The appearance of Reading Capital and For Marx in English translation influenced the development of Marxist thought in the Anglophone world throughout the 1970s.

[4] The Marxian economist Harry Cleaver wrote that Althusser and his co-authors provided one of the most politically influential of the philosophical reinterpretations of Das Kapital that were made by Marxists in the 1960s and 1970s.

However, he considered their influence regrettable, writing that in For Marx and Reading Capital, Althusser's aim was to revitalize dialectical materialism "as an ideology to mediate the widely discredited political practices of the French Communist Party."

However, he suggested that the difficulty of the work supported the charge that Althusser aspired to "Leninist vanguardism" and wanted "a small, theoretically sophisticated cadre" to "direct the revolution", and expressed agreement with the historian Eric Hobsbawm's view that the book showed that Althusser was an "extremely selective reader of Marx.

"[6] The economist Alain Lipietz further pointed out that, while Reading Capital helped to disengage French Marxism from an oversimplification, determinism and mechanism inherited from the Stalinist period,[7] it also obscured and censored the first chapter of Das Kapital, in which Marx analyzed the relationship of commodity and money.