[Marxism] Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

William S. Lewis
Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism

William S. Lewis, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism, 
Lexington Books, 2005, 238pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0739113070.

Reviewed by Bruce Baugh, Thompson Rivers University

In the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet 
Union, the capitalist "reforms" of the Chinese economy, what remains for 
us, now, of Marx? William Lewis addresses this question by examining the 
"Structural Marxism" of Louis Althusser, which enjoyed its hey-day in the 
1960s and 1970s. His approach is to place Althusser's thought within the 
context of the history of the French Communist Party (or PCF, Parti 
Communiste Français) and the history of French intellectual Marxism (Henri 
Lefebvre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and others) leading up to 
Althusser's emergence as an important figure both in the PCF and on the 
French intellectual scene with the 1965 publication of his ground-breaking 
For Marx and (in collaboration with others such as Pierre Macherey and 
Étienne Balibar) Reading Capital.

Lewis portrays these works as emerging from the crisis in PCF and other 
French Marxist circles following the denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev 
at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and 
the subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Althusser's solution to 
the crisis, says Lewis, was to refute both Stalinist orthodoxy, with its 
belief in a law of dialectical development that would inevitably lead from 
the economic contradictions of capitalism to the establishment of a 
classless society under "the dictatorship of the proletariat," and the 
"humanist" Marxism that followed in the wake of Stalinism's demise. In 
place of Stalinism's reduction of science to an arm of politics (as in the 
notorious pseudo-science of Lyssenko), Althusser argued for the autonomy of 
theory; against both Stalinism and humanism, he argued against teleological 
conceptions of history, whether the end of history is conceived of as "full 
communism" (Stalinism) or the end of alienation (humanism). In doing so, he 
pointed to the possibility of a "science of Historical Materialism" capable 
of analysing how socio-economic structures function and the ideological 
effects they produce, a science which can enable us to determine what sort 
of socio-economic changes are possible given present realities. It is not 
(contrary to what Althusser sometimes claims) as if Althusser gives us "the 
real Marx;" Marxism is not a set of timeless truths or "classical" texts. 
Rather, Althusser's interpretation must be understood in light of the 
history of the French interpretation and application of Marxism. To see 
what remains valuable in Marxism today, we must look at the history of 
French attempts to use Marxism to solve problems of other times and other 
places, including the history of French Marxism's errors.

Although Althusser is very much the hero of this story, he does not enter 
the picture until chapter six; the first five chapters go through the 
history of the PCF and of French intellectual Marxism from 1920 (the 
founding of the PCF) to 1956. Lewis shows the shifts in PCF policy and how 
its more "open" or liberal phases, such as during the Popular Front of the 
1930s, coincided both with its greatest success at the polls and the most 
productive periods of French Marxist thought, whereas the constraints on 
party direction issuing from Moscow led to narrowly sectarian "class 
against class" policies that resulted in intellectual stagnation and 
political isolation. As in the Soviet Union, the PCF's "Marxist-Leninist 
catechisms" owed more to Engels and Plekhanov's simplifications and 
reductions than to Marx, a process which reached its nadir with the French 
publication of Stalin's History of the Bolshevik Party of the Soviet Union 
(Short Course) in 1939, which was treated as the "definitive" version of 
Marxism, rendering Marxist intellectuals superfluous. Nevertheless, the 
Party attracted some brilliant minds in one of its "open" phases during the 
Popular Front alliance in the 1930s: Paul Nizan, Georges Politzer, René 
Maublanc, Henri Lefebvre, Norbert Guterman and Georges Friedmann. Although 
Politzer and Nizan became quite orthodox and Stalinized, Lefebvre and his 
associates developed a Hegelian Marxism focused on the problem of 
alienation, while Maublanc and the Cercle de la Russie Neuve worked on the 
relation of dialectical materialism to modern science (physics, biology, 
psychology). In the 1945-48 period, when the PCF held ministries in the 
post-Liberation government, the PCF allowed Lefebvre to pursue his Hegelian 
Marxism, while the prestige that accrued to the PCF as the "Party of the 
Resistance" attracted existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice 
Merleau-Ponty to Marxism, even though the PCF vilified them both. After 
1948, the Party retreated to ideological narrowness until 1956 brought 
about the collapse of the Stalin cult.

full: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=6864


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