Althusser?

[Malesori]

Is anyone here a fan of the Structural Marxism of Louis Althusser? If so, why?

[subcp]

Althusser's politics were terrible, but I do enjoy his reading of Capital. Don't know that there is such a thing as 'structural Marxism', but I do think a structuralist view of the state and of capital are superior models to understand real experience and phenomenon.

[blake 3:17]

There's been a number of threads on Althusser. You could do a search!

I enjoyed this one, although it's not a primer: http://www.revleft.com/vb/althussers-later-writings-t176068/index.html

While I am certainly not a "fan" or adherent to Althusserian Marxism -- his thought was very provocative and brought a certain seriousness to both Marxist philosophy and theoretical rigor to Marxist social analysis. Maybe too much so. He was a philosopher and a philosopher of science.

I've only known one absolutely committed Althusserian, Norm Feltes, who was a fabulous thinker, teacher, and activist. I met Norm after he'd retired from York University, and was spending his retirement years as an entirely dedicated militant in the anti-poverty movement. I was doing my undergrad in English Lit and it was mentioned to a mutual friend while we were at a picket during a localized general strike in a city nobody on the line knew. We talked for a while, and I mentioned I'd just started reading a book on Modes of Production and the Victorian Novel, and did he know it? Yes, one couldn't be more familiar...

[JPSartre12]

Most of what Althusser and the structural Marxist tradition say is too determinist, in my opinion. It takes to much responsibility and free will out of the hands of the individual for my liking.

[blake 3:17]

I just read this from Richard Seymour. By far the best short overview of Althusser's I've ever read: http://www.leninology.com/2011/11/louis-althusser-and-socialist-strategy.html


Most of what Althusser and the structural Marxist tradition say is too determinist, in my opinion. It takes to much responsibility and free will out of the hands of the individual for my liking.


Well M. Sartre, of course. Althusser was writing against Sartre.

And the question of how much will v external determining factors is really not a question of whether one likes it or not.

I was involved in a solidarity campaign around injustices committed in Thailand. Global, national, and state corruption were involved and particular atrocities had been committed. People in Thailand, Canada and Holland were working together on this. It was difficult, and it was hard to see a fair outcome, but people were trying.

The tsunami of 2004 hit. The town was wiped out, the local state collapsed, and many of Thai activists died or disappeared.

Althusser's later writing, where he talks about a stochastic materialism, is in many ways better suited for acknowledging what is.

I've been reading Jean Genet recently, and have come across some of his very interesting responses to Sartre. Sartre makes a big deal about Genet choosing homosexuality (this is way before gay), and Genet emphatically denies it.

Revolutionary democratic socialism should embrace the agency of the oppressed and exploited as well as their allies, but that doesn't mean our agency is simply doing what we think is right and getting any closer to socialism.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Is anyone here a fan of the Structural Marxism of Louis Althusser? If so, why?

The term "structural Marxism" is, I think, more associated with Poulantzas and his eurocommunist school. But both seem to share the same error; they treat the state and state institutions far too independently (although the early Althusser mentions the dependence of superstructure on the economic base, it is token at best).

Which is not to say that reading Althusser is entirely pointless; he does make some good points about the epistemological break in Marx's work (though I would place it much earlier than Althusser - Capital is already a mature Marxist work with some Hegelian remnants), about the difference between materialist and Hegelian dialectics (some comrades treat the former as simply an application of the latter to the material world), and about the philosophy of science. That said, he gives much to credence to certain idealist bourgeois philosophers and psychoanalysts popular in modern academia. And of course, his analysis of ideology is very interesting, even if he sometimes treats it as too self-sufficient.

His later work seems to be an outright abandonment of dialectical materialism, and can serve as neither the proper basis for social analysis nor revolutionary praxis.