 With his re-reading of Marx, Althusser wished to offer an alternative to the two then dominant understandings of Marx’s philosophy. Both understandings were charged with the same mistake. This mistake was, fundamentally, an epistemological one: each cast Marx as an empiricist. At first glance, this charge might seem ridiculous. This is especially the case as, according to Althusser’s own critique, both understandings of Marx offered variants of the Hegelian claim that there is a reason to history. For Althusser, however, both readings were “empiricist” inasmuch as each ascribed to Marx a theory of knowledge in which the subject, by means of a process of observation and abstraction, comes to know what an object really and truly is, according to its essence. This is a definition of empiricism meant to include philosophers as diverse as Locke, Kant, and Hegel and traditions as varied as British Empiricism, German Idealism, Positivism, and Pragmatism. In the case of Humanist Marxism, the object that comes to be known by its essence is the human subject in its full freedom. It does so by means of critique and by creatively overcoming that which is alien to it or “merely historical.” In the case of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, this object is the economy, the reality that underlies, causes, and can explain all historical structures and transformations. The economy comes to be known as it truly is only by the proletariat, by those whom the historical process has endowed with an objective gaze and who possess the ability to make this truth objective.