a note on althusser

8/2/2019 A Note on Althusser

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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.


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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


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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


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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.


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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 Critiqueof 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.

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