Revolutionaries (27 page)

Sooner or later a reaction was to be expected. It has now emerged under the leadership of Louis Althusser, a philosopher who has left the shadows of the great École Normale Supérieure of the Rue d'Ulm for the limelight of Parisian intellectual celebrity; or at any rate celebrity in the fifth and sixth
arrondissements
, which is even
harder to achieve. His rise has been curiously sudden. Before 1965 he was virtually unknown even to the left-wing public, except as the author of an essay on
Montesquieu
and a selection from
Feuerbach
. In that year no fewer that three volumes came out as the first offerings of a series called ‘
Théorie
' under M. Althusser's direction: a collection of papers under the title
Pour Marx
¹
and two volumes essentially recording the papers presented at an intensive seminar by M. Althusser and his followers called
Lire Le Capital
.
²
(The laconic titles are part of the Althusserian trademark.) Their success has been startling. It is no reflection on the very considerable gifts of the author – not least his gallic combination of evident intelligence, lucidity and style – to observe that he has been lucky in the moment of his emergence. The atmosphere of the Althusserian Quartier Latin is the one in which every self-respecting left-wing secondary schoolboy or student is a Maoist or at least a Castroite, in which Sartre and Henri Lefebvre are ancient monuments and the self-lacerations of the intellectual ex-communists of 1956 as incomprehensible as the ‘opportunism' of Waldeck-Rochet and Roger Garaudy. A new generation of rebels requires a new version of revolutionary ideology, and M. Althusser is essentially an ideological hard-liner, challenging the political and intellectual softening around him. It is typical that, though a member of the communist party, he should choose as his publisher François Maspero, the mouthpiece of the ultra-left.

This does not make him into a ‘neo-stalinist' as his detractors have suggested. The eloquent and rather moving pages of intellectual autobiography with which
Pour Marx
opens show no indulgence to stalinism, but their target is not so much ‘le contagieux et implacable système de gouvernement et de pensée [qui] provoquait ces délires' – the Althusserian prose is in the
classic tradition – but the ‘conditions of theoretical void' in which French communism grew up and which stalinism helped to conceal behind that ‘primacy of politics' which was in any case congenial to the French. It led those philosophers who were not content to ‘confine themselves to commentaries and meagre variations on the theme of Great Quotations' in sheer intellectual self-defence either to deny the possibility of any philosophy, or to maintain some sort of dialogue with their professional colleagues by ‘disguising themselves – dressing up Marx as Husserl, as Hegel, as the humanist and ethical Young Marx – at the risk of sooner or later confusing the mask with the face'. The end of stalinist dogmatism did not ‘give us back marxist philosphy in its integrity'. It merely revealed its absence. Yet – and here M. Althusser leaves a moderately well-beaten track and at the same time allows himself scope for a good deal of private innovation – its absence was not due merely to the defects of the French intellectual left. It was not there because marxist philosophy, ‘founded by Marx in the very act of founding his theory of history, has still largely to be constructed'; M. Althusser's ambitious purpose is to construct it.

In one sense this position has similarities with some tendencies of thought in the Stalin era, for one of the characteristics of that period was the systematic assertion of the absolute originality of Marx: the sharp cut which sundered him from Hegel and his own Hegelian youth, and from the utopian socialists (Roger Garaudy was obliged to revise his
Sources françaises du socialisme scientifique
on these grounds in the late 1940s). M. Althusser also talks of the
coupure
in Marx's evolution, and, while placing it, with most students, around 1845, seems reluctant to accept anything as fully ‘marxist' before the
Poverty of Philosophy
and the
Communist Manifesto
.
³
But of course the stalinist theories had
no doubt about what marxist philosophy was. M. Althusser is just prepared to admit that certain thinkers in the past began to ask the crucial question how, e.g., the purpose of
Capital
differs from that of political economy – Lenin, Labriola, Plekhanov, Gramsci and various Italian scholars following the underestimated Galvano Della Volpe, the Austro-marxists (who fell into neo-kantianism), and some Soviet commentators (who were incompletely aware of the implications of their analyses). But he denies that there is as yet a satisfactory answer.

For there is none in Marx himself
. Just as classical political economy did not quite see the point of what it observed, and what Marx formulated for it, so that Adam Smith gives, as it were, the right answer to questions he had not consciously asked, so Marx himself surpassed his own insight, leaving us to recognize where it was he was going:

What political economy does not see is not something preexisting which it might have seen but did not, but something it has itself produced in its operation of knowing [
connaissance
], and which did not exist before this operation. It is precisely the production [of knowledge] which is identical with that object. What political economy does not see is what it makes: its production of a new answer without question, and at the same time its production of a new latent question carried within that new answer (
Lire Le Capital
1, pp. 25–6).

Marx himself suffers from the same weakness, which is the inevitable concomitant of the process of understanding. He was a far greater man than Adam Smith, because, while unable to emerge fully into his own novelty, he reaches out for ‘his' question, formulating it somewhere or other, perhaps in a different context, searching for the answer ‘by multiplying the images suitable for its presentation'. We, however, can know
what he lacked: ‘le concept de l'Efficace d'une structure sur ses effets' (
ibid
., pp. 33–4). In discovering this lack we can not only begin to grasp marxist philosophy – the philosophy which Marx founded but did not construct – but also advance beyond it. For

a science progresses, that is to say lives, only by paying extreme attention to its points of theoretical fragility. In this respect it holds its life less by what it knows than by what it does not know; on the absolute condition of circumscribing that non-known, and of formulating it rigorously as a problem.

It will be evident that the core of M. Althusser's analysis is epistemological. The nature of his exercise is the exploration of Marx's process of understanding and his main method an intensely detailed critical reading of the works, using all the resources of linguistic, literary and philosophical discipline. The first reaction of his own critical readers may well be that the methods and concepts he applies are not necessarily those emerging by his own favourite process of epistemological advance, from Marx himself. To say that ‘along other roads contemporary theory in psychoanalysis, in linguistics, in other disciplines like biology and perhaps in physics has confronted the problem without realizing that Marx had “produced” it much earlier', may be true; but it is not impossible that the problem has been discovered in Marx because of the new and considerable vogue for linguistic ‘structuralism' and Freud in France. (Indeed, while structural-functionalist elements are easily recognized in Marx, it is by no means so clear what Freud has to contribute to the understanding of
Capital
.) But if in fact these are to some extent insights from the outside (‘nous devons ces connaissances bouleversantes . . . à quelques hommes: Marx, Nietzsche et Freud') it may be wondered whether the critical effort is merely confined to ‘making manifest what is latent' in Marx.

A second reflection is that the Althusserian type of analysis finds it difficult, if not impossible, to get outside the formal structure of Marx's thought. M. Althusser is aware of this characteristic (‘at no point do we set foot on the absolutely uncrossable frontier which separates the “development” of specification of the concept from the development and particularity of things') and appears to justify it by abstract argument (‘we have demonstrated that the validation of a scientific proposition as knowledge in a given scientific practice was assured by the interplay of particular forms, which guarantee the presence of scientificity [
scientificité
] in the production of knowledge, in other words by specific forms which confer the character of – true – knowledge upon an act of knowledge'). Yet even if this is true and this method of validation can be applied as easily to
Capital
as to mathematical propositions (which is not obvious) all mathematicians know that a considerable gap still remains between their demonstrations and such real life phenomena – for instance, the evolution and operation of the capitalist system – as may be found to correspond to their discoveries. One can agree with M. Althusser's profound and persistent dislike of empiricism, and still feel uneasy about his apparent dismissal of any exterior criterion of practice such as actual historical development, past or future (‘nous considérons le résultat sans son devenir'). For in fact Marx did get down to the difficult problem of the concrete. If he had not, he would not have written
Capital
but would have remained within the sphere of generality which dominates that marvellous and neglected
Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
, which is in many respects the key work of the Althusserian Marx, as the 1844 Manuscripts are the key work of the Hegelian-humanist Marx whom he rejects.

And indeed, as soon as M. Althusser descends from the level where marxism establishes what history or economics can or cannot do (‘the mathematical formalization of econometrics must be subordinate to conceptual formalization') and turns
to its actual subject matter, he says little that is new or interesting. He produces a brilliant critique of the vulgar-marxist views on ‘base' and ‘superstructure' and a satisfying formulation of their interaction. But such practical applications of the general principle as are used to illustrate it are taken from marxists who have used a more direct and less intellectually self-contained route.

While students like M. Godelier
⁴
face the concrete problems of historic periodization raised by Marx, and have, for instance, taken a leading part in the rediscovery and re-analysis of the ‘Asiatic mode of production' which is one of the more interesting intellectual results of the revival of original thought among communist intellectuals since Stalin, E. Balibar's long discussion of historical materialism (
Lire Le Capital
, vol. 2) remains resolutely on the heights of what one might call meta-history.

Moreover, M. Althusser's type of approach, valuable though it is, simplifies away some of Marx's problems – for instance, that of historic change. It is right to show that the marxian theory of historical development is not ‘evolutionist' or ‘historicist' in the nineteenth-century sense, but rests on a firm ‘structuralist' foundation: development is the totality of all combinations, actual or possible, of the limited number of the different elements of ‘production' which analysis defines; those actually realized in the past make up the succession of socio-economic formations. Yet one might object to this, as to the not dissimilar Lévi-Straussian view, that by itself it does not explain how and why one socio-economic formation changes into another but merely establishes the limits outside which it is senseless to speak of historic development. And also that Marx spent an extraordinary amount of his time and energy trying to answer these questions. M. Althusser's work demonstrates, if demonstration be still needed, the remarkable theoretical power of
Marx as a thinker, his status and originality as a ‘philosopher' in the technical sense of the word, and argues persuasively that he is far from a mere Hegel transposed from idealism to materialism. Yet even if his reading of Marx is correct, it is only a partial reading.

This does not diminish the force of his analysis as a tool of negative criticism. Whatever we may think of the polemical formulation of his contentions (‘from the point of view of theory marxism is no more an historicism than it is a humanism'), the strength of his objections to the Hegelian and 1844 Manuscripts interpretation of Marx is substantial, the acuteness of his analysis of certain weaknesses of the thought of Gramsci (and their reasons) or of Sartre is impressive, the critique of ‘model-building' including that of Weberian ideal types, is to the point. This is due to some extent to the personal abilities of the man whom
Le Monde
(reporting the special session of the French Communist Party's Central Committee devoted to the discussion of his and M. Garaudy's views) calls a ‘philosophe de grande qualité', a quality revealed among other things in the intellectual respect he thinks he owes to some of those he criticizes. Nevertheless, it is also due to the thinker and the cause who so evidently inspire his passionate study.

One reads him with attention, even with excitement. There is no mystery about his capacity to inspire the intelligent young, and though it may be feared that the Althusserian school whom he will certainly gather round him will be more scholastic than sparkling, the net effect of his irruption into marxist theoretical debate may be positive. For his procedure is, almost by definition, that of asking rather than answering questions: of denying that the right answers have merely to be re-established even by the closest textual scrutiny of authority, because they have as yet to be worked out. For M. Althusser the relation between Marx and his readers is one of activity on both sides, a dialectical confrontation which, like reality, has no end. It is curious and
characteristic that the philosopher (who has also, as in one essay of
Pour Marx
, doubled as a dramatic critic) chooses the metaphor of theatre – needless to say that of Brechtian theatre – to describe both Marx's process of exposing what lies beyond him (the
Darstellung
of ‘ce mode de présence de la structure dans ses effets, donc la causalité structurale elle-même') and the readers' relation to him: