>>> James Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> 02/02/00 09:38AM >>>
I suppose the approach they chose to take can be in part understood by the fact that they were reacting against while still remaining influenced by Althusserianism (see Cohen's preface to KMTH). Althuuser's structural Marxism left little room for a consideration of historical change as such. Cohen sought to correct this by offering a theory of history which in itself turned out to be rather ahistorical.
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CB: This fits exactly my critique of Levi-Strauss and Sahlins on structuralism. What I finally asked Sahlins was "how does the structure change ?" Even the term "structure" is a rigid, unchanging metaphor.
And for Levi-Strauss, the structure of course, is an ideology. And it is true that ideologies tend NOT to change, exactly because they follow the rule of identity from formal logic. Ideas systems are not self-changing.
So, it takes a change in being, not thought, to make a historical CHANGE.
Thus, Engels and Marx anticipated structuralism in passages in _The German Ideology_ , which I found in thinking about this.
Ideological systems do significantly determine how a given group of actual people act. This proposition is not idealist or anti-materialist. The materialist position is the the idea system does not change itself (based some "logic" in the idea system). The systems of ideas tend to be "consistent", that is stay the same. The systems of ideas (that determine individual action) are only changed by contradictions that arise in the practice of the idea systems, especially in the relations of production, which contradictions then enter the idea system and are the symbolic marker of the real change.
CB