Judith Butler and a whole lotta of people got interested in Althusser and Balibar but I find Lucio Colletti (From Rouseau to Lenin) and Derek Sayer (Marx's Method) much more interesting.
Then fellow graduate students delved deeply into Pierre Bourdieu's *Logic of Practice* as the new great work of theory after Althusseer and Foucault, and I just find it much less illuminating than Maurice Godelier's *Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology* and *Mental and Material*.
Actually I have never seen any evidence that Bourdieu understands a word of Marx's critique of commodity fetishism. Since critical critics want to be critical of everyting but the actual religion of every day life that would explain the easy acceptance of Bourdieu into the academy as opposed to Colletti, Sayer and Godelier.
(At the same time, I should say that Bourdieu's analysis of how arbitrary systems of classification become effectively entrenched in social life is the most illuminating I have read.)
Fellow American Marxists have grown up on Sweezy's *Theory of Capitalist Development* and Sweezy and Baran's *Monopoly Capital*, but I memorized Blake's *Marxian Economic Theory and Its Criticism* and Paul Mattick's books.
American critical theory is deep into Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, but I find myself interested in Max Adler (in Austro Marxism, ed. Patrick Goode) and Alfred Sohn Rethel (Intellectual and Manual Labor). I went to a Marcuse conference, I ended up thinking about Patrick Murray's analysis of Marx's critque of German Idealism (Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge).
Maybe I just root for the underdog?
yours, rakesh