💾 Archived View for tanelorn.city › ~vidak › old-blog › althusser-an-assessment.gemini captured on 2020-11-07 at 01:38:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
---
generator: pandoc
title: 'Althusser: An Assessment'
viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'
---
2018-06-17T00:23:22+10:00
working together on a common project to revolutionise Marxist political
philosophy and try and kick-start a new era of Marxism for the 21st
century. This represents an excellent contribution to the field on what
we can learn from Althusser, about whom Simon is very interested*.
Louis Althusser is arguably the most influential Marxist thinker of the
latter half of the 20th century, and yet finds almost no uncritical
followers among Marxists today. This essay explores this apparent
paradox, summarising why Althusser is considered such a significant
figure in the history of Marxist thought, influencing almost every
prominent Marxist thinker today, whilst simultaneously being considered
a highly flawed thinker. Writing his most important texts in the 1960s &
1970s, an era notable for the political crises that swept many countries
including France (which saw the Algerian War, May 1968, and subsequent
high strike levels), Althusser's thought is notable for its critique of
then-dominant form of Marxism embodied in the large Western European
Communist Parties, of which he was a member in France. Under the
influence of theoretical trends such as structuralism, psychoanalysis,
and the philosophy of science, Althusser undertook an original reading
of Marx that attempted to challenge the conception of Marxism of the
Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF), proposing new concepts for
understanding society with a new set of philosophical references. The
success of this attempt is however strongly contested, as Althusser's
concept of history "without a subject" seems to be an inadequate answer
to the questions that theories of the subject account for. Here I argue
that while many of the concepts that Althusser proposes as a
'scientific' Marxism to replace Stalinist and Humanist varieties are
highly flawed and inadequate, the questions he posed, and the paths he
begun to attempt to answer them remained a significant and positive
influence on Marxist thought. His rejection of Humanism and preliminary
attempts to replace it remain valuable, even if he leaves many issues
open for further development.
Althusser's work intervened into the tumultuous political and
philosophical worlds of a post-war France. The PCF, an important
political force in French society which Althusser joined in 1948, had
its hierarchical model and political approach challenged in 1956 by the
impact of the Hungarian revolution and the famous speech by Khrushchev
denouncing the personality cult of Stalin. These events shook the
authority of the Communist Party leaders across the West, and prompted
wider criticism of the rigidly Stalinist theories and politics of these
Parties. In addition the Maoist People's Republic of China would respond
by claiming that Khrushchev's line was a right wing 'revision' of
Marxism, and rhetorically placed itself as an alternative pole of
radicalism, influencing Althusser deeply as an alternative to the PCF's
commitment to the USSR (Elliot, 2009: 2-7). Within the PCF this process
of criticism was incorporated by its leadership as an embrace of
'Humanist Marxism', a loose strand of Marxist thought that emphasised
Marx's early writings on 'species-being' and alienation. While
Marxist-Humanism was developed by many thinkers critical of both
Stalinist societies and the Stalinised Communist Parties (an aspect
disregarded by Althusser), it was instrumentalised in this period by the
PCF as an attempt to rebrand itself, and deflect criticism after the
Stalin era (Elliot, 2009: 20-43). Parallel to this, the existential
philosophy of thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre (a PCF supporter until
1956, and an influence on Humanist-Marxism), was waning in the face of a
new theoretical trend, structuralism. The semiotics-inspired works of
anthropologist Levi Strauss and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan challenged
the focus on free & intentional subjectivity found in existentialism,
laying the foundations for the generation of anti-Humanist theorists
such as Althusser who attempted to conceptualise society without the
subject as its fundamental foundation or 'essence' (Elliot, 2009: 43-51;
Glucksmann, 2014: 97-102).
Both published in 1965, Althusser's books *For Marx* and *Reading
Capital* took aim at the attempt to read the later Marx through his more
overtly philosophical earlier works argued for by Marxist-Humanism. The
Humanist reading placed Marx's 1867 crowning work *Capital* in
theoretical continuity with his earlier arguments in his 1844
manuscripts, where Marx argued that humanity shares a common
'species-being', a form of human nature which is repressed ('alienated')
under the dehumanising organisation of work under capitalism (Althusser,
2005: 51-71). This stood in contrast to the previous Stalinist
orthodoxy, described as 'economism' by Althusser, which emphasised the
role of economic 'laws of history' as the key, or only, determinant over
every other aspect of society (Althusser, 2005: 108-109; Althusser et.
al, 2006: 111; Elliot, 2009: 127-129). Althusser argued in *Reading
Capital* and *For Marx* that the PCF's renovation via Marxist-Humanism
thus in fact hid a continuity with the Stalin era more than it broke
with it. According to *Reading Capital*, the 'Humanism' of alienation,
human essence, and early Marx contained the same conceptual structure as
the 'economism' that came before it (Althusser et. al, 2016: 139-140;
Elliot, 2009: 126, 139-142). In both cases society was reduced to a
singular cause --- human essence for Humanism, and the mode of
production for economism. Every element of a society is reduced to an
expression, or 'appearance' of this fundamental cause or essence, while
critiquing this allows a more open-ended account of dissimilar elements
and their combinations in society as argued by Hall, in opposition to
the classical conceptions of the PCF (Hall, 1985: 51). The reduction of
the complexity of society and its antagonisms to a uniform & linear
historical development is referred to as a homogenous "expressive
totality", which Althusser associates philosophically with the influence
of the 18th century philosopher Hegel. According to Althusser, this
fatal Hegelian flaw underlying economism and Humanism is the presumption
of a historical Subject --- an a-priori nature of humans as free beings
with already-existent interests that grows gradually more powerful (due
to economic laws) or more self-conscious (as it overcomes alienation)
(Althusser, 2005: 223-231).
With history neither the march forward of class interests determined
mechanically by the economy, nor the dis-alienation of a collective
subject of humanity that contained a pre-existing 'species-essence',
Althusser proposed a new set of Marxist concepts that no longer relied
upon a pre-existing subject. He controversially made the argument that
within Marx there existed an 'epistemological break' between his early
and later works, a shift in theoretical perspective where the very
problems that Marx was attempting to tackle with the concepts of
'alienation' and 'species-being' shifted to a new perspective that
underlined the arguments of *Capital* (Althusser, 2005: 32-38). This
break according to Althusser shifted the views of Marx from 'ideology'
to 'science', as Marx broke with the assumption of the prior subject and
founded a self-legitimising science with its own internal legitimation
(a process of "theoretical practice") (Althusser et. al, 2016: 60).
With a new non-Humanist philosophy, Althusser outlined a conception of
society without any external cause or 'essence' that would reduce
society to its expression. In *Reading Capital* Althusser describes a
multiplicity of different levels, or practices within society, such as
economic, political, and ideological practice, and rather than see these
as expressions of a single level, he sees them instead as relatively
autonomous from each other. He however maintained that this was a
conception faithful to Marx by arguing that the level of economic
practice in fact determined the very hierarchy of the various practices,
deciding which exerted more control over the others, up to the 'dominant
practice' in every society (Elliot, 2009: 133-137). In this model,
subjects are merely the 'bearers' of the positions assigned within
society instead of being a pre-existing essence of society's structures,
an argument inspired heavily by the structuralists Levi-Strauss and
Lacan (Elliot, 2009: 141) --- yet significantly leaving no explanation
of the agency of the subjects involved (Elliot, 2009: 153-158).
The argument for society's complexity is also found in *For Marx*, where
Althusser under influence from Mao and borrowing terms from
psychoanalysis described what role this complexity plays in political
change, with every situation a product of multiple intersecting
contradictions in society. The cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall
outlined in 1985 *For Marx*'s grasp of both the complexity and unity of
society as a significant advance within Marxism, where differences and
multiplicity are maintained in a limited unity, and political change
results from the 'condensation' of a range of contradictions rather than
being a mechanical product of a single issue by itself, as implied by
the PCF conception of class overriding any other political issue (Hall,
1985: 94).
The reception of these arguments by Althusser and his students followed
a dramatic path over the next two decades. Initially treated with
hostility by the French Communist Party leadership, it played a pivotal
role forming the theoretical approach of the emerging strands of Maoist
politics in France. Indeed, it was several of Althusser's Maoist
students who would break with the PCF's youth organisation, provoking a
path at unease with Althusser's refusal to break with the PCF himself
(Bourg, 2005: 486). The pivotal events of May 1968 in France greatly
accelerated this trend, as student protest sparked the largest general
strike in French history. In the context of the PCF's conservatism in
the face of this significant rebellion in French society, Althusser's
'scientific' Marxism was challenged by many of his former students as a
prop for the PCF's Stalinism (Ranciere, 2011: xiv). Jacques Ranciere,
who contributed to *Reading Capital*, published in 1974 *Althusser's
Lesson*, a withering critique of the scientific pretensions of
Althusser's Marxism, a 'philosophy of order' aligned with the PCF's
conservatism. While Althusser had debunked the Humanist explanations of
radical change and agency as the realisation of a historical subject,
his inability to provide an alternative explanation for these issues
posed overtly by the events of May 1968 led Ranciere to claim that
"Althusserianism had died on the barricades of May 68", as his
conceptions seemed to do nothing to challenge the dominance of the PCF
(Ranciere, 2011: xx; Elliot, 2009: 178).
Additionally, despite Althusser's psychoanalytic refinement of his
concept of ideology and subjectivity in his 1970 essay "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses", he maintained the flaws of *Reading
Capital*'s notions of 'bearers', which as EP Thompson pointed out
considered subjectivity purely from the functional perspective of
capitalism, statically reproducing its structures without an explanation
of why this was necessitated or how it could change (Thompson, 1995: 6,
82-83, 113-114, 234-237).
Yet while conceding these weaknesses (Hall, 1985: 100), Elliot and Hall
both argue that genuine advances within Marxism were made by Althusser.
His critique of Humanism as an inadequate replacement for economism
within Marxism allowed questions such as the multiplicity of structures
and contradictions, and their relative unity at historical moments to be
posed. Hall especially defends the insights of this attempt to think
difference with unity against the rising tide of post-structuralist
thinkers such as Foucault, who according to Hall step too far in the
anti-Humanist direction and dissolve the unity into difference
altogether (Hall, 1985: 93-94). Elliot similarly defends Althusser from
being considered a stop-gap for post-structuralism, highlighting the
numerous theorists who took inspiration from Althusser's project and
developed it in new directions such as state theory, ideology analysis,
and even feminism (Elliot, 2009: 307-311), whilst King argues as recent
as 2016 that Althusser's works provide fruitful ground for further
development by Marxists (King, 2016).
With the rapid dissolution of the hold Althusser's concepts had over the
generation that rejected the PCF amidst the political tide of
anti-Marxism that prevailed in France by the the end of the 1970s,
Althusser was swiftly considered a relic of the past. Yet despite the
valid criticisms made by Ranciere and Thompson of Althusser's incomplete
answer to the Humanist concepts he problematised, leaving the question
of agency and change within society open ended if not occluded, other
figures within Marxism have defended many of Althusser's original
insights. Without a prior subject that society can be traced to, issues
of complexity and unity 'condensed' at particular points in time can be
appreciated. It is in this sense that Althusser's influence within
Marxism can be seen as a positive one.
References:
===========
Glucksmann, M, 2014. *Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social
Thought: A Comparison of the Theories of Claudelévi-Strauss and Louis
Althusser*. Routledge
Patrick King, 2016. *Introduction: Althusser's Theoretical Experiments*.
\[ONLINE\] Available at:
https://www.viewpointmag.com/2016/07/18/introduction-althussers-theoretical-experiments/\#fn25-6438.
\[Accessed 22 May 2018\].
Hall, S, 1985. Signification, representation, ideology: Althusser and
the post‐structuralist debates. *Critical Studies in Mass
Communication*, 2:4, 91-114.
Goldstein, P, 1994. "The Legacy of Althusser, 1918-1990: An
Introduction," *Studies in 20th Century Literature*: Vol. 18: Iss. 1,
Article 2, 472-490
Julian Bourg, 2005. The Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism of
the 1960s, *History of European Ideas*, 31:4, 472-490,
Rancière, J., 2011. *Althusser's Lesson*. 2nd ed. London: The Continuum
International Publishing Group Ltd.
Elliot, G., 2009. *Althusser: The Detour of Theory*. 2nd ed. Chicago:
Haymarket Books.
Althusser, L., 2005. *For Marx*. 3rd ed. London: Verso.
Althusser, L. et al., 2016. *Reading Capital: The Complete Edition*.
London: Verso. translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach.
Thompson, E.P., 1995. *The Poverty of Theory*. 2nd ed. London: The
Merlin Press Ltd.