[lbo-talk] "Process without a Subject or Goal(s)"

[Michael Pugliese]

Marta Harnecker http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/m-fem/2002/msg00240.html , an orthodox M-L, making a few of the points that E.P. Thompson makes, in regards to the political origins of Althusser's anti-humanism in reaction to those sectors of the New Left, early on that were breaks from Communist Party practice and theory (Thompson, The New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review) in his polemic against (and a very funny one when he gets to his diagrams of the Althusserian orrery w/ motors pushing and chugging the class struggle along) Althusser, "The Poverty of Theory."
http://www.rebelion.org/harnecker/althusser251102.pdf
"6. THEORETICAL VERSUS PRACTICAL HUMANISM 
In the end, Althusser cannot deny, as some of his critics pretend, that a preoccupation with 
human beings has been at the center of the work of Marx, before and after the break. What 
he indicates is that in the works of young Marx this preoccupation entailed an effort to 
conceive human problems by using humanistic categories; in his mature works these 
categories disappear and new categories, very different from the previous ones, take their 
place. 
What Althusser questions is the theoretical value of the concept, not the reality indicated by 
it, nor, therefore, the need for the existence of humanistic ideologies, given that these may 
have an important practical ideological function. 
For him it is clear that the historical nonreason and inhumanity that weigh heavily on the 
past of the USSR--the terror, the repression, the dogmatism (evident in the Twentieth 
Congress of the CPSU)--are what explains the avalanche of reflections on humanism in the 
socialist countries and between Marxist intellectuals of that time (Althusser 1970, 237). 
Page 8
ALTHUSSER AND THE "THEORETICAL ANTIHUMANISM" OF MARX 
MARTA HARNECKER 
8 
Althusser does not deny the importance of the indictments contained in these discourses, he 
attributes to them a practical importance. They put the finger on the wound, but do not heal 
it.
The term humanism serves to indicate a set of realities, a set of errors committed in the 
socialist countries, but, we insist, we are not given the means to recognize them. They 
allow us to recognize the errors, but not their causes, and, therefore, prevent us from 
rectifying them. There is no historical therapy for the errors committed if we stop at the 
symptoms of the illness and do not proceed to the causes. 
In order to resolve the problems presented in the absence of a practical humanism in the 
socialist countries, it is not enough to speak of humanity, it is necessary to seek what 
determines this dehumanizing effect in a social system whose final objective, the one 
presented by Marx, was the full development of individuals respecting their differences--
that is to say, their individuality. 
It goes without saying that all collectivism that annuls individuality--that is to say the 
features that differentiate each member of society--is a flagrant deformation of Marxism.
Suffice it to remember that Marx criticized bourgeois law for artificially pretending to bring 
human equality rather than recognizing human differences; he therefore held that a truly 
just distribution had to take into account differentiated needs. Hence his maxim: "From 
each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." 
Althusser criticizes the resort to humanistic ideology not because he is unfamiliar with the 
importance of the underlying preoccupations of humanism, but rather because this resort to 
ideology rather than to theory leaves us without the theoretical resources for a genuine 
solution to our problems. 
"It would be a mistake," he states, "to elaborate a theory of individuality that ignores the 
effects of the social structure upon the individual." Thus he rejects the reductive argument 
that all that has occurred in the USSR, and in the socialist countries in general, is due to the 
cult of personality. 
It is necessary to compose a theory "about the forms of existence of individuality, starting 
with the existing structures of the existing means of production: it is the only way to deal 
with all that concerns the effects on individuality pertinent to the existing structures. It is 
necessary to invert the question and the majority of the problems that make sense will find 
solutions when they are understood as a function of social structures. The historical 
therapeutics of these structural effects upon the individual will be announced then in terms 
of a transformation or creation of the structures needed to resolve the problems: structures 
of economic, political, cultural, and individual existence, etc." In the end it makes clear that 
this method can only touch upon questions that pertain to its own sphere and not others. 
"For the questions that remain to be solved it will be necessary to seek for answers in 
psychoanalysis and with respect to that which will some day be built: a theory for 
ideological practices, such as art, religion, etc." (Althusser 1968). 
Thirty-two years have passed since the appearance of those initial works by the French 
philosopher that elicited so many criticisms. And what has happened to the theoretical 
production of Marxist intellectuals? What is the theoretical instrument we count on today to 
analyze the crisis and fall of socialism? What rigorous analysis exists at this time for the 
actual form that the capitalist means of production have taken? Where are the projects that 
Page 9
ALTHUSSER AND THE "THEORETICAL ANTIHUMANISM" OF MARX 
MARTA HARNECKER 
9 
offer an alternative to neoliberalism in the first and third worlds? What can we do so that 
"democratic" socialism (nothing other than the current version of "socialism with a 
human face" of the seventies) may become a concrete alternative project and not mere 
generalities--noble as they may be--such as the respect for human rights. 

Michael Pugliese