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| Karl Marx leyendo a Louis Althusser ✆ Jeffrey Ascott |
The turn of Western Marxism towards the theory of action and
the tautological reinterpretation of the left wing politicism associated with
that theory did not enjoy an uninterrupted development, once that, in the
ideological thought of Modernity, the metaphysics of intentionality did not
generally succeed in freeing itself from the metaphysics of law-governed
structures, or vice-versa. This is why Western Marxism also produced a
“structuralist” version after the Second World War, represented principally by
Louis Althusser. However, the so-called structuralism of the post-war period,
which gave rise to Althusser’s “structuralist reading of Marx”, did not follow
the classical bourgeois metaphysics of law-governed structure, but developed
from linguistic (Saussure) and ethnological (Lévi-Strauss) paradigms. Here,
too, however, they revealed pseudo-scientific reductions; in Lévi-Strauss, for
example, these “explanatory models” were simultaneously directed against the
Enlightenment and the Hegelian metaphysics of history. “Conformity with the
laws” was no longer considered to be historically dominant; it was reduced to
the “respective structures” and to their “necessary autonomization”, without
teleological components.