Althusser

[Bradley Mayer <concrete@xxxxxxxxx>]

>From H. Rodwell:

>Note 5: No, I'll save Althusser's unhistorical, undialectical,
>anti-Marxist, Stalinist crap for later. Except that trying to twist the
>meaning of 'sive' in 'Substantia sive Deus sive Natura' from the
>disjunctive 'or' into the explanatory, it's-all-the-same-thing 'that is' is
>a real piece of Maoist confusionism. The relationships within and between
>the different concepts brought into identity by Spinoza's logic need to be
>kept distinct. That's what dialectics is all about.

Yeah, we need to have a good Althusser-bashing party! Althusser is
interesting in three respects: 1) He had the prescience to seize upon key
questions of Marxism and pipe them off to /dev/null; 2) He was a
transitional figure in the degeneration of postwar Marxist thought; and
3) thus was a conduit for the introduction of poststructuralist concepts
into Marxism. This, of course, is what so many find so "valuable" in
Althusser.

The time is ripe to put a historical seal on this shit.

                        -Brad Mayer


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