French "structuralists" general!

Out of the – so called – "french intellectual scene" I think 4 people are worthy of reading to this very day by communists: (1) Sartre, (2) Lacan, (3) Lévi-Strauss, and (4) Althusser. Let me break it down for you why.

A fucking humanist existentialist. I personally do not like him, but it should be said that he was the kind of "intellectual" who put all of his efforts into popularizing communism (through philo-books AND novels, making it accessible to a larger crowd). He stressed a lot how this so called individual (we are under capitalism) bears a lot of responsibility and communist potential: existentialcomics.com/comic/248

Moreover, he provided an excellent critique of "applying materialist dialectics to [everything]" in his Critique of Dialectical Reason – a stab at Engels, seen as an abandoner of Marx! Sartre, mind you, kept supporting the communist bloc even after the infamous 1956 revolution. He was ugly as shit, but had all the pussay he wanted. Nuff' said.

Though sell to a tough crowd, I know! Let me take the Leninist road here. Lacan is useful for a Marxist (and/or Leninist) for the following reason: he was faced with a psychoanalytic institution that basically betrayed ALL of Freud's innovations. For me, as a 21st century Leninist, this reminds me of Stalin's time.

Let me break it down for you before you accuse me of [whatever]:
ALL human institutions become behemoths that eventually betray their original raison d'être: Saint Paul wanted to create the universal framework for Christ's message, and we are left with the Vatican; Elon Musk (lol) "only" wanted us to go to Mars, and look at his institutionalized crowd. I could go on, obviously…

If you take a look at Stalin's (pure!) intentions and contrast it to the results it becomes rather obvious: the institution you found will INEVITABLY betray your original "radical edge". (I need my fellow "tankies" to grasp this point precisely!) If you train cadre (or psychoanalysts, or veterinarians, or whatever) to follow a kind of "scripture", a kind of "101" (to communism, to psychoanalysis), or a step-by-step "guide", your institution will INEVITABLY betray you, since it has been founded to reproduce the already established content – something that might have been initially radical, turned into an "institution for its own".

Mind you, this is not a cheap "Trotskyite" critique! ⛏️rotsky according to this framework got it wrong because he wanted a USSR without the USSR…

Now this dude is something different, you see. All the so called "anthropologists" today – wink, wink, David Graeber – have a basic fetish, so to speak: "MAKE [OCCUPIED LAND GREAT AGAIN]." This theorist saw through all of this bullshit and said: "Sorry, mehr dudes, your so called "civilized west" is not so much different from this "uncivilized" African tribe!"

You must remember Zizek reiterating Strauss' main point from a tribal society that was on the brink of becoming a class-society: the lower classes drew a "map" of their territory as something fractured, while the becoming-ruling-class drew a concentrical map of the area: "What's the problem, LOL?"

Finally, THIS guy!
I have the most respect for him. Let me start with an excursus. I have had the opportunity to be one of the participants of the so called "European Left Forum" annually held in Germany that year. Most of the fucking socdems wanted to praise either
1) Rosa Luxemburg (for some kind of shady anti-Bolshevism – something which she denounced in her later years;)
2) or Lukács for his absolute commitment to "Marxist Humanism!"

Both of these positions are teared apart by Althusser. You see, Althusser is the one and only theorist that can be useful to ancoms and Leninists. He tears apart humanism, he tears apart Gramsci's bullshit (while remaining sympathetic towards his analysis of the superstructure), while he tears apart the so called hegemony of the STATE.

It is this above lesson that should be studied by BOTH anarchists and Leninists. This dude gave us a completely NEW way of understanding "ideology as such" and political economy. This dude, while he killed his wife during a psychotic episode, totally re-conceptualized Marxism…

These niggers like "Zizek" and "Badiou" all came out of Althusser's footsteps. If you are interested in 21st century Marxism you simply CAN NOT AFFORD to leave Althusser out of your studies, no matter of your position (M-L; ancom, etc.)!

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Jesus fucking christ. Your style posting is so fucking awful. Am I on fucking reddit?
more people should Levi-Strauss, particularly The Savage Mind

le kill urself

This was a clear depiction, what would you recommend reading from each of them? As some kind of introduction to their work, the best depiction of their ideas or something that would convince us they are worth reading?

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What the fuck is all this "le" shit? Go back to reddit you disgusting piece of shit

Althusser is ok, but he over simplified the "ideological apparatus of the state"

honestly it reminds me of pre-mid-2016 leftypol

we've gone full circle haha

The in French? This is a French thread?
J'suis morte

Grug see book grug no like

Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and was committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990.

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Thanks for your contribution, go away.

thanks, DSM

I recommend starting with .pdf related: Althusser's philosophy of science. It's a really good entry point to already STEMfags as well as philofags who are not yet familiar with the class conscious takes on science. The book starts off with a pretty good 101 on the distinction of diamat/histmat, the nature of scientific (and pre-scientific) practice, and a general overlook of his contemporary situation (hint: ours as well):

>The first kind of reason has to do with the very nature of the new tasks that 'life' - that is, history - imposes upon us. Since the 1917 Revolution and the era of Lenin, immense events have turned world history upside down. […] these events pose a considerable number of new, sometimes unprecedented problems, for whose solution the development of Marxist theory - and especially the Marxist theory of the forms of transition from one mode of production to another - is indispensable. This theory not only concerns the economic problems of transition (forms of planning, the adaptation of the forms of planning to different specific stages of the transition, according to the particular condition of the countries considered); it also concerns the political problems (forms of the State, forms of the political organization of the revolutionary party, the forms and nature of the revolutionary party's intervention in the different domains of political, economic and ideological activity) and the ideological problems of transition (politics in the religious, moral, juridical, aesthetic and philosophical, etc., domains).
>[…] We are confronted with a second kind of reason that has to do with the theoretical time lag that built up during the period of the 'cult of personality'. Lenin's slogan 'to develop theory in order to keep pace with life' is especially cogent here. If we would be hard pressed to cite any discoveries of great calibre in many areas of Marxist theory since Lenin, this is due in large part to the conditions in which the international working-class movement was enmeshed by the politics of the 'cult', by its countless victims in the ranks of very valuable militants, intellectuals and scientists, by the ravages inflicted by dogmatism on the intellect. If the politics of the 'cult' did not compromise the development of the material bases of socialism, it did, for many years, literally sacrifice and block all development of Marxist-Leninist theory; […]
>What is most painful - and directly expressed in these generous, if often ideologically confused, essays - is how the period of the 'cult', far from contributing to their formation, on the contrary, prevented the theoretical formation of an entire generation of Marxist researchers, whose work we cruelly miss today. […] This is all the more true, since the positions that Marxists did not know how to occupy in the domain of knowledge have not remained vacant: they are occupied - especially in the domain of the 'human sciences' - by bourgeois 'scientists' or 'theoreticians', under the direct domination of bourgeois ideology, with all the practical, political, and theoretical consequences whose disastrous effects can be observed - or rather, whose disastrous effects are not always even suspected. Not only, then, do we have to make good our own delay, but we have to reoccupy on our own behalf the areas that fall to us by right (to the extent that they depend on historical materialism and dialectical materialism) and we have to reoccupy them in difficult conditions, involving a clear-minded struggle against the prestige of the results apparently achieved by their actual occupants.
(TL;DR: pissed off about idpol? We were the ones who fucked up, and only we can fix this shit!)
[cont.]

[cont.]

Later he moves on to meticulously draw the line between science and philosophy,

and to define what makes Marx so unique, groundbreaking – but also: kinda shitty:

Your style of posting is revolting. Barf-inducing.

I'm French and have read most of those. They are a waste of time. I'm not going to detail why, I'll just say their whole schlick was to show off. None of them cared about the working class or anything like that, they were just in it because being a marxist was pretty much mandatory for having anything published or being taken seriously as a writer. And Lévi-Strauss is the caricature of a jew talking against the West without realizing the only reason he has the intellectual tools to do so is thanks to Western civilization.

Detail why please :S

Another easier read: 101 political philosophy with a Marxist bend. How did bourg. political philosophy develop, what makes Marxism stand out from the rest? Highly recommended read for anyone interested in the crucial theoretical steps taken in the history of western political thought, but also to those who want some easy BTFO's against liberal, conservative, and "red liberal" ideologues.

If you have to take a polsci or political philo course this book is great for sources.

Because muh joos, muh western civilization, muh charletans.

The aforementioned classic. Mandatory for every radical, regardless of creed. How does capitalism reproduce and legitimize itself without us noticing?
(.epub, because the .pdf is shit quality: libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=A044F65D19F335C0C55AC142DBA37C47 )

[cont.]

[cont.]

Tjank you!!

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Let's move on to harder texts. Althusser was pretty obsessed with Machiavelli, since he saw in him the first (proto-)materialist theorist of historical change. Machiavelli had everything his contemporaries (still busy with 'le harmonic order' meme) lacked: the recognition of the necessity of historical change; the mass political subject to bring about that change; not just the criticism of, but warning ordinary folk against the abuses of power; the recognition of the aleatory nature of the political event (The Prince – the revolution); and so on.

Offering highly original contrasts to Marx, Lenin, and Rousseau, a new and iconoclastic figure of Machiavelli is born before the reader's eyes, doing away with centuries of Catholic propaganda that conflated (and invented the term of) "machiavellianism" with the abuses of power, covering up their own 'holy' brutality. Meanwhile, the reader learns what makes historical materialism and revolutionary praxis one of a kind.

Posting pic related because shitty pdf copy. Higher res pdfs are available here: libgen.io/search.php?req=machiavelli althusser&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def

Short book, but hard. Take buncha often.

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*Take buncha notes.

Lastly, from his most controversial: Reading Capital. (I have no time, so no intro this time.) From the section titled 'Marxism is not a Historicism':
[cont.]

[fucking battery dying, no formatting:]

It must be said that the union of humanism and historicism represents the
gravest temptation, for it procures the greatest theoretical advantages, at least in
appearance. In the reduction of all knowledge to the historical social relations a
second underhand reduction can be introduced, by treating the relations of
production as mere human relations. [29] This second reduction depends on
something 'obvious': is not history a 'human' phenomenon through and through,
and did not Marx, quoting Vico, declare that men can, know it since they have
'made ' all of it? But this 'obviousness' depends on a remarkable presupposition:
that the 'actors' of history are the authors of its text, the subjects of its production.
But this presupposition too has all the force of the 'obvious', since, as opposed to
what the theatre suggests, concrete men are, in history, the actors of roles of
which they are the authors, too. Once the stage-director has been spirited away,
the actor-author becomes the twin-brother of Aristotle's old dream: the doctor-
who-cures-himself; and formulations about the 'real men', the 'concrete individuals', who, 'with their feet
firmly on the ground', are the real subjects of history? Do not the Theses on
Feuerbach declare that objectivity itself is the completely human result of the
'practico-sensuous' activity of these subjects? Once this human nature has been
endowed with the qualities of 'concrete' historicity, it becomes possible to avoid
the abstraction and fixity of theoogical or ethical anthropologies and to join Marx
in the very heart of his lair: historical materialism. This human nature will
therefore be conceived as something produced by history, and changing with it,
while man changes, as even the Philosophers of the Enlightenment intended, with
the revolutions of his own history, and is affected by the social products of his
objective history even in his most intimate faculties (seeing, hearing, memory,
reason, etc. Even Helvetius claimed this, and Rousseau too, in opposition to
Diderot; Feuerbach made it one of the main articles of his philosophy – and in
our own day, a horde of cultural anthropologists have adopted it). History then
becomes the transformation of a human nature, which remains the real subject of
the history which transforms it. As a result, history has been introduced into
human nature, making men the contemporaries of the historical effects whose
subjects they are, but – and this is absolutely decisive – the relations of
production, political and ideological social relations, have been reduced to
historicized 'human relations ', i.e., to inter-human, inter-subjective relations. This
is the favourite terrain of historicist humanism. And what is its great advantage?
The fact that Marx is restored to the stream of an ideology much older than
himself, an ideology born in the eighteenth century; credit for the originality of a
revolutionary theoretical rupture is taken from him, he is often even made
acceptable to modern forms of 'cultural' anthropology, and so on. Is there anyone
today who does not invoke this historicist humanism, in the genuine belief that he
is appealing to Marx, whereas such an ideology takes us away from Marx?
[cont.]

[…] This 'left-wing' humanism designated the proletariat as the site and
missionary of the human essence. The historical role of freeing man from his
'alienation' was its destiny, through the negation of the human essence whose
absolute victim it was. The alliance between the proletariat and philosophy
announced in Marx's early texts was no longer seen as an alliance between two
mutually exclusive components, The proletariat, the human essence in revolt
against its radical negation, because the revolutionary affirmation of the human
essence: the proletariat was thus philosophy in deed and its political practice
philosophy itself. Marx's role was then reduced to having conferred on this
philosophy which was acted and lived in its birth-place, the mere form of self-
consciousness. That is why Marxism was proclaimed 'proletarian' 'science' or
'philosophy', the direct expression, the direct production of the human essence by
its sole historical author: the proletariat. Kautsky's and Lenin's thesis that Marxist
theory is produced by a specific theoretical practice, outside the proletariat, and
that Marxist theory must be 'imported ' into the proletariat, was absolutely rejected
– and all the themes of spontaneism rushed into Marxism through this open
breach: the humanist universalism of the proletariat. Theoretically, this
revolutionary 'humanism' and 'historicism' together laid claim to Hegel and to
those of Marx's early texts then available.
This historicist humanism may, for example, serve as a theoretical warning to
intellectuals of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois origin, who ask themselves,
sometimes in genuinely tragic terms, whether they really have a right to be
members of a history which is made, as they know or fear, outside them Perhaps
this is Sartre's profoundest problem. It is fully present in his double thesis that
Marxism is the 'unsurpassable philosophy of our time', and yet that no literary or
philosophical work is worth an hour's effort in comparison with the sufferings of a
poor wretch reduced by imperialist exploitation to hunger and agony. Caught in
this double declaration of faith, on the one hand in an idea of Marxism, on the
other in the cause of all the exploited, Sartre reassures himself of the fact that he
really does have a role to play, beyond the 'Words' he produces and regards with
derision, in the inhuman history of our times, with a theory of 'dialectical reason'
which assigns to all (theoretical) rationality, and to every (revolutionary) dialectic,
the unique transcendental origin of the human 'project'. Thus in Sartre historicist
humanism takes the form of an exaltation of human freedom, in which by freely
committing himself to their fight, he can commune with the freedom of all the
oppressed, who have always been struggling for a little human light since the long
and forgotten night of the slave revolts.
The same humanism, with some shift in accent, can serve other causes,
according to conjuncture and needs: e.g., the protest against the errors and crimes
of the period of the 'cult of personality', the impatience to see them dealt with, the
hope for a real socialist democracy, etc.

OH NO!!
doubt.jpeg
STAHP GIVING ME A HARDON
hon hon hon
So predictabbel :—))

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faggot: no1 is interested in jewish "theory"

the white class will 'emancipate' itself without your help

lemme guess: you've read a lot of ITT texts!

Welcome to my world.

why leftypol sux atm

Sorry but what in the world does this mean?

point to the post u r butthurt 'bout, faggot

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babby's first philosophy, useful idiot Stalinite, mis-read Heidegger, now only a meme and token used to impress women
another meme and you did not explain at all what's worthwhile about him
I read his "Totemism" and it was accessible and I felt enriched from having read it
le ideology man who took a bunch of pages only to say in a tiny post-script that class struggle is what's really important

fuck OP but at least he tried

>I've read more Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger than Sartre
doubt.jpeg
Lemme guess :DDD you read 10 Lacans, no?
doubt.gif
:DDDD

You can't say j' before a consonant you brainlet

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