DISCUSSION 67 capital, from the resistances of the workers on the shop floor to the people, groups, movements, parties and organizations who sing of the new times, who fight for a world where there is no oppression. The contemporary world does not afford us the luxury of policing the borders of marxist theory the way Lenin or the inheritors of his legacy could. How very simple it was in those days to say that "X is not a marxist", "Y is a revisionist or left-sectarian" or worse still, "Z is a bourgeois idealist in the garb of marxism"! In today's world when it is no longer possible to police the borders of such tangible entities as nation-states, the ambition to do so with theory can only lead to its internal sterility. The strength of marxism was precisely in its ability to engage with and transform the theoretical insights, tools and concepts taken over from a whole range of philosophies/theories from the Hegelian to the Classical Economists. It is precisely this that became the biggest casualty in subsequent decades, so that figures like Lukacs and Korsch had to recant or apologise for their "idealist deviations", or just part ways—and I say this despite my deepest disagreements with them. I think it would be accurate for me to say that while I stand by the substance of my argument in the paper, I would find it difficult to defend it or argue it out in the same way any longer. One of the points where I would like to distance myself from my own earlier position, which in a slightly incorrect way, Aunindyo has detected, relates to historicism of my argument. The historicism however, is not in the claim that history has posed questions for marxist theory. It lies certainly in my. use of the sections from the German Ideology, in the recourse to the "myth of origin" which Marx himself debunks in the later years, as Althusser has shown. His assertion that the simplest form of commodity production can only be understood through an understanding of the most developed form, namely, the bourgeois economy; his assertion that the "anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape", all point to the fact that we can only know the past through the present and that the "origin" therefore is always irretrievably lost. One minor observation before I go on to the substantive questions. My "invocation" of Althusser does not commit me to his larger project or even to his "problematic", just as Althusser's own references to ("invocations" of?) Lacan, Freud, Bachelard, Foucault and others does not commit him to theirs. There are undoubtedly many points on which there can be very serious theoretical quarrels with him. I therefore read Althusser himself in the way he reads Marx; not by referring simply to the explicit/manifest discourse but "symptomatically", paying attention to the unsaid, the unconscious. I believe that the Althusserian moment in the history of marxism constitutes an important point of departure that has either been inadequately appreciated or applauded/decried for the wrong reasons.