Experience and Historical Materialism E-Book

Ib Gram-Jensen

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 574

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Experience and Historical Materialism: Five Argumentative Essays. The central essay in this volume sketches a revised version of historical materialism, with agents' experiences of and responses to their social circumstances as the motive power of historical development and transformations. The other four essays are critiques of Althusserian structural Marxism, various misreadings of Marx and Engels, Laclau & Mouffe's"discourse analysis" as put forward in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and Keith Jenkins' postmodernist Re-thinking History.

Leseprobe

For Susanne

Contents

Introduction

Althusser, Stalinism and Agency

Reading Marx

Experience and Historical Materialism: an Investigation

Laclau & Mouffe Revisited

Keith Jenkins: Re-thinking History

Postscript

Notes

References

Introduction.

This collection of five relatively self-contained essays exhibits a certain oddity which requires explanation. Readers will find references to another text by this writer: Structure, Agency and Theory, and indeed passages quoted verbatim from it; but they will not, at the time of writing, be able to locate that text anywhere. The simple reason for this is that Structure, Agency and Theory has not, to this date, been published or even printed and is consequently not accessible. Whether or not this will remain the case is, at the time of writing, impossible to say. References below to Structure, Agency and Theory are consequently not very precise, as references to a specific page would not make any sense. As things stand, a brief summary of some main results presented in it seems meaningful, not least considering the problems of historical materialism left unresolved by the ebb of interest in it.

The first two essays deal with subjects which are touched on in Structure, Agency and Theory, but they have a somewhat narrower focus. The third one is intended to offer a relatively brief sketch of the version – or revision – of classical historical materialism suggested in Structure, Agency and Theory. Although all the essays can be read independently,1 the fourth and the fifth between them make up a kind of sequel to the third, permitting a comparison between this historicalmaterialist approach to the study of society and history on the one hand and two alternative ones: the “discourse-analytical” one found in Laclau & Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and “Post-Marxism without Apologies”, and Jenkins’ postmodernist one as presented in his Re-thinking History on the other. The assessment of their positions is based on those three texts, while it also draws on the critiques of Laclau & Mouffe from Geras, Mouzelis and Meiksins Wood referred to below, and that of postmodernism in Evans’ In Defence of History. There is no attempt to cover all aspects of Laclau & Mouffe’s or Jenkins’ arguments; the emphasis is on demonstrating their shortcomings as alternatives to historical materialism.

As both, in their different ways, deny the explanatory power of historical materialism, the problematic guiding these chapters may be condensed into the questions whether

Laclau & Mouffe’s critique of Marxism/historical materialism in terms of its explanatory power is valid.

Laclau & Mouffe’s “discourse-analytical” approach has superior explanatory power.

Jenkins’ repudiation of knowledge of the past is valid.

The problematic of Structure, Agency and Theory and its theoretical and historical context was presented as follows:

The work embodied in the present text originally centred on the problematic of analysing the capitalist state, and accounting for its concrete role and functioning in advanced capitalist societies. Considerations on various Marxist approaches to the subject led to the conclusion that it is impossible to work out a general concept of the capitalist state from which its historical functions can be derived. The social structure imposes limits and pressures on the state, but within those limits its concrete role and functioning depend on historical eventuation which is, to be sure, determined by the structural context, but neither reducible to, nor derivable from it.

Along with this, if based on a less focused exploration, university training in history and social studies as well as the experience of history from the early 1970s and on lead to the following more general assumptions:

The actual process of history is causally irreducible to the structure of society determined by the dominant mode of production.

Social

practice

, in particular, and hence the actual course of the history of advanced capitalism, cannot be derived from the structural analysis of capitalism, nor dismissed as immaterial. Practice – or agency – makes a difference to actual history, and the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist type of society eventuates from, and as part of, that actual history.

Still more specifically, Marx’ expectations that the dialectic of forces and relations of production he posited as the motive power of history

2

will inexorably eventuate in a transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually communism

3

have not been confirmed by the actual history of advanced capitalism so far.

The question is whether this failure of Marx’ expectations and predictions about the supersession of capitalism is accountable for within a theoretical framework which is, at least in a broad but still meaningful sense, Marxist or historical-materialist, in spite of such more or less far-reaching modifications of the original, and various other, conception(s) of historical materialism as turn out to be necessary. It is argued that if the conception of the interaction between social circumstances and agency suggested below is substituted for the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development, the failure of Marx’ expectations and predictions to come true can be accounted for cogently and consistently with Marx’ structural analysis of Capital (which is not to suggest that the latter is perfectly complete and correct on all points) and at least the minimum of Marxist assumptions which is necessary to answer the above question in the affirmative.

What are those assumptions? As several strands and varieties of Marxism can be identified, the answer cannot be taken for granted, but the rejection of any of the following three assumptions would, in the opinion of this writer, be inconsistent with the claim to argue within anything describable as a historical-materialist or Marxist framework or the Marxist tradition in any meaningful sense of those terms. In addition, abandoning any of these three assumptions would imply an obvious answer to the question why Marx’ expectations have not come true, whereas upholding them suggests its relevance:

Social circumstances, including such as are due to agents’ positions in relations of production, are determinants of agents’ consciousness.

Capitalism is an exploitative, antagonistic, crisis-ridden and alienating mode of production.

The working class constituted by capitalist relations of production consequently has an objective interest in a transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually communism in the sense of a classless society based on the collective command of the means, process and outcome of production.

4

It may be just as well to warn readers at the outset that while the suggested conception of the nature of the process of historical development derives from historical materialism and is indeed, in the opinion of this writer, a variety of historical materialism, it is also, in a real sense, a revised, or revisionist, variety of it, which may cause scandal to some, and give rise to misunderstandings. A brief summary of some main points of the text may, therefore, be useful. The suggested theoretical position rejects collective subjects and the reduction of human agents (their consciousness, individuality and actions) to the mere supports or products of structural causality. It rejects the reduction of human agents and agency to discursive articulation or ideological interpellation, but acknowledges the irreducibility of agents’ articulation of their experiences of and responses to their “lived” reality to simple (and hence derivable) effects of that reality. And it rejects Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, but accepts their general historical-materialist approach, their critique of the capitalist mode of production and type of society, and the objective interest of the working class in accomplishing the transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually classless communist society – while, however regretfully, rejecting their expectations and predictions of its inevitability along with the idea of the dialectic of forces and relations of production supposed to prompt or force the working class to effect it.

Today, disbelief in Marx’ and Engels’ expectations and predictions that the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually classless communist society is inevitable is in fact probably less likely to cause scandal than is the assertion that they actually did nourish such expectations and make such predictions – or, at least, that they actually believed in them. A single quotation will suffice to represent a widespread argument to the contrary:

At its heart, historical materialism is a theory of historical change through the evolving contradictions between the forces and relations of production of various modes of production. [.....] The possibility for a better world grew within capitalism, but this was only a possibility; and despite some ambiguous formulations to the contrary, the general thrust of both Marx’s and Engels’s work was as a critique of political and historical fatalism.5

In Structure, Agency and Theory, the fact that they did nourish such expectations, based on the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production, and did make such predictions, and, judging from the evidence, certainly did believe in the latter, is, however, amply documented.6 And as argued below the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production must be abandoned, not only on account of its weaknesses, but also because it has served to gloss over some very real strategic questions raised by the objective of the transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually classless communist society.

Again, the suggested revision of Marxian (and Engelsian) historical materialism is not the abandonment of the objective of a revolutionary-socialist historical transformation; or of Marx’ critique of capitalism as an exploitative, antagonistic, alienating and crisis-ridden mode of production, which it is in the objective interest of the capitalist working class to substitute by socialism and eventually communism defined by the collective command of the means, process and outcome of production. What is suggested is to abandon the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, while the idea of the interaction between social circumstances and agency as that motive power, which is also part of Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism, is retained; and to face the theoretical and practical implications squarely.

The idea of such a revision should not, in itself, be controversial; or more precisely, it should be dealt with as a matter of establishing whether or not it is justified by any real theoretical weakness in Marx and Engels, not by attempting to gloss over such weaknesses by asserting that Marx and Engels never held ideas which, according to the textual evidence, they certainly did hold. Nevertheless, a reluctance to acknowledge Marx’ and Engels’ expectations and predictions of the inevitable supersession of capitalism – or at least to take them at their face value rather than dismissing them as attempts to “cheer on the troops”7 – has been unmistakable in many cases. This can hardly be interpreted as anything but a defensive reluctance to admit that Marx could in fact, on any important issue concerning historical materialism, be mistaken, a failure “to detach the question ‘What is authentically Marxist?’ from the question ‘What is authentically scientific?’”.8 In any case, such few responses as there have been to this writer’s calling attention to Marx’s determinism were decidedly chilly.

For similar reasons, a few words about eclecticism may be relevant at this point. “Eclecticism” has a rather unpleasant ring, suggesting a more or less arbitrary jumbling together of disparate theoretical elements. However, the combination of elements from Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism and analysis and critique of capitalism on the one hand with the conception of agents’ articulation of their experiences and responses on the other; the rejection of collective subjects and Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, along with their expectations and predictions that it would inevitably eventuate in the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually classless communist society; and the acceptance of the argument on the problem of class capacities in Levine & Wright and Wright, Levine & Sober – is that a case of arbitrary theoretical picking and choosing? Not quite, for the simple reason that the theoretical body resulting from it seems consistent, and moreover relevant in terms of historical analysis. The combination of theoretical elements from various sources cannot in itself be illegitimate if the theoretical tool set produced by it works. And therefore, critique of eclecticism is meaningless unless it is demonstrated that the theoretical body in question is in fact inconsistent.

Finally, to anticipate one of the points made below: the past cannot be considered unknowable, or interpretable in an infinite number of ways. Our knowledge about it will always, like all knowledge, be partial, approximate and subject to revision; but it will nevertheless be real knowledge, supported by evidence and rational argument, and has to be accepted as such until perhaps superseded by superior knowledge supported by better or more evidence and better argument: as real knowledge as far as we have been able to get.9 As such it is the best we have to go on, and it is not irrelevant. We can learn from the past that our present social order and the way it works and develops are not immutable conditions: things have been different in the past. If we want to understand the structure and dynamics of it, we have to use historical material, and make abstractions and deductions from it. And researches into the past as well as the present offers both lessons about what kind of process historical development is, and how it has been handled, and some warnings about what should be done and what to avoid if we want to handle it to our advantage in the future.

Apart, of course, from Marx and Engels, a major influence is what may somewhat loosely be labelled as the British Marxist historians, the approach of whom seems related to the one suggested, and has proved fruitful in terms of explanatory power. It should perhaps be added that there is, and must be, a considerable overlap between Marxist and non-Marxist historiography in terms of rules or norms of evidence and documentation: while the areas and focal points of research and explanation, as well as specific explanations, may be different, the commitment to getting it right, and to rational argument, and the recognition that imaginary historical experience is at best irrelevant, are shared. And to adumbrate a main front line running through the subsequent arguments on historical materialism, “discourse analysis” and Jenkins’ postmodernism, some passages in Hobsbawm, who was a prominent British representative and practitioner of historical materialism, are relevant in that context:

It has become fashionable in recent decades, not least among people who think of themselves as on the left, to deny that objective reality is accessible, since what we call ‘facts’ exist only as a function of prior concepts and problems formulated in terms of these. The past we study is only a construct of our minds. One such construct is in principle as valid as another, whether it can be backed by logic and evidence or not. So long as it forms part of an emotionally strong system of beliefs, there is, as it were, no way in principle of deciding that the biblical account of the creation of the earth is inferior to the one proposed by the natural sciences: they are just different. Any tendency to doubt this is ‘positivism’, and no term indicates a more comprehensive dismissal than this, unless it is empiricism.

In short, I believe that without the distinction between what is and what is not so, there can be no history. Rome defeated and destroyed Carthage in the Punic Wars, not the other way round. How we assemble and interpret our chosen sample of verifiable data (which may include not only what happened but what people thought about it) is another matter.

Actually, few relativists have the full courage of their convictions, at least when it comes to deciding such questions as whether Hitler’s Holocaust took place or not. However, in any case, relativism will not do in history any more than in law courts. Whether the accused in a murder trial is or is not guilty depends on the assessment of old-fashioned positivist evidence, if such evidence is available. Any innocent readers who find themselves in the dock will do well to appeal to it. It is the lawyers for the guilty ones who fall back on postmodern lines of defence.10

If some readers think that Hobsbawm drew up a caricature of his adversary here, the discussions below should disabuse them.

Althusser, Stalinism and Agency.

a. Stalinism?

There are several good reasons to criticise Althusser’s structuralist Marxism. It is a functionalist approach, with the consequent weaknesses. As, in Elliott’s words, “In effect,” according to Althusserian conceptualisation, “the mode of production [.....] is a perpetuum mobile,”11 it leaves transforming class struggle and the transition from one mode to another inexplicable. The “knowledge effect” of theoretical practice remains an unexplained postulate.12 And the reading of Marx ostensibly providing its basis as a more rigorous, scientific historical materialism seems arbitrary and misleading.

These criticisms, which apply first and foremost to the original version of “structuralist Marxism” presented in For Marx and especially Reading Capital, are hardly controversial today. Even most of those making them have, however, rejected the accusation that, “In short, Althusserianism is Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of Theory. It is Stalinism at last, theorised as ideology”13 as “unwarranted in the extreme”,14 “outrageous and unhistorical abuse”15 or “wild”.16 Does it nevertheless have any basis in the substance of “Althusserianism”? And if so, what?

Thompson did not systematically define what he meant by “Stalinism”, which, according to his own words, was never “given its true, rigorous and totally coherent theoretical expression” before Althusser.17 But a more or less approximate outline of Stalinism as a historical phenomenon would be something like the following: it involved the concentration of power in the highest echelons of party and government, especially in the hands of Stalin himself, with a rigid hierarchy, strict censorship and the suppression of any initiative from below; the substitution of free discussion and information by the constant dissemination of whatever lies the leadership considered expedient; the freezing of the theory of historical materialism into a set of dogma, the interpretation of which was the monopoly of the highest echelons of the party and government, often exercised in arbitrary ways for reasons of Realpolitik; and most monstrously of all the arbitrary and unrestricted use of terror to eliminate any opposition, with witch-hunts, labour camps and mass murder on a huge scale, and a correspondingly vast and ruthless security apparatus.18

This writer is convinced that the textual evidence does not corroborate the idea that Althusser subjectively supported Stalinism in this sense, or that it was the objective consequence of his theoretical edifice. All the same it must be admitted that insofar as he discussed Stalinism at all, he did it in such an ambiguous19 and unsatisfactory way that it might seem a parallel to the attempts to take a distance from Stalinism and retain a hierarchical “socialist” regime in post- Stalin “real existing socialism”: the reduction of Stalinism to aberrations and abuses (“cult of personality”) in the superstructure leaving the infrastructure of socialist society intact. Indeed Althusser wrote to that effect when he suggested that,

[.....]. However, everything that has been said of the “cult of personality” refers exactly to the domain of the superstructure and therefore of State organization and ideologies; further it refers largely to this domain alone, which we know from Marxist theory possesses a ‘relative autonomy’ (which explains very simply, in theory, how the socialist infrastructure has been able to develop without essential damage during this period of errors affecting the superstructure).20

Theoretically erroneous and perhaps embarrassing as such a passage is in itself (as if it made no difference to socialist infrastructure that the command of the means, process and outcome of production was monopolised by an undemocratic state apparatus!), Althusser also, just a few pages before it, wrote about “the ‘inhuman’ that the past of the U.S.S.R. bears within it: terror, repression and dogmatism – precisely what has not yet been completely superseded, in its effects or its misdeeds.”21

That was in an essay dated October 1963. In a “Note on “The Critique of the Personality Cult” dated June 1972 Althusser rejected the concept “personality cult”, arguing that it explained nothing and suggesting instead the (provisional) term “the “Stalinian” deviation”22 Why this specific term? What did that explain? Althusser further emphasised the necessity of serious research into the basic historical causes of this deviation: “[.....] into the Superstructure, relations of production, and therefore the state of class relations and the class struggle in the U.S.S.R.”23 Very sensible – and then, seven pages on, Althusser suggests the hypothesis that “the Stalinian deviation” is caused by, precisely, a deviation: economism, one half of the bourgeois-ideological pair economism/humanism.24

Can we make a comparison? Yes, we can. And we discover the factor which permits us to identify the ideological pair economism/humanism and its practices as bourgeois: it is the elimination of something which never figures in economism or humanism, the elimination of the relations of production and of the class struggle.25

This pair has, Althusser asserts, invaded the labour movement and become the main tendency of the Second International. And so, this is his hypothesis on the cause of “the Stalinian deviation”:

The International Communist Movement has been affected since the 1930s, to different degrees and in very different ways in different countries and organizations, by the effects of a

single

deviation, which can provisionally be called the “Stalinian deviation”.

Keeping things

well in proportion

, that is to say, respecting essential distinctions, but nevertheless going beyond the most obvious phenomena – which are, in spite of their extremely serious character, historically secondary: I mean those which are generally grouped together in Communist Parties under the heading “personality cult” and “dogmatism” – the Stalinian deviation can be considered as

a form

(a

special form

, converted by the state of the world class struggle, the existence of a single socialist State, and the State power held by the Bolshevik Party) of the

posthumous revenge of the Second International

: as a revival of its main tendency.

This main tendency was, as we know, basically an economistic one.

26

It is hard not to consider this a remarkably feeble theorisation of “the Stalinian deviation”, with the kind of historical circumstances Althusser himself insisted should be considered left out: what about the actual heritage from the Tsarist society in terms of economy, social structure, culture? The effects of world and civil war? The circumstances of the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the development after that? The failure of the revolution to spread to the West? What about repression and purges, the concentration of power in a single person?27 The effects of the lack of democracy on relations of production – the question about the “infrastructure” so nonchalantly brushed aside in For Marx? The ideological excesses and practices? The question why the economistic deviation affected the “The International Communist Movement” since the 1930s? Considering all this, is the above hypothesis really the most likely one could come up with? Are the abnormities of the collectivisation really attributable to economism, one aspect of which is “the elimination of the relations of production and of the class struggle”?

Rather than explaining “the Stalinian deviation”, Althusser’s hypothesis almost, some might think, looks like an attempt to trivialise it.28 According to Elliott, Althusser seems to have produced a manuscript some years before which, judging from the evidence, “featured the hypothesis advanced in Reply to John Lewis a few years later, but was firmer in asserting a continuity between Stalinism and Khrushchevism in their negation of proletarian democracy, and a discontinuity between the Stalinist and Chinese models in precisely this respect.”29 But, given what Althusser actually published, it is perhaps little wonder that critics of Althusser saw his “left-wing critique” as (part of) the smokescreen of more or less unreal arguments serving to hide a continuity with the Stalinist past in “real existing socialism” (including China) by means of misleading “critique”.

In any event it is questionable to which extent Althusser’s published critique even touches the historical reality of Stalinism, let alone helps to explain it. As Colletti, mentioning what he considers Althusser’s “organic sympathy with Stalinism”, remarks,

[.....]. In his Reply to John Lewis, of course, Althusser tries to establish a certain distance from Stalin. But the level of this brochure makes one throw up one’s arms, as we say in Rome, with its mixture of virulence and banality. Nothing is more striking than the poverty of the categories with which Althusser tries to explain Stalinism, simply reducing it to an ‘economism’ that is an epiphenomenon of the Second International – as if it were a mere ideological deviation and a long familiar one at that! Naturally, Stalinism was an infinitely more complex phenomenon than these exiguous categories suggest.30

Moreover, if Althusser did not express any sympathy with Stalinist oppression, and his politics were ambiguous and perhaps naïve, but, in any case, not (pace Colletti) obviously Stalinist, some other factors might actually lend some plausibility to the accusation of Stalinism. The first and less substantial one was his polemical style, already suggested by Colletti: as Elliott observes, “Althusser’s treatment of other members of the Western Marxist tradition was crude and cavalier”,31 and he failed to make adequate distinctions between individual theorists, let alone examine their views in detail.32 These weaknesses are visible from his coupling together of his three bugbears: historicism, humanism and economism (three misinterpretations of Marxism), and the Second International, in Reading Capital:

[.....]. Paradoxical as this conclusion may seem – and I shall doubtless be attacked for expressing it – it must be drawn: from the standpoint of its theoretical problematic, and not of its political style and aims, this humanist and historicist materialism has rediscovered the basic theoretical principles of the Second International’s economistic and mechanistic interpretation. If this single theoretical problematic can underly [sic] policies of different inspiration, one fatalist, the other voluntarist, one passive, the other conscious and active – it is because of the scope for theoretical ‘play’ contained in this ideological theoretical problematic as in every ideology.”33

In his later texts, moreover, Althusser sometimes used a “militant” vocabulary of “class struggle” that might give the impression of a PFC die-hard intolerant of opposition and deviations.34 Moreover, his persistent criticism of “humanism” might make a similar impression, although it was not a criticism in terms of ethics, but analytical approach, as may be suggested by the quotations above, and will become apparent below, from his rejection of the question of the individual in history, and his positions on that about the subject(s) of history.

If Thompson failed to read Althusser’s texts in their contemporary (French and international) context,35 Althusser may be taken to task for failing to recognise that “humanist” anti-Stalinism need not be a “right” deviation. In fact Thompson may be excused for reading the following passage in Althusser’s “Reply to John Lewis” as directed precisely against those socialist anti- Stalinists, including Thompson himself, who left the communist parties in the wake of the twentieth congress of the CPSU and the invasion of Hungary in 1956:

[.....]. After the Twentieth Congress an openly rightist wave carried off (to speak only of them) many Marxist and Communist “intellectuals”, not only in the capitalist countries, but also in the socialist countries. It is not of course a question of putting the intellectuals of the socialist countries and Western Marxists into the same bag – and especially not of confusing the mass political protests of our comrades in Prague, known as “socialism with a human face”, with Garaudy’s “integral humanism”, etc. In Prague they did not have the same choice of words (the words did not have the same sense) nor the same choice of roads. But here…! Here we see Communists following the Social-Democrats and even religious thinkers (who used to have an almost guaranteed monopoly in these things) in the practice of exploiting the works of Marx’s youth in order to draw out of them an ideology of Man, Liberty, Alienation, Transcendence, etc. – without asking whether the system of these notions was idealist or materialist, whether this ideology was petty-bourgeois or proletarian. “Orthodoxy”, as John Lewis says, was almost submerged: not Stalin’s “thought”, which continued and continues to hold itself comfortably above the uproar, in its bases, its “line” and certain of its practices – but quite simply the theory of Marx and Lenin.”36

There is certainly something written between these lines which Thompson seems to have failed to notice from the words on Prague and Stalin’s “thought” (and certain of its practices), but still it is no wonder that Thompson, having quoted the first period, comments: “So that is what we all were – “an openly rightist wave”.”37 And:

This, then, is the missing protagonist with whom Althusser wrestles in For Marx and Reading Capital: the anti-Stalinist revolt, the total intellectual critique, which converged for a time under the motto: “socialist humanism.” Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not offering “socialist humanism” as an alternative orthodoxy, nor as an adequate definition of all that this critique entailed, nor yet as a motto endorsed on every side. The term has had its own ambiguous history and I am not so tender at the passing of time as to wish to preserve it in theoretical amber. But this, if anywhere, is where all these critiques and actions converged.

This is the object of Althusser’s police action, the unnamed ghost at whom his arguments are directed. But the ghost is allowed no lines of his own. The reader of the “post-Stalinist generation” is encouraged to suppose him to be some timid intellectual, remote from any political action, “shocked” in his bourgeois moral sensibility, putting on his glasses, peering at Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, and collapsing back into a “rightist” Feuerbachian complacency. This is also a direct lie. The actual themes of the critique: the structure and organisation of the Party: the control of the membership by the full-time apparatus: the Moscow orientation (and training) of that apparatus: the selfperpetuating modes of control (“democratic centralism”, the “panel” system, the outlawing of “factions”) – and from thence to the wider political and intellectual themes: none of these themes appear.

Of course, if one defines oneself as being in the middle of a sea, then any other waves must be on the “right” or on the “left”. The other waves will see it differently. From my own position, I cannot conceive of any wave in the working-class movement being further to the “right” than Stalinism. From any consideration of working-class self-activity, of socialist liberty, how is it possible to be further to the “right” than the antihistoricism and anti-humanism of Althusser?”38

With the final paragraph, Thompson points to something substantial, namely the strategic implications of Althusser’s “theoretical anti-humanism”, which indeed, although they do not prove any subjective Stalinist intent on the part of Althusser, are something like Stalinist “socialism”. That “theoretical antihumanism”, the core conception of structural Marxism, can be defined in the words of Brewster’s Glossary to Reading Capital:

Humanist ideologies see the social totality as the totality of inter-subjective relations between men, as civil society, the society of human needs. In other words, they are anthropologies strictly homologous with the classical economic theory of the homo oeconomicus. In Marxist theory, on the contrary, the real protagonists of history are the social relations of production, political struggle and ideology, which are constituted by the place assigned to these protagonists in the complex structure of the social formation (e.g., the labourer and the capitalist in the capitalist mode of production, defined by their different relations to the means of production). The biological men are only the supports or bearers of the guises (Charaktermasken) assigned to them by the structure of relations in the social formation. Hence each articulation of the mode of production and each level of the social formation defines for itself a potentially different form of historical individuality. The correspondence or non-correspondence of these forms of historical individuality plays an important part in transition.”39

This conception is closely related to Althusser’s distinction between theoretical practice and science on the one hand and ideological practice and ideology on the other, which suggests a dogmatic insistence on representing the former against representatives of the latter – and, especially, involves his insistence, at least in his early work, that ideology “survives alongside science as an essential element of every social formation [.....], including a socialist and even a communist society.”40 The reason for this is, according to Althusser, that, “ideology (as a system of mass representations) is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence.”41 Consequently,

“In a class society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is settled to the profit of the ruling class. In a classless society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is lived to the profit of all men.”42

Apart from the obvious functionalist-teleological assumptions implicit in this, it suggests a “classless” society in which the division between haves and have-nots is substituted by the division between knows and know-nots, the former constituting an elite of theoretical practitioners, those who have somehow made the passage from ideology to science, a passage the defining characteristics of which, the nature of the “knowledge effect”, are, as was noted above, not made clear by Althusser. Both come out clearly in the passage between the two last quotations

[.....]. If, as Marx said, history is a perpetual transformation of men’s conditions of existence, and if this is equally true of a socialist society, then men must be ceaselessly transformed so as to adapt them to these conditions: if this ‘adaptation’ cannot be left to spontaneity but must be constantly assumed, dominated and controlled, it is in ideology that this demand is expressed, that this distance is measured, that this contradiction is lived and that its resolution is ‘activated’. It is in ideology that the classless society lives the inadequacy/adequacy of the relation between it and the world, and it is in it and by it that it transforms men’s ‘consciousness’, that is, their attitudes and behaviour so as to raise them to the level of their tasks and the conditions of their existence.43

What could be further than this from Marx’ and Engels’ vision of “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”,44 humanity having made its leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom, and thus become the master of its own social organisation and the conscious master of its own history?45

The elitism implied by Althusser’s words may not be what he wanted to suggest, let alone recommend, but follows from his conception of ideology and science, and of agents as the mere supports of the character masks assigned to them by the social relations that are the real protagonists of history. They are adapted to those roles assigned by the social relations by means of ideology – rather than ideology being articulated by agents as (part of) their articulation of their experiences of and responses to their “lived” reality.

So, when Althusser states that, “only the existence and the recognition of its necessity enable us to act on ideology and transform ideology into an instrument of deliberate action on history”,46 who are to accomplish that transformation? This involves two, though related, problems. Firstly, if, “The ‘subjects’ of history are given human societies”, and, “Human societies secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life”,47 why is it necessary for any other agent to act on the ideology in a socialist society, and how is it possible to do so?

Secondly, the puzzle is not made less by Althusser’s suggestion in Lenin and Philosophy that, “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all)”.48 And certainly not by the following paragraph either:

I might add: what thus seems to take place outside ideology [.....] in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says: ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).49

The first thing to notice is how completely ideology has been divorced from agents: rather than agents articulating their experiences of their “lived” reality into various forms of ideology, ideology is articulated apart from any agency, by social relations, and transforms agents into subjects. How is that “quite exceptional case” of being knowingly “in ideology” possible, when realising its true nature is the same thing as getting outside it (inasmuch as one cannot see through an illusion and still nourish it)? And how is realising the true nature of ideology possible if ideology is inevitably secreted from society and imposed on agents? Althusser’s pupil Poulantzas has written of ideology in a way which clearly brings out the paradox:

[.....]. The status of the ideological derives from the fact that it reflects the manner in which the agents of a formation, the bearers of its structures, live their conditions of existence; i.e. it reflects their relation to these conditions as it is ‘lived’ by them. Ideology is present to such an extent in all the agents’ activities that it becomes indistinguishable from their lived experience. To this extent ideologies fix in a relatively coherent universe not only a real but also an imaginary relation: i.e. men’s real relation to their conditions of existence in the form of an imaginary relation. [.....].

It follows that through its constitution ideology is involved in the functioning of this social-imaginary relation, and is therefore necessarily false; its social function is not to give agents a true knowledge of the social structure but simply to insert them as it were into their practical activities supporting this structure. Precisely because it is determined by its structure, at the level of experiences the social whole remains opaque to the agents. [.....] It also follows that ideology is not itself visible to the agents in its internal action; like all levels of social reality ideology is determined by its own structure which remains opaque to the agents on the level of experience.50

In the first place, then, the transformation of ideology into an instrument of deliberate action on history would seem to be the business of the knows, who have somehow seen through ideology and are therefore, in some unexplained way, able to manipulate it (and through that the rest of the population). Secondly, however, the very idea of manipulating ideology which is secreted and imposed by society to adapt agents to their necessary functions is meaningless. And what is more, if ideology is necessarily opaque to agents, how can Althusser and Poulantzas, who are presumably agents, look through it? The idea of ideology as inexorably “secreted” and imposed on agents is central to “structuralist Marxism” and at the same time explodes it: if its conception of ideology and agents as the mere supports of the character masks assigned to them by the structure of relations in the social formation is true, then we cannot acquire true knowledge of ideology or the social whole. Postulating that ideology is by definition inescapable and opaque, “Structuralist Marxism” in effect implies its own status as mere ideology, and the impossibility of a scientific social theory. Its distinction between ideology and (itself as) science is thus completely arbitrary.51Either the idea of acquiring true knowledge of the social whole or this conception of ideology has to be abandoned: they are mutually exclusive. And obviously no theory implying its own invalidity can be accepted as valid.

All the implications of this collapse of “structuralist Marxism” (if it is true on ideology, it must itself be ideology; if it is wrong on ideology, its functionalist assumptions and the reduction of agents to mere supports or bearers of the character masks assigned to them by the structure of relations in the social formation are subverted) cannot be dealt with here. The primary concern here is the elitism inherent in the very Althusserian conception of ideology and theory/ science. As Geras observed, “When knowledge celebrates its autonomy, the philosophers celebrate their dominance.”52 As for Althusser’s words about “This ‘break’ between the old religions and ideologies, [.....], and Marxism, which is a science, and which must become the ‘organic’ ideology of human history by producing a new form of ideology in the masses (an ideology which will depend on a science this time – which has never been the case before)”,53 Geras’ comment is equally apt:

To come to the final consequence of Althusser’s idealism: the knowledge which Marxism provides and which intellectuals import into the working class movement has, for him, a very specific kind of directive role. It tries to produce ‘a new form of ideology in the masses’ by supporting and using, or transforming and combating the ideologies in which the masses live. But Althusser also tells us, in at least a hundred passages, that ideology is a realm of mystification and deformation, of illusion, falsehood and myth, of confusion, prejudice and arbitrariness, of the imaginary and non-knowledge. He thus cuts off the masses, by a necessity he never explains, from the knowledge of their situation which the intellectuals have produced. How then can the intellectuals brandish what they know to be an ideology without violating the first principle of revolutionary politics – to tell it as it is?”54

Thompson gave a somewhat blunter answer to the question why Althusser and others thought it necessary to offer “the masses” an ideology rather than knowledge: “All these exalted thinkers, “bourgeois” or “Marxist”, proceed from the same “latent anthropology”, the same ulterior assumption about “Man” – that all men and women (except themselves) are bloody silly.”55

Even the unmistakable – though perhaps not deliberate – elitism implied by Althusser’s views does not amount to Stalinism in the sense defined above. But it makes the accusation less outrageous or wild, as Althusser’s words do suggest a scenario of structural-Marxist knows manipulating the ideology of the masses of know-nots, albeit for a good purpose and on a scientific basis. Actually, that scenario is unrealistic on Althusser’s own assumptions because the idea of an active intervention of agency in the formation of ideology is as arbitrary in the context of the mode of production as a perpetuum mobile as the idea of a revolutionary transition from one such perpetuum mobile to another. But the transition from Marx’ conception of the capitalist mode as transient and bound to be superseded by socialism and eventually classless communist society through the revolutionary agency of the working class to an elitist conception of the socialist/communist future is unmistakable. In Benton’s words on Althusser’s conception of “structural causality”,

[.....] is the problem one of explaining the capacity of a set of social relations to maintain its integrity, to persist and reproduce itself? If so, and if the reference to Spinoza is to be taken seriously, then the concept of structural causality is if anything far too effective. Spinoza’s ‘cause immanent in its effects’ is, as a selfgenerating and self-sustaining totality, eternal. If Althusser is to be taken strictly at his word, then a central feature of the Marxist project – the fluid, the essentially transient and transformable character of the social world – is abandoned.56

Now, that feature: the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformation through the means of human agency, and the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually communism accomplished by the working class which would be forced to effect it “under penalty of its own destruction”57 is a red thread running through Marx’ and Engels’ work from the mid-1840s and on, and to excommunicate it as a remnant from an alien problematic is to set up a Marx who is not the one who wrote or co-wrote The German Ideology, the Manifesto, Grundrisse, the 1859 “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, or Capital, to mention just a few. It is an application of “symptomatic” reading as arbitrary as expurgating every trace of the theme “jealousy” from Othello and proclaiming that now it is the real play with that title by Shakespeare.

Again, these criticisms against Althusser do not mean that he is guilty of Stalinism, but they do mean that the whole original structural-Marxist project falls apart: historical transformations are in effect rendered unaccountable for, and structural and historical analysis part company, as made manifest in Balibar’s self-critique.58 The working class is reduced to mere supports of the character masks assigned to them by the structure of relations in the social formation, eternal dupes of ideological illusions imposed by that structure. Science and knowledge too are in effect rendered unaccountable for, and the “symptomatic” reading of Marx renders him unrecognisable, a theorist sharing little but the name with the actual person, 1818-1883.

This is not to defend Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations. This writer has argued that it should be abandoned – but substituted by the interaction between social circumstances and agency as that motive power. The implications of that substitution have been discussed elsewhere and need not be dealt with here. The point is that Althusser’s attempt to elaborate a structural Marxism turns out to be disastrous, while his later attempts at revision only, as Anderson noted, made his theoretical edifice incoherent.59 As for the original one, it has been argued above that it effectively implies its own invalidity: its non-ideological, non-illusory nature can only be posited by means of an arbitrary, unaccounted for distinction between ideological and theoretical practice, with the posited knowledge effect of the latter remaining unaccounted for as well. As will be demonstrated below, it too was, moreover, incoherent, as it included both the reduction of agents to the supports of the character masks assigned to them by the structure of relations in the social formation and, in a text dated April-May 1963, the “basic Marxist proposition: ‘the class struggle is the motor of history’”.60

It may be mentioned here that the discourse-analytical approach advocated in Laclau & Mouffe’s “post-Marxist” (more precisely “post-Althusserian”) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy simply accomplished a transition from structuralist Marxism by detaching Althusser’s conception of “ideological interpellation” from the social structure, which left unaccounted, and unaccountable for, discourses interpellating agents as the motive power of social development and transformations. As both social relations and agents as subjects were discursively articulated, agency, or social practice, was still reduced to a passive object – though now no longer of the social structure, but of discourses.61 There is no reason to discuss this sequel to structural Marxism here, only to note that it, too, left historical change unexplained, as it could not, on its own assumptions, explain why or how new discourses are articulated and subvert older ones, or why agents accept them.

To return to the question of Althusser and Stalinism, there is nothing to suggest that he subjectively wanted his arguments to be interpreted in a Stalinist sense. The elitist implications nevertheless invited such interpretations. If the know-nots have to be consciously manipulated to adopt ideology appropriate for socialism and communism,62 a monopoly of power in the hands of the knows seems the logical conclusion. The implications of Althusser’s argument on ideology and theory are, in fact, comparable to the picture he himself drew of the state of things under Stalin, in a text quoted by Elliott:

In Marx’s name, Stalin fixed for years and years the formulae of this poor man’s Hegelianism, this Absolute Knowledge without exterior. Any topography had disappeared from it, and for a very good reason: since ‘the cadres decide everything’, the definition of the True was the prerogative of the leaders, the bourgeois ideology of the omnipotence of ideas triumphed in the monstrous unity of State-party-State ideology, the masses had only to submit themselves in the very name of their liberation.63

It seems a sad irony that Althusser was attracted to the Chinese cultural revolution which “was – on the face of it – a massive, popular anti-bureaucratic mobilization”, that is, ostensibly (at least it was often understood in that way) meant to transfer power from the “headquarter” to the masses.64 Moreover, while Thompson’s attack on Althusser in The Poverty of Theory was unjust at the subjective level, the critique of Althusser’s reduction of agents to the supports of their assigned character masks and his conception of ideology and theory was very much to the point.

So, while this writer agrees with Elliott that Althusser’s late, open critique of the PCF leadership of 1978 deserves respect,65 it is hard to feel admiration, even critical admiration, for Althusser’s “innovations” of 1960-1965, as they must be considered theoretically retrogressive, simply because Althusser’s basic approach was wrong, and the theory politically potentially damaging. Whatever the problems of historical materialism at that time, Althusser’s structural Marxism was no solution.

b. Structural or Historical Materialism?

Its (literally) fundamental weakness is the reduction of agents to (the supports or bearers of) their character masks. Human history simply cannot be grasped and accounted for except by means of grasping the interaction between social circumstances (in a wide sense involving the human beings’ metabolism with nature) and agency, because, as Marx pointed out,66 there would not be any social history of the human species if that species did not interact with its natural and social environment. That interaction is the motive power of historical development and transformations; one might indeed say that it is the process of historical development. The weakness of Marx’ and Engels’ own conception of that development is their conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as its motive power and determining factor: a dialectic which embodies the interaction between social circumstances and agency, to be sure, but posits that historical development is propelled by the development of the forces of production, while relations of production are those appropriate to the given stage of that development, and are transformed when they turn into fetters on it.67

In Marx’ and Engels’ conception, this dialectic itself is conceived in terms of interaction between social circumstances and agency, as apparent from Marx’ 1846 letter to Annenkow:

[.....]. Humans never relinquish what they have won, but that does not mean that they never relinquish the social form in which they have acquired certain productive forces. Quite the reverse. In order not to be deprived of the results attained, in order not to forfeit the fruits of civilization, humans are forced to change all their traditional social forms as soon as their mode of intercourse no longer corresponds to the acquired productive forces.”68

Hence Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic between forces and relations of production is not contradicted by their words in Die heilige Familie:

[.....]. History does nothing, it “owns no immense riches”, it “fights no battles”! On the contrary it is man, real, living man, who does, owns and fights all of it; it is definitely not “history” that uses man as a means of going through with its ends – as if it were a person apart – on the contrary it is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his own ends.69

It is precisely these ends which Marx points out in his letter to Annenkow written the year after the publication of Die heilige Familie, and it is in terms of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as involving agency in the same sense that Marx predicts the supersession of capitalism in Capital, in the passage later quoted in Anti-Dühring:

[.....]. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers.

This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the concentration of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this concentration, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. Capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Concentration of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”70

The reduction of agents to the supports of their assigned character masks is not found in Marx as a conception of the relation between structure and agency in history: it is a deliberate act of abstraction made for the analytical purpose of unveiling the immanent logic of capitalist accumulation, or, as Marx puts it in one passage, “the inner organisation of the capitalist mode of production, so to speak on its ideal average”. Like some of Marx’ other formulations,71 that passage could make a “structuralist” reading tempting:

In the exposition of the reification of the relations of production and their autonomisation from the agents of production we do not go into the way in which the conditions appear to them as superior laws of nature that reduce them to powerlessness through the world market, its fluctuations, the movements of the market prices, the periods of credit, the cycles of industry and trade, the alteration of prosperity and crisis, and assert themselves against them as blind necessity. The reason why is that the real movement of competition lies outside our project, and we only need to give an account of the inner organisation of the capitalist mode of production, so to speak on its ideal average.72

However, not just Marx’ historical analyses, but also that of the struggles over wages and the length of the working day in Capital itself make it obvious why one should not succumb to that temptation: in spite of all the pressure on agents from social circumstances, they are never completely reduced to their economic character masks in actual history, which is consequently irreducible to the unfolding of the logic or causal regularities of capitalist accumulation. The weakness of Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations is not that agency is eliminated from it, but that it is taken for granted that agents will always transform relations of production rather than forfeiting the fruits of civilisation. If transformations may take place for other reasons, and/ or relations of production may turn into fetters on the development of the productive forces without a transformation, then the said dialectic cannot explain the course of history in the era of class societies, and the transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually classless communist society cannot be predicted from it.

If, conversely, “Men do not appear in the theory except in the form of supports for the connexions implied by the structure, and the forms of their individuality as determinate effects of the structure” and, “The specific practices which are articulated in the social structure are defined by the relations of their combination before they themselves determine the forms of historical individuality which are strictly relative to them”,73 then this is only true in the case of a theory not dealing with real history, or one which fails to account for historical transformations. On the other hand it is easy to see why ideology appears as the medium through the interpellation of which agents are constituted as subjects with the appropriate forms of individuality. And why, in this context, the existence and knowledge effect of theoretical practice remain unaccounted for, as mere postulates.

[.....]. But I should like to signal that this false problem of the ‘role of the individual in history’ is nevertheless an index to a true problem, one which arises by right in the theory of history: the problem of the concept of the historical forms of existence of individuality. Capital gives us the principles necessary for the posing of this problem. It defines for the capitalist mode of production the different forms of individuality required and produced by that mode according to functions, of which the individuals are ‘supports’ (Träger), in the division of labour, in the different ‘levels’ of the structure.74

[.....] the structure of the relations of production determines the places and functions occupied and adopted by the agents of production, who are never anything more than the occupants of these places, insofar as they are the ‘supports’ (Träger) of these functions. The true ‘subjects’ (in the sense of constitutive subjects of the process) are therefore not these occupants or functionaries, are not, despite all appearances, the ‘obviousness’ of the ‘given’ of naïve anthropology, ‘concrete individuals, ‘real men’ – but the definition and distribution of these places and functions. The true ‘subjects’ are these definers and distributors: the relations of production (and political and ideological social relations).75

It should be noted that a passage in Balibar’s contribution to Reading Capital does in fact, if perhaps inadvertently, seem to suggest that agents are in fact not completely reduced to the supports of their assigned guises:

[.....]. We can say that each relatively autonomous practice thus engenders forms of historical individuality which are peculiar to it. This observation results in a complete transformation in the meaning of the term ‘men’, which, as we have seen, the Preface to A Contribution made the support for the whole construction. We can now say that these ‘men’, in their theoretical status, are not the concrete men, the men of whom we are told, in famous quotations, no more than that they ‘make history’.76

This could