When Althusser articulated the concept of theoretical practice (la pratique théorique) in his introduction to Reading Capital, he intended the concept not as a conflation of the traditional pairing of theory and practice, nor by any means as an elimination of other forms of revolutionary practice, but just the opposite, as an enlargement of the concept of practice to include that of theoretical production, bypassing the subject-object doublet of traditional theories of knowledge.¹ He did so, moreover, by deploying the central Spinozist epistemological tenet, verum index sui et falsi to make the famous claim that underlies the argument of this book:

The criterion of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges produced by Marx’s theoretical practice is provided by his theoretical practice itself, i.e., by the adequacy of demonstration [valeur demonstrative]. Marx’s theoretical practice is the criterion of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges that Marx produced.²

Against empiricism, Althusser categorically asserted in this manner the autonomy of adequate demonstration, against traditional theories of knowledge as the correspondence of thought with its empirical referent.

Equally Spinozist is Althusser’s categorical assertion that Marx constructs Capital not from observation of the empirical real, but from the critique of pre-existing ideas – of classical political economy, French socialism, and even the English Factory Reports – such that Marx’s analysis takes place entirely within the attribute of thought, or, as Etienne Balibar puts it in his Methodological Annex to the first edition of Lire le Capital, ‘an analysis that remains entirely within thought [intérieure à la connaissance]’:³

Knowledge working on its ‘object’ [writes Althusser] does not work on the real object but on the peculiar raw material, that constitutes … its ‘object’ (of knowledge), and which, even in the most rudimentary forms of knowledge, is distinct from the real object.⁴

Holding to Spinoza’s rigorous distinction between the attributes of thought and extension, Althusser’s position constitutes a coherent rejection of both traditional theories of knowledge as the correspondence of a concept with its empirical object, as well as of Hegelian sublation of the real of Nature within the Idea. One would think these are terms so transparently Spinozist, that for any reader with even a passing knowledge of his thought, Althusser’s subsequent, repentant admission (‘We were Spinozist’) should have been wholly superfluous.⁵ Instead, criticism of Althusser has tended to focus on his critique of the idealist subject,⁶ largely ignoring his original epistemological theory.

In this book, in contrast, I have sought to remain faithful to Althusser’s equally Spinozist rejection of universals, manifest in the position that there is no ‘practice’ in general, standing in diametrical opposition to an idealist notion of ‘theory’. There are only singular modes of practice; among which, alongside the revolutionary, political, economic, musical, postcolonial, and a thousand others, is to be counted theoretical practice:

There is no practice in general, but only distinct practices that are not related in any Manichaean way with a theory which is opposed to them in every respect. For there is not on one side theory, a pure intellectual vision without body or materiality – and on the other side a completely material practice which ‘gets its hands dirty’. This dichotomy is merely an ideological myth in which a ‘theory of knowledge’ reflects many ‘interests’ other than those of reason.⁷

In these pages, I have tried to further develop in this fashion the singular modality of theoretical practice that is Marx’s critique of political economy, following its transformations across the drafts, editions, and notes to Capital from 1857–75, reading the history of these mutations through the thought of Althusser, Macherey, Balibar, and Badiou.

That this conception of plural, singular practices maintains into the present a certain validity is perhaps confirmed by the counter-example of Badiou’s essential division of theory and practice, strikingly manifest for example in his 2023 Mémoires d’outre politique. Here we find a conspicuous distinction between the extreme abstraction of Badiou’s ontological system, on the one hand, and a surprising poverty of ‘communist’ practice. Badiou describes at length in his memoir the history and activity of the political party he co-founded with Sylvain Lazarus and Natasha Michel, the groupe pour la foundation de l’union des communists français (marxiste-léniniste) (UCFml) in the period 1970–85. In this rich and varied history of Badiou’s transformation in the wake of May ’68, from local member of the Parti Socialiste in Reims to Maoist militant founder of the UCFml, Badiou recounts memorable moments in the latter’s history.

Among the varied anecdotes composing Badiou’s memoir, what stands out to this reader is the glaring disparity, not so much with the pure abstraction of Badiou’s ontology, though this is striking as well, but between the grandiose rhetoric of Badiou’s ‘Idea of communism’ and the targeted (not to say limited), local nature of the militant interventions of the UCFml.

In The Communist Hypothesis, we read in this vein that:

An Idea is the subjective operation whereby a specific real truth is imaginarily projected into the symbolic movement of a History, we can say that an Idea presents the truth as if it were a fact. … In order to anticipate, at least ideologically, or intellectually, the creation of new possibilities, we must have an Idea. … By combining intellectual constructs, which are always global and universal, with experiments of fragments of truths, which are local and singular, yet universally transmittable, we can give new life to the communist hypothesis, or rather to the Idea of communism.⁸

The Idea of communism, Badiou proposes, is sustained by local, Maoist ‘experiments’, moments of militant practice that would embody ‘the Idea of communism’. Badiou’s actual militancy, then, is presumably dedicated to such interventions in the name of this Idea.

Indeed, in Mémoires d’outre politique Badiou relishes in descriptions of the Maoist militancy of his youth in the ‘Red Years’ of the 1970s. In one such sequence, he narrates the occupation of the Chausson car factory, in which the UCFml aligned itself with the more militant, anti-union faction of workers, the so-called ‘Left Workers’ [gauche ouvrière]. Following the police occupation of the factory,

In the night of Sunday to Monday, a striking and very tense standoff occurred in the factory: the police inside, with the management and staff, the striking workers outside. Around 3 AM, a squadron of police attempted to escape. The workers’ anger exploded, and the police squadron, bombarded by stones, broke up and abandoned their attempt. It was a moment of intense joy, one that united the workers and Maoist militants. … By Tuesday, slowly, tortuously, there occurred movement toward a limited compromise: the management, which was in fact quite scared, agreed to give 160 francs to everyone, and promised that 250 francs [per worker] would also be distributed in November. There thus followed a return to work.⁹

While Badiou’s narration of such struggles is bracing, the disparity between the Maoist militants’ rhetoric and the actual terms of such struggles is glaring. In sharp contrast to Badiou’s grandiose rhetoric of the Idea of communism, in Badiou’s Mémoires, these local and singular ‘fragments of truth’ have a surprisingly limited ‘communist’ weight and bearing.

It is not only the actual, necessarily compromised results of such struggles that marks this disparity; the very terms of the demands of the Left workers and UCFml are unexpectedly modest, given the latter’s militant rhetoric and putatively anti-capitalist and communist position. In the case of the Chausson struggle, three points were at stake for the UCFml, in Badiou’s retrospective telling: 1. ‘That the worker be respected in his work’; 2. ‘[Rejection] of hierarchy in its most grievous forms’, including arbitrary individual salary increases and bogus ‘qualifications’ demanded for work reassignments; and, above all 3. ‘A forty-hour workweek without salary decrease’.¹⁰

Now, it’s obviously laudable to struggle for workers’ and immigrant rights, as did the UCFml. Badiou, however, presents the militancy of the UCFml as if it were the now-forgotten cutting edge of communist, anti-capitalist struggle, when instead, his memoir arguably reveals just how much French Maoism was of a piece with what Moishe Postone disparaged four decades ago as ‘traditional Marxism’: the fight for the Ricardian redistribution of wealth within an unchanged, unexamined, and ill-comprehended capitalist social form by ‘Marxists’ of all stripes.¹¹

Among the most surprising examples in Badiou’s memoir of this profound theoretical obliviousness to the nature of capitalism is his commentary on the third demand of the Chausson workers for a 40-hour workweek: ‘A guaranteed forty-hour workweek without salary decrease. This is the median proposal we [the UCFml] supported. The question of salary must be separated from that of work time’. I was astounded to read, in 2023, Badiou’s next two sentences, a still-enthusiastic and approving explanation of the significance of this position: ‘The UCFml militants explained [to the workers] that this more or less amounted to saying that one had abolished capitalism! The bosses make their own profit from surplus value, work time extorted invisibly and without pay from the workers’.¹²

Leaving aside the condescending tone of the passage, how is it possible for an avowedly anti-capitalist, Marxist philosopher so thoroughly grounded in theory, to believe today – a half century after the Reading Capital project (in which, of course, Badiou himself played no role, having left the ENS in 1961 for the army and then Reims), after the Neue Marx-Lektüre, after the critiques of Postone, of Robert Kurz’s Wertkritik, after the contributions of the International Symposium on Marxist Theory – that the firm would not simply go out of business or relocate in search of cheaper labour power were they unable to realise a profit with this 40-hour workweek? That the ongoing class struggle over the workweek and wages is not entirely integral to the laws of tendencies of capitalism (and thus analysed by Marx smack in the middle of Volume I of Capital, as Chapter 10, ‘The Working Day’)? That capitalism is a matter of free choice from which a handful of workers could simply opt out, rather than an all-encompassing social form? That both these workers and the UCFml militants instructing them, having successfully negotiated their 40-hour workweek and thus ‘abolished capitalism’, would not continue to require cash in hand to purchase their bundle of life necessities, necessities otherwise unavailable because they have been universally commodified in the capitalist social form? I could go on.

My point is plain and simple, though perhaps far-reaching in its implications for how we think about theoretical practice today. Between the lofty theory of Badiou’s Idea of communism and both hollow UCFml claims to have transcended capitalism and the modest, benevolent practice of UCFml militancy, lies an abyss: the unexplored Dark Continent that is Marx’s theoretical practice. In the previous chapter, I constructed a palimpsest of Marx’s critique drawn from the manifest content of Badiou’s agnostic logic of worlds. In the absence of actual engagement with and working through of that critique at any point in Badiou’s vast oeuvre, however, theory and practice alike are distorted: reduced to acting out the causality of a social form, the nature of which one is unaware, practice remains limited to the histrionic throwing of stones – granite or conceptual – at the imaginary villains of capitalist misdeeds, whether evil Wall Street bankers or ‘a handful of billionaires’,¹³ the self-proclaimed subjects of anti-capitalism struggle on, secure in their faith, as was Lukács a century before, that ‘Capitalism, after a fight of barely a century, has with great difficulty won a round. In the end, it will be defeated by a knockout’.¹⁴

As the capitalist social form increasingly destroys not just human lives and well-being, but planetary survivability for the majority of living species, we discover that it was Marx himself who refused all facile ideas of ‘communist’ or ‘Marxist’ practice, and instead remained faithful to the imperative of an ever-developing, relentlessly transformed theoretical practice.¹⁵ There is no royal road to overcoming the capitalist social form, and as its global subjects, we are condemned to working through and ever more adequately conceptualising its nature, if future generations are to live on to escape its contingent, historically limited, but nonetheless implacable dynamic. What other, more incisive forms of practice might arise from this more adequate theoretical practice is a question, as Zhou Enlai famously said of the French Revolution and Commune, that it is too soon to answer definitively.