SA wrote:
I'm glad you bring up Althusser, because while I haven't read any of his books, this review-essay on him by Leszek Kolakowski makes my point more eloquently than I could...
JG writes:
SA, I often find myself at odds with you on political economy questions, but boy oh boy do I find virtually any and all takedowns of Althusser resonant. "In understanding Marx, or Hegel, or political economy, or the methods of social science, they give us nothing except pretentious language." Mercy, am I glad I wasn't a Marxist grad student in the 1970's, induced and goaded and pressured into Althusserizing my research and writing into an abominable mess. It is breathtaking how much cruddy "Marxist" urban political economy was produced in the 1970's, most of it French and under the spell of Castells in his Althusserian days/daze, and none of it underpinned by empirical fact-collecting and fact-checking.
(Incidentally, a tour through the lbo-talk archives the other evening led me to some unkind words about the 1990's Castells penned by our list father. Castells dropped his nominal "Marxism" for woolly techno-futurism but retained his Althusserian habits of unmoored theoretical abstraction, missing material referents, and windy rhetoric).
Now, there's a primer in how to make friends and influence people!
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