January 29, 2006: Draper and Althusser
Draper's great essay "The Two Souls of Socialism" is interesting for its Althusserianism, by which I mean Draper's deployment of protocols which many of us associate with L.A.
Draper sketches the problematic which has "socialism" as its object, showing that the principled dividing line between currents and strategies is not between reform versus revolution, or violence versus nonviolence, but between self-emancipation versus emancipation-by-someone-else. He shows where the major historical socialist currents lie within the problematic, and that the notion of socialism-from-above has been historically "dominant" (his term).
Draper doesn't use the term "problematic", and doesn't mention L.A. by name. (He does use "dominant" in L.A.'s sense.) His essay was published in 1968, before L.A.'s works were translated into English. Was Draper familiar with Althusser from the French CP theoretical journals where Althusser's work was first published?
Seems unlikely, and, I hope not. More likely is that Draper and Althusser arrived at a similar method as the result of their study of Marx. From different starting points, for different purposes, Draper and Althusser undertook systematic exegesis of Marx's work, struggling to free it from the "Alp" of nonsense under which it typically lies buried. Today Marx is very difficult to understand, not because there's anything so tough about his ideas, but because of the sheer weight of distortion piled up over 150 years. Draper and Althusser provide the protocols necessary to recover Marx's politics (Draper), and his method (Althusser). That they turn out to have certain kinds of similarities, at those points where they overlap, is gratifying.
Our little Trouble-Tickets crew have posed the question of protocols. If we want to pick and choose those elements from socialist history which are appropriate for our circumstances, it's important to proceed in a non-arbitrary way. The really great thing is that some of the key protocols already exist. IMO, Draper is the starting point for any rigorous understanding of Marx's politics, while Althusser is necessary for understanding Marx's method. In an ironic way, this is a stronger starting position than could have been enjoyed by previous generations of socialist militants.
Comments
Draper stresses that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and others advocated socialism-from-below. He doesn't point out that this current never defined "socialism" as an object, in Althusser's term. Where Social Democracy equated "socialism" with nationalization, the socialism-from-below current refused definition on principle, by way of rejecting utopianism. For them, "socialism" is the Great Silence.
I don't know what Draper would have thought about this statement. Yet I think it's implied by the logic of his essay.
Perhaps we'll learn more when Volume 6 of KMTR is published. :-)
Posted by: Mark Phillips | February 6, 2006 01:11 PM
Something more about the irony of our "privileged position". I mean by that firstly that although the movement is at low ebb, we nevertheless have this very strong body of work to proceed from -- Draper and Althusser. But also that, by golly, nobody can stop us! LOL! Ain't like the old days.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | February 6, 2006 06:17 PM
In his essay "Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformists", Draper uses the term "framework" where Althusser would use "problematic". When he says, "the form [of a particular set of ideas] taken within the framework of socialism", that "framework of socialism" is what Althusser would have called the problematic of socialism. Draper demonstrates how the complex of ideas he's discussing originates outside of socialism; then, when it becomes part of the socialist problematic, is forced by the logic of the problematic to take on changed forms.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | February 6, 2006 10:47 PM
From "In Defense of the New Radicals" (1964): "Politics abhors an ideological vacuum. The new-radical knows, just knows, that racial discrimination is wrong because he has already absorbed and internalized this consensus-idea from his milieu. Just as people who "don't believe in theories" merely mean that they accept the current theories of the status quo without examination and uncritically, so also the new-radical ideological vacuum is inevitably filled with unexamined content."
This characteristically Althusserian statement derives, I think, as does Althusser's similar work, from Lenin's critique of "spontaneity" as unexamined dominant ideology. Althusser's work reformulates and generalizes these themes: that's his job, he's a philosopher, he's building tools. Draper's work is direct political intervention where the tools are put to use. Similar origins, different immediate purposes, similar conclusions.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | February 9, 2006 03:16 PM
An example in which the dominant framework/problematic fills the ideological vacuum: "It is an old story: Hayden and Lynd see anti-Communism solely in terms decided by the Estabslishment; they accept the same frame of reference and put a different sign in front of it. It is the Establishment's ideology they are working with; and isn't this inevitable as long as they eschew a consciously thought-out one of their own? The vacuum is going to be filled, one way or the other." ("In Defense of the New Radicals".)
There's a subjective-idealist formulation in this passage: "frame of reference". Still, it's a pretty nifty use-in-practice of the methodoligical armature developed by L.A. What I'm finding so cool about it is that H.D. didn't know that!
Posted by: Mark Phillips | February 9, 2006 10:10 PM