MARXISM AND POWER 5 in his discussion of Marx's reading of classical political economy, quotes the following passage from Capital Voll: "In this way, classical political economy believed it had ascended from the accidental prices of albour to the real value of labour. It then determined this value by the value of subsistence goods necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of the labourer. It thus unwittingly changed the terrain by subsituting for the value of labour, upto this point the apparent object of its investigations, the value of labour-power, a power which only exists in the personality of the labourer...classical political economy never arrived at an awareness of this substitution...".4 This was so, says Althusser, because it was answering a question that was never posed: "its eyes are still fixed on the old question".5 It is Althusser's argument that, within scientific discourses, objects and problems often remain invisible "because they are rejected in principle, repressed from the fields of the visible; and that is why their fleeting presence in the field when it does occur , . . goes unperceived".6 Power suffers a similar fate in marxist theoretical discourse, even though it remains implicit in the whole range of his and Engels' writings. We may add that when history poses questions anew, only then are texts re-read to locate the silences and absences in discourse. The fact that increasingly, Marxist scholars are finding themselves pre-occupied with the problem of the theoretical status of power/~only indicates that this hitherto repressed object now "seeks to appear", to enter the field of the visible. For, the blanks in the theoretical field of marxism present a serious obstacle to inquiry. We begin with a brief reconceptualization of power as it appears in the theoretical discourses where it has a central presence. This, we beleive, will help us re-read Marxist texts. This reconceptualization, based primarily on the works of Hannah Arendt, Talcott Parsons, Michel Foucault and Anthony Giddens, is only briefly recounted here.7 In the subsequent section, we take a look at the way Marxist texts deal with the notion of power and argue that already there is a notion that deviates significantly from the received wisdom of Marxism. The third section attempts to locate resources for an alternate conceptualization from certain other texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin. In the final section, we turn, to some of the major philosophical implications of this reconceptualization. This section may be seen as a post-Gramscian return to a philosophy of praxis, within which alone can the new conceptualization be located. The Concept of Power Despite incompatible theoretical frameworks and widely differing conceptual languages, the common point that binds all the theorists mentioned above, namely Arendt, Parsons, Foucault and Giddens, is