> The NLR was in part a reaction against Stalinism. The Communist Party of Great Britain was a staid, if not outright reactionary organisation in the 1960s. It dedicated a lot of its time campaigning against the evils of American comics, and trying to stop rank and file activists taking over the unions. That was why the NLR came into being. Some of the people involved were Trotskyists, like Isaac Deuscher, Norman Geras and Tariq Ali. But Anderson made sure that the editorial board was never beholden to any one party, and kept a number of 'reform Communists' - like Monty Johnstone - involved, as a counterweight to the Trotskyists.
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Anderson wasn't the editor when it started. It came into being as a synthesis between two journals--The New Reasoner (edited by E.P. Thompson) and The Univesities and Left Review (by Stuart Hall). There were a variety of reasons it came into being, one of which being the Campaign for the Nuclear Disarmament, another being the "cultural turn" that led to Hall's career at the Birmingham School looking at popular culture, and another being to clarify ideas of socialist strategy.
> NLR readers were mostly carried away with the Althusser cult. Anderson's criticisms at the time were more muted. But he is right. Althusser was a repulsive shit, whose influence on Marxism, philosophy and radical politics was wholly detrimental.
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Not just NLR readers. A good portion of the Western left, hence Thompson's reaction against it in "Poverty." Anderson would not say Althusser's influence on Marxism was detrimental because he helped Anderson among others to think more theoretically about the way capitalism functioned in the present age. Poulantzas political theory (cut short by his death) was highly regarded by many people at the time and it was basically an attempt to rethink the state (or theorize the state at all) using much of Althusser's problematic. I think you're letting your political perspective tint the intellectual legacy here. Like Deconstruction, there are very useful attributes of Althusser's paradigm; and like Thompson's there are many things that, when adhered to dogmatically, are rather self-defeating.
I can't comment on the internecine party politics of the time, but it is hard to see Althusser as necessarily the nail in the coffin of the PFC or French Communism more generally (can you really blame one guy for this?) That Althusser was a "bad person" is a bit beside the point. It is the flipside of Zizek's criticism of the humanization of Hitler and the Nazis (probably in many places, as per his self-plagiarizing style of writing, but most recently in First as Tragedy then as Farce.)
<BQ> Do the details of [Hitler or individual Nazis'] personal life 'redeem' the horrors that resulted from his reign, do they make him 'more human'? To cite one of my favorite examples, Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, liked to play Beethoven's late string quartets with friends during his evenings of leisure. Our most elementary experience of subjectivity is that of 'the richness of my inner life': this is what I 'really am,' in contrast to the symbolic determinations and responsibilities I assume in public life (as father, professor, etc.) The first lesson of psychoanalysis here is that this 'richness of inner life' is fundamentally fake: it is a screen, a false distance, whose function is, as it were, to save my appearance, to render palpable (accessible to my imaginary narcissism) my true social-symbolic identity. One of the ways to practice the critique of ideology is therefore to invent strategies for unmasking this hypocrisy of the 'inner life' and its 'sincere' emotions. The experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is thus a lie--the truth lies rather outside, in what we do. [. . . .] What is truly unbearable about the Nazi executioners is not so much the terrifying things they did, as how 'human, all to human' they remained while doing those things. (39-40) <BQ>
Upon reading this, I suppose it doesn't really work as a defense of a guy who strangled his wife. On the other hand, it is a critique that is only really possible because of the work that guy and others did modifying Lacan and Marx. And while I think subjectivity is certainly an important empirical concept (people making their own history, etc.), I think a lot of the debate going on elsewhere in the thread on The Nation is pointing to two things that Althusser's critique of subjectivity would have us remember. One, something like Zizek's critique here about how, "'Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves' serve to obfuscate the ethical dimensions of our acts." In the case of The Nation, how the meagre proposals of social democratic pablum do little to pressurize the debate even if those promoting it think of themselves as "radical." This leads to a second: ideas are important and ideas which help to understand the structural conditions under which we're operating are increasingly under-developed and unpopular. Together, the two might lead to a better understanding of one's own structural position, how it helps to (in)form your own subjectivity, and so how you might need to try to look beyond the commonplace appearance of the world in order to orient yourself to a more actually radical political position. I find this an important set of considerations (among others these ideas lead to). I don't credit Althusser with this insight, but he was certainly an element in that crucible that helped to develop it more rigorously. I find it rather short sighted and overly polemical for james to find them so utterly decrepit and disgusting.
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