P.58 (pdf 82) - 8 Sep 2010
Marxist philosophy was dialectical materialism, the science of the laws of nature and thought. Applied to society, it became historical materialism, the science of the laws of social development.
Two adjustments were made: the negation of the negation was restored to the corpus of dialectical materialism; the Asiatic mode of production to that of historical materialism.
P.66 (pdf 91)
According to this historicism, just as scientific socialism was the theoretical expression of a class subject, so the natural sciences were bourgeois ideology –bourgeois sciences which would be abolished together with the capitalist mode of production. Contrariwise, as the theoretical expression of the ‘universal’ class of capitalist society – the proletariat – Marxism could attain to a genuine understanding of the social totality, which, according to these philosophies of praxis, was the creation and expression of humanity (of whose alienation and disalienation history was the unfolding drama). Thus, for Lukács, Marxism was the self-consciousness of the proletariat, itself the subject-object of history which would redeem all humanity in the act of emancipating itself. And ‘orthodoxy’ ‘refer[red] exclusively to method’ – the dialectical method inherited from Hegel and now restricted, contra Engels, to ‘the realms of history and society’. A ‘proletarian science’, historical materialism ‘completed the programme of Hegel’s philosophy of history, even though at the cost of the destruction of his system’.
P. 154 (pdf 179) 11 Sep Lacanian Real – Reality
The target of Althusser’s theory of ideology was the supposed messianism involved in the postulate of a disalienation with the advent of communism, a society whose deepest ‘laws of motion’ would be transparent to the consciousness of its members in an ‘end of ideology’. For Althusser, this was a chimera. He impugned any theory of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ as itself ideological, on two grounds. First, it implied the possibility of a true consciousness, whereas, epistemologically, consciousness was non-veridical by definition. Secondly, it circumscribed the social space and underestimated the objective power of ideology. For Althusser, ideology is an ‘objective reality . . . independent of the subjectivity of the individuals who are subject to it’, a system of representations dominated by a ‘false conception of the world’. Men are ‘ideological animals’. They need representations of the world and their relations to it in order to function as social agents. Ideology provides the requisite representation (which can be more or less conscious/unconscious, untheorised/theorised). Analytically a relative autonomous superstructural level of society, in reality ideology is a ‘cement . . . sliding into all the parts of the [social] edifice’. It ‘permeates’ all human activities and practices, governing the ‘lived’ relations of individuals to the ensemble of their ‘conditions of existence’. Indeed, ‘[i]deology is so much present in all their acts and deeds that it is indistinguishable from their “lived “experience”’.
P.160 (pdf 185)
the path which was opened up to men by the great revolutionary thinkers, theoreticians and politicians, the great materialist thinkers who understood that the freedom of men is not achieved by the complacency of its ideological recognition, but by knowledge of the laws of their slavery, and that the ‘realization’ of their concrete individuality is achieved by the analysis and mastery of the abstract relations which govern them – Althusser , ‘Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract’ (1966)
P.169 (pdf 194) 15 Sep
…at his ‘trial’ on 30 November 1963, Althusser finessed his critics by adopting the tactic of distinguishing between the ‘theoretical value’ of Mao’s concepts in On Contradiction and their utilisation by the CPC in the current conjuncture to sanction false political positions. His accusers, he retorted, were guilty of a ‘theoretical pragmatism’ inverse but akin to that of the Chinese, impugning genuine theory as a result of its conjunctural exploitation. Althusser upheld the authentically Marxist nature of Mao’s theses on contradiction, but abjured their deformation at the CPC’s hands, affirming the correctness of the PCF’s own international line.5 This did the trick – for the time being at least.
P.175 (pdf 200) Althusser (unsigned) – ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ (1966)
Is it impossible for it to regress to
capitalism?
Do we not already possess an example of this phenomenon: Yugoslavia?
Can a socialist country, then, not retain – even for a considerable period of time – the, or at least some, external forms of socialism (economic, political), whilst imparting to them a quite different economic, political, and ideological content (the mechanism of capitalist restoration), and allowing itself to be progressively neutralised and utilised politically, then dominated economically,
by imperialism?
P.190 (pdf 215)
If philosophy is the class struggle in theory, then for a Marxist philosopher to philosophise is to fight the good fight; philosophy, to borrow the title of Althusser’s interview, is a revolutionary weapon. Marxist philosophers may no longer be quite the illuminati they once were. But they can now flatter themselves that their desks have been turned into barricades (Brecht), the seminar room into a place d’armes.
P.198 (pdf 222) 16 Sep
The new orthodoxy, presented as the epitome of Marxist-Leninist rectitude, was set out at greatest length in the short Reply to John Lewis, via a juxtaposition of the respective theses of Lewis and his critic. To Lewis’s proposition that ‘it is man who makes history’, Althusser counterposes the dictum: ‘It is the masses who make history.’ Against the British Communist’s notion that ‘Man makes history by “transcending” history’ is set the scientific precept: ‘The class struggle is the motor of history.’
P.199 (pdf 223)
‘The class struggle does not go 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 in a given mode of production, in a concrete historical social formation. This materiality, in the last instance, is at the same time the ‘base’ . . . 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 classes and the class struggle . . . 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.’
- Althusser
P.231 (pdf 256) 18 Sep
‘If we look back over our whole history of the last forty years or more, it seems to me that . . . the only historically existing (left) ‘critique’ of the fundamentals of the ‘Stalinian deviation’ to be found . . . 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 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. . . .’ – Althusser, 1976
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