Return to Louis Althusser (1983)

This article first appeared as an interview with Sylvain Lazarus in issue number 29-30 of Le Perroquet in 1983. Le Perroquet was a periodical associated with the UCF(ml) that ran from 1981-1990, and its editors were Natacha Michel and Alain Badiou. This work is also situated in a broader timeline of Lazarus’s theoretical relationship with Louis Althusser in “Althusser and Lazarus: Continuity or Rupture?”, also published in this issue of Fracture.

All reflection on Marxism in France must be situated in relation to Althusser. Althusser is a mandatory benchmark, and failing to recognize him always carries great significance. Why?

I would like to say that Althusser was, in France, the first to attempt to analyze the crisis of Marxism in a double register of events (the twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the Congress of the PCF) and themes (the critique he developed of humanism, economism, and historicism). Althusser used the political events related to the history of the PCF as a jumping off point to analyze the crisis of Marxism, and there was a recurring theme that presents two ideas: the first, that Marxism is in crisis, and the second, that the nature of Marxism itself is in question.

Althusser is the theorist of a certain phase of the crisis of Marxism, which I would date from 1956 to 1966 (from the 20th Congress of the CPSU to the Cultural Revolution), although a more obvious dating ranges from 1956 to 1968 (which includes May ‘68 in France and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia). But at the same time, Althusser proposes to reflect on this crisis and resolve it by combining the effects of two positions: reflecting on things from within philosophy and reflecting on things from within a self-proclaimed commitment to the PCF.

A Modern Figure of the Theorist

Althusser approaches these issues in a way that gives him a particular status, one that is often denied but rarely by him. First and foremost, he is a party militant. And second, he assigns a field of knowledge the primary role in reflecting on and resolving problems. With these choices, Althusser proposes an answer to the question: “what is Marxism?”. And it is in the modern figure of the theorist, because that is a political figure. Althusser’s thesis is that Marxism is a science, while at the same time renewing the very nature of science by extending it to the phenomena of society, its being, and its internal development. This science “in a new sense” is what Althusser calls theory.

I want to indicate right away that I fundamentally disagree with this thesis because I say that understanding what Marxism is can only be done from inside the thought of politics. This is what I sometimes express, in a condensed formula, that Marxism is a politics. Of course, this point is at work even within Althusser’s approach. Althusser constructs and closes off his own system precisely to prevent this point from bursting through.

The PCF as a Real Point

The four essential concepts of Althusser’s system are politics, history, economy, and philosophy (what he calls Dialectical Materialism, and what I prefer to name the materialist dialectic). But before even examining the underlying forces, we must grasp the significance of the role played by Althusser’s PCF membership within the theoretical framework. It is no coincidence that Althusser asserts this membership in his works, including the “Soutenance d’Amiens”.¹ This Althusser, member of the PCF and thus an organized political figure, is precisely why the question of politics is excluded by Althusser from the theoretical approach. Reflection on the PCF, its history and nature, despite appearances (the situational texts following the 22nd Congress), is not only not addressed by Althusser and his disciples within their theoretical propositions, but is even denied as a central issue, or indeed as an issue at all.

We can explain why, at least since May ‘68. In reality, any critical examination of the PCF, whether political or historical, can only take place from outside the party in a relationship of genuine independence and radical critique. A living, critical, and rigorous reflection on the PCF (which, in France, conveys a perspective on French political history and Marxism) cannot take place either from within the PCF or even from a formal and precarious external position (the “critical communist” current).

Althusser thus undertakes a highly sophisticated endeavor: to reflect on the crisis of Marxism, and thereby adopt a critical stance toward the PCF, but to do so from within the PCF itself, drawing on a theoretical framework in which critical distancing is not, in and of itself, a source of thought and concepts.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism

For Althusser, the distinction between dialectical and historical materialism is an essential achievement of Marxist thought, or more precisely, as he says in his “Reply to John Lewis”, an achievement of Marxism-Leninism. Yet this couple, in its formulation and the affirmation of its importance, comes from Stalin. This is a distinction unique to Marxism-Leninism, in the sense that the latter is not only contemporary with Stalin (and not with Lenin), but even more so an original Stalinist production, which cannot be reduced to a particular interpretation of Marx and Lenin, because it is an ideological and political device characteristic of the 1930s.

Althusser continually reiterates the importance he attaches to this distinction. I would like to point out at least one of its key effects. The key role of the distinction between dialectical materialism and historical materialism allows Althusser to assert that, within the field of Marxism, the question of materialism takes precedence over that of dialectics; that therefore, in his view, the essential point of Marx’s history is the epistemological rupture (with Hegel) that brings his early period to a close and opens the way to materialism, that is, to science (the science of history, he says). It is from this point that he is able to think, drawing on Engels’ theses, that the whole of philosophy is structured by the debate between materialism and idealism. Hence, in a certain sense, philosophy has no history.

What is at stake, within the triangle of philosophy-science-politics explicitly addressed by Althusser in “Lenin and Philosophy,” is the nature of the relationship between philosophy and politics. Althusser establishes a certain type of subordination by asserting that the relationship between philosophy and politics can be analyzed through the prior deployment of the relationship between philosophy and science.

Politics and History

The real critical question, in my opinion, is on the triangle of philosophy-politics-history. To resolve this question, while remaining within the framework of the opposition between dialectical and historical materialism, Althusser is obligated, on the one hand, to consider philosophy as “the class struggle in theory” and, on the other hand, to assimilate “class struggle” into politics, concluding that “philosophy is, in the final instance, the theoretical concentration of politics.” The presence of class struggle within it is thus what enables philosophy to communicate with history.

The essential debate hinges on the relationship between politics and history. This is where the weakness of Althusser’s analysis bursts forth. In the, “Reply to John Lewis”, for example, he maintains that exploitation is always-already class struggle. Here he repeats Engels’ categories, which, it is true, were cited by Lenin, of “economic struggle,” “political struggle,” and “ideological struggle”, and he ultimately affirms that history is a process and a process without a subject. Ultimately, all of this reverts to an evacuation of politics. An evacuation of the singularity of the historicity of political phenomena, the very essence of which is that they are subjective phenomena, even if this unfolds in an environment where material conditions of existence intervene.

The fundamental choice is this: connecting the question of history and politics, or connecting it to philosophy. In Reading Capital, Althusser astutely notes the absence, within the field of Marxism, of fully developed formulations of the concept of history. Like so much in Althusser’s writings, this observation offers great insights into questions that remain open today. But by seeking to inscribe it within the couple dialectical materialism/historical materialism, and by maintaining, whatever he may say, that the essence of Marxism lies in its epistemological demand, even if that demand is fueled by class contradictions, Althusser leaves the question of history in a subordinate, if not impossible, state.

In 1972, Althusser cites the Cultural Revolution, May 1968, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia as essential events that had “political and ideological repercussions throughout the entire capitalist world.” Yet these are events regarding which Althusser was unable, either at the time or subsequently, to formulate any analysis or assess their actual significance, whether in the so-called field of historical materialism or in that of materialist and dialectical philosophy.² The Althusserian framework remains external to the processes of politics and history. Nevertheless, only by critically examining the answers he proposes can we advance in the important series of pressing questions he raises.

The Category of Totality

Consider, for example, Althusser’s critique of the Hegelian conception of history and concept of historical time. That’s a good question!

Althusser opposes the idealist Hegelian conception of totality with a materialist and Marxist conception of totality, which includes a diverse set of instances, some of which play a determining role, while others are dominant. Althusser opposes the Hegelian conception of a single, linear historical time with what he calls differential time.

In essence, in my view, Althusser does not break radically with Hegel. Perhaps that is why he hounds him so relentlessly with his criticisms, even his sarcasm. The fact is that Althusser retains the concept of totality as the foundation of his conception of history, and, as a necessary consequence, the notion of historical time as a mediating concept. This is certainly a structural totality. But its logic, as in Hegel, closes off the possible theoretical investigation of the political field and, with regard to history, prevents us from considering events, particularly events of rupture, or revolutions, as also being the possible beginnings of a new sequence, a new stage. Maintaining totality as a concept of history ultimately renders the latter epiphenomenal, and never primary.

This touches on the essential question: the choice between the dialectical unity of history and politics, and the unity of history and philosophy. To put an end to the philosophy of history, whether Hegelian or structuralist, we must put an end to totality. That is to say, we must agree to consider history and politics as part of the same movement, and recognize that when this is done (Marx, Lenin, Mao), the philosophical effects are almost organic to the approach.

For Althusser, the couplet of dialectical and historical materialism is what allows the structuralist conception of history to be maintained, under the illusion that politics is to be located in philosophy, even though neither the nature of politics nor the way it bursts forth is ever articulated. Or, even if it were articulated, it would have no effect on thought or theory.

Quick Trips

Historical materialism, for Althusser, unfortunately amounts to nothing more than the workers’ movement, that is the PCF, even if reluctantly. By delegating politics to it by right, Althusser also delegates history to it in practice. He thus finds himself engaged in an irreparable conflict.

Althusser had friends and a few disciples. Some of them eventually left the PCF, even long after ‘68. However, they did not pursue, or revisit, the questions Althusser had posed, the advancement of which, as he often wrote, is essential. Undoubtedly because today, whereas this was not clarified until 1968, the unity of the question of history, politics, and philosophy is unavoidable, and because, in a singular and profoundly contemporary way, Althusser had attempted to bypass it.

Analyzing the twists and turns, as well as the insights, of Althusser’s journey is essential, in many respects, to gaining a clearer understanding of the geography of our own.

Translated by Cam West