For Marx

For Marx

Cover of the first edition
Author	Louis Althusser
Original title	Pour Marx
Translator	Ben Brewster
Country	France
Language	French
Subject	Karl Marx
Publisher	François Maspero, Allen Lane
Publication date	1965
Published in English	1969
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	258 (first edition)
ISBN	978-1844670529

For Marx (French: Pour Marx) is a 1965 book by the philosopher Louis Althusser,^[1] a leading theoretician of the French Communist Party (PCF), in which the author reinterprets the work of the philosopher Karl Marx, proposing an epistemological break between the young, Hegelian Marx, and the old Marx, the author of Das Kapital (1867–1883). The book, first published in France by François Maspero, established Althusser's reputation. The texts presented in For Marx are theoretical interventions in a definite conjuncture, particularly aiming at the definition of the lines to be pursued by the PCF after Stalin's years in the Soviet Union. Althusser's position is of theoretical antihumanism, and is against the teleology of history. Althusser defends that history is a process without subject and with an open end, but that has determinations that can be theorized by the science of history as constructed by Marx in his mature work, Das Kapital. Society is then conceptualized as a complex whole articulated in dominance by the economy where several social practices co-exist with a relative autonomy, introducing the concept overdetermination to characterize the levels of effectivity.