What in the hell …

I don’t know Althusser’s work. I was uninterested in it for a long time - categories like ideology and structure don’t interest me very much. My impression was that his work was largely about the successful continued accomplishment of the reproduction of capital, which doesn’t strike me as of much use to articulating the breakdowns thereof. I’ve become more interested, while those concerns remain, in large part via exposure to folks I respect very much who have made use of Althusser (Angela and David are high on that list, as is Jason Read).

I just got the new collection of Althusser’s late work, _Philosophy of the Encounter_. So far I’ve just read a few pages in it beyond the translator’s introduction. What strikes me in it so far is how it changes what I’d thought of the only Althusser I’d read before, the ISA’s essay. There’s much to be said about this piece, for and against, but that will have to wait. All I want to do here is put down a few notes on a change in how I read it after reading the new collection.

In the ISA’s essay Althusser emphasizes the importance of education in the reproduction of the capital relation (via the reproduction of the hegemony of the capitalist class and via the reproduction of labor power as a salable and usable commodity). He writes “Ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle,” between the ruling class, the former ruling classes, and the exploited classes. The resistance of these latter “is able to find means and occasions to express itself there, either by utilization of their [the ISA’s] contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle.” (p21 in Essays In Ideology.) What the new collection changes for me is I read what he calls “the class struggle in the ISAs” (59). I had read this as addressing “those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped,” in the sense of doing ‘good’ teaching as opposed to what the educational system impels to be taught.

He may still be addressing this activity, at least in part, but I think in a different fashion. Or, I want to read this in a different fashion, one sympathetic to my own general take on this, after reading the intro to the new collection.
Althusser calls these teachers “a kind of hero”. It’s easy to read this as in line with the self-sacrificing teacher who gives all to the students, teaches ‘real’ material despite the school board and teaches well despite the workload and class size. This read, though, is in large part a myth (or, when people really do it, a practice) that helps educational institutions continue to function despite cuts (despite the increase of absolute and relative surplus value in the institution [or their equivalent, bracketing the question of SV production in education]). Stakhnovite teaching. The political value of the work is one way some people get hooked into doing it and doing so much of it. Ethical value as well. It’s very similar in a lot of NGOs.

I in no way want to put down hardworking teachers. I would want my kids to have those teachers, just like I would want a family member to have doctors and nurses willing to sacrifice themselves to providing good medical care. But this has little to do with class struggle or communism. That’s not to say it has no value - the abolition of capitalism is not the sole good and prior to that we have to live and be able to live with ourselves. Ethical issues are real issues. Still, what is the relationship of the class struggle to the educational ISA, what is the class struggle in the ISAs?

According to the intro to the new collection, Althusser differed from much of the French CP, and pushed a dissident line, on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. I’m not comfortable with the term, but that will have to wait. For now, for Althusser the question was the existing French state, it’s status. G.M. Goshgarian’s intro says that Althusser was opposed to within Marxism “an apparently congenital weakness for the deadly illusion that the state is above class, or could be or should be.” (Philosophy of the Encounter, xx.) This feeds into a move from class struggle to class collaboration (xxi).

The CPF was for a parliamentary road to socialism that sought to democratize and render socialist the state apparatus. Althusser, on the other hand, held that “the vocation of a Communist Party is not to ‘participate’ in government, but to overturn and destroy the power of the bourgeois state.” (xxiii.) That is, “the political apparatus of the bourgeois state should be object, not the terrain, of working-class struggle.” (xxvii.)

The heroic hardworking teacher strikes me - as a model of political practice for people employed in the education ISA - as analogous to the PCF position of democratizing the state. Goshgarian characterizes “a Eurocommunist shibboleth” held to by the PCF, “the righteously indignant, even rebellious state agent”, who “were increasingly troubled by the glaring, ‘unbearable’ ‘class character’ of their state, which thus harbored potential enemies in the ‘very heart of its apparatus.’” (xxix.) His examples are civil servants, magistrates, court officers, and police, but one could certainly the state employees (and employees in privatized division) in the educational ISA.

To my mind, the political positions about the state apply to the educational ISA, because “ideological state apparatuses are state apparatuses, and, as such, like courts, ministries, and death squads, part of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” (xxi.) This isn’t how I’d read the ISAs piece earlier.