PRAGOTI

In the various strands of the Radical Enlightenment the principle theme is the question of the crisis: we have the crises of the sciences, of reason, of modernity, etc. But, of course, Murzban Jal points out that in these renderings there is no crisis of capitalism. So it follows for the alternative Enlightenment, since something is indeed rotten in the state of the Enlightenment, the subject of history cannot be a class subject. The theme of the crisis of the sciences is now expressed in the crisis of Marxism. The proletariat cannot be the subject of history. And yet there has to be the subject. The tragic hero of Romanticism comes marching in. What Romanticism wants is not the negation of capitalism, but negation of all reality. The Romantics cannot be the revolutionaries, but only the tragic heros, who like Goethe’s Faust, are dragged to hell. There they take residence like Adorno, waiting for the missing messiah to come.

We present the full text of the article on DD Kosambi by Prabhat Patnaik which has been published in the latest issue of The Marxist.

The rhetoric of the market has been a fundamental and central component of ideological struggle - the struggle for the legitimation or delegitimation of left discourse. The surrender to the various forms of market ideology - on the left, not to speak of everybody else, - has been imperceptible but alarmingly universal. This is the second shoe of the destiny of that older piece of discourse, 'nationalization' - which it follows some twenty years later, just as in general full postmodernism (particularly in the political field) has turned out to be sequel, continuation and fulfillment of the old 50s 'end of ideology' episode. 'The market is in human nature': this is the proposition that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. That is, the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time, Fredric Jameson had argued in 1990 in the Socialist Register.

Pragoti reproduces this seminal article where Jameson holds that nothing is served by substituting for one inert institutional structure (bureaucratic planning) another inert institutional structure, namely the market itself.

 This interview with Louis Althusser, first published four decades ago in the height of the radical movements in Europe and beyond, has had a lasting influence on Marxist writers, thinkers and communist parties. Positions have been taken for and against the ideas which Althusser expressed here and in his other writings. Pragoti republishes this seminal interview of Althusser to rekindle some of the debates within Marxism with regard to science and ideology, the relation of theory to practice and the very definition of Marxism as a science or ideology.