by Judy Jones
Of contemporary Marxist theorists, the hardest one to read is Althusser, which may account for his recent vogue. Althusser is the main proponent of a hybrid of structuralism and Marxism, a combo he opposes to old-fashioned Hegelo-Marxism as well as to more recent Marxist humanism. Basically, Althusser focuses on Marx’s later work (the humanists celebrate “the young Marx,” Marx the “poet” and the utopian, the messianic and “hip” Marx), citing an “epistemological break” between the early writings, hopelessly mired in our old friend the “subject,” and the mature ones, in which Marx was finally able to get down to something that might be the basis of a real science.
After explaining how to give Marx the properly “symptomatic” reading (paying attention, like the psychoanalyst, to both what is said and what gets left out), Althusser explains how the object of knowledge is different from the real object. This process—equivalent to knowledge working on its object—he calls “theoretical practice.” Such theoretical practice, when applied to society, leads inevitably to a view of society as a totality (you remember “totality”), which can, however, be broken down—not into a vulgar base/superstructure scheme, but into a tripartite division of economy, politics, and ideology, each of the three relatively autonomous but all of them united in a larger “structure of structures.” Or, as Althusser says, “The whole existence of structure consists of its effects.”
As you may have gathered, these structures are very complex and have very complex relationships. Althusser calls particular relationships among them conjunctures, and reasons that any specific conjuncture is likely to be, in his memorable term, “overdetermined.” Which is to say, complex—also, slightly redundant. This is the one Althusserian concept you may actually be able to use: If you are late to work because your mother called, you couldn’t find your contact lenses, and the bus broke down, your lateness might be said to be overdetermined.
Otherwise, should you actually meet an Althusserian, there’s not much you can do. In a pinch, try asking by what criterion he or she knows historical materialism is scientific. Failing that, the charge of Stalinism may prove useful. In any case, Althusser proves our basic point as well as the next Marxist: Nobody really understands Marx any better than you do.
Four Cautionary Tales THE DREYFUS AFFAIR
A landmark in the history of modern France and a national disgrace. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a wealthy Jewish officer in the French artillery, was accused of having betrayed secrets to the Germans. Although the evidence against him was slim, rabid anti-Semitism in the military prompted a court-martial to convict him of treason and sentence him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Great applause from the public. Two years later, Colonel Georges Picquart, chief of army intelligence, discovered new evidence pointing to the innocence of Dreyfus and the guilt of one Ferdinand Esterhazy, a major in the army and a notorious adventurer. The military, however, was unwilling to admit its error and opted for a cover-up. Picquart was silenced and the authorities refused to reopen the case. But Dreyfus’ brother made a few discoveries of his own, and soon the whole affair turned into a major political issue, with all France divided into two factions: the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards (for which read pro-republic, anticlerical liberals, and royalist, militarist conservatives, respectively). The former group included a number of intellectual—and a scattering of political—big guns, including Émile Zola, Georges Clemenceau, and Anatole France, who, although determined to redress the injustice, were actually less concerned with the plight of Dreyfus himself, who was still languishing on Devil’s Island, than with discrediting the rightist government. The anti-Dreyfusards, who included no small number of reactionaries and out-and-out bigots, felt obliged to resort to perjury and intimidation to protect their idea of patriotism.
The plot continued to thicken. Major Esterhazy was finally tried and acquitted by a court-martial. An outraged Zola wrote his famous open letter beginning “J’accuse,” for which he was promptly sentenced to jail. He escaped to England. Major Henry, an army intelligence officer who, it now turned out, had forged much of the evidence used against Dreyfus, committed suicide. Ester-hazy followed Zola’s lead and escaped to England. A Dreyfusard became premier. Dreyfus was retried, convicted again by a military court—this time, found “guilty with extenuating circumstances.” Great hue and cry from the public. The President of France finally stepped in and pardoned Dreyfus, but by this time, pardon wasn’t good enough. The public was still up in arms, and demands for Dreyfus’ complete exoneration were coming in from all over the world. Finally, in 1906, he was cleared, and, in 1930, his innocence was proven by the publication of secret German papers showing that Esterhazy had, in fact, been the culprit.
The repercussions of “I affaire Dreyfus” were enormous. It discredited the royalist elements in France, brought the left wing to political power, gave rise to a period of rabid antimilitarism and anticlericalism, hastened the separation of church and state, and exposed the extent and depth of French anti-Semitism. And for at least a decade, the country remained split between die-hard anti-Dreyfusards and righteous Dreyfusards, many of whom were neighbors or members of the same family, who would no longer sip a vin du pays together. As for poor old Dreyfus, he was promoted to the rank of major and decorated with the Legion of Honor, but he had a hard time readjusting to army life. He died in obscurity in Paris in 1935. THE SARAJEVO ASSASSINATION
June 28, 1914: The visiting Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife, Sophie, are shot dead in the streets of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, for centuries under Turkish rule but since 1878 a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The assassin is a young Bosnian revolutionary named Gavrilo Princip, member of the Black Hand, a secret society headquartered in the kingdom of Serbia, just next door. The murder has the characteristic irony of many political assassinations, since the Archduke was, himself, something of a Serbian-rights activist. One month later, Austria, delivering an outrageous ultimatum to the Serbian government, demands to be allowed to participate in suppressing anti-Austrian feeling in Serbia and in punishing any conspirators in what has turned out to be an assassination plot involving officials of the Serbian government. When the Serbs tactfully rebuff the ultimatum, Austria declares war. As a result of the elaborate, if somewhat tenuous network of alliances in effect, Germany declares war on Russia, and France and Great Britain declare war on Germany, all within a week. By the end of the month, Japan is engaged against Germany, too, and three months later, Turkey jumps in on the side of the Germans and Austrians, an alliance known as the Central Powers. World War I is in full swing, and all because a fanatic from some weird little country nobody ever heard of blew away a man who wasn’t even a monarch yet.
Obviously, blaming World War I on what happened at Sarajevo is like blaming Norman Bates’ slasher impulses on Janet Leigh’s turning on the hot water. Europe had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown since at least the turn of the century as a result of both family and personality problems dating back to the 1870s. That was when Germany, having just trounced the French in the Franco-Prussian War, started angling for its own place in the sun among the powers of Europe. In order to consolidate the new German position and forestall any thoughts of revenge on the part of the French, Bismarck, then Germany’s chancellor, ran around forging secret alliances with anyone who’d let him in the door—specifically, the Hapsburgs, who were looking for an ally against the Russians in their attempt to grab a bigger piece of the Balkans, and the Italians, who liked the idea of siding with a winner. Virtually everyone else was offended by the Germans, who struck them not only as parvenus, but as too ambitious, truculent, and devious to make acceptable neighbors. Bismarck’s Triple Alliance turned an undercurrent of resentment into out-and-out paranoia. Pretty soon France, Russia, and Great Britain had formed the Triple Entente—not anything as formal as an alliance (Britain was too determinedly isolationist for that), but an entente cordiale, whereby each would pitch in to help out if e
ither of the others was attacked by members of the Triple Alliance. This didn’t make the Germans, who now saw themselves surrounded by potential enemies, any easier to get along with. By the early 1900s, every major power had armed itself to the teeth, and Europe was divided into two camps, each nervously waiting for the other to draw first.
In such a high-stress situation, a German unexpectedly scratching his ear might have been enough to set things off, but there was a better catalyst: the Balkans. A cluster of wild, backward countries that had only recently gotten out from under the thumb of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, the Balkans were the object of perpetual rivalry between the Russians and the Austro-Hungarians, both of whom were on their last legs without realizing it, and were, therefore, semi-hysterical much of the time. The Austrians, in particular, had to be a little crazy to keep trying to throw their weight around the Balkan peninsula, much of which was inhabited by angry Slavs—Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins, and Slovenes—who, believe it or not, saw themselves as a single nationality and who, being quasi-Orientals who still depended on garlic to ward off vampire attacks, felt closer to the Russians than to the Austrians, who looked down on them as ethnically inferior.
Thanks largely to the Serbs, who had a tendency to register discontent by forming secret societies and committing terrorist acts, both rival empires were, by 1914, ready to be driven around the bend. An assassination was just the ticket. It was also the chance the Germans had been waiting for. Fed up with being treated, as they saw it, as second cousins, and convinced that the Russians, who had been notoriously unreliable allies up to that point, wouldn’t fight, they gave full rein to their ambitions—and to the military strategy they’d had ready for ten years. As for Great Britain, it felt honor-bound to declare war on Germany when German troops invaded Belgium on their way to smash the French. At this point, no one was thinking clearly and everyone was wishing the whole business would just go away. But, as the British historian A. J. P. Taylor noted, politicians and generals had a hard time keeping up with each other’s point of view in those days, and before they knew it, the heads of state had lost control. “Their sensations, when diplomacy collapsed,” writes Taylor, “were those of a train passenger who sees the express thundering through the station at which he intended to alight.”
And that’s only what was happening on the surface. Behind all these global neuroses was the newfound conviction, born out of the traumatic effects of Darwinism on human consciousness, that Nature was a struggle for survival of the fittest; that, in the case of people, the fittest meant the best-armed; and that, under the circumstances, war was inevitable anyway. Those who still hoped this wasn’t true tended to believe that enormous military strength on all sides would act as a deterrent, and that common sense would surely prevail. Wrong again. Not only was World War I out of control virtually from the beginning, it went on for four years, and it wound up ending European domination of the world. THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
World War II broke out officially on September 1, 1939, when the Nazis overran Poland, but it had really been going on for the better part of a decade. Germany had already, you may recall, invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, adding a few million additional Germans—some happy about it, some not, and some not even exactly German—to her empire, as Britain and France stood huffily by. Italy was entrenched in Ethiopia and Albania, and Japan in China’s Manchuria. The League of Nations protested from time to time, but, puhleez, who cared what the League of Nations thought? The saddest, most wrenching events of the proto-War period, though, took place in Spain—for over a century Europe’s backwater, self-contained, aloof, apathetic with regard to the rest of the continent, unenviable, even contemptible, in its eyes.
Civil war didn’t start until 1936, but for the preceding five years, since King Alfonso XIII was driven out in a fairly uneventful revolution, Spain had been feeling shaky. The new republican government, pledged to economic and social reform and determined to propel the country out of the eighteenth century and into the twentieth, moved against the Church (separating it from the State, which it had been pushing around since at least the Inquisition); broke up a few of the big landed estates, redistributing the acreage among the peasants; and gave a degree of local autonomy to the Catalans, in and around Barcelona, as well as to the Basques. Frankly, it was all a case of too-little-too-late, at least in the eyes of the extremists (anarchists and Communists, mostly). But it was more than enough to infuriate the priests and the landowners, not to mention the former royalists, who were upset anyway. In 1933, the government fell into the hands of the rightists, who themselves proved both ineffectual and inflammatory: A simple miners’ strike was put down with more than your average brutality, and the Catalans were sent to their rooms without any supper.
Okay, now it’s 1936. New general elections. All the leftist types (republicans, socialists, communists, anarchists, trade-union members) join in a Popular Front against all the rightist types (monarchists, priests, landowners, army officers, and Fascists, known locally as Falangists). The leftists beat the rightists at the polls— but it’s very close. Even so, the leftists push ahead with their vision of the new Spain, figuring that reconciliation was a luxury, or an impossibility, or that it damn well could wait—this part isn’t so clear.
Next thing you know, the military (never a factor to be discounted in Spain) has acted; revolts at Spanish army bases in Morocco, led by General Francisco Franco, result in what amounts to an invasion of Spain, with almost all the soldiers siding with their officers—and the rightists. Thus the battle lines are drawn: the leftists, or Republicans, sometimes called the Loyalists, are concentrated in the south, which tends to be poor, in the industrial region around Barcelona, and in Madrid, the capital; the rightists, or Nationalists, sometimes called the Rebels (even though they’re the Establishment types), are strongest in the ancient—read strongly Catholic—heartland of Spain, plus Galicia, in the northwest corner.
Even without the foreign intervention, which we’ll be getting to in a minute, it would have been an especially appalling civil war. Neither side behaved itself particularly well; the Republicans, at their worst, raped nuns, cut off the ears of priests, and fought savagely and treacherously among themselves. The Nationalists came in the night and shot in the dark, with the result that whole villages weren’t around in the morning; their most famous victim was the Spanish poet García Lorca. In the end, some six hundred thousand Spaniards would die, with many more permanently crippled; still others were in exile, never to return.
But it was the Great Powers—Hitler and Mussolini on the side of the Nationalists, Stalin on the side of the Republicans—who, by taking a local amateur production and turning it into a dress rehearsal for bigger things, made sure the civil war turned into chapter-length world-history-book stuff. The Germans and Italians sent troops (the Italians over fifty thousand); the Soviets technicians and military advisors; both sides as much equipment—tanks, planes, guns—as they could pack up, with the emphasis on those items that still needed to be tested on the battlefield. The British and French, again, hung back, though plenty of Brits, French, Americans, and others went to Spain as volunteers, usually on the Republican side.
A lot more happened in the course of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted until 1939, by which time the Nationalists, led by Franco, had crushed the Republicans. Guernica, in the Basque country, was bombed by the Nationalists, or at least by the Germans (Picasso got it down on canvas); General Mola tossed off his famous “fifth column” line (about how he had four columns of soldiers encircling Madrid, and a fifth column infiltrating and undermining it from within); and Ernest Hemingway completed his research for For Whom the Bell Tolls.
But what really mattered was what the war had crystallized: the splitting of the world into Fascist and anti-Fascist camps; the proof that Germany and Italy could work nicely together in a Rome-Berlin Axis; the general belief that not just war, but War, was inevitable. Also to be noted: the arrival on the world scene
of Generalissimo Franco, a brilliant military strategist and so-so politician, who, far from attempting to conduct Spain into the twentieth century, would, over the course of the next forty years, insulate her from the rest of the world and immunize her to the present. DIEN BIEN PHU
Years later, nearly everyone would agree that France’s colonial ambitions in Indochina had been doomed from the start, that her seven-and-a-half-year war in the region had been a series of disastrous misjudgments and miscalculations, and that her empire had been little more than a grand illusion since at least the end of World War II. But it wasn’t until the total defeat of its forces at the North Vietnamese garrison of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 that the French government was forced to drop its blindfold and admit that the game was over. And no sooner had the smoke cleared than the American government crept back to the battlefield, retrieved the blindfold, and tied it securely over its own eyes.
The area now called Vietnam had always been the biggest headache in France’s Indochinese empire. The territory was divided, geographically and culturally, into two native kingdoms, Tonkin and Annan, in the north, and a colony, Cochin China, in the south, a fragmentation that made communication difficult and administration awkward. What was worse, the peoples of the north, the center of Viet culture, were proud, feisty, and subversive by nature; they had never been ones to bow and smile when outsiders tried to take over their turf. By the time Japan invaded Indochina in 1940, the French had already spent a couple of decades putting down village rebellions, scattered resistance groups had begun to coalesce into a Communist-dominated nationalist underground, and Ho Chi Minh had learned some valuable lessons in organization and strategy. When the Japanese took the keys to the country away from the French, who were too busy keeping up with the war in Europe to put up much of a fight, and turned them over to the Vietnamese, the struggle for control in the north was effectively over, although none of the major powers realized it at the time.
