What does Holla Forums think of Althusser and his social theories?

What does Holla Forums think of Althusser and his social theories?

Personally, I've always thought of him as a kind of final boss.

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It's good shit. Leftists of every tendency should read "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses."
marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm

inb4 the "le he didn't read Marx meme"

this and aswell as "on the reproduction of capital"

I think it is really important that the different between a serf and a wage labourer is that within wage labour the exploitation is hidden in the work process. So when Althusser explains the few other places exploitation hides he loses me.

The idea that 'exploitation' is necessarily against 'species-being' is very interesting though. For instance a Horse or Donkey will not care if it creates surplus value - yet somehow we do? There is no real reason we care is there?

I don't know, I think you're taking things a bit far when you murder your wife over insufficient devotion to the cause

Kill your wife ONE TIME and everybody comes out of the woodwork to rag on ol' Lou.

Why is it an imperative to read him, rather?

Althusser's work gives us the final demarcation line between 20th (1) and 21st century (2) communism.

1) He brings Marx and Lenin to their theoretical apices. He tackles them and reformulates them in order to bring out the best in and most from them. He shits on Hegel as a good orthodox Marxist.

2) He provides contours of the modern materialisms to come, the "aleatory" kinds. He views critically "really existing socialism" and gives us the succinct criticism of it.

Eventually – Zizek would say –, he reaches a point where he'd need to reevaluate Hegel. Nota bene: Althusser started off as a Hegelian, a tradition he abandoned in favor of Marx! Yet he came full circle.

You'd be mad not to read Althusser.

Althusser, theoretically speaking, is the one and only gateway between the last and current century's communism. And he writes beautifully.

he's definitely worth reading (and not to mention really fun). but i think he's a bit dangerous to consider in isolation without a firm understanding of dialectics/historical materialism. i've read for marx and lenin and revolution and found the two bigger issues i had with his ideas:

1) he confines his discussion largely to individual rather than collective subjectivities, probably under the influence of laconian psychoanalysis. this is obviously excellent for us marxists who hold collective self-consciousness and resultant action above all else

2) his ideological superstructures is that they seem to float above the economic structures of society, instead focusing on culture and ideology (no wonder he was a maoist). he implies that real changes have to happen at the level of superstructure, ideology. there is a way in which this claim obviates any real discussion of the working class in his writing (again it gets abstracted into the lacanian subject that is both subjected to and at the same time)

this is simply false
6/10 for attemp

.t