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On Nov 13, 2011, at 2:31 PM, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
On 13/11/2011 19:17, Sean Noonan wrote:
1) Didn't Althusser admit he didn't really understand Capital?
No, not in the least. This is obviously a fourth hand mis-
remembering of something that Althusser wrote in his posthumous
memoir.
What he wrote, as Angelus has informed us, is that he never even
*read* Capital until 1964. Think of it--a "philosopher," an activist
in a professedly Marxist party for sixteen years who never bothered to
read Marx! And when he got around to it he discovered, like Max
Eastman (in every way his moral, theoretical, political, personal, and
literary superior) thirty years earlier, that Marx needed to be
deHegelianized, dedialecticized. And this is someone who "really
understood" Capital? Lenin (the real one) wrote all that needed to be
said about this sort of "Marxist": "It is impossible to understand
Das Kapital without a thorough grasp of Hegel's *Science of Logic*. As
a result, after half a century none of the Marxists have understood
Marx." L. Tomb admits that Althusser never read any of the
antiStalinist Marxists, not Trotsky, not Marcuse, none of them. He
was, in the most literal sense, an ignoramus. And this is someone on
whose scribblings we are asked to waste our eyesight?
And L. Tomb also writes: "Yet to simply read the failings of his
followers back into Althusser's project would be a travesty as unfair
as E P Thompson's execration of the 'Stalinist' Althusser." Admire
the scare quotes put around the word "Stalinist!" Althusser merely
joined a Stalinist party in 1948 and remained a loyal disciplined
member of that gang for almost all the rest of his life. Through the
cold war against Yugoslavia; the murder of Mikhoels and the Jewish
Antifascist Committee; the Lysenko revolution in the biological
sciences; the Rajk frameup; the Slansky frameup; the Kostov frameup;
the humiliation of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian; the
incipient pogrom, aborted only with the fortuitous demise of the
tyrant, signaled by the "Doctors' Plot;" the June 17 Stalinallee
uprising; all the GULAG Archipelago revelations from David Rousset to
Solzhenitsyn; the Hungarian Revolution, etc. And for the rest of his
life never any self-criticism, any understanding of what in him made
him the willing enabler of such a series of monstrous crimes.
No, those scare quotes were indeed out of place--Stalinist does
describe Althusser's political and mortal nature with total accuracy.
Note that this is not an *ad hominem* argument against anything
Althusser may have said, anymore than Heidegger's Nazism is an
argument against anything Heidegger may have said. Any arguments
worth discussing from either man have undoubtedly been made by others
and so should be discussed
in their own terms without needing to refer to their more-than-suspect
originators.
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos
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