Controversies and Viewpoints

by Alain de Benoist

  The union between the Marxist theory and the workers’ movement can hence take place, a union which Mr Althusser boldly perceives as ‘the greatest event in human history’. Having ceased to act as a tool to interpret the world, philosophy turns into a weapon that allows one to transform it. No longer is philosophy the mere reflection of class struggle; instead, it embodies the latter to the extent that it is expressed in a theory — thanks to it, the working class can draw what Lenin called a ‘dividing line’ between right and wrong ideas (and as such, it no longer has to justify nor prove itself, for it is within itself that it finds its own justification).

  It is therefore exclusively in Marx’s ‘economic’ works that Althusser intends to detect the ‘specificity of Marxist discourse’, a specificity whose ‘unheard-of’ novelty he, in turn, longs to develop and ‘theorise’.

  The objective of this undertaking is to avoid reducing Marx to his critique of capitalism (for if Marx were only someone who criticises capitalism and its mistakes, he would ultimately be nothing more than a theoretician of capitalism, but without the latter’s mistakes).

  Since no type of capitalism has ever led to socialist or Marxist revolution as a result of the sole interaction of its inner contradictions, it was obviously necessary for neo-Marxist thinkers to introduce some correctives into their doctrine. Indeed, there are only two options: either Marx was mistaken or he has been misinterpreted. In Mr Althusser’s eyes, it is out of the question for one to dispute the Holy Scriptures, which form a certain ‘totality’. This leaves us with the second position, which Mr Althusser embraces while emphasising a notion which is as central for the ‘second Marx’ as ‘alienation’ is for the ‘first’ — that of surplus-value.

  ‘In the Last Instance’

  This notion, however, which is founded upon an ‘essentialist’ and moralising conception of economy, implies that one can reduce various kinds of work whose qualification is different to a single norm, which is utterly absurd. Furthermore, it is neither quantifiable nor operational. This is why no Marxist economist has ever dared to attempt and calculate its actual rate. Last but not least, surplus-value is directly connected to the salary theory and the theory of labour value, both of which are founded upon a law that prices, ever determined by production costs, have never successfully confirmed. And all three notions, embodying the very core of the structure followed by Marx’s Capital, cannot be dissociated from the criticism of capitalism.

  Mr Raymond Aron remarks:

  Grounded in historical materialism, the theory of the capitalistic means of production represents the essential part of Marxism, which applies to Marx’s own version of the latter as well as to that of his epigones, regardless of whether they are revolutionaries or reformists. Marxism, in fact, only aspires to scientific dignity as a theory of capitalism. (Op. cit.)

  Mr Althusser bestows extraordinary importance upon the fact that Marx and Engels356 both supported the hypothesis of the last instance determination of history by the economy. This clarification seems sufficient for him to simultaneously reject idealism and ‘economism’. For to state that the economy acts as the determining factor ‘in the last instance’ is to define it as the basic structure, while also acknowledging the existence of other instances (politics, ideology) whose intervention prevents the economic dialectic from exerting exclusive influence and compels one to view society as ‘a differentiated and therefore complex and articulated whole’.

  It is not enough, however, to believe that the economy is the determining basis of history ‘in the last instance’ to avoid being accused of idealism.

  Questioning the validity of the Althusserian model, Mr Jean-Marie Benoist has correctly demonstrated the speciousness of a ‘discontinuation’ which, above all, leads to the inhibition of the most visibly metaphysical aspects of Marx’s doctrine, with these aspects attributed to a ‘pre-Marxist’ Marx, a proponent of the ‘real theoretical revolution’ accomplished by Feuerbach.357

  Indeed, an attentive examination of things shows that far from being able to contrast the ‘ideology’ of the young Marx with the ‘science’ of the mature one, one must, instead, consider the second to be the continuation of the first.

  One does, of course, notice an evolution between The Manuscripts of 1844 and Capital. Gradually, the ‘second’ Marx broke free from an excessively unreal conception of ‘alienation’. Not only did he reject the concepts of the Hegelian sphere, but simultaneously also the immediate ontology of the perceptible (meaning the primacy of the Dasein358 ), all to the benefit of more radical concepts. He also moved on from a simplistic theory of work alienation (See the Master-Slave topic in The Manuscripts of 1844) to a more intricate theory of work understood as production, which would henceforth dominate his system. Yet he only did so in order to adhere to another ontology of presence, to another immediacy.

  Mr Jean-Marie Benoist writes:

  Even if it were true that the history of Western philosophy is indistinguishable from the history of the reign of idealism at the expense of materialism, one would still have to wonder whether the possibility of a symmetric or asymmetric reversal of this hierarchy to the benefit of materialism does not, in fact, borrow all of its resources from metaphysics itself.

  Indeed, he adds, ‘the reversal which consists in inverting the idea-matter hierarchy into a matter-idea ranking occurs in the “beyond” of an original division that constitutes the very foundation of metaphysics, a division in which the two concepts of “idea” and “matter” act as essences, as ousiai,359 and ultimately as an ontology of presence’. It is ‘the division between “idea” and “matter” itself that is embodied by metaphysics, independently of the kind of relation maintained by the two terms’. ‘To reverse the domination is’ thus ‘merely to construct, in a manner that remains internal to metaphysics, a symmetrical relation from the previous’.

  A Metaphysical Relation

  When believing himself to be putting dialectics back on its feet, Marx did not thus tear himself away from the ‘venture of the ontology of presence’. Remaining within Parmenides’360 filiation, he even accentuated the fundamentally metaphysical character of the soil into which the discourse of his own disciples would take root once he was gone.

  What serves as evidence of this fact is that one encounters the Aristotelian concept of a generic man, of man’s own essence, both beyond and beneath the famous ‘epistemological discontinuation’. In what are, according to Mr Althusser’s assertions, the most ‘scientific’ texts, Marx persists in defining the revolution as the (re)generation of man’s essence, as the (re)coinciding of man with his own peculiarity, as the (re)production of a dis-alienated man-object in which man’s own self reclaims its being beyond the alienating constraints of real life. It is actually this ‘teleological expectancy of peculiarity’, this return of the Other to the Self, this reconciliation between the genos and the ousia, that defines the ‘second’ Marx best, the very same Marx who, in his German Ideology, goes as far as to state that ‘a non-objective being is a non-being’!

  The same inspiration underlies the entire analysis of surplus-value: in Marx’s Capital, the terms ‘capitalism’, ‘proletariat’, ‘worker’, etc. have a constant and transhistorical value (‘Ideology has no history’) and play a role which can be equated to that of the ‘universals’ of Scholasticism, within a unitary conception of time connected to the logico-metaphysical principle of identity.

  The relation between proletariat and social class thus enjoys a metaphysical connection analogous to the relation between Spinoza’s substance/attribute and mode. The very notion of class consecrates the resurfacing of the identity principle in conjugation with that of substance. The idea of revolution is a chiasmus through which the relation between proletariat and class finds itself reversed, with the substance-subject-substratum becoming the hidden support for a kind of interspace caught between the categories of essence and accident, etc.

  Mr Benoist expands on things further:
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br />   This concept of surplus-value, which acts as the key notion governing all alienation and constitutes the cornerstone of this criticism of political economy, ultimately turns out to be an absence, a never-presence. What this theory of surplus-value produces are universals, generics, meaning entities that owe the persistency of their substance to Aristotelian metaphysics. Most analyses in Marx’s Capital are therefore doubly encumbered: on the one hand, by their inconspicuous borrowing from metaphysical universals and, on the other, by their evasive denial which, as part of a desire to strip away the rags of philosophy, leads one to resort to such empirical data as industry, commerce, trade and production. An unavowed sort of metaphysics contaminated by techne361 -based thoughts: that is what we end up with.

  And here is Mr Benoist’s conclusion: the notion of surplus-value, in which Mr Althusser claims to perceive the very essence of Marx’s ‘scientificity’, actually relates to the worst kind of ideology. Its presence alone allows us to inscribe Marx’s work into the sphere of metaphysics.

  What Althusser’s reading of Marx actually constitutes is the opaquest blind denial of Marx’s non-scientificity.

  The very same observation is made by Mr Raymond Aron:

  What the Althusserians have adopted as the scientific core of Marxist economy is, in the eyes of the modern economist, its metaphysical or ideological part. (op. cit.)

  Althusser’s systematics is entirely founded upon this. With dialectical materialism defined as the ‘science pertaining to the evolution of social formations’, the existence of societies is, ‘in the last instance’, reduced to economic life as perceived at the level of mere ‘social formation’, meaning that of class. As for history, it lacks a subject, since man is to be re-placed into a ‘global’ economic perspective, which is governed by structures that are simultaneously causes and effects. At most, it is regarded as driven by an engine, namely class struggle. Man only exists through his integration into a class, which means that he is entirely an object: ‘in the last instance’, he does not act but is acted upon. And since the subject category is a constituent element of all ideology and ‘ideology addresses individuals as subjects’ (Positions), the rejection of ideology automatically results in the dismissal of the subject.

  On this level, the ‘structuralising’ Marxism of the Althusserians contrasts with a ‘historicising’ sort of Marxism that is said to present the laws of history as being equivalent to those of natural sciences (for Hegel, history embodies the accomplishment of the truth). To be more specific, it contrasts with any definition of historicity as an archetypically human reality.

  For these same reasons, Mr Althusser and his friends declare themselves hostile to the ‘humanism’ represented in particular by Mr John Lewis and Roger Garaudy, meaning, to use their jargon, to any ‘discourse in which the notion of man fulfils a theoretical function’. Such a discourse is, in their eyes, a variant of moral idealism (one that is often connected to ‘primary economism’), a ‘leftist’ deviation that only takes the ‘first’ Marx into account and whose theory is founded on the sole concept of individual alienation. And yet Mr Althusser asserts that ‘one can only find something out about men under the absolute condition of reducing the philosophical myth of man to ashes’.

  This statement is in agreement with the major hypotheses of structuralism (whose vocabulary Mr Althusser often borrows): absolute priority is given to the synchronic over the diachronic (to the spatial over the temporal), as structures replace individuals and culture is resorbed into nature, etc. One must also draw a parallel between these words and Lévi-Strauss’s famous formula: ‘The ultimate goal of human sciences is not to construct man but to dissolve him’.

  Whatever its proponents may claim, Althusserian dogmatic intransigence thus leads to a fanatic sort of idealism. Their ‘theoretical practice’ is a pure philosophy of concepts. Mr Raymond Aron declares:

  To the great pleasure of those accustomed to philosophical dissertation, their intellectual ratiocinations replace with school-level problematics the perhaps tedious yet still authentic problems that relate to facts instead of “structural reality”.

  Having allowed Mr Althusser to ‘theorise’ beyond its control for many years, the French Communist Party eventually resigned itself, however timidly, to publishing his Positions in 1976 (Indeed, most of his other writings have been released through Maspéro). Whether it all constitutes an ‘innocent’ reading or not, he is undoubtedly under no illusions when it comes to the influence of a handful of philosophy professors on the masses.

  Mr Althusser does not enjoy any unanimity among leftists either. For a while, the manner in which he stressed the importance of ‘practice’ and the necessity to turn philosophy into a tool of class struggle earned him a decent amount of popularity among the ultra-leftist students and graduates of the École normale supérieure.362 He was, above all, considered a key figure among independent Maoists within the so-called ‘For Communism’ tendency (Alain Badiou and Emmanuel Terray). This, however, was not the case among French Trotskyites. Mr Daniel Bensaïd, a member of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), has written the following in Rouge:363

  Althusser has mastered all the skills of a charlatan.

  Mr Emile Bottigelli, an assistant professor in Nanterre, states:

  The Marx that Althusser presents us with is not the real Marx, but an imagined one. (Structuralisme et marxisme,364 UGE/10–18, 1970)

  Interviewed in 1968 by the communist Italian daily L’Unità, Mr Althusser made the following confession:

  To become a Marxist-Leninist philosopher is not an easy endeavour. Just like any other intellectual, a professor of philosophy is a petty bourgeois. Whenever he opens his mouth, it is the voice of petty-bourgeois ideology that one hears; indeed, its resources and ruses are infinite.

  *

  Réponse à John Lewis, an essay by Louis Althusser. Maspéro, 102 pages.

  Pour Marx, an essay by Louis Althusser. Maspéro, 264 pages.

  Lire ‘Le capital’, a collection of texts edited by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar. Maspéro, 240 and 192 pages.

  Positions, an essay by Louis Althusser. Ed. Sociales, 173 pages.

  Théorie et politique: Louis Althusser,365 an essay by Saül Karsz. Fayard, 340 pages.

  Marx est mort, an essay by Jean-Marie Benoist. Gallimard, 252 pages.

  ***

  Note that Mr Althusser, whose theories have often been criticised within the French Communist Party, seems to have nowadays returned to the bosom of communist orthodoxy. In connection to this, one should read his Eléments d’autocritique366 (Hachette, 1973), as well as the text of his ‘Soutenance d’Amiens’,367 dated June 1975, which was included in his first (and only) book published by the Party, Positions (Ed. Sociales, 1976). In it, Louis Althusser accuses himself of having cultivated paradox and even provocation by declaring, for instance, that ‘theory is a practice’ and thus putting forward the ‘theoretical practice’ theory (in contrast with the idealism of pure theory). He also admits having inflated Marx’s theoretical ‘anti-humanism’ and ventured a little too far in his struggle against pragmatism and empiricism, particularly when supporting the internal aspect of ‘theoretical practice’ relating to the latter’s validation criteria, which was synonymous with declaring that a theory is not actually correct simply because it is so, but is proven as such as a result of its correctness (‘Here again, what was at stake was the theory’s relative autonomy’, he writes). Last but not least, he acknowledges his excessive ‘flirtation with structuralist terminology’.

  The French Marxist magazine Dialectiques, which was established in 1973 by ‘normaliens’ defining themselves as ‘leftist communists’, published a special issue dedicated to Louis Althusser (numbers 15–16, 1976). The issue focuses primarily on a critique of Stalinism and all socialisms involving a ‘bourgeois activity’ on the part of the state.

  In early 1977, Mr Pierre Fougeyrollas368 published a violent pamphlet targeting ‘leftist idealism’
entitled ‘Trois essais sur l’obscurantisme contemporain. Contre MM. Lévi-Strauss, Lacan et Althusser’369 (Savelli). In Mr Althusser’s work (which ‘is ultimately but a work of exegesis and perhaps even hermeneutics’), the author of ‘Contradiction et totalité’370 (Minuit, 1964) detects a ‘perfect example of regression towards Christian idealism’. Here again, he writes, ‘we regress, in a hypocritical manner, towards the world of speech, meaning towards words that have been erected into a world at the expense of the very objectivity of historical processes’. He then adds:

  ‘Through his reference to the spirit, Lévi-Strauss ebbs towards Christianity. On his part, Lacan never exits this very same Christianity when going around in circles in his phallic speech. And as for the pseudo-Marxist Althusser, he accomplishes his own Christian regression by adding to dialectical and historical materialism a kind of scholasticism compared to which the medieval one may indeed seem innovative’.

  *

  Roger Garaudy

  ‘My human life started when I became a revolutionary militant in order to satisfy the demands of my Christian faith’.

  With his tortoise shell glasses, white hair and turtleneck jumper, sixty-three-year-old Roger Garaudy once desisted Christianity to embrace Communism. He has now relinquished Communism in order to return to Christianity. A very smooth process indeed.

  During the thirty years that he has spent on the look-out for the transcendence ‘emerging from our era’s revolutionary requirements’, never has he ceased to assign to Marxism its ‘true mission’: the earthly realisation of the message which traditional Christianity ascribes to the beyond. In other words: the secularisation of evangelical morals, all under the authority bestowed upon him by Engels’ theories on primitive (‘subjectively revolutionary’) Christianity and the words added by Marx merely a few lines after his famous formula stating that ‘religion is the opium of the people’: