#althusser

[athousandgateaux]

"In 1890 Engels wrote: 'Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasize the main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to allow the other elements involved in the interaction to come into their rights'".

--Louis Althusser, For Marx, n. 23, pg. 105

[grandpasessions]

The ideological coordinates of such liberal multiculturalism are determined by two features of our "postmodern" zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist historicism -

(all values and rights are historically specific, hence any elevation of them into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its most violent)

and the universalized "hermeneutics of suspicion" -

(all "high" ethical motives are generated and sustained by "low" motives of resentment, envy, etc.— the call to sacrifice our life for a higher cause is either a mask for manipulation by those who need war to sustain their power and wealth, or a pathological expression of masochism— and this either/or is an inclusive vel, i.e., both terms can be true at the same time).

Another way to formulate Badiou's insight that we live in a world-less universe would be to say that the functioning of ideology today no longer relies on mechanisms for the interpellation [the mechanism through which pre-existing social structures "constitute" (or construct) individual human organisms as subjects with consciousness and agency] of individuals into subjects: what liberalism proposes is a value-neutral mechanism of rights, and so on, a mechanism "whose free play can automatically generate a desired political order, without at any point in interpellating individuals into subjects."

The nameless jouissance cannot be a title of interpellation proper; it is more a kind of blind drive with no symbolic value-form attached to it— all such symbolic features are temporary and flexible, which is why the individual is constantly called upon to "re-create" himself or herself.

Living In the End Times / Slavoj Zizek

[leftistfeminista]

Chilean Marxist, Marta Harnecker's magnum opus has been uploaded to Marxists.org

https://www.marxists.org/archive/harnecker/1969/historical-materialism/whole-book.pdf

Introduction to Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism

Authored by Marta Harnecker, 1969 Translated by the Theoretical Review periodical of the Tucson Marxist-Leninist Collective, 1978-81 Preserved by marxists.org Edited by anonymous using libre software, 2024 January 4, 2025

Her books The Elemental Concepts of Historical Materialism and Notebooks of Popular Education were widely used by communist parties and workers' organizations in Spanish-speaking countries for the training of their militants during the 1970s and later. 

Fotos Unidad Popular Chile on Instagram: "Marta Harnecker, directora del Semanario Chile Hoy, entregando una reflexión sobre el rol de la pr

2,401 likes, 47 comments - fotosunidadpopularchile on September 22, 2023: "Marta Harnecker, directora del Semanario Chile Hoy, entregando un

Her work is mentioned in By Night in Chile By Roberto Bolaño

As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel—Roberto Bolano's first work available in English—recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study "the disintegration of the churches," a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned—after the destruction of Allende—the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy.

It is telling that even in the abstractions of Marxist theory, the 1st question the Junta Admiral asks is "Is she good-looking?". Revealing of the extremely objectifying views misogynist Junta officers had towards Marxist women, especially those with intellectual achievements. Which went beyond "locker room talk" to the official Junta policy on how they should be treated.

[althusserresuscitate]

Reading Capital. Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar 1968

To sum up: the concepts which contain Marx’s basic discoveries are: the concepts of value and use-value ; of abstract labour and concrete labour ; and of surplus-value.

That is what Marx tells us. And there is no apparent reason why we should not take him at his word. In fact, while reading Capital we can prove that his economic analyses do depend on these basic concepts in the last instance. We can, so long as our reading is a careful one. But this proof is not self-evident. It presupposes a great struggle for rigour – and above all it necessarily implies from the beginning something which is present in Marx’s declared discoveries – but present in a strange absence – if we are to complete this proof and see clearly in the very clarity it produces.

As an index which gives a negative foretaste of this absence, one comment will do: the concepts to which Marx expressly relates his discovery and which underlie all his economic analysis, the concepts of value and surplus-value, are precisely the concepts on which all the criticism addressed to Marx by modern economists has focused. It is not immaterial to know in what terms these concepts have been attacked by non-Marxist economists. Marx has been criticized on the grounds that they are concepts which, although they make allusion to economic reality, remain at heart non-economic, ‘philosophical’ and ‘metaphysical’ concepts. Even as enlightened an economist as Conrad Schmidt – who was intelligent enough to deduce the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall from Volume Two of Capital soon after its publication, even though that law was first expounded in Volume Three – even Conrad Schmidt attacked Marx’s law of value as a ‘theoretical fiction’, a necessary one no doubt, but a fiction all the same. I do not quote these criticisms for fun, but because they are directed at the very foundation of Marx’s economic analyses, the concepts of value and surplus-value, which are rejected as ‘non-operational’ concepts designating realities which are non-economic because they are non-measurable, non-quantifiable. Obviously, this reproach in its own way betrays the conception the economists in question have of their own object, and of the concepts it authorizes: but if this reproach does show us the point in which their opposition to Marx is at its most palpable, these economists do not give us Marx’s object in their reproach, precisely because they treat that object as ‘metaphysical’. However, I indicate this point as the point of misunderstanding, the point where the Economists misconstrue Marx’s analyses. But this misunderstanding in their reading was only possible because of a misunderstanding of Marx’s object itself: a misunderstanding that made the Economists read their own object into Marx, instead of reading another object in Marx which is not their own object but a quite different one. This point of misunderstanding which the Economists declare the point of Marx’s theoretical weakness and error is, on the contrary, the point at which he is strongest! the point which marks him off radically from his critics, and also, on occasion, from some of his closest followers.

Part II: The Object of Capital, Chapter 2. Marx and his Discoveries.

[yinedemeliha]

Louis Althusser sevmeyi şöyle tanımlamış:

“diğerlerine karşı düşünceli olmak, onların arzularına ve ritimlerine saygı duymak, asla bir şey talep etmemek, ama almayı öğrenmek ve her armağanı bir sürpriz olarak karşılamak.”

[primulcalator]

[codswallopia]

345 (more) days in America

CELEBRATING STRUCTURALISM (at work and on the road)

Althusser would love this. Note the yellow "STATE" sign peeking from the bottom. A perfect caution against ideological state apparatuses.

[mindrat]

Quote of the Day:

Judith Butler's gripping account of the evolution of the post-structuralist understanding of power in social relations

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.