Marxism and the "Crisis of Marxism"

Althusser's philosophical position is obviously out of step with current postmodern (post-Marxist, neo-pragmatist, neo-liberal, poststructuralist) tendencies wherein individualism, pluralism, and relativism have congealed into an anti-scientific, anti-Marxist, and anti-modernist orthodoxy. I will not repeat the criticisms of postmodernist tendencies already advanced in my introductory remarks, but it is worthwhile to recall, in light of the concept of philosophy as class struggle in theory, the dividing line that separates postmodernism in all its variations from Structural Marxism. Postmodern philosophy combines epistemological and ontological relativism in order to mount a relativist attack on scientific realism. From relativism, which constitutes its axiomatic core,

postmodernism fashions a voluntaristic political individualism (either neo-liberal conformity or neo-anarchist dissidence) and a descriptive theoretical pluralism. Postmodern philosophy accepts—implicitly or explicitly, with regret or with enthusiasm—the rapid and brutal restructuring of global capitalism, and it masks its intellectual complicity in this process by exploiting the so-called crises of Marxism, modernism, and history to discredit the very project of a realist, complex, and scientific explanation of the current conjuncture. Althusser's philosophical position, which subsumes epistemological relativism by the principle of ontological realism, defends both the category of the scientific and the scientificity of historical materialism. By explicitly rejecting the problematization of knowledge, Althusser disrupts the modus vivendi currently (and cautiously) being negotiated between the old New Left and the new New Right under the auspices of postmodernism.

In a lecture delivered in 1977, Althusser addressed the "crisis of Marxism" in the context of Eurocommunist debates over a variety of issues including party democracy, national versus international paths to socialism, and parliamentary reformism versus proletarian dictatorship. Althusser told his audience that Marxism's major difficulties—the explanation of Stalinism, the absence of an adequate theory of the liberal democratic state or class struggle under contemporary capitalism, and so on—should be viewed as a challenge, indeed an important opportunity, not as a refutation or a defeat. Rather than relying on a vaguely defined faith in the future to justify ignoring the crisis or simply enduring it passively, Althusser advocated an active, analytical response. It is "much better," he concluded, to "view the matter with sufficient historical, theoretical, and political perspective . . . to discover—even if the task is not easy—the character, meaning and implications of the crisis" (Althusser 1978, 217). Althusser's message is even more relevant now, as socialists confront the simultaneous collapse of Stalinism and Fordism.

Hard questions must be asked of Marxism in light of contemporary events, particularly with regard to the political strategies socialists have hitherto pursued. The contemporary crisis has set two tasks for historical materialism: first, a scientific task, producing new knowledge of the way things really work in order to permit the emergence of a new political vision of how they might possibly work; second, a corresponding philosophical task facilitating the scientific task by defending the categories of realism and materialism and especially the category of science itself. Althusser forcibly impresses on us the fact that making a

distinction between the concept of science and the category of the scientific increases rather than decreases the importance of philosophy. The philosophical category of science must be fought for—it is not a given—and the place that it is fought for is philosophy. In For Marx and Reading Capital , Althusser stoutly defended the category of science against irrationalist and voluntarist tendencies on the Left in order to "resist the bourgeois subjective idealist and the petty-bourgeois Marxists who, all of them, shout 'positivism' as soon as they hear the term [science] . . . who refuse the very idea of a scientific theory, even the word 'science,' even the word 'theory,' on the pretext that every science or even every theory is essentially 'reifying,' alienating and therefore bourgeois" (Althusser 1976, 116-18). Aside from changing "Marxists" to "postmodernists"—acknowledging the conservative sea change that has taken place in philosophy since the global restructuring began in the late seventies—the philosophical struggle against irrationalism and voluntarism on (what is left of) the Left remains precisely as Althusser described it in the seventies.

We have already alluded to the fact that scientific practice is always critical since it necessarily intervenes in the ideological field of a social formation by attacking ideology/error and thereby provoking ideological and theoretical struggles that reverberate through philosophy onto the field of politics. The social sciences are particularly volatile in this regard because they lay bare the actual mechanisms at work in society and thus open up the possibility of changing things. Historical materialism, the science of social formations, continues to be the object and stake of a fierce and implacable class struggle because it continues to expose the exploitation and domination inherent in the capitalist mode of production. The very existence of historical materialism makes it difficult for philosophy to exercise its traditional function of reconciling the category of the scientific with the status quo. Marxism, Althusser explains, causes "a complete upset in philosophy: not only by forcing philosophy to revise its categories in order to bring them into line with the new science and its effects, but also, and above all, by giving philosophy the means, in terms of an understanding of its real relation to class struggle, of taking responsibility for and transforming its own practice" (Althusser 1976, 174).

To repress this understanding and evade this responsibility, Althusser insists, post-Marxist philosophy must attack not only Marxism but the category of science itself. The novelty of Marxist philosophy with respect to all previous philosophy is that the latter, in keeping with its

ideological role, denies its political nature, denies that it has any connection with politics, while continuing nonetheless to practice politics in its theoretical interventions. Marxist philosophy, by contrast, openly admits its dependence on science and its relationship to politics and openly takes both a realist and a proletarian position in philosophy. Historical materialism is both a scientific and a critical theory, its critical function following from its scientific nature. Althusser's concepts of ideology, science, and philosophy deny the obfuscatory and domesticating distinction, beloved of professional middle-class academics, between "two Marxisms," one scientific (totally unacceptable) and one critical (acceptable, but only if used with extreme caution). Instead, Althusser insists that Marxism is a revolutionary unity: the necessary, and necessarily explosive, interrelationship between the production of knowledge about how things happen in history and an uncompromising defense of that knowledge. In this sense Saül Karsz is correct to maintain that Althusser's definition of philosophy in terms of "a double articulation—theoretical and political within politics and theory"—is nothing less than "an attempt to realize Marx's famous thesis that philosophy must no longer interpret the world but must change it" (Karsz 1974, 305).