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

farmelantj at juno.com farmelantj at juno.com
Mon Feb 22 06:52:35 PST 2010


Granted that Althusser, even accepting his own self-descriptions was not a very appealing human being, I am not sure that I buy James's analysis here.

When Althusser was pushing his structuralist Marxism in the 1960s, he was going against the PCF's line, in which was the Party was officially committed to a "humanist Marxism." The Party's official house philosopher at the time, Roger Garaudy, was a self-proclaimed "humanist Marxist." During the 1960s, Althusser and Garaudy had a famously contentious relationship. (Ironically, Garaudy, who had been a member of the PCF's central committee was eventually expelled from the Party, over his disagreements with the Party's line after the May-June 1968 events. Garady converted first to Catholicism, then later to Islam. And he got involved in Holocaust denial. But none of that has much to do with Althusser.)

As has already been suggested, the PCF, in its embrace of Marxist humanism, seemed to be trailing philosophers like Sartre (who had his own very complicated relationship with the PCF).

---------- Original Message ---------- From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: [lbo-talk] Althusser, NLR and the meaning of 'Stalinism' Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:13:00 -0000

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. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

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