>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.
I agree that Althusser's prose is hard on the eyes. And he tried to get too much mileage out of select few statements of Marx in order to argue for the existence of an epistemological break. Many postmodern philosophers have inherited Althusser's reading habit (hence my remark on de-skilling).
That said, Marx did mature in his thinking, through his own criticism of the Feuerbachian problematic that he had used before (e.g., Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology, etc.). It's just that it's impossible & unnecessary to posit a clear & clean "break" anywhere in his political career.
Rob wrote:
>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.
Marx didn't change in the sense of ditching the idea of alienation (or moral outrage, for that matter) altogether. The question is, what is alienation? Alienated *from what*? Certainly *not* from "human nature" (or Man) ahistorically conceived in a left-Hegelian fashion.
Yoshie