On Tue, 22 Feb 2000 10:33:19 -0500 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
writes:
> Hi Ken H.:
>
> >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.).
I think that is correct. I don't think that Althusser's claim that Marx's work exhibits an epistemological break can be sustained (which was in any case a restatement of the old Stalinist notion of the "old" Marx versus the "young" Marx restated in Bachelardian terms). And indeed Althusser, himself, had a good deal of trouble pinning down when this break was supposed to have occured. In earlier works like *For Marx* and *Reading Capital*, he located the break as occurring around 1845, two years after Marx had written his critique of Hegel's *Philosophy of Right* with Marx becoming a full fledged Marxist by 1857 by then seeing the productive forces and relations rather than real concrete people as the genuine subjects of history.
However, in his later writings, Althusser had much more difficulty specifying when the break was supposed to have taken place and he even admitted that Marx in *Capital* and other mature writings was still exhibiting strong traces of the Feuerbachian humanism that he supposedly had long left behind. These kinds of admissions have raised questions concerning how carefully he had read Marx's texts. And Althusser, indeed admitted in his memoirs that he had not read that much Marx until the time of his famous seminar on *Capital* at L'Ecole Normale Superiuere in the mid-1960s. Nevertheless, Althusser was certainly correct in supposing that Marx had over time engaged in a critical rethinking of his origianal problematic, and his writings do show a shift over time from the kinds of rather vaugue philosophizing and moralizing that had been characteristic of the Young Hegelians to an approach that emphasized concrete, empirically based analysis of social phenomena.
>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.
Quite true! Marx certainly retained in his vocabulary terms like alienation that he had picked up in his Young Hegelian days but it is doubtful indeed that the mature Marx would have defined these terms in the same semi-metaphysical manner that he would have when he was still cavorting around with the likes of Bruno Bauer and D.F. Strauss. I think that for the mature Marx the notion of self-alienation entailed not alienation from "human nature" conceived of in ahistorical left Hegelian terms but rather the alienation of people (especially workers) from their potentialities as those had been unveiled and developed by capitalist society. I think the notion referred to the growing contradiction between potentiality and actuality as capitalism developed the forces of production while impeding their deployment in ways that would enhance human existence.
Jim F.
>
> Yoshie
>
>
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