perry anderson

AN AFTERNOON WITH ALTHUSSER

Summer 1977

Althusser and his wife Hélène Rytman were in London for a few days to
visit their friend, the Chilean surrealist painter Matta. It was his first visit to
England. He seems to have rung because of the Gramsci essay in no. 100, since
he is working on an article on Gramsci for Rinascita. There were four hours
of conversation.1

A
lthusser was in general unforthcoming on biographical
matters—­personal questions about his history encountering a
wary, although not blank response. The two main experiences
of his youth were Catholicism, with its then interest in ‘the
social question’ (one of them, he commented ironically), and five years
of imprisonment in Germany during the war. His education was broken
by the war, in the way that those of Williams or Hobsbawm were, resum-
ing again in 1945. He received little philosophical training, attending
some lectures by Merleau-Ponty at best. His decision to join the party in
1948 was not motivated by the advances of the Chinese revolution, or by
the Czech crisis, but seems to have been the product of a gradual evolu-
tion from 1945 onwards (effects of Spanish Civil War also), precipitated
by personal factors (his encounter with his wife, of whom he did not
speak?—a surmise).

Asked how he reacted to the 20th Party Congress of the cpsu, he made
the most important remark about his own development. I mistakenly
thought that it represented the great danger for Marxism, he said. That
was my whole political idea at the time and afterwards, when writing the
essays in the sixties. Now, however, I understand that the real danger
to Marxism went much further back—to the thirties, to Stalinism. In

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effect, Stalinism was the crisis within Marxism, masking it in the form
of a petrified stasis or non-crisis. The very stillness of Stalinist ideology
was the worst symptom of that crisis, which Khrushchevism merely ren-
dered mobile and visible.

Today, Fernando Claudín can be praised for having seen the depth of
the crisis for Marxist theory so much earlier—although without having
dealt with it philosophically. That historical situation did indeed produce
a kind of pessimism in his thought (an allusion to Considerations on
Western Marxism, a chapter of which he had read in translation), com-
mon to that of others too. After the publication of his recent pamphlet
on the 22nd Congress of the pcf (see below), he is now working on a
polemical article on Gramsci for Rinascita in a direction not unlike the
text in nlr (critique of idea of hegemony), but philosophical rather than
historical. He hinted that he may eventually renounce publication of it,
as too acerbic to be well-advised. Otherwise, he would like to write a
short, compact book on the capitalist state now, for mass diffusion.

pcf

Asked about life in the pcf, he emphasized the complete transformation

in the membership of the party in the past five years. The mass of new,
young recruits now lack any serious Marxist formation whatever—they
have merely joined in the context of the Common Programme. They
form an absolute contrast with those who had lived through the Third
Period, the Popular Front, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the Resistance and the
Cold War—experiences whose intensity and variety had obliged mili-
tants of that epoch to think for themselves, and to think seriously. Very
few cadres of that time now survive in the party. The oldest are mostly of
his generation—like his political contemporary Georges Marchais.

For the leaders, he had scant respect. Marchais was selected by a process
of elimination after Waldeck Rochet, as the least controversial or junior.
Now possessing a certain authority in the party because of his candour
and directness, with a certain aplomb on television, he is very limited.

1
Aide-memoire set down in July or August 1977, after an unexpected visit by
Althusser to the New Left Review office. ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ had
appeared in the journal in February.
 anderson: Althusser 61

Roland Leroy, who is abler, was ill. Paul Laurent and René-Émile Piquet
were too young to succeed. He reported, as if it were an impropriety, that
Laurent had remarked the other day that he was five when the Spanish
Civil War broke out. The pcf leaders, he claimed, are arrantly anti-Soviet
in private, revealing chauvinist contempt for the ‘backward’ Russians as
muzhiks, vaunting the ability of the pcf to perform far better in France
than the cpsu in Russia had done, and generally regarding the ussr
as a tiresome embarrassment for them. Questioned about the degree
of their knowledge of the Soviet Union, he stated that every member
of the French Central Committee had the right to take a free holiday in
the ussr every four years, and members of the Political Bureau every
year—so that they were well-acquainted with life in Russia. Yet there
was no serious reflection among them on the historical experience
of Soviet society.

The international perspective of the Western cps today was in some

ways akin to that of the Chinese cp—support for nato, and assurances
to Washington that nothing too serious would be changed within its
sphere of influence. Anti-Sovietism was now rampant in France, Italy
and Spain (where he described Carrillo as a very able Communist leader,
who regrettably was not a Marxist). The prospect of the Union of the
Left was a complete leap in the dark—no force has any real idea of what
would happen, once it won the elections, least of all the pcf. However, the
President’s project of detaching the ps from the pcf after successful elec-
tions was unrealistic—there was no chance that the ps as a whole, whose
militants were now profoundly imbued with the ideas of the Common
Programme, and whose leaders were bent on securing the political
hegemony of the party over the French working class, to compensate for
their trade-union weakness, would accept a coalition with the Centre.
The pcf had registered some electoral gains finally in the municipal elec-
tions, the two most interesting being at Saint-Étienne and Rheims.

His own situation within the party was one of isolation and suspi-
cion. When his speech to the uec was scheduled in April, Catala—the
41-year-old general secretary of the youth organization of the party—
phoned him to cancel the occasion. He refused. Thereafter, he sought
to get his speech printed in the party press. Delay, obstruction, averrals
of in­opportunity, refusal. Hence now publication in an expanded ver-
sion, with Maspero. Taxed with the weakness of his arguments against
tendency rights in the party, he replied that the question was dynamite in
 62 nlr 113

the pcf—the one holy of holies which the leadership was determined to
maintain. It was impossible to advocate tendencies in the French party
today, whatever had been the norm in the Russian party in the epoch of
Lenin. To do so would be to resign oneself to a ghetto. Besides, the ps
itself was now being subjected to pressure by Mitterrand for the aboli-
tion of tendencies. He recounted, with a mixture of awe and scandal,
that there existed institutional tendencies within the ps, with their own
dues, press, offices and organizations—Mitterrand could never tolerate
that for long. What was the alternative? Friends in the Revolutionary
Communist League had told him that tendencies existed only for pre-
congress discussions there, disappearing afterwards. So even there, no
institutionalized rights of tendency existed. However, there must sooner
or later be greater freedom of discussion within the pcf—that was the
logic of the 22nd Congress, however recalcitrant the leadership. The
recommended list would, in fact, probably be abolished soon—but no
great hopes should be entertained of the results. The membership was
accustomed to conformity and obedience, and would probably vote for
the same men and the same policies anyway.

The party would no longer proceed to expulsions—but it could enforce

an ostracism which he sought to avoid. Since the 22nd Congress, cul-
tural controls had intensified, not relaxed. A significant symptom was
the prompt removal of the secretary responsible for La Pensée, a liberal
who had always helped Althusser to publish his articles there, and his
substitution by Casanova, a prominent apparatus functionary. Culture
in general was now superintended by Chambaz, a mediocre collabora-
tor of Marchais. In general, the party treated his ideas with a systematic
silence. Neither Pour Marx nor Lire le Capital had ever been reviewed
in the party press. Positions had been published by Éditions Sociales,
but had not sold more within the membership thereby—workers being
quite capable of buying Maspero books if they wanted to.

Students at the École Normale and elsewhere were nowadays far more
unpolitical than in the sixties—those who joined the pcf were generally
passive and uncritical. There were now scarcely any intellectuals of merit
or seriousness left within the party. All his friends, of his generation,
had gradually left—he cited Jean-Pierre Vernant, Jean-Toussaint Desanti
and Michel Foucault, who had been a member in 1948. Psychologists,
writers, artists, scientists—these could work untroubled within the pcf.
Historians, philosophers and sociologists could not. Hence the dearth of
 anderson: Althusser 63

Marxist theoretical work or research. I suppose, he said, that the British

Communist Party today has more genuine intellectuals in it than the
French Communist Party.

china

Asked whether he had not been mistaken in his assessment of the ccp
in the late sixties, together with many other Marxists in the West, he
agreed. It was very difficult to know the realities of Chinese society, and
the official visits of sympathizers were of little use, although he had noted
a decreasing enthusiasm on the part of friends who had travelled there
in recent years. However, one woman who had been there for a stay of
two years had given something like an accurate account, he thought. For
the masses, the world was just that of everyday life—a daily existence
which was extraordinarily transparent, in the sense that everyone knew
what the other was doing, and why they were doing it, in a way unthink-
able in a capitalist society.

Yet above that transparent daily world, or rather behind it, there was
the domain of politics, from which they were absolutely excluded, and
about which they knew nothing. Orders descended from above, and they
complied. Within the state that issued these orders, there had been an
evident degradation in the past years. However, the real problem was the
millennial tradition of saying ‘yes’ within China, which went back to the
remotest past in the history of the country. It was that which produced
the profound passivity of the masses in China today. Confucius had been
the thinker who theorized the tradition of obedience and compliance—it
was no accident that the radicals had tried to campaign against him in
the end. The immense ‘yes’ of the country was an impossibility in the
West, where there had been bourgeois revolutions that had produced a
whole intellectual tradition capable of saying ‘no’. The absence of any
bourgeois revolution in Chinese history was of central importance for
understanding the country.

Discussing the comparative structures of the Russian and Chinese revo-

lutions, he conceded the greater adherence of the peasant majority of the
population to the Chinese revolution, yet remarked that the revolution
had aroused them once into politics, but after that they had gone home
again to the land and to docility. The workers who gave the Russian
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revolution its imprint could have played a major role in China too, how-
ever, had it not been for the counter-revolution of 1927 (sentence not
entirely clear—a possible interpretation of it).

gramsci

Gramsci was a great Communist leader, but an uncertain Marxist. To

demonstrate the aporia of his ideas of hegemony, Althusser drew an
equation. In the Prison Notebooks, he said, ‘hegemony = coercion +
hegemony’. Result: coercion = 0. Gramsci talks about hegemonic appa-
ratuses, but always from the point of view of their hegemony­-inducing
effects. He doesn’t ask: what powers or produces these apparatuses, what
is—not their effect—but their motor? In other words, he neglects the
coercive cohesion which holds them together. The gold analogy appeared
to appeal to Althusser.2 He enquired about Bobbio’s work on civil society,
and generally seemed to be following Italian debates on Gramsci closely.

trotsky

Trotsky was an indisputable part of the heritage of revolutionary Marxism

and the workers’ movement. Who would now deny that? But what was
the idea of those who joined Trotskyist organizations today? Could
they gain a real role among the masses? In France, the pcf leadership
remained very repressive and hostile to Trotskyism; but there were some
signs of change. At Saint-Étienne, during the elections, the Communist
mayoral candidate had given an interview to Rouge (the Revolutionary
Communist League had campaigned for the pcf there). However, the
Political Bureau had angrily refused to authorize any interview to the
League’s press, denouncing the very idea—unlike the pci, for example.
He had friends in the League.

culture

Among numerous asides or comments on countries or persons may be

noted the following, as signs of Althusser’s personal outlook and culture.

2
See ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, pp. 42–3.
 anderson: Althusser 65

Russia he has visited once, in 1974, for a Hegel Congress. Some local
philosophers were competent there, but had to disguise it. His works
were rigorously banned, to the third circle of hell (i.e. the third-most
restricted category of books in libraries, for which special permission
is necessary). In Poland, Lire le Capital was published, in Romania Pour
Marx, in Hungary a collection of writings (including one not released in
the West). Nothing in Bulgaria or the ddr (above all). He has often been
to Italy, and was recently in Spain, where for the first time he found he
had to answer journalists’ questions.

In economics, he said he was aware of the potentially explosive charac-

ter of Sraffa’s work. In France, there was a productive Sraffian school,
centred on De Brunhoff and Benetti. Informed of Ian Steedman’s work,
he showed interest and asked to be sent a copy. He indicated a general
willingness to accept that all Marx’s value theory might be wrong, to be
abandoned. Besides, he remarked, Marx constructed Capital in a com-
pletely mistaken way, by starting with commodities in Chapter One.

In philosophy, he said he had never read a line of Russell or Wittgenstein.

People had told him that his dictum ‘Philosophy has no object’ was iden-
tical to maxims of Wittgenstein, and that there were many similarities
between the two works. But he had not looked at Wittgenstein. In gen-
eral, the French spiritualist tradition in philosophy was very resistant to
Anglo–Austrian neo-positivism, although now there were some enclaves
of it in Paris. If he were to write on philosophers again, he would have
something to say about Machiavelli (not for himself, but to explain cer-
tain aspects of Gramsci) and something about Epicurus.

He had not heard of Sebastiano Timpanaro, till noticing the name in

the chapter in Considerations. He said he found Poulantzas’s theory of
classes in Political Power scholastic and difficult to understand, although
he had many other merits. He was surprised to learn that there was
any Marxism in the United States. He liked Le Roy Ladurie, but said
he had been an ultra-truculent Stalinist in their youth, now an anti-
Marxist. Lucien Sève was now the official philosopher of the pcf, the
director of Éditions Sociales, a man whose intellectual credo was one of
passionate conformism—‘I must, therefore I can’ being his theoretical
motto. Among English intellectuals, he enquired after Miliband (pos-
sibly because he is working on the state now) and James Klugmann,
whom he regretted not having called on during his stay, since Klugmann
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had always published his articles in Marxism Today without creating

difficulties. He knew of the appointment of Martin Jacques. He said
Charles Bettelheim’s second book was probably superior to his first,
since it seemed to be less a mere legitimation of the Cultural Revolution.
He thought Valentino Gerratana an honest philosopher, although criti-
cizing the ending of his recent article on Gramsci as pieties.

althusserianism

Talking of ‘Western Marxism’, he said, who has ever looked at the way
it has been appropriated and taken up in successive countries, and
by whom? There were some astonishing phenomena there. He never
ceased to be disconcerted or baffled by what people made of his work.
In an organization, your ideas might well be changed and distorted,
but at least that was a process you could control and measure in some
degree—you could see what was happening. Outside organizations,
the reception of a work was absolutely bizarre and bewildering, often.
Who had really taken his ideas up, and what had they done with them?
An anecdote symbolized for him their fate. An Australian had visited
him one day to say that the universities in Australia were in an uproar
between the supporters of Althusser and the foes of Althusser. Life had
been made impossible by their quarrels—above all by the bellicosity of
the Althusserians. Could not he, Althusser, who was surely a man of
reason and peace, try to restore calm by an ecumenical message to his
disciples? My ideas in Australia!—Althusser spoke as if with a comic
despair, about an ultima thule of the workers’ movement. Speaking more
sadly, he said that writing books was like casting a bottle with a note
inside it onto the high seas.