Early Writings, The Spectre of Hegel, 1953 Louis Althusser
On Marxism
Written: 1953 Source:Louis Althusser, Early Writings, The Spectre of Hegel Translated by: G M Goshgarian Publisher: Verso, 1997 HTML Markup: Andy Blunden
Marxism constitutes one of the main currents of contemporary thought. By now, there is no counting the works that set out to expound, combat, or even ‘supersede’ it. It is already no easy task to find the path that cuts through this mass of polemical works and leads to the texts. Moreover, there are a great many of these texts. The (incomplete) French edition of the works of Marx and Engels published by Costes comprises some sixty volumes; that published by Editions Sociales more than twenty; the (incomplete) edition of Lenin’s works includes some twenty volumes; the edition of Stalin’s, some fifteen; and so on ... But the fact that there are so many texts is not the only problem. The Marxist canon spans an historical period that stretches from 1840 to the present, and raises problems that have fuelled polemics: the nature of Marx’s early works; the problem of the Marxist tradition. Finally, the very nature of Marxism — a science and a philosophy closely bound up with (political or scientific) practice — represents an additional difficulty, perhaps the greatest of all. If one neglects the constant reference to practice, which Marx, Engels, and their followers insistently call to our attention, one is liable to misunderstand the significance of Marxism entirely, and to interpret it as an ‘ordinary’ philosophy.
Here we would like to provide a few guideposts that may make approaching and studying Marxism easier.
A few bibliographical pointers may be useful. At the end of a work by H. C. Desroches, Signification du marxisme (Éditions Ouvrières, Economie et humanisme, Paris, 1950), the reader will find an introductory bibliography by C. F. Hubert. This annotated bibliography is divided into two sections. In the first, the author presents us with an initiatory bibliography of selected works or chapters — the compendia of Marxism — by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, organised under four headings: economy, theory of the state, general theory of history, and tactics and strategy. The second section (complementary bibliography) contains a chronological listing of the works of Marx and Engels, together with a very partial list of Lenin’s works. This bibliography is quite serviceable. But it has a number of faults: it tends to sacrifice dialectical materialism to historical materialism; it is not up-to-date; and it does not include works about Marxism (with the exception of a text by Plekhanov and Auguste Cornu’s dissertation [on the young Marx]). <SNIP>
Michael Pugliese