How To Do Dialectics With a Hammer
Louis Althusser’s search for a materialist dialectic—dialectics as a weapon, and materialism as a revolutionary possibility.
The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser wanted to make war against the prevailing currents of his time—to be untimely, to make a rupture with the current situation, to create space for revolutionary possibility. This, for Althusser, has always been the point of Marxism, but Marxists have too often adopted frozen, dogmatic, or utopian ideas. He wanted to reinvest a revolutionary spirit as well as a scientific spirit into Marxism—scientific in the sense of going back to first principles, the way that any great scientist does, to reinvigorate a moribund science. Marxism is a science in the sense that Marx’s materialist dialectic of history was a rupture with previous understandings of worldly dynamics on the magnitude of Newton and Einstein. “In particular,” he says, “if both historical and dialectical materialism are scientific disciplines, we must of necessity develop them, make them produce new knowledges—expect from them, as from any living science, some discoveries.” (Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, 18). This living spirit of science has often been forgotten in the Marxist tradition—a science can either be living or dead, and if it has no new discoveries, if it is not developed, it is dead, and so cannot serve any revolutionary purpose. Marxism is a scientific approach to history and socialism—as opposed to the utopian socialism of pre-Marxist periods—and this has gotten lost in the shuffle.
Marx’s radical difference with all previous thinkers, like how Darwin or Freud mark a radical break with all thinkers in their fields, needs to be kept in mind. His science was revolutionary, like all great sciences, and ought to be treated accordingly. This means not treating Marx as a figure of veneration, but as a figure to challenge, as Einstein challenged Newton, and as Einstein has been challenged by countless scientists after him. Althusser attacks Marx’s work in a radical way, but not to undermine it—to build upon it, in the spirit of a living science.
This notion of living science is very much in the spirit of Nietzsche, and it’s no surprise that, in the letters he writes to Fernanda Navarro contained in his last book Philosophy of the Encounter, he talks about being drawn to Nietzsche in his later years, though he remained mostly ignorant of Nietzsche in his younger years. Nietzsche was always concerned with science, or knowledge, that serves life—that’s the only way a science can really be revolutionary. It was in the spirit of science that Nietzsche said once: “One repays a teacher badly if one remains always only a student.” This is the only way that science can make progress, and really live—a revolutionary scientist is only revolutionary because he makes previous science obsolete. In his emphasis on treating Marxist science as a living science , Althusser develops philosophy for Marxism that is surprisingly close to Nietzsche. When Marx is treated as a religious figure beyond reproach, that’s when ideology and dogma set in, which Althusser is always on guard for. Althusser brought this antagonistic approach, a kind of theoretical war, to Marxist theory, which was sorely needed. This made him hugely popular as a radical among radicals during an turbulent time. Just as the workers movement and the mass struggle reached a boiling point of action in the 1960s, he incorporated that explosiveness into a new way of thinking about Marxism: “I argued and wrote that ‘theory is a practice,’ and proposed the category of theoretical practice, a scandalous proposal in some people’s eyes.” (SCI, 208) He is investing the weight and urgency of political practice into theory itself—and since politics is war, theory is also war.
Althusser is especially relevant today because he takes direct aim at the stuckness of Marxist theory and practice—and all we ever hear about today is how “the Left” is stuck, or even that it has ceased to exist! This requires first of all acknowledging that there is a crisis of stuckness in the first place, which Marxists have not always been willing to do. Althusser calls for a kind of reality check: “If, today, we talk about the ‘crisis of Marxism,’ we are not providing our adversaries with a single weapon that they themselves have not already used a hundred times over.” (Philosophy of the Encounter, 11). There has been a hesitancy among Marxists to even acknowledge deep problems within Marxism because this would further undermine it and strengthen the bourgeois position against socialism. But Althusser is saying that shying away from the real problems of Marxism will not protect it, but rather will further expose it to the same attacks it has always suffered. Taking hold of its problems, using the attacks that are made against it, taking them into Marxist theory itself, takes power away from the bourgeois critique. It weakens the enemy, rather than strengthening them. When problems are acknowledged, they cease to have power over us, and are less effective weapons against us in the hands of our enemies.
When we are blind to problems and weaknesses, they can be used against us in countless ways. Althusser finds a fundamental crisis within Marxist theory itself, which has been compounded by Stalinism and the ‘cult of personality’, which, for Althusser, led to a blockage of any further development of Marxism as a science, freezing theory into dogma, preventing the open formulation of theoretical questions that all sciences need. The crisis of Marxist theory comes from multiple directions, which must both be faced and overcome. Althusser notes that: “‘Scientific’ economists have ‘proved’ that the theory of value was a fairy tale, and the theory of surplus-value worthless, because it was ‘not operational’ mathematically speaking.” (POE 11). Bourgeois economists, then as now, try to use an avalanche of data to show that capitalism is the best possible system, and that Marxist economics is not a serious science. Althusser wants to show that not only is Marxist theory a science, it is a living science, meaning not dogmatic or ideological, in a way that bourgeois economics never will be.
Bourgeois economics, as the preservation and rationalization for the dead-end system of capitalism, will never be a living science—it will always be just an ideological ritual that services a corpse. But there is also a threat in the opposite direction, not by bourgeois economists, but by bourgeois humanists: “And those who have tried to ‘save Marx’ have turned him into a revolutionary by moral indignation, humanism or religion; they too have buried him, but beneath their high praise and ideological exploitation.” This is a tendency we still very much see today, of making Marxism about sentimentality and vague notions of social justice, which are all too easily absorbed by the liberal bourgeois state to serve the status quo, and make sure nothing ever changes. We need Althusser’s critique today because the Left is experiencing a kind of existential confusion about what it is, and what it can be. The Left today is blamed for everything, and yet can do nothing, because it does not know what it is.
The Left today is as stuck as it was in the 1960s when Althusser felt like his interventions into Marxist theory were necessary. To be revolutionary, Marxist theory must regain its status as a living science: “…Marxism itself risks repeating truths which are no longer any more than the names of things, when the world is demanding new knowledge…” (SCI 230). This is how Marxist theory entered the world—as a response to the demand for new knowledge, the objective knowledge of class relations, that the workers movement desperately needed. Before Marx supplied objective knowledge of political economy and relations of production, the workers movement had no stable theory to understand their situation—they were pulled every which way by utopian, humanistic, sentimentalist ideas.
Marxism, as the scientific understanding of history and social formations, marked a decisive turning point in the workers movement. But after Marxism became the standard theory of the workers movement, Marxism inevitably faced problems which required intervention and reinvigoration: “We were attempting to give back to Marxist theory, which had been treated by dogmatism and by Marxist humanism as the first available ideology, something of its status as a theory, a revolutionary theory.” (SCI 230) True science, living science, revolutionary science, is not the “first available” thing laying around, it isn’t something familiar—it is experimental, brought into the world by necessity, by sacrifice and daring. For science to really be science, it must be revolutionary, it must be a genuine discovery that requires constant struggle to be brought into the world.
This was the case with Marx himself, as Althusser emphasizes: “This discovery, this foundation of a new science and philosophy, was the work of Marx’s genius, but it was also an unrelenting work, in which—in the most abject poverty—he used all his energies and sacrificed everything to his enterprise. Engels carried on his work, and Lenin developed it anew. This, then, is the scientific doctrine which, in the course of a long and patient struggle, was imported from without into a working-class movement still given over to ideology, and transformed that movement’s theoretical foundation.” (SCI 31-32). Marx’s discovery of the scientific understanding of history as class struggle, historical materialism, was a struggle for Marx himself to discover. It required Engels and Lenin to build upon it, in order for it to fully live as a science, just as all sciences build upon each other, from discovery to discovery. But Marxism was also based in the struggle of the real conditions of the working class. Marxism fused with the working-class struggle because the workers needed it, and they recognized the objective truth within it. It broke the workers movement out of its bind, which it couldn’t escape by itself, while operating within the hegemony of bourgeois ideology.
But even Marxism, the best theoretical weapon ever devised against the bourgeoisie, can itself become part of ideology, if it doesn’t remain true to its origin as a science that is both living and revolutionary. Marxism is living and revolutionary when it is fully materialist and dialectical. Althusser’s aim is to pinpoint when, why, and how this truly materialist dialectic appears within Marx’s work—and to separate it from the rest of Marx’s work, so that it can be properly understood and built upon.
Althusser was always looking for reasons why Marxism had not been successful—why there were setbacks. He emphasizes the need for facing the crisis of Marxism. The crisis is in two parts: history and theory. He asks: “Why has the Communist movement been incapable of writing its own history in convincing fashion: not just Stalin’s history, but also that of the Third International and everything that preceded it, from The Communist Manifesto on?” (POE, 9). This lack of clear historical knowledge leaves Marxism, theory and practice, in a confused, disoriented state. This is obvious enough, but is not acknowledged by most Marxists, who do not want to do the hard work of grappling with the confused, haphazard state of Marxism. “Today,” he says, “we must forthrightly talk in terms of the crisis of Marxist theory, with the crucial reservation that this crisis has lasted for a very long time…” The distinction between theory and practice is one major area of weakness—they should rather be thought of as having a dialectical relationship. Theory, he says, “is the business of the popular masses in the ordeal of their struggle.” (SCI 280). The masses need a theory to orient themselves by, to be waiting for them when the moment comes—and theory needs to be based in the practical, popular struggle, as much as possible.
The distinction between theory and practice needs to be overcome if Marxism is to fulfill its revolutionary potential. Marx himself required the workers movement as a laboratory of sorts for his theory, and the workers movement itself required Marxist theory as objective knowledge to make sense of their situation in a scientific, rather than a utopian, way. The difference between a scientific and utopian approach to socialism is one of Marx’s fundamental discoveries—and what does this really mean? Utopianism comes from the Latin word utopos, which literally means “no-place.” Utopian socialism is ideological, not materialist, not based in objective conditions. It lacks a place, and so cannot get anywhere.
Scientific socialism, by contrast, seeks to base itself in objective knowledge of capitalist conditions, and by building on this true analysis of real life, get somewhere. A science can develop, but utopianism can’t. Science develops from discovery to discovery—utopianism just stays the same utopianism, there are no utopian discoveries, it never goes anywhere. Utopianism creates the illusion of some kind of motion or progress—utopian beliefs take the status quo as something new. Our utopian neoliberal elites today have forced us into a condition of changeless change—the lives of the mass of people are the same or worse than they were decades ago, but we hear endlessly about how far we’ve come.
The theoretical importance of the mass movement of workers has not been understood—it plays an essential role in the ongoing discoveries and revolutionary nature of Marxist theory. And this division between theory and practice is one major reason for the crisis, the stagnancy, of Marxist theory: “We are also—thanks to the mass movement itself, which sharpens contradictions and ultimately drags them into the light, the broad light of day, and puts them on the agenda—in a novel situation.” (POE, 10). Theory, therefore, must find novelty within the mass movement itself—just as Marx would not have discovered anything without the history of the class struggle and the workers movement, Marxist theory today needs the novelty and motion that only material struggle in the real world can provide. The mass movement, the ongoing class struggle, plays a theoretical function, of exposing contradictions that are implicit within material relations, but are all too often submerged. Theory needs to take this seriously and use what the mass movement can offer—and the mass movement needs theory to help it understand itself.
The distinction between theory and practice thus needs to be overcome—this is the importance of Althusser’s category of theoretical practice. He called this category that he proposed “scandalous” in the eyes of some—because it violates the separation of theory and practice, between ideas and the mass movement. But Althusser wants us to realize that they can’t be thought of as separate, and the separation between them weakens Marxism, and is in large part responsible for the failures of the Communist movement.
Lenin wrote that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,” which is true—Althusser is adding to this that without the mass movement itself, there can be no theory. The weakness of theory is largely due to its disconnection from the source that inspired and oriented Marx to begin with—the mass movement, the class struggle. But, at the same time, we must not think that the masses themselves can spontaneously generate correct socialism by their own pure consciousness.
They also need theory, but a theory that meets them where they are, and that supplies them with the means to win the ideological and material war against the bourgeoisie. Theory must therefore be a weapon that the masses know how to use, that is familiar to them—but that also helps them break out of the bourgeois ideology that they necessarily are stuck within. This is the challenge of Marxist theory—something familiar enough to be accepted as true by the masses, but different enough to be a tool for exiting the circle of bourgeois ideology.
Althusser is for Marxists who are ready for war, but not a haphazard war of lashing out in disorganized actions in the streets; rather, a theoretical war, where words are weapons. It is about treating ideas as events—here, as so often, Althusser echoes Nietzsche, who said that “the greatest ideas are the greatest events.” (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 285) If politics is a struggle, and theory is a form of politics, then theory must take on all the aspects of struggle—it must be a war. As Althusser puts it: “But in political, ideological, and philosophical struggle, the words are also weapons, explosives or tranquilizers and poisons. Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word.” (Lenin and Philosophy, 21) The struggle over words, the fight to find a language, is a revolutionary act. Part of Marx’s scientific discovery was precisely in this struggle to discover a new language for understanding history. This was, as Althusser noted in his later years, also the essence of Nietzsche’s philosophical project as well: “…in Nietzsche, the quest for another form of language, a poetic and aphoristic form, almost without reasoned argument…” (POE 235). Language that is too rational, too familiar, will never be revolutionary. A theoretical war is a war to find a language to describe the world in a new way—and this is the essence of Marx’s scientific discovery. He was trying to find new words, invent a new language, for critiquing capitalism, synthesizing the three currents of German philosophy, British political economy, and French socialism, and finding ways to express this synthesis that could be grasped by the workers movement, but that also was a potent enough theoretical weapon to explain real conditions so that they could be faced for the first time, and then transcended.
But Marx’s revolutionary language had ossified, became canon and orthodoxy—Althusser wanted to give it its revolutionary edge back. Althusser’s aim was “…to prevent the living freedom of science from being buried under its own results.” (SCI 229) This is the paradox of science; when it is a successful, true science, its own discoveries can cause it to become a frozen, ideological trap. Marxism does not have to be saved because it was false—it has to be saved because it is true. But, crucial point, it is not true because of its humanistic content—it is true because it avoids humanism; or, rather, it is truest insofar as it avoids humanism, which Marx doesn’t always (the concept of alienation, for instance, is a major humanistic trap that Althusser wants to pull Marxist theory away from).
Althusser takes a materialist approach to everything. Even philosophy must always be thought of, not as hanging in some ideal realm, but as existing in a material world of conquered positions, of territories—nothing is neutral, war is total. Philosophy, he writes, “exists only in so far as it occupies a position, and it occupies this position only in so far as it has conquered it in the thick of an already occupied world.” (SCI 205) Philosophies must be carved out of the world as it is, like anything else—they don’t descend ready-made from on high. In his view of philosophy as this kind of struggle, he comes close to Nietzsche again, in the idea that life only exists at the expense of other life. In Althusser’s militant opposition to the bourgeoisie, his single-minded focus on eradicating them and installing a dictatorship of the proletariat, he embodies something of a reversal of Nietzsche’s hatred of the masses—he has as much contempt for the bourgeoisie as Nietzsche does for the masses. Just as Nietzsche wanted to give new theoretical weapons to the aristocracy, Althusser wanted to give new theoretical weapons to the masses.
Nietzsche wants to usher in the epoch of the ubermensch, and Althusser wants to usher in the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nietzsche says in the section “On The Rabble” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:. “Life is a well of joy; but where the rabble also drinks, there all wells are poisoned….and when they called their filthy dreams joy, they poisoned even words.” Nietzsche wants a new language, as does Althusser, they are both revolutionary in this way, but in precisely opposite directions. Nietzsche wants to de-proletarianize language—rooting his enemy, the rabble, the masses, out of language itself. Nietzsche is looking for an almost counterrevolutionary language, while Althusser is looking for a revolutionary one—but in precisely the same way. This is another example of Nietzsche’s total war approach—he sees the enemy, the masses, even in language itself. Althusser also sees the enemy here. Both thinkers want to discover a language to resolve the problem of circularity. As Althusser says: “For Hegel, society, like history, is made up of circles within circles, spheres within spheres…It is not an accident that Marx abandons the metaphor of the circle…. A circle is closed…” (SCI 219-220) Althusser wants to break out of this circle, so that the proletariat can emerge in full consciousness of itself. Nietzsche, on the other hand, wants to see this circle as inevitable—this is the meaning of his famous doctrine of the eternal return of the same.
For Nietzsche, seeing that all of history repeats endlessly is the challenge that defines the ubermensch, the superior man of the future who he prophesizes. The ubermensch is powerful precisely because he recognizes and accepts the circularity of time, he is able to affirm the fact that nothing changes. The ubermensch should draw power from this—it should inspire him. Althusser, on the other hand, rejects the circularity of time, but also the linearity of time. History is not a closed, repeating loop for Althusser, but it is also not a straight line that will lead us from capitalism to socialism and finally to communism, as some overly teleological Marxists believe. Rather, the possibility for revolution exists within materiality itself—history is material, and material is explosive.
Althusser sought to capture the radical energy in the streets and in the workers movement at the time, in theory. He wanted to make theory speak the language of explosiveness, because only a theory like that can be revolutionary. In order to free history from bourgeois ideology, Althusser wants us to view history as living history—and here again he comes close to Nietzsche, whose important early essay on history is titled “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.” In that essay, Nietzsche critiques the modern academic tendency that sucked the life out of history: “We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life: for it is possible to value the study of history to such a degree that life becomes stunted and degenerate—a phenomenon we are now forced to acknowledge, painful though this may be, in the face of certain striking symptoms of our age.” (Untimely Meditations, 59). This echoes Althusser’s assessment of why Marxism has stagnated, why its theory has failed—because it has been separated from its source in the mass movement and the class struggle. “Living history,” Althusser says, “obeys only a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle.” (POE 264). For Marxists, there has been too much emphasis on laws, of history, of dialectics, and this has rigidified into dogma that has blinded Marxism, sealing it within itself, deadening its force as a science and as a revolutionary weapon. Althusser wants Marxists to think of history as part of Marxist science—historical materialism. This means history as a living thing, as part of living science. This is the revolutionary essence of Nietzsche’s project, of a gay science—finding a living history.
All this applies above all to that favorite tool of Marxists—dialectics. If dialectics is not done with Marxist ends, it ceases to be a materialist dialectic—that is to say, it ceases to be a living science. Dialectics can become a weapon of the status quo, which Althusser thinks has become the case, with the emphasis on “laws” of dialectics. Laws box things in, they close us off from the possibility all around us. Dialectics is only revolutionary when it disregards laws. As he says, “When the ‘laws’ of the dialectic are stated, it is conservative (Engels) or apologetic (Stalin). But when it is critical and revolutionary, the dialectic is extremely valuable.” (POE, 254). So Althusser’s project is to rescue a revolutionary dialectic from the rigid dialectical laws that Marxism has been turned into—the dialectic implicit within materiality, the dialectic of living history, of life itself.
Althusser’s conviction that everything is a war, that words are weapons, extends to dialectics above all. Only a materialist dialectic can be a weapon. Something is only useful in war if it can be made into a good weapon—and since, for Althusser (as for Lenin) politics is philosophy, and politics is war, philosophy should employ tools and concepts only when they are good weapons. Dialectics can become an abyss, it can become a trap of idealism that we fall into endlessly, losing our direction and our common sense. Indeed, this is the critique of dialectics that Nietzsche makes in the chapter called “The Problem of Socrates” in Twilight of the Idols: “One chooses dialectics only when one has no other expedient. One knows that dialectics inspire mistrust, that they are not very convincing. Nothing is easier to expunge than the effect of a dialectician….Dialectics can only be a last-ditch weapon in the hands of those who have no other weapon left.” Dialectics, for Nietzsche, is something that we use when we are scrambling, weak, in retreat, not when we are on the offensive and ascending. Dialectics, for Nietzsche, is not a weapon for warriors, but for those who are merely trying to survive—it is a way for lower forms of life to eke out some kind of meager survival by confusing and disorienting the superior men.
Althusser wants instead to think about how dialectics can be a weapon of first resort, a weapon used to conquer—a tool for the aim of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. And a weapon is powerful precisely insofar as it is focused and unitary—a weapon that tries to be too many things is not much of a weapon. Look at one of the most expensive weapons of all time, the F-35 fighter jet. It was everything, it had every conceivable technology and form of attack. And yet it was a total failure. Not despite this, but because of it. The F-35 was a weapon for everything, a weapon without limits, and so it ended up being a weapon for nothing, a weapon that was at every point limited. Clear limits, paradoxically, are the only thing that allow us to overcome limits. If we don’t define our limits, then our limits will define us. A weapon is meant to help us win victories and expand our territory, so it must be conceived along the same lines, of having definite limits.
This is how dialectics should be thought of, too. Dialectics without limits is an abyss that we can fall into—dialectics with limits can be a weapon that we use to make our enemies, those in charge of the bourgeois state, fall into an abyss. Marx, in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, himself comes close to echoing Nietzsche’s critique of dialectics: “The dialectical form of exposition is only correct when it knows its limits.” What might dialectics that knows it limits mean and look like? Dialectics within limits is what enables us to avoid idealism, and remain rooted in authentic materialist philosophy, and avoid dogmatisms of all kinds. A limited dialectic is one that can be wielded as a weapon with a purpose, a grounded weapon, one that can root out idealism wherever it is. Limited dialectics is the only kind of dialectics that can have anything to do with a really materialist philosophy.
Idealist dialectics, the dialectics of Socrates, was the kind of dialectics without limits that Nietzsche criticized, and it was done without any goal in mind—what did Socrates want? Nothing. What did he know? He claimed he knew nothing. But nothingness is a lie—it always contains, or conceals, multitudes. Nothingness is rather the most tangible, the most potent, category that there is. Nothingness, the void, the abyss—is so potent and active that Nietzsche famously warned his readers to be careful of looking too long into the abyss, because the abyss looks also into us, and changes us. This is a kind of revolutionary materialism within the abyss or the void itself. This posture of nothingness as empty is precisely what Althusser wants to critique, and in his materialism of the encounter, he wants to find possibility within materiality itself, specifically within the void that the oldest Greek philosophers, like Epicurus and Democritus, the ones before Socrates, theorized.
Here again, in going to the pre-Socratic philosophers for meaning, Althusser echoes Nietzsche, who always looked to them as a source of more useful thinking, which had been messed up by the arrival of Socrates on the world historical scene. In thinking of materiality as containing a void and atoms at play within it, which can collide and spark off a whole world, revolution is conceived as a materialist phenomenon, not something that is imposed on materiality from without, but always already implicit, waiting to be unleashed. Words are weapons, in philosophical and political struggle. But philosophy, as Althusser defines it, is the creation of a void—so how can a void be a weapon of revolution? It helps create a revolution without ideals. The void is the opposite of the ideal. A void sucks the ideal down into it, so that real encounters, real possibility, can begin. No ideals in the void—and ideals suppress real material possibility, so the void, rather than being empty and a dead-end, is actually the essence of possibility. Materiality contains everything within it if we only have ears to hear it.
A material encounter itself can give birth to a new world of revolutionary possibility. It’s already there waiting, the new world ready to be born from within the material of the old. We don’t need to wait for perfect conditions, or for certain economic criteria to be met, like some Marxists think—we need to unleash what is already there. The void is not innocent and empty, as the idealist dialectic of Socrates would have it. Rather, the void of the materialist dialectic is revolution itself. The dialectic of Socrates is nihilistic, ironic, idealist—he wanted nothing, he knew nothing. Marxists on the other hand, want something, and know something. What do Marxists want when they do dialectics? They ultimately want to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. And what do Marxists know? They know that the history of hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. These two concerns—dictatorship of the proletariat and historical materialism—act as the ground for Althusser (and for all revolutionary Marxists who wish to explode through bourgeois idealism). These concepts are the limits that give power, direction, and meaning to dialectics. This is the foundation of a properly materialist dialectic.
But, as Althusser always points out, a dictatorship of the proletariat is not something that is inevitable, it is not an endpoint that history is necessarily building towards. There is no telos towards it, or towards anything. This is why Marx’s scientific, rather than utopian, understanding of history was such an important discovery. Science has no final end point, nothing about it is inevitable—it requires work and constant effort to advance. Science is never finished, just like revolution is never finished. Discoveries are not inevitable—they can remain hidden just as easily. Science works on the materiality of the world, not imposing concepts onto it, but working from within it. So, the future that Marxist science works towards is already implicit within material existence itself. But just because it's already here, it doesn’t mean it’s inevitable—in fact it’s the opposite. The future is not something you see far off in the distance and try to move towards—it is something you rip out of the present and throw ahead of you. Althusser uses the image of a moving train that we have to catch—it takes a revolutionary spirit; it takes an openness to adventure.
Materialist revolution is an ongoing wave that is there waiting for us—we don’t have to wait for it. We just need to hop on. Since the revolutionary potential of a dictatorship of the proletariat is already possible, it is easy to overlook and miss—we always look to the future for it, when we should be looking to the present, to what already exists within materiality itself. As he says: “Marxism…when it was living, was always in a critical position…because it was always engaged in—and surprised by—mass movements, and open to the demands of the unpredictable history of their struggles. Now more than ever, even in the midst of the worst contradictions, the masses are on the move.” (SCI 280). The masses, like materiality itself, are on the move already. Marxist theory needs to catch this moving train and ride it for all its worth. We will be surprised where it takes us—but this is as it should be, since revolution, as the greatest of adventures, requires surprise. Just as an adventure without surprise isn’t an adventure, a revolution without surprise isn’t a revolution.
Unleashing the potential within materiality itself requires a total cleansing of idealism from dialectics and from Marxism. But even Marx (and Engels), the inventors of dialectical materialism, have traces of idealism within their thinking. Althusser’s total war approach, his focus on identifying limits, applies even to Marx—especially to Marx. And this is one of the inspiring things about Althusser—that a properly materialist dialectic has not yet been discovered, and there is still this challenge ahead of us. The world of Marxist theory, which seems so old, orthodox, and established, is thus wide open again, with this great task of discovering a revolutionary materialist dialectic.
And this is the unique thing about reading Althusser—he makes Marxism seem alive and new, in a way that few other thinkers have managed. But at the same time, this openness is also a closedness, because the whole problem is that dialectics has been too open and has verged into idealism. So, Althusser represents a kind of openness in service of closedness—of transcending the limits of Marxist theory, but only in order to find limits. This dialectic of openness and closedness, in service of smashing bourgeois idealism wherever it is, to unleash revolutionary materialism, echoes Nietzsche once again. Nietzsche’s book Twilight of the Idols is Althusserian, in the smashing idealism and overturning the veneration of the past. The subtitle of that book is even better: “How To Philosophize with a Hammer.” A hammer for smashing idealism wherever it is, but a hammer can also be thought of as a tuning fork, an instrument to hear and to sound out the music of the future within materiality itself. This is Althusser’s dialectic exactly: smashing and listening. One might also think of what Michelangelo said about his approach to sculpture. He was trying to discover and free the figure within the unfinished rock. By chipping away at the rock with his hammer, he freed the beautiful art within the material itself. He wasn’t imposing the figure on the rock, he was listening to what was already within the material, hearing it, smashing it, hearing it. Listening and attacking. This is how to do dialectics with a hammer—and a beautiful future, meaning a future beyond capitalism, requires it just as much as a beautiful statue.
The image of the hammer as a guide to revolution: pounding and sounding, both a mallet and a tuning fork for hearing vibrations, smacking materiality, listening to what comes out. The musicality of materiality is where revolution is. One must have an ear for chaos. As Nietzsche said, we must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star. This seems like a bourgeois, egoist perspective, which is appropriate for Nietzsche’s aristocratic political commitments. For Althusser it is reversed. Chaos is not within; we are not giving birth to a dancing star. Rather chaos is already part of the dialectic of materiality. Althusser traces materialism back to the earliest Greeks, the pre-Socratic theorists of the atom, who held that only two things exist: atoms and the void. The atoms are generally in parallel with each other, but sometimes they swerve, and collide, and lock together with each other, to form new possibilities and new worlds. And what is a swerve if not a dance? Materiality is a dance. Part of a dance is always found during the dance—losing yourself in the dance is how you find your movements.
This is exactly the nature of materialist revolution, as Althusser sees it. “The materialist philosopher,” he says, “is a man who always ‘catches a moving train,’ like the hero of an American Western.” (POE 277). We must recognize that reality and materiality is itself in motion. We aren't, as for Nietzsche, creating something within that will transform the world. Rather we are encountering the world in its materiality, on its own terms, rather than on ours. For Althusser, the dancing star is materiality itself, which we attune ourselves with. It's already there. This is consistent with his idea of working-class consciousness as already there, on the move. It doesn't need to be developed, it doesn't need to be de-alienated, there is no need for a humanist, sentimentalist detour. Marxists who get bogged down in alienation, to free humanity from alienation, are missing the bigger picture.
We don’t overcome alienation by focusing on it—we overcome it by being true materialists, which means, aleatory materialists, revolutionaries who see possibility within the world around us already. We do not need to return to some pre-alienated state. Theorists don’t need to free working-class consciousness from alienation. That is not what materialist revolution is about. It is rather just the unleashing of what's already there. Proletariat consciousness is itself always already inherent in materiality. The better world is already built, it's there waiting in materiality itself, it just needs a chance to explode.
Class domination is the fact of history—so why would the dominated class need to have its consciousness developed? Domination creates far more consciousness in the dominated rather than the dominators; Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, says history would have been altogether too stupid a thing without that admixture of weakness. The working class being by far the most dominated class, means its consciousness is also most highly developed. The mass of people knows what is going on, they don’t need a magic de-alienation trick done on them. One might say that domination has warped the consciousness of the working class, and so it needs to be de-bourgeoisified, but this is wrong. Domination sharpens and clarifies for the dominated—it only obscures for the dominators. Working class consciousness does not need to be de-bourgeoisified—the bourgeoisie just need to be removed. The working class is not alienated, it is just trapped in a state run by aliens. Working-class consciousness is a gun that has already been loaded—it’s just waiting for the trigger to be pulled.
Getting a kind of clarity about this is the problem. Limits bring clarity. The importance of limits, of horizons, is at the core of Nietzsche’s thought, from his earliest work to his last. Limits are also important for Althusser. Nietzsche’s critique of Socratic dialectics is essentially that it has no limits, and its effect is disorienting, making us feel like we fell in it, sweeping our feet out from under us. Modernity, for Nietzsche, is characterized primarily by its lack of limits. It is an infinity that we are drowning in, and crashing into. As he writes in The Gay Science, in an aphorism titled “In the Horizon of the Infinite”: “But hours will come when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of his cage!” Infinite spaces, pure openness, the melting of all limits, seems like freedom and possibility, but is actually a trap, a cage we can’t escape. Possibility and revolution, for Nietzsche as for Althusser, requires finitude.
Finitude applies to a properly materialist dialectic. Dialectics can make us lose our sense of ourselves, since we are constantly pushing off the ideas of others. Dialectics is necessary but can be counterproductive. As Althusser writes, “Marx…was able to define himself only by reference to Hegel and by marking himself off from Hegel.” (SCI 206). This is dialectical engagement—Marx’s own position came into being as he pushed off from Hegel. This is necessary, but also risks taking on aspects of Hegel’s idealism. Identifying and eliminating those traces from Marxism is the essence of Althusser’s project. Dialectics without limits results in a kind of melting into that which you are engaging with—limits help you keep sense of your own mission. This is why limits are so important for what Marx calls “correct” dialectics. Althusser wants to build on this idea of a correct dialectics, operating within limits. Marxist dialectics can thus only be “correct” and materialist if it operates within limits, if it obeys finitude—so this becomes Althusser’s goal, finding the limits of Marx, and this is where his radicalism lies. Finding the limits of Marx, making war against Marx, in order to create a materialist weapon for Marxism to use—this requires extricating the traces of ideology infecting Marx’s work.
One of Althusser’s major essays in his later philosophy is called “Marx in his Limits,” which is an attempt to find the limits of Marx’s thought, for the purpose of making Marxism a more effective revolutionary weapon. It’s all about finding finitude within Marxism, not to decrease or minimize Marxism, but rather to give it its full potency. In his later years, Althusser came to define his project as creating a philosophy for Marxism to use—and we can only know what kind of philosophy Marxism needs, if we know the limits of Marxism, and those limits start with Karl Marx himself. Althusser makes frequent reference in his writings to Kant’s definition of philosophy as a Kampfplatz or battlefield, and he never stops using that as his inspiration. Reflecting on his philosophical battles of the 1960s in an important 1975 essay called “Is It Simple To Be A Marxist in Philosophy?” he writes of his earlier work as “political interventions in the existing world of Marxist philosophy, directed at one and the same time against dogmatism and the rightist critique of dogmatism; and also philosophical interventions in politics, against economism and its humanist ‘appendix.’” (SCI 208). Here we see how he was at war on almost every imaginable front, some of which almost seem contradictory. This is dialectical combat—war in every direction. He mentions his critique of Economism. Economism is the old Marxist heresy that Lenin attacks in What Is To Be Done? It is the idea that the category of economics itself, pure and unalloyed, is the royal road to revolutionary change in politics and theory. This goes along with a mechanistic (rather than dialectical) view of reality, that economics is the sole factor in sociopolitical dynamics. As Althusser says in For Marx, “…the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History, these instances…are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.” (For Marx, 113)
Revolution is not about waiting like this for perfect economic conditions to present themselves—it is about catching the moving train, the masses on the move. Althusser has pinpointed a form of idealism deep within a Marxist tendency that fancies itself the most materialist. Those who reduce Marxism to just the pure play of economic factors view themselves as being the least idealistic, and the most materialist. But this is why Althusser says that materialism must not be taken at face value, because it can contain idealist delusions: “We must therefore treat the term ‘materialism’ with suspicion: the word does not give us the thing, and, on closer inspection, most materialisms turn out to be inverted idealisms.” (POE 272).
Here we see Althusser critiquing Economism, the belief that focusing on pure economics will catapult revolution into being, because, despite its seemingly concrete, materialist basis, this is actually a form of idealism. Marxism, which for Althusser must be a revolutionary theory grounded in the mass movement, should not be about waiting for the perfect conditions, for the King Economy to finally appear and show the way to true revolution. The masses are already on the move—to wait for the King Economy to appear is to miss the materialist dialectic where it really is. Economism dresses itself up as a kind of authentic materialism, but Althusser, despite (or perhaps because of) being totally committed to materialism, is always on the lookout for materialisms that contain idealism within them. Even in this seemingly most secure and material form of Marxism, reducing things down to pure economic phenomena, Althusser sees a kind of idealism. Waiting for the right moment, when economic relations by themselves will spark off mass political change based in revolutionary consciousness, ends up paralyzing both theory and practice. This is a major reason why the science of dialectical materialism—which has to be the most living science—has not progressed.
Althusser critiques Economism because of its materialism that is really idealism, and for its naïve belief in mechanistic change—that one element, economics itself, can deterministically bring about revolution. This aversion to dialectical thinking is characteristic of the bourgeois mind. But Althusser also critiques another tendency, Marxist humanism, which is equally idealistic and bourgeois. This tendency was ascendent in the 1960s, and is certainly with us today, in the conflation of Marxism with sentimentalism, identity politics, social justice, and related things. As he writes, “And those who have tried to ‘save Marx’ have turned him into a revolutionary by moral indignation, humanism, or religion; they too have buried him, but beneath their high praise and ideological exploitation.” (POE 11). So, this flight into humanism takes on moralistic, religious aspects—and that is as far away from materialism as it gets. Humanism cannot be the starting point for revolutionary materialist Marxism, for Althusser, because humanity is a maze in which we get lost.
Revolutionary spark can never emanate from the labyrinth of humanity itself—it is, to paraphrase Nietzsche, an abyss. But not a materialist abyss which contains possibility—rather, an idealist abyss, that contains only the endless maze of man’s inward consciousness. Man is something to be overcome, to be transcended, and humanism of all kinds is a trap, a bourgeois blind alley. Humanism gets in the way of truly posing the problems of historical materialism, and so of solving them. Humanism obscures the development of dialectical materialism as a science. This applies to all kinds of Marxist humanism—especially the focus on alienation as a determining concept. If we start from the concept of humanity itself, we stay stuck within humanity, and can’t properly understand the evolution of social formations, which is what is really revolutionary about Marxism. The dialectic doesn’t work towards solving alienation, or bringing some kind of long lost wholeness. The dialectic is always driving forward, always incomplete, but that strengthens it, rather than weakening it. Alienation has nothing to do with the essence of the materialist dialectic.
This is why Althusser interrogates the concept of alienation, and is deeply suspicious of its role in Marxist theory—it creates this idea that working class consciousness somehow has vanished. In truth, it is what has always been there, waiting for us to catch up with it. It is not only a distraction that sinks us deep within the labrynth of the human soul, from which it is hard to find a way out, but it also has the effect of delaying revolution—that we need to wait until worker consciousness has been un-alienated. But the consciousness of the masses does not need to be cured of its alienation. Rather, theory needs to be cured of its idealism—dialectic must be made properly materialist and revolutionary, so that it forms a good weapon for the masses to use. “If Marx does not start out from man, which is an empty idea—that is, one weighed down with bourgeois ideology—it is in order finally to reach living men…” (SCI 239) That is to say, rather than get lost in the labrynth of alienation, as some Marxists are all too eager to do, it is better to avoid the trap of humanism entirely, since that always just leads to bourgeois sentimentalism, delaying revolutionary action, and reinforcement of the status quo.
For this reason, Althusser recommends a position of theoretical anti-humanism. Althusser sees Marx’s fixation on alienation as a holdover of his Feuerbachian days—when Marx was a younger thinker, he was necessarily influenced by the idealism of Hegel and Feuerbach. Part of Marx’s struggle was in freeing himself from that influence, and developing a truly materialist dialectic—which was only achieved in fits and starts, breaking through in certain places in Capital and other later writings. This is why Althusser recommends avoiding much of Marx’s early writings, because they are so tinged by the bourgeois humanism and idealism of Feuerbach and Hegel. “No one will deny,” Althusser says, “that Feuerbach’s philosophy is openly a theoretical humanism.” (SCI 231).
Part of Marx’s development was in creating a dialectical materialist analysis that was free of this bourgeois humanistic idealism. “But I do not see how [Marxist dialectical materialism] can allow any humanist interpretation: on the contrary, they are designed to exclude it, as one variety of idealism among others, and to invite us to think in a quite different manner.” (SCI, 234-235). Marx’s way of thinking, a materialist dialectic, is explicitly anti-humanist, but only theoretically—in practice, it is the most humanistic way of thinking, because it is based in a desire to emancipate the mass of people from their class-based exploitation. Marxist anti-humanism is done in the name of humanity itself.
Bourgeois humanism must perish, so that humanity itself may live. As Althusser says: “But Capital is full of the sufferings of the exploited, from the period of primitive accumulation to that of triumphant capitalism, and it is written for the purpose of helping to free them from class servitude.” (SCI 235). The materialist dialectic that Marx developed is humanistic in its intent—that is the whole point of The only way to achieve a humanism worthy of the name is through anti-humanism, by negating humanity itself. Real humanism, freedom of the masses from exploitation and domination by their class enemies, is not achieved by being directly aimed at. This risks fetishizing the human essence, which leads to bourgeois humanism and confusion. We see many Marxists going down this path. Real humanism is achieved rather by materialist analysis, which explicitly excludes any notion of humanism, essence, alienation, and so on. The whole reason Marx was powerful was because he developed an objective system for analyzing and understanding the way that misery was produced in real life—the soul, the human essence, all of that is what is deeply motivating his materialist dialectic, but it plays no conscious role. The way to achieve humanity at last is by anti-humanistic analysis.
Althusser holds that the young Marx was still working out the bourgeois ideology that he was raised in, both in his personal material life as a son of a bourgeois family, and his intellectual milieu, especially Hegel and Feuerbach. As Marx himself lived the life of a revolutionary, playing a key role in the First International Workingmen’s Association, and so on, he was able to work toward developing his scientific theory. So his early ideas, which focus on humanistic themes like alienation, distort his real revolutionary rupture with all previous thinkers, which is only fully developed in Capital (but for Althusser, even Capital is plagued by Marx’s early bourgeois tendencies, and so it has to be read in this special way, to navigate around traces of bourgeois ideology). So, for Althusser, the young Marx is not really Marx at all, and Capital begins with these errors of the young Marx, and have caused many of the problems of Marxism, which Althusser is correcting. Humanism gets in the way of truly posing the problems of historical materialism and so of solving them. Theoretical anti-humanism is the engine of the materialist dialectic—and only a materialist dialectic can be truly revolutionary.
Althusser emphasizes the importance of theoretical anti-humanism in Marxism as a way of defending the status of Marxism as a science, and its status as a science is what gives Marxist analysis its power and makes it unique. Marx developed his science while writing Capital, which was his way of sort of purging the bourgeois tendencies of his earlier Feuerbachian thought. Marxism was conceived of as a science, but did not become a science all at once—it was a long, arduous process to create a truly materialist dialectic, a truly scientific theory of history. And this process remains incomplete—this is what Althusser wants to remind us. But instead of being discouraged by this, it should be inspiring—there is so much more thinking still to be done!
Bourgeois humanism, like Marxist humanism, suppresses and confuses revolutionary sharpness and clarity. It is quicksand into which we sink. Marxist anti-humanism is done in the name of humanity itself—dialectics is about hitting a target by not aiming at it. The most important targets are the ones that retreat from you when you aim too directly at them. Hitting the most important targets requires indirect aim—that’s dialectics. Bourgeois humanism must die, and Marxist humanism is just a symptom of that, in order for humanity itself to at last live. We don’t destroy bourgeois humanism by reverting to a Marxist humanism. But, crucial point, we also don’t destroy humanism by using a mechanical, economistic Marxism either. A materialist dialectic avoids humanism of all kinds, but it also avoids economic determinism and a idealistic belief in mechanistic change. This would be a simple materialism, since many materialisms, as Althusser says, are really just forms of idealism. Althusser’s materialist dialectic all about splitting this difference, between anti-humanism and anti-mechanism.
Marxist revolution is neither humanistic nor deterministic—yet it is all too often conceived of in those terms by leading theorists. It is neither just about the alienated human essence, nor just about cold, mechanically, economic conditions determining everything. Marxist revolution is about one thing—a materialist dialectic. What might that really mean? How can materiality be revolutionary? How can materiality contain possibility for changing the world?
This question leads the later Althusser to develop his own concept of materialism, which contains dialectical possibility within it, which is not simple or deterministic, and has no concept of teleology or idealism, yet still remains revolutionary. He calls this materialism a materialism of the encounter, or aleatory materialism: “A materialism of the encounter, of contingency—in sum, of the aleatory, which is opposed even to the materialisms that have been recognized as such, including that commonly attributed to Marx, Engels, and Lenin which, like every other materialism of the rationalist tradition, is a materialism of necessity and teleology, that is, a disguised form of idealism” (261-262 POE).
Teleology and necessity are the two enemies of all materialism. This is the idea that there is some definite, final end point that history is leading towards. For Althusser, this is pure idealism, and leads to stagnation, dogmatism, and hopelessness. The revolutionary future is not something guaranteed, or something that history is marching toward. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous line about “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice” is precisely the kind of bourgeois idealism and teleology that Althusser is critiquing. No wonder MLK is the patron saint of the liberal bourgeois state—he enshrined teleology as America’s national social justice fetish! Even his “I Have A Dream” speech shows traces of this bourgeois tendency of idealism and teleology: the idea that one day perfect conditions will obtain and so on, this is precisely how the bourgeoisie like us to think. The alternative view is Malcolm X’s: justice now, by any means necessary, not some dream that we are working towards. People are ready now—the masses are already on the move. The dream isn’t in the future one day—the dream is happening now, and if it is ignored, it will turn into a nightmare that can’t be ignored. Which is precisely what is happening right now.
Instead of teleology, conceiving of the revolutionary future as some end point that history is marching us towards, Althusser wants to be a true materialist—meaning, locating revolution and possibility within materiality itself. It is always already there, if we can develop ears to hear it. It isn’t something far off, it’s all around us—it is us. And it is not guaranteed, we are not on an escalator towards socialism. Rather, it is all about chance, it could go either way, we might fail, we probably will fail—but this is what makes revolution what it is, just as an adventure possibly going wrong is what makes it an adventure.
Althusser conceives of materialist philosophy as “a philosophy of the void: not only the philosophy which says that the void pre-exists the atoms that fall in it, but a philosophy which creates the philosophical void in order to endow itself with existence: a philosophy which, rather than setting out from the famous philosophical problems (why is there something rather than nothing?), begins by evacuating all philosophical problems, hence by refusing to assign itself any object whatever…in order to set out from nothing…” (174-175 POE). Setting out from nothing is the only way to get anywhere, paradoxically—just like theoretical anti-humanism is the only way to achieve real humanism. Setting out from nothing is also the only way to be free of teleology, or a fixed end point that you move toward—and so the only way to be open to the real possibility in materiality itself, which contains chance and randomness, two essential elements of any revolution. The void is not a problem to be solved, as the concept of alienation seems to have it. Marxist humanism treats the void as a problematic to be resolved, rather than as the site of revolutionary materialist possibility.
What is needed is the creation of a void for proletariat consciousness to take shape in. What is needed is a void for possibility, for imagination, to do its work. What will fill the void—if the void itself is authentic enough—is working class consciousness itself, the fact of history. It doesn’t have to be developed—it has already been developed. It just takes trust. To create a void, with all your heart—what takes more trust than that? What we need is a reason to create a void—Marxism, the philosophy for changing the world, gives us that. Marxism lost its way, for Althusser, by focusing on understanding and combating the void, like alienation, rather than creating the void itself. The void is at the root of a materialist outlook. It is where atoms collide. What must be done is to create an authentic void—not an authentic un-alienated consciousness. An authentic void, clear of bourgeois ideology, is a materiality where swerves, dances, collisions happen, and that alone can be truly revolutionary.
Something is aleatoric if it is not capable of being foretold. And a revolution that can be foretold, that can be planned out, is not a real revolution at all, but merely bourgeois idealism. Aleatoric change is part of materiality itself, going back to the ancients—but the materialism of change requires a kind of trust, that it isn’t being guided by some rational end, some fleshed out plan, but rather emerges from the void and from collisions between atoms or individuals, or between classes even. Atoms are hooked, to interlock, and create possible worlds—which is why capitalism and the bourgeois mind smooth everything down—so nothing can interlock, so no worlds can be built, so things stay in parallel, linear progression, towards some End, some Utopian distant place, that never comes. But Althusser’s revolutionary materialism rejects this separation, this smoothness, incrementalism and reformism. Revolutionary possibility, revolutionary consciousness, is always already contained in materiality itself, building up, ready-to-go. We just need to listen to it and have the courage to ride the wave when it comes.
Something is revolutionary if it creates uncertainty—true change can only come from uncertainty. And uncertainty is what the bourgeois mind hates the most—how often have we heard them lament the uncertainty of Trump’s shock politics, and how much they lament his haphazard approach to the virus. They also lament how the virus itself is so unpredictable, like that’s its worst crime. The bourgeois mind operates under the delusive fiction that its system of capitalism is orderly and predictable—but the reality is that capitalism has crashes built into it; bourgeois economists call it the “business cycle” to give it a nice name, but this just masks the underlying uncertain, chaotic nature of capitalism itself.
Aleatory materialism is harnessing this uncertainty and unpredictability and using it against capitalism and the bourgeoisie themselves, rather than having them wield it disingenuously behind the scenes. They use uncertainty as a control mechanism, they rely on the uncertainty of capitalism, of workers never knowing if they’ll have a job and so on. Bringing uncertainty out into the open, intentionalizing it, is a revolutionary act.
Making sense of one of the most enduring contradictions of Nietzsche’s philosophy—how to reconcile the two pillars of his thought, the theory of the Ubermensch and the doctrine of the Eternal Return. How can a new man, a man who has overcome humanity itself, exist when the universe consists of nothing but the eternal return of the same. The answer is that the new man always already exists within materiality itself—the ubermensch isn’t new, it has always been there. Compare to Althusser’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat—doesn’t need to be created, we don’t need to wait—it’s there, ready, waiting. The better world is already built, it's there waiting, it just needs a chance. The ubermensch is already there—it is you, you must, as Nietzsche always says, become who you already are.
How does one become who one is? This is a materialist idea—who you are is not some idea that you need to tap into from on high. It is already here. Becoming who you already are is not a journey, it is not a telos that you progress too—you already are what you are. You just need to recognize it. Similarly, the proletariat already is the meaning and purpose of all history—it just needs to become aware of it. Man is something that must be overcome, says Nietzsche. This is a kind of theoretical anti-humanism—for Nietzsche, as for Althusser and Marx, the bourgeois humanism and idealism of modernity must be negated and opposed, in order for real humanity, which for Nietzsche is the ubermensch, to be able to develop.
Nietzsche is first and foremost a materialist—everything about him comes back to the body, to the play of forces within this world. Idols, ideals, morality, God himself—all these are tossed aside as harmful lies. One of the clearest statements of his materialism can be found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the section On The Despisers of the Body. “But the awakened, the knowing one says: body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is just a word for something on the body. The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, one herd and one shepherd….It does not say I, it does I.”
This is precisely a materialist dialectic, a materiality containing multiplicities. An idealist dialectic, like that of Socrates or Hegel, says I—a materialist dialectic, by contrast, does I. This is Marx’s standing Hegel on his head—from an I that says, to an I that does. Nietzsche said of himself that he was no man, he was dynamite. What he is after is precisely what is most explosive, most revolutionary—a materialist dialectic. Althusser’s search for a materialism of the encounter can be found within Nietzsche’s materialist multiplicity—a materialism that can encounter itself, that is war and peace, herd and shepherd, all at once.
In that same section, Nietzsche continues: “What the sense feels, what the spirit knows, in itself that will never have an end. But sense and spirit would like to persuade you that they are the end of all things: so vain are they.” Rooting out teleology in traces of idealism within materiality itself—this could not be more Althusserian. There is no End. Just as Althusser rejects teleology as a form of idealism that must be banished from a materialist dialectic, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return is the secret of the awakened, knowing one, the master of the Gay Science—the discoverer of the materialist dialectic.
There is no End of a materialist dialectic—but rather than have this paralyze us, as it did for the idealist dialectic of Socrates (who chose to die, rejecting life, daying No instead of Yes, which is Nietzsche’s main criticism of Socrates, and so therefore of dialectics itself, which is indistinguishable from Socrates himself for Nietzsche) it inspires us to say Yes to life. It gives us a reason to be happy, to joyfully pursue this science, to dance in a way that channels a chaos that can give birth to a dancing star. Such a rebirth is inherently revolutionary, and this is what Althusser was after—he often speaks of the necessity of a rebirth of Marxism.
True materialism, for Nietzsche as for Althusser, has no end, no goal, no teleology. It is only a doing, not a saying. There is no plan, no reason that can be imposed upon materiality, no final aim that is pre-set in advance. Rather, the body, materiality itself, has its own reason—its own music, its own future always already within itself, waiting for us, if we would only have ears to hear it.
But what kind of materialism is it that we can find in Nietzsche? What can we call it? I think it may be thought of as a materialism of the wanderer, similar to Althusser’s materialism of the encounter. Nietzsche ends his book Human, All Too Human with an aphorism called The Wanderer. “Not a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing….he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness….Born out of the mysteries of the dawn, they ponder how the day can have such a pure, transparent, transfigured, and cheerful face between the hours of ten and twelve—they seek the philosophy of the forenoon.” Again, this is strikingly Althusserian. A traveler is idealist, and can’t really get anywhere new—which is the whole point of a materialist philosopher, to get somewhere new, somewhere he doesn’t know about, but wants to go. And you can only achieve this by wandering, with Nietzsche, or by catching a moving train, with Althusser. A materialist philosopher is a wanderer, he takes pleasure in change, chance, mystery—if he knew where he was going, he wouldn’t get anywhere.
Althusser is a radical, against dogmatism, in order to preserve what is most revolutionary within Marxist thought. Radical comes from the Latin word radix, which means root. A radical materialist goes to the root, but not to preserve the root, to go beyond it. This is how materialist philosophers advance—underground, traveling by root. And when you travel underground, you can’t see too far ahead—which is why it is the most revolutionary way of traveling, there is no ideal end point in sight. You struggle underground because it is the only way to get anywhere real.
Underground, traveling by the root, is the path to the future, to the new horizon. In his preface to his 1881 book The Dawn of Day, Nietzsche writes: "In this book you will discover a `subterranean man' at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines. You will see him—presupposing you have eyes capable of seeing this work in the depths—going forward slowly, cautiously, gently inexorable, without betraying very much of the distress which any protracted deprivation of light and air must entail; you might even call him contented, working there in the dark. Does it not seem as though some faith were leading him on, some consolation offering him compensation?” A radical materialist is happy burrowing underground, because he knows that this is where the new horizon is, where the brightest sunlight is—where the future is, where the revolutionary music of materiality itself can be heard most clearly.
Being always at the root also allows you to see limits. Following roots, tracing roots, not to get stuck in them, but to find out why we are stuck. Marx was engaged in “a battle that was always in doubt, even when it seemed won; a struggle to find words that do not yet exist in order to think what was concealed by some omnipotent words. (The struggle is also fought over words).” (SCI 274). And the battle was up and down, like all battles. Some points are higher than others. Althusser identifies the most decisive victory in this battle, this struggle for a true revolutionary language—the materialist dialectic itself—in a few specific places: chapters 10 and 15 and part 8 of Capital. These are the parts on the working day, on machinery and large scale industry, and primitive accumulation. These are the most material elements of working life under capitalism. And they are engaged in a most dialectical way. As Althusser says, these most material elements appear “…on the margin of the dominant mode of exposition, as if he had to break off or interrupt this mode in order to impart its meaning to it!” (SCI, 273) This, for Althusser, is the materialist dialectic at its most revolutionary. What is most revolutionary, and most materialist, can only be touched on in this way—dialectically, almost as an aside, or an afterthought—and yet it is the essence of what is most critical and revolutionary in the dialectic that Marxist materialism is in search of.
As the philosopher Emil Cioran said: “The essential often appears at the end of a long conversation. The great truths are spoken on the doorstep.” The dialectic is most material—and so most revolutionary—in precisely this way, on the doorstep. Most of the time, we are not on the doorstep at all, but rather underground, at the root. But the materialist dialectic senses the connection between the root and the doorstep—it is the meeting of doorstep and root. Even when you are hopelessly underground, you are always on the doorstep of the next discovery in the revolutionary science of dialectical materialism. That is what it’s like to do dialectics with a hammer.
Reference Key
POE = Philosophy of the Encounter
SCI = Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists