vii
 

Preface 

 






In 1970 I was invited to lecture at Marx House in London on the work of Althusser. John Lewis was sitting in the front row of the audience. In the discussion he expressed his disagreement with what he had heard, and, later, his intention to combat it. Early in 1972 he published his article on "The Althusser Case" in Marxism Today. James Klugmann, the editor of the journal, asked Althusser to reply, and this reply appeared in October and November of the same year.
    This latter text was then rewritten and expanded, and appeared in a French edition in 1973, together with two other pieces. The French edition is translated in its entirety in the present volume, which also includes a translation of Eléments d'autocritique, published in France in 1974, and of the text "Est-Il Simple d'Etre Marxiste en Philosophie?", published in La Pensée, October 1975. In total, then, this volume contains some five times the volume of material contained in the original Marxism Today article.
    It is preceded by an Introduction in which I attempt to show something about the political inspiration behind Althusser's writings by applying certain of his concepts to a specific and controversial political question.
    The bibliography of works by and on Althusser to be found at the end of the book builds on that provided by Saül Karsz in his Théorie et Politique (Paris, 1974), but adds more than twenty new titles.
    For helpful discussions in the preparation of this Introduc- tion I must thank Althusser himself, together with Etienne Balibar. For help with the translation I am grateful to Ann,

 
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Jean-Jacques and François Lecercle, and for the typing, to Maria Peine.

Grahame Lock,       
Leyden, Holland, 1975. 

 
page 1
 

Introduction 

 






Louis Althusser became a controversial figure in France with the publication of his essay "Contradiction and Overdetermination" in 1962. He became a politically controversial figure when the essay "Marxism and Humanism" appeared in 1964.[1] The reason was his attack on the notion of humanism. "Ten years ago", he wrote at the time, "socialist humanism only existed in one form: that of class humanism. Today it exists in two forms: class humanism, where the dictatorship of the proletariat is still in force (China, etc.), and (socialist) personal humanism where it has been superseded (the USSR)". But while "the concept 'socialism' is indeed a scientific concept . . . the concept 'humanism' is no more than an ideological one". His purpose at this time was thus, first, to distinguish between the sciences and the ideologies; and second to show that while Marxism is a science, all forms of humanism must be classed among the ideologies.
    This was the basis of what he called "theoretical anti-humanism". (Althusser's use of the term "humanism" is specific, and it has of course nothing to do with "humanitarianism".) The reaction to his arguments, however, went far beyond the realms of theory, and into the political world itself. I will try to outline this political reaction and Althusser's response to it, because this is one of the best ways of approaching his philosophical work, and also of learning something about a man whom the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur thought it useful

 
    1. Both articles are reprinted in For Marx (Allen Lane, 1969).

 
page 2

to describe as "one of the most mysterious and least 'public' figures in the world"!
    It was clearly impossible for the French Communist Party, of which Althusser has been a member since 1948 to endorse all of his writings as they appeared, since on certain points they put its own positions in question. Nevertheless, these writings were intended as an intervention in the debate within the party, and the enormous interest which they raised did not remain without an echo there. Articles, some of them hesitantly favourable, began to appear in Party journals.[2] Lucien Sève, in some ways the Party's senior philosopher, devoted a long note to Althusser in his work La Théorie marxiste de la personnalité, outlining certain points of disagreement. But Althusser stuck to his position.[3] Waldeck Rochet, Party General Secretary at the time, gave encouragement to his research work, while distancing the Central Committee from its conclusions.
    Meanwhile the row between the philosopher Roger Garaudy and the Party of which he had so long been a member was blowing up. The situation was already changing. An article by Jacques Milhau for example, published in the Party journal La Nouvelle Critique in 1969, made it clear, referring to Garaudy and Althusser, that "there can be no suggestion of putting on the same level [Garaudy's] out-and-out revisionism, whose theoretical premises go back ten years, and what can be considered as temporary mistakes [gauchissements] made in the course of research work which always involves risks". The lecture-article "Lenin and Philosophy" (1968) seems to have been quite well received in the Party, but the article "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970) caused anxiety in some circles, which misinterpreted it as implying a simplistic condemnation of the ideological role of the education system in the service of the ruling class.
    When the Reply to John Lewis appeared in a French edition in 1973, it provoked some excitement. One news journal ran a story (though without any foundation) to

 
    2. See for example Christine Glucksmann, "La Pratique léniniste de la philosophie", in La Nouvelle Critique, April 1969.
    3. Sève has replied to Althusser in the third edition of the same work.

 
page 3

the effect that a copy of the book was being sent to every Party Central Committee member and official so that they could prepare their answers. A review by Joe Metzger in the Party weekly France Nouvelle (October 9, 1973) praised Althusser for having "raised the essential questions", but argued that he had supported the "dangerous" thesis of the sharpening of the class struggle under socialism, a thesis which "justifies priority being given to administrative and repressive measures over ideological confrontation". This remark, however, seems to be in contradiction with the sense of the text.
    The reaction to Althusser's writings in the International Communist Movement was also mixed. A critical (but not over-critical) article by T. A. Sakharova appeared in the Soviet magazine Voprosy Filosofii, following the debate carried by La Nouvelle Critique in 1965-66. But the Bulgarian S. Angelov took a much harsher line in an article in World Marxist Review in 1972, characterizing Althusser's anti-humanism as an "extreme" view, and implying (though indirectly) its connexion with "barracks communism", a term used to describe the line of the Chinese Communist Party. The Yugoslav Veljko Korac, writing in the journal Praxis in 1969 on "The Phenomenon of 'Theoretical Anti-humanism'", went even further: Althusser's book For Marx, he said, was written "in the name of inherited Stalinist schemes"; it was "Stalinist dogmatism" to reject as "abstract" humanism everything that could not be used as an ideological tool.
    On a more serious level, André Glucksmann attempted in 1967 to "demonstrate the weakness" of Althusser's work from a rather traditional philosophical standpoint (see New Left Review no. 72), while in Britain Norman Geras offered a serious if limited critique of For Marx and Reading Capital (New Left Review no. 71; see also John Mepham's reply in Radical Philosophy no. 6). But these articles contained little politics. It seems that the reaction to Althusser was, in general, either a real but rather narrow theoretical interest, or political hysteria.[4] The article by Leszek

 
    4. See for example the article by Althusser's ex-collaborator Jacques [cont. onto p. 4. -- DJR] Rancière, "Sur la théorie politique d'Althusser", in L'Homme et la Société, no. 27, January-March 1973. His critique was expanded to book length as La Leçon d'Althusser (Gallimard, 1974). According to Rancière, Althusser's philosophy performs a "police" function. Rancière prefers the standpoint of "anti-authoritarianism", "anti-State subversion", etc.

 
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Kolakowski in Socialist Register 1971 ("Althusser's Marx") might seem to be an exception; its length at least would suit it for a serious treatment. But his misunderstanding of the subject is so severe that Kolakowski never comes near to constructive criticism. He accuses Althusser of "religious thinking", and attacks him for "failing to remember" how long ago it was discovered that knowledge "has nothing to do with pure, immediate, singular objects, but always with abstractions", so long ago that it had become "a commonplace in contemporary philosophy of science" (Kolakowski, p. 125). But Althusser had pointed out, in black and white (Reading Capital, p. 184) that the theses according to which "an object cannot be defined by its immediately visible or sensuous appearance", so that a detour must be made via its concept in order to grasp it, "have a familiar ring to them -- at least they are the lesson of the whole history of modern science, more or less reflected in classical philosophy, even if this reflection took place in the element of an empiricism, whether transcendent (as in Descartes), transcendental (Kant and Husserl) or 'objective'-idealist (Hegel)". This is just one example of the kind of criticism levelled at Althusser.
    The unfortunate failure of Althusser's critics to produce reasoned arguments must have its political causes, whether or not these are explicit. Sometimes the motives are rather clear, as in I. Mészàros' comment that the category of symptomatic reading is a veil for "the sterile dogmatism of bureaucratic-conservative wishful thinking" (Marx's Theory of Alienation, p. 96). At other times the lack of a serious approach seems to be based on a simple lack of ability to understand his work, as in the case of David McLellan, who comments that For Marx "may well be profound, but is certainly obscure" (Encounter, November 1970, "Marx and the Missing Link"). On occasion even the background facts are wrongly reported, as in the case of Maurice

 
page 5

Cranston's article in the United States Information Service journal Problems of Communism (March-April 1973), which mistakenly promotes Althusser to the Central Committee of the French Communist Party! Cranston also attributes some strange philosophical positions to him: "For Althusser", he says, "membership of the proletariat is determined by the existence of certain attitudes in the minds of individuals. . . . The external economic situation (whether a person is in the lower-, middle-, or upper-class income group) hardly matters." But whether or not Cranston's study can be counted a useful contribution to the debate, it must have flattered Althusser to find himself the subject of a full-length article in a US Government journal.
    From the other side of the political spectrum, the "ultra-left", come the attacks of the novelist Philippe Sollers and the Tel Quel group, inspired by their own interpretation of "Mao Tse-Tung thought". An article in the journal's Spring 1972 issue ("Le Dogmatisme á la rescousse du révisionnisme ") accuses Althusser of evading and suppressing the notion of struggle, and in an interview with the journal Peinture Sollers describes his thesis that philosophy has no object as "ultra-revisionist" and "hyper-revisionist" ("Tac au tac", Peinture nos. 2/3).
    In the middle of this ferment the Reply to John Lewis appeared. In a review in the daily paper Combat (June 19, 1973), Bernard-Henri Lévy summed up the situation: "There has been a lot of speculation in the salons about Althusser's 'commitments'. Is he a Maoist or an orthodox Communist? Is he a product of Stalinism or a consistent anti-Stalinist?" At last Althusser intervenes on these questions -- "he puts his cards on the table, in order to clarify the political meaning of his philosophical interventions". First: For Marx and Reading Capital are placed in their historical context -- the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and "de-Stalinization"; in a sense, Khrushchev's de-Stalinization came from the right. And it led, as might have been expected, to a shift to the right in the theoretical work of Communist intellectuals.
    It also left the Communist Parties open to attack from those, either to the right or left, who wanted to claim that

 
page 6

their Marxism was more consistently humanist. This would presumably be true of figures otherwise as different as Garaudy, Marcuse, Kolakowski, and even Mandel with his "Marxist theory of alienation".[5]
    But Althusser's critique goes back further than 1956, back to Stalin himself. The Stalin period does indeed haunt the Communist movement, and not only because anti-communism will always evoke the spectre of "Stalinism". It will continue to haunt the movement, says Althusser, until a left critique of the period replaces the "rightist" analysis dominant in certain circles. And he suggests that such a critique must treat it as an example of a deviation characterized by the terms economism and humanism. He suggests as much, but could not in the space available go on to spell the mutter out.

 
II.
    How then are we to understand the enigmatic references to Stalin which occur in Althusser's Reply to John Lewis ? It is true that he says little enough on the subject, and this has led certain commentators to claim that the function of his remarks is purely political. Rancière, for example, thinks that their role is to allow him to adapt to his own use -- or rather, to the profit of "orthodox Communism" -- some "currently fashionable ideas about Stalinism"[6] (above all, presumably, those of certain "pro-Chinese" writers, including Charles Bettelheim[7]). But Rancière's arguments are themselves all too obviously motivated by directly political considerations. In my opinion, what Althusser says in this text, together with what he has said elsewhere, allows us to constitute a genuinely new theory of the Stalin period.

 
    5. It may even explain the fact that a recent collection of Trotskyist essays against Althusser resurrects Karl Korsch and Georg Lukàcs as sources for its theoretical critique (Contre Althusser, J.-M. Vincent and others; 10/18, 1974).
    6. Rancière, La Leçon d'Althusser, p. 11.
    7. Cf. especially Bettelheim's Luttes de classes in the URSS (Seuil/Maspero, 1974). [Transcriber's Note: See Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period: 1917-1923. -- DJR]

 
page 7

It therefore seemed useful to devote this Introduction to just this question, so that the reader can at least get an idea of what kind of politics lies behind Althusser's "philosophy".
    Simple as the following scenario may be, and incomplete as it is (it only attempts to provide some elements of an explanation), it contradicts alternative accounts. That is enough to be going on with.

 
    According to the Reply to John Lewis, "the Stalinian deviation can be considered as a form . . . of the posthumous revenge of the Second International : as a revival of its main tendency"; it is based on "an economistic conception and line . . . hidden by declarations which were in their own way cruelly 'humanist'".[8] To talk about Stalin's humanism is not to talk about a simple philosophical or theoretical mistake. It is to talk about something with political causes and political effects. These can be more easily understood if we glance at certain aspects of Soviet history.
    When the working class and peasantry took power in Russia in 1917, great hopes were raised among exploited peoples throughout the world. Perhaps they expected too much, too soon. At any rate, when the euphoria had given way to practical tasks, and especially to the Civil War and to the New Economic Policy, it became clear that there could be no straight, unsullied path to Communism. There would have to be detours, sometimes steps back; there would be mistakes and even disasters.
    The Soviet Union faced two major problems on the economic front: industrialization and the resolution of the agrarian question. These were not simply economic, but also ideological and political problems. The peasant question, for example, following the relatively short NEP period, was handled by the introduction of collectivization, but at an enormous cost. This cost was of course not the result of purely "technical" economic mistakes. The rich peasants, for example, resisted collectivization. No amount of agitation or of socialist propaganda could convince them that they

 
    8. In the "Note on 'The Critique of the Personality Cult'".

 
page 8

should voluntarily hand over their lands and property.
    Industrialization was vital. The machinery had to be provided to accompany the development of agriculture, and weapons had to be made available to enable the army to resist any further attempt at capitalist intervention. It was in general a question of generating the surplus necessary for investment in a country where the most basic services were still lacking in many areas, where a large part of the population was illiterate, and where the towns and industrial regions contained only a very small proportion of that population.
    During the NEP Period the resolution of certain political and ideological problems was postponed in the interest of survival. The new economic system represented a retreat. The economy was decentralized; enterprises were given financial and commercial independence; certain small enterprises were denationalized; foreign companies were granted concessions; private shops appeared, together with private merchants; the links between agriculture and industry became market-oriented once again. Lenin called this a "transitional mixed system" -- that is, not something stable in itself, but a state of affairs to be superseded either (it was hoped) by a development towards communism, or -- and this was a real possibility -- by a reversion to capitalism, if the kulaks and Nepmen grew too powerful.
    The possibility of counter-revolution was thus recognized. The danger was seen as two-fold: on the one hand, the capitalist states might attempt an intervention; on the other hand, the old and new capitalist and kulak classes might attempt to overthrow the régime from within. These were indeed the immediate dangers. But another, deeper threat was not clearly recognized. To understand why we can usefully begin by looking at one particular problem faced by the Soviet state, which then throws light on a more general contradiction.
    It was very quickly realized, following the October Revolution, that industry and agriculture urgently required the services of workers of all levels of knowledge and skill, and also of managers, technical experts, etc. These latter groups -- which on the one hand obviously did not constitute

 
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a capitalist class, but on the other hand could not be said to form part of the working class -- presented special problems. Even in the mid-twenties, before the first Five-Year Plan was put into effect, these specialist groups numbered some tens of thousands of persons, totalling perhaps 100,000.
    One problem about the specialists (I use the term in a general sense, to include managers) was that many of them were opponents of the régime. In 1925, Kalinin, President of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union, explained that "Communism is being created in the provinces by the man who says: 'I am against Communism'". Moreover, these groups were not particularly popular among the working class. E. H. Carr reports for example in his Foundations of a Planned Economy that a number of "excesses" were said to have taken place in this period against engineers and technicians, for which ordinary workers were responsible.[9] Several attempts were actually made against the lives of specialists in the Ukrainian mines during the summer of 1927. What kind of contradictions were at work here?
    The government's policy towards the specialists, at least up to 1928 or so, was not based on the use of repressive measures. Even after the Shakhty trial of 1928, when numbers of technical personnel were executed and imprisoned for alleged "sabotage" in the mines of the Donbass region, official pronouncements continued to be made against "baiting the specialists". At this time it seems that monetary incentives were the main instrument used in keeping them in line. There was a serious shortage of specialists, of course, and many had to be imported from America, Germany and Britain. Of the existing native specialists, moreover, less than one per cent were Party members.
    The first and second Five-Year Plans did require and provide an enormously increased pool of experts and skilled workers of all kinds. Those in the population equipped with at least secondary technical school education were estimated to have increased by two and a half times during the life of the first Plan, and specific figures for teaching, medicine, etc. show similar advances. From 1928-29 on, we can in

 
    9. Foundations of a Planned Economy, Part I, C, ch. 21: "The Specialists".

 
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fact talk of an enormous effort to train a new generation of "red experts". The problem was, however, not only that this could not be done all at once, but also that the new generation had to be educated by the old, with all the ideological consequences that this implied. In fact there was, during the plans, a tendency for wage differentials in general to rise, and in particular for the salaries of the experts to rise disproportionately when compared with those of manual workers. This phenomenon seems to reflect the fact that the new generation of specialists was not prepared to work for primarily ideological rewards. The new Soviet man was not to be born in a single generation.
    Let me halt there for a moment. I have raised certain problems posed by the role of the specialists in the early years of the Soviet state. I wanted to make it clear that these problems were not simply "technical", but also political and ideological -- that is, in fact, problems of class struggle. But, secondly, these particular problems make up only one aspect of a more general question : that of the continued operation under socialism of the wage system.
    We must therefore go back for a moment and look at the wage system in capitalism. We know that the very existence of this system is linked to distinctions in the degrees of skill or qualification of labour power. We also know that the difference between the price of skilled and unskilled labour power rests on the fact that the former "has cost more time and labour, and . . . therefore has a higher value" (Marx in Capital, vol. I). But it also rests on something else, because this value must be realized. The difference in price (that is, the existence of wage differentials) also rests on the ideological and political conditions which enable and cause the skilled worker to demand -- normally with success -- that he be paid more than the unskilled worker. The same holds for the differentials which separate the expert on the one hand and the worker (including the skilled worker) on the other.
    These ideological and political conditions are actually among the conditions for the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, therefore of (capitalist) exploitation -- that is, of the extraction of surplus-value. They are

 
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fulfilled by the operation of the Ideological State Apparatuses.[10] These apparatuses help to guarantee the continuing domination of one class, the capitalist class, over another class, the working class. But, as we shall see, this they do -- and can only do -- in a contradictory manner, by also reproducing class struggle. Thus, finally, we can say that the existence of the wage-system in capitalism is linked to the existence both of exploitation and of class struggle.
    We can go further, however. The process of the creation of value in general (what Marx calls Wertbildung) is itself bound up with the process of the realization of surplus-value (Verwertung); indeed, the latter is nothing but the former, says Marx, continued "beyond a certain point" (Capital, vol. I, Part III, ch. VII). It is therefore not only the wage system (the production and exchange of labour power as a commodity) but commodity production in general (i.e., the value creating process) which is bound up with the process of the realization of surplus-value, that is, with exploitation.
    The creation of value takes place within the labour process, which is both "technical" (a process of the production of use-values) and "social" (a process of the production of commodities). Thus the socio-technical division of labour is at the heart of the process of exploitation.
    This process in fact depends on the fact that labour power itself functions as a commodity, with of course the special characteristic that its use-value is a source of more (exchange) value than it has itself. Thus the socio-technical division of labour is linked to the system of differentiation between the prices of more or less complex forms of labour power.
    We can in this way establish a number of general connexions: between commodity production, the wage system, the socio-economic division of labour, and the extraction of surplus-value.
    We ought finally to glance at the special situation in capitalism of what are often referred to as the "middle

 
    10. See Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (NLB, 1971).

 
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strata". The various groups which are aggregated under this heading are in fact of very different character.[11] It is true that, in general, they are distinguished from the working class by the fact that the reproduction of their labour power takes place separately from that of the working class (its members compete on a different labour market). In the course of the development of capitalism, certain of these groups -- especially the so-called "employees" -- tend to become "proletarianized", that is, thrown onto the same labour market as the workers. But not all are in this position: far from it. Some remain quite outside of the process of proletarianization. Moreover, while the "employees", though not productive workers, tend to become subject to exploitation, other groups not only are not so exploited, but actually combine their productive function with the task of managing the process of production and circulation -- i.e., of exploitation.[12]
    The above detour through capitalism was necessary to our understanding of socialism. We shall see later more exactly why. Meanwhile, however, we are at least in a position to pose a few questions. For example: why does the wage-system continue to operate after the proletarian revolution? Why does commodity production continue -- in a different form -- to take place? Does the persistence of commodity production imply the continued operation, in socialism,

 
    11. The "middle strata" do not constitute a social class. The development of capitalism tends to reduce the existing social classes to two only, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (Cf. E. Balibar, Cinq Etudes du matérialisme historique, p. 134.) The antagonism between them is an element of the definition of the capitalist mode of production; whereas the character of the relations between the "middle strata" on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie and proletariat respectively on the other, are not so given. In particular, the question of whether an alliance between the proletariat and middle strata is possible in an given situation can only be answered in concrete political practice, and not by a formal definition of a new "middle class" or "petty-bourgeoisie. See also Lenin's comments on the Draft Programme of the RSDLP, 1902: "In the first place it is essential to draw a line of demarcation between ourselves and all others, to single out the proletariat alone and exclusively, and only then declare that the proletariat will emancipate all, that is call on all, invite all" (Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 73)  [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's Material for the Preparation of the Programme, p. 75. -- DJR].
    12. Cf. E. Balibar, Cinq Etudes du matérialisme historique, pp. 144. 150.

 
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of a value-creating process, and therefore, indeed, also of a process of production of surplus-value? Finally: we know that, after the proletarian revolution, the working class must take over from the bourgeoisie the function of organizing production. But, on the one hand, must it not also, at the same time, struggle continuously against the forms in which it is forced to organize production, since its goal is the complete elimination of the conditions of exploitation (therefore the elimination of the wage-system, commodity production, etc.)? And, on the other hand, must it not at one and the same time make use of the old bourgeois specialists, and yet struggle against them?
    These were some of the questions facing the young Soviet state. But, of course, they did not present themselves spontaneously in this form. Stalin, for example, formulated the questions rather differently. And, curiously enough, he often changed his mind about the answers. For example, he was apparently unable to make up his mind about the internal class struggle in the USSR. In 1925 he was talking about the need to struggle against a "new bourgeoisie". In 1936, on the occasion of the introduction of the New Constitution, he considered the class struggle to be at an end. But in 1937 he was again talking about the need to combat "sharper forms of struggle" by the old exploiting classes. Then, in 1939 he was once again speaking of the USSR as "free of all class conflicts".
    Stalin in fact recognized two threats to the development of socialism. He recognized a struggle between the Soviet state and the imperialist states; and he recognized (though it disappeared sporadically from his speeches) a struggle between the Soviet working class and peasantry on the one hand and the former exploiting classes on the other. But he did not (or rarely, and in distorted form -- for example in 1952) recognize a threat which might be formulated in terms of the questions which I posed. In particular, he tended to displace the problems resulting from the contradictory development of class relations within the USSR onto the two forms of class struggle which he did recognize, thus explaining them as effects either of the international class struggle or of the struggle against the former exploiting

 
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classes. This perhaps explain his vacillations: whenever the class struggle between the various classes and groups inside the Soviet Union became intense, Stalin would pull "imperialism" or the "old exploiting classes" out of the bag.
    We have said that the "Stalin deviation" may be characterized by the terms economism and humanism. Why? And what is the link between these two forms of a single deviation? In order to answer these questions we must make use of a number of theoretical concepts of Marxism, including those of the mode of production and of the social formation. A mode of production is characterized primarily by a given system of production relations, and secondarily by the "level of the material productive forces. The reproduction of a system of production relations is not a function of the operation of the mode of production alone, but of the social formation as a whole, including its "superstructural forms".
    To "forget about" the role of the "superstructure" in the reproduction of production relations, to want to explain everything (for example, crises in capitalism or the transition to communism by reference to the economic infrastructure alone, is of course economism. But to "forget about" the role of the superstructure is also to forget how the super-structure operates. It operates through apparatuses which maintain the domination of the ruling class, but at the cost of continuously reproducing class struggle. To fall into economism is therefore also to forget about class struggle and to forget about class struggle is humanism. Stalin fell into both economism and humanism when he argued, for example, that the problem of the transition to socialism was primarily a problem of the development of the productive forces. Etienne Balibar has pointed out that "this interpretation of Marxism was already dominant among certain Socialist leaders of the Second International (like Kautsky), and was developed and plainly stated by Stalin on several occasions".[13]
    Stalin, in fact, did tend to "forget about" class struggle.

 
    13. In Les Sciences de l'économie (eds, A. Vanoli and J.-P. Januard), article on "La Formations sociales capitalistes", p. 287.

 
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This claim may surprise some readers, since, after all, he is known for the thesis that the class struggle sharpens as socialism develops. Indeed, it is precisely this thesis which is often held responsible for the "excess's" and "crimes" of the Stalin period. But the class struggle which he recognized was, as we have seen, either the struggle against international capitalism or the struggle against the old exploiting classes, There is a logic to his position. For example, if these classes have been defeated, if only remnants still exist, then the obvious course of action for them would be to resort to terrorism, sabotage etc. in collaboration with their natural ally, imperialism. The obvious way of dealing with such acts of terrorism would be to use the Repressive State Apparatus (police, courts, and so on). Thus the importance for Stalin of the show trial, in which the accused are treated as criminals, and in particular as foreign agents.
    A scientific treatment of the Stalin period will, in my opinion, show that the events which characterized it (trials, purges, etc.) were, in spite of "appearances", effects of (a specific) class struggle fought out in the economic, political and ideological spheres. It is of course true that -- for example -- the great trials of 1936-38 were not, legally speaking, directed against the representatives of a particular class, but against certain senior Party members. Again from a legal point of view, they contained many absurd allegations. But that does not mean that they can be explained -- and written off -- as simple "violations of socialist legality". The trials and purges played a role determined in the last instance by the class struggle inside the USSR, even if in practice their victims were the "wrong" ones. But this was inevitable, since the methods used were the "wrong" ones, too: they were bourgeois methods used against the bourgeoisie, and they backfired disastrously. This too, however, is not surprising, since "Stalinism" -- the deviation from Leninism -- is, after all, a consequence of the penetration of Marxism by bourgeois theory (economism/humanism) and bourgeois practice.
    To illustrate the argument, let us compare the Soviet situation with its "opposite": the case in which the capitalist class resorts, for whatever reasons, to the use of large-scale

 
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physical repression. Such a policy is of course never the result of a "decision" on the part of some "executive committee of the bourgeoisie" as a whole. On the contrary: in practice it tends to result in large-scale splits inside bourgeois political organizations. The Nazi régime, for example, suppressed not only the organizations of the working class (Communists, Social-Democrats, trades unions) but also the old bourgeois and "petty-bourgeois" parties, together with cultural, artistic and scientific institutions and of course racial groups. The millions which it murdered came from all classes. It is precisely this fact which makes it easy to misunderstand the Nazi régime, even to suppose that there is some essential resemblance between it and Stalin's government. One can have lived through fascism, fought for years against it, even died in the fight, without knowing that its roots lay in the class struggle between labour and capital.
    This example is not intended, let me repeat, to imply a similarity between the Stalin and Nazi régimes (one of the tricks of anti-communism), nor any mirror relation between them. On the contrary: it is intended as a warning against empiricism, against the temptation of assuming that in order to locate the cause of an event one need not look much further than the effects. Hitler killed and imprisoned the leaders of the capitalist parties. Was he therefore an anti-capitalist, a traitor to the capitalist class? Is the case of Stalin so much simpler?
    I argued that behind Stalin's "crimes" was hidden a specific class struggle. But what were its roots ? Why do we claim that in spite of the disappearance of the old exploiting classes, such a struggle continued to exist in the USSR? The answer to this question demands further theoretical clarification.
    We arrive here at a critical point in the argument. We know that the Marxist orthodoxy of the Stalin period conceived of the relation between base and superstructure under socialism by analogy with capitalism: whereas capitalism is based on the capitalist mode of production, which is of course socially determined in the last instance, socialism is based on the socialist mode of production (state ownership,

 
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and so on). This too is ultimately determinant, in that it tends, perhaps slowly but still inexorably, to produce a population steeped in the "socialist ideology" whose development is a necessary superstructural condition for the transition to communism. The infrastructural condition is of course satisfied by the development of the productive forces, a consequence of the efficiency of the socialist economy.
    Now this picture -- which effectively eliminates the question of class struggle under socialism -- is organized around one key concept, precisely that of the socialist mode of production. It is however this concept which unfortunately constitutes the principal obstacle to understanding socialism. Because there is no socialist mode of production.[14]
    The nearest way of formulating this point is perhaps to say that social formations of the transition period called socialism are based not on a single, socialist mode of production (stamped perhaps with the birth marks of the old, capitalist society), but on a contradictory combination of two modes of production, the capitalist and communist.[15] We must however not forget that these modes of production do not (co)exist in a "pure" form, and that no concrete revolutionary transition can be explained by reference to the contradictory presence of the general form of two modes of production. What we find in any given socialist system is in fact a specific combination of a concrete, determinate form of the capitalist mode of production, transformed and "emasculated" by the proletarian revolution, and a similar form of the communist mode of production, as it emerges and develops on the basis of the victories of that revolution and of the continuing class struggle.[16]
    But what characterizes the capitalist mode of production (Lenin's "capitalist form of social economy")? According

 
    14. "There is no socialist mode of production" -- thesis advanced by Althusser in a course on Marx's Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, given at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d'Ulm, Paris in June 1973.
    15. Cf. the interesting Section I of Lenin's Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1919), Collected Works, vol. 30.
    16. Cf. Balibar, op. cit. p. 305: "In all existing 'socialist countries', capitalist relations of production -- and thus the structure of classes themselves -- have been profoundly transformed. But in no case have they totally dis- [cont. onto p. 18. -- DJR] appeared". Naturally. the reproduction of these relations of production also depends on the existence of corresponding superstructural forms. The contradictory coexistence of two modes of production under socialism thus also implies contradictory superstructural relations (for example, at the level of the State, as we shall see).

 
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to Marx and Lenin, it is the extraction of surplus-value But to obtain surplus-value you need not simply a system of commodily production and exchange, but "a commodity whose process of consumption is at the same time a process of the creation of value. Such a commodity exists -- human labour power".[17] The capitalist mode of production cannot exist except where labour power itself is produced and exchanged as a commodity.
    We know however that the wage system -- precisely, the production and exchange of labour power as a commodity -- continues to operate after the proletarian revolution, and that general commodity production in Marx's Department I (production of means of production) and Department II (production of means of consumption) also continues to take place.
    Let us now look at Stalin's attempt to deal with the question of the role of the commodily under socialism (in his Economic Problems of Socialism, 1952). He argues very clearly that "commodity circulation is incompatible with the prospective transition to communism". And he concludes that "the transition from socialism to communism and the communist principle of distribution of products according to needs precludes all commodity exchange" (in the "Reply to Sanina and Venzber"). But how does Stalin understand the abolition of commodity exchange? Essentially in terms of the abolition of collective-farm (socialist, but non-public) property, in terms of its conversion into state -- or, more exactly public -- property. Thus, "when instead of two basic production sectors, the state sector and the collective-farm sector, there will be only one all-embracing production sector, with the right to dispose of all the consumer goods produced in the country, commodity circulation, with its 'money economy', will disappear" (ch. 2).
    Two things can be said against Stalin here. First, the

 
    17. Lenin, "Karl Marx", Selected Works (Moscow, 1967), vol. I, p. 18.

 
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abolition of the role of the commodity is certainly not simply a question of bringing all sectors of production into public ownership. Centralized state control and planning can itself be a form of commodity circulation. Second, the sale of means of consumption to the public implies its ability to buy them. But the fact that the public can buy such products -- even from a single "all-embracing" publicly-owned production sector -- implies that it can pay, i.e., that it earns wages. It implies, in other words, the existence of a wage system.
    Stalin, however, specifically argues that (in the USSR of 1952) "the system of wage labour no longer exists and labour power is no longer a commodity" (ibid.) -- a rather curious claim. His reasoning is that talk of labour power being a commodity "sounds rather absurd", as though the working class "sells its labour power to itself". But in that case why was it -- if not because of the operation of the "law of value" -- that those members of the working population whose training had been relatively lengthy and costly were able to command a higher income?[18]
    For Stalin the socialist commodity is not "of the ordinary [capitalist] type", but "designed to serve . . . socialist production". The socialist commodity is a remnant of capitalism, but "essentially" not a "capitalist category".[19] For him, indeed, the link between the process of the creation of value (Wertbildung) and that of the realization of surplus-value (Verwertung) is broken. He believes in socialist commodity production, a distinct form, though it is a remnant of capitalism, just as some economists believe in a mode of production called "simple commodity production" distinguished from capitalism because it preceded it.[20]
    Stalin's political positions are consistent with his theoretical

 
    18. With some exceptions (relatively low rewards for doctors, relatively high rewards for miners and so on). These exceptions are indices of the strength of the working class, and of the development of communist relations of production. But we should add that the transition to communism is by no means equivalent to a simple process of wage equalization!
    19. In the "Reply to A. I. Notkin".
    20. Cf. Balibar, Cinq Etudes, p. 125; also Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (International Publishers, 1972), p. 114: "The rule of exchange- [cont. onto p. 20. -- DJR] values, and of production producing exchange-values presupposes alien labour power as itself an exchange-value. That is, it presupposes the separation of living labour power from its objective conditions, a relationship . . . to them as capital."

 
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standpoint. His attempt to solve the problem of the specialists is an example. Because he had no theory of class struggle under socialism with which to orient his policy, it was always decided on an ad hoc basis. Thus it vacillated constantly between the use of monetary incentives and political repression.[21]
    Another example is the primacy which he attributed to the question of the development of the productive forces. "Why", he asks (in his Problems of Leninism), "can socialism, must socialism, will socialism necessarily vanquish the capitalist economic system? Because . . . it can make society richer than the capitalist economic system can do."[22] Such economic progress would of course be possible only on the basis of socialism ; but socialism, here, means above all public ownership and planning. Like many another Marxist, he simply contrasts capitalist commodity production with socialist planned production, forgetting that commodity production and planning are in principle compatible, and that the required distinction therefore cannot lie there.
    The common belief in a fundamental incompatibility between commodity production and planning has in fact distinct humanist connotations. In Paul Sweezy's formula-

 
    21. By 1939 -- when, as we saw, Stalin was (again) claiming that the USSR was "free of all class conflicts" -- he could also speak of a "new, socialist intelligentsia" which was "ready to serve the interests of the people of the USSR faithfully and devotedly" (Report to the 18th Party Congress).
    22. Khrushchev took over this position as his own. It is dangerous -- not for any "moral" reason (because it "alienates", "reifies", etc.), but because of its political effects. Some of the proposals for economic reform in the socialist world are influenced by this standpoint. One example is Wlodzimierz Brus' proposed rectification of Stalin's economic policies. He says that Stalin's picture of a "complete conformity" between socialist production relations and productive forces is false. In fact, he argues, socialist production relations may cease to meet the needs of the development of the productive forces. The theoretical framework here is identical with that of Stalin (primacy of the productive forces). Only its application is different: growth now demands of course, the extension of market (commodity) relations. See Brus, The Market in a Socialist Economy (Routledge, 1972).

 
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tion, for instance, when the law of value is king, the economy is regulated only by that law, while planning means that "the allocation of productive activity is brought under conscious control" (The Theory of Capiralist Development, p. 53) In his Reply to John Lewis Althusser contrasts the humanist thesis, man makes history, with the (Marxist) thesis: the motor of history is class struggle. We can contrast the humanist thesis on socialism: man makes socialism -- by conscious planing, and so on -- with the (Marxist) thesis:the motor of socialism is class struggle.
    If the progress of socialism cannot be measured (simply) in terms of the development of the productive forces; if it must be measured instead in terms of the development of the contradiction between specific forms of the capitalist and communist modes of production, then it becomes clear that it depends on the development of the class struggle. It may therefore be that, in the case of two socialist states, the one which is behind in building its productive forces is ahead in building communism. I think, for instance, that undue optimism was originally placed in some of the People's Democracies of Eastern Europe, at least as far as the tempo of the advance to communism was concerned, an optimism based on their relatively developed economic infrastructure. But it is quite likely that Cuba (to take an example), which did not contain such a strong -- and ideologically formed -- educated "middle class" as, say, Czechoslovakia, is nevertheless at least equally advanced politically.
    The thesis that there is no socialist mode of production, that socialism rests on the contradictory combination of specific forms of two modes of production, capitalist and communist, allows us to understand the roots of the class struggle under socialism. It also allows us to deal with the inevitable question: if there is class struggle under socialism, where are the classes in struggle? Where, in particular, is the capitalist class ?
    We could of course answer the question (answering that there is no capitalist class) and leave it at that. But we have not yet reached the heart of the matter. The reason is that social classes do not precede the class struggle: on the contrary, the class struggle creates classes. We must

 
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therefore rephrase the question. The problem is not to find a capitalist class, but to find out under what conditions a capitalist class is generated.
    That is not such a curious way of posing the problem. Lenin, after all, had argued that "even in Russia capitalist commodity production is alive, operating, developing and giving rise to a bourgeoisie " (my emphasis).[23] The difficulty is that Lenin thought that this new bourgeoisie was emerging mainly from among the peasants and handicraftsmen. Thus Stalin, following the letter of Lenin, was able to claim that collectivization and nationalization had at the same time put a stop to the process by which the new bourgeoisie was being produced.
    But we must go further. We must add that the capitalist class does not precede the production of surplus-value; on the contrary, it is the production of surplus-value which creates the capitalist class. The consequence should be obvious. If socialism rests on a contradictory combination of specific forms of the capitalist and communist modes of production, it follows that certain conditions for the generation of a new bourgeoisie are fulfilled, and that only class struggle on the part of the proletariat can prevent it. The modalities of its generation (out of which social groups does it emerge? and so on) cannot be dealt with here. What we can say, however, is that just as the Ideological State Apparatuses of the capitalist State reproduce the domination of the capitalist class only at the cost of reproducing class struggle, so too, in the same way the Ideological State Apparatuses of the proletarian State only reproduce the domination of the proletariat at the cost of reproducing class struggle -- a class struggle whose stake is the generation of a new bourgeoisie, and ultimately counter-revolution and the restoration of capitalism. That is why Lenin was right when he claimed that "the transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire historical epoch". But Lenin

 
    23. At the 8th Congress of the RCP(B). Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 29, p. 189. Cf. his Theses Presented to the First Congress of the Comintern: "The entire content of Marxism . . . reveals the economic inevitability, wherever commodity economy prevails, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" (Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 464).

 
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was most concerned with the threat from the old exploiting classes, and it is not clear how he would otherwise have wanted to establish his claim.
    It should now be rather clearer why Althusser characterizes the Stalin period in terms of a deviation from Marxism which took the form of economism and humanism. It is not of course that the events of this period were the simple consequence of a theoretical mistake. The deviation was itself not only theoretical, but also political. But in any case its roots lay in the class struggle -- in the class struggle under capitalism, which had allowed bourgeois ideology to penetrate deeply into the Marxism of the early Social-Democratic Parties, and in the class struggle under socialism, which prevented Stalin from casting off that influence.
    I ought to say a few words at this point about alternative conceptions of the Stalin period.[24] First, it should by now be evident that what I have said conflicts in the sharpest possible way with every explanation couched either in terms of legal ideology (Stalinism is essentially a "violation of socialist legality") or psychology (Stalin was mad, a criminal, or both).
    Secondly, it is incompatible with Trotsky's accounts. I agree with Charles Bettelheim that in spite of the political struggles which he waged against Stalin, Trotsky's theoretical positions coincide with those of Stalin in two important respects: on the one hand he too thought that the disappearance of "private property" excluded the development of a new capitalist class; and on the other hand he too affirmed that "the root of all social organization is in the productive forces".[25] As a consequence, his account of the so-called "degeneration" of socialism in the USSR

 
    24. I will not mention the many "bourgeois" accounts here. What they naturally cannot see is that Stalinism was a result first, of the penetration of bourgeois theory and bourgeois methods into internal Soviet politics, and second, of the isolation of the new and still extremely weak socialist state in a capitalist world. "Stalinism" is not the price of communism; it is a price paid by the Soviet people, but extorted, ultimately, by imperialism.
    25. Bettelheim, Luttes de classes en URSS, pp. 25-27. According to the author, "the two theses (on the disappearance of antagonistic classes in the USSR and on the primacy of the development of the productive forces) were a kind of 'commonpolace ' for 'European Marxism' in the 1930s".

 
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is in any case unilaterally political, especially as far as his comments on the role of the "bureaucracy" are concerned.[26]
    But, thirdly, what I have said also conflicts with Bettelheim's positions. This becomes clear if one considers his account not only of the Stalin but also of the post-Stalin period.
    It is true that Bettelheim correctly cites Stalin's economism and his belief in the disappearance of the objective basis for the existence of classes. But he adds that these doctrinal weaknesses led not only the existence of class struggle but also the rise of a new class, the State Bourgeoisie, to be overlooked.
    It is this category of the State Bourgeoisie which presents the first difficulty (I speak only of theoretical difficulties here). It is that the category is not sufficiently specific. Every bourgeoisie, after all, is a "state bourgeoisie" in the sense that the action of the state is integral to the process of its constitution and reproduction as a unified ruling class.[27] Bettelheim means of course that this bourgeoisie is constituted by a body of functionaries and administrators "which become in effect the proprietors (in the sense of a relation production) of the means of production".[28] Since he is convinced that the emergence of this new class has at some time since Stalin's death, resulted in the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, we know that it must now be not simply a bourgeoisie but a capitalist class in the strict sense (the two things are not exactly the same).
    One reason for Bettelheim's conclusion (a theoretical reason -- I say nothing of the political reason) may lie in his treatment of the distinction between the legal and real appropriation of the means of production. His version of this distinction contrasts property (in the legal sense) and possession. He uses it, however, in such a way that property sometimes appears to be little more than an illusion. For example, it appears that the new capitalist class establishes

 
    26. Cf. Nicos Poulantzas' argument that the problems of bureaucracy always concern the state apparatus and not the state power" (Political Power and Social Classes, p 333 ) On this distinction, see below.
    27. Cf. Balibar, Cinq Etudes, p. 177.
    28. Bettelheim, Calcul économique et formes de propriété, p. 87. [Transcriber's Note: See Economic Calculation and Forms of Property. -- DJR]

 
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its possession of the means of production not so much by creating new legal relations -- by constituting its property in the means of production -- but rather by reducing state property to "a merely legal relation", therefore a fiction. The consequence is that it becomes rather easier for Bettelheim to conclude -- like the Chinese Communist Party -- that, in spite of the fact that there has been no fundamental transformation in property relations in the Soviet Union, the class struggle has ended not simply in the generation of a new bourgeoisie and a new capitalist class but also in the restoration of capitalism itself. And this, from a "Chinese" standpoint, which Bettelheim is apparently struggling to respect, would mean precisely the abolition of "socialist production relations". Our disagreement with this kind of account will be obvious.
    In fact, the subsistence of capitalist relations of production within socialism implies a tendency to the generation of a new bourgeoisie, but whether or not this tendency is realized depends on the outcome of the class struggle. Such a bourgeoisie may be generated, it may transform itself into a full-fledged capitalist class and it may succeed in restoring capitalism. But, as we shall see, a number of conditions, political as well as economic, must be fulfilled before such a thing can take place. And -- to take a concrete example, the example -- there is ample evidence, as far as the Soviet Union is concerned (especially of its remarkable stability), to refute the claim that it is rushing headlong toward such a restoration.
    Be that as it may, it is no ground for complacency. On the contrary. Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1970 are the proof. If the principal contradiction dominating the complexity of the Czech events clearly lay in the relation to the USSR (as Althusser and the French Communist Party believe), it is just as clear that secondary contradictions operated which were internal to Czech society. But these internal contradictions were by no means specific to the Czech situation. They also touched the USSR. This is no secret. The Cambridge economist Michael Ellman, for example, has pointed out that "in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s the distribution of incomes was exceptionally

 
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equal. . . . A major objective of the abortive Czech reform was to overcome this situation. Similarly one of the features of economic reform in the USSR has been to improve the position of the specialists relative to that of the workers".[29]
    The Polish events demonstrate something important, too. The workers' protest itself was not -- contrary to a common opinion -- directed against "Stalinism": rather the opposite. It was the result of economic reforms, especially in pricing policy, which in effect constituted one step in the abandonment of the relative equality of the Stalin years. The fact that the protest had to take the form of riots was, on the other hand, in all probability a result of the legacy of the "administrative methods" preferred in those years. But that is a different question.
    It is therefore impossible to paint the Stalin period in wholly black or white terms, and it is equally impossible to pretend that its faults can be eliminated simply by "democratizing" or "liberalizing" the political structures (for the sake of "liberty") and "reforming" the economy (for the sake of "productivity"). The effects of Stalin's humanism and economism cannot be rectified by a more consistent humanism and a more consistent economism.
    Something ought perhaps to be said here -- since the example will have occurred to the reader -- about the policies of the Chinese Communist Party. It is true that these policies have been consciously anti-humanist and anti-economist. This is certainly true of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 (which was however widely misrepresented in the West as a utopian, humanist project, whatever it was, it was not that). But, as far as it is possible to determine, the Chinese critique of Stalin suffers from an inadequate supply of alternative theses. Thus two recently published texts of Mao (dating from 1958 and 1959*) on Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism make the following criticisms: Stalin failed to deal with the political and ideological conditions of the transition to communism; he put the accent on the "expert"

 
    29. Michael Ellman, "What Kind of Economic Reform Does the Soviet Union Need?", in Cambridge Review, May, 1971, p. 210.
    [* Transcriber's Note: See Mao's "Concerning Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR " and "Critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR " in the collection A Critique of Soviet Economics. -- DJR]

 
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and not the "red'' side of the specialist; and he relied on the cadres and not on the masses.
    Mao also argues, correctly, that one must not confuse the demarcation line between socialism and communism with that which distinguishes collective-farm property from public property. But his reasoning actually relies on Stalin's thesis that commodity production under socialism is a consequence of the existence of a non-public, collective farm sector. Since the abolition of this sector is not equivalent to the transition to communism, the two lines of demarcation are not identical. Thus for Mao, as for Stalin, "labour [under socialism] is not a commodity". Finally, he sometimes tends to identify the principle of the supremacy of politics (anti-economism) with planning.[30]
    None of these positions (to judge from the pages of Peking Review) appears to have been modified up to the present day.[31] Unless evidence to the contrary becomes available, it must be considered that the Chinese still share certain of Stalin's fundamental theses.[32] And they certainly appear

 
    30. Mao Tsé-Toung et la construction du socialisme, ed. Hu Chi-hsi (Seuil, 1975), pp. 39, 41, 58.
    31. See for example an article by Nan Ching, who argues that "commodity production and commodity exchange still exist in socialist society . . . because two kinds of socialist ownership, namely, ownership by the whole people and collective ownership, exist side by side. . . . However, the socialist type of commodity production differs from the capitalist type. This is manifested chiefly by the fact that there no longer is the economic relation of exploitation of workers by the capitalists, anarchism in production has been eliminated and the scope of commodity production has been reduced" (Peking Review, May 30,1975, p. 12).
    32. What the Chinese have rejected -- and this they did early on -- is the thesis of the primacy of the productive forces. Thus they no longer define communism in terms of material superabundance. Interesting in this connexion is an episode which took place in China in 1958 concerning the translation of the so-called "fundamental principles" of socialism and communism. The communist principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", had been mistranslated in Chinese, said Chang Chung-shih (Deputy Director of the CCP Central Committees translation Bureau) to imply that anyone could take for himself whatever he wanted and as much of it as he liked. This was wrong said Chang. The revised translation indicated that the members of a communist society would have to work as hard as they could and would get what was distributed to them.

 
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to accept the existence of a socialist mode of production.
    So much for alternative interpretations of the Stalin period and of socialist construction in general. We have seen that they fail to grasp some of the essential characteristics of the construction process. Up to now we have looked mainly at the question of the socialist economy. But we ought also to glance quickly at the political sphere. As we have seen, the State must play a key role in the generation within a socialist system of any new bourgeoisie. It is not simply a site of struggle between the working class and its potential enemies; it is also itself an obstacle to the victory of the working class.
    This question really must be clarified, since it is the source of much confusion. Communists believe, as everyone knows, in the "dictatorship of the proletariat". What everyone does not know is the meaning of this expression. One very common interpretation considers it to be a dictatorship indeed, but not of the kind suggested by the Communists. It involves, in this interpretation, the existence of an enormously powerful State machine capable of crushing all opposition to the rule, not of the workers, but of a handful of Party bosses. This is for example how not only openly bourgeois thinker's but also most Social Democrats understand the dictatorship of the proletariat.
    They are wrong. The term dictatorship, in the Marxist sense, is not contrasted with (or identified with) democracy. It functions in a different (though connected) theoretical space. Marxists also talk about the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and this term they apply to the most "democratic" of bourgeois nations. They mean that the bourgeoisie rules; but not necessarily (or primarily) by repression. It rules through the State, that is true, but mainly (at least in the "free West") by the use of the Ideological Apparatuses -- thus precisely not by the method of "dictatorship", in the bourgeois sense of the term. The term "dictatorship of the proletariat", similarly, implies that the proletariat rules. But not (necessarily) primarily by the use of the Repressive Apparatus. The bourgeoisie can in principle rule indefinitely in this way, but the proletariat, as we shall see, cannot.
    Of course, everyone who has read Lenin's State and

 
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Revolution knows that "the proletariat needs the State as a special form of organization of violence against the bourgeoisie". But it needs a State "which is withering away, i.e., a State so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately". Why?
    The withering away of the State means, here, the abolition of the State Apparatus. An uninterrupted struggle to abolish the State Apparatus is in fact a condition of the reinforcement of proletarian State power. [33] The reason is that to strengthen the "Proletarian State Apparatus" -- even when it must be strengthened, in order to function as a means of repression against the bourgeoisie -- is always at the same time, tendentially, to weaken the control of the proletariat over its political, i.e. (here) State representatives. This is because every State is more or less bureaucratic, and therefore distant from the masses (Lenin in The State and Revolution : bureaucrats are "privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people"). That is precisely why Marxists insist on the final abolition of the State.
    In fact the (necessary) existence of a proletarian State Apparatus paradoxically constitutes one of the conditions of the emergence of a new bourgeoisie. But this condition, let it be noted, is only one condition, and certainly not a sufficient one. Indeed, the existence of a "bureaucracy" under socialism is not itself even evidence of the "degeneration" of the system, unless every form of socialism is degenerate. Because some bureaucratism under socialism is inevitable (that is one of the reasons why socialism is not communism). Lenin, by the way, seems to have admitted as much when arguing in 1921 that "it will take decades to overcome the evils of bureaucracy" (Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 56*). But this is bureaucracy in the narrow sense. In a wider and more fundamental sense it is inevitable because, as Lenin also admitted a year earlier in an argument with Trotsky, "the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organization. It cannot work without a number of 'transmission belts' running from the vanguard to the mass of the working people."

 
    33. Cf. Balibar, Cinq Etudes, p. 95.
    [* Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "The Second All-Russia Congress of Miners". -- DJR]

 
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Or, in other words, the State (the dictatorship of the proletariat) subsists, as a necessary evil, under socialism -- not only because of the need to repress the old exploiting classes, etc., but also because the working class emerges from capitalism and imperialism "divided" and even "corrupted" (Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 21*).
    We have already said that the subsistence of capitalist production relations under socialism implies a tendency to the generation of a new bourgeoisie. One of the conditions for the realization of this tendency is a progressive bureaucratization of the State Apparatus. That is why the struggle against bureaucratization is not simply a struggle for efficiency, or against abuses, but a class struggle for communism. Once again, therefore, the tendency -- in this case to bureaucratism -- cannot be avoided, but the extent to which this tendency is realized depends on the class struggle.
    We ought to add, finally, that it is this same class struggle which will determine whether these two tendencies (to capitalism in the economy, to bureaucracy in politics) are allowed not only to develop but also to converge and to unite in a critical conjuncture.
    The new proletarian State must therefore not only destroy the old bourgeois State; it must itself be of a new type, a "State which is no longer a State" (Lenin). How can this be? It can be because the proletarian State is both a State of the old type" (this is especially true of its Repressive Apparatus) and also an "anti-State". It is an anti-State in so far as certain of its Ideological Apparatuses -- especially the Party, the Trades Unions, and mass popular organizations of all kinds -- are transformed into non-State organizations capable of "controlling" and eventually of replacing the State.[34]
    It is, very schematically, with the State that the proletariat wages class struggle against the old bourgeoisie and against imperialism. It is with its non-State organizations that it

 
    [* Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "The Trade Unions. The Present Situation and Trotsky's Mistakes". -- DJR]
    34. It would of course be absurd simply to contrast state and Party in this respect. The Party, like other mass organizations, is also a site of class struggle. The history of this struggle cannot be examined in the space available here.

 
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wages class struggle against the emergence of a new bourgeoisie.
    That is the proletarian "State which is no longer a State". Not only the formulation is contradictory, but also the reality. To put it another way: the two kinds of class struggle which the proletariat must wage can never be in perfect harmony with one another. The conditions for the success of one may be obstacles to the success of the other.
    Stalin, in this connexion, found himself faced with a rather complex set of dilemmas. The threat posed by the old bourgeoisie (including the old intelligentsia) was countered by the use of the Repressive State Apparatus. (That was logical.) The threat posed by the new generation of specialists -- though Stalin was not sure what kind of threat it was, or even, sometimes, whether it was a threat at all -- was met by a combination of financial inducement and the use of the same Apparatus. The measures had two obvious effects. On the one hand they perpetuated the danger, by reproducing the specialists as a privileged social group; on the other hand they encouraged the growth and independence of the Repressive State Apparatus and its functionaries.
    As we saw, Stalin all but ignored the problem of the generation of a new bourgeoisie. He considered the class struggle under socialism to be primarily a struggle against the old exploiting classes. When that difficulty was resolved, he therefore tended (only tended, however, because he was never quite sure) to consider that class struggle had ceased to exist in the USSR. Thus the dictatorship of the proletariat could be relaxed. That was a "right deviation". In fact, however, it could not be relaxed without putting socialism at risk. And a mechanism seems to have operated which substituted itself for this absent dictatorship, for the absent theoretical, political and ideological struggles of the Party and masses. Or, rather, the dictatorship of the proletariat was maintained, but by the use of the Repressive State Apparatus, by "administrative methods". This was a "left" deviation (rhetoric of the political police as a weapon of the proletarian masses, and so on). The cost was enormous not only in terms of human suffering, but also in terms of

 
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the damage caused to the struggle for communism. Because in building such a State, which was, it is true, a "proletarian State", but a State very much of the old type (that is, without adequate corresponding non-State organizations), Stalin solved one set of problems at the cost of generating a whole new set.

 
    The "Stalin deviation" was a deviation above all because it implied that the road to communism lay not so much through class struggle as through the development of the productive forces. That is why it can be characterized in terms of humanism and economism. But it is precisely Stalin's humanism and his economism which Khrushchev did not touch, which he did not rectify. Can we, in these circumstances, conclude that Stalin's ghost has been laid? Can the errors of so many years of Communist history be wiped out by injecting Marxism with a bigger dose of humanism? These are the political questions which lie behind Althusser's Reply to John Lewis.

 
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1.  
Reply to  
John Lewis  

 

 
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Foreword 

 






The reader will find an article and a note here, dating from June 1972.
    The article, "Reply to John Lewis", appeared, translated by Grahame Lock, in two numbers of the theoretical and political journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Marxism Today, in October and November 1972.
    "Reply": because, a few months earlier (in its January and February numbers of 1972), the same journal had published a long critical article by John Lewis (a British Communist philosopher known for his interventions in political-ideological questions) under the title: "The Althusser Case".
    The present text of the Reply to John Lewis follows the English version of the article, except that I have made some corrections, added a few paragraphs for purposes of clarification, and also added a Remark.
    To this text I have joined an unpublished Note, which was to have been part of my Reply, but which was cut to avoid extending the limits of an article which had already grown too long.

1 May 1973
L.A.      



 

 
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Reply to John Lewis 
(Self-Criticism) 

 





I.
I want to thank Marxism Today for having published John Lewis's article about the books I have written on Marxist philosophy: For Marx and Reading Capital, which appeared in France in 1965. He took care to treat me in a special way, in the way a medical specialist treats a patient. The whole family, as it were, together with his silent colleagues, stood motionless at the bedside, while Dr John Lewis leaned over to examine "the Althusser case".[1] A long wait. Then he made his diagnosis: the patient is suffering from an attack of severe "dogmatism" -- a "mediaeval" variety. The prognosis is grave: the patient cannot last long.
    It is an honour for this attention to be paid to me. But it is also an opportunity for me to clear up certain matters, twelve years after the event. For my first article [reprinted in For Marx ], which was concerned with the question of the "young Marx", actually appeared in 1960, and I am writing in 1972.
    A good deal of water has flowed under the bridge of history since 1960. The Workers' Movement has lived through many important events: the heroic and victorious resistance of the Vietnamese people against the most powerful imperialism in the world; the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (1966-69); the greatest workers' strike in world history (ten million workers on strike for a month) in May 1968 in France -- a strike which was "preceded"

 
    1. The title of John Lewis's article is The Althusser Case. Not surprisingly: in his conclusion, John Lewis compares Marxism to . . . medicine.

 
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and "accompanied" by a deep ideological revolt among French students and petty-bourgeois intellectuals; the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the other countries of the Warsaw Pact; the war in Ireland, etc. The Cultural Revolution, May 1968 and the occupation of Czechoslovakia have had political and ideological repercussions in the whole of the capitalist world.
    With hindsight one can judge things better. Lenin used to say: the criterion of practice is only really valid if it bears on a "process" which is of some length. With the help of the "practical test" of the twelve, ten or even seven years which have passed since the original articles were written, one can look back and see more clearly whether one was right or wrong. It is really an excellent opportunity.
    Just one small point in this connexion. John Lewis, in his article, never for one moment talks about this political history of the Workers' Movement. In For Marx -- that is, in 1965 -- I was already writing about Stalin, about the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and about the split in the International Communist Movement. John Lewis, on the other hand, writes as if Stalin had never existed, as if the Twentieth Congress and the split in the International Communist Movement had never occurred, as if May 1968 had never taken place, nor the occupation of Czechoslovakia, nor the war in Ireland. John Lewis is a pure spirit; he prefers not to talk about such concrete things as politics.
    When he talks about philosophy, he talks about philosophy. Just that. Full stop. It has to be said that this is precisely what the majority of so-called philosophy teachers do in our bourgeois society. The last thing they want to talk about is politics! They would rather talk about philosophy. Full stop. That is just why Lenin, quoting Dietzgen, called them "graduated flunkies" of the bourgeois state. What a wretched sight they make! For all the great philosophers in history, since the time of Plato, even the great bourgeois philosophers -- not only the materialists but even idealists like Hegel -- have talked about politics. They more or less recognized that to do philosophy was to do politics in the field of theory. And they had the courage to do their politics openly, to talk about politics.

 
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    Heaven be thanked, John Lewis has changed all that. John Lewis is a Marxist and we are in 1972. He does not feel the need to talk about politics. Let someone work that one out.

    But to Marxism Today I must express my thanks for giving an important place to a discussion about philosophy. It is quite correct to give it this important place. The point has been made not only by Engels and of course by Lenin, but by Stalin himself! And, as we know, it has also been made by Gramsci and by Mao: the working class needs philosophy in the class struggle. It needs not only the Marxist science of history (historical materialism), but also Marxist philosophy (dialectical materialism). Why?
    I should like to reply by using a formula. I will take the (personal) risk of putting it this way: the reason is that philosophy is, in the last instance,[2] class struggle in the field of theory.[3]
    All this is, as John Lewis would say, perfectly "orthodox".

 
    2. N.B.: in the last instance. I do not want to be misunderstood. What I am saying is that philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory. I am not saying that philosophy is simply class struggle in the field of theory.
    3. This formula, which is extremely condensed, might mislead the reader. I would therefore like to add three points to help orient him. (1) Because of its abstraction, its rationality and its system, philosophy certainly figures "in" the field of theory, in the neighbourhood of the sciences, with which it stands in a specific set of relations. But philosophy is not (a) science. (2) Unlike the sciences, philosophy has an especially intimate relation with the class tendency of the ideologies ; these, in the last instance, are practical and do not belong to theory ("theoretical ideologies" are in the last instance "detachments" of the practical ideologies in the theoretical field). (3) In all these formulations, the expression "in the last instance" designates "determination in the last instance", the principal aspect, the "weak link" of determination : it therefore implies the existence of one or more secondary, subordinate, overdetermined and overdetermining aspects -- other aspects. Philosophy is therefore not simply class struggle in theory, and ideologies are not simply practical: but they are practical "in the last instance". Perhaps there has not always been a full understanding of the theoretical significance of Lenin's political thesis of the "weak link". It is not simply a question of choosing the "weak link" from a number of pre-existing and already identified links: the chain is so made that the process must be reversed. In order to recognize and identify the other links of the chain, in their turn, one must first seize the chain by the "weak link".

 
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Engels, whom Lenin quotes on the point in What is to be Done?, wrote in 1874 in his Preface to The Peasant War that there are three forms of the class struggle. The class struggle has not only an economic form and a political form but also a theoretical form. Or, if you prefer: the same class struggle exists and must therefore be fought out by the proletariat in the economic field, in the political field and in the theoretical field, always under the leadership of its party. When it is fought out in the theoretical field, the concentrated class struggle is called philosophy.
    Now some people will say that all this is nothing but words. But that is not true. These words are weapons in the class struggle in the field of theory, and since this is part of the class struggle as a whole, and since the highest form of the class struggle is the political class struggle, it follows that these words which are used in philosophy are weapons in the political struggle.
    Lenin wrote that "politics is economics in a concentrated form". We can say: philosophy is, in the last instance,[4] the theoretical concentrate of politics. This is a "schematic" formula. No matter! It expresses its meaning quite well, and briefly.
    Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics : in the political class struggle.
    We will show in a moment why that is so.
    Of course, since I cite Engels and Lenin in support of my point, John Lewis will surely say, once again, that I am talking like "the last champion of an orthodoxy in grave difficulties".[5] O.K.! I am the defender of orthodoxy, of that "orthodoxy" which is called the theory of Marx and Lenin. Is this orthodoxy in "grave difficulties"? Yes, it is and has been since it came to birth. And these grave difficulties are the difficulties posed by the threat of bourgeois ideology. John Lewis will say that I am "crying in the wilderness". Is that so? No, it is not!

 
    4. See note 2 above.
    5. I cite the expressions of John Lewis himself.

 
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    For Communists, when they are Marxists, and Marxists when they are Communists, never cry in the wilderness. Even when they are practically alone.
    Why? We shall see.
    I therefore take my stand on this theoretical basis of Marxism -- a basis which is "orthodox" precisely in so far as it is in conformity with the theory of Marx and Lenin. And it is on this basis that I want to take issue both with John Lewis and with my own past errors, on the basis of the need to carry on the class struggle in the field of theory, as Engels and Lenin argued, and on the basis of the definition of philosophy which I am now proposing (in June, 1972): philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.
    I will therefore leave aside all the rather imprudent remarks, some of them "psychological", which John Lewis thought it worth making at the end of his article, about Althusser's "whole style of life and writing". John Lewis is for example very worried, very put out, quite upset -- good "humanist" that he is -- by the fact that Althusser "argues exhaustively and with an extreme dogmatism", in a way which makes him think not so much of the Scholastics, who were great philosophers of the Middle Ages, but of the schoolmen, commentators of commentators, erudite splitters of philosophical hairs, who could not rise above the level of quotation. Thank you! But really, this kind of argument has no place in a debate between Communists in the journal of a Communist Party. I will not follow John Lewis onto this ground.
    I approach John Lewis as a comrade, as a militant of a fraternal party: the Communist Party of Great Britain.
    I will try to speak plainly and clearly, in a way that can be understood by all our comrades.
    So as not to make my reply too long, I will only take up those theoretical questions which are most important, politically speaking, for us today, in 1972.

 
II.
To understand my reply, the reader must obviously know what John Lewis, in his "radical" critique of my

 
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"philosophical writings", essentially holds against me.
    In a few words, we can sum this up as follows. John Lewis holds:
1. that I do not understand Marx's philosophy ;
2. that I do not understand the history of the formation of Marx's thought.
    In short, his reproach is that I do not understand Marxist theory.
    That is his right.
    I will consider these two points in succession.

 
III.
First Point: Althusser does not understand Marx's philosophy.
    To demonstrate this point, John Lewis employs a very simple method. First he sets out Marx's real philosophy, which is Marx as he understands him. Then, beside this, he puts Althusser's interpretation. You just have to compare them, it seems, to see the difference!
    Well, let us follow our guide to Marxist philosophy and see how John Lewis sums up his own view of Marx. He does it in three formulae, which I will call three Theses.[6]

1. Thesis no. 1. "It is man who makes history."

John Lewis's argument : no need of argument, since it is obvious, it is quite evident, everyone knows it.

John Lewis's example : revolution. It is man who makes revolution.

2. Thesis no. 2. "Man makes history by remaking existing history, by 'transcending', through the 'negation of the negation', already made history."

John Lewis's argument : since it is man who makes history,

 
    6. In a Philosophy Course for Scientists (1967, to be published), I proposed the following definition: "Philosophy states propositions which are Theses ". (It therefore differs from the sciences: "A science states propositions which are Demonstrations".)

 
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it follows that in order to make history man must transform the history which he has already made (since it is man who has made history). To transform what one has already made is to "transcend" it, to negate what exists. And since what exists is the history which man has already made, it is already negated history. To make history is therefore "to negate the negation", and so on without end.

John Lewis's example : revolution. To make revolution, man "transcends" ("negates") existing history, itself the "negation" of the history which preceded it, etc.

3. Thesis no. 3. "Man only knows what he himself does."

John Lewis's argument : no argument, probably because of lack of space. So let us work one out for him. He could have taken the case of science and said that the scientist "only knows what he himself does" because he is the one who has to work out his proof, either by experiment or by demonstration (mathematics).

John Lewis's example : no example. So let us provide one. John Lewis could have taken history as an example: man's knowledge of history comes from the fact that he is the one who makes it. This is like the Thesis of Giambattista Vico: verum factum.[7]
    These then are the three Theses which sum up John Lewis's idea of Marx's philosophy:
Thesis no. 1 : It is man who makes history.
Thesis no. 2 : Man makes history by transcending history.
Thesis no. 3 : Man only knows what he himself does.

    This is all very simple. Everyone "understands" the words involved: man, make, history, know. There is only one word which is a bit complicated, a "philosopher's" word: "transcendence", or "negation of the negation". But if he wanted to, John Lewis could say the same thing more simply. Instead of saying: man makes history, in

 
    7. "What is true is what has been done." Marx cites Vico in Capital, in connexion with the history of technology.

 
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transcending it, by the "negation of the negation", he could say that man makes history by "transforming" it, etc. Wouldn't that be more simple?
    But a little difficulty still remains. When John Lewis says that it is man who makes history, everyone understands. Or rather, everyone thinks he understands. But when it is a question of going a bit further in the explanation, when John Lewis honestly asks himself the question: "what is it that man does when he makes history?", then you realize that a nasty problem appears just when everything seemed simple, that there is a nasty obscurity just in the place where everything seemed clear.
    What was obscure? The little word make, in the Thesis that "it is man who makes history". What can this little word make possibly mean, when we are talking about history ? Because when you say: "I made a mistake" or "I made a trip around the world", or when a carpenter says: "I made a table", etc., everyone knows what the term "make" means. The sense of the word changes according to the expression, but in each case we can easily explain what it means.
    For example, when a carpenter "makes" a table, that means he constructs it. But to make history? What can that mean? And the man who makes history, do you know that individual, that "species of individual", as Hegel used to say?
    So John Lewis sets to work. He does not try to avoid the problem: he confronts it. And he explains the thing. He tells us: to "make", in the case of history, that means to "transcend" (negation of the negation), that means to transform the raw material of existing history by going beyond it. So far, so good.
    But the carpenter who "makes" a table, he has a piece of "raw material" in front of him too: the wood. And he transforms the wood into a table. But John Lewis would never say that the carpenter "transcends" the wood in order to "make" a table out of it. And he is right. For if he said that, the first carpenter who came along, and all the other carpenters and all the other working people in the world would send him packing with his "transcendence". John Levis uses the term "transcendence" (negation of the negation) only

 
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for history. Why? We have to work out the answer, for John Lewis himself does not provide any explanation.
    In my opinion, John Lewis holds on to his "transcendence" for the following reason: because the raw material of history is already history. The carpenter's raw material is wood. But the carpenter who "makes" the table would never say that he was the one who "made" the wood, because he knows very well that it is nature which produces the wood. Before a tree can be cut up and sold as planks, it first has to have grown somewhere in the forest, whether in the same country or thousands of miles away on the other side of the equator.
    Now, for John Lewis it is man who has made the history with which he makes history. In history man produces everything: the result, the product of his "labour", is history: but so is the raw material that he transforms. Aristotle said that man is a two-legged, reasoning, speaking, political animal. Franklin, quoted by Marx in Capital, said that man is a "tool-making" animal. John Lewis says that man is not only a tool-making animal, but an animal which makes history, in the strong sense, because he makes everything. He "makes" the raw material. He makes the instruments of production. (John Lewis says nothing about these -- and for good reason! Because otherwise he would have to talk about the class struggle, and his "man who makes history" would disappear in one flash, together with his whole system. And he makes the final product: history.
    Do you know of any being under the sun endowed with such a power? Yes -- there does exist such a being in the tradition of human culture: God. Only God "makes" the raw material with which he "makes" the world. But there is a very important difference. John Lewis's God is not outside of the world: the man-god who creates history is not outside of history -- he is inside. This is something infinitely more complicated! And it is just because John Lewis's little human god -- man -- is inside history ("en situation ", as Jean-Paul Sartre used to say) that Lewis does not endow him with a power of absolute creation (when one creates everything, it is relatively easy: there are no limitations!) but with something even more stupefying -- the power of "transcendence", of being able to progress by indefinitely negating-superseding

 
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the constraints of the history in which he lives, the power to transcend history by human liberty.[8]
    John Lewis's man is a little lay god. Like every living being he is "up to his neck" in reality, but endowed with the prodigious power of being able at any moment to step outside of that reality, of being able to change its character. A little Sartrian god, always "en situation " in history, endowed with the amazing power of "transcending" every situation, of resolving all the difficulties which history presents, and of going forward towards the golden future of the human, socialist revolution: man is an essentially revolutionary animal because he is a free animal.
    Please excuse all this if you are not a philosopher. We philosophers are well acquainted with this kind of argument. And we Communist philosophers know that this old tune in philosophy has always had its political consequences.
    The first people who talked about "transcendence" in philosophy were the idealist-religious philosophers of Plato's school: the Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophers. They had an urgent need of the category of "transcendence" in order to be able to construct their philosophical or religious theology, and this theology was then the official philosophy of the slave state. Later, in the Middle Ages, the Augustinian and Thomist theologians took up the same category again and used it in systems whose function was to serve the interests of the Church and feudal state. (The Church is a State Apparatus, and the number one Ideological State Apparatus of the feudal state.) Is there any need to say more?
    Much later, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the notion of "transcendence" received, in Hegelian philosophy, a new function: the same category, but "wrapped" in the veil of the "negation of the negation". This time it served the bourgeois state. It was quite simply the philosophical name for bourgeois liberty. It was then revolutionary in relation to the philosophical systems of feudal "transcen-

 
    8. I do not know John Lewis's personal philosophical history. But I am not sticking my neck out much in betting that he has a weakness for Jean-Paul Sartre. Lewis's "Marxist Philosophy" in fact bears a remarkable resemblance to a copy of Sartrian existentialism, in a slightly Hegelianized form, no doubt designed to make it more acceptable to Communist readers.

 
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dence". But it was one hundred per cent bourgeois, and it stays that way.
    Since that time, Jean-Paul Sartre has taken up the same idea once more, in his theory of man "en situation ": the petty-bourgeois version of bourgeois liberty. And this is to cite only one example, for Sartre is not alone -- "transcendence", in its authoritarian or eschatological form, is still flourishing today among large numbers of theologians, some reactionary, some very progressive, from Germany and Holland to Spain and Latin America. The bourgeois no longer has the same need to believe -- and anyway has for the thirty years since 1940 no longer been able to believe -- that his liberty is all-embracing. But the petty-bourgeois intellectual: he is quite a different kind of animal! The more his liberty is crushed and denied by the development of imperialist capitalism, the more he exalts the power of that liberty ("transcendence", "negation of the negation"). An isolated petty-bourgeois can protest: he does not get very far. When the petty-bourgeois masses revolt, however, they get much further. But their revolt is still limited by the objective conditions of the class struggle, whether it is helped or hindered by them. It is here that petty-bourgeois liberty meets necessity.
    John Lewis now, in 1972, takes up the old arguments in his turn, in the theoretical journal of the British Communist Party. He can, if I may say so, rest assured: he is not "crying in the wilderness"! He is not the only person to take up this theme. He is in the company of many Communists. Everyone knows that. But why should it be that since the nineteen-sixties many Communists have been resurrecting this worn-out philosophy of petty-bourgeois liberty, while still claiming to be Marxists ? We shall see.

 
IV.
But first, I shall follow the procedure used by John Lewis. I shall compare his "Marxist" Theses with the Theses of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. And everyone will be able to compare and judge for himself.

 
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    I will go over the points in John Lewis's order. That way things will be clearer. I am making an enormous concession to him by taking his order, because his order is idealist. But we will do him the favour.

    To understand what follows, note that in the case of each Thesis (1, 2, 3) I begin by repeating Lewis's Thesis and then state the Marxist-Leninist Thesis.

1. THESIS No. 1

John Lewis : "It is man who makes history".
Marxism-Leninism : "It is the masses which make history".
    What is this "man" who "makes" history? A mystery.[9]
    What are the "masses" which make history"? In a class society they are the exploited masses, that is, the exploited social classes, social strata and social categories, grouped around the exploited class capable of uniting them in a movement against the dominant classes which hold state power.
    The exploited class capable of doing this is not always the most exploited class, or the most wretched social "stratum".
    In Antiquity, for example, it was not the slaves (except in a few periods -- Spartacus) who "made" history in the strong, political sense of the term, but the most exploited classes among the "free" men (at Rome, the urban or rural "plebs").[10]
    In the same way, under capitalism the "lumpenproletariat",

 
    9. For us, struggling under the rule of the bourgeoisie, "man" who makes history is a mystery. But this "mystery" did have a sense when the revolutionary bourgeoisie was struggling against the feudal regime which was then dominant. To proclaim at that time, as the great bourgeois Humanists did, that it is man who makes history, was to struggle, from the bourgeois point of view (which was then revolutionary), against the religious Thesis of feudal ideology: it is God who makes history. But we are no longer in their situation. Moreover, the bourgeois point of view has always been idealist as far as history is concerned.
    10. It is not certain -- here I shall have to bow to the judgement of Marxist historians -- that the slave class did not, in spite of everything, quietly but genuinely "make history". The transition from the small-property slave system to the large-scale system at Rome is perhaps significant here.

 
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as Marx called it, groups together the most wretched of men, the "lazarus-layers of the working-class".11 But it is around the proletariat (the class which is exploited in capitalist production ) that you will find grouped the masses which "make history", which are going to "make history" -- that is, who are going to make the revolution which will break out in the "weakest link" of the world imperialist chain.
    Against John Lewis's Thesis -- it is man who makes history -- Marxism-Leninism has always opposed the Thesis: it is the masses which make history. The masses can be defined. In capitalism, the masses does not mean "the mass " of aristocrats of the "intelligentsia", or of the ideologists of fascism; it means the set of exploited classes, strata and categories grouped around the class which is exploited in large-scale production, the only class which is capable of uniting them and directing their action against the bourgeois state: the proletariat. Compare this with Lewis's Thesis.

2. THESIS No. 2

John Lewis : "Man makes history by 'transcending' history".
Marxism-Leninism :"The class struggle is the motor of history" (Thesis of the Communist Manifesto, 1847).
    Here things become extremely interesting. Because Marxism-Leninism blows up John Lewis's whole philosophical system. How?
    John Lewis said: it is man who makes history. To which Marxism-Leninism replied: it is the masses.
    But if we said no more, if we went no further, we would give the impression that Marxism-Leninism gives a different reply to the same question. That question being: who makes history? This question therefore supposes that history is the result of the action of (what is done by) a subject (who)? For John Lewis, the subject is "man". Does Marxism-Leninism propose a different subject, the masses?

 
    11. Capital, Part VII, Ch. XXV, sec. 4. Excluded from production, without fixed work or completely unemployed, (often) in the street, the sub-proletarians are part of the reserve army, the army of unemployed, which capitalism uses against the workers.

 
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    Yes and no. When we started to sketch out a definition of the masses, when we talked about this idea of the masses, we saw that the whole thing was rather complicated. The masses are actually several social classes, social strata and social categories, grouped together in a way which is both complex and changing (the positions of the different classes and strata, and of the fractions of classes within classes, change in the course of the revolutionary process itself). And we are dealing with huge numbers: in France or Britain, for example, with tens of millions of people, in China with hundreds of millions! Let us do no more here than ask the simple question: can we still talk about a "subject", identifiable by the unity of its "personality"? Compared with John Lewis's subject, "man", as simple and neat as you can imagine, the masses, considered as a subject, pose very exacting problems of identity and identification. You cannot hold such a "subject" in your hand, you cannot point to it. A subject is a being about which we can say: "that's it!". How do we do that when the masses are supposed to be the "subject"; how can we say: "that's it"?
    It is precisely the Thesis of the Communist Manifesto -- "the class struggle is the motor of history" -- that displaces the question, that brings the problem into the open, that shows us how to pose it properly and therefore how to solve it. It is the masses which "make" history, but "it is the class struggle which is the motor of history". To John Lewis' question: "how does man make history?", Marxism-Leninism replies by replacing his idealist philosophical categories with categories of a quite different kind.
    The question is no longer posed in terms of "man". That much we know. But in the proposition that "the class struggle is the motor of history", the question of "making" history is also eliminated. It is no longer a question of who makes history.
    Marxism-Leninism tells us something quite different: that it is the class struggle (new concept) which is the motor (new concept) of history, it is the class struggle which moves history, which advances it: and brings about revolutions. This Thesis is of very great importance, because it puts the class struggle in the front rank.

 
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    In the preceding Thesis: "it is the masses which make history", the accent was put (1) on the exploited classes grouped around the class capable of uniting them, and (2) an their power to carry through a revolutionary transformation of history. It was therefore the masses which were put in the front rank.
    In the Thesis taken from the Communist Manifesto, what is put in the front rank is no longer the exploited classes, etc., but the class struggle. This Thesis must be recognized as decisive for Marxism-Leninism. It draws a radical demarcation line between revolutionaries and reformists. Here I have to simplify things very much, but I do not think that I am betraying the essential point.
    For reformists (even if they call themselves Marxists) it is not the class struggle which is in the front rank: it is simply the classes. Let us take a simple example, and suppose that we are dealing with just two classes. For reformists these classes exist before the class struggle, a bit like two football teams exist, separately, before the match. Each class exists in its own camp, lives according to its particular conditions of existence. One class may be exploiting another, but for reformism that is not the same thing as class struggle. One day the two classes come up against one another and come into conflict. It is only then that the class struggle begins. They begin a hand-to-hand battle, the battle becomes acute, and finally the exploited class defeats its enemy (that is revolution), or loses (that is counter-revolution). However you turn the thing around, you will always find the same idea here: the classes exist before the class struggle, independently of the class struggle. The class struggle only exists afterwards.[12]

 
    12. To clarify this point, this reformist "position" must be related to its bourgeois origins. In his letter to Weydemeyer (5 March 1852), Marx wrote: "No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle of the classes, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes". The thesis of the recognition of the existence of social classes, and of the resulting class struggle is not proper to Marxism-Leninism: for it puts the classes in the front rank, and the class struggle in the second. In this form it is a bourgeois thesis, which reformism naturally feeds on. The Marxist- [cont. onto p. 50. -- DJR] Leninist thesis, on the other hand, puts the class struggle in the front rank. Philosophically, that means: it affirms the prirnacy of contradiction over the terms of the contradiction. The class struggle is not a product of the existence of classes which exist previous (in law and in fact) to the struggle: the class struggle is the historical form of the contradiction (internal to a mode of production) which divides the classes into classes.

 
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    Revolutionaries, on the other hand, consider that it is impossible to separate the classes from class struggle. The class struggle and the existence of classes are one and the same thing. In order for there to be classes in a "society", the society has to be divided into classes: this division does not come later in the story ; it is the exploitation of one class by another, it is therefore the class struggle, which constitutes the division into classes. For exploitation is already class struggle. You must therefore begin with the class struggle if you want to understand class division, the existence and nature of classes. The class struggle must be put in the front rank.
    But that means that our Thesis 1 (it is the masses which make history ) must be subordinated to Thesis 2 (the class struggle is the motor of history ). That means that the revolutionary power of the masses comes precisely from the class struggle. And that means that it is not enough, if you want to understand what is happening in the world, just to look at the exploited classes. You also have to look at the exploiting classes. Better, you have to go beyond the football match idea, the idea of two antagonistic groups of classes, to examine the basis of the existence not only of classes but also of the antagonism between classes: that is, the class struggle. Absolute primacy of the class struggle (Marx, Lenin). Never forget the class struggle (Mao).
    But beware of idealism! The class struggle does not go on in the air, or on something like a football pitch. It is rooted in the mode of production and exploitation in a given class society. You therefore have to consider the material basis of the class struggle, that is, the material existence of the class struggle. This, in the last instance, is the unity of the relations of production and the productive forces under the relations of production of a given mode of production, in a concrete historical social formation. This

 
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materiality, in the last instance, is at the same time the "base" (Basis : Marx) of the class struggle, and its material existence; because exploitation takes place in production, and it is exploitation which is at the root of the antagonism between the classes and of the class struggle. It is this profound truth which Marxism-Leninism expresses in the well-known Thesis of class struggle in the infrastructure, in the "economy", in class exploitation -- and in the Thesis that all the forms of the