Makers of Mod 8. Louis Althi Marxism

Scan page 6

No single contemporary Marxist philosopher has had a deeper influence over the past decade than Louis Althusser, veteran theoretician of the French Communist The positions set forward in Althusser's major worksFor Marx (1965), Reading Capital (1965), Lenin and Philosophy (1968)-have infiltrated Marxist theory from political science to anthropology, from the writing of history to the criticism of art.

"Althusserianism', whether as a fashionable flirtation with Althusser's language or as a more serious body of work, represents the most radical challenge, from within the Marxist camp, to revolutionary theory and practice.

It is one which Trotskyists can by no means ignore.

It would be impossible in a brief article to summarise Althusser's thought. Instead I propose to single out four central areas of his theory, and in each case to do three things:

First, to show what is of value in these positions, as correctives to inadequate Marxist formulations; second to show how what is of value is closely intertwined with theoretical positions which must be rejected; and third, to point out in each case the connection between Althusser's theoretical errors and the Stalinism of which he has for so long been a leading ideologue.

1. The theory of knowledge. Althusser rightly and vehemently rejects all empiricist theories of knowledge.

This is more than a pious gesture, because empiricism in one form or another, still deeply contaminates much Marxism.

Many Marxists, consciously or not, continue to hold a crude theory of knowledge whereby 'truth' is established by measuring your concepts of. things against the things themselves.

This, as Althusser perceives, is utterly naive and incoherent. For we never have access to things, whether they be coffee-cups or capitalist society, except through concepts.

There is no 'naked' encounter with reality, independent of particular conceptual frameworks.

To measure your concepts against the things themselves itself demands concepts in which to do it;

and then how do we measure the truth of these concepts?

Althusser argues, then, that all realitv is constructed in and by particular conceptual discourses.

All knowledge of readity occurs within what he calls a 'problematic'-an historically particular structure of concepts, in which certain ideas will be granted privileged status, and others silently excluded.

The 'problematic' of the bourgeois political economists necessarily excluded the concept of 'labour power'; in criticising their work, Marx revealed this hidden problematic and actively transformed it.

Marx could not have written Capital without developing a particular structure of concepts, such as the 'commodity, which made the capitalist mode of production intelligible.

He didn't simply look around him and see what was, there, as a crude empiricist theory of knowledge would suggest.

Moreover, that structure of concepts was not just given once and for all: it took Marx-a long time to elaborate it, and it underwent constant historical development.

So tar, then, there 1s little to ditterentiate Althusser's theory of knowledge from Marx's.

But there is more to Althusser's theory than that. For him, theory is essentially a kind of practice -a form of production.

Theoretical labour, like takes ther fo raw materials, (concepts), and by the use of certain 'instruments of production' (theoretical procedures) transforms them into a particular theoretical product.

As an account of the theoretical process, this usefully dispels idealist illusions that theory 'comes from nowhere' * although it is really not much more than a metaphor.

But in another sense it is itself idealist: for it really comes down to saying that the Marxist theoretician doesn't need to leave his study.

Theory, for Althusser, is an autonomous practice, which propels itself along by its own internal procedures.

There is no need to relate theory to practice, because theory is a practice anyway.

We never need to relate theories to other forms of practice in order to test them out, because the truth of a theory is guaranteed entirely by procedures internal to that theory.

Althusser has later modified the extreme theoreticism of this position:

He would now define Marxist philosophy as 'the class-struggle at the level of theory'-by which he means that it is only by first of all taking up a proletarian, materialist position at the level of theory that the autonomous science of historical materialism can be developed.

But the class struggle enters in here only as a theoretical precondition for Marxist science.

This is hardly the relation between theory and the class struggle which Lenin had in mind when he wrote that "Correct revolutionary theory assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement."

It is the absence of such a dialectic in Althusser which defines his Stalinism.

Theory is essentially the property of the party bureaucracy, sealed off from the practical activity of the working class, to be dispensed to the masses from above.

2. 'Humanism'. . Althusser's attempt to win complete autonomy for theory can be seen as part of a struggle for his own particular theories within the French CP.

But it is also an extreme caricature of what, taken in itself, is a valuable opposition to historicist' notions of Marxist theory.

We have encountered such notions several times in the 'Hegelian-Marxist' thinkers examined in these articles: the reduction of dialiectical materialism to no more than the 'expression' of the particular historical interests of a class, which thus tends to deprive Marxist theory of all objective validity and degrade it to a form of pragmatism.

Althusser's work is a timely , antidote to such reductionism, even if it's attempts to counter it keel over into the most rampant idealism.

Something similar can be said of Althusser's resolute denunciation of what he terms 'Marxist humanism' He means by this those forms of Marxist theory which continue to base themselves upon some concept of 'Man': , and which read history as the process whereby this entity becomes alienated from itself (class society) and later restored to itself (communism).

This, to be sure, is the perspective underlying Marx's early writings, influenced as they were by Hegelian and Fueuerbachian humanism; but Althusser insists on a more-or-less complete 'epistemological break' between an earlier idealist Marx and a later scientific one.

The early Marx still thinks in terms of such French, Stalinist congress: idealist concepts as 'speciesbeing'-the 'essence' 'humanity' which is alienated under capitalism.

For his work to achieve the scientific status of Capital, it had to break decisively with such humanism for an entirely different, scientific. set of concepts: forces and relations of production, base and superstructure and so on.

Whether or not there is such a clean break between Hegel and Marx is still a matter of fierce contention within Marxist scholarship. My own view is that Althusser is right to claim that the early Marx is a 'humanist' , and that humanism is ideological; at the same time, Althusser almost certainly underestimates the continuities between earlier and later Marx, and is forced into some drastic scissors-and-paste manoeuvres.

The mature Marxist doctrine of the 'fetishism of cohoes the earlier humanist, commodities', for example themes of alienation; the Althusserians accordingly throw overboard a keystone of Marxist theory.

The root of Althüsser's opposition to Marxist humanism is that it undermines the Scientific nature of Marxism by reducit everything back to the acti ities of 'living human iad iduals' For Marxism. ne can be understoos

Scan page 7

From the 1920s to the present day, major contributions to Marxist theory have been made by thinkers indifferent or implacably opposed to the revolutionary heritage of Trotskyism.

From George Lukacs to Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci to Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Korsch to Herbert Marcuse, a powerful body of Western ' Marxist' theory has been developed, which has yet to receive full critical assessment by Trotskyists fails to grasp exploitation at the point of production How are the Stalinist or revisionist politics of these writers to be weighed against their theoretical In this series, Terry Eagleton examines the work of the theorists named above, as an introduction to way: it operates by objec- its purposes through their mine the activity of human turalism, is little more than beings. the weaving of a set of variaAlthusser's 'anti-human- tions on such a static strucism' is thus a necessary ture; and Althusser and his counterblast to those forms collaborators accordingly of subjectivised Marxism- set out to define modes of whether Hegelian, existen- production as mere permutialist or ethical-which we tations of certain given have reviewed in this series. elements, with all the misIn opposition to the placed ingenuity of a matheantics of such revisionist matician solving quadratic luminaries of the French CP equations while his univeras Roger Garaudy, who sity burns down around SOCIALIȘT PRESS, themselves.

contributions to Marxist theory?

a full evaluation of their work.

tive laws, accessible to scien- heads. tific analysis, which detercame to see Marxism as him. some poetic scheme of human redemption compatible with Christianity, Althusser unswervingly sought to defend its scientific claims.

He did this, however, at an immense price. For in order to combat the contamination of Marxism by one form of bourgeois ideology, he reached for another: structuralism.

Structuralism certainly shifts emphasis away from 'living human individuals', but only at the cost of reducing them to mere functions of some invariant 'structure' which works out Wednesday April 16, 1980 History itself, for strucWhat structuralism is finally unable to account for is how structures get historically transformed.

Human practices, for structuralism, are just 'effects' of the structure itself, and are thus eternally contained within it.

It is not difficult to see the appeal of such a theory to the French Stalinists. Nothing could have pleased them: better than to hear from their leading intellectual, in the most sophisticated theoretical language, that the working 'class were merely, 'functions' and 'effects' of the capitalist structure.

3. 'Historicism'. For Althusser, much Marxism has gone on repeating a mistake of Hegel's. Hegel believed that all historical phenomena could be reduced to a single essence or principle, of which such phenomena were merely 'expressions?.

For him, this principle was the World-Spirit; but Marxism has often enough simply replaced this principle with another-the mode of production, the productive forces, the class struggle-and lett the Hegelian picture intact.

Althusser argues against this reduction what there is no 'essence' to history for Marxism.

Societies are made up of four distinct regions'economic, political, ideological and theoretical-no one of which can be reduced to the others. Each 'region' has a relative autonomy of the whole, and each is related to the others in complex, varying ways.

Each area develops by its own internal laws, as well as in conjunction with the others; and these developments, as between the various areas, are usually uneven.

Althusser is not denying that the economic is, in the last instance, determinant. When he writes, in a notorious phrase, that 'the last instance never comes', , he does not reject the ultimate determinacy of the "base'.

He means, rightly, that this determinacy is never 'naked' never "purely' economic, always deeply intertwined with political and ideological factors.

Borrowing concept from Freud, Althusser speaks of all historical phenomena as 'overdetermined: they are never the product of a single, abstractable cause, but rather of the simultaneous action of several causes.

Such a position valuably counteracts reductionist tendencies within Marxismthat mechanical linking of the political, economic and ideological which can have disastrous political consequences.

But it is also highly convenient for 'Althusser's own politics. True to his Stalinism, Althusser holds that the key to capitalist exploitation lies in the political region-in the state framework which allows the proceeds of production to be unequally distributed among the classes.

For him, as for the bourgeois political economists whom Marx combatted, the actual social organisation of production is merely a technical matter. It is not here that the secret of the capital-labour relation lies; it is merely in the distribution of the product.

II, then, the state itsell can be taken over, the actual social organisation of production can go on much as before.

Stalin with fellow bureaucrats husser Socialism is essentially a juridical matter of who owns the means of production through the state; it is not basically a question of social relations at the point of production.

Little wonder, then, that Althusser is happy to keep 'economic and "political' separate.

For this is precisely what his Stalinism demands. Indeed the most blatant exposure. of this truth can be found in his comments on what he naturally refers to as the 'cult' of personality': .. 'Everything that has been said of the 'cult of personality' refers exactly to the domain of the superstructure and therefore of State organisation and ideologies; further it refers largely to this domain alone, which we know from Marxist theory possesses a 'relative autonomy' (which explains very simply, in theory, how the socialist infrastructure (of the Soviet Union) has been able to develop without essential damage during this period of errors affecting the superstructure).

For Marx Nothing, indeed could be more simple. Stalinism, we are relieved to learn, is merely a matter of the superstructure; while one or two unhappy events were occuring there, the 'socialict, infractranture nranpeded merrily on its way, protected from the superstructure by its 'relative autonomy' 4. Ideology. There are two main ways in which Althusser has made i an important, original contribution to the Marxist theory of ideology.

rirst, in his insistence that " ideology is not reducible to 'false consciousness. For one thing, it is for the most part deeply unconscious; for another thing, ideology is not just a 'distorted reflection' of reality, but rather signifies the way men and women live out their relation to that reality..

Secondly, Althusser has shown us the 'materiality' of ideology. It is not just a cloud of illusions floating above the economic base; it is embedded in material practices and institutions (family, education, media, political parties, churches and so on), which are quite as material as economic production itself.

Ideology is more than a disembodied set of ideas: it is a material, practical force within class-society.

What Althusser is unable to do, however, is to relate ideology adequately to the class struggle. In his earlier work, ideology figures merely as the opposite of science; later on, ideology is presented as a monolith into which individuals are passively inserted, an automatic mechanism whereby capitalism reproduces itself.

This is a view almost indistinguishable from that of bourgeois sociology. Althusser pays scant attention to the contradictions withiri ideology, by which individuals may be transformed from passive subjects to revolutionary agents.

His vision of class-society is that of a self-contained structure which carries within it the mechanisms of its own, potentially eternal reproduction.

Once again, no vision could follow more logically from his Stalinisin.

Althusser's stress on the autonomy of "theoretical practice' has proved extremely attractive to whole groups of younger left wing intellectuals. in Europe-not surprisingly, since it assigns a high status to their own activity.

As Regis Debray, a former pupil of Althusser's put it: 'All we had to do to become good theoreticians was to be lazy bastards' Some of those intellectuals are now clearly beyond redemption: the English 'Marxists' Paiul Hirst and Barry Hindess, former disciples of Althusser and widely influential among english students, nave to date reiected as 'erroneous' the concepts of mode of production, economic determination, Marx's theory of value, materialism, revolutionary party and more or less any other Marxist notion you care to mention. i None of this follows logically from Althus:ser's own work; there are other 'Althusserian' theorists who have made valuable coratributions, and should be engaged in controversy. As for 'Marxists' like: Hindess and Hirst, only one response is possible: their theories should be opposed and destroyed.

Scan page 8

SOCIALIST FRESS, Wednesday 16, 1980 A pril Recruiting strikebreakers during the General Strike Soldiers guard food lorries

----- pull-quotes -----

RN sser