The publication of the first volume of Marx's Capital in paperback (in French)(1) is an important event. It is evidence of the growing popularity of Marxist ideas, or more precisely, evidence of the fact that bourgeois publishing houses are conscious of the massive demand that they can satisfy in this sphere, conscious of their capacity to transform Capital into a [mass] of commodities whose exchange value (and the surplus value which it contains) is easily realisable on the market.
Marcuse grieves when he discovers in this phenomenon the diabolical ability of bourgeois society in our epoch to integrate all the writers of the left and even leftists (of which Marx remains the prototype). We believe that he is wrong,
The fact that 699 pages of closely-typed paper are sold in some tens of thousands of copies and gain profit for capitalist publishers confirms of course the tendency of bourgeois society to transform into commodities everything which it can lay its hands on; the promotion of the sale of Capital as a financial undertaking is only possible, however, because this book satisfies a social demand, because in fact it has a use value. This use value of Capital is not of course the consolidation of the socio-economic system based on generalised commodity production, that is the capitalist mode of production. On the contrary, the use value of Capital is the demystification of that mode of production; contributing then in this fashion to its destruction and overthrow.
In this sense the publication of Capital in paperback is a witness not to the strength but to the growing contradictions of bourgeois society, just as Lenin's famous witticism according to which the capitalist before last will sell the rope to hang the last is not a proof of the ability of the bourgeoisie to integrate everything, even weapons to fight itself with. And it does not just evidence this in a general abstract meaning of the term but in a far more exact sense,
The growing response to Marxist publications in France is a product of May '68, a product that is of the revolutionary crisis which shook French capitalist society and which has considerably increased scepticism about the chances of survival of this society. If a section of the capitalist class sees in it a way of rapidly accumulating capital before the flood sweeps it away with the rest of its brothers, fellow thieves and collaborators, so much the better for them! There's no reason to complain, in fact exactly the opposite.
The paperback does not gain very much, however, from "The Warning" with which Louis Althusser introduces it. Of course, not everything is bad about this introduction. There are some useful and learned pieces of advice in it, although they should be treated cautiously. The object of Capital is precisely delimited; that is the analysis of the capitalist mode of production, of a particular and specific mode of production, and not the analysis of any "general laws" which regulate the economic life of humanity in every epoch. The nature of surplus value—one of the essential economic discoveries of Marx—is summarised in a succinct correct manner. The link between Capital and Lenin's analysis of the world imperialist system is sketched, although incompletely.(2) The importance and reality of social global capital are correctly put into focus. Althusser knows his Marx and of course it's preferable to see Capital prefaced by someone who at least knows what it's about, rather than by a writer who would see in Capital merely the corrected continuation of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, or an essay on the necessity of reorganising society on the basis of aprioristic moral principles.
Having said this, we must add that this foreword suffers from a series of fundamental faults which the reading of Marx by Althusser contains. And it offers us the opportunity to expose some of its weaknesses in the shape of a warning as much for the readers of Capital as for the works of Louis Althusser.
THE "SHORTCOMINGS" OF THE FIRST VOLUME OF CAPITAL
Louis Althusser expresses a mitigated judgment for the book he prefaces. Of course, Volume One of Capital is a work of genius, a revolutionary work of historical import. But it also does not go far enough. Our severe critic summarises in this way his opinion on these insufficiencies:-
"Volume One contains yet other theoretical difficulties linked to the preceding ones or to other problems.
"For example the theory of the distinction to be made between value and the form of value; for example, the theory of the quantity of work socially necessary; for example, the theory of simple work and complex work; for example, the theory of social needs, etc. For example, the theory of the organic composition of Capital. For example, the famous theory of commodity fetichism and its subsequent generalisation.
"All these questions—and many others besides—constitute real objective difficulties, to which Volume One gives either temporary [sic] or partial solutions. Why these inadequacies?" (P. 20)
Althusser gives two reasons; first because Marx had the whole of Capital in mind when he wrote Volume One and he could not put all four volumes in the first; hence the anticipatory character of the analysis (Althusser carefully avoids mentioning that an exposition of all the economic discoveries of Marx in one volume is in the Grundrisse which he does not like much because it is too much marked by Hegelianism). Finally, because Capital itself bears "traces of Hegelian thought in the language and even in the thought of Marx." (P. 21)
Here then is Capital and poor Marx himself is in the dock; must we burn these heretics or not? Is our Grand Inquisitor already preparing the stake from which only the Critique of the Gotha Programme and Marginal Notes on Wagner escape? Doubtless the reduction of "pure Marxism" to these two occasional and polemical works of Marx has so very incongruous a character that even a man like Althusser, in general bereft of a sense of humour, recoils before the enormous burst of laughter that he risks provoking. We won't burn Capital then; we'll simply declare Volume One inadequate (but not just Volume One, as we'll see in a moment),
The Inquisitor, however, if he has a heavy hand, has also a clumsy one. The example that Althusser chooses to unmask the Hegelian influence on Capital reveals his own inadequate assimilation of Marxism. It is the beginning of Capital that he considers Hegelian:
"Trapped in a Hegelian conception of science (for Hegel there is no science, only philosophy, therefore all real science must found its own beginning), Marx thought then [sic] that 'in all science the beginning is arduous'. In fact Section One of Book One is presented in an order of explanation whose difficulty lies for a good part in this Hegelian prejudice. Moreover, Marx rewrote this beginning a dozen times, before giving it its definitive form—as if he stumbled there on a difficulty, which was not just one of simple explanation—and for a good reason.
Now, what's this all about? It concerns the fact that Marx began the analysis of Capital by an analysis of the commodity. Is this a concession to the Hegelian conception of science? Certainly not.
It is the expression of a conception of history founded on dialectical materialism, The point is not that a science should found its own beginning (the idealist dialectic) but to search for the secrets of a mode of production in its historical, material and social origins (materialist dialectic). The fundamental weakness of Althusser resides in his refusal to distinguish the two methods, which is because of his suspicions about the materialist dialectic as being Hegelian, and in his de facto rejection of the dialectic for these reasons.
Why did Marx begin Capital by an analysis of commodities, not as a Hegelian, but precisely as a Marxist? Because contrary to Althusser he did not want to analyse the capitalist mode of production as something static, as an immobile structure, separated from the past and the future. What he sought to do has been summarised with "much accuracy" by Marx himself in the following formula; "to illuminate the laws which regulate the birth, life. growing and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another superior order' (3) And as soon as one understands this scientific plan of Marx, the beginning of Capital ceases to be a simple Hegelian flirt, or worse, just a concession to an idealist conception of science which "founds in itself its own beginning". but becomes a reply to the question: Where does capitalism come from? What are its essential contradictions? Capitalism is the generalised production of commodities, It is the mode of production in which for the first time in the history of society. the labour force and all means of production become commodities. To discover the secrets of the commodity in the relations of production which create it, is to unveil the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production itself, for these contradictions are all contained in embryo in the commodity itself.
"The beginning, the simplest [element], the most common, the most immediate of the being': the particular commodity. His analysis as analysis of a social relationship. A bilateral analysis, deductive and inductive—both logical and historical (the forms of value). "Checking by facts, that is to say by practice, is done here at each step of the analysis. "With reference to the subject of the question "Essence" (Wesen) and 'appearance price and value [illegible] 'value' (crystallised labour) wages and [illegible] demand and supply versus [illegible] demand price of the labour force." (5)
One can see quite clearly that Lenin approves of and highly appreciates the method that Marx used in the writing of Chapter One of Capital. He even sees there the specific characteristic of the materialist dialectic applied by Marx to the study of the capitalist relations of production. He does not define like Althusser this Marxist method simply as a research for abstract concepts permitting an analysis of an abstract reality (the capitalist mode of production in general), He defines it as the unity of two opposites, deduction and induction, as the synthesis of two opposites: "The history of capitalism and the analysis of the concepts which summarise it", that is at one and the same time both abstract and general capitalism (without this work of abstraction, one gets lost in a thousand insignificant and meaningless details, one is incapable of grasping the trends of historical development, one loses the prey for its shadow) and concrete historically developed capitalism (without this return to the concrete and to history. without this checking through practice, one gets lost in unreal abstractions, bearing no reference to social reality, [it] must be understood before it can be consciously [illegible].
We would be interested to hear what Althusser thinks of those passages full of the wisdom and profundity of Lenin on Marx's method. Has Lenin himself also mistaken Hegelianism and Marxism? Is he also suspect of heresy? Must we burn him along with the first chapter of Capital?
THE LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE, THE ORGANIC COMPOSITION OF CAPITAL AND THE LAWS OF MOTION OF CAPITALISM
Althusser quotes and requotes Lenin complacently as the pure and true interpreter of Marxist thought (freed from its Hegelian fetters). Now what is Lenin's opinion on the very subject that concerns us? Here is what he said about it in his works on the Logic of Hegel:
"To stand it on its head: Marx has applied the Hegelian dialectic in its developed form to political economy ...
"Just as the simple form of value, the single act of exchange of a given commodity with another commodity, already contains within itself all the contradictions of capitalism in an undeveloped form, so does the simplest generalisation, the first most simple formation of concepts (judgments, conclusions, etc.) show already ever increasing comprehension by man of the deep objective relationships of the world. That is where you must look for the true meaning, the real significance and the role of Hegel's logic."
And again in the same [work]:
"If Marx has not passed on any Logic (capital L) he has all the same passed on the logic of Capital, which must be fully utilised for the question which concerns us. In Capital Marx applies to the subject the logic, dialectic and epistemology of materialism (one doesn't need three terms, for all those amount to one and the same thing), which has used all that was valuable in Hegel and has developed it further. It is contrary to the letter and to the spirit
"Commodity-money-Capital-production of absolute surplus value-production of relative surplus value.
"The history of capitalism and the analysis of the concepts which
The lack of understanding that Louis Althusser shows with respect to the first chapter of Volume One of Capital, and his rejection of the materialist dialectic, integrating abstract deductive analysis and genetico-historical analysis, leads him moreover to several serious theoretical errors. Two of these errors appear in his introduction to the Garnier-Flammarion pocketbook edition of Capital.
When he is accounting for "the great theoretical difficulties of Book One, above all those which are concentrated in the terrible Section One, on the subject of the famous labour theory of value" he states:
"I give in a word the principle of the solution.
"Marxist labour theory of value which all 'economists' and bourgeois ideologues have reproached him for with laughable 'refutations' [appears] only as a particular case of a theory which [Germans] call the Law of Value [illegible] Distribution of the total disposable quantity of "[labour]" to the various branches of production, a distribution indispensable to the reproduction of the conditions of production" (P. 19)
The "solution" which Althusser gives is particularly unfortunate. It is contrary to the letter and to the spirit of the writings of Marx and Engels on this question. Nowhere does Marx talk about a "law of value" as a general theory applying to every society. What Marx explains is that every human society must effect a certain economy of labour time, a more or less proportional distribution of this quantity between different branches of social and economic activity. But this general law—it is indeed one—must precisely not be confused with the law of value, which is only one particular application of this law to a specific type of socio-economic organisation, a society based on the production of commodities.
Althusser refers to the Critique of the Gotha Programme as Marx's most mature economic text. If he had wished to pay attention to the question of the Law of Value, he would have noticed that Marx wrote there:
"In the framework of a cooperative society (genossenschaftlich) based on the collective appropriation of the means of production, the producers don't exchange their products; no longer does the work spent in making these products appear as the value of these products, since now in contrast to capitalist society individual labour becomes part of social labour directly and no longer by a detour.
In the first chapter of Capital, Marx states explicitly that commodity production and the production of value exist only "[in this case where several] labours executed independently of [each other]" [illegible] (Flammarion edition of Capital). And here is the whole sense of the famous "law of value": it fulfils the function of establishing spontaneously that proportional division of the labour force between different economic activities which, in a non-market society, is consciously realised by the collectivity, whether this be by means of habit, customs and ritual in primitive society or by the socialist plan (based on the associated producers) to take up Marx's formula again.
It's not permissible then to confuse the general law with its particular form of application under the reign of commodity production. Far from being a particular application of a more general law called the "law of value", the labour theory explains precisely why and how this law of value succeeds [in ensuring the] direct economy [of labour time in commodity producing] societies. But to be able to [do that he would have to] reintroduce history into Capital which he obstinately refuses to do. Most of all, he would have to admit that Chapter One of Volume One (where all that is explained in a profound manner, albeit in a language which makes understanding difficult sometimes) is more than a simple flirt with Hegelian terminology.
Let us add that the grave theoretical error committed by Althusser over the question of the Law of Value is not without relationship with his Stalinist ideological origins, with his ambivalent and ambiguous relationship with respect to Stalinism. We know that it was Stalin who brought an appearance of orthodoxy to this fundamental revision of Marxism, which [consisted] in affirming [the] law of value [illegible] in the Soviet economy (and even in [illegible]). [Althusser] promises us an analysis "of what one calls with a term which owes nothing to Marxism the period of the personality cult". [illegible] and from the Critique of the Gotha Programme—to [illegible] Marx's Preface to [the] Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy his main text of reference, would surely lead him into a theoretical dead end.
Althusser's second theoretical error concerns the question of the organic composition of capital. He discovers "a very serious misunderstanding which...stems from the necessity to read Marx's text closely." According to Althusser, the vast majority of readers of Capital would have seen in the organic composition of capital (the relationship between constant capital and variable capital) a theory of the firm, or to employ Marxist terms, a theory of the unity of production. Yet Marx said very clearly the contrary: he always talks of the composition of total social capital, but in the context of a concrete example.
It's possible that certain bourgeois economists see in the question of the organic composition of capital only, even exclusively, a theory [of the firm], and we leave them to order (we mention to him, however, that almost all Marxist commentators or pretenders to the name of Marxism [would] have avoided this mistake, which seems elementary). But Althusser is wrong when he concludes from it that Marx always talks about the social organic composition of capital, that is to say of capital in its entirety and only of this social capital.
The whole Marxist theory of the equalisation of the rate of profit, that is the whole Marxist theory of capitalist competition, is founded on the existence of an organic composition of capital different in different branches of production. One discovers the concept again all through Part [Two] of Volume [Three] of Capital [illegible] Marxist theory of land rent. In order not to tire the reader with numerous quotations, we will limit ourselves to one only:
"But if capitals in different sectors of production...capitals of an equal value in different sectors of production, produce unequal profits because of their different organic composition of capital, it follows that profits from unequal capitals in different spheres of production can have another relationship than the proportional relationship to their respective dimensions." (7)
We mention this error of Althusser's not through pedantry, but because it relates to the author's methodological weakness. We have already said that Althusser's Introduction does not mention the aspect of the object of Capital, which is the chief aspect for Marx himself: the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production. Now these laws of motion follow from competition (that is, private ownership of the means of production and generalised commodity production), But the word "competition" is scarcely mentioned in the Introduction. It does not appear for example in Pages 14 and 15 to explain the reasons why capital develops the machine system more and more. Althusser is correct to give great importance to the idea of social capital created by Marx. But he is wrong to lose sight of the fact that for Marx capitalism is a social capital which can appear only in the form of [many] different [capitals], that is to say which always presupposes competition.
ALTHUSSER AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
This same methodological error is not without relation to the most astonishing passage that the Introduction contains: a full-scale attack on Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
"Last trace of the Hegelian influence and this time flagrant and full of consequence (almost all the theoreticians of reification and alienation have found in it the means to base their idealist interpretations of Marx's thought): the theory of fetichism ("The fetish character of the commodity and its mystery", [Vth part of Chapter One of Section One)
"One will understand that I cannot talk at length here on these [questions] [illegible] which would [take] [illegible]. I just mention them, however, for together with [illegible] with which they are [linked] (evolutionism being the poor man's Hegelianism) have caused havoc in the history of the Marxist working-class movement. I mention that not for one moment did Lenin succumb to the influence of those Hegelian-evolutionary pages, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to fight the betrayal of the Second International, to build the Bolshevik Party, to conquer state power at the head of the Russian masses, to instal the dictatorship of the proletariat And to begin the construction of socialism." (P. 22)
Althusser is not lucky with his bete noires. Yesterday it was the Marxist theory of alienation. The assertion of Althusser according to which alienation is a pre-Marxist concept which practically no longer appears in the works after the 1844 Manuscripts (Pour Marx...) shows itself to be untenable; we have shown this in La Formation de la pensee economique de Karl Marx. (10) Althusser [abandons] this now in his [introduction] [illegible] only to pass over to a new untenable bete noire: "that not for one moment would Lenin have succumbed to the influence of these evolutionary Hegelian pages" that the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy constitutes.
Now without looking for all the passages of Lenin's work where these Hegelian evolutionary passages are quoted with approval, it is sufficient to mention one revealing text. Written during the second half of 1914, in a biography of Marx which summarises the whole Marxist doctrine, Lenin wrote as follows: "In the Preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx gives an integral formulation of the fundamental principles of materialism as extended to human society and its history in the following words..." (12)
A long quotation of the most striking passages of this Preface follows, indeed the longest quotation from Marx contained in this whole text of Lenin which mentions, however, all the principle works of Marx known at this time. The least that one can say is that "these Hegelian evolutionary pages", far from not having influenced Lenin "for a single moment", were considered by him (as they were indeed by most Marxists) as a complete formulation of the fundamental theses of historical materialism.
But Althusser's mishaps don't stop there. Since he considers this "complete formulation of the fundamental theses" of historical materialism as "Hegelian-evolutionary", it's useful to quote a passage of the same text of Lenin on the subject of Marxism, which throws quite an interesting light on the manner in which the idealist Lenin (or should one say the "leftist Lenin?) conceptualised the links between evolutionism and Hegelianism:
"Nowadays the idea of development, of evolution, has penetrated the social consciousness almost in its entirety, but by different ways not by way of the Hegelian philosophy. But as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegel, this idea is far more comprehensive, far richer in content than the current idea of evolution. A development that seemingly repeats the stages already passed but repeats them otherwise on a higher basis ( 'negation of the negation' ), a development, so to speak, in spirals, not in a straight line;-a development by caps, catastrophes, revolution; "breaks in continuity",—the transformation of quantity into quality—the inner impulse to development imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society;—the interdependence and the closest indissoluble connection of all sides of every phenomenon (while history constantly discloses ever new sides), a connection that provides a uniform, law-governed, universal process of motion—such are some of the features of dialectics as a richer (than the ordinary) doctrine of development," (13)
Let's note in passing that in contrast to Althusser, Lenin imitates "Marx's folly" and integrates in his turn the "negation of the negation" into the laws of the dialectic. Althusser, following in Stalin's footsteps, believes that this wretched "negation of the negation" has not stopped creating havoc—but really how can one be astonished with the Marxist folly of Lenin? (4) Surely the passage that we've just quoted shows that Lenin, in contrast to Althusser, claims evolutionism for his own (this "poor man's Hegelianism" according to Althusser), And does not this same Lenin indulge in sin [to] the extent of preferring a particular type of evolutionism, which [is] precisely evolutionism as corrected by Hegel, namely a conception of evolution, of universal change. which sees in it [not] just a [succession] of gradual changes but also sharp changes by leaps, [that] is to say, a conception of evolution which integrates in it the concept of revolution, which conceives change as the union of continuity and discontinuity? It was Lenin's opinion that this brilliant content of Hegel's dialectic had been preserved by Marx and Engels ("rescued" as the founders of Marxism said themselves) in putting it back on its feet, that is in considering that the fundamental movement from which theoretical work must begin is that of the material and objective reality of matter, nature and human society and not that of the Absolute Idea. Althusser has the right to express a different opinion, of course; but he has no right to present it under the guise of Marxism-Leninism, for Marx and Lenin have many times expressed the contrary opinion.
It's difficult to understand what elements of vulgar "evolutionism" (that is to say what there is opposed to the idea of transformation by jumps, leaps and revolutions) are present in the famous Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. On the contrary, we find ourselves confronted with a succinct account of [the uni]versal form of passage from one mode [of production to another]. Is Althusser's criticism limited [to] the fact that the [f]ormula "dictatorship of the proletariat" [does] not appear in it? [If] this was the case, however, he would be able to level the same criticism at Capital itself where one would search in vain for these words. Only people of bad faith could demand that the representatives of so complex and rich a theory as revolutionary Marxism should reproduce all the basic concepts of this theory in every one of their writings, independently of the object and specific function of them.
ALTHUSSER'S MOTIVES
Doubtless it will always remain a mystery to everyone (unless Althusser decides to enlighten us on the subject) to know why the influence that the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy could have exercised on Lenin would have hindered him from combatting the betrayal of the Second International or to struggle successfully for the conquest of power in Russia, not to mention the obstacle that this Preface would have constituted in the way of the Leninist theory of the Party and in that of the construction of the Bolshevik Party. The real situation is that the scholastic ideas which Althusser opposes to the materialist dialectic of Marx and Lenin are very close to the mechanical evolutionism of a Kautsky or a Guesde and the other leaders of the Second International, which led them directly to the shameful capitulation of August 1914.
The Preface bases the possibility of social revolutions on the materialist statement of structural crises of the mode of [production] (conflicts between the development of the productive forces and the social relationships of production). That is the same fundamental approach which all revolutionary Marxists before and after 1914 have followed, in revealing the nature of imperialism as that of a regime leading to a structural crisis of the world capitalist system. It's by opposing all sorts of mechanical and partial sophisms to this fundamental approach, forgetting this lesson of Hegel taken up by Marx and Lenin that one must consider imperialist war as "in interdependence and close indissoluble connection" with all sides of one and the same [thing], the world crisis of the imperialist system, i.e. in the context of that social totality, that the social democrats could allege in turn that imperialism was only "one aspect among others" of monopoly capitalism; that imperialist wars contain "elements" of national defence; that the Party should not cut itself off from the masses "drunken with chauvinism", to justify their shameful refusal to fight against the imperialist war, contrary to what they had solemnly promised to do.
By starting from the same dialectical conception of the crisis of the imperialist system (of the capitalist mode of production functioning as a contradictory but unified totality on the world scale), Lenin was able in April 1917 to agree with the brilliant prediction of Trotsky, that it was precisely because of the backward state of Russia that the revolution could lead there in an uninterrupted manner to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. For in the era of fully developed imperialism, the domination of the imperialist monopolies on the world market and on the economy of the underdeveloped countries (where they find themselves allied with the native possessor classes) blocks in a definite manner the possibility of a capitalist growth of the productive forces and prevents a solution of the agrarian problem in the framework of capitalism (through a development of agriculture "in the American style", as Lenin still thought till the eve of the first world war) and leaves these countries only the choice between stagnation in underdeveloped structures or the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Althusser's introduction does not mention these fundamental options at all, which were at the base of Leninist action in 1914 and 1917, He likewise shows himself as objectively opposed to the fundamental orientation of Lenin, which was at the base of What is to be Done? and of the creation of the Bolshevik Party.(19) [He expresses himself in the following] fashion: "A class struggle deliberately confined to the economic struggle alone remains and will always remain defensive and, therefore, without hope of ever overthrowing capitalist rule... Only a political struggle can reverse the trend and pass beyond these limits to become offensive instead of defensive... That's the no. 1 question of the international working class movement since it fused with Marxist theory." Or worse still: "Marx thus shows in an irrefutable manner...that from now until the capture of revolutionary power...the working class can have no other aim, [than to limit the] effect of explosion [on] the development of productivity, to limit these effects..."
Had Lenin been limited to this scholasticism he would surely have [written] neither What is to be Done? nor Imperialism [nor] The State and Revolution! As it is, The Communist Manifesto teaches us already that all the proletariat's economic struggle becomes a political struggle, [illegible] hand, any [illegible] to mention Wilson and [illegible] only a political struggle can "reverse the trend". The no. 1 question of the international working class movement since the first world war is not to get lost in byzantine distinctions between economic struggles and political struggles, between the defensive and the offensive, but to [realise] the fact that [in the epoch of] capitalism's decline [illegible] of the struggles [into] which the proletariat periodically launches (whether they are economic or political) into struggles oriented towards the [bringing] into question of the whole of capitalist relations of production and towards the overthrow of bourgeois state power. [illegible]
That's what Lenin and the founders of International Communism taught. That's the Hegelian spirit—the dialectic, that is—of the famous "Preface". That is also—may it be said in passing—the main lesson to be drawn from May 1968 in France. Perhaps it is to avoid an open confrontation with this problem that Althusser [illegible] (16) [illegible] to correct Marx and Lenin?
Here [illegible] scholastic [illegible] the [general] strike of May '68 that's being alluded to, The "Marxist theoretician" Althusser goes to the help of the reformist practicists Waldeck Rochet and Seguy, who would have been right not "to follow the leftists", since it is necessary [to know] how to distinguish an "economic class struggle" from a "political class struggle".
One can imagine the rebukes with which Lenin would have berated our philosopher who loses himself in politics after having wandered for a long time in the desert of political economy. Offer us a little line then, ten words only of Marx and Lenin, O dear master, to prove to us that those revolutionaries follow you in your metaphysical ramblings and conceive themselves as well of "defensive economic general strikes" without "political" i.e. revolutionary implications, especially when the workers throw in a little occupation of factories to "confuse" the specialists of "fine distinctions".
Althusser's impudence is truly limitless when one knows that Lenin has analysed the manner in which the 1905 Russian revolution developed the combination of economic strikes into mass strikes, and wrote, "It would be an irreparable mistake if the workers did not understand the whole originality of significance, necessity, importance of the principle of such a mixture (of economic and political strikes)" (Lenin: Oeuvres, Tome 18, pp. 86-87. See also pp. 104-105, Paris Editions sociales, 1969). It is true that on the basis of this Leninist conception of mass strikes, it's impossible to justify the politics of the PCF in May 1968...
FOOTNOTES
(1) Marx, Capital, Book One. Paris 1969, Garnier Flammarion, [illegible].
(2) [illegible] "capitalist exploitation [illegible] system of exploitation" (p. 24). But he could have referred to passages in Capital which allow a theory of unequal exchange to be based on this subject, and not only to those which refer to primitive accumulation.
(3) [illegible] p. 583, reproduced in the same paperback, [illegible].
(5) (V.I. Lenin: Zur Kritik der Hegelschen "Wissenschaft der Logik" [illegible] Nachlass. Dietz-Verlag, [illegible].)
(6) In Marx-Engels: Ausgewahlte Schriften, Volume Two, p. 15. Moscow 1950, Verlag fur Fremdsprachige Literatur (Foreign Languages Publishing House).
(7) Capital, III, p. 128. Hamburg, Otto Meissners Verlag, 1921.
(8) Capital, II, p.328. Hamburg, Otto Meissners Verlag, 1921.
(9) Let us point out another error of Althusser's here. Talking of overtime, he writes: "Apparently, overtime seems to cost the capitalist 'very dear' since they pay 25, 50, even 100% over the normal rate. But actually it is to their advantage since it allows machinery, whose working life becomes shorter and shorter through the rapid advance of technology, to be used twenty-four hours a day. In other [words] [illegible] to draw the maximum [illegible] a more rapid depreciation [illegible] of fixed capital [illegible] explained that the total quantity of annual surplus value did not depend alone on the mass of variable capital and the rate of surplus value, but also on the length of the cycle of circulating capital, Althusser should have mentioned this factor to make his argument intelligible. For "to allow machinery to be used 24 hours a day" does not increase surplus value by a penny by itself. Surplus value is produced only by living labour and not by machines. For overtime to increase capitalist profits, the rate of surplus value must be such that, in spite of overtime rates, the worker continues to produce surplus value. If an overtime hour is paid at double the rate for a normal hour, only a rate of surplus value in excess of 100% will make the introduction of overtime profitable to the employers under normal conditions,
(10) [illegible] Marx. Paris, Maspero. 1967. pp. [illegible]. An English edition is about to appear at Monthly Review Press, New York, soon.
(11) P.24 where he coldly remarks that the Grundrisse is deeply marked by Hegel's thought.
(12) Lenin: Marx Engels-Marxism, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1951. p. 26.
(13) Ibidem, p. 24-25.
(14) "The same Hegelian influence makes itself shown in the unfortunate formula of Chapter 23 or Section VII of Book One where Marx, talking about "the expropriation of the expropriators', declares "this is the negation of the negation'. Unfortunate: for it has not stopped creating havoc, though Stalin has been for his part right to suppress 'the negation of the negation' from the dialectic, it's true to the benefit of other still graver errors. (Introduction, p.22)
(15) By the absurd thesis according to which the workers have no difficulty in understanding the theory of surplus value, while the petty bourgeois intellectuals who "have no direct experience of capitalist exploitation but who, on the other hand, are dominated in their practice and their consciousness by the ideology of the dominant class, the bourgeoisie cannot understand this theory (p.9). Or further on: "What these intellectuals conceive of as Marxist theory is 90% false ideas then." We have always thought that "the ruling ideology of every society is the ideology of the ruling class". For Althusser [this] first truth of historical materialism becomes the [illegible] ideology of the ruling class is the ideology of the ruling class", in other words a senseless tautology. If the workers were liberated from the ideology of the ruling class by the simple fact of being workers, why would it be necessary to organise a vanguard party, a bolshevik party, a communist party? It would be sufficient then to gather together all the workers so that they express spontaneously the fact that they have the experience of exploitation, and there you would have Marxist theory! Is it not from the opposite hypothesis, namely the predominant influence of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology on the workers as well, that Lenin explains in What is to be Done? the necessity for the vanguard party? Appropriately enough, who is this Althusser who comes out with these strange statements? He doesn't look like a worker from Renault, after all. Could it be that he is one of these sinister "academics" of whom he says that 90% of the [illegible] that they have about Marxism are false"? Would Althusser have wished to revel in a bold self-criticism in this roundabout way?
(16) We read this in the Introduction: "The wages question is an issue of class struggle. It does not regulate itself independently but by the struggle of the class; before everything else by the different forms of strikes, leading one day or another to the general strike. "Whether this general strike remains purely economic [sic] and therefore defensive (defence of the material and moral interests of the workers, struggle against the dual capitalist tendency to increase the amount of work and decrease wages) or whether it takes a political and therefore offensive form (struggle for the conquest of state power, socialist revolution and the construction of socialism), all those who know the distinctions of Marx, Engels and Lenin know what differences separate the economic from the political struggle of the class."