> I have to
> say that I have no idea what Althusser you are referencing in this
> conversation. Could you fill me so that I could take a look?
Althusser: "Remark on the Category: 'Process without a Subject or Goal(s)'" <http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/ESC76i.html#s1c>
“These philosophical positions are of course not without their consequences. Not only, for example, do they imply that Marxism has nothing to do with the ‘anthropological question’ (‘What is man?’), or with a theory of the realization-objectification-alienation- disalienation of the Human Essence (as in Feuerbach and his heirs: theoreticians of philosophical reification and fetishism), or even with the theory of the ‘excentration of the Human Essence’, which only criticizes the idealism of the Subject from within the limits of the idealism of the Subject, dressed up with the attributes of the ‘ensemble of social relations’ of the sixth Thesis on Feuerbach -- but they also allow us to understand the sense of Marx's famous ‘little phrase’ in the Eighteenth Brumaire.
“This comment, in its complete form, reads as follows: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it out of freely chosen elements (aus freien Stücken), under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances (Umstände) directly encountered (vorgefundene), given by and transmitted from the past.’ And -- as if he had foreseen the exploitation of these first five words, and even these ‘circumstances’ from which Sartre draws out such dazzling effects of the ‘practico-inert’, that is, of liberty -- Marx, in the Preface to the Eighteenth Brumaire, written seventeen years later (in 1869, two years after Capital), set down the following lines: ‘I show something quite different (different from the ideology of Hugo and of Proudhon, who both hold the individual Napoleon III to be the [detestable or glorious] cause “responsible” for the coup d'état), namely how the class struggle (Marx's emphasis) in France created the circumstances (Umstände) and the relations (Verhältnisse) which allowed (ermöglicht) a person (a subject) so mediocre and grotesque to play the role of a hero".
“One must read one's authors closely. History really is a ‘process without a Subject or Goal(s)’, where the given circumstances in which ‘men’ act as subjects under the determination of social relations are the product of the class struggle. History therefore does not have a Subject, in the philosophical sense of the term, but a motor: that very class struggle.” <http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/ESC76i.html#s1c>
Ironically, this shows Althusser’s own inability to read with understanding.
The analysis of “class struggle” in the Brumaire sublates the Hegelian ideas Althusser here has it rejecting.
Hegel had embodied his idea of the “passions” in “World Historical Individuals”, “heroes”, such as Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon. Marx, in sublating the idea, embodied it instead in “classes”, e.g. in the “passions” he takes as motivating capitalists.
Here is Engels, once more in the 1886 Ludwig Feuerbach, elaborating this aspect of his and Marx’s sublation of the idea.
"the old materialism becomes untrue to itself because it takes the ideal driving forces which operate there as ultimate causes, instead of investigating what is behind them, what are the driving forces of these driving forces. This inconsistency does not lie in the fact that ideal driving forces are recognized, but in the investigation not being carried further back behind these into their motive causes. On the other hand, the philosophy of history, particularly as represented by Hegel, recognizes that the ostensible and also the really operating motives of men who act in history are by no means the ultimate causes of historical events; that behind these motives are other motive powers, which have to be discovered. But it does not seek these powers in history itself, it imports them rather from outside, from philosophical ideology, into history. Hegel, for example, instead of explaining the history of ancient Greece out of its own inner interconnections, simply maintains that it is nothing more than the working out of ‘forms of beautiful individuality’, the realization of a ‘work of art’ as such. He says much in this connection about the old Greeks that is fine and profound, but that does not prevent us today from refusing to be put off with such an explanation, which is a mere manner of speech.
"When, therefore, it is a question of investigating the driving powers which — consciously or unconsciously, and indeed very often unconsciously — lie behind the motives of men who act in history and which constitute the real ultimate driving forces of history, then it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole people, and again whole classes of the people in each people; and this, too, not merely for an instant, like the transient flaring up of a straw-fire which quickly dies down, but as a lasting action resulting in a great historical transformation. To ascertain the driving causes which here in the minds of acting masses and their leaders — to so-called great men — are reflected as conscious motives, clearly or unclearly, directly or in an ideological, even glorified, form — is the only path which can put us on the track of the laws holding sway both in history as a whole, and at particular periods and in particular lands. Everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds; but what form it will take in the mind will depend very much upon the circumstances." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ ch04.htm
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So, in his comment in the Preface to the Brumaire, Marx is rejecting that aspect of Hegel’s idea of the “passions” that would allow “the individual Napoleon III” to “play the role of a hero” and be “the [detestable or glorious] cause ‘responsible’ for the coup d'état”.
Marx claims to have shown instead that it was “the class struggle in France” that “created the circumstances (Umstände) and the relations (Verhältnisse) which allowed (ermöglicht) a person so mediocre and grotesque to play the role of a hero.”
In particular, he claims “the cause ‘responsible’ for the coup d’ état” was the “choice” of the French peasantry.
Napoleon III was the “chosen of the peasantry”, in particular of “the conservative peasant” who "represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes but his modern Vendee."
The “superstition” and “prejudice” are then explained in terms of the inconsistency of “the circumstances (Umstände) and the relations (Verhältnisse)” of “masses” of French peasants with those required for “the development of the human mind”, for “the integral development of the individual”, i.e. in terms of that conception of the historical process that Althusser misreads Marx to be here rejecting.
"Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses. The chosen of the peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament but the Bonaparte who dismissed the bourgeois parliament. For three years the towns had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the December 10 election and in cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of December 10, 1848, has been consummated only by the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851.
"The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self- sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.
"Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants' belief in the miracle that a man named “Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: 'Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.' After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.
“But, it may be objected, what about the peasant uprisings in half of France, the raids of the army on the peasants, the mass incarceration and transportation of the peasants? Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar persecution of the peasants 'on account of demagogic agitation.'
"But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in 1702-1705. — Ed.] but his modern Vendee. [A peasant-backed uprising against the French Revolution in the French province of Vendee, in 1793. — Ed.] " <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th- brumaire/ ch07.htm
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Ted