> This statement ignores that systems of domination are always fraught
> with contradictions. As Marx noted, and Althusser always insisted,
> the class war begins on the terrain of ideology.
>
No, I'm sorry, Miles wrote that "morality is a product of power relations" and that "the moral system is always the product of the historical moment, not the cause." Either it is or it isn't - which is it? If morality is not solely determined by power relations, then the argument Miles was making is no longer valid. There is nothing more maddening than this marxist habit of justifying an assertion with some grand generalization, only to retreat at the slightest challenge behind meaningless qualifications about "contradictions," "relativity," "in the final instance."
I'm glad you bring up Althusser, because while I haven't read any of his books, this review-essay on him by Leszek Kolakowski makes my point more eloquently than I could:
http://socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/SR_1971_Kolakowski.pdf
[pp.119-122, p.127]
> This question is directly tied to the concept of "overdetermination"
> to which Althusser attaches particular importance (FM, pp. 8gff).
> He seems to believe that this concept is a discovery of a fundamental
> truth of Marxism, entirely overlooked until now by its followers as
> well as its critics. He applies this concept above all to the question of
> the "revolutionary situation", but it has universal applicability. The
> point is that the general contradiction of capitalism (productive forces
> -relations of production) does not itself lead to revolution there
> must be an accumulation of circumstances of various kinds which
> converge at a certain moment in an explosive unity. This may be
> explained by the fact that various domains of social life do not develop
> in parallel to each other. Each of them has a rhythm of development
> of its own, the principle being always valid that "in the last instance"
> the social whole is determined by the economic conditions. This
> Marxist theory runs counter to Hegel's concept, since in Hegel any
> historical "totality" expresses itself through all the spheres of life;
> the "spirit of the time" or the spiritual principle (essence) organizing
> the historical moment is articulated in all domains of culture as its
> "phenomena". However, from the Marxist point of view, the relation
> of various parts of the superstructure to the conditions of production
> is not a relation between "phenomena" and "essence", precisely be-
> cause the superstructure enjoys a relative autonomy and produces
> many "contradictions" within itself. Now Mao-Tse-Tung wrote that
> nothing in the world develops absolutely evenly. This phrase, which
> Althusser calls "the law of uneven development" and a few pages
> later "the great law of uneven development" explains that contra-
> dictions which accumulate in the historical process and explode in
> revolutions are not simply manifestations of one basic contradiction
> but come from "relatively autonomous" parts of the superstructure.
> This theory, expressed in Althusser's works in extremely pretentious
> language, is nothing else but the repetition of Engels' principle of
> the "relative autonomy" of the superstructure in respect to economic
> conditions and is just as unclear as that principle. "The great law of
> uneven development", if it means anything, means that comparable
> units (e.g. individuals or industrial societies or tribal societies or
> trees
> or galaxies) do not change exactly in the same way since their environ-
> ment is never exactly the same. It is of course a common sense
> platitude that may perhaps have a certain philosophical meaning,
> e.g. in Herbert Spencer. To present it as a dazzling achievement of
> Marxist thought and to call it "the great law" proves nothing. The
> same is true of "overdetermination". That important historical events,
> such as revolutions, result from the coincidence of many cir-
> cumstances is a commonplace and one could hardly find anybody
> foolish enough to maintain that any detail of the historical process
> may be deduced from the general principle of "contradiction"
> between productive forces and relations of production. Neither
> is this commonplace specifically Marxist in any sense. What
> is specifically Marxist is Engels' famous phrase about the deter-
> minant forces of economic conditions "in the last instance". This
> is vague and is not made less vague by Althusser's repetition of it
> without any further explanation. It is certainly true that Marx never
> tried to replace historical inquiry by general statements about
> "contradictions" nor did he hope that the course of history might be
> described by deductions from this statement. But this is precisely
> what makes the whole meaning of historical materialism unclear unless
> it is reduced again to the commonplace idea that many factors are
> at work in any historical event and that economic conditions are one
> Page 11
> of them. This is why some Marxists of the Second International were
> reluctant to admit Engels' well-known explanations in his letters to
> Schmidt, Bloch or Mehring. They believed, perhaps not without
> reason, that the idea of "many factors" enjoying "relative autonomy"
> deprives Marxism of its specificity, and makes of historical materialism
> a banal commonplace, since the additional vague statement about
> the "determination in the last resort" has no meaning whatsoever in
> historical explanation as long as we are not able to define what are
> the limits of this "ultimate determination" and, similarly, the limits
> of the "relative autonomy" granted to other domains of social life,
> especially to various spheres of the so-called superstructure.
> Again, the whole theory of "over-determination" is nothing but a
> repetition of traditional banalities which remain exactly on the same
> level of vagueness as before. If we say, e.g. that the state of science,
> or of philosophy, or of legal institutions, does not depend only, in a
> given moment, on the actual economic conditions, but also on the past
> history of science, of philosophy or of legal institutions, we will cer-
> tainly have difficulty in finding anybody to contradict us and
> Althusser's expenditure of indignation in attacking his non-existent
> enemies on this point seems rather exaggerated. Moreover, he contra-
> dicts himself directly, as far as ideology is concerned. After quoting
> with approval Marx's statement from The German Ideology, that
> philosophy and religion, in a number of ideological forms, have no
> history of their own but that their apparent history is only the "real"
> history of the relations of production (FM, p. 83) he goes on to explain
> in the second book (RC, pp. ggff) that, on the contrary, every domain
> of the "superstructure", including philosophy and art, har its own
> specific history, which does not mean, as Althusser explains, that they
> are independent of the social "totality", but that their degree of
> independence is determined by their degree of dependence. This last
> remark is either a tautology or a vague statement that the state of
> philosophy, or of art, is partially dependent on the actual economic
> "totality"-a statement which belongs to common sense but is useless
> so long as we are unable to define the limits of this partial dependence.
> Neither is Althusser able to explain what is the meaning of the idea
> that different domains of culture don't develop at the same rhythm
> when compared with each other. On what basis can we state that a
> certain change in science or in religion corresponds to a change in
> political or economic history (and we must know this in order to
> give a meaning to the statement that the "corresponding" changes do
> not occur simultaneously)? And why should we expect that "revolu-
> tions" in all domains of culture should arrive at the same time? What
> conceptual tools do we have for comparing changes in painting and
> in the movement of prices or "revolutions" in physics and in political
> institutions in order to point out their parallelism or lack of paral-
> lelism? No answer.
...
> I am far from being a follower of Anglo-Saxon analytical philo-
> sophy. However, while reading some dialectical philosophers
> (Althusser is an example) I do find myself regretting their lack of
> any training in this philosophy and consequently of any logical disci-
> pline. Such a training would help them to understand the simple
> difference between "saying" something and "proving" it (Althusser
> often formulates a general statement and then quotes it later and
> then refers to it by saying "we showed" or "it was proved"), between
> a necessary and a sufficient condition, between a law and a statement
> of fact, etc. It would permit them, too, to know what the analysis
> of concepts means. These two books of Althusser provide a disagree-
> able example of empty verbosity which, as noted earlier, can be
> reduced either to common sense trivialities in new verbal disguise,
> or to traditional Marxist tenets repeated with no additional explana-
> tion, or to wrong historical judgements. In understanding Marx, or
> Hegel, or political economy, or- the methods of social science, they
> give us nothing except pretentious language. They teach us only about
> Althusser and may be useful to someone interested in this subject.
SA