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A Note on Althussers Importance for Marxism Today Rick Wolff

[Published in Rethinking Marxism 10:3 (Fall, 1998), 90-92]

Lenin wrote in 1914 that Marx integrated the best of three nineteenth century sources (German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy) to constitute the Marxism that would inform the twentieth century (1964, 43). Althusser, I propose to argue, critically integrated the best of twentieth century philosophical sources with that Marxism to constitute the new Marxism we need now. The problems, limitations, and tragedies of Althussers work and life may enable Marxisms enemies and even some of its friends to bury his achievements, but that would only be Marxisms great loss. Althusser sought to interrogate critically from a Marxian standpoint - two philosophical breakthroughs of the twentieth century. In briefest terms, these were, on the one hand, the psychological theories of Freud and Lacan, and, on the other, the epistemological postmodernism that emerged in the works especially of French thinkers such as de Saussure, Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault. Althussers interrogation led him to displace the received Marxisms particular modernism namely, economic determinism by means of the breakthrough to overdetermination (Resnick and Wolff 1987, chapters 1 and 2). The epistemological commitment to overdetermination coupled to his lifelong commitment to the class-transformative project of revolutionary Marxism enabled Althusser to provide the basis for taking the broad postmodernist movement in a pointedly Marxist direction that conflicts with the non-Marxist directions preferred by so many other postmodernists.

Vis--vis psychology, Althusser undertook to connect the discovery of the unconscious and the resulting rethinking of human subjectivity to Marxism (Althusser 1996, 149). He made himself the guinea pig for exploring this connection: first in terms of his own long struggles with manic-depressive oscillations, and second in terms of the death of his wife, Helene. In his only sustained study of how human subjectivity both overdetermines and is overdetermined by its objective context, Althusser wove the subjective and objective together in their mutual, interactive shaping of his own life (1993). There, he offered one of the few and certainly one of the very best efforts by a Marxist theorist to account for objective historical events by including systematically the most personal, subjective, painful, and unconscious elements as full participants in the explanatory project (Wolff 1995). As a body of work, Althussers bequeaths invaluable theoretical means of production for a Marxism adequate to the twenty-first century. If Marxism is to appropriate from postmodernism those of its impulses that undermine the hegemony of the dominant theoretical paradigms of our time that are overwhelmingly modernist, then Althussers work will be a crucial means to do so. The same applies to the associated task of rethinking Marxism so that it can benefit as well from the internal critique of its own long and costly collaboration with modernism (Cf. Amariglio 1987). Althussers focus on overdetermination also enables a resituation of Marxisms class-transformative project in relation to the different projects of others committed to fundamental social changes that are compatible with those sought by Marxists. In short, if societies in which capitalist class structures prevail are to be transformed into societies in which communist class structures prevail, Marxists will need complex alliances with others whose goals are the

transformations of non-class components of those societies. Marxists have long understood this abstractly but only rarely have they been able practically to build or sustain such alliances. Determinist social theories that essentialize one or another aspect of society as most fundamental often fail in alliance building precisely because determinism is an absolute; it thrives on attaching relative weights to the different factors shaping any historical conjuncture. Althussers contrary focus on overdetermination provides the systematic theoretical underpinning that allows Marxists both their unique attention to class and class revolution and also their alliance with others different social transformative projects. They can then more easily let go of the fruitless, endless, and divisive disputations over which social factor (or contradiction) is the most fundamental or determinant. Marxists theoretically armed with overdetermination can more successfully negotiate with other social revolutionaries to construct mutually acceptable alliances actually capable of making the transition to the new societies they can agree upon. Indeed, overdetermination is itself a theoretical framework Marxists can offer to their partners in such negotiations as one basis for the alliance they all seek. In a remarkable extension of Althussers notions of the interweaving of subjective and objective factors within overdeterminist Marxist explanation, Harriet Fraad (1994) has shown how class processes interact with unconscious processes and cultural constructions of gender to overdetermine the epidemic of anorexia in young women across the US. By pointedly refusing to reduce this epidemic to either class or unconscious or gender processes, Fraad connects it to the Marxist class-transformative project in a way no one else had been able to do. She demonstrates the relevance of Marxism in a way determinist Marxism could not do; she likewise demonstrates the

relevance of Marxism to the subjective dimensions of individual lives in new ways. Her work shows how Althussers appropriations of the psychology of subjects and of postmodernisms impulses toward overdetermination can lead to a kind of Marxism capable of relevance to the most urgent problems of contemporary life and hence entitled to a central place in movements for social change. Precisely because of the social goals, theoretical achievements, and political importance of Althussers works, they need to be critically engaged, extended, and transformed as a central task of the renewal of Marxism. Like all before him, he left ambiguous legacies, incomplete arguments, and all sorts of contradictions all raw materials indispensable to the next period of Marxist theoretical and political activity. Now more than ever.

References

Althusser, Louis. 1993. The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir. Ed. Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier. Trans. Richard Veasey. New York: The New Press. Althusser, Louis. 1996. Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia University Press. Amariglio, Jack. 1987. Marxism Against Economic Science: Althussers Legacy. In Paul Zarembka, Ed. Research In Political Economy, Vol. 10. Greenwich and London: JAI Press, pp. 159-194. Fraad, Harriet, Resnick, Stephen and Wolff, Richard. 1994. Bringing It All Back Home: Class, Gender, and Power in the Modern Household. London: Pluto Press, 112-131. Lenin, V.I. 1964. The Teachings of Karl Marx. New York: International Publishers. Resnick, Stephen and Wolff, Richard. 1987. Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Wolff, Richard. 1995. Review of Louis Althusser,s The Future Lasts Forever. Rethinking Marxism 8:2, 123-134.