Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic (Historical Materialism)

In this critical re-appraisal of Reading Capital, Nick Nesbitt traces the Althusserianist theory of a materialist dialectic across diverse sites, including Althusser’s unpublished archive, Macherey’s exposition of Spinoza’s Ethics, and Badiou’s Logics of Worlds. The explicit Althusserian engagement with Marx’s Capital was largely limited to Reading Capital. But this theoretical intervention remained insistent after 1968, adopting the form of a general theory of materialist dialectic. In this book, Nesbitt brings this fully developed theory of materialist dialectic to bear anew on the reading of Capital itself. In doing so, he unsettles common misconceptions about Marx and shows that Spinoza’s influence on Marx is far greater – and that of Hegel lesser – than has been previously thought.