[lbo-talk] Althusser, NLR and the meaning of 'Stalinism'

[James Heartfield]

Matthias writes: 'I don't think it would be a very ambitious claim to say that Althusser was not a particularly good person. (This has nothing to do with whether his social theories are true or useful, of course)'.

I don't agree. I would accept his own behaviour could not stand in for an argument against his various propositions. But there is indeed a relationship between his supine toadying to the officials of the PCF, and his social theory, whose essential component is the evacuation of subjectivity from history, and on top of that, a tedious attempt to construct a theory of society as a 'process without a subject'. 

His social theory was against human agency; his political practice was to reimpose the authority of first the PCF upon those revolutionary movements that challenged it. The two are intimately connected.