Australian Left Review
Article Title
Reading 'Reading Capital'
Abstract
WITHIN THE WORLD OF MARXIST THEORY western Marxism has developed in richness and responsiveness to reality to the very extent that it has disengaged itself from the scholastification and dogmatisation of Marx’s thought by the Soviet diamat. But at this moment there has emerged within western Marxism itself, an interpretation of Marx which shows no intense theoretical quarrel with the diamat but rather turns against the whole of western Marxism within which it was nurtured, an interpretation of Marxism as a ‘science’, an interpretation which summons up the whole nexus of dogmatics associated with the centrality of Das Kapital, economic determinism, antihumanism, and dialectical materialism as Marxist philosophy. Do we have in this interpretation whose centre is Louis Althusser, dogmatism returned in disguise inveighing against western Marxism’s non-scientificity, Hegelianism and humanism, a dogmatism that argues for Marxist ‘science’ from the standpoint of Marxist ‘science’?