Rereading Reading Capital

Re-reading Reading Capital was an unexpected delight. When I first sat down with this book 17 or 18 years ago, each page was scoured over meticulously with a determination to unspool the meaning of Althusser's tightly-wound prose. It got to the ludicrous point of amassing a pile of notes for the first third of the book greater even than the hefty wedge I recently turned out while reading actual Capital. Coming back to Reading Capital many years later and after much practice reading difficult social theory, I found ploughing through something of a (semi-masochistic) pleasure. It also came with a surprising bonus.

There is a regrettable tendency on the left these days to dismiss Althusser's contributions to Marxism. A part-cancellation part down to the murderous circumstances of his final breakdown, but also because of the sustained and withering polemic over his oeuvre - not helped by some of his more high profile disciples, at least on these shores, going down the controversial highways and by-ways of post-structuralism and outright obscurantism. Nevertheless, Althusser's raison d'etre, his problematic, was a sound enough intellectual enterprise. That is setting out to demonstrate what is unique and specific about Marxism versus mainstream social science, philosophy and, above all, political economy. His second objective is inextricable from the first: an examination and the subsequent isolation and removal of the residues of bourgeois philosophy lingering on in Marxism. These hangovers serve to cloud rather than elucidate the concepts necessary for a scientific enquiry into the dynamics and laws governing capitalist societies - or social formations, in Althusser-speak.

This enterprise debuted in For Marx, setting out what a non-humanistic (anti-humanist) and non-essentialised Marxism should look like. Here, Althusser focused particularly on Marx's relationship with Hegel and through a close philosophical reading of key texts made the case that dialectics and materialism in Marx was a much more involved affair than simply standing Hegel the right way up. Similar to other French structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers of the time, Hegel's philosophy was attacked for, ultimately, offering a simplistic and metaphysical approach to history. Here, history in all essentials is the unfolding of the principle of reason through fits and bursts, but with a clear upward trajectory to an end point where, effectively, history as Hegel understands it has come to an end and reason triumphs. This metaphysics has found various ways into Marxism, via Promethean/humanist iterations of Marx (history as the becoming realisation of humanity's species-being), its mechanical opposite (history animated by economic or technological determinism), or history as the inevitable realisation of communism proceeding to this end point through a series of ever more progressive modes of production. For Althusser, these Marxisms operated with 'expressive totalities' - at any point a social formation was an expression of some essentialised underlying principle. For Althusser, this emphatically was not Marx's method. Turning to his 'mature works' - the volumes of Capital, Critique of the Gotha Programme, the notes assembled as Theories of Surplus Value, and various marginalia. Here we find no principles animating the movement of history. Instead we find societies structured in particular ways owing to the patterning of class struggle, the mode of exploitation, strength, extent and relationships between institutions, the mode of production and its conjunctural hybridity/residuum of preceding modes, and so on. In short, social formations are complex but knowable.

Althusser's second argument was one for the real geeks, but nevertheless bound up with the above. Marx himself wasn't always a Marxist. His earlier works were radical but were irredeemably Hegelian and abounded with humanist concepts and essentialisms. It was philosophical and obviously pre-scientific. Or ideological, in Althusser's rendering. For instance, Althusser located Marx's famous 1844 Paris Manuscripts and their treatment of and polemic against alienation as a work condemning capitalism for the way it estranged humans from their essential humanity, which was a thoroughly woolly notion. However, during 1846 Marx, with Engels, wrote The German Ideology, a polemic against their philosophical contemporaries. For the first time their materialist conception of history was outlined and there was no room for metaphysical props. Still, while a vital breakthrough Althusser argues neither Marx nor Engels fully articulated their novel approach in philosophical terms. What was distinctive was buried in the operationalisation of (not fully articulated) concepts, notes or asides in their work, remarks in the voluminous correspondence between them and other thinkers and activists they exchanged letters with. Marx never wrote a book about Marx's method.

This was the meat and gravy of Althusser's project. He was concerned with rescuing the specificity of Marx's contribution from under the weight of misinterpretation and distortion, and set it out in stark terms. Doing so would aid theoretical clarity and demonstrate its superiority versus the ideologies passing for bourgeois thought.

Reading Capital is a continuation of this project. For instance, one of the particularly valuable and oft-overlooked contributions here is Althusser's discussion of time. As the social is positioned as an expressive totality by idealist philosophy and political economy, making an analytical intervention at any point in history amounts to an 'essential section'. i.e. That point in time reduces events and occurrences to expressions of the underlying metaphysic of history. Therefore time is simple, linear, and uniform. Contrast this to the Marxist approach to time. Because capitalism is complex, and because all capitalist social formations are complex articulations of struggles and institutions, time itself is complex and multiple. To demonstrate, while all businesses depend on their circuit of capital to successfully complete (the advance of capital, its transformation into commodities by setting the means of production and labour power into motion, and then the value locked up in these commodities getting realised at the point of sale, returning the investment plus surplus value to the capitalist), the speed this takes place at varies from firm to firm, and industry to industry. Therefore it assumes at times compressed, at times elastic and elongated properties depending on conjunctural and specific circumstances. Likewise, the velocity of exploitation differs from the speed of politics and the pace of ideologies. The 'time' of the labour movement - its consolidation and progress to class consciousness differs from the 'time' it takes capital to become conscious of its own interests, for instance.

This is illustrative of Althusser's chief thesis in Reading Capital and For Marx. The difference between idealist philosophy and classical political economy versus Marx's work isn't a matter of interpretation, of viewing the same object (capitalist political economy) from differing perspectives, but of looking at separate things entirely. The thought-object of Adam Smith is not the thought-object of Karl Marx. This for Althusser is why Capital is so difficult for mainstream economists - they try reading their object into the books and are troubled when their suppositions don't find an echo there, but their obviousness is challenged.

To demonstrate, classical political economy emphasises distribution and subordinates production and consumption to it, while assuming the social field this takes place in is homogenous and measurable (hence the difficulties bourgeois economics has with surplus value, because it is "invisible" and the product of a process of exploitation that passes it by entirely). Second, economics rests on an 'anthropology of needs'. That capitalist economic activity, from the buying and selling of commodities to the buying and selling of labour, is premised on need. And if an economy meets all needs, there is a tendency to equilibrium and harmony.

Marx trashes this woolly nonsense. He divides need into two 'departments' - department I is the production of the conditions of production, of capital selling to other capitals, and department II, or individual consumption. Therefore not all needs are made equal nor are they qualitatively the same. Secondly, not only is department II historicised, i.e. individual consumption changes over time, only those needs that are economically affective tend to be met. There is an urgent need to address food shortages for human beings, but the commercial imperative ensures millions of dogs get their Pedigree Chum while people starve. None of this is a product of human nature, but a characteristic of production for accumulation - the historically contingent, transitory, but nevertheless real structural imperatives of capitalism. Therefore the destruction of 'naive' needs anthropology entails the destruction of political economy itself, and a new theoretical object that is entirely separate and anti-humanist:

The true subjects (in the sense of constitutive subjects of the process) are therefore not these occupants or functionaries [of entrepreneurs, managers, workers] but the definition, distribution of their places and functions. The true 'subjects' are these definers and distributors: the relations of production. (p.180)

For Althusser, this leads to a number of important conclusions about Marx's approach to capitalism, his theoretical object. The economic is not a given, and so its concept has to be articulated by specifying what constitutes the economic, how this in turn is incarnated in its mode of production, its relation to the social whole, the specificities and efficacy of the political, economic, and so on. In other words, how the concept has to be alive, nuanced, and consistently renovated. Second, where Marxism eschews conceptual formalisation it leads to confusion, error, and all the nasties Althusser warned against. And third, linear causality is dumped. It is always structural, complex, and requires careful elaboration.

Althusser's observations on the gulf between political economy and Marx, and Marx's relationship with his forebears may have attracted much criticism, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Neoclassical and Keynesian economics proceed as if Marx never happened, and little if anything has appeared in mainstream economics that has seriously disturbed Marxist critiques of political economy. And this is a separation in which the different theoretical objects of each are materialised in academic departments and journals.

And the surprising bonus spoken of near the top of this post? It helped clarify my own approach to politics. Establishment commentators have often had it in the neck here for their stupidity, ignorance, and all the rest of it, and this lies in the complete absence of not treating politics as social relations. In other words, they have a faulty conception of what politics is. A true enough if banal observation. However, applying the same analysis to politics that Althusser excavated from Marx's critique of political economy and it is pretty obvious there is a qualitative difference between the gossip mongery and the parliament-centric output of political journalism and its academic corollary in political science. This world of difference lies in the fact that we do not have the same object. They are constructing and analysing a mystification, whereas the materialist analysis of politics embeds it fully within its context, characterised by the effectivity of other structures on it, its constitution by and constitution of class relationships, the struggles of sections and factions, and the sometimes rude intrusion of masses of new people - to give it an uncut rendering. Marxism is sometimes criticised for not having a political theory, in the same sense conservatism and liberalism has one. Well, it's obvious that it does and it can be seen in every critique it makes of bourgeois politics. It's just that its theory cannot be abstracted as a set of free floating principles. Though just as Althusser lamented the fact Marx never wrote his philosophy book and set down in explicit detail what separated his discoveries from what went before, perhaps a 'politics' book for Marxism should be written for the same reasons.

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