ABSTRACT
Whereas in American deconstruction the topic of epistemology came up via the work of Derrida, in British post-structuralism it was posed particularly in the area of social sciences, in the writings of Barry Hindess and Paul Q. For reasons Marx explored in The German ideology, the dominant culture in France has a rationalist, in Britain an empiricist tradition. An epistemology always aims to establish a relation of knowledge between an object and a subject of that knowledge. Beginning from such abstractions as labour and money, already worked up by classical economics, this advances to categories such as the state, international exchange and the world market. Marxist epistemology, as re-worked in Althusser, appears immune to the simplistic claim that there cannot be knowledge because you cannot have a signified without a signifier so that all science depends upon discourse. PCMP supposes that a conceptual organisation can work on the concept of mode of production.
