>>> Rob Schaap <rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au> 02/22/00 04:23AM >>>
G'day Ken, Kel'n'Den,
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.
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CB: Now , I'll drink to that one , comrade.
Cheers,
Chas.