Introduction
Verso have just published the
English translation of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s book On
the Reproduction of Capitalism.
Althusser, who was the Marxist philosopher, in the late 1960s and early
1970s, is perhaps best known for his essay on Ideological and Repressive State
Apparatus. However his work on ISAs and RSAs was just a fragment of a much
larger book that was unseen in his lifetime.
On the Reproduction of Capitalism, will change perspectives on
Althusser, as profoundly as the publication long after his death of Marx’s Grundrisse
or Paris Manuscripts, transformed understanding of Marx’s work.
Written in the immediate
aftermath of the 1968 French student rebellion, On the Reproduction of
Capitalism, is bathed in the glow of the Algerian uprising against France and
the Viet Cong’s battles against first the French and then the US forces. While it is written by a philosopher, whose
work rightly or wrongly is often viewed as opaque, it asks a simple question
and is directed not at philosophers but at workers and peasants fighting for
liberation. The question is as is
evident from the title, how does capitalism reproduce the conditions necessary
for its own existence. How does
capitalism mould us to serve a system which rests upon our exploitation? Althusser asked this question so as to
further the struggle to destroy capitalism and to produce a new social
system. Althusser was widely seen to
have been destroyed, both personally by severe mental illness and
politically/philosophically over thirty years ago, yet the text is fresh and
relevant to those of us who seek to challenge capitalism today. While On the Reproduction of Capitalism, is
both flawed and unfinished, I believe that it will, eventually, be referenced
as widely on the left as The Communist Manifesto, Fanon’s The Wretched of the
Earth or Lenin’s State and Revolution. Reading it is an unsettling experience,
it is a dangerous text, but lucid and relevant.
Althusser, born in 1918, was
originally a Catholic, imprisoned by the Nazi occupiers during the Second World
War, he became a Marxist. He joined the French
Communist Party and sought to fight a philosophical war, in his eyes, on behalf
of Marxism and the working class. He collaborated with close associates on
books such as Reading Capital, Lenin and Philosophy and For Marx. He was known as a structuralist, an
anti-humanist and anti-Hegelian thinker. He rejected the idea that humans have
an intrinsic unchanging essence, so felt that so called ‘humanist Marxist’
critiques in the 1950s and 1960s of Stalin, were inappropriate. He felt that we had no fixed identity and
humanism was anti-Marxist. He was seen
as a structuralist, arguing that underlying processes shaped society and human
subjectivity. He sought to understand
Marx’s work as a form of science, arguing that there was a break between the
works of the younger Marx, such as the Paris Manuscripts, and the mature Marx
who wrote Das Kapital. The younger Marx
was a Hegelian thinker, while the mature Marx rejected any idea of historical
‘stages’, historical inevitability or other Hegelian inspired ideas.
Cynics argued that he was a
Stalinist, in Britain his supporters like Paul Hirst were seen as preparing the
way for Tony Blair’s right wing New Labour project. Described as anti-humanist, hostile to the
study of history and opposing human freedom with his functionalist and
structuralist approach, Althusser was widely attacked in print by both former
students such as Jacques Rancière and other Marxists such as Britain’s E.P.
Thompson.
Plagued by severe mental illness
for much of his life, he killed his wife and was placed in an institution. His ideas, dominant at least on the French
Marxist left in the 1960s and 70s, were discarded. It is however clear that the thought of prominent
post Marxist, post modernist and post structuralist thinkers including his
friend Derrida, his former student Foucault and Laclau and Mouffe, were shaped
by much of his work. The tragedy of
Althusser was reinforced, when Nicos Poultzans, who applied his work to the
study of the state, committed suicide. Althusser
in works of biting self-criticism, attacked his own work and on his death in
1990 appeared likely to have disappeared other than as tragic and politically
bankrupt figure.
In the last decade or so, a new
Althusser has emerged, huge quantities of previously unpublished material has
appeared, showing that Althusser in his later work traced the origins of a new
materialism from Greek philosophers and Spinoza on to Marx. Althusser’s work on Machiavelli has also attracted the attention of many on the left and recently the
literary critic Warran Montag has produced an impressive reassessment of
Althusser’s work.
On the Reproduction of Capitalism
provides a new perspective on the old Althusser but rather than being a work of
philosophical or literary interest, is one that can inform struggles for
socialism in the 21st century.
I
Stalin to Tony Blair
Contributions
ISA
Class Struggle
Relations of Production versus
the forces of production
Economic democracy, democratic
ownership
Law of value, law of law
Neither plan nor market
ISA product of ruling class
warfare
Critique of Stalin
Class warfare
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