Pour Marx

i've always liked anderson's description of marxism as an amalgam or synthesis of i) british empiricism, ii) french utopian socialism and iii) german idealism both because it is an inveterately marxist reading of marxism -- anderson being reliably synoptic in his points of view -- and also because it offers a robust means of understanding marx's ouevre, in its oscillations between these three poles. in althusser we see something quite different being proposed, utopian socialism, empiricism and idealism all banished; the strength of marx's argument is now held to exist in its structural or material, self-enclosing and autonomous logic. gillian rose, in a brief aside in hegel contra sociology, notes how althusser's philosophy sort of ends whenever the 'material' or 'structural' are invoked and indeed what exactly these concepts represent for althusser never become quite clear to me, in a way that would render them meaningfully distinct from the ways in which they are invoked within the context of french structuralism, a school of thought i've come to understand as idealistic or kantian, since reading both rose and anderson's writings on it.

i happen to think marx is correct, i think capitalism possesses immanent laws which tend towards the creation of two antagonistic classes, one of which exploits and deprives the other of the value it is responsible for creating, and that this exploited class needs to seize control of the means of production in order to supersede capitalism's limitations, but i think all this because das kapital offers concepts which are capable of grasping the forces which are at work in society, with some necessary adjustments, rather than because marx is prima facie right (though he is), if that distinction makes sense. a marxian account of the motive forces at work in say, ireland, at the present time, require us to supplement our understanding of capital's laws with imperialism, an understanding of the political subject within a 'parliamentary' 'democracy', post-industrial economics etc. in other words, all the history and politics which marx builds das kapital up and out of, and althusser, pointedly, does not.

finally, it is a bit of a pity that a work which is so invested in erecting a distance between marx and hegel spends so little of its time engaging with hegel's work, especially given how central the supposed simplicity or vagueness of hegel's dialectic in comparison to marx's is to althusser's argument. my biggest problem with for marx was its tendency to render the most complicated aspects of marx's works very simple -- the good marxist dialectic versus the bad, vague and simplisitic hegelian dialectic -- while the simple stuff becomes very complicated. perhaps saint-simonism was running rampant in the PCF in the sixties, but why we need to exorcise the spectre of the young marx rather than saying, yeah, he hadn't really figured it out in his twenties, there are some continuities but overall, let's move on to capital i just don't understand. in the name of this dubiously invoked science we seem to have reverted almost wholly to formal or transcendental categories which i had found the phenomenology so effective in moving beyond, i'm not sure how any notion of the absolute, whether or not we're calling the absolute the absolute or marx's brain can remain standing after hegel's clarification of it. a critique of empiricism as ideology i don't like much either, it is adorno to me