Andrew,
Your comments on Althusser's reading of Capital were insightful and
raised what I see as the main issue of contention around TSS, "Is Marx's
Marxism an intellectual whole that is consistent, coherent?" Althusser
split Marx to negate Marx's humanism and recreation of the Hegelian
dialectic. Shanin and others, for different reasons, thought the late Marx
was so different from what Shanin considered Marxism, that he considered it a
break in Marx's development. I'm speaking of the Ethnological Notebooks.
Same story, Marx was inconsistent.
Ted