Self-criticism and Revision

Abstract

The year 1967 marks the beginning of a period of self-critical activity in which Althusser takes his distance from some, though not all, of the concepts and theses of his essays of the early and mid — sixties. In the course of these self-criticisms, new theoretical positions emerge. As we shall see, these ‘new’ positions sometimes are genuinely new, but there is also some justification in the view of those commentators who have seen the later positions as a retreat — as a termination, in effect, of ‘Althusserianism’ as a distinct tendency of thought in Marxism.¹ As Althusser himself comments, his self-critical work is not generated wholly ‘within theory’ — it has its ‘external sources’ in politics. Undoubtedly these external sources were, principally, the radical student movement of the late 1960s, culminating in the mass strikes and factory occupations of May 1968, and, connectedly, the Chinese ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. For the students, and for many of the working class militants of the period, the response of the PCF to the ‘events’ of May ‘68 exposed it as not just incapable of offering revolutionary leadership but as an essentially conservative apparatus of control and containment of mass struggles. In the face of this assessment of the role of the PCF, and with the example of the Chinese cultural revolution in mind, some of Althusser’s former students and colleagues on the left of the PCF broke with the Party and were active in the formation of several small ‘Maoist’ groups and parties.