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Pill Pod 115 - MarxismS: Louis Althusser and Structuralist Marxism (Patreon)

Published:
2023-03-17 15:01:01
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Erik and Pills duo on Althusser, reading "Contradiction and Overdetermination" from the book For Marx. We read this anticipating a couple episodes trying to figure out what "post-marxism" could mean, and we don't want to strawman, and this is one of my (Pills') favourite bites attempting to delineate what Marxist theory can and cannot aspire to. 

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Comments

anacidcommie

True, subjectivities are produced by events, but we've been living in the midst of successive, accelerating crises for a while now, so it's not like material conditions for the working class are great and you're trying to create a revolutionary subject out of such a context. You're interpellated into ideology, but ideology as false consciousness is still everywhere, with many still believing that billionaires work hard for their money, that capitalism is human nature etc etc. Also like Chris asked, what's the problem with that mutualism that Erik spoke about? That is a pretzel he's worked himself into tho, cause if at the end one of the main causes is capital, then why avoid it? It feels like beating around the bush to me, which is pretty much what bourgeois social science keeps doing: talking about socioeconomic inequality being linked to this or that negative dependent variable without actually addressing the inherent contradictions of capitalism or the various social/education/judicial systems that sprung up in its wake to support it. Not that capitalism by itself is the only factor, but it is one of the, (if not the main) factors one must consider in terms of cause and effect. Especially when you consider that capitalism is not simply just an economic system. I don't see how one can be a Marxist and ignore or do away with alienation. Alienation is an objective condition of the capitalist mode of production, like alienation from your labour, products and other workers qua competitors. You can find many instances of Marx referring to alienation in Capital, so I don't know how one can claim that alienation is a concept exclusive to early Marx alone. Also, how different is a symptomatic reading from immanent critique? Cause from what I've read at least, an important component of the latter is acknowledging the fact that the standards critical theorists employ are not divorced from the object of critique itself. Really interesting episode tho, I really dig it when you guys explain shit like the structuralist method, and then, say, contrast that with poststructuralism.

Echoes from Elsewhere

I think Marcuse phrased the question of the revolutionary (historical) subject most concisely in One-Dimensional Man as, "how can the administered individuals—who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions, and thus reproduce it on an enlarged scale—liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken?"