Chapter Two

A Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism

. . . we are absolutely committed to a theoretical destiny:

we cannot read Marx’s scientific discourse without at the
same time writing at his dictation the text of another
discourse, inseparable from the first one but distinct from
it: the discourse of Marx’s philosophy.
Louis Althusser, Reading ‘Capital’

In Chapter 1, it was argued that Althusser considered

a transformation of the PCF’s political practice to be
dependent upon a restoration of Marxist theory –
more specifically, a renewal of historical materialism.
But this, in turn, had three theoretical preconditions:
(i) a critique of the dominant accounts of historical
materialism, which supposedly departed from Marx,
thereby vitiating development of his theory; (ii) the
displacement of these versions and their eventual
replacement by the genuine article (in the event,
Althusser ’s own reconstruction); and (iii) the
elaboration of the veritable Marxist philosophy
which could underwrite the scientificity of historical
materialism and guide and guarantee the necessary
extensions of it. It should now be apparent why the
final component of the Althusserian programme was
in fact – for Althusser – of paramount importance:
‘the investigation of Marx’s philosophical thought
[was] indispensable if we were to escape from the . . .
56 • Chapter Two

impasse in which history had put us’.1 What was needed was a philosophical,
that is, ‘epistemological and historical’,2 reading of Marx’s œuvre which barred
the route – opened by Marx himself – pursued by Marxist intellectuals in
reaction against the vulgarisation and Stalinisation of Marxism. The constitution
of Marxist philosophy was a sine qua non of epistemological critique and
scientific reconstruction. As Althusser put it in Reading ‘Capital’, ‘the theoretical
future of historical materialism depends today on deepening dialectical
materialism.’3 The hour of the missing Marxist ‘dialectics’ had arrived.
Of course, Althusser was not the first to feel the need for an archaeological
and methodological operation of this order. Marxist philosophers since Engels
had attempted to remedy the absence of a ‘Logic’. According to Althusser,
however, complementary to the deformation of historical materialism after
Marx was the proliferation of illegitimate versions of Marxist philosophy. For
reasons that were both ‘historico-political’ and ‘theoretical’,4 the requisite
historical epistemology had not materialised within Marxism. Instead, Marxist
philosophy had taken the form of a succession of ‘philosophical ideologies’
which posited an illicit relationship between themselves and historical
materialism. The dogmatist night, moreover, had not given way to the Marxist
dawn.

A Stalinist de-Stalinisation
The PCF had conducted its own inquiry into Stalinist philosophical dogmatism
in June 1962. Presided over by Thorez and presented by Garaudy, it was
published under the title of ‘The Tasks of Communist Philosophers and the
Critique of Stalin’s Errors’ in Cahiers du Communisme, the ‘theoretical and
political review’ of the Central Committee. In his report to the Twentieth
Congress, Khrushchev, notwithstanding his concluding injunction, was silent
on the subject of Marxist theory. Following the amplification of his critique
of Stalin at the Twenty-Second Congress, however, Soviet philosophers set
to work on defining the ‘tasks of Marxist-Leninist philosophy’ on the ‘road

1
Althusser 1969a, p. 21.
2
Althusser 1969a, p. 39.
3
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 77.
4
Althusser 1969a, p. 14.