review

Joseph McCarney

For and Against Althusser

Gregory Elliott’s book appears at a time when the reputation of its

subject seems near to total eclipse.1 In Althusser’s own country he is,
as Elliott reports, practically a ‘dead dog’, buried beneath ‘the settled
anti-Marxist consensus among the majority of the French intelligent-
sia’.2 In Britain he is ‘largely absent from current Marxist debate, the
high ground of which is occupied by an Analytical current that has
declined a critical engagement with him’.3 For Elliott this consign-
ment to oblivion affords an opportunity, ‘the resurrection of Althus-
ser’s intellectual and political career as history’. It makes possible a
‘reassessment’ of his work, a ‘more equitable presentation and
appraisal’ of it than has hitherto been available. Elliott believes that
such a ‘return to and reconsideration of ’ Althusser would have a large
significance. In particular, it ‘may aid a fuller appreciation’ of ‘some
of the background to the present acute crisis of Marxism’.4 It seems
obvious that Elliott has set himself an ambitious and important
undertaking. It promises a balanced view of a thinker who has been
subjected to irrational extremes of abuse and adulation. Moreover, it
offers the prospect of shedding a general light on pressing issues of
contemporary intellectual life on the Left.

The book carries the dedication ‘To Louis Althusser’, and this some-
what curious circumstance prefigures the sympathy and inwardness
Elliott brings to his task. He has a deep understanding of the intellect-
ual and political background from which Althusser sprang and of the
nature of the theoretical project that was conceived against it. Elliott
accepts the validity and significance of this project, and deals in detail
with the vicissitudes of its implementation and the changes that
thereby came about in the conception itself. His work is a sustained
and comprehensive example of immanent critique, a critique focused
on the internal coherence of its object and on the gap in it between
aspiration and performance. The critique is carried out with great
thoroughness, analytical acuity and scrupulous attention to the
1
Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, Verso, London 1987, pp. 359.
2
Ibid., pp. 1–2.
3
Ibid., p. 6.
4
Ibid., p. 7.

115
evidence of the texts. The results have a weight, at times a definitive-
ness, unrivalled in the literature on Althusser. It is no more than the
plain truth to say that Elliott has placed all future students in his debt
and that his work will be indispensable to them. Yet it may be
doubted whether it is altogether successful by its own exacting, imma-
nent standards. That is to say, it is doubtful whether it fully realizes
the goal of resurrecting Althusser’s career ‘as history’, and thus of
drawing its chief lessons for the ‘crisis of Marxism’. Misgivings on
this score have two immediate sources. The first is the reverse side, as
it were, of the advantages prefigured in the dedication. Stated crudely,
it is that Elliott may be too close to his subject to permit the degree of
detachment appropriate to situating his career in historical perspec-
tive. The second is that, somewhat paradoxically, he may turn out to
be too close also to current forms of conventional wisdom about that
career. The first of these factors leads him to be over-indulgent of
demonstrated inadequacies, and the second causes him to fall some-
what short of the measure of Althusser’s achievement as a whole.
Thus, the two tend to work against each other, and they mark the site
of a structural tension in Elliott’s discussion. Both are, as we shall see,
made possible only by his recurring reluctance to trust to, and follow
through, the logic of his own detailed arguments.

A Balanced Critique

The reluctance is most evident on occasions when Elliott rounds off

the treatment of some aspect of Althusser’s work with a seemingly
judicious balancing of praise and censure. This symmetry regularly
turns out to be misleading in that the censure is precisely aimed and
solidly grounded in the discussion, while the praise is unfocused and
at odds with what has gone before. A couple of illustrations will have
to suffice here. An incisive critique of Althusser’s ‘epistemological
project’ is supplemented by the observation that ‘At the same time, all
credit is owed to him for a pioneering initiative in epistemology from
within Marxism’.5 Yet the entire tendency of the critique itself had
been to show that what is pioneering in Althusser’s epistemology can-
not properly be described as arising ‘within Marxism’. It represents
precisely a turning to sources outside, above all to Spinoza and Bache-
lard. Thus, the critique serves to give substance to Elliott’s earlier
acceptance of Martin Jay’s view that Althusser was ‘the most promis-
cuous [of Western Marxists] in allowing non-Marxist influences to
affect his ideas’.6 In the case under discussion his promiscuity gener-
ates what Elliott acknowledges to be a ‘contradiction’, an ‘unresolved
tension’ between Marxist and non-Marxist elements in his thought.
The result is that while claiming to have solved ‘intractable problems
in the philosophy of science’, he had in truth ‘either offered unsatis-
factory answers or dissolved the very questions’.7 This verdict seems
entirely justified in itself, but it sits oddly with the attempt to assign
credit which Elliott immediately appends to it. The attempt is in the
circumstances unconvincing.
5 Ibid., p. 112.
6 Ibid., p. 67.
7 Ibid., p. 112.

116
A second example arises from a similar tension, that between Althus-
ser’s Marxism and his structuralism. Elliott is inclined to agree with
Andrew Levine’s conclusion that, in its structuralist aspect, Althusser-
ianism was part of ‘a revolt against historical materialism’.8 For
Althusser and Balibar were, in Elliott’s view, ‘fundamentally revising
Marx where they professed to be returning to him’. This seems
uncompromising enough. Yet, when it comes to a summing up, an
impression of punches being pulled is once more given: ‘whatever the
flaws in Althusser’s reconstruction of historical materialism, and how-
ever tenuous its title to orthodoxy, it represented, and was widely
experienced as, a liberation.’9 On Elliott’s own showing, however,
this work is to be regarded as a revolt against, or fundamental revi-
sion of, historical materialism, and, if this is so, the term ‘reconstruc-
tion’ is simply inappropriate here. Moreover, Elliott has provided
excellent grounds for supposing that its title to orthodoxy is not
merely tenuous but is actually without merit. Nothing has survived of
it under the rigours of his scrutiny.
It has to be asked why Elliott should seek to dull the edge of his own
demonstrations. A clue to at least part of the answer is perhaps to be
found in the reference to the experience of Althusser’s work as a
‘liberation’. Elliott expands the point by asserting that Althusser’s
criticisms ‘released Marxists from more than one conceptual prison,
re-establishing historical materialism as a research programme’, and
‘reminded Marxists that there was a continent waiting to be
explored’.10 What seems excessive tenderness is due in some measure,
one might suppose, to respect and gratitude for an influence exerted
in a particular historical conjuncture. It would be difficult for anyone
on the Left in Britain who began to think for themselves in the decade
or so from the mid-sixties onwards not to sympathize with such a
motive. In that time and place Althusser’s work was indeed a liber-
ation. Apart from all substantive doctrines, this was so in virtue of its
simple insistence on taking Marx seriously, on establishing his right
to the same quality of attention as any other figure in the philosoph-
ical tradition. The message owed much of its impact to Althusser’s
personal attributes, to his own deep seriousness and magisterial self-
assurance, his peculiar density of texture and authority of tone and his
remarkable skills as a rhetorician and phrase-maker. It is true that
there was a negative side to his influence. As many observers have
noted, British Althusserianism soon assumed a scholastic, even sectar-
ian character. It is also the case that for some of its leading represent-
atives the conceptual prison from which they were eventually to be
released was Marxism itself. Nevertheless, the somewhat histrionic
course of their emancipation had its own particular interest and
exemplary value. Moreover, Althusser was himself largely unscathed
by this development, partly at least because of his apparent reluctance
to acknowledge his British disciples, still more to confer on them any
right of apostolic succession. No sect will thrive in these circumstan-
ces, and, as the wind changed in academia and outside during the
8 Ibid., p. 183.
9 Ibid., p. 184.
10 Ibid., pp. 184–85.

117
eighties, the British branch of ‘high Althusserianism’ folded almost as
quickly as it had arisen. Some of the gains from the reception of
Althusser’s work in Britain were, however, permanent. It is difficult
to see how there could even now be a return to the complacent ignor-
ance and incomprehension which, in the pre-Althusser period, char-
acterized the work of analytical commentators on Marx. Some at least
of the credit is due to the Althusserian role in shifting him nearer the
centre of the intellectual stage. There were in addition some signifi-
cant British contributions to the process of continental exploration to
which Elliott refers.

Elliott attempts to establish ‘the continuing productivity and vitality

of the Althusserian research programme’ through a lengthy citation
of writings in the social sciences, philosophy, historiography, aesthet-
ics, cultural studies, literary criticism and feminist theory. Impres-
sive as the list is, it is impossible not to have some reservations
concerning it. For one thing, the criteria for inclusion are generously
vague and yield somewhat motley results. Thus, to stay with the
British contingent, it will be obvious to any reader of Roy Bhaskar’s
A Realist Theory of Science and John Taylor’s From Modernization to
Modes of Production that these remarkable works could be said to
exemplify an ‘Althusserian research programme’ only in quite
different usages of that description. Moreover, one may well suspect
that in many other cases a closer look would reveal that its
application in any usage is problematic. Thus, the best-known name
on the list is perhaps that of Nicos Poulantzas. Yet in a recent study,
described by Elliott as ‘important work’, Bob Jessop has pains-
takingly and persuasively argued that Althusserian influence on
Poulantzas was never dominant and was steadily eliminated as he
found his own voice and, hence, that the usual reading of him as an
Althusserian structuralist is mistaken.11 It is also worth noting that
even where the main impulse is undeniably received from Althusser,
it often develops against the grain of his thought and in ways not
countenanced or adumbrated there.12 It is, of course, possible to
make too much of reservations of this sort. The need for them may,
after all, be in some sense inescapable, or, at any rate, only to be
expected. That historical significance has to be read out of silence,
rejection and misappropriation is a fate by no means unique to
Althusser. It does not impugn his claim to an enduring place in the
history of Marxist thought, and that claim may fairly be said to have
been convincingly re-affirmed by Elliott’s discussion.

A Career as History

This achievement has, however, only a minor significance for the task
of resurrecting Althusser’s career as history, as Elliott conceives it.
11
Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy, London 1985; see
esp. pp. 14–15, 53, 82, 134–35, 317–18.
12
As Elliott in effect recognizes: ‘The single most important achievement of For Marx
and Reading Capital was to help renew Marxism—often in spite of Althusser’s episte-
mological protocols and in directions unforeseen by him.’ Elliott, p. 331.

118
What is crucial for the task is the ‘equitable appraisal’ of a body of
work. Such an appraisal may now be thought to be needed more
than ever. It is needed if one is to have a means of dealing with
the suggestion, which is bound to arise, that all the Althusserian
researchers are in fact barking up the wrong tree. At this point,
however, the basic tension in the structure of Elliott’s study begins
to make itself felt. The tension may be seen from one standpoint
as arising in the following way. As has already been indicated, not
much survives of what might be thought of as classic Althusserian
positions—roughly speaking those taken up in For Marx and Reading
Capital—once they have passed through the mill of Elliott’s analysis.
Again and again key doctrines and concepts are shown to be
incoherent, undertheorized, inadequate to their objects or in some
other way untenable. These positions were, of course, subjected
to criticism by Althusser himself, and some elements of it chime
with Elliott’s findings. Yet the later career, from the self-criticism
onwards, wins from Elliott a markedly unenthusiastic, indeed
negative, response. He treats it as essentially a process of intellect-
ual decline, of a systematic loss of novelty and power.13 The struc-
tural tension here may be said to take the form of an incongruity
between the actual substance of his commentary and his abiding, and
overriding, sense of the intrinsic significance of Althusser’s achieve-
ment. There seems little hope of lessening the tension by seeking
to undo the demolition of classic Althusserianism. It will be more
rewarding to look again at the later career, for this may well deserve
a warmer welcome than Elliott provides. His predicament arises, one
might suggest, because he takes too conventional, too straight-
forwardly ‘Western Marxist’, a view of this part of the story, and is
in consequence frequently apologetic where he should have been
celebratory. To make the issues manageable here, one will have to
take a single, though uncontentiously central, theme as the yardstick
of Althusser’s progress. An obvious choice is the question of the
status of Marxist social theory and, specifically, of its relationship to
practice. The problem is set by the fact that Marx and later Marxists
have characteristically not been content to accept, in the manner of
bourgeois philosophy of science, that the relationship of their social
theory to its object is simply explanatory. It has also in some sense an
inescapably practical, indeed revolutionary, dimension. The question
to be asked is what this sense amounts to: precisely how is the theory
to be conceived of as contributing to, or informing, the movement
for socialism?
The answers available to Althusser are constrained by his consistent
refusal to go down one particularly inviting and well-trodden path.
Throughout his career he has disavowed any normative dimension to
Marxist science, even, as Elliott somewhat disapprovingly notes, ‘any
indictment of capitalism’s inhumanity and injustice’.14 His intransi-
gence on the issue is well captured in an anecdote of an ex-student,
Pierre Victor, which is retold by Elliott: ‘I said to him that if people
were communists, it was for the sake of happiness. In substance his
13 Ibid., pp. 199, 270, 313.
14 Ibid., p. 181.

119
reply was: You mustn’t say that. It is in order to bring about a change
of mode of production. . . . ’15

This formulation gives rise to a problem of rendering intelligible the

purposive activity of the communists, and, in particular, of grasping
how it is that for them a theory of modes of production is connected
with the springs of action. In rejecting the idea that it is through the
mediation of a normative ideal, Althusser is rejecting the standard
solution of Western Marxism. In this tradition socialist theory has
usually been taken, implicitly or explicitly, as in essence a normative
critique of capitalist society. Such a critique is assumed to have a
practical, and not simply explanatory, significance in virtue of pro-
viding its audience with reasons for acting to change that society. In
repudiating this view Althusser is squarely in line with the consistent
and unequivocal stance of Marx himself. Whenever he addresses the
issue he emphatically denies that his science has any reliance on nor-
mative appeals, and he condemns socialist theorists who do rely on
them.16 Althusser’s deep feeling for, and loyalty to, this fundamental
aspect of Marx’s thought is one, wholly honourable, source of the
stressful and refractory character of his intellectual development.

In Althusser’s earlier work the relationship between theory and prac-

tice is understood, as Elliott’s account makes clear, in technical or
instrumental terms.17 The theory is a neutral body of scientific know-
ledge which renders more effective the practice of any politics to
which it can be externally harnessed. Elliott shows that what underlies
this conception in Althusser is the thesis of ‘relative autonomy’:
‘theory had to secure recognition of its justified claims to relative
autonomy—precisely in order to fulfil its proper function as a
“guide” for practice.’18 There has been much debate as to what ‘rela-
tive autonomy’ can, or should, mean. Elliott cuts through these tangles
to argue that, in its operational aspect, ‘relative autonomy took the
form of absolute autonomy and omnipotence’.19 Nevertheless, in his
final summing up, he takes the doctrine of the autonomy of theory to
be one of Althusser’s best achievements: ‘Above all, the first version
of Althusserian philosophy had the considerable merit of insisting on
the cognitive autonomy of scientific theory (albeit by granting it inde-
pendence from the non-theoretical). . . . ’20 Elliott is speaking here
with the voice of what may be regarded as the current consensus
among sympathetic critics of Althusser. Thus, the main aim of
Michael Sprinker’s discussion of these matters is ‘to insist once
more on the evaluation of Althusser’s project in terms of the relative
15
Loc. cit., n. 235.
16
Norman Geras has demonstrated with particular clarity that ‘early and late’ Marx’s
denials in this matter are ‘quite general in scope’ and that his ‘impatience with the
language of norms and values is global in range’. ‘The Controversy About Marx and
Justice’, New Left Review 150, March/April 1985, pp. 84–85. It should be said that Geras
is not willing to take Marx’s denials and impatience at face-value, and his arguments
on this point should be consulted by anyone interested in the issue.
17 See, e.g., Elliott, pp. 113, 143.
18 Ibid., p. 95.
19 Ibid., p. 205.
20 Ibid., p. 329.

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autonomy of theory’. Indeed, Sprinker takes Elliott to task for dis-
counting relative autonomy in the course of his excessively ‘political’
reading of Althusser, a reading which ties theoretical developments
too closely to political positions.21 This is surely a curious situation.
What these writers are in their different ways singling out for praise is a
feature of Althusser’s work which can contribute little to his stature as a
Marxist philosopher. On the other hand, the ‘cognitive autonomy’ of
theory is a familiar tenet of bourgeois ideology, and one which is
effortlessly realized every day by the most mediocre bourgeois thinkers.
Moreover, the writers in question see themselves as standing in some
close and positive relationship to both Marx and Althusser. The
suggestion seems irresistible that we have here a characteristic
manifestation of the latter-day Western Marxist tradition, an almost
too schematic image of its long accommodation to bourgeois modes of
thought and, above all, of the ‘first and most fundamental’ of its spe-
cific substantive traits, ‘the structural divorce of this Marxism from
political practice.’22 The situation is most curious in the case of Elliott
in view of his understanding of what relative autonomy means, and in
view also, it should be said, of his uniquely sustained attempt to cap-
ture the true inwardness of Althusser’s career. Elliott has traced at
length the process by which Althusser came to think that his earlier
position had to be abandoned, that it was not a merit in it to have ‘dis-
articulated’ the ‘particular relationship between Marxist theory and the
working-class movement’, and, in doing so, to have ‘passed over in
silence’ important ideas of Marx and Engels on this relationship.23
Althusser’s breaking of the silence in the course of his self-criticism is
surely to be regarded as a considerable personal, and intellectual,
achievement. In the light of it, the trouble with Elliott’s reading is that it
is not political, and thereby immanent, enough. It fails, one may argue,
precisely in the degree to which it takes on the shallow outlook of
conventional criticism in place of the profound, truly radical and
energetically developing one of its subject.
A Course of Self-Criticism

Althusser’s self-criticism has two main, interconnected aspects, the

much greater prominence accorded to class struggle and the recogni-
tion of the theoretical significance of class perspectives. The first finds
its most striking expression in the new definition of philosophy not as
the ‘theory of theoretical practice’ but as ‘in the last instance, class
struggle in the field of theory’.24 The second is crystallized in the
insistence that historical materialism is framed from, and gives voice
to, the class standpoint of the proletariat.25 There is much to admire
in the process of development leading to these results. It is for one
thing a record of intellectual integrity and commitment. The emphasis
21 Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical
Materialism, Verso, Lonson 1987, pp. 179, 233. See also Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall
of Structural Marxism: Althusser and his Influence, London 1984, esp. pp. 88–96.
22 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, NLB, London 1976, p. 29.
23 Elliott, pp. 205, 130.
24 Ibid., p. 203.
25 Ibid., p. 214.

121
on class struggle was a response to ‘more politically-oriented’ critics
who had complained of its absence from the earlier writings. These
complaints derived their force from a view of what it was to be a
Marxist in philosophy which Althusser could not disavow. Yet in
yielding to them he was giving up positions which were still the focus
of intense, subtle and apparently unresolved debate, a kind of transi-
tion which is more unusual than it should be in intellectual life. It may
also be shown to involve a ‘return to Marx’ in a more authentic sense
than anything represented by Althusser’s first essays. The shift from
absence to insistent presence in the case of class struggle is plainly a
move towards Marx’s idea of the significance of this factor. Moreover
the new interpretation of the logical status of Marxist theory is an
echo of certain canonical formulations on the subject by its founder.
Again and again in Marx’s moments of metatheoretical reflection he
returns to the notion that socialist theory simply is the expression or
mouthpiece of a movement of reality, the movement of proletarian
self-emancipation.26 The notion is neither so perspicuous nor so
articulated as one could wish, and this state of affairs was not to be
greatly altered by Althusser’s coming to adopt it. Nevertheless, it
remains the case that from a Marxist standpoint his career exempli-
fies a classic pattern of development in that what he achieved was to
‘wither into the truth’. This must always be for a philosopher a more
important consideration than conceptual display, or even than
genuine power and novelty. For a dialectical philosopher issues of
truth are inextricably bound up with issues of the objectification of
truth in reality. In both these crucial respects Althusser’s development
is a getting of wisdom, a deepening awareness of the nature of his
intellectual inheritance and of the demands of the historical situation
in which he found himself.
It is a developmental process which has, like any other, its inherent
limitations. They arise, as one might expect, from the unbroken grip
of the past in certain key areas. What chiefly remains locked in its
dead hand are features of Althusser’s thought which are familiar from
numerous commentaries, the overwhelmingly epistemological charac-
ter of his philosophical project and the specific shape his epistemol-
ogy takes. In this context he emerges as a quintessentially Western
Marxist thinker. His career might have been designed to point the
moral of the ‘marked predominance of epistemological work’ within
that historical tendency.27 Moreover, Althusserian epistemology is
irredeemably ‘positivist’ in a strict sense of that term, the sense of the
tradition of Comte and Bachelard. It takes science to be the only
authentic form of human knowledge, and conceives the task of philo-
sophy as being to exhibit and preserve this status through its strict
demarcation of knowledge from all varieties of error and illusion.
This conception survives essentially intact into the later phases of
26 K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow 1955, p. 109; K. Marx and F. Engels, The

Communist Manifesto, Harmondsworth 1967, pp. 95–96. Some further relevant passages
are cites by Elliott in support of his recognition that in the later period ‘Althusser
unequivocally assented to views—from which he had previously dissented—enter-
tained by Marx himself on the relationship between historical materialism and the
workers’ movement.’ Ibid., p. 315.
27
Anderson, p. 93; see also pp. 52–53 and 92.

122
Althusser’s work. There is, as it were, no ‘epistemological break’ in it,
and this fact has itself a wider significance. It is a reminder of the
limits of what may be expected of any time-bound individual life,
and, hence, a rebuke to the melodramatic schematism of Althusser’s
conception of the ‘break’ in Marx’s case as utter diremption and dis-
continuity. Some consequences of the inner continuity of his own
career should now be noted.

The Science/Ideology Antithesis

It is symptomatic that it is specifically philosophy that is in the later

period thrown into the struggle between classes; philosophy which, we
are told, ‘is not (a) science but class struggle in theory’.28 The plain
implication here, as throughout the later writings, is that ‘science,
even Marxist science, is not class struggle in theory’, and so the new
conception of philosophy, like the old, ‘protects the peculiarly theoret-
ical status of science itself’.29 What it protects it from in particular is
the burden of the political responsibilities urged by Althusser’s critics.
These responsibilities are acknowledged in his self-criticism, but their
discharge is, as it were, displaced onto philosophy. An even more
striking positivist survival in the later work is the ‘cardinal principle’
of the earlier epistemology itself, the distinction between science and
ideology conceived as a distinction between what is and what is not
cognitively satisfactory in thought and in the lived relationship to the
world.30 It might have been supposed that this principle would prove
particularly vulnerable in a process of returning to Marx, with its sug-
gestion of greater sensitivity to what he actually thought and wrote.
For neither Althusser nor anyone else has produced a shred of textual
evidence to show that the science/ideology contrast has any theoretical
significance for him. A conception of these categories in antithetical
terms seems clearly incompatible with his use of them in concrete
situations.31 Moreover, it is decisively ruled out by his best-known
and most explicit dealings with the notion of the ideological.

These occur in the ‘Preface’ of 1859 to A Contribution to the Critique of

28 Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, NLB, London 1976, p. 142.
29 Roy Edgley, ‘Marx’s Revolutionary Science’, in J. Mepham and D-H. Ruben, eds.,
Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol. 3, Brighton 1979, p. 12.
30 The ‘antithesis science/ideology’ must be ‘rejected’ only ‘in its general, rationalist-

speculative form’, in order that it may be ‘“reworked” from another point of view’.
Althusser, pp. 147–48. The reworking was not carried out by Althusser and one cannot
be sure precisely what he had in mind. It seems clear, nevertheless, that it would have
to register the old epistemological hierarchy in some form. ‘Ideology’ continues to be
uses pejoratively in the later work, and theory has still to achieve an epistemological
break with its ideological origins in order to be constituted as science. Althusser, pp.
78–79, 116, 126, 151, 157, 160, 173; see also n. 33 below.
31 A striking instance is provided by the treatment of classical political economy.

Thus, the work of Ricardo is regarded by Marx as both ‘scientific’ and ‘ideological’.
But this is surely not to be explained in terms of the possibility of using a science/
ideology antithesis to partition it. The descriptions pertain to the work as a whole in
virtue of its own nature. The secret of that nature lies in a set of circumstances much
emphasized by Marx, that Ricardo’s work is conceived from the epistemologically pri-
vileged standpoint of a rising class and that it assumes the world of that class to be the
authentic, eternally valid mode of human social existence.

123
Political Economy. In this text the ‘ideological forms’ are directly
associated not with cognitive failure but with what must in some sense
be cognitive success: it is in them that ‘men become conscious’ of the
fundamental social conflict. More significantly, it is evident that all
parties to the conflict are envisaged as having to ‘fight it out’ in these
forms.32 Yet Marx is far from supposing that all are similarly
enmeshed in distorted or illusory views of the social world. On the
contrary, he assumes that one side, that of the proletariat, will be
armed with such insights into the nature of that world as he had
devoted his life to providing. The implication of what might be called
the cognitive neutrality of ideology is unmistakable. In a remarkable
late text, ‘Le Marxisme Aujourd’hui’, Althusser comes firmly and
characteristically to grips with this challenge. In the 1859 ‘Preface’, he
declares: ‘Marx considers his ideas no longer as explanatory prin-
ciples of the given whole, but solely in relation to their possible action
in the ideological struggle. Therewith they also change form, passing
from the theory-form to the ideological form.’33
This is surely one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of
Western Marxism. At any rate nothing could illustrate more dramat-
ically the enduring hold of the science/ideology antithesis on Althus-
ser, nor the consequences of his remaining subject to it. Faced with
incontrovertible evidence that Marx regarded his own ideas as ideo-
logical, Althusser’s response is not to question his ‘cardinal principle’
but, in the light of it, to consign these ideas to the side of action and
struggle while cancelling their explanatory and theoretical status.
Pointing the moral of this moment in the starkest terms, it may be
said that when finally compelled to choose between his positivism and
his loyalty to Marx, he chooses positivism. It is from one point of view
a tribute to the perverse integrity of his thought. Yet it is also the case
that he had little alternative here in view of a commitment even more
fundamental than that to the science/ideology antithesis. This is the
commitment to the epistemological reduction of philosophy which
underlies it. For it left him without the resources necessary to concep-
tualize a body of work which is, at one and the same time and in
virtue of its own unitary nature, both descriptive and dynamic, both
theory and ideology. It left him, that is to say, without the means of
doing justice to the scale and integrity of Marx’s achievement. Even
the first step towards the integration of this whole must fall outside
the bounds of a conception of philosophy as epistemology.
The issues involved here may become clearer if one considers the
furthest point attained in Althusser’s late return to Marx, the idea of
theory as the elaboration of a class standpoint. However welcome this
may be, it does nothing of itself to vindicate for theory a practical, as
well as explanatory, character. A class theoretical standpoint may be
simply a location in conceptual space from which veridical views are
obtainable. It remains to be shown how the theory developed from
such a standpoint connects with the springs of class action. For Marx
and Althusser this is emphatically not through the mediation of
32 K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow 1970, p. 21.
33 Quoted in Elliott, p. 317.

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values. The modality in which the practical force of theory is exerted
cannot be that of an ‘ought’. It is difficult to see what it conceivably
could be, other than some form of ‘natural’ or ‘ontological’ necessity.
This suggestion will have to be drawn out here by means of an anal-
ogy.34 In the case of individual human subjects there is no obligation
to take the question ‘What ought I to do in this situation?’ as the only
formulation of the problem of practical reason. Indeed, an alterna-
tive, which is, roughly speaking, Aristotelian rather than Kantian in
its philosophical associations, may well correspond better to many
people’s experience of the actual weight and complexity of practical
dilemmas. It is the question ‘What must I do in this situation in virtue
of being the person I am?’ Finding an answer to this question is more
like a process of cognitive discovery, both self-discovery and the dis-
closure of the objective world in which the self is situated, than it is
like one of normative reflection on the intimations of an ideal. It may
reasonably be regarded as a possible model for the case of collective
subjects also. At any rate some such conception seems to be presup-
posed in statements like the following: ‘It is not a question of what
this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment
regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is and what, in
accordance with this being (Sein), it will historically be compelled
to do.’35

The reference to what the proletariat will be compelled to do exempli-

fies the kind of necessity that is relevant here, a necessity grounded in
the nature of subjects of action. The revelation of ‘being’ and its
requirements must, for the proletariat in the mystified conditions of
class society, draw on the help of theory. It involves an unmasking of
the phenomenal forms of the society, a going behind its appearances
to the reality, which is by definition a scientific achievement. The sug-
gestion that now arises is that the practical significance of theory con-
sists in its indispensable role in forming and transforming, through its
cognitive power, the consciousness and action of historical subjects.
To suggest this is itself merely to indicate a programme for research.
Marx did not in his own work go far beyond programmatic announce-
ments and, in spite of some valuable contributions, it can hardly be
contended that the omission has been repaired by his successors. In
this perspective Marxist philosophy has still, just as Althusser insists,
largely to be constituted.36 Its constitution will, however, fall primar-
ily within the realm of social ontology, and, specifically, of the ontol-
ogy of class subjects. Since it is a ‘historical’ compulsion that works on
them, and since the general framework within which it works has to
be determined, it will also be important to advance positions within
the philosophy of history. It is at any rate clear that the goal is not to
be realized through epistemological research alone, and, a fortiori, not
by means of an epistemology conceived as an outer rampart behind
which science shelters from the exigencies of the practical world. To
34
A full-scale theoretical treatment is attempted in Joseph McCarney, Social Theory and
the Crisis of Marxism, Verso, forthcoming.
35
K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism, Moscow 1965,
p. 44.
36
Elliott, pp. 57–59.

125
note this is to be brought up once more against the limits of Althus-
ser’s development. The inescapable fact is that it is after all a process
of ‘withering’, and what it produces is shrivelled fruit. Althusser has
not made a significant contribution to the task of construction which
his evolution throws into such sharp relief. He appears to lack the
capacity, in part at least because of the still powerful influence of the
old epistemological problematic, to be creatively discursive about the
truths he had struggled to attain. This is a serious deficiency for a
philosopher, and one which goes a considerable way towards justify-
ing Elliott’s complaints of a decline in intellectual power. Neverthe-
less, if one attends to what was achieved, and against what odds, a
positive evaluation is still appropriate. That the record taken as a
whole shows a progressive development is a verdict which is quali-
fied, not vitiated, by noting its outer boundaries and inner regions
of petrifaction.
The Crisis of Marxism

This should be a suitable point at which to review the prospect that

Althusser’s career may aid an appreciation of the current ‘crisis of
Marxism’. The matter is best approached by noting the way in which
his own sense of the crisis came to inform his work. The suggestion of
a turning away from Marx which is implicit in the comments on the
1859 ‘Preface’ is, as Elliott shows, part of a larger pattern. It is one of
increasing scepticism, pessimism and even despair over the theoret-
ical legacy of historical materialism, attitudes which did not spare its
founder.37 What should be emphasized is that this is an intelligible,
indeed almost inevitable, accompaniment of Althusser’s develop-
ment, of his deepening insight into the meaning of Marx’s life-work
and what it affirms and presupposes. The process is one of movement
towards, and assimilation of, the thesis that Marxist theory is, in its
self-conception, the consciousness of a movement of social reality. If
the movement which was the ground of the theory begins to fail, it has
to face not simply difficult times but the possibility of extinction. It is
in danger of becoming an increasingly distorted and fading echo
rather than a living voice. From this standpoint the crisis of Marxism
is at root a crisis of Marxist practice, precipitated by the apparent loss
or absence of the historical subject identified by Marx, the revolution-
ary proletariat of advanced capitalism. It is a crisis which threatens
the very basis of the life of Marxist theory. This is the background
against which the final phase of Althusser’s career as a Marxist philo-
sopher has to be situated.
The discussion may be given a more concrete turn by considering the
question of Althusser’s Maoism. The extent to which, after the mid-
sixties, his political programme came to be centred on events in China
is well documented by Elliott. It was there he looked for a practical
correlate of his reconstruction of Marxist theory, ‘a really living refer-
ence for socialism’. Elliott also shows how decisive the defeat of these
hopes was for the Althusserian project as a whole. It was when ‘the
red star over China fell’ that it became plunged into scepticism and
37 Ibid., pp. 275–76, 314–15, 320–21, 326–27.

126
crisis.38 The merits of a political reading of Althusser now seem
evident, in particular its ability to make unified sense of his life and
thought. It must be said, however, that its potential is not entirely
realized by Elliott, and that at times he falls somewhat below the level
the topic requires. The use of trivializing language is symptomatic
here, as in the reference to Althusser’s ‘chinoiseries on the class struggle
in theory’ and to his relationship with Maoism as one of ‘flirtation’
and of being ‘seduced’.39 More important is the fact that Elliott’s sub-
stantive judgement on the relationship is unequivocally hostile; it was
‘an influence for the worse’, involving a turning aside from ‘the far
more original and fruitful course of 1960–65’.40 Yet Althusser was, at
the very least, setting an example to Western Marxist theorists of tak-
ing seriously the ‘outlying’ regions of the world system. In doing so he
could be said to be counteracting in some measure one of the weakest
features of the tradition, its Eurocentricity and preoccupation with
things ‘Western’ in a provincial sense.

It may also be doubted whether Elliott has fully come to terms, intel-
lectually or imaginatively, with the quality of his subject’s response to
the collapse of his political hopes. It is true that there was an element
of despair in that response. Nevertheless, in view of the fact that what
occasioned it was the loss of a reference for thought, this may be par-
donable, and even, in a sense, admirable. It demonstrates at any rate
how deeply Althusser had absorbed the crucial lesson of his late
return to Marx, the conviction that for socialist theory to be dialec-
tical it must move in harmony with the movement of reality. Despair
may be seen as a kind of acknowledgement of the authority of this
requirement in circumstances where it seems altogether impossible
that it could be met. It may help to bring out the point if one notes
what Althusser did not do by way of response. Most obviously, he did
not use his last published writings to renege on socialism. Neither did
he abandon the dialectic to decline into the essentially liberal stance of
social critic, a stance which is always available whatever way reality
seems to be moving. More specifically, he did not adopt the role,
which might be thought a tempting one in the circumstances, of being
a connoisseur of despair like Adorno, an intellectual whose opposi-
tion to the world and superiority to it are ever more confirmed as it
moves towards apparent catastrophe. Althusser’s response has by
contrast an authentically tragic character. This is an aspect of his ‘des-
tiny’ to which Elliott is fully alive, even if he has not used to the full
his opportunities for capturing it. No one is as yet in a position to fix
all the human lineaments of the tragedy, and Elliott recognizes this as
‘another story, for a different teller’.41 His work is a vital contribution
to the foundations on which that teller will have to build. The present
discussion has been an attempt to show that his contribution might
have been even more satisfyingly comprehensive had he consistently
trusted his own best insights and drawn out his political reading to
the furthest limits of its strength.
38 Ibid., pp. 275–76, 287.
39 Ibid., pp. 194, 209, 270.
40 Ibid., pp. 209, 270.
41 Ibid., p. 10.

127
It is, of course, possible to be impressed by the tragic dignity of
Althusser’s response to events without having to respond in the same
way. For Marxists the most fertile element in his last writings is still
the challenge, delivered with his usual rhetorical force, to give the
phrase ‘the crisis of Marxism’ a ‘completely different sense from
collapse and death’, and thus to show ‘how something vital and alive
can be liberated by this crisis and in this crisis’.42 Here too is a
natural, indeed classic, response of dialectical thought to the moment
of crisis, a vision of it as ‘a time of birth and a transition to a new
period’. The constitution of Marxist philosophy undoubtedly has a
part to play in meeting this challenge. The main burden must,
however, be borne by what was polemically contrasted to philosophy
by the young Marx, ‘the study of the real world’. This is more than
ever necessary to comprehend the vast changes now taking place
before our eyes, as both capitalism and ‘actually existing socialism’
reconstruct themselves in the hazardous enterprise of shifting their
contradictions to a new plane. There is no need to assume that the
task of revitalizing Marxist theory in this context will be easy or the
result assured. But for post-Althusserian Marxists despair would be
equally premature and, hence, faint-hearted and irrational. It is clear
at least that the task cannot be carried through without engaging all
available intellectual resources, and that the time for anathemas and
boycotts in the socialist camp is past. To say this is to say that it
cannot be carried through in the exclusive, Jansenist spirit of ‘high
Althusserianism’. Among its sources of inspiration and warnings a
proper appreciation of Althusser’s career as contemporary history
must, nevertheless, have a significant place.

42
Louis Althusser, ‘The Crisis of Marxism’, in Power and Opposition in Post-revolutionary
Societies, London 1979, pp. 225, 229.

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