Chapter Two a Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism

Chapter Two A Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism . we are absolutely committed to a theoretical destiny: we cannot read Marx’s scientific discourse without at the same time writing at his dictation the text of another discourse, inseparable from the first one but distinct from it: the discourse of Marx’s philosophy. Louis Althusser, Reading ‘Capital’ In Chapter 1, it was argued that Althusser considered a transformation of the PCF’s political practice to be dependent upon a restoration of Marxist theory – more specifically, a renewal of historical materialism. But this, in turn, had three theoretical preconditions: (i) a critique of the dominant accounts of historical materialism, which supposedly departed from Marx, thereby vitiating development of his theory; (ii) the displacement of these versions and their eventual replacement by the genuine article (in the event, Althusser’s own reconstruction); and (iii) the elaboration of the veritable Marxist philosophy which could underwrite the scientificity of historical materialism and guide and guarantee the necessary extensions of it. It should now be apparent why the final component of the Althusserian programme was in fact – for Althusser – of paramount importance: ‘the investigation of Marx’s philosophical thought [was] indispensable if we were to escape from the... 56 • Chapter Two impasse in which history had put us’.1 What was needed was a philosophical, that is, ‘epistemological and historical’,2 reading of Marx’s œuvre which barred the route – opened by Marx himself – pursued by Marxist intellectuals in reaction against the vulgarisation and Stalinisation of Marxism. The constitution of Marxist philosophy was a sine qua non of epistemological critique and scientific reconstruction. As Althusser put it in Reading ‘Capital’, ‘the theoretical future of historical materialism depends today on deepening dialectical materialism.’3 The hour of the missing Marxist ‘dialectics’ had arrived. Of course, Althusser was not the first to feel the need for an archaeological and methodological operation of this order. Marxist philosophers since Engels had attempted to remedy the absence of a ‘Logic’. According to Althusser, however, complementary to the deformation of historical materialism after Marx was the proliferation of illegitimate versions of Marxist philosophy. For reasons that were both ‘historico-political’ and ‘theoretical’,4 the requisite historical epistemology had not materialised within Marxism. Instead, Marxist philosophy had taken the form of a succession of ‘philosophical ideologies’ which posited an illicit relationship between themselves and historical materialism. The dogmatist night, moreover, had not given way to the Marxist dawn. A Stalinist de-Stalinisation The PCF had conducted its own inquiry into Stalinist philosophical dogmatism in June 1962. Presided over by Thorez and presented by Garaudy, it was published under the title of ‘The Tasks of Communist Philosophers and the Critique of Stalin’s Errors’ in Cahiers du Communisme, the ‘theoretical and political review’ of the Central Committee. In his report to the Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev, notwithstanding his concluding injunction, was silent on the subject of Marxist theory. Following the amplification of his critique of Stalin at the Twenty-Second Congress, however, Soviet philosophers set to work on defining the ‘tasks of Marxist-Leninist philosophy’ on the ‘road 1 Althusser 1969a, p. 21. 2 Althusser 1969a, p. 39. 3 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 77. 4 Althusser 1969a, p. 14..

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