle is one thing, the idea of a circle
another. For the idea of a circle is not something having a circumference and a centre, as
is a circle, nor is the idea of a body itself a body’.

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xii preface

point, in media res, a beginning determined not ontologically, but in materialist

fashion by Marx’s previous analytical enquiry, Capital develops a demonstra-
tion of the real complexity of this social form as an open, general system of
law-governed causality without totality, what Marx called the ‘law of motion’
of capitalism, and Althusser, its systemic structural causality.
To develop this political epistemology of the limits of capital, Reading Capi-
tal’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians analyses the the-
ory of a materialist dialectic as it is developed in the writings of Louis Althusser,
Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou, focusing on their singular
analyses of Marx’s process of demonstration in Capital and Spinoza’s Ethics.18
My argument flatly rejects the imaginary figure of Reading Capital as a ‘theo-
reticist’ relic, to focus attention precisely on the long-overlooked yet radically
anti-Hegelian epistemological claims of Reading Capital: that, in Althusser’s
words, ‘in Capital we find an apodictic [i.e., logically certain] arrangement of
the concepts in the form of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analy-
sis’.19 While artful readers to this day seek to extract a Hegelian, negative dialec-
tical logical kernel from the core of Capital (as in the ‘Systematic Dialectics’ of
Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, and Chris Arthur), furthermore presuming without
demonstration that Capital constitutes a totality (whether real or merely logi-
cal), this book critically rejects this imaginary figuration. Instead, Reading Capi-
tal’s Materialist Dialectic remains faithful to Althusser’s essential identification
of Marx’s synthetic, materialist dialectic, a dialectic excluding totality, nega-
tion, and contradiction, its ‘apodictic’ demonstration deploying the Spinozist

18 The relative neglect of Etienne Balibar’s writings in this book is not due to any disinter-
est in Marx’s masterpiece following Balibar’s initial contribution to Reading Capital. To
the contrary, and in contrast to both Macherey and Badiou, Balibar has continued to reaf-
firm the necessity of reading Capital as an unending task: ‘Are we still, will we always be,
“reading Capital”? No doubt; and we are beginning to understand that, as with every truly
great theoretical oeuvre (Hegel’s, for example), our task is by its nature endless because the
meaning we are looking for can only be found at the point where questions formulated on
the basis of current events (or even current emergencies) encounter contradictions that,
in latent fashion, haunt the writing of the text that we have to set back in motion’. That
said, Balibar’s interest in Marx remains primarily and explicitly political, to the neglect
of the epistemological problems of reading Capital that this book will explore: ‘The goal
I am pursuing [in rereading Capital], however, is not (if it ever was) purely epistemo-
logical. I am trying to shed light on the thorny question of the various conceptions of
politics, their irreducible plurality, and the choices they dictate’. Balibar 2015a, p. 205,
translation modified. Thanks to Josef Fulka for reminding me of Balibar’s masterful and
penetrating analysis of the final section of Capital in the third chapter of Violence and
Civility.
19 Althusser et al. 2015, p. 51 (henceforth rc).

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the limits of capital xiii

creative power of the real in its immanent, ‘structural’ causality, whether that
power is grasped in the attribute of thought or material extension.20
Never a systematic thinker, Althusser was instead a semeur d’idées, and it
has been left to his readers to test and deploy those manifold ideas as to their
degree of creative productivity. It is certainly the case that Althusser does not
explicitly link Marx’s ‘apodictic’ method to Spinoza in Reading Capital, nor
even say the first word about what actually makes Marx’s demonstration ‘apo-
dictic’ (the latter task falling in part to Pierre Macherey in his long-forgotten
chapter for Reading Capital). Instead, I will take him at his word – ‘Nous étions
spinoziste’, he famously declared of the Reading Capital collective, and again,
publicly declaring to colleagues in 1967, ‘Je suis spinoziste’21 – and follow Vit-
torio Morfino’s injunction to ‘go beyond Althusser, but with Althusser’, to show
that when systematically developed, Althusser’s undemonstrated claim for the
Spinozist ‘apodicticity’ of Capital is in fact correct.22
While a thinker of polemical genius, Althusser – unlike Spinoza, Marx,
Macherey, or Badiou – never developed his countless insights into systematic,
large-scale works on the model of Ethica or Capital, but instead sought contin-
uously to refuse all reassuring guarantees of knowledge and desired to sustain
theoretical practice in a state of perpetual enquiry, critique, and questioning.
As such, his thought seems in hindsight destined never to have produced the
affect Spinoza called beatitude, and instead fitfully to signify and elicit, à ses
risques et perils, the distressing yet simultaneously exhilarating positions of
both uncompromising desire and apprehension before the absence of the law
that Lacan called anxiety (l’angoisse).23

20 Macherey has said of the Althusserian project in which he participated that ‘Spinoza was
that which, for us, bridged epistemology and politics: by returning to theoretical prac-
tice its consequential reality [poids de réalité], insofar as it made of it an order of reality
unto itself. It seemed to us by that token to open perspectives for practical investment, the
dynamic of thought simultaneously acting in reality’ (Macherey 1999, p. 24).
21 Althusser 1974. In his correspondence with Franca Madonia, Althusser describes Spinoza
as ‘mon unique maître’, and again as ‘le plus grand [philosophe] de tous, à mes yeux’.
Althusser 1998b, pp. 528, 579.
22 Morfino 2022, p. 86.
23 Lacan 2016. See McNulty 2009. Spinoza was the decisive formative thinker for Lacan, who
discovered him at the age of 14, at which point ‘he hung a diagram on the wall of his bed-
room that depicted the structure of the Ethics with the aid of colored arrows’ (Roudinesco
1995, p. 11). Spinoza then became the central conceptual reference for Lacan’s 1932 the-
sis, at which point the Ethics offered him the means to formulate a monist materialist
intervention in psychology based on the traditional ‘parallelist’ reading of the Spinozist
attributes. Subsequently, for example in the 1962–63 seminar Anxiety, Lacan’s position,
while no longer explicitly citing Spinoza, would reject the monist phantasy of an episte-

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xiv preface

If, as Tracey McNuty has suggested, ‘anxiety is the affect that responds to
the desire of the Other’,24 the aggressive resistance this uncompromising desire
tends to provoke (think for example of Freud’s Moses, Robespierre, or more
recently Jean-Bertrand Aristide) can tell us much about the ongoing demonisa-
tion of Althusser. Equally, it can help to explain Althusser’s own initial, uncom-
promising theoretical intervention (as the Other of Marxist philosophy) as well
as his own subsequent theoretical anxiety to the point of self-destruction in his
relation to the proletarian Other. Like Moses, Robespierre, and Freud before
him, Althusser desired ruthlessly to destroy an existing god and clergy and to
construct a new, impossible object for his people: in Althusser’s case, these were
the god that was ‘Man’ for Marxist humanism, along with the Party who repre-
sented Him; the object he sought to produce, a fully adequate construction of
Marx’s philosophy, shorn of all phantasmatic Hegelian guarantees of monist
totality and the Absolute. The price he paid for this uncompromising interven-
tion is well-known.
Althusser, intensive and singular reader of Spinoza and Marx, without re-
serve pushed Spinozist thought to its furthest limit, a point where substance
is understood not as Absolute Subject, as an imaginary Abwermechanism (de-
fence) against the anxiety of not knowing, nor as reified monism (Plekhanov),
indeed, not as a thing at all. Instead, Althusser’s esoteric, unpublished writings
show that he decisively redefines substance as the infinite order of causal con-
nection within a contingent historical field (the capitalist social form), an order
existing only in the immanent immediacy of its situated effects – though I will
argue that this order can be made to nonexist through acts of theoretical for-
malisation such as the modes of schematic formalisation Marx introduces into
later drafts of Capital.
It is precisely here, I will argue, at this limit-reading of Spinoza, that Al-
thusser’s intuition of a Marx-Spinoza co-determination manifests its decisive
originality: if the logic of capital is not a whole, not a substantial thing to be
reified as an imaginary monist totality, it is nonetheless the case that this struc-
ture can be made to nonexist, produced in the attribute of thought, in other
words, as what Spinoza calls a nonexistent thing.25 This, then, is the ultimate
tendency of Marx’s original process of exposition in Capital that Althusser’s
intuition first began fitfully to construct in Reading Capital and that this book

mological whole in terms doubtless attractive for Althusser, to argue instead that ‘logic
henceforth has the essentially precarious function of condemning the real to eternally
stumble [trébucher] within the impossible’ (Lacan 2016, p. 78, translation modified).
24 McNulty 2009, p. 7.
25 eiip8.

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the limits of capital xv

pursues: the theoretical production, as a science of causality, of the structure

of capital as nonexistent, atemporal thing, as the eternal, formalisable laws of
its tendencies.
Althusser’s militant refusal to speculate on the ontological foundations of
science in his published works, however, pushes his Spinozist thought, as a
theory of contingent structural causality without (monist) substance, to the
brink of relativist pluralism; the theoreticist position of Reading Capital, in
other words, was not wrongheaded, as Althusser’s admirers and detractors alike
have so often claimed, but, on the contrary, insufficiently theoreticist. Remaining
faithful to the Althusserian refusal to regress to a neo-Hegelian monism of the
One, Pierre Macherey and Alain Badiou instead have proceeded in two direc-
tions in the wake of Reading Capital, to more adequately develop Althusse-
rian theoreticism. Macherey, on the one hand, systematically demonstrates the
coherence and accuracy to the letter of the Althusserian limit-conception of
Spinozist substance as causality without monism in his massive, five-volume
exposition, Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza. To read Capital with Macherey,
then, will require demonstrating the fundamental nature of Marx’s demonstra-
tion as a Spinozist science of ramified, systemic causality without totality.
Badiou, in contrast, develops in the three volumes of Being and Event an
axiomatic epistemology, one that can rigorously initiate apodictic demonstra-
tions of the logic of a given, purely immanent world (such as the capitalist
social form) without recourse to imaginary, speculative foundations or the
totality of the One. This orientation will require reading Capital as a science
or logic of causes whose apodicticity arises not from a speculative foundation
or guarantee, but from a minimally axiomatic beginning – a minimal yet abso-
lutely true idea we already possess of the nature of capitalism – the necessity
of which starting point arises from Marx’s prior materialist enquiry into the
critique of political economy.
To do so, I argue that while the explicit engagement of these Althusserian
thinkers with Marx’s process of exposition in Capital remained largely limited
to the pages of Reading Capital (and in the case of Badiou’s massive oeuvre
is to this day virtually nonexistent), after 1968 this theoretical intervention
remained insistent, to adopt instead the more abstract form of a general the-
ory of positive, materialist dialectic. The movement of the book’s argument is
thus twofold: to follow the exposition of this theory of a materialist dialectic
in the wake of Reading Capital across sites including Althusser’s unpublished
archive, Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza and five-volume exposition of Spinoza’s
Ethics, and Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, on the one hand, while simultaneously,
at each step, bringing this general theory of materialist dialectic to bear anew
on the reading of Capital itself.

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xvi preface

When Althusser asserted the ‘apodictic’ nature of Marx’s demonstration in

Capital, he was essentially asking what gives the capitalist social form its bind-
ing nature in the absence of all ontological presuppositions and epistemolog-
ical guarantees of subject-object correspondence.26 The Spinozist answer he
suggested is that we are capable of apprehending one and the same capital-
ist social form via two attributes, thought and extension, without substance –
when correctly understood not as thing but as the immanent, infinite order of
a historically contingent causality – offering an extrinsic ground or guarantee
to this knowledge, which instead comes to depend only upon the adequacy of
its construction, verum index sui et falsi.
In the empirical attribute of temporal extension, that of our lived, sensuous
experience of the capitalist real, that compulsion is immediately and violently
apparent in the form of the lived, daily experience of commodity fetishism – as
the compulsion of all subjects of capital to sell as a matter of survival the com-
modity that is our labour power; to then work for monetary remuneration, in
order to realise continuous and unending increases in surplus value for capital,
etc.
As such, however, as mere empirical, sensuous experience, the veiled, fetish-
istic nature of this compulsion is nonetheless not adequately understood, even
by the classical political economists who were the object of Marx’s critique.
This would instead require that the binding nature of the capitalist social form
be demonstrated in the attribute of thought, as an apodictic logical exposi-
tion; and this not as a mere formalist exercise, but as a science of causes in
the mode of a materialist critique of political economy. This demonstration,
in other words, must begin not from a concept such as value, or from some
merely formal axiom, but from our initial, minimal, but nonetheless true idea
of capitalism, which is to say from ‘the simplest social form in which the prod-
uct of labour presents itself in contemporary society[:] the commodity’.27 Only
then does Marx proceed to produce and deploy, from the first sentence of Cap-
ital, his world-historical array of original concepts that cohere to convey, in the
attribute of thought, the logically binding nature of this necessity.
In the book’s Introduction, I refuse the ideological dummy of so-called ‘the-
oreticism’ to argue for the crucial, long-overlooked importance of Althusser’s
uncompromising epistemological propositions in his introduction to Reading
Capital. While upholding Althusser’s intervention, this critique simultaneously
identifies a series of theoretical impediments to the arguments of For Marx and

26 Thanks to Laurence Hemming for posing the question to me in this form.

27 ‘Wovon ich ausgehe, ist die einfachste gesellschaftliche Form, worin sich das Arbeitspro-
dukt in der jetzigen Gesellschaft darstellt, und dies ist die “Ware” ’. Marx 1879.

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the limits of capital xvii

Reading Capital (figurative nominalism, dualistic treatment of the attributes

thought and the real), impediments that in fact are shown to dissolve when
considered in light of Althusser’s esoteric, unpublished writings. I then turn in
Chapter 2 to Pierre Macherey’s theory of materialist dialectic, first examining
his little-discussed yet decisively original contribution to Reading Capital on
Marx’s process of exposition, to then engage his subsequent works (Theory of
Literary Production, Hegel or Spinoza, ‘En matérialiste’, Introduction à l’Ethique).
I show that each of these substantive contributions to a theory of materialist
dialectic can serve to illuminate crucial aspects of Marx’s process of demon-
stration in Capital, beyond the brief indications of Macherey’s precocious 1965
contribution to Reading Capital.
In the book’s central chapter, I redirect these theoretical materials to sys-
tematically investigate Marx’s additive synthetic dialectic in the text of Capital
itself. I demonstrate that Marx’s cumulative revisions to Capital tend to elim-
inate the logical categories of totality (Totalität), the reflections of determina-
tion (Reflexionsbestimmungen), aufhebung, and contradiction from its exposi-
tion of the essential nature of capitalism. Instead, I show that Marx’s modifica-
tions serve to increasingly develop and implement a positive, additive synthetic
dialectic as the categorial demonstration of the necessary forms of appearance
and relation of the capitalist social form, the real construction of this nonexis-
tent thing, the idea of the laws of its tendencies. In contrast to previous analyses
of Spinoza’s influence on the young Marx that have uniformly addressed its
political and critical content, through a close reading of Chapters 1 and 11 of
the first volume of Capital, I argue for the decisive importance of Marx’s 1841
reading of Spinoza for the epistemological project of Capital. This analysis con-
firms Althusser’s proposition of Marx’s objective, tendential development after
1857 (as an ongoing epistemological transition rather than evental ‘break’) of a
non-Hegelian, additive synthetic dialectic – and this despite what Marx might
consciously have continued to believe to the end of his days about his imagi-
nary, lived relation to Hegel.
Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, to argue that despite
his non-engagement with Marx’s Capital, the development of an axiomatic phi-
losophy in Being and Event, and of a ‘science of appearance’ in Logics of Worlds
can and should be brought to bear on Capital itself, toward the construction
of a theoretically consistent understanding of the capitalist social form as an
object of thought. In Chapter 3 I thus turn to Badiou’s theory of the necessity
of an axiomatic theoretical foundation for apodictic discourse – underscoring
in the process the crucial importance of Bernard Bolzano for Badiou’s argu-
ment – to interpret Marx and Spinoza’s starting points in Capital and Ethics.
In Chapter 4, I argue that Badiou has in fact fulfilled to some real extent the

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xviii preface

project Althusser first called for in his 1947 thesis, i.e., to read Capital as a theory
of the ‘transcendental’ structural determinations of the capitalist social form,
Badiou objectively displacing and refiguring Althusser’s initial, undeveloped
claim that ‘Capital is our transcendental analytic’.28 I thus take Badiou’s ‘sci-
ence of appearance’ to indicate, in Marx’s terms, the science of the necessary
forms of appearance of all things of value (commodities) in the capitalist social
form, the logic, that is to say, of our world.

28 Cited in Estop 2021, p. 113.

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Acknowledgements

It would not have been possible to complete this project without the ines-
timable support of Etienne Balibar, Rok Benčin, Nathan Brown, Harrison Fluss,
Landon Frim, Josef Fulka, Peter Hallward, Roman Kanda, Ivan Landa, Jean
Matthys, Warren Montag, Vittorio Morfino, Charlie Post, and Panagiotis Sotiris,
and at Brill hm, Danny Hayward and Marlou Meems. At the imec, discus-
sions with François Bordes crucially helped test and develop these arguments,
and Allison Demailly offered invaluable assistance obtaining manuscripts from
Althusser’s archive. In Prague, my colleagues at the Philosophical Institute –
including Ivan Landa, Petr Kužel, Jana Berankova, Michael Hauser, and Joe
Grim Feinberg – continue to offer invaluable intellectual inspiration, as well
as critical perspectives on my arguments on Marx, Althusser, Badiou, and
Bolzano. Others for whose assistance, insights, and support I am grateful
include Emily Apter, Alain Badiou, Banu Bargu, Riccardo Bellofiore, Yann
Moulier Boutang, Svenja Bromberg, Rebecca Comay, Chad Córdova, Sam Diio-
rio, Maxfield Evers, Jackson Smith, Ruo Jia, Elena Louisa Lange, Philippe Le
Goff, Rob Lehman, Jacques Lezra, Tracey McNulty, Gregor Moder, Donald
Moerdijk, Alberto Moreiras, Bertrand Ogilvie, Knox Peden, Seth Rogoff, Max
Tomba, Gabriel Tupinambá, McKenzie Wark, Audrey Wasser, and Szymon Wró-
bel. Love and gratitude above all to Eva Cermanová.
Earlier versions of two of these chapters have previously appeared: Chap-
ter 2 in the volume Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production (Warren
Montag and Audrey Wasser, eds., copyright © 2022 by Northwestern Univer-
sity), and Chapter 5 as ‘Capital, Logic of the World’ (Filosovski Vestnik fv xlii 2).
This book was written as part of the grant project ga19–20319s ‘From Bol-
zano to Badiou. An Investigation of the Foundations of Historical Epistemology
and Modern European Philosophy’, supported by the Czech Science Founda-
tion and coordinated by the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of
Sciences in Prague, and benefitted as well from the support of Princeton Uni-
versity.

I dedicate this book to our beautiful, beloved son Rafael:

Mens nostra, quatenus intelligit, aeternus cogitandi modus fit. … In

hac vita igitur apprime conamur, ut Corpus infantiae in aliud eique
conducit, mutetur, quod ad plurima aptum fit, quedque ad Mentem
referatur, quae fui, et Dei, et rerum plurimum fit conscia.
evp39s

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Abbreviations

rc Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, by Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger
Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière. Translated by Ben Brewster and
David Fernbach, New York: Verso, 2015.
lc Lire le Capital, by Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Mache-
rey, and Jacques Rancière, Paris: puf, 1996 [1965].

References to Spinoza’s Ethics will take the standard form: E, followed by sec-
tion, proposition, and subdivision of the proposition: appendix (A), corollary
(C), demonstration (D), definition (Def), lemma (L), proposition (P), scholium
(S). E vp39s, for instance, refers to Ethics, section 5, proposition 39, scholium.

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 chapter 1

Introduction: Reading Capital Beyond Its Limits

The publication of Reading Capital in 1965 by François Maspero remains today

a momentous theoretical event in the fullest sense of the word: the founding
and preliminary construction of a novel theoretical project and domain, the
idea of the idea of Marx’s Capital itself. An event: in the history of the produc-
tion, analysis and reception of Marx’s Capital since the publication in 1867 of its
first volume; in its consummate break with the theoretically problematic tradi-
tions of Marxist thought after Marx – whether economistic, humanist, produc-
tionist, or teleological – all generally united (with important exceptions to be
sure) in their superficial, tendential, or even flatly ignorant acquaintance with
Marx’s systematic analysis of the capitalist social form; above all, in the unfin-
ished project Reading Capital initiated, to construct Marx’s philosophy as an
object of thought, its method of presentation rightly grasped for the first time as
an additive synthetic, materialist dialectic without negation. The striking fact
from which this book begins, then, is how rarely this Althusserian reading of
Capital – surely one of the two or three most original and influential readings
in the history of Marxist thought, however one may judge its propositions – has
been relayed and developed, whether by former students of Althusser them-
selves or across the vast literature on Althusserianism, all while volume after
volume continues to assert the negative dialectical nature of Marx’s process of
exposition.1

1 The most notable exception to this striking neglect is perhaps Jacques Bidet’s Exploring
Marx’s Capital (2006). While authors such as Chris Arthur continue to assert the Hegelian
negative dialectical nature of Marx’s demonstrations, generally with only highly selective
citation of the text, it is striking how Michael Heinrich’s How to Read Marx’s Capital (2021), in
closely reading the first seven chapters of Capital line by line, actually concludes – without
ever mentioning Althusser or Reading Capital – that Marx’s process of exposition is in fact
an additive synthetic one without negative dialectical sublation of the categories, precisely
as Althusser and Pierre Macherey first claimed in 1965. The Althusserian tenor of Heinrich’s
argument is hardly surprising, as Vittorio Morfino has shown that Heinrich’s debt to Althusser
is much greater than the handful of citations – both positive and negative – to be found in
The Science of Value (2022 [1999]). In fact, Morfino shows that Althusserian categories are
crucial to Heinrich’s argument in his principal work: ‘Si infatti il nome “Althusser” appare con
parsimonia e sempre con misura critica, lo stesso non si può dire di tre concetti althusseriani
che hanno une presenza ubiqua all’interno del testo: … Bruch (rottura), … theoretisches Feld
(campo teorico), … e Problematik (problematica)’. Morfino 2023, p. 121. Heinrich’s analysis will
prove crucial to the post-Althusserian reading of Capital I will develop in Chapter 3. Thanks
to Vittorio Morfino for sharing his text ahead of its publication.

© The Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004703599_002

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2 chapter 1

Etienne Balibar has repeatedly testified to this event, arguing that Read-
ing Capital ‘inscribed Marxism within the history of French philosophy in
the … 20th century’, its intervention forcing the human sciences more gener-
ally to ‘take Marxism seriously [as] a horizon and challenge for contemporary
thought’.2 In addition to this crucial historical accomplishment, however, this
book argues that Reading Capital marked a commanding, situated theoretical
intervention, an intervention on the Kampfplatz of the absolute, as it promul-
gated a Spinozist project of political epistemology, seeking at once to relegate
all (Hegelian) forms of negative dialectic and contradiction to their rightful
domain – existence – and to grasp the demonstration of the essential nature of
the capitalist real as a singular world in its eternal, infinite nature.
This book argues that the core epistemological3 claim of Reading Capital (‘In
Capital we find … an apodictic arrangement of the concepts in the … demon-
strational discourse that Marx calls analysis’) did not disappear as an object of
post-Althusserian theory, but instead shifted terrain: from an initial attention
in Reading Capital devoted to the literal text of Capital itself, this claim became
instead a more abstract theoretical object of investigation. No longer situated
and nominally defined as a non-Hegelian mode of reading Marx’s text itself,
the Althusserians, and above all Pierre Macherey and Alain Badiou, nonethe-
less objectively sustained the theoretical project initiated by Reading Capital at
a higher level of abstraction, henceforth defined as the theoretical imperative
to produce the concept of a positive materialist dialectic. Crucial texts such as
Badiou’s Logics of Worlds or Macherey’s essay ‘En matérialiste’ (both to be dis-
cussed in subsequent chapters) explicitly develop this notion of a materialist
dialectic in opposition as much to the Stalinist notion of dialectical materialism
as to Hegelian negative dialectics.
This book will track this concept of a positive, materialist dialectic across
various facets and moments in the writings of Spinoza, Marx, Althusser,
Macherey, and Badiou, to construct this thought object, as Althusser famously
enjoined, as the overdetermined, dynamic complexity of a theoretical force
field or constellation, a conceptual structure whose reality exists in the dis-
cursive effects produced by the heterogeneous deployments it has received. I
do so in the conviction that these varying epistemological interventions con-

2 Balibar 2018, p. 6.
3 Taking into account Althusser’s warning, in the Eléments d’autocritique, against a specula-
tive, idealist tendency inherent to the notion of epistemology (1974, p. 176n30). Jean Matthys
notes that Althusser tends to prefer the phrase ‘théorie de la pratique théorique’ to ‘episte-
mology’ due to the dominant associations of the latter with traditional theories of knowledge
(Matthys 2023, p. 237).

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 3

stitute always singular, yet faithful elaborations of Althusser and Macherey’s

initial reading of Marx’s Capital as a positive, apodictic dialectic, a project of
political epistemology dedicated to the displacement and dismantling of all
ideological, imaginary guarantees – of Capital as logical or monist totality –
to read Capital instead as an untotalised, open and incomplete science of the
causal complexity governing the capitalist social form.
If Marx’s process of exposition does in fact take the form of an ‘apodictic’
demonstration, as Althusser suggests, and if this process is furthermore to be
understood in Spinozist terms, as Althusser retrospectively informed his read-
ers (‘we [the Reading Capital collective] were Spinozist’),4 this immediately
implies a series of radical epistemological protocols to be kept in mind across
the following chapters, provisos that Vittorio Morfino succinctly summarises:
1. For Spinoza, infinite substance must be thought simultaneously as imma-
nent within the finite, a position that eliminates the logical distinction
between the possible and the actual.
2. Rejecting the Aristotelean and Cartesian plurality of substances, the
Spinozist real is indivisible; it can be apprehended through an infinity of
attributes (of which humans implement thought and extension); within
the attribute of thought, Spinoza distinguishes in turn three forms of
knowledge: the imaginary, common notions, and ‘intuitive’ knowledge.
3. Spinoza regularly adopts traditional and scholastic philosophical termi-
nology, yet radically reworks its meanings in ways that must constantly
be kept in mind. A case in point is the distinction essence/appearance.
Morfino observes that for Spinoza, ‘There are no essences – that is com-
plete concepts of individuals that subsist before their worldly existence.
Rather, the essence of an individual emerges after the fact – after the indi-
viduality already exists – from its power of acting and its ability to enter
into relations with other individuals’.
4. Above all, the development of knowledge takes non-traditional forms.
The domain of the law of non-contradiction is not so much ‘eliminated’, as
Morfino suggests, but put in its measured place within Spinoza’s process
of exposition.5 Similarly, Spinoza continues to deploy subject-predicate

4 ‘Nous avons été Spinozistes’ (Althusser 1974, p. 29).

5 A great many of Spinoza’s demonstrations in Ethics depend upon the law of non-
contradiction, which Spinoza deploys in a specific subset of cases that Macherey clearly
defines: ‘Spinoza does not hesitate to use [the method reasoning via non-contradiction] on
occasion, when it is a matter of questions that are not susceptible to direct consideration [d’un
abord direct], as for example the fact that the existence of God is a necessary existence (a ques-
tion treated in Proposition 11 of de Deo). Despite its negative character’, Macherey observes,

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4 chapter 1

forms of judgement and logical implication within and between the

increments of his demonstration, but as an infinitely open, ‘structured
complexity … that unfolds within the aleatory and material realm of dura-
tion, without center or end’, an uncountable whole without totality, ‘an
open system that constructs the object of knowledge through a process
of transforming the imagination’.6
5. This ethics of the intellect as an open, infinite process, though necessarily
articulated as the discursive, linear passage from one proposition to the
next, additively forms a highly, even infinitely complex and open network
of references, implications, and consequences without totality, such that
Spinozist substance, as Althusser displaces it within his own theoretical
framework, is neither reified thing (as in monist readings of Spinoza), nor
ontological guarantee, but structural causality understood as the neces-
sity governing a given form of social relations: the finite, contingent, his-
torically limited, yet fully determinate causality of the capitalist social
form.7
The chapters that follow develop this argument neither as a linear history of
ideas (from Spinoza and Marx to the post-Althusserian present) nor by reduc-
ing various theories to the status of mere determinate expressions of a single
text (whether Capital, Ethics, or Reading Capital). Instead, my argument strives
to proceed topologically, seeking to construct a complex, overdetermined net-
work of theoretical articulations, its object a materialist dialectic of the capi-
talist social form structurally determined, in the last instance, by Marx’s unfin-
ished masterwork, his critique of capitalist political economy.

‘this form of reasoning is perfectly integrated within the geometric method, and is particu-
larly apt when it is a question of treating objects that – due to their absolute nature which
completely contains [renferme] their reality within themselves – seem to refuse a demonstra-
tional approach that considers causes [since these] would as such be given within themselves
[données en eux-mêmes]’ (Macherey 2001 [1998], p. 246).
6 Morfino 2022, pp. 87–8.
7 In the case of Spinozist substance, Macherey takes extraordinary care to indicate this trans-
versal, ramified network of the demonstration of general causality at every moment in his
five-volume analysis, a concern that culminates in his highly complex schematic represen-
tation of this rhizomatic logical system in the appendix to volume one of his Introduction,
‘The Demonstrative Network of the Ethics’. Macherey 2001 [1998], pp. 277–359. For every def-
inition, axiom, postulate, proposition, corollary and scholium in the five books of the Ethics,
Macherey carefully indicates both the anterior sequences by which each is justified, as well
as the ensuing claims that will depend upon it in turn for their own justification.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 5

1 The Limits of Reading Capital

Decades of reflexive, ideological criticism have continued to disavow the cru-

cial originality and power of Reading Capital and have successfully produced
in its place the imaginary figure of a wrong-headed relic of a bygone theoretical
and political era. The stridently proclaimed sin of ‘theoreticism’ long served to
summarise this dismissal, judging Reading Capital to have committed an act of
dogmatic, idealist hubris that rightfully would have relegated its intervention to
the dustbin of history.8 This book argues against this received commonplace,
from the position that we must look not merely to more familiar and readily
accepted Althusserian concepts like ‘symptomatic reading’ or the ‘continent
of history’, but precisely to the uncompromising, categorical epistemological
claims of Reading Capital, in order to (re)discover, follow through, and fully
reactivate the infinite productivity Althusser and his virtuoso students initially

8 The most famous of these blanket condemnations is undoubtedly E.P. Thompson’s 1978 ful-
minating historicist polemic The Poverty of Theory, in which Thompson sees fit to dismiss
Althusser’s thought as a ‘freak’ dedicated to an ‘ahistorical theoreticism, … a structuralism
of stasis’, although Thompson begins by freely admitting that ‘I don’t understand Althusser’s
propositions as to the relation between the “real world” and “knowledge”’, which is to say, the
entire basis of Althusser’s epistemological position (Thompson 1987, pp. 17, 20, 21). While in
retrospect Thompson’s historicist diatribe is surprising mainly in its length and vehemence
(‘starting moderately and ending in a gale of fury’, Perry Anderson observes [1980, p. 4]), even
insightful and sympathetic studies of Althusser have tended to sustain this condemnation of
the ‘theoreticism’ of Reading Capital. Anderson’s own famous response to Thompson, his 1980
essay Arguments within English Marxism, in fact begins by endorsing Thompson’s empiri-
cist condemnation of theoreticism, to conclude, without analysis, that Althusser’s ‘theory
of knowledge, dissociated from the controls of evidence, is untenably internalist’ (Anderson
1980, p. 7). Similarly, in his groundbreaking 1987 book Althusser, The Detour of Theory, Gre-
gory Elliott proposes that ‘the cause defended by Althusser some twenty years ago [i.e., in
For Marx and Reading Capital] – the axiomatic scientificity of Marxism – cannot be cham-
pioned today’ (Elliott 1987, p. 45). Why is this the case, the reader might ask? Elliott provides
no theoretical reasons relating to the adequacy, or not, of this axiomatic position in relation
to the object of Marx’s analysis in Capital (the capitalist social form), but instead argues that
‘the vicissitudes of contemporary history [circa 1987]’ have shown that ‘Marxism has proven
fallible’ (1987, p. xxii). The correctness of a theoretical position, in other words, is to be judged
based on its ability to read the tea leaves of the future, or, as Engels famously put the matter
in Socialism: Scientific and Utopian, ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’. Althusser’s
Spinozist position in Reading Capital (Verum index sui et falsi) might instead take the alter-
nate form: ‘The proof of the pudding is in … the pudding’. All three of these quite different
and famous studies of Althusserianism share this focus on the materialist historiography of
capitalism (historical materialism), while tending to ignore the theoretical status of Capital
as the abstract analysis and exposition of the theoretical categories determining the capitalist
social form (on the latter, see Heinrich 2021, p. 39).

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6 chapter 1

produced: the idea of Marx’s positive, materialist dialectic, a dialectic with-

out negation that deploys the Spinozist creative power of the real (substance)
not as ontological, monist guarantee, but as the sheer immanence of structural
causality, whether that power is grasped in the attribute of thought or material
extension.9
‘Nothing positive contained in a false idea can be annulled by the pres-
ence of what is true’;10 never was Spinoza’s epistemological politics of the
adequate idea and the ongoing struggle it requires to instantiate itself better
exemplified than in the endless flow into the present of books and articles
that seek to reduce Capital to a palimpsest of Hegel’s Logic, readings that,
for all their often ingenious complexity, should, this book will argue, right-
fully have been short-circuited by the demonstrations of Reading Capital five
decades ago.11 Unfortunately, both for Capital and the adequacy of its recep-
tion, Reading Capital itself could muster only a very limited power to impose
the concept of Marx’s positive dialectic it rightfully proclaimed. Its chapters,
consisting of oral presentations written up from Althusser’s seminar at the Rue
d’Ulm from January–April 1965, could attain, as Althusser himself candidly pro-
claimed, no more than the status of ‘incomplete texts, the mere beginnings
of readings … [marked by] hesitations and uncertain steps … no more than
a sketch’.12
To these inherent limitations of texts necessarily situated and constrained
by the context and moment of their iteration, must be added the impedi-
ment of the hobbled editions of Reading Capital following its initial publi-
cation: its second, 1968 abridged edition amputating, to constitute a handy
‘pocket’ edition, not only Jacques Rancière’s rich and probing initial chapter,
but, even more problematically for the argument I wish to develop here, Pierre
Macherey’s brief, long-overlooked but positively dazzling and unprecedented
analysis of Marx’s process of exposition in the initial pages of Capital; that is
to say, precisely the text in which Althusser’s core proposition of ‘the apodictic

9 It was only in the final phases of revising this manuscript that I discovered Jean Matthys’
brilliant study Althusser lecteur de Spinoza, perhaps the only other monograph in the liter-
ature on Althusser to affirm the fundamental validity of the ‘theoreticist’ epistemological
positions of For Marx and Reading Capital. Thanks to Jean Matthys for sharing the pre-
publication manuscript of his book.
10 eivp1.
11 For recent, thoughtful examples, see Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital: A Reconsideration
(Moseley and Smith 2014); Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (2002) and
The Spectre of Capital: Idea and Reality (2022).
12 rc, pp. 2, 11.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 7

[i.e., logically certain] character of the order of [Marx’s] theoretical discourse’

found its minimally adequate demonstration.13
To this self-inflicted blow was added the contingent historical encounter
that was Mai-68, bringing in its wake the anti-intellectual categorical imper-
ative of ‘practicism’, the caricatural positive valence of a henceforth proscribed
‘theoreticism’.14 The 1970s Siren song of practicism – whose forceful interpel-
lation drove Althusser himself to recant the putative ‘theoreticism’ of Reading
Capital (i.e., what Reading Capital had assuredly called ‘theoretical practice’)
in the name of the revisionist mot d’ordre of ‘class struggle in theory’ – declared
open season on the daunting theoretical complexity of Reading Capital. In
response, Althusser found himself interpellated by the empiricist demand to
reflect ‘proletarian experience’.15 This abandonment of the autonomy of ‘the-
oretical practice’ (rebaptised ‘theoreticism’ after 1968) for a position in which
‘philosophy represents the class struggle in theory’,16 this theoretical regression
from Spinoza’s verum index sui et falsi to a theory of knowledge as the adequacy
of its representation of an empirical object,17 marks a moment of epistemolog-
ical break in Althusser’s thought, at least in published texts such as Lenin and
Philosophy and Éléments d’autocritique.18

13 rc, p. 50.
14 Balibar 2018, p. 6. It was of course Althusser himself who identified in his autocritique the
‘deviation’ of a ‘theoreticist tendency’ in For Marx and Reading Capital, noting that the
majority of critics had instead wrongly seen these as works of ‘structuralism’ (Althusser
1998a, pp. 177–81).
15 Althusser 1974. Althusser’s revisionist position was first articulated in 1967 in the lectures
collected as ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’ (2012).
16 Althusser 1968, p. 5.
17 Ironically, Althusser’s slogan is a perfect and explicit example of precisely the ‘traditional
theory of knowledge’ he repeatedly condemned, a mode of thought universally depen-
dent upon the principle of reason as the demand that the theoretical object adequately
represent or reflect the empirical. Althusser would in turn vehemently critique this very
theoretical orientation in Etre marxiste en philosophie in 1977 (to be discussed below).
Both Vincent Descombes (1980, pp. 134–5) and Gregory Elliott (1987, pp. 194, 222) anal-
yse Althusser’s turn to the position of ‘class struggle in theory’ as a theoretical regression
from the radically novel propositions of For Marx and Reading Capital. Jean Matthys calls
for readers of Althusser to ‘nuance’ the epistemologically extreme positions of Reading
Capital with a ‘more “politicist” conception in which political practice serves as prior
and posterior determination [fait office d’amont et d’aval] for Marxist science’, whereas
I wish to argue that the position of ‘class struggle in theory’ constitutes an unambigu-
ous regression from the political epistemology of Reading Capital that Matthys elsewhere
champions without reserve (2023, p. 292).
18 This in contrast to recent studies that have tended to emphasise the often-subterranean
continuity of thought across the arc of Althusser’s intellectual production. See for example
Goshgarian 2006; Bruschi 2021; and for a critique of this recent trend in Althusser studies,
Thomas 2013, pp. 145–6.

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8 chapter 1

G.M. Goshgarian succinctly summarises the problem of theoreticism as an

incapacity of theoretical practice to account for the political necessity of its
conclusions:

The theory of philosophy this philosophy proposed [in Reading Capital]

did not allow for an accounting of what it did. Proclaiming itself a science
– and even a science of the sciences – the proper task of which, according
to Althusser, is to work on a [thought] object distinct from its real object,
it proved itself incapable of being transformed by the world that it theo-
rised, or to transform it [in turn]: it could only know it.19

Goshgarian, however, arguably conflates what must necessarily remain two dis-
tinct problems or processes: A) the production of the adequate knowledge of
the capitalist social form (such as Marx constructs in Capital) and B) the polit-
ical problem of how that adequate knowledge, as a political epistemology, can
be militantly brought to bear upon an existing world and its subjects toward
the aim of its and their transformation.
In abandoning Reading Capital’s claims for the autonomy of theoretical
practice as index sui et falsi in favour of the empiricist methodology of ‘class
struggle in theory’, Althusser arguably conflated or inversed the necessary order
of these two processes via the demand that the lived experience of class strug-
gle (pre-)determine the adequacy of theory itself.20 Marx himself proceeded

19 Althusser 2015, p. 26.

20 Along with Matthys’ book, the only text that makes a similar defence of theoretical prac-
tice, to my knowledge, is Antony Cutler and Michael Gane’s ‘Statement: On the Question
of Philosophy – for a Theory of Theoretical Practice’, which appeared in the final issue
of the British journal Theoretical Practice. Breaking with the journal’s initial support for
Althusser’s 1967 ‘new definition of philosophy’ (as the representation of class struggle in
theory), Cutler and Gane interestingly emphasise the co-dependency of concepts such as
conjuncture and symptomatic reading with the theory of theoretical practice articulated
in For Marx and Reading Capital. In Althusser’s new definition of philosophy, they argue,
‘the significance of the elements of any theoretical problematic “encountered” in the inter-
vention derives not from the structure of that problematic itself [as in the theory of the-
oretical practice] but on the contrary from the demands of the theoretical conjuncture’,
resulting, they conclude, in a return to a classic subject-object, representation-based the-
ory of knowledge (1973, p. 39). Their position differs from that which I am defending here,
however, in its extreme theoreticism (in the pejorative sense), arguing as they do that ‘The
modes of production exist only within thought as does history’ (1973, p. 46). This is, Pana-
giotis Sotiris observes, ‘a version of anti-empiricism that turns into a complete distancing
between theoretical conceptual transformations, defined in a strict intra-theoretical man-
ner, and any possible linking between historical political dynamics, conflicts and struggles
and the terrain of philosophy’ (Sotiris nd, p. 10). Neither Spinoza, Marx, nor Althusser

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 9

differently, strictly maintaining the purely theoreticist focus of Capital, the

results of which demonstration could then be powerfully brought to bear in
the militant interventions of his activity after 1867, for example in Civil War in
France (1871) and the (unpublished) 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.
While in 1969 flower children pelted Adorno to the point of infarct,
Althusser, following his confrontation with Garaudy over theoretical orthodoxy
and the humanism debate – for infinitely overdetermined reasons on which it
would be pointless to speculate – took it upon himself to offer up in sacrifice the
theoretical adequacy and power of Reading Capital to the Big Other’s demand
for practice.21 In doing so, he arguably abandoned his initial categorical cri-
tique and rejection of all forms of empiricism and idealism in a proclamation
of resentful bad faith that Etienne Balibar has identified as a veritable ‘revenge
of practice’.22 Balibar has described how in the aftermath of May ’68, Althusser
himself sought to ‘destroy’ the theoretical position he had previously occupied,
‘as though constrained by a merciless authority [comme contraint par une force
impitoyable]’.23 These wilful acts of theoretical self-immolation (‘I will destroy
what I have done’ Balibar recalls Althusser telling him at one point) consti-
tuted the sabotaging of the very theoretical claims that had animated For Marx
and Reading Capital.24 While Balibar has denied that this position implied an

would ever claim that circles exist only in thought (and strictly speaking, Spinoza argues,
they do not ‘exist’ in thought at all, but only in space-time extension); the same holds
for modes of production and the other categories of the capitalist social form Marx con-
structs, aspects of which are perfectly perceptible, if inadequately understood, in lived,
sensuous experience. The thought object and the real object are not two different things
one can compare for their correspondence, but one and the same thing, perceived alter-
nately via the absolutely distinct attributes of thought and extension.
21 Althusser 2003. On Adorno’s last months, see Müller-Doohm 2004.
22 Balibar 2018, p. 10.
23 Ibid. Similarly, François Matheron has argued that in this period, ‘Althusser progressively
destroyed the theses he had constructed’ (cited in Thomas 2013, p. 145).
24 Balibar has succinctly distilled the terms of this shift in Althusser’s theoretical orientation:
‘Au bout du compte, [Althusser in his writings of 1976–78] pointait le symptôme majeur
de la crise et de son inconscience propre dans l’énoncé de Lénine : “La théorie de Marx
est toute-puissante parce qu’elle est vraie.” Or, [Balibar continues,] à quelques variantes
près, c’est lui-même qui avait le plus hautement revendiqué cet énoncé, de 1965 à 1975,
comme l’expression provocatrice et risquée de l’objectivité du marxisme, dont les critères
de vérification (succès, échecs politiques) présupposent toujours une théorie explicative
de la lutte des classes (bien loin de pouvoir l’engendrer). Désormais il y voyait l’expression
la moins équivoque de l’illusion d’autonomie de la théorie, entretenue par son propre jeu
conceptuel (la logique formelle de son “ordre d’exposition”)’ (Balibar 1978, p. 61). Balibar
has more recently sought to nuance the vehement critique of his 1978 essay, in ‘L’objet
d’Althusser’ (2015b, pp. 85–116).

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10 chapter 1

abandonment of Althusser’s insistence on the autonomy of theoretical pro-

duction,25 he is clearly over-generous to his intellectual mentor: Althusser’s
post-1975 position, as Balibar himself points out, was no mere ‘inscription of
non-theoretical practice in the definition of objectivity’ (Balibar), a truly neces-
sary imperative for any materialist theoretical practice. Instead, I wish to argue,
Althusser’s position constituted a far stronger, eminently empiricist insistence
that theory must, in Balibar’s words, ‘“listen” to what [the masses] say of their
experiences and their struggles’.
This theoretical self-sabotage manifested in particular via Althusser’s mes-
sianic, historico-theological faith in the possibility a ‘fusion’ between the work-
ers’ movement and Marxist theory, perhaps most explicitly and grandil-
oquently stated in a 1968 interview with L’Unità: ‘The fusion of Marxist theory
and the workers’ Movement is the greatest event in the history of class struggle,
which is to say, practically in the whole of human history’.26 It would only be
with the recognition of the collapse of this myth – polemically announced in

25 ‘Insistons bien sur le fait qu’il ne s’agit en aucune manière de renoncer à l’idée de connais-
sance scientifique ou “par concepts”, et a fortiori de rabattre celle-ci sur un empirisme,
un pragmatisme ou un subjectivisme. L’objectivité de la connaissance fait partie (comme
l’existence de la lutte des classes) des thèses sur lesquelles, à travers quelque autocritique
que ce soit, Althusser n’a pas cédé. Mais la référence à la pratique non théorique doit être
inscrite dans la définition même de l’objectivité, comme sa condition’ (Balibar 1978, 64).
26 Interview with L’Unità, 1 February 1968, cited in Estop 2021, p. 205. Estop goes on to inci-
sively critique the messianic, theological tenor of Althusser’s faith in this ‘fusion’ in the
period 1968–77, reminiscent of nothing less than Lukács’s humanist faith in the prole-
tariat: ‘“Man”, who had been expelled from theory [in For Marx and Reading Capital]
seems here to rediscover a history, and, moreover, a “human” history bestowed by Marx-
ism. The event of this fusion implies the self-transparency of the workers’ movement,
insofar as it possesses the science of its own history and that of humanity as a whole, a
fusion of the subject and object of knowledge. … This indistinction between science and
ideology appears to regress to a form of historicism or Hegelian absolute knowledge in
which the proletariat would be transparent to itself, not by virtue of its class conscious-
ness [as Lukács had claimed], but through its science’ (Estop 2021, p. 206, my translation).
Althusser similarly invokes the actuality of this ‘fusion’ in his unpublished 1967 ‘Book
Project on Capital Vol. 1’: ‘La situation du travail théorique a changé depuis Marx: très
précisément depuis que s’est réalisé la “fusion” du Mouvement ouvrier et de la théorie
marxiste. Cette “fusion” a produit une pratique absolument nouvelle’. imec, 20alt 16.11,
p. 36. Jean Matthys discusses the initial form of this Althusserian faith in the redeeming
force of the proletariat in his 1947 thesis: ‘Pour l’Althusser de 1947, … le prolétariat nomme
le lieu virtuel-réel, à la fois inscrit dans le contenu existant et contre lui, où pourra se
réaliser véritablement la circularité absolue d’une humanité réconciliée …: “L’action rév-
olutionnaire peut concevoir, au moins formellement, l’avènement de la totalité humaine
réconciliée avec sa propre structure”’ (Matthys 2023, p. 96).

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 11

Althusser’s 1977 speech ‘Enfin la crise du Marxisme!’ – that Althusser would

come to affirm that ‘for the masses, there no longer exists a “realised ideal”
[in the ussr] or living reference for socialism’.27 The concept of fusion in this
sense functioned for Althusser after 1968 as an ideological guarantee, both for
the teleological destiny of socialism and for the truth of its historical claims;
in its absence after 1977 at the latest, the promise of socialism was reduced for
Althusser to the status of a historical déchet.28
The call for ‘philosophy to represent the class struggle in theory’ and the
attendant faith in the ‘fusion’ of proletarian lived experience with Marxist the-
ory thus formulated the protocol of a regressive theoretical position. In the
same February 1968 interview with L’Unità, Althusser publicly broke with the
Spinozist theory of knowledge of Reading Capital, asserting instead a
representation-based model in which ‘world outlooks [such as that of the work-
ing class or “idealist bourgeois”] are represented in theory … by philosophy.
Philosophy represents the class struggle in theory’.29 In this interview, Althusser
publicly silences the aim of Reading Capital to understand Marx’s critique of
political economy and the capitalist social form as an object of thought that
finds the measure of its truth (and falsity) immanently from its own construc-
tion, and instead reduces the hollow affirmation that ‘Yes, it is essential to read
and study Capital’ to a utilitarian political imperative, the object of which is
merely to grasp ‘the revolutionary character of Marxist theory’.30 Althusser fur-
thermore claims to base this reductive protocol on the sorry, meagre platform
of a politicised identity politics: ‘Proletarians’, he claims, ‘have a “class instinct”
which helps them on the way to proletarian “class positions”. Intellectuals, on
the contrary, have a petty-bourgeois class instinct which fiercely resists this
transition’.31
To be sure, one might sustain a weak view of this dogmatic, empiricist
position, i.e., that an infinite variety of external factors (the lived experience

27 Cited in Estop 2021, p. 208, my translation.

28 Estop 2021, p. 209. The result of this final kehre, in Althusser’s post-1980 writings, was
his turn to an ‘aleatory’ materialism, focused principally on neither the epistemological
concerns of Reading Capital, nor the directly militant political imperatives of ‘the class
struggle in theory’, but instead engaging a Spinozist critique of ontological foundations
via the concept of the void.
29 Althusser 1968, p. 5, emphasis in original. Althusser repeats this claim on the following
page: ‘Marxist-Leninist philosophy, or dialectical materialism, represents the proletarian
class struggle in theory’ (Althusser 1968, p. 7, emphasis in original).
30 Althusser 1968, p. 7.
31 Althusser 1968, p. 2.

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12 chapter 1

of working-class exploitation, the encounter with Engels, political militancy,

the failed revolutions of 1848, Marx’s intellectual temperament and ‘genius’,
etc.) were indeed necessary external conditions for the orientation and vehe-
mency of Capital’s ‘critique of political economy’.32 Althusser, however, sum-
marises this position in far stronger, psychologistic and epistemologically abso-
lute terms in the Preface to Lenin and Philosophy, stating categorically that ‘it
is only from the point of view of class exploitation that it is possible to see and
analyse the mechanisms of a class society and therefore to produce a scientific
knowledge of it’.33
This position must be rejected categorically on the very Spinozist grounds
that animate the claims of Reading Capital, arguing as it does from imaginary
lived experience (‘the point of view of class exploitation’) backward to impute
its imaginary causes. Capital must instead be understood as the systematic
demonstration of the necessary forms of appearance and relation in any soci-
ety, past, present, or future, real or imagined, of any and all ‘societies in which
the capitalist mode of production prevails’.34 Marx shows, among his countless
propositions, that in any society in which all things of value tend to take the
form of commodities and commodified relations (the form of appearance of
which is ‘an immense collection of commodities’), the basic ‘cell form’ of that
society is, necessarily, the commodity; that the commodity as such, at its most
abstract, simply has, as a given fact, two principal aspects or attributes: its use-

32 In the sense that Alain Badiou has theorised the ‘conditions’ of philosophy (Conditions).
Panagiotis Sotiris writes similarly that ‘In Spinoza’s terms, freedom is a consequence of
intelligible necessity, and in Marx’s terms it is knowledge of the objective conditions of
the class struggle that makes possible the political direction of the class struggle’. Sotiris
2013, p. 37.
33 Althusser 1968, p. xvi.
34 Marx 1976, p. 125. Michael Heinrich shows that the received notion of Capital as a work
of the history of capitalism, derived from Kautsky, ‘baldly contradicts Marx’s claims in
the Preface to the first volume. There, he emphasises that the work deals with “theoretical
developments” (1976: 90), and that the text makes reference to conditions in England only
as an “illustration” of such developments. Marx makes it clear that he is by no means offer-
ing a historical depiction: “Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of
development of the social antagonisms that spring from the natural laws of capitalist pro-
duction. It is a question of these laws themselves” (90). In keeping with this perspective,
Marx emphasises at the end of Volume 3 that he wants to present “the internal organi-
sation of the capitalist mode of production, its ideal average, as it were” (970). This way
of defining the object of Capital is not arbitrary, nor does it exclude historical develop-
ments from the account. On the contrary, the presentation of this “ideal average” is what
makes possible an approach to history that is not based on mere anecdotes but rather on
scientific analysis’ (Heinrich 2021, p. 397).

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 13

value and its exchange-value, which coexist as positive facts without contradic-
tion;35 that the substance of value of such commodities is abstract labour, etc.
Marx’s propositions and their demonstration in Capital are not derived from
‘the point of view of class exploitation’, as Althusser would demand in 1968
(though, again, this ‘point of view’ certainly constitutes one of their indirect
conditions), but instead from Marx’s painstaking critique of the theories of clas-
sical political economy, working at his desk and in the British Library.36 This
theoretical revisionism on Althusser’s part should be rejected as forcefully as
the conclusion that because Marx’s later unfinished manuscripts and study
notes demonstrate his concerted engagement with empirical research and his-
torical analysis (which is certainly the case), that the argument of Capital itself
bears an ‘empiricist’ dimension.37 The laws of the tendencies of capitalism that
Marx demonstrates, are, in their materialist necessity, eternal, their truth or
falsity, their adequacy or inadequacy determinable purely from their own con-
struction (Spinoza’s index sui). What Marx calls for example ‘the law of the mass
of surplus value’,38 in Chapter 11 of Capital, constitutes an abstract formalisa-
tion of an aspect of the capitalist social form, grasped in thought and derived
not from workers’ lived experience of exploitation, but as a necessary and sum-
mary consequence of the categories and relations he has demonstrated to that
point in his argument.
The opposite as well is true: insofar as they have a real theoretical content,
Marx’s essays such as ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’ and The Civil War in France
might rightly be said to depend directly upon, and be necessarily limited by,
empirical, historical experience, as Althusser demands. Marx’s historical essays
and journalism, for all their brilliance and flashes of insight, however, remain
just that, pieces linked to a particular historical situation and do not possess

35 ‘En quoi la “valeur d’usage” qui est dite “porteur” – “Träger” – de “valeur”, peut-elle bien être
dite contradictoire à la valeur qu’elle porte? Mystère’. Althusser 1998, p. 253. I will argue this
point systematically in Chapter 3.
36 Althusser would assert precisely the opposite in a series of unpublished 1967 notes for a
‘Book Project on Capital Vol. 1’, i.e., that Capital is the result of Marx’s ‘experiments’. There,
Althusser claims that Marx’s various enquiries to Engels on the actual process of running
a capitalist enterprise (regarding the calculation of amortisation, for example), constitute
an empiricist ‘experimental usage [l’usage expérimental] that Marx made of the given facts
[données] of Engels’s practical experience’. imec, 20alt 16.11, p. 38.
37 Musto 2020, p. 151n86.
38 ‘The masses of value and of surplus-value produced by different capitals – the value of
labour-power being given and its degree of exploitation being equal – vary directly as the
amounts of the variable components of these capitals’ (Marx 1976, p. 421). I develop my
argument about the apodictic, non-empirical nature of Marx’s argument in light of this
crucial chapter of Capital below in Chapter 3.

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14 chapter 1

the same degree of ‘scientific value’ Marx vaunted in his 1875 Postface to the
French edition of Capital.39 The case of a journalistic piece such as The Civil
War in France is just the opposite of the scientific apodicticity of Capital: if the
latter can rightly be said to have depended upon Marx (and Engels’s) direct
experience of class exploitation and political militancy as a condition of its
urgency and critical orientation, but not for the scientific rigour of its insights
into the capitalist social form, The Civil War in France can conversely be said to
depend upon Marx’s prior, painstakingly acquired theoretical understanding
of capitalism and its limits, but merely as an extrinsic condition that allowed
Marx accurately to judge in the heat of the historical moment a chaotic and
overwhelmingly complex empirical situation as ‘the great harbinger of a new
[communist] society’.40
Even the famous penultimate concluding chapter of Capital, Volume i, ‘The
Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’, the moment in Capital at
which Marx actually describes the ‘transformation of capitalist private prop-

39 In the sense that ‘a scientific analysis of [the forms of appearance of capital such as] com-
petition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent
motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with
their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses’ (Marx 1976, pp. 105, 433).
40 The Civil War in France. Available at: https:/www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/​
civil‑war‑france/index.htm. It should be obvious that the problem of the material, bio-
graphical, and historical determination of Marx’s critique of political economy vastly
exceeds the scope of the problem this book addresses, the Althusserian analysis of Marx’s
process of apodictic exposition in Capital. Alain Badiou’s concept of the materialist con-
ditions of philosophy that I invoke here can do no more than serve as a placeholder for
future work in that direction that would remain faithful to Althusser’s critique of empiri-
cism and the rigorous, Spinozist distinction between theory and the capitalist real. The
outstanding existing example of such an orientation (devoid, to be sure, of any reference
to Althusser) is Michael Heinrich’s biography of Marx (Heinrich 2019). Flatly rejecting
the inadequacy of existing biographies of Marx, Heinrich combines a deep and broad
knowledge of Marx’s relation to his contemporary society and thought with an unequaled
familiarity with Marx’s theoretical project, insight richly informed, in a way no other biog-
rapher of Marx in English can even remotely claim, by Heinrich’s intimate familiarity with
Marx’s many drafts and notes for Capital across the mega2 project. This knowledge, along
with a critical approach to Marx’s biography that explicitly distinguishes documented
archival facts from the many myths and legends that have long been propounded from
one biography to another, leads Heinrich to argue against the imaginary figure of the bio-
graphical subject as totality, and to propose instead that ‘a biography contains mediations,
breaking points, and contingencies [that] dispute the idea of an unmediated access to
the subject. Biography should not aim to reveal the “essence” of the person Marx; rather,
it is about the permanent, contradictory, and often ruptured process that characterises
the constitution of a particular person under particular social conditions and conflicts’
(Heinrich 2020, 478).

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 15

erty … into social property’, does not contradict this position, but rather stands
as its negative confirmation.41 As its title and adjunct position indicate, the
chapter’s seven paragraphs constitute a brief, rhetorically powerful but ana-
lytically meagre addition to the immediately preceding historical chapters on
primitive accumulation.42 As such, this entire concluding section comprises
an exterior supplement to Marx’s systematic, apodictic demonstration of the
capitalist social form in chapters 1–25. It is no coincidence that its handful of
famous predictions,43 in the absence of any and all demonstration, articulate
a theoretically enfeebled and imaginary teleology, one that continues to rely
on the theoretical rump of a Hegelian vocabulary that demonstrates nothing:
‘Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its
own negation. This is the negation of the negation’.44
Marx will renounce this teleology of historical necessity (as the necessity
that the communist social form be preceded by developed, industrial capital-
ism), a regressive, Hegelian moment of ‘writing recipes for the cook-shops of
the future’, not only by the time of his famous 1872 Postface (in which the lat-
ter phrase appears), but above all in his late turn to an aleatory position on the
problem of transition in the 1881 letters with Vera Zasulich.45
To continue to think beyond Althusser, with Althusser, we should radicalise
his famous assertion that philosophy has no object (‘Philosophy has no object,
it has its objects’), to assert more generally that critique has no object, in the
sense of a preconstituted empirical object that it analyses, subsequently to rep-
resent in thought.46 Critique – and this includes above all Marx’s critique of

41 Marx 1976, p. 929.

42 Marx 1976, chs. 26–31.
43 ‘The centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour reach a
point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integu-
ment is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators
are expropriated’ (Marx 1976, p. 929).
44 Marx 1976, p. 929. In The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Chris Arthur takes a very
different position on this chapter of Capital, to construct a highly complex Hegelian inter-
pretation of its political logic. I will discuss Arthur’s interpretation in Chapter 3.
45 Marx 1976, p. 99. See Musto 2020, pp. 63–70. Marx had already articulated this refusal of
historical teleology in his 1877 unsent draft letter to the Russian journal Patriotic Notes
[Otechestvennye Zapiski] in which he flatly affirmed that history shows only that ‘events
of striking similarity, taking place in different historical contexts, [lead] to totally disparate
results’. The structural theory of the capitalist social form that Marx articulates in the body
of Capital can under no circumstances, he writes, serve as ‘the master-key of a general
historico-philosophical theory, whose supreme virtue [as a highly abstract theory] con-
sists in being super-historical’. Cited in Musto 2020, p. 64.
46 Althusser 1974, p. 66.

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16 chapter 1

political economy – instead constructs its object, in the attribute of thought, as

a composite, materialist intervention itself situated within a forcefield of ten-
sions and positions. While both Althusser and Macherey, unlike Marx, limit this
position to address the academic institution of ‘philosophy’ and the history
of thought, Macherey has further argued that the materialist position con-
stitutes ‘an attitude of thought that initially possesses no objective contents’.
Extended to include materialist critique in general (such as Marx’s critique of
political economy),47 we necessarily arrive at the position that having no pre-
determined, empirical content, materialist critique cannot claim to knowledge
of an empirical object, and thus remains ‘dispossessed of its aspiration theo-
retically to apprehend a real content’.48 Instead, this anti-empiricist materialist
critique, strictly remaining within the attribute of thought, ‘does not apply out-
side of itself, [yet] produces distinct effects [as] a process invested in the real’.49
Rather than the adequate representation of an object as its truth [vérité],
Macherey argues that materialist critique, as a determinate intervention in a
discursive field, stakes out an unstable, dynamic position of justesse or exacti-
tude within divided and contradictory situations that possess ‘adverse lines of
force’, to arrive at always precarious positions of equilibrium.50 To read Capital
as such a materialist intervention, one that possesses no pre-existing object, is
to distinguish a text that instead actively constructs, in the attribute of thought,
the real nature of the multifarious capitalist social form: as ‘a discursive dis-
positif, itself a material process that develops specific effects [in this case, as
the century and a half of effects of the reception of Capital] in the problematic
space opened by the development of its own contradictions …. [Materialist cri-
tique] is real movement [mouvement réel], the objective process that discovers,
in inventing them step by step, the overdetermined forms of its materiality’.51
Keeping due measure, the writing of this book subjectively confirms to me
the correctness of Macherey’s anti-empiricist position: prior to its composition,
there existed no empirical object ‘the materialist critique of Marx, Spinoza,
and the Althusserians’ for me to analyse, but only a series of disparate texts,
with their contradictions and often incomplete discursive powers, a sundry
set including manifold abandoned intentions and unpublished fragments, and,

47 Macherey himself seems to encourage such a position, observing in his 1997 commentary
that his 1991 essay ‘could be interpreted as the resurgence of a critical conception of phi-
losophy’ (Macherey 1999, p. 110).
48 Macherey 1999, p. 109.
49 Macherey 1999, p. 96. I will follow Macherey’s further development of this position in the
next chapter.
50 Macherey 1999, p. 97.
51 Macherey 1999, p. 98.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 17

above all, a succession of silences, all of which I have sought to articulate – not
to reveal a truth – but instead as the exact and exacting composition of a force-
field of discursive relations that constitute Capital’s materialist dialectic.

2 An Act of Theoretical Repression

In contrast to the slogan of ‘class struggle in theory’, the ‘theoreticist’ object of

For Marx and Reading Capital that Althusser’s retrograde call to arms sought
to terminate was arguably never openly engaged with in theoretical strug-
gle, but dutifully repressed, the theoretical object that is Marx’s philosophical
‘thought-concrete’ [Gedankenkonkretum] seemingly forgotten even by those
who remained faithful to the project of Reading Capital. Simply put, nowhere in
all the literature on Althusser and Reading Capital did there occur a sustained
engagement with and interrogation of what is arguably the central claim of
Althusser’s famous introductory text: the claim that in the place of a (Hegelian)
negative dialectic, ‘in Capital we find [instead] a systematic presentation, an
apodictic arrangement of the concepts in the form of that type of demonstra-
tional discourse that Marx calls analysis’.52
The correlate of this claim is Althusser’s unadulterated Spinozist statement
of the ‘theoreticist’ position, i.e., that ‘theoretical practice is indeed its own cri-
terion, and contains in itself definite protocols with which to validate the qual-
ity of its product’.53 In opposition to all forms of empiricism, Althusser’s asser-
tion in Reading Capital redeploys Spinoza’s famous axiom ‘verum index sui et
falsi’, uncompromisingly to assert the absolute autonomy of Marx’s materialist

52 rc, p. 51. In his discussion of the dialectical method Marx progressively developed in Cap-
ital, Michael Heinrich’s Science of Value makes a similar claim with distinctly Althusserian
overtones (such as the focus on the ‘placement’ of concepts): Marx, Heinrich writes, ‘sie
in eine bestimmte Ordnung bringt, die ihnen aber nicht äußerlich ist und lediglich den
Gesamtzusammenhang herstellt, sondern die zur Bestimmung der Kategorien selbst noch
wesentlich ist: eine Ordnung, die wesentliche Beziehungen der Kategorien ausdruckt.’
(Marx ‘places them [concepts] in a certain order, one that is not external to them to merely
establish an overall context, but [an order that] is essential for determining the categories
themselves: an order that expresses the essential relationships between the categories’)
(Heinrich 2022 [1999], p. 172; 2023, p. 268, my translation). Where Heinrich differs from
Althusser is in his quite traditional, empiricist theory of knowledge, one in which, for
Heinrich, Marx’s dialectical demonstration attends to ‘den Zusammenhang von Begrif-
fen (Plural) geht, die empirisches Material verarbeiten’ (‘the context of concepts (plural)
that process empirical material’, ibid.).
53 rc, p. 61.

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18 chapter 1

thought-concrete, refusing empiricist theories of knowledge, and consequen-

tially rejecting all subject-object, representational and correspondence-based
models of truth:

The criterion of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges produced by Marx’s theo-

retical practice is provided by his theoretical practice itself, i.e., by the
proof-value, by the scientific status of the forms which ensured the pro-
duction of those knowledges.54 Marx’s theoretical practice is the criterion
of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges that Marx produced; and only because
it was really a matter of knowledge, and not of chance hypotheses, have
these knowledges given the famous results.55

This epistemological claim, which it is the aim of this book to sustain and
amplify, has, despite its theoretical daring, remained almost without exception
lettre morte in the literature on Reading Capital; even among the Althusseri-
ans themselves, only Pierre Macherey’s precocious, all-too-brief 1965 analysis
attends systematically to the process of exposition and demonstration Marx
deployed in Capital.
Among the results of Althusser’s theoretically self-destructive turn after 1968
is the surprising fact in question here: his general failure to extend and develop
the innovative and henceforth world-famous reading of Marx’s Capital initi-
ated by For Marx and Reading Capital itself. To my knowledge, Althusser would
reiterate the theoreticist position of Reading Capital on only three occasions.
Above all, in his inflection of the positions of Reading Capital in the single pub-
lished instance of this return, his 1977 ‘Avant-propos du livre de G. Duménil, Le
concept de loi économique dans Le capital’. There, Althusser: 1. warns against the
temptation of erecting a concept of a ‘methode dialectique’ in general (whether
Hegelian, Marxian, or otherwise) as well as that of ‘method’ tout court; 2. argues
for a process of exposition in Capital by the ‘positioning’ of concepts rather
than their idealist deduction as an ‘autoproduction’; 3. argues against any ide-

54 Here, as at so many other points in his Introduction, Althusser redeploys a fundamen-

tal notion from Cavaillès’ On Logic and the Theory of Science, i.e., that of what Jacques
Bouveresse calls the ‘effective construction [construction effective]’ of a theoretical object,
to illuminate Marx’s conceptual realism (Bouveresse, imec 20 alt 51.7, p. 30). Cavaillès
points out in his critique of Kant that ‘there must be a substratum or substance in order
for subject and predicate to be distinguished, or for the act of judgement to be recognised
as an act that can be accomplished as such and linked to the act of reasoning. But a direct
description presupposes knowledge, which is to say the construction of the object of the
concept’ (Cavaillès 2021, p. 30, emphasis added).
55 rc, p. 62.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 19

ological understanding of the ‘axiomatic’ nature of Marx’s demonstration; and

4. identifies a multiplicity of orders of exposition in Capital.56
In his 1967 notes for a ‘Book Project on Capital Vol. i’, Althusser writes that
‘Formally the beginning of Capital resembles the order of exposition of a math-
ematically formalised system. … In mathematics the order of exposition hold-
ing to the criteria of the formalisation begin with the most abstract concepts
(the definitions), which are indispensable for the ensuing development [of the
demonstration], and subsequently, according to the demands of the theoretical
development, one proceeds via the “injection” of new concepts. This is exactly
what Marx does in the beginning of Book i [of Capital]’.57
Subsequently, in a 1978 text (in the wake, that is, of the antithetical position
of ‘class struggle in theory’), composed of 23 meticulously drafted and typewrit-
ten pages and bearing the archival title ‘Cours sur le mode d’exposition chez
Marx’, Althusser would reaffirm that

Capital [is a] work that belongs to the register of a presentation (Darstel-

lung) of truth according to the order of reasons [l’ordre des raisons]. Truth
does not take the form in it of presence, but that of the production of pre-
sentation, of deduction in a system dominated by the order of reasons or
method. … There is an order of reasons, a method, an order for the linking
of things [un ordre d’enchainement des choses] that is par excellence that
of the Darstellung of truth. Truth can only be presented, which is to say,
in the strongest of terms, rendered present, visible to the eyes in its pre-
sentation, in the form of a Denkprozess that conforms to this norm and
takes no other form.58

For the reader hoping for some further specification, a demonstration, even a
citation from Capital to bolster this claim, not a word, any more than in Reading
Capital. This would be Althusser’s last written statement on the logic of Capital.

56 Althusser 1998a, pp. 247–66. Althusser’s interest in apodictic demonstration in general

(and not only in its deployment by Marx) persisted at least until 1968: there exists, for
example, an unsigned document in the imec Althusser archive entitled ‘Cours sur Frege,
Carnap, et Bolzano’. Shortly before his passing, Jacques Bouveresse confirmed (in an email
to Etienne Balibar et al., 9 November 2020) that this is the (incomplete) text of a seminar
he offered at Ulm in 1967, the typescript of which Althusser explicitly requested from him
in that year (‘Althusser l’avait fait dactylographier’ jb), the same year as he (Althusser)
made the above comments on Marx and mathematical formalisation. ‘Cours sur Frege,
Carnap, et Bolsano [sic]’. imec 20alt 28.5, pp. 1, 3.
57 imec 20alt 16.12, pp. 54–5, emphases in original.
58 imec 20alt 28.5, pp. 1, 3.

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20 chapter 1

In the case of Althusser’s Reading Capital collaborators, Jacques Rancière

has never returned to the study of Capital, a disinterest made eminently man-
ifest in his very public 1974 denunciation of Althusser’s ‘theoreticism’ (La Leçon
d’Althusser). Indeed, only Etienne Balibar has explicitly developed the
Althusserian idea of Marx’s philosophy (La philosophie de Marx), but even here,
the majority of that book addresses Marx’s thought prior to the elaboration of
Capital beginning in 1857. The case of Alain Badiou is even clearer. While not
an original contributor to Reading Capital itself, he in fact remained closely
aligned with the Althusserians as a member of the so-called groupe Spinoza in
the years 1965–67.59 Nonetheless, and despite both his frequent invocations of
Marx’s political writings and his consistent critiques of capitalism in the name
of the ‘Idea of Communism’, Badiou has never written a study engaging Marx’s
Capital in any fashion, let alone to address the specific epistemological claims
Reading Capital put forward.
Pierre Macherey’s writings since 1965 constitute in many ways the most com-
plex and fascinating case in this regard, and much of this book is devoted to
investigating his thought. While he as well has never published further analyses
of Capital since his brief, long-overlooked study of Marx’s process of exposi-
tion that constituted the third chapter of the first edition of Reading Capital, he
nonetheless intended, but then abandoned, a 1967 project for a thesis on Marx’s
philosophy, a project that would presumably have extended and developed
his avowedly Spinozist reading of Capital.60 Instead, the object of Macherey’s
sustained philosophical attention has remained Spinoza himself, the theorist
whose thought had initially inspired the most radical epistemological positions
of Reading Capital. In this vein, Macherey has produced an original and com-
pelling understanding of Spinoza’s thought as a positive, materialist dialectic,
first in his celebrated 1979 book Hegel or Spinoza, and, above all, in his masterful
five-volume, line by line exposition and analysis of Spinoza’s Ethics.
In fact, Macherey’s post-’68 turn from Marx to Spinoza can be said to struc-
ture the argument of this book as a whole.61 On the surface, the epistemological
claims of Reading Capital appear to have been largely if not entirely abandoned
by the Althusserians in the wake of May ’68. This occurred in the context of a
more general theoretical turn, a movement away from the notion of theoretical
practice that had guided For Marx and Reading Capital, toward the immediate
imperative of political action at the level of theory: ready examples from the

59 Althusser 1994.
60 Macherey 2021.
61 Peter Thomas has called into question the adequacy of Spinozist philosophy to that of
Althusser. See Thomas 2002 and Sotiris 2021, p. 180.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 21

1970s in addition to Althusser’s writings on the ‘class struggle in theory’ include

Badiou’s so-called ‘Red Years’ texts, Balibar’s La Dictature du prolétariat, and
Rancière’s Proletarian Nights.
That said, in the remainder of this Introduction, I wish to leave aside
Althusser’s dubious programme of ‘class struggle in theory’ and to return to
address in detail his initial epistemological critique in the arguments of For
Marx and Reading Capital. To do so, it will be essential to indicate the orig-
inality of that intervention in Marxist theory, as well as the real ambiguities
and limitations of Althusser’s incipient propositions. These initial theoretical
impediments will then find further, conclusive development when read in light
of the esoteric, unpublished writings of Althusser and, in the subsequent chap-
ters of this book, in the writings of these ‘Althusserians’ – Spinoza and Marx,
Macherey, and Badiou – as the shared pursuit of a theory of the materialist
dialectic.

3 For Marx in Its Limits

Already in the essays collected in For Marx, Althusser articulates the core epis-
temological proposition of his rereading of Marx, but in an initial form marked
by various deficiencies that will find subsequent (if still problematic) devel-
opment in the essays of Reading Capital. The 1962 essay ‘Contradiction and
Overdetermination’ sounds an opening salvo in Althusser’s theoretical inter-
vention, in its steadfast refusal to take Marx’s word on Hegel at face value.
This is the Marx who famously asserted in the 1873 Postface to the second edi-
tion of Capital that ‘With [Hegel the dialectic] is standing on its head. It must
be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’.
Althusser flatly rejects the idea that Marx simply ‘overturned’ Hegel, as Marx
himself claimed. Instead of a mere overturning that would leave the structures
of his dialectic unchanged but only inverted, Althusser famously affirms an
epistemological break between the ‘Marxist’ and the ‘Hegelian’ dialectic, as two
radically heterogeneous philosophical practices:62

62 In the Eléments d’autocritique, Althusser will reaffirm the correctness of this proposition
(‘Cette these, qui n’a pas éte épargné par les critiques, je la maintiens’), with the crucial
proviso that it be understood as an event (‘surgit quelque chose comme un événement
sans précédent’) in precisely the sense Badiou has given the concept: as a punctual break
‘à partir de L’idéologie allemande’, but one that required Marx’s ongoing fidelity as a perpet-
ual struggle to realise, step by step, to the end of his days, its full theoretical implications
(Althusser 1974, pp. 165, 164).

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22 chapter 1

If the Marxist dialectic is ‘in its principal’ fully the opposite of the
Hegelian dialectic, … this radical difference must manifest itself in its
essence, which is to say in its determinations and its own structures. To
speak clearly, this implies that the fundamental structures of the Hegelian
dialectic, such as negation, the negation of the negation, the identity of
opposites, ‘sublation’, the transformation of quality into quantity, contra-
diction, etc., possess for Marx (in so far as he takes them up, which is not
always the case!) a different structure from that which they possess for
Hegel.63

On the one hand, Althusser here rightly refuses simply to take Marx at his
word, as though Marx’s declared, imaginary relation to Hegel’s thought were
sufficient in itself to resolve the complex question of the nature of the episte-
mology deployed in Capital. Marx, for all his genius, was necessarily a subject
of ideology like anyone else, even in a text as authoritative as the 1873 Post-
face to the Second Edition of Capital in which he makes his famous claim
‘to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’. Instead, Althusser
rightly proposes that the difference between these two forms of dialectic can
only be determined immanently, through an analysis of the ‘determinations
and structures’ of Marx’s logical demonstration itself, that is to say, through a
critical analysis of the actual dialectical method deployed in the pages of Cap-
ital.64
At the same time, Althusser’s initial formulation of his proposition suf-
fers from several inadequacies. Althusser appears hesitant and anxious at the
very thought that Marx might in fact have constructed a dialectic based upon
entirely different principles than those of Hegel’s negative dialectic. It remains
a tentative suggestion, merely hinting that the categories of the ‘Marxist dialec-
tic’ might possess ‘a different structure’ than the ‘Hegelian dialectic’, offering no
more than a summary list of the principal characteristics of the latter (‘nega-
tion, … contradiction, etc’.) without substantiating this claim through even a
minimal concrete investigation or example.
Even more problematically, Althusser immediately abandons the distinc-
tion he indicates between the Marxist and Hegelian dialectics as a question of

63 Althusser 1974, p. 165, my translation.

64 This is the procedure I seek to follow throughout this book, above all in Chapter 3. Victor
Béguin, in contrast, takes Marx’s declarations on his relation to Hegel at face value, and
finds in Capital the intentional working-through of Marx’s initial, 1843 critique of Hegel,
and this on three registers, which Béguin terms genetic, empirical-historical, and dialectical
(Béguin 2021, p. 109).

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 23

thought at the level of the ‘determinations and self-same structures’ of a dialec-

tical demonstration, as what Pierre Macherey will call, in his contribution to
Reading Capital, Marx’s ‘process of exposition’. Instead of pursuing this insight,
he quickly shifts his analysis to the temporal, worldly domain of existing things,
to engage a discussion of ‘the Marxist concept of contradiction’ via Lenin’s anal-
ysis of the historical conditions governing the phenomenal unfolding of the
Bolshevik revolution. It is in this discussion, which occupies the remainder of
the essay, that Althusser first develops his famous concept of historical overde-
termination and deploys it to offer a penetrating critique of traditional and
Hegelian philosophies of history; that said, in doing so he completely aban-
dons his initial proposition to investigate the ‘Hegelian’ and ‘Marxist’ dialectics
at the level of a logic of apodictic demonstration rather than historical exis-
tence.
While Pierre Macherey’s contribution to Reading Capital will redress this
shortcoming, to focus precisely on the dialectical logic of Marx’s initial pro-
cess of exposition in Capital, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ is marked
by a further weakness, one that will only be more adequately addressed when
Althusser’s students Macherey and Badiou shift the object of their critique
from the analysis of Capital itself to the more abstract determinations of the
concept of a materialist dialectic as such. Althusser’s argument in fact suffers
from a nominalist deficiency, in its repeated assertion that the proper names
‘Marxist’ and ‘Hegelian’ in fact suffice to indicate the essential, universal nature
of two forms of dialectic. I will argue throughout this book that these attributes
(‘Hegelian’ and ‘Marxist’ dialectics) should rightfully be replaced, as Macherey
and Badiou will not hesitate to do, with the functional attributes ‘positive’ or
additive synthetic vs. ‘negative’ or contradiction-based, to indicate more ade-
quately the essential distinction governing the dynamic impulse of dialectical
development in each case.
The reason Althusser’s nominal distinction (Marxist vs. Hegelian) remains
problematic is immediately familiar, since Althusser’s claim that Marx made
a clean and absolute epistemological break from Hegel has long constituted
one of the principal sites of the rejection of Althusserian thought. Marx him-
self, as is often pointed out in response to Althusser’s famous proposition of
the epistemological break, continued to assert to the very end of his life that he
remained ‘the pupil of that mighty thinker [Hegel]’.65 Taken in itself, however,

65 Marx 1976, p. 103, 1873 Postface. This late position from Marx’s ‘Postface’ to the second,
1872 edition of Capital, reiterated earlier statements by Marx, for example, in his corre-
spondence with Lassalle, where Marx already asserted that: ‘This [Hegelian] dialectic is,
to be sure, the ultimate word in philosophy’ (cited in Fluss 2022, p. 481).

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24 chapter 1

such a statement, while suggestive, cannot resolve the question of whether and
in what ways what Marx calls the ‘method of presentation’ he deploys in Capi-
tal differs from that of Hegel. Marx’s own subjective point of view both reduces
the rich complexity of Hegel’s development and deployment of his dialecti-
cal method across a lifetime of work to a single nominal cipher (the ‘Hegelian
… dialectical method’), as well as presupposing precisely what would need to
be ascertained once those two methods were conceptualised: the determina-
tion through textual analysis of the precise factors that differentiate these two
‘methods of presentation’.
Had Marx written his projected study of dialectical method,66 he might well
have found, as Althusser repeatedly suggested, that the actual method of expo-
sition he had developed in the decades he spent writing Capital in fact dif-
fered far more fundamentally from that of Hegel than he had realised. Marx
might have found that in fact Hegel had not been ‘the first to present its [the
dialectic’s] general forms of motion in a comprehensive manner’,67 but had in
fact only identified the forms of motion of a specific, negative dialectic, one
that Marx himself gradually abandoned after 1857, to develop instead a posi-
tive dialectic of additive synthesis for his exposition in Capital, as Macherey
demonstrates in his brief contribution to Reading Capital (to be discussed in
the next chapter), a dialectic that finds antecedents in thinkers including Aris-
totle and Spinoza (both of whom Marx read intensively), and Bernard Bolzano
(whom he did not).
A final limitation of what I am calling Althusser’s nominalist deficiency
encompasses the further reference – beyond that which Althusser makes to
‘Hegelian’ and ‘Marxist’ dialectics in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ –
to a putative ‘Spinozist’ method of exposition, an attribution that Althusser and
Macherey will identify in both Reading Capital as well as in subsequent works
that focus explicitly on Spinoza’s method of exposition, such as Macherey’s
Hegel or Spinoza.68 The problem is not that Spinoza lacked a coherent notion of
an additive synthetic dialectic more geometrico (he did), but rather the impossi-
bility of contrasting this with a so-called ‘Hegelian’ dialectic. Althusser’s initial
references in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ to a ‘Hegelian’ dialectic

66 Marx famously intended, but never managed, to write a treatise on dialectics, as he wrote
on various occasions to Engels and Joseph Dietzgen (Fluss 2022, p. 482).
67 Marx 1976, p. 103.
68 ‘With Marx, [there occurs] the emergence of a new science … rather in the way that
Spinoza takes up the more geometrico only to give it a new and original meaning’ (rc,
p. 182).

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 25

remain vague and theoretically inadequate, lacking a formal identification that

would enable more precise determination of the dialectical form or practice of
a thinker in whatever variety and at whatever moment in the spectrum of their
writings.
Hegel himself did not develop a single, antagonistic (mis-)reading of
Spinoza, but in fact developed at least two conflicting readings of Spinoza in
his early and later works, the first positive, the second (as Macherey shows)
impoverished, critical, and tendential.69 This general neglect of Hegel’s early
reading of Spinoza on the part of Althusser and Macherey is problematic in
the present context because in texts such Faith and Knowledge (1802), the
young Hegel in fact resolutely defended Spinoza’s philosophy and his dialec-
tical method in particular against its critique by Jacobi.70 While it may well
be the case, as Macherey has shown in his many studies of Spinoza, that the
latter develops across the entirety of his thought a precise and coherent philos-
ophy of a positive, materialist dialectic that one might well term ‘Spinozist’, the
same coherency cannot be attributed to Hegel, whose own philosophy, while
always acknowledging a real debt to Spinoza, moved from an initial appreci-
ation in which Hegel unreservedly claimed Spinoza as ‘a dialectical thinker’
fully consonant with his own evolving thought, to then subsequently betray
this initial position in the Logic ‘in descriptions of Spinozism and pantheism
so caricatured that they had very little in common with the defence Hegel gave
of Spinoza in opposition to Jacobi decades before’.71
This initial imprecision in Althusser’s many references to a ‘Hegelian’ dialec-
tic remained hobbled by a further impediment, an obstacle related to the very
notion of the ‘dialectic’ itself. Althusser’s references to ‘Hegelian’ and ‘Marxist’
dialectics in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ implies a formal, generic
multiplicity of ‘dialectics’, as do subsequent references by Althusser, Balibar,
Macherey and Badiou to ‘materialist’ and ‘positive’ dialectics. Post-Kantian and
Marxist readers, however, have become all-too-accustomed to thinking of the

69 Macherey himself has in fact criticised his 1979 book on the grounds that it focuses
on Hegel’s later works and the Logic in particular, neglecting Hegel’s engagement with
Spinoza in his early writings (1999, p. 146).
70 Harrison Fluss has argued that ‘Hegel’s later understanding [of Spinoza] represented not
so much an advance but a regression towards the very same anti-Spinozist positions he
had already refuted in the early Jena period. In reverting back to old characterisations of
Spinozistic substance as a-cosmic in his later work, Hegel obfuscated his own deeper con-
nections with Spinoza, who had formerly represented for him a genuine philosopher of
the absolute Idea’ (Fluss 2016, p. 2).
71 Fluss 2016, p. 7.

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26 chapter 1

‘dialectic’ as limited to the Hegelian metaphysics of totality, contradiction,

and sublation, as the negation of the negation, and/or as traditional Marx-
ism’s understanding of the materialist ‘inversion’ of this contradiction-based
logic.72
It is too often forgotten, however, that the principal meaning of dialectic in
English, according to the oed, is simply ‘logical argument’, and in French (from
which the English derives), ‘the art of reasoning in general’.73 Anterior to these

72 This reductive position perhaps originates with Engels’s famous assertion, in Anti-
Duhring, that dialectics, as the science of nature, can be reduced to three laws: the trans-
formation of quantity into quality; the interpenetration of opposites; and the negation of
the negation (Bhaskar 1983, p. 126).
73 A key moment in this forgetting of the plurality of dialectical methods is surely to found
in Abram Deborin’s crucial contributions to the theoretical foundations of Soviet phi-
losophy in the pages of the journal he edited from 1922–30, Pod Znamenem Marksizma
(Under the Banner of Marxism). In a 1927 article on the occasion of the 250th anniversary
of Spinoza’s death, Deborin neatly divided the forces of Soviet theory into ‘the Hegelian
front and the Spinozist front’, in which reference to Hegel (and his constitutive negative
dialectic) is judged relevant for ‘the foundation of our method’ and Spinoza for ‘our world
view’ (cited at Oittinen 2022, p. 5). At the stroke of a pen, Deborin disappears the lat-
ter’s positive dialectic as a viable methodology for dialectical materialism. More recently,
Harrison Fluss, in an otherwise insightful and informed presentation, from his first sen-
tence radically limits his definition of ‘Dialectics’ to its post-Hegelian, negative dialecti-
cal form, when he writes: ‘As the logic of contradiction, dialectics has a long pre-history
before Marx’ (Fluss 2022, p. 474, my emphasis). Similarly, in her article on ‘Dialectics’ for
the Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, Carolyn Lesjak presents the topic of her article as
the ‘imperative for thought to expose and work through the contradictions and tensions
that underlie all conceptual coherence …. This critique proceeds by the route of nega-
tion, a path whereby the contradictions of capitalism are made apparent’ (Lesjak 2021,
p. 463). Andrew Cole, in his brilliant analysis of the Medieval origins of Hegelian dialec-
tic, focuses almost entirely on the concept as ‘the dialectic of identity and difference’
and underscores the originality of Hegel’s ‘recuperation of the concept of contradiction’
(Cole 2014, p. 34). Roy Bhaskar, in the Harvard Dictionary of Marxist Thought, identifies
three predominant meanings of the term ‘dialectics’ in the Marxist tradition: ‘as (a) a
method, most usually scientific method, instancing epistemological dialectics [i.e., the
general usage Althusser invokes in For Marx and Reading Capital]; (b) a set of laws or
principles, governing some sector of the whole of reality, ontological dialectics; and (c)
the movement of history, relational dialectics’. Yet for all this real subtlety, Bhaskar too
ultimately reverts to a contradiction-based understanding of Marx’s epistemology: ‘Marx’s
dialectics is scientific, [Bhaskar summarises], because it explains the contradictions in
thought and the crises of socio-economic life in terms of the particular contradictory
essential relations which generate them’ (Bhaskar 1983, pp. 122, 124, 125). Patrick Murray is
the only reader of Capital as far as I am aware who underlines the generic, non-Hegelian
meaning of dialectic for Marx as the art of logical demonstration per se. Murray 2017,
p. 131.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 27

various definitions,74 for Aristotle, dialectic [διαλεκτική] indicates quite simply,

in the words of E.S. Forster, ‘the application of logical methods to argument’.75
André Lalande, in his classic Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philoso-
phie – which has served as the standard theoretical reference for generations of
French thinkers since its initial publication in 1923 and which Althusser himself
refers to for his initial definition of ‘political economy’ in Reading Capital76 –
follows this degree of generality in defining la dialectique as ‘toute suite de
pensées … qui dépendent logiquement l’un de l’autre’ [any sequence of thoughts
that depend logically upon one another].77
Althusser, Macherey, and Badiou’s use of ‘dialectics’ in the plural (whether
Hegelian, Marxist, Spinozist, negative, positive, or materialist) follows this ety-
mological plurality and refers to various modes of ‘logical argument’ or demon-
stration in this capacious sense. Althusser, in For Marx, initially indicates this
generic plurality of processes of logical demonstration via the bare nominal
distinction between ‘Hegelian’ and ‘Marxist’ dialectics, without substantially
developing this distinction at the level of Marx’s method of demonstration.
Reading Capital, in contrast, would attend far more fully to the formal and func-
tional differences between these two modes of exposition.

74 In Latin, from which these derive, dialectica is defined as simply ‘the art of methodical
reasoning’ (Le Robert historique). In German the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie
defines Dialektik as ‘der Art einer Disziplin mit der Analyse und Synthese von Begriffen
und dient vornehmlich der Erkenntnis des Seienden, um die Ideen zu begreifen’ [a disci-
pline in which the analysis and synthesis of concepts primarily addresses the knowledge
of being in order to comprehend Ideas]. On the multifarious interpretations of the con-
cept of dialectic in Capital, see Heinrich 1999, pp. 164–79; 2023, pp. 259–75.
75 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 25, note b.
76 ‘I can take as my elementary theoretical guide the definitions proposed in A. Lalande’s
Dictionnaire philosophique …. They can be taken as so many indices not only of a com-
mon theoretical background, but also of the possible resonances and inflexions of sense
this background provides’ (rc, p. 312, lc, p. 366).
77 Lalande 2010 [1923], p. 227. Lalande furthermore notes that ‘This word [la dialectique] has
received such diverse meanings that it can only be usefully employed by indicating pre-
cisely in what sense it is taken’ (ibid.). Throughout this book, I will follow Althusser’s lead
and repeatedly refer to Lalande’s definitions from his magisterial 1923 work of erudition,
currently in its eighteenth edition, a reference work that Jacques Fallon described on its
1993 reedition with puf as ‘the most famous philosophical dictionary in the French lan-
guage …. Still today, no other dictionary in our language can claim to rival either in quality
or scope this monument of French erudition’. Fallon 1993, p. 512.

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28 chapter 1

4 Reading Capital’s Process of Exposition

This further development of the initial claims of ‘Contradiction and Overde-

termination’ occurs in Reading Capital in three stages: 1) an initial critique
of empiricist epistemologies in Althusser’s introductory essay ‘From Capital
to Marx’s Philosophy’, followed by 2) the crucial and rarely discussed affirma-
tion in that same essay’s section 14, which argues that ‘in Capital we find … an
apodictic arrangement of the concepts in the form of [… a] demonstrational
discourse’,78 a proposition that Althusser nonetheless leaves to Macherey actu-
ally to demonstrate in 3) the latter’s analysis and demonstration in Chapter
Three, ‘The Process of Exposition of Capital’.
Althusser initiates his determination of Marx’s epistemological method in
‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’ through a general critique of empiricism.
He refuses to limit the notion of empiricism to the bare dictionary definition,
as the assertion that all knowledge arises from sensuous experience, whether
classically for Hume or as the ‘vulgar empiricism’ that ‘takes the objects of sci-
entific practice to be pure phenomena that have not undergone a process of
either ideological or theoretical transformation’.79
If in his Introduction to Reading Capital, Althusser seeks to develop an
encompassing and unyielding critique of empiricism, its articulation is none-
theless surprising: one would expect Althusser simply to have based his critique
on Spinoza’s familiar claim, in the Appendix to Ethics Book 1, for the radi-
cal inadequacy of all thought derived from sensory impressions, in its neces-
sary movement from observed effects backward to their imaginary, ideological
causes.80 Instead, Althusser identifies an entirely different criterion that he will

78 rc, p. 51.
79 rc, p. 243.
80 Spinoza’s critique of empiricism in Book ii of Ethica is absolute: ‘Insofar as the human
mind imagines an external body, to that extent it does not have an adequate knowledge
of it’ (quatenus mens humana corpus externum imaginatur aetenus adaequatam ejus cog-
nitionem non habet) eiip26c, and again, the corollary to Proposition ii29, ‘Whenever the
human mind perceives things after the common order of nature, it does not have an ade-
quate knowledge of itself, nor of its body, nor of external bodies, but only a confused and
fragmentary knowledge’ (mens humana quoties ex communi naturae ordine res percipit
nec sui ipsius nec sui corporis nec corporum externorum adaequatam habet cognitionem)
eiip29c. Spinoza once more: ‘When we gaze at the sun, we see it as some two hundred
feet distant from us. The error does not consist in simply seeing the sun in this way but in
the fact that while we do so we are not aware of the true distance and the cause of our see-
ing it so. For although we may later become aware that the sun is more than six hundred
times the diameter of the earth distant from us, we shall nevertheless continue to see it as
close at hand. For it is not our ignorance of its true distance that causes us to see the sun

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 29

contrast with Marx’s materialist method of exposition in Capital. Althusser

pointedly claims that ‘The whole empiricist process of knowledge lies in fact
in an operation of the subject called abstraction. To know is to abstract from
the real object its essence, the possession of which by the subject is then
called knowledge’.81 This initial formulation already casts empiricism, in all its
variants, as a dualist relation of subject to object, a conception of knowledge
production that Althusser will then contrast with Marx’s Spinozist ‘thought-
concrete’ that reproduces (as opposed to merely representing) the material,
extensive real of the capitalist social form, capitalism itself, that is to say, in
the attribute of thought.82
Althusser then takes a further step in this general critique of empiricism, to
draw a necessary implication of the empiricist extraction the essential truth
from an object.83 In all empiricist operations, Althusser asserts, encompassing
both its sensualist and rationalist variants, the ‘sole function [of knowledge] is
to separate, in the object, the two parts which exist in it, the essential and the
inessential, … the gold [from] the dross – by special procedures whose aim is
to eliminate the inessential real’.84
In the case of Marx’s Capital, Althusser makes a very compelling claim
indeed. For a real distinction should be drawn between the empiricist meth-
ods of Adam Smith, for example, and Marx’s Spinozist materialism in Capital.
Smith, to take a famous example, begins The Wealth of Nations with the asser-
tion of a universal notion inductively abstracted from the observed regularities
of human communities in general. Transhistorically, these constitute the basic
anthropological features that need only, in this view, naturally come to flour-
ish once the historical impediments to trade of previous social forms (agrarian,
feudal, etc.) were lifted. There exists, Smith writes in the first paragraph of The
Wealth of Nations, ‘a certain propensity in human nature, … the propensity to
truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. … It is common to all men,
and to be found in no other race of animals’.85

to be so near; it is that the affection of our body involves the essence of the sun only to the
extent that the body is affected by it’. Spinoza, eiip35s.
81 rc, p. 35.
82 rc, p. 41.
83 rc, p. 36.
84 Ibid.
85 Adam Smith 1999, p. 11. I take this example from the analysis of Marx’s 1857 methodology
by Juan Iñigo Carrera (2013). The same point could be made of Hegel and capitalism: none
of the various categories that Hegel develops in his social logic (Elements of the Philosophy
of Right), from the family to the free association of individuals in civil society, to political
community and the relation of states, can be properly comprehended in abstraction from

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30 chapter 1

Althusser’s point is well taken, since not only does Smith appear to derive
this universal notion from empirical abstraction, but he furthermore deploys
it to distinguish an essential characteristic of human behaviour from other
inessential qualities common to human and other animal species (‘passions’,
‘acting in concert’). Marx, in contrast, does not merely demystify the illusory
nature of the various phenomenal features of capitalism, such as commodity
fetishism, money, profit, the ‘freedom’ of the wage labour contract, the illusions
of a supposedly virtuous and benevolent primitive accumulation, and of the
Trinity Formula of profit, land-rent, and wages, as well as many others. In every
case, Marx does not simply dismiss these as inessential features of capital-
ism, in contrast to the more ‘essential’ categories he discovers such as abstract
labour, labour power, or surplus value. In addition, in Spinozist fashion, he rig-
orously demonstrates in every case the systematic necessity that governs each
category of the capitalist social form, including its superficial forms of appear-
ance.86 In addition to mere negative critique, Althusser emphasises Capital’s
production of a positive theory of ideology and its forms of appearance as a
science of causes.
Rather than an extraction of truth from an empirical object, Marx asked
a more fundamental question in Capital: what are the laws of the tendencies
governing these empirical, quantitative fluctuations? In contrast, the ‘empiricist’
dimension of the initial enquiries for Capital (the Grundrisse) and the decades
of painstaking drafting and revision from 1859 to just before his death in 1883 is
arguably limited to Marx’s tired eyes scouring the markings across thousands,
even millions of sheets of paper.87

their subordination to what Marx calls the objective ‘social form’ of compulsion that is val-
orisation under the general social predominance of capital; in contrast, these remain for
Hegel (highly-developed) empirical analytical categories arguably drawn from the forms
of appearance of capitalist society, like those of Smith before him. See Tony Smith 2014,
p. 28.
86 Jacques Bidet develops this Althusserian argument in Exploring Marx’s Capital: Philo-
sophical, Economic, and Political Aspects (2009 [1985]). While Bidet’s work richly and pro-
ductively pursues the Althusserian reading of Capital, in this book I refer to his writings
only intermittently, focusing instead on the first generation of Althusserians, Macherey,
Badiou, Balibar, and Althusser himself.
87 Althusser in fact tries to argue along these lines at one point in his introduction, in con-
tradiction, I think, with the entire thrust of his general critique of empiricism: ‘Taking
Marx as an example, we know that his most personally significant practical experiences
(his experience as a polemicist of ‘the embarrassment of having to take part in discus-
sions on so-called material interests’ in the Rheinische Zeitung; his direct experience of
the earliest struggle organisations of the Paris proletariat; his revolutionary experience
in the 1848 period) intervened in his theoretical practice, and in the upheaval which led

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 31

Essentially, empiricism, in the strong, Spinozist sense in which Althusser

rightly understands the term in 1965 in Reading Capital, refers not to the varied
nature of the texts Marx studied, from the abstract theories of classical politi-
cal economy or socialism to histories of the British workers’ struggle over wages
and letters from Engels. Empiricism is not a matter of what one sees (or hears
or touches), whether words on a page, a slide through a microscope, or living
workers on an assembly line. It is certainly the case that Marx, among count-
less examples, undertook an intensive study of world history in 1881–82, filling
four large notebooks with details and critical observations on events from the
Roman Empire to the beginnings of capitalism in Renaissance Italy and the Ref-
ormation.88 These readings no more make Marx’s method of scientific analysis
‘empiricist’ than does his reading letters from Engels on the capitalist manage-
ment of production.
The mode of demonstration of Capital categorically repudiates empiricism
because Marx systematically deploys what Althusser calls an ‘apodictic’ argu-
ment to construct his critique of political economy. Capital articulates this
systematic exposition of the materials of Marx’s research via the narrative
deployment of an initial materialist axiom (‘The wealth of societies in which
the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of
commodities”’),89 propositions (‘the individual commodity appears as its ele-
mentary form’), and their demonstration, in radical distinction (on the model
of Spinoza’s non-identity of the attributes) from all lived, sensuous experience,
whether that of words read on a page or the street battles of 1848 and the Paris
Commune.90

him from ideological theoretical practice to scientific theoretical practice; but they inter-
vened in his theoretical practice in the form of objects of experience, or even experiment,
i.e., in the form of new thought objects, ‘ideas’ and the concepts, whose emergence con-
tributed, in their combination (Verbindung) with other conceptual results (originating in
German philosophy and English political economy), to the overthrow of the still ideo-
logical theoretical base on which he had lived (i.e., thought) until then’ (rc, p. 63). The
entire argument of an epistemological break is undermined by such a claim. Rather, the
theoretical break occurs, as an ongoing transitional process till Marx’s death, through the
ceaseless development of his theoretical practice.
88 Musto 2020, pp. 99–102.
89 While warning against any idealist or ideological understanding of the axiomatic nature of
Marx’s method of demonstration and reaffirming instead its materialist determination by
Marx’s preliminary enquiries (Grundrisse, etc.), Althusser nonetheless admits that ‘il faut
bien reconnaître [in Capital …] un mode de pensée très proche d’une pensée axiomatique’.
Althusser 1998, p. 259.
90 Marx 1976, p. 125. It is precisely in such Spinozist terms that Lalande formulates a general
definition of empirisme in the Vocabulaire technique de la philosophie, as ‘the generic name

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32 chapter 1

Here is Marx’s famous definition of this anti-empiricist method, from the

1873 Postface: ‘The method of presentation must differ in form from that of
inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its dif-
ferent forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Only
after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately pre-
sented’.91 Marx’s method (in Capital) is anti-empiricist because the apodictic
mode of exposition or ‘presentation’ of the materials of his various ‘inquiries’
(of which the Grundrisse is the best-known example92) presupposes a fun-
damental epistemological distinction between his systematic, category-based
demonstration and the muddled (empirical) indistinctness of his theoretical
sources of all kinds (Aristotle, Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat, the notes on Darimon
with which Grundrisse contingently begins in media res) as well as, a fortiori,
that of temporal lived, subjectively experienced events. In distinction to the
infinite variety and obscure nature of these lived, empirical experiences, were
capitalism never to have existed, Marx’s analysis and demonstration, insofar as
it is adequate (and it must not be forgotten that Capital is an unfinished work
made largely of incomplete and tentative drafts, with even Volume I existing
in multiple versions, none of which can be called definitive or final)93 would
remain apodictically true (or false, insofar as its demonstrations remain inad-
equate), albeit lacking its materialist grounding in the capitalist real.
Althusser’s critique of empiricism is decisively indebted to the ‘philosophy
of the concept’ that Jean Cavaillès famously proposed in his posthumous On
Logic and the Philosophy of Science.94 In contrast to Bachelard’s experimental-

of all philosophical doctrines that deny the existence of axioms as principals of knowledge
logically distinct from experience’ (Lalande 2010 [1923], p. 281).
91 Marx 1976, p. 102.
92 On the Grundrisse’s status as a preliminary inquiry into the nature of the capitalist social
form, as opposed to constituting a ‘first draft’ of Capital, see Nesbitt 2019.
93 See Heinrich 2021, p. 15; Musto 2020, pp. 85–93.
94 The thought of Cavaillès, legible in palimpsest in many of the most decisive passages
of Althusser’s introduction to Reading Capital, constitutes an emphatic rejection of all
empiricist understandings of the scientific experimental apparatus (see Nesbitt 2017,
pp. 4–8). Althusser problematically in fact proposes such an empiricist conflation in the
1966 lecture ‘The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Research’ (Brown 2021, p. 14).
Althusser’s two positions from 1965 and 1966 are theoretically incoherent: the Introduc-
tion to Reading Capital finds Althusser at the peak of his theoretical powers of insight in
pages of genius, cast with Rimbaldian clairvoyance, while in the latter Althusser – consti-
tutionally weakened and theoretically ambivalent, embroiled in the debates with Garaudy
and Aragon on theory and practice, under attack by the pcf for the so-called ‘theoreticism’
of Reading Capital–weakly asserts the reductive conflation of a line of thought he names
‘rationalist empiricism’ (Brown 2021, p. 6). While Althusser is clearly making a broadly

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 33

ist empiricism, Cavaillès there initiated a philosophical orientation attentive

to the historical determinations of the criteria governing adequate demonstra-
tion, in which the formal signs or marks of logic are taken to constitute an
(asubjective) history of mathematics, precisely, that is to say, what Althusser
will call ‘the history of the theoretical as such’.95 It is in this Cavaillèsian sense
that empiricism should be defined as any doctrine that denies the existence of
axiomatic principals as logically distinct from sensuous experience.
In On Logic – a text that Althusser read intensively after its initial publi-
cation in 1947 – Cavaillès called for a notion of mathematics, and scientific
development more generally, that follows the internal development of its con-
cepts rather than a dualist model of the adequation of an empirical object to
its mathematical formalisation. Cavaillès invoked in this manner an apodictic
philosophy of the concept, a dialectic that displaces the philosophy of con-
sciousness to demonstrate the ‘internal necessity’ determining the necessary
development of a science.96 Though Cavailles’ debt to Spinoza is as decisive as
it is elusive,97 and the object of his writings remained devoted entirely to the
philosophy of mathematics (in which domain this ‘internal necessity’ governs
most evidently), Althusser, in the Introduction to Reading Capital, simultane-
ously brings together the thought of Spinoza and Cavaillès, while expanding
their materialist propositions to encompass the non-mathematical science of
Marx’s critique of political economy.98

inclusive point about the history of French epistemology, to place as he does the name
of Jean Cavaillès next to that of Bachelard in this brief essay obscures the anti-empiricist
intervention that Cavaillès initiates in On Logic and the Theory of Science: ‘Even in the
natural sciences, this increase [in the system of concepts] takes place without any input
from the outside world [l’exterieur]: there is a rupture between sensation or right thinking
[opinion droite] and science. Far from being an involvement in nature, the experiment is,
on the contrary, the incorporation of the world into the scientific universe’. Cavaillès 2021
[1942], p. 41. See also Cavaillès 1994.
95 ‘The question of the form of order required at a given moment in the history of knowledge
by the existing type of scientificity, or, if you prefer, by the norms of theoretical validity
recognised by science, in its own practice, as scientific’ (rc, p. 50).
96 Cassou-Nogès, 2017, 12. ‘Science’, Cavaillès writes, ‘is no longer considered as a mere inter-
mediary between the human mind [esprit] and being in itself, equally dependent upon
both and lacking its own reality, but rather as an object sui generis, original in its essence
and autonomous in its movement’ (2021, p. 40).
97 Cavaillès’ sole surviving reference to Spinoza comes from a personal remark to Raymond
Aron: ‘I am Spinozist. I believe in necessity. The necessity of mathematical inferences, the
necessity of the history of mathematics, the necessity also of the struggle [against fascism]
in which we are engaged’. Cited at Cassou-Noguès 2017, p. 13.
98 While Althusser only mentions Cavaillès in passing, many of his formulations on the his-
toricity of science should be read as direct refigurations of the latter’s positions in On

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34 chapter 1

This Spinozist materialist critique, which Althusser in his Introduction

argues governs Marx’s 1957 methodological Introduction, refuses the dualist
empiricist logic of the representational adequation of an object to its con-
cept, to assert instead a single order and connection of all things (including
ideas), differentially grasped under the attributes of extension or thought (or
any other).99 The conclusion to be drawn from Althusser’s Spinozist episte-
mology is that the material thought-concrete (Gedankenkonkretum) that Marx
constructs, the unfinished book that is Capital, that is to say, is not analytically
or inductively extracted from any supposed experimental observations of cap-
italism, but simply is capitalism, grasped under the attribute of thought rather
than in its physical extension.
Spinoza, in the Scolium to eiip7, refuses any notion of the adequation of the
object to the idea as the index of its truth, to assert instead the epistemologi-
cal position that so influenced Althusser in Reading Capital, i.e., that adequate
knowledge of a thing, as knowledge, can be demonstrated only from within the
attribute of thought itself rather than as an abstraction from observed empiri-
cal extension. ‘Theoretical practice’, Althusser observes, ‘is indeed its own crite-
rion, and contains in itself definite protocols with which to validate the quality
of its product’.100 Marx’s Capital, in this view, is exactly what its subtitle names,

Logic: ‘To pose this question [of the history of the theoretical] is obviously to pose the
question of the form of order required at a given moment in the history of knowledge
by the existing type of scientificity, or, if you prefer, by the norms of theoretical validity
recognised by science, in its own practice, as scientific. … The essential problem presup-
posed by the question of the existing type of demonstrativity is the problem of the history
of the production of the different forms in which theoretical practice (producing knowl-
edges, whether “ideological” or “scientific”) recognises the validating norms it demands.
… This history [is] the history of the theoretical as such, or the history of the production
(and transformation) of what at a given moment in the history of knowledge constitutes
the theoretical problematic to which are related all the existing validating criteria, and
hence the forms required to give the order of theoretical discourse the force and value of
a proof. This history of the theoretical, of the structures of theoreticity and of the forms
of theoretical apodicticity, has yet to be constituted’ (rc, p. 50).
99 ‘The idea of the circle, which is the object of knowledge, must not be confused with the
circle, which is the real object. In the third section of the 1857 Introduction, Marx took up
this principle as forcefully as possible’ (rc, p. 40).
100 rc, p. 61. Here is Spinoza: ‘The formal being of the idea of a circle can be perceived only
through another mode of thinking as its proximate cause, and that mode through another,
and so on ad infinitum, with the result that as long as things are considered as modes of
thought, we must explicate the order of the whole of Nature, or the connection of causes,
through the attribute of Thought alone; and insofar as things are considered as modes of
Extension, again the order of the whole of Nature must be explicated through the attribute
of Extension only’ (eiip7s). See Pierre Macherey’s meticulous, materialist explication of

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 35

a critique of political economy: a radical reworking of the substantial ideas

forged by the tradition of thought from the Physiocrats, Smith, and Ricardo
onward (ideas of value, of money, of labour, etc.). In Reading Capital, Althusser
puts the matter in decisively and unapologetically theoreticist terms: ‘No math-
ematician in the world waits until physics has verified a theorem to declare it
proved, although whole areas of mathematics are applied in physics; the truth
of his theorem is a hundred per cent provided by criteria purely internal to the
practice of mathematical proof, hence by the criterion of mathematical prac-
tice’.101

5 Hallucinatory Empiricism

In his critique of empiricism, Althusser argues that Capital must be read not
as a history, but instead as a logic. Not, Althusser quickly points out, as ‘logi-
cians [would, which] would have meant posing it the question of its methods
of exposition and proof’,102 in other words as a mere discursive, logical posi-
tivist word game, but as the Spinozist, materialist logic of the necessary forms
of appearance of things in the capitalist social form. While Althusser’s critique
of empiricism is encompassing and unyielding, it is not always clear on what
grounds he rejects the empiricist processes of, for example, the abstraction of a
kernel of truth from the empirical object, or the ‘scouring’ of material. Why, one
might ask, are these necessarily inadequate procedures? Spinoza, in contrast,
offers in eiip14–24 clear and simple terms for his own rejection of empirical,
sensory-derived truth.103 Macherey will interpret and develop Spinoza’s cri-

Proposition eiip7 in volume ii of his Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza: La réalité mentale

(1997, pp. 70–81), which I discuss below in Chapter 2.
101 rc, p. 61, my emphasis.
102 rc, p. 12. Of course, it is precisely the object of Macherey’s contribution to Reading Capital
to analyse what he calls the ‘Process [Macherey avoids the term “method”] of Exposition
of Capital’, but to do so in terms other than those of traditional logic, and instead to begin
to construct the concept of Marx’s exposition as a Spinozist positive, materialist dialectic.
I return to Macherey’s argument in the next chapter.
103 While Spinoza’s conception of adequate, scientific knowledge and the processes govern-
ing its development are radically original, the Spinozist rejection of empiricism is already
a shibboleth for Aristotle’s conception of scientific knowledge in the Posterior Analyt-
ics, where he states categorically: ‘Scientific knowledge cannot be acquired by sense-
perception. … A universal term of general application cannot be perceived by the senses,
because it is not a particular thing or at a given time; if it were, it would not be universal; for
we describe as universal only that which obtains always and everywhere. Therefore, since
demonstrations are universal, and universals cannot be perceived by the senses, obviously

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36 chapter 1

tique in a series of comments on these passages that I wish here to bring to

bear as a further specification of Althusser’s initial rejection of empiricism in
Reading Capital.104
In the second book of the Ethics, Spinoza, as Macherey reads him, rejects
sense-perception as a basis for adequate knowledge due to the provisional,
mutable nature of the composition of any body:

Composed bodies [writes Macherey,] possess no other reality than a

purely circumstantial one given by their configuration [ figure, from
Spinoza’s Latin figura], the provisional stability of which is never defini-
tively guaranteed. … Corporeal nature in its entirety, in the sense of the set
[ensemble] of things existing in the category of extension [is] fluidified by
the application of the universal law of movement … without any of these
configurations defined by the dynamic of its global system arriving at a
definitive stability.105

While physical bodies, in this view, are determined by a necessary instability,

this inherent volatility need not universally invalidate the sensory derivation
of knowledge. In contrast, the fundamental deficiency of empirically derived
knowledge, Spinoza argues in eiip14–23, lies in its overwhelming complexity,
inherently at odds with the scientific demand for abstraction from empirical
convolution.106 In sensory perception, Macherey argues,

Perceptions, insofar as they are ideas, are related to the fundamental

activity of the psyche [âme] that is knowledge, but under conditions such
that this knowledge is simultaneously that of the psyche itself, the body of
which is an idea, and the other things of which it has knowledge through
the intermediary of the idea it has of the body. … In this sense, one could
say that the deficit that ideas of the imagination present from the point of

knowledge cannot be obtained through sense-perception. Again, it is obvious that even

if we were able to perceive by the senses that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal
to two right angles, we should still require a proof of this; we should not know that it is
so. … The value of the universal is that it exhibits the cause.’ (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics,
pp. 157–9).
104 I will show in the next chapter that Althusser’s rejection of empiricism is a constant for
Macherey as well, from Theory of Literary Production to his studies on Spinoza.
105 Macherey 1997, p. 150.
106 Recall Marx’s invocation of the necessity of abstraction for scientific understanding: ‘In
the analysis of economic forms, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assis-
tance. The power of abstraction must replace both’ (1976, p. 90).

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 37

view of rational knowledge corresponds, in their economy itself, not to a

lack but to an excess of reality, an excess linked to their natural complexity.
These ideas, which simultaneously bear upon too many things, are them-
selves made up of too many ideas; they are not simple enough, and this
is precisely what renders them inadequate by reason of their constitu-
tionally confused character. … The life of the psyche begins with the most
complicated forms [from experience], the most muddled [embrouillés],
and it is only at the price of a considerable work upon itself that it can
move to simpler forms, such as those that correspond to the production
of clear and distinct ideas.107

Sense-perception is inherently inadequate, Macherey argues, insofar as it

presents itself ‘in the form of an unanalysable perceptual complex’, one that is
at once partial and an instantaneous bodily perception.108 Inherently and nec-
essarily absent from this perception, as Macherey reads Spinoza, is an adequate
understanding of the essential nature governing that body, since the sensory
perception of a body is impossible to distinguish from the idea of its nature
and thus the causes that govern its sensory manifestation. This amounts to the
presentation to sense-perception of a knowledge of certain effects without a
clear understanding of the causes upon which these effects depend.
The result of this necessary imprecision is what Macherey terms the ‘hal-
lucinatory character’ of all sense-perception, since we do not perceive things
themselves, in their essential nature, but only, Macherey observes, corporeal
‘images of things [rerum imagines]’.109 In other words, the psyche’s immedi-
ate representation of the sensuous things it perceives is necessarily imaginary,
since ultimately this representation must remain ignorant of the real nature of
things, and instead can only indicate an imaginary representation of the body
it perceives.110 Now to be sure, Spinoza argues in eiip17 that the formation of
imaginary representations (such as our inadequate sense-perception of the dis-
tance of the sun from the earth) inherently depends upon necessary causes;
the inadequacy of such representations, however, lies in their obscure nature,
in their necessary deficit of knowledge (such as the scientific determination of

107 Macherey 1997, pp. 165–6. I cite here and the following chapters passages from Macherey’s
1997 commentary on Ethics ii not only for their power of insight, but because none of
these five volumes of extraordinary analyses of Spinoza’s materialist dialectic have yet to
be translated, and what is in my view the most important of these, Book ii, is no longer in
print even in its original French edition.
108 Macherey 1997, p. 171.
109 Macherey 1997, p. 182.
110 Macherey 1997, p. 184.

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38 chapter 1

the distance of the earth from the sun).111 It is in this sense, precisely, that the
representation-based model of knowledge that Althusser rightly condemns in
his Introduction, but with little justification, can be said, in light of Macherey’s
subsequent comments on eiip13–24, to indicate the purely ‘indicative’ function
of perception, in which a thing is perceived without being understood.112
Knowledge, for Spinoza, instead of indicating the adequation of an empir-
ical object and its representation, constitutes the adequation of an idea to its
inherent degree of clarity and power within the attribute of thought alone. The
empiricist model of knowledge thus constitutes in contrast, Althusser argues,
a secular ‘transcription’ of revelation, a ‘religious reading’ compromised by its
inherent circularity, the presupposition that its truth occurs not in the con-
structed thought object, but lies hidden in the real object itself.113 This implies
in consequence that empiricist knowledge cannot inquire into the real con-
ditions of the production of an adequate idea, since this (empiricist) truth is
claimed to lie dormant, always-already present in the real object itself, await-
ing its mere extraction.
Eventually, after the compromised theoretical interlude of ‘class struggle in
theory’, Althusser would – in his late, posthumously published texts Etre marx-
iste en philosophie and Sur la philosophie – return to further specify this initial
critique of the representational nature of empiricist knowledge. In this late
thought, Althusser reformulated his initial critique of empiricism based on a
reference to the Heideggerian critique of the principal of reason. This is the
principle shared by idealism and materialism alike that, in Althusser’s words,
‘every existing thing, whether ideal or material, [must] submit to a question-
ing of the reason for its existence’, that any existing thing, in other words, must
uphold the exactness of its representation of the real object.114

6 Reading Capital’s Apodictic Structure

In Reading Capital, however, Althusser’s condensed critique of empiricist

knowledge already sets the ground for that volume’s principal positive episte-
mological claim, that ‘In Capital we find … an apodictic arrangement of the
concepts in the form of that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx

111 Macherey 1997, p. 185.

112 Macherey 1997, p. 173n1.
113 rc, p. 34.
114 Althusser 1994, p. 57, cited in Estop 2021, p. 251, my emphasis.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 39

calls analysis’.115 This unassuming proposition for reading Marx’s method of

exposition in Capital as a positive (Spinozist) dialectic has, for all its radi-
cal implications, gone virtually unheeded in the literature on both Althusser
and Capital itself in the intervening decades, the latter in particular contin-
uing to suffer from an unrelenting allegiance to the conviction that Capital
should be read as a palimpsest of the negative dialectic Hegel expounded in
the Logic.116
Althusser unfolds this epistemological proposition in the two central sec-
tions (13–14) of his Introduction. There he articulates, in opposition to the
empiricist representational model of knowledge he has just rejected, a prop-
erly Spinozist affirmation of the strict heterogeneity of the attributes of thought
and the material, extensive reality of the real, actually existing object (in this
case, the capitalist social form), stating categorically that ‘the order which gov-
erns the categories of thought in the process of knowledge does not coincide
with the order which governs the real categories in the process of real historical
genesis’.117
Here in his Introduction Althusser strategically torques the literal words
of Marx’s own famous 1857 ‘Introduction’ in order to rout the otherwise still-
Hegelian, negative dialectical argument of the Grundrisse. Althusser’s rhetori-
cal strategy here seeks to displace and invalidate the traditional Marxist reading
(an ‘empiricist’ and ‘Hegelian’ problematic) of Marx’s assertion in that 1857 text,
i.e., which Althusser summarises as the claim that

115 rc, p. 51.

116 Chris Arthur’s New Dialectic, which I discuss in chapter three, is surely the most extensive
and notable example of this continued dedication to reading Capital as a palimpsest of
Hegel’s Logic. Examples abound of this neglect of the epistemological dimension of Read-
ing Capital in Althusser studies: in what is otherwise one of the most rigorous, original,
and stimulating books on Althusser in recent decades, Juan Domingo Sanchez Estop sum-
marises the three innovations of Reading Capital in comparison to the essays of For Marx
as: 1. Its initiation of a close reading of Capital in the wake of its neglect in traditional
Marxism and French Marxism in particular; 2. Its theory of a practice of symptomatic
reading; and 3. Its elaboration of theory of philosophy as a practice of reading. As such,
Estop entirely disregards the book’s call to determine the positive, materialist dialectic
deployed in Capital’s mode of exposition (2021, p. 81). Similarly, while many contributors
discuss Marx’s Capital in the outstanding edited volume Encountering Althusser: Politics
and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (2013), none mentions Althusser’s cen-
tral epistemological proposition that Capital is characterised by an ‘apodictic’ mode of
analysis.
117 rc, p. 47.

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40 chapter 1

the ‘logical’ order, being identical in essence with the real order and exist-
ing in the reality of the real order as its essence itself, can only follow the
real order; [and furthermore] that the real order being identical in essence
with the ‘logical’ order, the real order, which is then merely the existence
of the logical order, must follow the logical order.118

This traditional reading of Marx’s distinction between the real object and
the thought object [Gedankenkonkretum] thus follows precisely the empiricist
model Althusser has rejected a moment before in the abstract: both that the
order of thought ‘follows’ the real order of capitalism in the form of its repre-
sentation, and, furthermore, that what presents itself, in traditional Marxism,
as a materialist argument is in fact eminently idealist, since the order of the
real object (capitalism) is then said not to have priority, but instead merely to
‘follow the logical order’. Each of these positions, Althusser maintains, ‘does
violence’ to Marx’s actual argument.119
While ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, as we have seen, quickly
abandoned its epistemological propositions regarding Marx’s method of dem-
onstration to pursue a politico-historical discussion of Lenin and the Bolshevik
Revolution, in Reading Capital Althusser insists on staying with and pursuing
this methodological terrain as a strictly ‘theoretical problematic’.120 The force
of Althusser’s argument – lacking as it does any explicit analysis of Marx’s
mode of analysis (he leaves this to Macherey’s contribution) – has rarely been
registered as anything but dogmatic polemic. To take the position Althusser
adopts, following Marx’s own literal suggestion, that there exists not a rela-
tion but ‘a radical distinction between the order in which [conceptual] “cate-
gories” appear in knowledge, on the one hand, and in historical reality on the
other’,121 is quite simply to relegate the traditional, empiricist inquiry into the
correspondence of the thought object and the real object, along with various
monist idealist readings of Spinoza, to the status of a nonexistent problem.

118 Ibid.
119 Though both Alain Badiou and Jean Matthys read Althusser as here rejecting the Spinozist
principle of the ‘parallelism’ of the attributes, I will argue in the next chapter against
these interpretations that Althusser’s position constitutes a radicalisation of Spinoza in
his own terms, and that, in line with Macherey’s critique of this philosophical common-
place, the so-called ‘parallelism’ of the attributes (a term Spinoza never used, by which
Leibniz (mis)represented his thought) is simply a monist misreading of Spinoza, one that
Althusser overcomes by theorising substance not as a reified (monist) thing, but as struc-
tural causality.
120 rc, p. 47.
121 rc, p. 48, my emphasis.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 41

While this correspondence-based position certainly exists in traditional Marx-

ist understanding, it is nonetheless a perfectly ‘imaginary’, inadequately con-
ceived problematic, one that Althusser summarises as ‘the ideological (empiri-
cist or absolute-idealist) myth of a one-to-one correspondence between the
terms of these two orders’.122
In section 11 of his Introduction, Althusser briefly and schematically, if
unequivocally, specifies the Spinozist basis of this assertion of the absolute het-
erogeneity of the thought- and real-objects in this reading of Marx: ‘Spinoza
warned us that the object of knowledge or essence was in itself absolutely
distinct and different from the real object. … In the third section of the 1857
Introduction, Marx took up this principle as forcefully as possible’.123 The pre-
cise nature of this claim nonetheless remains unclear: is Althusser ascribing to
Marx an explicitly Spinozist understanding of the thought and real objects, pre-
cisely as the Ethics presents the concept of the Attributes thought and exten-
sion, in their so-called parallelism, or is this merely Althusser’s interpretation
of Marx’s comment? Ignoring the question of Marx’s subjective intentions, I
will argue in chapter three that traditional, political interpretations of Marx’s
relation to Spinoza have in fact entirely ignored the epistemological dimen-
sion of his 1841 reading of Spinoza and the Ethics specifically. Marx’s method
of exposition as he actually deploys it in Capital after 1867 (whatever he sub-
jectively continued to believe about his relation to Hegel), as Althusser first
suggested but never demonstrated, does in fact gradually eliminate the various
‘Hegelian’, negative dialectical epistemological impediments overwhelmingly
predominant in the Grundrisse, to produce an additive synthetic, materialist
dialectic, this no matter what Marx thought of his lived relation to his theoret-
ical predecessor.124

122 rc, p. 48.

123 rc, p. 41.
124 My argument thus refuses the commonplace that Marx ‘popularised’ and essentially
dumbed-down the presentation of the first chapter of Capital at Engel’s urging. While
the addition of a simplified Appendix to the 1867 edition undoubtedly accorded with
Engels’s request to that effect, when Marx subsequently combined and rewrote the two
to constitute a single, unified first chapter for the 1872 German and 1875 French editions,
he carefully chose which aspects of his presentation to retain and which to modify or
eliminate. In chapter three, I will argue that at this point he systematically, though not
entirely, eliminated (Hegelian) negative dialectical forms of presentation – i.e., Reflexions-
bestimmungen (determinations of reflection) – in favour of a positive dialectic of his own
fashioning. Heinrich points out that Backhaus and Reichelt’s support for the ‘popularisa-
tion’ argument (in their 1995 critique of Heinrich ‘Wie ist der Wertbegriff in der Ökonomie
konzipieren?’) implies that given this position, ‘an authentic understanding of [Marx’s]
method would only be possible via the Grundrisse’ and the 1859 Urtext (Heinrich 2022

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42 chapter 1

The result is in fact to have produced in Capital a positive, materialist dialec-

tic of decisively Spinozist character, as Althusser first suggested in these para-
graphs of his 1965 Introduction. To point ahead to my argument in Chapter 3,
this process of exposition in Capital tends, above all in its crucial and the-
oretically arduous first chapter, to displace the ‘Hegelian’ figures of totality,
negation and contradiction to the domain of existence rather than essence
(themselves traditional scholastic terms that Marx ambiguously retains despite
this shift). Marx, furthermore, explicitly signals (in Chapter 11 on the ‘laws’
governing the rate of surplus value production) the correlation of what he
calls the ‘laws of the tendencies’ of the capitalist social form to Spinoza’s con-
cept of common notions. All of this can serve to sustain and prove Althusser’s
claim that Marx’s distinction between the thought and real objects is in fact
a distinction of the attributes of thought and extension as Spinoza conceived
them.

7 The Topography of the Attributes

Althusser’s distinction in Reading Capital between the object of thought and

the real object operates a decisive and original refiguration of Spinoza’s concept
of the attributes.125 Never explicitly developed or even posited in Reading Capi-
tal, Althusser’s position on the attributes instead reveals its explicitly Spinozist
tenor across the expanse of Althusser’s unpublished texts, from his earliest
notes on Spinoza in 1948126 through the now-famous 1980s essays on aleatory
materialism and the ‘rain’ of the infinite attributes.127 Althusser’s understand-
ing of the concept, while evolving and always highly original, derives directly
from the argument of the Ethics to inform this distinction between the thought
and real object in Reading Capital.
In his 1965 essay ‘A propos de la rupture’, Macherey further specified the
Spinozist character of the Althusserian distinction between thought and the
real, noting that ‘Althusser should have further developed the allusions he

[1999], p. 171). Marx’s 1867 Appendix can be found at Marx 1983, mega2 ii/5 ‘Anhang zu
Kapitel i, 1. Die Wertform’ 626–55.
125 I agree with Jean Matthys that ‘Behind every great Althusserian conceptual innovation,
… there lurks the figure of Spinoza. … The multiplicity of Spinozist figures in Althusser’s
[thought] is no heteroclite assemblage, … but articulates in a relatively coherent fashion
a true Spinozist “plane of consistency” or “problematic” ’ (2023, pp. 192, 43).
126 imec 20alt/32/10. See Matthys 2023, Chapter 2.
127 Estop 2021, pp. 226–32.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 43

made to Spinoza [in Reading Capital]’.128 For Macherey, science takes on its
fundamental character as a materialist inquiry into the real ‘from the moment
it gives form to reality’.129 Science is not the representation, classification, or
explication of the real; instead, ‘the thought real [is] the real transformed’.
Macherey even seems to distinguish between the real [le réel] and reality [la
réalité], such that the former would occupy the theoretical position of the (infi-
nite, untotalisable) set of all things – both nonexistent idealities and actually
existing things – in their infinite relations, and the latter that of substance: ‘The
rupture between the real [le réel] and thought is the difference between two
forms of reality [la réalité] … the science of the real [le réel] is the institution
of a new form of reality [la réalité]’.130 Macherey’s distinction between the real
and reality seems to address, without truly explicating, this point of ambigu-
ity or obscurity in Althusser’s thought, without, on the other hand, explicitly
reverting to Spinoza’s scholastic terminology.131 In other words, if Althusser is
a self-proclaimed ‘spinoziste’, and the theory of substance, the attributes, and
modes the foundation of Spinozist thought, how does Althusser parse and criti-
cally reconfigure these crucial concepts? In the absence of explicit elaboration
on Althusser’s part, this must ultimately remain a speculative reconstruction
elaborated from materials across the expanse of his published and unpublished
works.132
Simply to distinguish between thought and the real, as does Althusser in
Reading Capital, or even between thought, the real, and reality, as Macherey
will inflect this pair in ‘En matérialiste’, constitutes a point of ambiguity in the
conceptual apparatus of Reading Capital.133 Provisionally, and I will address
aspects of this problem at different points below, I wish to indicate a series

128 Macherey 1999, p. 16.

129 Macherey 1999, p. 15.
130 Macherey 1999, p. 16.
131 Macherey seems to encourage such an interpretation in his 1997 commentary on this essay
in Histoires de dinosaure, noting that ‘In affirming that “the rupture between thought and
the real is the difference between two forms of reality” … I tried to develop, in the spirit of
the Spinozist doctrine of the attributes, the thesis according to which thought being also
of the real [du réel], ideas are things unto themselves’. Macherey 1999, p. 23.
132 My own reconstruction is decisively informed by the two most recent treatments of this
problem, Estop’s Althusser et Spinoza (2021) and Matthys’ Althusser lecteur de Spinoza
(2023).
133 Althusser initially takes the concept of the ‘real’ [das Reale] in its opposition to thought
from Marx himself. ‘Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real (das Reale) as the
product of thought concentrating itself’ (Marx, cited in rc, p. 41; lc, p. 40). See also
Althusser 1998, p. 255.

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44 chapter 1

of Spinozist concepts that can more adequately parse Althusser’s flat, binary
distinction between thought and the real. Substance, the most basic and fun-
damental of Spinozist terms, is one that Althusser publicly and polemically
refuses in its reified form, through his critique of Marxist-Hegelian philoso-
phies of monism (while tentatively affirming its necessity in private discussion
with the Groupe Spinoza).134
Instead, through attention to Althusser’s archive, it becomes clear, above
all in his 1948 notes on Spinoza, that Althusser refigures the concept of sub-
stance, rejecting the reifying implications of the word itself as well as its status
as ontological guarantee, instead to conceive of substance as the finite struc-
tural causality of a social form, a causality that exists only in its effects.135 This
is the famous concept Althusser develops in the final sections of Reading Cap-
ital:

Structure is not an essence outside economic phenomena. … The

absence of the cause in the structure’s ‘metonymic causality’ on its effects
… is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its
effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the struc-
ture, are not a pre-existent [reified] object, element or space upon which
the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the contrary, … the structure
is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist
sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its
effects.136

While Althusser nowhere indicates in his published writings that his concept of
structural causality is a materialist, anti-monist refiguration of Spinozist sub-
stance, Jean Matthys has shown that this operation, which remains a constant
in Althusser’s thought, finds explicit articulation as early as Althusser’s first
notes on Spinoza from 1948. Though these notes cannot be interpreted unilat-
erally, it is here that Althusser asserts that Spinoza should not be understood
‘from the identification God = Substance but [from the position that] substance
= attribute, which is the foundation of structure’.137 Althusser further indicates
that this ‘problem’ must be understood not ‘ontologically’, as ‘the identity of

134 I will discuss Althusser’s critique of Marxist monism below in this chapter.
135 imec 20alt/32/10, ‘Notes sur Spinoza (1948)’. I take this crucial insight for my argument
from Matthys 2023, pp. 123–8.
136 rc, p. 344, translation modified, emphasis in original.
137 Cited at Matthys 2023, p. 123.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 45

an essence’, but rather as the finite ‘identity of causal structure’.138 Substance,

in this view, is not what Althusser terms ‘a unity prior to [all] differences’, but
constitutes instead finite causality itself, understood as the productive power
that exists only in the infinite plurality of the attributes and their modes. It is
substance decisively recast as materialist social form, the means to think the
structure of causality that governs an actually existing systemic complex, in
which the heterogeneity of substructures and their production does not, can-
not constitute a closed, ontological totality.139
Macherey, in his analysis of the first book of The Ethics, will pursue this
conception, to develop a rich and original reading of substance as uncount-
able and not a thing at all, but rather as just what Spinoza indicates, what is
in itself (quod in se est), that is, causa sui. In his 1998 Introduction to Book 1
of the Ethics, Macherey develops this materialist understanding of Spinozist
substance as pure immanence through an attentive, literal reading of Spinoza’s
initial definitions and propositions. Macherey stresses that in adopting this cru-
cial philosophical concept, inherited from Aristotle, Descartes, and Scholastic
thought more generally, Spinoza reinvents the notion of Substance to indicate
not a thing, in the sense of an individually existing, and thus numerically count-
able thing (as monist One), nor a mode of the apprehension of a thing (this is
the role of the attributes), but Being as such, ‘the fact of being in itself. … Forcing
syntax, one could say that [substance] “s’est” [“be’s itself”]’.140 If ‘the existence of
substance coincides with its essence, to which it adheres immediately [étroite-
ment], [… substance] is not at all ‘an’ existence, … but existence itself, thought
in the absolute’.141
The attributes thought and extension, as Spinoza defines them, are no more
existing things, however, than is Substance. Althusser’s binary distinction
between thought and the real would thus seem from Spinoza’s perspective

138 Matthys 2023, p. 124. Matthys’ commentary on this note is revealing: ‘Dans le but d’éviter
que cette identité soit fondée sur une essence ontologique qui réduirait les attributs
(et a fortiori les modes) au statut d’apparences phénoménales dénuées de toute forme
d’autonomie et de diversité réelles, mais en cherchant tout autant à éviter l’écueil symé-
trique d’une pure et simple juxtaposition des attributs, Spinoza invite, selon Althusser …
à penser une “identité de structure causale. … La substance n’est pas le lieu d’une identifi-
cation ou d’une réduction “essentielle” entre les attributs, où ceux-ci seraient réduits à de
simples formes secondaires et épiphénoménales réductibles à une essence commune que
serait la substance. L’identité des attributs dans la substance, et donc l’uni(ci)té de celle-
ci, réside dans l’identité de l’acte causal “naturant” qui constitue “un seul et même ordre,
autrement dit un seul et même enchaînement des causes’. Matthys 2023, pp. 127, 128.
139 Matthys 2023, pp. 127, 117.
140 Macherey 1998, p. 39.
141 Macherey 1998, p. 86.

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46 chapter 1

to constitute a category mistake: the former clearly an attribute, it makes no

sense to understand ‘the real’ as the attribute of extension. This categorial con-
fusion occurs in the sense that thought and extension, as attributes, indicate
for Spinoza ‘what the intellect perceives [quod intellectus de substantia per-
cipit] of a substance as constituting its essence’,142 which is to say, Macherey
observes, what the intellect apprehends as ‘a constitutive form of substance’,
rather than, as with Descartes, qualities inherent in things themselves. The
attribute, in Macherey’s reading of Spinoza, is ‘not a property or a propre (pro-
prium) attached to a substance, but an intrinsic determination of the being of
substance as it can be known by the intellect’.143 In contrast, to refer to ‘the real’
in distinction from thought, as Althusser does in Reading Capital, is arguably
to confuse categories: thought, for both Spinoza and Althusser, refers to a form
in which the intellect apprehends being. In contrast, Althusser’s ‘real’, unlike
Spinozist ‘extension’, remains indeterminate.
The immediate object Marx constructs in Capital is not an ontological the-
ory, in any case, but an analysis of actually existing things, such as the capitalist
social form, commodities, social classes, and the like, beginning from the single
dogmatic presupposition that we always already have a true idea of the nature
of capitalism (as general commodification). Althusser’s ‘real’, then, might best
be defined simply as does Lalande: what is ‘real’ [réel, Wirklich, actual] is ‘that
which is a thing, … that which constitutes a definite, logical, permanent object
having a certain autonomy’, and ‘the real’ as such, therefore, as the set of actu-
ally existing things along with their infinite and untotalisable relations of com-
position.144 Such a definition of the real would have the advantage of invoking
two other crucial, yet less familiar Spinozist categories, the idea of ‘singular
things existing in act’ (idea rei singularis actu existentis) and the corresponding
idea of ‘Anything whatsoever that can be conceived as nonexistent’ (quicquod
ut non existens potest concipi).145

142 eid4.
143 Macherey 1998, p. 43.
144 Lalande 2010, ‘Réel’, pp. 900, 902. In For Marx, Althusser writes that ‘Pour nous, le “réel”
n’est pas un mot d’ordre théorique: le réel est l’objet réel, existant, indépendamment de
sa connaissance, – mais qui ne peut être défini que par sa connaissance’. Althusser 2005,
p. 257.
145 eiip8 and 9. In Chapter 2, I will offer a critique of Alain Badiou’s assertion that Althusser’s
term ‘the real’ refers to Spinozist substance, to argue instead that it would be more coher-
ent to take it as the infinite set of all things. In Chapter 3, I will follow Macherey’s expo-
sition of the Spinozist distinction between nonexistent and actually existing things, to
argue that Marx’s schematic formalisation of the law of the rate and mass of surplus value
in Chapter 11 of Capital should rightly be understood as distinguishing between actually

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 47

In the case of Althusser, among the key documents that can serve to clarify
his properly Spinozist understanding of the attributes of thought and extension
is an unpublished manuscript from 16 June 1967.146 Here Althusser summarises
a discussion with Stanislas Breton on the nature of structural causality and
the attributes. Althusser emphatically rejects Breton’s assertion that in Spinoza
the attributes can be understood to emanate from substance, as an expressive
form of causality in which a reified substance retains its transcendence to the
attributes and modal expressions of being.147 Instead, Althusser affirms the ‘dis-
continuity’ and ‘cut’ [coupure] between Spinoza’s various orders or topoi of
being (substance, attributes, infinite and finite modes): ‘Though one may have
the illusion of a continuity of “emanation” between the “orders” [in fact] there
is a non-preinscription of these cuts in the concept of substance and in the
concept of immanent causality’.
The various Spinozist orders of being do not derive or emanate from sub-
stance, Althusser continues in his notes to their discussion, they are not
‘inscribed in advance’, but simply exist, as a given ‘Faktum’, as the ‘immanent
(not eminent) cause of the structuration of these regions in their efficacity,
regions structured insofar as they are separated by “cuts”’.148 These various
dimensions of being thus determine the Spinozist orders of substance as what
Althusser calls a topography [topique] of ‘defined regions’, a decentred struc-
ture of causality without a transcendent subject, a position strictly analogous
to the Freudian topographic model of the psyche.149
The point to be taken here in relation to the theoretical position of Reading
Capital is that the elliptical nature of Althusser’s presentation of the abso-
lute distinction between the orders or attributes of thought and the real as he
reads Marx’s 1857 ‘Introduction’ in his own ‘Introduction’ to Reading Capital

existing things (such as the ‘bakers’ and ‘spinners’ Marx invokes) and atemporal, nonexis-
tent things such as the generic formula for this law that he introduces to the 1875 French
translation of Capital.
146 Juan Domingo Estop is the first to have discussed this fascinating document, and to have
reproduced it in its entirety as an Appendix to his Althusser et Spinoza (2021).
147 This position from 1967 might be brought to bear on Althusser’s later, autocritique of his
‘theoreticism’ as a putative neglect of the ‘primat de la théorie sur la pratique’ (1974, p. 176).
Althusser’s later practicist position should be rejected in favour of the Spinozist one artic-
ulated in these private notes on the discussion with Breton: for a Spinozist materialist
critique, there is a primacy of neither theory nor practice, as though theory emanates
from practice (as ‘class struggle in theory’), or the converse. Instead, thought (theory) and
extension (practice) must be conceived in their sheer immanence within a structure of
causality.
148 Cited at Estop 2021, p. 286.
149 Estop 2021, p. 288. On the latter, see Laplanche and Pontalis 2018, pp. 448–453.

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48 chapter 1

can and should be seconded by reference to Althusser’s explicit invocations of

the Spinozist concept of the attributes in unpublished texts such as his 1948
notes and this discussion with Breton. In this view, Althusser remained com-
mitted from beginning to the end, with varying turns of interpretation, to the
Spinozist understanding of the heterogeneous attributes of thought and exten-
sion.150
That said, it is this same distinction – between Althusser’s at times sugges-
tively enigmatic exoteric (published) writings and his often more explicitly
Spinozist unpublished texts – that points to a final epistemological obstacle
of Reading Capital.151 This refusal to discuss Spinoza in Althusser’s published
works as anything more than a nominal cipher for a highly original epistemo-
logical position forms a final epistemological impediment in Reading Capital,
one that will lead directly to my subsequent chapters’ investigations of the
materialist dialectic. In the case of the absolute distinction Althusser draws in
Reading Capital between thought and the real, to adequately grasp the theo-
retical intent of this claim requires following up on Althusser’s own passing
indication of the Spinozist origins of this distinction, bringing to bear a selec-
tion of Althusser’s unpublished writings on Spinoza and the attributes such as
these notes to his discussion with Stanislas Breton, all set alongside his explicit
and public rejection of substance monism in Marxist thought.

8 The Theoretical Danger of Monism

Given that Althusser categorically identified Spinoza as ‘in my view the great-
est philosopher of all time’,152 and publicly asserted in 1968 (in response to
Paul Ricœur’s invocations of Kantian and Hegelian positions) that ‘I am a
Spinozist’,153 it is quite surprising that one has to search through his archives
to find obscure suggestions of the link between Spinoza’s most basic, found-
ing principle and one of Althusser’s most famous and original concepts. This
absence of explicit reference to Spinozist substance is no doubt due to
Althusser’s allergy to grandiose metaphysical pronouncements and guarantees,
a position he maintained from For Marx through late texts such as Philoso-

150 In Chapter 2, I will discuss Pierre Macherey’s penetrating critique and rejection of the
philosophical commonplace of the ‘parallelism’ of the Spinozist attributes.
151 For a different parsing of the distinction between an exoteric and esoteric Althusser, see
Thomas 2013, pp. 144–5.
152 Althusser 2015, p. 76.
153 Althusser 1969.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 49

phy for Non-philosophers, where he observes that ‘It is inordinately pretentious

of idealist philosophy to claim to … “think” the whole, or aspire to “totalisa-
tion”’.154
In the absence of any explicit development of the concept in his pub-
lished texts, however, this nominalism of actually existing singular things rad-
icalises Althusser’s Spinozism to the limit position of a relativist pluralism.155
Althusser’s critique of the concept of substance as reified thing, in the sense
of Hegelian monism, indicates a rejection of monist, ontological understand-
ings of substance and the ‘parallelist’ (mis)readings of Spinoza that have pre-
dominated since Leibniz. What then is the problem with monism with which
Althusser takes such vehement, polemical issue?
In the first footnote to Section v of ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’
in Pour Marx, in reference to Plekhanov’s Spinozist ‘monism’ and its appro-
priation by Garaudy and Gilbert Mury, Althusser unambiguously affirms that
‘this concept [of Substance monism] has no positive theoretical use in Marx-
ism, and is even theoretically dangerous’.156 The polemical nature of Althusser’s
position is eminently clear. Monism, the position that the set of all things
is reducible to a unity, whether of matter or idea,157 consistently represents
in Althusser’s thought not just the monisms of Hegelian expressive causal-
ity and Cartesian mechanistic causality, but also, and at least as crucially, the
vulgar determinism of traditional Marxist dialectical materialism.158 Such fan-

154 Althusser 2017, 68.

155 Jean Matthys argues that this pluralist position indicates not a radicalisation, but a break
with Spinozist monism and the ‘parallelism’ of the attributes. I will argue against this read-
ing, which is substantially identical to that of Alain Badiou, in Chapter 2. See Matthys 2023,
p. 244.
156 Althusser 2005, 300.
157 Lalande defines monisme as any ‘philosophical system that considers the set of things
as reducible to a unity. … From the point of view of substance, Wolff, who created the
term, applied it to the ontological doctrine that reduces all things either to matter or mind
[l’esprit]. … Monism itself [thus] divides into ‘materialist’ monism and ‘idealist’ monism’.
Lalande 2010, p. 648. Interestingly, in light of Althusser’s anti-Hegelianism, Lalande’s sub-
stantial 1923 article – seemingly unaware of the ongoing Russian debates on Spinozist
monism since the 1890s – never mentions Spinoza in its history of the concept, but instead
links the term above all to ‘the Hegelian conception of the universe’.
158 In Etre marxiste en philosophie, Althusser will explicitly reconfirm the condemnation of
monist materialism first articulated in For Marx, when he observes that ‘dire que … le Sujet
et l’Objet sont une seule et même chose, ce qui est la position moniste, … peut être aussi
bien spiritualiste (si cette seule et même chose est l’esprit) que matérialiste (si cette seule
et même chose est la matière)’ (Althusser 2015, §12). In his 1984 discussion with Fernanda
Navarro, Althusser again reaffirms this position in even stronger terms: ‘Navarro: Why do
you criticise dialectical materialism? Althusser: Because I have to destroy the material-

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50 chapter 1

tasmatic closure of a speculative totality consistently represents for Althusser

the zenith of imaginary, ideological fantasy [Phantasie], a theoretical kyblík
that he opposes to the interminable scientific production of knowledge of the
real.159
It is the Stalinist doctrine Dialectical Materialism that forms the actual sub-
stance of Althusser’s topical condemnation of the monism of Ernst Haeckel,
Plekhanov, and Roger Garaudy in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’.160
The source of Althusser’s rejection of this Marxist monism lies in the crudely
codified materialism promulgated to generations of Marxists in Stalin’s influen-
tial and didactic philosophical summum Dialectical Materialism and Historical
Materialism.161 Drawing on Plekhanov’s reductive interpretation of Spinozism
as a deterministic dialectic of matter, Stalin’s breviary presents dialectical
materialism as the general science of motive matter, such that ‘the multi-
ple phenomena of the universe are the different aspects of matter in move-
ment’.162 In Stalin’s reductive materialism, matter as such is imperiously stated
to possess a general essence that founds and guarantees the universal con-
sistency of the lawful behaviour of phenomena in their necessary determina-
tions.

ism of monism, with its universal dialectics. Materialist dialectics is an erroneous theory
invented by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It just replaces Hegel’s “spirit” or “absolute
idea” with “matter”’. See also Vargas 2008, p. 162.
159 ‘What Freud means in the first place by ‘Phantasien’ are … fictions which the subject cre-
ates and recounts to himself in the waking state’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 2018, p. 315).
Althusser’s definition of materialist analysis as ‘not telling oneself stories’ invokes pre-
cisely this Freudian topos of phantasy (Althusser 1994, p. 221). I discuss Althusser’s defini-
tion in chapter 2. As Althusser constantly reasserted, ideology takes real material forms:
in Central Europe, infants are often bathed in an upright bucket or kyblík that reassur-
ingly supports and encases them in a facsimile of the intra-uterine experience. In contrast,
Lacan would name the affective position of the interminable scientific production of
knowledge anxiety: ‘With anxiety, … it’s a matter of going deeper into the function of the
object in the analytic experience’. (Lacan 2016, p. 43). On the latter, see also Matthys 2023,
p. 260.
160 On Plekhanov’s reading of Spinoza as an empiricist materialism, see Matysik 2023, Chap-
ter 6.
161 Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), available online at https://www.
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm. See also Estop 2021, pp. 26–
9; Elliott 1987, pp. 20, 127–9; Van Ree 2000; Thomas 2008; Oitinnen 2022. Plekhanov’s
monism was far exceeded in theoretical vulgarity by Vladimir Shulyatikov’s farcical claims
that ‘Spinoza’s conception of the world is the song triumphant of capital’, his thought
putatively the mere and direct reflection of the capitalistic organisation of the forces of
production of his era. Cited in Oitinnen 2022, p. 3.
162 Stalin, cited in Estop 2021, p. 28.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 51

An inherent teleology thus governs the Stalinist determination of the

essence of matter and its movement, such that all phenomena are said to
adhere to the principal of reason and universal necessity. In its ultimate conse-
quence, the rudimentary determinism of Stalin’s materialism reduces thought
to the status of a sheer reflection of determining matter, with knowledge
itself merely a relatively complex and developed form of matter. Matter itself
remains always already the seat and emanant foundation of the meaning and
essence of reality. In consequence of this universal, speculative determinism,
historical materialism then constitutes for Stalin the science of the necessary
laws of social organisation and movement, the knowledge of which, embodied
in the Party, stands as the governing and determining epistemological instance,
its discernment legitimated by a ‘scientific’ insight into this determinist teleol-
ogy.163
The immediate context of Althusser’s public and absolute rejection of sub-
stance monism lies in his exchange with Gilbert Mury in the pages of La Pensée,
a polemic that he summarises in his unpublished 1976 memoir Les vaches
noires. Following the theoretical disquiet his first articles in the journal intro-
duced in the Marxist humanist consensus of the pcf, Roger Garaudy tasked
Mury, at the time Garaudy’s ‘right hand man’, with writing an article that would
rebut Althusser’s theoretical deviation, ‘to execute me with a lightening rebuke
in La Pensée’. Looking back on the event, Althusser does not mince words,
qualifying Mury’s indeed feeble article as ‘long, confused, verbose, and peremp-
tory’.164
Althusser’s immediate response to Mury’s meandering and tepid rebuke, a
biting and summary three-page ‘Annexe’ attached to the essay ‘Sur la dialec-
tique matérialiste’ (in other words, just what Garaudy had hoped Mury would
produce, only with the inquisitor interrogated), was not included in Pour Marx
(‘to spare Mury’, Althusser comments dryly in Les vaches noires), and must be
consulted in the original 1963 text.165 There, Althusser focuses on the place of
the ‘ideological’ concept of monism in Mury’s convoluted argument, as the con-
cept, the ‘unique essence’ that ‘seals the identity Hegel-Marx’, a concept that,
Althusser observes, might well have served its purpose, were it not ‘foreign to
Marxism’.166 Marx, in turn, is said by Mury to be ‘monist’, in Althusser’s read-
ing, insofar as ‘all the determinations of society (political, the State, ideolo-

163 Estop 2021, pp. 28–9.

164 Althusser 2016. See Mury 1963, pp. 38–51.
165 Althusser 1963, pp. 43–6.
166 Althusser 1963, p. 43.

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52 chapter 1

gies …) are mere phenomena of a unique reality that constitutes their essence’.
Here, Althusser observes, Mury rejoins ‘the latent substantialism’ of Plekhanov:
‘There is a unique mother-reality [réalité-mère], a sort of active substance, an
essence-cause producing effects that are its proper phenomena …. [as a form
of] of substantialism’.167
Flatly rejecting the speculative ontological dictates on the nature of reality of
Mury and those of Plekhanov and Stalin behind him, Althusser seeks to rebut
Mury by refusing all theoretical guarantees, asserting in reply that the example
of ‘the unity of a mode of production, in reality, has nothing “moniste” about it,
because the mode of production, is, in itself, a highly complex totality, in which
the forces of production, themselves complex, and the relations of production,
attain their unity in this real complexity’.168
Reality, Althusser asserts, ‘is not in the least materially constituted by a
unique reality, substance, matter, etc.’.169 Refusing all imaginary, specious guar-
antees of the nature of ontological totality, Althusser’s reply to Mury is simply
to note that ‘the unity of society for Marx … is not the unity of a substance or
single reality, but that of a structured totality …: nature, instruments of produc-
tion (tools, machines, techniques), men, technical knowledge’.170 Where Mury
talks of speculative first principals, Althusser rejects monism by invoking the
differential complexity of actually existing singular things. While Mury’s essay
lacks the clarity of Althusser’s that might make it a coherent defence of sub-
stance monism rather than a mere polemical assertion,171 Althusser’s truncated
rebuttal in For Marx articulates in turn only a polemical desire to suppress the
‘theoretically harmful’ ontological category of substance as flatly equivalent
to monism, a theoretical acting-out, one that in its refusal explicitly to work
through the problematic of a materialist reformulation of Spinozist substance
as structural causality, leaves the impression of a mechanistic pluralism of het-
erogeneous existing singular things.

167 Althusser 1963, p. 44.

168 Ibid.
169 Ibid.
170 Ibid.
171 Composed of ‘miraculous concepts’, Althusser observes, Mury’s claims ‘are not scientific
clarifications, but declarations of clarity; they are designed not to resolve a problem, but
to declare it resolved’ (ibid.).

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 53

9 Against Monism, the Return of Substance

What Althusser leaves in a state of theoretical underdevelopment, Pierre

Macherey will subsequently develop as a coherent Spinozist critique. In the
case of monism, Macherey addresses his critique at precisely the level
Althusser invokes in his reply to Mury: not that of ontological first principals
and presuppositions, but that of actually existing things such as the forces and
instruments of production or the scientific and technical organisation of pro-
duction (to repeat Althusser’s examples against Mury). Macherey’s critique of
monism takes place in the context of his exposition of Spinoza, and so lacks any
reference to Marx or Marxism, occurring in a note accompanying his analysis of
Spinoza’s distinction between nonexistent and actually existing things,172 along
with their corresponding scholastic referents essence and appearance, respec-
tively, and so can be said to address the same problem as Althusser (that of the
relation of monism to the heterogeneity of the real), albeit at a greater level of
abstraction.173
In explicating two of the most ‘obscure’ propositions of the Ethics, Macherey
stresses the absolute heterogeneity of these two categories in Spinoza’s radical
reformulation of the essence/appearance doublet.174 To conceive nonexistent
things (res singulares non existentes) is to grasp them, Macherey writes, ‘from
the point of view of essence’, as ‘idealities’ [idéalités], precisely analogous to the
idea of a (nonexistent, ideal) circle (Spinoza’s illustration) and the properties
that follow solely from this essence as its infinite, immediate modal deter-
mination, as opposed to the actually existing figure of a real circle and two
intersecting lines actually drawn within it from among the infinite number that
constitute one of its essential properties.175

172 eiip8, 9.
173 Macherey 1997, pp. 81–97.
174 Macherey 1997, p. 85.
175 Macherey 1997, p. 87. In distinguishing between nonexistent and existent things, Spinoza
is clearly reacting to Descartes’ overtly psychologistic understanding of essential: ‘[B]y
essence we understand the thing insofar as it is objectively in the intellect, by existence
[existentia], this same thing insofar as it is outside the intellect [rem eandem prout est
extra intellectum]’ (Descartes, ‘Correspondance, vol. 4,’ cited in David, 2014: 194). In con-
trast to Descartes’ psychologism, Spinoza’s purely logical understanding of res singulares
non existentes would await further theoretical development until Bolzano’s concept of
Vorstellungen an sich [Representations as such], the primary universal characteristic of
which he formulates as “Vorstellungen an sich haben kein Dasein” [“Representations as
such have no existence”] in the Wissenschaftslehre (Bolzano 1978: 75). I discuss Bolzano in
Chapter four. Spinoza’s emphasis on the atemporality of nonexistent things (vs. essence as
a lack of spatial extension, as in the thereness of ‘being there’), however, is quite unique in

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54 chapter 1

The crucial corollary to the nature of nonexistent things, that which above
all and absolutely distinguishes them from actually existing things (and here
we return to the problem of monism and the heterogeneity of the real), is that
they are, Macherey observes, ‘by definition abstracted from all consideration of
duration and deploy themselves in the perspective of eternity’. The idea of actu-
ally existing singular things, in contrast, necessarily ‘implies’, Spinoza writes,
‘the existence by which they are said to endure’ (earum ideae etiam existentiam
per quam durare dicuntur involvunt). Macherey emphasises the radicality and
absolute nature of this distinction, insofar as it precludes any understanding of
existence as the actualisation of a (temporally) precedent essence, ‘the tempo-
ral passage for singular things from essence to existence’. Essence and existence
must instead be understood as ‘completely distinct manners of being, equally
real’.176
It is at this point, then, that Macherey inserts his rejection of monism as the
consequent implication of this position. Here is Macherey:

Spinoza’s philosophy, then, is situated in complete opposition to an ele-

mentary monism [i.e., such as that of Plekhanov, Stalin, and Mury] that
would conceive of reality as an undifferentiated set [un ensemble indiffér-
encié] given once and for all in its massive globality. Whether considered
from the point of view of essence or from the point of view of existence,
… reality declines itself [se décline] in completely different forms, forms
so entirely distinct that it is impossible to compare them by interpreting
them as levels of reality situated at differing positions on a single scale of
judgement [échelle d’appréciation].177

Here, as Althusser had before him, Macherey limits the problem of monism
to the domain of things (les êtres or ‘beings’ in Heideggerian jargon) rather
than Being qua Being and the nature of substance. Considered alongside his
materialist explication of Spinozist substance as uncountable causa sui, how-
ever, while certainly not accounting for the real diversity of Marxist theo-
ries of monism since Plekhanov, Macherey’s Althusserian critique nonethe-
less constitutes a coherent and compelling critique of substance monism as
such.

the complex history of the related concepts of the Latin existentia, the French and English
‘existence,’ and the German pseudo-synonyms Existenz and Dasein (David, 2014).
176 Macherey 1997, p. 91.
177 Ibid.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 55

To return to Althusser’s polemical position, however, absent a systematic

critique of monism such as that of Macherey, the reductive determinism of
traditional, Stalinist materialism such as that of Mury nonetheless readily
explains Althusser’s situated, polemical rejection of all expressions of sub-
stance monism, as well as his refusal explicitly to articulate an alternative mate-
rialist concept of substance in his published, exoteric works. To have done so
would arguably have compromised with speculative guarantees the situated
articulation of a polemical theoretical position, one that consistently, for all its
variation, refused a metaphysics of emanant matter as another form of ideal-
ism, which in positing matter as universal causal determinacy, merely consti-
tutes an alternative form of idealist transcendence: matter as subject, essence,
substrate, and emanant cause.178
This univocal polemical position, however, grows decidedly more complex
when one considers Althusser’s unpublished writings on Spinoza. Althusser
readily takes on Macherey’s precocious, 1965 critique of Althusser’s references
to ‘the whole’ (le tout)179 in the first edition of Lire le Capital as the theo-
retically superfluous introduction of a reified, transcendent subjectum to an
otherwise materialist critique. At times, Althusser’s notes go on to invoke a het-
erodox notion of Spinozist substance as the infinite, unmediated expression
of a structure of causality in an infinity of registers and modes, a philosophy
of pure immanence that exists only in its effects.180 In these esoteric writings,
the Althusserian concept of a structural causality, of a structure that exists
only in the immediacy of its determinate effects, more explicitly deploys the

178 In his essay ‘En matérialiste’ (to be discussed in the following chapter), Pierre Macherey
more consistently than Althusser (who continued to the end to speak positively of cer-
tain forms of materialism), generalises this rejection of all forms of materialism, to invoke
instead a fidelity to a materialist dialectic, a commitment shared as well by Alain Badiou
(see below Chapter 5).
179 Montag 2013, pp. 84–6; Estop 2021, pp. 138–44. I discuss Macherey’s critique of the concept
of totality in Chapter 3.
180 ‘Althusser’, Estop insightfully writes in his analysis of Althusser’s 1967 notes to the discus-
sion with Stanislas Breton (discussed above), ‘makes of Spinoza his fundamental philo-
sophical reference for a theory of immanent causality. … The different orders of being are
not prefigured either positively or negatively [as a negative theology or the absent cause
of metonymic causality] in the cause; their discontinuity is of the order of the Faktum, and
not that of a necessary derivation from a [transcendent] essence. … There is only a factual
relation of substance to the attributes and these to the modes: a simple ‘there is’ [il y a]
without guarantee and without justification. … Substance [for the Althusser of these 1967
notes] is nothing but structure as such, the complexity of a plural infinity that [immedi-
ately] expresses and thus effectuates an infinite power [puissance]’ (Estop 2021, pp. 154–5,
my translation).

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56 chapter 1

Spinozist notion of substance to indicate not the transcendent and countable

(‘monist’) causal subject, but rather the complexity (as overdetermination) and
immanence (as topology or topique) of purely intrinsic causality.181 As early as
his 1940s notebook on Spinoza, Althusser had already affirmed the necessity
of thinking the attributes in their immediate articulation of immanent sub-
stance: ‘In Spinoza, the famous parallelism is itself abstract: what is affirmed
before parallelism is the unity and unicity of substance – it is this identity that
resolves the problem of dualism’. Althusser’s early commentary, however, artic-
ulates this unity in precisely the terms of the ‘substance monism’ that he would
reject categorically in Pour Marx over a decade later: ‘An epistemological dual-
ism persists, but sustained [soutenu] by a radical ontological monism’.182
Following Althusser’s public rejection of any and all substance monism in
For Marx and the corresponding absence of any unifying, substantial material-
ist category in the arguments of Reading Capital, Althusser makes an implicit
auto-critique of this silence in the founding, privately circulated document of
the Groupe de travail théorique (aka ‘Groupe Spinoza’), the ‘Three Notes on Dis-
course’ from October 1966.183 In these working notes to his informed readers
(Etienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Yves Duroux, and Alain Badiou), Althusser
initially reiterates the seemingly dualistic terminology of Reading Capital, con-
tinuing to distinguish in the abstract between ‘the object of knowledge’ and ‘the
real object’, as if these indicated two separate, directly comparable objects or
things, as opposed to, in the case of the Spinozist attributes of substance, two
modes of apprehending a singular existing thing, such as the capitalist social
form (for Marx in Reading Capital), or the object of this 1966 text, the uncon-
scious for Freud and Lacan.184
Toward the end of his first note, however, Althusser privately specifies for
his circle the insufficiency of a position (such as that which Althusser had
expressed in Reading Capital) that refuses to think the nature of the articula-
tion of theoretical domains, such that ‘we remain [merely at the abstract level]
of the parallelism of the attributes’. The necessary supplement to the hetero-
geneity of the attributes, Althusser immediately adds, lies in the manner in
which ‘Spinoza tempers and corrects the parallelism of the attributes by the
concept of substance: the different attributes are the attributes of a single and
same substance. It is the concept of substance that plays the role of the concept

181 Estop 2021, p. 152. See also Matthys 2023, Chapter 4.

182 alt 2. A 60–08, cited in Estop 2021, p. 229.
183 In Ecrits sur la psychanalyse (Althusser 1993, pp. 111–70). See also Williams 2013, pp. 157–8;
and Sotiris 2021, p. 183.
184 Althusser 1993, p. 120.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 57

of the articulation of the attributes. … The distinction of the attributes is only

possible under the condition of their articulation’.185
Althusser sustains and further specifies this necessity of a concept of purely
immanent structural causality that would allow for the distinction between the
object of thought and the real object in his 1976 text Etre marxiste en philoso-
phie (first published in 2015). It is precisely Spinoza’s concept of substance,
Althusser argues there, that allows for the construction of ‘a consequential
form of materialism, one that annuls the difference between the object and its
knowledge, all the while recognising … the difference between the object and
its knowledge’.186 While the mechanism of this ‘annulment’ remains unspec-
ified, in place of the identity of the object and its representation in tradi-
tional theories of knowledge, Althusser argues that a Spinozist epistemology
moves, always within the attribute of thought, from inadequate (though nec-
essary) imaginary forms of knowledge, to the contrasting adequacy of com-
mon notions and singular things, ‘a dialectic’, Althusser specifies, ‘that passes,
in three moments, from one to the other, across the diverse genres of knowl-
edge’.187 The essential Spinozist epistemological distinction between the real
circle (which is round) and its concept (which is not) articulated in Reading
Capital would merely constitute, in this view, an initial distinction that escapes
the ideological constraints of traditional theories of knowledge whether as
‘reflection or revelation’, to found the adequate knowledge of any singular thing
in which the circle and its adequate idea are not two objects of adequation,
but rather ‘one and the same [existing and nonexisting] thing in two different
attributes’.188

10 The Theoretical Basis of Theoreticism

The suppression of any explicit reference to and/or rearticulation of the

Spinozist concept of substance in Althusser’s published writings, and its
replacement by the untheorised dualism of thought and the real, articulated
alongside the seemingly unrelated concept of structural causality, had dis-
astrous consequences for the reception of Althusser’s thought. These conse-
quences resonate into the present, as a general agreement on all sides – from
E.P. Thompson’s historicist ravings to the manifest desire to save Althusser from

185 Althusser 1993, p. 150, emphases in original.

186 Althusser 2015, §12.
187 Althusser 2015, §12.
188 E2P7S, cited in Estop 2021, p. 195.

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58 chapter 1

his ‘theoreticism’ shared by highly informed readers including Anderson, Elliot,

and Goshgarian – that the epistemological positions articulated in For Marx
and Reading Capital constituted a politically dysfunctional, hyper-rationalist
idealism. From Thompson (‘Althusser and his acolytes … offer an a-historical
theoreticism which, at the first examination, discloses itself as idealism’),189
to Elliot (Althusser’s proposition of a ‘“knowledge effect” … remains unillumi-
nated beyond cryptic, and in any case circular, allusions to the significance
of the internal organisation and disposition of concepts’),190 and Anderson,
one finds general agreement: ‘Althusser does indeed rely improperly on logico-
mathematical protocols of proof as models of scientific procedure. His theory
of knowledge, dissociated from the controls of evidence, is untenably internal-
ist’.191
If the charge of theoreticism has any real basis, however, this is to be located
not in a putative political deficit (Goshgarian, Anderson) or historiographic
imprecision or idealism (Thompson, Elliot), but at the theoretical level, pre-
cisely as a failure to be theoreticist enough. To follow Althusser down the retro-
grade path from an initial repentance for ‘theoreticism’ toward the empiricist

189 Thompson 1987, p. 18.

190 Elliott 1987, p. 87, emphasis in original.
191 Anderson 1980, p. 7. It is worth noting that Elliott, whose brief presentation of Spinoza’s
thought symptomatically disregards the category of substance (1987, p. 77), sees fit to
draw a diametrically opposite conclusion to the Spinozist position I offer here, i.e., that
Althusser’s ‘guilty silence’ regarding the relation of thought and the real disavows the
true nature of this theoreticist epistemology as ‘a reprise of the diamat tradition’ (1987,
p. 88). Elliott does so by problematically reducing Spinoza and Althusser’s appropria-
tion of him to the reflection theory of Engels: ‘“The differential nature of scientific dis-
course” is assured [for Althusser] by its identity with the structure of reality, the “non-
problematicity between an object and the knowledge of it” guaranteed by ontology …
Insofar as [Althusser’s critique of empiricism] encompassed epistemologies which posit
an identity between knowledge and the object of which it is knowledge, it would therefore
not only include Althusser’s own, but also – and crucially – Spinoza’s’ (1987, p. 89). This
critique remains superficial – although consonant with Althusser’s truncated dualism of
thought and the Real – since Elliott first reimports the traditional epistemological crite-
rion of the adequation of subject and object, to then assert that Spinoza posits the identity
of thought and the real object. In contrast, Spinoza (and Althusser in his unpublished
writings such as the notes on his discussion with Père Breton discussed above) rigorously
maintains the distinction of the orders of the attributes, while at the same time rejecting
any notion of substance as a transcendent thing (see note 96 above). Elliott’s parallelist
misreading of Spinoza should be measured against Macherey’s more exacting analysis
of Ethics iip7, which I discuss in the following chapter. There Macherey argues that this
proposition indicates not an identical order of thought and order of extension, but rather
that the attributes differentially comprehend one and the same thing.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 59

position of ‘class struggle in theory’ is to risk ending up, with no small irony,
at precisely the Stalinist epistemology For Marx had rightly and so powerfully
excoriated. At its most extreme, this position is nothing less than the regres-
sive endorsement of a bureaucratic politicisation of science (Lysenkoism) such
as that explicitly formulated for the pcf by Jacques Desanti in a 1950 edito-
rial for La nouvelle critique: i.e., that ‘taking a proletarian stance in science and
adopting the criteria of proletarian science [are] preconditions for objectivity
in scientific debate’.192
When Althusser made the political decision publicly to reject the onto-
logical and epistemological guarantees of substance monism in For Marx, in
order to categorically distinguish his theoretical intervention from the vulgar
materialism of Plekhanov and Stalin, he suppressed the category of Spinozist
Substance from his (public) discourse, developing the concept of structural
causality as finite determination within a contingent (capitalist) social form.
Though Macherey echoes Althusser’s condemnation of substance monism in
his five-volume commentary on the Ethics, he articulates in its place a rigor-
ous, materialist understanding of Spinozist Substance as uncounted causal-
ity.
To count Spinozist substance as One (i.e., as a monism) is for Macherey
to grasp substance from the standpoint of the imagination, which is to say,
inadequately, ‘by replacing [the concept of substance] in a network of exterior
determinations in which it is made to figure as one thing existing alongside or
above [in transcendence to] all others, which is to deny its absolute self-relation
[rapport à soi] that excludes any relation to another thing than itself’.193 Sub-
stance, in Macherey’s reading of the Ethics as a materialist dialectic of pure
immanence, cannot be ‘considered as ‘one’ [une] substance, but as subsisting
[le subsister], or existing [l’exister], considered as such’.194
For Macherey, if Proposition 1 of Ethics I emphasises the priority of sub-
stance to its modal affections, this implies not only the overarching Spinozist
epistemological imperative to ‘think the real in its totality according to
[Spinoza’s] synthetic procedure … from cause to effects, and not the inverse’,
but also, and at least as importantly, the unstated corollary of this proposi-
tion as the Spinozist position of a radical immanence of the attributes: that,
in other words, ‘substance is [in contrast to its affectations] not first in nature
in relation to its attributes. There is no more priority of substance in relation to

192 Cited in Elliot 1987, p. 69.

193 Macherey 1998, p. 87.
194 Macherey 1998, p. 90.

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60 chapter 1

its attributes than there is a priority of the attributes in relation to substance,

because they [substance and the attributes] neither can be nor can be con-
ceived separately’.195
In place of Spinoza’s rigorous distinction between Substance as ‘that which
is in itself and conceived through itself’ and the attributes as ‘that which the
intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence’, Althusser’s dual-
ist invocation of thought and the real either makes a lopsided category error (if
we take the real to indicate Spinozist substance) or seems to articulate an ideal-
ist dualism or even pluralism without materialist determination (if we take the
real to indicate the attribute of extension). In either case, the reader of For Marx
and Reading Capital is understandably left with the impression of a rationalist,
idealist construction, a Gedankenkonkretum devoid of materialist necessity.
In his public writings, Althusser never invoked Spinoza as more than a spec-
tral presence (in Reading Capital) or lapsus of theoreticist hubris (in Essays
in Self-Criticism). By the time Macherey would supplement this lack through
his exacting construction of a materialist theory of Spinozist substance and
the attributes in Hegel or Spinoza and his Introduction to the Ethics, the self-
inflicted, damaged reception of Althusser’s thought had long become a fait
accompli, and, in any case, Macherey’s rearticulation – rigorously addressed
neither to Marx nor Althusser, but to Spinoza alone – could only respond to
a question no one had asked, nor seemed interested in asking, since all con-
cerned, starting with Althusser himself, agreed on the nature of Reading Cap-
ital’s theoreticism as a politico-historicist, as opposed to epistemo-theoretical,
inadequacy.
To grasp the true nature of Althusser’s theoreticism as a failure to be theoreti-
cist enough would in consequence require, as I seek to do in this book, the con-
struction of a new object of thought, along with the incipient demonstration
of its necessity, a theoretical object that would refuse to limit the thought of
Althusser, Macherey, and Badiou to their nominal subjects (whether Spinoza,
Hegel, or Marx), but which instead articulates the complex and overdeter-
mined theoretical field these thinkers have constructed since 1960, interrogat-
ing its resonances and dead spots, its silences and invocations, in their attempt
to formulate this common theoretical object: the materialist dialectic.
Althusser’s published texts suppress the category of Substance to leave read-
ers with the impression of a rationalist dualism, the inwardness of a thought
construct without materialist purchase on an untheorised ‘real’. In contrast,
Althusser’s unpublished writings point toward the necessary, Spinozist artic-

195 Macherey 1998, p. 72, my emphases.

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introduction: reading capital beyond its limits 61

ulation of Reading Capital’s merely dualist distinction between the capitalist

social form distinguished as an object of thought and the real order or attribute
of temporal extension: they do so through a reconceptualisation of substance
as the immanence of a conjunctural structural causality without transcen-
dence. While this Spinozist proviso provides an essential articulation to the
principal proposition of that book – that in Capital, Marx ‘really did invent a
new form of order for axiomatic analysis, … a new order in the theoretical, a
new form of apodicticity or scientificity’ – this as yet says nothing about the
actual form of Marx’s analysis.196
Althusser himself says little more about Marx’s actual process of exposi-
tion and analysis in Reading Capital, and rarely returned to the topic after
1965.197 To further elaborate this claim will require turning in the following
chapter to Pierre Macherey’s contribution to that volume, a text to be read as
a prolegomenon to Macherey’s elaboration of a Spinozist, materialist dialectic.
Macherey’s concept of a positive, materialist dialectic without negation can
then (in chapter three) be returned and brought to bear anew on Marx’s actual
process of exposition in Capital, in essence extending Macherey’s innovative
initial reading of Capital from 1965 in light of his later readings of Hegel and
Spinoza. This in turn will set the stage for the final chapters of this book, which
will consider the concept of a materialist, axiomatic dialectic in Alain Badiou’s
thought, to show that all of these texts written in the wake of Reading Capital,
texts that rarely if ever explicitly engage with or even mention Marx’s Capital,
nonetheless sustain the fidelity to a heterogeneous school of Althusserian the-
ory, the insistent return to read and reread Capital as a materialist, apodictic
analysis of the capitalist social form.

196 rc, p. 52.

197 See above, note 29.

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 chapter 2

What Is Materialist Analysis? Pierre Macherey’s

Spinozist Epistemology

In this chapter, I turn to Pierre Macherey’s theory of a materialist dialectic,

a project that can be said to unite his work from his initial contribution to
Reading Capital into the present. I will first discuss Macherey’s reading of the
first five pages of Marx’s Capital in his brief but decisive contribution to Read-
ing Capital. I will then turn to his 1966 book A Theory of Literary Production,
to argue that it cogently summarises the materialist critique of Reading Cap-
ital as a general theory of the materialist production of the textual object in
the form of thought as opposed to its extensive, empirical reality on the page.
My discussion will then turn to Macherey’s subsequent development of a the-
ory of materialist dialectic in works such as Hegel or Spinoza, the essay ‘En
matérialiste’, and Macherey’s extraordinary, five-volume, line by line explica-
tion of Spinoza’s Ethics. The latter, a major work that as of this writing remains
untranslated into English, offers in my view not only a masterful explication
of Spinoza’s dauntingly complex and original philosophical masterpiece; its
extensive commentary itself constitutes, I will argue, an original theoretical
intervention that can serve systematically to articulate the theory of positive,
materialist dialectic that Macherey initially proposes in his earlier works.

1 Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic

Pierre Macherey’s brilliant and long-overlooked contribution to Lire le Capi-

tal, ‘A propos du processus d’exposition du Capital’, is a treasure of theoret-
ical investigation revealed anew by the republication of the complete vol-
ume of Reading Capital.1 Macherey’s precocious genius in these pages pushes

1 To be sure, the second edition of Lire le Capital that appeared in two volumes in 1968, com-
prised only of Althusser and Balibar’s texts (and which served for the various international
translations of the book), was eventually completed in 1973 with a third and fourth vol-
ume, containing the original contributions of Rancière (Vol. iii) and Macherey and Establet
(Vol. iv). That said, even among Francophone readers, who save a few specialists can be said
to have actually read that obscure fourth volume in the waning years of Althusserianism in
the 1970s?

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what is materialist analysis? 63

Althusser’s Spinozist epistemology to its most extreme and rigorous formula-

tion imaginable. The object of Macherey’s brief chapter is to investigate Marx’s
conception and practice ‘of the scientific exposition’ of his principal concepts
in the initial five pages of Capital Vol. 1, chapter 1, section 1.2 In its modest pre-
tensions to closely read these five pages of text, the essay expands on the form
of the scholastic explication de texte that every French normalien is trained to
master by the ‘caïmans’ such as Althusser who prepared them for the rigorous
agrégation. Macherey’s brief exposé nonetheless brings a discerning precision
to bear upon the opening lines of Capital, to draw a series of analytical divisions
between the concepts with which Marx begins his critique of political econ-
omy: wealth (la richesse/Reichtum), the commodity (la marchandise/Ware), the
commodity’s two essential aspects or attributes, its use-value and exchange-
value, and, finally, value itself (la valeur/Wert).
If the first of these, wealth, is only fleetingly presented in the opening
sentence of Capital (‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode
of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities” ’),
Macherey argues that this is due to its extreme conceptual poverty. Wealth, in
this reading, is a reductively empirical category, the general form of appearance
that any and all things take on as objects of value in any given social form what-
soever. This form of appearance of any object of wealth per se is ‘the empirical
mode of existence of the thing’, says Macherey, ‘its manner of appearing, show-
ing itself, manifesting itself’.3 In contrast to value, a much richer concept that,
above all, ‘does not show itself, does not appear’, wealth is ‘empirically very thin
[maigre]: transparent’.4
The concept of wealth serves to initiate the conceptual analysis of Capital
primarily, Macherey argues, as a ‘reminder’, in its capacity to refer back to the
origins of classical economy, to its arbitrary and precritical status in Smith and
Ricardo. Consequently, this implies for Macherey two key points that he will
develop intensively. First, that the array of concepts Marx deploys in Capital
are not equal: wealth is an impoverished, ‘sterile’, concept, referring merely to
the empirical form of appearance of things, a form fully inadequate to its essen-

2 Macherey has offered a surprisingly modest, even resentful disavowal of his contribution to
Lire le Capital: ‘When, with fifty years’ distance, I reread [my] contribution, I see all of its
imperfections. … When, subsequently, I was addressed as a ‘coauthor’ of Reading Capital,
I could not prevent myself feeling a certain malaise …. In reality, Reading Capital has only
one author: it is Althusser who, when he constructed this book on the basis of the work-
ing documents [we] provided him with, made a work unto itself, for which he himself bears
responsibility’ (Lasowski 2016, pp. 176–7).
3 rc, p. 191.
4 rc, p. 192.

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64 chapter 2

tial nature as commodity.5 ‘Wealth’ is never anything more than the empirical
definition Marx gives it: ‘a mass of commodities’. In contrast, the endpoint of
Macherey’s exposition, value, is a rich concept, one that will require the entire,
incomplete exposition of Capital volumes i–iii to elaborate. Secondly, however,
Macherey argues that wealth, for all its superficiality and brevity of appear-
ance in Marx’s analysis, is nonetheless purely a concept. Wealth can never be
confused with any of its empirical manifestations; it is and remains purely a
concept.
Macherey’s analysis attends closely to the logical components and operators
he identifies in the opening pages of Capital. These constitute what he terms
‘intermediaries’, the ‘instruments of rationality’ that allow for the construction
of a rigorous demonstration. Macherey’s assertion that the various concepts
laid out in these opening lines of Capital are fundamentally and necessarily
heterogeneous is a point his own demonstration will sustain and develop step
by step; the notion of conceptual heterogeneity constitutes, moreover, ‘one of
the fundamental conditions of scientific rigour’. The system of Marx’s concepts,
and the system of rational operators more generally, in this view, consists of
various components that do not coexist ‘on one and the same level of intelligi-
bility’, but which instead inhabit multiple, incommensurable planes.6
This assertion next leads Macherey to consider the relations of heterogene-
ity between the four concepts under consideration: the ‘empirical form’ of
wealth, the contradictory pair of ‘factors’ of the commodity that are use-value
and exchange-value, and, finally, the purely relational concept of value. If use-
value, like wealth, remains tied to the empirical, but grasped as ‘the notion of
a thing’ rather than via its sensuous existence, exchange-value in contrast only
exists as a relation between commodities.7 This dual nature of the commodity,

5 rc, p. 190.
6 rc, p. 188.
7 rc, p. 194. This key point, first elaborated by Macherey in 1965, will undergo intensive devel-
opment by Michael Heinrich in his close reading of the first seven chapters of Capital: ‘Why
can’t we grasp value-objectivity in a single commodity’, Heinrich asks? ‘This is due to the
social character of the substance of value, which was emphasised in the first subsection [of
Capital]. The substance of value, abstract labour, is not inherent to a single commodity, but
rather held in common by two commodities that are exchanged. … The table can only become
an expression of equal human labour through exchange, when confronting other commodi-
ties. Then the various particular and individual acts of labour are reduced to equal human
labour. From this “purely social” character of value-objectivity, Marx says that it follows “self-
evidently” that “it can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity”
(1976: 139). … Commodities have value-objectivity only in the social relation of one com-
modity to another – which is why it first comes to light here. Prior to and outside of this
relation, they are mere use-values: they are on the way to becoming commodities, but far

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what is materialist analysis? 65

as both thing and relation, is for Macherey a primary contradiction or aporia

of capital that is not ‘resolved’ in a Hegelian Aufhebung, but which is instead
‘suppressed’.8 This contradiction between use-value and exchange-value exists,
furthermore, purely at the level of Marx’s concepts, and leads to ‘a break in the
treatment of these concepts … and in no way refers to a real process … The
concepts that sustain the scientific exposition are not of the same kind’.9
Adhering to Althusser’s principled rejection of empiricism described in the
previous chapter, Macherey’s analysis furthermore rejects phenomenological
experience as a basis for Marx’s demonstration. Value, in this view, is a cate-
gory invisible to immediate experience of the commodity in its phenomeno-
logical appearance. Value, in Macherey’s reading, is to be located neither on
the surface of phenomena (in their appearance as use-values), nor in their
empirical relation to one another (as exchange-values); but for all that, nor can
value be said to lie hidden within the depths of that relation, to stand revealed
in a moment of Hegelian Aufhebung. Instead, the concept of value exists in
a relation of ‘rupture’ to commodities given their dual aspects as use-values
and exchange-values. ‘The paradox of the analysis of exchange is that value is
neither in the terms of exchange, nor in their relation. Value is not given, or
revealed [dégagée], or displayed [mise en évidence]: it is constructed as con-
cept’.10 The object that is value ‘is more hidden than revealed’ in the act of
exchange.
Thus the necessity for Marx’s categorial, ‘scientific’ critique of political econ-
omy: ‘Without the rigor of scientific exposition, which alone is able to produce
knowledge, the concept of value would have no meaning: that is to say, it would
not exist’.11 The aporetic structure of the commodity, its dual nature, thus leads
to the heart of Macherey’s analysis. Macherey identifies in the relation between
two equivalent commodities, in the system of market exchange, the determi-
nant condition of a concept devoid of all empiricism. To approach value itself,
he writes, ‘the analysis must no longer be conducted in terms of experience’.
Instead, the concept of a relation of exchange, Macherey provocatively asserts,

from being commodities. When Marx speaks of the value of a single commodity (or its
magnitude of value), he always presupposes a value-relation to another commodity, of
which the individual commodity is a part’. Heinrich 2021, pp. 93–5.
8 rc, p. 195.
9 rc, p. 196. In the next chapter I will argue against Macherey that Marx’s presentation of
the concepts of use-value and exchange-value is in no sense based upon a logic of con-
tradiction [Widerspruch], but that the two are simply factual aspects or attributes of the
commodity that coexist in ‘opposition’ [Gegensatz] without contradiction.
10 rc, p. 203, original emphasis.
11 rc, p. 205, translation modified, italics in original.

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66 chapter 2

has no empirical content.12 Unlike wealth or the commodity, value, the con-
cept of the measure allowing for the exchange-based equality of empirically
nonidentical commodities, is purely and only that, a concept. Like any other
concept, it is real but nonexistent, a reality in the attribute of thought alone,
rather than the empirical attribute of sensuous extension.
The conceptual relation that is value, Macherey continues, poses the equal-
ity of two commodities as a formula, a = b; it is, in other words, ‘defined as a
relation of expression’.13 Unlike the qualitative, empirical relation of two use-
values standing side by side in the market, the relation of exchange-value is
characterised by the extinction of all qualities. Fungibility is thus more pre-
cisely represented as a purely quantitative schematisation, as the expression of
relative value: ‘ax = by (a is so much of b)’.14
It is this schematic reduction of the commodity form to a purely quantita-
tive relation that then definitively displaces Macherey’s analysis in its final step,
to enjoin the concept of value itself: Marx’s ‘new analysis [now addressing of
the concept of value] begins with a decisive choice: the refusal to study the
exchange relation as a qualitative relation, to only consider it in its quantita-
tive content’.15 It is this pure conceptualisation, then, that will finally allow for
the adequate (initial) construction of the concept of value, as ‘the structure of
the relation’ of exchange itself.16
The heterogeneous, nondialectical series of logical steps Macherey iden-
tifies in Marx’s exposition then suddenly culminates in a parenthetical ges-
ture of pure conceptual abstraction, momentarily abstracting, that is, from
Marx’s exposition itself to articulate a purely axiomatic statement regarding
the nature of conceptual formalisation. It is possible, Macherey provision-
ally concludes from this exposition, to ‘formulate a general rule: … to com-
pare objects non-empirically, it is necessary as a preliminary to determine the
general form of this measurement … It is not possible to make a relation of

12 ‘In experience, it is possible to conceive that two things stand alongside the other, that
they are juxtaposed (like commodities in wealth). But they do not explicitly tolerate any
relation; from the standpoint of experience, between two things and one thing there is a
quantitative difference, but absolutely no qualitative difference’ (rc, p. 200).
13 Ibid.
14 I will present a more complex and developed version of this position first asserted by
Macherey, in my analysis in the next chapter of Marx’s introduction of a formula to
schematise the Law of the Rate and Mass of Surplus Value that is the object of Chapter 11
in Roy’s 1875 French translation of Capital.
15 rc, p. 200.
16 rc, p. 201.

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what is materialist analysis? 67

expression say what it expresses if it is examined only in its empirical reality’.17

The concept expressing the nature of any relation whatsoever is of a differ-
ent nature, ‘another kind’, than empirical experience. ‘To know what a relation
expresses’, Macherey concludes, ‘it is also necessary, even first of all, to know
what is expressing it’.18
Macherey’s demonstration advances not via a logic of the negation of nega-
tion, but rather through a series of quantum-like leaps from one discrete,
bounded concept to another, each shown to occupy a singular, heterogeneous
orbital.19 Macherey’s analysis to this point has traced the systematic elimina-
tion of all empirical qualities (of wealth, and the use-value aspect of commodi-
ties) in the analytical passage to exchange-value and then value, arguing in
Spinozist terms that just as ‘the area of a triangle is not in itself triangular; in
the same way too, the notion of value is not exchangeable’.20
At this culminating point in Macherey’s demonstration, however, the previ-
ously abandoned notion of quality suddenly returns, now, however, residing
in a state of pure nonempirical conceptuality, a state in which ‘the notion
of value qualifies commodities as the notion of area qualifies areas’. In con-
trast to the merely sensuous nature of wealth, it is abstract labour, a purely
relational, nonempirical notion, that now constitutes ‘a new quality’, the sub-
stance of value itself.21 As Macherey quotes Marx, to conclude his brief con-
ceptual exposition of these pages from Capital, ‘there remains only a quality’,
the abstract, nonquantifiable concept of the substance of value.22 The logic is
implacable and unyielding, the density of Macherey’s argument in these seven
pages formidable, brilliant, original, in itself as daunting as the five introduc-

17 rc, p. 201. Here too, I will argue in the next chapter that Marx rigorously and systematically
adheres to this proposition of Macherey’s above all in Chapter 11 of Capital.
18 rc, p. 201.
19 In this sense, Macherey’s precociously original analysis already points forward in 1965 to
Althusser’s assertion in his late writings (described in the previous chapter) that Marx’s
process of exposition proceeds in its demonstration through the successive ‘positioning’
[position] of concepts, as opposed to their negative dialectical (‘Hegelian’) aufhebung.
Instead, Althusser will argue, Marx’s order of exposition is no mere (structuralist/formal-
ist) combinatory, but in fact derives its materialist necessity from the priority of Marx’s
preliminary enquiries (Grundrisse, etc.) to the drafting of Capital.
20 rc, p. 205.
21 ‘As mere things’, Macherey writes, ‘objects are differentiated by their uses, i.e. their irre-
ducibility. If this character is set aside then at the same time as their empirical qualities
disappear, there appears, not their quantitative aspect, but another quality (of a quite dif-
ferent nature: not directly observable): … It will be precisely value whose substance it will
then be possible to determine’ (rc, p. 206).
22 rc, p. 206.

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68 chapter 2

tory pages of Capital it theorises, its Cavaillèsian rigour constituting a culmi-

nating and bravura theoretical gesture of Lire le Capital in its totality.

2 A Theoretical Prolegomenon to the Materialist Analysis of Texts

Pierre Macherey’s next work, A Theory of Literary Production, might seem, to all
appearances, a mere work of literary criticism, familiar in its genre, modest in
its intentions, a study in which, after a somewhat lengthy methodological intro-
duction, Macherey proceeds to offer a number of ‘materialist’ analyses of works
ranging from Lenin’s comments on Tolstoy to Jules Verne, Jorge Luis Borges, and
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Such a view, however, would profoundly misrepresent
the enormous scope and compass of the book’s epistemological implications.
Instead, the achievement of A Theory of Literary Production is far more sweep-
ing than the analysis of a handful of classic novels; Macherey, in this, his first
book, in point of fact puts forward a generic protocol for the materialist analy-
sis of textual, symbolic objects of all types, a compellingly original analytical
practice for the critique of discourse as such, a procedure that can then, in
the next chapter, illuminate Marx’s process of exposition in Capital, moving
beyond Macherey’s all-too-brief propositions in his contribution to Reading
Capital.
It will surprise none of his readers that materialism in Macherey’s under-
standing receives a comprehensively Spinozist inflection. While Macherey only
mentions Spinoza nine times in Theory of Literary Production, and then only
in passing, Warren Montag has shown the degree to which Spinoza’s epis-
temology – inflected through a series of intensive exchanges with Althusser
from 1961 onward – underwrites and founds an encompassing philosophico-
critical project.23 Indeed, it is now clear, given the trajectory of Macherey’s
research, that from his initial, precocious contribution to Reading Capital in
1965, through his explosive and highly influential critique of Hegel’s misread-
ings of Spinoza in Hegel or Spinoza (1979), and culminating in his extraordi-
narily meticulous, systematic, and original interpretation of Spinoza’s Ethics
across five volumes and over a thousand pages, Macherey has synthetically
redeployed Spinoza to articulate a comprehensive theory of materialist anal-
ysis, one that fully takes into account and builds upon the classic Althusserian
critiques of empiricism, hermeneutics, totality, and negative-Hegelian dialec-
tics.

23 Montag 2013; Montag 1998.

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what is materialist analysis? 69

3 Textual Production in a Materialist Mode

A Theory of Literary Production initiates its materialist critique via a three-

fold proscription: against empiricism, against hermeneutics, against expressive
totality. Each of these protocols resonates in consonance with Althusser’s criti-
cal introduction to Reading Capital published the year before (discussed in the
previous chapter). Each of these proscriptions can in turn be traced to the sub-
terranean influence of Spinoza on the thought of Althusser and his students,
an influence to be explicated and further elaborated in Macherey’s later works.
Against empiricism. If the study of literature traditionally attends to an
empirically accessible domain or field, Macherey rejects this ‘necessarily insuf-
ficient’ orientation to argue instead that critical analysis, properly understood,
entails in every case the novel construction of its object of analysis: ‘Rational
investigation bears directly upon objects that have no prior existence, but are
instead produced’.24 This is the materialist lesson Althusser had drawn from
Marx’s crucial 1857 methodological introduction to the Grundrisse notebooks,
where Marx rejects Adam Smith’s empiricist, representational method to assert
instead a properly materialist, productionist epistemology.25 If Smith famously
asserts the universally observable nature of human economic comportment
as a ‘propensity to truck, barter, and exchange’, such an assertion constitutes
the abstract, merely conceptual representation and generalisation of an empir-
ically observable series.26 Against the inadequacy of Smith’s method of mere
empiricist representation, flawed in its derivation of general knowledge from
immediate, sensuous impressions, Marx – and Althusser and Macherey in his
wake – asserts the autonomy of conceptual production, the reproduction (as
opposed to representation) of the real object as what Marx calls a ‘thought-
concrete’ (Gedankenkonkretum).27

24 Macherey 2006, p. 6, translation modified, my emphasis.

25 ‘Marx defends the distinction between the real object (the real-concrete or the real total-
ity, which “retains its autonomous existence outside the head (Kopf ) just as before”),
and the object of knowledge, a product of the thought which produces it in itself as a
thought-concrete (Gedankenkonkretum), as a thought-totality (Gedankentotalität), i.e., as
a thought-object, absolutely distinct from the real-object, the real-concrete’. rc, p. 41. See
also Marx 1973, p. 101.
26 Adam Smith 1974, p. 11. See above, p. 29.
27 rc, p. 41. ‘However far back we ascend, into the past of a branch of knowledge, we are never
dealing with a “pure” sensuous intuition or mere “representation”, but with an always-
already complex raw material, a structure of “intuition” or “representation” which com-
bines together in a peculiar “Verbindung” sensuous, technical, and ideological elements;
that therefore knowledge never, as empiricism desperately demands it should, confronts a
pure object which is then identical to the real object of which knowledge aimed to produce

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70 chapter 2

Macherey redeploys this fundamental assertion of Reading Capital in the

opening pages of A Theory of Literary Production. Never the mere exposition or
translation of a latent, hidden meaning, adequate knowledge of a text requires
the incipient production of an analytical discourse, an object necessarily dis-
tinct from that initial text itself.28 This analysis will furthermore have as its
content not the description of an authorial intention, but the presentation of
the ‘laws of production’ of the text in question, the synthetic elaboration of the
conditions of its situated necessity: ‘To know the conditions of a process: this is
the true programme of a theoretical investigation’.29 Such an inquiry will refuse
the mere description of a product (for transmission, for consumption); instead,
it will formulate the universal and necessary ‘laws of literary production’, a
general science of the causes governing textual fabrication, a process that is
distinctly Spinozist in its affirmation of necessity and an adequate knowledge
of the common, universal notions of textual production, that precede the fur-
ther articulation of the singular essence of any given discursive object.30
Against textual hermeneutics. From the critique of empiricism necessarily
follows a refusal of any hermeneutic that would seek to reveal the hidden
truth lying latent within a text: ‘It is not enough to unfold the line of the text
to discover the message inscribed there, for this inscription would be that of
an empirical fact’.31 Textual interpretation – understood as the revelation of
an immanent meaning (sens), as the true, concealed content of a text that
would take form in critical discourse – inherently relies on an ideology of depth.
Immanent critique constitutes, in this view, an empiricism of the factic text
in its putative self-sufficiency; in its place, Macherey calls for adequate knowl-
edge to be derived from the text, but as its analytic supplement: neither the
translation of an immanent content nor its comprehension as a normative act
of judgement indexified to an objectified truth, instead, ‘analysis can hope to
articulate the necessity determining the textual object’.32
Macherey associates such a procedure with a weakened form of analysis. If
in so-called structural analysis (Macherey’s example is Roland Barthes) there

precisely … the knowledge’. rc, p. 43, emphasis in original. Similarly, in ‘On the Materialist
Dialectic’, Althusser writes, in terms that directly invoke the epistemology of Jean Cavaillès
and Gaston Bachelard, that ‘a science never works on an existence whose essence is pure
immediacy and singularity (“sensations” of “individuals”) … A science always works on
existing concepts’. Althusser 2005, p. 184.
28 Macherey 2006, p. 6.
29 Macherey 2006, pp. 8, 10, translation modified.
30 Macherey 2006, p. 13.
31 Macherey 2006, p. 85, translation modified.
32 Macherey 2006, p. 87.

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what is materialist analysis? 71

occurs a certain minimal fabrication of ‘the object of an analysis’, this nonethe-

less remains an empirically derived, immanent criticism, one that understands
the text as the utilitarian carrier of an encoded message, ‘its value lying in the
specific information that it transmits’.33 This interpretive rendering of a mes-
sage encrypted within the depths of the text requires a mere act of translation
to render its truth visible, decoded into the language of structuralism, reduced
into the form of a totalised structure of meaning ‘deposited in the interior of
the work’.34
Warren Montag has argued that in place of this structuralist hermeneutic,
the materialism of the textual object that Macherey calls for, on the model of
Spinoza’s critique in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, considers ‘writing, as a
part of nature in its materiality, as irreducible to anything outside of itself, no
longer secondary in relation to that which it represents or expresses, a repeti-
tion of something posited as primary’.35 This materialism of the textual object,
rejecting the hermeneutics of depth, attends to the pure textual surface in its
fully present materiality: ‘The work hides nothing, it holds no secret: it is fully
legible, offered to view, given up’.36
Any and every discursive text – and this emphatically includes Capital, as I
will argue in the next chapter – is thus for Macherey fundamentally incom-
plete, contradictory, and devoid of a coherent totality, a given whole whose
immanent meaning could be simply decoded and translated via the revelatory
logos of the critical operation. Macherey rejects any notion of the consistent
unity of a text, affirming instead its necessary ‘incompleteness and informity’.37
Analysis, in this view, consists not in revelation but in the production, as an
object of thought, of the discursive object in its internal décalage, this uneven
textual network of forces ‘corresponding’ to the work without constituting its
mere reflection.38 Criticism devoted to the work’s specious totality remains in
this view mere interpretation, the rendition of a principle that would conjure
the coherence of any such totality, the nominal identity of its unity, the reason
underwriting its harmony.39

33 Macherey 2006, p. 158, translation modified.

34 Macherey 2006, p. 159, translation modified.
35 Montag 1999, p. 5.
36 Macherey 2006, p. 111.
37 Macherey 2006, p. 88, translation modified.
38 Macherey 2006, p. 89.
39 Macherey 2006, p. 170.

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72 chapter 2

4 On the Inadequacy of the Structuralist Combinatory

These critiques of empiricism, hermeneutics, and totality necessarily culmi-

nate in Macherey’s comprehensive rejection of the notion of structure as total-
ity.40 In A Theory of Literary Production, Macherey systematically deploys the
critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism that had been patiently elabo-
rated in Althusser’s seminar and subsequent exchanges between the two since
1961. Warren Montag has described in revelatory detail the complex articula-
tions of this critique, in which, most notably, it is Macherey, Althusser’s aston-
ishingly precocious student, who identifies the contradictions in the master’s
presentation of the concept of structure in Reading Capital.41
Elements of this critique of structuralism were first elaborated in Althusser’s
1962–63 seminar on structuralism (in which Macherey participated), and in
Althusser’s 1963 essay ‘On the Materialist Dialectic: On the Unevenness of Ori-
gins’, collected in For Marx; there then ensued an exchange of letters between
Althusser and Macherey at the moment of the publication of the Reading Cap-
ital seminar in 1965 and again in 1966; and Althusser returned to the problem in
his essay ‘On Feuerbach’ from 1967. As Montag shows, the results of this discus-
sion, marked by Althusser’s self-contradictions, flashes of insight, backtracking,
and self-censorship, never amounts to a coherent, totalised presentation of
its object. After tracing an unpredictably inflected ‘prehistory’ of structural-
ism, from Edmund Husserl and Wilhelm Dilthey through Georges Canguil-
hem, Tran Duc Thao, and Jacques Derrida, Montag focuses in particular on
Althusser’s twofold rejection of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist method, as simul-
taneously comprising a transcendental idealism and empiricist functionalism.
For Lévi-Strauss, Althusser argues in the 1962 seminar, the universal ban
on incest identified by structural anthropology functions as a transhistorical,
transcendental category that grounds human identity in its singular manifes-
tations across time and space, determining the various possible kinship com-
binations (thus its description as a ‘combinatory’), in which the system of all
possible kinship structures remains ultimately grounded by ‘the structure of
the human mind’.42 Through the manifold historical variations of this combina-
tory, humans produce social forms in exhaustive divergence, but in accord with
a limiting structural determination of which they are unaware. This amounts to
the imputation on Lévi-Strauss’s part of a social unconscious, one that remains,

40 Macherey’s critique of totality will prove essential in my critique of Chris Arthur’s reading
of Capital in the following chapter.
41 Montag 2013, Chapters 3–5.
42 Lévi-Strauss, cited in Montag 2013, p. 68.

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what is materialist analysis? 73

in Althusser’s biting critique, ‘still a form of subjectivism that endows ‘society’

with the form of existence of a subject having intentions and objectives’.43 This
unconscious structure, hidden beneath the manifest content of social com-
portments, requires Lévi-Strauss to decode hermeneutically its form of con-
straint as the identity of infinite variation across time.
Structural anthropology thus manages to articulate a transcendental ideal-
ism – the hidden nature of which requires hermeneutical elaboration – to
which Lévi-Strauss appends in uneasy tension an even less satisfactory empiri-
cist functionalism. The latter, wholly inadequate, functionalist explanation of
the role of kinship becomes necessary for Lévi-Strauss, Althusser observes,
insofar as the transcendental structural combinatory can only identify the
admissibility of any given kinship combination within the compass of an
ungrounded series of otherwise arbitrary combinations. What the combinatory
remains unable to explain is the causal necessity governing any specific instan-
tiation, ‘why’, in Althusser’s summary rejection, ‘it is that this reality and no
other has become and therefore is real’.44 To address this problem, Lévi-Strauss
merely appends to the combinatory model a weak functionalism, referring the
variety of empirical kinship systems to the putative survival needs of any given
empirical group.45
In contrast to the Spinozist imperative to explain ends always by their nec-
essary causes, kinship structures are thus for Lévi-Strauss to be comprehended
and justified by the ends they serve. Althusser summarily rejects such an imagi-
nary explanation of the unconscious structuration of society as the mere impu-
tation of a spurious intentionality to a subject: in this case, neither God nor
Man, but instead Structure.46 The problem structural anthropology remains
unable to address is precisely that to which Spinoza’s epistemological under-
taking addresses its labours: to know adequately what constitutes the necessity

43 Cited in Montag 2013, p. 69.

44 Cited in Montag 2013, p. 68.
45 Montag 2013, p. 69.
46 In the famous appendix to Ethics I (a key text, moreover, for Althusser’s appropriation of
Spinoza), Spinoza’s example of such faulty reasoning from empirical effect backward to an
imaginary cause is that of a tile falling from a roof, which, in striking a passerby, is (neces-
sarily but inadequately) attributed to a vindictive deity by the imagination of the observer
of this empirical event. ‘Nature’, Spinoza trenchantly retorts, ‘has no end prescribed to it
[naturam finem nullum sibi praefixum habere] and all final causes are but figments of the
human imagination …. The doctrine of final causes turns Nature completely upside down,
for it regards as an effect that which is in fact a cause, and vice versa’. Spinoza, Ethics i, App.,
translation modified. See also Macherey’s insightfully detailed explication of this passage
in the final section of his analysis of Ethics I in Introduction à l’Éthique de Spinoza. La pre-
mière partie: La nature des choses (1998, pp. 205–70).

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74 chapter 2

governing any singular essence, without recourse to a transcendental formal-

ism of the combinatory.
To adequately grasp the necessity governing a text thus constitutes the chal-
lenge Pierre Macherey puts to a rightly conceived theory of literary production.
Althusser was never able to fully articulate a theory of structural causality, but
instead only managed to address his own theoretical hesitations and incon-
sistencies regarding the concept through the mere suppression of problematic
passages in the second, 1968 edition of Reading Capital, passages that Macherey
had initially brought to Althusser’s attention in their correspondence of 1965–
66.47 In contrast, A Theory of Literary Production articulates a systematic cri-
tique of the concept of structure: rather than merely rejecting the term out-
right, Macherey distinguishes inadequate conceptions of structure – depen-
dent upon notions of coherency, totality, functionalism, depth, and hermeneu-
tic translation – from its more adequate conceptualisation.
This more adequate understanding of structure is for Macherey to be indexi-
fied to (1) the Spinozist distinction between the work as an object of theoretical
(structural) knowledge and that same work understood empirically, under the
attribute of its material extension (as a tangible book one takes in hand to read);
(2) the necessary affirmation of structure qualified as the infinite incompletion
of any set without totality;48 (3) adequate understanding of such a notion of
structure without recourse to a hermeneutics of revelation, affirming instead
the immanent materiality of the text in its manifest articulations; and conse-
quently, (4) an unremitting faithfulness to writing, taken in its immediate, nec-
essary materiality, irreducible to any inherent, hidden meaning or intention.
Such are the propositions Macherey deploys in his discussion of structure
in A Theory of Literary Production. If the concept of structure allows for com-
prehension of the ‘type of necessity from which the work derives’, this necessity
can refer neither to a unity derived from the putative productive intention of an
author nor the formalist unification of the work via a transcendental theory of
totality.49 Structure is not to be discovered, as a bounded totality latent within

47 Montag 2013, Chapter 5.

48 In Hegel or Spinoza, Macherey cites Gilles Deleuze’s lapidary formulation of this key
proposition of a Spinozist materialist dialectic without totality: ‘Nature as the production
of the diverse can only be an infinite sum, that is, a sum that does not totalise its own
elements’. Macherey 2011, p. 195, quoted in Montag 2013, p. 187. Althusser will in fact take
on (without explicit attribution) Macherey’s critique of the notion of totality in the 1976
Essays in Self-Criticism, where he writes that ‘Spinoza served us as a (sometimes direct,
sometimes very indirect) reference: in his effort to grasp … a Whole without closure, which
is only the active relation between its parts’. Quoted in Morfino 2015, p. 93n11.
49 Macherey 2006, pp. 45, 55, translation modified.

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what is materialist analysis? 75

the hidden depths of the work, but is instead constituted in the very absence of
a coherent totality of meaning, in the productive décalage and ‘real complexity’
of the constructed thought object.50 Analysis – truly adequate, materialist anal-
ysis of an object of knowledge – can in this view only refer to ‘the constitution of
a structure’, the interpretive act of structuration (structurer) as the demonstra-
tive deployment of elements, a process that paradoxically constructs the object
of knowledge in its infinite incompletion, as an ‘absence’ (of the whole).51 Such
an absence will attend to this incoherence, to the gaps and contradictions of a
text, as what Althusser had famously termed in Reading Capital a ‘symptomatic
[symptomale] reading’.52

5 Toward a Materialist Analysis of Form

In his 2006 afterword to the fortieth anniversary edition of A Theory of Liter-

ary Production, Macherey distils the question that, in hindsight, compelled the
book’s original intervention in 1966: ‘How was it possible to be simultaneously a
materialist and a formalist?’53 To this point, I have largely attended to this ques-
tion, addressing the book’s critiques of empiricism, hermeneutics, and totality,
culminating in Macherey’s critical diremption of inadequate from adequate
notions of structure, while leaving what is for me a key, unaddressed problem
of materialism itself in suspense.
It can seem immediately, intuitively obvious that Macherey, in accord with
Althusser and his fellow Althusserian Étienne Balibar, practices a ‘materialist’
form of analysis (in a materialist way, as the title of the 1998 Verso collec-
tion of Macherey’s essays puts it), and that, moreover, this practice is in some
way consonant with that of those thinkers Macherey has repeatedly addressed,
those whom Althusser called ‘the only materialist tradition’: Lucretius, Spinoza,
and Marx.54 To be sure, Althusser famously asserted that in the texts compos-
ing Reading Capital, if ‘we were never structuralists’, this is because ‘we were
Spinozists’, and in fact he further specifies that this entailed rejecting the ‘rela-
tion of adequacy between mind and thing, in the Aristotelean tradition’.55 In

50 Macherey 2006, p. 114.

51 Macherey 2006, p. 168.
52 See rc, p. 26. See also Young 2017, pp. 35–48.
53 Macherey 2006, p. 362.
54 See Althusser 1997, pp. 3–20. Macherey notes the crucial influence of Lucretius in
Spinoza’s elaboration of the appendix to Ethics i. Macherey 1997, p. 238.
55 Althusser 1976, pp. 132, 137, quoted in Morfino 2015, pp. 2, 4.

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76 chapter 2

the absence of a more explicit critique of the concept of materialist analysis,

however (and this is even more the case for Althusser himself), we are left to
construct such a concept from the diverse (Spinozist, Marxian) materials of
Macherey’s many analyses addressed to other, related problems.56 What then
is the relation between materialist critique, and the Althusserian proscription
of monist materialism (described in the previous chapter), in which imputation
of motive matter, as Althusser argues in his unpublished notes on a conversa-
tion with Stanislas Breton, constitutes one more form of transcendental ideal-
ism? More specifically, how are we to conceive a properly materialist analysis,
given the various Althusserian proscriptions described above against empiri-
cism, idealism, functionalism, the hermeneutics of depth, and totality, critiques
that, as we have seen, Macherey wholly subscribes to and even further clarifies
in A Theory of Literary Production?

6 Against Materialism, en matérialiste

Macherey will in fact address this problem in his 1981 essay ‘En matérialiste’,
to distinguish categorically between the process of materialist critique as the
science of causes and all forms of materialism.57 There he argues that all mate-
rialisms, including the Marxist construct ‘dialectical materialism’, are ‘theories
of matter’ to be rejected as such in their inherent idealism (in positing matter as
transcendent prime mover). Macherey does not argue this point in sustained
fashion, but instead punctually invokes Engels’s attempt to elaborate a ‘gen-
eral theory of movement’, the failure of which (‘this path led him nowhere, …
abandoning it in incompletion’) serves to indicate in abbreviated fashion the
impossibility of a coherent doctrine of materialism: ‘Engels’s aborted attempt
has produced an essential consequence: it is henceforth no longer possible to
be a materialist’.58

56 In La philosophie de Marx (2014, p. 98), Étienne Balibar observes in passing that in the
1845 Theses on Feuerbach, ‘Marx’s materialism has nothing to do with a reference to matter
[but is instead] a strange “materialism without matter” ’. Alberto Toscano has extrapolated
on Balibar’s suggestive comment in relation to Sohn-Rethel and I.I. Rubin’s analysis of
the value form, proposing that Marx’s subsequent analysis of the capitalist social form of
value constitutes precisely such a materialism, one in which, as Marx famously comments
in Capital, ‘not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values’.
Toscano 2014. See Marx 1976, p. 138.
57 Macherey 1999, pp. 87–113.
58 Macherey 1999, p. 88.

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what is materialist analysis? 77

In place of any and all doctrines of materialism, Macherey asserts in con-

trast the necessity of a properly ‘materialist dialectic, which must necessarily
culminate in a refutation of materialism as such’.59 Materialist critique, then,
necessarily takes the form not of the positive doctrine representing the object
of philosophy – since for Macherey like Althusser, philosophy has no preex-
isting object – but instead takes the form of an intervention within a field of
thought; not a representation of reality, materialist critique constructs instead
a critical orientation within the attribute of thought: ‘Neither doctrine, the-
ory, nor knowledge [savoir], but a mode of intervention, … the philosophical
field apprehended in the concrete complexity of its internal conflicts’. Materi-
alist critique, in this view, is materialist in the sense of a real intervention, an
‘objective practice of intervention’ within the domain or attribute in which it
operates.60 Macherey draws the full implications of this materialist position, in
which the critique of the real as a science of necessity that intervenes to dis-
place and weaken the hold of ideology, given sufficient force, can serve to pro-
duce a new disposition of potentia. It necessarily enacts this operation within
the attribute of thought, ‘without having to find beyond itself [au-dehors] the
instruments and criteria that could allow it to test [éprouver] and measure its
power, its capacity effectively to act in the terrain of reality which it has never
left’.61

7 Reading Capital as a Theory of Literary Production

In the wake of his key contribution to Reading Capital, Macherey has in his pub-
lished work only occasionally returned to the analysis of Marx’s magnum opus,
most notably and extensively in the talk he gave on 13 July 1967, at Cérisy-la-
Salle during the conference ‘Le centenaire du Capital’.62 Macherey’s discussion
of the object of analysis in Capital in both these texts (as is the case in A Theory
of Literary Production) closely follows the series of imperatives first presented
in Reading Capital and reiterated in Theory: Macherey argues that Marx’s epis-

59 Macherey 1999, p. 88.

60 Macherey 1999, p. 89.
61 Macherey 1999, p. 96.
62 Macherey 2012. Macherey’s 13 July talk was followed immediately by that of Étienne Bal-
ibar, titled ‘La Science du “Capital”’, both of which are immediately followed in the pub-
lished version of the proceedings by some thirty pages of rich and often polemical discus-
sion with the other members of the colloquium. Thanks to Étienne Balibar for calling my
attention to this volume.

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78 chapter 2

temological procedure in Capital constitutes the refusal of empiricism, ide-

alism, hermeneutics, communication, genesis, and transcendental notions of
totality.
To read Capital adequately, ‘to escape from the empiricist myth of reading’,
requires, Macherey reiterates, a ‘theoretical reading, constructing at each step
its novelty, elaborating its principles. Reading so conceived is a theoretical prac-
tice: it produces in effect an effect [en effet un effet] of knowledge’.63 The result
of such a reading of Capital will be, he argues, an adequate understanding of
the ‘systematic’ nature of Marx’s work, an ‘organisation that depends upon the
laws of theoretical rigor’. That said, the rigorous theoretical organisation of Cap-
ital that Macherey identifies in this talk, as he had in his earlier chapter from
Reading Capital, by no means implies that Capital forms a coherent totality;
on the contrary, Capital, like the literary works that constituted the object of
Theory, is subject to ‘a strict incompletion [inachèvement]’, an incompletion
that calls upon its reader to ‘develop the logic proper to’ Capital.64 Macherey’s
critique of the notion of totality in Capital is uncompromising: ‘We can even
say’, Macherey continues, ‘that the enterprise of a total or ‘totalising’ reading
is ideological in its essence: it lies at the root [au principe] of all revisionisms,
which are absolute by vocation …. A scientific text can only be taken up on
the condition of being continued: a closed, repetitive reading is itself an ide-
ological reading’.65 Macherey then continues in this vein to reiterate various
subsidiary themes from Theory of Literary Production, here applied to the read-
ing of Capital, including the critique of all commentary, and the mere aesthetic
delectation of texts.66
As Althusser had before him in the passages of Reading Capital discussed
above, Macherey reiterates the constructed, nonempiricist nature of the object
of thought.67 Macherey furthermore rigorously adheres to Althusser’s primary
distinction between the constructed object of analysis (Marx’s Gedankenkon-
kretum) and reference to the ‘real’, substantial order of being. It is in this
sense then that Macherey will assert that ‘the real [le réel] subsists outside
of thought and preexists it. This difference between the real and the thought
[le pensé] must be understood so as to avoid expression in a new form of

63 Macherey 2012, p. 54.

64 Macherey 2012, p. 55.
65 Macherey 2012, pp. 57, 61.
66 Macherey 2012, p. 60.
67 ‘Scientific discourse has been produced as a new reality …. Knowledge is a reflection only
of itself’. Macherey 2012, p. 61.

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what is materialist analysis? 79

empiricism that would conclude that thought is the emanation or mechanical

reproduction of the real’.68
While this last point constitutes a further reiteration of the anti-empiricism
of Theory of Literary Production and Reading Capital, Macherey suddenly
injects a properly Spinozist clarification of this critique, a point crucially miss-
ing, I argued in the previous chapter, from Althusser’s dualist presentation in
Reading Capital. Not only must an adequate reading of Capital reject all empiri-
cism, Macherey reminds his listeners in terms that echo those of the 1965 essay
‘A propos de la rupture’ cited above, now addressed explicitly to Capital itself: it
must further refuse all forms of neo-Cartesian dualism, drawn between thought
and a material order of extension in the sense of two distinct substances: ‘Nor
can it [scientific discourse] constitute a dualism in which thought is exterior to
the real, such that it would be necessary to think the coexistence of two inde-
pendent orders’.
At the same time, it (scientific discourse) must bear some clear distinction
from the material order. If ‘science is the science of the real’, it involves no mere
‘transposition’ or elaboration of a reflective, ‘allegorical object’. Science involves
‘the institution of another form of reality. It is the production of a new real that
is the thought real [le réel pensé] … The thought real is not the real considered
from another point of view, the interpreted real; it is the real transformed’.69
While Macherey here reiterates Spinoza’s distinction between the real and the
idea of the real, the terms of Macherey’s rejection of Cartesian dualism already
point forward to his further discussion of Spinoza’s concept of the attributes in
Hegel or Spinoza, along with its further development and interpretation in his
systematic and powerful critique of so-called parallelism and the proper under-
standing of the famous proposition 7 of Ethics ii, ‘The order and connection of
ideas is the same thing as the order and connection of things’ (Ordo et connexio
idearum idem est, ac ordo, et connexio rerum).

68 Macherey 2012, p. 55.

69 Macherey 2012, p. 64. my emphasis. Macherey is emphatic in his elaboration of this point
in the ensuing discussion: ‘A science is defined by an object that is constructed accord-
ing to a definition – not [empirically] by an object given by reality [la réalité] – and by
functional rules …. The object of Capital is an object constructed theoretically, and this is
precisely why Capital is not a formal system. If we were to read it as a closed system, this
would constitute an interpretive reading, a repetition and reprisal of a completed system
…. Marx did not record [in Capital] the theoretical results spontaneously issued from a
historical “experience”’ (Macherey 2012, pp. 92, 93).

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80 chapter 2

8 Materialism in a Spinozist Way

The initial Althusserian formulation of a materialist dialectic lies, I wish to

argue, immediately at hand in the texts of esoteric texts of high ‘Althusserian-
ism’ of 1965–67: the ‘Notes on Discourse’ (discussed in the previous chapter),
and Macherey’s lesser-known ‘A propos de la rupture’ and ‘Lire Le capital’.70
In essence, and to reiterate and further develop the position of the previous
chapter, this is to claim that Althusser’s famous general proposition in Reading
Capital on the subterranean Spinozism of philosophy (Spinoza’s ‘radical revo-
lution was the object of a massive historical repression. … The history of phi-
losophy’s repressed Spinozism thus unfolded as a subterranean history’) holds
true for Althusserian epistemology itself, in which Spinozist thought functions
as an occasionally acknowledged but never adequately explicated theoretical
foundation.
In the wake of their combined Spinozist critiques of the subject-object
logic of empiricism, of expressive totality, and of the functionalist combina-
tory of structuralism, for Althusser, Macherey, and Balibar and in contrast to
the imprecision of many Hegelian readers of Capital, in the Spinozist episte-
mology that avowedly underlies their various analyses of Capital, there is in
fact no substantial distinction to be made between the constructed, a posteri-
ori ‘object’ of materialist analysis and that of analysis itself.71

70 Under this category of high Althusserianism I would include not only the published vol-
umes For Marx, Reading Capital, A Theory of Literary Production, and Macherey and
Balibar’s contributions to the Cérisy colloquium ‘Le centennaire du Capital’, but also the
various exchanges of the Groupe Spinoza and related texts such as Althusser’s 1966 ‘Sur
Lévi-Strauss’ in Althusser 1994. On the Groupe Spinoza, Alain Badiou has reflected: ‘The
Groupe Spinoza was a group composed by Althusser, with some friends of Althusser, all
reading Capital practically, engaged in the project to write a sort of synthesis of our epis-
temological convictions. The idea was to produce a fundamental book concerning theory:
concerning what theory is, what constitutes an epistemological rupture and so on; to pro-
pose something like an educational book concerning all these sorts of themes. All that
was destroyed by 1968 and, after that, by very strong political differences and struggles’.
Badiou 2017, p. 25.
71 As Althusser famously wrote in the 1972 Essays in Self-Criticism, ‘If we were never struc-
turalists, we can now explain why: … we were guilty of an equally powerful and com-
promising passion: we were Spinozists [nous avons été spinozistes]’. Quoted in Morfino
2015, p. 2. Vittorio Morfino points to the decisive influence Spinoza brought to bear on
Althusser’s 1965 reading of Capital: ‘The reference to Spinoza … is fundamental with
respect to three decisive questions in the Althusserian re-reading of Marxism: the process
of knowledge, structural causality, and ideology’. Morfino 2015, pp. 2–3. For an outstand-
ing, often critical and always informative recent example of the ongoing effort to read
Capital as a palimpsest of Hegel’s Logic, see Moseley and Smith 2015.

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what is materialist analysis? 81

The pseudo-problem of an object that materialist analysis would represent

is an inadequate, imaginary fabulation, once one accepts instead that sub-
stance is indivisible, that the infinite attributes constitute, immediately, the
expression of substance and its infinite modes as the determinations of those
attributes, and that, above all, the order of ideas is one and the same thing as
the order of things (‘Ordo, et connexio idearum idem est, ac ordo, et connexio
rerum’). To conceive of materialist analysis in terms of a substantial distinc-
tion and representational correlation between analysis and its object is, from
a Spinozist perspective, inadmissible; it is to reintroduce precisely the Carte-
sian dualism of substances (between extension and the intellect) that Spinoza
systematically criticises.
Judging by his powerful (private) critiques of Althusser’s presentation of the
concept of structural causality in the first edition of Reading Capital, Macherey
seems to have developed a reading of Spinoza even more rigorous and system-
atic than Althusser’s by 1965 at the latest, a reading that clearly determines
the theoretical propositions of A Theory of Literary Production.72 It is only in
his writings since Hegel or Spinoza, however, that Macherey has fully expli-
cated the interpretation of Spinoza that can retrospectively be said to deter-
mine the epistemology of the high-Althusserian texts of 1965–67. In Hegel or
Spinoza, and above all in the second volume of his explication of the Ethics,
Macherey reads Spinoza’s demonstration of the formal structure or order of
the attributes to constitute the singular essence of a materialist critique of the
real.
Rejecting point by point the Hegelian misreading of Spinoza in Hegel or
Spinoza, Macherey affirms that, for Spinoza, the following propositions hold
true:
1) The (infinite) attributes of substance cannot consist in a linear and count-
able or ordinal sequence (i.e., the attribute of thought, plus the attribute
of extension, plus all the other infinite attributes). ‘The unity of sub-
stance is thus not an arithmetic unity …, an empty form of the One ….
It is this infinitely diverse reality that comprises all its attributes and that
expresses itself in their infinity …. One can no more count substance than
one can count its attributes, at least if one renounces the point of view of
imagination …. To say that there is a single substance is to speak from the
imagination that can only consider the absolute negatively, from nothing-
ness, that is, from the part of the possible, which it envelops’.73

72 Montag 2013, Chapter 5.

73 Macherey 2011, pp. 99, 104.

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82 chapter 2

2) That the attributes do not coexist in ordinal relation implies in turn that
they do not consist of elements defining one another as a totality through
their negative relation. ‘If all the attributes together belong to substance,
constituting its being,74 they do not coexist within it as parts that would
adjust to each other to finally compose the total system. If this were so,
the attributes would define themselves in relation to each other through
their reciprocal lack’.75
3) This further implies that substance itself cannot be divided up into its
various (infinite) attributes, but is instead indivisible. ‘To think the infi-
nite, whether it be in the attribute (in a kind) or in substance (absolutely),
is to exclude any notion of divisibility; substance is entirely complete in
each of its attributes (because it is identical to them), just as, moreover,
all extension is in each drop of water or all thought is in each idea …. The
infinite is not a number; this is why it evades all division. Indivisible sub-
stance is not the sum of all its attributes’.76
From these propositions Macherey then concludes that the relation of the
attributes is one of unitary (rather than comparative, negative) identity: ‘As
an attribute of substance, thought is identical to everything and therefore has
nothing above it, but the sequence through which it is realised poses, at the
same time, its absolute equality with all other forms in which substance is also
expressed, and these are infinite in number’.77
We then come to what must count among Macherey’s most radical inter-
ventions in the field of thought, his seemingly scholastic reading of Spinoza’s
proposition eiip7. The so-called parallelism of the attributes (a term that
Spinoza never uses in any of his writings, and which Macherey attributes to
Leibniz), Macherey shows conclusively, is quite simply ‘inadmissible’. This must
be the case, Macherey argues, if one reads the wording of proposition eii7
attentively: in the statement ‘Ordo et connexio idearum idem est, ac ordo, et
connexio rerum’, Spinoza identifies the order and connection of ideas as not
the same as the order of physical bodies in extension, but rather the same as
that of ‘things’ (rerum), of all things without distinction, including, of course,
ideas themselves: ‘The word things [res] absolutely does not, in a restrictive
way, designate the modes of the attribute of extension, but the modes of all
the attributes, whatever they are, including thought itself …. This is one and the
same order, one and the same connection’.78

74 eip10s.
75 Macherey 2011, p. 100.
76 Ibid.
77 Macherey 2011, p. 74.
78 Macherey 2011, p. 106, emphasis in original.

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what is materialist analysis? 83

Macherey will subsequently, in his magisterial explication of Book ii of the

Ethics, further develop and refine this absolutely decisive critique of the notion
of ‘parallelism’, to affirm in its place the more adequate understanding of the
relation of the order of the attributes as a complex unity.79 To do so, Macherey
first repeats his assertion from Hegel or Spinoza summarised above, to the effect
that Ethics iip7 must refer to the substantial coherence (as opposed to a paral-
lel identity) of the order of ideas and the order of things, further specifying this
assertion, based first on grammatical and then apodictic determinations.
Grammatically, in the phrase ‘Ordo et connexio idearum idem est, ac ordo,
et connexio rerum’, the masculine/neutral adjective idem cannot be argued to
apply to the feminine connexio. The phrase ‘is the same as’ (idem est ac) there-
fore cannot be said to apply to a (‘parallel’) relation between two ‘independent
sets [ensembles]’, but instead qualifies a single substantial order as identical to
itself. From this, Macherey concludes that the proper translation of Spinoza’s
proposition should be ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same thing as
the order and connection of things’.80
This assertion finds its immediate confirmation in the demonstration of
proposition 7, which points to its axiomatic basis in the initial axiom 4 of de
Deo, the meaning of which is eminently clear: ideas are subject to a single, iden-
tical order that holds for all things.81 In sum, Macherey concludes,

Proposition 7 of de Mente does not affirm the extrinsic identity between

two systems of order and connection facing each other, one of which
would be the order of ideas and the other that of things bestowing on
these ideas their objects, these things being themselves identified uni-
laterally as bodies. Instead, proposition 7 proposes that the order and
connection inheres in its proper, intrinsic constitution to that by which
all things in general are governed [soumises], and from which nothing dis-
tinguishes it.82

79 Macherey 1997, pp. 71–81. I insist on this development in Macherey’s 1997 volume, which
as of this writing is, like the other four volumes in the series, unavailable in English transla-
tion. Not only does it constitute the most developed explication of Macherey’s substantial-
ist, Spinozist materialist critique, but, moreover, the 400-plus pages of this crucial second
volume of his explication are currently out of print even in the French original. All trans-
lations from this volume are mine.
80 Macherey 1997, p. 71. Macherey’s analysis of this famous proposition of the Ethics strongly
resonates with that of Martial Geroult. See Peden 2014, p. 158.
81 Macherey 1997, p. 72.
82 Macherey 1997, p. 73.

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84 chapter 2

For Spinoza, in Macherey’s reading, the order of causality of ideas is literally

‘the same thing’ as the order and causality of all things, including ideas; there
is, in other words, only one order and causality of things, which can be differ-
entially apprehended through an infinite number of attributes, insofar as those
attributes are in fact different means by ‘which the intellect perceives substance’
(though humans only have access to two, thought and extension).83 To argue
otherwise in the sense of a ‘parallelism’, Macherey insists, would be to reinstate
a Cartesian dualism of thought and extension taken as distinct substances (pre-
cisely as Althusser had done in Reading Capital via the imperfect distinction
between thought and the real): ‘The ‘parallelist’ reading of proposition 7 rein-
scribes the Spinozist doctrine in a dualist perspective, explaining all of nature
through the relation of extended substance and thought substance’.84

9 On Telling Stories

In contrast to Macherey’s minute attention to the letter of Spinoza’s text,

Althusser offers little concrete analysis of Spinoza’s formulations, but instead
proposes at various moments a number of laconic, even enigmatic, one-line
definitions of materialism.85 It is thus possible to orchestrate, in counterpoint
to Macherey’s attention to Spinoza’s demonstrations, the suggestive promise
of Althusser’s allusive materialist critique. It would take a volume in itself to
address Althusser’s various reiterations and critiques of the related problems
of historical and dialectical materialism, of the materialist turns in Marx’s phi-
losophy, of the relation of materials of production to the capitalist mode of
production, and the like. The ‘aleatory materialism’ of Althusser’s final period
poses similarly complex problems of interpretation beyond the scope of this
chapter, which we might sum up in saying that in turning to Lucretius and Dem-
ocritus in his now-famous 1982 essay, Althusser distances himself on crucial
points from the Spinozist materialism of the 1960s and 70s with which I am here

83 eid4. Read 2007, p. 511.

84 Macherey continues to drive his grammatical point home: ‘For this [parallelist] reading
to be possible would require that, in the enunciation of the proposition, not only would
the neutral singular idem [thing] have to be replaced by the masculine plural iidem sunt,
but also that the term corporum [bodies] be implicitly substituted for the term rerum’.
Macherey 1997, p. 72.
85 As Vittorio Morfino notes, ‘The works published in [Althusser’s] lifetime include only
a handful of brief references to Spinoza – none longer than a paragraph. And neither
his extensive posthumous work nor his archived writings [with two exceptions Morfino
notes] contain texts dedicated to Spinoza’. Morfino 2022, p. 82.

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what is materialist analysis? 85

concerned, and even more decisively from Macherey’s categorical rejection of

all doctrines of materialism and corresponding attention to the explication of
Spinozist text as a materialist critique.86
Leaving aside the circularity of the definition Althusser offers in lecture 3
of Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (the ‘materialist
character’ of science is characterised, as to its object, by ‘an external object with
a material existence’) along with other definitions that merely equate material-
ism with an adequate scientific practice,87 in The Future Lasts Forever, Althusser
offers the following definition of materialism: ‘“Not to indulge in storytelling”
still remains for me the one and only definition of materialism’.88 Though
Althusser makes no mention of Spinoza in this passage, ‘to resort to mere sto-

86 One striking example of this incongruity is Althusser’s assertion in ‘The Underground Cur-
rent of the Materialism of the Encounter’ (1982) that ‘for Spinoza, the object of philosophy
is the void’. This is not simply a ‘paradoxical thesis’, as Althusser observes; it is quite simply
antithetical to Spinoza’s explicit and extensive critique of the concept of the void in Book i
of the Ethics. The free-floating associations of Althusser’s argument culminate weakly in
the metaphorical (rather than ontological) conclusion that Spinoza asserted ‘the void that
is philosophy itself ’. Althusser 2006, p. 178, italics in original. In fact, Macherey shows that
Spinoza, reaffirming Descartes’s critique, decisively rejects the atomism of the Ancients
as fully inadequate, imaginary representation, to explicitly affirm instead that ‘matter is
everywhere the same [materia ubique eadem est] in its substantial principle’. Macherey
1998, p. 124. ‘Corporeal substance’, Spinoza writes unambiguously, ‘can be conceived only
as infinite, one, and indivisible’ (41 eip15Sch). Macherey consequently reads these pas-
sages in proposition 15 of Book i and its Scholium as ‘the affirmation of a plenitude [of
substance] leaving no place for void, absence, or negativity …. Substance is thought reality
in the intense intimacy of its self-relation … such that nothing else, not even nothingness
… can disturb its infinite positivity …. To conceive of extension as constituted of distinct
parts is to deny its infinity’. In contrast to the Ancients’ imaginary depiction of atoms in
a void, ‘only the intellect’, Macherey concludes, ‘is apt [en mesure] to understand that the
materiality of extended substance is given at once as an indivisible totality’. Macherey
1998, pp. 128, 129. Althusser’s related, imagistic redeployment of the thesis of the paral-
lelism of the attributes in ‘Materialism of the Encounter’ – which Althusser claims ‘fall in
the empty space of their determination’ (Althusser 2006, p. 177) – repeats the philosoph-
ical commonplace of so-called parallelism that Macherey subjects to such extensive and
compelling critique in both Hegel or Spinoza (ch. 3) and his analysis of proposition 7 of
Ethics ii, discussed above.
87 Althusser 1990, p. 135. In Reading Capital, following Lenin, Althusser affirms that ‘In the
expression “historical materialism”, “materialism” means no more than science, and the
expression is strictly synonymous with that of “science of history” ’ (rc, p. 360). Althusser
will reiterate this definition, for example in ‘Lenin and Philosophy’: ‘Historical material-
ism thus means: science of history’, and again, in modified form, in ‘Lenin before Hegel’,
where he refers to ‘the materialist thesis of the material existence and of the objectivity
of scientific knowledge’. Althusser 2001, pp. 23, 83.
88 Althusser 1993b, p. 221.

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86 chapter 2

rytelling’ neatly encapsulates the principal assertion of Spinoza’s appendix to

Ethics i, upon which many of the arguments of this book are grounded: that
reasoning inadequately from effects to causes is the basis of imaginary, ideo-
logical thinking. Materialism, in contrast, would thus implicitly seek always to
argue from the adequate understanding of causes to the effects they produce.
In his 1985 text ‘The Only Materialist Tradition’, Althusser proposes another
enigmatic yet even more auspicious definition of materialism: ‘Nominalism
is not the royal road to materialism but the only possible materialism’.89 Here
again, it lies far beyond the scope of this chapter to distinguish Althusser’s
flat assertion that nominalism is ‘the only possible materialism’ from the innu-
merable accreted historical senses of nominalism, from the diverse critiques of
universals and abstract objects as well as corresponding assertions of the real-
ity of particular objects and of concrete objects. Instead, I propose merely to
summarise the Spinozist construct Althusser’s assertion is meant to encapsu-
late.
In the third section of ‘The Only Materialist Tradition’, in which this def-
inition of materialism appears, Althusser – in the course of a broad reflec-
tion on the centrality of Spinoza to his thinking – turns to his interpretation
of Spinoza’s third genre (genus) of knowledge, the ‘intuitive science [scien-
tiam intiutivam]’ that Spinoza characterises as ‘the adequate knowledge of the
essence of things [adaequatam cognitionem essentiae rerum]’.90 In Althusser’s
usage in this passage, the term ‘nominalisms’ (in the plural) refers precisely
to such singular essences of things, things comprehended as ‘singularities’.
Such singularities are to be distinguished from Spinoza’s second genre of mere
common or abstract universal notions (notiones communes), such as motion
and rest taken as universal characteristics of all bodies in extension; these are
explicitly, for Althusser, ‘generic and not “general” constants’. In Althusser’s
reading, Spinoza’s invention of an adequate materialist (‘nominalist’) knowl-
edge is thus held to encompass his discovery of ‘generic constants or invariants
… which arise in the existence of singular “cases”’. Equally, it is their generic-
ity as constants of any singular case that allows for what Althusser revealingly
calls, in clinical terms with psychoanalytic resonance, their ‘treatment’, as dis-
tinct from any empirical or experimental verification.91

89 Althusser 1997b, p. 10.

90 eiip40s2.
91 The constants diagnosed in any singularity ‘do not constitute the object of a will to veri-
fication in an abstract renewable experimental dispositive, as in physics or chemistry, but
whose repetitive insistence permits us to mark the form of singularity in presence and,
therefore, its treatment’. Althusser 1997b, p. 8.

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what is materialist analysis? 87

If a common notion or law would constitute an abstract or general universal,

the constant arising in a given instance (a symptom in the analysand or patient,
for example) allows for the adequate analysis and treatment of that case in its
‘nominalist’ singularity: no universal treatment is proper for the singularity of
every case, and yet the analyst must construct an adequate knowledge of its
causes and not be misled by mere surface impressions (the manifest content of
the dream, say, or the visibility of bodily symptoms) that threaten to be inade-
quately attributed to imaginary causes. Such attention to constants, moreover,
holds in Althusser’s view for any singular being, for example a people (the Jews,
in Spinoza’s analysis in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) or what Althusser
calls a ‘social singularity’ (the critique of the capitalist social form in Marx, or
political revolution for Lenin).92
Following this elaboration, along with a brief excursus on the ttp and
Spinoza’s ‘philosophical strategy’ of ‘taking over the chief stronghold of the
adversary’,93 Althusser then concludes his presentation with the affirmation
of Spinoza’s materialist ‘nominalism’ quoted above. The attribute ‘nominalist’
thus redeploys the critique of transcendentals that Althusser and Macherey
had articulated in their parsing of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism in the 1960s, dis-
cussed above: ‘Without ever sketching a transcendental genesis of meaning,
truth, or the conditions of possibility of every truth, … [Spinoza] established
himself within the factuality of a simple claim: “We have a true idea”’.94 The
‘nominalist’ materialist thus passes beyond the universal generality of common
notions, of transcendental guarantees (such as Lévi-Strauss’s kinship order or
discourse in Gilles Deleuze’s problematic definition of structuralism) to artic-
ulate instead the generic necessity determining any singular essence.95
This final step then brings Althusser to define, in eminently clear and dis-
tinct terms, the fundamental Spinozist proposition that should be seen retro-
spectively to constitute the essential order of Althusser and Macherey’s episte-
mology in their works from 1965–67: ‘This factual nominalism was rediscovered
– and with what genius! – in the famous distinction … between the ideatum and
the idea, between the thing and its concept, between the dog that barks and the
concept of the dog, which does not bark, between the circle that is round, and
the idea of the circle, which is not round, and so on’.96

92 Ibid.
93 Althusser 1997b, p. 10.
94 Althusser 1997b, pp. 10–11.
95 On Althusser and Macherey’s critique of Deleuze’s famous text, see Montag 2013, pp. 96–
100.
96 Althusser 1997b, p. 11.

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88 chapter 2

What Althusser names his ‘nominalist’ materialism in this late, 1985 text
might indeed be more properly termed an axiomatic, substantialist material-
ist critique. For the proposition that the order of ideas and of things is the same
thing is indeed an axiomatic proposition for Spinoza: its ground lies not in the
apodictic, synthetic demonstration of proposition 7 in Ethics ii, but instead in
the initial axiomatic foundation of Spinoza’s entire system. It is in precisely this
sense that proposition eii7 explicitly refers the reader back to Ethics i, axiom 4.
It is axioms 4, 5, and 6 of Ethics I that together constitute the fundamen-
tal epistemological order of an inherent, necessary identity between the two
orders or attributes of thought and extension. While axioms 3–5 of Ethics I
affirm the necessary structure of causality under both the attributes of exten-
sion and the intellect, it is axiom 6 that draws these together to affirm that
the true idea ‘must be in conformity with its ideate [debet cum suo ideato con-
venire]’.97 Macherey’s interpretation of this key axiom bears citing in whole, as
it is this statement that arguably should be taken to summarise the entire epis-
temological apparatus of Althusser’s and Macherey’s thought:

This axiom [EIAx6] takes up in a new perspective the general teaching

[enseignement] from the initial definitions and axioms [of Ethics i]: as the
thing is, so it is conceived, as well as the inverse: as the thing is conceived,
insofar as this is a true knowledge, so it is, necessarily. For every idea in the
intellect, insofar as it is true, that is to say, … well formed – since all ideas
are true in the intellect that understands them, and at the same moment
relates them to the ideate to which they are in a relation of conformity –
there necessarily corresponds a content given in reality.98

This position founds for Macherey a substance-based materialist critique, in

which the ‘real’ – an indeterminate, reflexively deployed category in Althusser’s
contribution to Reading Capital99 – stands plainly revealed in Macherey’s expli-
cation as neither mere sensuous materiality (empiricist, imagination-based
materialism) nor transcendentally finite totality (idealism); materialist critique
as the science of necessity constructs, in the attribute of thought, substance
itself, the infinite dynamic of the causa sui as ‘the process within which sub-
stance determines itself through the “essences” that constitute it’.100 This
substance-based materialist critique affirms that

97 EIAx6.
98 Macherey 1998, p. 61, my translation.
99 rc, p. 41.
100 Macherey 2012, p. 91.

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what is materialist analysis? 89

thought reality and extended reality coincide in the absolute being of sub-
stance, where they are only distinguished by the intellect. … There is just
as much materiality, no more nor less, in reality envisaged from the per-
spective [angle] of the mental as when envisaged from the perspective
of the bodily. … Mental reality is a reality unto itself [une réalité à part
entière], whose elements, ideas, are materially existing things, no less con-
sistent, in their own order, than those that materially compose extended
nature.101

10 The Persistent Problem of the Attributes

I have dwelled on Macherey’s critique of the so-called ‘parallelism’ of the

attributes in part because what Macherey calls the ‘problem of the attributes’
is perhaps as actual as ever. In a recent text on ‘The Althusserian Defini-
tion of Theory’, Alain Badiou identifies in Althusser’s ‘Introduction’ to Read-
ing Capital what he, Badiou, reads as an explicit reference to, and rejection by
Althusser of a Spinozist ‘parallelism’ inhering between the thought-concrete
[Gedankenkonkretum] and the real.102 Jean Matthys has made the same claim –
i.e., that ‘Althusser goes so far as to oppose a central point of Spinozist doctrine:
the ‘parallelism’ of the attributes’ – arguing that this so-called ‘parallelism’, this
supposedly ‘central point’ of Spinoza’s thought which is claimed by Matthys to
lie ‘at the heart of the entire Spinozist doctrine’, despite being a term he never
uses (it being the invention of Leibniz), constitutes a ‘resurgence of an idealist
tendency in Spinoza’. This is the case, Matthys argues, insofar as the concept
of the unity of substance, what Matthys calls ‘this monism’ (and ‘parallelism’
is indeed a monist concept), stands as the guarantee that assures the identity
of the order and connection of the attributes.103 I wish to argue, against both
Badiou and Matthys, that when carefully read, Althusser’s claim (‘The produc-
tion process of the object of knowledge takes place entirely in knowledge and
is carried out according to a different order, in which the thought categories
which ‘reproduce’ the real categories do not occupy the same place as they do
in the order of real historical genesis’)104 is an eminently Spinozist position,
one that implies not a rejection of Spinoza, but its clarification, as a theory of
finite, contingent structural causality without a priori ontological guarantee.

101 Macherey 1997, p. 5.

102 Badiou 2017, pp. 21–34.
103 Matthys 2023, pp. 281–4.
104 rc, p. 41.

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90 chapter 2

Initially, Badiou flatly and problematically affirms the identity of the

Althusserian ‘real’ with Spinoza’s substance: Althusser’s is for Badiou ‘a
Spinozist vision’ in which ‘we have the real … understood as the Spinozist sub-
stance, that is, the totality of what exists’. This seems a blatant misreading of
both Spinoza and Althusser. There are in any world both actually existing singu-
lar things and nonexistent things (such as eternal, atemporal ideas), a distinc-
tion Spinoza clearly develops in Propositions 8 and 9 of Ethics ii. Althusser’s
‘real’, absent any definition, I am arguing, indicates not merely Badiou’s ‘total-
ity of what exists’ but the set of all things, existent and nonexistent, in a given
world. To equate Spinoza’s substance, however, with ‘the totality of what exists’
makes even less sense, since Spinoza defines substance not as an actually exist-
ing thing or even all things, but only as ‘that which is in itself and is conceived
through itself’; Althusser himself avoids the term ‘substance’, given the term’s
reifying, monist implication as an emanant source and guarantee of the order
of being, and refers in its place only to ‘structural causality’.
Immediately following this statement, moreover, Badiou appears to relapse
into the very Hegelian dualist misreading of Spinoza that Macherey criticises
in Hegel or Spinoza, referring not to an infinity of attributes in the Spinozist
system, but only two: ‘There exist two attributes within the totality: think-
ing and what is not thinking’, which, in Althusser’s case, Badiou figures as
‘the knowledge-object, completely inside thinking, and the real-object, com-
pletely inside the real’. Badiou, as did Hegel, thus reverts to the Cartesian
dualism that Spinoza was at such pains to reject.105 Badiou immediately dis-
qualifies this dualist position, however, asserting that these two attributes are
in fact for Althusser ‘not the reproduction of a metaphysical dualism, but
simply two attributes of the same generality … the expression of the same
order’.106 Badiou nonetheless seeks to make a distinction between Althusser
and Spinoza, where none in fact exists: ‘For Althusser [unlike Badiou’s Spinoza,

105 In The Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel, to ground his accusation of Carte-
sianism in the Spinozist system, voices an astounding misrepresentation. Here is Hegel:
‘Spinoza’s philosophy is the objectification of that of Descartes, in the form of absolute
truth. The elemental thought of Spinoza’s idealism is this. What is true is quite simply the
one substance, whose attributes are thought and extension. … What comes second after
substance is the attributes. … Substance has only two attributes, Thought and Extension’
(Hegel, cited in Macherey 2011, pp. 82–3). Even the most casual reader of Spinoza must be
shocked at this extraordinary omission by close readers such as Hegel and Badiou, since
Spinoza affirms unambiguously and repeatedly that substance is comprised not of two
but of an infinity of attributes (eip11), of which humans perceive only two, thought and
extension.
106 Badiou 2017, p. 32.

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what is materialist analysis? 91

the reader is led to assume], there is no isomorphism, no parallelism, no rela-

tionship point by point between the two [attributes]’.107 The problem here is
double: Badiou wrongly adheres to the philosophical commonplace of
Spinozist ‘parallelism’ of the attributes, and thus misinterprets Althusser’s real
and explicit rejection of parallelism as a rejection of Spinozism. This stands
in contrast to Macherey’s immanent and more authoritative reading, which
rejects the commonplace of Spinozist ‘parallelism’ as both a literal misreading
of Spinoza’s text and the extraneous attribution of a term and concept, paral-
lelism, that Spinoza himself never uses.108
Badiou’s text thus becomes problematic in its specious distinction between
Spinoza’s solution to the relation of the attributes and that of Althusser in Read-
ing Capital. Here is Badiou: ‘[For Spinoza] there is no difference [between the
attributes], in some sense; they belong to the same order, but the same order is
expressed, is symbolised in two different forms. So there is no real problem of
the relationship between the idea and the thing: the idea and the thing are in
the same general order’. The confusion thus arises from Badiou’s assertion that
Althusser refuses the ‘Spinozist’ solution of ‘parallelism’.109
Badiou bases this claim for Althusser’s rejection of ‘parallelism’ on a specific
passage in Reading Capital, a passage Badiou cites with introjected commen-
tary and in ellipsis: ‘The production process of the object of knowledge takes
place entirely in knowledge [and so, Badiou interjects, completely within think-
ing] and is carried out according to a different order … which is different from
the real order of real genesis [… that organises] the process of production of a
given real object’.110 This is a passage that comprises, Badiou affirms, ‘a categor-
ical refusal of the Spinozist solution in which the two attributes are attributes
of the same order’.111
In Badiou’s reading of Althusser, the latter rejects the Spinozist substantial
identity of the order of the attributes: ‘For Spinoza, this problem does not exist
… because there is in fact no relationship between the two, because they are
of the same substance. But, for Althusser, the order is not the same, so there is

107 Ibid.
108 This is the case, with even less ambiguity, in the more recent Immanance des vérités: ‘Pour
Spinoza, … les relations de causalité entre les choses matérielles immanentes à l’attribut
étendue sont identiques – isomorphes – aux relations de causalité entre les choses idéelles
immanentes à l’attribut pensée. … On voit bien qu’ici la structure des attributs est ce qui
atteste, par isomorphie, l’identité invariable et suprême de la Substance.’ Badiou 2018b,
p. 377.
109 Badiou 2017, p. 32.
110 Badiou 2017, p. 41, my emphasis.
111 Badiou 2017, p. 33.

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in fact a real difficulty’.112 Here the real question is whether or not for Spinoza,
like Althusser, the ‘order’ of the attributes is nonidentical. Rather than pursuing
an immanent critique of Spinoza’s text,113 Badiou’s deus ex machina solution to
this putative problem is surprising, to say the least: ‘It is a difficulty, the solu-
tion of which is for Kant “schematism”, … precisely the mechanism by which the
formal organisation of the categories of knowledge are related to the external
existence, which we cannot know, of the world’.114 Badiou proceeds to sug-
gest an awkward admixture of Spinoza and Kant in his reading of Althusser to
resolve a (nonexistent) problem: ‘a mixture of the immanent Spinozist vision
of two attributes of the same real with this Kantian schematism. There is only
one real: it is not an ontological dualism, but instead we find two attributes of
the same substance but without parallelism, without identity of the order’.115
What Badiou here speciously presents as Althusser’s rejection of Spinoza’s
‘parallelist’ position (‘we find two attributes of the same substance but without
parallelism, without identity of the order’) is precisely that which Macherey’s
literal, grammatical reading of eiip7 has shown to be its actual proposition:
the attributes are not to be reified any more than substance. They are not two
things that can be compared point by point for their isomorphism, but are
‘that which the intellect perceives’ of substance (causality), remaining purely
and eternally heterogeneous: the concept of a circle is not round. How a neo-
Kantian schematism would mediate ‘two attributes of the same substance but
without parallelism’ remains unclear in this brief, ambiguous closing section of
Badiou’s (oral) text.116 What is immediately striking, however, is that Badiou, in
spontaneously reverting to a dualist understanding of the Spinozist attributes,
suddenly requires a Kantian solution to a problem (the ‘parallelist’ dualism of
the attributes) that Spinoza himself has criticised and superseded. The ‘mate-
rialist schematism’ that Badiou calls for is already rendered superfluous by
Spinoza’s own understanding of the attributes.
Analogous to his argument that Spinoza has already pre-empted Hegel’s var-
ious critiques, Macherey himself appears already to have anticipated Badiou’s
recourse to Kant in Hegel or Spinoza. ‘Through his critique of Cartesianism’,
Macherey writes in Hegel or Spinoza, ‘Spinoza invalidates, in advance, a Kan-
tian type of problematic of knowledge, posed in terms of the relationship of

112 Ibid.
113 eiip7.
114 Badiou 2017, p. 33.
115 Ibid.
116 The text originates from a talk Badiou presented at Princeton University, 6 December 2013,
at the conference ‘Reading Capital Today’.

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what is materialist analysis? 93

subject and object or form and content’, precisely the binary relationship that
it is the conceptual mission of Kantian ‘schematism’ to mediate.117 Badiou’s
importation of the Kantian schemata as deus ex machina in fact reintroduces
the Cartesian dualism of subject and object – what Althusser had provocatively
termed ‘the latent dogmatic empiricism of Cartesian idealism’ – that Spinoza’s
thought renders inoperative.118
Badiou takes Althusser at his word (‘The production process of the object
of knowledge takes place entirely in knowledge [… an order] which is differ-
ent from the real order of real genesis’) without questioning what the phrase
‘the real order of real genesis’ might mean. Judging from his initial claim (i.e.,
that Althusser’s ‘real [indicates] the Spinozist substance, that is, the totality of
what exists’), Badiou appears to assume that for Althusser the order of the real
indicates not the intellect’s apprehension of things via the attribute of sensu-
ous, temporal extension but substance itself, (mis)understood as a determinate
thing: as ‘the order of the real’.
It is worth citing Althusser’s proposition in whole, rather than Badiou’s trun-
cated version, because Althusser clearly bases his assertion of the heterogene-
ity of order not on the causal order of being qua being, but rather on the his-
torical, factual, sensuous existence of actually existing things, apprehended in
temporally determined extension:

While the production process of a given real object, a given real-concrete

totality (e.g., a given historical nation) takes place entirely in the real and
is carried out according to the real order of real genesis (the order of suc-
cession of the moments of historical genesis), the production process of
the object of knowledge takes place entirely in knowledge and is carried
out according to a different order, in which the thought categories which
‘reproduce’ the real categories do not occupy the same place as they do in
the order of real historical genesis, but quite different places assigned them
by their function in the production process of the object of knowledge.119

Althusser in this passage predominantly uses the adjectival form of ‘real’, such
that the term ‘real’ here clearly refers to factual, temporal events sensuously

117 ‘If for Spinoza’, Macherey continues, ‘the attributes are forms or kinds of being, or natures,
or even essences, they are certainly not forms in opposition to a content, any more than
they are predicates in opposition to a subject, or abstract categories in opposition to a
concrete reality that would remain outside them’ (2011, p. 86).
118 rc, p. 40.
119 rc, p. 41, my emphasis of the passages Badiou suppresses.

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94 chapter 2

apprehended (through what Spinoza calls the attribute of extension). The

question is thus whether Spinoza, like Althusser, asserts that the intellect’s
apprehension of things through the attribute of sensuous extension indicates
a different order (rather than an isomorphic, ‘parallelism’ of reified attributes)
compared to its apprehension of the causal order of things via the attribute
of thought. It is perfectly obvious that for Spinoza, as for Althusser, the ade-
quacy, and thus the order of things will be utterly heterogeneous between the
two attributes.
One immediately thinks of Spinoza’s example of the falling tile in the
Appendix to Ethics i: it is simply impossible, Spinoza asserts, for the finite
human mind adequately to understand the causality that determines the tem-
poral, historical crash (or miss) of a given stone on a given day on a given
passer-by’s head, simply because the chain of causes is infinite, even in this
minimal, simplest example of a ‘historical’ event (and the ‘production pro-
cess’ of, in Althusser’s example, ‘a given historical nation’ would of course be
infinitely more complex than that single tile). But why did the wind blow, and
the stone fall that day, and the man pass at that time? ‘And so they will go on
and on, asking the causes of causes, until you take refuge in the will of God –
that is, the sanctuary of ignorance’. Any and all causal explanations of histori-
cal, temporal real things, what Spinoza calls actually existing singular things,120
are necessarily and inevitably inadequate, the attribution of imaginary causes
and ends.
In contrast, the universal and eternal ideas the intellect can construct of
nonexistent things,121 for example the common notion of the laws of gravity,
along with the singular idea the intellect can construct of the fall of that stone
as singularity within the parameters of those general laws (its weight, speed,
wind speed, angle of striking the passer-by’s head, etc.) will not explain why
that stone fell on that day on that head (one – inadequate and imaginary –
causal sequence) but how that singular event conformed to the general laws of
gravity, replacing the variables in the Newtonian formula with constants.
Badiou and Jean Matthys seem to assume that Althusser is making a general
statement regarding the universal structure of causality, when in fact it is quite
clear from his statement that he is contrasting the temporal forms of appear-
ance of actually existing things (‘the order of succession of the moments of
historical genesis’), with a thought construct. The former, Spinoza argues, will
always take an inadequate form due to the nature of empirical sense impres-

120 eiip8.
121 eiip9.

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what is materialist analysis? 95

sions, while the latter can be constructed adequately, without this implying that
this construction refer to the ontological, infinite nature of causality as such.
In fact, and despite his initial lapses in Reading Capital into an invocation of
the social ‘whole’ (which Macherey rightly criticised), Althusser almost entirely
avoids grandiose ontological statements on the nature of being, categorically
rejecting such idealism, for example in the unpublished text Philosophy for
Non-philosophers: ‘It is inordinately pretentious of idealist philosophy to claim
to “see” the whole, “think” the whole, or aspire to “totalisation”. What gives phi-
losophy this superhuman power?’122
In his truncated citation, Badiou does not cite Althusser’s key qualifying
phrase that supports the interpretation that Althusser is limiting his claim to
that of the order of actually existing singular things in their sensuous, tempo-
ral existence: it is precisely ‘the order of real historical genesis’ which is said
by Althusser to bear a different order from that of the adequately constructed
thought-concrete. Althusser’s example of such a ‘real historical genesis’ – which
again Badiou does not cite – is, precisely, ‘a given real-concrete totality (e.g., a
given historical nation)’, in other words, a phenomenal, temporal actually exist-
ing, singular (historical) thing. In the passage Badiou (partially) cites, it seems
clear enough that the term ‘real’ refers to the phenomenal order of appearance
of historical events as the intellect grasps them via the attribute of extension,
an order that is necessarily perceived in a manner limited and qualified not
only by the finite nature of human experience but above all by the inadequacy
of imaginary, ideological modes of thought.
This interpretation of Althusser’s admittedly ambiguous text is nonetheless
confirmed quite plainly in Althusser’s critique of historicism. Only a few pages
before the passage Badiou cites, Althusser argues that the order of ‘histori-
cal genesis’, necessarily suffers from the fetishistic inscription of ‘the illusion
of an immediate reading’, a necessarily symptomatic and compromised read-
ing of the fetishised document – whether the Bible, in Spinoza’s critique that
Althusser here refers to, or the fetishisation of the archival document in histori-
cist discourse more generally. Althusser moreover explicitly indicates Spinoza
as the originator of this critique of the fetishisation of the historical document:
Spinoza was ‘the first in the world to have proposed both a theory of history
and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate’.123
Spinoza’s critique of representation – in the final proposition 49 of Ethics
book ii, de Mente – ultimately implicates, in Macherey’s reading, the entire

122 Althusser 2016, p. 68.

123 rc, p. 15.

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96 chapter 2

sensuous order of images and words (as diverse, arbitrary and conventional
signifiers), an order necessarily subject to the confusion of the imagination. In
contrast, the necessity of the idea remains defined by the materialist order of
the intellect, in its necessity absolutely distinct from that of mere sonorous and
imagistic extension. Here is Macherey:

Ideas are themselves things, mental things, which … are not a sort of
doubling of reality, as are [for Spinoza] representations, images, signs,
and words. … By affirming that images and words are products of bod-
ily extension, and nothing more, Spinoza does not wish to say that they
have more reality or even materiality than ideas; rather … they are things
of an entirely different order. … This is why ideas are not reducible to repre-
sentations of things, as images and signs are, because, as ideas, they bear
a potential for reality and activity that is conditioned by the position they
maintain in the order of thought.124

In sum, historicist discourse, in its empiricist reference to the attribute of tem-

poral extension, necessarily lacks the means to an adequate analysis of the
‘structure of structures’ determining the phenomenal events that documentary
history merely registers. It must necessarily remain, in this view, inadequate to
the presentation of the causal necessity determining these empirical events,
no matter how finely rendered its representations of the archive.
Both Spinoza and Althusser assert the absolute heterogeneity of the
attributes; the attribute indicates not a thing (the order of extension) that can
be compared with another thing (the order of thought), but nonidentical ways
the intellect apprehends a single causal order. As such, it is perfectly clear that
for both Spinoza and Althusser, apprehension of the real via the attribute of
extension will be eminently inferior (and thus nonidentical to) its adequate
apprehension via the attribute of thought.
To take an example close to Marx’s critique of capital, the causal, temporal
narrative of an act of simple exchange, of, say, buying an apple at market, will
take a radically different form whether apprehended via temporal, sensuous
experience or common notions. The former, empirical apprehension provides
only an overwhelming mashup of sense impressions: I see the apple on the
stand; I automatically reach in my pocket for a coin; I touch and smell the apple
and feel the coin in my hand; the seller gives me a look for handling his mer-
chandise; I feel shame and anger and hunger and resentment; I reflexively hand

124 Macherey 1997, p. 392, emphasis added; see also Macherey 1994, p. 85.

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what is materialist analysis? 97

over the coin and take the apple and bite into it, tasting its tartness, etc., etc.,
in an infinite complex of phenomenal impressions, causes, and affects that are
factually real, but inadequately understood.
In contrast, Marx’s analysis of the capitalist social form might tell me that
at the level of common notions, in a society governed by general commodifi-
cation, the coin in my pocket is the necessary general equivalent form of value
that commands the exchange of things of value, adequately explaining how it
comes to be the case that handing over a piece of metal causes the seller to
hand me the apple; that the commodification of food and other necessities as
ongoing primitive accumulation enforces via the threat of starvation the social
command that all subjects of capital sell their labour power to capital in order
to have that coin in their pocket in the first place; etc.
Furthermore, at the level of an intuitive science of the singularity of this sit-
uation, I might conclude that the cause of the seller’s resentment is not my
touching the apple but the socially enforced sale of his own labour power,
which required him to arrive at the market in early morning freezing tempera-
tures to pay for his own necessities in order not to starve, etc. The point again, is
that a single, complex order of causality – substance as ordo et connexio – will
be apprehended in radically heterogeneous forms depending on the attribute
in question.
At the more abstract level of a grand historical narrative, Althusser argues
that it is Marx who relays the Spinozist invention of ideology critique, bringing
its force to bear upon the determinant social structure of modernity, capitalism:

Only from history as thought, the theory of history, was it possible to

account for the historical religion of reading: by discovering that the his-
tory of men, which survives in Books, is however not a text written on the
pages of a Book, discovering that the truth of history cannot be read in
its manifest discourse, because the text of history is not a text in which a
voice (the Logos) speaks, but the inaudible and illegible notation of the
effects of a structure of structures.125

To take an example from Capital, a temporal narrative representing the his-

torical development of an entity such as the universal equivalent, money, no
matter how detailed its discursive, archive-based representation, remains inca-
pable of adequately conceptualising and presenting the categorial necessity
governing this genesis, unlike Marx’s logical, categorial presentation of its cru-

125 rc, p. 15, my emphasis.

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98 chapter 2

cial function in a commodity-based society.126 The point is that it is only when

the object’s categorial necessity is adequately understood that the phenome-
nal, historical forms that that category takes on (in the case of money, as wages,
as prices, as profits, and all the subsidiary forms and instances of its appear-
ance) can be adequately understood in their identity with the concept of that
category.
In Part iv of Reading Capital, ‘The Object of Capital’, Althusser describes just
such a distinction, that of ‘the Marxist whole’ as a complex of heterogeneous
orders:

the Marxist whole … is a whole whose unity … is constituted by a cer-

tain type of complexity, the unity of a structured whole containing what
can be called levels or instances which are distinct and ‘relatively auton-
omous’, and co-exist within this complex structural unity, articulated with
one another according to specific determinations.127

This is precisely the heterogeneity inhering between the subjective, sensuous

perception of the flow of linear, homogenous time (what Althusser calls var-
iously ‘the historian’s empiricist practice [and the] ideological conception of
historical time’128) on the one hand, and the conceptual order of the categorial
presentation of capital on the other, the very heterogeneity Spinoza criticises
between the inadequacy of apprehension of phenomena via temporal exten-
sion and that of common notions and intuitive science.
My point is that this heterogeneity obtains only when considering actually
existing things from the distinct perspectives or attributes of sensuous human
perception and thought; understood from the materialist perspective of infi-
nite substance, contra Badiou, there is only one single order of causes, for
Althusser as for Spinoza. Althusser clearly summarises this conclusion (in a
passage Badiou notably ignores):

126 Jacques Bidet shows more generally in this fashion how Marx’s famous critique of the
fetishism of commodities in Volume i is systematically deployed at the level of the vari-
ous forms of appearance of capital in Volume 3, and that this development constitutes, in
other words, not merely a critique of ideological illusions (though it is of course that too),
but, in truly Spinozist fashion, a ‘theory of ideology’ that adequately renders the necessity
of these very forms of appearance for the system itself: ‘This is the very project of a theory
of ideology: to show what forms of consciousness are implied in the practice of its agents,
in relation to the function they occupy in the system that has been progressively defined’
in the course of the first two volumes of Capital (2005, p. 198, emphasis in original).
127 rc, p. 244.
128 rc, pp. 242, 244.

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what is materialist analysis? 99

The fact that each of these times and each of these histories is relatively
autonomous does not make them so many domains which are indepen-
dent of the whole: the specificity of each of these times and of each of
these histories – in other words, their relative autonomy and indepen-
dence – is based on a certain type of articulation in the whole, and there-
fore on a certain type of dependence with respect to the whole …. The
synchronic is eternity in Spinoza’s sense, or the adequate knowledge of a
complex object by the adequate knowledge of its complexity.129

Lacking this ultimate identity of the order of the thought-object and the order
of the real adequately understood as structural causality, the capitalist real as
the necessity of its ‘structure of structures’, beyond its various ideological, het-
erogeneous forms of appearance – as Badiou reads Althusser, that is to say –
there would be no point to Marx’s project of a materialist critique of political
economy, and the three volumes of Capital would constitute a mere idealist
exercise in the imagining of a hypothetical form of social existence.130
The point, then, is that while the mere historical forms of appearance of
social life under capitalism do indeed follow an entirely different order from
the adequately developed thought-concrete that is Capital, as a materialist cri-
tique, Marx’s analysis nonetheless ultimately allows for the comprehension
of the essential nature of capitalism as a causal structure existing only in its
effects, as one and the same order, one and the same thing, as a ‘structure of
structures’, whether grasped conceptually or in the necessity of its historical

129 rc, pp. 247, 255. ‘The structure of the whole is articulated as the structure of an organic
hierarchised whole … governed by the order of a dominant structure’ (rc, p. 245; lc,
p. 282). Macherey, as discussed above, will privately critique Althusser’s references to the
‘whole’ as superfluous and misleading, in terms that he then systematically formulates, as
noted above, in A Theory of Literary Production.
130 This is the mistaken empiricist/idealist position Engels adopts in his review of Marx’s
1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he writes that ‘The logi-
cal method of approach … is indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of
the historical form and of interfering contingencies. … Its further progress will be simply
the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the course of history’ (cited
in van der Linden and Hubman 2019, p. 4, my emphasis). Althusser summarises Engels’s
empiricist epistemology in the following terms: ‘Engels applies to the concepts of the
theory of history a coefficient of mobility borrowed directly from the concrete empirical
sequence (from the ideology of history), transposing the ‘real-concrete’ into the ‘thought-
concrete’ and the historical as real change into the concept itself’ (rc, p. 263; lc, p. 304). It
should be noted that though Engels does not seem to have ever read the notebooks com-
prising the Grundrisse, including Marx’s now-famous methodological introduction, Marx
was elsewhere perfectly clear about this question in passages Engels knew intimately, such
as the 1873 Postface to the second edition of Volume 1 (Marx 1976, p. 102).

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100 chapter 2

manifestations. This is not to read a multiplicity of orders against the measure

of ‘a single ideological base time’, nor necessarily to agree with Althusser that
that structure need be hierarchically ‘fixed in the last instance by the level or
instance of the economy’, nor especially that the capitalist social form consti-
tutes a single whole or totality, but, rather, to hold those diverse attributes of
Marx’s categories to the measure of the atemporal presentation of the absolute,
what Althusser rightly and unequivocally calls ‘eternity in Spinoza’s sense’.131
Badiou’s dualist reading of Althusser, in contrast, would return Reading Capi-
tal to the Cartesian, Kantian dualist idealism it categorically abhors.

11 Reading Capital in a Materialist Way

In anticipation of my analysis in the next chapter of Marx’s process of expo-

sition in Capital as a positive, materialist dialectic, I wish briefly to indicate in
conclusion a few of the implications Macherey’s Spinozist materialism contin-
ues to hold for a reading of Marx’s Capital itself. To be sure, Reading Capital
long ago brought to bear upon Marx’s masterwork, both explicitly and silently,
a multitude of the varied implications of the Spinozist critique; it must be said,
however, that in its wake, Spinozist readings of Capital remain exceedingly rare.
In light of Macherey’s subsequent extensive and infinitesimal articulation of a
Spinozist, materialist protocol for textual critique, a great many other impli-
cations of Spinozism nonetheless remain to be developed in contemporary
readings of Capital, a field that remains, for all its insight and vibrancy, over-
whelmingly determined by a negative dialectical and even Hegelian horizon.
Let me briefly indicate just three of these possible paths for reading Capital in
a Spinozist way, which will lead directly to the analysis of following chapter:
1. In his 1965 contribution to Reading Capital, Macherey already discerns
in Capital what he will subsequently, in Hegel or Spinoza, name a ‘positive
[Spinozist] dialectic’. In this long-overlooked yet insightful treatment of Marx’s
initial exposition of his concepts, Macherey argues that the movement of
Marx’s demonstration is governed by a number of logical ‘intermediaries’,
mediations that allow for a rigorous, apodictic demonstration of the initial
characteristics of the value-form in a demonstration that develops synthetically
rather than via dialectical Aufhebung.
Macherey argues in particular for the fundamental heterogeneity of con-
cepts such as wealth, use-value, and value, a heterogeneity that itself consti-

131 rc, pp. 244, 252.

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what is materialist analysis? 101

tutes ‘one of the fundamental conditions of scientific rigor’ (rc 188). The rela-
tions between what Marx calls the various ‘factors’ of the commodity and the
movement of Marx’s exposition occasion no procedure of dialectical Aufhe-
bung, Macherey argues, but Marx’s demonstration instead proceeds in a series
of synthetic ‘ruptures’ or leaps from one order to the next following the analyt-
ical exhaustion of each concept.
It is only in 1979, however, that Macherey will explicitly theorise this dialec-
tic without negation in the closing pages of Hegel or Spinoza. Macherey there
identifies in Spinoza a dialectic without subject, teleology, or negation. This
invocation of a positive, Spinozist dialectic puts in its place the logical subject
and its function of grounding all true propositions: ‘What Spinoza refuses to
think is the dialectic in a subject, which is exactly what Hegel does. [Spinoza]
poses the problem of a dialectic of substance, that is, a materialist dialectic
that does not presuppose its completion in its initial conditions through the
means of a necessarily ideal teleology’.132 In this manner, Spinoza limits the
principle of contradiction and its grounding in the subject to existences and
not essences. As such, Macherey concludes, Spinoza’s ‘theory of the subject’
pertains above all to the constitution of bodies in extension.133 This limitation,
moreover, holds for all bodies as such, not merely the human body, Spinoza’s
privileged example.
A Spinozist limitation of negative dialectic to existences can therefore serve
to ground a materialist analysis of the (actually existing) body of capital, an
analysis that starkly contrasts with all Hegelian idealism (Capital is no mere
reorientation of the Hegelian dialectic placed ‘on its feet’), an analysis in which
contradiction is strictly limited to the phenomenal features of the social forms
constituting the body of capital in its existence (in the form of actually existing
contradictions, between given forces and means of production, in the strug-
gle over the working day or the violent imposition of primitive accumulation,
and the like), while the essential nature of this social form (including the cru-
cial confrontational relation between capital and the proletarian owners of
labour power) will be adequately known by the intellect only as a thought-
concrete without negation.134 In this view, human social relations bear no
inner, essential drive toward their culmination in capitalism, as the imaginary

132 Macherey 2011, p. 170.

133 Macherey 2011, p. 175.
134 ‘In response to [Hegel’s] finalist conception that abstractly summarises an infinite
sequence of determinations in the fiction of a unique intention, we must substitute an
integrally causal explanation, one that does not take into account anything but the exter-
nal relations of bodies’. Macherey 2011, p. 177.

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102 chapter 2

doctrines of liberalism and neoliberalism would have us believe. Instead, as

Marx first argued in his presentation of so-called primitive accumulation, and
Ellen Meiksins Wood has further insisted, the historical body of capitalism is
composed through a fundamental and renewed system of constraint based
upon the methodical dispossession of the means of production and reproduc-
tion of the working class, to form a proletariat in the precise sense Marx gives
the term, through the existential, juridical, and regulated compulsion of human
bodies to compose themselves, in real subsumption, as subjects of the valori-
sation of value under capitalism.135
2. A positive dialectic, such as Macherey already discerns in the opening
pages of Capital in 1965 and subsequently articulates in Hegel or Spinoza,
requires for its adequate conceptualisation the synthetic mode of presenta-
tion that Spinoza upholds (more geometrico) against the Cartesian defence and
deployment of an analytic analysis. While Althusser defends Marx’s 1857 epis-
temological distinction between the thought-concrete (Gedankenkonkretum)
and the ‘real’ in Spinozist terms, a Spinozist synthetic mode of presentation
arguably determines Capital to an even greater and unsuspected degree, and
furthermore comes to displace the initial Hegelian negative dialectical formu-
lations of the Grundrisse in the actual drafts of Capital after 1861, as I will argue
in detail in the next chapter.
The Spinozist, positive dialectic that Macherey identifies in the most theo-
retically developed arguments in Capital136 implies that Marx’s increasing ten-
dency to deployment of a ‘positive’ dialectic throughout his manuscripts tends
to displace the less adequate, negative, contradiction-based Hegelian dialecti-
cal structure still visible in the earlier drafts of Capital.137 A contradiction-based
dialectic is in this view inherently inadequate for the comprehension of the
essential nature of capital, and moreover tends, in traditional, Left Ricardian

135 ‘Each part of the [Spinozist] body’, Macherey writes, ‘belongs to this global form that is
the body taken in its entirety, not according to its own essence, but in light of this external
liaison, whose transitive necessity is one of constraint, which holds together all the elements
…. The reason for this harmony is not found in an obscure predetermination of singular
essences that inclines them to converge all together toward a unique essence (an ideal
nature) but in the transitive relationship of determination that constrains them, provision-
ally, to associate’. Macherey 2011, p. 177, my emphasis. See Wood 2002 [1999]. On Marx’s
various definitions of the proletariat, see Nesbitt 2022.
136 Chapter 1 of Volume 1 is undoubtedly the section that Marx rewrote more than any other,
from the closing pages of the Grundrisse through the various drafts and editions, to Marx’s
final 1881 notes on his further intended revisions to volume i. On the latter, see Heinrich
2012, pp. 92–3; and also Heinrich 2021.
137 See the following chapter, as well as Bidet 2005, pp. 132–95.

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what is materialist analysis? 103

readings of Marx (on the model of Alexandre Kojève) to represent this nature in
the humanist form of subject-based, Hegelian conflicts – the struggle between
proletariat and capitalist, between forces and relations of production, or, as
a philosophy of praxis, that of a productive, conscious human subject whose
intentionality transforms and humanises nature.138 Such a negative dialectic
describes the development of the whole and its Aufhebung in a process guar-
anteed by the rationality of a subject, whether human, logical, or absolute. As
Macherey first indicated in Reading Capital, Marx’s Gedankenkonkretum – the
unfinished work-in-progress we know as the three volumes of Capital – con-
tains a fundamental, if largely invisible, synthetic mode of presentation of its
claims.139 The identification of various moments of a synthetic demonstration
in Marx’s argument remains crucial for more adequate construction of theo-
retical protocols for the reading of Capital.
3. Capital should be read in light of the Spinozist epistemology of the three
forms of knowledge: (1) imaginary; (2) via general or common notions; and as
Althusser reminds us, (3) in light of eternity, as ‘the adequate knowledge of a
complex object by the adequate knowledge of its complexity’.140 Each of these
modes of understanding has in turn its element of truth and necessity, though
only the third is fully adequate to the comprehension of its object.

138 See Kojève 1980. Among the key theoretical distinctions Marx analyses in the opening
pages of Capital (in pure abstraction from prices, capital, and the human owners of com-
modities themselves) is that between the production of wealth (in the form of use-values),
exchange-value, and value itself (rc, pp. 188–93). These fundamental categorial deter-
minations not only delineate Marx’s decisive break with Ricardian value theory (Marx
was not a Left Ricardian) but remained as well a distinction generally overlooked by the
productivist orientation of traditional, Leninist Marxism. On the concept of Left Ricar-
dianism – that is, the failure clearly to distinguish wealth from value and the consequent
promotion of the redistribution of that wealth rather than the overcoming of the capitalist
mode of production – see Murray 2002, pp. 250–2.
139 Jacques Bidet has insightfully identified crucial moments of what I am calling after
Macherey a positive dialectic in Capital. Implicitly developing Macherey’s precocious,
Althusserian identification of various nondialectical conceptual leaps in the opening
pages of Capital, Bidet points to the crucial movement from the concept of the commodity
to that of capital in Marx’s exposition (from part 1 to part 2, chs. 4–6) – a passage ‘devoid of
dialectical continuity, genesis, deduction, or transition – between the presentation, that is
to say, of C–M–C and that of M–C–M.’ Bidet describes this as an ‘isolated intervention’ at
this crucial axial moment of Marx’s argument, one in which contradiction (the apparent
impossibility that the exchange of equal values can nonetheless produce surplus value) is
not a matter of essence, but ideological existence, a merely apparent contradiction that
in fact shrivels away in the face of Marx’s synthetic presentation of the concept of surplus
value and valorisation in chapter 6. Bidet 2006, pp. 160–2.
140 rc, p. 255.

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104 chapter 2

An example of Marx’s deployment of the imaginary occurs, for example, in

his famous image of the ‘language of commodities’:

Everything our analysis of the value of commodities previously told us

is repeated by the linen itself, as soon as it enters into association with
another commodity, the coat. Only it reveals its thoughts in a language
with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to
tell us that labour creates its own value in its abstract quality of being
human labour, it says that the coat, insofar as it counts as its equal, i.e. is
value, consists of the same labour as it does itself’.141

Marx here supplements the synthetic analysis of the structure of capital as a

social form (the object of chapter 1 prior to the appearance of this passage)
with an imaginary figure, that of two animated commodities, a length of linen
and a coat, in an image that bears its own measure of truth and even necessity.
Marx seems to be telling his reader that the abstraction that is value must be
thought not only as concept but also vividly imagined, in the form of an ani-
mated manifestation in the concrete materiality that is the human symbolic
order. This dreamlike dimension of Marx’s critique is indeed one necessary
aspect of the object of Marx’s materialist analysis. Fredric Jameson has in this
sense identified the more general repetition of what he terms ‘figural demon-
stration’ as central to the stylistic apparatus of Capital, a rhetorical process to
which Marx repeatedly resorts in the attempt to represent to his reader the
immaterial, real substance of surplus value, abstract labour (in the above exam-
ple), or in another example Jameson develops, in the sense of the figuration of
‘separation’ that occurs in Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation.142
A second order of demonstration inherent in Capital, the one that I will focus
on in the next chapter, is its presentation of a structure of general notions or
categories, as what Marx calls the ‘value-form’, an order that, grasped in the
complexity of its general articulation, constitutes the ‘structure’ of capital in
the Spinozist sense of the synchronic that Althusser indicates.143 Marx’s con-
struction of this structure produces a general, universal exposition of the laws
of the tendencies of capitalist valorisation, accumulation, and reproduction.
Finally, Macherey’s thought demonstrates – with no contradiction in terms
whatsoever – that an adequately materialist analysis requires above all that we
learn to read Capital from the perspective of the eternity of the singular nature

141 Marx 1976, p. 143.

142 Jameson 2014, pp. 31, 81–93.
143 Marx 1976, Chapter 1.3, ‘The Value-Form’; rc, p. 255.

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what is materialist analysis? 105

of its object. Such a reading might take many forms; for this reader of Capi-
tal, it seems essential to take into account, for example, the full development
of Marx’s founding epistemological distinction between the production of sur-
plus value as a total mass and its subsequent distribution among many individ-
ual capitals in the manifest form of profit via competition, such as Fred Moseley
has systematically argued. While Marx famously defines abstract labour as the
substance of surplus value (‘The labour that forms the substance of value is
equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power’), we
might further say with Moseley that surplus value, as distinct from material
wealth, itself forms the general substance of capital.144
In this view, Marx abstracts from the temporal existence of production and
the phenomenology of individual labourers and capitalists, to present, at every
level of the increasing degrees of concretion that characterise his analysis in
Capital, a monetary analysis that might rightly be characterised via the eter-
nity of the concept (in the sense that Spinoza speaks of the adequate concept
of the triangle145): ‘Money’, Moseley writes, ‘is derived in the very first chapter
(Section 3) of Volume i, as the necessary form of appearance of abstract labour,
and from then on Marx’s theory is about quantities of money that represent,
and thus are determined by, quantities of labour time’.146
This in turn entails – as Moseley demonstrates in detail across Marx’s innu-
merable manuscripts – that Capital is constructed at two levels of determina-
tion: first, an initial determination of the production of a total mass of surplus
volume (its ‘substance’), and subsequently, in analytical terms, via the determi-
nation of the distribution of that mass of value among competing individual
capitals.147 Marx’s presentation, repeatedly invoking individual processes and
factors of production, is admittedly confusing on this point; Moseley convinc-
ingly argues, however, that ‘Marx’s theory in Volume i is about the total capital

144 Marx 1976, p. 129. ‘The most essential common property of all capitals [i.e., its “substance”]
… is the production of surplus-value’. Moseley 2017, p. 43. I bring this theoretical perspec-
tive to bear upon the concept of capitalist slavery in Nesbitt 2022.
145 ‘From the nature of a triangle it follows from eternity to eternity that its three angles are
equal to two right angles’. eip17s. It should be noted in the context of this argument, that
to indicate the movement of Capital from the abstract to the concrete is to grasp the ‘con-
crete’ not as the abandonment of an abstract conceptual order for that of an empiricist,
sensuous concretion but to invoke instead the meaning of ‘concrete’ closest to the Latin
concrescere, indicating the cohesion or growing together of parts into a complex mass,
compound, or composite (always remaining in the attribute of thought). Compare Bidet
2005, p. 174.
146 Moseley 2017, p. 9.
147 ‘The total amount of surplus-value must be determined prior to its division into individual
parts’. Marx, quoted in Moseley 2017, p. 46.

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106 chapter 2

and the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole, [even though]
the theory is [necessarily] illustrated in terms of an individual capital and even
a single, solitary worker …. Individual capitals are not analysed as separate and
distinct real capitals, but rather as representatives and ‘aliquot parts’ of the total
social capital’.148 As Marx himself writes, ‘In capitalist production [i.e., in Vol-
ume i], each capital is assumed to be a unit, an aliquot part of the total capital’.149
Here again, following Moseley’s analysis, we see the necessary inherence of all
three forms of knowledge in the adequate presentation of Marx’s object, even
including in his apodictic, synthetic analysis the imaginary figure of the ‘single,
solitary worker’.
Attention to the capacious brilliance of Pierre Macherey’s thought, from
Reading Capital and A Theory of Literary Production to his five-volume expli-
cation of Spinoza’s Ethics, necessarily draws the reader onward to interrogate
the general nature of materialist critique, such as Macherey has developed that
notion across the broad expanse of a life of theoretical analysis. No mere didac-
tic exposition of the Spinozist system, the writings of Pierre Macherey as a
whole construct for contemporary thought the adequate notion of a veritably
materialist analysis of the conceptual system of knowledge, both in its immedi-
ate forms of appearance as a symbolic system and in the eternity of its singular
concepts. Such, one might rightfully conclude, is the nature of Macherey’s the-
oretical project: to grasp the eternal in a materialist way. It is this imperative,
in turn, that will in the next chapter guide my analysis of Marx’s development
of a positive dialectic adequate to his world-historical critique of the capitalist
social form.

148 Moseley 2017, pp. 45–6.

149 Quoted in Moseley 2017, p. 46, Moseley’s insertion.

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 chapter 3

The Positive Logics of Capital: On Spinoza and the

Elimination of the Negative Dialectic of Totality
from Marx’s Revisions to Capital, 1857–1875

Pour savoir quelles étaient véritablement leurs opinions, je devais

plutôt prendre garde à ce qu’ils pratiquaient qu’à ce qu’ils disaient …;
car l’action de la pensée par laquelle on croit une chose, étant différ-
ente de celle par laquelle on connaît qu’on la croit, elles sont souvent
l’une sans l’autre.
descartes, Discours de la méthode

∵
The previous chapters’ discussion of Althusser and Macherey’s concept of
a materialist dialectic – not only in For Marx and Reading Capital, but in
many of their subsequent writings, published and unpublished, texts that at
times explicitly address Marx’s Capital, but more often do not – provides the
means now to return this theoretical position back to bear upon the logics
or what Macherey calls the ‘process of exposition’ of Capital itself.1 The plu-
ral of my chapter title (‘logics’) already indicates a crucial claim of my argu-
ment: that as opposed to the still-dominant view that Marx’s theoretical expo-
sition of the capitalist social form deploys a single negation- and contradiction-

1 Needless to say, in the scope of this chapter there can be no question of addressing the huge
volume of philological and genetic research into Capital since the 1960s. Here, I only hope to
extend Althusser’s and Macherey’s original epistemological propositions in Reading Capital
in the context of their later work and its reception, in particular in relation to the problem
of a Spinozist reading of Capital. For a summary of this broader discussion, focusing on the
Germanophone field and in particular the relation of Hegel’s Logic to Capital, see Heinrich
2009, pp. 71–98 as well as the entire contents of that outstanding volume more generally; and
Heinrich 2022 [1999], pp. 167–71; 2023, pp. 263–7. Heinrich summarises his own view on the
relation of Hegelian logic to Capital in the following terms: ‘For me, the most plausible con-
clusion is the following: from Hegel, Marx gained a precise perception of the difficulties of
presentation … but regarding Hegel’s notions and lines of argumentation themselves, there
is no application’ (2009, p. 75).

© The Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004703599_004

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108 chapter 3

based logic (i.e., a materialist version of ‘Hegelian’ logic), Capital instead imple-
ments a diverse multiplicity of logics.2 These include, predominantly, a post-
Aristotelean and Spinozist positive logic of implication that I will call additive
synthesis, which coexists with others that range from the imaginary-literary
and polemic invective, to the highly original materialist process that Althusser
names the determinate ‘positioning’ (la position) of concepts, and the related
procedure Macherey identifies in Reading Capital as the ‘exhaustion’ of con-
cepts.
Alongside these logics, remaining instances of a ‘Hegelian’, negative, contra-
diction-based dialectic, while existing in marginal passages such as Capital’s
supplementary, historical (as opposed to apodictic) Chapter 23, constitute
no more than a conceptually meagre theoretical relic of Marx’s intellectual
formation and habitus.3 Marx tendentially suppresses, in this view, the ini-
tially predominant negative dialectic of the Grundrisse, with only lingering
remnants increasingly relegated to the margins of Capital’s demonstration.
This occurs as a fundamental aspect of the ongoing process of revision that
Marx undertakes from his initial enquiries of 1857 to the final 1881 notes on
his intended, but never implemented, revisions for a third edition of Capital,
Vol. i.
Textual analysis of the various logics of exposition in Capital reveals, I wish
to argue, that the negation-based version of so-called ‘Hegelian’ logic that is
still widely referred to as Marx’s ‘dialectic’, is in fact the least significant of
these logics of exposition. More specifically, I wish to argue that Marx’s ini-
tial exposition of the concept of the commodity (in Chapter i of Capital) in
terms of an internal, constitutive contradiction [Widerspruch] between use-
value and exchange-value, and this even as late as the first, 1867 edition of Cap-
ital, proves an epistemological impediment,4 one that Marx overcomes through

2 An extreme example of the former position is to be found in Jairus Banaji’s essay ‘From
the Commodity to Capital: Hegel’s Logic in Marx’s Capital’, in which Banaji presents Marx’s
method of exposition as both static and unitary. Unitary since for Banaji every methodolog-
ical comment Marx made constitutes a moment of an expressive totality (‘It is obvious that
the methodological references express a consistent and internally unified conception’) and
static, since Banaji identifies examples of this univocal totality – among which Banaji freely
translates into Hegelese as necessary – from the 1841 dissertation to Volume ii of Capital, the
final manuscript on which Marx worked. Banaji 2015, p. 20.
3 On Marx’s complex appropriation of Hegelian thought from 1836–48, see Levine 2012.
4 I take the term epistemological impediment from Jacques Bidet, who makes an analogous
argument regarding Marx’s appropriation of Hegelian negative dialectic, but without specifi-
cally addressing this to the putative negative dialectical contradiction between use-value and
exchange-value in the concept of the commodity (Bidet 2005).

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the positive logics of capital 109

the articulation of a positive, materialist dialectical exposition without (onto-

logical, constitutive) contradiction.
My argument on this score is thus quite specific: it is certainly the case that
Marx continues to the end to identify real and crucial theoretical contradic-
tions in his predecessors, such as the conceptual inadequacies that mired the
classical political economists’ analysis of surplus value (i.e., as what he calls,
in chapter 5, ‘Contradictions in the General Formula [of Capital]’); it is also
certainly the case that Marx identifies real practical contradictions that render
capitalism as an actually existing entity necessarily prone, for example, to crisis,
via the contradiction between the contradictory systemic demands to reduce
variable capital costs while simultaneously assuring the realisation of surplus
value through, in part, the consumption of commodities by the working class.5
Instead, here I wish to argue that it is only the specific logic of Hegelian, nega-
tive dialectical contradiction that proves an impediment to Marx’s analysis and
exposition of the commodity and the capitalist social form more generally.

1 The Discontinuity of the Attributes

The position I present here crucially depends upon the fundamental Spinozist
distinction Althusser and Macherey sustain (described in the previous chap-
ters), between the attributes of thought and extension, attributes (along with
the infinite others to which humans do not have access) that in Spinoza’s view
remain absolutely and infinitely distinct – without, that is to say, being sub-
ject to their sublation in the Hegelian Idea of the Absolute Subject.6 Follow-

5 In a note Marx placed in his manuscript for Capital, Volume ii, he gives an example of this
practical form of contradiction: ‘Contradiction in the capitalist mode of production. The
workers are important for the market as buyers of commodities. But as sellers of their com-
modity – labour-power – capitalist society has the tendency to restrict them to their min-
imum price. Further contradiction: the periods in which capitalist production exerts all its
forces regularly show themselves to be periods of over-production; because the limit to the
application of the productive powers is not simply the production of value, but also its real-
isation. However the sale of commodities, the realisation of commodity capital, and thus of
surplus-value as well, is restricted not by the consumer needs of society in general, but by the
consumer needs of a society in which the great majority are always poor and must always
remain poor’. I take this example as well as the three-way distinction between theoretical,
practical, and (Hegelian) dialectical contradictions from Arash Abazari’s article ‘Marx’s Con-
ception of Dialectical Contradiction in Commodity’ (2019, p. 181). I will return to Abazari’s
argument below.
6 ‘Each attribute of one substance must be conceived through itself’ (eip10). Spinoza goes on
to develop this crucial point in the second section of Ethica: ‘As long as things are considered

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110 chapter 3

ing Althusser and Macherey, the theoretical object I seek to construct here
adheres to this Spinozist distinction, and addresses not the historical existence
and development of capitalism as a singular existing thing bearing real con-
tradictions, but only the logics or processes of exposition to be found in Capi-
tal.
Marx famously never wrote his proposed treatise on his dialectical method,7
and in its absence, the logics of Capital do not constitute an autonomous
‘method’, but exist only immanently, discernible through what Althusser called
their ‘structural causality’. This singular (as opposed to generalisable or even
universal) ‘method’ exists nowhere else than in its real effects, which is to
say, in this case, in the text of Capital itself, but in the state of a discursive
practice as opposed to an explicit theory of a ramified apodictic demonstra-
tion. This implies that to determine the logics at work in Capital, as I seek
to do here, requires constructing a theoretical object distinct from Marx’s lit-
eral demonstration of the capitalist social form, yet simultaneously insisting
that this object of analysis remains determined in its necessity by the material
object that is the finite discourse of Capital.8 This process, as what Macherey
calls materialist explication, stands opposed to the alternative fabrication of an
autonomous interpretation;9 the latter tends in contrast to disregard the materi-

as modes of thought, we must explicate the order of the whole of nature, or the connec-
tion of causes, through the attribute of Thought alone; and insofar as things are considered
as modes of Extension, again the order of the whole of Nature must be explicated through
the attribute of Extension only. The same applies to the other attributes’ eiip7Sch. These
assertions derive in turn from Spinoza’s initial propositions eip2–4, which together imply,
Macherey comments, that ‘the attributes of substance … can be distinguished without main-
taining [entretenir] relations between themselves’. Furthermore, Macherey continues, the
attributes are precisely ‘defined by the fact that they have nothing in common between them
and therefore do not reciprocally limit one another …. There is a mental reality as there is
a corporeal reality, each neither more nor less real than the other, and without reciprocal
relations [existing] between them’ (1998, pp. 75, 94, my translation).
7 Marx was quite clear that despite the decisive influence Hegel’s thought had on his intel-
lectual development, his own method was not Hegelian: ‘My method of exposition is not
Hegelian, since I am a materialist, and Hegel an idealist’ (Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann,
6 March 1868). In consequence, Marx famously wrote to Joseph Dietzgen in 1868 that ‘When
I have cast off the burden of political economy, I shall write a “Dialectic” ’.
8 ‘If knowledge is expressed in discourse, and is applied to discourse, this discourse must by
its nature be different from the object which it animated in order to talk about it. Scientific
discourse is rigorous because its chosen object is defined by a different order of strictness and
coherence’. Macherey 2006, p. 7.
9 Crucial to Macherey’s materialist analysis of texts, as discussed in the previous chapter, is his
systematic attempt ‘to replace interpretation (why is the work made?) by explication [explica-
tion] (which answers the question, how is the work made?)’ (2006, p. 84, translation altered).

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the positive logics of capital 111

alist determination of Marx’s actual text and to create in its place an (aesthetic
idealist) theoretical object (this, I will argue, is the case of Chris Arthur’s inter-
pretation of the logic of Capital).
An example may help to clarify this distinction between the logics of Capi-
tal and capitalism as a historically existing, contradiction-prone singular thing.
Just as the concept of the circle is not circular,10 the concept of negation is
not negative, nor is that of contradiction contradictory; both can easily be
defined positively and without contradiction. Bolzano, for example, defines
negation positively, as the formal statement ‘Proposition A has no truth’, while
Lalande defines contradiction without contradiction, as ‘The relation … that
exists between two propositions, in the form: “A is true” and “A is not true”’.11
Though Marx explains how as a lived, historical phenomenon the capitalist
social form produces a multitude of lived, practical and theoretical, i.e., merely
apparent contradictions, the concept of surplus value, in the adequate, positive
formulation it receives in Chapters 6 and 7, is not contradictory in the least.
It is this Spinozist distinction, between the logical process of exposition that
is the purely conceptual analysis of the capitalist social form in Capital, and
the finite, sensuous temporality of the capitalist real, that constitutes the key
epistemological proposition and militant theoretical intervention of Reading
Capital.
At stake in this book, however, is not merely this straightforward epistemo-
logical distinction, albeit one to this day all too frequently ignored in Marx-
ist criticism (including, ironically, by Althusser himself in ‘Contradiction and
Overdetermination’, as I argued in my Introduction). As already noted, I wish

10 ‘Spinoza … warned us that the object of knowledge or essence was in itself absolutely dis-
tinct and different from the real object, for, to repeat his famous aphorism, the two objects
must not be confused: the idea of the circle, which is the object of knowledge, must not be
confused with the circle, which is the real object. In the third section of the 1857 Introduc-
tion, Marx took up this principle as forcefully as possible’ (rc, p. 41, translation modified;
lc, p. 40).
11 Bolzano 2011 [1837], p. 299; Lalande 2010, p. 183. I cite Bolzano not only because of the
elegant simplicity of his positive definition of negation, a definition as devoid of psychol-
ogism as it is of dependency on the concept (negation) it seeks to define (petitio principii),
but also because, though Marx could not have known of his work, Bolzano has come to
be recognised, since his rediscovery by Husserl after 1893, as the crucial innovator in the
development of a positive and objective logic, a logic that he developed, moreover, via
explicit critiques of both Kant and Hegel’s positions. His relation to the theory of materi-
alist dialectic I discuss in this book is, moreover, crucial yet still underappreciated, both in
the explicit importance of his theory of apodictic demonstration for Jean Cavaillès, and
through the latter, indirectly for Althusser and Badiou in particular. I discuss Bolzano’s
importance for Badiou in the following chapter.

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112 chapter 3

furthermore to argue that Marx’s logical analysis of the concept of the com-
modity tends to replace a negative dialectical logic of exposition with a positive
one. This is to say that although Marx’s initial analysis of the commodity as
constituted by an internal, ontological contradiction (between use-value and
exchange-value) might well have been demonstrated (as it largely was in the
Grundrisse and the first edition of Capital) without contradiction, Marx fur-
thermore, at the level of his categorial exposition, comes to replace this nega-
tive dialectical logic with a more adequate, positive logic without (ontological,
constitutive) contradiction. The Hegelian logic of constitutive contradiction
can certainly be presented without contradiction; for all that, it may well have
proven inadequate to Marx for what Althusser calls his ‘apodictic arrangement
of the concepts [as] that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls
analysis’.12

2 Totality, Negation, Contradiction

To develop this position, to reprise an argument initiated in this book’s Intro-

duction, it is important to move beyond the inadequate formulation of Marx’s
dialectical (apodictic) method of exposition as a question of ‘Hegel or Spinoza’,
whether we take this conjunction in its differential sense, following Althusser
– as the either/or choice between two distinct modes of logical demonstration
– or, following Macherey’s argument in his book of that title, also in its connec-
tive sense, to suggest as well as the variegated unity of two modes of thought
indicated by these famous proper names. Hegel’s relation to Spinoza, for all its
real complexity, is no mere question of disavowal and misrepresentation. In
crucial aspects, Hegel explicitly and unambiguously reaffirms crucial aspects
of Spinoza’s epistemology.
Tellingly, Hegel makes a point of concluding his 1827 Preface to the Encyclo-
pedia Logic with the categorical statement that ‘It has been rightly said of the
true that it is index sui et falsi, but that the true is not known [gewusst] on the
basis of the false’.13 Repeating this ringing endorsement of the Spinozist posi-
tion in the body of his text, Hegel simultaneously appends to it a condemnation
of empiricist theories of knowledge dependent upon the adequation of subject
and object:

12 rc, p. 51.
13 Hegel 2010a, p. 21.

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the positive logics of capital 113

Usually we call truth the agreement of an object with our representation

of it. Thus we have an object as a presupposition, and our representation
is supposed to conform to it. – In the philosophical sense, by contrast,
truth means in general the agreement of a content with itself, to put it
abstractly.14

No less than for Spinoza and Althusser, for Hegel, the empiricist model of truth
remains radically inadequate and subject to ideological distortions: ‘From the
fact that immediate knowing is supposed to be the criterion of truth, it follows
that all kinds of superstition and idolatry are declared to be true’.15 Aligning
himself with the epistemological tradition from Aristotle to Spinoza, Hegel
likewise sustains, in his own fashion, the necessity of adequate demonstration
and apodictic judgements.16
While I argued in my Introduction that Althusser’s initial presentation of
Marx’s theory in For Marx and Reading Capital sacrificed analytical clarity on
multiple fronts to the demands of a situated theoretical polemic (i.e., slip-
page from the theoretical to the historical, the unqualified suppression of the
concept of substance, etc.), the extreme theoretical density and interwoven
complexity of Macherey’s contrasting argument in Hegel or Spinoza, seeking
to parse Hegel’s various (mis)readings of Spinoza through Spinoza’s own pro-
leptic responses to such positions and misunderstandings, is unnecessary fully
to rehearse here, since my object is neither Spinoza nor Hegel per se, but rather
Marx’s process of exposition in Capital. Instead, in the place of proper names, it
is important to focus on the specific logical operations Marx deploys in this pro-
cess. Thus, instead of vaguely contrasting ‘Hegelian’ and ‘Spinozist’ logics, I wish
more precisely to interrogate Marx’s process of exposition in Capital in relation
to three categories, all of which are as central to Hegel’s logic as they are ten-
dentially suppressed from Marx’s: totality, negation, and contradiction. I will
proceed by confronting one of the most influential and comprehensive recent

14 Hegel 2010a, p. 62.

15 Hegel 2010a, p. 121. ‘Truth in the deeper sense consists in this, that objectivity is identi-
cal with the concept’; ‘Correctness generally affects merely the formal agreement of our
representation with its content; however this content may be otherwise constituted. The
truth consists, by contrast, in the agreement of the object with itself, i.e. with its concept’
(Hegel 2010a, pp. 284, 246).
16 ‘In the apodictic judgement we have an individual that relates itself, thanks to its constitu-
tion, to its universal, i.e. its concept …. The truth has to prove [bewähren] itself precisely to
be the truth, and here, within the logical sphere, the proof consists in the concept demon-
strating itself to be mediated through and with itself and thereby also as what is truly
immediate’ (Hegel 2010a, pp. 134, 254).

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114 chapter 3

defences of a Hegelian reading of Capital – Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and
Marx’s Capital – with various moments of Pierre Macherey’s critique of these
Hegelian categories, at each step bringing this critique back to bear upon the
text of Capital itself in the desire not merely to counter neo-Hegelian readings
of Capital such as Arthur’s, but to further the interrogation and articulation of
Marx’s positive, materialist dialectic as it is deployed in his magnum opus, in
the wake of the Althusserians’ relinquishing of this project after 1967.

3 Totality

Marx’s Capital does not constitute an objective totality, whether we take the
term in its material, demonstrative, or logical sense. Such a position, I wish
to argue, follows imperatively both from Reading Capital as well as Pierre
Macherey’s general critique of the concept of totality in For a Theory of Liter-
ary Production (in which he does not discuss Capital explicitly). It also follows
directly from a comparison of the Grundrisse with the revised versions of Cap-
ital, from which the term Totalität almost entirely disappears. In Grundrisse,
the Hegelian concept of totality is vital and determinant, recurring nearly a
hundred times in Marx’s notebooks: ‘The conclusion we reach is not that pro-
duction, distribution, exchange, and consumption are identical, but that they
all form members of a totality [Totalität], distinctions within a unity’.17 By the
time Marx drafts and subsequently revises Capital Volume one in 1872, the term
totality only occurs twice, within a single citation from Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right, while in the 1875 French translation, the final version Marx oversaw, the
term totalité occurs just once in reference to the figure of a given sum (‘la total-
ité du capital employé’).18
This claim, to be sure, stands in direct contrast to the Marxist humanist
tradition since Lukács and Karel Kosík, as well as to the exponents of the
so-called systematic Dialectical reading of Capital such as Chris Arthur’s neo-
Hegelian position in The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital.19 In what follows,

17 ‘Das Resultat, wozu wir gelangen, ist nicht, dass Production, Distribution, Austausch, Con-
sumtion identisch sind, sondern dass sie alle Glieder einer Totalität bilden, Unterschiede
innerhalb einer Einheit’. Marx 1973, p. 99; mega ii.1.1 [1857–58], p. 35.
18 Marx mega ii.6 [1872], p. 184; Marx mega ii.7 [1875], p. 529.
19 Riccardo Bellofiore remarks that ‘A consensus among all the ismt [International Sympo-
sium on Marxist Theory] authors is that Marx is a systematic dialectician, that is, he pro-
poses the articulation of categories to conceptualise an existent concrete whole’. Bellofiore is
referring to Arthur, Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, Roberto Fineschi, Patrick Murray, and Fred
Moseley, along with himself. Though my own reading of Capital is heavily indebted to

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the positive logics of capital 115

I will develop this position as both a critique of Lukács’s original affirmation

and Arthur’s book, as well as immanently within Marx’s text. I do so in three
moments: first, by briefly recalling the Hegelian affirmation of totality; next,
through an equally brief critique of its Marxist inflection in Lukács’s 1921 essay
‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’ followed by an examination of Arthur’s
application of this Hegelian doctrine of totality to Marx’s Capital. This will then
allow for a consideration of the specific case of Capital and totality, in the three
senses just mentioned: as a material totality (whether Capital the book forms a
totality); as a demonstrative totality (whether Marx’s process of demonstration
in Capital constitutes a totality); and finally, whether the categorial critique of
Capital theorises a logical totality (in the sense Arthur affirms, that ‘Capital [the
social form, not Marx’s book] is a closed totality only in form’).20
The category of totality is central to Hegel’s doctrine of logic, and constitutes
one of the most familiar aspects of his systematic thought. The theme of totality
is crucial to the systematicity of Hegelian logic, and Hegel strongly underscores
this importance in the capstone of his thought, the Encyclopedia Logic.21 Hegel

the work of the ismt authors, this is obviously a shared position with which I take issue.
Bellofiore 2014, p. 167, emphasis in original. Among these authors, my critique of total-
ity is closest to that of Bellofiore, who stresses, like Macherey’s Spinoza (see below), the
perspectival, subjective nature of any actually existing totality: ‘In the section on repro-
duction, Marx was looking at capital relations from a point of view [of] the whole of the
capitalist class [and] the whole of the working class’ at which point we ‘abandon the per-
spective of the single capitalist and the single worker and look instead at the capitalist class
and the working class’ (Bellofiore 2018, pp. 379, 380, emphasis added). Another proponent
of the systematic dialectic school is Norman Levine. His book Marx’s Discourse with Hegel,
taking account of both recent Hegel scholarship and the mega2, offers a detailed and
comprehensive examination of Marx’s appropriation of Hegel’s thought, drawing atten-
tion both to those texts Marx read, and others he either ignored or which only became
available after his death, along with the diverse consequences of this complex disposi-
tif. Unlike the work of Bellofiore, Arthur and Smith, however, Levine’s probing analysis
is strictly limited to the years 1836–48, and thus does not address the process of exposi-
tion in Capital. See Levine 2012. In general, the Systematic Dialectic position can be said
to move backwards from the observed reality of Capital to fabricate its imaginary cause
– the Hegelian logical categories to be found in Grundrisse – as opposed to moving for-
ward from 1857 to follow Marx’s general tendency as the necessary replacement of many
of the logical categories and operations he took from Hegel with original, more adequate
concepts of his own construction, as I seek to do in this chapter, following Althusser and
Macherey’s Spinozist protocol for a materialist science of causes.
20 Arthur 2009, p. 175.
21 I will focus here on the Encyclopedia, since, in contrast to the more widely discussed Phe-
nomenology, Logic, and Philosophy of Right, each of which constitute only partial elements
of this system, the Encyclopedia is the only site in which Hegel systematically (if schemat-
ically) develops his system of thought as a totality. See Stein and Wretzel 2022.

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116 chapter 3

argued that a coherent and comprehensive philosophical doctrine required

systematic form, in the sense of its apodicticity, i.e., that all propositions be
rigorously derived one from another in a systematic and methodical demon-
stration. Furthermore, this systematicity necessarily implied for Hegel the cul-
mination of this demonstration (and thus his presentation of that system in the
Encyclopedia as the capstone of his life’s work) as a single closed system, one
that would comprehensively present the logical structures of the real (the Idea,
in Hegel’s jargon). As opposed to Spinoza’s absolute separation of the attributes
thought and extension, thought for Hegel sublates extensive reality (‘Nature’,
in the terminology of the Encyclopedia), such that in conceptualising the real,
thought is understood to think itself in schematising the determinations of the
natural world.22
This moment of sublation occurs in the crucial, final paragraph of the Ency-
clopedia Logic, which engenders the passage from the presentation of the sys-
tem of logic itself to that of the natural world as Idea: ‘The idea, which is for
itself, considered in terms of this, its unity with itself, is the process of intuiting
[Anschauen] and the idea insofar as it intuits is nature’. The idea, Hegel contin-
ues, is not a separate attribute through which to grasp an aspect of being, but
is ‘released’ from its containment in nature:

Yet the absolute freedom of the idea is that it does not merely pass over
into life or let life shine in itself as finite knowing [i.e., as mere logical sys-
tematicity], but instead, in the absolute truth of itself, resolves to release
freely from itself the moment of its particularity or the first determining
and otherness, the immediate idea, as its reflection [Widerschein], itself
as nature … This idea insofar as it is [diese seiende Idee], is nature.23

In Hegel’s understanding, philosophy itself forms a totality,24 its constructed

and reflected unity constituting a whole: ‘The science of [the absolute] is essen-
tially a system, since the true insofar as it is concrete exists only through unfold-
ing itself in itself, collecting and holding itself together in a unity, i.e. as a

22 For Hegel, the sublation of nature within the absolute idea necessarily maintains what
he calls a ‘real content’, that consists ‘only in its exhibition [Darstellung], an exhibition
that it [the concept] provides for itself in the form of external existence [Dasein]’. Cited
in Schülein 2022, p. 139.
23 Hegel 2010a, p. 303, emphasis added, translation modified.
24 ‘The history of philosophy presents only one philosophy at different stages of its unfolding
throughout the various philosophies that make their appearance …. the specific principles
each one of which formed the basis of a given system are merely branches of one and the
same whole’ (Hegel 2010a, p. 42).

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the positive logics of capital 117

totality [Totalität]’.25 In this manner, Hegel’s system depends upon the notion
of totality at all three levels indicated above: the three-volume Encyclopedia
constitutes a material totality, its pretension being to present the total system
of absolute knowledge – from its most abstract initial moment, to the most
concrete, the absolute idea – across the material expanse of its pages and the
discourse they convey; a demonstrative totality, the sequence of its argument
proceeding apodictically from each moment to that which it logically entails,
to demonstrate in sum the systematic unity of being in its totality; and, logi-
cally, the Encyclopedia presents the absolute idea as the rational totality of its
determinations.
More precisely, Hegel’s entire philosophical system consists in not just one
final totality (the absolute idea) in distinction to the contradictory inadequacy
of all its prior moments, but through the articulation of its various sections,
it articulates a sequence of totalities. This is to say that each determination
of being – from the first, most abstract determination of being and noth-
ingness as becoming, through to the complete and sufficient totality of the
absolute idea, along with the many other forms of determination Hegel con-
siders along the way (finitude, identity, etc.) – constitutes an aspect of the
totality of being according to a specific, determinate form. Hegel famously
visualises this as a system in which the totality of being, understood as abso-
lute idea, ‘presents itself as a circle of circles, each of which is a necessary
moment, so that the system of its distinctive elements makes up the idea in
its entirety. … Each sphere of the logical idea proves to be a totality of determi-
nations’.26
If each Hegelian determination of being, from the most abstract to the most
concrete, forms a totality, each of these (prior to the absolute) must further-
more be understood as ontologically constituted by its inner negativity and
inadequacy;27 each determination of being, in other words, is not simply a
totality, but stands as an inadequate or illegitimate totality, to adopt Michela
Bordignon’s terminology.28 This is to say that each logical determination or cat-

25 Hegel 2010a, p. 43, emphasis in original. Though Gesamtheit and Totalität are synonymous
in German, Hegel’s preferred term is Totalität, which appears 153 times in the Encyclopedia
Logic, while the former is used only once.
26 Hegel 2010a, pp. 43, 136.
27 ‘Everything actual contains within itself opposite determinations, and therefore know-
ing and, more specifically, comprehending [Begreifen] an object means nothing more or
less than becoming conscious of it as a unity of opposite determinations’. Hegel 2010a,
pp. 94–5.
28 Bordignon 2022, pp. 115–32.

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118 chapter 3

egory of being through which Hegel articulates his system of logic defines a
totality according to a certain form: being as it is perceived under the determi-
nation of quantity, of finitude, of identity, etc.
The key point, then, is that if Hegel’s analysis of being under the attribute of
identity, or any other determination, constitutes a totality (the totality of being
grasped via the concept of identity), this totality must necessarily, insofar as
it refers to the totality of being, refer as well to the definition of identity itself
as an element of this totality.29 If each logical totality constitutes a set, then
the immediate consequence to be drawn is that each and every one of these
sets (i.e., each of Hegel’s logical determinations of being) is ‘illegitimate’ in the
familiar sense of Russell’s paradox: in Bordignon’s terms, ‘each logical determi-
nation denotes a set of which it is a member, and thus refers to itself’.30
Hegel’s familiar example of the contradictory logic of identity makes this
paradox apparent.31 Being, when grasped under the attribute or determination
of identity, constitutes a totality – and since the definition of the absolute as
a determinate totality necessarily includes the definition of identity, this set
refers to itself (the concept of identity) as well. That identity is identical to
itself (necessarily, according to its definition), however, implies, as Hegel shows
in the doctrine of essence, that it is different from, not identical to, what it is
not, namely, difference. Its difference from difference is thus not merely exter-
nal, but gives identity its self-identity, making it a member of the set of all being
grasped under the determination of identity. And yet, since its difference from
difference constitutes in this sense, ontologically, the very identity of identity,
it can be said that the concept of identity necessarily, ontologically, contains
difference within itself. If this is so, then it cannot be a member of the set of
all being grasped as self-same, determinate identity without difference. Or in
Bordignon’s recapitulation: ‘Insofar as identity is identical with itself, identity

29 ‘The determination of the finite is the logical form of all there is insofar as all there is, is
finite. The determination of identity is a logical form of all there is, insofar as all there is,
is identical to itself …. If each determination is [therefore] a way in which all there is, is
defined, the determination has to define itself too. In this way, the content of each deter-
mination is a definition of all there is, including itself’ (Bordignon 2022, p. 122).
30 ‘Since the content of the determination defines a totality – all there is and all that is think-
able – according to a certain form, the whole content of this totality turn out to be inside
the totality and, at the same time, paradoxically, outside the totality itself’ (Bordignon
2022, p. 125). Alain Badiou founds his anti-Hegelian claim that there is no total universe
or world of worlds, but only purely multiple worlds each possessing its own logic, upon a
version of Russell’s paradox (2008, pp. 109–11). I discuss Badiou’s Logics of Worlds in Chap-
ter 5.
31 I take the example from Bordignon 2022, p. 124.

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the positive logics of capital 119

differs from difference and thus it involves difference in itself and transcends
the limit of the totality that it is supposed to define and that it is a part of’.32
Now, the interesting conclusion Bordignon draws from this presentation,
which simply translates the notion of Hegelian negative dialectic into the
language of set theory and Russell’s paradox, is that this ‘illegitimacy’ of all
Hegelian set theoretic determinations of being leads not to their ruination
(as it will for Badiou, for example), but rather constitutes the singular power
and dynamic source of Hegelian logic. Hegel, she argues, while not anachro-
nistically adopting set theoretical terminology, was nonetheless quite aware of
the contradictions governing such logical totalities, but simply rejected their
‘illegitimacy’ as a symptom of a specific, inadequate form of rationality, pre-
cisely one that could not incorporate such contradictions within its compass.33
Instead, Hegel affirmed such contradiction [Widerspruch], in its integral neces-
sity to the totality of the absolute idea, as a new form of logic, one precisely able
encompass such limited, determinate forms of totality, negation.

4 The Imaginary Presuppositions of Systematic Dialectics

At stake in this chapter cannot be a summary judgement of Hegelian logic as

such, nor abstractly to claim its absolute distinction from Marx’s various modes
of demonstration in Capital. As will become clear below, at certain moments,
Marx does depend upon precisely such a Hegelian logic of constitutive total-
ity, negation and contradiction (for example in the presentation of the concept
of the commodity in the Grundrisse and the first, 1867 edition of Capital). The
question instead must be to determine the multiple modes of demonstration
that Marx deploys in Capital through an explication of the text itself, with-
out invoking a transcendent, reified totality of which each of these moments
would be a determinate expression.34 This Althusserian analytical protocol, as

32 Bordignon 2022, p. 125.

33 Hegel shows, Bordignon concludes, that ‘Russell’s verdict on the illegitimacy of such total-
ities is neither universal nor necessary. In effect, his verdict is based on a specific under-
standing of logic and, more generally, on a specific understanding of thought, which Hegel
would relegate to the paradigm of understanding (Verstand)’ (Bordignon 2022, p. 126).
34 It is obviously well beyond the scope of this chapter to undertake such an explication in
its entirety, and I will focus here only on certain key passages: the opening paragraphs of
Capital, the concept of the commodity developed in Section Three of Volume i, and the
concept of the rate and mass of surplus value in Chapter 11. As I write, the standard for
such a comprehensive textual explication is set by Michael Heinrich’s 400-page, line by
line analysis of the first seven chapters of Capital in How to Read Marx’s Capital. Hein-

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120 chapter 3

the general rejection of the category of expressive totality, finds analogous iter-
ation in Macherey’s programme in Theory of Literary Production (discussed in
the previous chapter); at the same time, it stands in direct opposition to the
neo-Hegelian reading of Capital to be found in Chris Arthur’s The New Dialec-
tic and Marx’s Capital.
To confront these two influential readings of Capital then is at once to
choose between a reconstructive interpretation of the (Hegelian, negative dia-
lectical) logical form of Capital (Arthur) and the autonomous construction of
an analytic theory of Capital’s modes of demonstration and the necessity gov-
erning their organisation. At the same time, it is to clarify the decision drawn
between an understanding of Capital as a unified, totalised negative dialectical
object, in which each moment incompletely expresses this totality, and Capital
as a materialist structure of multiple logics and concatenated conceptual sin-
gularities without totality.35 In rejecting the inadequate nominal abstraction of
‘Hegelian’ vs. ‘Spinozist’ (or Marxian) logics, I choose to focus instead on three
aspects of Marx’s apodictic demonstration: totality, negation, and contradic-
tion. I begin with the problem of totality not only because it offers a stark and
radical contrast between Arthur’s and Macherey’s understandings of the pro-
cess of exposition in Capital, but even more because Arthur’s analysis of the
status of negation and contradiction in Capital crucially depends upon his ini-
tial assertion of the book’s status as a formal totality.
Chris Arthur’s influential 2002 book The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital
offers a sustained reading of the logic of Capital as what Arthur calls a ‘sys-
tematic dialectic’.36 By this, Arthur rightly seeks to distinguish this form of

rich’s analysis of Capital has been called into question by Fred Moseley in Marx’s Theory
of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation (2023).
What I take above all from Heinrich’s analysis in How to Read Capital, as will become evi-
dent below, is his demonstration of the additive, as opposed to negative dialectical nature
of Marx’s demonstration. Moseley’s critique of Heinrich in contrast addresses a problem
extraneous to the issue in question here, i.e., whether value is created by the exchange
of commodities (as Moseley reads Heinrich), or entirely in production itself (as Moseley
claims). I discuss this critique below.
35 The tendential fabrication of a mere interpretation, Macherey observes, seeks to reveal
‘the apparent expression of the unity of an intention or model that permeates and ani-
mates the work, bestowing on it life and the status of an organism. Whether this unity is
subjective (the result of an authorial choice, conscious or unconscious) or objective (the
embodiment of an essential device – a key signature, frame or model [or, for Arthur, the
ubiquitous logical device of the Hegelian negative dialectic]) the assumption remains that
it is the whole that is determinant’ (Macherey 2006, 45–6, translation modified).
36 Arthur has sustained and further specified his original analysis of the capitalist social form
in his more recent book The Spectre of Capital: Idea and Reality (2022), as well as in the

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the positive logics of capital 121

analysis as the attempt logically ‘to articulate the relations of a given social
order, namely capitalism’, from what he calls the ‘Old Dialectic’, the Soviet Stal-
inist ‘school of “Diamat”, rooted in vulgarised versions of Engels and Plekhanov’,
a tradition that, retaining Hegel’s teleological philosophy of history, has read
Capital as the historicist analysis of the origins and progression of capitalism
from so-called primitive exchange to the fully developed industrial capitalist
social form.37
In contrast, the process of exposition Arthur calls ‘systematic dialectic’
adopts Hegel’s concern to demonstrate the logical form of its object, as for
example that found in the Logic or the Philosophy of Right, arguing that Marx
univocally adopted this Hegelian logical dialectic in Capital.38 While I have
argued above that the Spinozist distinction between the historical develop-
ment of capitalism, in the attribute of temporal extension, and the exposi-
tion of its logical structure in that of thought forms the basis of Althusser’s
epistemology in Reading Capital – a theoretical reference that Arthur, in his
anti-Althusserian Hegelianism unsurprisingly neglects to mention – this quasi-
Althusserian distinction that Arthur draws constitutes little more than an
opening prelude to his analysis.
Instead, Arthur’s introductory exposition of his project confusingly – from
the Althusserian position I am arguing in this book – conflates a salutary rejec-
tion of Diamat historicist readings of Capital, with the imaginary, unexamined,
and undemonstrated presupposition that Marx’s Capital, via what Arthur calls
its ‘systematic dialectic’, presents the logic of capitalism as a unitary expressive
totality (‘the significance of each element is determined by its place in the total-
ity’, Arthur states categorically) via a negative, contradiction-based dialectic.39

article ‘Contradiction and Abstraction: A Reply to Finelli’ (2009). I focus here on his ear-
lier book both because it has been the object of sustained interest and critique, and, more
importantly, because in his most recent book he largely abandons any earlier pretense
actually to read and explicate Capital’s dialectic and instead borrows freely from Hegel
and Marx’s conceptual toolbox such that ‘what I present here [in The Spectre of Capital]
should be understood as my own view, not as Hegel’s or Marx’s’ (Arthur 2022, p. 1).
37 Arthur 2002, p. 3. Michael Heinrich articulates a similar critique of historicist readings of
Capital in Wissenschaft vom Wert (2022 [1999], pp. 172–3; see also Heinrich 2023, pp. 260–
1).
38 Macherey is unsparing in his critique of such a procedure: ‘The worst defect of such logi-
cal formalism is that it tries to explain the work in relation to a single series of conditions:
the model, by definition, is unique and self-sufficient. And here we have smuggled back
the postulate of the unity and totality of the work; its real complexity has been abolished,
dismantled, the better to be ignored’ (2006, p. 55, translation modified).
39 Arthur 2002, p. 25. This commitment to capitalism as totality is shared by other represen-
tatives of the Systematic Dialectic school, for example Geert Reuten: ‘The starting point [of

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122 chapter 3

Arthur’s undefended position implicitly invokes the authority of the entire

Marxist humanist tradition, a position that originates in Marx’s early writ-
ings,40 to find its definitive and most influential formulation in Lukács’s 1921
essay ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’: ‘The decisive difference between
Marxism and bourgeois thought [is] the point of view of totality’.41 In Lukács’s
famous treatment, the category of totality constitutes ‘the essence of the
method that Marx took over from Hegel’.42 This position necessarily implies,
Lukács argues, the mediated unity of both subject and object as totality, such
that ‘only classes can represent this total point of view’. For Marx, abandon-
ing the initial political sloganeering of the Communist Manifesto, the cate-
gory of class would come to represent in Capital’s science of causes the ter-
minal explanandum of its thousands of pages of analysis (in the form of the
four, incomplete paragraphs of Volume iii, chapter 52, ‘Classes’), with the sci-
ence of value in the capitalist social form its explanans. For Lukács, in con-
trast, the subjective point of view of totality, which is to say, that of the pro-
letariat, miraculously explains the teleology it presupposes, the faith-based
theodicy of revolution: ‘Revolution’, writes Lukács, ‘is the product of a point
of view in which the category of totality is predominant …. As doubt devel-
ops into certainty the petty bourgeois and reactionary elements disappear
without a trace: doubt turns to optimism and to the theoretical certainty
of the coming revolution’.43 This assertion culminates in Lukács’s dogmatic
certainty of the historical necessity of revolution, as if the imputed, merely
imagined proletarian standpoint of totality could predict the fall of paving
stones on the collective head of the capitalist class: ‘This certitude [of pro-
letarian revolution] can be guaranteed methodologically – by the dialecti-
cal method … as the certitude that the … historical process will come to
fruition’.44

Systematic Dialectics] is an all-encompassing conception of some object-totality (capital-

ism) that abstractly captures the essence of that object-totality (compare the “commodity”
for Marx’s Capital)’ (Reuten 2014, p. 244).
40 We thus read in the entry on ‘Totality’ in the Harvard Dictionary of Marxist Thought that
‘World history becomes decipherable only when the totalising interconnections objec-
tively arise out of the conditions of capitalist development and competition “which pro-
duced world history for the first time insofar as it made all civilised nations and every
individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of the wants on the whole world
[via] the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality” ’ (Marx, cited in Bot-
tomore 1983, p. 480, emphasis in original).
41 Lukács 1968, p. 27.
42 Ibid.
43 Lukács 1968, pp. 29, 37.
44 Lukács 1968, p. 43.

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the positive logics of capital 123

Proletarian revolution having weathered the vicissitudes of the twentieth

century, in Arthur’s case, unlike that of Lukács, the ‘standpoint of totality’
remains strictly limited to that of a logical presupposition devoid of any explicit
political teleology.45 ‘Ontologically’, Arthur summarises, systematic dialectic
‘addresses itself to totalities and thus to their comprehension through systemat-
ically connected categories’.46 While, as we have seen, Hegel explicitly under-
stands the object of his various analyses to be totalities, whether this is true
for Marx remains uncertain in the absence of some degree of textual analysis
on Arthur’s part that would support this fundamental claim. Instead, Arthur
simply begs the question regarding this shibboleth of the Systematic Dialec-
tic school, and directly proceeds to draw his own original conclusions from a
position that may or may not correspond to Marx’s argument in Capital.47
Arthur thus rightly underlines the specificity of Marx’s logical – as opposed
to historical – form of demonstration, stressing its discontinuity with the order
of historical events (‘The expositional order of [the] categories does not have to
coincide with the order of their appearance in history’), while in the very same
sentence presupposing without demonstration that the categories of capital-
ism serve to ‘conceptualise an existent, concrete whole’.48
Macherey, in contrast, decisively rejects a vision of critical interpretation
as the revelation of the consonant unity of the work, ‘the postulate of har-
mony or totality: the work is perfect, completed, and constitutes a finished
entity’.49 While in this view its constitutive dissonance subtracts the work from
the category of totality, it is nonetheless a singular, existing thing.50 Whether,

45 ‘Capital is closed in form, hence the relevance of Hegel’s totalising logic’ (Arthur 2009,
p. 172, emphasis in original).
46 Arthur 2009, p. 5, emphasis added. Arthur goes on to repeat this undemonstrated presup-
position in The New Dialectic (2002), for example pp. 17, 25, 26, 64.
47 Chris Arthur does not define his own understanding of totality, but simply deploys the
term immediately from the beginning of New Dialectic: ‘My own view starts from the
premise that theory faces an existent totality [and] hence transitions in the argument
spring from the effort to reconstruct the whole’ (2002, p. 6).
48 Arthur 2009, p. 4.
49 Macherey 2006, p. 90, translation modified. See also Bellofiore’s contrasting distinction
between the reading, interpretation, and reconstruction of Das Kapital. Bellofiore 2018,
pp. 358–60.
50 ‘What begs to be explained in the work is not that false simplicity that derives from the
apparent unity of its meaning, but the presence of a relation, or an opposition, between
elements of the exposition or levels of the composition, those disparities that point to a con-
flict of meaning. This conflict is not the sign of an imperfection; it reveals the inscription
of an otherness in the work, through which it maintains a relationship with that which
it is not, that which happens at its margins. To explain the work is to show that, contrary

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124 chapter 3

like Marx’s Capital, it remains a radically unfinished and incomplete work in

progress, or nominally complete, like Spinoza’s Ethics or Proust’s A la recherche,
the work, despite and even because of its infinite determinations, remains a
finite thing, and, consequently, emphatically not a totality: ‘If the work does not
produce or contain the principle of its own closure, it is nevertheless defini-
tively enclosed within its own limits (though they may not be self-appointed
limits). The work is finite because it is incomplete’.51
Readers of The New Dialectic have tended to focus on the inadequacies
of Arthur’s liberal reconstruction of the capitalist social form, taking issue
for example with Arthur’s ‘random selection of categories of Hegel’s Logic …
applied to a selection of more or less random categories of the first five chapters
of Capital’, as well as with Arthur’s reconstructivist claim that Marx prema-
turely introduces abstract labour as the substance of value in the first chapter
of Capital.52 Here, I wish to focus not on Arthur’s interpretive reconstruction
of the capitalist social form, but instead on the adequacy of categories such as
totality and constitutive negation for understanding Capital’s process of expo-
sition. On this score, Jacques Bidet’s is to my mind the most relevant critique of
The New Dialectic, for he asserts (without actually developing this argument)
the basic inadequacy of the categories of totality53 and the expressive determi-
nation that totality would bestow on each determination.54

to appearances, it is not independent, but bears in its material substance the imprint of
a determinate absence which is also the principle of its identity’ (Macherey 2006, p. 89,
translation modified, emphasis added).
51 Macherey 2006, p. 90.
52 Both of these critiques find eloquent elaboration in Elena Louisa Lange’s article ‘The Cri-
tique of Political Economy and the “New Dialectic”: Marx, Hegel, and the Problem of
Christopher J. Arthur’s “Homology Thesis”’ (2016).
53 ‘The mistake, to my mind, lies in the attempt to represent capitalism as a “system”, whereas
it can only be conceived in fact as a “structure”’ (Bidet 2006, p. 132).
54 In contrast to Arthur, who argues that ‘the significance of each element is determined by
its place in the totality’ (2002, p. 26), Bidet rightly reads Marx as presenting each concep-
tual category ‘as a moment possessing its own coherence and completion …. And this is
incompatible with the Hegelian concept of system …. It is not the concept that changes
[in its negative dialectical determination through the progression of Marx’s argument];
rather, there is a change of concept …. The “theory of value” is in no way transformed by
the [subsequently introduced] theory of surplus-value, which, on the contrary, expressly
presupposes it, unchanged, in the pure and perfect form that Marx has given it in his
exposition in Part One’ (Bidet 2006, p. 132). Bidet’s position precisely develops Althusser’s
schematic proposition, in his 1977 ‘Avant-propos’, that Marx proceeds by the positive
dialectical ‘positioning’ of concepts, to be discussed below, as well as echoing Heinrich’s
exhaustively detailed analysis of the additive logic of the first seven chapters of Capital in
How to Read.

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the positive logics of capital 125

The initial presentation of The New Dialectic is predetermined by a signif-

icant silence, in the form of its unquestioned presupposition that the con-
cept of ‘dialectic’ refers to Hegelian, negative contradiction-based demonstra-
tion. Here too, Arthur simply presupposes what needs to be shown: if dialec-
tic refers to the notion of logical reasoning in general,55 and Hegel’s dialectic
based on constitutive negation and contradiction constitutes only one vari-
ety of this process, could it be that Marx deploys other modes of demonstra-
tion across the thousands of pages of Capital? Never actually addressing this
possibility, one striking aspect of The New Dialectic is Arthur’s general willing-
ness to forgo analysis of Marx’s actual modes of logical analysis and demon-
stration, and instead liberally to ‘reconstruct’ his own understanding of the
(negative) dialectic of capitalism. With the important exception of his chap-
ter 6, where Arthur analyses ‘The Negation of the Negation in Marx’s Cap-
ital’ (discussed below), The New Dialectic never develops its claim for Capi-
tal’s ‘systematic dialectic’ via a systematic analysis of Capital’s dialectic (in the
general sense of its modes of demonstration), but instead only occasionally
inserts citations selected to support its negative dialectical presuppositions,
these most frequently being taken from the Grundrisse and earlier drafts and
editions of Capital in which the influence of Hegel’s logic remains most pro-
nounced.56
Here too, we can say that Arthur’s procedure confirms Macherey’s critique
of interpretation, in its tendency to conceal the complex, overdetermined work
and its constitutional dissonance behind the gleaming image of the vision of
totality it artfully constructs: primarily directed toward ‘an external end’ (the
articulation of his own original understanding of the negative dialectical sys-

55 See above, p. 26.

56 As for example Arthur’s reliance upon Marx’s formulation in the Grundrisse of the contra-
diction of money as value ‘for itself’ as opposed to the immediate relation of specific com-
modities as ‘values “in themselves” to each other’, from which Arthur draws the imaginary
conclusion that ‘money cannot realise the concept of value because of the contradiction
that in striving to be value for itself it must be alienated but cannot be’ (2002, p. 31). Bidet
argues in this vein that Arthur’s interpretation and its reliance on the Hegelian concepts of
totality and system ‘leans chiefly on the Grundrisse’ (Bidet 2005, p. 124). I will argue below
against this widespread assumption that Arthur shares, i.e., that Marx presents the con-
cept of the commodity as constitutively contradictory. On the intensive relation between
Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic, see Uchida 2016 [1988]; the classic reference is Roman Ros-
dolsky’s The Making of Marx’s Capital (1992 [1968]): ‘The Rough Draft [i.e., the Grundrisse]
must be designated as a massive reference to Hegel, in particular to his Logic – irrespective
of how radically and materialistically Hegel was inverted! The publication of the Grun-
drisse means that academic critics of Marx will no longer be able to write without first
having studied his method and its relation to Hegel’ (Rosdolsky 1992 [1968], p. 323).

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126 chapter 3

tematic dialectic of capital) rather than an explication of the necessary and

complex dynamics of the text itself,57 Arthur’s interpretive effort amounts to
‘a mythical task that endows [the work] with a unity and totality into which
it vanishes’.58 This process of reduction and revelation culminates in Arthur’s
schematic and reductive chart of correspondences between Hegel’s Logic and
Capital.59

5 The Problem with Totality

Capital is not a totality, whether considered materially or logically. This gen-

eral conclusion follows simply as a logical consequence of the nature of all
axiomatic logical systems.60 Any logical system requires an axiomatic founda-
tion to establish the basic principles allowing for its demonstrations, and the
largely informal logical system of Capital is no different. I argue throughout this
book that the first sentence of Capital provides such an axiomatic starting point
to Marx’s argument – that capitalism is the social form characterized by the
generalization of commodity production and exchange, with the commodity as
its basic unit – and that many of Marx’s propositions follow apodictically from
this initial axiom – that in the capitalist social form, all commodities require a
value form; that generalized exchange requires a general equivalent form; that
labour power is the only commodity capable of creating surplus value; that the
value and price of a commodity tend to diverge, etc.
Now, any axiomatic system can be said to be complete – a logical totality –
if it can derive whether any proposition formulated within its language is true
or false, and it can be said to be consistent as a totality if its derived proposi-

57 ‘The literary work is not … a quest for its own vanishing point. The linear simplicity that
gives it boldness and freshness is actually only its most superficial aspect; we must also be
able to distinguish its real and fundamental complexity. And in this complexity we must
recognise the signs of a necessity …. In all literary works can be found the tokens of this
internal rupture, this decentring, the evidence of its subordinate dependence on precise
conditions of possibility. Thus the work is never – or only apparently – a coherent and
unified whole’ (Macherey 2006, pp. 44, 46, translation modified).
58 Macherey 2006, p. 27. In such an interpretation, ‘the work is only the expression of this
meaning, which is also to say, the shell that encases it, which must be broken to reveal
[this meaning]. The interpreter accomplishes this liberating violence: he dismantles the
work to refashion it in the image of its meaning, to make it denote directly that of which it
was the indirect expression …. Translation and reduction: to reduce the apparent diversity
of the work to its unitary signification’ (Macherey 2006, p. 85, translation modified).
59 Arthur 2002, pp. 108–9.
60 Thanks to Burhannudin Baki for helping me to think through this logical question.

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the positive logics of capital 127

tions do not result in logical contradictions. While I argue that this is the case
for the great majority of Marx’s propositions and demonstrations, Macherey,
Balibar, Antonio Negri, Jacques Bidet, Riccardo Bellofiore and others have all
shown that there exist multiple points of logical rupture and discontinuity in
Capital: in other words, that the logic of Capital is incomplete because its own
consistency or inconsistency cannot be derived from its initial axioms.61 With-
out needing to rehearse their various readings, I will simply argue below that it
is Arthur himself who undermines his own assumption for the logical totality
of Capital, insofar as he can only present this ideological image of a complete
functional system by excluding from consideration the anomalous, disjunctive,
disruptive power of living labour.

Following his private critique of Althusser’s use of the concept of totality

in the first edition of Reading Capital,62 Pierre Macherey would develop a
more sustained critique of the concept in Theory of Literary Production and
his writings on Spinoza.63 Macherey’s critique is extensive, if not systemati-
cally argued: totality, he argues, can and should only refer to the fabrication
of imaginary, inadequately determinate sets (such as Arthur’s undemonstrated
position), and necessarily remains a tendential, incomplete construction of a
thought object. In Macherey’s understanding, the explication of a text must
seek instead to construct an analysis of the necessity that governs its overde-
termined, dissonant complexity:

Rather than sufficiency and ideal consistency, a determinate insufficiency

and incompleteness actually shapes the work. The work is necessarily
incomplete in itself: not extrinsically, in a fashion that could be completed
to ‘realise’ the work. This incompleteness, indicated by the confrontation
of distinct meanings, is the true reason for its articulation. The thin line
of the discourse is the temporary appearance behind which we recognise

61 See rc, Ch. 3; Balibar 1991, Bellofiore 2009, Bidet 2009, and Negri 1985.
62 See Montag 2013, Ch. 5.
63 As discussed in the previous chapter, while Macherey does not discuss Capital in Theory
of Literary Production, he does explicitly apply its general critique to the case of Capital in
his 1967 intervention at the Cérisy ‘Centennaire du Capital’: ‘The enterprise of a total or
“totalising” reading is ideological in its essence …. A scientific text can only be taken up on
the condition of being continued: a closed, repetitive reading is itself an ideological read-
ing …. The object of Capital is an object constructed theoretically, and this is precisely why
Capital is not a formal system. If we were to read it as a closed system, this would consti-
tute an interpretive reading, a repetition and reprisal of a completed system’ (2006, pp. 57,
61, 92).

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128 chapter 3

the determinate complexity of a text: on the condition that this complex-

ity is not that of a ‘totality’, illusory and mediate.64

Constitutionally finite and incomplete, the work is never a terminate totality

or unified whole. This position, one that Macherey articulates so resolutely,
nonetheless itself remains underdetermined: what, we may ask, does the con-
cept of totality in fact indicate, and why does Macherey, following Spinoza, so
vigorously assert its epistemological inadequacy?
Derived from the Greek To holon [τὸ ὅλον], the Latin totalis indicates a com-
plete and integral whole.65 Conceptually, the notion of totality thus implies that
which has nothing essential to its nature outside itself: it is the thing entirely
self-sufficient and in-itself [in se est]. This as opposed to all finite singular things
[res in suo genere finita (eid2)], which, as finite, necessarily depend causally
upon other things for their determination, and, via the infinity of these recip-
rocal determinations, are in fact, Macherey observes, overdetermined by other
things within their genre or attribute: a body (in the sense of any extensive
material thing) will always be limited and essentially determined by other bod-
ies, just as any finite thought [cogitatio] will necessarily be limited and deter-
mined by other thoughts.66
The conclusion Macherey draws from Spinoza’s incipient definitions consti-
tutes a rejection of the notion of totality as applied to any finite thing: Spinoza’s
‘logic of the finite [indicates that] a finite thing, whatever it may be, can never
be thought absolutely for itself, but only relatively by the intermediary of its
relation to another thing’.67 The implication of this initial position is thus that
to speak of any finite, determinate thing as a totality (such as the capitalist
mode of production and/or the logical system of the book Capital for Arthur) is
to have recourse to a merely imaginary figure based on our sense impressions
of that object as a discrete and self-sufficient thing, as opposed to adequately
grasping its necessarily infinite determinations by other things. Consequently,
this imaginary figure (say, Arthur’s abstract hypostatisation of the capitalist
mode of production) is then imagined to produce effects upon the various
moments of the system. Marx, in Capital, proceeds in precisely the opposite
fashion, from the logical demonstration of the essential nature of a thing (such
as the commodity) to its necessary effects, without the imputation of what
Lukács called ‘the standpoint of totality’.

64 Macherey 2006, pp. 88–9, translation modified.

65 Cassin 2014, p. 1234.
66 Macherey 1998, pp. 35, 36.
67 Macherey 1998, pp. 72–3.

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the positive logics of capital 129

Indeed, Macherey indicates in his commentary that the topic of Book i of

Ethics is precisely not some finite, determinate thing, but ‘an object that is infi-
nite, and even infinitely infinite: the set [ensemble] of reality considered in its
totality and as a totality, according to the principles that found its unity [and]
develop a rational thought on the subject of all [au sujet de tout] by treating
this whole according to its nature as whole [sa nature de tout]’.68 It would thus
seem that Macherey expressly limits the notion of totality or whole [τὸ ὅλον]
to Spinoza’s substance, not as the hypostatisation of a thing, but as the starting
point for the adequate knowledge of nature.
I would argue, moreover, that Macherey’s initial use of the terms totality
and whole in reference to Spinozist substance that I have just cited is itself
merely imagistic, in the sense that the indefinite article (‘a totality’) tends to
hypostatise into a determinate thing, what Macherey goes on to steadfastly
and repeatedly argue is precisely not a thing, determinate and countable (as
one monist substance): ‘to think the real in totality according to the synthetic
procedure or geometric order that proceeds from the cause to its effects, and
not the reverse’ requires a conception of substance not as a thing but as Being,
understood as the presupposition that ‘conditions the set of its [determinate]
affections’.69 To think of substance as a thing is ‘to transfer onto [the concept of

68 Macherey 1998, p. 65, my emphasis. Note how Macherey’s phrasing in the French original
seeks to avoid any definite or indefinite articles that would reify substance and to speak
instead ‘au sujet de tout’, a formulation difficult to render in English.
69 Macherey’s critique of the substantivisation of Spinozist substance implicitly pursues
Althusser’s initial polemical and underdeveloped rejection of Plekhanovist, monist under-
standings of dialectical materialism (discussed in Chapter 1). After Plekhanov himself,
the determinant figure in this regard is the Spinozist Marxism of Plekhanov’s disciple
Abram Deborin, editor of Pod Znamenem Marxsizma (Under the Banner of Marxism).
Tasked by Lenin and Trotsky from 1922 with developing the theoretical foundations of
Bolshevism, Deborin’s contributions to the journal were crucial in particular for orient-
ing the extensive Soviet reception of Spinoza (Oitinnen 2022, pp. 4–5). In this regard, it
is notable, for example, that in a 1927 article in which he discusses Spinoza’s ‘remarkably
dialectical formulation of the problem of finite and infinite’, Deborin speaks repeatedly
of ‘the whole of nature’ and ‘nature as a whole’ (cited in Oikinnen 2022, pp. 7–8, emphasis
added). (Of course, the Russian original, like all Slavic languages other than Macedonian,
would not use articles to identify the nominal referents of phrases, as in English or French).
On the debates in Soviet philosophy more generally, as well as its reception of Spinoza
more particularly, see Yakhot 2012 [1981]. Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss articulate a
richly argued contemporary version of Marxist substance monism, for example via a cri-
tique of Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza in ‘Substance Abuse: Spinoza contra Deleuze’ (2018).
Fluss and Frim more generally reaffirm the Plekhanovist-Deborin tendency to hypostatise
Spinozist substance as countable thing, for example in their theoreticist-materialist inter-
vention ‘Reason is Red’, where they write that ‘Marxism … demands monism, the idea that
the entire universe is an intelligible Whole’ (2022).

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130 chapter 3

substance] characteristics that belong only to its affections …. Substance, inso-

far as it exists necessarily [i.e., as causa sui], thus by virtue of its proper [seule]
nature, does not exist in the manner of a finite thing, and thus in the mode
of an individual existence, as a singular entity finding its place next to others
within a series that can be enumerated’. Substance, in other words, is not one
or a substance or totality; ‘it is not “an” existence, in the sense of a particular
existence that would depend upon causes exterior to its nature, but existence
itself thought as absolute … the fact of existing understood in itself, thus inde-
pendent of reference to any particular existence whatsoever’.70
To think of Spinozist substance as a determinate thing or totality is to grasp
this most difficult concept inadequately, through the imagination.71 ‘To atten-
tively think the nature of substance’, Macherey observes,

is a new manner of thinking existence, in itself and no longer in number

[non plus en nombre], and thus without bringing to bear consideration
of exterior causes …. The nature of substance is such that it is subtracted
from the grasp of the imagination, which can only denature it in replac-
ing it in a network of exterior determinations in which it figures as an
existing thing next to or above others [as a transcendent instance or sub-
ject of monism, Althusser would have said], which amounts to denying
its absolute relation to itself that excludes all relation to anything other
than itself.72

70 Macherey 1998, p. 86. Let me reiterate that despite our unyielding disagreement on this
point, the generous and probing comments of Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss while
drafting this chapter, not to mention their informed and original understanding of the
relation between Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, have been essential in pushing me to better
articulate my own position.
71 Macherey emphasises that the process of enumeration in general is fundamentally linked
to the imagination: Spinoza indicates in this way ‘the privileged relation that the imagina-
tion bears, not only with the consideration of singular existences, but with the very fact
of enumerating them, and thus as well with that of counting in general, a preoccupation
from which the rational analysis of substance … is completely removed in principle’ (1998,
p. 86).
72 Macherey 1998, p. 87. Macherey continues to develop this point a few pages further in his
commentary on the second Scolium to eip8: ‘Substance can only be unique, not in the
sense of a nature that would be realised in only a single copy [exemplaire], and thus more
than zero and less than two, but of a thing of which all possible forms of realisation enter
into the nature that defines it …. In the expression “a single substance of the same nature”,
[the indefinite article] “a” is not to be taken in the sense of the number “one” as an element
of quantification’ (Macherey 1998, p. 90).

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the positive logics of capital 131

To think Spinoza’s idea of substance, then, is to refuse to speak of ‘a’ substance

at all, but instead, Macherey continues, of ‘subsisting [le subsister], or existing
[l’exister] considered as such’.73
If the concept of totality or the whole as hypostatised thing is thus necessar-
ily inadequate and imaginary, both in the case of substance (because to speak
of substance as a thing is to reify it as an existing thing) as well as of any determi-
nate object of thought (since the process of adequate construction of an object
of thought is infinite), how does Spinoza, in Macherey’s reading, allow for the
adequate understanding of any existing thing or ‘whole’ (such as the capitalist
social form)?
In his letters of 10 and 14 May 1965 to Althusser on the problem of total-
ity in Reading Capital, Macherey somewhat cryptically suggests that Spinoza’s
1665 letter xxxii to Oldenberg contains the theoretical resources to overcome
Althusser’s ungrounded references to ‘the structured whole’ in the first edition
of Reading Capital: ‘It seems to me’, Macherey writes, ‘that when you speak of
a set [ensemble] or of a whole, you thereby add a concept that is absolutely
unnecessary to the demonstration, and which may later become an obstacle
(the idea of the real whole in opposition to that of the spiritual whole is not very
clear: the idea of the whole is really the spiritualist conception of structure) ….
Each time I have encountered the phrase “structured whole” in what you have
written, I was struck by the problems that it raises’.74 Macherey’s point is that
reference to totality or a whole, whether expressive totality, the explicit object
of Althusser’s critique in Reading Capital, or structured whole (as Althusser
suggests positively) is ‘absolutely unnecessary to the demonstration’. In what
sense is this the case, following the Spinozist logic Macherey refers to?
Let us look at Spinoza’s letter xxxii more carefully than Macherey does
in his suggestion to Althusser. There, in answer to Oldenberg’s inquiry into

73 Macherey 1998, p. 90n1. It is interesting to note how Macherey’s critique of the hypo-
statisation of substance has distant, far cruder echoes, in the 1920s debate between the
mechanistic Spinozism of Liubov Akselrod, with its emphasis on substance as causa sui,
and Deborin’s Plekhanovist position that ‘substance is matter’ (Yakhot 2012, Chapter 6.4).
Despite basing her critique of Spinoza on a racist antisemitism that deterministically
reduces Spinoza’s thought to its putative ‘Jewish origins’, Akselrod argues: ‘What an absur-
dity to assert that Spinoza’s substance is matter. To recognise it as matter means to design
a very strange entity: substance is matter, one of its attributes is matter, and another
attribute is thinking’ (Akselrod, cited in Yakhot 2012, Ch. 6.4). To indicate the base nature
of this impassioned debate (to say nothing of Akselrod’s antisemitism), one need only
observe that for Spinoza it is not ‘matter’ that is an attribute, as Akselrod claims, but exten-
sion, which is an entirely different concept.
74 Cited in Montag 2013, p. 75.

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132 chapter 3

‘the grounds of our belief that each part of Nature accords with the whole’,
Spinoza begins by pointing out that ‘the actual manner of this coherence and
the agreement of each part with the whole … is beyond my knowledge. To
know this it would be necessary to know the whole of Nature and all its parts’.
Instead, Spinoza argues to his correspondent that our knowledge of any puta-
tive whole, and not only being qua being, remains inadequate and imaginary in
the absence of its systematic, adequate demonstration, whether through com-
mon notions or intuitive knowledge. Rather than developing a systematic and
comprehensive demonstration of this point as he does in the Ethics, however,
Spinoza fabricates for his correspondent a striking, hauntingly graphic and
even fantastic image, his famous parable of the worm in the blood. The point
of Spinoza’s allegory is that the decision as to whether an object (such as the
blood in which Spinoza’s imaginary worm swims) constitutes a whole or a part
is necessarily subjective.75 It is possible to understand any determinate thing as
either part or whole, depending on how this knowledge is constructed, whether
things are understood to ‘adapt themselves to one another so that they are in
closest possible agreement’, such that each is a part of a whole, or, alternatively,
‘are different from one another’, such that each is understood to constitute a
whole. As objects of knowledge, the parts of the blood (what we today identify
as white and red blood cells, plasma, etc.), in Spinoza’s example, can readily be
understood either as whole or part: from the perspective of their ‘agreement
[they] form all together one fluid’, but were we to consider each in its singular

75 To be sure, in this letter Spinoza does explicitly speak of ‘the whole of Nature’ and of ‘the
universe as a whole’, which seems to imply for his reader a conviction that there is an objec-
tive totality of Nature, though our finite minds cannot know its infinitely infinite determi-
nations. This, however, stands in marked contrast to his definitions of substance and God
(Nature) in the Ethics, which make no reference of any kind to a whole or totality. In my
view, Spinoza’s epistolary recourse to this image of the ‘whole of Nature’ marks a rhetor-
ical compromise intended to engage his reader’s inadequate understanding of Spinoza’s
position, analogous to Marx’s parable of the linen and coat that speak to one another in
‘the language of commodities’ in Capital. Rather than speaking more adequately of sub-
stance without reference to totality or the whole, as causa sui and the in se as he does in
Ethics, Spinoza here instead adopts the relatively unclear and imaginary language of his
interlocutor (‘I presume that you are asking for the grounds of our belief that each part
of Nature accords with the whole’), a rhetorical device he regularly adopts in the Scolia
of Ethics (Macherey is at pains to indicate many of these passages in his Introduction, for
example in his lengthy commentary on the Appendix to Book i). Spinoza regularly does
so, Macherey insists, through an ethical commitment to meet his interlocutor halfway,
as it were, and to communicate more effectively with a reader who, from habit, neces-
sarily understands something entirely different by familiar terms such as God, Nature,
substance, or whole than what Spinoza means by them.

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the positive logics of capital 133

difference from the others (white vs. red cells, etc.), ‘to that extent we regard
them each as a whole, not a part’.
To call a thing either a whole or a part is thus for Spinoza merely relative and
subjective, fundamentally dependent upon how an object of knowledge is con-
structed, more or less adequately, as a figure of the understanding. As Macherey
summarises in Hegel or Spinoza, ‘For Spinoza, the notion of totality … does not
represent the positive existence of a being … but [depends] on the point of view
of the understanding that cuts it up in the infinite chain of singular things, by
considering it as a whole’. This position, moreover, indicates Spinoza’s funda-
mental antagonism with Hegelian logic, as the absolute distinction between
substance and subject, insofar as the former, by definition for Spinoza absolute
and thus indeterminate, can never be figured as a determinate whole.76
That said, Spinoza is not propounding the relativism of all judgements. He
clearly indicates to Oldenberg an entirely different path to adequate knowl-
edge of any singular thing: beginning from a true idea, it is possible adequately
to understand the essential nature of that thing, and then, constructively, to
proceed from one adequately constructed idea to another. This synthetic logic
proceeds to construct the ‘coherence [cohaerentiam] of parts’ via a cumulative
understanding by which ‘the laws or nature of another part adapts itself to the
laws or nature of another part’, absent all teleology.77 While we cannot know
in totality either the infinite determinations of any singular thing (such as the
capitalist social form) nor the infinitely infinite determinations of the whole
of Nature, the mind can nonetheless proceed constructively, from an adequate
knowledge of one true idea, to the (logical) successor with which it additively
forms a part of a larger body.78

76 Macherey 2011, p. 184.

77 Cavaillès modulates this Spinozist position as a philosophy of the mathematical science
of the infinite: ‘The body of a theory is a certain operatory homogeneity – as described
by the axiomatic presentation – but when the theory is carried to the infinite, the itera-
tion and the complications provide results and an intelligible system of contents that are
ungovernable, and an internal necessity obliges itself by way of an enlargement, which
moreover is unforeseeable’. Cavaillès 2021, p. 81.
78 Arthur himself seems to admit to imagining totality and the constitutive negative dialectic
of Capital precisely because – as Spinoza argues to Oldenberg – of the (Hegelian) per-
spective he chooses, ie., as what Lukács called the ‘point of view of totality’: ‘There is a
contradiction in the commodity only if it is claimed that it is imbued with a universal,
namely value, as a result of its participation in a whole network of capitalist commodity
production’ (Arthur 2002, p. 70). Precisely so: if one examines the concept of the com-
modity in itself, as Marx does in the first pages of Capital, then, as a whole, the concept
possesses two parts or attributes: its use and exchange-values. If, as subsequently in Marx’s
presentation, the commodity is instead examined within the general system of exchange,

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134 chapter 3

Instead of Arthur’s claim for a negative dialectical knowledge based on the

contradiction between any determinate concept such as money or value and
the (merely presupposed, imaginary) totality of the capitalist social form in
all its infinite determinations, Marx’s argument in Capital, in this view, should
be understood to proceed constructively, from the adequate knowledge of one
concept (the general form of appearance of any society ‘in which the capital-
ist mode of production predominates’, the commodity form, the substance of
value, etc.) to the next with which it is most closely linked (the passage from
use-value to exchange-value, for example). This is precisely to indicate what
Macherey only suggests to Althusser: the reference to totality is not simply
‘absolutely unnecessary to the demonstration’, but utterly misleading, in the
sense that the concept of totality inherently refers to ‘the complete set of ele-
ments of a whole’ (Lalande), a terminally and wholly complete object rather
than an inherently infinite construct.79 Neither Capital the book nor the capi-
talist mode of production, the object of knowledge Marx constructs, is subject
to the completion of totality, but only the more or less adequate construction of
each of its logical steps and their infinitely complex ramifications and network
of correspondences, the sum of which do not make up a whole.
A case in point is Marx’s concept of total surplus value: ‘Equal amounts
of capital, no matter how they are composed, receive equal shares (aliquot
parts) of the totality of surplus-value produced by the total social capital’.80
Marx’s analysis here explicitly takes as its object not the investigation of specific
individual commodities, as did classical economics, but the total mass of com-
modities, initially in the first sentence of Capital impressionistically described
as an undifferentiated, ‘immense heap’ (ungeheure Warensammlung), and sub-
sequently and with increasing theoretical concretion, as identical subdivisions
or ‘aliquot parts’ that constitute the general substance of capital.81

then it appears as a single component part of that system, precisely as Spinoza argues in
his parable of the worm in the blood stream.
79 ‘Totalité’, in Lalande 2010, p. 1137, emphasis added.
80 Marx 1981, p. 274, emphasis added.
81 ‘In capitalist production, each capital is assumed to be a unit, and aliquot part of the total
capital’. Marx, quoted in Moseley 2017, p. 46. Marx’s fractional perspective has confused
many readers, since Marx repeatedly frames the rhetoric of his argument in terms of indi-
vidual examples (coats, linen, tailoring and weaving, and the like), above all in the first
chapters of Volume i. Moseley emphasises the purely theoretical nature of Marx’s analy-
sis, observing that ‘It is not always clear that Marx’s theory in Volume i is about the total
capital and the total surplus value produced in the economy as a whole, because the the-
ory is usually illustrated in terms of an individual capital and even a single, solitary worker
…. However, the individual capitals in Marx’s examples represent the total social capital of
the capitalist class as a whole. Individual capitals are not analysed as separate and distinct

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the positive logics of capital 135

As Fred Moseley has shown, Marx meticulously constructs this concept

across the three volumes of Capital, such that it serves, in Volume iii, as the cru-
cial theoretical object that allows Marx to distinguish between profit and sur-
plus value. The concept has no empirical or even quantitative basis or nature,
there exists no Fort Knox of total surplus value, but remains from the first
page of Capital to the last a purely theoretical object of increasing theoreti-
cal complexity. For all the rigor and adequacy of Marx’s construction, ‘the total
mass of surplus-value’ remains in Capital an inherently incomplete concept,
as Moseley’s 400-page analysis amply demonstrates. In the place of Arthur’s
impressionistic gesture to capital as a logical totality, a concept such as total
surplus-value, which Marx rigorously, if necessarily incompletely, develops,
serves to lucidly distinguish Marx’s theoretical analysis from the inherent con-
tradictions of mainstream economics’ individualist, summative process. From
this we might even conclude that Marx’s reference to the ‘totality’ of surplus-
value that I cited above is a terminological lapsus, a usage limited to a single
instance in the uncorrected 1864 manuscript that Engels reworked into Vol-
ume iii; instead, Marx in every other case refers to the ‘total mass of surplus-
value’, arguably tending to avoid the implication of surplus-value as a complete
and closed conceptual set.
Arthur, like Lukács before him, plays the role of the worm in Spinoza’s blood:
reassuringly swathed in the balm of absolute knowledge (whether that of the
logic of Capital or the theodicy of the proletarian revolution), the point of view
of expressive totality bestows the aura of absolute truth via its mere asser-
tion. In The New Dialectic, as it had for Lukács, the subjective hypostatisation
of the actually existing concept of capitalism as negative dialectical totality
offers a reassuring image, the function of imputed totality magically bestow-
ing on every partial, expressive determination of the whole its necessary and
sufficient reason. Affectively, the transcendent monism of totality, whether log-
ical or revolutionary theodicy, serves in this view to repress the anxiety of the
knowing subject before its constitutive not-knowing, to repress the necessary
incompletion of any object of knowledge. It was not for nothing that Lacan
initially founded the singularity of any analysis on this Spinozist epistemol-
ogy: it is Spinoza who most forcefully refuses the imaginary, regressive figure
of totality as guarantee. The Ethics, principle among its many virtues, instead

real capitals, but rather as representatives and ‘aliquot parts’ of the total social capital’
(2017, pp. 45–6). In this sense, one could say of Marx’s examples of specific commodities
such as coats and linen what he says of his historical example of English capitalism, i.e.,
that coats and linen, like ‘England [are] used as the main illustration of the theoretical
developments [he] makes’ (Marx 1976, p. 90).

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136 chapter 3

initiates a treatment, offering the subject the means to sustain the anxiety of
not-knowing via the progressive amendment of the intellect, in the certainty
that the finite human mind is capable of more adequate understanding than
such imaginary chimera, even to realise a scientia intuitiva – not of totality –
but of the absolute.82

6 The Systematic Dissonance of Capital

Materially, it is quite obvious that Marx’s book Capital is a radically incomplete

project. Even Volume i of Capital – the publication of which Marx oversaw
through its second, revised German edition and first French translation (1872–
75) – remains a work-in-progress; Marx made notes for a further complete revi-
sion of it in 1881 (which he never carried out). What we know today as Volume i
is a bricolage Engels made of the second German edition of 1872 and the French
edition of 1872–75. While the bulk of the first draft of Volume I from 1863 is lost,
the first German edition of 1867 as well as Marx’s notes for the 1872 edition and
his intended further 1881 revision contain many important formulations and
developments of his demonstration (in particular, a radically different presen-
tation of the key first chapter on the value-form), aspects absent from Engels’s
posthumous ‘definitive edition’. Volume iii, assembled by Engels after Marx’s
death, is based upon a single manuscript from 1864–65; it is thus not only the-
oretically immature compared to Marx’s subsequent work on Volumes i and
ii, but in fact terminates abruptly with Marx’s comment ‘etc.’, a mere five para-
graphs into its twenty-fifth chapter dedicated to what presumably would have
been one of the essential results of Marx’s analysis, the concept of ‘Classes’.83
In fact, attention to the totality of Marx’s drafts, notebooks, and letters
from 1857 to 1881, gradually becoming available in the definitive mega2 edi-
tion of Marx and Engels’s works, leads Michael Heinrich to draw the distinctly
Althusserian conclusion that ‘in a strict sense, a three-volume work “Capital”
written by Marx does not really exist. … There is no clear difference between
drafts and the final work – we have only differently developed drafts of a shift-
ing, unfinished and incomplete project’.84

82 ‘Sensing what the subject can tolerate, in terms of anxiety, is something that puts you to
the test at every moment. … As regards anxiety, there isn’t any safety net. … It’s upon the
cutting edge of anxiety that we have to hold fast’. Lacan 2014, pp. 5, 9, 15, translation mod-
ified. See McNulty 2009, pp. 1–39.
83 See Moseley 2016.
84 Heinrich 2009, p. 96.

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the positive logics of capital 137

Given this genetic complexity, it is patently obvious that Marx’s intellectual

project of a critique of political economy that we know as Capital does not con-
stitute a totality in any sense of the word, and that the presumption of totality
by proponents of Systematic Dialectics such as Arthur and Reuten is a mere
article of faith. Their unquestioned certainty underwrites a distinctly theolog-
ical reading of Capital. This imaginary totality, that of the theoretical object
Marx constructed, as well as its materialist basis in the putative totality of
actually-existing capitalism, constitutes for this Hegelian school of thought the
transcendent instance that bestows meaning on each moment of the (imagi-
nary) whole:

Only on completion of the presentation, [Reuten writes, citing Hegel,]

will we know that ‘the truth of the differentiated is its being in unity’. …
Once the presentation is complete – and thus when the initial unifying
concept [of the commodity] is shown to be inherent in the object-totality,
in its full concreteness (γ) – will we have come full circle, confirming the
truth of the abstract starting point.85

This providential day of theoretical plenitude is one that will never arrive, as
Reuten himself knows as well as Althusser or Heinrich: Capital Volume I as
we know it, Reuten observes parenthetically, ‘requires further concrete ground-
ing of the moments presented in this sequence (Capital Volumes ii and iii, as
well as the books which Marx had planned but did not even begin to draft)’.86
The Hegelian theoretical commitments of this school of Marxology thus lead
them – despite their intensive knowledge of the extreme genetic complexity
of Marx’s Capital project that makes of it an unequivocally ‘unfinished and
incomplete project’ (Heinrich) – to adhere to this Lukácsian-Hegelian theoreti-
cal imperative, and to bestow upon Capital the aura of a transcendent, emanant
totality. Their analytic pursuit recommences a perpetually-in-process inquest
into the theoretical promised land that is Marx’s alleged Hegelian palimpsest,
as they fervently continue to invoke ‘the lonely hour of the last instance [that]
never comes’.87
Similarly, it should be obvious on even the most cursory reading that Marx
deploys a multiplicity of demonstrative modalities across the pages of Capi-
tal, from Marx’s recurrent recourse to classical modus ponens, if-then propo-

85 Reuten 2014, p. 253.

86 Reuten 2014, p. 254.
87 Althusser 2005, p. 153.

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138 chapter 3

sitions,88 to imaginary phantasmagorias89 and other quite original modes of

demonstration Macherey, Althusser, and Balibar identify as the ‘exhaustion’
of concepts (Macherey), the non-dialectical, discrete ‘positioning’ (position) of
concepts (Althusser), and the methods Balibar calls ‘comparison’ and
‘results’.90 While Chris Arthur does not literally claim that Marx’s demonstra-
tion in Capital, unlike that of Hegel’s Logic, proceeds solely via a dialectic of con-
stitutive, negative contradiction and sublation, his unrelenting and unques-
tioned focus on this mode of demonstration certainly implies such a belief.
Arthur’s exclusively Hegelian understanding of Capital as a substantive,
expressive totality – the presentation of which is driven by the contradictory
relation of any of its moments with that totality – grounds his presentation of
its logic univocally, to the exclusion of any other mode of presentation:

The [logic of Capital] depends upon the presupposition that there is a

whole from which a violent abstraction has [initially] been made so as
to constitute a simple beginning …; and thus there arises a contradiction
between the character of the element in isolation and its meaning as part
of the whole. The treatment of this moment as inherently in contradic-
tion with itself, on account of this, is given if it is assumed throughout
the dialectical development that the whole remains immanent or implicit

88 A great many of Marx’s principal propositions in Capital are articulated in variations of

this form, for example: ‘It follows from this that …’; ‘If then we disregard the use-value of
commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour’; ‘If we leave
aside the determinate quality of productive activity, and therefore the useful character of
the labour, what remains is its quality of being an expenditure of human labour-power’;
‘since the magnitude of the value of a commodity represents nothing but the quantity of
labour embodied in it, it follows that all commodities, when taken in certain proportions,
must be equal in value’; ‘[Commodities’] objective character as values is therefore purely
social. From this it follows self-evidently that [value] can only appear in the social relation
between commodity and commodity’ (Marx 1976, pp. 127, 128, 134, 136, 139).
89 ‘If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it
does not belong to us as objects’ (Marx 1976, p. 143).
90 Balibar proposes the latter two categories in one of his rare analyses of Marx’s method of
demonstration in Capital, ‘Un texte de methodologie’. This brief analysis appeared only
in the first edition of Lire le Capital, in the form of an ‘Annex’ following his well-known
chapter. One senses that Balibar cut this short, five-page text from subsequent editions
because it would require much greater development actually to demonstrate what it only
briefly proposes: that the distinction between the concepts of ‘production en général’ and
‘production générale’ in Marx’s 1857 Introduction depends upon two distinct and ‘paral-
lel’ forms of abstraction, and furthermore that this distinction proves that Marx’s method
unfolds ‘toute entière dans la connaissance’, (Balibar 2012, p. 657) rather than in the form
of a traditional empiricist theory of knowledge. See Balibar 2012, pp. 655–61.

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the positive logics of capital 139

in it. This provides the basis for the transitions in the development of
the categorial ordering. There is an impulse to provide a solution to a
contradiction – a ‘push’ one might say – and there is the need to over-
come the deficiency of the category with respect to its fulfilment in the
whole.91

In this fashion, with no more than sporadic, selective textual references, Arthur
bases his claim for the negative dialectical logic of Capital upon the priority of
its status as an expressive totality: it is only because Capital is presupposed to
form a substantive totality that each of its moments, in its incompletion, can
be argued to enter into negative contradiction with that supposed-totality, log-
ically propelling its sublation from one moment to the next.
On my reading of New Dialectic, Chris Arthur variously presents three dis-
tinct arguments for the consistency of Marx’s logic of the capitalist social form
as a totality, none of which is either systematic (to adopt Arthur’s own term) or
even directly relevant to showing that ‘Capital [the book and its logic? The con-
cept? The social form?] is closed in form’.92 The first of these ‘arguments’ points
to the totalising nature of capital, its tendency subsume all things within its
logic, and to commodify all things and social relations: ‘If value depends for its
reality on the full development of capitalist production, then the concepts of
Marx’s first chapter can only have an abstract character, and the argument itself
as it advances develops the meanings of these concepts, through grounding
them adequately in the comprehended whole’.93 Arthur’s statement seems to
confuse its categories, its first clause on the reality of value apparently indicat-
ing the real, material subsumption via commodification of means and relations
of capitalist production, the second, confusingly addressing ‘the concepts of
Marx’s first chapter’.
Were we to assume, for argument, that Arthur rigorously remains at the
level of Marx’s logic, and instead means ‘the [concept] of value’ and ‘[Marx’s
concept of] the full development of capitalist production’, this obscure claim
(even granted all this the reader must still guess at Arthur’s exact meaning) has
been more adequately and systematically explicated by Fred Moseley. In Money
and Totality, Moseley comprehensively shows that throughout the expanse
of Marx’s economic manuscripts he presumes that ‘the means of production
in capitalist production are commodities, which have been purchased at the

91 Arthur 2002, p. 67.

92 Arthur 2009, p. 172.
93 Arthur 2002, p. 26.

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140 chapter 3

beginning of the circuit of money capital, and which therefore enter the val-
orisation process with already existing specific prices’.94
Even so, while Arthur’s claim may be true that ‘only at the end of the recon-
struction of the totality is its truth unfolded’, this is true not because this so-
called ‘end’ – a point Arthur never concretely indicates within Marx’s exposi-
tion, nor could he, since it does not in fact exist within the incomplete and
unfinished three volumes we know as Capital – would realise the putative neg-
ative dialectical totality of Capital’s logic of exposition, but only, as Moseley
shows, because Marx, like Spinoza in the Ethics’ Scholia, chose to simplify for
his readers this aspect of his initial presentation in the second edition of 1872,
such that this ‘totality’ represents no more than a mere reductive, summary
position.
In contrast to Arthur’s ungrounded claim, Marx explicitly emphasises this
situated, subjective, provisional nature of the concept of the circularity of the
reproduction of capital as a whole when, in the final paragraph of chapter 23
he indicates that ‘The capitalist process of production, … seen [betrachtet] as
a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only
commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the
capital-relation itself’.95 Coming at the end of Volume i, this position is no

94 Moseley 2017, p. 141. ‘Capital’, Moseley summarises, ‘exists first in the form of money
advanced in the sphere of circulation, then in the form of means of production and labour
power in the form of means of production and labour power in the sphere of production,
then in the form of commodities produced at the end of the production process, and then
finally back again in the form of money recovered, including more money than was orig-
inally advanced at the beginning of this real historical process’ (2017, p. 11, emphasis in
original). See also Marx 1976, p. 709. Moseley further shows that in volume 1 of Capital,
Marx simplified for readers, at Engels’s repeated urging, his initial, comprehensive formu-
lation of the circuit of capital as a wholly monetary process in which both the constant
and variable means of production are initially purchased as actual commodities already
possessing a price form. This has resulted, in Moseley’s view, in the ‘common interpreta-
tion of Volume I that it is only about labour times, not money or prices, and that Marx’s
theory deals with money and prices only in Volume iii’ (Moseley 2017, p. 9). Through a
comprehensive reading of Marx’s various drafts and manuscripts, Moseley shows that
the ‘interpretation of these passages [in traditional Marxism] ignores and is contradicted
by all the textual evidence … – that the circuit of money capital is the analytical frame-
work of Marx’s theory, and the circuit of money capital begins with an independently
existing quantity of money capital (M) … which is “thrown into circulation” in order to
make more money; … the inputs to capitalist production and the valorisation process are
commodities with already existing prices’ (2017, pp. 185–6, emphasis in original). On the
wholly monetary nature of the circuit of capital, see also Murray 2017, p. 135; and Bellofiore
2018.
95 Marx 1976, p. 724, emphasis added.

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the positive logics of capital 141

doubt infinitely more developed and concrete than the initial, minimal true
idea with which Marx began Capital (i.e., that the capitalist mode of produc-
tion appears [erschient] as a general accumulation of commodities); for all that,
it is still a partial, incomplete position, a viewpoint obviously possessing none
of the further conceptual determinations to be introduced in Volumes ii and
iii.96
The fact that the circuit of money capital constitutes a constant in the cap-
italist social form, in other words, hardly makes of Marx’s logic or the system
itself a totality: the concept of this feedback loop is only one among the throng
of dissonant concepts Marx develops, existing alongside quite heterogeneous,
but nonetheless crucial concepts such as class struggle, the theory of ground
rent, cost price, and a hundred others composing the logical body Marx con-
structs, step by step, concept by concept, as the finite, dissonant thing without
totality that is Capital.
Related to but distinct from this first claim for the logic of Capital as total-
ity is Arthur’s similarly obscure implication that because capital requires not
just the valorisation of value (as in the previous argument), but its unceasing
accumulation, Marx’s logic thus ‘treat[s] a given whole’, this because ‘it is char-
acteristic [of Capital like the works of Hegel] that it demonstrates how [this
given whole] reproduces itself …. The movement winds back upon itself to form
a circuit of reproduction of these moments by each other’.97 Certainly, Marx
shows the necessity of this circularity of reproduction and accompanying lin-
ear accumulation; nonetheless, my response is identical: Arthur’s claim is true
and just as wholly irrelevant to the status of capital (whether the book or the
social form) as totality, as it is only one among innumerable dissonant concepts
in Marx’s logical construct.
Finally, the most developed but just as problematic argument Arthur puts
forward for capital as totality is, paradoxically, its partial nature. Building on
the previous points regarding the generality of value and subsumption, Arthur

96 Here too, among the members of the Systematic Dialectic school of reading Capital, it is
Bellofiore who has the position closest to the one I am arguing here, stressing as he does
that Capital is composed of ‘fragments of a systematic reasoning’ such that he refuses
the ‘attempts [of Arthur and Reuten in particular] to ‘rewrite’ Marx in Hegelian fashion’
and insists instead (while rightly indicating various moments where Marx deploys aspects
of Hegelian logic) that ‘we are forced to remain in a fragmentary reading of Marx’. It is
likewise surely no coincidence, given this orientation, that Bellofiore is perhaps the only
member of this school actually to refer to Althusser and Lire le Capital both explicitly and
affirmatively. Bellofiore 2018, pp. 359–60, 357.
97 Arthur 2002, p. 64.

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142 chapter 3

argues that ‘It is inherent to the concept of capital that it must reproduce and
accumulate, and in this it seeks to overcome all obstacles and to make the mate-
rial reality it engages with conform as perfectly as possible to its requirements’.
But this it cannot do, ‘its ideal world of frictionless circulation and growth’ is
inevitably dependent upon recalcitrant externalities, namely, living labour and
its resistance to subsumption and the objective social demands of the valorisa-
tion process.98
Arthur makes this interesting and subtle point, one that in fact subverts the
general argument of his book, in the context of a wider claim for the compre-
hensive logical, as opposed to historical, argument of Capital. He asserts for
example that the discussion of the historical struggle over the length of the
working day in chapter ten of Volume i ‘is strictly illustrative and does not
advance the [logical] argument’.99 While literally correct, I think Arthur’s posi-
tion fails to indicate the necessity that governs Marx’s inclusion of this material
at this point in his analysis. When Marx writes that between the buyer and seller
of the commodity labour power there exists ‘an antinomy, of right against right,
both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange’, he clearly indicates a point
in his analysis that cannot be decided theoretically, one which, having as always
first explicated the theoretical parameters of this struggle (between necessary
and surplus labour), requires reference to this historical conflict.100
Note, however, how Arthur has externalised the category of class struggle
from his governing framework of the ‘ideal world of [capital’s] frictionless cir-
culation and growth’: first as merely ‘illustrative’ historical data,101 then as a
‘material reality’102 that impinges on this ideal logical form (totality). While the

98 Arthur 2002, p. 76.

99 Arthur 2002, p. 75.
100 Marx 1976, p. 342. As Michael Heinrich observes, ‘Theorising capitalism in its “ideal aver-
age” … constitutes a precondition [for Marx] for analysing the history of developed, fully-
formed capital …. The “theoretical development” of the categories, however, does not just
constitute a general background for analysing concrete struggles. The categorical presen-
tation itself leads to points where nothing further can be developed conceptually, and we
must turn to the contested historical process instead. Chapter 10 of the first volume, which
deals with the working day, demonstrates this in an exemplary way. We cannot determine
the limits of the working day based on the “laws of commodity production”. Instead, it is
the “violence” (Gewalt) of class struggle and the state that decides these limits, which are
repeatedly brought into question. Hence, there are historical depictions in Capital that are
not just “illustrations” and go beyond telling how capitalist relations emerged. Neverthe-
less, the location and meaning of these passages are by no means arbitrary but rather are
based strictly on the theoretical development of the categories’ (Heinrich 2021, p. 398).
101 Arthur 2002, p. 75.
102 Arthur 2002, p. 76.

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the positive logics of capital 143

data Marx cites may well be merely ‘illustrative’, is it not the case that the pre-
sentation of this data nonetheless depends not just upon ‘material reality’, but
precisely upon a concept of class struggle, a concept obviously vital and neces-
sarily internal to Marx’s entire critique of political economy, for the data Marx
presents to make sense in his argument?
When Arthur writes that ‘The logical form of capital is by no means abso-
lute but totally insufficient to maintain itself and it requires a transition to the
domain of reality;’ that ‘while capital has the form of self-realisation it still lacks
control over its bearers’; or that ‘the logic of the development can issue only
in tendencies, which in truth depend on material premises’,103 he unwittingly
reveals the nature of the imaginary logical totality he constantly presumes:104
in contrast to the object of Arthur’s analysis, a purely imaginary logical form
purged of class struggle, Marx’s (critical) logic of the capitalist social form inte-
grally and essentially positions the dissonant concepts of class struggle and the
recalcitrance of living labour as necessary logical components of his logical sys-
tem.105
In contrast to Marx’s critique, in which concepts such as class struggle and
the working day form integral, dissonant moments, the ideal system Arthur
presents as ‘frictionless’ totality, from which these dissonances have been exter-
nalised, is none other than the ideological apology for capitalism that is clas-
sical political economy itself (and neoliberalism more generally), precisely the
imaginary totality from which class struggle has been magically erased by an
‘invisible hand’. If capital is indeed a totality, it is so only in the imagination of
its apologists and benefactors. As Arthur himself is obviously not to be counted
among these, one is left to conclude, with Spinoza, that the powerful impres-
sion of the univocal Hegelian philosophy of totality has blinded the Marxist
analysis of The New Dialectic to the discordant, polyphonous logics of Marx’s
theoretical critique.

103 Arthur 2002, pp. 104, 106.

104 Arthur similarly claims in ‘Contradiction and Abstraction’ that ‘capital, as the totalising
Subject, is at home with itself only in the world of forms. At that level, it may well be con-
ceded that it is grounded on itself, and achieves closure when producing commodities
on the basis of ex nihilo bank credit. [But] the human and natural basis of the economic
metabolism remains …. Capital is a closed totality only in form; in reality, capital cannot
posit its presuppositions where its material conditions of existence are concerned’ (Arthur
2009, p. 175, emphasis added).
105 And Marx does so precisely, one might add, in order to critique the theoretical incapacity
of classical political economy to theorise the substance and nature of surplus value (Hic
Rhodus, hic salta!).

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144 chapter 3

7 Negation and Contradiction

In the sixth chapter of New Dialectic, Arthur explicates in detail the nega-
tive dialectical logic of chapter 32 of Capital Volume i, ‘The Historical Ten-
dency of Capitalist Accumulation’. While the previous chapters of New Dialectic
only punctually cited and analysed Marx’s text to support Arthur’s interpre-
tive reconstruction of the logic of capital, here, Marx’s sole reference to the
Hegelian concept of the ‘negation of the negation’ in the whole of Capital
serves Arthur as the occasion actually to cite and closely analyse the logic of
this moment in Marx’s demonstration. Beginning with an extensive, two-page
citation (to ‘remind ourselves of Marx’s text’), Arthur goes on to construct a
detailed, original interpretation of the logic of this passage.
Though the arch-Hegelian figure of the ‘negation of the negation’ amply vin-
dicates Arthur’s decision to analyse this long passage in detail, in other respects
the section is an odd choice for a study of ‘systematic dialectic’. For not only
have this chapter’s summary, teleological claims, as Arthur himself notes, long
been an object of ridicule from Dühring on, but their very formulation is pre-
cisely the opposite of the painstaking, systematic dialectic (of whatever type)
to be found in the initial chapters of Capital. In the place of the apodictic logic
of a rigorous demonstration that moves precisely, step by step, sentence by sen-
tence, to demonstrate the essential nature of the commodity and its forms, of
surplus value, of capital, etc., in this concluding chapter of volume one, Marx
famously makes sweeping, unfounded claims for the inevitable, unitary move-
ment of history: ‘At a certain stage of development [the precapitalist mode of
production] brings into the world the material means of its own destruction ….
Its annihilation … forms the pre-history of capital’. With the further develop-
ment of social productive forces, Marx continues, ‘the monopoly of capital
becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished along-
side it …. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated’.106
Stuck at the very end of Marx’s thousand-page volume, its penultimate chap-
ter retains the grandiose, undemonstrated logic of an inevitable, automatic
collapse of capitalism characteristic of the Grundrisse’s famous ‘Fragment on
machines’, claims buttressed not by rigorous demonstration but instead by the
unrevised, teleological Hegelianism of Marx’s Grundrisse notebooks that is pre-
cisely the object of Arthur’s fascination: ‘Capitalist production begets, with the
inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of

106 Cited in Arthur 2002, p. 112.

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the positive logics of capital 145

the negation’.107 Whether Marx’s grandiose claims do justice to the intricacy

of Hegel’s logical demonstrations is doubtful; at the very least, though, their
articulation through the Hegelian category of negation constitutes a further
instance of my argument in this chapter: that Marx’s process of exposition
in Capital follows not one single logical model (Hegelian or otherwise), but
deploys a multitude of demonstrative logics.
Despite Arthur’s close attention to the letter and movement of Marx’s text in
this passage, its grandiose, telegraphic nature forces him to revert to the process
of interpretation (as opposed to textual explication) that guided the previ-
ous chapters of New Dialectic. Arthur’s intention, then, is to show that Marx’s
deployment of the logic of the negation of negation in this chapter ‘is more
than just metaphor or parody’, but instead that its high degree of abstraction
in fact constitutes ‘the form of the transition [from one mode of production to
another] at the most general level, however highly mediated and contingent is
the real process’.108
Arthur thus proceeds interpretively to reconstruct the logic of the ‘two nega-
tions’ Marx indicates in the passage: from pre-capitalist to capitalist social
forms, and from the latter to the point at which, in Marx’s words, ‘The knell
of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’. This
analysis is predicated on the founding distinction of New Dialectic, i.e., between
a traditional historical reading of Capital as describing the passage from simple
exchange to the capitalist mode of production, in favour of a ‘structural prob-
lematic requiring an account of the “genesis” [of the capitalist social form] in
logical terms’.109 Given the resolutely historical terms in which Marx presents
his claims in this chapter (in this, it is of a piece with the entire concluding his-
torical section eight of Capital on so-called primitive accumulation), Arthur’s
point seems to be that even here, in what is argumentatively the weakest chap-
ter of the entire book, Capital remains a resolutely, unflaggingly logical work
(as opposed to a historical study of capitalism, its antecedents, and succes-
sors).

107 Cited in Arthur 2002, p. 113. Marx’s pre-1860 reliance on the Hegelian figures of estrange-
ment, objectification, and alienation, absent from the first seven chapters of Capital,
remains predominant in this penultimate one: ‘Before he enters the process [of capitalist
production], his own labour has already been estranged from him, appropriated by the
capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly
objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him’ (Marx 1976, p. 716). Arthur
rightly notes how this language is ‘reminiscent of a parallel passage in [Marx’s] 1844 Mss’
(2002, p. 133n18).
108 Arthur 2002, p. 114.
109 Arthur 2002, p. 116.

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146 chapter 3

Arthur’s focus is on the source of the original capital to initiate the capitalist
production process (this being the topic of section eight of Capital more gen-
erally). Here, Marx castigates the ideological faith that the capitalist gets these
funds from his own hard labour. This, Marx observes ironically, is ‘the unani-
mous answer of the spokesmen of political economy. And in fact’, Marx adds
slyly, ‘their assumption appears to be the only one consonant with the laws of
commodity production’.110 The point of Marx’s irony, as any reader of Capital
will know, is that this appearance is not just an ideological justification on the
part of the capitalists themselves, but possesses its own necessity, given the
theoretical inadequacy of the analysis of the question prior to Marx.
Arthur’s claim then is that Marx’s ensuing rectification of this ideological –
though necessary – misapprehension adheres to a negative dialectical logic of
‘the transformation of the laws of exchange, appropriation, and property, into
their opposites’.111 And indeed, Marx’s language in this passage, which Arthur
cites extensively, seems to indicate the automatic transformation characteristic
of dialectical sublation:

It is quite evident … that the laws of appropriation … become changed into

their direct opposite through their own internal and inexorable dialectic ….
The property laws of commodity production must undergo an inversion so
that they become laws of capitalist appropriation.112

This passage incontrovertibly constitutes, as Arthur rightly maintains, an

instance of Hegelian negative dialectic that Marx continued to deploy at cer-
tain moments in Capital, a movement of sublation that Marx presents as a
passive process of transformation that occurs automatically, as more adequate
categories sublate previous inadequate, ideological ones in the progression of
his argument.
This passage should be compared, however, with the strictly analogous pre-
ceding passage from chapter five to six and seven, the very crux of Marx’s cri-
tique of classical political economy. There, he shows that the ‘contradictions
in the general formula of capital’, i.e., the inability of the classical economists
to account for the source of surplus value given the inadequate conceptual
terms in which they posed the problem, requires not an automatic sublation
of those concepts based on their inner contradictions, one that would retain
them in their transformation, but, as Jacques Bidet and Riccardo Bellofiore have

110 Arthur 2002, p. 119, emphasis added.

111 Arthur 2002, p. 119.
112 Marx 1976, pp. 729, 734, cited in Arthur 2002, p. 119.

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the positive logics of capital 147

both argued, a logical break or leap to another theoretical terrain, one in which
Marx’s original concept of labour power – crucially absent from the concep-
tual framework of classical political economy – can be analysed in its use by its
purchaser, the capitalist, to reveal the source of surplus value as the difference
between necessary and surplus labour.113
While the object in question differs, Marx’s basic demonstrative procedure
is identical in these two passages: he first shows the necessity governing inad-
equate, ideological forms of appearance of a phenomenon (respectively, the
origin of a capital fund and the source of surplus value), and then offers its more
adequate analysis in his own theoretical terms. Despite this superficial similar-
ity, the terms of Marx’s demonstration are radically different, fully constituting
two singular modes of logical demonstration in the pages of Capital. In both
cases, the transformation in question is a transformation in the adequacy of our
understanding of the logic governing the capitalist social form; in both cases,
Marx contrasts an initial, inadequate and ideological form of appearance of a
phenomenon, with the greater adequacy our understanding can attain thanks
to the original concepts he has constructed.
For Arthur, the conclusion to be drawn from chapter 24 is merely that even
in this most superficially ‘historical’ analysis, ‘Marx speaks “virtually” [i.e., log-
ically] rather than historically, [which] refutes any interpretation of Capital
that equates the systematic presentation of the existing totality with historical
stages, as if the first chapter explicated some prior regime of simple commodity
production’.114 While Arthur’s defence of the entirely logical status of Capital
is in my view correct, the more interesting question, I think, is one that pre-
cisely subverts the claims to logical totality (‘the systematic presentation of
the existing totality’) that accompany this assertion. A comparison between
this passage and the transition from chapter five to six and seven incontro-
vertibly shows that the unrevised negative dialectical form of presentation in
chapter 32 constitutes an epistemological impediment, obscuring Marx’s lucid,
apodictic argument behind the foggy automatism and passivity of a putative
‘internal and inexorable [negative] dialectic’.
In its place, Marx’s famous invocation to his readers to solve the riddle that
had confounded the greatest minds of classical political economy, ‘Hic Rho-
dus, hic saltus!’ invokes not the imaginary automatism of a Hegelian dialectic
but the real power of the intellect to emend its comprehension of an object
through the difficult labour of Marx’s concepts. In comparison with the con-

113 See Bidet 2006, pp. 161–3; Bellofiore 2018, p. 365.

114 Arthur 2002, p. 121.

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148 chapter 3

ceptual gymnastics Arthur must perform to reveal the logical kernel of Marx’s
eschatological historicist claims in chapter 24, the blatant superiority of Marx’s
process of exposition in chapters five, six, and seven lies in the very simplicity
of his presentation of a series of powerfully creative critical concepts: when
two commodities are exchanged at their value without cheating, the source of
profit cannot be readily discerned; for labour power to be sold as a commodity
requires that the labourer own their own person as a free subject, not a slave;
upon its sale, the commodity labour power is entirely at the disposition of its
owner who has purchased it, the capitalist, who may continue to use it beyond
what is necessary for the sustenance and reproduction of the labourer, in order
to produce surplus value.
As such, Marx’s presentation in part two of the first volume of Capital dis-
cards his earlier reliance on the logical automatisms of a negative dialectic in
the Grundrisse and other preparatory manuscripts, directly to invoke the ful-
some powers of the human intellect more adequately to understand the object
of its analysis (‘Hic Rhodus, hic saltus!’), an invocation analogous to Spinoza’s
subjective presentation of the initial definitions of the Ethics. In those opening
statements, Spinoza defines each of his founding concepts (causa sui, sub-
stance, God, etc.) in resolutely subjective terms, via the concerted repetition
of the qualification intelligo [I understand]: ‘By substance I understand that
which is in itself and is conceived through itself’ [‘Per substantiam intelligo id,
quod in se est, et per se concipitur’].115
Macherey’s illuminating commentary on this crucial dimension of Spinoza’s
presentation is worth citing in whole for its resonance with Marx’s method in
part two of Capital:

It is important to note that the first statements that confront the reader
of the Ethics make an appeal to his capacity to ‘understand’ (intelligere),
that is to say, to his ‘intellect’ (intellectus), through which he is called to
know things in themselves, as they are really [réellement] and not only
as they could be in the abstract. In this manner, [Spinoza’s] philosoph-
ical discourse installs itself immediately in the movement [mouvance]
of the third genre of knowledge. It is furthermore notable that Spinoza,
in these inaugural definitions, conjugates the verb intelligere in the first-
person indicative present [‘I understand’], which necessarily associates
the formulation of the idea in question in each of these definitions with
an activity of effective thought [pensée effective], fully engaged in its affir-

115 eid3.

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the positive logics of capital 149

mation …. It is evident that in constructing in this way the first definitions

of the Ethics, Spinoza sought to confer on their expression, and at the
same time to the entire sequence of discourse that will be elaborated from
them, a personal character, something unusual [décalé] compared to the
impersonal form typical of abstract scientific discourse. The reader thus
implicitly receives the following message, which amounts to a provoca-
tion [défi]: here is what I myself understand, here is how things irrecus-
ably present themselves to my mind, on the model of eternal truths; it is
up to you to see whether this thought experiment [expérience] imposes
itself on you with the same necessity, or whether you find it possible to
understand things otherwise …. Spinoza practices philosophical thought
as a free spirit [esprit libre] who elaborates the conditions of a communi-
cation with other free spirits.116

Like that of Spinoza, Marx’s audacious challenge ‘Hic Rhodus, hic saltus!’ is
an encomium to the infinite powers of the human intellect progressively to
emend its capacity for understanding. While Marx’s early subjection to the fas-
cination of Hegel’s negative dialectic remains determinant in certain marginal
moments of Capital even in its second revision, such as its thirty-second chap-
ter, nowhere is this progressive emendation more evident than in the revisions
Marx operates upon his extraordinary and unparalleled analysis of the con-
cept of the commodity, as he reworked an initial presentation based upon its
putative contradiction-based determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestim-
mungen], to formulate instead a novel ramified, additive synthetic dialectic for
the 1872 and 1875 editions of Capital.

8 Constituting the Commodity

To argue as Arthur does that Marx deploys a Hegelian totality-based logic of

negation in a marginal, historicist recoin of Capital such as its thirty-second
chapter is in some ways to offer too easy a target for the post-Althusserian read-
ing of Capital I am developing here. Far more consequential would be to show
this negative dialectic at work in the crucial initial chapters of Capital, along
with its supersession in the course of Marx’s revisions by an alternative mode of
apodictic demonstration. ‘Beginnings’, Marx observed in the Preface to the First

116 Macherey 1998, pp. 29–30.

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150 chapter 3

Edition of Capital, ‘are always difficult in all sciences’.117 This is undoubtedly

true not only for the readers of Capital whom Marx cautions in this passage,
but for the author himself, who struggled mightily to find the proper mode of
demonstration for this crucial initial moment in his argument, and constructed
no less than four published versions of his analysis of the value-form (two in
the 1867 edition, and two others in the second, 1872 German edition and the
1875 French translation he carefully rewrote), along with an entire manuscript
from January 1872 in which he points to the shortcomings of his initial (1867)
presentation, in order to revise and emend his analysis in what would become
the 1872 edition.118
In fact, as Arash Abazari has shown, Marx’s analysis of the commodity form
in the first chapter of the first (1867) edition of Capital ‘is the only place in
Marx’s entire oeuvre where he systematically deploys and develops the concept
of dialectical contradiction’.119 Abazari argues that Marx’s initial analysis of the
commodity form deploys the Hegelian logic of constitutive negation [Reflex-
ionsbestimmungen], comparing Marx’s analysis with Hegel’s discussion in the
Logic of the ‘thing’ [das Ding].120 Abazari argues that in the Logic, Hegel dis-
tinguishes two forms of the contradictory nature of the thing.121 In the initial
logic or doctrine of being, Hegel analyses how the thing constitutes its iden-
tity as a positive entity through its negative, contrastive exclusion from other
things: salt gains its self-same identity through its negative distinction (differ-

117 Marx 1976, p. 89.

118 On the latter, see Heinrich 2021, pp. 375–80.
119 Abarazi 2019, p. 182, emphasis in original. Abazari’s article reprises that of W.A. Suchting’s
‘Marx, Hegel, and Contradiction’ (1985, p. 409), though without the former clearly indicat-
ing his proximity to Suchting’s analysis, whom he does not cite in his bibliography.
120 This is one point at which Abazari goes beyond Suchting’s earlier piece, which based its
presentation of Hegel’s logic of contradiction on Chapter 6 of the Encyclopedia rather
than, as with Abazari, the analysis of the Ding in the Science of Logic. This difference in
approach allows Abazari, in my view, to bring out much more sharply than Suchting the
homologous logics of contradiction and Reflexionsbestimmung in Hegel and the 1867 edi-
tion of Capital. In the following paragraphs I follow Abazari’s suggestive comparison of
the Hegelian logic of Reflexionsbestimmungen and Marx’s 1867 analysis of the commod-
ity, rejecting Abazari’s argument only in its further, undemonstrated claim that ‘although
Marx omits [explicit reference to dialectical contradiction] in later editions of Capital,
[this Hegelian logic], I believe, remains central to his analysis even in the later editions’
Abazari 182. In Wissenschaft vom Wert Heinrich criticises Helmut Brentel’s systematic
argument for the predominance of a Hegelian logic of determinations of reflection in Cap-
ital in Brentel’s Widerspruch und Entwicklung bei Marx und Hegel (Heinrich 2022 [1999],
p. 168; 2023, p. 264).
121 Abarazi 2019, p. 183.

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the positive logics of capital 151

ence) from pepper and all other spices, or, in the case of Capital, we could say
that capitalism gains its identity through its difference from feudalism and all
other modes of production.
In such contrastive negation, Abazari observes, ‘there is no contradiction in
something. Something excludes other somethings, and, as it were, remains a
harmonious ensemble of qualities and quantities’.122 While this form of exter-
nal contradiction is determinant in the first book of Hegel’s Logic, only occa-
sionally and in passing does Marx define the capitalist mode of production in
this exclusive manner, through its distinction from feudalism, slavery, or com-
munism; instead, he develops his critique through the analysis of the categories
proper and internal to the capitalist social form itself (the commodity, surplus
value, competition, etc.).123
In the second Book of the Science of Logic, the ‘doctrine of essence’, however,
Hegel shows the object to gain its essential determination not through its con-
trastive exclusion from other things, but instead through the sublation of such
external reflection as the inner, constitutive contradiction that he names the
‘determination of reflection’ [Reflexionsbestimmung].124 By this he indicates
the inner, contradictory determination of the thing by dyadic categories such
as cause and effect or essence and appearance, categories that are in internal
relation to the thing they define.125 The key point for Hegel is that such inner

122 Abarazi 2019, p. 185, emphasis added.

123 Marx repeatedly invokes feudalism, but only in passing, as a contrastive example or aside
in his systematic demonstration, i.e.: ‘The medieval peasant produced a corn-rent for the
feudal lord and a corn-tithe for the priest; but neither the corn-rent nor the corn-tithe
became commodities simply by being produced for others’ (1976, p. 130).
124 ‘Determining reflection is in general the unity of positing and external reflection …. The
positing is now united with external reflection; in this unity, the latter is absolute presup-
posing, that is, the repelling of reflection from itself or the positing of determinateness as
its own. As posited, therefore, positedness is negation; but as presupposed, it is reflected
into itself. And in this way positedness is a determination of reflection .… The deter-
mination of reflection is on the contrary positedness as negation – negation which has
negatedness for its ground, is therefore not unequal to itself within itself, and hence essen-
tial rather than transient determinateness …. The determination of reflection … has taken
its otherness back into itself. It is positedness – negation which has however deflected the
reference to another into itself, and negation which, equal to itself, is the unity of itself
and its other, and only through this is an essentiality’ (Hegel 2010b, pp. 352–3).
125 Abazari focuses his analysis on the Hegelian dyad of form and matter, which becomes
problematic when he argues for their direct homology with Marx’s concepts use-value
(‘matter’) and exchange-value (‘form’). Problematic because while the use-value of a com-
modity may bear a physical form or shape, many commodities are immaterial (the use-
value of services for example); on the other hand, exchange-value, as the form of appear-
ance of value, has material attributes (the number printed on a bill or coin, for example).

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152 chapter 3

determinations, unlike those of the doctrine of being, stand in negative contra-

diction to each other:

The self-subsisting determination of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmung]

excludes the other in the same respect as it contains it and is self-
subsisting for precisely this reason, in its self-subsistence the determina-
tion excludes its own self-subsistence from itself. For this self-subsistence
consists in that it contains the determination which is other than it in
itself and does not refer to anything external for just this reason; but no
less immediately in that it is itself and excludes from itself the determi-
nation that negates it. And so it is contradiction [Widerspruch].126

This is to argue that the object is not merely a positive entity, its being consist-
ing of a synthetic addition of its various qualities (as shown in Hegel’s doctrine
of Being), but constitutes instead, from the perspective of its essence, a neg-
ative or contradictory totality: ‘The thing as this totality is contradiction [Das
Ding als diese Totalität ist der Widerspruch], … the form in which the matter is
determined … and at the same time consisting of sorts of matter that … are at
once both self-standing and negated’.127
The question in the case of the commodity is thus whether use-value and
exchange-value, what Marx calls the two ‘factors’ [Faktoren] of the commodity,
simultaneously contain and exclude one another to constitute a contradic-
tion in Hegel’s sense, or, instead, stand in positive ‘opposition’ [Gegensatz] to
one another without contradiction. Note carefully Hegel’s contention: ‘[Self-
subsistence] contains the determination which is other than it in itself …; but
no less immediately … excludes from itself the determination that negates it’.
Each determination of reflection, in other words, contains its opposite within
itself, which I will argue does not obtain in Marx’s analysis of the commodity.
There, in contrast, I will seek to show that the determinations or what Marx
calls the ‘factors’ of the commodity such as use- and exchange-value merely
stand in positive ‘opposition’ to one another without mutual reflection, pre-
cisely as Marx will state in the revised versions of this analysis.

Here, I can only agree with Roberto Fineschi, who writes that ‘I do not think that we have
to look for analogies or homologies between Marx’s theory of capital and Hegel’s logic; this
alleged ‘Hegelian approach’ has paradoxically resulted in a very non-dialectical attitude in
many scholars. In fact, Marx himself criticised any external application of categories to a
given content’ (Fineschi 2014, p. 140).
126 Hegel 2010b, p. 374, emphasis in original.
127 Hegel 2010a, p. 196, translation modified.

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the positive logics of capital 153

In Hegel’s recuperation of the concept of contradiction, the object – in its

essential, constitutive nature rather than its mere external being – is ‘the abso-
lute contradiction [der absolute Widerspruch]’ of form and matter.128 While this
position famously constitutes the originality of Hegel’s reconstruction of logic
as a negative, contradiction-based dialectic,129 it is far from clear that Marx
adopts and, above all, holds to this same logic of the determinations of reflec-
tion in his analysis of the concept of the commodity.

9 From Dialectical Contradiction to Additive Synthesis

What Abazari does show convincingly is that in the analysis of the concept of
the commodity in the first edition of Capital, Marx systematically adopts this
Hegelian logic of constitutive negation [Reflexionsbestimmung], the commod-
ity, that is to say, as it has commonly been understood in traditional Marxism ‘as
the contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-value’.130 It is not merely the
case that Marx initially adopts the Hegelian vocabulary of externalisation, con-
tradiction [Widerspruch], the determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestim-
mung], and essence and appearance in the first chapter of the 1867 edition.131
Abazari argues more generally that in Marx’s analysis of the value-form:

128 Hegel 2010a, p. 268.

129 ‘Contradiction [is] the negative in its essential determination, the principle of all self-
movement …. Only when driven to the extreme of contradiction are the many of that
manifold quickened and alive to each other: they hold the negativity in them which is the
inner pulse of self-movement and life’ (Hegel 2010b, pp. 382, 384).
130 Abazari 2019, p. 188.
131 Examples of this Hegelian vocabulary from the 1867 edition that are absent from the 1872
edition include: ‘Since it is, as value, of the same essence [Wesens] as the coat, the natural
form of the coat thus becomes the form of appearance of its own value’; ‘[The coat’s] status
as an Equivalent is (so to speak) only a reflection-determination [Reflexionsbestimmung]
of the linen’; ‘The commodity is the immediate unity of use-value and exchange-value,
i.e., of two opposites [zweier Entgegengesetzten]. It is therefore an immediate contradic-
tion [unmittelbarer Widerspruch]. This contradiction [Widerspruch] must enter upon a
development just as soon as it is no longer considered as previously in an analytic man-
ner (at one point from the viewpoint of use-value and at another from the viewpoint
of exchange-value) but is really related to other commodities as a totality [ein Ganzes]’;
(Dragstedt’s translation of first chapter of the first German edition of Capital, entitled ‘The
Commodity’, pp. 13, 16, 29–30, translation modified, available at https://www.marxists.org/​
archive/marx/works/1867‑c1/commodity.htm. For the original German text, see mega ii5
[1867]). Heinrich points out that in the 1872 edition, Marx never uses the term essence
[Wesen] before page 458 of the Penguin translation (Heinrich 2021, p. 58). I will make a sim-
ilar point about the systematic absence of the term Widerspruch (contradiction) from the
first chapter of Capital, and its replacement by the term ‘opposition’ [Gegensatz], without

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154 chapter 3

The simple form of value, for Marx, is constituted by a contradiction;

since, first, the exchange-value of A is contained in the use-value of B,
and yet, since the two commodities are necessarily two distinct things,
the exchange-value of A is excluded by the use-value of B. The relation is
contradictory, since it is composed of two moments that contain, and yet
exclude, each other.132

This, then, is the familiar claim for the ‘contradictory’ nature of use- and
exchange-value in the commodity, but does it hold up when measured against
the actual terminology and argument to be found in Marx’s demonstration in
the 1872 edition of Capital?
It is important to distinguish this first chapter of the 1867 edition that founds
Abazari’s claim, the argument of which, Marx warns his reader, will ‘present
the greatest difficulty’, from what Marx calls the ‘supplementary, more didactic
exposition of the form of value’ that he added as an appendix to that same first
edition, at the request of Engels and Kugelmann.133 The latter material then
formed the basis of Marx’s 1872 revision of this chapter. In that 1867 appendix –
Marx tells the reader in his Postface to the second edition – the process of expo-
sition ‘[was] completely revised’. While the 1867 appendix thus already begins
the tendential elimination of this Hegelian vocabulary, a process that will cul-
minate in the 1872 and 1875 editions, a systematic comparison of the five ver-
sions of this chapter shows that this tendency is both uneven and incomplete,
such that none of Marx’s varied analyses of the value form can be considered
as definitive.134
The revision manuscript that Marx drafted in December 1871-January 1872,135
for example, develops the social, communal nature of value-objectivity to
a degree unparalleled in any of the three published versions of his analy-
sis,136 while the 1875 French translation by Joseph Roy, which Marx person-
ally and extensively revised, inserts, for example, a negative dialectical pas-
sage absent from both the 1867 and 1872 German editions: ‘Les contradictions
que renferme la forme équivalente exige maintenant un examen plus appro-

hesitating to draw Althusserian conclusions from this absence, conclusions that Heinrich
steers clear of in his commitment to reading Capital literally and without interpretation.
132 Abazari 2019, pp. 190–1.
133 Marx 1976, pp. 89, 94.
134 Heinrich 2021, pp. 363, 370.
135 ‘Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals (Additions and Changes
to the First Volume of Capital)’.
136 Heinrich 2021, p. 375.

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the positive logics of capital 155

fondie’.137 Similarly, the 1872 edition, while abandoning the vocabulary and
logic of contradiction [Widerspruch] in its body text, nonetheless inserts a
note observing that ‘determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmungen]
of this kind [i.e., in the analysis of the value form] are altogether very curi-
ous’.138
Given this complexity and unevenness between Marx’s various presenta-
tions of the value form, it is notable that Marx already distinguishes in 1867
between his materialist derivation of the form of value as ‘an external mate-
rial in which labour objectifies [vergegenständlichen] itself … as determinate
labour [bestimmten Arbeit]’, and Hegelian idealism, in which, he observes iron-
ically, ‘it is only the ‘concept’ [Begriff ] in Hegel’s sense that manages to objectify
itself without external material’.139 Marx’s 1867 critique of Hegelian idealism is
thus precociously analogous to that which Badiou will develop of Frege in Being
and Event: thought cannot imperiously determine being, but must remain sub-
ject to a materialist determination.140
Heinrich observes, however, that this position nonetheless remains a mere
negative critique; it will only be with the further revision in the 1872 version of
this chapter that Marx would develop the conceptual means to distinguish the
‘chimerical’ objectivity of the commodity form from the tangible value form.
According to Heinrich’s reading,

both in chapter 1 of the first edition and in [Marx’s 1872] revision manu-
script, Marx seems unsure about how exactly to present the relation
between the ‘purely chimerical’ objectivity of value and its tangible form
of existence in the shape of another commodity. It’s clear that this relation
is not to be grasped in the manner of Hegel’s philosophy. In fact, Marx first
found an adequate solution [only] in Capital’s second edition. There, he
distinguishes between two levels of investigation: (1) The examination of
the exchange relation between two commodities [as …] value-objectivity,
which cannot be grasped in the case of the individual commodity; (2)

137 mega ii7 1989, p. 38.

138 Marx 1976, p. 149.
139 Dragstedt’s translation of Capital, [Chapter 1]: ‘The Commodity’ (p. 13), https://www​
.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867‑c1/commodity.htm.
140 Here is Heinrich: ‘In the second edition of Capital, Marx put the rational kernel of this con-
ceptual form of expression into words: “Our analysis has shown that the form of value, that
is, the expression of the value of a commodity, arises from the nature of commodity-value”
(Marx 1976: 152). That is, the value-form does not arise from the concept of value, but
rather from that which the concept of value expresses scientifically, namely the “nature
of commodity-value”’ (Heinrich 2021, p. 374). On Badiou’s critique, see below, Chapter 4.

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156 chapter 3

The examination of the value-relation between two commodities, which

already assumes the result of the analysis of the exchange relation in level
(1).141

Here we have one of the clearest examples of the furtive and uneven tendency
of development across the multiple versions of Marx’s exposition of the value
form, from an initial rejection of Hegelian idealist, negative dialectic that still
lacks the means replace this with a positive demonstration, to Marx’s further
development by 1872 of what Heinrich and Fred Moseley agree is an additive
synthetic method of presentation without negation, one that clearly distin-
guishes between and synthetically proceeds from an analysis of what Heinrich
identifies as the ‘exchange relation’ to that of the ‘value relation’, and Moseley,
from the substance and magnitude of value in the first two sections of chapter 1,
to its necessary form of appearance in the third.142
Abazari, in contrast, finds Marx’s 1872 insertion of the footnote 22 referring to
the ‘Determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmungen]’ in the value-form
to be certain proof of a continued reliance on Hegelian logic. In comparison
with the body of the text, from which the concept of contradiction is strictly
absent, I believe, in contrast, that the insertion of this new footnote in 1872 is
rather an example of Marx falling back on an old and familiar category to inad-
equately indicate a new, post-Hegelian process he is in the process of inventing,
an original form of additive, synthetic dialectic.
This would then be another example of what Althusser identified as the
symptomatic tendency of a novel theory in its deployment to run ahead of sub-
jective recognition of its novelty:

141 Heinrich 2021, p. 380. Heinrich’s contention that the first chapter of Capital is divided
between analyses of the exchange relation and the value relation has not gone unchal-
lenged, in particular by Fred Moseley (2023). I will discuss the dispute between Heinrich
and Moseley over the nature of value in Capital below.
142 Here is Moseley: ‘The overall logical structure of Marx’s analysis of the commodity in
Chapter 1 is in terms of the concepts of the substance of value, the magnitude of value,
and the form of appearance of value. The substance and magnitude of value are derived
in Sections 1 and 2, and then the form of appearance of value is derived in Section 3,
with the predetermined substance and magnitude of value presupposed’ (Moseley 2023,
p. 236). The distinction I make throughout this chapter between Marx’s analytic method
of research in preparatory notebooks such as the Grundrisse and the synthetic method
of Darstellung characteristic of Capital is also held by the systematic dialectical school of
Marxist epistemology, including Heinrich’s vehement critic Fred Moseley, and is explicitly
developed for example in Reuten 2014, p. 251. Though I agree with Reuten, Arthur and Tony
Smith on the relevance of this analytic/synthetic distinction, as noted above, I reject the
positions of this school regarding the concepts of capital as a totality and the putatively
contradiction-based process of Marx’s exposition.

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the positive logics of capital 157

This is what Marx tells us. And there is no apparent reason not to take
him at his word …. [And yet,] at certain moments, in certain symptomatic
points, this silence [i.e., the absence of a proper name for a novel concept
or procedure Marx has invented] emerges as such in the discourse and
forces it against its will to produce real theoretical lapses, in brief blank
flashes, invisible in the light of the proof: words [such as Reflexionsbestim-
mungen] that hang in mid-air although they seem to be inserted into the
necessity of the thought, judgements which close irreversibly with a false
obviousness the space of which seemed to be opening before reason ….
Marx has not thought what he is doing to the letter.143

It would be incongruous to condemn Marx’s failure to find the time to name

and theorise the novel process of exposition he develops in Capital, as
Althusser observes more generally, for ‘no one can be convicted for not say-
ing everything at once. But his too hurried readers can be attacked for not
having heard this silence’.144 Althusser’s more general claim holds as well for
this putative obviousness of the constitutive contradiction between use- and
exchange-value, i.e., that it indicates precisely such a ‘point at which the theo-
retical incompleteness of Marx’s judgement of himself has produced the most
serious misunderstandings’.145 To determine whether in fact Capital continues
to rely on the Hegelian logic of determinate reflection requires actually to fol-
low Marx’s demonstration line by line in the first chapter of Capital, asking
furthermore whether the elimination of the category of contradiction and its
replacement by that of opposition indicates a fundamental change in the nature
of Marx’s demonstration.

10 Toward an Additive Demonstration, Without Contradiction

While the word Widerspruch (contradiction) does not appear at all in Chap-
ter 1 of the 1872 edition, Marx comes to prioritise in its place the concept of
Gegensatz (opposition) to indicate the precise nature of the relation of use- and
exchange-value in the concept of the commodity. The word Gegensatz (which
is only used 4 times in the 1867 version of Chapter 1) appears some twenty-five
times in Chapter 1 (1872), as Marx’s term of preference to indicate the relation
of use-value and value: i.e., ‘The simple form of value of a commodity is the

143 rc, pp. 231, 237, emphases added.

144 rc, p. 235, emphasis in original.
145 rc, p. 238.

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158 chapter 3

simple form of appearance of the opposition [Gegensatz] between use-value

and value which is contained within the commodity’.146
Gegensatz, synonymous with the German Opposition, does indeed indicate
something quite different from Hegelian contradiction and determinations of
reflection: the relation of extreme difference, diversity, or contrast between
two things, in other words, an intensive positive distinction without contradic-
tion.147 While this etymological distinction seems merely suggestive, it in fact
clearly and succinctly indicates for Marx a profound and longstanding theo-
retical distinction, between Hegelian logical negation and Marx’s own devel-
opment of a positive, materialist mode of demonstration, a distinction that
originates in his intensive engagement with Hegelian and Aristotelean logic in
the period 1839–1842.
Briefly put, in the period 1839–1841, Marx initially studied Hegelian and Aris-
totelean logic not only to prepare his highly original deployment of Hegelian
logic in his dissertation, but intending as well, as Charles Barbour has shown,
to compose a never-completed Hegelian rebuttal to the leading proponent of
Aristotelean logic of the time, Adolf Trendelenburg. Trendelenburg was famous
in philosophical circles for his 1833 critical edition of Aristotle’s De Anima, and
this likely motivated Marx’s decision to initiate a competing translation of De
Anima, as well as his explicit critiques of Trendelenburg in the dissertation.
It was, however, Trendelenburg’s highly influential 1840 critique of Hegelian
logic, Logische Untersuchungen, that was the primary focus of Marx’s theoreti-
cal ire in March 1841, when he hatched a plan with Bruno Bauer to compose a
Hegelian rebuttal to Trendelenburg in the journal the two projected, to be enti-

146 In the 1872 edition, Marx first uses the word Widerspruch only toward the end of chap-
ter 3.1, ‘The Measure of Values’: ‘The price-form … may also harbour a qualitative contra-
diction [qualitativen Widerspruch]’ (1976, p. 197). Marx refers once to the mere illusory
appearance [scheint] that exchange-value is ‘something accidental’ as a pseudo ‘contra-
diction in adjecto’, but translates the Latin as ‘Widersinn’ rather than the more Hegelian
synonym Widerspruch [1976, p. 126] (1976, p. 153).
147 In The Science of Value, Michael Heinrich casually equates the two terms in passing: ‘Das
Mangelhafte an einer Kategorie wird von Marx oft als “Gegensatz” oder “Widerspruch”
ihrer verschiedenen Bestimmungen bezeichnet’ (‘What is deficient in a category is often
defined by Marx as the “opposition” or “contradiction” between its different determina-
tions’) (Heinrich2022, p. 174; 2023, p. 270, my translation). In Hegel or Spinoza, Macherey,
in contrast, observes that ‘The contradiction (Widerspruch) distinguishes itself from the
opposition (Gegensatz) in that it is not a fixed relation between distinct and antagonistic
terms but the irresistible movement that discovers in each of these elements the truth of
the other and thus produces them as moments of a unique process in which they appear
as inseparable’ (2011, p. 121).

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the positive logics of capital 159

tled Annals of Atheism.148 While Marx’s initial intent in 1839–1841 was to defend
Hegelian logic against Trendelenburg, on at least one count, the latter’s learned
exposition of Aristotelean logic and critique of Hegelian dialectics seems to
have hit home, and to have provided for this brilliant and learned young reader
of Aristotle a signal theoretical distinction between Hegelian idealist and sci-
entific materialist methods of logical demonstration.
In Logische Untersuchungen, Trendelenburg vehemently criticizes Hegel for
confusing quite basic Aristotelean logical principles, primary among which in
Trendelenburg’s judgment is Hegel’s failure to grasp the fundamental distinc-
tion Aristotle makes between what Trendelenburg calls ‘logical negation’ and
‘real opposition [Gegensatz].’149 If Marx had not already gleaned this theoreti-
cal distinction from his reading of Aristotle, it would have been impossible to
overlook its primacy in Trendelenburg’s critique. It is, moreover, this distinction
between Hegelian ‘logical negation’ and Aristotelean, materialist ‘real opposi-
tion’ that, I wish to argue, becomes a fundamental theoretical distinction for
Marx, from his 1843 ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ through his revi-
sions to Capital three decades later.
When Marx first came to critique Hegelian logic in the 1843 “Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” he reproached Hegel throughout for his logical
idealism, for his derivation, that is to say, of the empirical existence of the
orders of the state – sovereign, executive, legislative, and the Estates – from
their logical Idea. This process inevitably leads, Marx argues, to an uncritical
defence of the status quo:

Hegel’s purpose is to narrate the life-history of abstract substance, of the

Idea, and in such a history human activity etc. necessarily appears as the
activity and product of something other than itself; he therefore repre-
sents the essence of man as an imaginary detail instead of allowing it to
function in terms of its real human existence. This leads him to … the
inevitable result that an empirical existent [eine empirische Existenz] is
uncritically enthroned as the real truth of the Idea. For Hegel’s task is not

148 Barbour 2023, 18.

149 Here is Barbour: ‘In pure logic or [what Trendelenburg calls Hegelian] “logical negation,”
it is possible to claim that the one term is determined by its difference from another, or
through purely logical negation. Being, for example, has meaning insofar as it is not noth-
ing, and nothing insofar as it is not being. But the same is not true in nature or [what
Trendelenburg calls] “real opposition.” For in nature there are no negative terms, only pos-
itive facts. The natural existence of a cat, for example, is not to be found in the idea “not
dog,” but in an empirical description of a cat.’ Barbour 2023, 22.

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160 chapter 3

to discover the truth of empirical existence but to discover the empirical

existence of the truth.150

Marx instead calls for an opposing materialist-scientific method, one that

would arrive at “the truth of empirical existence” through the critical analysis
of real, actually-existing entities (in this case, the orders of the state).
Marx’s primary critique of Hegel in this early text, however, is Hegel’s repre-
sentation of the orders of the state as existing in a negative dialectical relation
to one another, such that they derive their identity and legitimacy through their
mutual, negative dialectical relations to one another, the contradictions of each
order resolving those of the others. This, Marx argues, is to treat actual differ-
ences between real, actually-existing entities, what Marx calls “real extremes,”
as mere logical differences that harmoniously sublate one another’s contradic-
tions.151
It is precisely here that Marx deploys Trendelenburg’s distinction between
“logical negation” and “real opposition,” distinguishing the materialist method
he calls for – as the analysis of real “opposition” or “extremes” – from the logical
idealism of Hegel’s negative dialectic of Reflexionsbestimmungen:

It is remarkable that Hegel could have reduced this absurd process of

mediation to its abstract, logical and hence ultimate undistorted form,
while at the same time enthroning it as the speculative mystery of logic
[spekulatives Mysterium der Logik], as the scheme of reason, the ratio-
nal mode of deduction par excellence. Real extremes cannot be mediated
precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require mediation,
for their natures are wholly opposed [sie sind entgegengesezten Wesens].152

It is precisely this theoretical distinction, first developed in the “Critique of

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” that will govern Marx’s variable recourse through-
out his drafting and revisions to Capital to these two modes of theoretical
demonstration: the logical idealism of Hegelian negative dialectical “contradic-
tion” [Widerspruch] versus the materialist analysis of the real order of existence
that takes each thing in its real “opposition” [Gegensatz] to others.
In light of Marx’s reading of Trendelenburg and his argument in the “Critique
of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” my claim is straightforward: when decades

150 Marx, 1974, 98; mega2 i.2, 40, translation modified.

151 Barbour 2023, 26.
152 Marx, 1974, 155; mega2 i.2, 97, emphasis added.

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the positive logics of capital 161

later Marx came to draft and subsequently revise the various sections of Capi-
tal, it would be this nominal distinction between “contradiction” and “opposi-
tion” that would serve to clearly indicate to an informed reader the distinction
between two theoretical procedures of analysis and demonstration. It is a the-
oretical doublet that allowed Marx succinctly to realise in his various revisions,
in part, the task he had given himself in the Grundrisse: the systematic elimi-
nation of the impression that the various categories of his analysis are derived
from the Idea of the capitalist social form, rather than scientifically constructed
from his analysis of a real thing, a society typified by the accumulation and
exchange of commodities.153

If now we return to reading Capital to the letter, we do in fact find that what
Marx demonstrates in his analysis of the commodity is an “opposition” rather
than a Hegelian “contradiction” between use- and exchange-value.154 Indeed,
Marx begins his demonstration by introducing each dimension of the com-
modity positively, as what he calls ‘factors’ [Faktoren] or attributes. There is no
derivation of use-value or exchange-value in the opening paragraphs of Capi-
tal; instead, they are simply additively posed or ‘positioned’, as Althusser will
say, one after another: ‘The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing
which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind … The use-
fulness of a thing makes it a use-value’. And then, in his fifth paragraph, with
neither transition nor derivation of any kind, Marx immediately poses the sec-
ond factor of the commodity: ‘Exchange-value appears first of all as the quan-
titative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for
use-values of another kind’.155
If we abstract from Marx’s intervening analysis of the characteristics of these
two factors or attributes of the commodity (satisfying a human need, having
both quality and quantity, etc.), we are left with two positive, underived propo-
sitions:
A. The commodity has the attribute (‘factor’) use-value.
B. The commodity has the attribute (‘factor’) exchange-value.156

153 “It will be necessary later,” Marx noted to himself in the Grundrisse, “to correct the ide-
alist manner of the presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of
conceptual determinations and of the dialectic of these concepts” Marx, 1973, 151.
154 Here I only summarize relevant moments in Marx’s exposition of the commodity form in
Capital, chapter One (1872), referring readers to Michael Heinrich’s more detailed exposi-
tion of this chapter’s logic in How to Read Marx’s Capital.
155 Marx 1976, pp. 125–6.
156 To call these factors ‘attributes’ of the commodity implies that, analogously to the infi-
nite attributes of substance that Spinoza identifies, use-value and exchange-value are ‘that

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162 chapter 3

In the relation between Marx’s initial proposition that the ‘individual com-
modity’ constitutes the ‘elementary form’ [Elementarform] of the capitalist
mode of production and the additive introduction of these two attributes in
the four succeeding paragraphs,157 there is no trace of any deduction or infer-
ence whatsoever, to say nothing of a putative negative dialectical sublation
such as is to be found in the first lines of Hegel’s Science of Logic (Being|Noth-
ing→Becoming).158 At the same time, this additive positioning of concepts is
no a priori formalist or abstract axiomatic exercise, but comprises a prop-
erly materialist critique, thanks to the necessary determination of this starting
point – the true idea that we as subjects of capitalism always already possess
of its nature (as general commodification).159 Marx has determined precisely
these as the attributes of the commodity, thanks to his painstaking research
or ‘enquiry’ [Forschungsweise] prior to the elaboration of his reproduction
[Darstellungsweise] of the capitalist real in the attribute of thought.160

which the intellect perceives of’ the ‘substance’ of the capitalist mode of production – i.e.,
what Marx has just called its ‘Elementarform’, the commodity – ‘as constituting its [the
commodity’s] essence’ at its greatest level of abstraction (eid4).
157 Marx 1976, pp. 125–6.
158 This absence of a contradiction-based logic in Capital is one of the principal themes of
Althusser’s ‘Avant-propos du livre de G. Duménil’ (written in February 1977), along with
his subsequent (unpublished) seminar of March 1978, the ‘Cours sur le mode d’exposition
chez Marx’ (imec 20 alt 28.5): ‘In what respect could use-value … be said to contradict
the value it “carries”? Mystery’ (‘Avant-propos’, p. 253). ‘The relation between use-value and
exchange-value is not a relation of contradiction (as the result of a scission) … the scis-
sion of an abstraction of value into use-value and exchange-value …. Marx insists on the
difference in function of use-value [which] can in no sense be thought of as contradictory
to exchange-value’ imec 20alt 28.5, pp. 16–17. Althusser’s assertion remains little more
than that, however, this claim in both these texts cryptically referring to Marx’s passing
observation that use-values are the ‘bearers’ [Träger] of value (‘In the form of society to be
considered here [use-values] are also the material bearers [Träger] of … exchange-value’)
(Marx 1976, p. 126).
159 What Macherey says of Spinoza’s starting point in Ethics holds identically for Marx’s begin-
ning to Capital: ‘If the exposition of the Spinozist doctrine begins with definitions, axioms,
and postulates, if it begins with substance rather than God, this does not at all indicate that
these primitive notions constitute a source of truth from which all that follows could be
simply deduced, following a rigid and predetermined course in the form of an explication.
Substance, attributes, and modes, as they appear in these liminary principals, are precisely
the equivalent of the rough, unpolished stone that the first smiths needed to “begin” their
work: these are still abstract notions, simple words, natural ideas that will only truly take
on meaning from the moment they function in demonstrations’ (Macherey 2011, p. 76).
160 Marx 1976, p. 102. In the Avant-propos to G. Duménil, Althusser offers a qualified agree-
ment with Duménil’s assertion (equivalent to that which Arthur makes in New Dialectic)
that ‘“Political economy is not an axiomatic”. Certainly’, Althusser observes, this is the case

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the positive logics of capital 163

What I am calling Marx’s additive synthetic method is essentially a devel-

opment, on my part, of Althusser’s abstract assertion that Marx’s exposition
proceeds via the ‘positioning’ [la position] of one concept after a preceding one
has been adequately analysed. ‘Marx’s thought’, he writes in the Avant-propos
au livre de G. Duménil, ‘proceeds by the positioning [la position] of concepts,
inaugurating the exploration (analysis) of the theoretical space opened and
closed by this positioning, followed by the positioning of a new concept, thus
enlarging the theoretical field, and so forth, to the point of constituting theo-
retical fields of extreme complexity’.161 This thesis of the additive positioning of
concepts, Althusser observes, ‘excludes all appearance of an auto-production of
the concept (and a fortiori of the real by the concept) in Hegelian fashion, [ver-
sus] the intervention at a given moment of the exposition of the key concepts
around which is organised the constitution and exploration of the theoretical
field in its multiple combinations’.162
It’s notable in particular how by this late moment in Althusser’s reflection,
his analysis of la position proceeds in purely additive fashion, from Marx’s ini-
tial research [Forschungsweise] to its demonstration, and within the latter, from
one concept to the next, never referring to a putative totality or whole (as
does Arthur or as Althusser himself had in the first edition of Reading Capi-
tal) that would govern and guarantee the truth of this exposition (as opposed
to the crudely suppressed paragraphs in the second edition of Reading Capital
that were the object of Macherey’s 1966 critique). This additive procedure that

‘in the sense of an ideological axiomatic: Marx neither positions [pose] nor adds [ajoute]
a given concept [merely] to “explore” what would follow from it, as a pure hypothesis,
or to produce consequent effects. He doesn’t indulge in arbitrary variations, nor in the
“apprehension” of a given phenomenal totality as a mere indulgence [par plaisir]. His
exposition is patently guided, behind the scenes, by the great realities discovered by the
silent “method of research” [Forschungsweise]’ (Althusser 1998, p. 259). Althusser writes in
the 1978 ‘Cours sur le mode d’exposition’, in terms that similarly emphasise the materialist
determination of Marx’s method, that ‘this method is not without resemblance [analo-
gie] with an axiomatic method, with the understanding that the positioning of concepts
… plays the role of the conceptual introduction of real [materialist] determinations that
must be introduced in abstract form in order simultaneously to think the discontinuity of
the field within a previously constituted theoretical continuity’ imec 20alt 28.5, pp. 18–
19.
161 Althusser 1998, p. 257.
162 Althusser 1998, p. 258. In the ‘Cours sur le mode d’exposition’ Althusser observes in a simi-
lar vein that the additive procedure of the positioning of concepts ‘is the condition of the
discontinuity of the theoretical field [of Capital] …. [While] Hegel proceeds by the auto-
production of concepts, Marx proceeds by the positioning of a concept, [such that] the
positioning of each concept opens and closes a new theoretical field’ (imec 20alt 28.5,
p. 17).

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164 chapter 3

Althusser describes, I would add, thus coheres perfectly with Spinoza’s critique
of totality in his 1665 letter to Oldenburg, despite its telegraphic nature in this
late moment of Althusser’s thought.
While the variegated analysis of exchange-value and that of the even more
complex value relation characteristic of these two attributes will occupy Marx
in the rest of chapter one, his three-paragraph analysis of the concept of
use-value in the first two pages of Capital starkly illustrates Macherey and
Althusser’s claim that Marx’s demonstration proceeds sequentially, via the
‘exhaustive’ (Macherey) analysis of each concept; a given concept’s essential
nature having been thoroughly analysed at the corresponding level of abstrac-
tion, all without logical contradiction, Marx can then presuppose that analysis
as a given, and move to the next level of abstraction as what Althusser calls an
additive positioning.
Now, if this were all there were to Marx’s process of exposition, the case for
the tendential suppression of Aufhebung in Capital would be closed; indeed,
Macherey has it easy on this score by only considering the first five pages of
Chapter 1 in his brief contribution to Reading Capital. That said, Marx’s pro-
cess of exposition throughout Capital, if we look beyond Althusser’s elliptical
assertions and Macherey’s brief analysis, is indeed impelled not by contradic-
tory reflections of determinations [Reflexionsbestimmungen], but instead due
to what Marx variously calls the ‘insufficiency’ [Unzulägliche], ‘defects’ [Män-
gel] or ‘peculiarities’ [Eigentümlichkeit] of a concept, terms that indicate its
various inadequacies at that level of abstraction.
Indeed, the real and telling complexities can be said to begin in the third
section of the first chapter, precisely the section, that is, that Abazari, and,
indeed, Marx himself in footnote 22, identify as the locus of various Reflex-
ionsbestimmungen. It is in this section 1.3 that Marx examines not use-value,
exchange-value, and what Heinrich identifies as the basic exchange relation
of commodities in abstraction from their value form, but – at this subsequent
degree of concretion – the value relation, the complex interrelation of use- and
exchange-value in the analysis of the value form, which necessarily culminates
in the general equivalent and money form.163
Close attention to Marx’s analysis of the value form in this section unequivo-
cally shows that he additively builds upon his analysis of the exchange relation
in the preceding two sections, without those demonstrations being superseded
or invalidated. In the initial moment of his demonstration (sections 1.1–1.2),
Marx first analysed the exchange relation between two commodities, from

163 See Heinrich 2021, pp. 92–143.

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the positive logics of capital 165

which he concluded that they must share a ‘common element’, value, the sub-
stance of which he shows to be abstract labour. In section 1.3, he then proceeds
to the analysis of the form of value, as the section title clearly indicates: ‘The
Value-form, or Exchange-Value’. In this logical progression from sections 1.1 and
1.2 to section 1.3 – the latter arguably one of the most crucial demonstrations
of Capital – there is not a trace of negative dialectical, contradiction-based
Hegelian logic determining the development of these categories.
Instead, Marx deploys an original process of logical demonstration that I
am calling additive synthesis. The demonstration is additive, in the sense that
Marx’s analysis of the value relation presupposes his prior adequate and com-
plete demonstration of the exchange relation, the analysis of the value relation
constituting a subsequent degree of concretion relative to the initial high level
of abstraction of section one.164 This additive mode of positive dialectic in
Part One of Capital confirms Jacques Bidet’s abstract assertion, in his review
of Arthur’s New Dialectic, that there is no Hegelian, contradiction-based ‘fluid-
ity’ of Marx’s concepts in the movement from one part or section to another
(as Arthur asserts):

It is not the concept that changes [from one section to another]; rather,
there is a change of concept, through conceptual determinations …. The
‘theory of value’ [in Part One of Capital] is in no way transformed by the
theory of surplus-value [in Part Two], which, on the contrary, expressly
presupposes it, unchanged, in the pure and perfect form that Marx has
given it in his exposition in Part One.165

164 Marx initially abstracts from the category of the form of value, in addition to the many
other variables held at bay in his incipient analysis of the commodity, such as prices,
money, other commodities, commodity owners and buyers, capital, etc. In this, I follow
Heinrich’s conclusion: ‘If we speak of the “value-relation” between two commodities, then
value is already presupposed as a result of the exchange relation …. What is new here
is that Marx has introduced the concept of form and undertakes a detailed analysis of
the value-form’ (Heinrich 2021, pp. 98, 99). In this section of my argument, I am building
on Heinrich’s comprehensive but theoretically agnostic presentation, to argue that Marx
deploys a novel process of demonstration that I am calling the additive synthetic. Hegel, in
The Science of Logic, indicated precisely the methodological procedure Marx would adopt
in Capital: ‘[One must begin a scientific exposition] with the subject matter in the form
of a universal …. The prius must be … something simple, something abstracted from the
concrete, because in this form alone has the subject-matter the form of the self-related
universal …. It is easier for the mind to grasp the abstract simple thought determination
than the concrete subject matter, which is a manifold connection of such thought deter-
minations and their relationships’ (cited in Musto 2020, p. 16).
165 Bidet 2005, p. 133. Though unattributed, Bidet’s argument clearly develops the late
Althusser’s concept of la position, described above.

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166 chapter 3

In the first chapter of Capital that I discuss here, Marx implements a purely
additive synthetic method, in which the process of logical synthesis operates
in a fashion analogous to that which Macherey identifies in his commentary on
Spinoza’s method. Basing his comments on Spinoza’s Preface to the Principles of
the Philosophy of Descartes, the only site at which Spinoza reflected on method,
Macherey observes that for Spinoza, ‘synthesis [as opposed to Cartesian anal-
ysis] is the method of formal exposition that allows for the presentation of
truths [that have been previously discovered and analysed in the research pro-
cess] in a demonstrative form that proceeds from the known to the known ….
Synthesis proceeds from the knowledge of causes to that of their effects, in
conformity with the real order of things’.166 For both Spinoza and Marx, such
additive demonstration, as a science of causes without superfluous reference
to a putative totality or whole, constitutes the adequate modality of a material-
ist demonstration, the synthetic reproduction of the real order of things in the
attribute of thought.
This synthetic mode of demonstration [Macherey continues],

mentally reproduces … the order in which things effectively are and pro-
duce one another [sont et se font] …. Synthesis concomitantly expresses
the productivity of the real [as] a form of discourse, the organisation of
which, which is to say its necessary progression, adheres to that of the
causal process, and reproduces the order of the real as it is in itself, leading
to understanding as if from the interior of things, as they are and as they
develop [telles qu’elles sont et telles qu’elles se font], following the rational
movement that leads from causes to effects, rather than the inverse.167

Synthetic demonstration, in this view, constitutes a rigorous form of material-

ist demonstration, an organisation of discourse whose object is to make visible
what Macherey calls ‘the syntax of the real’ in its effective constitution and
‘intrinsic intelligibility’.168 Spurning all constraint and guarantees, all formal
obligation and teleology, this mode of demonstration, one that I am arguing
is shared by Marx and Spinoza as a science of causes, invites the reader to fol-
low the logic of the real, step by necessary step, as a materialist ‘restitution of
the texture of the real in the form of the order of ideas’.169 Marx suggests noth-
ing less by his otherwise strange self-quotation from the 1859 Introduction, that

166 Macherey 1998, p. 17.

167 Macherey 1998, p. 18.
168 Macherey 1998, p. 19.
169 Macherey 1998, p. 20.

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the positive logics of capital 167

he inserts in the first sentence of Capital, as if to say: ‘This, reader, is what I have
come to understand as the effective constitution of the real order of things and
relations of value in the capitalist social form: follow my reasoning carefully,
and judge for yourself if this is the case’.170
Let’s look at Marx’s analysis of the value relation more carefully. In Marx’s
initial analysis of the exchange relation in sections 1.1–1.2, he determined that
the value of commodities – a ‘residue’ obtained by abstracting entirely from
their characteristics as use-values – has no material form at that level of abstrac-
tion, and thus cannot exist as a sensuous singular thing, but instead constitutes
a mere ‘spectral objectivity’.171 This first stage of analysis showed that the sub-
stance of the commodity’s value is abstract labour, but did so in abstraction
from its phenomenal manifestation in any determinate form whatsoever.
The substance of this value, abstract labour, will only obtain objective, mate-
rial form, and thus actual existence, as opposed to this mere spectral objectivity,
when Marx’s logical demonstration investigates the concrete social relation of
one commodity to another, and it is to the nature of this relation that Marx
turns in section 1.3.172 At stake in this section, the development of which will
culminate in Marx’s unprecedented demonstration of the logical (as opposed
to historical) genesis and necessity of the money form, is a problem that had
previously remained at best a riddle, and at worst entirely invisible, in the his-
tory of political economy: while it is obvious to anyone that money allows for
the exchange of commodities, this does not at all explain how it is that money
possesses this strange power, and why it must necessarily be so in any soci-
ety governed by commodity relations: only Marx’s logical genesis of the money
form can answer this question.173
My point here is simply to show that each logical step in Marx’s demon-
stration fully preserves the findings that precede it, and, as opposed to any
alleged negative dialectical Aufhebung, proceeds instead through a positive,
additive logic of implication. Marx begins this analysis in section 1.3a by con-

170 ‘I welcome every opinion based on scientific criticism’, Marx writes in the Preface to the
first edition. ‘As to the prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made
concessions, now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: “Segui il tuo corso, e
lascia dir le genti”’ (1976, p. 93).
171 Marx 1976, p. 128. This point will prove crucial when I come to discuss Moseley’s critique
of Heinrich in the next section.
172 ‘Commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expres-
sions of an identical social substance, human labour, [such] that their objective character
as values is therefore purely social’ (Marx 1976, p. 138).
173 Heinrich 2021, p. 97. See also Bellofiore’s analysis of this spectral aspect of Marx’s demon-
stration, Bellofiore 2018, pp. 360–1.

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168 chapter 3

structing the value relation in its most abstract form, one that is ‘simple’ (it
investigates only two commodities), ‘isolated’ (bearing no relationship to com-
modities other than these two he has chosen), and ‘accidental’ (because any
two commodities could be chosen as examples of this abstract relation).174 This
simple isolated and accidental form of the value relation, he next specifies,
possesses two ‘poles’ [Pole] that coexist and allow for this relation, mutually
determining and barring one another, all without contradiction, precisely as
the poles of a compass coexist in their opposing, non-contradictory difference
to define North and South.
Marx first recalls the results of his prior analysis of the exchange relation,
which involved the exchange of two commodities of equal value such that
both commodities identically and symmetrically shared a ‘common element’
(value).175 In marked contrast, when Marx now turns to the analysis of the
form of expression of value, that value relationship is by no means symmetri-
cal. Instead, the first commodity (linen) is said by Marx to actively expresses its
value in the second commodity (coat), while the second commodity remains
passive, serving as the material expression of something else, the value of the
first. Marx names these two forms the ‘relative’ and the ‘equivalent’ form of
value. Like the two attributes of the commodity that Marx introduced in the
first pages of Capital, Marx here observes that these two forms of value bear
two non-contradictory aspects or attributes: they are 1. mutually dependent,
each requiring the existence of the other, as well as being 2. mutually exclusive,
such that a given commodity can only play the role of one of these two forms
at a time.176
Having presented these attributes, in section 1.3.2, Marx next proceeds to
analyse the first of these two forms of value, the relative. Though Marx’s initial
analysis of the exchange relation has shown that the value of any and all com-
modities can be reduced to an identical unit (abstract labour), in now analysing
the form that this value must take, he proceeds to investigate the particulari-
ties of these differential roles (relative and equivalent forms of value), explicitly
calling attention to the difference between these two levels of his analysis:

If we say that, as values, commodities are simply congealed quantities

of human labour [i.e., the principal finding of his initial analysis of the
exchange relation], our analysis reduces them, it is true, to the level of an
abstraction, value, but does not give them a form of value distinct from

174 Heinrich 2021, p. 97.

175 Marx 1976, p. 139.
176 Heinrich 2021, p. 99.

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the positive logics of capital 169

their natural forms. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity

to another. The first commodity’s value character emerges here through
its own relation to the second commodity.177

While it is the case that as values, at the level of the exchange relation, com-
modities are what Marx describes as ‘congealed’ abstract human labour, this
common unit, since it possesses not an ‘atom of matter’,178 cannot be appre-
hended in the sensuous, actually existing form of a singular, isolated commod-
ity.179
Now, however, additively building upon this prior determination of an initial
‘value-abstraction’, Marx proceeds to show that when considered at the higher
level of logical concretion of the value relation, the value of the commodity
that plays the relative role in this relation (linen) does in fact acquire the mate-
rial expression of its value in and through the equivalent form possessed by the
second, actually existing commodity (coat), a material form necessarily differ-
ent from its own (the value of linen cannot be expressed in linen).180 From this
demonstration, Marx draws a simple, minimal inference: that ‘the value of the
commodity linen is therefore expressed by the physical body of the commodity
coat, the value of one by the use-value of the other’.181 This then leads him to
offer a summary statement of this stage of his analysis:

Commodity A, then, in entering into a relation with commodity B as an

object of value, as a materialisation of human labour, makes the use-value
B into the material through which its own value is expressed.182

This completed, in the next step of his analysis, in section 1.3.2.ii, Marx intro-
duces the quantitative aspect of this value relation from which he had
abstracted to this point (‘The quantitative determinacy of the relative form of
value’). As a material expression or actually existing embodiment of value, in

177 Marx 1976, p. 141f., emphasis added.

178 Marx 1976, p. 138.
179 Once again, this point will prove crucial to rebut Moseley’s critique of Heinrich.
180 ‘Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself
value. It becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form …. The value of the linen
as a congealed mass of human labour can [thus] be expressed only as an “objectivity”
[Gegenständlichkeit], a thing which is materially different from the linen itself and yet
common to the linen and all other commodities’ (Marx 1976, p. 142, cited at Heinrich 2021,
p. 104).
181 Marx 1976, p. 143.
182 Marx 1976, p. 144, cited at Heinrich 2021, p. 106.

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170 chapter 3

contrast to the nonexistent ‘spectral’ nature of value when considered in the

exchange relation, this value form must furthermore be ‘quantitatively deter-
mined’ as a determinate ‘magnitude’.183 This being the case, Marx proceeds to
consider the four logically possible variations of the relative value of the two
commodities in question in this basic form of the value relation: either the
value of one or the other changes, while the second remains constant, or both
change in identical proportions, or both change in different proportions.184
Having enumerated these cases, Marx next turns to examine the nature of
the equivalent form of value in a passage that clearly indicates the additive,
non-contradictory nature of his demonstration:

The commodity linen brings to view its own existence as a value through
the fact that the coat can be equated with the linen although it has
not assumed a form of value distinct from its own physical form. The
coat is directly exchangeable with the linen; in this way the linen in fact
expresses its own existence as a value. The equivalent form of a commod-
ity, accordingly, is the form in which it is directly exchangeable with other
commodities.185

While the first sentence summarises Marx’s analysis of the value form to this
point, the second and third add to this a new proposition: the actually exist-
ing, material form of the linen expresses the coat’s direct ‘exchangeability’ with
it, such that the equivalent form ‘is the form in which it is directly exchange-
able with other commodities’, which is to say, that it requires no mediation (of
another commodity) for the exchange process to occur.186
Marx next indicates three ‘peculiarities’ [Eigentümlichkeiten] (none of
which constitute ‘contradictions’) of the equivalent form, in which he stresses
the necessity that governs this form, such that the appearance of the value of
the linen in the form of the coat requires and can only occur within this value-
relation:

The natural form of the commodity becomes its value-form. But, note
well, this substitution only occurs in the case of a commodity B (coat, or
maize, or iron, etc.) when some other commodity A (linen etc.) enters into
a value-relation with it, and then only within the limits of this relation.

183 Marx 1976, p. 144.

184 Marx 1976, pp. 145–6.
185 Marx 1976, p. 147, emphasis added.
186 Heinrich 2021, p. 109.

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the positive logics of capital 171

Since a commodity cannot be related to itself as equivalent, and there-

fore cannot make its own physical shape into the expression of its own
value, it must be related to another commodity as equivalent, and there-
fore must make the physical shape of another commodity into its own
value-form.187

Here again we find Marx stressing the systematic necessity that governs the
value relation between two commodities: since no commodity can express its
value in its own material form, it must relate to another, materially distinct
commodity as its equivalent, the actually existing material form of its value.
The linen (in Marx’s example) must take the physical form of the equivalent
commodity (coat) as the form of its value, since the value of linen cannot be
expressed in linen. This, Marx shows, is the real, necessary, and positive form
of the value relation, involving no contradiction whatsoever between use- and
exchange-value, but only a peculiarity that he insightfully notes, one that allows
for the value relation materially to exist.
Next, following his famous excursus on Aristotle’s socially determined inca-
pacity to grasp the nature of the value relation,188 Marx summarises his qual-
itative and quantitative analysis of the simple form of the value relation, to
which he adds the important terminological clarification that the two factors
or attributes of the commodity introduced at the beginning of chapter one
should, strictly speaking, have been identified as use-value and ‘value’ (rather
than exchange-value), since exchange-value is merely the ‘form of manifes-
tation’ of value, not something a given commodity possesses in and of itself.
Instead, Marx specifies, ‘the commodity never has this form when looked at in
isolation, but only when it is in a value-relation or an exchange relation with a
second commodity of a different kind’.189 As Heinrich specifies, ‘A commodity
“is” something double: use-value and an object of value. But it is not exchange-
value; it has exchange-value, when another commodity expresses its value’.190
While it may seem that Marx is splitting hairs, the point is important in the
context of my argument (and I will argue it applies analogously in Moseley’s
dispute with Heinrich), since it clearly indicates a key conceptual and logical
difference from the 1867 edition, where Marx did not yet clearly distinguish
between value and exchange-value.

187 Marx 1976, p. 148.

188 Marx 1976, pp. 151–2.
189 Marx 1976, p. 152.
190 Heinrich 2021, p. 119.

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172 chapter 3

Even more crucial is the next step in Marx’s argument, and in fact the inter-
pretation of this passage condenses and radicalises my entire argument for
Marx’s additive, positive dialectical method. Here is Marx’s observation, which
I cite in full:

The internal opposition [innere Gegensatz] between use-value and value,

hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by
an external opposition [äusseren Gegensatz], i.e. by a relation between two
commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed
to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other
commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only
as exchange-value. Hence the simple form of value of a commodity is the
simple form of appearance of the opposition [Gegensatzes] between use-
value and value which is contained within the commodity.191

Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the first chapter of Capital, we
would expect to find a statement of the ‘contradictory’ nature of use-value and
exchange-value. Instead, Marx does not simply refuse outright the Hegelian
terminology of contradiction [Widerspruch]; what’s more, he clearly and oth-
erwise defines the nature of this relation – both within the single commodity
possessing its two attributes of use-value and value when initially analysed at
the level of the exchange relation, and now, at the level of the value relation –
as an opposition [Gegensatz].
As I have throughout this book, let me pause to invoke the lucidly contrast-
ing definitions André Lalande offers for these two concepts:
– ‘Contradiction’ [D. Widerspruch]: the relation existing between the affirma-
tion and the negation of a same element of knowledge, in particular, between
two terms, one of which is the negation of the other, such as A and not-A.
– ‘Opposition’ [D. Gegensatz, Opposition]: the relation of two contrary objects
placed facing one another in contrast or distinction.192

191 Marx 1976, p. 153, emphasis added. ‘Der in der Ware eingehüllte innere Gegensatz von
Gebrauchswert und Wert wird also dargestellt durch einen äußeren Gegensatz, d.h. durch
das Verhältnis zweier Waren, worin die eine Ware, deren Wert ausgedrückt werden soll,
unmittelbar nur als Gebrauchswert, die andre Ware hingegen, worin Wert ausgedrückt
wird, unmittelbar nur als Tauschwert gilt. Die einfache Wertform einer Ware ist also die
einfache Erscheinungsform des in ihr enthaltenen Gegensatzes von Gebrauchswert und
Wert’. mega ii 6, Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik Der Politishen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Ham-
burg 1872. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987, p. 93.
192 Lalande 2010, pp. 183, 717, emphasis added. I have added the specification ‘in contrast or
distinction’ to Lalande’s from the oed definition of opposition.

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the positive logics of capital 173

The crucial difference between Hegelian contradiction and the ‘opposition’ of

use-value and exchange-value in Marx’s analysis is that while the former indi-
cates the simultaneous affirmation and negation of ‘a same element’ or object
(A and not-A), opposition indicates the contrast or distinction between two
different objects.
As a point of contrast, take for example Hegel’s famous beginning to the Sci-
ence of Logic. Hegel here unequivocally indicates a relation of contradiction, as
‘A and not-A’, as opposed to Marx’s indication by the concept of ‘opposition’
a relation of contrast, a determination without any implication whatsoever
that use-value and exchange-value are in any sense the same thing. In other
words, for Hegel, a thing (‘Being, pure being – without further determination’),
through the necessity governing its essential nature as this phrase defines it
(‘without determination’), reveals its selfsame identity to be, ‘in fact nothing,
pure nothingness’, i.e., all at once one and the same thing, both A and not-A,
both being and nothingness, in what constitutes a real contradiction in the full
sense of the word.193
In marked contrast to Hegel’s analysis of Being, Nothing, and Becoming, at
no point does Marx ever state or imply that use-value and exchange-value are in
any sense the same thing (A and not-A). Instead, he goes to painstaking logical
detail to precisely formulate the nature of the differential relation of these two
always distinct concepts, and in the case of both the exchange and value rela-
tions, and he defines this relation as an opposition. He introduces this concept
in the passage I have cited above to indicate at once the dependent and nec-
essary nature of these two distinct attributes of the commodity form, as well
as the important distinction that in the more abstract exchange relation, the
differential opposition of use-value and exchange-value is internal to (‘hidden
within’, Marx says) any given, individual commodity, while in the value relation
between the relative and equivalent forms of the commodity, the differential
opposition finds its ‘representation’ on the surface (as the forms of appearance
of the value relation), as an ‘external opposition’.
This differential opposition of use-value and exchange-value, Marx has
shown, is neither contradictory nor contingent. Instead, in each logical form, it

193 Hegel 2010b, p. 59. Compare Hegel’s argument with that of Spinoza in proposition 3 of
Ethics iii, as Macherey reads the latter: ‘There is nothing in the essence of a thing, follow-
ing from its definition, which can cause it not to be [qui puisse faire qu’elle ne soit pas],
or that its reality encompass [soit marquée] any negativity whatsoever [and thus Spinoza
writes:] “the definition of any thing whatsoever affirms the essence of that thing itself, but
does not negate it; that is to say, it posits the essence of the thing but does not suppress
it” (definition cujuscunque rei ipsius rei essentiam affirmat sed non negat; sive rei essentiam
point, sed non tollit)’. Macherey 1997 p. 382.

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174 chapter 3

is emphatically and logically necessary, he shows, for this very distinction (as A
and B rather than A and not-A) to exist such that commodity and commodity
relations may themselves exist (and Marx has begun Capital by defining soci-
eties in which the capitalist mode of production predominates, his object of
investigation, as the general existence (appearance) of commodities and com-
modified relations).
In fact, these two contrasting starting points of Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Cap-
ital could not be more radically opposed, though each thinker at the same time
fully comprehends and calls attention to the difficulty and crucial nature of the
beginning of any scientific analysis.194 For the one, a word, a notion, Being, con-
ceived and defined as a maximum of abstraction, as ‘without content’. For the
other, a (maximally abstract but positive) definition of capitalism as the general
accumulation of commodities, one that is quite the opposite of nothing (it is
an ‘ungeheure Waarensammlung’); instead, having come to this definition and
starting point by necessity through his materialist enquiry, Marx’s beginning
indicates something very concrete, full of positive implications that remain to
be concretised.
The negative dialectical dice are loaded if one picks a notion with no deter-
minate content to start with: then of course this ‘thing’ without content will of
necessity immediately reveal itself as a contradiction, as the negation of itself,
as nothing, as A and not-A.195 On the one hand, a logic that begins with a logi-
cal contradiction and develops this into an entire science of negative dialectical
logic, on the other, a critique of a real social form, one that begins in materialist
fashion in media res, with an abstract definition of this determinate mode of
production to initiate an increasingly concrete analysis via the logic of ramified
additive synthesis and implication.
To prepare the necessary logical passage to the expanded and then general
equivalent forms of value, Marx simply indicates that the simple form of the
value relation he has analysed to this point in section 1.3 possesses an ‘insuffi-

194 Here is Hegel: ‘That which constitutes the beginning, the beginning itself, is to be taken as
something unanalysable, taken in its simple, unfilled immediacy; and therefore as being,
as complete emptiness …. Let those who are still dissatisfied with this beginning take upon
themselves the challenge of beginning in some other way and yet avoiding such defects’
(2010b, p. 53); while Marx famously warns his readers that ‘Beginnings are always difficult
in all sciences’ (1976, p. 89).
195 Compare with Caligaris and Starosta, who write, ‘In so far as [Hegel’s] systematic dialectic
begins with the simplest thought-form (that is, with a purely ideal or formal abstraction),
his subsequent derivation of categories is bound to follow the immanent necessity of ‘pure
thought’ as such, which does not express the inner movement of the simpler determina-
tions of “real material being”’ (Caligaris and Starosta 2014, p. 96, emphasis in original).

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the positive logics of capital 175

ciency’ [Blick] (as opposed to a Widerspruch) relative to the general equivalent

and price-form.196 This is to say that while Marx’s analysis of the simple form
is fully coherent and non-contradictory, that simple form is nonetheless log-
ically deficient or inadequate, in the sense that the forms of value (relative
and equivalent) inhering between only two commodities cannot account for
the general exchange and accumulation of commodities, the defining feature
of capitalism for Marx at its most general and abstract level. Simply because
linen expresses its value in the form of actually existing coats, it cannot there-
fore be directly exchanged, in this form of relation, for any other commodity
than coats.
In other words, the simple value relation of two commodities cannot express
the relation of any given commodity to all other commodities, which, Marx log-
ically assumes from his point of departure, is nonetheless essential in a social
form determined by general commodification. Capitalism is not defined by the
exchange of two or even a small set of commodities, but by the general com-
modification and exchange of all things of value, and thus the demonstration
of the form of value must proceed adequately to account for the level of gener-
ality of exchange this specific social form requires.
Marx’s analysis of the value form therefore progresses sequentially to inves-
tigate the ‘expanded’ and ‘general’ forms, indicating along the way both the
necessity of each as well as various ‘defects’ [Mängeln] of the former, here
again proceeding additively to indicate the (logical) development of the (non-
contradictory) Gegensatze that positively, if inadequately, constitute each ‘pole’
of the value form: from the symmetrical, and thus ‘unfixed’ simple form to
its subsequent fixation in one commodity set aside as the general equivalent
form.197 I leave to the reader to follow the development of this additive logic in

196 Marx 1976, p. 154. Heinrich at this point underscores the purely logical nature of this
demonstration in terms that again evoke Althusser’s concept of la position: ‘The transi-
tion from the simple form of value to the expanded form is not a historical transition,
which we are merely describing; rather, it is a transition to a new level of analysis, which
we are carrying out. It’s a conceptual development – a development of our conceptual
constructions – that aims to dissect what is always mixed up and interconnected in capi-
talist reality, so that we can understand it’ (Heinrich 2021, p. 124).
197 While Marx continues to speak only of ‘Gegensatze’ (‘In demselben Grad aber, worin sich
die Wertform überhaupt entwickelt, entwickelt sich auch der Gegensatz zwischen ihren
beiden Polen, der relativen Wertform und Äquivalentform’), Fowkes inconsistently, if sug-
gestively, at this point translates the term as ‘antagonism’ (1976, p. 160). For the original
German of the 1872 edition, see mega ii/6, Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik Der Politischen
Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1872. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987, p. 99. The wording of this
passage is identical as well in the 1890 edition; cf. mega ii 10, Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik
Der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1890. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991, p. 67.

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176 chapter 3

the remainder of chapter 1, to turn now to the dispute between Heinrich and
Moseley over the substance of value in Capital.

11 When Does Socially Necessary Labour Exist?

In the previous section I have based my own anti-Hegelian argument upon

Heinrich’s distinction between the exchange and value relations in the first
chapter of Capital.198 Heinrich’s reading has not gone uncriticised, however:
Robert Kurz, Barbara Lietz and Winfried Schwarz, and Fred Moseley have
all disputed Heinrich’s contention (as they read him) that value is only cre-
ated through the exchange of commodities, or, to cite Heinrich himself, that
‘Abstract human labour, as the substance of commodities’ value, does not
emerge on the basis of the individual commodity but is based on the exchange
relation between commodities’.199 Heinrich’s critics argue instead that Marx
clearly and repeatedly indicates that, as Moseley puts the matter, ‘each com-
modity is assumed [by Marx] to possess a common property, the “substance”
of value (objectified abstract human labour) in definite quantities … deter-
mined in production, independently of exchange’.200 Moseley’s value realism,
as I would call it, thus stands opposed to Heinrich’s relational understanding
of the substance of value: ‘Commodities’, Heinrich summarises, ‘have value-
objectivity only in the social relation of one commodity to another’.201 In turn-
ing to this debate over the substance of value, I wish to argue against Hein-
rich’s critics, that Marx’s analysis of the substance of value is not uniform and
unchanging, but instead undergoes an important process of auto-critique. This
critique – while revising Marx’s initial Hegelian position that an existing but
imperceptible essence or substance of value must appear through its dialec-
tical sublation as exchange-value – remains obscure, since Marx only clearly
articulated it in long-unpublished revision notes for the second edition of Cap-
ital.

198 Heinrich, as noted above, follows Althusser in rejecting the theoretical commonplace that
Marx’s dialectic is a materialist revision of Hegel’s Logic, but, to my knowledge, does so
only in passing, as opposed to the more sustained attention I seek to give the question in
these pages.
199 Heinrich 2021, p. 66. Note already that in this passage (which Moseley cites on page 117
of Marx’s Theory of Value), Heinrich does not say that value is ‘created’ by exchange (as
Moseley repeatedly reads him), but only that it ‘emerges’ in this process.
200 Moseley 2023, p. 50. Here I will primarily address Moseley’s critique, which develops in
more systematic, book-length form a position on Heinrich essentially identical to that of
Kurz and Lietz and Schwarz. See also Kurz 2016 and Lietz and Schwarz 2023.
201 Heinrich 2021, p. 95.

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the positive logics of capital 177

In my view this dispute between Heinrich and Moseley has resulted in a

persistent dialogue des sourds in large part due to the failure by Moseley in par-
ticular to clearly formulate the terms of their disagreement, relying instead on
a hodgepodge of vague, unexamined terms either imputed to or taken directly
from Marx. The commodity is repeatedly claimed by Moseley to ‘possess’, ‘con-
tain’, or ‘have’ value, a value which is said to ‘emerge’, ‘congeal’, ‘exist’, ‘be’, or
‘become’ as a result of the production process. All of these varied expressions
can in my view be reduced to a single, theoretically clear (though false) claim
on Moseley’s part: that value exists already in the production process of any
single commodity, that, as Moseley writes, ‘the value of the coat … does exist
by itself’, or as Lietz and Schwarz write, ‘value exists as a form-determination …
in production, where it arises’.202
We should cut this Gordian knot simply by holding here as well to Marx’s
Spinozist distinction between a nonexistent thought-construct [Gedanken-
konkretum] and actually existing singular things. My interest in addressing this
question is not merely to break through this protracted dispute on the origin
of value between Heinrich and his opponents; my principal claim is that Marx
eventually articulated this clear distinction between the nonexistent abstrac-
tion of a thought-construct such as value and that of actually existing, sensuous
things such as singular commodities and their price forms, but only in the little-
known 1872 Ergänzungen Und Veränderungen preparatory manuscript and in
a single, but crucial sentence added only to the 1875 French translation. It was
only in these obscure passages that he managed fully to escape the Hegelian
hermeneutics of revelation still prevalent in the discussion of the substance of
value in the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital.
These earlier texts do in fact suffer from a conceptualisation of the substance
of value as a hermeneutic, in which a latent, formless yet putatively existent
essence, simultaneously claimed to be ‘congealed’ in the commodity yet ‘spec-
tral’, is said to acquire its sensuous form in a moment of sublation. While Marx
overcame this mystical Hegelian logic of incarnation by 1875, it nonetheless
continues to haunt Moseley’s otherwise sober analysis into the present. I will
first recall the purely theoretical status of abstraction in Capital, before dis-
cussing the implication of this on the debate over the substance of value.
That Capital is an abstract theoretical construction of the capitalist social
form, and not a historical study of capitalism (as Kautsky argued in Karl Marx:
Oekonomische Lehren) is a point on which Heinrich and Moseley (as well as
Althusser and Chris Arthur) all agree. As Heinrich points out,

202 Moseley 2023, p. 155, emphasis added; Lietz and Schwarz 2023, p. 26, emphasis added.

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178 chapter 3

such a conception [as Kautsky’s] baldly contradicts Marx’s claims in the

Preface to the first volume. There, he emphasises that the work deals with
‘theoretical developments’, and that the text makes reference to condi-
tions in England only as an ‘illustration’ of such developments.203

Not only is Capital a ‘theoretical’ study in its entirety; Marx famously identifies
for his reader in the Preface to the First Edition the fundamental tool he deploys
for this analysis of the capitalist social form: abstraction. ‘In the analysis of eco-
nomic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The
power of abstraction must replace both’.204 Abstraction, as Lalande comments,
‘isolates by thought that which cannot be isolated in representation’.205 The
point is simple, but far-reaching and, indeed, eminently Althusserian: abstrac-
tion is fundamentally opposed to the representation of an empirical object.
Instead, abstraction indicates the sui generis construction of a non-existent
thought object, what Marx called in the 1857 Introduction a Gedankenkonkre-
tum.
Marx was no doubt familiar with Hegel’s anti-empiricist appraisal of abstrac-
tion in the Encyclopedia: ‘Ordinary consciousness deals with sensory represen-
tations which crisscross and get entangled. In the act of abstraction, however,
the mind is concentrated on a single point and, by this means, the habit is
acquired of preoccupying oneself with the interiority [of things]’. He emphati-
cally rejected, however, Hegel’s ensuing condescending judgement of Aristote-
lean ἀφαίϱεσις [abstraction] as no more than training wheels for the mind till
it learns to practice true, i.e. negative dialectical, thought: ‘To occupy oneself
with this kind of formal logic is no doubt useful. It clears the head, as they say.
One learns to concentrate’.206
Instead, Marx explicitly deployed ‘the power of abstraction’ as the funda-
mental tool for his entire critique of political economy, such that Heinrich can
devote an entire Appendix of his How to Read Capital to the multiple ‘Levels of
Abstraction and the Course of Argument in the First Seven Chapters of Cap-
ital’.207 What’s more, this understanding of abstraction as the construction of
nonexistent Gedankenkonkretumen constitutes, since the very beginning of his
research in 1857 when Marx first articulated this basic epistemological posi-
tion, a further confirmation of Althusser’s assertion that Marx rejects Hegel’s

203 Heinrich 2021, p. 397.

204 Marx 1976, p. 90.
205 Lalande 2010, p. 8.
206 Hegel 2010a, p. 54, bracketed insertion in original.
207 Heinrich 2021, p. 391.

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the positive logics of capital 179

model of abstraction as the representational extraction of a kernel of truth

from an object (Hegel’s ‘preoccupying oneself with the interiority of things’), to
instead undertake the fabrication of nonexistent concepts.208 Heinrich repeat-
edly emphasises this very Althusserian point in his reading of Capital, the sub-
tlety of which is quite surprisingly absent in Moseley’s rebuttal: ‘The object of
inquiry, the ‘commodity’, is not simply drawn from experience. Instead, it is
constructed, by means of abstraction’.209
While throughout this book I have repeatedly emphasised this Spinozist-
Althusserian distinction between the object of thought and real, actually exist-
ing things, the point I wish to make here in appraising Moseley and Heinrich’s
debate over the substance of value is simply that the concept of existence
should be taken in its rigorous definition as ‘the fact of being independently of
knowledge, [as] actually presented in [sensuous] perception’,210 in other words,
as the distinction between nonexistent thought objects and actually existing
singular things in sensuous extension. If this is the case, one must conclude that
as concepts, none of the original Gedankenkonkretumen that Marx constructs
in Capital, concepts such as use-value, exchange-value, and value, relative and
absolute surplus value, and the like, actually exists.211

208 rc, p. 36. This distinction between Hegel’s empiricist understanding of abstraction and
Marx’s Spinozist usage reproduces to some degree the founding distinction in Aristotle
between two models of abstraction, respectively, ‘abstractive induction’ (‘epagôgê [ἐπα-
γωγή]’), the additive grouping of similar elements under a single concept, versus the
‘stripping’ (‘aphaireisthai [ἀφαιϱεῖσθαι]’) [of] the image or representation of a thing of
its individualising characteristics (essentially material). Alain de Libera, ‘Abstraction’, in
Cassin 2014, p. 1.
209 Heinrich 2021, p. 53. I say the absence of awareness of this distinction is surprising in Mose-
ley’s argument because the entire, elaborate argument of his finely constructed previous
book Money and Totality is based upon the distinction between actually existing capitals
and the purely theoretical construction of aliquot subdivisions of a total mass of surplus
value. See Moseley, 2017, 45–46; Nesbitt 2022, 224 n. 68.
210 Lalande 2010, p. 318. On the extremely complex history of the related concepts of the Latin
existentia, the French and English ‘existence,’ and the German pseudo-synonyms Existenz
and Dasein, see David, 2014. Bolzano argues that the fundamental, universal characteristic
of all Vorstellungen an sich – his preeminent logical concept, analogous to Spinoza’s res sin-
gulares non existentes (eiip9) – is that ‘Vorstellungen an sich haben kein Dasein’ (Bolzano
1978, 75). I discuss Bolzano’s logic in the next chapter.
211 Of course, the general theoretical point regarding ‘existence’ that I am making here at the
high level of abstraction of the first chapter of Capital i (the site of Moseley and Hein-
rich’s debate) in no way exhausts the complexity of the relation between living labor and
the commodity labor power at greater levels of concretion, for example as what Riccardo
Bellofiore calls ‘the ambiguity built into the notion of abstract labor itself [:] abstract labor,
on the one hand, is the immediately private labor which is becoming social in circulation;
on the other hand, it is the private labor which has become socialized on the commod-

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180 chapter 3

At the same time, some of those nonexistent concepts are also sensuously
manifest as singular existing things. The nonexistent concept of concrete
labour, for example, also exists as the actual physical activity, the physiologi-
cal labour, involved in producing any singular commodity, a real coat or yard of
linen. Similarly, the nonexistent concept of exchange-value also exists in sensu-
ous form, for example as the singular price of any given commodity (as a price
on a tag), i.e., as the material form of appearance of the value of that actually
existing commodity.
The form of value as exchange-value thus constitutes at once a nonexis-
tent abstraction in thought (a concept), as well as indicating actually existing
real abstractions to be found in the material world of commodity exchange.212
It is precisely this distinction, between the non-existent thought abstraction,
Marx’s Gedankenkonkretum, and the actually existing real abstractions of the
manifest, material price-forms of value, that is entirely missing from Moseley
and Heinrich’s debate.
Now, Moseley and Heinrich, astute, seasoned readers of Capital that they are,
both agree that Marx derives the concept of the substance of value (abstract
human labour) as an abstraction from the sensuous, tangible qualities of any
singular, actually existing instance of concrete labour, in other words, as a con-
cept that Marx constructs in his analysis.213 Marx summarises this point quite
clearly in the Ergänzungen:

The magnitude of value represents a specific quantity of labour, but this

quantity is not the coincidental quantity of labour that A or B expend
in the production of a commodity. It is socially determined, the labour
socially necessary for the production of a thing. … Equality in the full

ity market. … The origin of the trouble goes back to the fact that Marx mostly deduces
abstract labor from exchange “as such,” but he also sometimes defines it as the labor which
is opposed to capital’ (Bellofiore, 2023, 6). In my view, however, the point Bellofiore makes
is a merely apparent contradiction, as I will argue below.
212 Adorno gives a succinct definition of real abstraction in Introduction to Sociology, confus-
ingly conflating at the same time, however, two different forms of real abstraction, the real
act of exchange and the material monetary form of value: In ‘exchange in terms of aver-
age social labour time the specific forms of the objects to be exchanged are necessarily
disregarded instead, they are reduced to a universal unit. The abstraction, therefore, lies
not in the thought of the sociologist, but in society itself’ (2002, p. 32). On the concept of
real abstraction, see Sohn-Rethel 2021; Toscano 2008; and Jappe 2013.
213 ‘I agree [with Heinrich] that Marx is not looking for the common property of commodi-
ties in the production process of a single commodity’. Moseley 2023, p. 108. Marx’s ‘focus’,
Heinrich writes, ‘is therefore upon a reduction (and abstraction) that only scientific anal-
ysis can make visible’ (2021, p. 64).

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the positive logics of capital 181

sense between different kinds of labour can be arrived at only if we

abstract from their real inequality, if we reduce them to the characteristic
they have in common, that of being the expenditure of human labour-
power, of human labour in the abstract.214

Yet while being fully aware of this point, Moseley nonetheless repeatedly reaf-
firms the real existence of the substance of value in any single, isolated com-
modity: ‘The value of the coat cannot be grasped by itself, but it does exist by
itself, [as] the values of all commodities (including the linen) exist by them-
selves’.215 If we take existence in the strict sense, however, to mean any real,
sensuous thing, sensible to us via what Spinoza calls the attribute of extension,
then it is clear that Marx’s abstraction constructs a nonexistent concept: lack-
ing a form of appearance or value-form, there is no actually existing ‘human
labour in the abstract’ or ‘identical human labour-power’; these phrases indi-
cate instead a conceptual construct without sensuous reality. In the attribute of
sensuous extension, there are only singular acts of concrete labour.216
The next step in Marx’s argument that both Heinrich and Moseley retrace is
to construct, in terms that follow directly from this initial abstraction, the con-
cept of the quantity of the substance of value in any commodity as such. One of
Marx’s great advances over the classical labour theory of value is to have under-
stood that this quantity cannot consist in the actual concrete time it took to
make any single existing commodity. Marx makes the point simply and mem-
orably in Capital:

It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quan-

tity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the
more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would
need more time to complete the article. However, the labour that forms
the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identi-
cal human labour-power.217

This ‘equal human labour’ is an abstraction from actually existing concrete acts
of labour, and as such, it cannot exist in space and time without a form of

214 Marx, cited in Moseley 2023, p. 183, emphasis added.

215 Moseley 2023, p. 155.
216 Riccardo Bellofiore similarly points out that ‘in a fully monetary exchange society like cap-
italism, the real abstraction of labor is only completed ex-post in the final circulation of
commodities’ (Bellofiore, 2023, 6).
217 Marx 1976, p. 128.

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182 chapter 3

appearance, which Marx will only introduce as a further degree of concreti-

sation in the third section of chapter one.218 While Moseley indeed ‘agree[s]
with Heinrich that value is “shown” or “revealed” only in exchange’, he imme-
diately adds the mistaken proviso that ‘the revelation of value in exchange
presupposes an already existing value … created in production and revealed
in exchange’.219
In repeatedly taking this position against Heinrich throughout Marx’s The-
ory of Value, Moseley is arguably misled by taking Marx too literally, citing
Marx’s published formulations without sufficiently taking into account Marx’s
own auto-critique in the Ergänzungen. Unfortunately, Marx only clearly for-
mulates this obvious point – that concepts as abstractions do not exist in the
strict sense of the word – in the Ergänzungen, such that numerous descrip-
tions of the quantity of the substance of value read as if Marx were referring
to the actual labour time that went into the production of any single commod-
ity. In other words, reading Marx to the letter, Moseley is arguably misled by
a problematic lack of clarity already present in Marx’s analysis, prior to his
self-criticism in the Ergänzungen, as when Marx writes for example that ‘The
value of a commodity … varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the
productivity, of the labour which finds its realisation within the commodity.
… A given quantity of any commodity contains a definite quantity of human
labour’.220
Moseley then reproduces in turn this same ambiguity inherent in the 1867
and 1872 editions of Capital: ‘Note that the magnitude of value is a distinct
quantity of objectified labour contained in each commodity and thus is an
intrinsic property of each commodity’.221 Moseley places particular emphasis on
Marx’s definition of the magnitude of value of any commodity as, in Moseley’s

218 Here is Moseley: ‘The labour that produces commodities is private independent labour,
and private commodity producers come into contact with each [other] only through the
exchange of their products, and, therefore, the labour expended to produce their com-
modities can only “appear” or manifest itself as the exchange-value of the commodities
they produce. The exchange-value of commodities is the form of appearance of the social
character of the labour expended to produce the commodities’ (2023, p. 178).
219 Moseley 2023, p. 180.
220 Marx 1976, pp. 131, 144, cited in Moseley 2023, pp. 122, 160.
221 Moseley 2023, p. 40, emphasis added. Other examples include: ‘[Marx’s phrase] “quanti-
tatively comparable magnitude” presupposes that each individual commodity contains a
given quantity of objectified human labour (the magnitude of value)’; ‘Sections 1 and 2 of
Chapter 1 presuppose that individual commodities contain definite quantities of objecti-
fied human labour-time, as determined in production’ (Moseley 2023, pp. 68, 70 emphases
added).

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the positive logics of capital 183

words, ‘the quantity of objectified labour-time contained in the commodity,

measured in hours, days, etc.’.222 Despite Moseley’s recurrent denials that he
considers the substance of value to pre-exist in any single commodity in isola-
tion,223 he repeatedly takes Marx’s initial ambiguity literally.
Rather than stating clearly and simply that the scientific object he has con-
structed – abstract human labour – is, as its name indicates, an abstract concept
without spatio-temporal existence, Marx presents his finding in a vivid and
unforgettable image, one that seems to confuse even Heinrich. Without a value
form, Marx argues, the concept of the substance of value – abstract human
labour measured as socially necessary labour time – takes on a disembodied
existence, an oxymoron that Heinrich struggles to puzzle through:

Marx describes what remains of the products of labour after abstracting

from their use-value, the ‘residue’, as a ‘phantom-like’ [or ‘spectral’, gespen-
stige Gegenständlichkeit] objectivity. … This objectivity can no longer
be grasped by the senses. If we associate it with weight, color, form, or
any other quality, we always come back to use-value – but we’ve just
abstracted from use-value! Thus, the objectivity is present but is as intan-
gible as a ghost; hence it is a ‘spectral objectivity’.224

Now, the one advantage of Marx’s image is to clearly indicate what it means
to believe in the existence of an object without sensuous qualities, as Moseley
apparently does: it is to believe in phantoms and spectres. Marx’s initial for-
mulation in the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital of an ‘objectivity’ that can,
as Heinrich writes, ‘no longer be grasped by the senses’, is needlessly confus-
ing. And in fact, this does confuse Moseley, who, despite his repeated denials
that he is not speaking of a single commodity in isolation, constantly reiter-
ates that any commodity ‘possesses’ a quantity of the substance of value, as
if this were the case for any actually existing commodity in isolation from all

222 Moseley 2023, p. 39. Here is Marx: ‘How then is the magnitude of value to be measured?
By means of the “value-forming substance”, the labour, contained in the article. The quan-
tity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time itself is measured on the particular
scale of hours, days, etc.’ (Marx 1976, p. 129, emphasis in original, cited in Moseley 2023,
p. 39).
223 ‘My interpretation does not consider a single commodity by itself. Rather (as I have
emphasised), my interpretation is about a single commodity as a representative of all
commodities (the “elementary form” or the “cell-form”) and the properties that all com-
modities (i.e. each and every commodity) have in common’ (Moseley 2023, pp. 118–19).
224 Heinrich 2021, p. 64, emphasis added.

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184 chapter 3

others.225 This leads Moseley confusingly to claim, for example, that ‘the unob-
servable equal human labour that exists in production appears for the first time
in exchange’.226
Moseley’s critique of Heinrich suffers from a failure clearly to distinguish
the nonexistence of Marx’s conceptual abstractions from actually existing phe-
nomena such as real, singular commodities, the concrete labour that produced
them, and the actually existing price form of their value.227 To be sure, a cer-
tain quantity of value actually exists in the production process of any singular
commodity, for example as the commodified inputs the capitalist purchases for
the production process, whether in the form of constant (machinery and raw
materials) or variable capital (labor power).228 These actually existing values,
however, are merely transmitted as such to the commodity in the production
process; at issue in this debate as I read it is instead whether a newly produced
surplus value obtained via the exploitation of labor power already comes to
exist in the production process. Extrapolating on Heinrich’s reading to Marx’s
discussion of the working day and unpaid work hours in chapter 10 of Capital,
we should say that what exists in the production process on this score are only
unpaid hours of real, concrete labor expended to produce any given commod-
ity; for these to exist as surplus value requires, Heinrich rightly argues, that they
take a value form and go on to achieve their social validation through commod-
ity exchange.

225 ‘Heinrich’s explanation confuses expressing value with possessing value. The coat
expresses the value of the linen only in relation to the linen, but the coat possesses value
on its own, independent of its relation to the linen, as a result of the homogeneous human
labour-power expended to produce the coat’ (Moseley 2023, p. 155, emphasis in original).
226 Moseley 2023, p. 186, emphasis added. Numerous passages in Heinrich’s How to Read Cap-
ital also suffer from a terminological vagueness regarding the existence or non-existence
of the substance of value prior to appearance in a value-form: ‘Commodities have value-
objectivity only in the social relation of one commodity to another – which is why it first
comes to light here. Prior to and outside of this relation, they are mere use-values: they are
on the way to becoming commodities, but far from being commodities’. Heinrich, cited in
Moseley 2023, p. 151, emphasis added.
227 Given this terminological vagueness, Moseley can even (correctly) formulate Heinrich’s
position in the terms I here insist on, only immediately to reject this position: ‘Heinrich’s
interpretation is that abstract human labour does not exist in production, but instead
abstract human labour comes to exist only in exchange’ (Moseley 2023, p. 130, emphasis
added).
228 Marx presumes in his analysis a fully developed capitalist social form, such that, Moseley
writes in Money and Totality, “The means of production in capitalist production are com-
modities, which have been purchased at the beginning of the circuit of money capital,
and which therefore enter the valorisation process with already existing specific prices.”
Moseley, 2017, 141.

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the positive logics of capital 185

Heinrich, while more consistently asserting that value only comes to

‘emerge’ or exist in the exchange relation,229 nonetheless does not formulate
this distinction between nonexistent abstractions and actually existing singu-
lar things as a theoretical position. Instead, focusing on Marx’s image of the
‘phantom-like’ nature of the substance of value, he seeks to puzzle through this
conundrum by asserting that already in the first two sections of chapter 1, Marx
implicitly analyses the commodity in an ‘exchange relation’. ‘Only based on the
exchange relation’ Heinrich argues, ‘can Marx say that there is an abstraction
from the use-value of the commodity, and then go on to draw further conclu-
sions’.230
Moseley argues at length that Heinrich autonomously imputes the concept
of the ‘exchange relation’ to the first two sections of chapter one in order to
make sense of the intangibility of abstract human labour, when Marx in these
initial sections only speaks of the concept of the commodity as such in isola-
tion.231

Heinrich presents no textual evidence in this appendix [where he defines

his concept of exchange relation] to support his interpretation of
exchange relation in Chapter 1, except the one sentence from Marx’s
‘Marginal Notes on Wagner’, which mentions only the commodity and
does not mention an act of exchange at all. … Heinrich’s very unusual
interpretation of ‘exchange relation’ as an abstraction from two acts of
exchange between commodities and money on the market is just asserted
by [him] with no explicit textual evidence.232

229 ‘Abstract human labour, as the substance of commodities’ value, does not emerge on the
basis of the individual commodity but is based on the exchange relation between com-
modities’ (cited in Moseley 2023, p. 117).
230 Heinrich 2021, p. 59.
231 Here is one example among countless similarly fastidious statements by Moseley, each
of which repeats the same point: ‘Marx’s first sentence does not say anything about
an “exchange relation” of two commodities. Instead, Marx’s sentence says “our analy-
sis reduces them”, and “them” clearly refers to “commodities”, and thus “our analysis”
means our analysis of commodities and the value of commodities, not our analysis of the
“exchange relations” of commodities’ (Moseley 2023, p. 154).
232 Moseley 2023, pp. 98, 99. ‘The term “exchange relation”’, Moseley continues, ‘occurs only
11 times in Chapter 1: 5 times in Section 1, 0 times in Section 2, 5 times in Section 3 and
1 time in Section 4. None of these passages defines “exchange relation” as an abstraction
from presupposed acts of exchange between two commodities and money on the market’
(Moseley 2023, p. 99).

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186 chapter 3

What Moseley convincingly shows, in my view, is that Heinrich needlessly

introduces a conceptual conflation absent from Marx’s presentation: it is only
in section 1.3.2 on ‘The Relative Form of Value’ that Marx will analyse the rela-
tion between two commodities as what Heinrich calls their ‘value relation’, in
which ‘the coat [in Marx’s example] counts as the form of existence of value’
of the linen.233 Prior to this, Marx analyses the concept of the commodity in
abstraction from its relation to other commodities.s
What Moseley does not and cannot show, however, is how Marx’s ‘phantom-
like’ concept of abstract human labour can exist without a form of appear-
ance. This instead is a mere faith-based assertion in his otherwise scrupu-
lous argument. Moseley arrives at this untenable position because of his uni-
formly Hegelian reading of Marx’s argument, assuming without discussion that
an abstract concept can exist prior to its incarnation in a material form.234
‘Essence’, Hegel famously asserted without proof, ‘must appear’, a position to
which Moseley subscribes without reserve.235
To be sure, Moseley adopts this position underwritten by Marx’s own phrases
in the first two editions of Capital, such as the following particularly unclear
assertion:

In the production of linen, a particular quantum of human labour exists in

having been expended. The linen’s value is the merely objective reflection
of the labour so expended, but it is not reflected in the body of the linen. It
reveals itself (i.e., acquires a sensual expression) by its value-relationship
to the coat.236

Marx’s language implies that he is speaking of the private, concrete ‘quantum

of human labour’ expended in making an actually existing length of linen, but
we know this cannot be the case (or else the existing length of linen’s value
would automatically be greater the longer it had taken to produce it), and that
instead Marx must be speaking of an abstraction, abstract human labour. His
language nonetheless clearly reveals the theoretical result of this muddle: a
mystical logic of revelation, in which the unseen but ‘existing’ spirit (phantom,

233 Marx 1976, p. 140.

234 ‘Even though Marx did not follow Hegel’s idealist conceptual speculation, Marx’s theory of
the value-form is a materialist version of Hegel’s logic of essence and appearance’ (Mose-
ley 2023, p. 31).
235 Hegel’s famous assertion appears as the subheading that begins ‘Section ii: Appearance’
of Book ii of the Greater Logic. Hegel 2010b, p. 418.
236 Marx 1976, p. 20, emphasis added.

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the positive logics of capital 187

spectre) becomes incarnate, sublated in a material object (not bread or wine,

in this case, but coat).
It is precisely the accomplishment of Marx’s exercise in self-clarification
in the Ergänzungen notebook to have worked through this point of mystified
theoretical confusion, to have abandoned his previous Hegelian hermeneutic
of revelation and incarnation, but without, unfortunately, having sufficiently
rewritten his manuscript to reflect this theoretical development:

The coat and the linen as values, each for itself, were reduced [in the first
section of chapter 1] to objectifications of human labour as such. But this
reduction forgot that neither is in and of itself value-objectivity [Werthge-
genständlichkeit]; they are this only in so far as this objectivity is held in
common [gemeinsam] by them. Outside of their relationship with each
other – the relationship in which they count as equal – neither coat nor
linen possess value-objectivity or objectivity as congelations of human
labour per se. They only possess this social objectivity as a social relation-
ship (in a social relationship).237

Marx only managed to insert a single but crucial sentence into the 1875 French
edition that reflects this auto-critique, while letting stand without clarification
sentences such as that cited above (‘In the production of linen, a particular
quantum of human labour exists in having been expended’), sentences that
continue to confuse astute readers such as Moseley into the present.
That new sentence – the meaning of which in the Ergänzungen Heinrich
and Moseley disagree on (neither Moseley nor Heinrich discuss the actual pub-
lished French rendition) – marks a crucial amendment to Marx’s argument, but
one that Marx fails explicitly to flag as a general position in his text, even in its
more expansive French articulation:

L’égalité de travaux qui diffèrent toto cœlo les uns des autres ne peut con-
sister que dans une abstraction de leur inégalité réelle, que dans la réduc-
tion à leur caractère commun de dépense de force humaine, de travail
humain en général, et c’est l’échange seul qui opère cette réduction en

237 Cited in Moseley 2023, p. 212, emphasis added. Moseley interprets Marx’s ‘as congelations
of human labour’ to imply that this congelation actually exists already in the individual
commodity, when the sentence says just the opposite: that they only ‘possess’ this in social
relationship with other commodities, not individually in isolation from the social network
of exchange.

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188 chapter 3

mettant en présence les uns des autres sur un pied d’égalité les produits
des travaux les plus divers.

The equality of labours that differ entirely one from another can only con-
sist in an abstraction from their real inequality, only in the reduction of
their common character as an expenditure of human force, of human
labour in general, and it is exchange alone that operates this reduction,
by placing the most diverse products of labour in the presence of one
another as equals [in value].238

While Heinrich correctly reads Marx’s ‘opère’ [vollszieht sich, ‘carried out’ in the
German Ergänzungen] to mean that ‘the abstraction of equal human labour
only exists in exchange’, Moseley instead perversely seeks to force the phrase
‘to be consistent with [Marx’s] earlier paragraphs’ (i.e., precisely the text Marx
seeks to correct here) paragraphs that putatively state that, in Moseley’s words,
‘equal human labour exists in production’.239
In fact, however, Marx’s clarification is not yet clear enough: when Marx
writes in the French edition that ‘The equality of labours that differ entirely
one from another can only consist in an abstraction from their real inequality’,
he should have added the obvious implication of this, i.e., that this ‘abstraction
from their real inequality’ results in, precisely and self-evidently, an abstrac-
tion, the nonexistent concept of abstract human labour. To clarify the theo-
retical obscurity that confounds Moseley, and given that his difficult, highly
abstract presentation in Chapter 1 relies upon singular examples (coats, linen)
to help the reader grasp his argument, Marx should have inserted in his text
an analogous clarification to his extremely important note on the difference
between value and exchange-value, which he only came to present clearly in
the 1872 edition: ‘Once we know this, our manner of speaking does no harm;
it serves, rather, as an abbreviation’.240 Once we know that the abstraction of

238 mega ii/7: 55 (my translation). In the original German in the Ergänzungen, Marx writes
more briefly that ‘The reduction of various concrete private acts of labour to this abstrac-
tion of equal human labour is only carried out [or accomplished, vollszieht sich] through
exchange, which actually equates products of different acts of labour with each other’
(‘Die Reduction der verschiednen konkreten Privatarbeiten auf dieses Abstractum gle-
icher menschlicher Arbeit vollzieht sich nur durch den Austausch, welcher Producte ver-
schiedner Arbeiten thatsächlich einander gleichsetzt’). mega ii/6: 41.
239 Moseley 2023, p. 185, emphasis added.
240 Having been inserted already in the 1872 German edition, this crucial moment of self-
clarification therefore found its way into all subsequent editions and translations, and is
thus common knowledge to any attentive reader of Capital the world over: ‘When, at the

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the positive logics of capital 189

equal human labour only exists as a real abstraction in the exchange relation via
its value-form, and is until then a nonexistent concept, our manner of speaking
– for example that ‘In the production of linen, a particular quantum of human
labour exists in having been expended’ – does no harm.

12 The Raw Materials of Marx’s Additive Synthetic Method

As he repeatedly rewrote the first chapters of Capital – from the simplified

Appendix of the 1867 edition, to the second, 1872 edition and its accompany-
ing preparatory notebooks, to his corrections of Roy’s 1875 French translation
– in the explicit intention to clarify and improve the process of exposition in
those initial chapters, Marx in fact gradually abandoned the negative dialectic
of totality that predominates in his initial scientific works. While from the 1841
dissertation through the Grundrisse, and as late as the 1867 edition of Capital,
this negative dialectical mode of exposition still plays an important role, I have
argued that in the process of rewriting, Marx developed an additive synthetic
process of exposition, in which the Hegelian logic of totality, contradiction and
determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmung] play no further role.
There is no evidence that Marx consciously undertook this process as the
invention of a novel materialist dialectical method; instead, he continued to pay
homage to the centrality of Hegel’s logic in his own formation, most famously
in the Postface to the 1872 edition where he celebrates ‘that mighty thinker’
in the face of the ‘ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who … take
pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as the good Moses Mendelssohn
treated Spinoza …, namely, as a “dead dog”’.241 This transformation in Marx’s
process of exposition instead involved a practical development, in the form
of the reconceptualisation, clarification, and rewriting of these crucial initial
chapters, most visibly for example in Marx’s preparatory notebook for the 1872
edition entitled Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals

beginning of this chapter, we said in the customary manner that a commodity is both a
use-value and an exchange-value, this was, strictly speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use-
value or object of utility, and a “value”. [… Its] form of manifestation is exchange-value, and
the commodity never has this form when looked at in isolation, but only when it is in a
value-relation or an exchange relation with a second commodity of a different kind. Once
we know this, our manner of speaking does no harm; it serves, rather, as an abbreviation’
(Marx 1976, p. 152).
241 Marx 1976, p. 103. Michael Heinrich points out that Marx’s parallel explicitly and admir-
ingly posits Spinoza on equal terms with Hegel in Marx’s judgement, a point to which I
will return below. Heinrich 2019, p. 331.

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190 chapter 3

(Additions and Changes to the First Volume of Capital).242 Since Marx made
no systematic statement or reflection on this process, it must be reconstructed
immanently from Marx’s text, as I have tried to do here.
What’s more, for all his customary polemical conviction, Marx’s two well-
known statements on his relation to Hegelian dialectic in the 1872 Postface are
quite ambiguous. On the one hand, he famously asserts that due to ‘the mystifi-
cation [Mystifikation] which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands … it must be
inverted [umstülpen], in order to discover the rational kernel within the mysti-
cal shell’, a process of mere inversion that, Althusser famously argued, were it
true, would have left intact the principal Hegelian logical categories (negation,
contradiction, Aufhebung, etc.).243
Instead, in Reading Capital, Althusser merely asserts what I have here tried
to demonstrate: that Marx’s claim fails to do justice to the real transformations
manifest in the process of exposition concretely deployed in the second and
all subsequent editions of Capital, as what Althusser rightly calls ‘the apodictic
character of the order of [Marx’s] theoretical discourse’.244 At the same time,
a few lines before that famous statement, Marx does in fact seem to go much
further in that very direction, asserting unequivocally (though without present-
ing any evidence that would indicate more precisely his meaning) that ‘My
dialectical method is, in its foundations [Grundlage], not only different from
the Hegelian, but exactly opposite [direktes Gegenteil] to it’.245
If by 1872, in the practical process of revision, Marx had transformed his
mode of exposition in the opening chapters of Capital into what I have termed
a method of additive synthesis,246 without ever committing to paper the sys-
tematic analysis of his understanding of method that he never found time to
write, he seems to have done so spontaneously, amply drawing on the resources
of his own genius to construct an original process of materialist critique. That

242 Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals [1871–72], in mega ii/6,
Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik Der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1872. Berlin:
Dietz Verlag, 1987, pp. 29–32. See Heinrich’s commentary on this text (2021, pp. 375–6).
243 See Althusser 2005, ‘On the Young Marx’.
244 rc, p. 50.
245 Marx 1976, p. 102.
246 The analogy with musical sound synthesis is no mere homonymic: the temporal articu-
lation of timbral singularity through the additive composition of sine waves to construct
complex harmonic overtone sequences might be said to adhere to Marx’s fundamental
(logical) imperative: always to proceed from the most abstract (whether a minimal def-
inition of the capitalist social form or a single pure sine wave) to encompass the fullest
degree of concretion, whether that is the composite body of Capital or the most complex
timbre frames of an ned Synclavier’s synthesis engine.

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the positive logics of capital 191

said, here I wish to indicate a number of theoretical resources in Marx’s theo-

retical toolkit that necessarily played decisive roles in this process.
The first of these has long been overlooked in Marx studies. In Heinrich’s
judgement, however, Marx’s thorough training in law and legal argumentation
was decisive for his intellectual formation:

Marx’s knowledge of law left behind clear traces in his work. Directly legal
arguments are found in a few of his articles for the Rheinische Zeitung,
[and] his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from 1843 and some pas-
sages in Capital also demonstrate Marx’s legal knowledge. And last but
not least, in February of 1849 in Cologne, Marx successfully pleaded before
the court twice when the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was charged with
insulting a magistrate and in a further trial for inciting rebellion.247

This is relevant in the present context because this training gave Marx what
Heinrich describes as ‘a reasonably solid (theoretical) training in law’, one
that in addition to his study of logic with Georg Andreas Gabler, for which
he unsurprisingly received a mark of ‘extremely diligent’, would necessarily
have grounded him in the subcategory of positive logic that is legal argumen-
tation.248
Etienne Balibar argues even more strongly that though ‘there remains a
remarkable blindness in the detailed commentaries on Marx’s Capital to the
issue of juridical forms and the function of law in Marx’s analysis’, in fact, ‘juridi-
cal form is key to the understanding of Marx’s reasoning’.249 Balibar shows that
the category of legal subject as property owner is crucial to the entire demon-
strative arc of Capital, from the initial analysis of exchange in chapter Two, to
that of the wage form, and finally that of the accumulation of capital in chap-
ter 24, such that there exists ‘a homology of the juridical form with the value
form’, in the sense that without the category of legal person the process of val-
orisation cannot proceed.250

247 Heinrich 2019, p. 310.

248 Heinrich 2019, p. 299. Marx also took a course on Hegel’s Logic with Gabler in the sum-
mer semester of 1838 (Heinrich 2019, p. 300). While the exact content of Marx’s studies in
legal argumentation is unknown, legal reasoning at its most abstract follows a syllogistic
form, in the sense that a general legal rule or law (major premise) is argued, in relation
to a specific claim or case (minor premise), to apply conclusively (conclusion). See Huhn
2022.
249 Balibar 2023, pp. 75–6.
250 Balibar 2023, p. 88.

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192 chapter 3

Second, Günther Schmidt has argued that given Marx’s extensive knowledge
of the works of Aristotle – including the Physics, Metaphysics, and On Genera-
tion and Corruption, to the point of having translated in 1841 sections of On the
Soul – he in fact originally intended to write his doctoral dissertation as a com-
parison of Epicurus not with Democritus, but with Aristotle himself.251 While
there is no direct evidence that Marx studied Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior
Analytics, the works in which Aristotle literally invented logic as a domain of
scientific, philosophical reflection, there is every reason to suppose that given
his training in logic, Marx was familiar with these canonical works as well. In
any case, Aristotle’s positive logic pervades at every moment the philosophical
works that Marx knew intimately, such as the Physics and Metaphysics. Marx’s
respect for Aristotle is, moreover, a constant of his intellectual universe, to the
point that in Capital he will unequivocally name the inventor of the Peripatetic
School, ‘the great investigator who was the first to analyse the value-form, like
so many other forms of thought, society and nature, … the greatest thinker of
Antiquity’.252
Finally – and here the question of influence is both significantly more
obscure but equally crucial to the argument of this book as a whole – there
is the problem of Spinoza and Marx.253 Compared to his extensive engage-
ment with thinkers such as Epicurus, Aristotle, Feuerbach, or Hegel, Marx has
little to say about Spinoza, all of it rather superficial and in passing (though
always positive and admirative). In its generality, Marx’s one theoretically sub-
stantive citation of the author of the Ethics, in a footnote to Capital, (‘These
gentlemen [the vulgar economists] would do well to ponder occasionally over
Spinoza’s “Determinatio est nagatio”’) most likely relays Hegel’s misrepresenta-
tion of Spinoza rather than a substantive engagement with Spinoza himself,
repeating Hegel’s erroneous word order rather than the original (‘determina-

251 Heinrich 2019, pp. 412–15. Charles Barbour has shown that this extensive familiarity with
Aristotle arose in part from Marx’s intensive engagement with post-Aristotelean logic
more generally in the period 1839–1842. Marx did so, Barbour shows, not just in prepa-
ration for writing his dissertation, but with the intention of writing a never-completed
response to the foremost scholar of Aristotelean logic of the time, Adolf Trendelenburg,
and his highly influential 1840 critique of Hegelian logic, Logische Untersuchungen (Bar-
bour, “The Logic Question”). See above, pp. 158–60.
252 Marx 1976, pp. 151, 532.
253 For systematic enquiries into Marx’s relation to Spinoza, none of which, however, even
raises the possibility that Marx’s familiarity with Spinoza may have impacted the epis-
temology and method of exposition of his critique of political economy, see Maximilien
Rubel’s classic article ‘Marx à la rencontre de Spinoza’ (1977); Matheron 1977; and more
recently, Matysik 2023, Chapter 3, ‘When Marx Met Spinoza’, pp. 97–134; Bianchi 2018;
Tosel 2008; Fischbach 2005; Lordon 2010.

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the positive logics of capital 193

tio est negatio’ rather than Spinoza’s ‘determinatio negatio est’).254 For Marx in
this footnote, the phrase ‘Determinatio est negatio’ is taken to refer in general
to ‘Hegelian “contradiction”, which [Marx continues] is the source of all dialec-
tics’, something quite different than its limited application in Spinoza’s letter to
Jelles.255
It would seem that Marx’s other principal reference to Spinoza (‘In oppo-
sition [Gegensatz] to Spinoza, [vulgar economics] believes that “ignorance is
a sufficient reason” [die Unwissenheit ein hinreichender Grund ist]’) is, if any-
thing, even less promising in its vagueness.256 I wish in conclusion, however, to
pause to consider this phrase that does not seem to have merited the attention
of previous commentators on Marx’s relation to Spinoza. It is my conviction
that taken in context, and given the importance Marx seems to attribute to
it judging from the phrase’s repetition from his 1841 dissertation through the
1872 edition of Capital, this seemingly cliched, even throwaway catchphrase in
fact indicates, as a sort of signpost or marker, precisely the additive synthetic
epistemological process that brings Marx’s revisions to Capital in proximity to
Spinoza’s apodictic, positive logic.

13 On Ignorance and Common Notions

In the existing literature on Spinoza’s possible influence on Marx, the focus has
remained unrelentingly limited to questions of the critique of religion and mir-

254 Marx 1976, p. 744. Spinoza’s letter of 2 June 1674 to Jelles, in which the phrase appears, is
not among those transcribed in Marx’s 1841 notebook on Spinoza, similarly indicating that
Marx based his knowledge of the proposition on Hegel’s misreading of Spinoza (mega2
vi.1, Berlin, 1977). In contrast, Marx, unlike Hegel, actually cites Spinoza correctly in the
identical citation in Grundrisse (1973, p. 90). Macherey argues that Hegel’s addition of the
single word ‘omnis’ in his analyses of Spinoza symptomatically transforms a specific, situ-
ated comment on Spinoza’s part into a general proposition on Being as such. See Macherey
2011, Chapter 4, ‘Omnis determinatio est negatio’. Marx also substantively engages with
Spinoza in The Holy Family (1844), but merely to indicate him as a thinker ‘representative
of a rationalist and abstract metaphysical system’ (Bianchi 2018, p. 49; see also Tosel 2008,
p. 141). Marx’s characterisation of Spinozist thought in his pre-1845 texts repeats aspects
of the Hegelian misreading that Macherey has critiqued, for example in the claim that
‘Spinoza’s substance … is metaphysically disguised nature separated from man’ (cited in
Bianchi 2018, p. 50). Bianchi, however, proposes that in arguing against Hegel’s Spinoza,
Marx was in fact targeting Hegelian idealism itself (2018, p. 51).
255 Macherey 2011, p. 162. For Spinoza the determinate figure, the topic of this interjection,
serves to constitute any totality as limited to a subjective point of view, as an actually
existing singularity rather than a nonexistent thing or even substance itself.
256 Marx 1976, p. 422.

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194 chapter 3

acles, freedom of speech, and the autonomy of the political. Bernardo Bianchi
remains squarely within this field of interpretation, noting only that ‘After 1844,
Marx drifts away from Spinoza as well as … the problems relating to the auton-
omy of the political’.257 No commentator to my knowledge has reflected on the
epistemological implications of the statement that ‘ignorance is no argument’,
though there is unanimous consensus that the source of this phrase in the first
volume of Capital is the Appendix to Ethics ip36.258
On at least three occasions spanning his intellectual production, from the
1841 dissertation to the final revisions of Capital, Marx cites Spinoza’s phrase
that ‘ignorance is no argument’.259 In The German Ideology, Marx briefly cites
the phrase to indicate Max Stirner’s ignorance of real human suffering, but
in the case of Marx’s 1841 dissertation, On the Difference between Democritean
and Epicurean Physics, Rubel suggests a far more consequential, epistemolog-
ical dimension, one that I will argue is carried over, amplified, and clarified
when Marx repeats it in Capital. While Marx’s lost Appendix to the Disserta-
tion, judging by the Notes that have survived, addressed potentially Spinozist
themes related to the ttp such as ‘On Individual Immortality’, ‘The Theol-
ogy of Epicurus’ and ‘The Relationship of Man to God’, in the second chap-
ter, Marx writes that ‘Spinoza says that ignorance is no argument’ in order

257 Bianchi 2018, p. 54.

258 As for example Fowkes, who adds a translator’s note at this point to the Penguin edition,
that states: ‘Spinoza, in the Appendix to Part i of his Ethics, rejects the teleological argu-
ment for the existence of God, stating that ignorance of other causes is not a sufficient
reason for the view that God created Nature with some particular end in view’ (Marx
1976, p. 1121). Bianchi points out, however, that ‘the same argument may also be based
on Chapter vi from the Theological-Political Treatise’ in which Spinoza analyses miracles
(2018, p. 39). The latter, moreover, is the chapter from ttp that Marx placed at the head
of his selection of excerpts and personally copied in his own hand, as opposed to later
sections of these notebooks that were the work of a copyist (Rubel 1977, p. 15). Further-
more, while there is a similar consensus that Marx was familiar with Spinoza’s Ethics, little
attention has been paid to Marx’s citation of one of Spinoza’s most original epistemolog-
ical positions: in his article “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship” from January
1842, Marx notes that “Truth is as little modest as light …. Verum index sui et falsi.” Cited
at Bianchi 2018, 44. Bianchi comments, “Both the light metaphor and Spinoza’s sentence
expressed as an aphorism – verum index sui et falsi – refer to eiip43: ‘Indeed, just as light
defines itself and darkness, so truth sets the standard for itself and falsehood’ ” (44).
259 There is no literal equivalent to this phrase in Spinoza’s writings; perhaps the closest is
to be found in eivp17s: ‘My purpose … is not to conclude that ignorance is preferable to
knowledge, or that there is no difference between a fool and a wise man in the matter of
controlling the emotions. I say this because it is necessary to know both the power of our
nature and its lack of power, so that we can determine what reason can and cannot do in
controlling the emotions’.

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the positive logics of capital 195

to reject the platitudes of commentators who ‘attributed no qualities to the

atoms’ based merely on their inability to ‘reconcile the qualities of the atom
with its concept’, in other words, based merely on the inadequacy of their own
thought.260
Rubel’s commentary on this reference to Spinoza is suggestive, if hesitant.
He argues that this seemingly offhand reference to Spinoza in fact indexifies
the dissertation’s fundamentally Spinozist epistemology:

One is tempted to speak of a Spinozist reading of Epicurus on Marx’s part;

at both the level of atomist physics as well as its ethics, the [dissertation’s]
concepts of reason, the sensible [sensibilité], consciousness and supersti-
tion all contribute to the conception of a ‘materialism’ that is not without
connection to the rationalism defined by Spinoza in relation to the ‘sec-
ond genre of knowledge’.261

Marx’s dissertation in its surviving form is divided between the theoretical

anti-empiricism of its first part, a position coherent with both Spinoza and
Hegel,262 and the purely Hegelian negative dialectic of its second section.263
In the former, Marx articulates the fundamental distinction between Democri-
tus’ empiricism and the purely conceptual orientation of Epicurus. Setting off
across the Mediterranean world in an endless search for knowledge, Democri-
tus, Marx observes, ‘is driven into empirical observation [empirische Beobach-
tung]. Dissatisfied with philosophy, he throws himself into the arms of empir-
ical knowledge [empirischen Wissen]’. Democritus ‘applies himself to empiri-
cal natural science [empirische Naturwissenschaft] and to positive knowledge,
and represents the unrest of observation, experimenting, ubiquitous learning
[überall lernenden], ranging over the wide, wide world’. Marx’s Epicurus, in con-
trast, ‘scorns the empirical [verachtet die Empirie]; embodied in him are the

260 Marx 1975a, p. 119.

261 Rubel 1977, p. 11.
262 In the Encyclopedia, Hegel writes for example that ‘perception is the form in which mat-
ters are supposed to be comprehended [begriffen], and this is the deficiency of empiricism
…. In perception, one possesses something concrete in multiple ways whose determina-
tions one is supposed to take apart like peeling away the layers of an onion. This process
of splitting them up [Zergliederung] is therefore intended to dissolve the determinations
that have grown together, breaking them up [zerlegen] without adding anything but the
subjective activity of breaking them up. Analysis is, however, the progression from the
immediacy of perception to thought’ (Hegel 2010a, p. 80).
263 See Levine 2009; McIvor 2008; Labelle 2020.

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196 chapter 3

serenity of thought satisfied in itself, the self-sufficiency that draws its knowl-
edge ex principio interno’.264
Epicurus’ position amounts to the refusal of all supernatural or miraculous
explanations of causality, all teleologies of divine intent, and asserts instead the
adequacy of a physics-based, ‘atomistic’ account of nature. ‘The atom is per-
ceived only through reason’, Marx flatly observes.265 There are no sensations
of atoms from which to construct their concept; instead, Epicurus’ philosoph-
ical project seeks to articulate the rational order of nature, beginning from the
purely theoretical, anti-empiricist concept of the atom and the void, to culmi-
nate in a materialist cosmology. Marx’s Epicurus squarely locates the produc-
tion of knowledge within scientific reflection – as opposed to the extraction
of truth from empirical observation so characteristic of Democritus – as the
positive construction of an adequate intellection of the real. This position,
despite its rudimentary development in the dissertation, nonetheless indicates
a purely Spinozist materialist position, in which the real order of nature finds
conceptual articulation in the attribute of thought; Marx’s reading of the ttp
and Ethics in preparation for the dissertation in all certainty contributed to the
articulation of this epistemological position.
The Spinozist theoretical anti-empiricism of Marx’s first chapter stands in
marked contrast, however, to the negative dialectical logic of its succeeding
sections, the latter deploying a none-too-subtle application of Hegel’s logic
of Reflexionsbestimmung to the Epicurean theory of the atom. If Democri-
tus’ assertion of the necessarily, eternally linear fall of atoms through the void
describes for Marx a realm of pure necessity, Epicurus’ introduction of the con-
cept of their clinamen or swerve, in Marx’s reading, introduces negation not
as the mere external definition of the atom as not-void, but internally, as the
negative unity of its becoming-other, its swerve the theoretical basis of self-
consciousness and the freedom of human action:

264 Marx 1975a, pp. 99, 107, translation modified. The original German can be found in
mega ii, Karl Marx Werke, Artikel Literarische Versuche bis März 1843. Berlin: Dietz Ver-
lag, 1975, pp. 27, 30.
265 Marx 1975a, p. 134. ‘Das Atom, ihr Fundament, nur durch die Vernunft geschaut wird’
(mega ii, p. 49). In the First Notebook on Epicurean Philosophy, Marx observes in more
Hegelian terms that ‘the motion of the atoms is in principle absolute, that is, all empir-
ical conditions in it are sublated [alle empirischen Bedingungen sind in ihr aufgehoben]
…. What is lasting and great in Epicurus is that he gives no preference to conditions over
notions, and tries just as little to save them. For Epicurus the task of philosophy is to prove
that the world and thought are thinkable and possible’ (Marx 1975a, pp. 186, 189, transla-
tion modified). For the German original, see mega iv1, Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Exzerpte
und Notizen bis 1824. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1976, p. 19.

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the positive logics of capital 197

The mode of being which [the atom] has to negate [negiren] is the straight
line. The immediate negation [unmittelbare Negation] of this motion is
another motion, which … is the declination from the straight line …. Epi-
curus objectifies the contradiction [Widerspruch] in the concept of the
atom between essence and existence …. In Epicurus atomistics with all its
contradictions [Widersprüchen] has been carried through and completed
as the natural science of self-consciousness [Selbstbewusstseins].266

Here, the Hegelian logic of the determinations of reflection that would remain
a constant in Marx’s thought through the first edition of Capital already offers
the young Marx the theoretical means to develop an original reinterpretation
of Epicurus’ materialism. The contrast with Marx’s return to Spinoza in chap-
ter 11 of Capital, as we shall see in a moment, could not be greater.
That said, Rubel’s hesitant, passing mention of the importance for the young
Marx of Spinoza’s ‘second genre of knowledge’, that of common notions
[notiones communes], puts us on the trail of the true and penetrating sig-
nificance of Spinoza for Marx’s process of exposition, the final piece in the
puzzle of what I am calling in this book Capital’s Spinozist epistemology. For
while in the dissertation this Spinozism remains superficial, if determinant in
Marx’s argument, by the time of its reappearance in Capital, the reference to
Spinoza, in the context of Marx’s argument in chapter 11, precisely and exact-
ingly indicates what Rubel could only vaguely infer from the 1841 dissertation
and its accompanying notebooks: a full-fledged theoretical reconstruction and
deployment on Marx’s part of what Spinoza called general or common notions,
notions that Marx names the ‘law of motion’ of the capitalist social form. In
other words, taken in the context in which it appears in the eleventh chapter of
Capital (‘The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value’), in saying that ‘ignorance is not a
sufficient reason’ Marx is not merely pointing to the ‘ignorance’ of the classical
political economists he criticises, but does so in the context of his contrasting
positive elaboration of an adequate mode of knowledge: specifically, the con-
cept of the ‘law’ of the rate and mass of surplus value that it is the remit of
chapter 11 to formulate.

266 Marx 1975a, pp. 112, 125, 146. mega i/1, pp. 36, 44, 58.

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198 chapter 3

14 Marx’s Spinozist Theory of Knowledge

‘Ignorance is not a sufficient reason’. For reasons he never explains, it is this

unassuming insight of Spinoza’s, gleaned from his readings and notes in 1841,
that permanently stuck in Marx’s mind. When Marx repeats this reference to
Spinoza three decades later, in chapter 11 of Capital Volume i, he tellingly does
so in the immediate context of a critique of the illusions and misapprehensions
of the classical economists regarding the nature of surplus value.267 Immedi-
ately following his eminently clear and concise statement of the general ‘law’
(Gesetz) governing the ‘Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value’ (henceforth ‘lrmsv’)
in the first three pages of the chapter, Marx notes that ‘This law clearly con-
tradicts all experience based on immediate appearances’.268 This is necessarily
the case, he argues, because, as ‘everyone knows’, the amount of profit made
from a commodity by ‘a cotton spinner’ or ‘a baker’ does not vary according
to the relative amounts of variable and constant capital either has invested to
produce their cotton or bread, but only according to the general cost of ‘inputs’
(in mainstream economic jargon) relative to their market price.269
While Marx can assume that ‘everyone knows’ this is the case from their
lived experience of commodity production and exchange, this ready familiar-
ity nonetheless directly contradicts the law Marx has just before stated; at this
point in his exposition, however, he has not yet explained the real and neces-
sary distinction between surplus value and profit, and Marx will continue to
hold their difference in abstraction and to assume instead that the two coin-
cide until many hundreds of pages later, when he will explicate the dynamics
and laws governing competition in Volume iii via concepts such as cost price
and average rate of profit.270
Here, Marx simply indicates that the authors of ‘classical economics’ are
just as subject to this empiricist illusion as ‘everyone’, and necessarily so: in
the absence of an adequate theory of value and its necessary concepts such
as Marx has developed to this point in his exposition in chapter 11, classical
economics can only ‘hold instinctively to this law, although it has never for-

267 To my knowledge, while many have repeated the assumption that Marx’s citation refers
to the Appendix of Spinoza’s Ethics Book i, no one, surprisingly, seems to have reflected
on the context in which he inserts this reference in Capital.
268 Marx 1976, p. 421.
269 As the US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the matter with naïve simplicity, ‘Inputs are any
resources used to create goods and services. Examples of inputs include labour (workers’
time), fuel, materials, buildings, and equipment’ (‘What Are Inputs?’, at https://www.bls​
.gov/k12/productivity‑101/content/what‑is‑productivity/what‑are‑inputs.htm.)
270 See Nesbitt 2022, pp. 138–52.

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the positive logics of capital 199

mulated it, because it is a necessary consequence of the law of value’.271 In

other words, the only difference between ‘everyone’ and classical economics
is that while the former simply observes and follows what is empirically the
case, the latter experiences this same fact as a theoretical contradiction that it
cannot solve: having posited labour as the source of value, but lacking concepts
such as labour power and socially necessary labour time, classical economics
embroiled itself in insoluble contradictions trying to explain, for example, how
it can then be the case that a commodity is not ‘more valuable the more unskil-
ful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to
complete the article’.272
Lacking adequate theoretical concepts, ‘vulgar economics’ can only make
‘violent [as opposed to scientifically adequate] abstractions’; condemned to its
empiricist illusions, it ‘must rely … on mere semblance as opposed to the law
which regulates and determines the phenomena’.273 One could hardly imagine
a more perfectly Spinozist critique of the necessarily illusory and inadequate
nature of empirical, sensuous experience, and it is indeed precisely at this point
that Marx then inserts his reference to Spinoza.
The obvious conclusion is not merely that chapter 11 of Capital is explic-
itly constructed as a perfectly Spinozist critique of the necessity governing the
illusions of empiricist, ideological forms of knowledge such as those of ‘vul-
gar economics’, but furthermore, that Marx offers in contrast an equally per-
fect demonstration in the immediately preceding paragraphs of what should
necessarily take its place to constitute a properly scientific, adequate anal-
ysis of a concept such as the rate and mass of surplus value: ‘the law that
regulates and determines the phenomena’, or, in Spinozist terms, its common
notion.
Marx thus begins his analysis of this law, in the first paragraph of chap-
ter 11, by reminding his reader that ‘In this chapter, as hitherto, the value
of labour-power … is assumed to be a given, constant magnitude’.274 Super-
ficially, this reminder simply prompts the reader to recall the abstract con-
cept (the value of labour power) that allowed Marx, in chapter 7, to distin-
guish between necessary and surplus labour, and thus to indicate the source
of surplus value in the production process. More importantly, however, this
proviso also squarely replaces Marx’s forthcoming analysis of the lrmsv in
the purely theoretical domain of thought; the law of the rate and mass of

271 Marx 1976, p. 421.

272 Marx 1976, p. 129.
273 Marx 1976, p. 421.
274 Marx 1976, p. 417.

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200 chapter 3

surplus value is, in other words, not an empirical, sensuous thing, but unam-
biguously a Gedankenkonkretum.
I say replaces because Marx must here forcibly return his reader to the high
level of abstraction of the first nine chapters of Capital following the exten-
sive empirical illustration of these concepts in chapter 10 (‘The Working Day’);
equally, however, this initial prompt must be kept in mind in what follows,
because it clearly indicates that the initial presentation of this law stands
in utter distinction from the empiricism of both ‘everyone’ and the classical
economists he will then excoriate midway through the chapter in the passage
discussed above.
This point should not be forgotten when Marx immediately, in the second
paragraph, launches into a discussion of ‘the worker’ and ‘the capitalist’, offer-
ing as well specific numerical quantities of work time (‘6 hours a day’) and
its monetary expression as a specific value (‘3 shillings’) to calculate a ‘specific
mass of surplus-value’.275 How are ‘the worker’ and ‘the capitalist’ different, a
casual reader might ask, from the ‘baker’ or ‘cotton spinner’ whose empiricist
point of view he will condemn just after presenting this law? In fact, it will
shortly become clear – when Marx directly scales his analysis from a single
labour process to the ‘total capital of a society’ (‘for example … the social work-
ing day of ten million hours’) – that they inhabit utterly distinct theoretical
realms: the baker and spinner actually existing, singular examples of produc-
tive labourers with their distinct points of view and lived experiences of the
production and exchange processes, the ‘worker’ and ‘capitalist’ mere theo-
retical, abstract markers or stand-ins, imagistic ciphers of an abstract thought
construct that Marx will call ‘aliquot parts’ of a whole that can be directly scaled
up or down at will.276 Marx thus proceeds, in his third paragraph, to scale his

275 Ibid.
276 Marx 1976, p. 422. Patrick Murray writes that ‘Marx replaces the failed classical theory of
value, which explains individual prices in terms of individual values and individual prof-
its in terms of individual surplus values, with a labour theory of value that holds at the
aggregate level (the level of total capital) and explains subordinate phenomena on that
basis …. Marx revolutionises the classical labour theory of value by making the aliquot
or representative commodity the object of inquiry’ (Murray 2017, pp. 22, 23). This frac-
tional orientation can easily confuse the reader of Capital, however, since Marx repeatedly
frames the rhetoric of his argument in terms of individual examples (of coats, linen, tai-
loring and weaving, or here in chapter 11, bakers and cotton spinners). As discussed above,
Fred Moseley observes in this sense that ‘It is not always clear that Marx’s theory in Vol-
ume i is about the total capital and the total surplus value produced in the economy as
a whole, because the theory is usually illustrated in terms of an individual capital and
even a single, solitary worker …. However, the individual capitals in Marx’s examples rep-
resent the total social capital of the capitalist class as a whole. Individual capitals are not

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the positive logics of capital 201

analysis from aliquot, representative figures of the individual worker and capi-
talist, to address ‘the total value of all the labour-powers the capitalist employs
simultaneously’.277
Marx next examines factors governing the variation on this simple formula
for the production of surplus value: when variable capital invested diminishes
or increases, and when the corresponding rate of surplus value increases or
diminishes, the total mass of surplus value produced will directly vary accord-
ing to these given proportions.278 These variations, Marx insists, nonethe-
less remain governed by absolute ‘limits, which cannot be overcome’, in the
form of both limits to the working day (24 hours) and to reductions in the
number of workers employed (to the theoretical and potentially real limit of
zero).279
All of this combines, in Marx’s various simple, algebraic examples, to indi-
cate the ‘self-evident’ nature of the lrmsv: ‘With a given rate of surplus-
value, and a given value of labour-power, therefore, the masses of surplus-value
produced vary directly as the amounts of the variable capitals advanced’.280
Though Marx’s exposition in volume i to this point has focused on the rel-
ative division of capital into its constant and variable forms, ‘the law just
laid down is not affected by this’. This is the case since it is only the ele-
ment of variable capital, by definition and whatever its relative quantity to
constant capital employed in production, that effects ‘the valorisation pro-
cess performed by the labour-powers which set the means of production in
motion’.281
This final observation thus allows Marx to summarise in natural language
the lrmsv in its simplest form: ‘The masses of value and of surplus-value pro-
duced by different capitals – the value of labour-power being given and its
degree of exploitation being equal – vary directly as the amounts of the vari-
able components of these capitals, i.e. the parts which have been turned into

analysed as separate and distinct real [empirical] capitals, but rather as representatives
and “aliquot parts” of the total social capital’ (Moseley 2017, pp. 45–46). In contrast to the
examples of chapter one, here in chapter 11 Marx will make explicit this fractional scope
of his analysis through the explicit distinction between bakers and cotton spinners on the
one hand, and what he calls ‘the social working day’ as a whole, the overarching frame of
reference for the lrmsv.
277 Marx 1976, p. 417.
278 Marx 1976, p. 419.
279 On the latter point in relation to capitalist slavery, see Nesbitt 2022, pp. 145–50.
280 Marx 1976, p. 420.
281 Marx 1976, p. 421.

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202 chapter 3

living labour-power’.282 Having done so, Marx turns to his critique of both the
common sense of ‘everyone’ as well as the necessary contradictions governing
the ‘vulgar economists’ discussed above.
Now, the epistemological point I wish to make about Marx’s algebraically
simple lrmsv is that on at least eight counts, Marx’s law constitutes a perfect
example of what Spinoza called a common notion, i.e., general concepts or for-
mulae that are, in contrast to imaginary ideas, Spinoza insists, always and in all
cases necessarily adequate. It is quite extraordinary, I think, that both Spinoza,
in propositions 37, 38, and 39 of Ethics ii, and Marx in Capital chapter 11:
1. Reject empirical knowledge as radically and necessarily inadequate;
2. Propose in its place an abstract science of nonexistent things (res singu-
lares non existentes) without sensuous determination;283
3. Emphasise the absolute scalability of this knowledge between aliquot
part and whole;
4. Understand this form of knowledge as relational and proportional as
opposed to the observation-based study of actually existing singular
things;
5. Articulate this form of knowledge as a process of formalisation that mod-
els reality through the power of abstraction …
6. To produce a necessarily and universally adequate mode of knowledge …
7. The nature of which follows a necessary genesis that gradually transitions
from the inadequacy of imaginary, empirical knowledge to the adequacy
of the general, in order to …
8. Constitute the paradigm of a political epistemology as epistemological
commons
In his analysis of Spinoza’s exposition of the concept of ‘notions common to all
humans’ [notiones omnibus hominibus communes], Macherey initially empha-
sises the same distinction Marx makes, described above, between the inade-
quacy of empirical observations and a general notion: while the former are
produced ‘by the chance encounters of bodies, [common notions] differ fun-
damentally from those produced by the mechanisms of perception and imag-
ination, under conditions subject to infinite variations, which prevents their
meaning, always elaborated in a determinate context, in the here and now, to
be extended beyond the moment of their appearance’.284 In contrast, Macherey

282 Ibid.
283 On Macherey’s explication of Spinoza’s crucial and difficult distinction between nonexis-
tent things (idealities) and actually existing singular things (res singulares actu existentes)
in eiip8,9, see above, pp. 53–4
284 Macherey 1997, p. 274.

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the positive logics of capital 203

argues that such notions common to all humans by their very nature escape
from ‘the instability inherent in opinions’ insofar as they possess a fixed and
determinant form that allows for their deployment ‘by all in common’.285
What then is the nature of such common notions? For Spinoza, the cru-
cial distinction between the inadequate, imaginary ideas we necessarily form
from sense impressions, and common notions, is that the latter are ideas not
about any given, actually existing singular thing (such as coats and linen or
bakers and cotton spinners, among Marx’s examples), but about certain quali-
ties common to all things in general. In the wake of Galileo, who died in 1642,
Spinoza’s privileged example in these propositions is that of physical bodies
as such, universally existing in space and following the general laws that gov-
ern their relations. If it is the case that ‘all bodies agree in certain things’286 –
i.e., that aside from their particular existences, they possess common charac-
teristics, which is to say their extension – then they therefore have in common
that ‘they are determinations of extension, and are universally and identically
subject to the same laws of movement and rest’.287
For Spinoza, this common nature is what allows for the development of a
general science of bodies, one that is founded on purely mathematical princi-
ples. The essential characteristic of this scientific understanding of the phys-
ical, material world, Macherey observes, is that it does not ‘take into consid-
eration the existence of any specific body in particular, and is thus completely
abstract’.288 This immediately recalls Marx’s famous defence of the powers of
abstraction for the analysis and critique of political economy: ‘In the analysis
of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assis-
tance. The power of abstraction must replace both’.289 Like Marx’s scientific
critique of political economy (‘The ultimate aim of this work [i.e., Capital, is]
to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society’), Spinoza’s ‘science’, as
Macherey reads him, ‘determines figures of regularity that, despite the perpet-
ual variations impressed on [actually existing, singular] bodies due to the fact
that they exist en acte, constitute the manifestation of a permanence regarding
which laws can be formulated independently of the existence of any particular
body’.290
Spinoza further specifies a characteristic of common notions, one that
applies not only to physical bodies in extension, but to all actually existing

285 Macherey 1997, p. 275.

286 eiip13l2.
287 Macherey 1997, p. 278.
288 Ibid., emphasis added.
289 Marx 1976, p. 90.
290 Macherey 1997, p. 281.

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204 chapter 3

singular things as such: these common characteristics apply equally and abso-
lutely to the part and whole [quod aeque in parte ac in toto est], and are,
Macherey stresses, completely independent of any distinction between part
and whole, precisely in terms of the scalability that Marx stresses in the exam-
ple of the lrmsv: when considering aliquot, representative parts of a whole
such as the total mass of surplus value rather than actually existing labourers
such as bakers and cotton spinners and their lived experience, the law govern-
ing the rate and mass of surplus value holds absolutely.
This is necessarily the case, since a common notion such as Marx’s lrmsv
represents not actually existing singular things, but relations and proportions,
the nature of which, Macherey notes, ‘remains identical in every dimension
[ordres de grandeur], as long as the rule that defines these relations is sus-
tained’. As such, a common notion informs by this equivalence all ‘composed
and composing’ things, which, in their entirety and universally, constitute rela-
tional systems as singular structures of causality that through formalisation
come to nonexist, and do so independently of the particular conditions of exis-
tence of singular existing things (such as, for Marx, the particular characteris-
tics of baking bread or spinning cotton).291
Now, the astute reader will have noted that in my initial presentation of
chapter 11 of Capital, I skipped over what is perhaps the most striking confir-
mation of my argument that the lrmsv is a Spinozist common notion: Marx’s
graphic formula summarising the law itself in schematic form:292
s
×V
v
S ={ ′
P × aa × n

I did so because Marx’s introduction of this formula – though it adds no fur-

ther information to his presentation of the lrmsv – not only synthesises in
schematic form this common notion, but, what is more, its specific history
across the various editions of Capital can stand as a final confirmation of
my proposition that Marx tendentially supresses his initial reliance on the
Hegelian logic of determinations of reflection and contradiction for a properly
Spinozist additive synthetic method.

291 Marx 1976, p. 279.

292 Marx annotates this formula as follows: ‘Let the mass of the surplus value be S, the surplus-
value supplied by the individual worker in the average day s, the variable capital advanced
daily in the purchase of one individual labour-power v, the sum total of the variable capi-
tal v, the value of an average labour-power P, its degree of exploitation [= a’/a or: surplus
labour divided by necessary labour,] and the number of workers employed, n’ (1976, p. 418).

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the positive logics of capital 205

In fact, this schematic reduction and formalisation of the lrmsv, along with
the paragraphs directly preceding and following it, is absent from both the 1867
and 1872 editions of Capital.293 Retained by Engels in the 1890 ‘definitive’ edi-
tion of Capital, Marx in fact only inserted this formula, along with a number of
abbreviations and clarifications, in his revisions to Roy’s 1875 French transla-
tion. In the third paragraph, for example, he added a second sentence that more
clearly states, at a high degree of abstraction, the additive and scalable nature
of variable capital: ‘Sa valeur [that of the variable capital employed] égale la
valeur moyenne d’une force de travail multipliée par le nombre de ces forces
individuelles ; la grandeur du capital variable est donc proportionnelle au nom-
bre des ouvriers employés’.294 Immediately following the formula, Marx further
emphasises the purely abstract nature of the values it represents: ‘We assume
throughout, not only that the value of an average labour-power is constant, but
that the workers employed by a capitalist are reduced to average workers’.295
The overall tendency of Marx’s final, 1875 revisions to the first paragraphs of
this chapter are clear: simplifying its presentation, while above all emphasis-
ing the scalability of his propositions as well as their purely abstract character.
Now, I find it quite extraordinary that in his proof to eiip37, Spinoza charac-
terises the abstract, general nature of the properties common to all things (i.e.,

293 Schematisation in this sense refers not to the Kantian empiricist application of a category
to sense perception, but instead to the systematic replacement of referential terms in a
proposition by variables (n), while formalisation refers more generally to the establish-
ment of the logical form of a proposition. See Lapointe 2008, p. 29.
294 mega ii7 [1875], Le Capital, Paris, 1872–1875, Dietz Verlag, 1989, p. 257. The English in the
Penguin translation reads: ‘Its value is therefore equal to the average value of one labour-
power multiplied by the number of labour powers employed’ (Marx 1976, p. 417). Marx also
cut out the succeeding sentence from the end of the third paragraph in the 1867 and 1872
editions, presumably because it made much the same point more verbosely: ‘Der Werth
des vorgeschossenen variablen Kapitals ist also gleich dem Durchschnittswerth einer
Arbeitskraft multiplicirt mit der Anzahl der verwandten Arbeitskräfte. Bei gegebnem
Werth der Arbeitskraft wechselt also Werthumfang oder Größe des variablen Kapitals mit
der Masse der angeeigneten Arbeitskräfte oder der Anzahl der gleichzeitig beschäftigten
Arbeiter’ (mega2 ii5 [1867], p. 242; mega2 ii6 [1872], p. 303).
295 Marx 1976, p. 418, emphasis added. ‘Es wird fortwährend unterstellt, nicht nur dass der
Werth einer Durchschnitts-Arbeitskraft konstant ist, sondern dass die von einem Kapital-
isten angewandten Arbeiter auf Durchsnitts-Arbeiter reducirt sind’ (mega2 ii10 [1890],
p. 274). In fact, this sentence, a footnote in the French, replaces in the 1890 addition within
the body text an inconsequential one unique to the French, in which Marx had written:
‘Or, un produit ne change pas de grandeur numérique, quand celle de ses facteurs change
simultanément et en raison inverse’ (mega2 ii7 [1875], Le Capital, 258). An online scan
of the original French 1875 edition can be consulted at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/​
bpt6k1232830/f1n351.pdf.

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206 chapter 3

their common notions) by an abstract variable, ‘B’, precisely as does Marx in

the formula he inserts between the fourth and fifth paragraphs of Chapter 11.296
Common notions apprehend not actually existing singular things but relations,
in effect constructing an atemporal formal model of the real. The ethical and
political result of this process of abstraction, Macherey observes, is to multiply
the powers of the intellect adequately to grasp the essential, relational nature
of all things:

It is as though the intellect … surpassed itself, escaping from the limita-

tions of its particular situation as the idea of a particular thing as a body
in action, which is how it ordinarily perceives all other things. Instead,
[through the development of common notions] it is led to form ideas that
are not themselves ideas of particular things, but [nonexistent] ideas, the
object of which is the relations among things.297

In fact, Spinoza argues, common notions, though they do not grasp the essen-
tial nature of singular things (this he reserves to the third, ‘intuitive’ form of
knowledge), are nonetheless necessarily and universally adequate, and as such
constitute an instance of the political epistemology with which this book as a
whole is concerned.
‘Those things that are common to all things and are equally in the part as in
the whole can be conceived only adequately’.298 Aside from the laws govern-
ing the movement and rest of physical bodies, Spinoza also refers to axioms as
common notions, in the sense that they hold for ‘all things that are’ [omnia que
sunt].299 When the apparatus of thought moves in this fashion away from the
empirical consideration of various actually existing things, to construct instead
ideas whose object is the purely abstract relations between things, Macherey
observes,

It moves to a new mode of operation [régime de fonctionnement], one that

makes it see the things it apprehends in a completely new fashion: no
longer via contingent encounters tied to the existence in act of bodies, but

296 ‘Conceive, if possible, that it does constitute the essence of one particular thing, B. There-
fore, it can neither be nor be conceived without B (Def. 2, ii). But this is contrary to our
hypothesis. Therefore, it does not pertain to B’s essence, nor does it constitute the essence
of any other particular thing’ (eiip37Pr).
297 Macherey 1997, pp. 286–7.
298 eiip38.
299 eip8.

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the positive logics of capital 207

from a completely disincarnated point of view …. Relating to no specific

thing in particular, such an idea, by its nature, can indicate or consider no
other thing than that of which it is the idea: it can only be a clear and dis-
tinct idea, the transparency of which cannot be corrupted by opacity. It
is, therefore, an idea ‘that is for us absolute or adequate and perfect’ [quae
in nobis est absoluta sive adequate et perfecta].300

Common notions are absolute and complete ideas, precisely in the sense that
schematisation (via the introduction of variables, A or B, to replace all reference
to actually existing singular things) affords the passage from our inadequate
ideas about the actually existing, empirical things we perceive (like Marx’s bak-
ers and cotton spinners) to our conception of universally and eternally valid
relations (such as Marx’s lrmsv).
This political epistemology of common notions is grounded in what
Macherey terms ‘a dynamic of rational knowledge’, via the perfecting and
emendation of the capacity to grasp the real by means of ideas, in which the
intellect is led ‘from the activity of [sensuous] perception, in which it is at its
most passive, to that of conception, in which it is the most active … passing
from the particular to the general through a progressive process of abstrac-
tion’.301
The common notion as such thus possesses an inherent ethical and political
dimension: ideas that express properties common to all things are as such nec-
essarily ‘common to all humans’, Macherey comments, ‘which is to say that they
compose a common knowledge that can be universally shared’. This common
knowledge, accessible to all humans and necessarily identically conceived by
all who follow this democratic path, thus constitutes ‘the condition for a men-
tal community among all people …. In so far as people form common notions
that are necessarily adequate, they are actually united, and constitute as such
a single intellect and a single body’.302 Macherey insists above all on the real
actuality of this intellectual commons of theoretical practice: ‘In the intellect
of man, whoever he or she may be, there always exist common notions [such
as, I suggested above, a minimal idea of the nature of capitalism such as Marx
expresses in the first sentence of Capital] through which can be established
the forms of their union with other people, which is to say, with the maximum
possible others, and tendentially, with all’.303

300 Macherey 1997, pp. 282, 287.

301 Macherey 1997, pp. 289, 290.
302 Macherey 1997, p. 290.
303 Macherey 1997, p. 291.

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208 chapter 3

If this political dimension of theoretical practice holds for a universal under-

standing of the law of gravity or logical axioms, in Spinoza’s examples, how
much more then is this true of Marx’s critique of political economy in Capital,
in which the reader is swept up by Marx’s bracing rhetorical devices and com-
pelling argument, to develop for herself a dynamic of increasingly adequate
knowledge of the nature of capitalism, to grasp its essential nature in the fullest
complexity of its systematic dynamic, to pierce the ideological untruth of its
mere forms of appearance, and to join Marx in the construction, at the high-
est pitch of an active knowledge, of nothing less than a universal theoretical
commons, a communism of the active intellect, as the necessary and adequate
prolegomenon to the real ‘death of capital’ with which this book began.

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 chapter 4

Toward an Axiomatic Analysis of the Commodity in

Badiou and Marx

The publication of Reading Capital in 1965 initiated a theoretical intervention

that would both culminate in and be extinguished by the events of May ’68.
In this and the following chapter, I wish to argue that the thought of Alain
Badiou, beyond the historical and epistemological break that was 1968, though
never explicitly engaging Marx’s magnum opus, provides crucial theoretical
resources that carry forward the apodictic, anti-empiricist and anti-historicist
reading of Capital initiated by Althusser that I have analysed to this point. In
this sense, I wish to pursue Althusser’s original assertion that in Capital, Marx
‘really did invent a new form of order for axiomatic analysis, … a new order in
the theoretical, a new form of apodicticity or scientificity’.1 Badiou does so not
by considering Capital directly, but by theorising 1) the general imperative of an
axiomatic orientation of thought and 2) reconceptualising logic as the science
of the appearance of things in a given world. These imperatives, fundamental to
Badiou’s entire philosophical project, can be brought to bear on the reading of
Capital itself, to further specify and develop Marx’s tendency, discussed above,
to develop an additive synthetic demonstration of the structure of the capital-
ist social form. In other words, Badiou’s elaboration of a logical materialism (in
his early texts ‘Mark and Lack’ and Concept of Model) and an ontological mate-
rialism (in Being and Event and related texts such as Number and Numbers)
constitutes a direct development of the Althusserian critique of empiricism
and idealism, one that further specifies the tendency of Marx’s revisions to
Capital toward formalisation and schematisation as a materialist critique deter-
mined by the axiomatic starting point Marx chooses for his argument.
That said, Badiou’s relation to Capital is nonetheless an uncanny mixture of
manifest disinterest to the point of disavowal and censorship (is it not odd for
such a committed philosopher of Marxist communism never to have discussed
Capital at some point in over two hundred monographs?), and the correspond-
ing recurrent, unacknowledged reinscription of the order of Marx’s critique
within the abstract terms Badiou’s universal logic. This insistent reinscription
constitutes an objective process of displacement [Verschiebung] within the

1 rc, p. 52. See above, note 55.

© The Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004703599_005

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210 chapter 4

greater topography of theory, passing from a latent order (the critique of polit-
ical economy) to a manifest one (Badiou’s reconstruction of abstract logic).2
The insistent recurrence of this process gives the objective and obscure
impression (uncanny on the part of a Marxist) that the structure of the cap-
italist social form can, for Badiou, only be addressed indirectly; in short, that
the various discursive iterations of Badiou’s logics (not at the level of a spu-
rious psychology but through the analysis of real discursive objects) rewrite
Marx’s Capital, but with its charge censored and diminished via its displaced
reinscription within the more abstract terms of post-Cantorean logic.
In these two concluding chapters, I will argue that if 1968 marks the end of
the Althusserian initiative to construct a Marxian, anti-humanist ‘philosophy
of the concept’ (to redeploy Jean Cavaillès’s famous imperative), the Althusse-
rian theoreticist position ended by ’68 nonetheless takes on its purest form as
Badiou’s logical materialism of the mark (in ‘Mark and Lack’ and Concept of
Model), lectures whose oral presentation was itself short-circuited by the event
of May itself. The appearance of Being and Event two decades later in 1988,
in turn, dismisses the materiality of the logical mark to sound the call for an
axiomatic reorientation of philosophy as an ontological materialism of generic
multiplicity, against both empiricism and logicist idealism, including that of
the early Badiou himself.
While this tendency, I will argue in the following chapter, will culminate
in Logics of Worlds, it is already decipherable in Badiou’s 1967 contribution to
Cahiers pour l’Analyse, ‘Mark and Lack: On Zero’. Here, as if in a logician’s dream
of Capital, is that essay’s dense opening paragraph:

Epistemology breaks away from ideological recapture [reprise], in which

every science comes to mime its own reflection, insofar as it excludes
that recapture’s institutional operator, the notion of Truth, and proceeds
instead according to the concept of a mechanism of production, whose
effects, by contrast, one seeks to explain through the theory of its struc-
ture.3

Here we find Badiou already moving in silent parallel with Marx: not with the
political Marx of the Communist Manifesto, but with the theorist of the scien-
tific critique of capitalism.

2 Laplanche and Pontalis define ‘Displacement’ as ‘The fact that an idea’s emphasis, interest or
intensity is liable to be detached from it and to pass on to other ideas, which were originally
of little intensity but which are related to the first idea by a chain of associations’ (2018, p. 121).
3 Badiou 2012, p. 159.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 211

Badiou’s 1967 statement should be read, I am suggesting, as the objective, for-

mal reduction of the methodological programme Marx sketches out in the ‘1857
Introduction’ to the Grundrisse.4 In his 1857 text, Marx set himself the project,
in what would become Capital, of breaking away from the recapture of politi-
cal economy as the mere articulation of the ideology of bourgeois capitalism,
a theoretical recapture typical of classical economics, the consummate exam-
ple of which is Adam Smith. For Smith, the theoretical articulation of a true
image of capitalism was an empiricism based on the mere representation of
the concrete. This entailed an analytic process that sought to articulate abstract
conceptual generalisations drawn from the phenomenological manifestations
of capitalism, an abstraction based on the observed regularities of its universal
features. The classic example of this procedure is Smith’s famous assertion of a
universal and transhistorical ‘human propensity to barter and truck’.
In contrast, Marx rejects both Hegelian Idealism and the methodology of
classical political economy alike, as various modes of representation of the
concrete. In their place, to deploy Badiou’s more abstract phrasing in ‘Mark
and Lack’, Marx refuses the logic of conceptual representation for a novel ‘con-
cept of a mechanism of production, whose effects, by contrast, one seeks to
explain through the theory of its structure’.5 This, in a formulation analogous
to Althusser’s reading of the same passage, albeit at a far higher degree of
abstraction, is what Marx terms in the 1857 Introduction the ‘reproduction’ of a
‘thought-concrete [Gedankenkonkretum]’.6 Only here, in the manifest content
of Badiou’s 1967 formulation (to pursue this Marxian chain of associations I
am imposing on Badiou’s abstraction), ‘Truth’, as in Adam Smith’s ‘propensity
to truck and barter’, or the image of the magic hand, constitutes the operator
of ideological illusion, and is to be replaced by Marx’s categorial logic, a logic
that Badiou, in essence furthering Marx’s tendency toward the abstraction of
nonexistent idealities described in the previous chapter, pursues what Badiou
calls the systematic production of formal marks.
Badiou’s fundamental assertion in his formalist essays of 1967–68 is that
‘The concept of identity holds only for marks. Logic never has recourse to any
self-identical thing, even when thing is understood in the sense of the object
of scientific discourse’.7 One way to read this statement is as a formalisation
of the Spinozist distinction between actually existing and nonexistent things:
the abstract schematisation process of logic does not indicate actually exist-

4 Marx 1973, pp. 109–21. See also Iñigo Carrera 2013; Nesbitt 2019.
5 Badiou 2012, p. 159.
6 Marx 1973, p. 101. See rc, p. 41.
7 Badiou 2012, p. 165.

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212 chapter 4

ing singular things, but purely atemporal relations.8 In this view, one could say
that Adam Smith certainly produced a scientific, natural language discourse on
political economy, but Marx’s critique reveals that Smith’s analysis is an ideo-
logical representation of the mere forms of appearance of capitalism in their
superficial regularity (as the ‘tendency to truck and barter’).9 In other words,
the putatively self-same concepts of classical political economy are revealed in
Marx’s critique as fetishised forms of appearance of the true objects that only
conceptual critique can produce: the substance of value, abstract labour power
and the general social form of relation that he names the ‘value-form’, and the
like. ‘Nothing here warrants the title of “object” ’, observes Badiou. ‘Here the
thing is null: no inscription can objectify it. Within this space, one finds noth-
ing but reversible functions from system to system, from mark to mark-nothing
but the mechanical dependencies of mechanisms’.10 Badiou’s ultra-formalism
thus radicalises in the mathematically grounded abstraction of nonexistent
idealities, I am arguing, Althusser’s initial reading of Marx’s 1857 Introduc-
tion in Reading Capital, where Althusser famously asserted the fundamentally
conceptual nature of Marx’s project, stressing Marx’s materialist rejection of
empiricism and the destruction of all merely humanist Marxism.11 This rein-
scription of Althusser’s critique then becomes even more pressing in Badiou’s
1968 lectures, The Concept of Model.

8 See above, pp. 53–4.

9 Hegel had already formulated in the Logic’s ‘Doctrine of Concept’ an analogous critique of
empiricism as the mere abstract reflection of appearances: ‘Since the predicates immedi-
ately drawn from the appearances still belong to empirical psychology, so far as metaphys-
ical consideration goes, all that is in truth left are the entirely inadequate determinations
of reflection’. Hegel then continues – and here one should simply replace the more gen-
eral ‘metaphysics of the soul’ that Hegel criticises in this passage for Adam Smith’s more
specific search for a metaphysics of man’s economic nature that is the object of Marx’s cri-
tique – with the point that such empiricism is ‘intent on determining the abstract essence
of the soul; it went about this starting from observation, and then converting the latter’s
empirical generalisations, and the determination of purely external reflection attaching to
the singularity of the actual, into the form of the determinations of essence’ (Hegel 2021b,
pp. 689, 690). It is no coincidence, then, that this chapter of the Logic (‘The idea of cog-
nition’) appears to be precisely the section of the Logic that most decisively influenced
Marx’s formulation of the 1857 ‘Introduction’ (Meaney 2015, p. 45).
10 Badiou 2012, p. 165.
11 rc, pp. 40–2.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 213

1 1968: Logical Materialism

The Concept of Model consists of two brief lectures, along with a 2007 Pref-
ace by Badiou written for its reedition.12 These two lectures proceed in three
moments: the first five sections rearticulate Althusser’s critique of Lévi-
Strauss’s combinatory structuralism, rejected as an empiricist idealism, to
which Badiou then appends a similar critique of logical formalism, followed in
conclusion by Badiou’s presentation of his own materialist concept of logical
structure.
Although the text itself is a punctual intervention, one that addresses the
singular epistemological problem that Badiou calls the concept of ‘model’, it
nonetheless allows us, when read in the broader historical perspective Badiou
suggests in his 2007 introduction to the reprint of these lectures, to figure a
broader, three-part typology of this period. Its first moment stretches from
the initiation of the Althusserian philosophy of the concept, from the publi-
cation of For Marx and Reading Capital in 1965 to May ’68, including as well
the journal, Cahier pour l’Analyse that emerged out of the Althusserian project
to specifically develop this conceptual orientation and the articulation of a
philosophy of the concept and the formalisation of conceptual categories.13
This is followed by a second period marked by the retreat from theory into
political militancy (the ‘Red Years’, 1968–89). This is above all the moment
of an in-formal politics, a politique de l’informel, a period in which Foucault
and Deleuze famously invoked, against all universalism, a withdrawal into
local, situated politics – a politics of local situations, problems, and interven-
tions, refusing the overarching attempts to rearticulate the structural determi-
nants of a given social configuration or order that arguably determine both
Marx’s critique of capitalism and the dynamic of twentieth-century Marxism
itself.14
This period of retreat into local politics is followed, according to Badiou’s
chronology, by a third period: at the level of politics, universalism returns as
tragic farce with the triumph of neoliberalism as a putative global destiny, while
at the level of conceptual thought, Badiou bestows on this period (that extends
into the present) a vital determination characterised by the axiomatic orienta-
tion initiated by Being and Event.15

12 Badiou 2007 [1968].

13 See Hallward and Peden 2012.
14 Foucault and Deleuze 1977, pp. 205–17.
15 Althusser 2005; Badiou 2013 [1988].

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214 chapter 4

Badiou begins The Concept of Model by reiterating term for term Althusser’s
critique of Lévi-Strauss.16 He first defines empiricism as the (ideological) sci-
entific discourse that articulates the distinction between empirical reality and
theoretical form as a relation of representation, ‘the formal representation of
a given [empirical] object’. Within this ideological figure, Lévi-Strauss’s struc-
tural anthropology is then said (in section 3) to constitute a specific form of this
ideology, one in which

The pair empiricism/formalism takes the form of an opposition between

the neutral observation of facts and the active production of a model.
In other words, science is thought [by Lévi-Strauss] as the confrontation
[vis-à-vis] between a real object, which one examines (ethnography), and
an artificial object destined to reproduce and imitate the real object (eth-
nology) via the law of its effects.17

Lévi-Strauss implements precisely the empiricist procedure Althusser had con-

demned in the abstract in Reading Capital, extracting, in other words, the
essential kernel from the observed object, to fashion it into a faithful repre-
sentation of the real.18
The principal fault of Lévi-Strauss’s empiricist combinatory, for Badiou as it
was for Althusser, is the incomprehensible, aleatory nature of any observable
case or situation, the impossibility of determining, from mere observation of
the case at hand, the necessity that has determined this phenomenon. Instead,
the truth of scientific empiricism amounts to no more than the mere measure
of the ‘fit’ between fact and model:

If the model represents the truth of scientific work [for Lévi-Strauss],

this truth is never anything more than that of the best model. This is to
restore the dominance of empiricism: theoretical activity cannot choose
between necessarily multiple models, since its activity is precisely the fab-
rication of such models. It is then the ‘fact’ that decides, designating the
best model as the best approximation of itself.19

The model, in this empiricist procedure, is no more than the constructed object
that best accounts for, in the sense of representing, the observed facts. ‘To the

16 See above, pp. 72–4.

17 Badiou 2007, 19.
18 rc, p. 37.
19 Badiou 2007, 23.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 215

question, what is the criterion of this “accounting for” ’, the empiricist observer
has no other response than the circular reasoning of Lévi-Strauss, i.e., ‘the one
that accounts for all the facts’.20
To this critique of Lévi-Strauss, which takes up the first half of Badiou’s
lecture without adding anything substantial to Althusser’s previous critique,
Badiou appends, in his fifth section, a similar critique of logical positivism. In
Badiou’s presentation, the scientific doctrine of logical positivism is not at all
gratuitous, but similarly depends upon a strict correlation between a formal
system and its empirical objects. A formal system, as a system of necessary
deductions, constitutes the accurate expression or representation of its objects,
as ‘the correspondence between the statements of the formal system and the
domain of scientific objects under consideration’. The formal system adheres to
a syntactic regime of constraint at the level of its chain of deductions, without,
however, deriving the materialist necessity that would determine the necessity
of any specific axiomatic orientation.
When Badiou then turns to his own ‘construction of the concept of model’
in the final sections of his talk, it is conspicuous that this rigorous demonstra-
tion of ‘logical materialism’, as he will appropriately name this orientation in
his 2007 Preface, no more attends to its axiomatic starting point then do the
empiricisms of Lévi-Strauss and logical positivism he has just rejected. Badiou’s
2007 auto-critique is spot-on:

What is striking [in the talks comprising Concept of Model] is that of the
two general determinations of the paradigmatic function of mathematics
(the axiomatic decision and the logical constraint of its consequences), it
is the second that receives attention. [In these lectures] the recourse to
the normative script of formal logic is the principal focus, in so far as it
imposes, through the materiality of marks and symbols, a mechanism of
inscription opposed to all empiricist and idealist interpretations.21

Badiou’s definition of his earlier position as a logical materialism is reveal-

ing: rather than a (Spinozist) science of causes in which the axiomatic starting
point (for example causa sui for Spinoza or Marx’s initial true idea of capital-
ism as general commodification) determines the materialist basis of a critique,
here it is instead the mere materiality of the logical mark that produces a mate-
rialism, in which matter again stands as the emanant source, not of being qua

20 Lévi-Strauss, cited in Badiou 2007, 25.

21 Badiou 2007, 25.

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216 chapter 4

being as in ontological, monist materialisms, but merely as a materialist guar-

antee of what Badiou terms the ‘mechanism of inscription’.
Indeed, Badiou’s exposition of the ‘construction of the concept of model’
consists of little more than a virtuosic manipulation of basic set theory materi-
als. Despite his recognition that ‘the choice of axioms makes all the difference
in a demonstration’, he simply begins immediately with the problem of syntax,
admitting that his only concern is ‘to convey the articulation of the construc-
tion of the concept [of a model]’.22 The only difference from the rigor of logical
positivism is that Badiou has detached the model he constructs from any and
all reference to empirical objects to which it would correspond; neither deter-
mined at the front end by the sensuous given, nor idealistically via the rigor of
proof which would determine being, Badiou’s 1968 concept of model amounts
to little more than a free-floating formal system that finds its adequacy in the
mere ‘material sequence of the proof’.23 The closing invocation of Dialectical
Materialism is in this sense telling, clearly indicating this as an ultra-formalist
version of traditional matter-based materialism, the destiny of which, Badiou
claims, would be to find ‘its efficacious integration within proletarian ideol-
ogy’.24
In retrospect, Badiou coherently qualifies his subsequent rejection of this
‘logical materialism’ (‘my materialism of the sixties is a logical materialism’)
via the decisive turn in his thought formulated by the publication of Being
and Event in 1988, as the initiation of a quite different problematic, one that
he names in turn an ‘ontological materialism’:

I moved from a positive reading of mathematics [in The Concept of Model]

as the site of regulated inscriptions to one according to which the mathe-
matics of the multiple is the thought of being qua being. In brief, I passed
from a structural materialism that privileged the letter (the mark), to an
ontological materialism that privileges the evidence of being-there [l’évi-
dence du ‘il y a’] in the form of pure multiplicity.25

At the same time, I would add that this ontological materialism nonetheless
fails to constitute a science of causes in the sense of the materialist critique of
Spinoza or Marx, as Badiou himself seems to sense: ‘the fact that logical struc-

22 Badiou 2007, 30.

23 Badiou 2007, 31.
24 Badiou 2007, 40.
25 Badiou 2007, 19.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 217

tures are valid for any model only signifies their real vacuity, the fact that they
make possible thinking the transcendental form of different possible localisa-
tions’ in what he will eventually call a ‘world’ (in Logiques des mondes).
While the virtue of this later position, as we shall see in more detail in the
following chapter, is that it limits logic, against all empiricist and idealist ten-
dencies, to the rigorous description or science of the appearance of things in
a world, I will nonetheless argue that it remains, as Badiou himself calls it, a
mere materialism, one that, in the absence of a materialist axiomatic starting
point, holds true only at the level of ontology as generic multiplicity; it is, in
other words, a mere generic materialism that in its utter abstraction ignores the
singular structural logic of any specific world, such as the logic of our world,
the capitalist social form. Before developing this critique of Badiou’s generic
materialism as a logic of worlds in the next chapter, I wish to first take stock
of the real force of Badiou’s post-1988 ontological materialism, since it consti-
tutes a powerful critique of logical idealism such as that of Frege (the object of
Badiou’s explicit critique) and, implicitly, that of Hegelian Absolute Idealism
more generally.

2 Bolzano and the Formalisation of Axiomatic Thought

Badiou’s turn after 1988 to an axiomatic orientation constitutes a structural

materialism of the letter or the sign. This is a materialism in which ontology
is strictly subordinate to logic in a philosophy of the concept, a tendency that
in fact originates with the Czech logician, Bernard Bolzano, and only subse-
quently develops from Bolzano through Frege, through Cavaillès, Desanti, and
the Badiou.26 Although Badiou engages explicitly with the latter figures, it is
Bolzano who initiates and articulates the turn from Hegelian negative dialecti-
cal thought toward an axiomatic philosophy in the decades prior to his death in
1848, and given his relative invisibility in post-Althusserian thought, it is impor-
tant to indicate his key role for thinkers such as Cavaillès and Badiou.
Badiou never mentions the pioneering, long-overlooked Czech-German log-
ician Bernard Bolzano in the three volumes of Being and Event. In fact, his name
only appears in passing on two occasions in Badiou’s oeuvre: once in Number
and Numbers, in a list of the modern founders of the thought of number, and
once, in a passing reference to Bolzano’s pioneering formalisation of the con-
cept of the infinite in Paradoxes of the Infinite, in Badiou’s 1994–95 seminar on

26 See Lapointe 2011.

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218 chapter 4

Lacan.27 Badiou has, moreover, admitted that his knowledge of Bolzano’s work
is in fact limited and largely second-hand.28
Badiou’s neglect of Bolzano’s thought is hardly surprising, since the great
Czech-German philosopher’s pioneering and foundational work, in set theory,
in the critique of post-Kantian Idealism and intuitionism, in the semantic for-
malisation of mathematics and logic, in the formal nature of axiomatisation,
his precocious articulation of a realist, mathematics-based platonism a century
before Albert Lautman’s ‘transplatonism’, and in many other fields, remained
little acknowledged and even less studied until quite recently.29 As late as 1993,
Jacques Bouveresse could still decry this ‘historical injustice’ done to ‘the most
gifted and original adversary of German Idealism’.30
Decades before Frege, Husserl, Cantor, Tarski, and Gödel, Bolzano founded
or made possible many of the crucial discoveries of modern analytic philoso-
phy and set theory, innovations for which the former would become famous.
Following the prohibition of his publications and his early retirement to the
Czech countryside, Bolzano’s discoveries remained overlooked after his death
in 1848, and thus the breakthroughs of his major, posthumous works Para-
doxes of the Infinite and Theory of Science were only belatedly recognised
by Cantor and famously celebrated by Husserl in the Philosophical Investiga-
tions.31
Bolzano’s vast and still underexplored body of work announces Badiou’s
thought in a series of crucial dimensions, of which I will briefly indicate three:32
1) Bolzano’s thought remains the most original and decisive critique of post-
Kantian Idealism in the first half of the nineteenth century. While Badiou can-

27 ‘Les noms de cette première modernité [de la pensée du nombre] ne sont pas Proust et
Joyce, ce sont Bolzano, Frege, Cantor, Dedekind, Peano’. Badiou 1990, p. 24. ‘Après que
l’infini eut reçu dans la mathématique un statut clair, grâce à Bolzano, Weierstrass et Can-
tor, il cesse de jouer un rôle dans l’argumentation philosophique’. Badiou 2013b, pp. 256–7.
In English: Badiou 2008. Badiou 2018. See also Bolzano 1950 [1851].
28 Personal communication, New York, 18 October 2017.
29 Badiou 2013a, p. 12.
30 Bouveresse, ‘Préface’, in Laz 1993, p. iv.
31 ‘Bernhard Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre, published in 1837, a work which, in its treatment
of the logical ‘theory of elements’, far surpasses everything that world-literature has to
offer in the way of a systematic sketch of logic’. Husserl 2001 [1900], p. 68. See Bolzano
2014; 2011. On Bolzano’s life, see the biographical information in Rusnock and Šebestík
2019. Bolzano publicly articulated as radical a critique of Viennese militarism as was per-
haps possible in his Austro-Hungarian milieu, and it was this in particular that led to the
banning of his publications and his forced early retirement from Charles University.
32 I develop other points at which Bolzano announces Badiou’s thought, for example on the
concept of the infinite, in Nesbitt 2021.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 219

not be said to reject Hegelian dialectical modes of thought entirely, and in fact
has returned repeatedly to interrogate its modalities, it is arguably Bolzano
who initiates a tendency in European philosophy to supplement and com-
plete philosophical investigations with apodictic demonstrations formulated
in the precise, emphatically un-Hegelian mathematical terms of set-based the-
ory. This mode of demonstration culminates in Badiou’s mathematical appara-
tus deployed throughout the three volumes of Being and Event.
While Bolzano’s Theory of Science reiterates and refines the terms of Bol-
zano’s initial critique of post-Kantian Idealism, Jacques Laz has shown that
Bolzano’s 1810 Beiträge zu einer begründeteren Darstellung der Mathematik
[Contributions to an Exposition of Mathematics on a Firmer Basis], written when
Bolzano was only twenty-nine, already sets forth the principal propositions of
his thought.33 Key among these is his systematic critique of Kantian philoso-
phy, attacked at its root via what Bolzano shows to be the contradictory nature
of Kant’s claims for an a priori intuition that would ground the entire project of
the Critique of Pure Reason.34 While the extraordinary brevity of the Appendix
to Bolzano’s Contributions (‘The Kantian Doctrine of the Construction of Con-
cepts by Intuitions’) articulates its powerful critique in a mere eleven dense
and methodically parsed paragraphs,35 elsewhere Bolzano decries more gener-
ally the ‘love of imagistic language’, lack of expressive precision, and reliance
upon ‘analogies, paradoxes, and tautologies’ dominant in the Schellingian and
Hegelian thought of the age.36
Bolzano unequivocally condemns what he views as a catastrophic tendency
of philosophy, ‘the essence of [which] consists in … playing with images and
passing off the slightest superficial analogy between two objects as an iden-
tity’.37 The core of this limitation, Bolzano concludes, is that ‘the thinkers of our
age do not feel themselves in the least subject to … the rules of logic, notably to
the obligation always to state precisely and clearly of what one is speaking, in
what sense one takes this or that word, and then to indicate from what reasons
one affirms this or that thing’.38 Bolzano’s critique proved decisively productive
for his invention of what Jean Cavaillès would famously call a ‘philosophy of the
concept’.39 Badiou can be said in turn to have taken from Cavaillès’ critique a

33 Bolzano 2010.
34 Kant 1998.
35 See Bolzano 2010.
36 Cited in Laz 1993, p. 33.
37 Cited in Laz 1993, pp. 32–3.
38 Cited in Laz 1993, p. 32.
39 Cavaillès 2008. Note that beginning with his critique of Fregean logicism in ‘Meditation 3’

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220 chapter 4

positive notion of ontology in its intrinsic relation to science and to mathemat-

ics in particular as the adequate language of being as being.40
2) Bolzano, decisively influenced on this count by Leibniz, is arguably the
first modern philosopher to clearly define mathematics as the adequate lan-
guage of ontology in the form of a mathesis universalis based upon predicate
logic derived from Aristotle’s Posterior Analytic.41 Bolzano argues in the Contri-
butions that philosophy is the science addressed to the question ‘what things
are necessarily real’, while mathematics, in contrast, addresses the question
‘What properties must things necessarily possess to be possible?’42 While phi-
losophy attempts to prove the reality of particular objects a priori and uncondi-
tionally, mathematics, in Bolzano’s formulation, constitutes the a priori science
of the set of universal laws to which all possible objects are subject.43
Scientific method in general is for Bolzano coterminous with the logical rigor
of mathematical method.44 While for Bolzano philosophy seeks to deduce the
real existence of things (analogous to Badiou’s project to define an asubjec-
tive phenomenal logic in Logics of Worlds), mathematics applies its analysis,
Bolzano argues, to the possible existence of all objects as governed by general
laws. Bolzano can in this sense be said to announce Badiou’s demonstration of
the laws governing the phenomenal appearance of things in Logics of Worlds
(to be discussed in the next chapter): mathematics, Bolzano affirmed, devel-
ops a general theory of forms, which he defined as ‘a science that treats of the
general laws (forms) to which things must conform in their existence’.45 While
for Bolzano this constitutes an ontological affirmation, Badiou will reject cate-
gorial logic as identical with being as such, to argue instead that while mathe-

of Being and Event, Badiou decisively rejects the notion of logic as a purely syntactic oper-
ation: ‘Logic is not a formalisation, a syntax, a linguistic apparatus. It is a mathematised
description of possible mathematical universes, under the generic concept of Topos’. Cited
in Hallward 2003, p. 109. I will return to this point below, in reference to Bolzano’s innova-
tive formalisation of axiomatic method. While Cavaillès celebrates, in On Logic, Bolzano’s
rigorous attention to the necessary modalities of adequate, apodictic demonstration, he
nonetheless criticises the ahistorical nature of these conditions, to offer instead a his-
torically developmental concept of adequate demonstration. Hourya Benis Sinaceur has
argued that Cavaillès’ critique of Bolzano indicates a subterranean Hegelianism latent in
Cavaillès’ thought. Sinaceur 2013, pp. 114–16.
40 Thanks to David Rabouin for clarifying this point.
41 On Leibniz’s influence on Bolzano, see Laz 1993, pp. 33–5; and on Bolzano’s reconfigura-
tion and critique of Aristotelean logic, see Laz 1993, pp. 27–30.
42 Cited in Laz 1993, p. 29.
43 Cited in Laz 1993, p. 45.
44 Laz 1993, pp. 46–8.
45 Cited in Rusnock and Šebestík 2019, p. 417.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 221

matics constitutes the adequate language of what is dicible (sayable) of being, a

categorial logic offers the means to conceptualise an asubjective phenomenol-
ogy of worlds.
3) Finally, Bolzano crucially announces the axiomatic position Badiou will
develop in Being and Event: ‘Axiomatisation’, Badiou writes there, ‘is not an
artifice of exposition, but an intrinsic necessity. Being-multiple, if entrusted
to natural language and to intuition alone, produces an undivided pseudo-
presentation of consistency and inconsistency. … Axiomatisation is required
such that the multiple, left to the implicitness of its counting rule, be deliv-
ered without concept, that is, without implying the being-of-the-one’.46 While,
as David Rabouin points out, Badiou’s notion of axiomatisation draws upon
Hilbert and Bourbaki, one might note that Bolzano already presents in the
second section of the Contributions the first explicit model of axiomatisation,
decisively rejecting Kantian intuitionism.47
There, Bolzano does not proceed via a demonstration of the nature of the
axiom, which would return precisely to the very logicism axiomatisation seeks
to overcome (and for which Badiou takes Frege to task in both Being and Event
and Number and Numbers). The axiom, Bolzano argues in terms that decisively
announce those of Badiou, is derived neither through an intuition, nor even as
a minimally and generally acceptable common notion, which would rely on a
psychological recognition and agreement, but is instead, he argues, indemon-
strable, and objectively so. Bolzano argues that it is precisely and minimally the
indemonstrability of an axiom, rather than its essential nature, that can in fact
be proven. This minimal proof is merely the verification that allows axioms to
found the subsequent propositions subject to apodictic demonstration. ‘Nei-
ther deduction, nor demonstration of the truth of a proposition’, Jacques Laz
writes, ‘the [Bolzanean] Deductio of an axiom is the exposition of its status as
principle [statut de principe] in an objective sequence of connections between
propositions. It is the operation by which are revealed the propositions that
are the principles for other propositions’.48 Objective without being a logical
demonstration of the truth of an axiom, the Deductio founds the effective con-
ditions of demonstration, deducing only that a given proposition possesses an
axiomatic character, in the sense that it cannot be analytically reduced into
subsidiary components.49

46 Badiou 2005, p. 43, translation modified.

47 David Rabouin, personal communication.
48 Laz 1993, p. 55.
49 Laz 1993, pp. 52–6.

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222 chapter 4

Bolzano can thus be said to announce not only central features of Badiou’s
thought, but more generally the structuralist analysis of what Marx called
‘social form’ that is the topic of this book as a whole; structuralist analysis,
that is to say, in the quite specific sense in which Louis Althusser and Pierre
Macherey developed it in Reading Capital. Here, Bolzano’s concerted critiques
of intuitionism, psychologism, and empiricism, and above all his concept of
propositions in themselves can be said to second and further develop the
Spinozist critiques that Althusser, Rancière, Macherey, and Balibar deployed
in their readings of Marx’s Capital.
If Althusser and Macherey in particular looked back three hundred years
prior to Spinoza in order to develop their critiques of Hegel and Hegelian
Marxism, it is surely no less plausible to suggest that Bolzano, who developed
the single most rigorous critique of Kantian and Hegelian Idealism prior to
1848, might offer compelling theoretical arguments to further develop this anti-
Hegelian line of thought. Bolzano argued for an objective semantics governing
not subjective, hermeneutic knowledge of objects, but their objective proper-
ties and relations. He inaugurates, this is to say, the affirmation that Badiou will
formalise in 1988 as the governing imperative of Being and Event: that mathe-
matics ‘writes that which, of being itself, is expressible [dicible]’.50 This, Bolzano
argues, implies the independence of these concepts apart from conscious rep-
resentation. Their meaning, he argues, is rigorously objective and independent
from acts of judgement. In fact, I would willingly push this argument even fur-
ther, to suggest that Bolzano can rightly be said to formulate crucial theoretical
resources in the path leading to the Lacanian theory of the symbolic and real,
above all perhaps via his realist, semantic critique of the Kantian thing in itself.
As Badiou writes of Lacan’s notion of the real,

Lacan is not a critic. To be sure, the real differs from reality, which attaches
its regime to knowing. But Lacan immediately says: I don’t mean to say
the real is unknowable. I’m not a Kantian. … Although the real, as distinct
from reality, is exempted from the knowable, which is the essence of real-
ity, the real nevertheless does not end up being the absolute unknowable but
is instead exposed to being demonstrated.51

Bolzano’s asubjective order of propositions and representations – in a precise

and limited sense analogous to what Lacan will call the symbolic order (in what

50 Badiou 2005, p. 5, translation modified.

51 Badiou 2013b, p. 151.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 223

Badiou calls Lacan’s ‘hyperstructural axiomatic’ phase of the 1950s) – is emi-

nently knowable through acts of formalisation and judgement, in contrast to
Bolzano’s anti-Kantian notion of the thing in itself as much as the Lacanian
real.52 While this objective order presents things as they are in what Bolzano
calls the matter [Stoff ] of a semantic, symbolic order, it is for Bolzano (unlike
Kant) the real, as Lacan famously stated, that constitutes the impasse of for-
malisation.53 Or as Laz writes, for Bolzano, ‘we will never be able to grasp
the objects of our representation, but only their [objective] meaning through
which we represent them’.54
To suggest a Bolzanian reading of Badiou along the lines that I am suggest-
ing here is surely no more implausible than was Macherey’s reading of Hegel.55
It is to articulate a transversal relation; unlike that which Macherey articulates,
however, in Badiou’s case, there is no obscure disavowal on his part of a hidden
proximity to Bolzano’s historically prior thought, but rather a complex field of
relations and implications that remains to be developed and articulated, an
investigation that Badiou himself might be the first to welcome.

3 Ontological Materialism in Its Limits

That said, the explicit referent for Badiou’s critique of idealist ultra-formalism
is not Bolzano, but Frege, a thinker with whom he engages repeatedly across his
work – in ‘Mark and Lack’, in Being and Event, and again in Number and Num-
bers. Already the object of Badiou’s critique in ‘Mark and Lack’, the inventor
of formal logic will become, in both the Meditation Three of Being and Event
and the second chapter of Number and Numbers, the object of a critique of for-
malist idealism that will motivate and justify Badiou’s essential turn from his
initial logicism of 1967–68 to an axiomatic of Being as the pure presentation of
inconsistent multiplicity prior to all logic.
The key moment in the development of Alain Badiou’s thought, the cru-
cial turn is undoubtedly this conceptual decision to reorient ontology around
an axiomatic, anti-logicist, anti-Fregean position. This takes form in Badiou’s
axiomatic displacement and debasement of logical formalism, the destitu-
tion of the entitlement of Logic to legislate over Being classically sought after
by Frege and David Hilbert. Badiou instead relegates logic to an unimpeach-

52 Badiou 2013b, p. 237.

53 Badiou 2005, p. 5.
54 Laz 1993, pp. 121–2.
55 Macherey 2011 [1979].

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224 chapter 4

ably secondary status in strict subordination to an ontological materialism, the

inaugural presentation of Being as inconsistent multiple without a One.
What we observe is a movement between Badiou’s initial logical material-
ism, a culmination of this long tradition, an anti-phenomenological tradition
in thought from Bolzano, Cavaillès, and Althusser to Badiou – and an axiomatic
formalism, in which the process of formalisation in Badiou’s works, such as
Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, is retained, but to become strictly sub-
ordinate to ontology and philosophy. Mathematics, that is to say, reduced to
the status of a subordinate, proper, and adequate mode in which to speak of
being, longer assures the being there of being itself, as with Frege.
We find this Bolzanean, axiomatic turn or reorientation of Badiou’s thought
at work, drawn and measured against the demonstrative force of Frege’s logi-
cism, in the key founding ‘Meditation Three’ of Being and Event. If ‘Meditation
One’ sets forth the absolute necessity of inconsistent multiplicity, it does so in
the philosophical rhetoric of natural language. ‘Meditation Three’, in contrast,
indexifies the necessity of inconsistent multiplicity not only to Bertrand Rus-
sell’s paradox, a merely negative presentation of the limits of natural language,
but to the actual demonstration of these limits via Gödel’s proofs of complete-
ness and incompleteness.
This is the moment in which Badiou affirms the contingent, axiomatic ori-
entation of his thought as a refusal of all first principles, even those of logic
as they were first systematised by Frege in his 1879 Begriffsschrift. There Frege
sought to construct a comprehensive language for formal logic:

It is necessary [Badiou writes,] to abandon all hope of explicitly defining

the notion of set. … Axiomatisation is required such that the multiple,
left to the impliciteness of its counting rule, be delivered without con-
cept …. [Contrary to Frege,] language cannot induce existence, solely a
split within existence .… The power of language does not go so far as to
institute the ‘there is’ of the ‘there is’. It confines itself to positing that
there are some distinctions within the ‘there is’.56

Frege’s effort to secure the concept of set ‘guaranteed by a well-constructed

language’57 such that the ‘control of language (of writing) [would amount to]
control of the multiple’58 founders on the shores of Russell’s paradox, and this
limit to a totalising symbolic formulation is then formalised in Gödel’s proof

56 Badiou 2005, pp. 43, 47.

57 Badiou 2005, p. 39.
58 Ibid.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 225

of, first, the completeness of first-order logic as the predicate calculus – the
proof, in other words, that ‘every consistent formal system has a model’ – along
with Gödel’s proof of the existence of arithmetically true but unprovable state-
ments, the effective separation of the criteria for semantic truth from those
of provability.59 Gödel demonstrates that ‘there are provably unprovable, but
nevertheless true, propositions in any formal system that contains elementary
arithmetic, assuming the system to be consistent’.60
Badiou draws the ontological implication of incompleteness as the desti-
tution of monism with remarkable force: Since given not just Russell’s para-
dox, but above all incompleteness, ‘it is necessary to abandon all hope of
explicitly defining the notion of set, … axiomatisation is required such that
the multiple, left to the implicitness of its counting rule, be delivered without
concept, that is, without implying the being-of-the-one’.61 Even more strongly,
we read in the concluding lines of ‘Meditation Three’ this summation of the
ineluctable ontological conclusion to be drawn from incompleteness: ‘The
power of language does not go so far as to institute the “there is” of the “there
is”. It confines itself to posing that there are some distinctions within the “there
is”’.62
For what, after all, is Zermelo’s axiom of separation if not the restrictive war-
rant of the symbolic to operate critically upon a necessarily prior given in its
merely provisional totality, counted-as-one? Under the aegis of Separation, it
is the case, Badiou tells us, that ‘a property only determines a multiple under the
supposition that there is already a presented multiple’.63 There is always already
a presented multiple in Badiou’s ontological materialism, a generic multiplicity
prior to any counted-as-one. If this is the case, the ontological necessity of Zer-
melo’s axiom, required to save the operations of first-order logic from the proof
of incompleteness, logically necessitates the initiation of any critique from the
prior givenness of a world, as opposed to the idealist engendering of existence
from the loins of logic.
The axiom of separation certifies the absolute necessity that apodictic cri-
tique begin not from the absolute of an esoteric logical demonstration of a
logical structure as a closed, complete system, but, instead, as an ontologi-
cal materialism, from the most universal and immediate, a multiplicity as the
givenness, the il y a, of a generic plurality (for example, of commodities as an

59 See Goldstein 2013, pp. 186, 160.

60 Goldstein 2013, p. 168.
61 Badiou 2005, p. 43.
62 Badiou 2005, p. 47.
63 Badiou 2005, p. 45.

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226 chapter 4

immense, undifferentiated heap, the underived axiom of an ‘ungeheure Waren-

sammlung’). The axiom of separation, we could say, tells us that in our world, in
the capitalist mode of production, in this world in which everything under the
sun has its price, the world of commodities names a pure, perhaps the paradig-
matic instance of a consistent multiple, in which each is counted, everything
has its price, but counts in subtraction from any and all specific determina-
tion of singular form, any of the specific determinate use-values of various
commodities in their differentiated multiplicity. Use-value, though necessary,
is always secondary; from atom bombs to zaffre, the valorisation of value is the
universal logic of our world.
The axiom of separation can be said to formalise the critical procedure itself
as strict necessity. For the very meaning of critique – from the Greek kritikē,
krinein, becoming after 1838 the French neologism criticité, to designate after
Kant the examination of the rational foundations of knowledge – indicates pre-
cisely the operation of discerning, sorting, dividing, in a word, separating, that
very procedure the axiom of separation formalises as absolute necessity. Here
is Badiou: ‘Language cannot induce existence, solely a split [scission] within
existence’.64 The logical requirement of an axiom of separation formalises the
critical operation itself as absolute necessity. As Badiou writes in Number and
Numbers, ‘We can only move to an existence that is somehow carved out of a
pre-given existence. We can “separate” in a given domain those objects within
it that validate the property exposed by the concept’.65
Critique in these terms is precisely the operation Marx deployed as the sys-
tematic destruction of the fetishistic illusion of totality, of the illusion that
there are, in other words, natural beings we call commodities, in the pure invi-
olability of their self-same identity. There are only inconsistent multiples prior
to the localised, provisional presentation of any One. ‘The existence-multiple
anticipates what language retroactively separates out from it as implied ex-
istence-multiple’.66 In sum, the priority of being as inconsistent multiplic-
ity, confirmed and supported by its axiomatic separation from the demon-
strative critique that is the power of language, assures for Badiou the prior-
ity of an ontological materialism against all Hegelian and Fregean Idealisms
alike.
A turn occurs, following the 1988 publication of Badiou’s first major ontolog-
ical work, Being and Event: from that point on, Badiou recognises the impera-

64 Badiou 2005, p. 47.

65 Badiou 2008, p. 20.
66 Badiou 2005, p. 47.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 227

tive to retain a process of formalisation and reflection at a conceptual level, a

‘certain’ structuralism, a certain variant of structuralism as an axiomatic for-
malism. Nonetheless, this new form of thought is not a formal combinatory of
fixed, unchanging structural essences as in the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss,
but rather an axiomatic one, one in which politics and the critique of capital-
ism more specifically takes any given orientation as a decision, as a process of
decision, one that allies with that orientation a formal process of reflection.
This is to say, literally and specifically: with 1989 and the coming neolib-
eral ‘triumph’ or generalisation of capitalism as a global sequence, it suddenly
becomes imperative for Badiou to carry forward political thought axiomati-
cally, and to invent a critique and politics adequate to the vast and encom-
passing generalisation of capitalism after 1989 as the tendential totalisation of
global society. What we see is precisely the necessity of revisiting, and carry-
ing forward into the post-’89 period, both a contingent axiomatic orientation
toward the critique of capital, based not on an a priori moralism, or pre-given
norms or normativity, but one that refers instead to the capacity to orient
oneself in relation to universal categories – justice as equality, for example.
The enormous difficulty of comprehending the rapidity with which capital-
ism dominates and transforms our experience (particularly since the turn of
the century) is so overwhelming, that it becomes very difficult, if not impossi-
ble, to conceive of a politics that would truly be not just local politics, but also
veritably anti-capitalist, given our existing and lingering categories of politi-
cal critique from the twentieth century; to understand what that might mean
implies, of course, understanding the forms, limits, structures of capitalism
itself.
It is precisely in revisiting the conceptual categories that Marx developed in
his critique of political economy in the three volumes of Capital, that we can
recover the basic elements that still today define the structure of structures
that is capitalism, a social form that is, nonetheless, a contingent structure: a
structure of structures in which we see contemporary mutations of the orien-
tation, the domination, and the subordination of those various categories in
ways that require us to step back to invoke a conceptual moment and process
of reflection in order to grasp precisely what it means to live in a period that I
would call ‘posthuman capitalism’, in which there unfolds a general devalorisa-
tion of the capacity of labour power to create surplus value, the very substance
of capital. To grasp that process, and then to put forward and to think poli-
tics in the contemporary conjuncture is precisely to require what I am calling
an axiomatic formalism. This would constitute an effect or derivation from
a general philosophical project, an ontological project that following Badiou
sutures the axiomatic to the process of formalisation and conceptual reflec-

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228 chapter 4

tion, to provide resources to begin such a re-foundation, reconceptualisation,

and reorientation: the initiation of a critique adequate to our contemporary
conjuncture of posthuman capitalism.

4 The Displacement of Capital

As such, among the most striking features of Being and Event and Number and
Numbers is their reiteration and further development of the association noted
above in ‘Mark and Lack’ and Concept of Model, as the pressing refiguration of
Marx’s critique. Here too, these later texts schematise the logical reduction and
restatement of Marx’s initial derivation of the concept of exchange-value and
the commodity in Chapter One of Capital, Vol. 1. Here is Badiou on Frege: ‘To
say that two concepts are equinumerate is to say that they have the “same quan-
tity”, that their extensions are the same size, abstracting from any consideration
as to what the objects are that fall under those concepts’.67
And here, beside that formal statement of equinumeracy, is a passage from
Marx’s famous presentation of exchange-value in the first chapter of Volume i
of Capital:

Let us take two commodities, such as a coat and 10 yards of linen, and let
the value of the first be twice the value of the second, so that, if 10 yards
of linen = W, the coat = 2W. … Just as, in viewing the coat and the linen
as values, we abstract from their different use-values, so, in the case of the
labour represented by those values, do we disregard the difference between
its useful forms, tailoring and weaving [etc ….]68

The essence of Badiou’s critique is that while Frege’s idealism claims to con-
jure the self-same object – zero, that is – through the pure powers of logic, for

67 Badiou 2008, p. 17.

68 Marx 1976, p. 132, emphasis added. The formal resemblance of these two texts grows even
greater if we then consider Badiou’s schematic reduction of Frege’s idealist derivation
of number in Number and Numbers: ‘Concept→ Truth→ Objects that fall under the con-
cept (that satisfy the statement attributing the concept to the object) → Extension of the
concept (all truth-cases of the concept) → Equinumeracy of two concepts (via biunivocal
correspondence of their extensions) → Concepts that fall under the concept of equinumer-
acy to a given concept C (that satisfy the statement ‘is equinumerate to C’) → The extension
of equinumeracy-to-C (the set of concepts from the preceding stage) → The number that
belongs to concept C (number is thus the name for the extension of equinumeracy-to-C)’.
Badiou 2008, p. 18.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 229

Marx and Badiou both, the thought-object can only be the production of an
entirely secondary operation. Marx calls this process in the 1857 Introduction
the reproduction of the concrete as materialist thought-concrete, while Badiou
names this secondary derivation, more generally, the operation of the count-
as-one.69

5 A Materialist Axiomatic

In what sense then can we say that Marx’s beginning to Capital (‘The wealth
of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an
“an immense collection of commodities”’) constitutes a materialist axiomatic?
It is axiomatic, to begin with, in the minimal sense Lalande gives the term, as
‘a premise considered evident, and taken as true without demonstration by all
those who understand its meaning’.70 Marx chooses as his starting point just
such a ‘premise considered as evident’; he proposes a minimal, true idea, that
all its subjects, he wagers, already possess of the nature of capitalism: that it
appears as the general commodification of things.
Throughout this book, however, I have argued that the first sentence of Cap-
ital furthermore functions in a stronger, logically determinant sense, firstly
that of an axiom as Lalande further defines the concept as ‘every proposition,
in a hypothetico-deductive system … that is not deduced from another, but
which is posed by a decisionary [décisoire] act of thought, at the beginning of a
deduction’.71 This emphasis on the decisionistic aspect is precisely the sense in
which Badiou qualifies axioms, ‘which must’, he argues, ‘be affirmed, taken into
account [assumés], explicit, and which, as such, introduce into every rational

69 One could, I think, follow through nearly every step of this presentation to translate and
formalise Marx’s discursive analysis of exchange-value into Badiou’s more logically ade-
quate form, in which each logical step of derivation is indicated, beginning with the
famous initial postulation of the concept of commodities as given, as pre-existent mate-
rialist fact in the first sentence of Capital: ‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist
mode of production prevails appears as “an immense collection of commodities” ’ (Marx
1976, p. 125). From this follows the proposition that there are, in fact, commodities that fall
under that concept; this is followed by the extension of the concept of the commodity to
name the set of all commodities; to assert in turn the equinumeracy of all such concepts in
their consistent multiplicity, as differing quantities of use-values that relate to one another
as equivalent exchange-values (1 coat = 2 yards of linen); next the set of concepts that is
the consistent multiplicity of use-values that fall under the concept of equinumeracy, etc.
70 Lalande 2010, p. 105.
71 Lalande 2010, p. 105, emphasis added.

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230 chapter 4

system an element of decision’.72 Marx explicitly addresses the contingency of

the starting point of his critique, for example in the Grundrisse, when he rejects
the seemingly obvious option to begin the critique of political economy from
the fact of ground rent.73
Yet this leaves in suspension a third aspect of the axiomatic starting point,
the axiom as what Lalande calls ‘a general rule of logical thought’, which is to
say, the manner in which the choice of this axiom prescribes and determines
the nature of the exposition that follows from it. I have repeatedly emphasised,
in the previous chapters, the way in which the starting point of Capital deter-
mines the course of the demonstration that follows from it: for example the
necessity, in a society of general, as opposed to occasional, exchange, that that
exchange be mediated by a general equivalent (monetary) form of value.74
While Marx’s demonstration of the ‘simple’ form of value is logically coher-
ent and non-contradictory in the case of two commodities (coats and linen in
Marx’s example), it is nonetheless ‘insufficient’ or inadequate to account for
a society characterised by the general exchange of all things of value as com-
modities, as Marx has defined the capitalist social form in the first sentence of
Capital, and it is this axiomatic insufficiency (rather than some internal con-
tradiction) that compels his exposition in the first chapter of Capital to move
from the simple to the general form of value.75 Marx’s axiomatic demonstra-
tion shows that if capitalism is a social form of general commodification, then
it necessarily and by absolute implication requires a general, monetary form of
value for that exchange.
Badiou’s ontological materialism, in its refusal critically to investigate the
parameters of an actual, given world (such as that of capitalism), suffers from

72 Badiou 2007, p. 40. Similarly, Macherey emphasises how Spinoza’s definitions in their
axiomatic contingency forgo ‘all attempts at rhetorical persuasion, since these truths pro-
posed for examination are to take or leave as such, addressed to [the reader’s] completely
free mind, free to pursue – or not – the path they open’, (1998, p. 30).
73 ‘Nothing seems more natural than to begin with ground rent, with landed property, since
this is bound up with the earth, the source of all production and of all being, and with
the first form of production of all more or less settled societies – agriculture. But nothing
would be more erroneous …. Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois
society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt
with before landed property. After both have been examined in particular, their interrela-
tion must be examined’ (Marx 1973, pp. 106, 107).
74 Analogously, Macherey emphasises the determination Spinoza’s initial starting point, the
definition of causa sui, governs the entirety of his ensuing exposition: ‘the concept [of
causa sui] sustains from beginning to end Spinoza’s entire philosophy, which one could
present in a general manner as an effort to explain all things by their causes’ (1998, p. 31).
75 Marx 1976, p. 154. See the previous chapter on this point.

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an axiomatic analysis of the commodity in badiou and marx 231

a materialist deficit. While its axiomatic orientation determines the neces-

sity governing its ensuing demonstration, the choice of a given starting point
remains indeterminate, even arbitrary. It is, in other words, a mere generic
materialism, applicable to any world whatsoever. In contrast, Marx’s apodic-
tic exposition in Capital derives its starting point from the capitalist real itself:
‘I do not start out from “concepts”’, Marx writes in his ‘Notes on Adolph Wag-
ner’, ‘hence I do not start out from “the concept of value”, and do not have “to
divide” these in any way. What I start out from is the simplest social form in
which the labour-product is presented in contemporary society, and this is the
“commodity”. I analyse it, and right from the beginning, in the form in which it
appears’.76
Marx’s painstaking analytical enquiry into the nature of the capitalist social
form extended from the 1850s to the end of his life, to constitute the materi-
alist determination not only of his additive synthetic exposition, but of the
axiomatic starting point that initiates and determines that demonstration.77
This materialist determination is evident, for example, in Marx’s crucial finding
in the final paragraph of Grundrisse, when, nearly 900 pages into his analysis,
Marx at last determines the proper starting point for his exposition. Not, for
example, ground rent, a beginning point he explicitly rejects already in his 1857
Introduction (as noted above), but ‘Value’, the analysis of which, he adds in a
note to himself immediately following this section title, should necessarily con-
stitute his materialist starting point: it is the ‘section to be brought forward’ to
the beginning of what will become Capital.78
In contrast to Badiou’s generic materialism, Marx’s science of causes in Cap-
ital begins from the materialist position he develops not from empirical reflec-
tion on the lived experience of capitalism, but from his critical analysis of the
contradictions and insufficiencies of classical political economy and French
socialism. Despite this comparative insufficiency of Badiou’s ontological mate-
rialism, it is nonetheless possible and even fruitful, I wish to argue, to continue
to read Badiou’s abstract logic as the objective displacement (Verschiebung, in
the Freudian terminology) of Capital, as a body of work that in its incessant
commitment and faithfulness to the Marxian political project of communism,
objectively reinscribes Marx’s critique of political economy within terms that
raise to a point of extreme abstraction and schematisation that same initial
tendency to formalisation identifiable (as I argued in the previous chapter) in
Marx’s own revision process of his manuscript.

76 Marx 1996, p. 241.

77 Musto 2020. On Marx’s materialist enquiry as a guarantee against Hegelian idealism, see
Heinrich 2022, p. 170.
78 Marx 1973, p. 881.

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 chapter 5

Capital, Logic of the World

Alain Badiou’s oeuvre sits uneasily astride a bewildering paradox. Badiou re-
peatedly asserts that the single most imposing impediment to our subjective
access to truths, to our finite, yet substantial and materialist participation in the
infinite, is the tyrannical domination of global social relations and subjectivity
by the economic rationality of capitalism. In Number and Numbers, he writes:
‘Number governs the economy; and there, without a doubt, we find … the
“determination in the last instance” of its supremacy’.1 Similarly, in one of his
most recent books, Happiness, he tells us that the good and real life, ‘la vraie vie
absente’ as Rimbaud writes in Une saison en enfer, is systematically reduced in
the world of global capitalism to the specious freedom of consumerist choice:
‘Freedom is coded or precoded in the infinite shimmer of commodity produc-
tion and in what monetary abstraction institutes on that basis’.2 In the face of
this overdetermined and seemingly universal untruth, the name Badiou has
steadfastly maintained to indicate the political dimension of the true life, is, of
course, the ‘Idea of Communism’.
And yet, for all that, one could assert with little exaggeration that Badiou’s
engagement with Marx’s critique of political economy is a veritable empty
set. Badiou’s repeated, sustained, admiring and attentive engagement with this
great thinker is, in other words, addressed almost univocally to the political
Marx, the Marx of the Communist Manifesto and The Civil War in France. But if
capitalism constitutes the dominant logic of our untrue world, and not merely
a passing epiphenomenon, how can a reader hope to formalise the logic of
the true life, life subtracted from the reign of commodity fetishism, without
a systematic, formal construction of the categories and logic of the world of
capitalism?
Like Adorno’s superficial comments in Negative Dialectics on capitalism as
universal fungibility, Badiou’s explicit pronouncements on capitalism are not
false, but remain manifestly inadequate to the real complexity of their object,
betraying only the vaguest sense of the complexity of the logic governing the
valorisation of value, the many laws of the tendencies determining production,
circulation, exchange, and accumulation that Marx painstakingly develops. We

1 Badiou 2008, p. 3.
2 Badiou 2019, p. 43.

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capital, logic of the world 233

know as much as Badiou tells us about the logic of capitalism from even the first
sentence of Capital volume one: that the form of appearance of social relations
in which the capitalist form of production predominates is that of universal
commodification and exchange.3
This disinterest is of course odd coming from Badiou, who devotes metic-
ulous care precisely to the formalisation of his primary objects of inquiry in
systematic, philosophical and mathematical-logical terms. But while this is the
case, for example in Logics of Worlds, it is nonetheless striking that the worlds in
question there, along with the events that break free from them remain either
entirely generic, worlds as such, events as such, or else constitute decidedly
minor, even ‘baroque’ subsets of what Marx called the general social forms
(gesellschaftliche Formen) that govern social existence in any specific histori-
cal domain and period:

a country landscape in autumn, Paul Dukas’s opera Ariadne and Blue-

beard, a mass demonstration at Place de la République, Hubert Robert’s
painting The Bathing Pool, the history of Quebec, the structure of a galaxy
… Rousseau’s novel The New Heloise … Sartre’s theatre, Julien Gracq’s
novel The Opposing Shore and the architectural form of Brasilia [or] a
poem of Valéry.4

To take two other examples of events named in Logics of Worlds, it is certainly

the case that Toussaint Louverture and Schoenberg name world-historical
events in the political and musical domains respectively. But in both these
cases, there is no substantial demonstration of the structures either from which
these events break free nor the worlds into which they subsequently open.
Only the briefest presentation of the Haitian Revolution, and nothing of the
essence of slavery and capitalism in the Caribbean, arguably the logics gov-
erning these two worlds, before and after Toussaint Louverture. Similarly, in
Badiou’s ‘Scholium’ to Book i of Logics, one finds no substantial demonstration
of the logic of traditional western harmony and the various points and sites
where Schoenberg ruptures this logic to implement two entirely novel opera-
tional procedures, free atonalism and dodecaphonic composition.
Now, no one can know or say everything, and it may be fine to leave the
details to others, given the suggestive nature of Badiou’s propositions. But my
point is rather that while Logics of Worlds casts its remit explicitly as the apodic-

3 Marx 1976, p. 125.

4 Badiou 2009, p. 96.

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234 chapter 5

tic exposition of the ‘logic of appearance’ (la logique de l’apparaître) governing

any world (and thus the plural of its title), none of the examples in Logics
of Worlds in fact addresses the general logic and laws governing the forms of
appearance of any specific object in capitalism. Perhaps Badiou simply is not
interested in developing in his own terms the structural categories and logic
of capital that Marx initiated. Indeed, Badiou often appears more interested in
the novelty of events than the mundane regularity of the dominant logic of the
world: ‘Philosophy is asked to be capable of welcoming or thinking the event
itself, not so much the structure of the world, the principle of its laws or the
principle of its closure, but how the event, surprise, requisition, and precari-
ousness can be thinkable in a still-rational configuration’.5
I wish to argue in this final chapter that Badiou has, in the three monumen-
tal volumes of Being and Event, in fact produced the materials for precisely
such a logic, but in the form of an arsenal of concepts that remain to be pre-
cisely measured against Marx’s critical and formal reproduction of capitalism,
confronted with what Marx called his Gedankenkonkretum, a materialist, scien-
tific ‘thought-concrete’, the systematic exposition of which consumes the three
volumes of Capital. In what follows, I will proceed in two moments, the first
critical, the second comparative. While Badiou’s disinterest in the logic of cap-
italism and Marx’s Capital specifically constitutes a silence that traverses his
entire oeuvre, this absence takes on a strongly symptomatic, spectral presence
in the 1994–95 seminar recently translated to English as Lacan: Anti-philosophy
3.6
Secondly, while the previous chapter indicated certain general aspects in
which Badiou’s ontology reproduces the fundamental gestures of Marx’s mate-
rialist critique, here I wish to push this claim further and more strongly: while
it is true that Logics of Worlds never discusses the logic of appearance that gov-
erns all capitalist things (i.e., commodities), we should nonetheless read Logics
in a quite specific sense as the (objective, likely unintentional) abstract dis-
placement (Verschiebung) and formalisation of Marx’s Capital. In this view,
Capital should quite simply be read as the systematic demonstration of the
logic of what Marx calls the capitalist social form, which is to say in Badiou’s
jargon, as the logic of the appearance of things in the capitalist world.
This will then entail two subsidiary claims: 1) that the notion of a materialist
logic bears the same meaning for Marx and Badiou, and 2) that the domain
Badiou calls a ‘world’ encompasses what Marx calls social form. In a sense,

5 Badiou 2019a, p. 63.

6 Badiou 2018a.

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capital, logic of the world 235

then, this means nothing more, though nothing less, than subjecting Logics
of Worlds to a Marxian torsion: what Badiou has neglected, Marx has in fact
already accomplished (with his own specific formal, conceptual, and discur-
sive means): the systematic, synthetic demonstration of the necessary forms of
appearance of commodities in the capitalist social form.

1 Badiou’s Lacan, Badiou’s (Marx)

While Badiou fully grasps the essential nature of formal demonstration for
Lacan, his 1994–95 seminars circle around, and yet nonetheless betray a symp-
tomatic repression or blindness regarding Marx’s critique of political economy.
In these lectures, Badiou explicitly names Marx alongside Lacan as occupying a
very particular status in the pantheon of anti-philosophy, insofar as both Marx
and Lacan mount a critique of philosophy and truth in the name of science,
rather than Nietzsche’s poetic utterances or Wittgenstein’s language games.
Despite this crucial insight, Badiou nonetheless remains symptomatically deaf
in these lectures, as elsewhere, to Marx’s scientific discourse – to Capital, that
is to say.
This repression results in a highly problematic suturing in Badiou’s dis-
course, a suturing of the ideological imaginary to a politics of the real. In sup-
pressing any consideration of scientific discourse – whether of Marx’s Capital
or even Lacan’s systematic demonstration in the 1950s of the structure of the
unconscious, a demonstration that Badiou suggestively names a ‘hyperstruc-
tural axiomatic’7 – Badiou enacts a short-circuiting of analytical critique. The
result of this suture as theoretical short-circuit is that politics in Badiou’s Lacan
seminar lacks any consequential formalisation of the categorial structure of
capitalism understood as social form, as the value-forms of abstract labour, that
is to say. In its absence, politics can take the form not of a true act, but only and
ever the mere acting-out of ideological fantasy.
This becomes eminently clear in what is for me the key passage in the entire
seminar. Here is Badiou’s citation from Lacan’s Radiophonie:

What Marxism has shown by its actual revolution: that there’s no progress
to be expected from truth, nor any well-being, but only the shift from
imaginary impotence to the impossible, which proves to be the real by

7 Badiou 2018a, p. 203.

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236 chapter 5

being grounded only in logic: in other words, where I claim the uncon-
scious is located, but not so as to say that the logic of this shift shouldn’t
hasten the act.8

Badiou’s commentary of this passage is revealing, both in what it says and does
not say:

In short, in Lacan’s view, Marx showed that, instead of philosophical fan-

tasies about the good state or the good society, it was the logic of Capital
that had to be identified at the point of the real. Marx’s actual revolution
is a liquidation of philosophy. Should we say that Marx substituted a sci-
ence or knowledge for the philosophical imaginary? No, says Lacan, because
we must maintain that the ‘logic of this shift’ must ‘hasten the act’.9

The first point to note in Lacan’s original statement is his indication of Marx’s
refusal of ‘truth’ and ‘well-being’. This formulation reiterates Lacan’s post-May
’68 rejection of traditional, Leninist Marxism, as both a moralism of the prole-
tariat as the universal class, and Bolshevism as a mere programmatic redistribu-
tionism of wealth. It is Lacan’s rejection of the Leninist misreading of Marx’s
critique, the reduction of the critique of political economy to an ideological
moralism of the working class in the form of a politicised redistribution of
the wealth of production, in short, Left Ricardianism.10 Leninist Left Ricardian-
ism ignores Marx’s systematic demonstration of the laws of the tendencies of
capitalism as a structure and social form, while the mere superficial forms of
appearance of modes of market exchange become the target of political redis-
tributionism.

8 Jacques Lacan, ‘Radiophonie’, cited in Badiou 2018a, p. 155. Note the tortuous, ambivalent
grammar and tense structure of Lacan’s original phrasing: ‘Ce que le marxisme a démon-
tré par sa révolution effective: qu’il n’y a nul progrès à attendre de la vérité ni de bien-être,
mais seulement le virage de l’impuissance imaginaire à l’impossible qui s’avère d’être le
réel à ne se fonder qu’en logique: soit là où j’avertis que l’inconscient siège, mais pas pour
dire que la logique de ce virage n’ait pas à se hâter de l’acte’ (Lacan, cited in Badiou 2013b,
p. 155).
9 Badiou 2018a, p. 132, my emphasis.
10 This programme is encapsulated by the famous Leninist slogan ‘Communism is Soviet
power plus the electrification of the whole country’, the redistribution, that is to say, of
the wealth of production under the directives of the dictatorship of the proletariat, while
leaving untouched, and even expanding as a general productivist imperative, the general
social form that to this day demands the endless valorisation of value.

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capital, logic of the world 237

It is clear from his many disparaging comments on the proletariat and pro-
letarian politics after May ’68, a number of which Badiou cites in the course
of the seminar, that Lacan discounted all mythification of the proletariat as
ideological, as what he calls here the ‘impotent imaginary’. Virtually no atten-
tion, including Badiou’s presentation, however, has been devoted to a number
of brief but incisive comments Lacan makes on the formal logical structure of
Marx’s analysis in Capital in the seminars from the 1950s, precisely the period
when Lacan was elaborating his own systematic formalisation of the symbolic
structure of the unconscious. That said, Badiou rightly reads Lacan as here, in
the wake of May ’68, affirming in place of all utopian ‘philosophical reveries
on the good state and good society’ the systematic analysis of the structure
of capitalism. The point though is that this work, both Lacan reading Capital
and Lacan articulating his own structural demonstration of the nature of the
unconscious, had occurred long before, in the 1950s seminars, a period of his
thought Badiou studiously ignores in these seminars.
In this passage, Badiou reads in Lacan’s assertion a rejection of philoso-
phy (‘no clamor of being or nothingness’), revealingly identifying Marx as an
anti-philosopher of the same stripe as Lacan himself. In this vein, in order
to analyse Lacan’s assertion that philosophy merely plugs the hole of politics,
Badiou had reminded his listeners of Marx’s famous taking leave of philoso-
phy in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted
the world; the point is to change it’. While this disparagement of philosophy
and truth casts both Lacan and Marx as anti-philosophers, they are, as Badiou
points out regarding Lacan, different from all others in that for both, the rejec-
tion of philosophies of truth is enacted in the name of the rigour of scientific,
apodictic demonstration; for Lacan, the demonstration of the structure of the
unconscious, for Marx, the demonstration of the structure of capitalism.11

11 In articulating his critique of Freudian Ego-psychology, Lacan had striven to give a mate-
rialist turn to the notion of the symbolic, one that draws it into more direct proximity to
Marx’s Spinozist, materialist dialectic. In his 1954 Seminar ii, Lacan displaced the process
of signification from the intentionality of a subject, to argue instead that the figures of
machine language (cybernetics) offered a perfect illustration of the function of the Sym-
bolic. Lacan there reduces meaning (le sens) to the logical assemblage and concatenation
of signs, the purely formal relation of logical marks, such that Lacan can assert that ‘the
symbolic world is the world of the machine’ (Lacan 1991, p. 47). The symbolic, as Lacan
formulated it at this point, is understood to constitute an asubjective system of codes that
are supported, in Lacan’s example, by the materiality of computing (rather than the inten-
tionality of an ego). In this view, the Lacanian symbolic would constitute the asubjective
system of meaning into which we are thrown, to be interpellated as subjects of Capital.

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238 chapter 5

Badiou cites Lacan in a further development of what I would call Lacan’s

scientific anti-philosophy: ‘Thus the real differs from reality. This is not to say
that it’s unknowable, but that there’s no question of knowing about it, only
of demonstrating it’.12 Here, and although his name is never mentioned in the
whole of Badiou’s seminar, we are resolutely on the terrain of Spinoza. Not the
Nietzschean misreading of Spinoza as an invocation of the mere affect of beat-
itude as a joyful wisdom or Gay Science, but the precise categories of adequate
knowledge that Spinoza terms the general and the intuitive (the imaginary
remaining a necessary, but wholly inadequate form of knowledge, as we first
learn in the famous Appendix to Book i and more fully in Book ii of the Ethics).
If Lacan is an anti-philosopher, Spinoza nonetheless remained the crucial for-
mative philosophical reference for Lacan, prior to Hegel and Kojève, most
explicitly in the 1932 dissertation, where the entire presentation is framed by
citations and analyses of key propositions from the Ethics.13 No less is Spinoza
the crucial reference, as I have argued throughout this book, to grasp Marx’s
epistemology of the substantial unity of the real and the synthetic production
of analytic thought, as Althusser and Macherey famously argued in their anal-
ysis of the 1857 Introduction in Reading Capital.
It was Spinoza whose demonstrations already put Hegelian negative dialec-
tics in its proper place: things (such as the unconscious or capital) adequately
grasped in their singular essences, know no contradiction or negation. Here is
Badiou:

The real is the remainder of the disjunction between the knowable and
the unknowable. Here we take the measure of the anti-dialectical dimen-
sion of every anti-philosophy: the point of access to the real cannot be
reached negatively. As compared with knowable reality, no negation pro-
cedure provides any access to the real.14

Contradiction adequately understood is a figure of experience, of the forms

of appearance of things. While this has been well-understood of the uncon-
scious since Freud’s Traumdeutung, in Marx’s case, I have argued (in Chapter 3
above) that we witness across the development of his critique in the wake of
the dialectical Hegelianism of the Grundrisse a series of theoretical revolutions

12 Lacan, ‘Radiophonie’, cited in Badiou 2018a, p. 151. ‘Ainsi le réel se distingue de la réalité.
Ce, pas pour dire qu’il soit inconnaissable, mais qu’il n’y a pas question de s’y connaître,
mais de le démontrer’ (Lacan, cited in Badiou 2013b, p. 178).
13 Roudinesco 1997, pp. 52–4.
14 Badiou 2018a, p. 152.

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capital, logic of the world 239

in the notes and manuscripts of the 1860s and 70s: there, what Jacques Bidet
has called various Hegelian theoretical impediments (the identity and non-
identity of production and consumption, for example, or the merely apparent
contradiction between the exchange of equivalents and the realisation of sur-
plus value) are removed and in their place Marx develops, or tends increasingly
to develop in his unfinished masterpiece, the full relational complexity of the
laws of the tendencies and counter-tendencies as they determine the increase
in the organic composition of capital: not the mere falsity, but the absolute
necessity governing the phenomenal, fetishistic forms of appearance of cap-
ital (profit, rent, finance, for example).
Adequate knowledge, knowledge of both the general laws governing the
unconscious as well as the essence of any singular case, governs Lacan’s under-
standing of analysis. While in the Écrits and seminars Lacan develops a sys-
tematic exposition of the structure of the unconscious, it is no accident that
we are left, as Badiou laments toward the end of his seminar, without a the-
ory of the act. For the analytic act occurs on the register of Spinoza’s third,
intuitive mode of knowledge, as the knowledge of the singular essence of any
given case. We cannot know what to do in the case of a given, real analy-
sis, no matter how adequate our knowledge of the laws governing the struc-
ture of the unconscious may be. We can only approach the real of a given
subject via an adequate understanding of the singular essence of that case,
a process that indeed requires, along with the scientific mastery of general
laws, an improvisational genius attendant to Spinoza’s third genre of knowl-
edge.15
Badiou’s commentary is revealing: ‘Although the real, as distinct from reality,
is exempted from the knowable, which is the essence of reality, the real never-
theless does not end up being the absolute unknowable but is instead exposed
to being demonstrated’.16 ‘Demonstration’ is arguably the key epistemologi-
cal concept in the French tradition from Cavaillès and Koyré to Althusser and
Badiou himself. Beyond the knowable and the unknowable, lies not the will

15 In the third section of ‘L’Unique tradition matérialiste’, Althusser – in the course of a

broad reflection on the centrality of Spinoza to his thinking – turns to Spinoza’s inven-
tion of an adequate materialist (‘nominalist’) knowledge, a knowledge Althusser argues
encompasses Spinoza’s discovery of ‘generic constants or invariants … which arise in the
existence of singular “cases”’. Such constants are to be distinguished from the universal
generality of ‘laws’, (which would fall under Spinoza’s second genre of knowledge); equally,
it is their genericity as constants of any singular case that allows for what Althusser reveal-
ingly calls in clinical terms their ‘treatment’, as distinct from any empirical or experimental
verification. See Althusser 1997, pp. 3–20.
16 Badiou 2018a, p. 151.

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240 chapter 5

to power, or language games, but the adequate, asubjective, apodictic demon-

stration of the essential necessity governing an object of knowledge such as the
unconscious.
All this is, I think, a fully adequate reading of these two typically enigmatic
Lacanian pronouncements that Badiou cites. The problem, however, arises in
Badiou’s final gesture: ‘Should we say’, Badiou concludes, ‘that Marx substi-
tuted a science or knowledge for the philosophical imaginary? No, says Lacan,
because we must maintain that the “logic of this shift” must “hasten the act” ’.17
Where in the original text Lacan loads his typically baroque pronouncement
with ambiguous negatives and subjunctive conditionals (‘Be there where I
announce that the unconscious reigns, but not to say that the logic of this
turn may not hasten to the act’) Badiou declares an unambiguous imperative
to proceed directly to the political act itself. This ‘devoir’ (‘we must [on doit]
maintain that the logic of this shift must [doit] hasten the act’), this obliga-
tion Badiou imposes on Lacan’s ambiguity betrays a problematic disinterest
– in fact an extraordinary indifference given the systematic, logicist nature
of Badiou’s philosophy – in scientific knowledge of the object. It is at this
point that Badiou’s interpretation becomes not merely problematic, but wholly
symptomatic, symptomatic of a general oblivion and lack of engagement not
only with Lacan’s scientific discourse on the structure of the unconscious from
the 1950s, but above all with Marx’s Capital specifically.
Surprisingly, it is Badiou himself who unintentionally makes precisely this
point – presented here as a symptom of traditional Marxism’s lack of engage-
ment with Marx’s categorial demonstration – when he summarises Lacan’s
critique of the political Marx in the following terms: ‘Politics is glued to mean-
ing, and, insofar as it’s glued to meaning, it makes an imaginary, or if you will,
religious, hole in the real of Capital’.18
In the absence of any substantial engagement with Marx’s scientific demon-
stration on Badiou’s part and the rush to pronounce the imperative of the
political act, Marx remains a mere (hysterical) political activist, and revolution-
ary desire remains ‘stuck’ to mere ideological meaning, overdetermined by the
empty, even ‘religious’ hope of moving beyond capitalism to something called
communism.

Strictly speaking, there is no discourse of politics. And it’s because there

isn’t any that, in fact, politics always makes a hole in the discourses. And

17 Badiou 2018a, p. 132.

18 Badiou 2018a, p. 110.

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capital, logic of the world 241

more precisely in what, in these discourses, is based on imaginary consis-

tency, or, in other words, is based on semblance.19

The complexity of social form, of capitalism as the social logic of compulsory

valorisation, is reduced to mere imaginary ideological semblance, both in tra-
ditional Marxism (as Lacan and Badiou both note), as well as in Badiou’s own
suturing of politics to the Idea of Communism.
In the face of the immense theoretical complexity and simultaneous ab-
straction of Badiou’s logic of worlds and events, how is one to know where the
weak points and sites lie in the capitalist system, what constitutes its weak-
est links and limits? How to organise and articulate political militancy without
an adequate understanding of the social form that is its object? The result of
such reflexive politics invites the very conclusion Lacan never tired of bestow-
ing on the pseudo-events of May ’68 as the mere acting out of imaginary desires
sutured immediately to the inflammatory act and the messianic hope that the
system would magically crumble: ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’.
This brings us directly and imperatively to the limits of any formalisation of
the world of capital, to the very problem Badiou terms the ‘recherche du réel
perdu’, the search for the capitalist real. There is, in other words, a capitalist
Real, in the strong, Lacanian sense of the term. In À la recherche du réel perdu,
Badiou draws on Lacan to argue that the capitalist ‘real’ is no mere empirical,
ready-at-hand substance or experience of the everyday; instead, the capital-
ist real consists of the very impasse or impossible limit of capital understood
as a process of formalisation.20 I would argue, though, that a more appropri-
ate proper name for this real is not equality, as Badiou suggests. Equality is
certainly a necessary subcategory of the capitalist real – for example in capital-
ism’s dependence upon abstract labour as the substance of value. The essential
conclusion of Reading Capital still holds: we do not yet truly live as more than
the subjects (Träger) of what Marx named the ‘automatic subject’: subjects of
the general social structure of compulsion that he formalised as the system
of Capital. To live, then, beyond mere fleeting intimations of life in evental
moments such as 1789 and 1804, the Paris Commune and May ’68, requires the
deployment of a politics adequate to the demands of such events as a gen-
eral possibility, the transformation of the transcendental categories of social
structuration and subjectivity themselves, toward the construction of a post-

19 Badiou 2018a, p. 118, translation modified.

20 Badiou 2015.

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242 chapter 5

capitalist transnationalism, one that surpasses the mortal crisis of valorisation

that is the actuality of posthuman capitalism and its real and attendant threat
of anthropocenic catastrophe.
Badiou eloquently describes such an orientation as our finite participation
in the infinity of Number, real and true life, that is, beyond the tyranny of mere
numericality:

To think Number … restores us, either through mathematics, which is the

history of eternity, or through some faithful and restrained scrutiny of
what is happening, to a supernumerary hazard from which a truth orig-
inates, always heterogeneous to Capital and therefore to the slavery of
the numerical. It is a question, at once, of delivering Number from the
tyranny of numbers, and of releasing some truths from it. … It proceeds,
effectively and theoretically, to the downfall of numbers, which are the
law of the order of our situation.21

2 ‘Qu’en est-il de la logique?’: Reading Logics of Worlds After Capital

Let me restate in the most deliberate terms the paradox that determines the
limits of Badiou’s philosophical and political critique: On the one hand, Badiou
clearly and repeatedly states the obvious, that the overarching and predom-
inant form of contemporary global social relations is, quite simply, capital-
ism. Most recently, for example, Badiou has repeated this in the form of an
axiomatic truism: ‘Allow me to begin … from a perfectly banal conviction:
the dominant socio-economic structure, which is today in place at a global
scale, is capitalism. Everyone, or nearly so, agrees’.22 Who could disagree? On
the other hand, while I have argued above that the corresponding absence
of any concrete analysis of the capitalist social form on Badiou’s part occa-
sionally, as in the Lacan seminars, reaches symptomatic proportions, the one
moment where one would most expect such an engagement with ‘the dom-
inant socio-economic structure’ that governs the contemporary world is pre-
cisely in Badiou’s second magnum opus, Logics of Worlds. Instead, in the vast
complexity of its 638 pages comprising seven books and dozens of chapters,

21 Badiou 2008, p. 214.

22 Badiou, ‘Comment vivre et penser en un temps d’absolu désorientation?’, talk given at La
Commune Aubervilliers, 4 October 2021. Transcription available at http://www.entretemp
s.asso.fr/Badiou/21‑22.html?fbclid=IwAR1oOVauXtOuGfACRHIjSXrDLmBzDgRf87rpEQx
0kTe__gzC‑5PakoiHack, accessed 21 November 2021. My translation.

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capital, logic of the world 243

alongside the analyses of worlds from painting to poetry, mathematics to

music, love and revolutions past and present, the word capitalism appears
exactly once, in a banal and utterly indeterminate aside, when Badiou early
on castigates the nouveaux philosophes of the 1970s for their ideological role in
the unleashing of ‘an unbridled capitalism’.23
Stated as such, this stunning absence from a book proposing to analyse with
abundant examples the logic governing the forms of appearance of things in
any world would amount to no more than a final pièce de conviction in an
absurd and illegitimate condemnation of the author of some 200 books for
not having talked about a topic of particular interest to this reader; were it
not that Logics of Worlds, without ever explicitly mentioning capitalism, in fact
provides the means precisely and adequately to understand the philosophical
status of Marx’s critique of the political economy of capitalism as a materialist
logic. It is as if Logics of Worlds objectively takes up the long-forgotten conclu-
sion of Althusser’s 1947 thesis ‘On Content in Thought of G.W.F. Hegel’. There,
Althusser called for a reading of Capital as transcendental analytic of the capi-
talist social form, a reading that it would be left to Badiou to take up six decades
later: ‘The transcendental which conditions the a priori activity (theoretical or
practical) of man’, Althusser writes in his conclusion, ‘has, now, conquered its
nature: it is the concrete historical totality. … In the fundamental structure of
the human totality, Marx gives us the table of human categories that govern our
time. Capital is our transcendental analytic’.24
Here again, Badiou seems to displace Althusser’s explicit, 1947 invocation of
Marx’s Capital as transcendental analytic into a theoretically generic domain of
representation, as if Logics of Worlds conducted its dreamwork upon the con-
clusion of Althusser’s ‘On Content in Thought of G.W.F. Hegel’. To reread Capital
after Logics of Worlds, to analyse the latter as the abstraction of the former, is
to read Marx’s three volumes as a logic of capital, to account for its status as
an utterly contemporary presentation of a materialist logic of the dominant
structure of the world.
In this vein, Badiou recasts and precisely delimits logic, after Aristotle, Kant,
and Hegel, after the linguistic turn of analytic philosophy, as what he calls the
‘science of the forms of appearance’ (la science de l’apparaître) of objects in
any world. In the case of capitalism, following Marx, this will mean quite sim-
ply to grasp the precise ontological status of the critique of political economy,
understood as the science of the necessary forms of appearance of value in the
capitalist social form, as, in other words, Marx’s monetary labour theory of value.

23 Badiou 2009, p. 55.

24 Althusser 2014, p. 169.

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244 chapter 5

‘Qu’en est-il de la logique?’, ‘What then of logic?’ Badiou asks in his theoretical
prolegomenon to Logics of Worlds, the 1998 Court traité d’ontologie transitoire.25
To answer this question will require that Badiou reconceive the ontological sta-
tus of logic – this is the project of the Short Treatise – which will then allow him
to deploy this new, categorial logic of the forms of appearance of things in any
given world in Logics of Worlds. Badiou is forced to turn to the problematic sta-
tus of logic in the wake of Being and Event because, he argues, that book left
unaddressed a crucial aspect of any ontology: the being-there, existence, and
forms of appearance of beings that manifest themselves in any determinate
situation:

My goal [in Logics of Worlds] is to define what existence is … and to intro-

duce the fundamental philosophical difference between being [the sub-
ject of Being and Event] and existence … Logics of Worlds is the logic of
existence. It establishes the possibility of the logic of existence; that is,
the possibility of different forms of singularity, of different forms of rela-
tionship between a multiplicity and a world in which this multiplicity is
localised.26

To ‘establish the possibility of the logic of existence’, Badiou first steps back in
the Short Treatise to condense the problem of logic in the form of an axiomatic
decision between ‘Plato or Aristotle’.27 Either logic remains integrally linked to
the Idea of mathematical truths, as it does for Plato, he argues, or, in the case of
Aristotle, ‘thought is the [mere] construction of an adequate descriptive frame-
work’, the weaving together, in the form of demonstrations that construct a
‘purely ideal’ set of admissible consecutions, an aesthetic ‘art of calculation’.28
In Badiou’s reading, Aristotle’s logic remains ontologically determined (‘For
Aristotle, ontology prescribes logic’) in a manner analogous to that of Frege,
whom (as discussed in the previous chapter) Badiou had criticised in the cru-
cial Meditation 3 of Being and Event.
Badiou’s initial presentation would seem to relegate Aristotelean logic to the
dustbin of the history of philosophy, but in fact, surprisingly (and crucially in
the case of Marx, for whom Aristotle, not Plato, stands as ‘the greatest thinker
of Antiquity’29), this refoundation of logic as a categorial science of appear-

25 Translated as Badiou 2006, p. 153, translation modified.

26 Badiou 2019, pp. 103, 105.
27 Badiou 2006, p. 105.
28 Badiou 2006, p. 102, translation modified.
29 Marx 1976, p. 532.

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capital, logic of the world 245

ances will ultimately refashion Aristotle for a contemporary logic of worlds. To

do so, Badiou must address the immediate object of his critique, the linguis-
tic turn of logic since Bolzano and Frege. Badiou formulates this critique as a
second contrast, one that forces an axiomatic philosophical orientation: logic
will either be understood as the syntax of a linguistic semantics or, as Badiou
will propose, as a categorial logic, in which among plural ‘universes’ (a term
he will subsequently replace with ‘worlds’ in Logics) each necessarily bears its
own singular logic as an immanent, ‘internal dimension’.30
Key to this categorial reconceptualisation of logic is the notion of the plu-
rality of worlds and their attendant logics (as the title Logics of Worlds will
forcefully proclaim). Given that, as Russell’s Paradox first determined, there
exists no set of all sets, no totality of worlds (what Badiou will call in Logics
the ‘universe’ of worlds), there can correspondingly exist no single logic that
would govern the existence of all beings. Instead, logics in their plurality must
be conceived of as necessarily local:

It is an essential property of the existent qua existent [de l’étant en tant

qu’étant] that there can exist no totality of beings, in so far as they are
thought uniquely from their beingness (étantité). A crucial consequence
of this property is that every ontological investigation is irremediably
local. In fact, there can exist no demonstration or intuition bearing upon
Being as the totality of beings, or even as the general site in which beings
are disposed.31

This plurality of logics that Badiou will formalise in Logics of Worlds is not only
a necessary characteristic of any adequate materialist logic since Cantor, but,
I would add, indicates the relevance of a categorial logic to Marx’s critique of
political economy. Any world and its attendant logic of the existence of beings
must, Badiou argues, necessarily be local and contingent; there exists, Marx
argues analogously, no overarching ontology or anthropology of production,
labour, or commodities and their value as such, understood transhistorically;
each of these and other categories of political economy always necessarily exist
within a historically and conceptually distinct ‘social form’ (gesellschaftlich
Form) (feudalism, capitalism, communism, etc.).32

30 Badiou 2006, p. 113.

31 Badiou 2006, p. 161, translation modified.
32 This is among the key points Moishe Postone first developed in his influential critique of
traditional, Left Ricardian Marxism, to substitute instead a reading of Marx as what he
calls a ‘categorial’ critique: ‘I use “categorial” to refer to Marx’s attempt to grasp the forms

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246 chapter 5

The principal consequence of Badiou’s categorial reformulation of logic as

a plurality of situated logics is therefore that to the description of any given
world there correlates a specific structure of logic: ‘The descriptive charac-
terisation of a thinkable ontological state induces certain logical properties,
which are themselves presented in the space of Being, or the universe, that
thought describes’.33 This categorial reformulation allows Badiou to escape the
formalist dead-end of the linguistic turn of modern logic34 and to construct a
novel ‘contemporary theory of logic’. When logic is no longer understood as
a normative syntax, but instead as an ‘immanent characteristic’ of possible
worlds, it escapes its reduction to the status of a formal science of adequate
discourse, to regain instead the ontological dimension it had born from Aristo-
tle to Hegel, but now relegated to its limited and proper domain, as the science
of possible worlds according to the ‘cohesion’ or necessary forms of appearance
therein.
The final consequence of this reformulation is thus that the remit of logic
becomes necessarily limited to the ontological domain of existence, with logic
understood specifically as the science of the necessary forms of appearance of
any existing object in a given world.35 Since a necessary aspect of Being is that
it must take on forms of appearance,36 and since in this view ‘the essence of
appearance is relation’, categorial logic can thus demonstrate how any given

of modern social life by means of the categories of his mature critique. … A categorial
reinterpretation, therefore, must focus on Marx’s distinction between value and material
wealth; it must show that value is not essentially a market category in his analysis, and
that the “law of value” is not simply one of general economic equilibrium’. Postone 1993,
pp. 17, 123.
33 Badiou 2006, p. 113, translation modified.
34 ‘For a long time I had believed this superseding of Platonism involved a destitution of for-
mal logic as the royal path by which we have access to rational languages. Accordingly, and
so deeply French in this respect, I rallied to the suspicion that, in the minds of Poincaré
and Brunschvicg, was cast upon what they called “logistics” ’. Badiou 2006, pp. 159–60.
35 Badiou defines appearance as follows: ‘what links a being to the constraint of a local or sit-
uated exposure of its manifold-being we will call the “appearing” of this being [l’apparaître
de cet étant]’. Badiou 2006, p. 162, translation modified.
36 Badiou restates this Hegelian point categorically and without demonstration, but, against
both Kant and Hegel, in the form of an asubjective phenomenology: ‘It is the being of the
existent to appear [Il est de l’être de l’étant d’apparaître], insofar as the totality of Being does
not exist. … Appearing in no way depends on space or time, or more generally on any tran-
scendental field whatsoever. It does not depend on a subject whose constitution would
be presupposed. The manifold of beings [L’étant-multiple] does not appear for a subject.
Instead, it is rather the essence of a being to appear as soon as, unlocalizable within the
whole, it must assert the value of its being-multiple [ fasse valoir son être-multiple] from
the point of view of a non-whole’. Ibid., translation modified.

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capital, logic of the world 247

world can both be pure, inconsistent multiplicity (as Being and Event had
described), as well as intrinsically determined as the existence of beings and
their attendant and necessary forms of appearance. This affirmation of the
strict equivalence of logic and appearance then becomes a shibboleth in Logics
of Worlds (‘“Logic” and “appearance” are one and the same thing’) such that for
Badiou the compass of any given logic, as it governs the existence of things in
any singular world as such (rather than a particular world or social form such
as capitalism), remains strictly limited to the laws that determine the ‘cohesion
of appearing’.37

3 Logics of (Capitalist) Worlds

Following his refoundation of contemporary logic as the science of appearing

(‘science de l’apparaître’) in the Short Treatise, Logics of Worlds sets itself the
consequent task of grasping ‘the requirements of a contemporary materialism’
in the form of a systematic ‘materialist logic’.38 To do so, Badiou sets forth in the
crucial second book of Logics what he calls a ‘Greater Logic’ (Grande logique),
which he defines as ‘a materialist theory of the coherence of what appears’.39
This Greater Logic takes the form of an exposition and demonstration of the
concepts required for the apprehension of the existence, or ‘being-there’ (être-
là) (Badiou uses the terms interchangeably) of any multiplicity whatsoever. If
Being and Event had articulated Badiou’s understanding of ontology as such,
Logics turns to the subordinate problem of the ‘worldly’ existence of any being,
apprehended not as pure multiplicity, but according to the laws governing its
appearance or ‘localisation’ in the form of a general theory of objects and rela-
tions:

The mathematical theory of the pure multiple doubtless exhausts the

question of the being of a being, except for the fact that its appearing
– logically localised by its relations to other beings – is not ontologically

37 Badiou 2009, pp. 100–1. ‘We are speaking here of any appearing whatsoever in any world
whatsoever. In other words, our operational phenomenology identifies the condition of
possibility for the worldliness of a world, or the logic of the localisation for the being-
there of any being whatever’. Badiou 2009, p. 102.
38 Badiou 2009, p. 95.
39 Badiou 2009, p. 94. This ‘Greater Logic’ Badiou distinguishes from ‘ordinary logic, [i.e.]
the formal calculation of propositions and predicates’ which he considers a mere subset
of Greater Logic as such. Badiou 2009, p. 173.

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248 chapter 5

deducible. We therefore need a special logical machinery to account for

the intra-worldly cohesion of appearing.40

It is thus the task of Logics’ Greater Logic to set forth this ‘logical machinery’ in
the form of a novel series of concepts or ‘logical operators’, the functions that
provide any world with its singular coherent forms of appearance, the most
important of which for this task is what Badiou names, after Kant, the ‘tran-
scendental’.41
Reasserting in the wake of Russell’s paradox the inexistence of totality as a
necessary and governing condition of any contemporary materialist logic, Log-
ics analyses both worlds and their attendant logics in their plurality.42 One of
the few significant differences between the refoundation of logic in the Short
Treatise and its systematic exposition in Logics is a terminological one. Where
the Short Treatise spoke ambiguously of multiple ‘universes’, in Logics Badiou
reserves this term to indicate not a world but only the inexistence of the Whole
figured as an empty set or void (le vide).43 In its place, he substitutes the more
precise term of ‘world’, and crucially indicates by this not a material, exten-
sive space to be filled with beings, but instead only the governing logic of that
world.44 This is to formalise the concept of world in the order of thought, to
grasp the real structuration that allows for the manifestation of objects as they
appear in sensuous lived experience.

40 Badiou 2009, pp. 121–2.

41 In explicit contrast to the Kantian transcendental subject, Badiou’s materialist logic is rad-
ically pre-subjective, and necessarily so, since Badiou’s conception of the subject – which
Book i of Logics further articulates in the wake of the formal simplicity of the concept
in Being and Event – appears in subtraction from the governing logic of any world as the
bearer, faithful or otherwise, of an Event: ‘The transcendental that is at stake in this book
is altogether anterior to every subjective constitution, for it is an immanent given of any
situation whatever. … It is what imposes upon every situated multiplicity the constraint
of a logic, which is also the law of its appearing, or the rule in accordance with which the
‘there’ of being-there allows the multiple to come forth as essentially bound’. Badiou 2009,
p. 101.
42 Russell’s 1902 Paradox, Badiou summarises, ‘means that it is not true that to a well-defined
concept there necessarily corresponds the set of the objects which fall under this concept.
This acts as a (real) obstacle to the sovereignty of language: to a well-defined predicate,
which consists within language, there may only correspond a real inconsistency (a deficit
of multiple-being)’. Badiou 2009, p. 153.
43 ‘We will call universe the (empty) concept of a being of the Whole’. Badiou 2009, p. 102.
44 ‘A world is not an empty place – akin to Newton’s space – which multiple beings would
come to inhabit. For a world is nothing but a logic of being-there, and it is identified with
the singularity of this logic’. Ibid.

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capital, logic of the world 249

It is the concept of the transcendental that then enables Badiou to pass, log-
ically, from the inconsistency of any set in its abstract, ‘neutral’ multiplicity, to
account for the existential consistency of any object in a given world. Badiou
develops this process in four steps, steps that correspond, in the abstract,
to Marx’s initial and familiar demonstration of the basic categories of the
commodity form in the first three chapters of Capital: use-value, exchange-
value, value as such and its substance (abstract labour), along with the nec-
essary form of appearance of any commodity, the price-form. These steps,
given their high degree of abstraction in Logics of Worlds, can be rapidly sum-
marised.
Badiou’s demonstration sets off from the ontological standpoint of Being
and Event, and its description of the abstract multiplicity of the elements of
any set in its bare neutrality.45 To this corresponds Marx’s concept of the com-
modity’s use-value: every commodity possesses, and must possess if it is to be
sold, its singular identity. The set of all commodities in the capitalist social
form consists of an infinite variety of things, each of which – at this general
level of abstraction of use-values as such – exists in its singularity, unique unto
itself, in its abstract nature as use-value devoid of any systematic relation to
other commodities, each existing in sheer externality to all others within this
set. ‘The commodity is, first of all’, Marx writes, ‘an external object, a thing
which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind’.46 The set of
commodities taken solely as use-values refers each use-value to its singular pos-
session of any given quality whatsoever, the only requirement being the most
abstract one, that a commodity in fact have some use-value of whatever kind
(lest it be unsellable, and thus, in the capitalist social form, worthless). Were
we to reproduce capitalism analytically in this fashion as a structured totality
of the Symbolic, a Badiouian rearticulation of the opening sentence of Capital
might thus read: ‘The wealth of a society subject to the logic of the world of cap-
italism appears as a consistent multiplicity of commodities’. To posit being as
the abstract multiplicity of the objects in any world entails for Logics of Worlds
no more than a passing reference to Being and Event (‘A multiple is only identi-
cal to itself, and it is a law of being-qua-being’).47 Marx similarly spends a mere
three paragraphs analysing the use-value of commodities.

45 To initiate his Greater Logic, Badiou explicitly invokes this starting point: ‘Previously, I
identified [in Being and Event] situations (worlds) with their strict multiple-neutrality.
I now [in Logics of Worlds] also envisage them as the site of the being-there of beings’.
Badiou 2009, p. 99.
46 Marx 1976, p. 125.
47 Badiou 2009, p. 155.

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250 chapter 5

Exchange-value, in turn, is the crucial category that in Marx’s demonstration

initially explains how commodities can enter into relation with one another:
the commodity form requires that materially distinct commodities, commodi-
ties differing in their nature as use-values, possess identical exchange-values (in
their relative amounts) in order to be exchangeable one for the other. Crucially,
and even in Marx’s initial, abstract examples of simple exchange logically prior
to the price form (‘a quarter of wheat for example, is exchanged for x boot-
polish, y silk or z gold’), each exchange requires a definite, numerical quantity
through which it relates to all others.48 While it is only with the price form that
this quantity will appear and thus exist as identical – if in the barter example
‘x boot-polish, y silk or z gold’, the variables x, y, and z all constitute different
amounts, the dollar value of two exchangeable commodities must be iden-
tical – the key point to note here is simply the necessity of this numerical
count.
Badiou analogously characterises a necessary quantification as the degree
of difference between any two things that appear in a world. ‘The logic of
appearing’, he writes, ‘necessarily regulates degrees of difference, of a being
with respect to itself and of the same with respect to others. These degrees
bear witness to the marking of a multiple-being by its coming-into-situation
in a world’.49 Badiou argues that every object that exists in a world bears a
certain degree of strength of its appearance in relation to all other existing
things in that world. It is this relational logic of a world that ‘regulates’ the local
manifestation of an object, ‘affecting a being with a variable degree of iden-
tity (and consequently of difference) to the other beings of the same world’.50
While Badiou argues that this logic of the transcendental holds for any world
whatsoever, his examples often remain obscure (what do we learn from an anal-
ysis of the relative strengths of appearance of the objects – leaves, a wall, a
shadow – in a painting?), in the case of capitalism, it is luminously clear that
every commodity, to be exchangeable, must bear a numerary exchange-value

48 Heinrich analyses in detail the various levels of abstraction in Marx’s presentation across
the initial chapters of Capital, pointing out for example that in Chapter One (which I am
discussing here), ‘Marx is analysing a capitalistically produced commodity, which is nor-
mally exchanged for money, but he is doing so initially not only in abstraction from capital
but also in abstraction from money [as well as from the human subjects that exchange
commodities]. For that reason, Marx does not yet mention prices. The relation between
the money price that we are familiar with in everyday life and exchange-value still has to
be explained. … The object of inquiry, the “commodity”, is not simply drawn from experi-
ence. Instead, it is constructed, by means of abstraction’. Heinrich 2021, p. 53.
49 Badiou 2009, p. 118.
50 Badiou 2009, p. 119.

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capital, logic of the world 251

that precisely determines its ‘strength of appearance’ in the world of commodi-

ties and their exchange, in other words, its numerical price or exchange-value.
‘There must exist values of identity which indicate, for a given world, to what
extent a multiple-being is identical to itself or to some other being of the same
world’.51
Marx asked for the first time why under capitalism labour must appear
as what he called its ‘value-form’ (Wertform), manifest as the price of labour
power (wage), and, furthermore, demonstrated how the formal equality of
commodity exchange is nonetheless able to create surplus value. Money, in
the form of exchange-value (manifest as the price form), in this view, is no
mere convention, but the key relational intermediary that governs and regu-
lates social interaction under capitalism, crucially enabling the socialisation of
all private labour. Marx for the first time distinguished transhistorical, material-
physiological processes of commodity production (concrete labour) from their
specific social forms in a commodity-based society (as abstract labour, the ‘sub-
stance’ of value). In this fashion, he demonstrated why in a society governed by
commodity exchange, labour must take the historically distinct form of a mon-
etary exchange-value that Marx termed labour power. To count as a value in
the capitalist social form, a concrete object or service must necessarily, by def-
inition, have an exchange-value, a value that can and must be manifested in
the form of a price. A commodity without a price is simply not a commodity,
regardless of whether we treasure or despise it.
The price form of a commodity, Marx crucially shows in the first three sec-
tions of Capital, is no mere nominal contrivance or clever invention to facilitate
exchange, but is essential and absolutely necessary to the nature of the com-
modity.52 Since the capitalist social form is axiomatically defined, in Marx’s
view, by the predominance of commodities and commodity relations, a thing
without an exchange-value simply cannot appear as a thing of value within that
social form.53 There is nothing mystical in Marx’s mundane observation: that

51 Badiou 2009, p. 102.

52 See Murray 2017, p. 273. ‘For classical labour theory’, Murray writes, ‘labour of whatever
social sort was the source of value, and money was an afterthought, a “ceremonial form”,
as Ricardo called it; the answer to a merely technical problem’. Murray 2017, p. 278. Marx
vehemently rejected and critiqued such monetary nominalism of Proudhon and his fol-
lowers such as Darrimon in the first section of the Grundrisse.
53 ‘All other commodities relate to [the general equivalent] as their expression of value. It’s
only this act of “relating” within the world of commodities that makes a certain com-
modity into the general equivalent, thus endowing it with the ability to buy everything.
Importantly, this “relating” is not at all accidental or arbitrary; it is necessary, for only by
relating to a general equivalent can commodities relate to each other as values’. Heinrich
2021, p. 143.

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252 chapter 5

commodities require a price form is simply another of the necessary conse-

quences of Marx’s initial premise in the first sentence of Capital.54 A thing on
the store-shelf without a price, for example, simply cannot be exchanged for
money, it remains a tangible thing, perhaps even a privately useful thing, but,
under capitalist social relations, it cannot take the social form of an exchange-
able commodity.
Marx is not content to describe the dual nature of the commodity as use-
and exchange-value; he asks, furthermore, what is it that a numerical exchange-
value actually measures? What, in other words, constitutes the substance of
value of a commodity? Marx’s famous answer, abstract labour,55 indicates a
further point of congruence of Badiou’s abstract logic of worlds with Marx’s
systematic demonstration of the singular logic of the capitalist social form, as
what Badiou calls the scale (échelle) of evaluation of the strength of appear-
ance of any object. An object’s indexification to a transcendental, what Badiou
calls its ‘function of appearance’, must, he argues, offer a numerical measure of
something. What, in other words, does the degree of a transcendental measure?
Badiou’s answer is perfectly agnostic, given the abstract level of his analysis,
and yet its relevance to Marx’s analysis of the substance of value in the capital-
ist social form is uncanny:

But what are the values of the function of appearing? What measures the
degree of identity between two appearances of multiplicities? Here too
there is no general or totalising answer. The scale of evaluation of appear-
ing, and thus the logic of a world, depends on the singularity of that world
itself. What we can say is that in every world such a scale exists, and it is
this scale that we call the transcendental.56

54 ‘The busiest streets of London’, Marx observed matter of factly in the 1859 ‘Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy’, ‘are crowded with shops whose show cases display
all the riches of the world, Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian
corsets, furs from Russia and spices from the tropics, but all of these worldly things bear
odious, white paper labels with Arabic numerals and then laconic symbols £ s. d. This
is how commodities are presented in circulation’. Cited in Murray 2017, p. 471. See Hein-
rich 2021, pp. 92–143 for an extraordinarily meticulous, word-by-word analysis of Marx’s
demonstration of the logical and materialist necessity governing Marx’s monetary labour
theory of value.
55 ‘How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of
the “value-forming substance”, the labour, contained in the article … The labour that forms
the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-
power’. Marx 1976, p. 129.
56 Badiou 2009, p. 156.

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capital, logic of the world 253

Translating Badiou’s jargon to Marx’s analysis, we can say that the quantitative
degree of strength of an object, what Marx calls a commodity’s exchange-value,
is the monetary form of appearance of the substance of value of that commod-
ity, what Badiou terms the scale of values inhering in any world. In capitalism,
this scale is simply the price or exchange-value of any commodity.
Capitalist society, Marx argues, is that specific historical epoch in which
every thing and relation that counts as a value must bear a monetary price.
‘In this form’, Marx concludes, ‘when they are all counted as comparable with
the [general equivalent, money], all commodities appear not only as qualita-
tively equal, as values in general, but also as values of quantitatively comparable
magnitude’. Any commodity, under the general, monetary form of value, can
thus relate to any other through its equation with the universal equivalent: x
(quantity) of (any given commodity) a = $1. This, the general capitalist form
of appearance of value, is quite simply the price form: in Marx’s example, ‘20
yards of linen = 2£’.57
Here we should note that Badiou furthermore argues, again analogously to
Marx, that the existence of the things composing any world forms a relational
system; no single thing (such as a commodity) can exist on its own. Rather, the
logic of the necessary forms of appearance of things in a world necessitates a
relational order: ‘What is measured or evaluated by the transcendental organ-
isation of a world is in fact the degree of intensity of the difference of appear-
ance of two beings in this world, and not an intensity of appearance considered
[ontologically] “in itself”’.58 Badiou’s transcendental logic of appearance of any
world demands that each thing that appears in that world do so in relation to
all other things; the intensity of appearance of one thing must be relational,
‘measured by the intensity of appearance of one of them’.59 This ‘conjunction’,
Badiou states, is ‘carried’ by one of the two things in relation. The parallelism
with Marx’s analysis is here as well uncanny: in Marx’s derivation of the neces-
sity of the price form of appearance of any commodity in the capitalist social
form, he famously begins by defining exchange-value as a necessarily relational
determination.
While Badiou’s abstract point can be briefly stated as such, Marx’s more
complex analysis of the relational nature of the commodity can be summarised
in four crucial steps of his argument. In the famous opening sentence of Cap-
ital, Marx chooses to begin his demonstration with an axiomatic declaration
of the nature of the capitalist social form: ‘The wealth of societies in which

57 Marx 1976, pp. 159, 163, emphasis added.

58 Badiou 2009, p. 123.
59 Badiou 2009, p. 126.

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254 chapter 5

the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection

of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.
Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity’.60 Marx
thus asks his reader to accept axiomatically, initially and without prior logical
derivation, that in capitalism – the immediate form of appearance of which
is the massive accumulation of commodities – the predominant form of exis-
tence as well as the relations among existing things are those laws that govern
the exchange of commodities. This is to say that the capitalist social form is,
minimally but essentially, distinguished from other social forms by the pre-
dominance of both commodities and commodified social relations. His anal-
ysis, his initial statement informs the reader, will take as its object this spe-
cific social form, and furthermore will investigate not specific individual com-
modities, as did classical economics, but the total mass of commodities, an
undifferentiated, ‘immense heap’ (ungeheure Warensammlung), in relation to
which Marx will analyse individual commodities as identical subdivisions or
‘aliquot parts’.61 Marx initiates in this manner not a semantics of capital nor a
representation of the structure of capitalism, but instead undertakes a logical
demonstration of the essential nature of the real (commodified) social forms
of relation in capitalism, to construct, under the aspect of thought (rather than
sensuous material extension), as the logic of this world or social form, actual
capitalist social relations.62
One could imagine other axiomatic definitions of capitalism. Marx chooses
an initial, readily acceptable proposition (that capitalism appears as the accu-
mulation and generalisation of commodities and commodified relations) and
from it, the many implications he will demonstrate in his critique follow nec-
essarily. More specifically, if the reader accepts that the predominant form of
appearance of capitalism is the accumulation of commodities, this already
implies, as Marx will demonstrate, that only commodified things bearing a
monetary price form can appear as values under the capitalist social form. Non-

60 Marx 1976, p. 125.

61 See Fred Moseley’s penetrating analysis of this point in Money and Totality (2017).
62 As Marx affirms in his ‘Notes on Adolph Wagner’: ‘I do not start out from “concepts”, hence
I do not start out from “the concept of value”. … What I start out from is the simplest social
form in which the labour-product is presented in contemporary society, and this is the
“commodity”. I analyse it, and right from the beginning, in the form in which it appears.
Here I find that it is, on the one hand, in its natural form, a useful thing, alias a “use-value”,
on the other hand, it is a bearer of exchange-value, and from this viewpoint, it is itself
“exchange-value”. Further analysis of the latter shows me that exchange-value is only a
“form of appearance”, the autonomous mode of presentation of the value contained in
the commodity’. Marx 1996, pp. 241–2, emphasis added.

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capital, logic of the world 255

commodified things and relations certainly continue to exist (though tend to

be monetarised whenever possible), but they do not and cannot count as com-
modified values when the capitalist social form predominates: they can have no
value in capitalism since they have no value-form and thus cannot be objects
of commodity exchange.
If, as Marx proposes, the substance of value is social (as abstract labour in
general, rather than any specific concrete form of labour), this must mean that
value ‘can only appear [as exchange-value] in the social relation between com-
modity and commodity’. Marx argues that it is only when two (or more) com-
modities actually confront each other in the exchange process that they take
on the social form specific to capitalism, a commonplace value-form of which
‘everyone knows [:] the money-form’.63 To do so, he demonstrates that the value
of labour must be expressed not simply as an isolated exchange-value, but must
take the specific form of appearance of the universal equivalent, money. To do
so, Marx systematically develops his analysis of the social nature of commodity
relations:

1) One commodity (sugar, cotton, indigo) taken in isolation cannot

have an exchange-value expressed by itself, since this would be to
‘exchange’ one thing for the same. The exchange-value of a com-
modity can only be expressed relatively, in a relative form, in some
other, second commodity.64
2) This ‘relative form’ of the expression of value, which Marx analyses
in great detail,65 simply describes how one commodity can come to
have its value expressed in another commodity. There must, by this
reasoning, exist a minimal relation between (at least) two commodi-
ties for the substance of value (abstract labour) to find expression
(as an exchange-value). Only then does the commodity take a form
(in its equivalent) that is distinct from its material, natural form as a
use-value, a dual form that Marx has already shown any thing must
possess to count as an exchangeable commodity. The social nature
of this binary relation lies not merely in the comparison of these
two things (as exchange-values). The social aspect of the commodity
form finds its first (logical) mode of expression in this simple relative
form of relation insofar as the substance of that value (which Marx

63 Marx 1976, p. 139.

64 ‘I cannot’, Marx observes, ‘express the value of linen in linen’, for this would simply express
a concrete quantity of this item ‘as an object of utility’. Marx 1976, p. 140.
65 Marx 1976, pp. 139–54.

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256 chapter 5

has argued is abstract, rather than any specific concrete labour),

what exchange-value is actually measuring or expressing, is given
real concrete form in the social act of equating these materially
distinct concrete practices when two use-values (linen, coats) are
equated (X coats = Y yards of linen).
3) This simple relative form of value, however, is ‘insufficient’, Marx
notes, and ‘must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can
ripen into the price-form’, the form of appearance adequate to the
capitalist social form. A society in which only two commodities are
exchanged simply is ‘insufficient’ to determine the capitalist social
form as Marx has axiomatically defined it from the first sentence
of Capital. In what Marx calls the ‘expanded relative form of value’,
a commodity expresses its value not just in a single opposing com-
modity, but in each and every other commodity; there thus arises an
infinite sequence of relative values. The social relation of any given
commodity now becomes all-encompassing, and all commodities
stand ‘in a relation … with the whole world of commodities [as] an
endless sequence’.66
4) Commodities consequently must find their adequate form of ex-
pression in one single commodity, a general equivalent that is so-
cially specified to stand apart and to serve as the measure or expres-
sion of value (traditionally, gold). It is finally in this general form
of value that commodities achieve their full social form of expres-
sion, insofar as only this universal equivalent ‘permit[s] them to
appear to each other as exchange-values’.67 This general, social form
of relation to all other commodities is therefore necessary given the
axiomatic assumption that the capitalist social form is characterised
by the general predominance of commodities and commodifica-
tion.

Badiou’s abstract summary of the relational nature of any system of the tran-
scendental valuations governing the strength of appearance of the objects in a
world constitutes, therefore, a precise reformulation of Marx’s analysis of the
systematic logic governing the forms of appearance of commodities in the cap-
italist social form. ‘The transcendental values’, Badiou concludes,

66 Marx 1976, p. 155.

67 Marx 1976, p. 158.

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capital, logic of the world 257

do not directly measure intensities of appearance ‘in themselves’, but

rather differences (or identities). When we speak of the value of appear-
ance of a being, we are really designating a sort of synthetic summary of
the values of transcendental identity between this being, in this world,
and all the other beings appearing in the same world.68

The logic of the forms of appearance of existence in any world, Badiou argues,
can be succinctly summarised at this high level of abstraction with only three
basic operations: 1) the determination of a minimum value for any thing to
appear in that world (in capitalism, that a commodity bear a numerical price);
2) that there exist the possibility of conjoining the degrees of value of any
two objects (in capitalism, the determination of what Marx calls a relative
exchange-value between two commodities); and 3) the possibility of a ‘global
synthesis’ of these values among a specific number of multiples (in capitalism,
the necessity of the monetary price form to allow for the universal exchange-
ability of any and all commodities one for another). The degree of congruence
between Badiou’s abstract analysis of the logics of worlds and Marx’s analysis
of the necessity governing the forms of appearance of commodities in the cap-
italist social form is uncanny, all the more so as judging at least by his writings,
Badiou seems never to have closely studied Marx’s synthetic demonstration of
this logic in the third chapter of Capital.

4 Reading Capital as the Logic of a World

This book has argued that Marx’s demonstration of the nature of value in the
capitalist social form, of its forms of appearance (above all as money), and
of the essence of surplus value, are not derived from obscure metaphysical
elucubrations (as Marx’s academic and empiricist critics have often asserted),
nor from the theoretical reversals of a negative-dialectical (Hegelian) logic.69
Marx’s theory is at heart a materialist logic of the real process of the circuit of
capital as it passes, without logical negation, through its various forms. Marx
was not improvising when he methodically, revision after revision, constructed
the various drafts of Capital from 1861 to 1883, but instead sought the most
adequate (logical) form of demonstration to present the conceptual order of
the capitalist social form. Though he certainly continued to develop and fine

68 Badiou 2009, p. 127.

69 On the putative Hegelian, negative-dialectical structure of Capital, see for example Arthur
2002 and Moseley and Smith 2014.

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258 chapter 5

tune the diverse categories of his analysis till his last days, he had already con-
ducted his fundamental ‘inquiry’ into the structure of the capitalist social form
to arrive at his central notion of the monetary labour theory of value in the final
pages of the Grundrisse notebooks.70 Among the greatest accomplishments of
Capital, in this view, is to have constructed for readers the real, dynamic logic
of the capitalist social form, the immanent logic of a social form, to reveal, as
Marx proudly proclaims in his first Preface from 1867, ‘the natural laws of cap-
italist production, … these tendencies winning their way through and working
themselves out with iron necessity’.71
If capitalism appears as the general accumulation of commodities, and if
its predominant form of social relations is that of the exchange of commodi-
ties, then, Marx argues, a series of necessary consequences immediately follow.
What Marx will argue, in the limpid terms of a synthetic logical demonstration,
is that given this predominance, abstract labour, the substance of value, must
take a monetary form of appearance. To do so, he takes his reader step by step
to discover the essential nature of the commodity form. From the dual nature
of the commodity as both use- and exchange-value to the substance of value
(abstract labour) as the determination of what exchange-value measures in the
capitalist social form, Marx’s demonstration of the logic governing the com-
modity form culminates in his demonstration of the necessity of its monetary
form of appearance. If a thing does not possess this dual form, if, specifically,
it does not possess an exchange-value, Marx tells us, it cannot appear as, and
thus is not, a commodity. Marx categorically and unambiguously affirms this
often-overlooked point: ‘Money as a measure of value is the necessary form
of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities,
namely labour-time’.72
As does Badiou in his general theory of the logics of worlds, Marx repeat-
edly emphasises the criterion of appearance in his analysis, not just critically,
but positively. This is to say that the object of his critique of the commodity, the
substance of its value, and its various value-forms is not only to reveal the illu-
sory, ideological nature of social relations under the capitalist social form. Marx
undertakes in his analysis not just a negative critique of commodity fetishism,
but also a positive construction of the commodity in the form of a thought-
object, to demonstrate the logical necessity of its monetary form of appear-
ance. In arguing that in commodity relations, value must take a monetary form
of appearance, Marx is constructing not an adequate syntax of capital, but a

70 On Marx’s monetary labour theory of value, see Bellofiore 2018, p. 256.

71 Marx 1976, p. 91.
72 Marx 1976, pp. 138.

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capital, logic of the world 259

materialist logic of the immanent necessity governing the existence of what

counts as a thing and possesses value in the capitalist social form (a commod-
ity). Capital is not a well-ordered linguistic apparatus of semantic analysis that
would infer or prove the necessary existence of the capitalist social form and
its attendant value-forms; instead, given the a priori existence of this social
form, Capital simply reconstructs, in the attribute of thought (as opposed to
extension), as the logic of this world, a real object. Marx proceeds in material-
ist fashion from the unproven, axiomatic and reasonable presupposition that
accumulated commodities and generally commodified social relations do in
fact exist and prevail, and furthermore define the capitalist social form per se, to
then reproduce in thought the real structure of this social form via the demon-
stration of the necessary consequences of this predominance.
The expression of the value of any commodity in the form of the univer-
sal equivalent (money) fully abstracts not only from the material use-value of
that commodity, but universally, from the material specificity of all commodi-
ties, finally to ‘express what is common to all commodities’: abstract labour.
The general form of value thus fully expresses the (commodified) social rela-
tions of the capitalist social form, in the form of the quantitative abstractions
of exchange-values. ‘By this [general] form’, Marx writes, ‘commodities are, for
the first time, really brought into relation with each other as values, or permit-
ted to appear to each other as exchange-values’.73 Here again, Marx underscores
in his logic of capital the ‘positive nature’ of a form of appearance that allows
for a general social relation – between the commodities people exchange – at
the same time that it fetishistically obscures the substance of those exchange-
values, abstract labour.
Since Marx’s analysis is not an economic theory, but a critique of economic
theory, what the demonstration of the necessity of the quantitative, mone-
tary form of appearance of value reveals are not specific numerical values (the
object of econometric analyses, from profit rates to unemployment figures),
but rather the nature and substance of the various categories that constitute
the forms of appearance of the capitalist social form.74 The categorial logic
of Capital, in other words, is not a philosophy of ‘substance’ in the sense of

73 Marx 1976, p. 158, emphasis added.

74 As Paul Mattick writes, ‘Marx’s model of the capitalist economy does not yield quantitative
results that could be compared with economic data; it is capable neither of accounting
for the actual price of goods on the market nor of predicting (or even accounting for)
such phenomena as the rates of profit obtaining at one time or another. [Rather,] the phe-
nomena (price representations of labour time) with which it is concerned … serve social
functions involving the concealment of real relationships rather than their direct mani-
festation’. Mattick 2019, p. 33.

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260 chapter 5

the econometric, analytic manipulation of collections of objects or sets (com-

modities, profits, employment data, gdp, etc.); rather, from the moment Marx
defines the substance of value as abstract labour, derivable only as a socially
validated relation, Capital unfolds as a category theory of the capitalist social
form.75 Among Marx’s unprecedented accomplishments, in his logic of the
forms of appearance of value in capitalism, is to have systematically demon-
strated the absolute necessity that value take a monetary form of appearance
in commodity society.
The consequence of Badiou’s reformulation of the domain and remit of logic
as a categorial science of the necessary forms of appearance and existence of
the beings in any given world is that without ever considering Marx’s Capital
or even the capitalist social form in general, Badiou has quite surprisingly pro-
duced a theoretical formalisation of the object of Marx’s critique of political
economy, one that constructs the adequate notion of a materialist logic of capi-
talism. It is not that Logics of Worlds accounts in the abstract, point by point, for
the enormous complexity of Capital (though Logics contains many extraordi-
nary formulations that begin to do just that, only a few of which I have indicated
here), but, rather, that Badiou’s materialist logic for the first time adequately
accounts for the ontological status of Marx’s critique. For while Marx famously
takes leave of philosophy in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (‘Philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’),
the various ongoing attempts to map the movement of concepts in Capital
back onto Hegel’s Logic cannot account for the theoretical and, indeed onto-
logical specificity of this critique, but instead, implicitly or explicitly, tend to
reinscribe Marx’s critique of a singular social form as a monist and transhistor-
ical (Hegelian) ontology. Instead, following Badiou, it is clear that despite its
incompletion, Capital constitutes nothing less than the historically and theo-
retically delimited, adequate, and systematic demonstration of the necessary
forms of appearance of value in (and only in) the capitalist social form. In other
words, Capital should and indeed must be read and understood as the science
of the logic governing our world, the capitalist social form.

75 See Badiou’s comments on this distinction – in response to Jacques Desanti’s critique of

the latent ‘substantialism’ of Being and Event – where he presents Logics of Worlds as a
category theory of relations between existing things, in Badiou 2019b, pp. 97–105.

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 conclusion

Theory and Practice Today

When Althusser articulated the concept of theoretical practice (la pratique thé-
orique) in his introduction to Reading Capital, he intended the concept not
as a conflation of the traditional pairing of theory and practice, nor by any
means as an elimination of other forms of revolutionary practice, but just the
opposite, as an enlargement of the concept of practice to include that of theo-
retical production, bypassing the subject-object doublet of traditional theories
of knowledge.1 He did so, moreover, by deploying the central Spinozist episte-
mological tenet, verum index sui et falsi to make the famous claim that underlies
the argument of this book:

The criterion of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges produced by Marx’s theoret-

ical practice is provided by his theoretical practice itself, i.e., by the ade-
quacy of demonstration [valeur demonstrative]. Marx’s theoretical prac-
tice is the criterion of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges that Marx produced.2

Against empiricism, Althusser categorically asserted in this manner the auton-

omy of adequate demonstration, against traditional theories of knowledge as
the correspondence of thought with its empirical referent.
Equally Spinozist is Althusser’s categorical assertion that Marx constructs
Capital not from observation of the empirical real, but from the critique of pre-
existing ideas – of classical political economy, French socialism, and even the
English Factory Reports – such that Marx’s analysis takes place entirely within
the attribute of thought, or, as Etienne Balibar puts it in his Methodological
Annex to the first edition of Lire le Capital, ‘an analysis that remains entirely
within thought [intérieure à la connaissance]’:3

Knowledge working on its ‘object’ [writes Althusser] does not work on the
real object but on the peculiar raw material, that constitutes … its ‘object’
(of knowledge), and which, even in the most rudimentary forms of knowl-
edge, is distinct from the real object.4

1 rc, pp. 41–4, 61–2.

2 rc, pp. 61, 62 [lc, pp. 65, 66], translation modified.
3 Balibar, ‘Un texte de methodologie’, in lc, p. 659, my translation.
4 rc, p. 43; lc, p. 43.

© The Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004703599_007

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262 conclusion

Holding to Spinoza’s rigorous distinction between the attributes of thought and

extension, Althusser’s position constitutes a coherent rejection of both tradi-
tional theories of knowledge as the correspondence of a concept with its empir-
ical object, as well as of Hegelian sublation of the real of Nature within the
Idea. One would think these are terms so transparently Spinozist, that for any
reader with even a passing knowledge of his thought, Althusser’s subsequent,
repentant admission (‘We were Spinozist’) should have been wholly superflu-
ous.5 Instead, criticism of Althusser has tended to focus on his critique of the
idealist subject,6 largely ignoring his original epistemological theory.
In this book, in contrast, I have sought to remain faithful to Althusser’s
equally Spinozist rejection of universals, manifest in the position that there is
no ‘practice’ in general, standing in diametrical opposition to an idealist notion
of ‘theory’. There are only singular modes of practice; among which, alongside
the revolutionary, political, economic, musical, postcolonial, and a thousand
others, is to be counted theoretical practice:

There is no practice in general, but only distinct practices that are not
related in any Manichaean way with a theory which is opposed to them
in every respect. For there is not on one side theory, a pure intellectual
vision without body or materiality – and on the other side a completely
material practice which ‘gets its hands dirty’. This dichotomy is merely an
ideological myth in which a ‘theory of knowledge’ reflects many ‘interests’
other than those of reason.7

In these pages, I have tried to further develop in this fashion the singular modal-
ity of theoretical practice that is Marx’s critique of political economy, following
its transformations across the drafts, editions, and notes to Capital from 1857–
75, reading the history of these mutations through the thought of Althusser,
Macherey, Balibar, and Badiou.
That this conception of plural, singular practices maintains into the present
a certain validity is perhaps confirmed by the counter-example of Badiou’s
essential division of theory and practice, strikingly manifest for example in

5 Althusser 1972, p. 29.

6 ‘This definite system of conditions of theoretical practice is what assigns any given thinking
subject (individual) its place and function in the production of knowledges. … This determi-
nate reality is what defines the roles and functions of the “thought” of particular individuals,
who can only “think” the “problems” already actually or potentially posed; hence it is also
what sets to work their “thought power”, in the way that the structure of an economic mode of
production sets to work the labour-power of its immediate producers’ (rc, p. 42; lc, pp. 41–2).
7 rc, p. 59, translation modified; lc, p. 64.

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theory and practice today 263

his 2023 Mémoires d’outre politique. Here we find a conspicuous distinction

between the extreme abstraction of Badiou’s ontological system, on the one
hand, and a surprising poverty of ‘communist’ practice. Badiou describes at
length in his memoir the history and activity of the political party he co-
founded with Sylvain Lazarus and Natasha Michel, the groupe pour la foun-
dation de l’union des communists français (marxiste-léniniste) (UCFml) in the
period 1970–85. In this rich and varied history of Badiou’s transformation in the
wake of May ’68, from local member of the Parti Socialiste in Reims to Maoist
militant founder of the UCFml, Badiou recounts memorable moments in the
latter’s history.
Among the varied anecdotes composing Badiou’s memoir, what stands out
to this reader is the glaring disparity, not so much with the pure abstraction
of Badiou’s ontology, though this is striking as well, but between the grandiose
rhetoric of Badiou’s ‘Idea of communism’ and the targeted (not to say limited),
local nature of the militant interventions of the UCFml.
In The Communist Hypothesis, we read in this vein that:

An Idea is the subjective operation whereby a specific real truth is imag-

inarily projected into the symbolic movement of a History, we can say
that an Idea presents the truth as if it were a fact. … In order to anticipate,
at least ideologically, or intellectually, the creation of new possibilities,
we must have an Idea. … By combining intellectual constructs, which
are always global and universal, with experiments of fragments of truths,
which are local and singular, yet universally transmittable, we can give
new life to the communist hypothesis, or rather to the Idea of commu-
nism.8

The Idea of communism, Badiou proposes, is sustained by local, Maoist ‘exper-

iments’, moments of militant practice that would embody ‘the Idea of commu-
nism’. Badiou’s actual militancy, then, is presumably dedicated to such inter-
ventions in the name of this Idea.
Indeed, in Mémoires d’outre politique Badiou relishes in descriptions of the
Maoist militancy of his youth in the ‘Red Years’ of the 1970s. In one such
sequence, he narrates the occupation of the Chausson car factory, in which the
UCFml aligned itself with the more militant, anti-union faction of workers, the
so-called ‘Left Workers’ [gauche ouvrière]. Following the police occupation of
the factory,

8 Badiou 2015, §iv.

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264 conclusion

In the night of Sunday to Monday, a striking and very tense standoff

occurred in the factory: the police inside, with the management and staff,
the striking workers outside. Around 3 am, a squadron of police attempted
to escape. The workers’ anger exploded, and the police squadron, bom-
barded by stones, broke up and abandoned their attempt. It was a mo-
ment of intense joy, one that united the workers and Maoist militants. …
By Tuesday, slowly, tortuously, there occurred movement toward a limited
compromise: the management, which was in fact quite scared, agreed to
give 160 francs to everyone, and promised that 250 francs [per worker]
would also be distributed in November. There thus followed a return to
work.9

While Badiou’s narration of such struggles is bracing, the disparity between

the Maoist militants’ rhetoric and the actual terms of such struggles is glaring.
In sharp contrast to Badiou’s grandiose rhetoric of the Idea of communism, in
Badiou’s Mémoires, these local and singular ‘fragments of truth’ have a surpris-
ingly limited ‘communist’ weight and bearing.
It is not only the actual, necessarily compromised results of such struggles
that marks this disparity; the very terms of the demands of the Left workers
and UCFml are unexpectedly modest, given the latter’s militant rhetoric and
putatively anti-capitalist and communist position. In the case of the Chausson
struggle, three points were at stake for the UCFml, in Badiou’s retrospective
telling: 1. ‘That the worker be respected in his work’; 2. ‘[Rejection] of hierar-
chy in its most grievous forms’, including arbitrary individual salary increases
and bogus ‘qualifications’ demanded for work reassignments; and, above all 3.
‘A forty-hour workweek without salary decrease’.10
Now, it’s obviously laudable to struggle for workers’ and immigrant rights,
as did the UCFml. Badiou, however, presents the militancy of the UCFml as
if it were the now-forgotten cutting edge of communist, anti-capitalist strug-
gle, when instead, his memoir arguably reveals just how much French Maoism
was of a piece with what Moishe Postone disparaged four decades ago as ‘tra-

9 Badiou 2023, p. 304.

10 Other militant sequences of the UCFml articulated similarly modest demands. In July
1975, Badiou recounts that the UCFml articulated a ‘programme for the [immigrant] work-
ers’ dormitories [ foyers]’ that demanded 1. A fixed rate for rooms 2. Recognition of the
workers’ status as residents [locataires] 3. Freedom of assembly 4. Freedom to receive
visitors 5. Replacement of racist overseers [gérants] with concierges 6. Improvement of
hygiene and security 7. Availability of larger apartments for workers to house their fami-
lies’. Badiou 2023, p. 338.

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theory and practice today 265

ditional Marxism’: the fight for the Ricardian redistribution of wealth within
an unchanged, unexamined, and ill-comprehended capitalist social form by
‘Marxists’ of all stripes.11
Among the most surprising examples in Badiou’s memoir of this profound
theoretical obliviousness to the nature of capitalism is his commentary on the
third demand of the Chausson workers for a 40-hour workweek: ‘A guaranteed
forty-hour workweek without salary decrease. This is the median proposal we
[the UCFml] supported. The question of salary must be separated from that
of work time’. I was astounded to read, in 2023, Badiou’s next two sentences,
a still-enthusiastic and approving explanation of the significance of this posi-
tion: ‘The UCFml militants explained [to the workers] that this more or less
amounted to saying that one had abolished capitalism! The bosses make their
own profit from surplus value, work time extorted invisibly and without pay
from the workers’.12
Leaving aside the condescending tone of the passage, how is it possible for
an avowedly anti-capitalist, Marxist philosopher so thoroughly grounded in
theory, to believe today – a half century after the Reading Capital project (in
which, of course, Badiou himself played no role, having left the ens in 1961
for the army and then Reims), after the Neue Marx-Lektüre, after the critiques
of Postone, of Robert Kurz’s Wertkritik, after the contributions of the Interna-
tional Symposium on Marxist Theory – that the firm would not simply go out
of business or relocate in search of cheaper labour power were they unable to
realise a profit with this 40-hour workweek? That the ongoing class struggle
over the workweek and wages is not entirely integral to the laws of tendencies
of capitalism (and thus analysed by Marx smack in the middle of Volume i of
Capital, as Chapter 10, ‘The Working Day’)? That capitalism is a matter of free
choice from which a handful of workers could simply opt out, rather than an all-
encompassing social form? That both these workers and the UCFml militants
instructing them, having successfully negotiated their 40-hour workweek and
thus ‘abolished capitalism’, would not continue to require cash in hand to pur-
chase their bundle of life necessities, necessities otherwise unavailable because
they have been universally commodified in the capitalist social form? I could
go on.
My point is plain and simple, though perhaps far-reaching in its implications
for how we think about theoretical practice today. Between the lofty theory

11 On ‘traditional Marxism’, see Postone 1993, pp. 44–8.

12 ‘Les militants UCFml expliqueront que cela revient quasiment à dire qu’on abolit le capi-
talisme! C’est en effet sur la plus-value, donc un temps de travail extorqué gratuitement et
invisiblement aux ouvriers, que le patronat fait son bénéfice propre’. Badiou 2023, p. 302.

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266 conclusion

of Badiou’s Idea of communism and both hollow UCFml claims to have tran-
scended capitalism and the modest, benevolent practice of UCFml militancy,
lies an abyss: the unexplored Dark Continent that is Marx’s theoretical practice.
In the previous chapter, I constructed a palimpsest of Marx’s critique drawn
from the manifest content of Badiou’s agnostic logic of worlds. In the absence
of actual engagement with and working through of that critique at any point in
Badiou’s vast oeuvre, however, theory and practice alike are distorted: reduced
to acting out the causality of a social form, the nature of which one is unaware,
practice remains limited to the histrionic throwing of stones – granite or con-
ceptual – at the imaginary villains of capitalist misdeeds, whether evil Wall
Street bankers or ‘a handful of billionaires’,13 the self-proclaimed subjects of
anti-capitalism struggle on, secure in their faith, as was Lukács a century before,
that ‘Capitalism, after a fight of barely a century, has with great difficulty won
a round. In the end, it will be defeated by a knockout’.14
As the capitalist social form increasingly destroys not just human lives and
well-being, but planetary survivability for the majority of living species, we dis-
cover that it was Marx himself who refused all facile ideas of ‘communist’ or
‘Marxist’ practice, and instead remained faithful to the imperative of an ever-
developing, relentlessly transformed theoretical practice.15 There is no royal
road to overcoming the capitalist social form, and as its global subjects, we are
condemned to working through and ever more adequately conceptualising its
nature, if future generations are to live on to escape its contingent, historically
limited, but nonetheless implacable dynamic. What other, more incisive forms
of practice might arise from this more adequate theoretical practice is a ques-
tion, as Zhou Enlai famously said of the French Revolution and Commune, that
it is too soon to answer definitively.

13 Badiou 2023, p. 317.

14 Badiou 2023, p. 318.
15 See Saito 2017; Anderson 2010; and Musto 2020.

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Index
Abazari, Arash 109, 150–51, 153–54, 156, 164 logic of the world (l. of capitalism) 121,
Adorno, Theodor 9, 180, 232 233, 234, 249, 257, 258, 260
Akselrod, Liubov 131 ontological (logical) materialism 209,
Alexis, Jacques Stephen viii 210, 215, 216–217, 223–27
Althusser, Louis ix–xviii, 1–36, 38–63, 65, Balibar, Étienne ix, xii, 2, 7, 9, 10, 19–21, 25,
67–70, 72–81, 84–100, 102–04, 107–113, 30, 56, 62, 75–77, 80, 127, 138, 191, 222,
115, 121, 124, 127, 129–31, 134, 137–38, 141, 261, 262
156–57, 161–65, 175–78, 190, 209, 211–15, Banaji, Jairus 108
222, 224, 238, 239, 243, 261–62 Barbour, Charles 158–60, 192
apodictic analysis (a. dialectic, a. demon- Barthes, Roland 70
stration, a. structure) xii, xiii, xv, Bastiat, Frédéric Claude 32
xvii, 2, 3, 6–7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 23, 28, 31, Bauer, Bruno 158
32, 33, 38, 39, 61 Béguin, Victor 22
class struggle in theory 7, 8, 11, 17, 19, 21, Bellofiore, Riccardo 114, 115, 123, 127, 140, 141,
38, 47, 59 146, 147, 167, 179, 180, 181, 258
critique of empiricism (rejection of e.) Bhaskar, Roy 26
35–36, 38, 58, 65, 68, 209, 212, 261 Bianchi, Bernardo 192–194
nominalist deficiency (n. materialism, n. Bidet, Jacques 1, 30, 98, 102, 103, 105, 108,
knowledge) 23, 24, 86, 87, 88, 239 124, 125, 127, 146–147, 165, 239
overdetermination 23, 56 Bolzano, Bernard xvii, 19, 24, 53, 111, 179,
symptomatic reading xi, 5, 8, 39, 75, 95 217–224, 245
theoreticism (‘theoreticist’ position) ix, Bordignon, Michela 117–19
xv, xvi, 5, 6, 7–8, 17, 20, 32, 47, 57–58, Borges, Jorge Luis 68
60 Bottomore, Tom 122
Anderson, Kevin B. 266 bourgeois (petty b., b. thought, b. society)
Anderson, Perry 5, 58 11, 122, 211, 230
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand xiv Bouveresse, Jacques 18, 19, 218
Aristotle 24, 27, 32, 35–36, 45, 113, 158, 159, Brentel, Helmut 150
171, 179, 192, 220, 243–46 Breton, Stanislas 47, 48, 55, 58, 76
Aron, Raymond 33 Brown, Nathan 32
Arthur, Chris xii, 1, 6, 15, 39, 72, 111, 114–15, Brunschvicg, Léon 246
120–28, 133–35, 137–49, 156, 162, 163, Bruschi, Fabio 7
165, 177, 257, 268, 274
Caligaris, Gastón 174
Bachelard, Gaston 32, 33, 70 Cangiani, Michele x
Backhaus, Hans-Georg 41 Canguilhem, Georges 72
Badiou, Alain x, xii, xiii, xv, xvii–xviii, Cantor, Georg 218, 245
2, 12, 14, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 30, 40, 46, 49, commodification vii, viii, ix, xi–xii, xv,
55, 56, 60, 61, 80, 89–95, 98–100, 111, 118, xvi, 5, 13, 14, 15, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 40,
119, 155, 209–53, 256–58, 260, 262–66 46, 97, 99, 101–02, 109, 111, 121, 123, 124,
axiomatic thought (a. philosophy, a. 125, 126, 135, 137, 142, 143, 144, 145, 151,
materialism) xvii, 61, 209, 215, 217, 162, 174, 175, 177, 181, 207, 208, 211–12,
224, 227, 229, 231 213, 215, 227–28, 229, 230, 231–32, 234,
generic materialism 217, 231 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 242–43, 245, 247,
Idea of Communism 20, 232, 241, 263– 249, 250–52, 253, 254–55, 257, 258, 260,
64, 266 265–66

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282 index

capitalist accumulation (a. of commodi- Deleuze, Gilles 74, 87, 129, 213
ties) viii, 14, 104, 141, 144, 161, 174, 175, Democritus 84, 192, 195, 196
191, 232, 254, 258 Derrida, Jacques 72
capitalist mode of production viii, 12, Desanti, Jacques 59, 217, 260
31, 63, 84, 103, 109, 128, 134, 141, 144, 145, Descartes, René 45, 46, 53, 85, 90, 107,
151, 162, 174, 224, 229, 254 166
critique of c. 20, 210, 213, 227 Descombes, Vincent 7
development of c. 110, 121, 122 dialectics xii, 2, 22, 23–27, 50, 68, 121, 137,
industrial c. 15, 121 159, 139, 238
posthuman c. 227, 228, 242 Diefenbach, Katja x
primitive accumulation viii, 15, 30, 97, Dietzgen, Joseph 24, 110
101, 102, 104, 145 Dilthey, Wilhelm 72
Carrera, Juan Iñigo 29, 211 Dragstedt, Albert 153, 155
Cassin, Barbara x, 128, 179 Dukas, Paul 233
Cassou-Noguès, Pierre 33 Duménil, Gérard 18, 162
Cavaillès, Jean 18, 32, 33, 70, 111, 133, 210, 217, Duroux, Yves 56
219, 220, 224, 239
class struggle 7–8, 10–11, 12, 17, 19, 31, 38, 47, Elliott, Gregory 5, 7, 50, 58, 271
59, 141, 142–143, 265 Engels, Friedrich 5, 12–14, 24, 26, 31, 41,
class exploitation 12–13, 14 58, 76, 99, 121, 135, 136, 140, 154, 196,
Cole, Andrew 26 205
commodity (nature of c., c. production) Epicurus 192, 195–197
viii, ix, xvi, 12, 31, 46, 63, 64–66, Establet, Roger 62
101, 103, 104, 108–09, 112, 119, 122, Estop, Juan Domingo Sánchez xviii, 10, 11,
125, 126, 128, 133–34, 137, 138, 142, 38, 39, 42, 43, 47, 50, 51, 55–57
144, 146, 147, 148, 149–58, 161–62,
165, 167, 168–75, 179–86, 189, 198– Fallon, Jacques 27
99, 200, 229, 231, 232, 249–57, 258– Farris, Sara R. x
60 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 192, 237,
c. fetishism xvi, 30, 98, 232, 258 260
c.-based society 98, 251 Fineschi, Roberto 114, 152
commodification vii, viii–ix, 46, Fischbach, Franck 192
97, 139, 162, 175, 215, 229, 230, 233, Fluss, Harrison 23, 24–26, 129, 130
256 Forster, Edward Seymour 27
communism viii, ix, 151, 208, 209, 231, 236, Foucault, Michel 213
240, 245 Fowkes, Ben 175, 194
contradiction (Widerspruch) xii, xvii, 2, Frege, Gottlob 155, 217, 218, 221, 223, 224,
16, 22, 23, 26, 30, 42, 65, 72, 75, 101, 228, 244, 245
103, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111–12, 113, 119, Freud, Sigmund xiv, 56, 238
120, 125, 127, 133, 134, 135, 138–39, Frim, Landon 129, 130
146, 149, 150–58, 161, 162, 164, 165, Fulka, Josef xii
168, 170, 171, 172–73, 174, 180, 189, 190,
193, 197, 199, 202, 204, 230, 231, 238– Gabler, Georg Andreas 191
39 Gane, Michael 8
Cutler, Antony 8 Garaudy, Roger 9, 32, 49–51
Geroult, Martial 83
Darimon, Alfred 32 Goshgarian, G.M. 7, 8, 58
Deborin, Abram 26, 129, 131 Gracq, Julien 233
Defoe, Daniel 68

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index 283

Haeckel, Ernst 50 145, 146, 147, 155, 167, 168, 169, 180–89,
Hallward, Peter 213, 220 198, 199, 245, 251, 252, 255, 256
Hegel, G.W.F. xii, xvii, 6, 21–26, 29, 30, 39, abstract labour 13, 64, 67, 104, 124, 165,
41, 43, 50, 51, 60–62, 68, 80, 90, 92, 101, 167, 168, 169, 176, 186, 235, 241, 251, 252,
107, 108, 110–19, 121–26, 130, 137, 138, 255, 258, 259, 260
141, 145, 149–53, 155, 159, 160, 162, 163, labour power viii, ix, xvi, 13, 30, 97,
165, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 186, 189–93, 101, 105, 109, 126, 138, 140, 147, 148, 199,
195, 196, 212, 222, 223, 238, 243, 246, 201–02, 204, 205, 212, 227, 228, 249, 262,
260 265
Absolute Subject xiv, 109 labour theory of value viii, ix, 200, 243,
Aufhebung xvii, 65, 67, 100, 101, 103, 164, 258
167, 190 Lacan, Jacques xiii, xiv, 50, 56, 135, 136,
Hegelian negative dialectics 2, 68, 238 218, 222–23, 235–42
Reflexionsbestimmungen xvii, 41, 149, Lalande, André x, 27, 31, 32, 46, 49, 111, 134,
150, 151, 156, 157, 160, 164 172, 178, 179, 229, 230
Heinrich, Michael 1, 5, 12, 14, 17, 27, 32, 41, Lange, Elena Louisa 124
64, 65, 102, 107, 119–21, 124, 136, 137, 142, Laplanche, Jean 47, 50, 210
150, 153–56, 158, 161, 164, 165, 167–71, Lapointe, Sandra 205, 217
175–92, 231, 250–52 Lasowski, Aliocha 63
Hemming, Laurence xvi Lassalle, Ferdinand 23
Hubman, Gerald 99 Laz, Jacques 218–221, 223
Huhn, Wilson 191 Lazarus, Sylvain 263
Hume, David 28 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 23, 40, 68, 85, 87, 129
Hussain, Athar ix Lesjak, Carolyn 26
Husserl, Edmund 72, 111, 218 Levine, Norman 108, 115, 195
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 72, 73, 80, 87, 213–15,
ideology (theory of i., i. critique) 10, 22, 227
30, 50, 70, 77, 80, 97, 98, 99, 211, 214, Libera, Alain de 179
216 Lietz, Barbara 176, 177
Iñigo Carrera, Juan 29, 211 Linden, Marcel van der 99
Lordon, Frédéric 192
Jacobi, Carl Gustav Jacob 25 Louverture, Toussaint 233
Jameson, Fredric 104 Lucretius Carus, Titus 75, 84
Jappe, Anselm 180 Lukács, Georg 10, 114, 115, 122–23, 128, 133,
Jelles, Jarig 193 135, 266
Luxemburg, Rosa 115, 122
Kant, Immanuel 18, 92, 111, 219, 223, 226,
243, 246, 248 Macherey, Pierre xii–xiii, xv, xvii, 1–4, 6,
Kaplan, E. Ann x 16, 18, 20–21, 23–25, 27, 28, 30, 34–40,
Kautsky, Karl 12, 177–78 42–43, 45, 46, 48, 53–56, 58–85, 87–93,
Kirn, Gal x 95–96, 99–104, 106–10, 112–15, 120, 121,
Kojève, Alexandre 103, 238 123–34, 138, 148–49, 158, 162–64, 166,
Kosík, Karel 114 173, 193, 202–04, 206–07, 222, 223, 230,
Koyré, Alexandre 239 238, 262
Kugelmann, Ludwig 110, 154 literary (textual) production (p. of the
Kurz, Robert 176, 265 text) 70, 74, 77
materialist analysis 68, 75, 76, 80–81,
Labelle, Gilles 195 101, 104, 106, 110
labour xvi, 15, 35, 64, 73, 104, 105, 138, 142, Madonia, Franca xiii

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284 index

Marx, Karl vii–xviii, 1–24, 26–36, 38–43, Navarro, Fernanda 49

46, 47, 49, 50–53, 56, 60–69, 75–79, 84, Nesbitt, Nick viii, x, xi, 32, 39, 102, 105, 179,
87, 96–115, 119–28, 130, 132–213, 215, 216, 198, 201, 211, 218
222, 226–41, 243–46, 249–62, 265, 266
additive synthetic (dialectical) method Oittinen, Vesa 26, 129
xvii, 163, 172 Oldenburg, Henry 164
critique of political economy vii, xi, xv, opposition (Gegensatz) 65, 152, 153, 157–58,
xvi, 11, 12, 14, 16, 31, 33, 35, 63, 65, 99, 159, 160, 172, 175, 193
137, 143, 178, 192, 203, 208, 210, 227, 230,
231, 232, 235, 236, 243, 245, 260, 262 Peden, Knox 83, 213
process (method) of exposition 28, 42, Plato 244
61, 67, 68, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 120, 121, Plekhanov, Georgi Valentinovich xiv, 49,
145, 148, 157, 164, 189, 190, 197 50, 52, 54, 59, 121, 129
social form vii–xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii– Poincaré, Henri 246
xviii, 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13–16, 29, 30, political epistemology ix, xii, 2, 3, 7, 8, 202,
32, 35, 39, 42, 44, 45, 46, 56, 59, 61, 63, 206
76, 87, 97, 100, 101, 104, 106, 107, 109, Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 47, 50, 210
110–111, 115, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 131, Postone, Moishe 245, 246, 264, 265
133–134, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 151, 161, proletariat 10, 30, 102–103, 122, 236, 237
167, 174. 175, 177–178, 184, 190, 197, 209, Proust, Marcel 124
210, 212, 217, 222, 227, 230–31, 234, 235–
36, 241, 242–43, 245, 247, 249, 251–52, Rancière, Jacques 6, 20, 21, 62, 222
253–260, 265–66 Read, Jason 84
thought-concrete (Gedankenkonkretum) real object 8, 9, 29, 34, 38, 40–41, 42, 56, 57,
17, 34, 40, 60, 69, 78, 89, 102, 103, 177, 58, 69, 90, 91, 93, 111, 214, 259, 261
178, 180, 200, 211, 234 Ree, Erik Van 50
Maspero, François 1 reflections of determination (Reflexionsbes-
Matheron, Alexandre 192 timmungen) xvii, 41, 149, 150, 156, 157,
Matheron, François 9 160, 164
Matthys, Jean xi, 2, 6–8, 10, 40, 42–45, 49, Reichelt, Helmut 41
50, 56, 89, 94 Reinhard, Kenneth 268
Mattick, Paul 259 Reuten, Geert xii, 114, 121, 122, 137, 141, 156
Matysik, Tracie 50, 192 Ricardo, David 32, 35, 63, 251
McIvor, Martin 195 Ricœur, Paul 48
McNulty, Tracy xiii, xiv, 136 Rimbaud, Arthur 323
Meiksins Wood, Ellen viii, 102 Robert, Hubert 233
Michel, Natasha 263 Robespierre, Maximilien xiv
monism xi, xiv, xv, 44, 48, 49–56, 59, 89, Rosdolsky, Roman 125
129, 130, 135 Roudinesco, Elisabeth xiii, 238
Montag, Warren 55, 68, 71–74, 81, 87, 127, 131 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 233
Morfino, Vittorio xiii, 1, 3, 4, 74, 75, 80, 84 Roy, Joseph 66, 154, 189, 205
Moseley, Fred 6, 80, 105, 106, 114, 120, 134– Rubel, Maximilien 192, 194, 195, 197
136, 139, 140, 156, 167, 169, 171, 176, 177, Rubin, Isaak Illich 76
179–88, 200, 201, 254, 257 Rusnock, Paul 218, 220
Müller-Doohm, Stefan 9 Russell, Bertrand 118, 119, 224, 225, 245, 248
Murray, Patrick ix, 26, 103, 114, 140, 200, 251,
252, 277 Saito, Kohei 266
Mury, Gilbert 49, 51–55 Sartre, Jean-Paul 233
Musto, Marcello 13, 15, 31, 32, 231, 266 Schmidt, Günther 192

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index 285

Schoenberg, Arnold 233 163–64, 166, 189, 193, 225, 226, 243, 245,
Schwarz, Winfried 176, 177 246, 248, 249
Šebestík, Jan 218, 220 Trendelenburg, Adolf 158–60, 192
Shulyatikov, Vladimir 50 Trotsky, Leon 129
Smith, Adam 29, 30, 32, 35, 63, 69, 211, 212
Smith, Tony xii, 6, 30, 80, 114, 115, 156, 257 Valéry, Paul 233
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred x, 76, 180 value (nature or substance of v., v.-form –
Sotiris, Panagiotis ix, 8, 12, 20, 56 Wertform, v.-objectivity, v.-relationship)
Spinoza, Baruch xi–xv, xvii, 2–4, 6–9, viii, xvi, xviii, 12–13, 14, 18, 21, 22,
12, 13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24–26, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 63, 64, 66, 67, 76, 97, 100,
33–38, 40–50, 53–62, 68, 69, 71, 73– 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 120, 122, 124, 126,
75, 79–96, 98–102, 105–06, 109–13, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 148, 150, 151,
115, 116, 124, 127–35, 140, 143, 148– 153–56, 157–58, 164–65, 167–73, 174–77,
49, 158, 161, 162, 164, 166, 173, 179, 181, 179–89, 191, 192, 198–201, 204, 205, 212,
189, 192–95, 197–99, 202, 203, 205, 230–31, 232, 235, 236, 241, 243, 245–46,
206, 208, 215, 216, 222, 230, 238, 239, 249, 251–53, 254–60
262 exchange-value 13, 63, 64, 65, 66, 103,
attribute of extension 34, 46, 60, 81, 82, 108, 112, 133, 134, 151, 152, 153–54, 157,
94, 95, 96, 110, 181 158, 161–62, 164–65, 172, 173, 176, 179–80,
attribute of thought xiii, xvi, 3, 6, 16, 182, 188, 189, 228–29, 249–53, 254–56,
29, 34, 38, 57, 66, 77, 81, 88, 94, 96, 105, 257, 258, 259
110, 162, 166, 196, 259, 261 surplus value ix, xvi, 13, 30, 42, 46, 64,
common notions 3, 42, 57, 87, 96–97, 98, 65, 66, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 111, 119,
103, 132, 197, 202, 203, 206–07 124, 125, 126, 134–35, 140, 143, 144, 146–
substance x, xi, xiv, xv, xvi, 3, 4, 6, 13, 147, 148, 151, 165, 179, 184, 197, 198, 199,
18–25, 40, 43–52, 54–61, 64, 67, 81–82, 200, 201, 204, 227, 239, 251, 257, 265
84, 85, 88–93, 97, 98, 101, 104, 105, 109– use-value 64, 65, 67, 100, 103, 108, 112,
10, 113, 124, 129–34, 143, 148, 156, 159, 134, 138, 151, 152, 153–54, 157–58, 161–62,
161–162, 165, 167, 176, 177, 179, 180–85, 164, 167, 169, 171, 172, 173, 179, 183, 185,
193, 212, 227, 241, 249, 251, 252–53, 255, 189, 226, 228–29, 249–50, 256
258, 259–60 Vargas, Yves 50
Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich 50–52, 54, 59 Verne, Jules 68
Starosta, Guido 174
Stein, Sebastian 115 Wagner, Adolph ix, 185, 231, 254
Wark, Mackenzie 7
Thompson, Edward Palmer 5, 57, 58 Williams, Eric 56
Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 68 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 235
Toscano, Alberto 76, 180 Wood, Ellen Meiksins viii, ix, 102
Tosel, André 192, 193 Wretzel, Joshua 115
totality (Totalität) xi–xii, xiv–xv, xvii, 3,
4, 14, 26, 42, 45, 50, 52, 55, 59, 68–69, Yakhot, Yehoshua 128, 129, 131
71–72, 74–76, 78, 80, 82, 85, 88, 90, 93,
95, 100, 108, 113–41, 143, 147, 152, 156, Zasulich, Vera 15

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