Nothing is more remarkable in the tradition of Althusserian Marxism than the silence that has dogged the work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez. One thinks of the relative importance attached to the work of Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Some might believe the discrepancy is a matter of merit rather than of willful or unconscious neglect. But even the most casual comparison of Rodríguez's Theory and History of Ideological Production with Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology (1975) and with Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981) suggests that this can hardly be the case. The parallel with Jameson is particularly intriguing. Like Rodríguez, the North American scholar accepts Louis Althusser's view of the social totality as a “decentered structure” in which various levels develop in “relative autonomy” and in which different feudal and capitalist matrices coexist. Also like Rodríguez, he considers literary works to be a form of ideological discourse that represses historical truth. Why, then, the silence that surrounds Rodríguez? The answer lies in the extent to which Jameson's work recontains diverse critical positions in the larger horizon of Marxism. Such a practice, as Eagleton has argued, is congenial to a dominant American pragmatism and eclecticism, as are the presiding Marxist Hegelian categories of reification and commodification (60–62). The consequences, politically, are found in Jameson's amorphous brand of “alliance” politics. The material situation of Rodríguez was very different. Given the militancy of the working class in Spain, his presiding categories were those of exploitation and class conflict, which combine to form the basis of a revolutionary proletarian politics that is anything but acceptable to the North American academy.