Reply to Workers Power

Comrades,

I am glad that you have decided to set out your differences with the Hopi project in a principled and reasonably clear manner. The document “Hands off the people of Iran: campaign for action or propaganda bloc?” (all quotations, unless otherwise stated, are from this article) compares favourably with the hysterical response of the Stop the War bureaucracy, and the internally-contradictory sect-cohering cynicism of Workers Liberty, to name but two.

Political Centres

There are differences that are not really differences, in my view. Most of the arguments on the relationship between Hopi and Stop the War are rendered effectively null – we could not intervene as a group in StWC if we wanted to (as indeed we do – it was only in response to our application for affiliation that we were excluded, remember). The exclusion of Hopi and Communist Students from Stop the War was nakedly absurd at the time, and is not worth going over again – Workers Power and Revo’s support at the time was appreciated.

It seems that the comrades behind your document are suffering some confusion over what exactly constitutes a “political centre”. This does not designate the organisational structure into which the anti-war movement is placed, but the programme at its heart. Hopi and StWC are not two different potential/actual political centres for the anti-war movement. Of those two, in fact, only Hopi has that potential - the StWC is an entity far broader than its strict programmatic adherents (remember the absurdity that the CPGB is affiliated, while Hopi and Communist Students are excluded for being CPGB fronts!). The StWC leadership, rather, is the current political centre. This was why we were excluded – we were not setting up an alternative to Stop the War, but an alternative to Andrew Murray and the SWP inside Stop the War.

This leads on to an important difference between, certainly, the CPGB and its hopes for Hopi (and the StWC) and Workers Power. Your comrades mention the run-up to the Iraq war, where you raised the slogan “victory to Iraq”. In the CPGB, our slogan was a little less direct, but substantially no more “third-campist” – “rather the defeat of imperialist forces than their victory”.

The reason for the similarity is quite simple – while Saddam Hussein and his cohorts were a direct enemy of the oppressed masses in Iraq, they certainly were not comparable in terms of the scale of their threat to the forces of American and allied imperialism, and no less dedicated to the well-being of those masses (as is blindingly obvious as the skulls pile up five years into the war, but was quite clear then after 10 years of sanctions); one does not need to be a full-blooded “revolutionary defencist” to see that.

The reason for the distinction is a little more obscure – while an unqualified “victory to Iraq” implies[1] support to the Iraqi state, political or military (I will get onto the usefulness or otherwise of that distinction later), the call for the defeat of the imperialists leaves open the question of the agency of that defeat. This is important – only a force with genuine mass popular support and participation can have a chance of defeating the most heavily armed state in the world. If the Republican Guards were to manage to bog down the American tanks in the desert and liquidate all infantry forces and shoot down enough planes, they would have needed that kind of mass support. Saddam’s forces had earned only contempt from the workers and oppressed, and thus collapsed. The comparative success of anti-US militias since then has been a function of the utter hatred of the Americans that runs through Iraqi society – in this situation, literally anyone who stands up to them can command some kind of support from the people at large. Yes, a victory for the Iraqi state would be preferable to the victory of the imperialists – but the Iraqi state was in no position to produce that victory, so enshrining that agent explicitly or otherwise in a slogan is misleading.

Anti-imperialism

The more important difference alluded to above is a general one of approach to anti-war work. “We are socialists,” your authors opine; “the STWC is a mass anti-war organisation that unites many different forces that are not - trade unions, bourgeois pacifist groups, such as CND, religious groups, including Islamic groups, Labour against the War, and so on.” The consequence is not just that linking two slogans, against the war and against the Iranian theocracy, is incorrect, but that your own approved slogan is inappropriate too, “because this would limit the antiwar movement to its explicitly anti-imperialist elements”. Rather, we should march (and do a great deal more than march, as you have correctly argued) on the demand for “immediate and unconditional end to the wars and occupations” (I would prefer withdrawal of Coalition forces, but there you go).

I believe that this is correct as far as it goes, but the reasoning is awry. It is correct because actions are not general but specific – an anti-war action is generally against a war, and if one is marching against a war, the principled demand is for the defeat of the appropriate side (your own state, or an imperialist state). The demand for the defeat of US/UK forces is, for comrades in those countries, a concrete demand for all deployed troops, tanks, ships and planes to come scurrying home forthwith. They will not do so unless they have been defeated, either by political sabotage from anti-war demonstrations or the impossibility on the ground of further serious military operations. “Victory to Iraq/Iran/wherever” is inappropriate simply because it is wrong, and implies confidence in the named state to deliver that victory.

If we are to limit our slogans to preserve the breadth of support to the anti-war campaign, then why should we stop at the “immediate and unconditional” end to deployment? Why stop at that level of principle? It would be easier to keep on board a number of good, sincere activists of the liberal-pacifist type (often people who are pro-direct action), who want a staged withdrawal to avoid “chaos”, or a UN “peacekeeping” force to replace the US for a time. It is obvious, moreover, from the circumstances surrounding the periodic cessation of the “Troops Out Now” demand that it excludes the Military Families Against the War milieu, too.

It is also the case that the forms of action have a political content of their own. To put it more concretely – it is clear that Workers Power’s demand for anti-war strikes was inadmissible for very significant sections of the anti-war movement, not least the labour bureaucracy! Bringing industrial action into the question has the necessary effect of energising the movement into one of direct class-struggle, and that is something alien to a great deal of that constituency that is not “explicitly anti-imperialist”. Should Revo not have left that demand at home, or perhaps attempted to organise strikes itself (or in coalition with other class struggle anti-imperialists)?

The watering down of slogans, in the end, is the practice characteristic of the SWP/Murray axis, and is in no way politically superior to the watering down of actions. By contrast, the task of Marxists in an anti-war campaign is to be the enemy of pacifism and other bourgeois tendencies, and turn it into an anti-imperialist movement. That means raising principled anti-imperialist slogans as much as the need for militant tactics. Although I’m glad you haven’t on a cynical level, Workers Power should be bringing “victory to Iran” to StWC AGMs! You do not need to take my word for it. Were you to consult the fundamental document of Trotskyism, the Transitional Programme, you would find plenty of calls for the Trotskyists to aggressively counterpose their own anti-imperialist programme to those of the reformists, Stalinists and bourgeoisie and, while Trotsky’s demands are far from perfect, there’s no denying that it’s heady stuff – “not one man and not one penny for the bourgeois government”; “substitution for the standing army of a people’s militia”…

What about combining different slogans, however, with different emphases – “no to war, no to the theocracy”? Here, it’s worth stepping back a little.

Imperialism

Imperialism[2] is commonly defined, after Lenin and Hilferding, as the “highest stage” of capitalism, the epoch of the fusion of banking and industrial capital into finance capital, the creation of the great monopolies, and consequently the decline of the always-limited powers of the law of value to regulate production in a rational way; consequently, it is the epoch of massive expansion of territorial empires, of the export of capital and the political domination of the world by the metropolitan bourgeoisies, and of catastrophic outbreaks of war.

This flies in the face of the obvious – it is clear that the set of territorial empires that exploded into the First World War, for example, are not novel to the epoch of trusts, monopolies etc. but go back to the very birth of bourgeois power. Many were themselves based on feudal relations, or at least a political culture borrowed from feudalism (significant elements were present everywhere but France in the 19^th Century). As manufacture and ultimately industry begins to grow, so does the need for colonies and their raw materials (particularly in the case of small countries such as Britain), but more importantly, so does the need for a world market (though this, too, is present from day one – the price of wool on the world market was responsible for the Enclosure Acts which constituted the opening shots of proletarianisation in England, described vividly by Thomas More’s Hythloday).

Just as the domestic market requires a State to enforce contracts and a generally stable environment, the world market requires order between nations. This has resulted effectively in the need for a hegemon state - first Britain, then the USA. Fundamental to capitalism is the hierarchy of nations. Competition between nations for hegemony, and the consequent increase in military production (a sector necessarily much closer to the state than others), drives the centralisation and “trustification” of national capitals, and results in inter-imperialist war. Where inter-imperialist war is rendered problematic, the fight is conducted through proxies.

A subsidiary consequence of all this is that as soon as a national bourgeoisie assumes power, wherever they are (imperialist centre or ex-colony or semi-colony), their immediate interests lie in integration into the world market. Since integration into the world economy relies on the hegemony of a state or bloc of states – that is, of the imperialist states – there is a very powerful tendency for national bourgeoisies to act in the interests of imperialism. “Left-nationalists” are isolated and dispensed with.

There are two matters of fundamental consequence for communists:

1. Imperialism is an unmitigated and continuous catastrophe for the workers movement. To the very limited extent it is capable of anything “progressive” (ie, the building up of productive forces in particular primarily-extractive industries in semi/colonies), it is relatively reactionary compared with the possibility of proletarian socialism. Communists must resist imperialism and imperialist actions wherever possible.


2. However, non-imperialist states are class-divided entities. The bourgeoisie and its “unproductive consumers” in the state-repressive and state-ideological apparatuses are objectively bound towards collaboration with one or more imperialist states – the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’, as the Stalinists would put it, is simply a comprador class in waiting. Anti-imperialist strategy must also be co-ordinated towards breaking the masses from their rulers, through agitation on the ground and solidarity work abroad. This is the best thing about the TP on this point – the demand for the popular militia and the drawing of sharp class lines.

For these reasons, I find that the distinction between “military” and “political” support is a bit pointless. I do not believe that the standard CPGB critique – that Workers Power or whoever has no weapons or international brigades to send to Iran or wherever, and therefore their “military” support is in fact a sort of political support – really gets to the heart of the matter. It is plain that Trot “military support” is a call for actual military support, just as the CPGB is not actually a party (which has to be a serious chunk at least of the working class) but a call for a party. My objection is simply that it does not point to a politically important distinction. In the textbook case of China 1925-27, had the Comintern given only military support to Chiang instead of signing the bastard up, they would still have been physically liquidated. This was the one aspect of Mao’s strategy not worthy of the bin – he realised that the Kuomintang was an intractable enemy, and began military operations against it.

A far more useful approach, for me, is the simply-phrased demand for the maximum possible independence of the class forces of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie. In the imperialist centre, we break the masses from the war-drives of their rulers – in the semi-colonies, from the treachery and weakness of theirs. Everything else is tactics.

It is true, moreover, that anti-war work necessarily reaches beyond direct opposition to particular wars. Even the broad-as-a-broad-bean StWC feels the need to march about Trident, about Palestine solidarity – in short about imperialism as a whole, even if it does not always say so. A strategy for an anti-war movement must be a strategy for explicit anti-imperialism.

It would be perfectly legitimate, then, for Stop the War to organise or support protests against Iranian state repression, to invite communist and progressive workers, students and others to speak from its platforms – to weld together the concrete manifestations of the movement against imperialism and war in the metropolis and the periphery. Such work is anti-imperialist – it provides real support to the only forces which are objectively anti-imperialist in Iran. Yes, we can link – and march under – two slogans. The meaning of “no to imperialist war, no to the theocracy” is “no to imperialist war, therefore no to the theocracy”.

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[1] I do not mean to accuse Workers Power comrades of unqualified support for the Iraqi (or general semi-colonial) state – the document makes it clear that you consider the Iranian theocracy reactionary, for example. But it is nevertheless standard practice in the English language that, when one talks of a country’s victory or defeat in a war, we are talking of the country’s state – “victory to Iraq” in 2003 meant “victory to Saddam”, not the Iraqi working
class (except in the indirect sense that the victory of Saddam would have spared them an unprecedented nightmare).

[2] In this section I substantially paraphrase Mike Macnair’s work on the subject, developed in a series of articles in the Weekly Worker (July 29, August 5, August 12) and in a number of speeches, openings and papers delivered to meetings and conferences (for example, the Critique Conference of 2007 – sound file here).

Warning: this blog posting is petty bourgeois

The left can be a pretty cultish place. Not in the sense that it's filled with cults (though it is), but simply that being on that wing of politics involves inheriting a bunch of sub-cultural tics that look downright odd to mere mortals. My girlfriend cannot get over "comrade", for instance. Why do we insist on calling each other comrade all the time? It's like a bad film from the 1930s.

Of course, we press on regardless, often - even mostly - with good reason. Comrade is the only proper word for an equal companion in an ultimately life-or-death struggle. If it sounds a little weird to postmodern ears, it's only because this latest and most spiritually desolate stage of capitalism has made any notion of collective struggle a matter for 1970s nostalgia, and to sound weird before such philistinism is nothing other than a pleasure and a duty.

There is at least one case, however, where the tradition - such as it is - needs serious uprooting.

On the letters page of this week's Worker, one Robert Clough has a few stabs at me for being mean to that nice man Raul Castro. He claims at the end, rather grandly, to have discovered the "material basis" for my distaste for Cuban "socialism" (as Lenin said, oh please don't laugh!). it is "the privileged position of an upper section of the working class in the oldest imperialist country in the world, and the resultant tendency amongst this stratum towards a petty bourgeois political standpoint."

Let's get to the point - what the fuck is a "petty bourgeois political standpoint"?

And you do hear it a lot, don't you? Everybody is a petty bourgeois radical on the left - or at least, everybody else is. Anarchists call Lenin a petty bourgeois deviant leading the workers to an authoritarian hell - Leninists call anarchists petty bourgeois voluntarists. Orthodox trotskyists call Pabloites, Cliffites, and every other damn political species petty bourgeois, which is held to explain their enthusiasm for Stalinoid nationalists (Pabloites), their refusal to be sufficiently "defencist" with regards to the "degenerated/deformed workers states" (Cliffites), and sundry deviations and betrayals (everybody else).

The thing with the petty bourgeosie is that they're a class fraction perpetually "on the way out", so to speak - while bourgeois states usually attempt, with varying degrees of success, to artificially sustain this fraction, through appropriation and redistribution of a certain portion of the gross surplus value in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and indirect means (eg denial of planning permission for supermarkets), the tendency is for the petty bourgeoisie to occupy a very insecure position in society. They're neither one thing or the other.

So, what are petty bourgeois politics? On a very banal level, one can expect shopkeepers to support political measures which will keep them in business - but just as communism does not follow from wage demands, the fully-articulated positions that one associates with the petty bourgeoisie do not follow from a requirement for subsidies. The result is that, beyond a certain minimal anti-corporate standpoint, the petty-bourgeois is objectively rudderless. The concrete conjuncture in which she finds herself overdetermines her political standpoint - she may be a fascist, a communist, a Thatcherite, a social democrat, a liberal, a Pabloite, a Cliffite, even (sorry boys and girls) an Ortho-trot. In short, every political position is petty-bourgeois, which is another way of saying that none are.

So, the accusation I face - that I express, through a failure to defend a nationalist-stalinist tourist trap with a nice health service, a petty bourgeois political standpoint - is the ultimate non-statement.

Is there a political cuss-word to be had out of that unfortunate class fraction? Yes. There is a defining characteristic of petty-bourgeois politics - its heterogeneity, not just at any given time, but through time as well. A good petty-bourgeois will swing wildly from position to position, thinking with his gut rather than his brain. This phenomenon can be observed in the existing left - notably the Cliffites, but also the Pabloites and the Healy strain of Trotskyitis. Even now, we should be wary of thinking this 'proves' anything. This is an essentially descriptive epithet, not a theoretical one. It does not follow in any meaningful sense that Cliffism naturally tends towards a petty bourgeois base, still less that it represents anything like the objective political interests of the petty bourgeoisie. If we call John Rees a petty bourgeois leftist, we mean in an impressionistic and polemical way that his methods remind us of that class fraction, or we are talking bland waffle.

Conclusion: enough with this "petty bourgeois" shite, comrades!

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.

Global Shitties more like, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Something that didn't get in to the Weekly Worker, thanks to the bastards closing the exhibition before we went to press and thus negating the point somewhat. Oh well...

Global Cities: The Suicide of Empiricism

Given that the abiding tenor of exhibitions in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is towards monolithic and consummately single-minded displays, exemplified by Ólafur Elíasson's Weather Project with its permanent hazy sunset, it is a surprise to find in its great expanses so muddled and contradictory an entity as Global Cities, which fills the gap between two such spectacular displays. The form of the exhibition, such as it is, involves large wall displays and videos pronouncing (apparently) detailed statistical analyses of the lives of ten major cities in the world – London, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Tokyo, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Cairo, Istanbul and Shanghai – in terms of size, speed, density, diversity and form. In addition, there are displays of video art adding “anecdotal” flesh to the bones of “hard” statistical evidence. In a largely separate area, one finds a series of installations commissioned specifically for the exhibition.

A crisis of method

There are serious difficulties at all levels here. Firstly, the presentations of statistics are the ultimate in bourgeois empiricism. Beyond the standard usage of statistics as a descriptive tool, they become, in a bizarre twist on the Romantic Will, a kind of pseudo-divine creative and motive force in the lives of the cities themselves. One may first, for instance, look at the obviously arbitrary choice of the cities themselves – does Sao Paulo have more to tell us about urban existence than Rio de Janeiro or Caracas, Los Angeles than New York, etc? What, furthermore, makes the 5 holy criteria – density, speed and so on – the appropriate “thematic lenses” for such a study of urbanism? (For a Marxist, there is at least a silent sixth in “class”, but one would not expect such an inclusion in an exhibition with a raft of corporate sponsors.)

This specific issue is brought out most sharply in a particular set of diagrams illustrating the arrangement of buildings in selected square kilometres of five or so of our chosen cities. In a moment of delirious self-parody, these selections are openly arbitrary – we have a suburb of Los Angeles, a group of high-rises in Shanghai, a crowded sprawl in Cairo...why have these square kilometres been chosen? The answer is simply: because we say so. Dig beneath even the most superficial signs of “objectivity” and “science”, and one finds what the great French philosopher Jacques Derrida would call a “moment of madness” - a stubborn and utterly irrational imposition of an agenda. The method distorts the result, which in its distortions acts as a justification for the method.

Similarly, we find statements such as “15 children are born in city X every minute; by 2015 this will rise to 20”. Will it? What is entirely erased from this question is human agency, whether defined in the traditional liberal individualistic way or in theories of class and other group agencies. What is the subject of history for the curators? The numbers as such, it seems – moving themselves...

A crisis of identity

This disavowal of agency sits uneasily with the scattered video exhibits, obviously designed to paper over the cracks by “humanising” the urban experience. The best of these work by undermining, or reflecting the absurdity of, the project of the exhibition as a whole. One video shows worshippers traversing the perilous walkway over rough seas to the Haji Ali mosque off the coast of Mumbai. The camera is fixed on a particular 50 yard stretch. We cannot see where they are going or from where they are coming. This activity, rendered into a completely meaningless and masochistic action by the lack of context, is an excellent parallel for the erasure of origins and agency perpetrated by the statistical evidence.

Elsewhere, we have banal interviews with Londoners conducted by an artist sketching them, some overly worthy shots of Mumbaikars lacking in basic sanitation systems, and so on – it seems, really, that since the exhibition is in Tate Modern, the curators felt they should probably get some art in there somewhere.

Then, we are left with the specially-commissioned exhibits – most are conspicuously banal. The wooden spoon for the whole show, without a doubt, goes to Nils Norman's severely misjudged and gratingly didactic “reclaimed” street furniture, whose satirical bite – such as it is – would barely pass muster on a slow news day at Adbusters. At the opposite end of the scale, we have two redeeming features: Nigel Coates' “Mixtacity”, a diorama of the proposed Thames Gateway developments with household objects, toys, mantelpiece ornaments and even faintly surreal pseudo-organic forms as an alternative skyline; and the architect Rem Koolhaas' displays in the “new urbanism”. The former is playful without being self-conscious, and if it pushes the characteristically post-modern enthusiasm for kaleidoscopic diversity a little too obviously, it offers, through its magnification of the objects of everyday life, a critique of the exhibition's obliteration of agency.

Koolhaas, meanwhile, delivers a simple three-wall collage of photographs and adverts from around the world, acting as support for a thoughtful text on the relationship between contemporary architecture, public service and private capital. His ideological framework precludes any thoroughgoing solution, but the problems are posed intelligently. It is, furthermore, just about the only mention capital gets in the entire show.

Global Cities suffers because it does not know what it is for. The statistical and artistic elements are clearly intended to complement each other in some way, but the mechanicist, self-justifying empiricism of the statistics leaves no room for anything else. The rest of the exhibition, therefore, simply grates against it. Where it succeeds, it succeeds against the pernicious ideology of the statistical displays. An illustrative but frustrating fudge of the problems facing the urban world.

PR And “The Kids”

As most comrades will be aware, the small British group Workers Power and its network of clone-parties the League For the Fifth International (LFI) has recently fallen on hard times. Last summer, a minority consisting largely of the group's most experienced and talented activists were ejected, forming around a new and impressively shiny publication called Permanent Revolution (as the “PR supporters network”, or PRN). Not long after that, its “independent” youth group REVOLUTION (popularly called Revo) was forced to expel whole layers of non LFI-affiliated youngsters – again, including whole national sections, such as that in Germany. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the PRN would have to confront the question of youth organisation anew. Sure enough, this has happened, firstly in an open letter to iRevo's founding conference last yearⁱ, and now in a full article in the latest issue of PRⁱⁱ. both by leading (and not, it is probably fair to say, particularly young) figure Stuart King.

Youth organisation today

Firstly, the good news – King's logic flows from a very important fact: the lack of mass communist parties (Lessons, p37). Where such parties exist, it may be perfectly permissible, tactically speaking, to organise a youth section which is effectively within the party, subject to the same discipline as everybody else. In such circumstances, young comrades will naturally gravitate towards the party anyway, because it would be the expression of communist politics from the campus to the streets. Such a party, furthermore, would have to maintain full minority rights, and so “discipline” would not be the sort ofchafing, rigid regime we have come to expect.

However, this is not the scenario confronting youth and adult parties alike in 2007. Thus, the decisions of the Bolsheviks on the subject are largely of peripheral value, since they were confronting a very different era. It is good, then, that King uses as his starting point the 1938 positions of the American Socialist Worker's Party, for decades the largest and most important Trotskyist group and at the time operating under the authority of Trotsky himself. King notes that youth organisations “aim to attract large numbers”, whereas a revolutionary party will – barring a “mass revolutionary struggle” - attract only a few young people as such.

“Organisational independence, political subordination”

Nevertheless, King rejects calls for complete independence of the youth leagues. This could imply that “democratic-centralist fractions of the revolutionary organisations should not be allowed in the youth movement if they sometimes demand democratic centralist discipline over their youth members” (Letter...ⁱⁱⁱ). His preferred formula is “organisational independence, political subordination (or 'solidarity')”. This means that the youth group must have its own conferences and so on, at which policies should be debated and consensus won if possible. It may even take “some positions at variance with the adult organisation's program” (Lessons p37, my emphasis). However, the basic line would be the same.

This all is backed up with various tidbits from leftist history – Lenin calling for “complete independence” during WWI (to break the youth from the social chauvinist parties), through various Comintern resolutions culminating in the “organisational independence, political subordination” formula. He cites approvingly the Comintern's rearranging of a youth conference to ensure victory of the united front policy as evidence of the efficacy of OI-PS.

It should now be abundantly clear that this policy is essentially absurd and completely contradictory. If “political subordination” allows the adult party to rearrange conferences in order to force through votes, exactly what does “organisational independence” include? What, precisely, are the young cadres free to “organise”? How does this differ from the LFI Revo faction's unprincipled manoeuvrings? (King does have an answer of sorts to the latter question – more on which later.)

In my view, the whole gamut from the third congress of the Comintern, through the American SWP, through to the LFI's early relationship to Revo and finally King's articles all try to have their cake and eat it. On the one hand, the PRN know there is no point in simply setting up a youth “trotskyist cadre” organisation and do not wish to do so. They acknowledge that the majority of younger leftists have not “come up” through traditional communist or trotskyist groups but in fact through the ever-more-influential anarchist movement, and that the battle for partyism and vanguards must be won. For this reason, they wish for the youth to keep a degree of independence. On the other hand, however, they want to have the youngsters there for them, as another layer of footsoldiers. They want the youth group to have some kind of connection to the mothership, and this means (for an orthodox trotskyist) some kind of theoretical agreement. The youth group is to be of the revolutionary party but not in it.

The aforementioned actions of the Comintern pose it all very sharply. The OI-PS model lopes on quite happily as long as the Comintern can rely on winning all the important votes. They can make a show of convincing the youth rather than handing down the line. Nevertheless, when it comes to crunch time, the crisis cannot be resolved within that framework. Organisational independence implies control over the programme, or what else are the youth organising? Political subordination implies the adult organisation “trumps” the youth equivalent, otherwise how can they be effectively subordinated? There was no middle way in this dispute, then – either the Comintern acted as it did, or the CYI declared full independence. (iRevo's denunciation of this framework as “Maoist” is more true than they perhaps think – what was the paradigmatic bit of Maoist “philosophy” but the rejection of the Hegelian 'synthesis' in favour of catastrophic conflict, one side “devouring” the other “mouthful by mouthful”^iv? The OI-PS line disavows such an event but leads right to it.)

Line-dancing

Another well-known feature of Maoism is its elevation of the struggle between political lines to a near-cosmic force to which all trifling matters of organisation, epistemology and the like are to be subordinated. King certainly does not take such a histrionic view of things, but the determining factor for him does seem to be 'political perspectives'. For instance, we have his summary of the split in Revo, its “roots of the trampling on the independence of World Revo lies in the LFI’s political perspective and tactics” (Letter). The catastrophism embodied in the LFI's line led directly to the crisis in Revo. Things would, clearly, have been much better had the LFI leadership taken a more sober view of things.

However, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks reined in the youth in the early 1920s, this was principled and within the bounds of the party/youth relationship. Why? Because the youth were arguing against the allegedly correct line of the “united front”. The principled nature of the comintern's action, then, lies in the fact that they were “right” about the united front.

No doubt there is some truth in King's analysis of the Revo split. It is a general feature of political perspectives that they form into political practices, and a specific feature of catastrophism that it leads to a dramatic tightening of the chain of command. Like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, terrified of being late, the party must subordinate all other concerns to getting the best spot on the barricades. What he seems unable to concede, however, is that comrades in Revo had no way of challenging such perspectives, and no way of forging their own, for as long as they were under the cosh of OI-PS. The choice for revolutionary youth, it seems, is to try their best to hitch their wagon to the least swivel-eyed adult party on offer, and then hope the latter don't try anything stupid as long they're in a “politically subordinate” position.

Not good enough.

A balance sheet

King's analyses have the merit of not underestimating the complexity of the issue - one of the advantages of running a bureaucratic SWSS/Student Respect/Revo style regime is that you get to cut this Gordian knot without much bother. However, his resolution of the problem essentially amounts to a theorisation of such regimes. The balance he proposes is no balance at all but a dormant volcano, which will erupt the minute a dispute erupts on which the adult party, in its wisdom or stupidity, shall give no quarter. It is a recipe for splits, but more dangerously, driving potential activists away from the movement altogether.

The only ways out of the deadlock, as I see it, are an openly cadre-based group entirely subordinate to the party programme, consisting of full party members, which has a specific remit within the party's division of labour for youth work; or cutting the organic link entirely, and using youth groups as “neutral zones” between different parties and trends who struggle openly to define everything, from strategy to tactics to programme. Whether or not party fractions act under party discipline is up to the parties themselves. This certainly does include the possibility of a “hostile takeover” by a less scrupulous organisation, but it also includes the possibility of resistance to such a takeover. The OI-PS line amounts to writing the takeover into the youth organisation's genetic code, and frustrating all attempts to break this logic well in advance.

iStuart King, “PR letter to iRevo conference on October 7 2006” (http://tinyurl.com/38pekk )

iiStuart King, “Lessons of Revolution”, in Permanent Revolution #5 Summer 2007. Also reproduced are two articles by members of iRevo and the leadership of the dissident German Revo section.

iiiHe then asks the question, “is this in fact [iRevo's] position? It should be noted that the suggestion is dismissed by iRevo as “ridiculous” (http://www.anticapitalista.com/irevo/?p=43&language=en). King himself comes much closer to this when he cites approvingly the “graduation system”, whereby youth who join the Party leave the youth section after a year or so (Lessons, p39).

iviRevo, “Declarations of Independence”, in Permanent Revolution #5 Summer 2007; Mao Tse-Tung, “Talk on Questions of Philosophy” in On Practice & Contradiction, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2007).

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