For Marx, but with Reservations About Althusser: A Comment on Bernstein and Depelchin

Abstract

The 1970s have seen the growing influence of Marxism in the field of African history, with both the application of the neo-Marxist theory of “underdevelopment” to the study of the impact of international capitalism upon Africa and the employment of the more orthodox Marxist categories of “relations of production” and “mode of production” to the analysis of the indigenous social formations of Africa. The appearance in this journal of the programmatic article by Henry Bernstein and Jacques Depelchin, arguing for the development of a Marxist history of Africa, is therefore no surprise. It is, however, something of a disappointment, inasmuch as “Marxism” is peddled by Bernstein and Depelchin in a form particularly unhelpful to historians. Like Hindess and Hirst,” the ostensible inspirers of much Marxist work on African history, Bernstein and Depelchin subscribe to a particular variant of Marxism, that associated with the French philosopher Louis Althusser. While Marx should certainly be made welcome in the field of African history, since he has a great deal of interest to say on the crucial question of the relationship between economic, political, and ideological developments, it is less clear that Althusser is his most useful interpreter.Since Bernstein and Depelchin consistently emphasize the “radical break” which supposedly exists between Marxism, represented by themselves, and “bourgeois [i.e. non-Marxist] social thought” (1979: 31; cf. 1978:2) it is first of all necessary to consider the question: who is a Marxist? Many of the features which Bernstein and Depelchin, following Althusser, present as being distinctive of Marxism would, in fact, be contested by others equally claiming to be Marxists.