Seymour embraces Althusser
Anyone foolish enouigh to waste their time reading the SWP anti-semite and Libya expert Lenny “Seymour” Tombstone’s blog, will have noticed how pretentious his language, and obscurantist his ’logic’ has become of late. Now the explanation is revealed: he’s become an Althusserian!
Louis Althusser and socialist strategy posted by lenin (aka Seymour – JD)
Above: Althusser considers the epistemological break, before murdering his wife
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Lenny “Seymour” Tombstone writes:
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“I was going to proceed with the series on Poulantzas, but to do so properly, I need to address the influence of Louis Althusser. There is, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out, a trajectory that can broadly be sketched with Althusser, Poulantzas and Laclau/Mouffe as its three compass points: from Maoism to Eurocommunism to ‘radical democracy’ and the abandonment of class politics as a ‘fundamentalist’, ‘essentialist’ error.
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“Yet to simply read the failings of his followers back into Althusser’s project would be a travesty as unfair as E P Thompson’s execration of the ‘Stalinist’ Althusser. It is, in fact, a bitter irony that many of Althusser’s followers ended up in the social-democratic camp…” read the rest of Seymour’s apologia here, if you can be bothered.
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There was a time when the SWP took a rather less enthusiastic view of this anti-working class, anti-humanist Maoid Stalinist:
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Chris Harman:
“Althusser’s approach was not merely slightly different to that developed by those of us inspired by the revolutionary insurgency of 1956 (in Hungary -JD). It was in many respects the complete opposite, since Marxism (according to Althusser – JD) was no longer seen as a theory connected to the struggle for human emancipation from the alienated structures of capitalism, in which self-conscious self-activity of workers plays a role”
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Read the rest of Harman’s scathing attack on Althusser here.
Scott said,
November 14, 2011 at 5:37 am
Althusser gets a hard rap, and deserves some of it – but there was a reason why he inspired so many young leftists, not to mention sociologists and archaeologists and anthropologists in the ’60s and ’70s: there is substance as well as silliness in his work. Althusser’s work can’t in any case be summarily dismissed, because it moves through three distinct and irreconciliable stages (there’s the high science stuff of For Marx and Reading Capital, the 1968-inspired stuff from the ’70s, which abandons the notion of Marxism as a lofty scientific enterprise, and then the post-1980 stuff, which takes a very critical attitude to much of Marxism – it actually bears a remarkable resemblance to some of the stuff EP Thompson was writing and thinking in the ’80s – and is only now being read and discussed).
One of Althusser’s best points was his insistence that Marxists should actually read Marx. He slogged through Marx’s oeuvre in amazing detail, at a time when folks like Jean-Paul Sartre were content to read sumamries of Marx by other writers. It’d be nice to think that those who post denunciations of Althusser on the net have actually gone to the trouble of reading the bloke, rather than simply taking a look at a piece of secondary literature.
In my Manchester Uni Press book on EP Thompson I spend a chapter arguing that Althusser and EP had a little more in common than is often supposed:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/072.html
http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/catalogue/book.asp?id=1204782
In my country, Althusser helped Marxist and leftist thinkers to break through the categories of Stalinist theory. They were able to use him to get past the stagist view of history and primitive understandings of what a mode of production is. A lot of the youngsters who dug Althusser in the ’70s ended up becoming Trotskyists. Intellectual history is full of irony…
In this take on Althusser’s post-1980 work I try to explain why he exerted such an influence on scholars here and elsewhere in the postcolonial world:
http://www.labortribune.net/ArticleHolder/200607_Althusser/tabid/102/Default.aspx
Good on comrade Seymour, I say, for having a large reading list!
Pinkie said,
November 14, 2011 at 8:48 pm
Well, there’s a worry.
Roger said,
November 15, 2011 at 4:43 am
I haven’t frequented the Tomb since I was banned from the comments half a decade or so back – but wasn’t he already quoting the pretentious wife-murdering French psychopath back then?
Good to be reminded of EP Thompson’s Poverty of Theory though – wish I knew what happened to my old copy.
Monsuer Jelly est Formidable said,
November 15, 2011 at 12:57 pm
Stalin’s Tombola is well weird – sometimes i agree with what he writes. that is how strange it is
charliethechulo said,
November 15, 2011 at 5:44 pm
John Grey: Althusser’s British/Tory opposite number:
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/02/human-beings-science-ball
Jim Denham said,
November 16, 2011 at 12:31 am
Too good to miss; from ‘Lenin’s Tomb’:
Julian 1 day ago in reply to Richard Seymour
‘Marxism and Humanism’, http://www.marxists.org/refere… which you quote from, certainly critiques the attribution of the “terror” of stalinism to the cult of personality and therefore arguably implies that the whole official theoretical account of stalinism was inadequate.And it suggests that the real basis of stalinism was the backwardness of pre-revolutionary Russia, when subjected to the shock of ‘socialism in one country’, without suggesting that this was the wrong course. But it is sunnily optimistic about actual conditions in Russia (in 1964). This of course was one of the targets of Thompon’s polemic. It’s possible, if you give it the most favourable conceivable reading, to discern a hint of ambiguity in the description of progression from “socialism” to “communism”. But why should we have to decode it? Althusser may have been in the PCF, but he wasn’t in prison. It’s this obfuscation of the real nature of Russia, never mind the PRC, and not just illusions in the PCF, that makes it hard to believe that he’d really broken with stalinism.
Still, it will be interesting to see where you take this when you return to Poulantzas. Of course there may be insights in the theory whatever the political errors. You’ve made it easier for us, but perhaps harder for you, by publishing your argument as a part-work. By the way, I think you mean, “according to Althusser” not “pace Althusser” in the para about interpellation – unless I’ve completely misread it. Don’t want to be picky, but it does reverse the sense, and this stuff is hard enough without typos.
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(Below: Seymour’s response to Julian: note the stuff about “Althusser’s irony”!):
Three things:
1) Your reading of Marxism and Humanism essay is grossly in error, largely because you seem deaf to Althusser’s irony. For instance, take the passage which reads: “The dictatorship of the proletariat, rejected by Social-Democrats in the name of (bourgeois) personal ‘humanism’, and which bitterly opposes them to Communists, has been superseded in the U.S.S.R. Even better, it is foreseeable that it might take peaceful and short-lived forms in the West. From here we can see in outline a sort of meeting between two personal ‘humanisms’, socialist humanism and Christian or bourgeois liberal humanism. The ‘liberalization’ of the U.S.S.R. reassures the latter.” This is heavy irony. The whole point he is making here is that this ‘supersession’ is *not* a transition to the higher phase of communism! In a latter essay ‘On the Humanist Controversy’, he pointed out that absurd formulation “class humanism” was a deliberate provocation. Much of the difficulty people have with Althusser is in taking him far too literally, or missing when he’s ironising. Perhaps this is because something is lost in translation.
2) As late as 1976, Althusser was saying that the political, economic and ideological systems in the USSR had been more or less completely left in place after Stalin. There’s no evidence that he was ever convinced that it had been “superseded”.
3) I’ve been using ‘pace’ as a synonym for ‘as per’ for some time. Why did no one tell me? I think people just enjoy watching me make a fool of myself. Bless you sir.
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What a twat!
Roger said,
November 16, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Its all there: layer upon layer of pretension, the appeal to irony in an author in whom IIRC it was notably absent, the snobbish deriding of those poor souls who have to rely on reading a foreigner in translation…
It almost makes you pine for the days of Harman and Cliff who while frequently bonkers and often downright malignant had little tolerance for such pretentious little prats and kept them firmly corralled away in the pages of International Socialism.
Roger said,
November 16, 2011 at 2:37 pm
And I’ve also been misusing ‘pace’ in exactly the same way for like ever (although I hope far less frequently than the likes of Seymour) – so I’ve actually leaned something useful from a comment in Lenin’s Tomb….
martin ohr said,
November 16, 2011 at 3:04 pm
it must be a thankless task being the spell-checker for the huge arsehole idiot Dick Seymour. Every other word must be underlined:
ironising – did you mean ironing?
He must seriously believe that he looks big and clever to make up new words rather than just expressing himself clearly in words that already exist and are well understood.
I did laugh out loud when I read this short piece on wikipedia, in particular criticism 1 put me in mind of a certain overgrown student blogger:
“In a 1971 paper for Socialist Register, Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski[72] undertook a detailed critique of structural Marxism, arguing that the concept was seriously flawed on three main points:
I will argue that the whole of Althusser’s theory is made up of the following elements: 1. common sense banalities expressed with the help of unnecessarily complicated neologisms; 2. traditional Marxist concepts that are vague and ambiguous in Marx himself (or in Engels) and which remain, after Althusser’s explanation, exactly as vague and ambiguous as they were before; 3. some striking historical inexactitudes.
Kolakowski further argued that, despite Althusser’s claims of scientific rigor, structural Marxism was unfalsifiable and thus unscientific, and was best understood as a quasi-religious ideology. In 1980, sociologist Axel van der Berg”
Jim Denham said,
November 17, 2011 at 1:56 am
This, from ‘Socialist Unity’, must never be forgotten:
“As someone who has never even been able to join a union”:
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87.I must say that the kinds of venomous language being used about Jerry Hicks in this thread do no one any credit. Hicks is going to continue to be important to the labour movement and, one hopes, a viable member of the awkward squad.
As someone who has never even been able to join a union, never mind vote in one, I have a couple of questions. Denham, maintaining that McCluskey’s election was perfectly valid and above-board, says this on Permanent Revolution:
“Each regional Co-ordinator must use their discretion on differentiating between “new”, “recent” etc. but if there is any doubt the Chair and Secretary suggest that supporters should have been known and accepted as United Left supporters by 18th July when the National Co-ordinating Committee met tp decide arrangements for the Hustings Meeting.”
Can anyone enlighten me? Does this not give organisers considerable leeway for excluding people they don’t want there? Are there not membership lists, and would these not be a better criteria for admission than a co-ordinator’s discretion, on such nuanced distinctions between “new” and “recent” members? And if it is true that people were told in advance not to bother turning up, while others were barred on the grounds that their face was unfamiliar, is this an appropriate use of “discretion”?
Second question. Judging from this thread, and the linked information, the main differences between McCluskey and his two opponents are that: McCluskey favours retaining the link with New Labour, and the other two do not; McCluskey comes from the union bureaucracy and has similar politics to Woodley, whereas his opponents are rank and file socialist militants. Is that roughly the case? And if so, why was it not possible to have *one* rank and file candidate opposing McCluskey rather than two? I know nothing of Rob Williams, but I do know a little about Hicks’ record and his previous performance – was Hicks not the natural candidate?
Comment by lenin — 7 September, 2009 @ 9:25 am
tyresome points said,
November 19, 2011 at 1:40 pm
the SWP anti-semite
Is this sort of abuse best forgotten, or should Jim be reminded of it every time he tries to present himself as a serious socialist?
Monsuer Jelly est Formidable said,
November 19, 2011 at 2:20 pm
seymoRe Dick is an antisemite. You are an idiot. Fuck the fuck off