File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-08-17.000, message 125


Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 08:58:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Philip Goldstein <pgold-AT-strauss.udel.edu>
Subject: Althusser


A brief defense of Althusser: 
1) Gene is right to say that he effectively criticized the Hegelian 
character of Marx's thought. Gene forgets that Althusser's 
"structuralist" reformulations of Marx's economic doctrines were a 
disaster -- no one took up these reformulations in a serious way. Even 
Althusser recanted them in later work
2) Althusser made Marxism scientific by arguing that the standards of 
"theoretical production" matter more than the substance or content. 
Marxism is scientific not because practice proves the truth of theory but 
because theorists preserve the greatest rigor, consistency, coherence, 
etc. 
Phil Goldstein


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