The C.R.[Cultural Revolution] proposes, with its decisions, a number of new political theses: risk of “regression” of a socialist country toward capitalism, continuation of class struggle in a socialist regime after the transformation, more or less, of the relations of production, necessity for a mass ideological revolution and mass organizations specific to this revolution, etc. Do these new political theses conform to Marxist theory? a) The central thesis, which poses the most important theoretical problems, is the thesis concerning the possibility of “regressing” from a socialist country toward capitalism. The thesis runs up against many convictions anchored in ideological interpretations of Marxism (religious, evolutionist, economist interpretations). This thesis is, in fact, unthinkable if Marxism is an essentially religious philosophy of history that guarantees socialism by presenting it as the goal toward which human history has always worked. But Marxism is not a philosophy of history, and socialism is not the “end” of history. This thesis would also be unthinkable if Marxism were an evolutionism. In an evolutionist interpretation of Marxism, there is a necessary and guaranteed order of modes of production: one cannot, for example, “leap” above a mode of production. This interpretation supplies a guarantee that you are always moving forward, therefore excluding in principle any risk of “regression”: from capitalism we can only proceed toward socialism, and from socialism to communism, not toward capitalism. And when, out of necessity, evolutionism must admit the possibility of “regression,” it thinks that to regress is to return to the older forms from the past, that have remained unchanged in themselves. But Marxism is not an evolutionism. Its conception of the historical dialectic allows for lags [décalages], distortions, regressions without repetition, leaps, etc. In this way, for Marxism, certain countries can “pass on to socialism” without having to “pass through” capitalism. This is why the regression toward a mode of production that has been in principle surpassed is possible (cf. Yugoslavia). But it for this same reason that this regression is not a pure and simple reversion to the past, toward an intact past, toward older forms: it occurs by way of a different process, the insertion of new (formally socialist) forms in a system of the capitalist mode of production, producing an original form of capitalism beneath socialist “appearances.” The “regression” thesis would, finally, be impossible if Marxism were an economism. In an economist interpretation of Marxism, the abolition of the economic bases of social classes is all that is necessary to confirm the disappearance of social classes, and with them, class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat’s necessity, and therefore the class character of the Party and the State—in order, in other words, to be able to declare that the victory of socialism has been “definitively assured.” But Marxism is not an economism. ~ Louis Althusser; On the Cultural Revolution
Posted on: Sun, 04 May 2014 01:00:28 +0000
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