Richard Ashley's writings in the 1980s are central to the production of post-structuralist or ‘dissident’ scholarship in International Relations (IR). In this article, I use analysis of the standard dissident view of Ashley's writings to examine the interpretive practices through which the community of dissident scholars was produced textually. Dissident ‘thinking space’ in the discipline was produced in part through the exclusion of Marx, capital and class, despite these being present in Ashley's writings throughout this period. Similar interpretive practices were applied to the writings of Michel Foucault, with similar effects. This exclusion has negative consequences for dissident scholarship, in particular analysis of historicity and the place of capitalism in contemporary world politics. Overcoming these problems requires reading the work of Ashley and other founders of dissident scholarship in a different way are attentive to the silences of thinking space.