How can we rediscover the revolutionary doctrine today? How can we reconnect with the programme of the proletariat, when its official representative, the so-called French ‘communist’ Party, has sunk into the most blatant opportunism and renounced the doctrine, substituting it with an insipid progressive, national, and democratic ideology, resuming under the name of ‘advanced democracy’ the essentials of the old anti-proletarian programme of social democracy?

How can we rediscover Marxism when those who claim to oppose official opportunism and fight for the revolution have abandoned all recourse to principles, and dismiss all the lessons of past struggles with a stroke of the pen, reducing the revolution to a mere matter of recipes?

The P.C.F. on one side, ‘leftism’ on the other: this false alternative is the faithful reflection of the false prospects currently offered to the labour movement. Reactionary order or aimless will, open collaboration with the bourgeoisie or blind activism: official opportunism has drowned the doctrine in bourgeois ideology, while leftism has transformed it into tactical recipes and formulas.

It is only natural that those who, despite everything, wish to rediscover the doctrine should pass through this double barrier and, as a last resort, turn to the various theoreticians, ideologues, and academics who claim to be doing the work of Marxism. It is not the least of the evils of the counter-revolution that the doctrine of revolution seems to ebb back into the minds of isolated individuals, whom their keen theoretical consciousness seems miraculously to save from the general rout. But this hope itself is dashed: these people, for the most part, merely conscientiously play their role as active ideologues, striving to discover the most ingenious method of castrating Marxism, the most subtle means of disfiguring it. Apart from those who for over a century have sweat blood and water to mount subtle refutations against it, there are those – even more contemptible – who offer a shamefaced critique by adapting it, renewing it, and affixing new epithets to it, all of them more or less philosophical or abstract.

What opportunism does in practice, academic ‘Marxists’ do in their theories: in both cases, the aim is to make the revolutionary vision disappear, to bury it under a heap of filth and to prevent it from ever resurfacing.

We were lacking someone who might at last be capable of tackling things at their root, of returning to the sources of the theory and accomplishing an immense work of restoration: this someone, some believed they had found in the person of Mr. Louis Althusser.

This is hardly surprising: alone against all, Mr. Althusser today asserts the need for a return to the historical principles of Marxist doctrine, and for a critique of all the false ideologies that have sought to supplant it. It is therefore only natural that his writings should appear as a lifeline: they are the last resort for all those who today wish to approach true Marxism. That is enough to convey the importance of his works, and our eagerness to read them.

In opposition to the bourgeois who deny the doctrine, and the philosophers who turn it into a metaphysical theory, he begins by emphatically asserting its scientific nature. Marxism is a science: it alone, in fact, enables a genuine understanding of society and history, a positive knowledge of the real conditions of human existence; this is why it stands opposed to all other economic, historical, or philosophical doctrines which distort reality because they are always tainted by ideology. It is therefore essential to establish once and for all the distinction between science and ideology: we must distinguish true knowledge from all alienated systems of thought that directly or indirectly serve the interests of a ruling class. To avoid all misunderstanding, all ambiguity, we must therefore demonstrate in what way the birth of Marxism represented an immense theoretical revolution, and reflect on the principles of this science.

Neither Marx, nor Engels, nor Lenin were able to do this: for it requires a new philosophy which they never had time to formulate, either because science took up all their time, or because they were preoccupied with political tasks. This Marxist philosophy, the possession of which is so essential, is still only to be found in a ‘practical state’, that is to say, it is never formulated for its own sake:

‘[O]ur lot and our duty today is quite simply to pose and confront these problems in the light of day, if Marxist philosophy is to acquire some real existence or achieve a little theoretical consistency’ (Preface to ‘For Marx’.)

To reflect on the science of Capital in order to derive the principles of this new theory of knowledge: such is the task Mr. Althusser sets himself: a difficult task upon which, nevertheless, an understanding of the doctrine depends.

Before following Mr. Althusser into the labyrinths of critical consciousness, let us clarify what, within the revolutionary tradition, is meant by the term ‘Marxism’. By this term, we mean the doctrine that arises historically with the appearance of the proletariat as a class in the social arena, and which ‘accompanies’ it until its complete emancipation from the yoke of capitalist exploitation. Marxism is nothing other than the body of theoretical, political, and tactical doctrine specific to this revolutionary class, the conscious expression of its activity and its historical aims. This is why we must reject any notion of the search for ‘absolute truth’ and see in this doctrine not a product of abstract reason, or even of the intellect of any given individual, but a weapon of struggle arisen historically with the class that must wield it and which, as such, must remain invariant for as long as that class wages this struggle.

From this standpoint, it must be emphasised that Marxism, in its significance, far exceeds the products of the mind of the INDIVIDUAL Marx; a view that would seek to identify them (and we shall see that Mr. Althusser himself is no exception to this rule) has already been ridiculed by Engels in a famous passage from his Anti-Dühring (p. 51):

‘If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering’ ⁽¹⁾.

Marx himself repeated it a hundred times: the materialist conception of history necessarily had to be discovered in the years 1845-50, whoever the man or men capable of formulating it might have had to be, because it appears as the necessary product of the struggle between two classes produced by history: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In this struggle, the proletariat will oppose the bourgeois doctrine with its own conception of the world: materialist, determinist, and dialectical. It is not out of theoretical luxury that we insist on this point: we shall see later that Mr. Althusser has here too done the work of a reformer.

Subsequently, Marxist doctrine, as the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, was naturally led to study, in its historical development, the capitalist mode of production, which had engendered these two classes and their antagonism. This was not merely a study of contemporary historical phenomena, and still less a mere ‘science of the capitalist mode of production’ ⁽²⁾. On the contrary, it was a matter of showing, on the basis of such a study, that the economic and social conflicts engendered by capitalism call for the revolutionary solution. If it had been solely a matter of ‘describing capitalism’, Marx would have cared nothing for it. In his eyes, the study of capitalism means the demonstration of its necessary disappearance, and at the same time of the necessary disappearance of all ‘political economy’, regarded as the science specific to capital and its standpoint.

Our Party’s thesis is that, in reality, Marx spent his life describing not capitalism, but rather socialism and communism as the dialectical antitheses of capitalism. Each chapter of Capital demonstrates not only their necessity, but also their nature: to be convinced of this, one need only recall the famous conclusion to Book I, which describes ‘the expropriation of the expropriators’ in the very terms of the Communist Manifesto.

The fact is that Capital is not (as Mr. Althusser believes) a scientific manual of the capitalist economy: it is a PARTY TEXT which, in carrying out the analysis of the iron necessity governing capitalism, also calls for the dictatorship of the proletariat as the culminating point of these conflicts:

‘What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society’. (Emphasis by Marx; Letter to Weydemeyer, March 1852.)

It is in this sense that Marxist doctrine constitutes itself, against all those that preceded it, as the REVOLUTIONARY PROGRAMME of the proletariat, its fundamental task being to indicate to the latter the whole movement leading it from its birth to its disappearance as a class in communist society, and to furnish it with the theoretical and doctrinal weapons capable of making it conscious of this movement, which is the real movement of capitalist society itself, and of the fact that its own contradictions necessarily lead to this revolutionary destruction.

As Engels put it, ‘Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from principles but from facts’. In this sense, Marxist doctrine, as the product of the struggle ravaging capitalist society, is nothing other than THE THEORETICAL EXPRESSION of the proletariat’s position in that struggle, and the ability to FORESEE its final stage: the establishment by the proletariat of its own class dictatorship over the whole of society.

This is why such a doctrine cannot be separated from the political practice made necessary by the relentless defence of the programme; this is why it cannot be rediscovered through any intellectual exercise: for it can only be embodied in the tradition of the class Party alone, which defends, against all opportunism, the clear vision of the struggle.

This is also why Marxism is inseparable from a critique of philosophy in all its forms.

When Marx, in his famous ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, asserted that philosophers had merely interpreted the world in various ways, and that the task now was to transform it, this did not mean that theory had to be abandoned once and for all in favour of practice, but rather that it was finally time to make theory the TRUE expression of REAL practice, the sole condition under which theory could in turn become a material force.

If Marxism, from the moment it appeared, took aim precisely at the old philosophy, it was because the latter, far from providing an accurate image of reality, was only its mystified, inverted expression: philosophy is consciousness imagining itself to be independent in relation to its own material conditions of existence and which, consequently, imagines that these material conditions are nothing more than mere PRODUCTS of consciousness. All philosophy (even ‘materialist’ philosophy) is essentially characterised by the more or less clear, more or less conscious affirmation according to which it is ideas that rule the world. But in order to assert this, it was first necessary to show that ideas are independent in relation to the world: whence the habitual phraseology of philosophy on ‘consciousness’ (more or less pure), ‘Spirit’ (more or less absolute), thought (more or less abstract), etc...

To characterise in all its clarity the critique made by Marxism of the fundamentally idealist essence of all philosophy, one need only recall the luminous passage from The German Ideology (pp. 50–51):

‘Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

‘In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life (...)

‘...Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. WHEN REALITY IS DEPICTED, PHILOSOPHY AS AN INDEPENDENT BRANCH OF KNOWLEDGE LOSES ITS MEDIUM OF EXISTENCE’.

This means that the old philosophy could only give a mystifying image of the world: it transformed the real world into a thought-world, because thought detached from the real was its own mode of existence. On the other hand, philosophy, like all ideology, did not have solely a speculative function: it also had a practical function. Indeed, it culminated in the search for eternal truths, for absolute principles, capable of accounting for reality in a definitive and systematic manner, thereby transforming present reality into definitive reality – that is to say, by denying historical development.

Ultimately, all ideology possesses, first and foremost, a practical function: its role is not only to transform real relations into ‘pure concepts’, but also to render these concepts FROZEN concepts. In this way, it lends credence to the illusion of a possible eternalisation of real relations ⁽³⁾, just as religion was able to do within the feudal mode of production.

In reality, it is precisely because philosophy is a theoretical and practical substitute for religion that it has never been able to provide anything but an inverted image of real relations, one entirely dominated by the illusion of a pure thought, even amongst its most consistent representatives, such as Feuerbach; it is not through theoretical insufficiency, it is through practical impossibility: the role of philosophy is not to unveil real relations, but to conceal them beneath a host of imaginary relations (it is thus, for example, that after Descartes, it defined existence as being that of thought: cogito, ergo sum).

From that point on, it was evident that the study of real relations represented by Marxism had to break away definitively from all philosophy and subject it to critique. It also had to explain the why of the existence of philosophy: namely, that from the moment when there reigns in society a division between manual labour and intellectual labour, this division renders each of these occupations autonomous. Everyone regards their own profession as the true one: thus ideologists, insofar as they live off their thoughts, imagine that it is thought which sustains the world, and believe themselves to be pure consciousness. Hence arises the inversion that characterises all ideology:

‘Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all’ (Engels to Mehring, 14 July 1893).

The theoretical revolution represented by Marxism therefore consists not only in having moved beyond philosophy, but in having brought to light the ‘true driving forces’ that had given birth to philosophy. After that, it sufficed to show that philosophy was to the study of the real world what onanism is to sexual love, and to show how it necessarily had to efface itself before the study of the real world. The best proof of this is the philosophical inanity of the bourgeoisie’s present-day theologians, who do not even come up to Hegel’s ankle.

We very nearly forgot Mr. Althusser. Let the reader be reassured, we are going to give him the floor: we shall see what Mr. Althusser thinks of Marxism, of philosophy, and of their relations.

Mr. Althusser’s point of departure is precisely his regret at not having found, in Marx’s work, a philosophy developed for its own sake. According to him, Marx, in writing Capital, produced a work of ‘science’ (we shall see later what meaning Mr. Althusser attaches to this word) but he neglected to give this science a philosophical theory. As for Engels and Lenin, they produced nothing but ‘great polemical texts’, written in the heat of action, in which pure theory is drowned in ideological brawls.

That’s clear enough:

‘Marxist philosophy... is never given to us in person in a form appropriate to its subject matter: it exists in a practical state’ (‘Matérialisme historique et matérialisme dialectique’, p. 98).

According to Mr. Althusser, Marx, Engels, and Lenin would therefore never have found the time to do philosophy ‘in person’: preoccupied with other tasks, overwhelmed by thankless political work, they could only do philosophy ‘in a practical state’. Mr. Althusser, for his part, does not hesitate: if anyone is capable of giving Marxism the philosophy it lacks, it is certainly him. He tells us this without further ado:

‘[O]ur lot and our duty today is quite simply to pose and confront these problems in the light of day, if Marxist philosophy is to acquire some real existence or achieve a little theoretical consistency’ (preface to ‘For Marx’).

So we are duly forewarned: none enters here who is not a philosopher.

But what is this ‘philosophy’ that Mr. Althusser claims to be bestowing upon us? One of two things: either it is the new conception of the world brought about by Marxism on the basis of the study of history and social relations, in which case it is a conception that is no longer philosophical at all because it is founded on real relations, or it is, once again, a system of knowledge having as its aim to account for truth IN GENERAL, and we find ourselves right back in precisely the old philosophy that had to be critiqued.

In this sense, perhaps it is no coincidence that Marx, Engels, or Lenin did not see fit to formulate Marxist philosophy ‘in person’, and that they did so only in practice: for what Mr. Althusser desires is precisely a theoretical system general and abstract enough to account, IN GENERAL, for the ‘production of knowledges’, to isolate a set of principles which, even outside of practice, could serve to distinguish truth from error, science from ideology, etc... Thus, when Mr. Althusser asserts to us that we expressly need a philosophy in order to know whether Marx’s work is scientific or not, he is quick to overlook the famous ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’:

‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question’ (Thesis 2).

This means that there is no possible ‘theory of knowledge’ above or outside the very process of knowledge: this signifies, precisely, the death of all philosophy conceived as a general system of knowledge, along the lines of what Mr. Althusser wishes to propose to us. The fact that he calls this general system ‘Marxist philosophy’ changes nothing in the matter: it is still a matter of reasoning about truth, error, and science outside of their practical applications. (We shall see, moreover, that whenever Mr. Althusser ventures a step onto the minefield of ‘practice’, he falls flat on his face without any brio: one is a philosopher or one is not.)

Nevertheless, Mr. Althusser is not so easily put off his stride. He will no doubt reply that such a critique betrays a great deal of bad faith on our part, and that he has nothing to do with the old philosophy, since the latter merely interpreted the world, whereas he interprets only Marx.

Let us follow him, then, through his ‘interpretation’.

In the silence of his study, Mr. Althusser, who has read and reread Capital, dreams: all Marx had to do was read Smith, Say, Malthus, Ricardo and others still, realise their shortcomings, criticise their theories, to add a few pinches of dialectics and to place himself at the materialist point of view for the old economic theories to crumble and for that famous ‘epistemological break’ to take place which consecrates the birth of Marxism ⁽⁴⁾. In saying this, Mr. Althusser has explained nothing at all: on the contrary, he assumes that the transition from classical political economy to Marxist theory takes place entirely in the domain of pure thought. If a mere ‘epistemological break’ sufficed to effect such a theoretical revolution, that is because Mr. Althusser no doubt imagines, like all ideologists, that science is a pure product of the intellect. This is why the crux of his explanation lies in identifying the appearance of Marxism with a veritable intellectual feat of the individual Marx: ‘Then Marx came...’, ‘He had the audacity to ask the question…’, etc..., etc... It would therefore have been enough for Marx to have a little more intelligence than Ricardo in order to provide the key to the capitalist mystery, just as it would be enough for Mr. Althusser to have a little more intelligence than Mr. Sartre in order to provide us with the key to the philosophical mystery.

In reality, the ‘epistemological break’ in question is not an explanation, for it is nothing more than the result of another, deeper and more essential, break: a CLASS BREAK. It is solely insofar as Marx adopted a revolutionary stance with respect to capitalism (and, on this point, he was nothing other than the spokesperson of the revolutionary CLASS) that he was able to grasp its deep nature, whereas the finest bourgeois economists, such as Ricardo, were unable to do so to the full. This is because Marx did not adopt the perspective of capitalism, but rather that of its revolutionary destruction: this is what the famous ‘break’ consists in, about which Mr. Althusser has written an entire book in order to muddle the question. ‘Epistemology’ has labyrinths that Marxism knows nothing of.

How does Mr. Althusser present his ‘interpretation’ to us?

He begins by recommending us to

‘[A]lways keep closely in mind the idea that Capital is a work of theory, and that its object is the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production alone’ (Preface to the paperback edition of Capital, page 11).

So, Mr. Althusser’s first recommendation: set aside all the revolutionary characteristics of Capital, everything that makes it, precisely, a Party text. Always bear in mind that it is a text of pure theory. Once this is well understood, Mr. Althusser warns us further:

‘Now, what is this theory which is indispensable to every science? It is a system of basic scientific concepts. The mere formulation of this simple definition brings out two essential aspects of every scientific theory: (1) the basic concepts, and (2) their system’ (ibid., p. 10).

So, Mr. Althusser’s second recommendation: pay close attention, because in Capital you will find a system of concepts that will link together to form the pure theory. If you do not recognise these concepts as you go along, you will understand nothing of Capital.

Having thus masterfully detected the theoretical difficulty of Capital, Mr. Althusser finally brings us up to speed:

‘Volume One contains further theoretical difficulties, linked to the preceding ones or to other problems. For example, the theory of the distinction which has to be introduced between value and the value-form; for example, the theory of the socially necessary quantity of labour; for example, the theory of simple and compound labour; for example, the theory of social needs, etc. For example, the theory of the organic composition of capital. For example, the famous theory of the “fetishism” of commodities and its later generalization’. And further on: ‘We ought to draw the conclusions from this, which means ultimately that we ought to rewrite Part I of Capital, so that it becomes a “beginning” which is no longer at all “difficult”, but rather simple and easy’.

So, Mr. Althusser’s third and final recommendation: after all, you may just as well leave the whole of Capital to one side, as you’ll never make head nor tail of it: I, for one, didn’t understand a thing. Q.E.D.

How did Mr. Althusser manage to arrive at this startling conclusion in the name of Marxism? He began by turning Marxism into a theory in itself, whose scientific value would be justifiable solely from the perspective of ‘epistemology’. But, in saying this, he gave the word ‘science’ its crassly bourgeois meaning of knowledge above the classes. For him, it is Marxism that is above the classes: Marxism has, in fact, become a general theory of society and history, which any intellectual can make his own, provided he possesses the right method. This is why Mr. Althusser wishes to write a philosophy that would provide this method to everyone: for example, he suggests that all scholars, without exception, should become Marxists, since Marxist ‘philosophy’ is undoubtedly the one best capable of accelerating the development of the sciences. In doing so, he denies the fact that the doctrine is the result of a Party’s collective work, directed towards revolution beyond all false ideologies, foremost among which stands precisely that of ‘pure theory’, the hobbyhorse of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois idealism ⁽⁵⁾.

Mr. Althusser has pulled off the tour de force of writing hundreds of pages on Marxism whilst knowing nothing at all about Marxism: that is why he had to adopt the most hermetic language, the most abstract thought, the most theological method, and the most professorial air imaginable. It is worth noting in passing that these significant traits are by no means his personal preserve: they characterise just as well all the ‘Marxist’ hacks of the university, who spend their entire lives throwing dust in people’s eyes in order to make them forget their theoretical emptiness.

Thus, when Mr. Althusser tried to justify his philosophical project by saying that Marx had ‘not had time’ to do philosophy, he was no doubt overlooking The German Ideology and this famous passage from Anti-Dühring:

‘[M]odern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous. That which still survives, independently, of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws – formal logic and dialectics. EVERYTHING ELSE IS SUBSUMED IN THE POSITIVE SCIENCE OF NATURE AND HISTORY’ (pp. 56–57).

Mr. Althusser, who is determined at all costs to do philosophy, will no doubt reply to us that this is merely a polemical text, not to be taken literally, etc... In this regard, it should be noted that whilst he dislikes Engels (whom he accuses of ‘philosophical offhandedness’), Mr. Althusser dislikes Marx’s early works even more: according to him, these works, The German Ideology included, would still be ‘Hegelian or Feuerbachian’, that is to say, non-Marxist. Mr. Althusser gives us the solution by saying that a ‘break’ would have occurred in Marx’s thought: thus, according to him, all his youthful texts are to be thrown in the wastepaper basket.

There are several ways we can respond to this:

I. – Marxist doctrine appeared at a time when a certain conception of the world already reigned: the Hegelian system. It was against the backdrop of the disintegration of this system, from which it borrowed the dialectical conception, that Marxism constituted itself, employing the concepts and language bequeathed to it by that epoch. When Mr. Althusser tells us: ‘a Hegelian word conceals a Hegelian thought’, he very quickly overlooks Marx’s own assessment of this period of his thought:

‘This path (the materialist conception of the world, Ed.) was already indicated in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher – in the Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie [Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right] and Zur Judenfrage [On the Jewish Question]. But since at that time this was done in philosophical phraseology, the traditionally occurring philosophical expressions such as “human essence”, “species”, etc., gave the German theoreticians the desired reason for misunderstanding the real trend of thought and believing that here again it was a question merely of giving a new turn to their worn-out theoretical garment...’ (The German Ideology, p. 269).

Is Mr. Althusser doing anything different from these ‘German theoreticians’ when he tells us that a Hegelian word necessarily conceals a Hegelian thought? He is merely mistaking form for substance, which is indeed the best way to ignore dialectics.

II. – Where Marx and Engels saw TOO MUCH philosophy, Mr. Althusser sees only ANTI-PHILOSOPHY: what bothers him is not the philosophical aspect of Marx’s early works, but their merciless critique of all philosophy: they herald its necessary disappearance in ten different ways. Mr. Althusser, when he proclaims in every key that these works are not Marxist because they condemn philosophy, does nothing more than safeguard his own existence as a philosopher. It is therefore not out of any concern for ‘Marxist purity’ that he proclaimed this famous ‘break’; it is solely in order to be able to elaborate a new philosophical system capable of transforming the doctrine into pure theory.

III. – It is absurd to attribute two distinct personalities to Marx. According to this senseless hypothesis, the young Marx would have been a philosopher, a revolutionary, and a voluntarist, whilst the mature man would have lapsed into a scientific mania. On the contrary, we have shown time and again that the works of the mature man pursued the same revolutionary aims, and merely provided the indispensable theoretical foundation to the condemnation of capitalism as it had been formulated in his early works.

That is the whole secret of the ‘break’ that Mr. Althusser would like to introduce into Marx’s work: to deny the weapon of criticism in order to better deny the criticism of weapons.

Thus, the essence of what Mr. Althusser’s critical consciousness offers us can be summed up in a few words: severing Marxism from its class base. But what Mr. Althusser forgets is that separating Marxism from the proletariat in order to turn it into a ‘pure theory’ also means separating the proletariat from Marxism and casting aside the revolutionary tradition in order to rejoin another, all too familiar tradition: that of opportunism.

At this point, Mr. Althusser will immediately interrupt us and say: how dare you insinuate that I am an opportunist, since I do only theory, and never politics? It is true that Mr. Althusser’s AVOWED political positions are conspicuous by their absence: he scarcely dares, from time to time, to venture a few cautious opinions on ‘Stalinist dogmatism’ or on ‘the overcoming of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR’ ⁽⁶⁾. Most of the time, he leaves it to his epigones (whether they be members of the P.C.F., the P.S.U., or even Maoists) to venture onto this booby-trapped terrain, where pure theory feels ill at ease.

But Mr. Althusser’s TRUE political positions – for he has them – are of an entirely different order: unavowed, unconscious of themselves, they slip in surreptitiously, as if by some kind of magic, into every one of his sentences. Thus, when Mr. Althusser asserts that the labour movement is in decline because it lacks theoreticians, not only does he reverse the relations between thought and action, but he also revives the old social-democratic theory of the division of tasks within the Party between ‘theoreticians’, ‘politicians’, ‘trade unionists’, etc., a division that had specifically led the 2nd International to imitate the division of labour between practical and intellectual labour proper to bourgeois society itself. To seek to split the Party into ideologists on one side and politicians on the other is precisely to destroy it and to destroy its organic unity; it is to abandon the critique made by Marxism of the division between manual and intellectual labour.

We know that within the 2nd International, such a separation corresponded to a broadly reformist practice; we also know that, in Mr. Althusser’s mind, it corresponds to the most hollow idealism: does he not go so far as to attribute the defeats of the labour movement to a lack of ideologists, and even go so far as to say that:

‘Basically, these deviations [in the labour movement] are PHILOSOPHICAL deviations’? (‘Lenin and Philosophy’, p. 32).

As we can see, Hegel is not the only one to say that it is ideas that rule the world: now Mr. Althusser’s philosophy ‘in person’ leads revolutions and consummates counter-revolutions, since opportunist ideas precede real opportunism.

Mr. Althusser has, to begin with, severed all the ties that connected his philosophy to the world; he now wants to explain the world through his philosophy. The least one can say is that he has a staggering mind.

So, Mr. Althusser, we can give you an initial answer: it is precisely because you want to do ONLY theory that you ALSO do politics. Furthermore, we shall see that your theory is nothing more than a bland, idealised recuperation of the political perspectives of the counter-revolution. But before showing that, we must follow through to the very end with the arid elaboration of pure theory. Let us see what Mr. Althusser thinks of the dialectic.

To give Marxism a ‘new philosophy’, we must first tackle its method, that is to say, its dialectic. Mr. Althusser tells us quite frankly: Stalin ‘was right’ to remove the negation of the negation from the laws of dialectics because it was a ‘Hegelian legacy’ incompatible with the new science:

‘...it seems to me that it would be simpler to recognize that the expulsion of the “negation of the negation” from the domain of the Marxist dialectic might be evidence of the real theoretical perspicacity of its author’ (‘For Marx’, p. 205).

However, what Mr. Althusser fails to mention is that the negation of the negation is precisely the central point of the entire dialectical vision of Marxism ⁽⁷⁾. Indeed, it is on the basis of such a principle that the dialectic, as the science of movement, distinguishes itself from metaphysics, which presents the concepts of things as immutable, absolute, and eternal. According to metaphysics, if I negate a principle, I arrive at another that is contrary to it; but if I in turn negate this second principle, it is only to revert automatically to the first, by virtue of the principle of non-contradiction (take two opposing theses, A and B: to negate A is to arrive at B; to negate B is automatically to return to A. It is clear that the metaphysical or logical method is purely formal, and that it constitutes, in the end, only a negation of change: for it, categories are fixed and do not evolve).

According to the dialectical method, on the contrary, during the successive negations and affirmations, the terms in question have changed in character and in position, so that after negating the first negation, one does not revert to the original affirmation but arrives at a new result: such is the formal sense of the negation of the negation. Its historical sense is of fundamental importance to Marxist doctrine: indeed, it is by virtue of the negation of the negation, as a law derived from history itself, that Marxism has been able to bring out the clear vision of the entire historical process leading from primitive communism to communism proper. Let us take a historical example: capitalism is the historical negation of the feudal mode of production, that is to say, of a form of society in which non-mercantile production prevails, founded on the individual ownership of the instrumental goods and the worker’s personal access to the products (handicraft). Capitalism puts an end to both these forms: it transforms the instruments of production into private property and the products into commodities over which the worker no longer has any rights; but at the same time, it turns labour into social labour and brings forth a new historical relation, founded on the antagonism between capital and wage labour, the contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of the appropriation of products. What Marx shows in Capital is that, just as previously the development of individual production necessarily engendered the conditions for its own annihilation – that is to say, of the expropriation of individual producers – so too today has the mode of production engendered the material conditions that will necessarily make it perish:

‘The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation.’ (Capital, Book I).

This third phase, the negation of the negation, represents ‘the expropriation of the expropriators’. It pushes the process of socialisation of the productive forces that characterised capitalism to its conclusion. The instrumental goods cease to be private property, whilst at the same time all workers acquire individual ownership over the products. Society as a whole takes its own destiny into its own hands: this is socialism. Marx insists on the fact that this is nothing other than a historical tendency of capitalism itself, in that it produces the conditions for its own supersession:

‘Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation 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’ (ibid.).

When Mr. Althusser naively tells us that there are only ‘two short sentences’ in Capital on the negation of the negation, let him allow us to laugh: it is throughout the WHOLE of Capital, throughout the WHOLE of Marx’s work, that we see the negation of the negation at work: without it, it is impossible to understand the historical movement that leads, like a natural fatality, to socialism and communism. It is true that it is not the negation of the negation in and of itself that Mr. Althusser, following Stalin, wishes to strike from the laws of history, but rather the necessary advent of socialism and communism!

In this sense, Mr. Althusser will likewise allow us to laugh when he asserts that it was out of pure theoretical concern that Stalin felt the need to deny such a law: if he removed it from the official philosophical treatises of the Russian state, it is because, wishing to provide a ‘theoretical’ justification for ‘socialism in one country’, he needed to present the transition to ‘higher communism’ as a gradual and smooth process under the crook of the people’s State, without the need for any upheaval within society. As we can see, such a concern is by no means theoretical, but indeed POLITICAL: the treatment that Stalinism inflicted on the dialectic simply amounts to having codified it in order to eliminate from it all its revolutionary elements. This refusal to admit any possibility of an explosive transformation of so-called Russian ‘socialism’ is found again, moreover, in the famous theory of ‘non-antagonistic contradictions’ within the people, which the Chinese ‘communists’ have adopted as their bible.

Mr. Althusser’s own role vis-à-vis all this is a thankless one indeed: he must give all these opportunist theses a philosophical veneer thick enough for them to pass as inspired by ‘theoretical concerns’. Just as Hegel transformed hats into ideas, Mr. Althusser transforms the counter-revolution into concepts: one need only lift the philosophical fig leaf to uncover the appalling nakedness of Stalinism.

So far, we have followed Mr. Althusser through the labyrinths of ‘Marxist philosophy’. We can now follow him, in his wake, into the marshy regions of the counter-revolution. Having transformed the latter into a concept, he will now attack the revolution itself, skilfully consigning it to the nearest drawer. Let us see how he goes about it.

If we accept, as Mr. Althusser does, that Capital is merely the theory of the capitalist mode of production, we shall come up against a serious difficulty: how will humanity transition from this determinate mode of production to another?

Mr. Althusser, who had seen the problem before we did, was waiting for us to formulate it. His answer is ready and waiting:

‘Marx did not provide us – and this omission is of great significance – with a theory of the transitional forms from one mode of production to another, but only with indications and outlines’ (‘Matérialisme historique et matérialisme dialectique’, p. 92).

Mr. Althusser has presumably not read the chapters on ‘primitive accumulation’, nor the Grundrisse, nor Engels’s studies on the dissolution of primitive communism, nor the critique of the Gotha Programme: for in them he would have seen how one mode of production is replaced by another, how a new class extends its power throughout society. The problem is that Mr. Althusser, relying on the supposed ‘absence’ he detected in Marx, saw fit to complete him by constructing his own ‘theory of transition’: according to him, the transition from one mode of production to another sees the appearance of certain ‘forms of transition’, certain transformations in the relations of production, etc.; a coherent theory of ‘transition’ would consist precisely in reflecting on these ‘forms of transition’ and their development. It would thus provide us with the key to the transition from one social form to another ⁽⁸⁾.

A short while ago, Mr. Althusser was wondering where on earth philosophy had gone; for our part, we are wondering into which theoretical trapdoor the class struggle might have disappeared.

Where is the class struggle?

Mr. Althusser has skilfully spirited it away in favour of his famous ‘forms of transition’. It is no longer class struggle or revolution that enables the transition from one society to another; IT HAPPENS OF ITS OWN ACCORD, by virtue of the ‘forms of transition’. In fact, Mr. Althusser might reply that, in ‘primitive accumulation’ for example, Marx does indeed describe the transition from feudal to capitalist production at the level of the ‘forms of transition’; but he forgets to tell us that in the Communist Manifesto, the same Marx describes the fierce class struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudal forms in order to impose these new forms. Furthermore, not content with spiriting away the class struggle in general, Mr. Althusser also spirits away the proletarian revolution: indeed, this is precisely the only one in history to exclude the ‘forms of transition’ for the simple reason that the proletariat, as a class subjected to wage slavery, has no position to conquer within capitalist society. Its sole means of emancipation lies precisely in destroying, from top to bottom, this society and its State.

By putting forward his theory of the ‘forms of transition’, Mr. Althusser is merely generalising the bourgeois view of revolution: according to such a conception, every revolution must obey the bourgeois model, which was indeed able to gradually, step by step, win over entire sectors of feudal production before seizing the State in order to transform it in line with these new social relations. By suggesting that such a schema can be applied to the proletarian revolution itself, Mr. Althusser is merely echoing the old reformist view of Bernstein, which culminated in the apology for the proletariat’s progressive economic ‘conquests’ under the capitalist regime, whilst denying the fact that the proletariat’s primary task in the revolution is the destruction of the bourgeois State, and that this task admits of no transition: the political emancipation of the proletariat is the key to its economic emancipation, because as long as capitalism lives, it can only defend itself against its attacks.

In reality, the theory of ‘forms’ as Mr. Althusser conceives it serves a twofold purpose:

1. To show that it is no longer men who make history; to show that social relations are not primarily relations between men, but relations ABOVE men: this is done to eliminate the class struggle, and the possibility of a conscious intervention by the Party in that struggle.

This is the secret behind Mr. Althusser’s philosophical ‘anti-humanism’, which conceives of society as a vast mechanical system in which everything is linked and develops with quasi-mathematical rigour, even outside human intervention.

2. To show that, as a consequence, ‘socialist forms’ can exist within the capitalist economy and, in retrospect, to justify the famous Stalinist theory of the ‘construction of socialism’, conceived as a generalisation of these forms to the whole of society. On this point, Marxism has already answered that socialism is not ‘built’: it is capitalism that destroys itself, and it cannot be emphasised enough that the task of the proletariat in its revolution is to DESTROY the existing forms in order to liberate the productive forces, and not to ‘build’ new ones according to some sort of voluntarist logic. In fact, this famous theory of the ‘construction of socialism’ is nothing more than a paltry screen serving to conceal the sinister reality of capitalist accumulation.

It really is very difficult to remain pure in this impure world... ⁽⁹⁾.

Since, according to him, Marx did after all provide us with a certain image of society, Mr. Althusser is going – as is his habit – to give us a theory of this image, a ‘theory of the theory’: he is once again going to clarify for us what Marx himself was unable to grasp in his own doctrine. What, then, according to Marx, is the nature of a social formation?

Marx’s work, replies Mr. Althusser, shows us that one must conceive the structure of any society as being constituted by different ‘levels’ of unequal importance: thus, at the base of any society lies the infrastructure, or economic base, which is its material foundation; this consists of the forces of production and the relations of production corresponding to them at a given moment. Above this economic base lie the superstructures, which are of various kinds: juridical (the law), political (the State), ideological (morality, religion, philosophy, Mr. Althusser’s theory, etc.). This is a point on which we shall not dwell: Marxist doctrine did indeed insist on this organisation of every society, stressing that the economic infrastructure had a determining influence on the superstructures.

To clarify:

‘In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will ⁽¹⁰⁾, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’ (Preface to the Contribution p.4).

On the other hand, against all those who distorted the doctrine to the point of seeing in the action of economic forces the sole cause of social development, Engels showed that there was a RECIPROCAL INTERACTION between the superstructures and the economic base: thus the State can have a certain ‘repercussion’ on economic development, even though it is itself, in the final analysis, the product of that development ⁽¹¹⁾. Ideologies themselves can have a certain historical efficacy and play a role in history: the way in which men become conscious of real conflicts, even in a mystified form as in any ideology, exerts an influence on the course of historical struggles (otherwise one could not understand why ‘theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses’, nor why Mr. Althusser’s ideology can serve to mislead certain young people who are overly enamoured of theory). But this does not mean that superstructures (and in particular ideology) can have an independent development. Yet this is precisely Mr. Althusser’s thesis when he claims that one can ‘legitimately study superstructures in isolation’, and that they can be regarded as ‘the objects of a relatively independent scientific analysis’. According to him, the phenomena that emerge at the level of the superstructures can ‘legitimately’ be regarded as having their own causes. Mr. Althusser no doubt intends by this to justify the ‘relative autonomy’ of his own thought in relation to communism; in reality, however, we shall see that such a thesis is by no means ‘autonomous’ in relation to the counter-revolution ⁽¹²⁾.

Indeed, whilst it was not entirely clear what Mr. Althusser was getting at with this thesis, everything becomes crystal clear as soon as he mentions the ‘Stalinist period’. He explains to us, in fact, that

‘[V]ery simply, in theory (...) the socialist infrastructure has been able to develop without essential damage during this period of errors affecting the superstructure’.

(It is worth noting, in passing, the gentle euphemism Mr. Althusser uses to describe the counter-revolution: ‘period of errors affecting the superstructure’).

That is the crux of the matter: Stalinism managed to completely destroy the communist programme and drag the proletariat into the building of the Russian NATION, yet the fact remains that the latter is on the verge of transitioning to communism because Stalinist ‘errors’ affected only the superstructure, which, as everyone knows, is autonomous. Such is the insipid reality of Mr. Althusser’s theory, which here does nothing more than indirectly justify socialism in one country whilst giving itself the air of criticising Stalinism for its ‘dogmatic errors’! So the Russian state could have become an entirely counter-revolutionary machine without the infrastructure of Russian society ceasing to pursue its triumphant march towards full communism?

In fact, Mr. Althusser’s theory on the ‘autonomy of superstructures’ is the exact counterpart to his theory of the ‘forms of transition’: for him, it is a matter of showing that any change of society is the product of a parallel series of phenomena; on the one hand, at the level of the economic base, there would be the appearance of new forms; on the other hand, at the level of the political superstructure, there would be the replacement of one form of State by another. If Mr. Althusser insists so much on the ‘relative independence’ of these two orders of facts, it is precisely because he has severed the link between them. This link is the class struggle.

It is indeed on the basis of the class struggle, and of it alone, that one can understand how the dynamics of economic forces can render necessary a change and a transformation in political relations, extending as far as the destruction of the State. It is on the basis of the class struggle, and of it alone, that one can understand how the revolution is not a simple objective mechanism, and requires the conscious and voluntary intervention of a Party capable of preparing the revolutionary class for its tasks and organising it. Finally, it is only through this that one can understand the Stalinist disfiguration of Marxism, a product of the international crushing of the proletariat and the petty-bourgeois conditions of Russia at that time.

Mr. Althusser has almost succeeded in piecing together the fragments of Stalinism: what is simply missing from his theory is that which has become incompatible with Stalinism: the revolutionary perspective, the vision of the Party. This is why he struggles amid insurmountable theoretical acrobatics: thus, unable to establish a link between economic contradictions and political and ideological upheaval, he studies each of them separately and pompously declares that the latter is ‘relatively autonomous’ ⁽¹³⁾.

To all those who might seek in Mr. Althusser’s work any sort of demonstration of the invariance or scientific nature of Marxism, we would reply that he is precisely the living demonstration of the invariance of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois attacks on Marxism, expressed through the obscene pen of all the ‘theoreticians’ and philosophers, those armchair theologians, those hired killers grimly bent on discovering the best ‘theoretical’ means for assassinating the doctrine.

Mr. Althusser has followed the familiar path: he first decreed that Marxism was an ‘unfinished science’, one that ceaselessly calls for new discoveries (‘It would be very rash to believe that everything has been said’). The reasoning is simple: it is that of all those who, since Bernstein, have set out to ‘enrich’ Marxism; if they need to show that Marxism is unfinished, it is so that they may add to it, whenever possible (that is to say, always), ‘new principles’ which are its very negation.

Obviously, the best way to ‘finish’ Marxism is to demolish it.

Let us take a few examples from Mr. Althusser’s writings.

Before offering his advice on reading Capital, Mr. Althusser begins by drawing a distinction between the different audiences who will be embarking on this reading: the reader will forgive us for a lengthy quotation, but it is well worth it:

‘Of whom is this audience likely to be composed?
1. Proletarians or wage-earners directly employed in the production of material goods.
2. Non-proletarian wage-labourers (from the simple white-collar worker to middle and higher executives, engineers and research workers, teachers, etc.).
3. Urban and rural artisans.
4. Members of the liberal professions.
5. Students at school and university’.

It is worth noting in passing that Marx wasted his time insisting on the division of society into three fundamental classes: Mr. Althusser clearly prefers to turn to bourgeois sociology and its divisions into ‘social categories’. He elaborates on his thinking:

‘Among the proletarians or wage-earners who will read Capital Volume One, there will naturally be men and women who have obtained a certain “idea” of Marxist theory from the practice of the class struggle in their trade-union and political organizations. This idea may be more or less correct, as one passes from the proletarians to the non-proletarian wage-workers: it will not be fundamentally falsified’.

So, if we are to believe Mr. Althusser, all one needs to do today is to be a proletarian to have a ‘correct idea’ of Marxist theory. All one needs to do is militate in the proletariat’s CURRENT trade union and political organisations to understand Marxism, even though these organisations are precisely the ones that have KILLED Marxism and chained the proletariat to the bourgeois ideology of reformism, of gradual conquests and the ‘peaceful transition’ to socialism. Mr. Althusser will go on to tell us, quite naively, that the international labour movement ‘merged’ definitively with Marxist theory as early as the end of the 19th century: which is why, deliberately ignoring the counter-revolutions and the passage of ‘proletarian’ parties into the camp of the bourgeoisie during the two great crises that shook the beginning of the 20th century, he treats the P.C.F. as a Marxist Party, as the party of revolution and not as the party of counter-revolution: it is enough for these opportunist scoundrels to claim to be Marxists for Mr. Althusser, who wishes to do the same, to take them at their word immediately.

On the other hand, if we have correctly understood what Mr. Althusser puts forward, he justifies in the most trite possible way the ‘spontaneism’ currently flourishing amongst certain leftists: if, indeed, it is enough simply to be a proletarian to understand and put Marxist doctrine into practice, and to possess the communist programme, why would there be any need for a party that fights in defence of this programme, of a centralised organisation of the proletariat, etc... All that is needed is to carry out day-to-day agitation and wait for the proletarians, who innately possess a correct view of things, to feel the need (no doubt ‘spontaneous’ too) to make the revolution.

Mr. Althusser justifies both the counter-revolution currently underway and those who seek to combat it in a thoughtless manner: he justifies the existence of the P.C.F. at the head of the working class, but he also justifies the false ‘spontaneist’ views of certain leftists who claim to fight against this existence through a series of illusions. If Mr. Althusser endorses both, it is because these two attitudes are inextricably linked: it is because they amount to nothing more than a change of method designed to promote the same inter-classist view of ‘popular and democratic’ struggles.

Here again, Mr. Althusser will interrupt us and say: I am not an interclassist, since I go to great lengths to draw a distinction between the pure proletarians and the rest of the population. You will find proof of this by reading my fierce attacks on intellectuals:

‘But nine-tenths of the ideas these intellectuals have in their heads about Marxism are false (...) These ideas have had no trouble “winning” a wide audience, since the latter was “won” to them in advance by its anti-socialist and anti-Marxist ideological prejudices’.

‘This wide audience is primarily composed of intellectuals and not of workers, for, as Engels said, even when proletarians have not grasped the most abstract demonstrations in Capital, they do not allow themselves to be “caught out”’. (ibid.).

You see, triumphs Mr. Althusser, I fight for the class perspective against multi-classism. Alas, Mr. Althusser, you begin by forgetting that Engels was speaking solely of revolutionary workers: they alone are the ones who do not ‘allow themselves to be caught out’. When you extend this line of reasoning to the whole of the present-day proletariat, you deliberately overlook the fact that it has ‘allowed itself to be caught out’ and is now entirely dominated by the ideology of opportunism, to which you make your own small contribution by giving it a ‘theoretical’ tint.

As for your fierce diatribes against intellectuals, let us LAUGH: do you not yourself propose to resolve these little problems, and to act as an intermediary between a ‘spontaneously’ Marxist proletariat and intellectuals spontaneously subjected to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology? For is not the sole function of the hundreds of pages of admirable density that you have written precisely to furnish ‘intellectuals’ with the means to adhere unreservedly to your ‘Marxism’, without thereby relinquishing their comfortable position as ideologists? Let us laugh, Mr. Althusser, when you pour torrents of vinegar on the petty-bourgeois intellectuals: you are, after all, their finest standard-bearer.

‘As Engels put it, every scientist, whether they like it or not, inevitably practises a philosophy of science, and cannot therefore do without philosophy. (We can see how Mr. Althusser cherry-picks what suits him from Engels, and how he distorts the meaning of his writings.) The whole problem, then, is to know which philosophy he should adopt as his companion? An ideology that distorts his own scientific practice, or a rigorous philosophy that accounts for and understands it? An ideology that enslaves him to his errors and illusions, or, on the contrary, a philosophy that opens his eyes, frees him from myths, and enables him to master his theoretical practice and its effects? The answer is beyond doubt’ (‘Mat.hist. et Mat.dial.’, p.119).

So says Mr. Althusser, who earlier claimed to defend the ‘class perspective’ and who now embarks on the arduous task of ‘freeing scholars from their myths’ by offering them philosophy as a companion, in the very interest of knowledge.

In short, the proletariat’s task is to manufacture a good ideology capable of combating false illusions and errors: that is how the subjugated intellectuals will join the ranks... of the P.C.F.!

Mr. Althusser, staunch defender of the proletariat’s positions, or petty-bourgeois intellectual? THE ANSWER IS BEYOND DOUBT!

It would be easy for us to compile a catalogue of Mr. Althusser’s political aberrations: apart from the fact that such a book of blunders would be as thick as a telephone directory, it is hard to see what interest it might have. Let us merely point out that Mr. Althusser masterfully re-establishes, against Marxism, the separation between economic struggle and political struggle (foreword to reading Capital, p. 17), that he notes in passing the ‘formal disappearance of the International’ (ibid., p. 24), which, for him, had no significant impact on the proletariat’s struggle ⁽¹⁴⁾, and that, finally, he does not shy away from giving his opinion on the Marxist theory of the State, which according to him is incomplete (‘LA PENSEE’, review... of modern rationalism, no. 151) because it does not place sufficient emphasis on the pseudo-distinction between ‘State power’ and ‘State apparatus’, which is merely a pale imitation of the bourgeois distinction between the State and ‘government’ (it being well understood that ‘government’ makes use of the State and not the other way round). It is clear that Mr. Althusser does not skimp on ‘discoveries’.

We have followed Mr. Althusser into the land of conceptual wonders; he then led us into the desert of Stalinism: we can now take stock of this stroll.

The fundamental problem that Mr. Althusser addresses, one that recurs throughout his writings, is the following: how to distinguish science from ideology, how to become conscious of the differences between them, and how to draw a clear line between them? We shall conclude this study with the examination of this question, which will enable us to make sense of Mr. Althusser’s endeavour as a whole. Since the crux of Mr. Althusser’s concerns lies in ‘developing knowledge’ in the direction of science, the problem can be formulated thus: how to protect science from all the pernicious influences that ‘compromise its development’? How to free scholars from their ‘myths’? To do this, one must obviously understand what distinguishes science from other representations of reality in men’s brains.

Mr. Althusser therefore explains to us that

‘[I]deology, as a system of representations, is distinguished from science in that in it the practico-social function is more important than the theoretical function’ (‘For Marx’, p.238).

Let us translate: ideology serves certain practical and social interests, it is governed by class criteria, whereas science is solely ‘theoretical’ and has no other functions.

1. In saying this, Mr. Althusser endorses the bourgeois idea of an ‘objective’ science, one that would hover above society. We have, on the contrary, shown that scientific development is governed by purely social necessities, and in particular that, within bourgeois society, the development of science is subordinate to the accumulation of capital and broadly passes through the same phases ⁽¹⁵⁾. We saw above how Mr. Althusser had applied such a definition to Marxism itself in order to turn it into a theory standing above the class struggle. We shall not return to it: let us merely point out that, by taking science in general as something that would be independent of ideology, he overlooks the fact that the objects, aims and even the method of the sciences do not escape an ideological determination, insofar as the ideology of the ruling class intervenes in the ‘objective’ work of science to impose upon it a development compatible with that of class society and its imperatives.

Finally, it should be noted that this conception of an ‘objective’ science, capable of scientifically resolving all problems, is precisely part of bourgeois IDEOLOGY, denounced by Marxism as SCIENTIFIC OBSCURANTISM. Mr. Althusser is doing nothing here but lending his support to this modern opium.

2. When Mr. Althusser tells us that there will always be ideology, and that

‘And I am not going to steer clear of the crucial question: historical materialism cannot conceive that even a communist society could ever do without ideology’ (‘For Marx’, p. 239),

He makes ideology a permanent dimension of human existence, whereas it is merely the inverted reflection in men’s brains of their own conditions of existence WITHIN CLASS SOCIETY. This is because the essence of any ideology at a given moment is to be, directly or indirectly, the ideology proper to the ruling class of society at that given moment: thus, the current ideology is essentially characterised as being that of the bourgeoisie. What characterises it, as with all others, is that the class from which it originates succeeds in passing off its own representations, its own way of seeing things, as representations and a way of seeing things that would be common to the whole of society:

‘The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance’ (The German Ideology).

It is consequently impossible to envisage ideology as anything other than an ideal representation of the domination of one class over the others: thus, for example, the bourgeois ideology of ‘freedom’, which presupposes as its real foundation the existence of the ‘free worker’, that is to say, one freed from the constraints of property: expropriated, and ‘free’ only to be exploited.

That is why it is absurd to say, as Mr. Althusser does, that communism is compatible with the existence of ideology: as a classless and stateless society, communism specifically banishes any system of ideas whose function is to invert real relations in order to justify some form of exploitation of others, by presenting it as a NATURAL state of human existence ⁽¹⁶⁾.

Here again, the raison d’être behind Mr. Althusser’s thesis on the eternity of ideology is quite prosaic: it is to be found in Stalinist theory itself. Indeed, all the Kremlin’s official history or philosophy textbooks speak of the necessity of the struggle on the ‘ideological front’ against the enemies of the people who return to the old ‘individualist and liquidationist’ conceptions. Against such enemies, therefore, the ‘correct’ patriotic, nationalist and, above all, productivist ideology must be put forward: propaganda thus presents ‘socialism’ as ensuring the rational and total liberation of man, even though all social forms of exploitation, and in particular wage labour, persist within it. This is why an ‘ideology’ is needed, and why Mr. Althusser echoes these ramblings. For, as Marx said, the need for an ideology disappears

‘as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest as general or the “general interest” as ruling’ (The German Ideology).

To conclude on this point, let us consider an illuminating example: Marxism has always affirmed that the image through which men conceived nature was nothing more than a reflection of the way in which they conceive their social relations. Thus, just as the bourgeoisie was initially a revolutionary class, its science and ideology quite naturally began by being materialist and determinist (Galileo, Diderot, Darwin, Morgan, etc.). Today, not only does bourgeois philosophy begin again to serve us the old idealist bigotries, but science itself has become anti-determinist, even in biology or physics, not to mention the pseudo-sciences such as so-called ‘sociology’, whose sole function is to prove the eternity of the bourgeois regime and its categories. If today bourgeois science launches so many attacks on determinism in nature, it is because the bourgeoisie, which long ago ceased to be revolutionary, is trying to ward off the spectre of determinism in society: the spectre of social war, the spectre of its own downfall.

Where, then, is the difference between science and ideology, Mr. Althusser?

In reality, this false distinction may serve to summarise our philosopher’s entire endeavour: for if he feels such a need to insist on this so-called demarcation, it is because, by transforming Marxist doctrine into a science in the bourgeois sense of the term, he seeks above all to preserve its ‘purity’, that is to say, to ‘preserve it from the proletariat’ and from the class struggle, which he dismisses as ideology. On the other hand, we have seen that his sole concern was, all things considered, to ‘advance knowledge’: this is why he must draw a line between what is ‘theory’ and what is ACTION, in order to retain only the theory by severing it from all praxis. But, given that Marxism is inseparable from the revolutionary praxis of the proletariat, the ‘theory’ that Mr. Althusser offers us no longer has anything to do with it: he is forced to rely on Stalinism, which is the historical agent of this separation, the result of which was the proletariat’s loss of its historical programme. Ultimately, if one manages to strip away from Mr. Althusser’s work the thick coat of philosophical eyewash with which he shrouds his theses, all that remains is this: Stalinism, which today’s theologians of false Marxism no longer even dare to assert openly.

* * *

We have, of course, left out a whole host of details: the fact is, we couldn’t care less about the subtleties Mr. Althusser may bring to the formulation of his theory. The essential thing is to recognise that this theory is by no means anything new, but merely a pedantic rehash of all the bastard positions of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, which dares to claim to be Marxist because it has pecked here and there, from the Stalinist carrion, a few arguments to justify everything that runs counter to the emancipation of the proletariat. It is precisely this kind of buffoonery that Marx was alluding to when he wrote:

‘Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent’ (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 3).

So much for all those who, like Mr. Althusser, have sought, and still seek, to replace reality with their philosophical dreams. Against all such people, we shall repeat tirelessly that the science and philosophy of today are the forward march of the revolution; that the only knowledge that matters is the class knowledge of the proletariat, its revolutionary theory and praxis, its historical doctrine and the experience of its struggles: it is the organisation of the proletariat as a class around its programme and its Party.

Mr. Althusser asserts that the fundamental interest of Marxism, and its scientific character, lies in the fact that it succeeds in developing knowledge and ‘thinking’ reality better than any bourgeois theories have ever done. In doing so, he merely develops the petty-bourgeois dream of a total knowledge. For us, on the contrary, the fundamental interest of Marxism lies in the fact that it is the doctrine of revolution and that it has been able to detect the absolutely necessary character of that revolution, beyond the mere vision of present-day society. This is also what gives it its scientific character: if Marxism is today the only social science worthy of the name, it is not because of its theoretical superiority, but because it rationally articulates the aims of the revolutionary class, and is consequently capable of linking the study of past history and present society to the luminous perspective of those ultimate aims. If Marxism is a science, it is not because it alone is capable of studying capitalism, but because it alone is capable of FORESEEING THE END OF CAPITALISM. It is this capacity for prediction, based on determinism, and this alone, that distinguishes Marxism as a science from all the liquidationist ideologies that have claimed to overthrow it or, worse still, to ‘reform’ it.

Today, only a Party that has been able to draw the full lessons from the counter-revolution and resist the opportunist tide against all odds can have preserved such a science and embody the capacity to foresee and lead the struggles that flow from it. Only the revolutionary praxis, of which the class Party is the conscious and deliberate expression, can put an end to all the philosophical dreams to which the shameful apostles of pure theory are condemned.

It is only through the relentless struggle against these false prophets and theatrical Herculeses, whose theories still pollute, or seek to pollute, the labour movement, that the proletariat will rediscover the path to its revolutionary leadership: the class Party, organised around the invariant principles of communism, a merciless critic of all myths, all ideologies, and all philosophies whose sole aim is to DERAIL the proletariat’s struggle for its emancipation as a class, by chaining it to all the illusions peddled within its ranks by opportunism, whether theoretical or otherwise.

* * *

It comes as no surprise to learn that Mr. Althusser has just declared that the bulk of Marx’s work unfortunately bears the mark of ‘Hegelian influences’. In his view, Marx would only have become a Marxist at the time of the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). To those who might wonder where the triumphant forward march of the ‘break’ that gnaws away at Marx’s work will end, we can reply without hesitation that Mr. Althusser will soon be obliged to show us that Marx was never truly a Marxist – in the ‘theoretical sense’ of the term, of course – (did he not, after all, say so himself?).

Mr. Althusser will then be able to indulge himself to his heart’s content, rewrite Capital and move on to an open critique of the doctrine, which he has so far only made a shamefaced critique of, hiding behind the cloak of philosophy.

One cannot seek to do pure theory whilst at the same time maintaining any link whatsoever – even a formal one – with materialism. One cannot aspire to ascend to heaven without simultaneously severing all the threads that bind heaven to solid ground. Everyone regards their own profession as the true one: Mr. Althusser, whose profession is to think, transforms everything he touches into thought, and is surprised to find nothing but thoughts around him.

Marxism is dead, long live Saint Althusser!