/edu/ - Education

Hey /edu/! A new reading group has recently formed in the /read/ chat rooms. This time dedicated to the works of Louis Althusser. We should be starting soon, our first meeting is planned for March 6, Sunday. The plan is to work through some of Althusser's books, starting with For Marx, which is his most introductory work. We would like to invite anyone on this board to join us for the reading.

>Why Althusser?

We consider Althusser to have been one of the most important Marxists of the second half of the 20th century. His identification of the 'epistemological break' in Marx was a major innovation, and most modern readings of Marx, centered around the discontinuities and ruptures inherent to his work are all in some way indebted to Althusser. We consider that his attempt at reconstructing Historical Materialism during a time of a major theoretical crisis of Marxism, and his innovations towards Marxist science, are of utmost value. But we also recognize that Althusser's interventions were never isolated from practical politics - his consideration that ‘Philosophy represents the class struggle in theory’ being fundamental here. His theoretical work was always conceived as an intervention into not only the politics of the PCF, but of the international communist movement as a whole. As he would later say:

>I would never have written anything were it not for the Twentieth Congress and Khrushchev’s critique of Stalinism and the subsequent liberalisation. But I would never have written these books if I had not seen this affair as a bungled destalinisation, a right-wing destalinisation which instead of analyses offered us only incantations; which instead of Marxist concepts had available only the poverty of bourgeois ideology. My target was therefore clear: these humanist ravings, these feeble dissertations on liberty, labour or alienation which were the effects of all this among French Party intellectuals. And my aim was equally clear: to make a start on the first left-wing critique of Stalinism, a critique that would make it possible to reflect not only on Khrushchev and Stalin but also on Prague and Lin Piao: that would above all help put some substance back into the revolutionary project here in the West.

So, anyone interested?