One Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture

One-Dimensional Marxism is a much-needed examination of the influence of the French philosopher Louis Althusser on the English-speaking Left, especially in the cultural field where it has been strongest. The four essays in this book all had their origins as papers at the conference of the British Sociological Association. Simon Clarke's close interrogation of the main texts of "Althusserian Marxism", published here for the first time, has already been the inspiration for several other critiques. Victor Jeleniewski Seidler challenges Althusser's silence on precisely those issues which surfaced during his theoretical reign: sexual politics and the "critique of everyday life". Kevin McDonnell and Kevin Robins investigate, as a case study, Althusser's influence on the cultural politics of Left journals and Screen in particular. Finally Terry Lovell argues, with reference to the key Althusserian texts, that the crucial absence in his marxism is the notion of the social relations of cultural production. Altogether the book forms an indispensable set of essays for everyone concerned with marxism as it is lived and argued in the 1980s. "This book consists of four papers which have emerged from very different contexts and which have very different motivations. What they have in common is a rejection of the Althusserian interpretation of Marx and a reassertion of those elements of the marxist tradition that have been suppressed by Althusserianism. These elements can be summed up by the three terms used by Althusser to describe the major deviations from marxist "orthodoxy": "humanism", or a belief in the creative potential of human beings, a creative potential that is stunted and alienated under capitalism; "empiricism", or the belief that there is no higher basis for knowledge than experience, so that the basis for a critique of capitalist society can only be the experience of the mass of the people oppressed and exploited under capitalism; and "historicism", or the belief that knowledge, being based on socially mediated experience and being validated through social practice, is necessarily the product of social conditions at a particular time and place, conditions which are historically relative and which can be changed by those who live under them. These ideas have always been subversive of dogmatic marxism, which attempts to abstract marxism from the historical experience from which it derives and attempts to give marxism an absolute authority as source of a knowledge of history that is inaccessible to those who live and make that history." Introduction 5 1 Simon Clarke — Althusserian Marxism 7 2 Victor Jeleniewski Seidler — Trusting Ourselves: Marxism, Human Needs and Sexual Politics 103 3 Kevin McDonnell and Kevin Robins — Marxist Cultural Theory: The Althusserian Smokescreen 157 4 Terry Lovell — The Social Relations of Cultural Production: Absent Centre of a New Discourse 232