Why I think marxist humanism sucks (a thread):
I think in general the secret logic of humanism as althusser says is the difference between inhuman/human (this logic was used to justify slavery but ain't ready for that conversation) This logic, I think is one that marx moved from

For starters in the 1844 manuscripts he says:
"Man makes his life activity itself a object of his will and consciousness He has conscious life activity It is not a determination with which he directly merges Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life

activity Only because of that is he a species-being"
As we can see, its what makes Man(a concept heavily criticised by most post-modern philosophers) different from the rest of nature, from what is inhuman is what gives him this species-being. Now isn't nature-man divide purely

ideological? I would say so, I would there is no dichotomy between man and nature they are non-separable that this dichotomy is just a product of modernity, a remnant of which we can see in early and even late marx. So far you might think I am breaking from marx but this isn't

true, human/inhuman being the basis of idealist thinking is something marx pointed out in the german ideology. Furthermore the famous first line of gotha critique confirms this!

Marx, methodologically break away from humanism too moving to an analysis reliant on alienation as he says
"History is the alienation and production of reason in unreason,
of the true man in the alienated man"

To one reliant on social formation, produc-tive forces,

relations of production, superstructure, ideologies,
determination in the last instance by the economy etc etc we can see that he is methodologically an anti-humanist. You might say but doesn't althusser himself say that marx says things in capital that are supportive of the

humanist interpertation? That is correct but it doesn't go against his project at all, if anything althusser shows he actually understands marx not just quoting. In chapter 1 of capital marx when is talking about aristotle he praises him for his brillance but at the same time

recognises that he wasn't able to get value correctly due to limitations of his time, marx says the same of the utopian socialists. And so we must recognise that marx was bound to the set forth by the time period he lived in, as a man in the transition from modernity to the next

stage of development, and so remnants of modernity will be always present in his thought, its useful to compare him with thinkers that came after him that rejected Man, and thus we can see how marx's thinking wrt humanism had transitionary character.