Okay I’ve promised myself I’m going to read The Poverty of Theory by EP Thompson, if only to read this quote in context:

We might define the present situation more precisely if we employed a category found frequently in Marx’s correspondence with Engels, but a category which evaded Althusser’s vigilant symptomatic scrutiny. All this ‘shit’ (Geschichtenscheissenschlopff) in which both bourgeois sociology and Marxist structuralism stand up to their chins (Dahrendorf beside Poulantzas, modernization theory beside theoretical practice) has been shat upon us by conceptual paralysis, by the dehistoricising of process and by reducing class, ideology, social formations, and almost everything else, to categorical stasis… .the systems-analyses and structuralisms. . .the econometric and cleometric groovers – all of these theories hobble along programmed routes from one static category to the next. And all of them are Geschichtenscheissenschlopff,unhistorical shit.