For Marx

Published in France in 1965 by François Maspero, this book by the philosopher Louis Althusser, a leading theoretician of the French Communist Party (PCF), reinterprets the work of Karl Marx. Its texts are theoretical interventions in a specific conjuncture, aimed above all at defining the lines the PCF should pursue after Stalin's years in the Soviet Union.

The book proposes an «epistemological break» between the young, Hegelian Marx and the mature Marx, author of Das Kapital (1867–1883). Althusser defends theoretical antihumanism and rejects the teleology of history: history would be a process without a subject and with an open end, yet with determinations that the science of history, as Marx built it in his mature work, can theorize. Society is conceived as a complex whole articulated around the dominance of the economy, in which several social practices coexist with relative autonomy, leading Althusser to introduce the concept of overdetermination.