Encountering Althusser, Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought

摘要

The publication by Louis Althusser of Pour Marx and Lire le Capital (in conjunction with Etienne Balibar) in 1965 marked a real attempt to transform the theoretical premises of the French communist movement, by breaking with the stale dogmatism of the Soviet-inspired orthodoxy of historical and dialectical materialism, notably codified in the Short Course. As the editors of this volume rightly stress in their introduction, it was an attempt to bring about a 'renewal of Marxism by means of its elaboration as a rigorous theoretical research programme in critical dialogue with, but possessing its own relative autonomy from, left-wing political practice and organisation' ((ⅹⅲ)) and 'with ambitions to measure itself against the most advanced theoretical developments that had occurred outside the Marxist tradition in the twentieth century' ((ⅹⅲ)). There is no denying the enormous influence which Althusserianism had during this period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, firstly in France, then across Europe and further afield, most notably Latin America, in spite of the fact that the Althusserian research programme did not fulfil its promise to fundamentally renew Marxist theory, but proceeded more by way of punctual interventions in theoretical debates, revisions and repudiations of earlier propositions, critique and self-critique, contradictions and turns.