Digitalized by Mark R. Baker on November 11, 2010. Marked-up by Jonas Holmgren for the Marxists Internet Archive.
The text of The Poverty of Theory was completed in February 1978. In March the Union of the Left was defeated in the French elections. At the end of April Althusser published four articles in Le Monde, polemicising against the leadership of the French Communist Party. These have subsequently been republished by Maspero (Ce qui ne peut durer dans le parti communiste francais), and englished in New Left Review, 109, May-June 1978.
These articles have been variously presented in different organs of the British Left, as a ‘dramatic and eloquent intervention’, and as the ‘devastating’ pronouncements of a ‘non-dogmatic’ and ‘supple’ Marxist. Althusser has become a new ‘anti-Stalinist’ culture-hero of the francophile British intelligentsia, and I have shown my usual ineptitude in choosing this moment to publish my critique.
Unfortunately I have not been able to obtain these‘eloquent’ and ‘devastating’ articles. They have not yet reached me at Worcester. The articles which I have read were given up to the kind of political in-fighting predictable in the aftermath of a lamentable political defeat - a defeat ensured by the double-talk, double-tactics, and unabashed opportunism of the PCF One is given the impression that, if the Union of the Left had won 2% more of the poll, M. Althusser would have denied the world the benefit of his views. But defeat, repeating the experience of promise deferred which has become perpetual to generations of the French Left, has unloosed a squall of dismay, in which Althusser must either raise his voice above the others, or be consigned to nullity.
It would have been more impressive if Althusser’s critique (and in particular, his recommendation of joint action of the Left at the ‘base’) had been issued before the defeat, and in time to have influenced the campaign. It is, after all, rather familiar for unsuccessful politicians to find themselves exposed to retribution in the aftermath of defeat - and Althusser and his friends are playing the part of Mrs Thatcher to the Edward Heath of Marchais.
What distinguishes Althusser’s polemics is not their eloquence but their self-righteous tone and their utter lack of self-criticism. The Political Committee of the PCF is held responsible for all - for the Party's history, its strategies, and its ideology. The polemic is sharp, and sometimes caustic, in its exposure of the Party’s bureaucratic organisation and quasimilitary control. But this is, after all, a very old story, and one profoundly familiar to anyone with a practical (as opposed to theoretic) knowledge of the French Left. It has been written out, over several decades, by many hands: by Trotskyists and syndicalists, by the Communist oppositions of 1956 and subsequently, by Sartre at large in the late 1950s, by our comrades of the first Nouvelle Gauche, of France-Observateur and the U.G.S., by Socialisme ou Barbaric, by the activists of May 1968, and by many others. Throughout these decades, Althusser has refused any permissibility to this critique, and, as we have seen, has denounced it as ‘the most violent bourgeois anti-Communism and Trotskyist anti-Stalinism.’
No doubt we should admire his ‘supple’, even agile, Marxism. He has been able to move from ‘the cult of the personality’ (1965) to ‘a Stalinian deviation’ (1973) to a quite explicit dissent from Stalinist theory and forms - and all this in less than twenty years! We should perhaps welcome Althusser as a late developer, a philosopher innocent of practical political knowledge who has at length been enlightened by an electoral debacle in the classic arena of bourgeois democracy. But to what practical conclusions does this polemic lead? With much courting of the ‘militants of the base’, he calls for ‘a thorough critique and reform of the Party’s internal organisation.’ Very good. And in what should such a reform consist? Rather little, perhaps, for Althusser insists that ‘democratic centralism’ must be sacrosanct: the ‘militants’ and the ‘masses’ need no advice from ‘experts in bourgeois democracy - be they Communist or not.’ This is a pre-emptive strike: Communist critics are forewarned that if they propose reforms which are not to Althusser’s taste, he will enter their names in the Black Book of Bourgeois Democracy. For the rest, we are offered a delphic inscrutability. My friend Douglas Johnson, who is rumoured to have private information, tells us (New Statesman, 7 July 1978) that Althusser’s proposed reforms would be of extensive reach: ‘Discussion should be possible within the cells. A militant should be able to write to the Central Committee and have the right to a reply.’ I must remember to propose such devastating reforms in the cell of my local Labour Party.
What gives more pause for thought is Althusser’s third article (Le Monde, 26 April) on ‘Ideology.’ Here he demands ‘a Marxist theory brought back to life: one that is not hardened and deformed by consecrated formulae, but lucid, critical and rigorous.’ And he carefully explains that such a theory must be accompanied by concrete analysis! And, more than this, by concrete analysis of class relations! How very remarkable! And how remarkable, also, that he can intone these platitudes without a single tremor of self-criticism! For two decades Althusser and his immediate circle have had more influence upon the ideology of French Communist intellectuals than any other group. And this influence can be seen, precisely, in the reduction of Marxism to elaborate consecrated formulae, in the abject divorce (under the blanket attack of ‘empiricism’) between ‘theory’ and concrete analysis, and in the reduction of the analysis of class relations to metaphysical permutations. So that the first requisite of a critique of the ideology of the PCF must be a rigorous and unforgiving critique of Althusser’s works themselves.
I borrow the term ‘unforgiving’ from Althusser. He tells us that concrete analysis, and also theory, ‘do not forgive.’ But the necessary critique of the theory and practices of the PCF will turn out to be very much less forgiving than he supposes. For the PCF was, for many years, the major bastion of Stalinism in the non-Communist world, and its leaders had unusual positions of influence within the counsels of the Comintern.
It is true that Althusser takes a step towards honesty, when he admits that (‘between 1948 and 1965’) the PCF held its own faked ‘trials’ of critics and intimidated and blackballed independent sections of the French Left with campaigns of calumny. But, cheek by jowl with this, he twice invokes the memory of Maurice Thorez, and a supposed Golden Age of vital theory and honest practice. This is a useful demogogic trick to pass on the ‘militants', in whose memory Thorez is indelibly identified with the great mass anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s. But does not Althusser also know that Thorez (the Moscow exile of the Resistance) was a major engineer of Stalinism within the Comintern, the architect of that subordination of the International to Soviet interests, and of those structures, practices and ideology which now (in 1978) Althusser can at last identify as Stalinist? Does he not know that, according to the testimony of two members of the Central Committee of the PCF of that time (Politique Hebdo, Spring 1976; Socialist Register, 1976), in 1956 Thorez attempted to suppress from his own members any knowledge of Khrushchev’s secret report to the 20th Congress, and was associated with Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovitch in their attempt to overthrow Khrushchev in a coup? Althusser is a signatory to the appeal for the clearing of the name of Bukharin, and this does him credit. No doubt he will be interested to learn that, when Khrushchev and his colleagues signified their intention to ‘rehabilitate’ Bukharin, Rykov and Zinoviev, it was Thorez who flew to Moscow to beseech them to maintain silence (Ken Coates, The Case of Bukharin, Postscript)?
If Althusser wishes to revive the tradition of Thorez, then new Althusser is but old Thorez writ large. With Althusser, the critique of Stalinism has not even begun, nor can it begin, since his own thought is both the consequence of Stalinism and its continuance. But I do not wish to trespass further into French affairs: we can safely leave this unforgiving accounting to our French comrades.
What concerned me in The Poverty of Theory was not the particular situation of Althusser in France - the signs, and the complexities, of that situation I may not always have correctly read - but the influence of transposed Althusserian thought outside of France. And it is necessary to note the consistent misinformation as to French political realities, and mystification as to French intellectual affairs, which has been passed upon the English-speaking Left by the British francophiles who have, for some fifteen years, been promoting a purported ‘revival of Marxism’ in this country.
I make no objection to francophilia. There is very much in French intellectual and political life to learn from and to admire. But our own agencies, who have taken out their franchises to import Althusser, Balibar, Poulantzas, Lacan, &c., have consistently presented images of French life and politics which are little more than fairy-tales derived from Parisian cafe gossip. New Left Review (and New Left Books) hold a particular responsibility for this, since over the past fifteen years they have issued, to the accompaniment of ecstatic ‘presentations’ and theoretical heavy breathing, every product, however banal, of the Althusserian fabrik; and, from France or about France, they have issued nothing else. So that, whatever esoteric reservations the Review’s editors may hold as to Althusser, the imposition has been passed upon an innocent public that the French proletariat = the PCF, a Party supposedly composed of a heroic, uncomplicated, militant ‘base’, adjoined to which are rigorous and lucid Marxist theorists, imbricated in the concrete life of the Party.
One distasteful aspect of this fairy-story is that it has contributed, over the same period, to an actual breach of solidarity between ourselves and the very vigorous libertarian and anti-Stalimst Left in France, with which the first New Left had the closest fraternal associations, but whose activities are now neither examined nor even reported. So that, in the name of francophilia, exchanges have actually become more difficult with those independent French intellectuals and activists whom the PCF has chosen to blackball or calumniate. And an equally distasteful consequence is that the soi-disant Marxist Left in Britain is wholly unprepared to understand the long-delayed disaster that has now, at length, overtaken the Communist intellectual tradition in France.
For the drama of the last two decades has been wholly misreported in this country. It has never been the arduous intellectual epic that British promoters supposed. A number of episodes have been - and have been seen, by an increasing number of French intellectuals, to be - farce. One does not have to be as old as Methuselah to recall the years when Roger Garaudy (the Dr John Lewis of France) held the Office of Corrector of Bourgeois Heresies throughout the Western World - an office from which he was deposed as preliminary to his reconciliation with the Catholic Church! More than in any other Western country, the PCF succeeded in intimidating their intellectuals and in neutralising them with bourgeois guilt. The intellectuals were segregated in their ghettos, and subordinated to the discipline of the Party’s clerisy. The consequent rupture between theory and practice found a classical expression in Althusserian thought. More resistant to the education of experience than any other Western Communist Party, the PCF met the demise of Stalinism and the reinvigoration of capitalism with the rigorous response of an ostrich. This meant, for the Party leadership, a collapse into pragmatism and opportunism; and, for the intellectuals, a swift passage into idealism — a theoretically-justified refusal of evidence, of history, of ‘empiricism.’ Now, after many decades of battering at the door, social being is finally making a late forced entry upon social consciousness. Suddenly, the Party intellectuals in their breached fortress are making ‘eloquent’ and ‘devastating’ signals of recognition of. . . what everyone outside that fortress has long known.
I will not predict Althusser’s future evolution. He is unlikely to follow the path of Garaudy. What I will predict is that all that high and rigorous theory will collapse, for a decade, into a shambles, and that the tenacious posthumous Stalinism of the French Communist intelligentsia will vanish in a year or two amidst cries of sauve qui peut! I cannot say that this prospect displeases me. I found the cruel and largely-unmerited debacle of an honourable French Communist tradition of the Thirties and of the Resistance to be tragic; but in the last two decades I have seen less honour and more bad faith in that quarter. The work of rebuilding a libertarian revolutionary tradition in France has long been going on elsewhere.
In certain of these judgements I may be ill-informed. It is possible, even, that Althusser may prove to be more serious in his new-found anti-Stalinism than I suppose. Let us hope that this is so. But if he is to be so, then he must revoke the greater part of his own published theory. And this is what The Poverty of Theory is about. For the theory remains as theory, is replicated as theory, and is transplanted as theory, whatever personal or public contingencies arise. In this, at least, I am glad to be confirmed by Althusser. For, as he remarked rather grandly in an interview' to Les Nouvelles Litteraires (8 June 1978): ‘Philosophe, je ne suis pas piege par les effets de la politique publique quotidienne . . / Historian, je ne suis pas either. There is not one sentence in The Poverty of Theory which I wish to retract.
6 August, 1978.
Last updated on: 7.30.2016