MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of People
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Alekseevich, Peter [Peter the Great] (1672-1725)
Russian czar from 1682 until his death. Founded Petrograd and made it the capital of Russia in 1712. He is best known for introducing European culture to Russia.
Alexeyev, Mikhail Vasilevitch, (1857-1918)
Czarist General. Chief of Staff wider Nicholas II, 1915-17. Commander-in-Chief under Provisional Government 1917. Dismissed by Kerensky, June 4th 1917. Founder of counter-revolutionary Volunteer Army 1918.
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Aleksinsky, Grigory Alekseyevich (1879-1968)
Moscow Bolshevik in the early days. Social Democratic member of 2nd Duma 1907. “Otzovist” after the 1905 Revolution. Social-chauvinist in the War. Joined. After July, a counter-revolutionary. Author of forgeries against Lenin as a German agent. In emigration since April 1918, joined counter-revolutionary organization of General Wrangel.
Born of a well-off professional family in Daghestan. Excluded from Moscow University 1899-1902 for the participation in the student movement; joined Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo group during the 1905 Revolution but became a Bolshevik in 1907. Deputy in the 2nd Duma for Petersburg where he was a popular speaker. After the defeat of revolution, Aleksinskiy together with Bogdanov, etc. continued an ultra-left stance, and in 1907 Aleksinsky was one of the leaders of “boycottists.”
In 1909 Aleksinskiy, together with Bogdanov, was a leader of the left-wing group “Forward.” During the First World War he adopted a social chauvinist position, and edited the social-patriotic journal “Call” in Paris and until 1916 collaborated with Octobrist by Protopopov in publishing the monarchist paper “Russian Will.”
After the February 1917 Revolution, Aleksinskiy returned to Russia, joined Plekhanov’s “Unity” group and conducted systematic agitation against the Bolsheviks. In 1918 Aleksinskiy was arrested but then fought with the Soviets in Estonia. In 1920 he was found guilty of the counterrevolutionary plots and was denied the right of return to the Soviet Union.
Allman, George James (1812-1898)
English biologist.
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Allende, Salvador (1908-73)
Doctor; founder of the left-wing Chilean Socialist Party; Deputy 1937-45, briefly Minister of Health in Popular Front government 1938; Senator 1945-70. In September, 1970, Allende was elected President of the nation. Facing a hostile legislature, Allende proposed nationalisation of Chile’s vital copper mines, whose interests were sunk deep in the legislature. Opposition, including a strike by National Confederation of Lorry Owners, forced him to pull back. Allende then invited the Army into Cabinet and disarmed the militant copper miners. On 11 September 1973, three years after his election, Allende was overthrown in a CIA-organised coup led by Gen. Pinochet. He died, gun in hand, defending the Presidential Palace.
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Althusser, Louis (1918-1990)
Born 1918 in Algiers; Joined the Communist Party in Paris in 1948. Althusser murdered his wife in 1980, and was confined to an asylum till his death in 1990. Influential works - For Marx (1965) and Lenin and Philosophy (1969). Attempted to reconcile Marxism with Structuralism and is generally regarded as the foremost advocate of modern structuralism and main proponent of the idea that the “mature Marx” made a fundamental break with the romantic “humanism” of the “young Marx.”
At the time Althusser joined the Communist Party, Jean-Paul Sartre, the former Existentialist who had fought in the Resistance, and his associate in Les Temps Moderne, the former Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, were among a layer of intelligentsia aligning themselves with the USSR. In 1945 the PCF won some 25 percent of the vote in the first post-War election, and in 1946 took part in the Fourth Republic’s first government. After May 1947, when the PCF was dismissed from the Cabinet as the “Cold War” got under way, the PCF did not participate in any administration, though it won up to one-third and on average a quarter of the vote till 1968.
The dark post-war mood that lent existentialism its appeal faded when economic recovery set in, and in the boom-period of the 1960s it was replaced by a new vogue called structuralism, whose scientific pretensions better suited a technological age. Structuralism became an intellectual fashion in the 1960s in France, Roman Jakobson’s linguistic structuralism, Roland Barthes’ structuralist literary criticism and Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological structuralism enjoyed widespread interest. Louis Althusser and his student Michel Foucault were also regarded as representatives of this current. The structuralists stressed the persistence of "deep structures" that underlie all human cultures, leaving little room for either historical change or human initiative.
Starting from Marx’s criticism of empiricism, Althusser rejected the positive content of empirical knowledge entirely. Althusser asserts that Essence is not to be found in Appearance, but must be discovered through ’theoretical practice’ - "history features in [Marx’s] Capital as an object of theory, not as a real object, as an ’abstract’ (conceptual) object and not as a real-concrete object". Thus, as in Kant, the ’real’ history lies in a ’beyond’, behind the ’theory of history’, which is the only true object of knowledge. Althusser further rejects the concept of contradiction in Marx and Hegel, which he sees in structuralist terms as "over-determination". Althusser saw the early chapters of Marx’s Capital not as a key, but a barrier to understanding Marx’s view of capitalist society, advising readers to begin Capital with Part II. Althusser thus arrives not at a revision, but at a complete negation of Marx. On Marx is the earliest work in which his criticism of Marx is put forward. His most influential works include For Marx (1965) and Lenin and Philosophy (1969) including his article on “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Marx’s humanism he viewed as a temporary, Feuerbachian phase, surpassed by commitment to the scientific observation of the structure of bourgeois society.
At the same time, "Eurocommunism" became the trend among European communist parties during the 1970s and ’80s, moving toward independence from Soviet Communist Party, basing policies instead on social forces within their own country. This tendency was encouraged by the decline in support Stalinist Parties commanded from the 1950s, the continued failure of Stalin’s regime to resolve the problems of the USSR, the repression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 alienated many communists in the Western countries and was encouraged by the example of Tito’s Yugoslavia from 1948 on.
The term Eurocommunism was coined in the mid-1970s and received wide publicity after the publication of Eurocommunism and the State (1977) by the Spanish Stalinist leader Santiago Carrillo.
By the 1970s structuralism began to give way to a cluster of doctrines loosely labelled "post-structuralist," each variety identified with its own master-thinker: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan.