Guerino Calemine wrote:
>
> I understand Carrol that you have an antipathy for
> any discourse that strays from a purely economic understanding of history,
Not true. I believe the only acceptable historical explanation is in terms of ever-changing _social relations_. Within bourgeois thought that gets commonly reduced to "economic terms," but I do not primarily think in terms of economics (or even of political economy). In fact, I do not really know what a "purely economic understanding of history" would look like. The essential historical point about capitalism is that it brought about an illusory division of politics and "economics," thus generating such fetishes as "purely economic understanding."
The key point is whether or not one sees relations as having material reality. The texts from which I primarily operate (other than those of Marx himself) are Ellen Meiksins Wood, _Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism_ and Bertell Ollman, _Dialectical Investigations_.
>
> Freudian/Lacanian/Zizekian
> psychoanalysis.
Yes. Freud started out trying to be a materialist -- but he ended up just another version of Christianity.
If I _did_ engage in psychological explanations, I would suggest that it is not surprising that someone raised a Roman Catholic shouold end up a Freudian. :-) The change is very slight.
Sebastiano Timpanaro once remarked that all western Marxists shared one principle: that Freud was never wrong.
Carrol