Experience and Historical Materialism: Five Argumentative Essays

By Ib Gram-Jensen

Experience and Historical Materialism: Five Argumentative Essays.

The central essay in this volume sketches a revised version of historical materialism, with agents' experiences of and responses to their social circumstances as the motive power of historical development and transformations. The other four essays are critiques of Althusserian structural Marxism, various misreadings of Marx and Engels, Laclau & Mouffe's"discourse analysis" as put forward in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and Keith Jenkins' postmodernist Re-thinking History.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Jun 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9788743081999

Ib Gram-Jensen

Ib Gram-Jensen, born 1953, is an MA in history and social studies. He has previously published Experience and Historical Materialism, Structure, Agency and Theory (in three volumes) and A Critique of Mau: Mute Compulsion and Other Essays, also dealing with the subject of historical materialism. He lives in Denmark.

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For Susanne

Contents

Introduction

Althusser, Stalinism and Agency

Reading Marx

Experience and Historical Materialism: an Investigation

Laclau & Mouffe Revisited

Keith Jenkins: Re-thinking History

Postscript

Notes

References

Introduction.

This collection of five relatively self-contained essays exhibits a certain oddity which requires explanation. Readers will find references to another text by this writer: Structure, Agency and Theory, and indeed passages quoted verbatim from it; but they will not, at the time of writing, be able to locate that text anywhere. The simple reason for this is that Structure, Agency and Theory has not, to this date, been published or even printed and is consequently not accessible. Whether or not this will remain the case is, at the time of writing, impossible to say. References below to Structure, Agency and Theory are consequently not very precise, as references to a specific page would not make any sense. As things stand, a brief summary of some main results presented in it seems meaningful, not least considering the problems of historical materialism left unresolved by the ebb of interest in it.

The first two essays deal with subjects which are touched on in Structure, Agency and Theory, but they have a somewhat narrower focus. The third one is intended to offer a relatively brief sketch of the version – or revision – of classical historical materialism suggested in Structure, Agency and Theory. Although all the essays can be read independently,¹ the fourth and the fifth between them make up a kind of sequel to the third, permitting a comparison between this historicalmaterialist approach to the study of society and history on the one hand and two alternative ones: the discourse-analytical one found in Laclau & Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and Post-Marxism without Apologies, and Jenkins’ postmodernist one as presented in his Re-thinking History on the other. The assessment of their positions is based on those three texts, while it also draws on the critiques of Laclau & Mouffe from Geras, Mouzelis and Meiksins Wood referred to below, and that of postmodernism in Evans’ In Defence of History. There is no attempt to cover all aspects of Laclau & Mouffe’s or Jenkins’ arguments; the emphasis is on demonstrating their shortcomings as alternatives to historical materialism.

As both, in their different ways, deny the explanatory power of historical materialism, the problematic guiding these chapters may be condensed into the questions whether

Laclau & Mouffe’s critique of Marxism/historical materialism in terms of its explanatory power is valid.

Laclau & Mouffe’s discourse-analytical approach has superior explanatory power.

Jenkins’ repudiation of knowledge of the past is valid.

The problematic of Structure, Agency and Theory and its theoretical and historical context was presented as follows:

The work embodied in the present text originally centred on the problematic of analysing the capitalist state, and accounting for its concrete role and functioning in advanced capitalist societies. Considerations on various Marxist approaches to the subject led to the conclusion that it is impossible to work out a general concept of the capitalist state from which its historical functions can be derived. The social structure imposes limits and pressures on the state, but within those limits its concrete role and functioning depend on historical eventuation which is, to be sure, determined by the structural context, but neither reducible to, nor derivable from it.

Along with this, if based on a less focused exploration, university training in history and social studies as well as the experience of history from the early 1970s and on lead to the following more general assumptions:

The actual process of history is causally irreducible to the structure of society determined by the dominant mode of production.

Social practice, in particular, and hence the actual course of the history of advanced capitalism, cannot be derived from the structural analysis of capitalism, nor dismissed as immaterial. Practice – or agency – makes a difference to actual history, and the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist type of society eventuates from, and as part of, that actual history.

Still more specifically, Marx’ expectations that the dialectic of forces and relations of production he posited as the motive power of history² will inexorably eventuate in a transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually communism³ have not been confirmed by the actual history of advanced capitalism so far.

The question is whether this failure of Marx’ expectations and predictions about the supersession of capitalism is accountable for within a theoretical framework which is, at least in a broad but still meaningful sense, Marxist or historical-materialist, in spite of such more or less far-reaching modifications of the original, and various other, conception(s) of historical materialism as turn out to be necessary. It is argued that if the conception of the interaction between social circumstances and agency suggested below is substituted for the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development, the failure of Marx’ expectations and predictions to come true can be accounted for cogently and consistently with Marx’ structural analysis of Capital (which is not to suggest that the latter is perfectly complete and correct on all points) and at least the minimum of Marxist assumptions which is necessary to answer the above question in the affirmative.

What are those assumptions? As several strands and varieties of Marxism can be identified, the answer cannot be taken for granted, but the rejection of any of the following three assumptions would, in the opinion of this writer, be inconsistent with the claim to argue within anything describable as a historical-materialist or Marxist framework or the Marxist tradition in any meaningful sense of those terms. In addition, abandoning any of these three assumptions would imply an obvious answer to the question why Marx’ expectations have not come true, whereas upholding them suggests its relevance:

Social circumstances, including such as are due to agents’ positions in relations of production, are determinants of agents’ consciousness.

Capitalism is an exploitative, antagonistic, crisis-ridden and alienating mode of production.

The working class constituted by capitalist relations of production consequently has an objective interest in a transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually communism in the sense of a classless society based on the collective command of the means, process and outcome of production.⁴

It may be just as well to warn readers at the outset that while the suggested conception of the nature of the process of historical development derives from historical materialism and is indeed, in the opinion of this writer, a variety of historical materialism, it is also, in a real sense, a revised, or revisionist, variety of it, which may cause scandal to some, and give rise to misunderstandings. A brief summary of some main points of the text may, therefore, be useful. The suggested theoretical position rejects collective subjects and the reduction of human agents (their consciousness, individuality and actions) to the mere supports or products of structural causality. It rejects the reduction of human agents and agency to discursive articulation or ideological interpellation, but acknowledges the irreducibility of agents’ articulation of their experiences of and responses to their lived reality to simple (and hence derivable) effects of that reality. And it rejects Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, but accepts their general historical-materialist approach, their critique of the capitalist mode of production and type of society, and the objective interest of the working class in accomplishing the transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually classless communist society – while, however regretfully, rejecting their expectations and predictions of its inevitability along with the idea of the dialectic of forces and relations of production supposed to prompt or force the working class to effect it.

Today, disbelief in Marx’ and Engels’ expectations and predictions that the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually classless communist society is inevitable is in fact probably less likely to cause scandal than is the assertion that they actually did nourish such expectations and make such predictions – or, at least, that they actually believed in them. A single quotation will suffice to represent a widespread argument to the contrary:

At its heart, historical materialism is a theory of historical change through the evolving contradictions between the forces and relations of production of various modes of production. [.....] The possibility for a better world grew within capitalism, but this was only a possibility; and despite some ambiguous formulations to the contrary, the general thrust of both Marx’s and Engels’s work was as a critique of political and historical fatalism.⁵

In Structure, Agency and Theory, the fact that they did nourish such expectations, based on the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production, and did make such predictions, and, judging from the evidence, certainly did believe in the latter, is, however, amply documented.⁶ And as argued below the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production must be abandoned, not only on account of its weaknesses, but also because it has served to gloss over some very real strategic questions raised by the objective of the transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually classless communist society.

Again, the suggested revision of Marxian (and Engelsian) historical materialism is not the abandonment of the objective of a revolutionary-socialist historical transformation; or of Marx’ critique of capitalism as an exploitative, antagonistic, alienating and crisis-ridden mode of production, which it is in the objective interest of the capitalist working class to substitute by socialism and eventually communism defined by the collective command of the means, process and outcome of production. What is suggested is to abandon the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, while the idea of the interaction between social circumstances and agency as that motive power, which is also part of Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism, is retained; and to face the theoretical and practical implications squarely.

The idea of such a revision should not, in itself, be controversial; or more precisely, it should be dealt with as a matter of establishing whether or not it is justified by any real theoretical weakness in Marx and Engels, not by attempting to gloss over such weaknesses by asserting that Marx and Engels never held ideas which, according to the textual evidence, they certainly did hold. Nevertheless, a reluctance to acknowledge Marx’ and Engels’ expectations and predictions of the inevitable supersession of capitalism – or at least to take them at their face value rather than dismissing them as attempts to cheer on the troops⁷ – has been unmistakable in many cases. This can hardly be interpreted as anything but a defensive reluctance to admit that Marx could in fact, on any important issue concerning historical materialism, be mistaken, a failure to detach the question ‘What is authentically Marxist?’ from the question ‘What is authentically scientific?’.⁸ In any case, such few responses as there have been to this writer’s calling attention to Marx’s determinism were decidedly chilly.

For similar reasons, a few words about eclecticism may be relevant at this point. Eclecticism has a rather unpleasant ring, suggesting a more or less arbitrary jumbling together of disparate theoretical elements. However, the combination of elements from Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism and analysis and critique of capitalism on the one hand with the conception of agents’ articulation of their experiences and responses on the other; the rejection of collective subjects and Marx’ and Engels’ conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, along with their expectations and predictions that it would inevitably eventuate in the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually classless communist society; and the acceptance of the argument on the problem of class capacities in Levine & Wright and Wright, Levine & Sober – is that a case of arbitrary theoretical picking and choosing? Not quite, for the simple reason that the theoretical body resulting from it seems consistent, and moreover relevant in terms of historical analysis. The combination of theoretical elements from various sources cannot in itself be illegitimate if the theoretical tool set produced by it works. And therefore, critique of eclecticism is meaningless unless it is demonstrated that the theoretical body in question is in fact inconsistent.

Finally, to anticipate one of the points made below: the past cannot be considered unknowable, or interpretable in an infinite number of ways. Our knowledge about it will always, like all knowledge, be partial, approximate and subject to revision; but it will nevertheless be real knowledge, supported by evidence and rational argument, and has to be accepted as such until perhaps superseded by superior knowledge supported by better or more evidence and better argument: as real knowledge as far as we have been able to get.⁹ As such it is the best we have to go on, and it is not irrelevant. We can learn from the past that our present social order and the way it works and develops are not immutable conditions: things have been different in the past. If we want to understand the structure and dynamics of it, we have to use historical material, and make abstractions and deductions from it. And researches into the past as well as the present offers both lessons about what kind of process historical development is, and how it has been handled, and some warnings about what should be done and what to avoid if we want to handle it to our advantage in the future.

Apart, of course, from Marx and Engels, a major influence is what may somewhat loosely be labelled as the British Marxist historians, the approach of whom seems related to the one suggested, and has proved fruitful in terms of explanatory power. It should perhaps be added that there is, and must be, a considerable overlap between Marxist and non-Marxist historiography in terms of rules or norms of evidence and documentation: while the areas and focal points of research and explanation, as well as specific explanations, may be different, the commitment to getting it right, and to rational argument, and the recognition that imaginary historical experience is at best irrelevant, are shared. And to adumbrate a main front line running through the subsequent arguments on historical materialism, discourse analysis and Jenkins’ postmodernism, some passages in Hobsbawm, who was a prominent British representative and practitioner of historical materialism, are relevant in that context:

It has become fashionable in recent decades, not least among people who think of themselves as on the left, to deny that objective reality is accessible, since what we call ‘facts’ exist only as a function of prior concepts and problems formulated in terms of these. The past we study is only a construct of our minds. One such construct is in principle as valid as another, whether it can be backed by logic and evidence or not. So long as it forms part of an emotionally strong system of beliefs, there is, as it were, no way in principle of deciding that the biblical account of the creation of the earth is inferior to the one proposed by the natural sciences: they are just different. Any tendency to doubt this is ‘positivism’, and no term indicates a more comprehensive dismissal than this, unless it is empiricism.

In short, I believe that without the distinction between what is and what is not so, there can be no history. Rome defeated and destroyed Carthage in the Punic Wars, not the other way round. How we assemble and interpret our chosen sample of verifiable data (which may include not only what happened but what people thought about it) is another matter.

Actually, few relativists have the full courage of their convictions, at least when it comes to deciding such questions as whether Hitler’s Holocaust took place or not. However, in any case, relativism will not do in history any more than in law courts. Whether the accused in a murder trial is or is not guilty depends on the assessment of old-fashioned positivist evidence, if such evidence is available. Any innocent readers who find themselves in the dock will do well to appeal to it. It is the lawyers for the guilty ones who fall back on postmodern lines of defence.¹⁰

If some readers think that Hobsbawm drew up a caricature of his adversary here, the discussions below should disabuse them.

Althusser, Stalinism and Agency.

a. Stalinism?

There are several good reasons to criticise Althusser’s structuralist Marxism. It is a functionalist approach, with the consequent weaknesses. As, in Elliott’s words, In effect, according to Althusserian conceptualisation, "the mode of production [.....] is a perpetuum mobile,"¹¹ it leaves transforming class struggle and the transition from one mode to another inexplicable. The knowledge effect of theoretical practice remains an unexplained postulate.¹² And the reading of Marx ostensibly providing its basis as a more rigorous, scientific historical materialism seems arbitrary and misleading.

These criticisms, which apply first and foremost to the original version of structuralist Marxism presented in For Marx and especially Reading Capital, are hardly controversial today. Even most of those making them have, however, rejected the accusation that, "In short, Althusserianism is Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of Theory. It is Stalinism at last, theorised as ideology"¹³ as unwarranted in the extreme,¹⁴ outrageous and unhistorical abuse¹⁵ or wild.¹⁶ Does it nevertheless have any basis in the substance of Althusserianism? And if so, what?

Thompson did not systematically define what he meant by Stalinism, which, according to his own words, was never given its true, rigorous and totally coherent theoretical expression before Althusser.¹⁷ But a more or less approximate outline of Stalinism as a historical phenomenon would be something like the following: it involved the concentration of power in the highest echelons of party and government, especially in the hands of Stalin himself, with a rigid hierarchy, strict censorship and the suppression of any initiative from below; the substitution of free discussion and information by the constant dissemination of whatever lies the leadership considered expedient; the freezing of the theory of historical materialism into a set of dogma, the interpretation of which was the monopoly of the highest echelons of the party and government, often exercised in arbitrary ways for reasons of Realpolitik; and most monstrously of all the arbitrary and unrestricted use of terror to eliminate any opposition, with witch-hunts, labour camps and mass murder on a huge scale, and a correspondingly vast and ruthless security apparatus.¹⁸

This writer is convinced that the textual evidence does not corroborate the idea that Althusser subjectively supported Stalinism in this sense, or that it was the objective consequence of his theoretical edifice. All the same it must be admitted that insofar as he discussed Stalinism at all, he did it in such an ambiguous¹⁹ and unsatisfactory way that it might seem a parallel to the attempts to take a distance from Stalinism and retain a hierarchical socialist regime in post- Stalin real existing socialism: the reduction of Stalinism to aberrations and abuses (cult of personality) in the superstructure leaving the infrastructure of socialist society intact. Indeed Althusser wrote to that effect when he suggested that,

[.....]. However, everything that has been said of the cult of personality refers exactly to the domain of the superstructure and therefore of State organization and ideologies; further it refers largely to this domain alone, which we know from Marxist theory possesses a ‘relative autonomy’ (which explains very simply, in theory, how the socialist infrastructure has been able to develop without essential damage during this period of errors affecting the superstructure).²⁰

Theoretically erroneous and perhaps embarrassing as such a passage is in itself (as if it made no difference to socialist infrastructure that the command of the means, process and outcome of production was monopolised by an undemocratic state apparatus!), Althusser also, just a few pages before it, wrote about the ‘inhuman’ that the past of the U.S.S.R. bears within it: terror, repression and dogmatism – precisely what has not yet been completely superseded, in its effects or its misdeeds.²¹

That was in an essay dated October 1963. In a Note on The Critique of the Personality Cult dated June 1972 Althusser rejected the concept personality cult, arguing that it explained nothing and suggesting instead the (provisional) term the Stalinian deviation"²² Why this specific term? What did that explain? Althusser further emphasised the necessity of serious research into the basic historical causes of this deviation: [.....] into the Superstructure, relations of production, and therefore the state of class relations and the class struggle in the U.S.S.R.²³ Very sensible – and then, seven pages on, Althusser suggests the hypothesis that the Stalinian deviation is caused by, precisely, a deviation: economism, one half of the bourgeois-ideological pair economism/humanism.²⁴

Can we make a comparison? Yes, we can. And we discover the factor which permits us to identify the ideological pair economism/humanism and its practices as bourgeois: it is the elimination of something which never figures in economism or humanism, the elimination of the relations of production and of the class struggle.²⁵

This pair has, Althusser asserts, invaded the labour movement and become the main tendency of the Second International. And so, this is his hypothesis on the cause of the Stalinian deviation:

The International Communist Movement has been affected since the 1930s, to different degrees and in very different ways in different countries and organizations, by the effects of a single deviation, which can provisionally be called the Stalinian deviation.

Keeping things well in proportion, that is to say, respecting essential distinctions, but nevertheless going beyond the most obvious phenomena – which are, in spite of their extremely serious character, historically secondary: I mean those which are generally grouped together in Communist Parties under the heading personality cult and dogmatism – the Stalinian deviation can be considered as a form (a special form, converted by the state of the world class struggle, the existence of a single socialist State, and the State power held by the Bolshevik Party) of the posthumous revenge of the Second International: as a revival of its main tendency.

This main tendency was, as we know, basically an economistic one.²⁶

It is hard not to consider this a remarkably feeble theorisation of the Stalinian deviation, with the kind of historical circumstances Althusser himself insisted should be considered left out: what about the actual heritage from the Tsarist society in terms of economy, social structure, culture? The effects of world and civil war? The circumstances of the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the development after that? The failure of the revolution to spread to the West? What about repression and purges, the concentration of power in a single person?²⁷ The effects of the lack of democracy on relations of production – the question about the infrastructure so nonchalantly brushed aside in For Marx? The ideological excesses and practices? The question why the economistic deviation affected the The International Communist Movement since the 1930s? Considering all this, is the above hypothesis really the most likely one could come up with? Are the abnormities of the collectivisation really attributable to economism, one aspect of which is "the elimination of the relations of production and of the class struggle"?

Rather than explaining the Stalinian deviation, Althusser’s hypothesis almost, some might think, looks like an attempt to trivialise it.²⁸ According to Elliott, Althusser seems to have produced a manuscript some years before which, judging from the evidence, "featured the hypothesis advanced in Reply to John Lewis a few years later, but was firmer in asserting a continuity between Stalinism and Khrushchevism in their negation of proletarian democracy, and a discontinuity between the Stalinist and Chinese models in precisely this respect.²⁹ But, given what Althusser actually published, it is perhaps little wonder that critics of Althusser saw his left-wing critique as (part of) the smokescreen of more or less unreal arguments serving to hide a continuity with the Stalinist past in real existing socialism (including China) by means of misleading critique".

In any event it is questionable to which extent Althusser’s published critique even touches the historical reality of Stalinism, let alone helps to explain it. As Colletti, mentioning what he considers Althusser’s organic sympathy with Stalinism, remarks,

[.....]. In his Reply to John Lewis, of course, Althusser tries to establish a certain distance from Stalin. But the level of this brochure makes one throw up one’s arms, as we say in Rome, with its mixture of virulence and banality. Nothing is more striking than the poverty of the categories with which Althusser tries to explain Stalinism, simply reducing it to an ‘economism’ that is an epiphenomenon of the Second International – as if it were a mere ideological deviation and a long familiar one at that! Naturally, Stalinism was an infinitely more complex phenomenon than these exiguous categories suggest.³⁰

Moreover, if Althusser did not express any sympathy with Stalinist oppression, and his politics were ambiguous and perhaps naïve, but, in any case, not (pace Colletti) obviously Stalinist, some other factors might actually lend some plausibility to the accusation of Stalinism. The first and less substantial one was his polemical style, already suggested by Colletti: as Elliott observes, Althusser’s treatment of other members of the Western Marxist tradition was crude and cavalier,³¹ and he failed to make adequate distinctions between individual theorists, let alone examine their views in detail.³² These weaknesses are visible from his coupling together of his three bugbears: historicism, humanism and economism (three misinterpretations of Marxism), and the Second International, in Reading Capital:

[.....]. Paradoxical as this conclusion may seem – and I shall doubtless be attacked for expressing it – it must be drawn: from the standpoint of its theoretical problematic, and not of its political style and aims, this humanist and historicist materialism has rediscovered the basic theoretical principles of the Second International’s economistic and mechanistic interpretation. If this single theoretical problematic can underly [sic] policies of different inspiration, one fatalist, the other voluntarist, one passive, the other conscious and active – it is because of the scope for theoretical ‘play’ contained in this ideological theoretical problematic as in every ideology."³³

In his later texts, moreover, Althusser sometimes used a militant vocabulary of class struggle that might give the impression of a PFC die-hard intolerant of opposition and deviations.³⁴ Moreover, his persistent criticism of humanism might make a similar impression, although it was not a criticism in terms of ethics, but analytical approach, as may be suggested by the quotations above, and will become apparent below, from his rejection of the question of the individual in history, and his positions on that about the subject(s) of history.

If Thompson failed to read Althusser’s texts in their contemporary (French and international) context,³⁵ Althusser may be taken to task for failing to recognise that humanist anti-Stalinism need not be a right deviation. In fact Thompson may be excused for reading the following passage in Althusser’s Reply to John Lewis as directed precisely against those socialist anti- Stalinists, including Thompson himself, who left the communist parties in the wake of the twentieth congress of the CPSU and the invasion of Hungary in 1956:

[.....]. After the Twentieth Congress an openly rightist wave carried off (to speak only of them) many Marxist and Communist intellectuals, not only in the capitalist countries, but also in the socialist countries. It is not of course a question of putting the intellectuals of the socialist countries and Western Marxists into the same bag – and especially not of confusing the mass political protests of our comrades in Prague, known as socialism with a human face, with Garaudy’s integral humanism, etc. In Prague they did not have the same choice of words (the words did not have the same sense) nor the same choice of roads. But here…! Here we see Communists following the Social-Democrats and even religious thinkers (who used to have an almost guaranteed monopoly in these things) in the practice of exploiting the works of Marx’s youth in order to draw out of them an ideology of Man, Liberty, Alienation, Transcendence, etc. – without asking whether the system of these notions was idealist or materialist, whether this ideology was petty-bourgeois or proletarian. Orthodoxy, as John Lewis says, was almost submerged: not Stalin’s thought, which continued and continues to hold itself comfortably above the uproar, in its bases, its line and certain of its practices – but quite simply the theory of Marx and Lenin."³⁶

There is certainly something written between these lines which Thompson seems to have failed to notice from the words on Prague and Stalin’s thought (and certain of its practices), but still it is no wonder that Thompson, having quoted the first period, comments: So that is what we all were – an openly rightist wave.³⁷ And:

This, then, is the missing protagonist with whom Althusser wrestles in For Marx and Reading Capital: the anti-Stalinist revolt, the total intellectual critique, which converged for a time under the motto: socialist humanism. Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not offering socialist humanism as an alternative orthodoxy, nor as an adequate definition of all that this critique entailed, nor yet as a motto endorsed on every side. The term has had its own ambiguous history and I am not so tender at the passing of time as to wish to preserve it in theoretical amber. But this, if anywhere, is where all these critiques and actions converged.

This is the object of Althusser’s police action, the unnamed ghost at whom his arguments are directed. But the ghost is allowed no lines of his own. The reader of the post-Stalinist generation is encouraged to suppose him to be some timid intellectual, remote from any political action, shocked in his bourgeois moral sensibility, putting on his glasses, peering at Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, and collapsing back into a rightist Feuerbachian complacency. This is also a direct lie. The actual themes of the critique: the structure and organisation of the Party: the control of the membership by the full-time apparatus: the Moscow orientation (and training) of that apparatus: the selfperpetuating modes of control (democratic centralism, the panel system, the outlawing of factions) – and from thence to the wider political and intellectual themes: none of these themes appear.

Of course, if one defines oneself as being in the middle of a sea, then any other waves must be on the right or on the left. The other waves will see it differently. From my own position, I cannot conceive of any wave in the working-class movement being further to the right than Stalinism. From any consideration of working-class self-activity, of socialist liberty, how is it possible to be further to the right than the antihistoricism and anti-humanism of Althusser?"³⁸

With the final paragraph, Thompson points to something substantial, namely the strategic implications of Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism, which indeed, although they do not prove any subjective Stalinist intent on the part of Althusser, are something like Stalinist socialism. That theoretical antihumanism, the core conception of structural Marxism, can be defined in the words of Brewster’s Glossary to Reading Capital:

Humanist ideologies see the social totality as the totality of inter-subjective relations between men, as civil society, the society of human needs. In other words, they are anthropologies strictly homologous with the classical economic theory of the homo oeconomicus. In Marxist theory, on the contrary, the real protagonists of history are the social relations of production, political struggle and ideology, which are constituted by the place assigned to these protagonists in the complex structure of the social formation (e.g., the labourer and the capitalist in the capitalist mode of production, defined by their different relations to the means of production). The biological men are only the supports or bearers of the guises (Charaktermasken) assigned to them by the structure of relations in the social formation. Hence each articulation of the mode of production and each level of the social formation defines for itself a potentially different form of historical individuality. The correspondence or non-correspondence of these forms of historical individuality plays an important part in transition."³⁹

This conception is closely related to Althusser’s distinction between theoretical practice and science on the one hand and ideological practice and ideology on the other, which suggests a dogmatic insistence on representing the former against representatives of the latter – and, especially, involves his insistence, at least in his early work, that ideology survives alongside science as an essential element of every social formation [.....], including a socialist and even a communist society.⁴⁰ The reason for this is, according to Althusser, that, "ideology (as a system of mass representations) is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence."⁴¹ Consequently,

In a class society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is settled to the profit of the ruling class. In a classless society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is lived to the profit of all men.⁴²

Apart from the obvious functionalist-teleological assumptions implicit in this, it suggests a classless society in which the division between haves and have-nots is substituted by the division between knows and know-nots, the former constituting an elite of theoretical practitioners, those who have somehow made the passage from ideology to science, a passage the defining characteristics of which, the nature of the knowledge effect, are, as was noted above, not made clear by Althusser. Both come out clearly in the passage between the two last quotations

[.....]. If, as