Pour Marx made Althusser a sensation in French intellectual circles,^[8] and provided one of the most politically important philosophical readings of Capitalmade during the Marxist revival of the 1960s and 1970s.^[9] Pour Marx was translated into numerous languages: an Italian version was published in 1967 and an English version in 1969.^[10][11] Cesare Luporini, despite his largely favorable view of Althusser, commented in the preface to the Italian translation that Althusser's anti-humanism, "manifests itself in a tendency to make man disappear as much as possible from the framework of the so-called human sciences."^[12]

The English translation of Pour Marx helped to shape the development of Marxist thought in the Anglophone world throughout the 1970s.^[13] Harry Cleaver, who sees its influence as unfortunate, considers it, together with Reading Capital, as an attempt by Althusser and his colleagues to reinterpret Marx with the "aim of revitalizing dialectical materialism as an ideology to mediate the widely discredited political practices of the French Communist Party." He criticizes Althusser's science of history for being ahistorical and abstract.^[14]

Althusser was subsequently critical of Pour Marx, believing that it largely ignored the class struggle, a view expressed in his 1974 work Essays in Self-criticism. However, the only revision he considered necessary was to redefine philosophy, from being a "theory of theoretical practice" to being "the class struggle in theory". Althusser thus retained the basic theoretical structure of Pour Marx.^[15]