French "structuralists" general!

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.