End of Althusser's
International Viewpoint #195 • November 26, 1990 interview would provoke astonishment, if not shock. The journalist explained "The principal discovery that an impartial reader would make.... is that one has the impression that Mandel has especially borrowed his themes from diverse representatives of the political tendencies in the USSR, to make a sort of synthesis of them, attributing to the finished product
THERE is a sort of journalistic embarrassment surrounding the name of the ideology of contemporary the death of Louis Althusser, a homage granted with a bad interpretation
Trotskyism". But this comes up against an incontestable fact - conscience. It seems that all that is left to remember of this this so-called synthesis was developed defender of "theoretical anti-humanism" is his human well before the arrival of Mikhail Gorbagentleness and his qualities as a teacher. The personal drama chev in power! *
— the killing of his wife in a fit of depression - is recalled with
PORTUGAL prurient fascination, but his work is discreetly dismissed.
Seventh Congress of PSR
THE seventh Congress of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR — Portuguese section of the Fourth International) took place in Lisbon October 5-7 in the presence of 80 delegates and numerous guests, notably delegations from the Portuguese Communist Party
(PCP), the
Socialist Youth, the Popular Democratic
Movement (MDP), the Association of the
Captains of April, the José Afonso Association, the two principal trade union federations, and numerous personalities.
The large number of delegates confirmed the growth of the PSR's work, notably in new regions and new sectors.
Nearly half the participants were youth
(the average age at the Congress was 27)
and the majority had been in the PSR for less than three years.
The new Central Committee contains a lot of new faces — it includes an important youth representation and even a militant whose political history began in 1961 in the prison cells of the dictator Salazar.
The conference balance sheet showed that nearly 60 public meetings have been held in the past two years, attended by more than 15,000 people, around the big campaigns led by the PSR (anti-racism, anti-militarism, denunciation of the neofascist gangs and in response to the murder of PSR leader José Carvalho — see /V
173 and 174) - the PSR also made an analysis of its electoral campaigns.
The Congress reviewed the campaign it led around the trial of the assassins of
José Carvalho, and approved the crcation of an anti-fascist information centre.
Finally, the members of the PSR defined their plan of activities for the next two years. *
NÃ O
TROPA
224
DANIEL BENSAID
H OWEVER, frankness shows
more respect than allowances". Like most novice Communists in the 1960s, we read Althusser with passionate interest, pencil in hand, underlining and annotating. Even so, in the pre-1968 [French Trotskyist] JCR (Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionaires), there were not many
In 1968 Ernest Mandel published his "Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx", a polemical alternative reading of Marx, criticizing Althusser's notion of an "epistemological rupture" between the young and old Marx in the light of the Grundrisse. In 1975, we pubarticles entitled, Althusscr). In other words we were against him, perhaps to the point of
Althusser bathed Marxism in the acid of his "epistemological rupture", with the intention of establishing its stature as a science. In so doing, he freed theory from the nagging interference of day to day politics. He freed us from the period of Cold War "armed philosophers". were philosophers without works, who made every work into politics."
### Althusser emancipates theory
Henceforth, Althusser declared, "theoretical practice is its own criterion, containing within itself definite rules for evaluating the quality of its own product, that is to say the scientificity of the products of scientific practice." For Communist students in conflict with the totem of the party, such an emancipation of theory gave the signal for effective freedom of thought.
Althusser granted Marxism a new scientific dignity. In the introduction to his book For Marx, he spoke of the frustration of the Communist intellectual perceived as a mercenary petitioner. "There was no way out for a philosopher. If he spoke or wrote philosophy at the behest of the party, he was reduced to commentaries or to small variations for internal use on well-known quotations. We had no audience outside our own circles."
Marxism was to gain the precious recognition of academia. This was a godsend for the rising generation, caught up in the big expansion of higher education. Servants of an all-powerful, since true, science, these intellectuals were freed from guilt towards the "party of the working class".
Now they were themselves producers, since, so the master taught them, it would henceforth be necessary to "conceive of understanding as production." They were to have, at one and the same time, the technocratic power of this science and the good conscience of supporting the cause.
Theory liberated from practice
In this way, Althusser appeared as a libcrator. Here was theory liberated from practice. To the point where the philosopher were to shut themselves up in their ivory towers and break off all relations with practice.
This ratified the relations between the revolutionary pretensions of this theoretical renovation and the actual policy pursued by the French Communist Party in 1968. In this armed peace between theory and practice, policy remained under the control of the politicians of the party leadership.
With the goal of clevating Marxism to academic dignity, Althusser invited us to enter into a dialogue with psychoanalysis, linguistics, and structural anthropology. At the same time, it was the cursed union of historical materialism and dialectical materialism, distantly descended from Bukharin's "Popular Manual of Marxist Sociology" — well demolished by Gram-
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long march
November 26, 1990 • #195 International Viewpoint sci in the Prison Notebooks, given official status by Stalin in his immortal "Dialectical and Historical Materialism" - that enabled the marriage of Stalinist positivism ("Marxism-Leninism"") and the positivist traditions of French academia.
Since "the knowledge of history is no more historical than the knowledge sugar is sugary" history can be summed up in terms of profit and loss.
against the "theoretical leftism" of Lukacs and Gramsci, accused of "confusing under the heading of historical materialism two distinct disciplines, on the one hand the theory of history, on the other, dialectical materialism."
tinct science of history, on the other "a science of the and falsehood". Between remained in the competence of the party.
Intervention into student crisis the burden of guilt from the shoulders of the intellectuals had its counterpart in
Althusser's 1963 text on vention into a crisis in the
Union of Communist Students, which still sends a shiver down the spine: "All discussions between Communists are scientific discussions. This is the basis
Leninist concept of critiself-criticism rests. The right to criticism criticism have one and the same principle - the real of Marxist-
Leninist science and its consequences."
The distinction drawn between the technical and social divisions of labour gave a
"Marxist" justification — besides its pedagogical function — of the existing university and mandarinal order, on condition that in the material taught "the permanent dividing line between the technical and social division of labour, the most constant and profound class divide"
between "true science" and "pure ideology" was established.
Such an approach could lead both to complete submission before the verdicts of this true science or to purely mental rebellions against everything that could be labelled false bourgeois science. And this at a time when the very concept of science itself needed a hard critical look.
It is the texts Althusser wrote before his self-criticism and evolution in the 1970s that made of "Althusserianism" a school or current of thought.
In the political world, Althusser inevitably came up against the wall of Stalinism. He treated it as a product of a "theoretical deviation" rather than a formidable historical counter-revolution, equipped with all the thoroughly non-conceptual weight of
In his 1973 Reply to John Lewis, the positive side of Stalin was still allowed to prevail over the negative: "Stalin cannot. for clear and strong reasons, be reduced to the deviation that we associate with his name... He had other historical merits. He realized that it was necessary to renounce belief in the imminent miracle of the world revolution and thus undertake the construction of socialism in one country. He drew all the consequences from this — to defend this country at all costs as the rearguard of all socialism in the world, and to make of it, besieged by imperialism, a fortress that could not be captured.
"To this end it was necessary to give priority to heavy industry, which produced the tanks of Stalingrad, which served the Soviet people in their heroic life-and-death struggle to free the world from Nazism. This is also our history. And through the caricatures and even tragedies of this history, millions of Communists learned the principles of Leninism, even if Stalin taught them as
ALTHUSSER
For him "the only left critique of the Stalinist deviation"
was the "silent but active critique accomplished by the Chinese rev-
In this scenario, the Stalinist tanks in
Prague and Budapest, the Hitler/ Stalin pact and the camps were chicken feed.
Theoretical errors based on philosophical deviations
Althusser had equipped himself advance with a justification for this lasting
The "theoretical deviations that have led to the great historical failures of the prolephilosophical
"We are now near to understanding why they submerged who denounced them — in a certain sense they were inevitable in function of the backwardness of Marxist philosophy itself."
How happy is philosophy, that can turn up in the twilight after the battle and contemplate the ruins, after the poor politico has had to wade all day long in the mud and blood!
It would be illusory to suggest that the present can ever be fully understood, but even so, all the liquidated dissidents and oppositionists attest to the fact that the history that happened was not the only possible one, and that Stalinism was never obligatory.
What cannot go on any longer in the Communist
Party appeared later, in
1978.
As late as 1976, Althusser was saluting the 22nd
Congress of the French
Communist Party as "a decisive event".
He was critical of the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat as well as the party's internal regime, but welcomed the strategic innovations (this was the high tide of Eurocommunism) and categorically rejected the notion of the right to organize tendencies. What could not be allowed to last had already lasted far too long.
Armed with the sharp scalpel of science,
Althusser thought that he could dismiss history. But history struck back. Yet, paradoxically, Althusser's work now seems to have gained a quite new subversive import. In the present period, to "read
Capital" with
Althusser and against remains the point of departure for our rea-
23 soned rebellion. *