Back to the future of Marxist theory?

 

“Understood in its full complexities, the self-criticism undergone by structuralism and semiology has had far-reaching results. The book explains how the encounter of two disciplines – psychoanalysis and Marxism – on the ground of their common problem – language – has produced a new understanding of society and its subjects…[which] produces a critical re-examination of the traditional Marxist theory of ideology, together with the concepts of sign and identity of the subject. A genuinely materialist understanding of the subject is thus developed: it is both a revolutionary theory and a theory of revolution.”

That’s from the dust-jacket of Language and Materialism, an interesting enough book, which is probably better thought of as an artefact. I may do a full review when I finish it (there’s not a great deal of it to finish, only about 150 pages), but for now it’s just worth dusting it off, like a fragment of Roman pottery on Time Team, and wonder exactly what those involved would make of it now.

It’s effectively a chemically-pure sample of Screen, a journal which now exists more or less in the form you would expect of a scholarly periodical about films. In the 1970s, however, it formed – in the Mandelite jargon of the day – a “red base” in academia that was utterly dominated by Althusserian Marxism. It’s influence even began to dominate hoary old institutions like the British Film Institute – on Mark Kermode’s film review slot on Radio 5 a few months ago, Richard Attenborough somewhat summed up the mood; he had been at a BFI symposium during its “Marxist theory phase”, and found himself bemused by a theoretical barrage from the top table. “What’s he on about?” he asked the person next to him. “Oh, it’s perfectly simple, Dickie,” came the reply. “All you need is an understanding of dialectical materialism!”

Screen loved Althusser for his theory of ideology, but also his overtures to psychoanalysis in the person of Jacques Lacan. Lacan, despite his vocal privileging of clinical analysis, could not stop himself from veering into almost every other intellectual vocation going, and came up with a bunch of useful notions about semiology (getting lumped in with structuralism for his troubles). Screen could have its cake, eat it and devour it too – ideological coding, sign systems and symptoms should be enough to keep a film critic going for years.

But there was also the sense of historical mission – finally, we were going to have a properly materialist theory of ideological utterances and cultural production, rather than the vulgar-empiricist jabs at the thing that certain classical Marxists had knocked together in their 10 minutes off actually making revolutions (Plekhanov has a particularly bad rep), as well as more interesting but again partial studies that took up more of the theoretical issues (Trotsky’s fascinating Literature and Revolution). And there’s the last sentence from my little quote: “it is both a revolutionary theory and a theory of revolution.” Marxism railroaded these comrades-least-likely-to into vigorous ideological militancy (and there was nothing more Althusserian than the sharply-drawn demarcation – the ‘continuing break’ between idealism and materialism is particularly vexatious to professional Hegelians, who rather like their idealism).

This book is full of that stuff. So what happened? At some point, Coward and Ellis refer to a key thinker in their analysis as moving towards just that sentence – the revolutionary theory that’s a theory of revolution. Good news – except that it’s Julia Kristeva, who actually moved from an initial ultra-left Maoist position rapidly out of Marxism altogether (without having read much of her work, I couldn’t be sure, but I think she was being ‘disillusioned’ by a visit to China just as this book came out in 1977). Her Tel Quel comrade Roland Barthes is also cited extensively – he was also going in a postmodernist direction, though he was mown down by a laundry van before he could renounce all ties with the Marxist tradition (or otherwise).

As for our authors, the story is a little sadder. Ellis, for his part, is still a jobbing academic – his research interests are now completely focused on television, and he has apparently spent some time as a producer. The revolutionary fire in his belly appears to be fairly well doused. Rosalind Coward’s story is somehow sadder still – after writing a significant bunch of feminist work, she seems to have ended up as some kind of journalist and written an authorised biography of Lady Di – so good it comes with a preface by Nelson Mandela. I say ‘good’, but if this execrably clunky puddle of bilge-water of an article on the subject is any indicator, then it’s of exactly the quality you’d expect of an authorised hagi…sorry, biography of – as Paul Merton used to say an awful lot – that overblown tart.

The total ideological collapse of academia in the 1980s is, I’m sure, the subject of a number of detailed studies – some extant, some yet to be written. Historians of ideas should have a gander at the curious case of this pair – from an avant-Marxist theory of the subject to Daily Mail dimwittery in a few short decades.

Paul B. Smith, line by line

He's at it again...humanist hatchet-man Paul B Smith is once more putting his desire for "politeness" in the workers' movement into practice by...spreading malicious gossip about everyone's favourite French avant-Marxist (well, mine anyway), Louis Althusser. I originally wrote a letter back, but then there's only so much you can fit into a letter. So here's a good old fashioned, messageboard-style point by point demolition. Chunks are numbered for cross-referencing and stuff.

I. Liam O Ruairc follows Althusser in thinking that Marx’s ideas were incoherent and in need of “reconstruction” (Letters, December 6). As a result, concepts crucial to understanding Marx’s political economy, such as contradiction, abstraction, essence, abstract labour and surplus product, are air-brushed from his account of Althusser’s “continued relevance” to politics.

In Reading Capital, Althusser admits from the start that they have not made an "innocent" reading, that they read Capital "as philosophers". His project was not to refine the concepts of political economy (abstract labour, surplus product, although he does make claims about them here and there) but to deal with the philosophical and epistemological assumptions of Marx's project. That is what he is "reconstructing" - any reconstruction of the concepts themselves is implicit, and they are certainly not wiped from history. It is a bit like accusing a Marxist literary critic who cites the bit from Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique... about Greek art of wiping out Marx's political economy. It's just not a matter of primary interest to a literary critic, and it is myopic to expect it to be so.

As for those "philosophical" concepts cited above, Smith is simply lying. How does one talk about Althusser without mentioning his seminal essay "Contradiction [hint hint] and Overdetermination"? Large parts of Reading Capital are dedicated to the nature of abstraction, and the relation of abstract thought to its object, and discussions of essence and how that can be conceived. Smith may not like the conclusions, but it is fiction to pretend that these concepts to not occupy key positions in the Althusserian corpus.

II. Instead, Liam recommends students to start using sociological jargon like interpellation’ and ‘habitus’. As such, he is successful in proving that Althusser continues to be relevant to the social democratic politics informing the writings of sociologists such as Therborn and Bourdieu.

Mee-ow! We shall see this bizarre fixation on "sociologists" (what bastards!) crop up here and there.

Anyway, just as nobody is in favour of dismembering unborn babies and sucking them out with a big tube (as opposed to a woman's right to choose), nobody is in favour of jargon. But this really is ridiculous. Jargonistic as compared to what? As compared to Hegel? Hegel, the very master of the labyrinthine retooling of idiomatic expressions? As compared to Marx, father of surplus-value, surplus-product, departments I & II, simple and expanded reproduction, etc etc?

Jargon is one of those things that happens to other people. Or perhaps it is not the jargon Smith objects to, but the sociology? Unfortunately, "interpellation" is a product not of sociology but of psychoanalysis (an intellectual affliction which has, alas, also claimed Smith's beloved Erich Fromm), and "habitus" is not an Althusserian concept which influenced Bordieu, but a neologism coined by the latter himself.

III. Althusser is useful to those who wish to abolish Marx’s distinction between false and true consciousness and argue that ideology is an all-pervasive excrescence of social structures such as schools and the family. Althusser’s ‘reconstruction’ enables sociologists to teach Marx without reference to commodity fetishism, a category essential to understanding the ideology of bourgeois society. It justifies teaching a sociology - purporting to be Marxian - that makes little or no reference to Marx’s political economy.

Althusser is also useful to those who - like the man himself - are revolutionaries in an increasingly neutered reformist milieu which they wish to turn around somehow. Althusser has influenced social-democrats, yes - he has also influenced Trotskyists, Maoists, Eurocommunists, post-modernists, anarchists and everybody else. Althusser has been a major influence on that nasty old sociology - and political theory, and anthropology, and literary criticism, and film theory...

Again, this is startlingly hypocritical. I do not claim to know exactly what Smith's views on Hegel are, but he cites in [I] various concepts with specific Hegelian usages. He should reject this "jargon" - it is useful to theologians of the World Spirit! And that is to say nothing of the mass mangling of Marx's own texts quite apart from any misfortune they may have met at the hands of the Althusserian movement - the "special issue" of Euro bible Marxism Today that came out in 1998, its participants by then paid-up New Labourites, full of paeans to the market, nevertheless found a page for a David Edgar piece full of glowing praise for Marx's prescience of globalisation.

No extenuating circumstances for our Louis - all the sins of the world's sociologists are found to be "seminally present" in his concepts!

Onto the point about ideology - it's just about the only bit of honest theory we get in the entire letter. Still wrong, though. Althusser does not abolish the distinction between "false" and "true" consciousness - he certainly does not consider socialist humanism to be equal to his own ideas, for example. What he does do - which the cult-of-Man humanist morons can't - is provide an account of the startling effectivity of ideology, the mechanism by which it works. It answers the question: "where is ideology?" with a revolutionary answer - that it is embodied in rituals and practices. Kneel and move your lips in prayer...

IV. Liam points out that Althusser denounced structuralism as ideology. In order to gain academic credibility, Althusser distorted Marx according to linguistic criteria borrowed from structuralism. This inconsistency is an example of the man’s dishonesty. What Stalinism attempted to do in reality - the reduction of individuals’ consciousness to atoms subject to impersonal, overwhelming bureaucratic forces, Althusser - appealing to the authority of Marx - attempted to do in thought.

This is two points haphazardly lumped together...or rather, it is no point at all. Althusser borrowed no "linguistic" criteria from structuralism. Many Althusserian film critics, particularly the Screen group in the early-to-mid-70s borrowed these "linguistic" (more properly semiotic) concepts...from Christian Metz. Terry Eagleton, a literary critic, borrowed them from Roland Barthes. Althusser not only denounced structuralism as "ideology", but carefully distinguished his concepts from similar ones in the structuralist corpus (eg, the tortuous distinction between combinatory and combination in Reading Capital - essentially, "Marx's" [ie, in Althusser's reading] concept of combination does not leave the places between the structural determinations "empty", and provides for the dominance of certain elements). What more does this man have to do?

There is one serious link between Althusser and structuralism, and that is Jacques Lacan, who used a number of retooled structuralist concepts in his psychoanalysis. He also, however, used a great deal of Hegel (and even, despite being a right-wing Gaullist, adapted Marx's surplus value to "surplus enjoyment"). It would be necessary to actually dig through Althusser's writings to find references to signs, signifiers, signifieds and so on - and, being that clearly Smith is too busy to actually read anything about what he slags off, take it from me, mate - they're just not there.

Smith also develops his point about Althusser on ideology here, introduced in [III]. It needs only to be said that Althusser saw ideology not as rending people apart but sticking them together, producing out of individuals "subjects" which were participants in social life. Yes, capitalist ideology subjects the "subjects", to coin a phrase - but capitalist ideology is not a smooth whole, and breaks apart under stress. Otherwise we would not have communist ideology. The point is that man will always have an unconscious, "ideological" level, whatever class interests hegemonise it - the idea that we can escape from this, go back to pre-Freudian fantasies of rational man who merely needs to be "told the truth" (which obviously he does), is to revert to vulgar economics or secular theology.

Take your pick.

V. In effect, Althusser’s method was a form of subjectivism. It permitted readers to project whatever they imagined to be the case onto a particular text. This was popular with lazy students with well honed literary skills seeking approval and employment within bureaucratic institutions. It enabled Althusser to pretend to be an expert on Marx when, in reality, he was a fraud. In his memoir A future lasts forever (1995), he admitted he knew almost nothing about the philosophy of
history or about Marx.

Lazy? Moi? This is little more than incoherent ranting, a product of Smith's comically scatterbrained imagination. Althusser was popular with "students" - his own students, whom he demanded must read Capital not just in translation but in the original German (what slovenly layabouts!), and the PCF's student organisation, then radicalised and teeming with feverish Maoists (indolent freeloading scum!). Indeed, Reading Capital is peppered with quotes from Marx, with key words quoted in German. Whatever the 1980s Althusser thought on the matter, he had clearly read it, and closely, and in the original, and come to an understanding (correct or otherwise). All of this is irrelevant - Althusser's philosophy lives in his texts, and he constantly warned against "taking an author's word for it" on what their texts actually do.

And in that memoir, which flits between hallucination and autobiography, written when he had entirely abandoned Marxist philosophy for an "aleatory materialism" which supposedly linked Democritus to Spinoza to Marx to Heidegger, he also claims to have met and had a nice chat with Charles de Gaulle in the street. Quoting a man at his most delusional against him at his most lucid - the philosophical method of champions.

VI. Liam forgets to mention that the nature of Althusser’s project was to deny that there was any continuity between the thought of the early Marx of the Economic and philosophical manuscripts and the later Marx of Capital. In particular, he held that the concept of alienation was absent from Marx’s later work.

No, he held that the concept of alienation had a different epistemological status after the break, and believed after 1968 that there were odd humanist holdovers in all works apart from the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

VII. A superficial linguistic approach confirms such a reading. Marx does not use the
term ‘alienation’ in Capital. However, the concept is self-evident in Marx’s theories of exploitation and class. Liam must prove Marx’s incoherence in this respect if he is to give the “full defence of Althusser’s project” he promises.

That would be the theory of class that consists of three preparatory paragraphs at the end of Capital v3? The theory of exploitation which is based on the specific mode of appropriation of the surplus product by the capitalist? Both can do without alienation in the Feuerbachian sense. If you want Liam to "disprove" anything, you must establish it first. Or shall I demand you prove the non-existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

VIII. This project - separating a ‘humanist’ early Marx from an ‘anti-humanist’ later Marx - was motivated by the needs of a Stalinism under attack from the left as a result of the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968.

Students with access to the Manuscripts (and later the Grundrisse) were challenging Soviet dogmas of diamat and histmat. Moreover, following the work of Erich Fromm and others, they were using Marx’s concept of alienation to develop critiques of the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and China.

The comedy extravaganza begins in earnest. Where to start? Firstly, I suppose, by re-iterating - for the 400,000,000,000th time - that in the French communist party, Althusser was that "attack from the left". He was the PCF's most tireless campaigner against the forward march of opportunism and popular frontism.

And who were his most implacable opponents? HUMANISTS! Roger Garaudy specifically used the beloved "manuscripts" and selective readings of the Grundrisse to argue for evolutionism and alliances with Catholic soft-lefts. This man was the PCF's official philosopher, at the time Althusser was writing his pathbreaking first essays. He was immensely powerful; his bureaucratic tendencies unnerved even his fellow party bureaucrats, who moved to curb his power eventually (but not before affirming their commitment to marxist "humanism").

And that Erich Fromm - forget all this "developing of critiques" and assorted nonsense. What was his political character at the time? A fervent supporter of Democratic presidential hopeful, Eugene McCarthy, allied with bourgeois pacifist anti-war agitation. Who were his philosophical allies? In large part, writers from the Eastern Bloc, who were at least state-tolerated and often state-promoted. Marxist humanism became basically the official "philosophy" of the Khrushchevite USSR, an intellectual gloss on its phony destalinisation, and the justification for Khrushchev's declaration of a declassed "state of the whole of the people", and the justifications for ever further prostration to bourgeois politics in other countries.

But never mind! Fromm and the humanists may have been social-democrats in all but name, but Althusser sort of influenced some sociologists!

VIII. Althusser loyally upheld the doctrine of socialism in one country. The fact he was sympathetic to Mao’s China - a regime responsible for the deaths of possibly 70 million of its citizens - does not contradict this fact. Moreover, like some other Stalinists, he never broke intellectually or emotionally with a Roman catholic upbringing, seeking an audience with pope John Paul II in 1979.

Althusser was indeed loyal to "socialism in one country". But there is nothing about overdetermination, interpellation, structural causation or any other Althusserian concept which is tied to that. In the France of the late 1960s, Maoism meant the feverish excitement unleashed by the cultural revolution, a scenario where for a while it really looked to some like the masses were taking charge in China. They were wrong, and many others were not fooled. The only significance of this detour is to demonstrate that implying Althusser (who pseudonymously wrote just such a paean to the cultural revolution) is a stalinist in the sense of abject fear of the masses is a deliberate distortion of the actual record. And, as for that last point, Terry Eagleton has argued for various homologies between Althusser the Catholic and Althusser the Marxist, in that "superficial" "linguistic" manner Smith so abhors; but unlike some other Stalinists - of the Humanist variety - he did not argue for philosophical concessions to catholicism.

IX. A necessary condition for explaining Althusser’s unhappy consciousness is that he was a victim of the mental health system of oppression. He suffered depression, therapy and electro-shock treatment throughout his life. He had 15 mental breakdowns from 1945 to 1980. In 1980 he murdered his wife and was incarcerated in a mental hospital.

This is, of course, in no way sufficient.

Gossip. A bit like a prosecutor saying, "of course, it would be bang out of order for me to mention that the defendant has a long history of convictions for..."

X. A complete explanation needs to account for how it was that his ideas had such a huge appeal during the 1960s and 70s. This was a period during the cold war when Stalinism was successful in defeating revolutionary movements in France, Czechoslovakia and Portugal. At the same time, the Soviet Union and China were supporting national liberation movements in Africa, Asia and South America.

Why yes - that does account for the appeal of Althusser's anti-stalinism.

XI. It is therefore understandable that Althusser was able to masquerade as an academic authority on Marx for so long. He was able to capture the imagination of activists and intellectuals caught up on the fashionable radicalism of the period, many of whom were reluctant to study Marx in depth. Most of these people had illusions in the progressive nature of nationalism and leftwing social democracy - policies supported by communist parties throughout the world. As a result, they gained little or no knowledge of Marx.

Yes, if I was reluctant to study Marx in depth, I would certainly pick up a book which gets barely ten pages before ordering me to read all four volumes of Capital - in German.

At a time when there is the potential for a revival of revolutionary socialist ideas amongst students, I find it disturbing that, instead of calling for a revival of the study of Marx and Hegel, authors such as Liam O Ruairc and James Turley should uncritically acclaim the discredited anti-Marxist sophistry of Louis Althusser.

"Revival"? The study of Hegel has never stopped. New editions of Lukacs appear all the time. I fully endorse the study of Hegel, and have begun such studies myself. Althusser, despite his various positions on Hegel being a veritable bundle of bent sticks, and at a time when he was denying the very existence of causality, declared Hegel "the starting point for all of us", and that "one could spend a lifetime on him alone" (in a letter, anthologised in Philosophy of the Encounter).

What is abundantly clear, however, is that Smith has never bothered to study in any depth the Althusserian corpus - that or he has not the theoretical faculties to even basically comprehend it. As someone with either experience with or ambitions to read Hegel, a far denser and more complex writer, I sincerely hope, for Smith's sake, that he is merely dishonest.

the Althusser FAQ episode two

Given that I'm getting accused all the time of being an "apologist" for cantankerous French "Marxist-Spinozist" Louis Althusser, I thought I'd try on some tricks from more experienced apologists. So, with no apologies *rimshot* at all to Stop The War conference's "best in show", Somaye Zadeh of Campaign Iran, here are three and a half lies about Louis Althusser.

Lie number one: Althusser was a hardline Stalinist, widely disseminated among the new (and the decrepit) Hegel-o-trots. Althusser was, in the broadest sense of the term, a Stalinist. He was a member of the Parti Communiste Français until his death, and referred to the Soviet bloc as the "socialist countries" without qualification. Fine. The problem comes when people attempt to impute to him various other Stalinist positions that were not really his at all. He was not a popular frontist, and indeed the political stake of his theoretical anti-humanism was maintained at keeping any PCF alliances within the working class (just as his humanist rival Roger Garaudy was aiming at precisely the opposite, using theoretical humanism as a bridgehead to get "Christian Lefts" and the like on board).

Lie number two: Althusser was a Eurocommunist, as sneakily imputed by his hatchet job biography on the Marxists Internet Archive (this is, of course, a website who for a long time refused to even acknowledge anybody associated with the Stalinist bloc as "Marxist" at all, placing them instead in the "reference" section alongside Montesqieu, Fourier and Foucault. I suppose a little theory-police shite here and there is a small price for such an incredibly useful resource). As noted in lie 1, the substance of Althusser's political intervention in the PCF was keeping it about the proletariat and scuppering the cross-class nonsense that was then hegemonised by the Euros. Try again, boys.

Lie number three: Althusser considers dialectics "mumbo jumbo" or some such. Althusser in fact simply claims that there is a very important development that separates Marx's dialectic from its Hegelian predecessor, concerning the epistemological relationship between a real object and its corresponding thought object. On the one hand, empiricists consider the thought object to be an internal characteristic of the real object; on the other, Hegelians believe the object is internal to thought. Dialectical materialism breaks out of both, and conceives knowledge as a production.

Lie number three and a half: Althusser considers Hegel "mumbo jumbo". At the end of his life, by which point he had rejected causality itself in favour of a theory of "random encounters", Althusser was still able to say of Hegel that "he remains the fundamental reference point for everyone, since he is himself such a 'continent' that it takes practically a whole lifetime to know him well" (Philosophy of the Encounter, 2006. Tr. GM Goshgarian, Eds. Francois Matheron and Oliver Corpet. London: Verso, 2006. p229). Entire monographs
could be, should be and have been penned on Althusser's "eloquent silences" over Hegelian philosophy, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that there is "another Hegel", a "Hegel-for-Althusser" that he missed. To claim, however, that he dismissed Hegel in some crude fashion is idiotic, and treats his philosophy with a far larger dose of smug contempt than even the most boorish Althusserians (cough cough Hindess & Hirst) showed Hegel.

The Althusser FAQ

The problem with being Althusserian in this day an age is that his entire intervention was based on a confluence of intellectual fashions, trends and otherwise "facts on the ground" that, while more or less forgivable in the 70s, have become drastically unappealing since. And the thing with passed trends is that they have a habit of attracting more criticism than is due - Depeche Mode always get thrown out with Duran Duran.

This - along with the absolute, miserable hatchet job the poor bastard received at the hands of an unimaginative MIA writer - is why I have decided to put together a little pack of myth-busting aphorisms. Thus!

1. Who was Louis Althusser?
   Louis Althusser was born in Algeria. His family, strictly Catholic, moved to France while Louis was still very young, and he hung around in the catholic milieux in Paris. When the Second World War broke out, he joined the army - it was during detention in a prisoner of war camp that he first came across communism, and he became - by 1948 - a loyal member of the Parti Comuniste Francais. At the same time, his reputation as a prodigious student of philosophy culminated in a tutoring post at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. He was eventually to become a professor there.
   
   Contrary to his image as a withdrawn scholastic figure, Althusser intervened actively in the life of the communist party - however, stalinism is as a stalinism does, and often this meant he was forced to "out-philosophise" the leadership instead of taking them on politically, which would have entailed immediate expulsion. This problem led to his endorsement of by his own measure disastrous political lines, most infamously the PCF's scabbing on the workers and students during the evenements of 1968. And contrary to the rather bizarre implications of the aforelinked MIA debacle, he represented the staunchest and, but the late-70s crunch time, the most public defense within the PCF of revolutionary politics and opposition to the fetid opportunism of the Eurocommunists.
   
   Always struggling with mental illness, his life was shattered when, in 1980, he fell into a depressive rage and strangled his wife to death. His work rate dropped, and he too finally copped it in '90.
   
   
2. What's his point?
   Althusser really arrived at a time when Marxism was losing ground to a new intellectual fashion, structuralism. Taking after the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralists turned up everywhere in intellectual life claiming that meaning existed in the relations between elements, and interpreting everything in terms of elaborate "sign systems". Althusser became intimately involved in bashing out an accord between structuralism and marxism (and later on in his life, "post-structuralism" and "post-marxism"). He borrowed a term from Freud, "overdetermination", to argue against naive concepts of histrical causation ("historicism"), arguing persuasively that the 1917 revolution represented a paradigmatic example of thingsnever happening as they are "supposed" to, that historical forces identified by Marx and Engels can combine in a kaleidoscopic and surprising way - this diffusion of causality is characteristically structuralist. He became most controversial, however, for his lacerating attacks on "Marxist humanism". (Unfortunately, as with any time of reaction, this latter has become near-orthodox within marxism.) Later in his life, he began to doubt the very fact of causality, elaborating a theory of "random encounters" he called "aleatory materialism". While this is certainly a very dodgy position, it is worth noting that this was used by him as supporting evidence for very stringently "marxist" politics - the dictatorship of the proletariat, anti-reformism and so on.


3. So what's so bad about humanism anyway?
   Humanism is a difficult term to pin down. Strictly speaking, it is a term that endorses a central "essence" which makes a human a human, that there is a "human-ness". Classical humanism, for example, sought to re-admit the nobility of classical society into the conjuncture of Renaissance and Enlightenment culture on the basis of the universal humanity revealed in ancient texts. Humanism of this kind lies behinds liberal theories of human rights, among other things.
   
   Humanism also has a very imprecise usage, which essentially means "nice and fluffy". Thus we find those who turn towards "Marxist Humanism" characteristically emphasise the passages in Marx which seem most full of all-conquering spiritual rage at the, natch, "inhumanity" of it all. It is, obviously, philosophically underpinned by elements of humanism proper - cf. human rights again.
   
   Althusser excoriates both "varieties" of humanism. He first noted that the rise of "Humanist" scholarship in the USSR and Stalinist bloc is specifically linked to the revisions of Marxism propagated by the post-Stalinists (rather than those offered by Stalin himself, although he was not averse to wheeling out humanism when it suited him - the philosophical backup for Zhdanovschina, for example, was provided by that awful bloody man Lukacs; and an essay by Maxim Gorky, entitled "Proletarian Humanism", recommends the "extermination" of homosexuals). He characterises it as essentially "ethical idealism", and sure enough such movements always end up obsessed with timeless "ethical" principles - even that old Althusserian Terry Eagleton has now decided he's going to waste our time with Aristotelian virtue theory.
   
   The problem with Marxist-humanism lies simply thus - they focus overly on the "early Marx", the works of 1842-44 where he focuses on the problems of alienation and other fluffy hegelian matters. This basically ignored everything that is unique about Marx. If one is going to adopt a socialist humanism, why be a marxist? Why not take after one of the great utopians, William Morris and the like? Why not be a Bertrand Russelite? Marx's great discovery was that socialism must have a scientific basis, or it will never be more than coffee house daydreams.
   
   If one goes a step further than denouncing the resultant symptomatic 'heresies' and rejects humanism as such, one has then to account for the matter of agency some othjer way - Althusser's answer involves ideology. Traditional Marxist views held it as simply "false consciousness", people believing X to be the case when in fact it was Y. Althusser suggested that ideology is more important than that - that it is the 'zero level' of subjectivity. One cannot exist in social life unless one "knows the rules" - ideology provides these basic structural features of social existence.


4. Doesn't that mean we're completely boned as far as changing things goes? Only if ideology is a self-consistent closed system. Which it isn't. It inherently fails - the ideology produced by capitalist society points beyond itself.
   
   Remember, we're not dealing with an immaculate fiction cooked up consciously by devious members of the ruling class, but the structures of subjectivity arising out of an immensely complex social system riven with contradictions. Even if ideology were, in that way, "perfect", it would be in contradiction with the evidence of our own eyes - it would be, in other words, more vulnerable to destruction than an "imperfect" ideology.
   

TBC