Althusser’s What is to be done?
Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher, for a period in the 1960s and early 1970s he was, perhaps, the Marxist philosopher. He is best known for a number of publications in the 1960s and 1970s, such as For Marx and, with others, Reading Capital, and since his death in 1990 an avalanche of his previously unseen and unfinished texts has been published. Althusser seems to have started new books, got to a point of impasse, and left them incomplete. So if you want a conclusion to the question asked by Lenin of ‘What is to be done?’, you may be disappointed by Althusser’s book. Nonetheless, there is much of interest here in this recently translated text for those who believe that clear concepts are necessary to the construction of revolutionary action.
Written in 1978, much of Althusser’s What is to be Done? deals with the phenomenon of Eurocommunism which became the practice of many European Communist Parties during the 1970s and 1980s. Althusser explains Eurocommunism as a product of Antonio Gramsci’s theorising, and criticises both; the Eurocommunism that evolved first with the Italian Communist Party replaced revolution with electoral politics, threw out the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and sought a democratic socialist society rather than communism, while, in turn, Gramsci tended to substitute the state for civil society, seeing civil society as a product of ideological hegemony. Althusser argued that it lacked a convincing analysis of society and could not justify its strategy and that in its Eurocommunist interpretation, Gramsci’s ideas were used to ignore the coercive nature of the capitalist state. Ideological hegemony needs to be combined with a hegemony of physical force; revolutions are won in the streets not just in our heads. Thus Althusser argues in his What is to be Done? that with a focus on a battle for ideas, the Eurocommunist approach failed to recognise the real violence of the repressive state apparatus, in his opinion disarming communist political organisations.
The Eurocommunists had failed to analyse the real conditions of the struggle in Europe in the 1970s, and to establish ‘What is to be done?’, Althusser suggested, such analysis is necessary. Incidentally, the Eurocommunism of thinkers like Stuart Hall and others around the British journal Marxism Today, which provided an analysis of ‘New Times’, isn’t covered here. Althusser criticised French and Italian theorists but was largely dismissive of Marxists writing in England, failing to even name them. The discussion of Gramsci and Eurocommunism is enhanced by a comparison of Althusser and Gramsci’s respective uses of Machiavelli. Machiavelli is, after Lenin and Spinoza, Althusser’s key intellectual reference. But Eurocommunism as discussed in What is to be done? remains largely a moralistic critique.
The first chapter of What is to be Done? is, I feel, more useful than the chapters on Eurocommunism and Gramsci. It is a persuasive, logically constructed argument as to how to understand the conditions necessary for revolution. I recommend reading it with care. Chapter One begins:
‘What is to be done?
‘The old question of Lenin’s, which initiated the construction and the practices of the Bolshevik Party, is not for a communist who knows Marxist theory, a question like any other. It is a political question. What is to be done to help orient and organize the workers’ and the people’s class struggle so that it carries the day against the bourgeois class struggle.
‘We should weigh all the words in this simple question.
‘What is to be done to help orient and organise the workers’ and people’s class struggle? It can be seen that orientation, or the political line, comes before organisation. This is to affirm the primacy of the political line over the party, and the construction and organization of the party as a function of the political line.’ (p.1).
Althusser’s work remains instructive, in my opinion, to reimagining revolutionary strategy. Marxism demands intervention in a specific conjuncture, a particular situation. A consideration of both Marxist-Leninist practice and the specific contours of the conjuncture are necessary in construction of a political line, and in constructing a political line we can begin to put the ‘what’ into ‘What is to be done?’
What is to be done? Louis Althusser, trans. by G. M. Goshgarian
Polity, 2020
9781509538614