That Marxism perennially suffers from marginality, dogmatism, fixations with patterns of activism that go nowhere, as well as cart-before-horse type delusions that assume a material foundation that does not yet exist, should be patently obvious to any passing observer. Critique of these tendencies is most welcome. However, there is an equally historic tendency to use critique as a means to double down on the very practices that have brought Marxism to this point. It is quite unfortunate that the comrades at Geese Magazine have fallen into this latter tendency. It is doubly unfortunate that they do not even seem to be aware of the way in which they are repeating history. Favorable citation of Althusser in the essays “Marx’s Materialism” and “The Marginality of American Communism,” by Geese editors P.K. Gandakin and Scottie O. respectively, is especially bizarre, since Althusser quite definitively rebuffed the main thrust of their critique in explicit terms.

The ideology expressed in these essays can be summed up in all the favorite Althusserian lines of attack. They are idealist, certainly, but more specifically, they are historicist, empiricist, and humanist. “Marx’s Materialism” is the most empiricist and humanist and “The Marginality of American Communism” is the most historicist. Each of these pejoratives means something extremely specific and are not used lightly. This critique of Geese Magazine’s ideology will be used to show exactly why these accusations are merited and exactly what consequences result.

The Empiricist and Humanist Idealism of “Marx’s Materialism”

Having just completed an essay entitled “What is Materialism?” from an Althusserian and modern scientific perspective a few months ago, I was positively excited to see what another writer’s approach to this problem might be, especially if they also shared my sympathies for Althusser’s research project. It was somewhat shocking to find that in “Marx’s Materialism” everything I had seen in plain black and white in Reading Capital was inverted into its direct opposite, and not dialectically, but seemingly without awareness of what was being done.

Right off the bat, we are given the eternal claim of every idealist philosophy: that it has miraculously overcome the division of materialism and idealism:

Marx, in other words, was not a materialist rather than an idealist. For Marx, vulgar materialism was just as bad—if not worse—than idealism, and both positions remained limited in his eyes by their speculative origins. Rather, he rejected both and saw them as limited ways to understand the world.

The division, for Gandakin, is dissolved in the acid bath of practice, which destroys both the “objective external world” as well as “objective representations of that world.”

How, precisely, does practice spark this chemical reaction? By being totalizing. Practice, we are told, is everything. “There is only human practice” honks the goose, renouncing its former birthright, the majesty of nature. And with this renunciation, the goose abandons its lowly capabilities to reason, for what use is “true” or “false” when one has practice?

I’m reminded of The Japanese Ideology which, written in the 1930s by Japanese Marxist Tosaka Jun, was recently translated into English. Jun comments on the philosophic trends of liberalism and fascism during this period, all of which centered on politically expedient interpretations of classical Japanese philosophy that twisted them to find their place in modern bourgeois society. Quite popular was the philosophy of “nothingness,” contrasted with the ontologies and philosophies of “being” imported from German idealism. Nothingness, which had a long philosophic history in Japan, was said to be more fundamental than being, which was deemed insufficient as a determinant of experience. There must be a more totalizing nothing that lies behind being, it was believed.^[1]

What is practice here if it is everything? It is nothing. And it becomes nothing as soon as it takes on the mantle of all thought, action, and existence. It is the thing that determines without being determined externally. And, when used in this way, it is also a twisting of classical texts for purposes of creating a modern bourgeois ideology.

To preempt such accusations, Gandakin states that the true meaning of an ideology or text is not in its content, but in its form. To analyze the content is simply abstract metaphysics. The true spirit of Marx’s materialism, in this view, is praxis. It cannot even be said to be an idea, for this philosophy, supposedly attributed to Marx, is that ideas do not even exist at all. As Gandakin says, among various citations of the young Marx sprinkled in:

Therefore, thought functions as a mode of practice, as a way of relating to the world, rather than as a picture or description of the world. Questions about whether an idea or belief are “true” or "false” are moot for Marx. An idea is not an object that can be judged according to objective truth: it is a practice that only exists as it relates to a particular, subjective existence.

In his dissertation, Marx argues this point against traditional academic philosophy. He argues that trends such as Epicureanism and Stoicism have been only analyzed in a limited, metaphysical style. But a proper, materialist analysis means seeing these philosophies as the objective forms of subjective practices, rather as collections of beliefs. In other words, these philosophies were not just abstract doctrines possessed by a generic thinker, but ‘prototypes of the Roman mind, the shape in which Greece wandered to Rome.’ A description is not enough to understand them; philosophy, for Marx, is also a given person’s way of living…

…This emphasis on subjectivity and practice is the real core of dialectical materialism. For Marx, materialism means that the world can only be understood according to practice, not to reason.

Surely there would be no harm in reducing thought to action if we then gained another word for the type of action that goes on in people’s heads as they plan ahead in life, imagine, and otherwise attempt to understand things. But that is not the sort of operation going on here. The point of this maneuver is to shut down contemplation as such, as Gandakin makes clear. This project intends to dispense with the idea of Marxism as a system or science altogether. Marxism is therefore just a sort of action, just like any other. There is no difference between Marxism and the action of migration by geese, both are simply a certain habit that a certain type of creature acquires. Why, precisely, is the habit acquired? Why must the creatures act? Those are questions that remain unanswered. The essay is mostly an exercise in saying questions should not be answered at all, for that is a contemplative, metaphysical sort of operation.

What is equally baffling is just why Gandakin employs Althusser as his first line of defense against “objectivist marxism” and its theory of correspondence between ideas and reality:

To say Marxism is true is therefore not just to say merely that there is data that is proof for its statements, but also that these statements are a more or less accurate representation or ‘picture’ of reality that corresponds with how reality ‘really is.’...

The first to explicitly identify and theorize the critique of representationalism in Marxism was communist theoretician and politician Louis Althusser (1918-1990). In his seminal and groundbreaking Reading Capital (1965) he comprehensively criticizes the philosophical model of correspondence (which is also identified with empiricism, theology, idealism, etc.)—the mind as pictures of the external world—and criticizes its presence in Marxist theory.

Gandakin doesn’t provide citations for this argument against representationalism in Althusser which could help elucidate precisely what is meant here. If we turn to Althusser himself, he appears to say nearly the complete opposite:

…the fact that the process of production of knowledge necessarily proceeds by the constant transformation of its (conceptual) object; that it is precisely the effect of this transformation, which is the same thing as the history of knowledge, that it produces a new knowledge (a new object of knowledge) which still concerns the real object, knowledge of which is deepened precisely by this reorganization of the object of knowledge. As Marx says profoundly, the real object, of which knowledge is to be acquired or deepened, remains what it is, after as before the process of knowledge which involves it (cf. the 1857 Introduction ); if, therefore, it is the absolute reference point for the process of knowledge which is concerned with it -- the deepening of the knowledge of this real object is achieved by a labour of theoretical transformation which necessarily affects the object of knowledge, since it is only applied to the latter. Lenin understood this essential condition of scientific practice perfectly -- it is one of the major themes of Materialism and Empirico-Criticism: the theme of the incessant deepening of the knowledge of a real object by incessantly reorganizing the object of knowledge.^[2]

For Althusser then, it is simply not true that there is no relationship between the real object and the object of knowledge, the thing in reality and the thing in mind. These two things are, of course, not the same thing. The map is not the territory. However, this relationship is what allows us to know things so trifling as what is true or false by a movement of the object of knowledge to, indeed, reflect the real object. Without the ability to develop the object of knowledge so that it better resembles the real object, we are unable to learn anything new at all, much less new Marxist strategies.

Althusser, contra Gandakin, was the greatest promoter of Marxism as a system and science. It indeed defies all logic and reason, whatever that’s worth, to think the writer of Capital was not interested in the precise veracity of his theoretical claims. Marx goes to excruciating pains to break down the claims of his contemporary political economists, particularly the critics of Ricardo, bourgeois hacks, and even other socialists. Similarly, in The German Ideology, when Marx criticizes the Young Hegelians he does so on the basis of creating categories that are simply more real, those of town and country and general political economy, than something as vague and unscientific as “the essence of man.”

Gandakin’s essay asks for an abandonment of the abstract in favor of the concrete, the sensuous, and does so in chorus with the rest of Geese Magazine and its tendency. But it's precisely this concreteness, this sensuousness, which is the primary thing being critiqued by Althusser in Reading Capital.

The opposition often suggested between the 'abstract' character of Capital and the supposedly 'concrete' character of history as a science is purely and simply a misunderstanding, but one which is worth discussing, for it has a special place in the realm of the prejudices which govern us. It is true that the theory of political economy is worked out and developed by the investigation of a raw material provided in the last resort by the practices of real concrete history; it is true that it can and must be realized in what are called 'concrete' economic analyses, relating to some given conjuncture or given period of a given social formation; and these truths are exactly mirrored in the fact that the theory of history, too, is worked out and developed by the investigation of a raw material provided by real concrete history, and that it, too, is realized in the 'concrete analysis' of 'concrete situations.' The misunderstanding lies entirely in the fact that history hardly exists other than in this second form, as the 'application' of a theory… which does not exist in any real sense, and that therefore the 'applications' of the theory of history somehow occur behind this absent theory's back and are naturally mistaken for it… if they do not depend (for they do need a minimum of theory to exist) on more or less ideological outlines of theories. We must take seriously the fact that the theory of history, in the strong sense, does not exist, or hardly exists as far as historians are concerned, that the concepts of existing history are therefore nearly always 'empirical' concepts, more or less in search of their theoretical basis -- 'empirical', i.e., cross-bred with a powerful strain of an ideology concealed behind its 'obviousnesses.' This is the case with the best historians, who can be distinguished from the rest precisely by their concern for theory, but who seek this theory at a level on which it cannot be found, at the level of historical methodology, which cannot be defined without the theory on which it is based.^[3]

This passage by Althusser was the basis for some harsh criticism by historian EP Thompson,^[4] who defended the empiricist historian perspective in language eerily similar to Gandakin’s. Thompson was chiefly opposed to Marxism as a system, he wanted to apply the language of Marxism piece-meal, as whenever useful, to the study of concrete historical events. He believed that the only good theoretical concepts to describe what was going on at a given time were the words people were using to describe their lives at that given time. This sort of “subjectivist” twist is quite common in the social sciences, even though it would be seen as a bird-brained method of rigorous analysis in other disciplines. A biologist would hardly suggest that a species of pigeon has materially changed with our nomenclature for it. Yet, that’s precisely the sort of thing which we should expect from sensuous empiricism, everything becomes only what we feel it is.

The importance of theoretical abstraction is that it allows us to learn things about the world. The more rigorously we develop our ideas, the better we can refine them when we act in the world, and receive feedback for them. In a world without true or false, there is no learning. In the world of human action attested to by the goose, everything is ready-made to be used, our sensuousness is what permits us to grasp our situation and to act in an appropriate way. This emphasis on sensuous empiricism in early Marx is precisely included in what Althusser was critiquing as humanism, though this is totally missed by Gandakin, who believed that this critique of humanism only applied to the assumption of human essence. Here, I will quote Althusser at length once again and I must beg the reader’s forgiveness for these many block-quotes, but it is unfortunately unavoidable. The chief want of this essay is that people actually read and take to heart Althusser’s original insights into Marxism that are now oft-cited in ignorance.

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. 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 the relations of production, although they are the real stage-directors of history, are reduced to mere human relations.

Is not The German Ideology stuffed with 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 theological 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…). 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?^[5]

There we have the most clear encapsulation of Gandakin’s essay, which is situated in this classic historicist humanist tradition of using the sensuous, empirical world as a bludgeon to the world of theoretical abstraction. In the trash heap of things beyond human practice, beyond nothingness, lies this pitiful yet precious thing we call abstraction. Abstraction occurs when we take signs that are familiar to us, which stand in for some concrete phenomena, and operations that are familiar to us, which we have learned through concrete experience, and use them to create new signs that stand in for things that are yet unfamiliar to us. All things we imagine, anticipate, predict, or dream are born from this ability to create abstractions.^[6] Most animals can create abstraction to a small extent, and humans are unique for our ability to create higher abstractions through complicated languages. Upon this ability, all civilization has been built. How odd to find this sort of jewel in the dumpster. I don’t think the goose quite knows what it’s thrown out.

Why then go through this exercise of praising Althuser while siding with his theoretical enemies? I think that it has something to do with the ignorance of just how Geese Magazine’s ideology reproduces the same sort of activities that brought the Left to this point. Althusser’s position, from which he attempted to reform the official French Communist Party from within, was a minority among the broader radical Left at the time. Much more common was that of Thompson, as well as that of Althusser’s students, which rejected the Communist Parties, as well as the rigidity of Marxism as a scientific system. From the 1970s up until very recently, anti-systemic thinkers prevailed on the Left and in the academy. As the Left has begun to own up to the failures of post-structuralism as a perspective, this position has suddenly become unpopular. Siding with Althusser is thus a means to distance oneself from the debacle that was the past 50 years of the Left. As we shall see, in “The Marginality of American Communism” Geese are no strangers to making theoretical and ideological positions on the basis of political expediency.

The Historicism of “The Marginality of American Communism”

Similar to the critique of systematized, scientific Marxism found in “Marx’s Materialism,” the primary antagonist of “The Marginality of American Communism” is economism, a Marxist deviation that rejects the autonomy of the superstructure and its ability to shape the base. It shares the emphasis on the concrete and the sensuous as an antidote to this deviation. The piece takes some jabs that land on contemporary activism among left sects, on the sisyphean futility of door-knocking or schemes that require building a socialist economy before a socialist political movement can take form.

In opposition to this endless futility, Scottie O. proposes a great focus on the “practical.” The devotion to the practical is taken to extreme ends. Whereas Gandakin rejects all possibilities of true and false, Scottie O. does give us an idea of “truth.” The truth is whatever practice actually works. From the goose’s beak:

In reality, there is no such thing as a correct political idea that is not effectively practical. A comrade recently quipped that ‘the best part about being a Marxist is being right all the time,’ to which I responded by asking, ‘Why then does the American proletariat not follow us?’ The reply was that though communists are ‘right all the time,’ being right ‘doesn’t make our task any easier.’ In all due respect, comrade, this is mental gymnastics of the highest degree. What makes one ‘right’ outside of real human practice? As politicians, what makes us ‘right’ outside of practical success in politics? A Marxist cannot be ‘correct’ unless his ideas are the real expression of a living social practice…

There is no truth outside of practice—as a Marxist, to assert that one is correct and to further argue that the problem is that we haven't ‘brought’ the truth to enough people is to fall right back into pre-Marxist vulgar materialism, as well as reaffirm the idea that human activity is structured by reason and argumentation (odd for self-proclaimed ‘materialists,’ is it not?).

A statement which borders on nihilism. The poor, destitute, and enslaved might have hoped that there was perhaps something that the powerful could not take away; that they could not truly snuff out the stars in the sky, break the logic of arithmetic, or take away from them the few moral truths that they hold dear. But alas, it was not to be. What is true is only what works, and, even from a Marxist lens, who would dare deny that the ruling class is built upon action that works? Is not every social system one that must, in a given time and space, work in practice? The truth, therefore, everywhere and always, is on the side of the ruling class, of the tyrants.

Through certain Marxist formulas, Scottie O. attempts to conceal this conclusion, but it continues to sneak in.

‘The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history’ is a line all too often forgotten by our so-called ‘historical materialists.’ While parading slogans such as this around, their practice continues to portray exactly the opposite conviction: ‘We, the dedicated activists, are the motive force in the making of world history; the masses role is to join us, in a secondary supporting role, because it seems we need their support in achieving our goals.’ The masses do not begin to make history only after attaching themselves to some intellectual grouping (let alone the most isolated one in our entire society: the communists); those political groups that do ascend to hegemony do so not because the people ‘support’ them, but because that group expresses the living practice of a real and concrete social formation.

This call to go to where the masses are already making history is meant to refocus Marxist political action on the dominant issues on people's minds, such as national elections. But if the Marxist movement is only to enter the class struggle as it’s already occurring, then the question is, what exactly is the purpose of this Marxism in the first place? If the masses are already making history, then there’s certainly no need for any Marxist jargon and theory to begin with. Hell, from this point of view, even Scottie O. own essay would be nothing more than hot air. If truth is what works, then the truth is the Democratic and Republican parties, their ideologies, and inner machinations. And, it seems this is precisely the line of breadcrumbs the geese follow. For if national elections, as they already exist for the masses, are the chief place of class struggle, then there is nothing more required of Marxists than to dutifully liquidate into one of the bourgeois political parties. Maybe even the one that is more historically progressive!

Perhaps it goes without saying, but this strategy directly pushes aside any attempt to transform the relations of production, or even the forces of production if, for some reason, stagnation becomes the norm. It is political quietism and tailism to the extreme.

To defend this position, Scottie O cites Gramsci and Althusser favorably. In Gramsci, Scottie O. identifies justification for this subordination of truth to political expediency. In Althusser, they find the method of political action crafted by Machiavelli. What Scottie O. appears unaware of, however, is that Althusser was directly critical of Gramsci for this subordination of truth to political expediency, and identified it directly as historicism. Once again, it is necessary to quote Althusser in full.

We have seen that Gramsci was so insistent on the practical unity of the conception of the world and history that he neglected to retain what distinguishes Marxist theory from every previous organic ideology: its character as scientific knowledge. Marxist philosophy, which he does not clearly distinguish from the theory of history, suffers the same fate: Gramsci relates it to present history as its direct expression; philosophy is then, as Hegel intended (in a conception readopted by Croce) ‘the history of philosophy’, and, in short, history. As all science and all philosophy are at bottom real history, real history itself can be called philosophy and science….

Despite his enormous historical and political genius, Gramsci did not avoid this empiricist temptation in his attempt to think the status of science and above all that of philosophy (for he is little concerned with science). He is constantly tempted to think the relation between real history and philosophy as a relation of expressive unity, whatever mediations may be responsible for the maintenance of this relation. As we have seen, for him, a philosopher is, in the last instance, a 'politician'; for him, philosophy is the direct product (assuming all the 'necessary mediations') of the activity and experience of the masses, of politico-economic praxis: professional philosophers merely lend their voices and the forms of their discourse to this 'common sense' philosophy, which is already complete without them and speaks in historical praxis -- they cannot change it substantially. Gramsci spontaneously rediscovers, as an opposition indispensable to the expression of his thought, the very formulations which Feuerbach used in a famous text of 1839 which opposed the philosophy produced by real history to the philosophy produced by philosophers -- the formulations opposing praxis to speculation. And Gramsci's intention to retain what was valuable in Croce's historicism is expressed in the very terms of Feuerbach's 'inversion' of speculation into 'concrete' philosophy: he proposes to 'invert' Croce's speculative historicism, to set it back on to its feet, in order to make it into Marx's historicism -- in order to rediscover real history and 'concrete' philosophy. If it is true that the 'inversion' of a problematic retains the same structure as that problematic, it is not surprising that the relationship of direct expression (given all the necessary 'mediations') between real history and philosophy conceived by Hegel and Croce recurs in the inverted theory: precisely the relationship of direct expression Gramsci is tempted to set up between politics (real history) and philosophy.^[7]

This historicist error of Gramsci is precisely what is adopted by the flock of geese. The consequence is that scientific knowledge, and any labor towards scientific knowledge, is scorned as not sufficiently practical. It should be “obvious” by now that the development of scientific knowledge has advantages that are not capable of always being fully articulated in advance. Hence, all the fruits of this learning, all the knowledge gained from scientific investigation, the inheritance of all humankind, is pawned off by these geese, who cannot see its immediate use, its immediate political application.

Chasing The Wild Goose

Perhaps it is not completely the fault of the geese that they have this impression. There is a lot of built-up grime and dirt on this jewel. Particularly within Marxist sects, the ability to create new knowledge has been greatly hampered by dogmatism and the ban on factions in most parties, preventing frank and open discussion of theory and practice. And for those outside the sects, within academia for example, there has been open hostility to the scientificity of Marxism for a long time. Marxism is just another literary theory or historical commentary to them, at best, some type of philosophy no different from bourgeois philosophy. Thus, there has been very little development in Marxism as a science since Althusser’s time. I sincerely hope, however, that this situation is changing.

Doing the intellectual labor to create scientific knowledge first requires attempting to answer questions, rather than brush them aside and quibble about just how meaningless content is when compared to action. What is materialism? I think it should be uncontroversial to say it is an idea. How could Marxism one day cease to be marginal? It would require bourgeois society to cease to work. Hence, knowledge about just how, when, and why that ceasing to work might occur is extremely important and deserves immense theoretical effort. Questions of immediate political strategy, of course, cannot be neglected, but they should not be the final answer on truth. The limiting of the autonomy of truth-seeking as an activity is precisely how Marxism descended from a science into dogmatism, including the mindless activist tendencies decried by the above articles. All of which is to say that, after chasing the wild goose, we find ourselves exactly where we began; the exact same rut of Marxism. Surely there's a better way?

1. “Such determination in judgment is the self - determination of the universal of judgment, and so, in general, “being” — as something that is thought — is a kind of universal, something that is situated in a place ( basho ). But no matter how self - determined this universal of judgment is, in the end, it can never arrive at the individual (person or entity) [ kobutsu, kotai ]. This is because the individual should not be wholly determined by its environment as it is able to move and to act within it. Thus this universal of judgment is inadequate to think the individual. (Here this individual is nothing more than a guide or ferryman for what is later thought of as the individual self). Thus, to think the “individual,” this universal of judgment must be transcended and the individual backed by a new universal. This new universal is what Nishida calls a “self - conscious universal” and it is only with this self - determination that the individual is thought to have any meaning. In the same way, both the self - determination of the active individual ( noesis ) and the expressive individual ( noema ) can be thought. Now, the universal above is thought of as the self - determination of the universal below, but what determines the universal at the ultimate depths? It is called the final universal, but because it is a universal that is thought, it is still a determined universal that exists in a specific place, that is, it is the final “being.” But such a universal “being” is still determined, and as that which determines, it must be thought. Thus, this determination then is no longer “being.” At base there is nothingness [ mu ], but this nothingness must be determining, this determining “nothing” must be thought of as a self - determination of nothingness. Basho is the place of nothingness [ mu no basho ].” See: Tosaka Jun, The Japanese Ideology: A Marxist Critique of Liberalism and Fascism (Columbia University Press, 2024), Chapter Twelve.

   ↩

2. Louis Althusser, “Part I. From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” in Reading Capital (New Left Books, 1970), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch01.htm.

   ↩

3. Althusser, “Part II: The Object of Capital,” in Reading Capital, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch02.htm.

   ↩

4. E.P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory – or an Orrery of Errors,” (1978), https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1978/pot/essay.htm.

   ↩

5. Althusser, “Part II: The Object of Capital,” in Reading Capital, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch02.htm.

   ↩

6. Nicolas D. Villarreal, “Higher Order Signs, Hallucination and Schizophrenia,” Pre-History of an Encounter, November 2024, https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/higher-order-signs-hallucination.

   ↩

7. Althusser, “Part II: The Object of Capital,” in Reading Capital, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch02.htm.

   ↩