page 1
 

Introduction 

 






Louis Althusser became a controversial figure in France with the publication of his essay "Contradiction and Overdetermination" in 1962. He became a politically controversial figure when the essay "Marxism and Humanism" appeared in 1964.[1] The reason was his attack on the notion of humanism. "Ten years ago", he wrote at the time, "socialist humanism only existed in one form: that of class humanism. Today it exists in two forms: class humanism, where the dictatorship of the proletariat is still in force (China, etc.), and (socialist) personal humanism where it has been superseded (the USSR)". But while "the concept 'socialism' is indeed a scientific concept . . . the concept 'humanism' is no more than an ideological one". His purpose at this time was thus, first, to distinguish between the sciences and the ideologies; and second to show that while Marxism is a science, all forms of humanism must be classed among the ideologies.
    This was the basis of what he called "theoretical anti-humanism". (Althusser's use of the term "humanism" is specific, and it has of course nothing to do with "humanitarianism".) The reaction to his arguments, however, went far beyond the realms of theory, and into the political world itself. I will try to outline this political reaction and Althusser's response to it, because this is one of the best ways of approaching his philosophical work, and also of learning something about a man whom the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur thought it useful

 
    1. Both articles are reprinted in For Marx (Allen Lane, 1969).

 
page 2

to describe as "one of the most mysterious and least 'public' figures in the world"!
    It was clearly impossible for the French Communist Party, of which Althusser has been a member since 1948 to endorse all of his writings as they appeared, since on certain points they put its own positions in question. Nevertheless, these writings were intended as an intervention in the debate within the party, and the enormous interest which they raised did not remain without an echo there. Articles, some of them hesitantly favourable, began to appear in Party journals.[2] Lucien Sève, in some ways the Party's senior philosopher, devoted a long note to Althusser in his work La Théorie marxiste de la personnalité, outlining certain points of disagreement. But Althusser stuck to his position.[3] Waldeck Rochet, Party General Secretary at the time, gave encouragement to his research work, while distancing the Central Committee from its conclusions.
    Meanwhile the row between the philosopher Roger Garaudy and the Party of which he had so long been a member was blowing up. The situation was already changing. An article by Jacques Milhau for example, published in the Party journal La Nouvelle Critique in 1969, made it clear, referring to Garaudy and Althusser, that "there can be no suggestion of putting on the same level [Garaudy's] out-and-out revisionism, whose theoretical premises go back ten years, and what can be considered as temporary mistakes [gauchissements] made in the course of research work which always involves risks". The lecture-article "Lenin and Philosophy" (1968) seems to have been quite well received in the Party, but the article "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970) caused anxiety in some circles, which misinterpreted it as implying a simplistic condemnation of the ideological role of the education system in the service of the ruling class.
    When the Reply to John Lewis appeared in a French edition in 1973, it provoked some excitement. One news journal ran a story (though without any foundation) to

 
    2. See for example Christine Glucksmann, "La Pratique léniniste de la philosophie", in La Nouvelle Critique, April 1969.
    3. Sève has replied to Althusser in the third edition of the same work.

 
page 3

the effect that a copy of the book was being sent to every Party Central Committee member and official so that they could prepare their answers. A review by Joe Metzger in the Party weekly France Nouvelle (October 9, 1973) praised Althusser for having "raised the essential questions", but argued that he had supported the "dangerous" thesis of the sharpening of the class struggle under socialism, a thesis which "justifies priority being given to administrative and repressive measures over ideological confrontation". This remark, however, seems to be in contradiction with the sense of the text.
    The reaction to Althusser's writings in the International Communist Movement was also mixed. A critical (but not over-critical) article by T. A. Sakharova appeared in the Soviet magazine Voprosy Filosofii, following the debate carried by La Nouvelle Critique in 1965-66. But the Bulgarian S. Angelov took a much harsher line in an article in World Marxist Review in 1972, characterizing Althusser's anti-humanism as an "extreme" view, and implying (though indirectly) its connexion with "barracks communism", a term used to describe the line of the Chinese Communist Party. The Yugoslav Veljko Korac, writing in the journal Praxis in 1969 on "The Phenomenon of 'Theoretical Anti-humanism'", went even further: Althusser's book For Marx, he said, was written "in the name of inherited Stalinist schemes"; it was "Stalinist dogmatism" to reject as "abstract" humanism everything that could not be used as an ideological tool.
    On a more serious level, André Glucksmann attempted in 1967 to "demonstrate the weakness" of Althusser's work from a rather traditional philosophical standpoint (see New Left Review no. 72), while in Britain Norman Geras offered a serious if limited critique of For Marx and Reading Capital (New Left Review no. 71; see also John Mepham's reply in Radical Philosophy no. 6). But these articles contained little politics. It seems that the reaction to Althusser was, in general, either a real but rather narrow theoretical interest, or political hysteria.[4] The article by Leszek

 
    4. See for example the article by Althusser's ex-collaborator Jacques [cont. onto p. 4. -- DJR] Rancière, "Sur la théorie politique d'Althusser", in L'Homme et la Société, no. 27, January-March 1973. His critique was expanded to book length as La Leçon d'Althusser (Gallimard, 1974). According to Rancière, Althusser's philosophy performs a "police" function. Rancière prefers the standpoint of "anti-authoritarianism", "anti-State subversion", etc.

 
page 4

Kolakowski in Socialist Register 1971 ("Althusser's Marx") might seem to be an exception; its length at least would suit it for a serious treatment. But his misunderstanding of the subject is so severe that Kolakowski never comes near to constructive criticism. He accuses Althusser of "religious thinking", and attacks him for "failing to remember" how long ago it was discovered that knowledge "has nothing to do with pure, immediate, singular objects, but always with abstractions", so long ago that it had become "a commonplace in contemporary philosophy of science" (Kolakowski, p. 125). But Althusser had pointed out, in black and white (Reading Capital, p. 184) that the theses according to which "an object cannot be defined by its immediately visible or sensuous appearance", so that a detour must be made via its concept in order to grasp it, "have a familiar ring to them -- at least they are the lesson of the whole history of modern science, more or less reflected in classical philosophy, even if this reflection took place in the element of an empiricism, whether transcendent (as in Descartes), transcendental (Kant and Husserl) or 'objective'-idealist (Hegel)". This is just one example of the kind of criticism levelled at Althusser.
    The unfortunate failure of Althusser's critics to produce reasoned arguments must have its political causes, whether or not these are explicit. Sometimes the motives are rather clear, as in I. Mészàros' comment that the category of symptomatic reading is a veil for "the sterile dogmatism of bureaucratic-conservative wishful thinking" (Marx's Theory of Alienation, p. 96). At other times the lack of a serious approach seems to be based on a simple lack of ability to understand his work, as in the case of David McLellan, who comments that For Marx "may well be profound, but is certainly obscure" (Encounter, November 1970, "Marx and the Missing Link"). On occasion even the background facts are wrongly reported, as in the case of Maurice

 
page 5

Cranston's article in the United States Information Service journal Problems of Communism (March-April 1973), which mistakenly promotes Althusser to the Central Committee of the French Communist Party! Cranston also attributes some strange philosophical positions to him: "For Althusser", he says, "membership of the proletariat is determined by the existence of certain attitudes in the minds of individuals. . . . The external economic situation (whether a person is in the lower-, middle-, or upper-class income group) hardly matters." But whether or not Cranston's study can be counted a useful contribution to the debate, it must have flattered Althusser to find himself the subject of a full-length article in a US Government journal.
    From the other side of the political spectrum, the "ultra-left", come the attacks of the novelist Philippe Sollers and the Tel Quel group, inspired by their own interpretation of "Mao Tse-Tung thought". An article in the journal's Spring 1972 issue ("Le Dogmatisme á la rescousse du révisionnisme ") accuses Althusser of evading and suppressing the notion of struggle, and in an interview with the journal Peinture Sollers describes his thesis that philosophy has no object as "ultra-revisionist" and "hyper-revisionist" ("Tac au tac", Peinture nos. 2/3).
    In the middle of this ferment the Reply to John Lewis appeared. In a review in the daily paper Combat (June 19, 1973), Bernard-Henri Lévy summed up the situation: "There has been a lot of speculation in the salons about Althusser's 'commitments'. Is he a Maoist or an orthodox Communist? Is he a product of Stalinism or a consistent anti-Stalinist?" At last Althusser intervenes on these questions -- "he puts his cards on the table, in order to clarify the political meaning of his philosophical interventions". First: For Marx and Reading Capital are placed in their historical context -- the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and "de-Stalinization"; in a sense, Khrushchev's de-Stalinization came from the right. And it led, as might have been expected, to a shift to the right in the theoretical work of Communist intellectuals.
    It also left the Communist Parties open to attack from those, either to the right or left, who wanted to claim that

 
page 6

their Marxism was more consistently humanist. This would presumably be true of figures otherwise as different as Garaudy, Marcuse, Kolakowski, and even Mandel with his "Marxist theory of alienation".[5]
    But Althusser's critique goes back further than 1956, back to Stalin himself. The Stalin period does indeed haunt the Communist movement, and not only because anti-communism will always evoke the spectre of "Stalinism". It will continue to haunt the movement, says Althusser, until a left critique of the period replaces the "rightist" analysis dominant in certain circles. And he suggests that such a critique must treat it as an example of a deviation characterized by the terms economism and humanism. He suggests as much, but could not in the space available go on to spell the mutter out.

 
II.
    How then are we to understand the enigmatic references to Stalin which occur in Althusser's Reply to John Lewis ? It is true that he says little enough on the subject, and this has led certain commentators to claim that the function of his remarks is purely political. Rancière, for example, thinks that their role is to allow him to adapt to his own use -- or rather, to the profit of "orthodox Communism" -- some "currently fashionable ideas about Stalinism"[6] (above all, presumably, those of certain "pro-Chinese" writers, including Charles Bettelheim[7]). But Rancière's arguments are themselves all too obviously motivated by directly political considerations. In my opinion, what Althusser says in this text, together with what he has said elsewhere, allows us to constitute a genuinely new theory of the Stalin period.

 
    5. It may even explain the fact that a recent collection of Trotskyist essays against Althusser resurrects Karl Korsch and Georg Lukàcs as sources for its theoretical critique (Contre Althusser, J.-M. Vincent and others; 10/18, 1974).
    6. Rancière, La Leçon d'Althusser, p. 11.
    7. Cf. especially Bettelheim's Luttes de classes in the URSS (Seuil/Maspero, 1974). [Transcriber's Note: See Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period: 1917-1923. -- DJR]

 
page 7

It therefore seemed useful to devote this Introduction to just this question, so that the reader can at least get an idea of what kind of politics lies behind Althusser's "philosophy".
    Simple as the following scenario may be, and incomplete as it is (it only attempts to provide some elements of an explanation), it contradicts alternative accounts. That is enough to be going on with.

 
    According to the Reply to John Lewis, "the Stalinian deviation can be considered as a form . . . of the posthumous revenge of the Second International : as a revival of its main tendency"; it is based on "an economistic conception and line . . . hidden by declarations which were in their own way cruelly 'humanist'".[8] To talk about Stalin's humanism is not to talk about a simple philosophical or theoretical mistake. It is to talk about something with political causes and political effects. These can be more easily understood if we glance at certain aspects of Soviet history.
    When the working class and peasantry took power in Russia in 1917, great hopes were raised among exploited peoples throughout the world. Perhaps they expected too much, too soon. At any rate, when the euphoria had given way to practical tasks, and especially to the Civil War and to the New Economic Policy, it became clear that there could be no straight, unsullied path to Communism. There would have to be detours, sometimes steps back; there would be mistakes and even disasters.
    The Soviet Union faced two major problems on the economic front: industrialization and the resolution of the agrarian question. These were not simply economic, but also ideological and political problems. The peasant question, for example, following the relatively short NEP period, was handled by the introduction of collectivization, but at an enormous cost. This cost was of course not the result of purely "technical" economic mistakes. The rich peasants, for example, resisted collectivization. No amount of agitation or of socialist propaganda could convince them that they

 
    8. In the "Note on 'The Critique of the Personality Cult'".

 
page 8

should voluntarily hand over their lands and property.
    Industrialization was vital. The machinery had to be provided to accompany the development of agriculture, and weapons had to be made available to enable the army to resist any further attempt at capitalist intervention. It was in general a question of generating the surplus necessary for investment in a country where the most basic services were still lacking in many areas, where a large part of the population was illiterate, and where the towns and industrial regions contained only a very small proportion of that population.
    During the NEP Period the resolution of certain political and ideological problems was postponed in the interest of survival. The new economic system represented a retreat. The economy was decentralized; enterprises were given financial and commercial independence; certain small enterprises were denationalized; foreign companies were granted concessions; private shops appeared, together with private merchants; the links between agriculture and industry became market-oriented once again. Lenin called this a "transitional mixed system" -- that is, not something stable in itself, but a state of affairs to be superseded either (it was hoped) by a development towards communism, or -- and this was a real possibility -- by a reversion to capitalism, if the kulaks and Nepmen grew too powerful.
    The possibility of counter-revolution was thus recognized. The danger was seen as two-fold: on the one hand, the capitalist states might attempt an intervention; on the other hand, the old and new capitalist and kulak classes might attempt to overthrow the régime from within. These were indeed the immediate dangers. But another, deeper threat was not clearly recognized. To understand why we can usefully begin by looking at one particular problem faced by the Soviet state, which then throws light on a more general contradiction.
    It was very quickly realized, following the October Revolution, that industry and agriculture urgently required the services of workers of all levels of knowledge and skill, and also of managers, technical experts, etc. These latter groups -- which on the one hand obviously did not constitute

 
page 9

a capitalist class, but on the other hand could not be said to form part of the working class -- presented special problems. Even in the mid-twenties, before the first Five-Year Plan was put into effect, these specialist groups numbered some tens of thousands of persons, totalling perhaps 100,000.
    One problem about the specialists (I use the term in a general sense, to include managers) was that many of them were opponents of the régime. In 1925, Kalinin, President of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union, explained that "Communism is being created in the provinces by the man who says: 'I am against Communism'". Moreover, these groups were not particularly popular among the working class. E. H. Carr reports for example in his Foundations of a Planned Economy that a number of "excesses" were said to have taken place in this period against engineers and technicians, for which ordinary workers were responsible.[9] Several attempts were actually made against the lives of specialists in the Ukrainian mines during the summer of 1927. What kind of contradictions were at work here?
    The government's policy towards the specialists, at least up to 1928 or so, was not based on the use of repressive measures. Even after the Shakhty trial of 1928, when numbers of technical personnel were executed and imprisoned for alleged "sabotage" in the mines of the Donbass region, official pronouncements continued to be made against "baiting the specialists". At this time it seems that monetary incentives were the main instrument used in keeping them in line. There was a serious shortage of specialists, of course, and many had to be imported from America, Germany and Britain. Of the existing native specialists, moreover, less than one per cent were Party members.
    The first and second Five-Year Plans did require and provide an enormously increased pool of experts and skilled workers of all kinds. Those in the population equipped with at least secondary technical school education were estimated to have increased by two and a half times during the life of the first Plan, and specific figures for teaching, medicine, etc. show similar advances. From 1928-29 on, we can in

 
    9. Foundations of a Planned Economy, Part I, C, ch. 21: "The Specialists".

 
page 10

fact talk of an enormous effort to train a new generation of "red experts". The problem was, however, not only that this could not be done all at once, but also that the new generation had to be educated by the old, with all the ideological consequences that this implied. In fact there was, during the plans, a tendency for wage differentials in general to rise, and in particular for the salaries of the experts to rise disproportionately when compared with those of manual workers. This phenomenon seems to reflect the fact that the new generation of specialists was not prepared to work for primarily ideological rewards. The new Soviet man was not to be born in a single generation.
    Let me halt there for a moment. I have raised certain problems posed by the role of the specialists in the early years of the Soviet state. I wanted to make it clear that these problems were not simply "technical", but also political and ideological -- that is, in fact, problems of class struggle. But, secondly, these particular problems make up only one aspect of a more general question : that of the continued operation under socialism of the wage system.
    We must therefore go back for a moment and look at the wage system in capitalism. We know that the very existence of this system is linked to distinctions in the degrees of skill or qualification of labour power. We also know that the difference between the price of skilled and unskilled labour power rests on the fact that the former "has cost more time and labour, and . . . therefore has a higher value" (Marx in Capital, vol. I). But it also rests on something else, because this value must be realized. The difference in price (that is, the existence of wage differentials) also rests on the ideological and political conditions which enable and cause the skilled worker to demand -- normally with success -- that he be paid more than the unskilled worker. The same holds for the differentials which separate the expert on the one hand and the worker (including the skilled worker) on the other.
    These ideological and political conditions are actually among the conditions for the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, therefore of (capitalist) exploitation -- that is, of the extraction of surplus-value. They are

 
page 11

fulfilled by the operation of the Ideological State Apparatuses.[10] These apparatuses help to guarantee the continuing domination of one class, the capitalist class, over another class, the working class. But, as we shall see, this they do -- and can only do -- in a contradictory manner, by also reproducing class struggle. Thus, finally, we can say that the existence of the wage-system in capitalism is linked to the existence both of exploitation and of class struggle.
    We can go further, however. The process of the creation of value in general (what Marx calls Wertbildung) is itself bound up with the process of the realization of surplus-value (Verwertung); indeed, the latter is nothing but the former, says Marx, continued "beyond a certain point" (Capital, vol. I, Part III, ch. VII). It is therefore not only the wage system (the production and exchange of labour power as a commodity) but commodity production in general (i.e., the value creating process) which is bound up with the process of the realization of surplus-value, that is, with exploitation.
    The creation of value takes place within the labour process, which is both "technical" (a process of the production of use-values) and "social" (a process of the production of commodities). Thus the socio-technical division of labour is at the heart of the process of exploitation.
    This process in fact depends on the fact that labour power itself functions as a commodity, with of course the special characteristic that its use-value is a source of more (exchange) value than it has itself. Thus the socio-technical division of labour is linked to the system of differentiation between the prices of more or less complex forms of labour power.
    We can in this way establish a number of general connexions: between commodity production, the wage system, the socio-economic division of labour, and the extraction of surplus-value.
    We ought finally to glance at the special situation in capitalism of what are often referred to as the "middle

 
    10. See Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (NLB, 1971).

 
page 12

strata". The various groups which are aggregated under this heading are in fact of very different character.[11] It is true that, in general, they are distinguished from the working class by the fact that the reproduction of their labour power takes place separately from that of the working class (its members compete on a different labour market). In the course of the development of capitalism, certain of these groups -- especially the so-called "employees" -- tend to become "proletarianized", that is, thrown onto the same labour market as the workers. But not all are in this position: far from it. Some remain quite outside of the process of proletarianization. Moreover, while the "employees", though not productive workers, tend to become subject to exploitation, other groups not only are not so exploited, but actually combine their productive function with the task of managing the process of production and circulation -- i.e., of exploitation.[12]
    The above detour through capitalism was necessary to our understanding of socialism. We shall see later more exactly why. Meanwhile, however, we are at least in a position to pose a few questions. For example: why does the wage-system continue to operate after the proletarian revolution? Why does commodity production continue -- in a different form -- to take place? Does the persistence of commodity production imply the continued operation, in socialism,

 
    11. The "middle strata" do not constitute a social class. The development of capitalism tends to reduce the existing social classes to two only, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (Cf. E. Balibar, Cinq Etudes du matérialisme historique, p. 134.) The antagonism between them is an element of the definition of the capitalist mode of production; whereas the character of the relations between the "middle strata" on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie and proletariat respectively on the other, are not so given. In particular, the question of whether an alliance between the proletariat and middle strata is possible in an given situation can only be answered in concrete political practice, and not by a formal definition of a new "middle class" or "petty-bourgeoisie. See also Lenin's comments on the Draft Programme of the RSDLP, 1902: "In the first place it is essential to draw a line of demarcation between ourselves and all others, to single out the proletariat alone and exclusively, and only then declare that the proletariat will emancipate all, that is call on all, invite all" (Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 73)  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's Material for the Preparation of the Programme, p. 75. -- DJR].
    12. Cf. E. Balibar, Cinq Etudes du matérialisme historique, pp. 144, 150.

 
page 13

of a value-creating process, and therefore, indeed, also of a process of production of surplus-value? Finally: we know that, after the proletarian revolution, the working class must take over from the bourgeoisie the function of organizing production. But, on the one hand, must it not also, at the same time, struggle continuously against the forms in which it is forced to organize production, since its goal is the complete elimination of the conditions of exploitation (therefore the elimination of the wage-system, commodity production, etc.)? And, on the other hand, must it not at one and the same time make use of the old bourgeois specialists, and yet struggle against them?
    These were some of the questions facing the young Soviet state. But, of course, they did not present themselves spontaneously in this form. Stalin, for example, formulated the questions rather differently. And, curiously enough, he often changed his mind about the answers. For example, he was apparently unable to make up his mind about the internal class struggle in the USSR. In 1925 he was talking about the need to struggle against a "new bourgeoisie". In 1936, on the occasion of the introduction of the New Constitution, he considered the class struggle to be at an end. But in 1937 he was again talking about the need to combat "sharper forms of struggle" by the old exploiting classes. Then, in 1939 he was once again speaking of the USSR as "free of all class conflicts".
    Stalin in fact recognized two threats to the development of socialism. He recognized a struggle between the Soviet state and the imperialist states; and he recognized (though it disappeared sporadically from his speeches) a struggle between the Soviet working class and peasantry on the one hand and the former exploiting classes on the other. But he did not (or rarely, and in distorted form -- for example in 1952) recognize a threat which might be formulated in terms of the questions which I posed. In particular, he tended to displace the problems resulting from the contradictory development of class relations within the USSR onto the two forms of class struggle which he did recognize, thus explaining them as effects either of the international class struggle or of the struggle against the former exploiting

 
page 14

classes. This perhaps explain his vacillations: whenever the class struggle between the various classes and groups inside the Soviet Union became intense, Stalin would pull "imperialism" or the "old exploiting classes" out of the bag.
    We have said that the "Stalin deviation" may be characterized by the terms economism and humanism. Why? And what is the link between these two forms of a single deviation? In order to answer these questions we must make use of a number of theoretical concepts of Marxism, including those of the mode of production and of the social formation. A mode of production is characterized primarily by a given system of production relations, and secondarily by the "level of the material productive forces. The reproduction of a system of production relations is not a function of the operation of the mode of production alone, but of the social formation as a whole, including its "superstructural forms".
    To "forget about" the role of the "superstructure" in the reproduction of production relations, to want to explain everything (for example, crises in capitalism or the transition to communism by reference to the economic infrastructure alone, is of course economism. But to "forget about" the role of the superstructure is also to forget how the superstructure operates. It operates through apparatuses which maintain the domination of the ruling class, but at the cost of continuously reproducing class struggle. To fall into economism is therefore also to forget about class struggle, and to forget about class struggle is humanism. Stalin fell into both economism and humanism when he argued, for example, that the problem of the transition to socialism was primarily a problem of the development of the productive forces. Etienne Balibar has pointed out that "this interpretation of Marxism was already dominant among certain Socialist leaders of the Second International (like Kautsky), and was developed and plainly stated by Stalin on several occasions".[13]
    Stalin, in fact, did tend to "forget about" class struggle.

 
    13. In Les Sciences de l'économie (eds, A. Vanoli and J.-P. Januard), article on "La Formations sociales capitalistes", p. 287.

 
page 15

This claim may surprise some readers, since, after all, he is known for the thesis that the class struggle sharpens as socialism develops. Indeed, it is precisely this thesis which is often held responsible for the "excess's" and "crimes" of the Stalin period. But the class struggle which he recognized was, as we have seen, either the struggle against international capitalism or the struggle against the old exploiting classes. There is a logic to his position. For example, if these classes have been defeated, if only remnants still exist, then the obvious course of action for them would be to resort to terrorism, sabotage etc. in collaboration with their natural ally, imperialism. The obvious way of dealing with such acts of terrorism would be to use the Repressive State Apparatus (police, courts, and so on). Thus the importance for Stalin of the show trial, in which the accused are treated as criminals, and in particular as foreign agents.
    A scientific treatment of the Stalin period will, in my opinion, show that the events which characterized it (trials, purges, etc.) were, in spite of "appearances", effects of (a specific) class struggle fought out in the economic, political and ideological spheres. It is of course true that -- for example -- the great trials of 1936-38 were not, legally speaking, directed against the representatives of a particular class, but against certain senior Party members. Again from a legal point of view, they contained many absurd allegations. But that does not mean that they can be explained -- and written off -- as simple "violations of socialist legality". The trials and purges played a role determined in the last instance by the class struggle inside the USSR, even if in practice their victims were the "wrong" ones. But this was inevitable, since the methods used were the "wrong" ones, too: they were bourgeois methods used against the bourgeoisie, and they backfired disastrously. This too, however, is not surprising, since "Stalinism" -- the deviation from Leninism -- is, after all, a consequence of the penetration of Marxism by bourgeois theory (economism/humanism) and bourgeois practice.
    To illustrate the argument, let us compare the Soviet situation with its "opposite": the case in which the capitalist class resorts, for whatever reasons, to the use of large-scale

 
page 16

physical repression. Such a policy is of course never the result of a "decision" on the part of some "executive committee of the bourgeoisie" as a whole. On the contrary: in practice it tends to result in large-scale splits inside bourgeois political organizations. The Nazi régime, for example, suppressed not only the organizations of the working class (Communists, Social-Democrats, trades unions) but also the old bourgeois and "petty-bourgeois" parties, together with cultural, artistic and scientific institutions and of course racial groups. The millions which it murdered came from all classes. It is precisely this fact which makes it easy to misunderstand the Nazi régime, even to suppose that there is some essential resemblance between it and Stalin's government. One can have lived through fascism, fought for years against it, even died in the fight, without knowing that its roots lay in the class struggle between labour and capital.
    This example is not intended, let me repeat, to imply a similarity between the Stalin and Nazi régimes (one of the tricks of anti-communism), nor any mirror relation between them. On the contrary: it is intended as a warning against empiricism, against the temptation of assuming that in order to locate the cause of an event one need not look much further than the effects. Hitler killed and imprisoned the leaders of the capitalist parties. Was he therefore an anti-capitalist, a traitor to the capitalist class? Is the case of Stalin so much simpler?
    I argued that behind Stalin's "crimes" was hidden a specific class struggle. But what were its roots ? Why do we claim that in spite of the disappearance of the old exploiting classes, such a struggle continued to exist in the USSR? The answer to this question demands further theoretical clarification.
    We arrive here at a critical point in the argument. We know that the Marxist orthodoxy of the Stalin period conceived of the relation between base and superstructure under socialism by analogy with capitalism: whereas capitalism is based on the capitalist mode of production, which is of course socially determined in the last instance, socialism is based on the socialist mode of production (state ownership,

 
page 17

and so on). This too is ultimately determinant, in that it tends, perhaps slowly but still inexorably, to produce a population steeped in the "socialist ideology" whose development is a necessary superstructural condition for the transition to communism. The infrastructural condition is of course satisfied by the development of the productive forces, a consequence of the efficiency of the socialist economy.
    Now this picture -- which effectively eliminates the question of class struggle under socialism -- is organized around one key concept, precisely that of the socialist mode of production. It is however this concept which unfortunately constitutes the principal obstacle to understanding socialism. Because there is no socialist mode of production.[14]
    The nearest way of formulating this point is perhaps to say that social formations of the transition period called socialism are based not on a single, socialist mode of production (stamped perhaps with the birth marks of the old, capitalist society), but on a contradictory combination of two modes of production, the capitalist and communist.[15] We must however not forget that these modes of production do not (co)exist in a "pure" form, and that no concrete revolutionary transition can be explained by reference to the contradictory presence of the general form of two modes of production. What we find in any given socialist system is in fact a specific combination of a concrete, determinate form of the capitalist mode of production, transformed and "emasculated" by the proletarian revolution, and a similar form of the communist mode of production, as it emerges and develops on the basis of the victories of that revolution and of the continuing class struggle.[16]
    But what characterizes the capitalist mode of production (Lenin's "capitalist form of social economy")? According

 
    14. "There is no socialist mode of production" -- thesis advanced by Althusser in a course on Marx's Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, given at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d'Ulm, Paris in June 1973.
    15. Cf. the interesting Section I of Lenin's Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1919), Collected Works, vol. 30.
    16. Cf. Balibar, op. cit. p. 305: "In all existing 'socialist countries', capitalist relations of production -- and thus the structure of classes themselves -- have been profoundly transformed. But in no case have they totally dis- [cont. onto p. 18. -- DJR] appeared". Naturally, the reproduction of these relations of production also depends on the existence of corresponding superstructural forms. The contradictory coexistence of two modes of production under socialism thus also implies contradictory superstructural relations (for example, at the level of the State, as we shall see).

 
page 18

to Marx and Lenin, it is the extraction of surplus-value. But to obtain surplus-value you need not simply a system of commodity production and exchange, but "a commodity whose process of consumption is at the same time a process of the creation of value. Such a commodity exists -- human labour power".[17] The capitalist mode of production cannot exist except where labour power itself is produced and exchanged as a commodity.
    We know however that the wage system -- precisely, the production and exchange of labour power as a commodity -- continues to operate after the proletarian revolution, and that general commodity production in Marx's Department I (production of means of production) and Department II (production of means of consumption) also continues to take place.
    Let us now look at Stalin's attempt to deal with the question of the role of the commodity under socialism (in his Economic Problems of Socialism, 1952). He argues very clearly that "commodity circulation is incompatible with the prospective transition to communism". And he concludes that "the transition from socialism to communism and the communist principle of distribution of products according to needs precludes all commodity exchange" (in the "Reply to Sanina and Venzber"). But how does Stalin understand the abolition of commodity exchange? Essentially in terms of the abolition of collective-farm (socialist, but non-public) property, in terms of its conversion into state -- or, more exactly public -- property. Thus, "when instead of two basic production sectors, the state sector and the collective-farm sector, there will be only one all-embracing production sector, with the right to dispose of all the consumer goods produced in the country, commodity circulation, with its 'money economy', will disappear" (ch. 2).
    Two things can be said against Stalin here. First, the

 
    17. Lenin, "Karl Marx", Selected Works (Moscow, 1967), vol. 1, p. 18.

 
page 19

abolition of the role of the commodity is certainly not simply a question of bringing all sectors of production into public ownership. Centralized state control and planning can itself be a form of commodity circulation. Second, the sale of means of consumption to the public implies its ability to buy them. But the fact that the public can buy such products -- even from a single "all-embracing" publicly-owned production sector -- implies that it can pay, i.e., that it earns wages. It implies, in other words, the existence of a wage system.
    Stalin, however, specifically argues that (in the USSR of 1952) "the system of wage labour no longer exists and labour power is no longer a commodity" (ibid.) -- a rather curious claim. His reasoning is that talk of labour power being a commodity "sounds rather absurd", as though the working class "sells its labour power to itself". But in that case why was it -- if not because of the operation of the "law of value" -- that those members of the working population whose training had been relatively lengthy and costly were able to command a higher income?[18]
    For Stalin the socialist commodity is not "of the ordinary [capitalist] type", but "designed to serve . . . socialist production". The socialist commodity is a remnant of capitalism, but "essentially" not a "capitalist category".[19] For him, indeed, the link between the process of the creation of value (Wertbildung) and that of the realization of surplus-value (Verwertung) is broken. He believes in socialist commodity production, a distinct form, though it is a remnant of capitalism, just as some economists believe in a mode of production called "simple commodity production" distinguished from capitalism because it preceded it.[20]
    Stalin's political positions are consistent with his theoretical

 
    18. With some exceptions (relatively low rewards for doctors, relatively high rewards for miners and so on). These exceptions are indices of the strength of the working class, and of the development of communist relations of production. But we should add that the transition to communism is by no means equivalent to a simple process of wage equalization!
    19. In the "Reply to A. I. Notkin".
    20. Cf. Balibar, Cinq Etudes, p. 125; also Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (International Publishers, 1972), p. 114: "The rule of exchange- [cont. onto p. 20. -- DJR] values, and of production producing exchange-values presupposes alien labour power as itself an exchange-value. That is, it presupposes the separation of living labour power from its objective conditions, a relationship . . . to them as capital."

 
page 20

standpoint. His attempt to solve the problem of the specialists is an example. Because he had no theory of class struggle under socialism with which to orient his policy, it was always decided on an ad hoc basis. Thus it vacillated constantly between the use of monetary incentives and political repression.[21]
    Another example is the primacy which he attributed to the question of the development of the productive forces. "Why", he asks (in his Problems of Leninism), "can socialism, must socialism, will socialism necessarily vanquish the capitalist economic system? Because . . . it can make society richer than the capitalist economic system can do."[22] Such economic progress would of course be possible only on the basis of socialism ; but socialism, here, means above all public ownership and planning. Like many another Marxist, he simply contrasts capitalist commodity production with socialist planned production, forgetting that commodity production and planning are in principle compatible, and that the required distinction therefore cannot lie there.
    The common belief in a fundamental incompatibility between commodity production and planning has in fact distinct humanist connotations. In Paul Sweezy's formula-

 
    21. By 1939 -- when, as we saw, Stalin was (again) claiming that the USSR was "free of all class conflicts" -- he could also speak of a "new, socialist intelligentsia" which was "ready to serve the interests of the peoples of the USSR faithfully and devotedly" (Report to the 18th Party Congress).
    22. Khrushchev took over this position as his own. It is dangerous -- not for any "moral" reason (because it "alienates", "reifies", etc.), but because of its political effects. Some of the proposals for economic reform in the socialist world are influenced by this standpoint. One example is Wlodzimierz Brus' proposed rectification of Stalin's economic policies. He says that Stalin's picture of a "complete conformity" between socialist production relations and productive forces is false. In fact, he argues, socialist production relations may cease to meet the needs of the development of the productive forces. The theoretical framework here is identical with that of Stalin (primacy of the productive forces). Only its application is different: growth now demands of course, the extension of market (commodity) relations. See Brus, The Market in a Socialist Economy (Routledge, 1972).

 
page 21

tion, for instance, when the law of value is king, the economy is regulated only by that law, while planning means that "the allocation of productive activity is brought under conscious control" (The Theory of Capiralist Development, p. 53). In his Reply to John Lewis Althusser contrasts the humanist thesis, man makes history, with the (Marxist) thesis: the motor of history is class struggle. We can contrast the humanist thesis on socialism: man makes socialism -- by conscious planing, and so on -- with the (Marxist) thesis: the motor of socialism is class struggle.
    If the progress of socialism cannot be measured (simply) in terms of the development of the productive forces; if it must be measured instead in terms of the development of the contradiction between specific forms of the capitalist and communist modes of production, then it becomes clear that it depends on the development of the class struggle. It may therefore be that, in the case of two socialist states, the one which is behind in building its productive forces is ahead in building communism. I think, for instance, that undue optimism was originally placed in some of the People's Democracies of Eastern Europe, at least as far as the tempo of the advance to communism was concerned, an optimism based on their relatively developed economic infrastructure. But it is quite likely that Cuba (to take an example), which did not contain such a strong -- and ideologically formed -- educated "middle class" as, say, Czechoslovakia, is nevertheless at least equally advanced politically.
    The thesis that there is no socialist mode of production, that socialism rests on the contradictory combination of specific forms of two modes of production, capitalist and communist, allows us to understand the roots of the class struggle under socialism. It also allows us to deal with the inevitable question: if there is class struggle under socialism, where are the classes in struggle? Where, in particular, is the capitalist class ?
    We could of course answer the question (answering that there is no capitalist class) and leave it at that. But we have not yet reached the heart of the matter. The reason is that social classes do not precede the class struggle: on the contrary, the class struggle creates classes. We must

 
page 22

therefore rephrase the question. The problem is not to find a capitalist class, but to find out under what conditions a capitalist class is generated.
    That is not such a curious way of posing the problem. Lenin, after all, had argued that "even in Russia capitalist commodity production is alive, operating, developing and giving rise to a bourgeoisie " (my emphasis).[23] The difficulty is that Lenin thought that this new bourgeoisie was emerging mainly from among the peasants and handicraftsmen. Thus Stalin, following the letter of Lenin, was able to claim that collectivization and nationalization had at the same time put a stop to the process by which the new bourgeoisie was being produced.
    But we must go further. We must add that the capitalist class does not precede the production of surplus-value; on the contrary, it is the production of surplus-value which creates the capitalist class. The consequence should be obvious. If socialism rests on a contradictory combination of specific forms of the capitalist and communist modes of production, it follows that certain conditions for the generation of a new bourgeoisie are fulfilled, and that only class struggle on the part of the proletariat can prevent it. The modalities of its generation (out of which social groups does it emerge? and so on) cannot be dealt with here. What we can say, however, is that just as the Ideological State Apparatuses of the capitalist State reproduce the domination of the capitalist class only at the cost of reproducing class struggle, so too, in the same way the Ideological State Apparatuses of the proletarian State only reproduce the domination of the proletariat at the cost of reproducing class struggle -- a class struggle whose stake is the generation of a new bourgeoisie, and ultimately counter-revolution and the restoration of capitalism. That is why Lenin was right when he claimed that "the transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire historical epoch". But Lenin

 
    23. At the 8th Congress of the RCP(B). Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 29, p. 189. Cf. his Theses Presented to the First Congress of the Comintern: "The entire content of Marxism . . . reveals the economic inevitability, wherever commodity economy prevails, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" (Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 464).

 
page 23

was most concerned with the threat from the old exploiting classes, and it is not clear how he would otherwise have wanted to establish his claim.
    It should now be rather clearer why Althusser characterizes the Stalin period in terms of a deviation from Marxism which took the form of economism and humanism. It is not of course that the events of this period were the simple consequence of a theoretical mistake. The deviation was itself not only theoretical, but also political. But in any case its roots lay in the class struggle -- in the class struggle under capitalism, which had allowed bourgeois ideology to penetrate deeply into the Marxism of the early Social-Democratic Parties, and in the class struggle under socialism, which prevented Stalin from casting off that influence.
    I ought to say a few words at this point about alternative conceptions of the Stalin period.[24] First, it should by now be evident that what I have said conflicts in the sharpest possible way with every explanation couched either in terms of legal ideology (Stalinism is essentially a "violation of socialist legality") or psychology (Stalin was mad, a criminal, or both).
    Secondly, it is incompatible with Trotsky's accounts. I agree with Charles Bettelheim that in spite of the political struggles which he waged against Stalin, Trotsky's theoretical positions coincide with those of Stalin in two important respects: on the one hand he too thought that the disappearance of "private property" excluded the development of a new capitalist class; and on the other hand he too affirmed that "the root of all social organization is in the productive forces".[25] As a consequence, his account of the so-called "degeneration" of socialism in the USSR

 
    24. I will not mention the many "bourgeois" accounts here. What they naturally cannot see is that Stalinism was a result first, of the penetration of bourgeois theory and bourgeois methods into internal Soviet politics, and second, of the isolation of the new and still extremely weak socialist state in a capitalist world. "Stalinism" is not the price of communism; it is a price paid by the Soviet people, but extorted, ultimately, by imperialism.
    25. Bettelheim, Luttes de classes en URSS, pp. 25-27. According to the author, "the two theses (on the disappearance of antagonistic classes in the USSR and on the primacy of the development of the productive forces) were a kind of 'commonplace ' for 'European Marxism' in the 1930s".

 
page 24

is in any case unilaterally political, especially as far as his comments on the role of the "bureaucracy" are concerned.[26]
    But, thirdly, what I have said also conflicts with Bettelheim's positions. This becomes clear if one considers his account not only of the Stalin but also of the post-Stalin period.
    It is true that Bettelheim correctly cites Stalin's economism and his belief in the disappearance of the objective basis for the existence of classes. But he adds that these doctrinal weaknesses led not only the existence of class struggle but also the rise of a new class, the State Bourgeoisie, to be overlooked.
    It is this category of the State Bourgeoisie which presents the first difficulty (I speak only of theoretical difficulties here). It is that the category is not sufficiently specific. Every bourgeoisie, after all, is a "state bourgeoisie" in the sense that the action of the state is integral to the process of its constitution and reproduction as a unified ruling class.[27] Bettelheim means of course that this bourgeoisie is constituted by a body of functionaries and administrators "which become in effect the proprietors (in the sense of a relation production) of the means of production".[28] Since he is convinced that the emergence of this new class has at some time since Stalin's death, resulted in the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, we know that it must now be not simply a bourgeoisie but a capitalist class in the strict sense (the two things are not exactly the same).
    One reason for Bettelheim's conclusion (a theoretical reason -- I say nothing of the political reason) may lie in his treatment of the distinction between the legal and real appropriation of the means of production. His version of this distinction contrasts property (in the legal sense) and possession. He uses it, however, in such a way that property sometimes appears to be little more than an illusion. For example, it appears that the new capitalist class establishes

 
    26. Cf. Nicos Poulantzas' argument that the problems of bureaucracy always concern the state apparatus and not the state power" (Political Power and Social Classes, p 333 ) On this distinction, see below.
    27. Cf. Balibar, Cinq Etudes, p. 177.
    28. Bettelheim, Calcul économique et formes de propriété, p. 87. [Transcriber's Note: See Economic Calculation and Forms of Property. -- DJR]

 
page 25

its possession of the means of production not so much by creating new legal relations -- by constituting its property in the means of production -- but rather by reducing state property to "a merely legal relation", therefore a fiction.
    The consequence is that it becomes rather easier for Bettelheim to conclude -- like the Chinese Communist Party -- that, in spite of the fact that there has been no fundamental transformation in property relations in the Soviet Union, the class struggle has ended not simply in the generation of a new bourgeoisie and a new capitalist class but also in the restoration of capitalism itself. And this, from a "Chinese" standpoint, which Bettelheim is apparently struggling to respect, would mean precisely the abolition of "socialist production relations". Our disagreement with this kind of account will be obvious.
    In fact, the subsistence of capitalist relations of production within socialism implies a tendency to the generation of a new bourgeoisie, but whether or not this tendency is realized depends on the outcome of the class struggle. Such a bourgeoisie may be generated, it may transform itself into a full-fledged capitalist class and it may succeed in restoring capitalism. But, as we shall see, a number of conditions, political as well as economic, must be fulfilled before such a thing can take place. And -- to take a concrete example, the example -- there is ample evidence, as far as the Soviet Union is concerned (especially of its remarkable stability), to refute the claim that it is rushing headlong toward such a restoration.
    Be that as it may, it is no ground for complacency. On the contrary. Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1970 are the proof. If the principal contradiction dominating the complexity of the Czech events clearly lay in the relation to the USSR (as Althusser and the French Communist Party believe), it is just as clear that secondary contradictions operated which were internal to Czech society. But these internal contradictions were by no means specific to the Czech situation. They also touched the USSR. This is no secret. The Cambridge economist Michael Ellman, for example, has pointed out that "in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s the distribution of incomes was exceptionally

 
page 26

equal. . . . A major objective of the abortive Czech reform was to overcome this situation. Similarly one of the features of economic reform in the USSR has been to improve the position of the specialists relative to that of the workers".[29]
    The Polish events demonstrate something important, too. The workers' protest itself was not -- contrary to a common opinion -- directed against "Stalinism": rather the opposite. It was the result of economic reforms, especially in pricing policy, which in effect constituted one step in the abandonment of the relative equality of the Stalin years. The fact that the protest had to take the form of riots was, on the other hand, in all probability a result of the legacy of the "administrative methods" preferred in those years. But that is a different question.
    It is therefore impossible to paint the Stalin period in wholly black or white terms, and it is equally impossible to pretend that its faults can be eliminated simply by "democratizing" or "liberalizing" the political structures (for the sake of "liberty") and "reforming" the economy (for the sake of "productivity"). The effects of Stalin's humanism and economism cannot be rectified by a more consistent humanism and a more consistent economism.
    Something ought perhaps to be said here -- since the example will have occurred to the reader -- about the policies of the Chinese Communist Party. It is true that these policies have been consciously anti-humanist and anti-economist. This is certainly true of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 (which was however widely misrepresented in the West as a utopian, humanist project, whatever it was, it was not that). But, as far as it is possible to determine, the Chinese critique of Stalin suffers from an inadequate supply of alternative theses. Thus two recently published texts of Mao (dating from 1958 and 1959*) on Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism make the following criticisms: Stalin failed to deal with the political and ideological conditions of the transition to communism; he put the accent on the "expert"

 
    29. Michael Ellman, "What Kind of Economic Reform Does the Soviet Union Need?", in Cambridge Review, May, 1971, p. 210.
    [* Transcriber's Note: See Mao's "Concerning Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR " and "Critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR " in the collection A Critique of Soviet Economics. -- DJR]

 
page 27

and not the "red'' side of the specialist; and he relied on the cadres and not on the masses.
    Mao also argues, correctly, that one must not confuse the demarcation line between socialism and communism with that which distinguishes collective-farm property from public property. But his reasoning actually relies on Stalin's thesis that commodity production under socialism is a consequence of the existence of a non-public, collective farm sector. Since the abolition of this sector is not equivalent to the transition to communism, the two lines of demarcation are not identical. Thus for Mao, as for Stalin, "labour [under socialism] is not a commodity". Finally, he sometimes tends to identify the principle of the supremacy of politics (anti-economism) with planning.[30]
    None of these positions (to judge from the pages of Peking Review) appears to have been modified up to the present day.[31] Unless evidence to the contrary becomes available, it must be considered that the Chinese still share certain of Stalin's fundamental theses.[32] And they certainly appear

 
    30. Mao Tsé-Toung et la construction du socialisme, ed. Hu Chi-hsi (Seuil, 1975), pp. 39, 41, 58.
    31. See for example an article by Nan Ching, who argues that "commodity production and commodity exchange still exist in socialist society . . . because two kinds of socialist ownership, namely, ownership by the whole people and collective ownership, exist side by side. . . . However, the socialist type of commodity production differs from the capitalist type. This is manifested chiefly by the fact that there no longer is the economic relation of exploitation of workers by the capitalists, anarchism in production has been eliminated and the scope of commodity production has been reduced" (Peking Review, May 30, 1975, p. 12).
    32. What the Chinese have rejected -- and this they did early on -- is the thesis of the primacy of the productive forces. Thus they no longer define communism in terms of material superabundance. Interesting in this connexion is an episode which took place in China in 1958 concerning the translation of the so-called "fundamental principles" of socialism and communism. The communist principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", had been mistranslated in Chinese, said Chang Chung-shih (Deputy Director of the CCP Central Committees translation Bureau) to imply that anyone could take for himself whatever he wanted and as much of it as he liked. This was wrong said Chang. The revised translation indicated that the members of a communist society would have to work as hard as they could and would get what was distributed to them.

 
page 28

to accept the existence of a socialist mode of production.
    So much for alternative interpretations of the Stalin period and of socialist construction in general. We have seen that they fail to grasp some of the essential characteristics of the construction process. Up to now we have looked mainly at the question of the socialist economy. But we ought also to glance quickly at the political sphere. As we have seen, the State must play a key role in the generation within a socialist system of any new bourgeoisie. It is not simply a site of struggle between the working class and its potential enemies; it is also itself an obstacle to the victory of the working class.
    This question really must be clarified, since it is the source of much confusion. Communists believe, as everyone knows, in the "dictatorship of the proletariat". What everyone does not know is the meaning of this expression. One very common interpretation considers it to be a dictatorship indeed, but not of the kind suggested by the Communists. It involves, in this interpretation, the existence of an enormously powerful State machine capable of crushing all opposition to the rule, not of the workers, but of a handful of Party bosses. This is for example how not only openly bourgeois thinker's but also most Social Democrats understand the dictatorship of the proletariat.
    They are wrong. The term dictatorship, in the Marxist sense, is not contrasted with (or identified with) democracy. It functions in a different (though connected) theoretical space. Marxists also talk about the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and this term they apply to the most "democratic" of bourgeois nations. They mean that the bourgeoisie rules; but not necessarily (or primarily) by repression. It rules through the State, that is true, but mainly (at least in the "free West") by the use of the Ideological Apparatuses -- thus precisely not by the method of "dictatorship", in the bourgeois sense of the term. The term "dictatorship of the proletariat", similarly, implies that the proletariat rules. But not (necessarily) primarily by the use of the Repressive Apparatus. The bourgeoisie can in principle rule indefinitely in this way, but the proletariat, as we shall see, cannot.
    Of course, everyone who has read Lenin's State and

 
page 29

Revolution knows that "the proletariat needs the State as a special form of organization of violence against the bourgeoisie". But it needs a State "which is withering away, i.e., a State so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately". Why?
    The withering away of the State means, here, the abolition of the State Apparatus. An uninterrupted struggle to abolish the State Apparatus is in fact a condition of the reinforcement of proletarian State power. [33] The reason is that to strengthen the "Proletarian State Apparatus" -- even when it must be strengthened, in order to function as a means of repression against the bourgeoisie -- is always at the same time, tendentially, to weaken the control of the proletariat over its political, i.e. (here) State representatives. This is because every State is more or less bureaucratic, and therefore distant from the masses (Lenin in The State and Revolution : bureaucrats are "privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people"). That is precisely why Marxists insist on the final abolition of the State.
    In fact the (necessary) existence of a proletarian State Apparatus paradoxically constitutes one of the conditions of the emergence of a new bourgeoisie. But this condition, let it be noted, is only one condition, and certainly not a sufficient one. Indeed, the existence of a "bureaucracy" under socialism is not itself even evidence of the "degeneration" of the system, unless every form of socialism is degenerate. Because some bureaucratism under socialism is inevitable (that is one of the reasons why socialism is not communism). Lenin, by the way, seems to have admitted as much when arguing in 1921 that "it will take decades to overcome the evils of bureaucracy" (Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 56*). But this is bureaucracy in the narrow sense. In a wider and more fundamental sense it is inevitable because, as Lenin also admitted a year earlier in an argument with Trotsky, "the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organization. It cannot work without a number of 'transmission belts' running from the vanguard to the mass of the working people."

 
    33. Cf. Balibar, Cinq Etudes, p. 95.
    [* Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "The Second All-Russia Congress of Miners". -- DJR]

 
page 30

Or, in other words, the State (the dictatorship of the proletariat) subsists, as a necessary evil, under socialism -- not only because of the need to repress the old exploiting classes, etc., but also because the working class emerges from capitalism and imperialism "divided" and even "corrupted" (Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 21*).
    We have already said that the subsistence of capitalist production relations under socialism implies a tendency to the generation of a new bourgeoisie. One of the conditions for the realization of this tendency is a progressive bureaucratization of the State Apparatus. That is why the struggle against bureaucratization is not simply a struggle for efficiency, or against abuses, but a class struggle for communism. Once again, therefore, the tendency -- in this case to bureaucratism -- cannot be avoided, but the extent to which this tendency is realized depends on the class struggle.
    We ought to add, finally, that it is this same class struggle which will determine whether these two tendencies (to capitalism in the economy, to bureaucracy in politics) are allowed not only to develop but also to converge and to unite in a critical conjuncture.
    The new proletarian State must therefore not only destroy the old bourgeois State; it must itself be of a new type, a "State which is no longer a State" (Lenin). How can this be? It can be because the proletarian State is both a State of the old type" (this is especially true of its Repressive Apparatus) and also an "anti-State". It is an anti-State in so far as certain of its Ideological Apparatuses -- especially the Party, the Trades Unions, and mass popular organizations of all kinds -- are transformed into non-State organizations capable of "controlling" and eventually of replacing the State.[34]
    It is, very schematically, with the State that the proletariat wages class struggle against the old bourgeoisie and against imperialism. It is with its non-State organizations that it

 
    [* Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "The Trade Unions. The Present Situation and Trotsky's Mistakes". -- DJR]
    34. It would of course be absurd simply to contrast state and Party in this respect. The Party, like other mass organizations, is also a site of class struggle. The history of this struggle cannot be examined in the space available here.

 
page 31

wages class struggle against the emergence of a new bourgeoisie.
    That is the proletarian "State which is no longer a State". Not only the formulation is contradictory, but also the reality. To put it another way: the two kinds of class struggle which the proletariat must wage can never be in perfect harmony with one another. The conditions for the success of one may be obstacles to the success of the other.
    Stalin, in this connexion, found himself faced with a rather complex set of dilemmas. The threat posed by the old bourgeoisie (including the old intelligentsia) was countered by the use of the Repressive State Apparatus. (That was logical.) The threat posed by the new generation of specialists -- though Stalin was not sure what kind of threat it was, or even, sometimes, whether it was a threat at all -- was met by a combination of financial inducement and the use of the same Apparatus. The measures had two obvious effects. On the one hand they perpetuated the danger, by reproducing the specialists as a privileged social group; on the other hand they encouraged the growth and independence of the Repressive State Apparatus and its functionaries.
    As we saw, Stalin all but ignored the problem of the generation of a new bourgeoisie. He considered the class struggle under socialism to be primarily a struggle against the old exploiting classes. When that difficulty was resolved, he therefore tended (only tended, however, because he was never quite sure) to consider that class struggle had ceased to exist in the USSR. Thus the dictatorship of the proletariat could be relaxed. That was a "right deviation". In fact, however, it could not be relaxed without putting socialism at risk. And a mechanism seems to have operated which substituted itself for this absent dictatorship, for the absent theoretical, political and ideological struggles of the Party and masses. Or, rather, the dictatorship of the proletariat was maintained, but by the use of the Repressive State Apparatus, by "administrative methods". This was a "left" deviation (rhetoric of the political police as a weapon of the proletarian masses, and so on). The cost was enormous, not only in terms of human suffering, but also in terms of

 
page 32

the damage caused to the struggle for communism. Because in building such a State, which was, it is true, a "proletarian State", but a State very much of the old type (that is, without adequate corresponding non-State organizations), Stalin solved one set of problems at the cost of generating a whole new set.

 
    The "Stalin deviation" was a deviation above all because it implied that the road to communism lay not so much through class struggle as through the development of the productive forces. That is why it can be characterized in terms of humanism and economism. But it is precisely Stalin's humanism and his economism which Khrushchev did not touch, which he did not rectify. Can we, in these circumstances, conclude that Stalin's ghost has been laid? Can the errors of so many years of Communist history be wiped out by injecting Marxism with a bigger dose of humanism? These are the political questions which lie behind Althusser's Reply to John Lewis.

 
page 33

1.  
Reply to  
John Lewis  

 

 
page 34

 
Foreword 

 






The reader will find an article and a note here, dating from June 1972.
    The article, "Reply to John Lewis", appeared, translated by Grahame Lock, in two numbers of the theoretical and political journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Marxism Today, in October and November 1972.
    "Reply": because, a few months earlier (in its January and February numbers of 1972), the same journal had published a long critical article by John Lewis (a British Communist philosopher known for his interventions in political-ideological questions) under the title: "The Althusser Case".
    The present text of the Reply to John Lewis follows the English version of the article, except that I have made some corrections, added a few paragraphs for purposes of clarification, and also added a Remark.
    To this text I have joined an unpublished Note, which was to have been part of my Reply, but which was cut to avoid extending the limits of an article which had already grown too long.

1 May 1973
L.A.      



 

 
page 35

Reply to John Lewis 
(Self-Criticism) 

 





I.
I want to thank Marxism Today for having published John Lewis's article about the books I have written on Marxist philosophy: For Marx and Reading Capital, which appeared in France in 1965. He took care to treat me in a special way, in the way a medical specialist treats a patient. The whole family, as it were, together with his silent colleagues, stood motionless at the bedside, while Dr John Lewis leaned over to examine "the Althusser case".[1] A long wait. Then he made his diagnosis: the patient is suffering from an attack of severe "dogmatism" -- a "mediaeval" variety. The prognosis is grave: the patient cannot last long.
    It is an honour for this attention to be paid to me. But it is also an opportunity for me to clear up certain matters, twelve years after the event. For my first article [reprinted in For Marx ], which was concerned with the question of the "young Marx", actually appeared in 1960, and I am writing in 1972.
    A good deal of water has flowed under the bridge of history since 1960. The Workers' Movement has lived through many important events: the heroic and victorious resistance of the Vietnamese people against the most powerful imperialism in the world; the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (1966-69); the greatest workers' strike in world history (ten million workers on strike for a month) in May 1968 in France -- a strike which was "preceded"

 
    1. The title of John Lewis's article is The Althusser Case. Not surprisingly: in his conclusion, John Lewis compares Marxism to . . . medicine.

 
page 36

and "accompanied" by a deep ideological revolt among French students and petty-bourgeois intellectuals; the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the other countries of the Warsaw Pact; the war in Ireland, etc. The Cultural Revolution, May 1968 and the occupation of Czechoslovakia have had political and ideological repercussions in the whole of the capitalist world.
    With hindsight one can judge things better. Lenin used to say: the criterion of practice is only really valid if it bears on a "process" which is of some length. With the help of the "practical test" of the twelve, ten or even seven years which have passed since the original articles were written, one can look back and see more clearly whether one was right or wrong. It is really an excellent opportunity.
    Just one small point in this connexion. John Lewis, in his article, never for one moment talks about this political history of the Workers' Movement. In For Marx -- that is, in 1965 -- I was already writing about Stalin, about the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and about the split in the International Communist Movement. John Lewis, on the other hand, writes as if Stalin had never existed, as if the Twentieth Congress and the split in the International Communist Movement had never occurred, as if May 1968 had never taken place, nor the occupation of Czechoslovakia, nor the war in Ireland. John Lewis is a pure spirit; he prefers not to talk about such concrete things as politics.
    When he talks about philosophy, he talks about philosophy. Just that. Full stop. It has to be said that this is precisely what the majority of so-called philosophy teachers do in our bourgeois society. The last thing they want to talk about is politics! They would rather talk about philosophy. Full stop. That is just why Lenin, quoting Dietzgen, called them "graduated flunkies" of the bourgeois state. What a wretched sight they make! For all the great philosophers in history, since the time of Plato, even the great bourgeois philosophers -- not only the materialists but even idealists like Hegel -- have talked about politics. They more or less recognized that to do philosophy was to do politics in the field of theory. And they had the courage to do their politics openly, to talk about politics.

 
page 37

    Heaven be thanked, John Lewis has changed all that. John Lewis is a Marxist and we are in 1972. He does not feel the need to talk about politics. Let someone work that one out.

    But to Marxism Today I must express my thanks for giving an important place to a discussion about philosophy. It is quite correct to give it this important place. The point has been made not only by Engels and of course by Lenin, but by Stalin himself! And, as we know, it has also been made by Gramsci and by Mao: the working class needs philosophy in the class struggle. It needs not only the Marxist science of history (historical materialism), but also Marxist philosophy (dialectical materialism). Why?
    I should like to reply by using a formula. I will take the (personal) risk of putting it this way: the reason is that philosophy is, in the last instance,[2] class struggle in the field of theory.[3]
    All this is, as John Lewis would say, perfectly "orthodox".

 
    2. N.B.: in the last instance. I do not want to be misunderstood. What I am saying is that philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory. I am not saying that philosophy is simply class struggle in the field of theory.
    3. This formula, which is extremely condensed, might mislead the reader. I would therefore like to add three points to help orient him. (1) Because of its abstraction, its rationality and its system, philosophy certainly figures "in" the field of theory, in the neighbourhood of the sciences, with which it stands in a specific set of relations. But philosophy is not (a) science. (2) Unlike the sciences, philosophy has an especially intimate relation with the class tendency of the ideologies ; these, in the last instance, are practical and do not belong to theory ("theoretical ideologies" are in the last instance "detachments" of the practical ideologies in the theoretical field). (3) In all these formulations, the expression "in the last instance" designates "determination in the last instance", the principal aspect, the "weak link" of determination : it therefore implies the existence of one or more secondary, subordinate, overdetermined and overdetermining aspects -- other aspects. Philosophy is therefore not simply class struggle in theory, and ideologies are not simply practical: but they are practical "in the last instance". Perhaps there has not always been a full understanding of the theoretical significance of Lenin's political thesis of the "weak link". It is not simply a question of choosing the "weak link" from a number of pre-existing and already identified links: the chain is so made that the process must be reversed. In order to recognize and identify the other links of the chain, in their turn, one must first seize the chain by the "weak link".

 
page 38

Engels, whom Lenin quotes on the point in What is to be Done?, wrote in 1874 in his Preface to The Peasant War that there are three forms of the class struggle. The class struggle has not only an economic form and a political form but also a theoretical form. Or, if you prefer: the same class struggle exists and must therefore be fought out by the proletariat in the economic field, in the political field and in the theoretical field, always under the leadership of its party. When it is fought out in the theoretical field, the concentrated class struggle is called philosophy.
    Now some people will say that all this is nothing but words. But that is not true. These words are weapons in the class struggle in the field of theory, and since this is part of the class struggle as a whole, and since the highest form of the class struggle is the political class struggle, it follows that these words which are used in philosophy are weapons in the political struggle.
    Lenin wrote that "politics is economics in a concentrated form". We can say: philosophy is, in the last instance,[4] the theoretical concentrate of politics. This is a "schematic" formula. No matter! It expresses its meaning quite well, and briefly.
    Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics : in the political class struggle.
    We will show in a moment why that is so.
    Of course, since I cite Engels and Lenin in support of my point, John Lewis will surely say, once again, that I am talking like "the last champion of an orthodoxy in grave difficulties".[5] O.K.! I am the defender of orthodoxy, of that "orthodoxy" which is called the theory of Marx and Lenin. Is this orthodoxy in "grave difficulties"? Yes, it is and has been since it came to birth. And these grave difficulties are the difficulties posed by the threat of bourgeois ideology. John Lewis will say that I am "crying in the wilderness". Is that so? No, it is not!

 
    4. See note 2 above.
    5. I cite the expressions of John Lewis himself.

 
page 39

    For Communists, when they are Marxists, and Marxists when they are Communists, never cry in the wilderness. Even when they are practically alone.
    Why? We shall see.
    I therefore take my stand on this theoretical basis of Marxism -- a basis which is "orthodox" precisely in so far as it is in conformity with the theory of Marx and Lenin. And it is on this basis that I want to take issue both with John Lewis and with my own past errors, on the basis of the need to carry on the class struggle in the field of theory, as Engels and Lenin argued, and on the basis of the definition of philosophy which I am now proposing (in June, 1972): philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.
    I will therefore leave aside all the rather imprudent remarks, some of them "psychological", which John Lewis thought it worth making at the end of his article, about Althusser's "whole style of life and writing". John Lewis is for example very worried, very put out, quite upset -- good "humanist" that he is -- by the fact that Althusser "argues exhaustively and with an extreme dogmatism", in a way which makes him think not so much of the Scholastics, who were great philosophers of the Middle Ages, but of the schoolmen, commentators of commentators, erudite splitters of philosophical hairs, who could not rise above the level of quotation. Thank you! But really, this kind of argument has no place in a debate between Communists in the journal of a Communist Party. I will not follow John Lewis onto this ground.
    I approach John Lewis as a comrade, as a militant of a fraternal party: the Communist Party of Great Britain.
    I will try to speak plainly and clearly, in a way that can be understood by all our comrades.
    So as not to make my reply too long, I will only take up those theoretical questions which are most important, politically speaking, for us today, in 1972.

 
II.
To understand my reply, the reader must obviously know what John Lewis, in his "radical" critique of my

 
page 40

"philosophical writings", essentially holds against me.
    In a few words, we can sum this up as follows. John Lewis holds:
1. that I do not understand Marx's philosophy ;
2. that I do not understand the history of the formation of Marx's thought.
    In short, his reproach is that I do not understand Marxist theory.
    That is his right.
    I will consider these two points in succession.

 
III.
First Point: Althusser does not understand Marx's philosophy.
    To demonstrate this point, John Lewis employs a very simple method. First he sets out Marx's real philosophy, which is Marx as he understands him. Then, beside this, he puts Althusser's interpretation. You just have to compare them, it seems, to see the difference!
    Well, let us follow our guide to Marxist philosophy and see how John Lewis sums up his own view of Marx. He does it in three formulae, which I will call three Theses.[6]

1. Thesis no. 1. "It is man who makes history."

John Lewis's argument : no need of argument, since it is obvious, it is quite evident, everyone knows it.

John Lewis's example : revolution. It is man who makes revolution.

2. Thesis no. 2. "Man makes history by remaking existing history, by 'transcending', through the 'negation of the negation', already made history."

John Lewis's argument : since it is man who makes history,

 
    6. In a Philosophy Course for Scientists (1967, to be published), I proposed the following definition: "Philosophy states propositions which are Theses ". (It therefore differs from the sciences: "A science states propositions which are Demonstrations".)

 
page 41

it follows that in order to make history man must transform the history which he has already made (since it is man who has made history). To transform what one has already made is to "transcend" it, to negate what exists. And since what exists is the history which man has already made, it is already negated history. To make history is therefore "to negate the negation", and so on without end.

John Lewis's example : revolution. To make revolution, man "transcends" ("negates") existing history, itself the "negation" of the history which preceded it, etc.

3. Thesis no. 3. "Man only knows what he himself does."

John Lewis's argument : no argument, probably because of lack of space. So let us work one out for him. He could have taken the case of science and said that the scientist "only knows what he himself does" because he is the one who has to work out his proof, either by experiment or by demonstration (mathematics).

John Lewis's example : no example. So let us provide one. John Lewis could have taken history as an example: man's knowledge of history comes from the fact that he is the one who makes it. This is like the Thesis of Giambattista Vico: verum factum.[7]
    These then are the three Theses which sum up John Lewis's idea of Marx's philosophy:
Thesis no. 1 : It is man who makes history.
Thesis no. 2 : Man makes history by transcending history.
Thesis no. 3 : Man only knows what he himself does.

    This is all very simple. Everyone "understands" the words involved: man, make, history, know. There is only one word which is a bit complicated, a "philosopher's" word: "transcendence", or "negation of the negation". But if he wanted to, John Lewis could say the same thing more simply. Instead of saying: man makes history, in

 
    7. "What is true is what has been done." Marx cites Vico in Capital, in connexion with the history of technology.

 
page 42

transcending it, by the "negation of the negation", he could say that man makes history by "transforming" it, etc. Wouldn't that be more simple?
    But a little difficulty still remains. When John Lewis says that it is man who makes history, everyone understands. Or rather, everyone thinks he understands. But when it is a question of going a bit further in the explanation, when John Lewis honestly asks himself the question: "what is it that man does when he makes history?", then you realize that a nasty problem appears just when everything seemed simple, that there is a nasty obscurity just in the place where everything seemed clear.
    What was obscure? The little word make, in the Thesis that "it is man who makes history". What can this little word make possibly mean, when we are talking about history ? Because when you say: "I made a mistake" or "I made a trip around the world", or when a carpenter says: "I made a table", etc., everyone knows what the term "make" means. The sense of the word changes according to the expression, but in each case we can easily explain what it means.
    For example, when a carpenter "makes" a table, that means he constructs it. But to make history? What can that mean? And the man who makes history, do you know that individual, that "species of individual", as Hegel used to say?
    So John Lewis sets to work. He does not try to avoid the problem: he confronts it. And he explains the thing. He tells us: to "make", in the case of history, that means to "transcend" (negation of the negation), that means to transform the raw material of existing history by going beyond it. So far, so good.
    But the carpenter who "makes" a table, he has a piece of "raw material" in front of him too: the wood. And he transforms the wood into a table. But John Lewis would never say that the carpenter "transcends" the wood in order to "make" a table out of it. And he is right. For if he said that, the first carpenter who came along, and all the other carpenters and all the other working people in the world would send him packing with his "transcendence". John Lewis uses the term "transcendence" (negation of the negation) only

 
page 43

for history. Why? We have to work out the answer, for John Lewis himself does not provide any explanation.
    In my opinion, John Lewis holds on to his "transcendence" for the following reason: because the raw material of history is already history. The carpenter's raw material is wood. But the carpenter who "makes" the table would never say that he was the one who "made" the wood, because he knows very well that it is nature which produces the wood. Before a tree can be cut up and sold as planks, it first has to have grown somewhere in the forest, whether in the same country or thousands of miles away on the other side of the equator.
    Now, for John Lewis it is man who has made the history with which he makes history. In history man produces everything: the result, the product of his "labour", is history: but so is the raw material that he transforms. Aristotle said that man is a two-legged, reasoning, speaking, political animal. Franklin, quoted by Marx in Capital, said that man is a "tool-making" animal. John Lewis says that man is not only a tool-making animal, but an animal which makes history, in the strong sense, because he makes everything. He "makes" the raw material. He makes the instruments of production. (John Lewis says nothing about these -- and for good reason! Because otherwise he would have to talk about the class struggle, and his "man who makes history" would disappear in one flash, together with his whole system.) And he makes the final product: history.
    Do you know of any being under the sun endowed with such a power? Yes -- there does exist such a being in the tradition of human culture: God. Only God "makes" the raw material with which he "makes" the world. But there is a very important difference. John Lewis's God is not outside of the world: the man-god who creates history is not outside of history -- he is inside. This is something infinitely more complicated! And it is just because John Lewis's little human god -- man -- is inside history ("en situation ", as Jean-Paul Sartre used to say) that Lewis does not endow him with a power of absolute creation (when one creates everything, it is relatively easy: there are no limitations!) but with something even more stupefying -- the power of "transcendence", of being able to progress by indefinitely negating-superseding

 
page 44

the constraints of the history in which he lives, the power to transcend history by human liberty.[8]
    John Lewis's man is a little lay god. Like every living being he is "up to his neck" in reality, but endowed with the prodigious power of being able at any moment to step outside of that reality, of being able to change its character. A little Sartrian god, always "en situation " in history, endowed with the amazing power of "transcending" every situation, of resolving all the difficulties which history presents, and of going forward towards the golden future of the human, socialist revolution: man is an essentially revolutionary animal because he is a free animal.
    Please excuse all this if you are not a philosopher. We philosophers are well acquainted with this kind of argument. And we Communist philosophers know that this old tune in philosophy has always had its political consequences.
    The first people who talked about "transcendence" in philosophy were the idealist-religious philosophers of Plato's school: the Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophers. They had an urgent need of the category of "transcendence" in order to be able to construct their philosophical or religious theology, and this theology was then the official philosophy of the slave state. Later, in the Middle Ages, the Augustinian and Thomist theologians took up the same category again and used it in systems whose function was to serve the interests of the Church and feudal state. (The Church is a State Apparatus, and the number one Ideological State Apparatus of the feudal state.) Is there any need to say more?
    Much later, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the notion of "transcendence" received, in Hegelian philosophy, a new function: the same category, but "wrapped" in the veil of the "negation of the negation". This time it served the bourgeois state. It was quite simply the philosophical name for bourgeois liberty. It was then revolutionary in relation to the philosophical systems of feudal "transcen-

 
    8. I do not know John Lewis's personal philosophical history. But I am not sticking my neck out much in betting that he has a weakness for Jean-Paul Sartre. Lewis's "Marxist Philosophy" in fact bears a remarkable resemblance to a copy of Sartrian existentialism, in a slightly Hegelianized form, no doubt designed to make it more acceptable to Communist readers.

 
page 45

dence". But it was one hundred per cent bourgeois, and it stays that way.
    Since that time, Jean-Paul Sartre has taken up the same idea once more, in his theory of man "en situation ": the petty-bourgeois version of bourgeois liberty. And this is to cite only one example, for Sartre is not alone -- "transcendence", in its authoritarian or eschatological form, is still flourishing today among large numbers of theologians, some reactionary, some very progressive, from Germany and Holland to Spain and Latin America. The bourgeois no longer has the same need to believe -- and anyway has for the thirty years since 1940 no longer been able to believe -- that his liberty is all-embracing. But the petty-bourgeois intellectual: he is quite a different kind of animal! The more his liberty is crushed and denied by the development of imperialist capitalism, the more he exalts the power of that liberty ("transcendence", "negation of the negation"). An isolated petty-bourgeois can protest: he does not get very far. When the petty-bourgeois masses revolt, however, they get much further. But their revolt is still limited by the objective conditions of the class struggle, whether it is helped or hindered by them. It is here that petty-bourgeois liberty meets necessity.
    John Lewis now, in 1972, takes up the old arguments in his turn, in the theoretical journal of the British Communist Party. He can, if I may say so, rest assured: he is not "crying in the wilderness"! He is not the only person to take up this theme. He is in the company of many Communists. Everyone knows that. But why should it be that since the nineteen-sixties many Communists have been resurrecting this worn-out philosophy of petty-bourgeois liberty, while still claiming to be Marxists ? We shall see.

 
IV.
But first, I shall follow the procedure used by John Lewis. I shall compare his "Marxist" Theses with the Theses of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. And everyone will be able to compare and judge for himself.

 
page 46

    I will go over the points in John Lewis's order. That way things will be clearer. I am making an enormous concession to him by taking his order, because his order is idealist. But we will do him the favour.

    To understand what follows, note that in the case of each Thesis (1, 2, 3) I begin by repeating Lewis's Thesis and then state the Marxist-Leninist Thesis.

1. THESIS No. 1

John Lewis : "It is man who makes history".
Marxism-Leninism : "It is the masses which make history".
    What is this "man" who "makes" history? A mystery.[9]
    What are the "masses" which make history"? In a class society they are the exploited masses, that is, the exploited social classes, social strata and social categories, grouped around the exploited class capable of uniting them in a movement against the dominant classes which hold state power.
    The exploited class capable of doing this is not always the most exploited class, or the most wretched social "stratum".
    In Antiquity, for example, it was not the slaves (except in a few periods -- Spartacus) who "made" history in the strong, political sense of the term, but the most exploited classes among the "free" men (at Rome, the urban or rural "plebs").[10]
    In the same way, under capitalism the "lumpenproletariat",

 
    9. For us, struggling under the rule of the bourgeoisie, "man" who makes history is a mystery. But this "mystery" did have a sense when the revolutionary bourgeoisie was struggling against the feudal regime which was then dominant. To proclaim at that time, as the great bourgeois Humanists did, that it is man who makes history, was to struggle, from the bourgeois point of view (which was then revolutionary), against the religious Thesis of feudal ideology: it is God who makes history. But we are no longer in their situation. Moreover, the bourgeois point of view has always been idealist as far as history is concerned.
    10. It is not certain -- here I shall have to bow to the judgement of Marxist historians -- that the slave class did not, in spite of everything, quietly but genuinely "make history". The transition from the small-property slave system to the large-scale system at Rome is perhaps significant here.

 
page 47

as Marx called it, groups together the most wretched of men, the "lazarus-layers of the working-class".[11] But it is around the proletariat (the class which is exploited in capitalist production ) that you will find grouped the masses which "make history", which are going to "make history" -- that is, who are going to make the revolution which will break out in the "weakest link" of the world imperialist chain.
    Against John Lewis's Thesis -- it is man who makes history -- Marxism-Leninism has always opposed the Thesis: it is the masses which make history. The masses can be defined. In capitalism, the masses does not mean "the mass " of aristocrats of the "intelligentsia", or of the ideologists of fascism; it means the set of exploited classes, strata and categories grouped around the class which is exploited in large-scale production, the only class which is capable of uniting them and directing their action against the bourgeois state: the proletariat. Compare this with Lewis's Thesis.

2. THESIS No. 2

John Lewis : "Man makes history by 'transcending' history".
Marxism-Leninism :"The class struggle is the motor of history" (Thesis of the Communist Manifesto, 1847).
    Here things become extremely interesting. Because Marxism-Leninism blows up John Lewis's whole philosophical system. How?
    John Lewis said: it is man who makes history. To which Marxism-Leninism replied: it is the masses.
    But if we said no more, if we went no further, we would give the impression that Marxism-Leninism gives a different reply to the same question. That question being: who makes history? This question therefore supposes that history is the result of the action of (what is done by) a subject (who)? For John Lewis, the subject is "man". Does Marxism-Leninism propose a different subject, the masses?

 
    11. Capital, Part VII, Ch. XXV, sec. 4. Excluded from production, without fixed work or completely unemployed, (often) in the street, the sub-proletarians are part of the reserve army, the army of unemployed, which capitalism uses against the workers.

 
page 48

    Yes and no. When we started to sketch out a definition of the masses, when we talked about this idea of the masses, we saw that the whole thing was rather complicated. The masses are actually several social classes, social strata and social categories, grouped together in a way which is both complex and changing (the positions of the different classes and strata, and of the fractions of classes within classes, change in the course of the revolutionary process itself). And we are dealing with huge numbers: in France or Britain, for example, with tens of millions of people, in China with hundreds of millions! Let us do no more here than ask the simple question: can we still talk about a "subject", identifiable by the unity of its "personality"? Compared with John Lewis's subject, "man", as simple and neat as you can imagine, the masses, considered as a subject, pose very exacting problems of identity and identification. You cannot hold such a "subject" in your hand, you cannot point to it. A subject is a being about which we can say: "that's it!". How do we do that when the masses are supposed to be the "subject"; how can we say: "that's it"?
    It is precisely the Thesis of the Communist Manifesto -- "the class struggle is the motor of history" -- that displaces the question, that brings the problem into the open, that shows us how to pose it properly and therefore how to solve it. It is the masses which "make" history, but "it is the class struggle which is the motor of history". To John Lewis' question: "how does man make history?", Marxism-Leninism replies by replacing his idealist philosophical categories with categories of a quite different kind.
    The question is no longer posed in terms of "man". That much we know. But in the proposition that "the class struggle is the motor of history", the question of "making" history is also eliminated. It is no longer a question of who makes history.
    Marxism-Leninism tells us something quite different: that it is the class struggle (new concept) which is the motor (new concept) of history, it is the class struggle which moves history, which advances it: and brings about revolutions. This Thesis is of very great importance, because it puts the class struggle in the front rank.

 
page 49

    In the preceding Thesis: "it is the masses which make history", the accent was put (1) on the exploited classes grouped around the class capable of uniting them, and (2) an their power to carry through a revolutionary transformation of history. It was therefore the masses which were put in the front rank.
    In the Thesis taken from the Communist Manifesto, what is put in the front rank is no longer the exploited classes, etc., but the class struggle. This Thesis must be recognized as decisive for Marxism-Leninism. It draws a radical demarcation line between revolutionaries and reformists. Here I have to simplify things very much, but I do not think that I am betraying the essential point.
    For reformists (even if they call themselves Marxists) it is not the class struggle which is in the front rank: it is simply the classes. Let us take a simple example, and suppose that we are dealing with just two classes. For reformists these classes exist before the class struggle, a bit like two football teams exist, separately, before the match. Each class exists in its own camp, lives according to its particular conditions of existence. One class may be exploiting another, but for reformism that is not the same thing as class struggle. One day the two classes come up against one another and come into conflict. It is only then that the class struggle begins. They begin a hand-to-hand battle, the battle becomes acute, and finally the exploited class defeats its enemy (that is revolution), or loses (that is counter-revolution). However you turn the thing around, you will always find the same idea here: the classes exist before the class struggle, independently of the class struggle. The class struggle only exists afterwards.[12]

 
    12. To clarify this point, this reformist "position" must be related to its bourgeois origins. In his letter to Weydemeyer (5 March 1852), Marx wrote: "No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle of the classes, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes". The thesis of the recognition of the existence of social classes, and of the resulting class struggle is not proper to Marxism-Leninism: for it puts the classes in the front rank, and the class struggle in the second. In this form it is a bourgeois thesis, which reformism naturally feeds on. The Marxist- [cont. onto p. 50. -- DJR] Leninist thesis, on the other hand, puts the class struggle in the front rank. Philosophically, that means: it affirms the primacy of contradiction over the terms of the contradiction. The class struggle is not a product of the existence of classes which exist previous (in law and in fact) to the struggle: the class struggle is the historical form of the contradiction (internal to a mode of production) which divides the classes into classes.

 
page 50

    Revolutionaries, on the other hand, consider that it is impossible to separate the classes from class struggle. The class struggle and the existence of classes are one and the same thing. In order for there to be classes in a "society", the society has to be divided into classes: this division does not come later in the story ; it is the exploitation of one class by another, it is therefore the class struggle, which constitutes the division into classes. For exploitation is already class struggle. You must therefore begin with the class struggle if you want to understand class division, the existence and nature of classes. The class struggle must be put in the front rank.
    But that means that our Thesis 1 (it is the masses which make history ) must be subordinated to Thesis 2 (the class struggle is the motor of history ). That means that the revolutionary power of the masses comes precisely from the class struggle. And that means that it is not enough, if you want to understand what is happening in the world, just to look at the exploited classes. You also have to look at the exploiting classes. Better, you have to go beyond the football match idea, the idea of two antagonistic groups of classes, to examine the basis of the existence not only of classes but also of the antagonism between classes: that is, the class struggle. Absolute primacy of the class struggle (Marx, Lenin). Never forget the class struggle (Mao).
    But beware of idealism! The class struggle does not go on in the air, or on something like a football pitch. It is rooted in the mode of production and exploitation in a given class society. You therefore have to consider the material basis of the class struggle, that is, the material existence of the class struggle. This, in the last instance, is the unity of the relations of production and the productive forces under the relations of production of a given mode of production, in a concrete historical social formation. This

 
page 51

materiality, in the last instance, is at the same time the "base" (Basis : Marx) of the class struggle, and its material existence; because exploitation takes place in production, and it is exploitation which is at the root of the antagonism between the classes and of the class struggle. It is this profound truth which Marxism-Leninism expresses in the well-known Thesis of class struggle in the infrastructure, in the "economy", in class exploitation -- and in the Thesis that all the forms of the class struggle are rooted in economic class struggle. It is on this condition that the revolutionary thesis of the primacy of the class struggle is a materialist one.
    When that is clear, the question of the "subject" of history disappears. History is an immense natural-human system in movement, and the motor of history is class struggle. History is a process, and a process without a subject.[13] The question about how "man makes history" disappears altogether. Marxist theory rejects it once and for all; it sends it back to its birthplace: bourgeois ideology.
    And with it disappears the "necessity" of the concept of "transcendence" and of its subject, man.
    That does not mean that Marxism-Leninism loses sight for one moment of real men. Quite the contrary! It is precisely in order to see them as they are and to free them from class exploitation that Marxism-Leninism brings about this revolution, getting rid of the bourgeois ideology of "man" as the subject of history, getting rid of the fetishism of "man".
    Some people will be annoyed that I dare to speak about the fetishism of "man". I mean those people who interpret Marx's chapter in Capital on "The Fetishism of Commodities" in a particular way, drawing two necessarily complementary idealist conclusions: the condemnation of "reification"[14] and the exaltation of the person. (But the pair of notions person/thing is at the root of every bourgeois ideology!

 
    13. I put this idea forward in a study called "Marx and Lenin before Hegel" (February 1968), published with Lenin and Philosophy, Maspero, Paris, 1972 [English translation in Louis Althusser, Politics and History , NLB, 1972]. For more details, see below the Remark on the Category: "Process without a Subject or Goal(s) ".
    14. Transformation into a thing (res ) of everything which is human, that is, a non-thing (man = non-thing = Person).

 
page 52

Social relations are however not, except for the law and for bourgeois legal ideology, "relations between persons"!). Yet it is the same mechanism of social illusion which is at work -- when you start to think that a social relation is the natural quality, the natural attribute of a substance or a subject. Value is one example: this social relation "appears" in bourgeois ideology as the natural quality, the natural attribute of the commodity or of money. The class struggle is another example: this social relation "appears" in bourgeois ideology as the natural quality, the natural attribute of "man" (liberty, transcendence). In both cases, the social relation is "conjured away": the commodity or gold have natural value; "man" is by nature free, by nature he makes history.
    If John Lewis's "man" disappears, that does not mean that real men disappear. It simply means that, for Marxism-Leninism, they are something quite different from copies (multiplied at will) of the original bourgeois image of "man", a free subject by nature. Have the warnings of Marx been heeded? "My analytical method does not start from man, but from the economically given social period" (Notes on Adolph Wagner's "Textbook" ). "Society is not composed of individuals " (Grundrisse ).
    One thing is certain: one cannot begin with man, because that would be to begin with a bourgeois idea of "man", and because the idea of beginning with man, in other words the idea of an absolute point of departure (= of an "essence") belongs to bourgeois philosophy. This idea of "man" as a starting-point, an absolute point of departure, is the basis of all bourgeois ideology; it is the soul of the great Classical Political Economy itself. "Man" is a myth[15] of bourgeois ideology: Marxism-Leninism cannot start from "man". It starts "from the economically given social period"; and, at the end of its analysis, when it "arrives", it may find real men. These men are thus the point of arrival of an analysis which starts from the social relations of the existing mode

 
    15. The word "man" is not simply a word. It is the place which it occupies and the function which it performs in bourgeois ideology and philosophy that give it its sense.

 
page 53

of production, from class relations, and from the class struggle. These men are quite different men from the "man" of bourgeois ideology.
    "Society is not composed of individuals ", says Marx. He is right: society is not a "combination", an "addition" of individuals. What constitutes society is the system of its social relations in which its individuals live, work and struggle. He is right: society is not made up of individuals in general, in the abstract, just so many copies of "man". Because each society has its own individuals, historically and socially determined. The slave-individual is not the serf-individual nor the proletarian-individual, and the same goes for the individual of each corresponding ruling class. In the same way, we must say that even a class is not "composed" of individuals in general: each class has its own individuals, fashioned in their individuality by their conditions of life, of work, of exploitation and of struggle -- by the relations of the class struggle. In their mass, real men are what class conditions make of them. These conditions do not depend on bourgeois "human nature": liberty. On the contrary: the liberties of men, including the forms and limits of these liberties, and including their will to struggle, depend on these conditions.
    If the question of "man" as "subject of history" disappears, that does not mean that the question of political action disappears. Quite the contrary! This political action is actually given its strength by the critique of the bourgeois fetishism of "man": it is forced to follow the conditions of the class struggle. For class struggle is not an individual struggle, but an organized mass struggle for the conquest and revolutionary transformation of state power and social relations. Nor does it mean that the question of the revolutionary party disappears -- because without it the conquest of state power by the exploited masses, led by the proletariat, is impossible. But it does mean that the "role of the individual in history", the existence, the nature, the practice and the objectives of the revolutionary party are not determined by the omnipotence of "transcendence", that is, the liberty of "man", but by quite different conditions: by the state of the class struggle, by the state of the labour movement, by the ideology of the labour movement (petty-bourgeois or pro-

 
page 54

letarian), and by its relation to Marxist theory, by its mass line and by its mass work.

3. THESIS No. 3

John Lewis : "Man only knows what he himself does ".
Marxism-Leninism : "One can only know what exists " (ce qui est ).
    I am deliberately putting these propositions into such direct opposition: so that everyone can see the difference.
    For John Lewis, "man" only knows what he "does". For dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, one can only know what exists. This is the fundamental Thesis of materialism: "the primacy of being over thought".
    This Thesis is at one and the same time a Thesis about existence, about materiality and about objectivity. It says that one can only know what exists ; that the principle of all existence is materiality ; and that all existence is objective, that is, "prior" to the "subjectivity" which knows it, and independent of that subjectivity.
    One can only know what exists. This Thesis, difficult to understand, and easy to misrepresent, is the basis of all Marxist Theses about knowledge. Marx and Lenin never denied the "activity" of thought, the work of scientific experiment, from the natural sciences to the science of history, whose "laboratory" is the class struggle. Indeed, they insisted on this activity. They even, now and again, said and repeated that certain idealist philosophers (Hegel, for example) had understood this "activity" better, though in "mystified" forms, than certain non-dialectical materialist philosophers. This is where we get to the dialectical Theses of Marxist philosophy, But -- and this is where it differs fundamentally from John Lewis -- Marxism-Leninism has always subordinated the dialectical Theses to the materialist Theses. Take the famous Thesis of the primacy of practice over theory: it has no sense unless it is subordinated to the Thesis of the primacy of being over thought. Otherwise it falls into subjectivism, pragmatism and historicism. It is certainly thanks to practice (of which scientific practice

 
page 55

is the most developed form) that one can know what exists: primacy of practice over theory. But in practice one only ever knows what exists: primacy of being over thought.
    "One can only know what exists." As far as nature is concerned, there ought not to be much problem: who could claim that "man" had "made" the natural world which he knows? Only idealists, or rather only that crazy species of idealists who attribute God's omnipotence to man. Even idealists are not normally so stupid.
    But what about history? We know that the Thesis: "it is man who makes history" has, literally, no sense. Yet a trace of the illusion still remains in the idea that history is easier to understand than nature because it is completely "human". That is Giambattista Vico's idea.
    Well, Marxism-Leninism is categorical on this point: history is as difficult to understand as nature. Or, rather, it is even more difficult to understand. Why? Because "the masses" do not have the same direct practical relation with history as they have with nature (in productive work), because they are always separated from history by the illusion that they understand it. Each ruling exploiting class offers them "its own" explanation of history, in the form of its ideology, which is dominant, which serves its class interests, cements its unity, and maintains the masses under its exploitation.
    Look at the Middle Ages: the Church and its ideologists offered all its flock -- that is to say, primarily the exploited masses, but also the feudal class and itself -- a very simple and clear explanation of history. History is made by God, and obeys the laws, that is, the ends, of Providence. An explanation for the "masses".
    Look at the eighteenth century in France. The situation is different: the bourgeoisie is not yet in power, it is critical and revolutionary. And it offers everyone (without distinction of class! not only to the bourgeoisie and its allies, but also to the masses it exploits) a "clear" explanation of history: history is moved by Reason, and it obeys the laws or follows the ends of Truth, Reason and Liberty. An explanation for the "masses".
    If history is difficult to explain scientifically, it is because

 
page 56

between real history and men there is always a screen, a separation: a class ideology of history in which the human masses "spontaneously" believe: because this ideology is pumped into them by the ruling or ascending class, and serves it in its exploitation. In the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie is already an exploiting class.
    To succeed in piercing this ideological and idealist "smokescreen" of the ruling classes, the special circumstances of the first half of the nineteenth century were required: the experience of the class struggles following the French Revolution (1789, 1830) and the first proletarian class struggles, plus English political economy, plus French socialism. The result of the conjuncture of all these circumstances was Marx's discovery. He was the first to open up the "Continent of History" to scientific knowledge.
    But in history, as in nature, one can only know what exists. The fact that, in order to get to know what really does exist, an enormous amount of scientific work and gigantic practical struggles were necessary, does not disprove the point. One can only know what exists, even if this is changing, under the effect of the material dialectic of the class struggle, even if what exists is only known on condition that it is transformed.
    But we must go further. You will notice that I said that the Marxist-Leninist Thesis is not "man can only know what exists", but: "one can only know what exists".[16] Here too the term "man" has disappeared. We are forced to say in this connexion that scientific history, like all history, is a process without a subject, and that scientific knowledge (even when it is the work of a particular individual scientist, etc.) is actually the historical result of a process which has no real subject or goal(s). That is how it is with Marxist science. It was Marx who "discovered" it, but as the result of a dialectical process, combining German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism, the whole thing based on the struggles between the bourgeoisie and the working class. All Communists know that.

 
    16. I wrote "one can only know what exists", in order not to complicate things. But it might be objected that this impersonal "one" bears the traces of "man". Strictly speaking, we should write: "only what exists can be known ".

 
page 57

    Scientists, in general, do not know it. But if they are prepared to, and if they have enough knowledge of the history of the sciences, Communists can help scientists (including natural scientists and mathematicians) to understand its truth. Because all scientific knowledge, in every field, really is the result of a process without any subject or goal(s). A startling Thesis, one which is doubtless difficult to understand. But it can give us "insights" of a certain importance, not only into scientific work, but also into the political struggle.

 
V.
For all these philosophical Theses, these philosophical positions (Thesis = position) produce effects in the social practices. Among them, effects in political practice and scientific practice.
    But we have to generalize: it is not only the philosophical Theses which we have already discussed that produce these effects, but all philosophical Theses. Because if there is one idea which is popular today -- even among some Marxists -- it is the idea of philosophy as pure contemplation, pure disinterested speculation. Now this dominant idea is actually the very self-interested representation of idealism created by idealism itself. It is a mystification of idealism, necessary to idealism, to represent philosophy as purely speculative, as a pure revelation of Being, Origin and Meaning. Even speculative ideologies, even philosophies which content themselves with "interpreting the world ", are in fact active and practical: their (hidden) goal is to act on the world, on all the social practices, on their domains and their "hierarchy" -- even if only in order to "place them under a spell", to sanctify or modify them, in order to preserve or reform "the existing state of things" against social, political and ideological revolutions or the ideological repercussions of the great scientific discoveries. "Speculative" philosophies have a political interest in making believe that they are disinterested or that they are only "moral", and not really practical and political: this in order to gain their practical ends, in the shadow of the ruling power which they support

 
page 58

with their arguments. Whether this strategy is "conscious" and deliberate or "unconscious" means little: we know that it is not consciousness which is the motor of history, even in philosophy.
    You will remember the definition of philosophy which I proposed above. We can apply this definition to every philosophy: philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.
    If philosophy is class struggle in theory, if it depends in the last instance on politics, then -- as philosophy -- it has political effects: in political practice, in the way in which "the concrete analysis of the concrete situation" is made, in which the mass line is defined, and in which mass work is carried out. But if it is class struggle in the field of theory, then it has theoretical effects: in the sciences, and also within the field of the ideologies. If it is class struggle in the field of theory, it has effects on the union of theory and practice: on the way in which that union is conceived and realized. It therefore has effects, of course, not only in political practice and scientific practice, but also in every social practice,[17] from the "struggle for production" (Mao) to art, etc.[18]
    But I cannot deal with everything here. I will just say that philosophy, as class struggle in the field of theory, has two main effects: in politics and in the sciences, in

 
    17. John Lewis is right to criticize me on this point: philosophy is not only "concerned" with politics and the sciences, but with all social practices.
    18. How are these effects produced? This question is very important. Let us limit ourselves to the following comment: (1) Philosophy is not Absolute Knowledge; it is neither the Science of Sciences, nor the Science of Practices. Which means: it does not possess the Absolute Truth, either about any science or about any practice. In particular, it does not possess the Absolute Truth about, nor power over, political practice. On the contrary, Marxism affirms the primacy of politics over philosophy. (2) But philosophy is nevertheless not "the servant of politics", as philosophy was once "the servant of theology": because of its position in theory, and of its "relative autonomy ". (3) What is at stake in philosophy is the real problems of the social practices. As philosophy is not (a) science, its relation to these problems is not a technical relation of application. Philosophy does not provide formulae to be "applied" to problems: philosophy cannot be applied. Philosophy works in a quite different way: by modifying the position of the problems, by modifying the relation between the practices and their object. I limit myself to stating the principle, which would require a long explanation.

 
page 59

political practice and in scientific practice. Every Communist knows that, or ought to know it, because Marxism-Leninism has never ceased to repeat it and argue for it.
    So let us now set out our schematic "proof", by comparing John Lewis's Theses with the Theses of Marxism-Leninism. That will allow us to show a little more clearly how philosophy "functions".

    John Lewis's Thesis : "It is man who makes history".
    Thesis of Marxism-Leninism : "It is the masses which make history; the class struggle is the motor of history".
    Let us look at the effects of these Theses.

1. Effects in the Field of Science

    When someone, in 1972, defends the idealist Thesis that "it is man who makes history", what effect does that have as far as the science of history is concerned? More precisely: can one make use of it to produce scientific discoveries?
    It is a very regrettable fact, no doubt, but it is in fact no use at all from this point of view. John Lewis himself does not get anything out of it which might help us to see how the class struggle works. You might say that he didn't have the space in a single article. That is perhaps true. So let us turn to his (unavowed) Master, Jean-Paul Sartre, to the philosopher of "human liberty", of man-projecting-himself-into-the-future (John Lewis's transcendence), of man "en situation " who "transcends" his place in the world by the liberty of the "project". This philosopher (who deserves the praise given by Marx to Rousseau: that he never compromised with the powers-that-be) has written two enormous books -- Being and Nothingness (1939), and the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the latter devoted to proposing a philosophy for Marxism. More than two thousand pages. Now, what did Sartre get out of the Thesis: "it is man who makes history"?[19] What did it contribute to the science of history? Did the ingenious developments of the Sartrian positions finally permit the production of a few pieces of scientific

 
    19. Sartre's Theses are obviously more subtle. But John Lewis's version of them, schematic and poor as it is, is not basically unfaithful to them.

 
page 60

knowledge about the economy, the class struggle, the state, the proletariat, ideologies, etc. -- knowledge which might help us to understand history, to act in history? We have, unfortunately, reason to doubt it.
    But then someone is going to say: here is an example which proves just the opposite of your Thesis about the effects of philosophy, because, as you recognize, this "humanist" philosophy has no effect at all on scientific knowledge. Sorry! I claim that Theses like those defended by John Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre really do have such an effect, even though it is a negative one: because they "prevent" the development of existing scientific knowledge. Lenin said the same of the idealist philosophies of his own time. These Theses are an obstacle to the development of knowledge. Instead of helping it to progress, they hold it back. More precisely, they drag knowledge back to the state it was in before the scientific discoveries made by Marx and Lenin. They take us back to a pre-scientific "philosophy of history".
    It is not the first time that this has happened in the history of humanity. For example, half a century after Galileo -- that is, half a century after physics had been founded as a science -- there were still philosophers who defended Aristotelian "physics"! They attacked Galileo's discoveries and wanted to drag knowledge of the natural world back to its pre-scientific Aristotelian state. There are no longer any Aristotelian "physicists"; but the same process can be observed in other fields. For example: there are anti-Freudian "psychologists". And there are anti-Marxist philosophers of history, who carry on as if Marx had never existed, or had never founded a science. They may be personally honest. They may even, like Sartre, want to "help" Marxism and psychoanalysis. But it is not their intentions that count. What count are the real effects of their philosophies in these sciences. The fact is that although he comes after Marx and Freud, Sartre is, paradoxically, in many respects a pre-Marxist and pre-Freudian ideologian from the philosophical point of view. Instead of helping to build on the scientific discoveries of Marx and Freud, he makes a spectacular appearance in the ranks of those whose work does more to hinder Marxist research than to help it.

 
page 61

    That is how, in the end, philosophy "works" in the sciences. Either it helps them to produce new scientific knowledge, or it tries to wipe out these advances and drag humanity back to a time when the sciences did not exist. Philosophy therefore works in the sciences in a progressive or retrogressive way. Strictly speaking, we should say that it tends to act in one way or another -- for every philosophy is always contradictory.[20]
    You can see what is at stake. It is not enough to say that what John Lewis or Sartre says does not help us to produce any scientific knowledge of history. It is not even enough to argue that what they say represents an "epistemological obstacle" (to use Bachelard's term). We are forced to say that their Thesis produces or can produce effects which are extremely harmful to scientific knowledge, retrogressive effects, because instead of helping us, in 1972, to understand the great scientific treasure that we possess in the knowledge given us by Marx, and to develop it,[21] it goes back to zero. It takes us back to the good old days of Descartes, or Kant and Fichte, of Hegel and Feuerbach, to the time before Marx's discovery, before his "epistemological break". This idealist Thesis mixes everything up, and thus it paralyses revolutionary philosophers, theoreticians and militants. It disarms them, because in effect it deprives them of an irreplaceable weapon: the objective knowledge of the conditions, mechanisms and forms of the class struggle.

    If you now look at the Marxist-Leninist Theses -- "it is the masses which make history", "the class struggle is the motor of history" -- the contrast is striking. These Theses do not paralyse research: they are on the side of a scientific understanding of history. They do not wipe out the science of history founded by Marx -- for these two philosophical

 
    20. There is no absolutely pure idealist or materialist philosophy, even if only because every philosophy must, in order to take up its own theoretical class positions, surround those of its principal adversary. But one must learn to recognize the dominant tendency which results from its contradictions, and masks them.
    21. Lenin said: Marx has given us the "corner-stones" of a theory which we must "develop in every direction".

 
page 62

Theses are at the same time proven propositions of the science of history, of historical materialism.[22]
    These Theses, then, take account of the existence of the science of history. But at the same time they help the working out of new concepts, of new scientific discoveries. For example, they lead us to define the masses which make history -- in class terms. For example, they lead us to define the form of union between the classes which make up the masses. As far as the class struggle under capitalism is concerned, they put the question of taking state power, the long transition (to communism) and the proletariat in the forefront. For example, they cause us to conceive the unity of the class struggle and of class division, and all their consequences, in the material forms of exploitation and of the division and organization of labour, and therefore to study and come to understand these forms. For example, they lead us to define the proletariat as a class whose conditions of exploitation render it capable of directing the struggle of all the oppressed and exploited classes, and to understand the proletarian class struggle as a form of class struggle without precedent in history, inaugurating a "new practice of politics",[23] which is the secret of many still enigmatic or evaded questions.
    The theoretical consequences of these questions are obvious. They force us above all to break with the bourgeois -- that is, the economist conception -- of political economy ("criticized" as such by Marx in Capital ), with the bourgeois conception of the state, of politics, of ideology, of culture, etc. They prepare the ground for new research and new discoveries, some of which might cause a few surprises.
    On the one side, then, we have idealist philosophical Theses which have theoretically retrograde effects on the science of history. On the other side we have materialist philosophical Theses which have theoretically progressive effects in the existing fields of the Marxist science of history, and which can have revolutionary effects in those fields

 
    22. The fact that scientific propositions may also, in the context of a philosophical debate, "function philosophically" is worthy of thought.
    23. Cf. Etienne Balibar, "La Rectification du Manifeste communiste ", La Pensée, August 1972.

 
page 63

which have not yet been really grappled with by the science of history (for example in the history of the sciences, of art, of philosophy, etc.).
    This is what is at stake as far as the class struggle in the theoretical field is concerned.

2. Political effects

I think that, as far as political effects are concerned, things are rather clear.
    How could one carry on the class struggle on the basis of the philosophical Thesis: "it is man who makes history"? It might be said that this Thesis is useful in fighting against a certain conception of "History": history in submission to the decisions of a Deity or to the Ends of Providence. But, speaking seriously, that is no longer the problem!
    It might be said that this Thesis serves everyone, without distinction, whether he be a capitalist, a petty-bourgeois or a worker, because these are all "men". But that is not true. It serves those whose interest it is to talk about "man" and not about the masses, about "man" and not about classes and the class struggle. It serves the bourgeoisie, above all; and it also serves the petty-bourgeoisie. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx wrote: "The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to [human] labour".[24] Why? Because by making "men" think that "labour is the source of all wealth and all culture", the bourgeoisie can keep quiet about the power of "nature ", about the decisive importance of the natural, material conditions of human labour. And why does the bourgeoisie want to keep quiet about the natural-material conditions of labour? Because it controls them. The bourgeoisie knows what it is doing.
    If the workers are told that "it is men who make history", you do not have to be a great thinker to see that, sooner or later, that helps to disorient or disarm them. It tends

 
    24. Marx's emphasis. Marx was therefore criticizing the formula of the socialist John Lewises of his time, inscribed in the Unity Programme of the German Social-Democratic Party and Lassalle's Party: "Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture ".

 
page 64

to make them think that they are all-powerful as men, whereas in fact they are disarmed as workers in the face of the power which is really in command: that of the bourgeoisie, which controls the material conditions (the means of production) and the political conditions (the state) determining history. The humanist line turns the workers away from the class struggle, prevents them from making use of the only power they possess: that of their organization as a class and their class organizations (the trade unions, the party), by which they wage their class struggle.
    On the one hand, therefore, we have a philosophical Thesis which, directly or indirectly, serves the political interests of the bourgeoisie, even inside the labour movement (that is called reformism), and even within "Marxist" theory (that is called revisionism), with all the consequent political effects.
    On the other hand we have Theses which directly help the working class to understand its role, its conditions of existence, of exploitation and of struggle, which help it to create organizations which will lead the struggle of all exploited people to seize state power from the bourgeoisie.
    Need I say more?
    None of this is affected by the fact that these bourgeois or petty-bourgeois Theses are defended, in 1972, by a militant of a Communist Party. Read chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto. You will see that in 1847 Marx distinguished three kinds of socialism: reactionary (feudal, petty-bourgeois, humanist [25]) socialism, conservative or bourgeois socialism, and critical-utopian socialism and communism. You have the choice! Read the great polemical writings of Engels and Lenin about the influence of bourgeois ideology in the workers' parties (reformism, revisionism). You have the choice!
    What we want to know now is how, after so many solemn warnings and so. many testing experiences, it is possible for a Communist -- John Lewis -- to present his "Theses" as Marxist.
    We shall see.

 
    25. Then called "True" or "German" socialism.

 
page 65

VI.
So as not to hold things up, I will be brief in dealing with John Lewis's second reproach: that "Althusser" does not understand anything of the history of the formation of Marx's thought.
    Here I must make my self-criticism, and give way to John Lewis on one precise point.
    In my first essays, I suggested that after the "epistemological break" of 1845 (after the discovery by which Marx founded the science of history) the philosophical categories of alienation and the negation of the negation (among others) disappear. John Lewis replies that this is not true. And he is right. You certainly do find these concepts (directly or indirectly) in the German Ideology, in the Grundrisse (two texts which Marx never published) and also, though more rarely (alienation) or much more rarely (negation of the negation: only one explicit appearance) in Capital.
    On the other hand John Lewis would have a hard job finding these concepts in the Communist Manifesto, in the Poverty of Philosophy, in Wage Labour and Capital, in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme or in the Notes on Wagner's Textbook. And this is to cite only some of Marx's texts. As far as the political texts are concerned -- and this of course is equally true of the texts of Lenin,[26] Gramsci or Mao -- well, he can always try!
    But in any case, formally speaking John Lewis is right. And so, even if his argument in fact depends on leaving aside all the texts which could bother him, I must reply.
    Here, in a few words, is my reply.

1. If you look at the whole of Marx's work, there is no doubt that there does exist a "break" of some kind in 1845. Marx says so himself. But of course no one should be believed simply on his word, not even Marx. You have to judge on the evidence. Nevertheless, the whole work of Marx

 
    26. He can certainly cite Engels's use of the negation of the negation in Anti-Dühring -- which can be found in Lenin's What the "Friends of the People" Are. But it is a rather "peculiar" defence: an anti-Hegelian one.

 
page 66

shows him to be right on this point. In 1845 Marx began to lay down the foundations of a science which did not exist before he came along: the science of history. And in order to do that he set out a number of new concepts which cannot be found anywhere in his humanist works of youth: mode of production, productive forces, relations of production, infrastructure-superstructure, ideologies, etc. No one can deny that.
    If John Lewis still doubts the reality of this "break", or rather -- since the "break" is only the effect -- of this irruption of a new science in a still "ideological" or pre-scientific universe, he should compare two judgements made by Marx on Feuerbach and Proudhon.
    Feuerbach is described in the 1844 Manuscripts as a philosopher who has made extraordinary discoveries, who has discovered both the basis and the principle of the critique of political economy! But a year later, in the Theses on Feuerbach, and in the German Ideology, he is object of an all-out attack. After that he simply disappears.
    Proudhon is described in the Holy Family (end of 1844) as someone who "does not simply write in the interest of the proletariat, but is himself a proletarian, a worker. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat."[27] But in 1847, in the Poverty of Philosophy, he gets a hiding from which he will never recover. After that he simply disappears.
    If, as John Lewis says, nothing really happened in 1845, and if everything that I have said about the "epistemological break" is "a complete myth", then I'll be hung for it.

2. So something irreversible really does start in 1845: the "epistemological break" is a point of no return. Something begins which will have no end.[28] A "continuing break", I wrote, the beginning of a long period of work, as in every other science. And although the way ahead is open, it is difficult and sometimes even dramatic, marked by events -- theoretical events (additions, rectifications, corrections) --

 
    27. The Holy Family, English translation, Moscow 1956.
    28. Lenin speaking of the study of imperialism: "This study is only beginning, and it is without an end, by its very nature, like science in general". (The Collapse of the Second International.)

 
page 67

which concern the scientific knowledge of a particular object: the conditions, the mechanisms and the forms of the class struggle. In simpler terms, the science of history.
    We can say, then, that this science does not emerge, ready-made, from Marx's head. It merely has its beginning in 1845, and has not yet got rid of all its past -- of all the ideological and philosophical prehistory out of which it has emerged. There is nothing astonishing in the fact that for some time it continues to contain ideological notions or philosophical categories which it will later get rid of.
    We can also say: look at Marx's texts, look at the birth and development of his scientific concepts, and -- since John Lewis insists on talking about them -- you will at the same time see the gradual disappearance of these two philosophical categories inherited from the past and still subsisting as remnants, known as alienation and the negation of the negation. Now in fact, the more we advance in time, the more these categories disappear. Capital speaks only once of the negation of the negation in explicit terms. It is true that Marx several times uses the term "alienation". But all that disappears in Marx's later texts and in Lenin. Completely.[29] We could therefore simply say: what is important is the tendency : and Marx's scientific work does tend to get rid of these philosophical categories.

3. But this is not sufficient. And here is my self-criticism.
    I was not attentive enough to the fact which John Lewis points out, that is, to the fact of the continuing presence of the said philosophical categories after the "epistemological break". And that was because I identified the "epistemological ( = scientific ) break" with Marx's philosophical revolution. More precisely, I did not separate Marx's philosophical revolution from the "epistemological break", and I therefore talked about philosophy as if it were science, and quite logically wrote that in 1845 Marx made a double break, scientific and philosophical.

 
    29. One really must be short of arguments to have to use, as a proof of Lenin's "humanist philosophy", a few lines from The German Ideology (1844) which Lenin copied into his notebook! John Lewis is obviously not worried about gaining the reputation of "schoolman" himself.

 
page 68

    That was a mistake. It is an example of the theoreticist ( = rationalist-speculative) deviation which I denounced in the brief self-criticism contained in the Preface to the Italian edition of Reading Capital (1967), reproduced in the English edition.[30] Very schematically, this mistake consists in thinking that philosophy is a science, and that, like every science, it has: (1) an object ; (2) a beginning (the "epistemological break" occurs at the moment when it looms up in the pre-scientific, ideological cultural universe); and (3) a history (comparable to the history of a science). This theoreticist error found its clearest and purest expression in my formula: Philosophy is "Theory of theoretical practice".[31]
    Since that time, I have begun to "put things right". In a philosophy course for scientists, dating from 1967, and then in Lenin and Philosophy (February 1968), I put forward other propositions:

1. Philosophy is not (a) science.
2. Philosophy has no object, in the sense in which a science has an object.
3. Philosophy has no history, in the sense in which a science has a history.
4. Philosophy is politics in the field of theory.

    What are the consequences?

1. It is impossible to reduce philosophy to science, and (it is impossible to reduce Marx's philosophical revolution to the "epistemological break".
2. Marx's philosophical revolution preceded Marx's "epistemological break". It made the break possible.
    One can of course put forward serious arguments to the effect that there is a sense in which philosophy, as Hegel said, and as I repeated in Lenin and Philosophy, always

 
    30. And in the edition of Reading Capital published in the Petite Collection Maspero, 1968, vol. 1.
    31. The corrections which I later made to this formula (for example: Philosophy is "Theory of theoretical practice in its distinction from the other practices", or "Theory of the processes of the production of knowledge", or " . . . of the material and social conditions of the processes of production of knowledge", etc., in For Marx and Reading Capital ) do not touch the root of this error.

 
page 69

"lags behind" science or the sciences. But from another point of view, which is important here, one has to say the opposite, and argue that in the history of Marx's thought the scientific breakthrough is based on the philosophical revolution, which gives the breakthrough its form: that of a revolutionary science.
    In the case of other sciences, we often lack evidence and proof of what happened. But in the case of Marx, we are able to say that while both the philosophical revolution and the epistemological break take place "at the same time", the scientific break is based on the philosophical revolution.
    In practical terms, that means the following. The young Marx, born of a good bourgeois family in the Rhineland, entered public life as editor of a liberal newspaper of the same land. That was in 1841. A young and brilliant intellectual, he was, within three or four years, to undergo an astonishing evolution in politics. He was to pass from radical bourgeois liberalism (1841-42) to petty-bourgeois communism (1843-44), then to proletarian communism (1844-45). These are incontestable facts. But parallel to this political evolution you can observe an evolution in philosophy. In philosophy, over the same period, the young Marx was to pass from a position of subjective neo-Hegelianism (of a Kant-Fichte type) to theoretical humanism (Feuerbach), before rejecting this to pass over to a philosophy which would no longer merely "interpret" the world: a completely new, materialist-revolutionary philosophy.
    If you now compare Marx's political evolution with his philosophical evolution, you will see:

1. that his philosophical evolution is based on his political evolution; and
2. that his scientific discovery (the "break") is based on his philosophical evolution.
    That means, in practice, that it is because the young Marx had "settled accounts" with his previous philosophical consciousness (1845), because he had finally abandoned his bourgeois liberal and petty-bourgeois revolutionary positions to adopt (even if only in principle, at a moment when he was letting go the ropes) new revolutionary-proletarian class positions in theory, it was because of all this that

 
page 70

he was able to lay down the foundations of the scientific theory of history as history of the class struggle. In principle : because the process of recognizing and occupying these new positions in theory needed time. Time, in a ceaseless struggle to contain the pressure of bourgeois philosophy.

4. On the basis of these points it should be possible to account for the intermittent survival of categories like those of alienation and of the negation of the negation. Note that I talk about intermittent survival. For alongside their tendency to disappear in Marx's work, considered as a whole, there is a strange phenomenon which must be accounted for: their total disappearance in certain works, then their subsequent reappearance. For example, the two categories in question are absent from the Communist Manifesto as well as from the Poverty of Philosophy (published by Marx in 1847). They seem to be hidden in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (which he published in 1859). But there are many references to alienation in the Grundrisse (preparatory notes made by Marx in the years 1857-58, and which he did not publish ). We know, because of a letter sent to Engels, that Marx had "by chance" re-read Hegel's Logic in 1858 and had been fascinated by it. In Capital (1867) alienation comes up again, but much more rarely, and the negation of the negation appears just once. And so on.[32]

 
    32. One must be careful with philosophical categories taken one by one : for it is less their name than their function in the theoretical apparatus in which they operate that decides their "nature". Is a particular category idealist or materialist? In many cases we have to reply with Marx's answer: "That depends". But there are limit-cases. For example, I do not really see that one can expect anything positive from the category of the negation of the negation, which contains within it an irreparable idealist charge. On the other hand it seems to me that the category of alienation can render provisional services, given a double and absolute condition: (1) that it be "cut" from every philosophy of "reification" (or of fetishism, or of self-objectivization) which is only an anthropological variant of idealism; and (2) that alienation is understood as secondary to the concept of exploitation. On this double condition, the category of alienation can, in the first instance (since it disappears in the final result) help to avoid a purely economic, that is, economist conception of surplus-value : it can help to introduce the idea that, in exploitation, surplus-value is inseparable from the concrete and material forms in which it is extorted. [cont. onto p. 71. -- DJR] A number of texts from the Grundrisse and from Capital go, in my opinion, in this sense. But I know that others go in a different and much more ambiguous sense.

 
page 71

    However that might be, and without anticipating other studies which must be made if the contradictory dialectic of Marx's development and the elaboration of his work is to be understood, one fact is clear. The Marxist science of history did not progress in a simple straight line, according to the classic rationalist scheme, without problems or internal conflicts, and under its own power, from the moment of the "point of no return" -- the "epistemological break". There certainly is a "point of no return", but in order not to be forced to retreat, it is necessary to advance -- and to advance, how many difficulties and struggles there are! For if it is true that Marx had to pass over to proletarian class positions in theory in order to found the science of history, he did not make that leap all at once, once and for all, for ever. It was necessary to work out these positions, to take them up over and against the enemy. The philosophical battle continued within Marx himself, in his work: around the principles and concepts of the new revolutionary science, which was one of the stakes of the battle. Marxist science only gained its ground little by little, in theoretical struggle (class struggle in theory), in close and constant relation to the class struggle in the wider sense. This struggle lasted all of Marx's life. It continued after his death, in the labour movement, and it is still going on today. A struggle without an end.
    It is therefore possible to understand, at least in principle, the partial disappearance and reappearance of certain categories in Marx's work as indicative of survivals of old ideas or attempts to work out new ones, of advances and retreats in the long dual struggle to take up class positions in theoretical work and to found the science of history.
    When I said that it was the "epistemological break" which was primary, and when I said that it was at the same time a philosophical "break", I therefore made two mistakes. In the case of Marx it is the philosophical revolution which is primary -- and this revolution is not a "break". The theoretical terminology itself is important here: if one can legitimately

 
page 72

keep the term "break" to denote the beginning of the science of history, the clear effect of its irruption in the cultural universe, the point of no return, one cannot employ the same term in talking about philosophy. In the history of philosophy, as in very long periods of the class struggle, one cannot really talk about a point of no return. So I shall use the term: philosophical "revolution" (in the strong sense in Marx's case). This expression is more correct: for -- to evoke once again the experiences and terms of the class struggle -- we all know that a revolution is always open to attacks, to retreats and reverses, and even to the risk of counter-revolution.
    Nothing in philosophy is radically new, for the old Theses, taken up again in new form, survive and return in a new philosophy. Nor is anything ever settled definitively : there is always the struggle of antagonistic tendencies, there are always "come-backs", and the oldest philosophies are always ready to mount an offensive disguised in modern -- even the most revolutionary -- trappings. Why?
    Because philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory. Because the revolutionary classes are always opposed by the old conservative and reactionary ruling classes, who will never give up their ambition for revenge, even when they no longer hold state power. According to the state of affairs, these classes will either defend their power or, if they have lost power, they will try to regain it, using among other things the arguments of such-and-such a philosophy: that which serves them best politically and ideologically, even if it comes out of the depths of history. It only has to be done up a bit and given a modern coat of paint. Philosophical Theses, in the end, have "no age". That is the sense in which I took up Marx's comment in the German Ideology that "philosophy has no history".
    In practice, when the state of the class struggle enables it to put on enough pressure, bourgeois ideology can penetrate Marxism itself. The class struggle in the field of theory is not just a phrase: it is a reality, a terrible reality. Without understanding that, it is impossible to understand either the dramatic history of the formation of Marx's thought

 
page 73

or the "grave difficulties" which even today, in 1972, weigh on the "orthodoxy" defended by a certain number of Communists.
    The dramatic history of Marx and of his thought can be reduced, if we follow John Lewis, to a peaceful and problem-free university career! A certain Marx appears on the literary and philosophical scene. Quite naturally, he begins to talk about politics in the Communist Manifesto, then about economics in Capital. He founds and directs the First International, opposes the insurrection in Paris, then in the space of two months, takes a firm stand on the side of the Paris Commune. He wages a battle to the death against the anarchists and followers of Proudhon, etc., etc. All this without the hint of a problem, of a drama, aside from all the assaults of the struggle, with no regard to the difficulties, the questions, all the torments of the search for "truth" in that struggle itself. Like a good bourgeois intellectual, as well installed in his thought as he is in the comfort of his existence, Marx, in this view, always thought the same thing, without any revolution or "break" in his thinking: he always taught that "man makes history", by the "negation of the negation", etc. I think I am justified in saying here that only someone who has no experience of the class struggle, including class struggle in the field of theory -- or even simply of the way in which scientific research is done -- could argue such nonsense, and thus insult the life and sufferings not only of Marx himself but of all Communists (and also of all those scientists who succeed in finding something out ). Now, not only did Marx "find something out" (and at what risk, and of what importance!), but he was also a leader of the labour movement for thirty-five years. He always did his thinking and his "investigating" in and through the struggle.
    The whole history of the labour movement is marked by endless crises, dramas and struggles. There is no need for me to go over them here. But as far as philosophy is concerned, we ought at least to mention the great struggles of Engels and Lenin against the intervention of the idealism of Dühring and of Bernstein, both of them declared neo-Kantians and humanists, whose theoretical revisionism

 
page 74

covered their political reformism and political revisionism.
    John Lewis would do well to re-read the first pages of What is to be Done? In this text a petty-bourgeois intellectual named Lenin is defending Marx's "orthodoxy", which is "in grave difficulties". With "extreme dogmatism" (I use Lewis's terms). Yes, Lenin declared himself proud to be attacked as a "dogmatist" by the international coalition of "critical" revisionists, with the "English Fabians" and "French Ministerialists" at their head! (I am quoting Lenin.) Yes, Lenin declared himself proud to defend this old problem-ridden "orthodoxy", the orthodoxy of Marx's teaching. Yes, he thought it was "in grave difficulties". The cause: reformism and revisionism!
    Some Communists, today, are thinking and doing the same. There certainly are not too many of them.
    That is how things are. Why? We shall see.

 
VII.
We have to answer two questions.

1. Why are there Communists like John Lewis (and there are quite a lot of them) who, in 1972, can openly argue in Communist journals for a philosophy which they call Marxist, but which is in fact simply a variant of bourgeois idealism?

2. Why are the Communist philosophers who defend Marx's philosophy so few in number?
    To answer these two questions, which are really one and the same, we must -- all apologies to John Lewis -- briefly enter the field of political history.
    I have made the basic points in For Marx. But John Lewis does not seem to have read the political pages of For Marx. John Lewis is a pure spirit.
    And yet I was rather clear in explaining that the articles collected in For Marx had to be considered as a philosophical intervention in a political and ideological conjuncture dominated by the Twentieth Congress and the "split" in the International Communist Movement.[33] The fact that

 
    33. Cf. the Introduction to For Marx.

 
page 75

I was able to make such an intervention is a consequence of the Twentieth Congress.
    Before the Twentieth Congress it was actually not possible for a Communist philosopher, certainly in France, to publish texts which would be (at least to some extent) relevant to politics, which would be something other than a pragmatist commentary on consecrated formulae. That is the good side of the Twentieth Congress, for which we must be grateful. From that time on it was possible to publish such texts. The French Party, to take only one example, explicitly recognized (at the Argenteuil Central Committee meeting in 1966) the right of party members to carry out and publish their philosophical research.
    But the "criticism of Stalin's errors" was formulated at the Twentieth Congress in terms such that there inevitably followed what we must call an unleashing of bourgeois ideological and philosophical themes within the Communist Parties themselves. This was the case above all among Communist intellectuals, but it also touched certain leaders and even certain leaderships. Why?
    Because the "criticism of Stalin's errors" (some of which -- and rather a lot -- turned out to be crimes) was made in a non-Marxist way.
    The Twentieth Congress criticized and denounced the "cult of personality" (the cult in general, personality in general . . . ) and summed up Stalin's "errors" in the concept of "violation of Socialist legality ". The Twentieth Congress therefore limited itself to denouncing certain facts about what went on in the legal superstructure, without relating them -- as every Marxist analysis must do -- firstly, to the rest of the Soviet superstructure (above all, the state and party), and secondly, to the infrastructure, namely the relations of production, class relations and the forms of the class struggle in the USSR.[34]

 
    34. Lenin: "In theory there is undoubtedly a certain period of transition between capitalism and communism. It must necessarily combine the traits or particularities of these two economic structures of society. This transitory period can only be a period of struggle between the death agony of capitalism and the birth of communism, or, in other terms: between vanquished, but not yet eliminated capitalism, and already born, but still weak communism. [cont. onto p. 76. -- DJR] [. . .] Classes remain and will remain in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. [. . .] Classes remain, but each class has undergone a change in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the relations between the classes have also changed. The class struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the proletariat, it simply takes other forms" (Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat ).

 
page 76

    Instead of relating the "violations of socialist legality" to: 1. the state, plus the party, and: 2. the class struggle, the Twentieth Congress instead related them to . . . the "cult of personality". That is, it related them to a concept which, as I pointed out in For Marx, cannot be "found" in Marxist theory. I now venture to say that it can perfectly well be "found" elsewhere: in bourgeois philosophy and psycho-sociological ideology.
    If you take Communist philosophers and other Communist "intellectuals" and set them officially on a bourgeois ideological and philosophical line, in order to "criticize" a regime under which they (among others) have suffered deeply, you must not be surprised when the same Communist philosophers and intellectuals quite naturally take the road of bourgeois philosophy. It has been opened up right in front of them! You must not be surprised when they make up their own little bourgeois Marxist philosophy of the Rights of Man, exalting Man and his Rights, the first of which is liberty, whose reverse is alienation. It is quite natural for them to lean on Marx's early works -- that is what they are there for -- and then on humanism in all its forms! Shall it be Garaudy's socialist humanism, the pure humanism of John Lewis, the "true" or "real" socialism of others, or even (why not?) "scientific" humanism itself? Between these different varieties of the philosophy of human liberty, each philosopher can of course freely take his choice! All that is perfectly normal.
    Having said that, we must add that it is important not to mix things up which, politically speaking, ought not to be confused, things which are quite different from one another. The humanist reactions of western Communist theoreticians, and even of some from eastern Europe, are one thing. It would however be an extremely serious political mistake, for example, to claim to judge and condemn -- on account of an adjective ("human") -- something like the

 
page 77

slogan "socialism with a human face ", a slogan under which the Czech masses let everyone know -- even if the form was sometimes confused -- about their class and national grievances and aspirations. It would be an extremely serious political mistake to confuse this national mass movement, this important historical fact, with the humanist pedantry of our western, sometimes Communist philosophers (or of such-and-such a philosopher of eastern Europe). There were intellectuals in the Czech national mass movement, but it was not a "movement of intellectuals". What the Czech people wanted was socialism, and not humanism. It wanted a socialism whose face (not the body: the body does not figure in the formula) would not be disfigured by practices unworthy both of itself (the Czech people: a people of a high political culture) and of socialism. A socialism with a human face. The adjective is in the right place. The national mass movement of the Czech people, even if it is no longer to be heard of (and the struggle is nevertheless still going on) merits the respect and support of all Communists. Exactly as the "humanist" philosophies of western intellectuals (at ease in their academic chairs or wherever), the philosophies of "Marxist humanism", whether they are called "true" or "scientific," merit the criticism of all Communists.
    It is for all the reasons outlined above, then, that there are cases like John Lewis in the western Communist Parties -- and that there are rather a lot of them.
    It is for the same reasons that, in these parties, there exists a certain number of Communist philosophers who are fighting against a certain current -- and that there are rather few of them.
    And it is for these reasons -- directly political reasons -- that I want to repeat my thanks to Marxism Today, journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, for accepting to publish my reply.

Paris, July 4, 1972 

 
page 78

 
Note on "The
Critique of the
Personality Cult"

 



Not for one moment does the idea strike John Lewis that "philosophy is as close to politics as the lips are to the teeth", that, "in the last instance", what is at stake -- indirectly, but also very directly -- where philosophical Theses are concerned is always a number of political problems or arguments of real history, and that every philosophical text (including his own) is "in the last instance" also a political intervention in the theoretical conjuncture as well as, through one of its effects, today the main effect, a theoretical intervention in the political conjuncture. Not for a moment does the idea strike him of wondering about the political conjuncture in which my texts (and his own) were written, about what theoretical-political "effects" I had in mind when thinking them out and publishing them, about the framework of theoretical argument and political conflicts in which the enterprise was undertaken, or about the reactions it caused.
    I am not expecting John Lewis to have a detailed knowledge of French political and philosophical history, of the struggle of ideas (even unimportant or erroneous ideas) within the French Communist Party since the war, and especially between 1960 and 1965. But all the same! Communists have a history in common: a long, difficult, happy and unhappy history, one which to a large extent is linked to the Third International, itself dominated since the thirties by Stalin's political "line" and leadership. We have a common past, as Communists, in the Popular Fronts, the Spanish War, the Second War and the anti-fascist resistance, and the Chinese Revolution. But we also have Lysenko's "science",

 
page 79

which was no more than ideology, and a few formulae and slogans which were claimed to be "scientific" but were no more than "ideological", and which concealed very strange practices.[1] We all share, as Communists, a past which includes Khrushchev's "criticism of the personality cult" at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party, and the ordeal of the split in the International Communist Movement. We have the Chinese Cultural Revolution in common, whatever we think of it, and May '68 in France. A few ups and downs, in short, from which one ought to be able to abstract so as to "talk philosophy" between Communists in 1972. . .
    It is not too serious a matter. Because one day we really shall have to try and call things by their name, and to do that, as Marxists, we have to look for that name ; I mean the right concept (even if we have to do it while we advance), so that we can come to understand our own history. Our history is not like a peaceful stream flowing between secure banks, its course marked out in advance, any more than Marx's own history was, or the tragic and glorious history of the first two decades of the century. Even if we do not go back so far, even if we only speak of the recent past -- whose memory, whose shadow even, still reaches over us today -- no one can deny that for thirty years we lived through a period of ordeals, heroism and dramas under the domination of a political line and political practices which, for lack of a concept, we have to call by a proper name: that of Stalin. Do we quite simply leave all this behind as a consequence of Stalin's death and on the strength (and through the effects) of a little phrase: "the personality cult," pronounced at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the "last word" (in every possible sense) in the affair? I wrote, during the 1960s, in a

 
    1. A few examples, remaining at the theoretical level: the economist evolutionism of Stalin's Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism; the conjuring away of the historical role of Trotsky and others in the Bolshevik Revolution (Short History of the CPSU [B]); the thesis of the sharpening of the class struggle under socialism; the formula: "everything depends on the cadres", etc. Among ourselves: the thesis of "bourgeois science/proletarian science", the thesis of "absolute pauperization", etc.

 
page 80

philosophical text which John Lewis has right in front of him, that the concept of the "personality cult" was a concept which "cannot be found in Marxist theory ", that it had no value in terms of knowledge, that it explained nothing and left us in the dark. This was quite clear: it still is.
    "A concept which cannot be found in Marxist theory." This must be recognized. In the form in which it was put forward and used, both theoretically and politically, the concept of the "personality cult" was not simply the name of something: it did not satisfy itself with simply pointing out the facts (the "abuses", the "violations of Soviet legality"). It claimed at the same time -- this was openly stated -- theoretical pretensions: it was supposed to give an account of the "essence" of the facts which it revealed. And this is how it was used politically.
    Now this pseudo-concept, the circumstances of whose solemn and dramatic pronouncement are well known, did indeed expose certain practices: "abuses", "errors", and in certain cases "crimes". But it explained nothing of their conditions, of their causes, in short of their internal determination, and therefore of their forms.[2] Yet since it claimed to explain what in fact it did not explain, this pseudo-concept could only mislead those whom it was supposed to instruct. Must we be even more explicit? To reduce the grave events of thirty years of Soviet and Communist history to this pseudo-explanation by the "cult" was not and could not have been a simple mistake, an oversight of an intellectual hostile to the practice of divine worship: it was, as we all know, a political act of responsible leaders, a certain one-sided way of putting forward the problems, not of what is vulgarly called "Stalinism", but of what must, I think, be

 
    2. For Marxism the explanation of any phenomenon is in the last instance internal: it is the internal "contradiction" which is the "motor". The external circumstances are active: but "through" the internal contradiction which they overdetermine. Why the need to be precise on this question? Because certain Communists, finding the "explanation" in terms of the "cult" inadequate, thought of the idea of adding a supplement, which could only be external: for example, the explanation by capitalist encirclement, whose reality no one can deny. Marxism, however, does not like supplements: when you need a supplement too much, you have probably missed the internal cause.

 
page 81

called (unless one objects to thinking about it) by the name of a concept: provisionally, the "Stalinian" deviation.[3] And, at the same time, it was a certain way of not posing the problems. More precisely, it was (and still is) a way of seeking the causes of grave events and of their forms in certain defects of the functioning of the legal superstructure ("violations of socialist legality"), without (even in the form of a hypothesis!) looking into the whole of the State Apparatuses constituting the Superstructure (the Repressive Apparatus, the Ideological Apparatuses, including the Party), and above all without getting to the root of the problem (one which was so serious and lasted so long): the contradictions of the construction of socialism and of its line, that is, without dealing with the existing forms of production relations, class relations and the class struggle, the last of which is then said -- in a formula which has not yet been withdrawn -- to have been "transcended" in the U.S.S.R. Yet this is where the internal causes of the facts of the "cult" must be sought -- at the risk of finding other facts.
    Of course, it is not true that everything is always connected with everything else -- this is not a Marxist thesis and one does not need to invoke the whole infrastructure and superstructure to sort out a simple legal detail, if it is only a detail,

 
    3. The term "Stalinism", which the Soviet leaders have avoided using, but which was widely used by bourgeois ideologians and the Trotskyists, before penetrating into Communist circles, offers in general the same "disadvantages" as the term "personality cult". It designates a reality which innumerable Communists, above all, have experienced, either in direct and tragic form, or less directly and with more or less serious consequences. Now this terminology also has theoretical pretensions: among bourgeois ideologists and many Trotskyists. It explains nothing. To set out on the road of a Marxist explanation, to be able to pose the problem of the explanation of these facts, the least that is required is to put forward Marxist concepts, and to see whether they are suitable. That is why I am proposing the concept of "deviation ", which is a concept that can certainly be "found" in Marxist-Leninist theory. Thus one might, first of all, talk of a "Stalinian" deviation : first of all, because to talk of a deviation necessarily requires that it should next be qualified, that one should explain in what it consisted, and always in Marxist terms. One thing, at the present stage, must be made clear: to speak of a "Stalinian" deviation is not to explain it by an individual, who would be its "cause". The adjective certainly refers to a man in history, but above all to a certain period in the history of the International Labour Movement.

 
page 82

and only legal. But is the "Stalin" deviation a detail? A simple legal detail?! Of course, one cannot, at any and every moment, in a moment, remake what many years have unmade -- this is not a Marxist thesis. There are of course historical constructions which are so interconnected with neighbouring buildings, which are so much propped up by these latter that one cannot simply and brutally chop down their surroundings to give them some air: one must sometimes proceed "cautiously". But the precautions of the Twentieth Congress . . . !
    The "Stalinian" deviation, in the form revealed to us by the terms of the official declarations, pointed out certain facts, without -- for lack of Marxist explanations -- avoiding the trap of repeating much earlier denunciations: those of the most anti-Communist bourgeois ideology, and those of the "anti-Stalinist" theory of Trotskyism. As it was revealed to us, limited in its scope to "violations of socialist legality " alone -- while the Communists of the U.S.S.R. and of the world had an infinitely more "extensive" experience of it -- this deviation could, finally, only provoke two possible reactions (leaving aside its "classical" exploitation by anti-Communist and anti-Soviet elements). Either a left-wing critique, which accepts the term "deviation", even if in a very contradictory sense, and which, in order to account for it, undertakes serious research into its basic historical causes: that is, if John Lewis will excuse me, not into Man (or Personality), but into the Superstructure, relations of production, and therefore the state of class relations and the class struggle in the U.S.S.R. Such a critique may then, but only then, be justified in talking not only about a violation of the law but also about the reasons for this violation. Or a right-wing critique, which attacks only certain aspects of the legal superstructure, and of course can then invoke Man and his Rights, and oppose Man to the violation of his Rights (or simple "workers' councils" to the "bureaucracy").
    The fact is: one practically never hears anything but the second critique. And the official formulation of the critique of the "cult", of the "violations of socialist legality", far from keeping the most violent bourgeois anti-Communism

 
page 83

and Trotskyist anti-Stalinism at arm's length, actually provides them with a historical argument they could hardly have hoped for : it gives them a justification, a second wind, a second life. Which explains, let it be said in passing, a good number of apparently paradoxical phenomena: for example, the resurgence fifty years after the October Revolution and twenty years after the Chinese Revolution of Organizations which have lasted forty years without winning a single historical victory (because, unlike some of the present-day "ultra-left", they are organizations, and they also have a theory): the Trotskyist Organizations. And that is not to speak of the "effectiveness" of bourgeois anti-Sovietism, thirty years after Stalingrad!
    However that may be, we did not need to wait long before seeing the official critique of the "Stalinian" deviation, that of the "personality cult", produce -- in the special circumstances -- its inevitable ideological effects. After the Twentieth Congress an openly rightist wave carried off (to speak only of them) many Marxist and Communist "intellectuals", not only in the capitalist countries, but also in the socialist countries. It is not of course a question of putting the intellectuals of the socialist countries and Western Marxists into the same bag -- and especially not of confusing the mass political protest of our comrades in Prague, known as "socialism with a human face", with Garaudy's "integral humanism", etc. In Prague they did not have the same choice of words (the words did not have the same sense) nor the same choice of roads. But here . . . ! Here we see Communists following the Social-Democrats and even religious thinkers (who used to have an almost guaranteed monopoly in these things) in the practice of exploiting the works of Marx's youth in order to draw out of them an ideology of Man, Liberty, Alienation, Transcendence, etc. -- without asking whether the system of these notions was idealist or materialist, whether this ideology was petty-bourgeois or proletarian. "Orthodoxy", as John Lewis says, was almost submerged: not Stalin's "thought", which continued and continues to hold itself comfortably above the uproar, in its bases, its "line" and certain of its practices -- but quite simply the theory of Marx and Lenin.

 
page 84

    It was in these conditions that I came to intervene, let us say "accidentally", in the form of a critical review I wrote of a number of Soviet and East German articles which had been translated into French. This review, "On the Young Marx", appeared in the magazine La Pensée in 1960.[*] I was trying, to the best of my ability and with the makeshift tools at my disposal, by criticizing a few received ideas and asking a few questions, to combat the contagion which was menacing" us. That is how it was. At the beginning there were not very many of us, and John Lewis is right: "we" were crying "in the wilderness", or in what certain people might call "the wilderness". But one must be very wary of this kind of "wilderness"; or rather, know how not to be frightened by it. In reality "we" have never been alone. Communists are never alone.
    So, against the rightist-idealist interpretations of Marxist theory as a "philosophy of man", of Marxism as a theoretical humanism; against the tendentious confusion -- whether positivist or subjectivist -- of science and Marxist "philosophy"; against the evolutionist reduction of the materialist dialectic to the "Hegelian" dialectic; and in general against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois positions, I have tried to defend, we have tried to defend, come what may, at the cost of rash actions and errors, a few vital ideas which can be summed up in a single idea: that which is special and specific to Marx, which is revolutionary in both the theoretical and political senses, and this in the face of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology, with which he had to break in order to become a Communist and found the science of history, the same ideology with which even today we must still and always will have to break, to become, remain or become again Marxists.
    The forms may have changed: but the root of the question has remained, for 150 years or so, substantially the same. This bourgeois ideology, which is the dominant ideology, and which weighs so heavily on the labour movement and threatens its most vital functions -- unless the movement fights resolutely back on the basis of its own positions, quite exterior to bourgeois ideology because proletarian -- this

 
    * Reprinted in For Marx [Translator's note].

 
page 85

bourgeois ideology is actually, in its deepest essence, constituted by the ideological pair economism/humanism. Behind the abstract categories of the philosophy which provides it with titles and airs, it was this pair of notions which I was aiming at when I made a joint attack, both on theoretical humanism (I repeat: theoretical; not on a word, or a few phrases, or even an inspired idea of the future, but on a philosophical language in which "man" is a category with a theoretical function) and, passing by the vulgar forms of Hegelianism or evolutionism which join with it, on economism.
    For no one (at least, no revolutionary Marxist) can fail to see that when, in the midst of the class struggle, the litanies of humanism hold the theoretical and ideological stage, it is economism which is quietly winning. Even under feudalism, when humanist ideology was revolutionary, it was still profoundly bourgeois. In a bourgeois class society it always has played and still does play the role of hiding the class-determined economic and economistic practices governed by the relations of production, exploitation and exchange, and by bourgeois law. In a bourgeois class society there is always the risk that humanist ideology -- when it is not just a slip of the pen or an image of political rhetoric, when it is of a lasting and organic character -- serves as a cover for an economistic deviation in the workers' organizations, which are not immune to the contagion of the dominant ideology. This deviation is in principled contradiction to proletarian class positions. The whole history of the Rights of Man proves it: behind Man, it is Bentham who comes out the victor.[4] Much of the history of the Second International, whose dominant tendency Lenin denounced, also goes to prove it: behind Bernstein's neo-Kantian idealism, it is the economist current which comes out on top. Who can seriously claim that the whole of this long history, with all its conflicts and dangers, is behind us, and that it will never again menace us, that we shall never again be at risk?
    I am talking about the ideological pair economism/humanism. It is a pair in which the two terms are complementary. It is not an accidental link, but an organic and

 
    4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Part I, section 2.

 
page 86

consubstantial one. It is born spontaneously, that is to say necessarily, of the bourgeois practices of production and exploitation, and at the same time of the legal practices of bourgeois law and its ideology, which provide a sanction for the capitalist relations of production and exploitation and their reproduction.
    And it is quite true that bourgeois ideology is fundamentally economist, that the capitalist sees everything from the point of view of commodity relations and from the point of view of the material conditions (means of production are also commodities) which allow him to exploit that very special "commodity", the labour power of the workers. Thus, he sees things from the point of view of the techniques of the extortion of surplus-value (which are linked together with capitalist organization and division of labour), from the point of view of the technology of exploitation, of economic "performance" and development: from the point of view of capitalist accumulation. And what does the Bourgeois Economist do? Marx showed that, even when he raised himself to the point of thinking in terms of capitalism, he did no more than theorize the economistic viewpoint of the capitalist. Marx criticized the very project of "Political Economy", as such, because it was economistic.
    But at the same time it is true that the reverse side of the same coin, the necessary "cover", the alibi, the "point of honour" of this economism is humanism or bourgeois liberalism. This is because ideas find their foundations in the categories of Bourgeois Law and the legal ideology materially indispensable to the functioning of Bourgeois Law: liberty of the Person, that is, in principle, his right freely to dispose of himself, his right to his property, his free will and his body (the proletarian: a Person "free" to sell himself!), and his other goods (private property: real property -- which abolishes others -- that of the means of production).
    This is the breeding ground of economism/humanism: the capitalist mode of production and exploitation. And this is the precise link by which, the precise place in which these two ideologies join together as a pair : Bourgeois Law, which at the same time both provides a real support for

 
page 87

capitalist relations of production, and lends its categories to liberal and humanist ideology, including bourgeois philosophy.
    The question then arises: when this bourgeois ideological pair penetrates into Marxism, "when it pursues the struggle, not on its own terrain but on the general terrain of Marxism, as revisionism" (Lenin), what does it become? It remains what it was before: a bourgeois point of view, but this time "functioning" within Marxism. As astonishing as this may seem, the whole history of the Labour Movement and Lenin's theses are witness to it:[5] Marxism itself can, in certain circumstances, be considered and treated as, even practised as a bourgeois point of view. Not only by "armchair Marxists", who reduce it to academic bourgeois sociology, and who are never anything but "functionaries of the dominant ideology" -- but also by sections of the Labour Movement, and their leaders.
    This is something which depends on the relations of power in the class struggle, and, at the same time, on class position in the class struggle, in the "line", the organization and the functioning of the class struggle fought by the Labour Movement. That is to say that it is a historical form in which the fusion between the Labour Movement and Marxist theory -- which alone can assure the objectively "revolutionary" character of the "movement" (Lenin) -- is held up or reversed, in the face of what must perhaps, for purposes of understanding, also be called a "fusion": but quite another kind of "fusion", that between the Labour Movement and bourgeois ideology.
    The economism/humanism pair, when it is introduced into Marxism, does not really change in form, even if it is forced to make some changes (only some) in its vocabulary. Humanism remains humanism: it takes on a Social-Democratic accent, one which raises not the question of the class struggle and its abolition, through the emancipation of the working class, but that of the defence of Human Rights, of liberty and justice, even of the liberation and free develop-

 
    5. Cf. Marxism and Revisionism, The Collapse of the Second International, The Renegade Kautsky, etc.

 
page 88

ment of the "personality" or the "integral personality". Economism remains economism: for example, in the exaltation of the development of the Productive Forces, of their "socialization" (what kind of socialization?), of the "scientific and technical revolution", of "productivity", etc.
    Can we make a comparison? Yes, we can. And we discover the factor which permits us to identify the ideological pair economism/humanism and its practices as bourgeois: it is the elimination of something which never figures in economism or humanism, the elimination of the relations of production and of the class struggle.
    The fact that the bourgeoisie, in its own ideology, keeps silent about the relations of production and the class struggle, in order to exalt not only "expansion" and "productivity" but also Man and his liberty -- that is its own affair, and it is quite in order, in bourgeois order : because it needs this silence, which allows economism/humanism, expressing the bourgeois point of view, to work at the concealment of the relations of production while helping to guarantee and reproduce them. But when the Workers' Parties, before the revolution, or even after, themselves keep silent (or semi-silent) about the relations of production, the class struggle, and their concrete forms,[6] while exalting both the Productive Forces and Man -- this is quite a different matter! Because, unless it is only a question of words or of a few speeches, if it is really a question of a consistent political line and practice, then you can bet -- as Lenin did, when he spoke about the pre-1914 Second International -- that this bourgeois point of view is a contaminating agent which can threaten or even overcome the proletarian point of view within Marxism itself.
    And since we have been talking about the Second International, let us say a brief word about the Third, about the last ten years of its existence. After all, why be silent about a question which is burning to be expressed? Why meet the official silence with nothing but another silence, and thus give it sanction? For an official silence does still reign --

 
    6. Lenin: in the "transition" between capitalism and communism, classes remain, the class struggle remains, but takes on new forms.

 
page 89

beneath a facade of feigned or embarrassed "explanations" -- over this period, one whose heroism, whose greatness, whose dramas we have lived through or known. Why should we not try to understand, whatever the risks of what we say, not only the merits of the International but also the inevitable contradictions of its positions and its line (and how could it have avoided them, especially given the tragic times with which it had to deal)? I am rather afraid that we may one day have to recognize the existence within it of a certain tendency which, held in bounds by Lenin's efforts, could not finally be mastered, and ended up by quietly taking over the leading role. I am rather afraid that a long time might be allowed to go by -- for apparently pragmatic reasons, which doubtless have deeper roots -- before a "hypothesis" such as that which I want to put forward today could hope to be stated in black and white, and put to the test of a genuine Marxist analysis. I shall take the personal risk of advancing this hypothesis now, in the form of necessarily schematic propositions:

1. The International Communist Movement has been affected since the 1930s, to different degrees and in very different ways in different countries and organizations, by the effects of a single deviation, which can provisionally be called the "Stalinian deviation".

2. Keeping things well in proportion, that is to say, respecting essential distinctions, but nevertheless going beyond the most obvious phenomena -- which are, in spite of their extremely serious character, historically secondary: I mean those which are generally grouped together in Communist Parties under the heading "personality cult" and "dogmatism" -- the Stalinian deviation can be considered as a form (a special form, converted by the state of the world class struggle, the existence of a single socialist State, and the State power held by the Bolshevik Party) of the posthumous revenge of the Second International : as a revival of its main tendency.

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

 
page 90

    This is only a hypothesis, and I am simply laying down its reference points. It naturally poses very great problems. The most obvious of these problems can be stated in the following way: how could a basically economistic tendency have combined with the superstructural effects we know so well, effects which it produced as the transformation of its own forms? What were the material forms of existence of this tendency, which enabled it to produce these effects in the existing conjuncture? How did this tendency, centred from a certain time onwards on the USSR, spread through the whole International Communist Movement, and what special -- and sometimes differing -- forms did it take?
    If some readers are disconcerted by the comparison between the economism of the Second International and that of the "Stalinian deviation", I will first of all reply: you must look and see what is the first principle of analysis recommended and used by Lenin at the beginning of Chapter 7 of The Collapse of the Second International to help understand a deviation in the history of the Labour Movement. The first thing you have to do is to see if this deviation is not "linked with some former current of socialism". Not because of some vulgar "historicism", but because there exists a continuity, in the history of the Labour Movement, of its difficulties, its problems, its contradictions, of correct solutions and therefore also of its deviations, because of the continuity of a single class struggle against the bourgeoisie, and of a single class struggle (economic, political and ideological-theoretical) of the bourgeoisie against the Labour Movement. The possibility of cases of "posthumous revenge", of "revivals", is based on this continuity.
    But I would like to add something else. There are of course serious political questions at stake in the summary and schematic hypotheses which I am proposing -- but, above all, there exists the possibility of serious ambiguities which must at all costs be guarded against. Look how Lenin -- who was uncompromising in his denunciation of the idealist-economist tendency of the Second International -- treated this very organization: he never reduced the Second International to its deviation. He recognized the different periods in its history, he distinguished the main question from the

 
page 91

secondary one -- and, for example, he always gave the International credit for having developed the organizations of the proletarian class struggle, the trade unions and workers' parties; nor did he ever refuse to cite Kautsky, or to defend Plekhanov's philosophical work. In the same way, and for infinitely more obvious and powerful reasons, Stalin cannot be reduced to the deviation which we have linked to his name; even less can this be done with the Third International which he came in the thirties to dominate. He had other historical merits. He understood that it was necessary to abandon the miraculous idea of an imminent "world revolution" and to undertake instead the "construction of socialism" in one country. And he drew the consequences: it must be defended at any cost as the foundation and last line of defence of socialism throughout the world, it must be made into an impregnable fortress capable of withstanding the imperialist siege; and, to that end, it must be provided with a heavy industry. It was this very industry that turned out the Stalingrad tanks which served the heroic struggle of the Soviet people in their fight to the death to liberate the world from Nazism. Our history also passed in that direction. And in spite of the deformations, caricatures and tragedies for which this period is responsible, it must be recalled that millions of Communists also learned, even if Stalin "taught" them in dogmatic form, that there existed Principles of Leninism.
    Thus, if it seems possible, keeping everything in proportion, to talk about the posthumous revenge of the Second International, it must be added that it is a revenge which took place in other times, in other circumstances, and of course in other forms, which cannot be the subject of a literal comparison. But in spite of these considerable differences one can talk about the revenge, or the revival, or the resurgence of a tendency which is basically the same: of an economistic conception and "line", even when these were hidden by declarations which were, in their own way, cruelly "humanist" (the slogan "Man, the most precious capital", the measures and dispositions, which remained a dead letter, of the Soviet Constitution of 1936).
    If this is true, if the "Stalinian" deviation cannot be

 
page 92

reduced to "violations of Soviet legality" alone; if it is related to more profound causes in history and in the conception of the class struggle and of class position ; and even supposing that the Soviet people are now protected from all violations of legality -- it does not follow that either they or we have completely overcome the "Stalinian" deviation (neither the causes, nor the mechanisms, nor the effects of which have been the object of a "concrete analysis" in the Leninist sense, that is to say, of a scientific Marxist analysis) simply on account of the denunciation of the "personality cult ", or by a patient work of rectification unenlightened by any analysis. In these conditions, with all the information, past and present, available to us (including the official silence, which refuses to pronounce against these facts), we can bet that the Stalinian "line", purged of "violations of legality" and therefore "liberalized" -- with economism and humanism working together -- has, for better or worse, survived Stalin and -- it should not be astonishing! -- the Twentieth Congress. One is even justified in supposing that, behind the talk about the different varieties of "humanism", whether restrained or not, this "line" continues to pursue an honourable career, in a peculiar kind of silence, a sometimes talkative and sometimes mute silence, which is now and again broken by the noise of an explosion or a split.
    So that I do not have to leave anything out of consideration, I will advance one more risky hypothesis which will certainly "say something" to John Lewis, specialist of Chinese politics. If we look back over our whole history of the last forty years or more, it seems to me that, in reckoning up the account (which is not an easy thing to do), the only historically existing (left) "critique" of the fundamentals of the "Stalinian deviation" to be found -- and which, moreover, is contemporary with this very deviation, and thus for the most part precedes the Twentieth Congress -- is a concrete critique, one which exists in the facts, in the struggle, in the line, in the practices, their principles and their forms, of the Chinese Revolution. A silent critique, which speaks through its actions, the result of the political and ideological struggles of the Revolution, from the Long March to the Cultural Revolution and its results. A critique from afar. A critique

 
page 93

"from behind the scenes". To be looked at more closely, to be interpreted. A contradictory critique, moreover -- if only because of the disproportion between acts and texts. Whatever you like: but a critique from which one can learn, which can help us to test our hypotheses, that is, help us to see our own history more clearly. But here too, of course, we have to speak in terms of a tendency and of specific forms -- without letting the forms mask the tendency and its contradictions.
    If I have been able -- with the means at my disposal, and from afar -- even very feebly to echo these historic struggles and to indicate, behind their ideological effects, the existence of some real problems: this, for a Communist philosopher, is no more than his duty.
    These, to go no further, are some of the very concrete "questions" -- where politics stares you in the face -- which haunt the margins of the simple philosophical work undertaken by me, for better or worse, more than ten years ago.
    As far as John Lewis is concerned, it seems that it never occurred to him to ask such questions! From our point of view I hope that it is so. Because the matter would be that much more serious if, having understood what was at stake, he had kept silent about it: so as not to get his fingers burned.

June 1972 

 
page 94

 
Remark on the Category:
"Process without
a Subject or Goal(s)"

 



This formula ["process without a Subject", "process without a Subject or Goal(s)"] has everything required to offend against the "evidence" of common sense, that is (Gramsci) of the dominant ideology, and thus without any trouble at all to make some determined enemies.
    For example, the objection will be raised that "the masses" and "classes" are, when all is said and done, "made up of" men ! And that, if Man (a category which is then simply declared to be . . . an "abstraction", or, to add weight, a "speculative abstraction") cannot be said to make history, at least men do so -- concrete, living men, human subjects. In support of this idea Marx himself will be cited as witness, his testimony being the beginning of a little remark in the Eighteenth Brumaire : "Men make their own history . . ." With the backing of evidence and quote, the conclusion is quickly drawn: history has "subjects"; these subjects are obviously "men"; "men" are therefore, if not the Subject of history, at least the subjects of history . . .
    This kind of reasoning unfortunately only stands up at the cost of confusions, sliding meanings and ideological word-games: on Man-men, Subject-subjects, etc.
    Let us be careful, therefore, not to play with words, and let us look at the thing a bit closer.
    In my opinion: men (plural), in the concrete sense, are necessarily subjects (plural) in history, because they act in history as subjects (plural). But there is no Subject (singular) of history. And I will go even further: "men" are not "the subjects" of history. Let me explain.
    To understand these distinctions one must define the nature of the questions at issue. The question of the constitu-

 
page 95

tion of individuals as historical subjects, active in history, has nothing in principle to do with the question of the "Subject of history", or even with that of the "subjects of history". The first question is of a scientific kind: it concerns historical materialism. The second question is of a philosophical kind: it concerns dialectical materialism.

First question: scientific.

    That human, i.e. social individuals are active in history -- as agents of the different social practices of the historical process of production and reproduction -- that is a fact. But, considered as agents, human individuals are not "free" and "constitutive" subjects in the philosophical sense of these terms. They work in and through the determinations of the forms of historical existence of the social relations of production and reproduction (labour process, division and organization of labour, process of production and reproduction, class struggle, etc.). But that is not all. These agents can only be agents if they are subjects. This I think I showed in my article on "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses". [See Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, London NLB, 1971] No human, i.e. social individual can be the agent of a practice if he does not have the form of a subject. The "subject-form" is actually the form of historical existence of every individual, of every agent of social practices: because the social relations of production and reproduction necessarily comprise, as an integral part, what Lenin calls "(juridico-) ideological social relations ", which, in order to function, impose the subject-form on each agent-individual. The agent-individuals thus always act in the subject-form, as subjects. But the fact that they are necessarily subjects does not make the agents of social-historical practices into the subject or subjects of history (in the philosophical sense of the term: subject of). The subject-agents are only active in history through the determination of the relations of production and reproduction, and in their forms.

Second question: philosophical.

It is for precise ideological ends that bourgeois philosophy

 
page 96

has taken the legal-ideological notion of the subject, made it into a philosophical category, its number one philosophical category, and posed the question of the Subject of knowledge (the ego of the cogito, the Kantian or Husserlian transcendental subject, etc.), of morality, etc., and of the Subject of history. This illusory question does of course have a purpose, but in its position and form it has no sense as far as dialectical materialism is concerned, which purely and simply rejects it, as it rejects (for example) the question of God's existence. In advancing the Thesis of a "process without a Subject or Goal(s)", I want simply but clearly to say this. To be dialectical-materialist, Marxist philosophy must break with the idealist category of the "Subject" as Origin, Essence and Cause, responsible in its internality for all the determinations of the external "Object",[1] of which it is said to be the internal "Subject". For Marxist philosophy there can be no Subject as an Absolute Centre, as a Radical Origin, as a Unique Cause. Nor can one, in order to get out of the problem, rely on a category like that of the "ex-Centration of the Essence" (Lucien Sève), since it is an illusory compromise which -- using a fraudulently "radical" term, one whose root is perfectly conformist (ex-centration) -- safeguards the umbilical cord between Essence and Centre and therefore remains a prisoner of idealist philosophy: since there is no Centre, every ex-centration is superfluous or a sham. In reality Marxist philosophy thinks in and according to quite different categories: determination in the last instance -- which is quite different from the Origin, Essence or Cause unes -- determination by Relations (idem), contradiction, process, "nodal points" (Lenin), etc.: in short, in quite a different configuration and according to quite different categories from classical idealist philosophy.
    Naturally, these philosophical categories do not only concern history.
    But if we restrict ourselves to history (which is what concerns us here), the philosophical question presents itself in the following terms. There is no question of contesting the

 
    1. The category of "process without a Subject or Goal(s)" can therefore take the form: "process without a Subject or Object ".

 
page 97

gains of historical materialism, which says that individuals are agent-subjects in history under the determination of the forms of existence of the relations of production and reproduction. It is a question of something quite different: of knowing whether history can be thought philosophically, in its modes of determination, according to the idealist category of the Subject. The position of dialectical materialism on this question seems quite clear to me. One cannot seize (begreifen : conceive), that is to say, think real history (the process of the reproduction of social formations and their revolutionary transformation) as if it could be reduced to an Origin, an Essence, or a Cause (even Man), which would be its Subject -- a Subject, a "being" or "essence", held to be identifiable, that is to say existing in the form of the unity of an internality, and (theoretically and practically responsible identity, internality and responsibility are constitutive, among other things, of every subject), thus accountable, thus capable of accounting for the whole of the "phenomena" of history.
    The matter is quite clear when we are confronted with classical idealism, which, within the openly stated category of liberty, takes Man (= the Human Race = Humanity) to be the Subject and the Goal of history; cf the Enlightenment, and Kant, the "purest" philosopher of bourgeois ideology. The matter is also clear when we are confronted with the philosophical petty-bourgeois communitarian anthropology of Feuerbach (still respected by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts), in which the Essence of Man is the Origin, Cause and Goal of history.
    But the same position evidently takes on a more deceptive air in the post-Husserlian and pre-Kantian (Cartesian) phenomenological interpretations, like those of Sartre, where the Kantian Theses of the Transcendental Subject, unique because one, and of the Liberty of Humanity, are mixed up and "squashed together", and where the Subject is multiplied within a theory of the originating Liberty of an infinity of "concrete" transcendental subjects (Tran Duc Thao said, explaining Husserl: "We are all, you and I, each one of us, 'transcendental egos' and 'transcendental equals' ['egos ' and 'egaux ']", which brings us back to the

 
page 98

Thesis that "men" (the concrete individuals) are the subjects (transcendental, constitutive) of history). This is the basis of Sartre's special interest in a "little phrase" from the Eighteenth Brumaire, and a similar phrase from Engels, which fit him like a glove. Now this position -- which brings the Kantian categories down to the level, no longer of an anthropological philosophy (Feuerbach), but of a vulgar philosophical psycho-sociology -- not only has nothing to do with Marxism, but actually constitutes a quite dubious theoretical position which it is practically impossible to conceive and to defend. You just have to read the Critique of Dialectical Reason, which announces an Ethics that never appeared, to be convinced of this point.
    In proposing the category of the "process without a Subject or Goal(s)", we thus draw a "demarcation line" (Lenin) between dialectical-materialist positions and bourgeois or petty-bourgeois idealist positions. Naturally, one cannot expect everything from a first intervention. This "demarcation line" must be "worked on". But, as Lenin said for his part, a demarcation line -- if it is correct -- is in principle sufficient, just as it is, to defend us from idealism and to mark out the way forward.
    These philosophical positions are of course not without their consequences. Not only, for example, do they imply that Marxism has nothing to do with the "anthropological question" ("What is man?"), or with a theory of the realization-objectification-alienation-disalienation of the Human Essence (as in Feuerbach and his heirs: theoreticians of philosophical reification and fetishism), or even with the theory of the "excentration of the Human Essence", which only criticizes the idealism of the Subject from within the limits of the idealism of the Subject, dressed up with the attributes of the "ensemble of social relations" of the sixth Thesis on Feuerbach -- but they also allow us to understand the sense of Marx's famous "little phrase" in the Eighteenth Brumaire.
    This comment, in its complete form, reads as follows: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it out of freely chosen elements (aus freien Stücken), under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circums-

 
page 99

tances (Umstände) directly encountered (vorgefundene), given by and transmitted from the past." And -- as if he had foreseen the exploitation of these first five words, and even these "circumstances" from which Sartre draws out such dazzling effects of the "practico-inert", that is, of liberty -- Marx, in the Preface to the Eighteenth Brumaire, written seventeen years later (in 1869, two years after Capital), set down the following lines: "I show something quite different (different from the ideology of Hugo and of Proudhon, who both hold the individual Napoleon III to be the [detestable or glorious] cause "responsible " for the coup d'état), namely how the class struggle (Marx's emphasis) in France created the circumstances (Umstände) and the relations (Verhältnisse) which allowed (ermöglicht) a person (a subject) so mediocre and grotesque to play the role of a hero".
    One must read one's authors closely. History really is a "process without a Subject or Goal(s)", where the given circumstances in which "men" act as subjects under the determination of social relations are the product of the class struggle. History therefore does not have a Subject, in the philosophical sense of the term, but a motor : that very class struggle.

1 May 1973