 Inasmuch as Althusser admits in this piece that Marx never fully abandoned Hegel’s logic, the concept of human alienation, or the idea that history has a goal, the inventory Althusser offers can be seen as an assenting response to the charge that he had ignored Marx’s explicit statements in order to imagine for Marx a consistent and “true” philosophy. Althusser does not give up on the task of articulating a better Marxist philosophy, however. Instead, he argues that there is another, “materialist” criterion that allows us to see the limits of Marx’s thinking and to recognize those points in his work where Marx was unable to transcend his bourgeois background and his education in German Idealism. This criterion is that of the practical success or failure of Marx’s concepts as each has been employed in the history of Marxist movements. When we have made this inventory and grouped together the successful concepts, what we are left with is a materialist Marxism, a Marxism which endorses the scientific method as the best way for understanding ourselves and our potential but that also understands that this method is fallible. Remaining also is a Marxism which does not subscribe to any philosophy of history and which certainly does not maintain that capitalism will inevitably lead to communism. This Marxism has no system of interrelated concepts that guarantee a scientific analysis. Further, it possesses no worked-out theory of the relations between economic structures and cultural structures but for that limited knowledge which scientific practice provides. Finally, this Marxism has given up the dream of analyzing the whole of culture and its movement from the outside; it realizes that one thinks inside and about the culture one inhabits in order to possibly effect and change that culture.