A critique of the Althusserian approach to class

Abstract

last decade has been the influence of the French School of marxism which formed in the early 1960s around Louis Althusser. Serious criticism of their ideas has mostly come from within marxism, and has naturally focussed on what appeared to be novel within that intellectual framework- their epistemological doctrine, their account of "the break" in the history of Marx's thought, their theory of ideology and the state. Criticism (at least in English) has mostly overlooked their position on an issue that many socialists would regard as rather more fundamental- the theory of class. Partly this omission has to do with the history of the school itself. Its positions were first worked out as philosophical doctrines; Althusser retrospectively remarked that "the class struggle does not figure in its own right in For Marx and Reading Capital, "f and the same is true of Lenin and Philosophy. Books within the Althusserian framework explicitly devoted to the theory of class did not appear until 1974 (Poulantzas' Classes in Contemporary Capitalism) and 1977 (Carchedi's On the Economic Identification of Social Classes). Yet there is a definite approach to class to be found even in the philosophical texts, which after all use the term, if they don't examine it, on every second page. It was crystallized in 1968 in a highly influential forty pages of Poulantzas' Political Power and Social Classes, and can be followed in a more explicit and elaborated (and in some respects modified) form, into the texts of the 1970s.