Initiation, or, "To Separate the Analysand from the Herd"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Doug:
>>Schisms and anathemas in psychoanalysis -- which existed before Lacan --
>>come from the fact that it is "a confession."  It is instructive that those
>>who left and denounced Marxism thought of it as the "God That Failed."
>>Those of us who remain Marxist don't think of Marx as "God."
>
>So where do all the schisms in Marxism come from? And is there no
>trace of the scriptural in the way Marxists who aspire to orthodoxy
>look for backing in the sacred texts? And nothing of canon-formation
>in the process of certifying Marxian texts after Marx? And nothing of
>heresy-searching in the way some people (and here I'm speaking from
>personal experience) are judged on whether they're loyal or not?

I'm really going over the limit, but since you ask....

I think that many Marxists have treated Marxism as if it were a kind of
theodicy, and that explains, to me, why so many ex-Marxists have predicated
their new ideologies upon a denunciation of Marxism (the God That Failed
syndrome, as I mentioned above).

Within the Marxist tradition, ultra-left communists seem most given to
anathemas, in that their political identity is predicated upon multiple
negations -- not the CP (equated with Stalinism), not Trotskyism, etc.
Compare the tone of the Monthly Review with, say, that of Radical Chains
("RADICAL CHAINS IS A MAGAZINE TRYING TO GO BEYOND ALL LEFT IDEOLOGIES,
AUTONOMISM, LENINISM ETC. TO DEVELOP A MARXISM FOR THE 21ST CENTURY...").
I find the latter more turgid than the former.

Yoshie