We republish below the introduction of the essay Althusser’s Philosophy: How Postmodernists Parasitize Marxism-Leninism-Maoism by the Italian Maoist theoretical journal Nuova Egemonia. We recommend to our readers to read the whole essay, which is linked at the end of the introduction.
1. Introduction
Louis Althusser was a French philosopher with a structuralist and “Marxist” orientation. The critique of his positions is of some political importance because he is an author considered by many to be close to Maoism1.
This is not an easy task, given the multiple origins of his philosophy. We find similar difficulties when it comes to critiquing Althusserian-Lacanian figures such as Badiou and Zizek who, by the way, although on different positions continue Althusser’s earlier attempt to revise “Maoism”.2 A further difficulty is that multiple stages in the development of his philosophical thought can be identified. These are, in some cases, turning points internal to a specific intellectual path of Althusser without any relevant connection to more general political and social events. However, one can glimpse a basic core of his philosophy, one that retains to this day a certain influence among some intellectuals and some tendencies that present themselves as revolutionary. In the present text we begin to address the problem of the foundations of his philosophy. We will then try to point out the reactionary character of some of his theoretical conceptions related to his subjective idealistic method akin to postmodernism.
The rest of the essay can be found here.
- “Althusser and his disciples met in October and November 1966 to study and discuss the novelty represented by the ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. From these meetings emerged a series of articles that were published anonymously in the December 1966 issue by a Parisian journal of some circulation Los Cahiers Marxistes Léninistes” … “The first issue had appeared in December 1964 as the organ of the communist student circle of the École Normale Supérieure…” In 1967 the Revolutionary Communist Party was founded in which an important Althusserian current was present and, in 1970, the first book entirely devoted to Althusser, Saúl Karsz, Jean Pouillon, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Emilio de Ípola, (Lectura de Althusser, Buenos Aires, Galerna, 1970) was published in the country.” … “Balibar identified three successive but discontinuous stages in the relationship between Althusser and Maoism. The first began in 1952 when the PCF circulated Mao’s essay On Contradiction. Althusser discussed it together with Lucien Sève, another young PCF intellectual, to conclude that Mao was a new Lenin who presented a philosophical work of great relevance… The second stage had opened in August 1963, when Althusser published Above Materialistic Dialectics, an article that cites Mao to question the combination of economism and humanism with which the ideological deviation of the ICM began. In 1965, Althusser brought these and other essays together in For Marx where he used Mao’s dialectic to combat Hegel’s influence in the dialectic and to reject the centrality assigned by humanistic Marxism to the ‘negation of negation,’ a notion that Althusser considered mystifying, idealistic and bourgeois. In 1966 the last stage marked by the relationship with the circle began… the circle became the promoter of an enthusiastic campaign of support for the Chinese experience”. [Políticas de la Memoria n° 16, estate 2015/2016 I pp.220, Althusser, el maoísmo y la Revolución Cultural] – [translation and emphasis by editors]. “Nicos Poulantzas considers Per Marx a contribution to the constitution of Marxist theory and argues for the influence of Mao and Levi-Strauss in Althusserian discourse” [Politicas de la Memoria, cited]. Poulantzas is a pupil of Althusser who will take up Althusserian theory of the state while entering into contradiction with the master. ↩︎
- It would be particularly worth keeping in mind the controversy between these two authors over the figure of Mao, where Zizek attacks Mao from the right and Badiou apparently defends him from the “left.” ↩︎
