Reading Capital: Part II Continued (Chapter 6: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)

The gaps in Marx’s scientific discourse (historical materialism) cannot but suggest a tacit philosophical discourse (dialectical materialism). The task of the present text is to prevent Marx’s scientific texts from leading us by default to a philosophy of ideological empiricism.

What is new in Marx? Marx and Engels locate the novelty in the concept “surplus-value,” which nevertheless already appears in classical Political Economy, although not explicitly—there it is not named.

The classical Political Economists merely came across surplus-value as a fact, without recognizing, as Marx did, that in order to understand it an entirely new problematic was necessary. Marx was able to pose surplus-value as a problem rather than taking it as a solution.

Marx is the site of a genuine theoretical event, the inauguration of a new problematic in science and philosophy. Such a new problematic is both a reformulation of the basic questions and methodology of a theory, and also a transformation of the KO which through this transformation gains a better grasp of the RO. Althusser combines the Hegelian insight that the thing itself changes when our knowledge of it changes with the un-Hegelian distinction between the RO and the KO which leaves the RO intact while the KO changes.

Now it is said that the RO is “the absolute reference point for the process of knowledge which is concerned with it” (156). We continually deepen our knowledge of the RO by continually recalibrating, or else periodically reconstructing, the KO.

The study of the mutations of problematic and KO, or the history and mechanism of knowledge production, is philosophy.