1965 was a very good year for the late renowned French philosopher Louis Althusser. In that year Althusser published the single authored Pour Marx (For Marx in English) and his collaborative book with four other authors Lire Le Capital (Reading Capital in English), a radical new reading of Karl Marx. Not bad going for someone who suffered for many years from what we today call bipolar. For Marx remains a classic book from the period but Reading Capital has almost taken on a life of its own in the last couple of years. Rereading it today in English is possible in a way that could not have been envisaged when a very much abridged English translation of the parts by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar was published by New Left Books in 1970. Today’s Theoretical Times globe, post-GFC and post 9/11, a world of Donald Trump in the USA, United Kingdom Independence Party, Brexiteers and the English Defence League in the UK and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia, need this radical interpretation of Marx’s three volumes of Capital from the mid 19th century more than ever before.
These dangerous and threatening Theoretical Times explain partly why ‘we are still the contemporaries of May 68’ as another French philosopher Alain Badiou, and a student of Althusser in the 1950s and 1960s, has put it. Where though can we look for resources, for maps and routes out of the quicksand? Fifty year old texts, such as Louis Althusser and others’ Reading Capital from 1965, have recently been the subject of wholesale international conferences and overflowing conventions. These events are openly committed to theorising a new, resurrected ‘idea of communism’ for the future and are regularly occurring as far apart as England, USA, Germany and South Korea as the search for long term political economy answers to the ravages of contemporary neo-liberalism continues apace.
The Louis Althusser/Etienne Balibar version of Reading Capital was first published in 1968, an abridged version of the original 1965 text by Althusser and Balibar and also, Jacques Ranciere, Pierre Macherey and Roger Establet, published by Maspero at the time as Lire Le Capital Vols 1 and 2. Etiennne Balibar himself was one of the speakers a few years ago at the Princeton University conference in the USA in November 2013 which was held to celebrate the publication, forty eight years previously, of the original French version of this continuously influential book. Verso books, fully fifty years on from the original full French edition, last year published an English translation of the book, 565 pages in length, called Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. This edition comes replete with a fascinating and informative editorial ‘presentation’ by one of the surviving original authors Etienne Balibar, himself along with Jacques Ranciere one of the contemporary world’s foremost left philosophers.
The current watershed for theory today is the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-2008, a global mega event, a radical political rupture, an ‘event’ of the kind envisaged by Slavoj Zizek in his Event: Philosophy in Transit. For Zizek, after such an event nothing remains the same, even if there are no obvious large changes. The GFC has been seen as a fatal consequence of a post-millennial catastrophic search for ‘fool’s gold’ and, partially, the result of ‘automatic speculation in the futurism of the instant’ as French theorist of speed Paul Virilio enigmatically put it. Now, we are ‘after the goldrush’, as Canadian singer songwriter Neil Young once succintly sang in the early 1970s when yet another ‘capitalist crisis’ was manifesting itself, and furthermore stuck in what I have called in my own recent work ‘post-catastrophe’, a frantic search for theory is beginning again. It is, in this context, worth taking stock of the relationship between the ‘post-crash’ global society and contemporary theory, and new disciplinary and interdisciplinary movements across the globe. ReReading Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Ranciere’s Reading Capital in 2016 emphasises that we already have a partially sketched out, if flawed, theoretical base for this task. Theoretical Times indeed.
