Obituaries for Louis Althusser, who died in October, have widely credited him with being the most important Marxist philosopher in the post-war period. This claim, says PHIL HEARSE, has much to recommend it.
Widely reviled on the Trostkyist left as a Stalinist, Althusser left a lasting mark on Marxist theory. While be did not succeed in his project of refounding Marxist philosophy, and although his system contains flaws which in the end sank his whole project, nonetheless his attempt to re-work the concepts of historical materialism and the marxist theory of knowledge elaborated new concepts which have passed into the 'received wisdom' of Marxism. Why then should Trotskyists think Althusser important?
There are three points of reference in his work (1) which are of lasting value. First his elaboration of the concept of 'social formation'. Prior to Althusser's intervention Marxists had tended to analyse each concrete society as simply an example, however impure, of one or other 'classic' mode of production established by Marx and Engels – slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and so on. Althusser insisted on the complexity of real societies, the fact that each 'social formation' contained elements of and survivals of different modes of production, elements which were 'structured in dominance' and 'overdetermined' by the dominant social relations.
This notion of each social formation as a 'complex whole structured in dominance' may seem banal and obvious today. Don't all Marxists, even the passionate anti-Althusserian, use the notion of 'social formation'? Exactly – but only because Althusser invented it. There is just one reference to the term in the whole of Marx (2). The distinction between concrete social formation and the idea of 'mode of production' which exists at a different, higher, level of abstraction, owes its origin to Althusser. (3)
Althusser's second decisive contribution was the notion of 'overdetermined contradiction'. Previously, said Althusser, Marxists had too simple a concept of contradiction based on the Hegelian 'thesis-antithesis-synthesis' notion of dialectics. Basing himself on a reading of Lenin's conception of revolutionary crises, Althusser argued that in studying concrete conjunctures Marxists had to analyse the way in which contradictions at different levels of reality (and the social formation) interacted, and at a certain point produced a critical rupture (overdetermined contradiction). Aficionados of contemporary 'chaos theory' will be able to see the parallels between this idea and the way in which ordered systems suddenly break up and become 'chaotic'. But despite the suggestive insights in the notion of 'overdetermined contradiction', it contains ambiguities which are dangerous for Marxist theory, which we refer to below.
Althusser began his work as a political intervention in the early 1960s, where theoretical Marxism was dominated by the fad of Marx's early writings and a heavily 'Hegelian' reading of them. This meant, in the works of Roger Garaudy – the leading philosopher of the French Communist Party – a unilateral rendering of Marxism as a critique of humanity's 'alienation' from its essential 'species being'. On this basis a fashionable dialogue developed with Christian theologians. Althusser intervened sharply against these readings, insisting that Marxism was not a 'humanism', an interpretation of humanity's 'species being', but a science of society, of history and of social formations. Thus he attacked any tendency to make Marxism just a moral and ethical critique, and to downgrade Marx's later writings on economics, history and politics as some sort of unfortunate deviation.
Indeed, Althusser turned the fashion of Marx's early writings especially the *1844 Manuscripts* – on its head by insisting that they were not 'real Marxism'. He claimed that in Marx there was an 'epistemological break' in the mid-1840s, as Marx broke from his previous philosophical speculations about alienation, and worked out the scientific categories of *Capital* and mature Marxism – surplus value, exploitation, mode of production, and so on – scientific theories which could be used to analyse society and guide the struggle of the proletariat.
What can we say of this intervention? At the very least Althusser overdid it. He was right to stress to scientific character of Marxism. He was right to stress the dangers of rightism in the writings of the 'Marxist humanists' – people who had broken with Stalinism after the Hungarian revolution of 1956, but who tended to cast doubt on basic Marxist categories.
But his notion of the 'epistemological break' in Marx's writings underestimated the real continuity of Marx's thought – and indeed how concepts like 'alienation' and 'commodity fetishism' continued to play a role in his scientific writings like *Capital*. (4) The real value of Althusser's intervention was marred by this one-sidedness and by his polemical excesses ('when I hear the word humanity I reach for my gun').
The failings of Althusser's system, some of which have had a very negative effect on the development of Marxist theory, include the following.
First, his theory of knowledge. In a highly stylised and formal set of propositions about the 'production' of theoretical knowledge, Althusser – closely following Spinoza – insisted that
a) the 'concrete-in-thought' as opposed to the 'real-concrete' was the object of knowledge, and
b) the validation of otherwise of scientific knowledge takes place 'entirely in thought'. The weakness of this system has been commented on by virtually every Marxist critic.
This theory of scientific knowledge breaks the links between the real world and reflection, and between theory and practice as the decisive criterion of truth. If the validation of theory takes place entirely in thought, as opposed to social practice, then 'theoretical practice' as Althusser called it is not really about understanding the real world but about understanding concepts. The 'real concrete' in Althusser's schema is inherently unknowable.
In establishing this schema Althusser broke with Marx's own most precise explanation of his method – the section of the *Grundrisse* entitled 'The Method of Political Economy'. Here Marx insists (and here lies the superficial similarity with Althusser) that the concrete in theory is a synthesis of abstractions; but he also insists that these abstractions are worked up from data on the real world – facts – not simply from other abstractions.
The second failure of Althusser's system is more important because it is much more influential – his critique of 'economism'. Reacting against the notion that the different levels of the social formation (for example ideology and politics) are reducible to the 'economic' level, he repeated that the different levels of the social formation had their own specificity and acted upon one another through their various 'effects'. This would have been uncontroversial among Marxists, had Althusser stuck more rigidly to his own 'structure in dominance' idea. Althusser argued, that while the economic level is the determinant one in the last analysis, 'the lonely hour of the last analysis never comes'. This laconic phrase strikes at the heart of Marxism. If the lonely hour of the last analysis never comes, then the idea of the economic as the determinant level is worthless.
Now, a central problem in this discussion, which has raged as long as Marxism has existed, is establishing what Marx meant by the 'economic basis' of society, which he argued is its 'real foundation'. Hundreds of critics of Marx have failed to notice that he insisted, even in the most famous exposition of historical materialism (5), that the economic basis of society is the 'social relations of production'. 'Social relations of production' is the most important concept in the whole of historical materialism.
Marx and Engels always conceded that politics and ideology had a 'relative autonomy' (6). But the fundamental character of any social formation, its 'general dynamic', its 'laws of motion', can only be established at the level of the social relations of production. To take the most banal example, you cannot analyse the politics and ideology of 'Thatcherism' without knowing that the contemporary production relations in Britain are those of capitalism, and that this capitalist social formation is in crisis and decline.
In Althusser's work, and more blatantly in that of his most prominent successors like Nicos Poulantzas (7), the concept of the social relations of production becomes destructured. Thus we find 'political social relations' and 'ideological social relations' existing in parallel with the social relations of production and with no real hierarchy of causality between them. This has led many influenced by the Althusserian tradition to repudiate Marxism as a socio-economic determinism, and in particular to break the link between ideology and politics and the fundamental level of classes and class struggle. Invariably this leads to a political shift to the right (8).
Further failings of the Althusserian project which can only be mentioned here:
● his later idea that institutions like schools, the media and churches are 'ideological apparatuses of the state'
● his underestimation of social classes as active social subjects,
● his polemic, in the name of concrete conjuncture, against the idea that human history has an unfolding meaning and logic (which he described as 'historicism').
What then of Althusser's politics? The accusation that he was simply a Stalinist is often a substitute for critical engagement. The British SWP regularly trot out this accusation against their own resident heretic, Alex Callinicos, who rightly sees some value in Althusser's work. They conveniently forget that their own party-approved philosopher, Georg Lukacs, was not exactly pristine pure when it comes to Stalinism either. The historian E.P. Thompson denounced Althusser's work as the most complete expression of Stalinism in theory, and 'declared war' on 'all such Marxisms' – including Trotskyism (9). All these accusations forget the situation in which Althusser wrote, and what he was trying to do.
Althusser was never in any party but the French CP. His work started as a left critique of the party orthodoxy, implicitly siding with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Althusser became the guru and adviser to a group in the CP's youth organisation, who were later expelled to become the leadership of the Union Jeunes Communistes – Marxiste-Leniniste (UJCML), which played a certain role, as a Mao-centrist organisation, in the student revolt in May 1968. In the 1970s he reworked his criticisms of the CP leadership and of the Soviet Union to become, more-or-less, a partisan of left Eurocommunism. Althusser was never a Stalinist hack or an apologist for the party apparatus.
But of course he never made any critical engagement with Trotskyism, and thus with a central strand of classical Marxism. He never had access to the volume of Trotsky's philosophical writings published in 1986, or showed the slightest interest in trying to understand the theoretical contribution of the Trotskyist current.
As all the obituaries have related, Althusser's mental illness, from which he suffered for several decades, led to the final tragedy of the murder of his wife Helene in 1980, and his committal to a psychiatric institution where he died. His work emerged from the growing crisis of Stalinism, and its reflection among intellectuals who were distant from the class struggle. It was and is a crisis which cannot be adequately dealt with at the level of philosophy, as Althusser tried. In the end it could only be dealt with at the level of directly political struggle and the theoretical work – especially on economics and politics – needed to back that up.
Notes
1) The most important of Althusser's writings are: *For Marx* (1965); *Reading Capital* (1968), with Etienne Bailbar; *Lenin and Philosophy* (1970). All published by Verso. The best exposition/critique is Ted Benton: *The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism*, Macmillan (1988). See also Anderson (note 9 below).
2. In the Preface to the *Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy* (1859). The preface is included in the Marx-Engels selected works in one volume, Lawrence and Wishart.
3. A recent exposition of 'mode of production' and 'social formation' by Ernest Mandel has a distinctly Althusserian ring about it. See 'Marx', in the *Marxist Economics, The New Palgrave* vol , Macmillan (1990) p.6.
4. Among the best accounts of the development of Marx's thought is the highly underrated book by Ernest Mandel, *The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx*, NLB (1970).
5. 'In the social production of their life, men (sic) enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage in the development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of productions constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men which determines their being, but on the contrary their social being which determines their social consciousness'. Marx, op cit.
6. See, most famously, Engels' letter to Bloch in the Marx-Engels *Selected Correspondence* in one volume (Lawrence and Wishart).
7. See *Political Power and Social Classes*, Nicos Poulantzas, Verso (1968).
8. Notoriously, in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, *Hegemony and Socialist Strategy*, Verso (1986). For a critique see: Ellen Meiksins Wood, *The Retreat from Class*, Verso 1987.
9. E.P. Thompson, *The Poverty of Theory*, Merlin, 1978. See Perry Anderson's brilliant destruction of Thompson in *Arguments Within English Marxism*, Verso (1980).