On Ideology by Louis Althusser

Author:Louis Althusser
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books

VII.

We have to answer two questions.

1. Why are there Communists like John Lewis (and there are quite a lot of them) who, in 1972, can openly argue in Communist journals for a philosophy which they call Marxist, but which is in fact simply a variant of bourgeois idealism?

2. Why are the Communist philosophers who defend Marx’s philosophy so few in number?

To answer these two questions, which are really one and the same, we must – all apologies to John Lewis – briefly enter the field of political history.

I have made the basic points in For Marx. But John Lewis does not seem to have read the political pages of For Marx. John Lewis is a pure spirit.

And yet I was rather clear in explaining that the articles collected in For Marx had to be considered as a philosophical intervention in a political and ideological conjuncture dominated by the Twentieth Congress and the ‘split’ in the International Communist Movement.33 The fact that I was able to make such an intervention is a consequence of the Twentieth Congress.

Before the Twentieth Congress it was actually not possible for a Communist philosopher, certainly in France, to publish texts which would be (at least to some extent!) relevant to politics, which would be something other than a pragmatist commentary on consecrated formulae. That is the good side of the Twentieth Congress, for which we must be grateful. From that time on it was possible to publish such texts. The French Party, to take only one example, explicitly recognized (at the Argenteuil Central Committee meeting in 1966) the right of party members to carry out and publish their philosophical research.

But the ‘criticism of Stalin’s errors’ was formulated at the Twentieth Congress in terms such that there inevitably followed what we must call an unleashing of bourgeois ideological and philosophical themes within the Communist Parties themselves. This was the case above all among Communist intellectuals, but it also touched certain leaders and even certain leaderships. Why?

Because the ‘criticism of Stalin’s errors’ (some of which – and rather a lot – turned out to be crimes) was made in a non-Marxist way.

The Twentieth Congress criticized and denounced the ‘cult of personality’ (the cult in general, personality in general…) and summed up Stalin’s ‘errors’ in the concept of ‘violation of Socialist legality’. The Twentieth Congress therefore limited itself to denouncing certain facts about what went on in the legal superstructure, without relating them – as every Marxist analysis must do – firstly, to the rest of the Soviet superstructure (above all, the state and party), and secondly, to the infrastructure, namely the relations of production, class relations and the forms of the class struggle in the USSR.34

Instead of relating the ‘violations of socialist legality’ to: 1. the state, plus the party, and: 2. the class struggle, the Twentieth Congress instead related them to … the ‘cult of personality’. That is, it related them to a concept which, as I pointed out in For Marx, cannot be ‘found’ in Marxist theory.

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