I do reckon Horkheimer got to the idea that Marx was incoherently positing emancipation-through-the-very-instrumental-rationality-that-enslaves ahead of his intellectual offspring Habermas, though. Postone nails them nicely on this. As for 'the break', Part 1 section 4 of Capital is, for instance, no less about alienation (which he now calls fetishism in the particular context of the commodity form) and no less metaphysically humanistic than anything the young Hegelian Marx wrote in 1844. And 'The Working Day' (Ch 10) is as choc-a-bloc full of old fashioned unscientific moral outrage as it is of scientific fact-mongering.
My suspicion is not so much that Althusser could not read, but that he did not read the book about which he purported to write. Or failed to realise that the book constituted but part of a planned series, and that the positing of capital-as-subject, and the non-human dynamics it consequently stressed, were not characteristic of Marx's materialist conception of history as a whole. Yet with Althusser began a course of 'post-structuralist' nonsense that could never lend politics the momentum it lent certain academic careers. I also reckon, while I've my knives out, that Althusser wouldn't have resonated much at all but for the fact that the French left had been so statically supine for so long that it had begun to look a right pillock by the time of the Prague outrage. Once Stalinism had finally lost its sheen, everyone over-reacted, dropped the discredited Sartre and sought out whatever alternative available. Althusser was perfect for that job - the durability of capitalism explained, the failure of human agency confirmed, and enough ambiguity provided to keep 'em busy over their breadsticks and claret for, well, at least a third of a wasted century.
Cheers, Rob.
> It is surely Althusser who is responsible for the break nonsense. Not only
>could Althusser not write, but he couldn't read either. Or maybe his local
>library did not have the Grundrisse.
> CHeers, Ken Hanly
>
>kelley wrote:
>
>> jlgulick:
>>
>> >> I have long been skeptical of Frankfurtian-type claims that Marx's
>> >> discourse is riddled w/instrumental-rationalism or Prometheanism, or
>> >> that there is some fundamental break between an early humanist Marx
>> >> and a late "economistic" Marx.
>>
>> dennis:
>> >This may be Habermas' position, but Adorno makes it absolutely clear that
>> >Marx was critiquing the economic laws of capital, not defending such as
>> >the key to human happiness. Just as Marx was far more Marxist than most of
>> >his followers realized, so too were the Frankfurters far more Marxist than
>> >their self-proclaimed followers.
>>
>> i don't know where anyone got the impression that the frankfurter's or
>> habermas posited some fundamental break!? much of the work was about
>> making a link between the early and later work, to demonstrate a kind of
>> logic that explains the connections but not as some sort of progressive
>> "correcting" of work that he later went on to reject. they denouced, more,
>> it seems to me the marxist contemporaries who subscribed to an overly
>> economistic marxism and tried to examine the development of capitalism as
>> also involving the process of rationalization which took place
>> organizationally and institutionally, rather than simply culturally as
>> weber as examined it. that is, they were locating a material basis for the
>> cultural rationalization that weber explored.
>>
>> kelley