 In each of the practices that together comprise, at any given time, a specific mode of production, some form or forms of labor uses the existing means of production to transform existing materials into new products. According to Althusser, this realization is Marx’s basic insight. In scientific production, for example, thinkers use existing theories to transform existing concepts into new, scientific concepts. However, and this is where Althusser’s Spinozism becomes apparent and also where he breaks with economistic understandings of Marx, it is not the case that the analysis of any one mode of production within the totality of productive practices is capable of generating an understanding of the way in which all rest of the productive processes are causally determined. Rather, and in line with the parallelism attributed by Leibniz to Spinoza, as each productive process transforms a unique material (concepts in science, goods in economics, social relations in politics), each process can only be understood in terms of its unique causal structure. In addition, and again also in a way similar to Spinoza’s account of substance as seen from different aspects, each productive process is understood to stand in relation to and play a part of a complexly structured whole, none of which is reducible to being the simple or essential cause of the others.