Reviews for An Anthology of Western Marxism: From Lukacs and Gramsci to Socialist-Feminism

The average rating for An Anthology of Western Marxism: From Lukacs and Gramsci to Socialist-Feminism based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-12 00:00:00 Darshna Dave The essential task that Louis Althusser devoted his philosophical career, and this book most pointedly, to was rescuing what he understood as the science of Marxism from the philosophical musings of the young Marx, which Althusser believed constituted neither Marxist science nor philosophy. Althusser felt this was an imperative task, as he hoped that what he deemed to be Marxist science could transform humanity's relationship to ideology. Marxism would only be allowed to perform this heroic service, however, if it did not itself devolve into an ideology. When Althusser was writing these essays, in the early 1960s, he was witnessing a self-reassessment on the part of the global communist movement as a response to the revelation of Stalin's crimes. Western Marxists were turning to the work of the young Marx in order to insist that the spirit of Marx's philosophy was ideologically humanist. It was this tendency that Althusser felt the need to counter. Althusser called for an authentically Marxist study of Marx's early writings which were, Althusser fully acknowledged, indeed humanist. He claimed that the "western Marxists" were enraptured with the idealist notion of the author or philosopher. If humanism haunted the work of the young Marx, then, for the western Marxists, its seed must still be at the root of the mature works such as Capital, because, for them, nothing could transcend the idealist totality of the oeuvre, the ever present, metaphysical "human-ness" of the author's stamp. Rather, insisted Althusser, the work of the young Marx had to be subjected to the Marxist principles of ideological development that stated that the meaning of an ideology does not depend on its relation to "truth" but rather its relation to the social structure in which it developed and therefore, to understand an ideological position, one would have to look at the social conditions facing the thinker, and therefor the context of the thinker's intellectual development, as (s)he was writing any one piece. Texts can, for Althusser, point to a future, but all must be confronted within their singular present. (In this way Althusser, I think, lays the groundwork for Foucault's "death of the author" through the tenants of Marxism and structuralism.) Althusser called the cultural framework in which a concept exists its "problematic." The problematic of a thought determines what is possible within a system of thought. The problematic of Marx's early thought, when he was still a humanist liberal, was that of nineteenth century Germany, which had never experienced a revolution of any kind, including a bourgeois one. The German bourgeoisie, including Marx, could only think in the codes of servitude, which is to say the religious obscurantism of Hegel. Marx's earliest writings were thus Feurbachian- attempts to free the Hegelian Spirit from alienation through transcending what Marx and his German brethren viewed as its alienated form- religion. Althusser thought Marx could only escape this line of thought by getting out of Germany, which he luckily did in 1843, leaving for France in the hopes of glimpsing the spirit of the French Revolution. Instead of freedom, equality, and liberty, Marx found only a more intense workers struggle. This radicalized the young Marx, and he began writing about politics and socialism. For Althusser, however, these early socialist writings were still not truly Marxist. Indeed, they remained profoundly Hegelian. They rested on a simplistic notion of the proletariat superseding the bourgeoisie. Hegel viewed History as relentlessly marching towards its completion, the totality of absolute spirit manifested in a society that had evolved to the point of transcending all alienation. Marx's early political writings spoke of worker's struggle, but only as a simplistically messianic displacement of one stage of society by a less alienated stage of society. Marx remained, Althusser claimed, stuck in an essentially religious, idealist line of thinking, not yet truly starting from a materialist foundation. He was commenting on struggle, not partaking in it. According to Althusser's narrative, as Marx became more involved in activism and organizing, his thinking began to be increasingly based on the reality of the worker's struggle. Marx began, in other words, to develop the materialist dialectic which Althusser argues borrows only terminology from Hegel, but breaks fully with Hegel's philosophy. For Althusser, the materialist dialectic looks for social change to come not as a result of shifts in universal social consciousness but in contradictions in actual social being. Althusser posits, following Lenin and, most directly, Mao, that these contradictions are never universal but are localized and unique. (I must say here that it seems to me that Althusser's reading of the "mature Marx" invests somewhat unfairly in the texts the latter discoveries of Lenin and Mao as if these discoveries were "inherent" to the thought of the materialist dialectic.) Again following Mao, Althusser says that ruptures, be they scientific, political or philosophical are never the result of a simple, predictable dialectic between competing forces (proletariat vs. bourgeoisie) but instead come from complex networks of contradictions that boil into overdeterminations which make change necessary. For example, the Russian Revolution became necessary because Russia was pregnant with two revolutions. It was a feudal society existing in a capitalist world where a working class was already starting to rebel under the banner of socialism. Althusser defines the role of theory as being an aid to understanding the possibility of an epistemological break- when one kind of thinking turns into another, such as when Hegel's idealism is transformed into dialectical materialism. Such breaks make possible the creation of new types of knowledge. Theory is a specific practice that acts on general concepts. It is the means of production of knowledge. Dialectical materialism, for Althusser, is the mode of theoretical inquiry by which ideologically driven political activity is examined and turned into scientific arguments. Althusser dissects the theoretical process into three stages, or, in his terms, "generalities." Generality I is the process by which a theoretician critiques inherited ideological concepts in order to elaborate the theoretician's own concepts. Generality II determines a theoretical approach by determining what will be studied and how it will be studied, and it is imperative that this "study" be carried through in social practice- through tests in social organizing, agriculture, etc. (Again, Mao's influence on Althusser is here apparent.) Generality III arrives at a scientific hypothesis. Like all new kinds of science, Marxist science had the potential to create new possibilities for philosophy, although Althusser did not think a legitimately Marxist philosophy had yet presented itself. (Later in his career, Althusser would attempt to practice Marxist philosophy with his notion of the capitalist construction of the the individual.) Instead, what passed for Marxist philosophy, the work of Western Marxists such as George Luckaks, was in fact a kind of Hegelian thinking. Western Marxism denies the distinction between Generality I and III. It denies, in other words, that knowledge is a practice. Thought is self-creating knowledge for the Hegelians, for whom the totality of social being is constantly revealing itself. The Western Marxists threatened, then, to turn Marxism into just another ideology. Althusser never mentions the great irony that the Western Marxists, in trying to "humanize" Marxism, were in fact proclaiming that thought could make itself true- the purest intellectual manifestation of the Stalinist disaster. It was rather Althusser's line of thinking that would, at least potentially, lead humanity to a healthier relationship with ideology. In the final essay, "Marxism and Humanism" Althusser admits that any society, including a socialist or even communist society will always rely on ideology to frame its world outlook to all of its subjects. Ideology will always function, to some degree, subconsciously. But, Althusser hopes, if the essential nature of ideology is socially acknowledged, then it could be transformed into an instrument of deliberative social action. Ideology could mold humanity towards egalitarian social tasks. If rulers, socialist or otherwise, failed to understand that ideology is inescapable and acts on all, including the ruling strata of any society, then those rulers could fall into the trap of thinking they could simply use ideology as a tool (as Stalin did, though Althusser does not mention this). Humanism, Althusser finally admits, could have its uses for Marxism, but only if humanism is recognized as an ideology. Marx was able to arrive at a whole new way of thinking only by rejecting humanism for materialism. To understand humanity, we must, presses Althusser, reject "man." Marxism could, however, healthily adopt aspects of humanist ideology the same way socialist societies adopt aspects of capitalism while critiquing them. Humanist ideology may be able to point to questions for Marxism to tackle, but humanism cannot itself answer those questions.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-08-16 00:00:00 Steven Shum 'Each science, as science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them.' - Gadamer, Truth and Method 'If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life and feels like telling himself that everything is quite easy now, he can see that he is wrong just by recalling that there was a time when this "solution" had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too.'- Wittgenstein, stray remarks Gadamer was not claiming hermeneutics as a science. Just the opposite, he was affirming that it's profoundly misguided to ever expect to find a 'science' of human meaning along the lines of the physical sciences. By contrast, Althusser is extremely insistent that Marxism is a science. What exactly does he mean by that? At least in this collection he has rather little to say about the actual content of Marxism - history, the economy, the workers' movement, etc. He seems to define 'science' in totally formal, non-empirical terms. Somewhat like Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; but then Kuhn's great book did serious damage to the prestige of science, for suggesting science was more a series of semi-random mutations than cumulative progress towards the truth. Althusser appears to have a similar conception. However, he then wants to have it both ways by insisting on the absolute sanctity of the precious 'epistemological break' in Marx's writing; that is, the point at which Marx passed from ideology to science. Anyway, my own feeling is that Marxism doesn't stand or fall with being a science. If you do claim it as a science you're setting yourself up to have it called a pseudo-science or one that's already been falsified. Obviously much that Marx wrote did not come to pass in exactly the manner he thought it would. And yet he was probably the greatest western thinker to ever attempt a global critique of capitalism. Given that capitalism surely remains the chief adversary of humanity in the 21st century, his continued relevance should be obvious. However, I'm not sure the same can be said of Althusser. I enjoyed this book. I'd recommend it to other philosophy nerds, but that's about it. Althusser's concerns seem quite remote from our present situation.