ABSTRACT
The 'reading' of Karl Marx's philosophical achievement as antipositivist and anti-humanist in which this chapter offers, owes a great deal to the work of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, but it also departs from Althusser's work on a number of fundamental questions. It is well known that Marx and Frederick Engels were at first identified with the circle of 'left-wing' critics and interpreters of Hegel known as the 'Left Hegelians'. Conscious of the limitations of this philosophical milieu, Marx and Engels were immediately attracted to the Left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach's 'materialist inversion' of Hegel's philosophy. Feuerbach's critique of Hegelian speculative philosophy involved the claim that thought requires some real object, not just the object which does the thinking, but the object about which it thinks. Nicos Poulantzas has provided a threefold classification of the concepts specific to historical materialism which, despite its preliminary nature, provides some helpful clarification.
