Reappraisals (18 page)

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

8
Albert Camus,
Lettres à un ami Allemand
(Paris: Gallimard, 1948, 1972) No. 1 (July 1943), p. 19.

9
“Avant-propos,”
Actuelles III,
p. 23. “En ce qui me concerne, il me paraît dégoûtant de battre sa coulpe, comme nos juges-pénitents, sur la poitrine d’autrui.”

11
“He had never seen France. He saw it and was killed.”

12
“Entre Oui et Non,” from
L’Envers et l’Endroit
, originally published in Algiers in 1937, republished in
Essais;
see p. 25.

CHAPTER VI

Elucubrations: The “Marxism” of Louis Althusser

I was brought up a Marxist. Nowadays that is not much of a boast, but it had its advantages. Parents and grandparents were imbued with all of the assumptions and some of the faith that shaped the European Socialist movement in its heyday. Coming from that branch of East European Jewry that had embraced social democracy and the Bund (the Jewish Labor organization of early-twentieth-century Russia and Poland), my own family was viscerally anti-Communist. In its eyes, Bolshevism was not only a dictatorship, it was also—and this, too, was a serious charge—a travesty of Marxism. By the time I went to university, I had been thoroughly inoculated with all the classical nineteenth-century texts; and as a result I was immune to the wide-eyed enthusiasm with which Marxist revelations were greeted by those of my freshman peers who were discovering them for the first time.

Thus, when I arrived in Paris as a graduate student in the late sixties, I was skeptically curious to see and to hear Louis Althusser. In charge of the teaching of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, the French elite academy for future teachers and leaders, Althusser was touted by everyone I met as a man of extraordinary gifts, who was transforming our understanding of Marx and reshaping revolutionary theory. His name, his ideas, his books were everywhere. But listening to him, at a crowded and sycophantic seminar, I was utterly bemused. For Althusser’s account of Marxism, to the extent that I could make any sense of it, bore no relation to anything I had ever heard. It chopped Marx into little bits, selected those texts or parts of texts that suited the master’s interpretation, and then proceeded to construct the most astonishingly abstruse, self-regarding, and ahistorical version of Marxist philosophy imaginable. The exercise bore no discernible relationship to Marxism, to philosophy, or to pedagogy. After a couple of painful attempts to adapt myself to the experience and to derive some benefit from it, I abandoned the seminar and never went back.

Returning to the subject many years later, and constrained for professional reasons to read Althusser’s mercifully few published works, I understood a little better what had been going on, intellectually and sociologically. Althusser was engaged in what he and his acolytes called a “symptomatic reading” of Marx, which is to say that they took from him what they needed and ignored the rest. Where they wished Marx to have said or meant something that they could not find in his writings, they interpreted the “silences,” thereby constructing an entity of their own imagination. This thing they called a science, one that Marx was said to have invented and that could be applied, gridlike, to all social phenomena.

Why invent a Marxist “science” when so much was already at hand, the Marxist “theory of history,” “historical materialism,” “dialectical materialism,” and the rest? The answer is that Althusser, like so many others in the sixties, was trying to save Marxism from the two major threats to its credibility: the grim record of Stalinism and the failure of Marx’s revolutionary forecasts. Althusser’s special contribution was to remove Marxism altogether from the realm of history, politics, and experience, and thereby to render it invulnerable to any criticism of the empirical sort.

In Althusser-speak, Marxism was a theory of structural practices: economic, ideological, political, theoretical. It had nothing to do with human volition or agency, and thus it was unaffected by human frailty or inadequacy. These “practices” determined history. Their respective importance, and their relationship to one another, varied with circumstances; the “dominant structure” was sometimes “economic practice” and sometimes “political practice,” and so on. Of particular significance was the notion of “theoretical practice.” This oxymoronic phrase, which came to be chanted, mantralike, all over Europe in those years, had the special charm of placing intellectuals and intellectual activity on the same plane as the economic organizations and the political strategies that had preoccupied earlier generations of Marxists.

This subjectless theory of everything had a further virtue. By emphasizing the importance of theory, it diverted attention from the embarrassing defects of recent practice. In such an account, Stalin’s crime was not that he had murdered millions of human beings, it was that he had perverted the self-understanding of Marxism. Stalinism, in short, was just another mistake in theory, albeit an especially egregious one, whose major sin consisted of its refusal to acknowledge its own errors. This was important to Althusser, who was a member of the French Communist Party and who sought to admit the embarrassing history of that organization without undermining whatever remained of its claim to revolutionary omniscience. The party’s leadership itself had responded to this conundrum by belatedly treating Stalin as an unfortunate but parenthetical episode in the otherwise unblemished record of Communism. His crimes were a mere deviation born of the cult of personality. But Althusser went one better by showing that “Stalin” and his works constituted only a collective analytical error. This performed the double service of keeping personalities out of the matter and reiterating the centrality of concepts.

It is hard, now, to recapture the mood of the sixties, in which this absurd dialectical joust seemed appealing. But Althusser unquestionably filled a crucial niche. He gave young Maoists an impressively high-flown language in which to be “anti-humanist” Communists, dismissive of the “Italian road” to Socialism. At the time this was a matter of some importance: The early works of Marx, notably the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, had only recently entered the canon, having for many years languished unknown and untranslated. Placed alongside his other youthful writings, they suggested a rather different Marx from the conventional image passed down from Engels via the popularizers of the early European Socialist movements; a man more interested in Romantic-era philosophy than in classical economics, an idealist whose agenda was not simply social revolution but the moral transformation of mankind. The interest in this “humanist” Marx had been aroused both by the recent French rediscovery of Hegel and by a new generation of radical intellectuals seeking to locate Marx in something other than the lineage imposed upon the European left by the doctrinaire positivism of Leninism.

Taking his cue from the growing fashion for “structuralism” (initially confined to linguistics and anthropology, but by the early sixties seeping into sociology and philosophy), Althusser worked hard to excommunicate this humanist and understandably more appealing Marx as “unscientific.” In his view, to emphasize the moral condition and responsibilities of individual men was to detract from an appreciation of the larger, impersonal forces at work in history, and thus to delude the workers, or anyone else, into believing they could act on their own behalf, instead of accepting the authority of those who spoke and thought for them. In his words, “only theoretical anti-humanism justifies general practical humanism.”

To flesh out his structuralist account, Althusser invented something that he and his followers called “Ideological State Apparatuses.” In his heyday these were confined to the public and political world. In his memoirs, however, his attention was diverted to more personal matters.
⁶
Althusser informs us that “it is an irrefutable fact that the Family is the most powerful State Ideological Apparatus” (obligatory capitals), and in reflecting upon his experience in a mental hospital he wonders “what can now be done to free the mentally ill from the Hell created for them by the combined operations of all the Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Althusserian dogma the presence of these repressive and all-embracing ogres was held particularly responsible for the inconvenient stability and durability of liberal democracy. Of special note was the announcement that the university was, of all of these, the dominant one for our era. “Theoretical practice” in the academic arena was thus the site of ideological battle; and philosophy was absolutely vital as the “class struggle in theory.” Scholars in their seminars were on the front line, and need feel guilty no more.

Althusser borrowed a term from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and announced that an “epistemological break” in Marx’s writings had occurred somewhere in the mid-1840s. Everything he wrote before the break was neo-Hegelian humanist flannel and could be ignored. Henceforth left-wing students and lecturers were free to jettison those bits of (the early) Marx that seemed to speak of alienation, reconciliation, human agency, and moral judgment.

This was hard for many people in the sixties to swallow. In Italy and in the English-speaking world, most young left-wingers were more attracted to the idea of a gentler, kinder Marx. In France, however, where the sordid political compromises of the Socialists and Communists during the battle over decolonization had left a sour taste among some of their younger supporters, this static, structuralist Marx sounded analytically pure and politically uncompromising.

By the end of the seventies however, Althusser’s star was on the wane. He had been absent during the events of May 1968, and had showed little interest in the political developments of that year. His only direct comment on the “failed revolution” of 1968 was characteristic and revealing: “When revolt ends in defeat without the workers being massacred, it is not necessarily a good thing for the working class which has no martyrs to mourn or commemorate.” Even his erstwhile followers admitted that he had nothing new to offer, and his rigid stance in defense of Marxism, Communism, and “the revolution” made him appear irrelevant in a decade that saw the publication in France of
The Gulag Archipelago
, the tragedy in Cambodia, the eclipse of Mao, and the steady loss of radical faith among a generation of French intellectuals. Had matters been left there, Althusser could have looked forward to a peaceful and obscure old age, a curious relic of a bizarre but forgotten era.