On Feb 21, 2010, at 11:05 PM, "wrobert at uci.edu" <wrobert at uci.edu> wrote:
> E.P. Thompson initially made the accusation in his polemic against
> Althusser. (If you're interested in this, look at Dennis Dworkin's
> Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, although it makes no attempt to
> actually represent Althusser.) Perry Anderson wrote the defenses
> for the
> productivity of Althusser in response to Thompson. I suspect the
> article
> is referencing this conflict. robert wood
>
>
>> On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara
>> <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> This article on Perry Anderson
>>> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/marxist .
>>> I can't say that Cockburn and Hitchens are on the same terrain as
>>> writers
>>> (or have the same intellectual breadth). (I just read *For Marx*,
>>> so I
>>> wasn't thrilled at his dig at Althusser though.)
>>
>> He calls him a 'neo-Stalinist charlatan'. I wonder what his
>> definition
>> of 'neo-Stalinist is' (perhaps this is a job for Mr Doss). If he
>> includes as 'Stalinist' anyone who was a member of a Communist Party
>> affiliated to the USSR, I guess - though what is the 'neo'? Althusser
>> saw his work as an attack on Stalinism with the PCF and associated
>> 'marxist humanism' with Soviet leadership who wanted to sweep
>> 'Stalinism' under the carpet while maintaining its bureacratic
>> legacy.
>> Gregory Elliot's book on Althusser 'The Detour of Theory' gives a
>> good
>> political background.
>>
>> The meaning of Stalinist shifted a little in the British New Left,
>> with EP Thompson (for example) using it to describe an intellectual
>> tradition that did not necessarily imply political agreement with
>> Stalin or attachment to the USSR - and so, he suggested, certain
>> elements of Trotskyism were Stalinist despite the political
>> antagonism. (In his essay 'Socialist Humanism'.) I think Thompson's
>> polemical essay on Althusser has been hugely influential on the
>> latter's reception ever since. Of course, today, even someone like EP
>> Thompson can be called Stalinist by the likes of Tony Judt, and it
>> seems to mean 'anyone who is now or has ever been a member of a
>> Communist Party'.
>>
>> Mike Beggs
>>
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