Re: Poulantzas

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Liam wrote:
>Phil: Poulantzas committed suicide for a number of reasons, personal and
>political. He came from a family of big landowners, and his father was a top
>man in a tribunal set up by the colonel regime -he had a complex about that.
>The strategy Poulantzas had advocated for Greece did not come into effect,
>and he was not run as a PCF candidate for the elections -something he had
>wished. His daughter was seriously handicapped. His wife was having all
>kinds of affairs (including one with Balibar), and was writing in feminist
>journals on how bad a lover he was. Academically, his lectures were no
>longer attended by serious people, but by the politically irrelevant left
>and third worldist elements who engaged in endless polemics.


My recollection was from an obit at the time.  Poulantzas had a certain
influence in European sections of the Fourth International (USec), like the
French LCR.  Lord knows why, except that I guess there was probably a
shared class background and they were all 'Children of 68' and so on.  Yuck!

I'm afraid none of these trendy continental Euro-intellectuals impress me
much.  The last European Marxist intellectuals of any real substance were
people like Korsch, Lukacs and Gramsci.  These were *serious*
intellectuals, who discussed issues of vital importance to the
revolutionary movement and were actually engaged in real politics.  The
only continental Marxist intellectual that made any impression on me was,
very briefly, Roger Garaudy.  Although he went in a reactionary direction
in the later 70s, his 1970 book 'Marxism in the twentieth century', which I
finally read in 1994, contains a wonderful rejection of the whole
mechanical Stalinist approach to history - an approach derived from the
Second International and shared by the more mechanical Trotskyist groups -
which people like Althusser (and Poulantzas) never broke from.
Unfortunately, Garaudy's negative experience of Stalinism drove him away
from the intersection with revoltuionary politics he made in that book.

I would think the balance sheet on the Althusserians and Euro-communists is
overwhelmingly negative.  I doubt whether anyone even bothers with any of
their work today.  On the other hand, Lukacs and Gramsci remain highly
relevant, and Korsch's book on Marx is probably one of the best expositions
of Marx's theory ever, although he's more famous for 'Marxism and
Philosophy'.

On the left-reformist side give me Thompson and his 'Making of the English
Working Class' any day over the obtruse Euro-intellectuals.  Thompson's
'Poverty of Theory' also nicely disposes of Althusser and shows the deeply
anti-humanistic and mechanical nature of the whole Althusserian outlook.

Cheers,
Phil







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