Was Althusser a Mechanical Materialist? A Reply to Nicolas Villarreal
by P.K. Gandakin
Feb 27, 2025
Recently, Nicolas Villarreal has written a response to my “Marx’s Materialism” for Cosmonaut Magazine. While meaningful criticism is important, and welcomed, Villarreal for some reason decides in this piece to combine his lack of understanding with a self-assured pomposity that lends the reader of the piece a vague sense of embarrassment, if they have any familiarity with the texts or theory under discussion.
It would be one thing if Villarreal approached his disagreements with Geese by attempting to clearly explain his disagreements, where he thought we went wrong, what the correct approach is, etc. Instead, we get a medley of poor bird puns, distortions of our positions, and strange accusations that Geese is attempting to do things like “conceal” our views from the reader (?). Ultimately, Villarreal asserts that Geese takes the position that we do so sheerly out of “ignorance” and a desire to “distance oneself from the debacle that was the past 50 years of the Left.” Fascinating!
In the following, we will see which author’s position is based only on ignorance. Important for our purposes, however, is the argument that Marxist theory in the United States is totally dead. It is impossible to engage in Marxist theory or practice from a revolutionary standpoint without this basic understanding. Geese has made this obvious and banal point before, but, for the self-proclaimed activists who ‘understand’ Marx with deeper insight than those of us who read him, banalities are the subject of much controversy. I encourage whoever hasn’t to read “Marx’s Materialism” and “The Marginality of American Communism” (the other article criticized by Villarreal), then Villarreal’s response, and then to read this reply to Villarreal—and see if they cannot come out of it convinced that the task of the modern communist is not to listen to our self-proclaimed intellectuals, but to theorize as a practice—to treat theory as a weapon of war rather than a dogma. As I wrote in “Marx’s Materialism”:
A [theoretical] solution is not forthcoming—the seeking of a solution, as this essay will argue, is not only impossible, but essentially wrong-headed. Marxism is not a theory or a doctrine but a way of thinking. None of its text is valid, and its method is contingent. Marxism is not a theory that is determined by its formal intellectual content, nor a method that can be isolated and described, but—like all thought—an existential pathos which only has meaning in the way it structures our practice.
What is the ultimate result of Villarreal's approach? Let’s look into the horse’s (bird’s?) mouth. He writes:
What is materialism? I think it should be uncontroversial to say it is an idea. How could Marxism one day cease to be marginal? It would require bourgeois society to cease to work. Hence, knowledge about just how, when, and why that ceasing to work might occur is extremely important and deserves immense theoretical effort.
There is a classic line attributed to Lenin that characterizes his approach to the party and politics pretty well: “Sometimes, history needs a push.” Materialism is not an idea an individual should possess, it is an approach that characterizes an existence. Marxism will not be successful by bourgeois society ceasing to work—a silly proposition for millenarian sects who justify their failure with the promise of eventual salvation—but by being overthrown. Let me repeat the last point: bourgeois society will only be defeated if it is overthrown. Take the following line from Bordiga:
To say, “An objectively revolutionary situation exists, but the subjective element of the class struggle, the class party, is deficient”, is wrong at every moment of the historical process; it is a blatantly meaningless assertion, a patent absurdity.1
Although we are not Bordigists, this is the essence of Geese’s approach to Marxism. There is no magical falling-apart capitalism will do for us—we will have to break it. And the position of contemplation and stale activism is exactly characterized by the fallacious belief that capitalism is a thing that will collapse on itself rather than a generalization applied to living human practice. Capitalism will not be defeated once we learn enough about capitalism to find out when it’ll stop working—capitalism will only be defeated when a living political force takes state power and abolishes it; it is a question of practice and its structure rather than of knowledge and how quickly we can acquire it.
There are two main aims to this article. The first is to challenge the lobotomization of Althusser by his so-called “followers” such as Villarreal, who transform this extraordinary and revolutionary thinker into a base advocate for crude scientistic common sense, and the second, perhaps more important, is to undermine the notion of a privileged domain called “Marxist theory,” accessible to mysterious and knowledgeable “experts” who claim authority on that basis—and yet who preserve this authority and sense of superiority only by taking advantage of the novice character of communist circles to put forward an image of one who “understands” Marxism. After all, with intellectuals like these, who needs activists?
Let’s engage with Althusser’s Reading Capital (1965) as part of the anti-systematic trend of Marxism. In “Marx’s Materialism,” I made the claim that “[i]n [Althusser’s] seminal and groundbreaking Reading Capital (1965) he comprehensively criticizes the philosophical model of correspondence (which is also identified with empiricism, theology, idealism, etc.)—the mind as pictures of the external world—and criticizes its presence in Marxist theory.” This, really, is what the controversy between myself and the modern, vulgarized ‘systematic’ Marxism centers around: the relationship of thought to reality. Is thought something external to reality that exists in a non-causal relation with the rest of the world (as, e.g., a ‘representation’)? Or, as materialists, do we genuinely believe that the world is fundamentally matter and motion—which allows for no mystical third force called the ‘mind’ that stands outside of it?
In reply to the above line, Villarreal complains that “Gandakin doesn’t provide citations for this argument against representationalism in Althusser which could help elucidate precisely what is meant.” To be frank, I did not include a citation here because I assumed this point was self-evident— as the beginning of Reading Capital is wholly about the critique of representationalism!
What is representationalism? Representationalism, correspondence, etc. is the theory that the mind is a ‘mirror’ or a ‘camera’ that creates ‘representations’ of the outside world in the form of thoughts and ideas. A given mind interacts with a given empirical stimulus and forms a ‘picture’ of it—I look at a real ‘table’ and mentally possess a picture of that real ‘table,’ or, as Villarreal describes it, the task of thought is “develop the object of knowledge [i.e., our ideas] so that it better resembles the real object.” Thought, in other words, is the development of approximations of the ‘real’ (presumably until we are finally able to mentally capture it). For a more thorough engagement with representationalism on its own terms, see “Marx’s Materialism” and “Kuhn, and Marx’s Model of Scientific Practice.”
For now, however, we can limit ourselves to finding what Althusser has to say about it: and he is very negative. For Althusser, the belief in representationalism and correspondence is the modern equivalent of religion in the “literal[]” sense. Just as Christianity purports to find the Truth in the Word of the Bible, so, too, does correspondence in general claim to find truth in the propositional forms of mental description. This theory sees itself as ultimately culminating in the full scientific system, i.e., the comprehensive description of reality as a whole in terms of a coherent system of concepts and laws. But this ultimate dream belongs in original rights to philosophy, not modern science. For Althusser, this desire for the system of knowledge—whether in ‘materialist’ dross or openly idealistic—is nothing more than the empty dream of the “cult of religions and philosophies” (15). Althusser sees representationalism as one more variant of empiricism (ironic!), theology, idealism, etc.—which makes it all the more shocking that Villarreal seems to think that Althusser believes the opposite.
Nor is this position ambiguous within Reading Capital. Contrary to Villarreal’s assertions, Althusser criticizes the young Marx not simply for the latter’s reference to the primacy of practice, but the exact thing that Villarreal is now claiming Althusser stands for—representationalism. In Reading Capital, he writes:
For the Young Marx, to know the essence of things, the essence of the historical human world, of its economic, political, aesthetic, and religious productions, was simply to read in black and white the presence of the ‘abstract’ essence in the transparency of its ‘concrete’ existence. (14)
In other words, Althusser is criticizing the young Marx for his naive belief that observation was knowledge—that the object of knowledge (our thoughts about the object) are equivalent in any way to the ‘real’ object, i.e., the material world outside of thought. Importantly, Althusser is not just saying that knowledge as a representation is inexact or limited—he is saying that it is a myth and does not exist at all. He continues:
When I say the distinction between the real object and the object of knowledge implies the disappearance of the ideological (empiricist or absolute-idealist) myth of a one-to-one correspondence between the terms of these two orders, I include every form, even an inverted one, of one-to-one correspondence between the terms of the two orders… (48)
As Althusser describes it, the model of correspondence divides the material real object into two: the true essence of the object, and its phenomenal, extraneous appearance. To reach truth, the subject must separate the essence from the appearance and formulate the essence in terms of concepts and law. But if the essence of the real is conceptual is to say that the intellectual system of concepts is the essence of the material real. Further, it means that the qualities which have been deemed ‘appearance’ are inessential, not just inessential to someone or for a specific goal, but essentially inessential, determined as inessential within the object itself in contrast to its scientific essence. Consequently, the structure of the mind, of knowledge, is “completely inscribed in the structure of the real object, in the form of the difference between the inessential and the essence, between surface and depth, between outside and inside” (38). What belongs to the mind, the process of science, the system of concepts, is presented as the independent truth of the material real.2
The representationalist approach to knowledge, in other words, understands thought as contemplation rather than as a practice or production. This is Althusser’s key insight in Reading Capital. Within representationalism the world is presented as something that is equivalent to the static system in the rational thinker’s mind. But this is nothing but idealism par excellence. Regardless of the method by which a rational subject acquires truth-propositions, whether empiricism or rationalism, induction or deduction, etc. the ‘truth’ arrived at—the truth presented in terms of objective concepts—is always simultaneously the assertion that objective reality is identical to the ‘true’ idea, and hence that objective reality is identical in structure to the structure of human thought!
In contrast to the idealist position which places knowledge in a direct relation of representation to the real, Althusser insists that the thought object and the real object must be treated as completely distinct.3 He writes:
The real is one thing, along with its different aspects: the real-concrete, the process of the real, the real totality, etc. Thought about the real is another, along with its different aspects: the thought process, the thought-totality, the thought-concrete, etc. (232)
Idealism fails to faithfully follow this distinction. As a consequence, it compares objects that are really incommensurable, “the knowledge of one object with the existence of another,” or a “knowledge with a non-knowledge” (259). But these cannot be compared:
[We fall i]nto speculative idealism if, with Hegel, we confuse thought and the real by reducing the real to thought; into empiricist idealism if we confuse thought with the real by reducing thought about the real to the real itself. (233)
Not only is thought not posed as ‘inadequate,’ or an ‘approximation,’ as it is in correspondence theories, but it is not seen as in any representational relationship to the material real whatsoever. The material real is fundamentally not expressible exclusively within the particular practice of knowledge-production; it is consequently irrational, or, rather, non-rational:
…the truth of history cannot be read in its manifest discourse, because the text of history is not a text in which a voice (the Logos) speaks, but the inaudible and illegible notation of the effects of a structure of structures.
Inaudible, and illegible—this is the material real. But to argue that thought is not representational of reality is not to fall into relativism or skepticism, if an alternative theory of thought is offered.
The alternative theory of thought that Althusser offers in contrast to the representationalist account is one we have already touched on: knowledge as determinate modes of production, as productions.4 To say that knowledge is a production is to say that the model we should use to understand the mechanism of knowledge is the same that characterizes productive human activity in general, in its variety of manifestations (i.e., not strictly in the economic sense).5
This means that man does not merely ‘picture’ reality but actually produces his (intellectual) existence in the same way that a woodcarver does not just ‘picture’ the shape of a figurine in the tree but carves it out of wood himself. Not only are the concepts of economic production (object, labor, product) fully applicable to theoretical practice or thinking, but, also, the product of thinking is a product in the fullest sense of the word. Althusser writes:
It is therefore a question of producing, in the precise sense of the word, which seems to signify making manifest what is latent, but which really means transforming (in order to give a pre-existing raw material the form of an object adapted to an end), something which in a sense already exists. [my emphasis]
This is to say that the thought-object, the idea, is logically discontinuous with the object (the material real) we use to produce it. As a product, knowledge is not the reflection of the inner essence of the world (not the “making manifest” in theory “what is latent” in the material), but the “transforming… [of] something which in a sense already exists.” This ‘something’ is the given concepts of daily experience, which the intellect works on to clarify and organize, and thereby produce its product [cite]. But this does not mean that thought is representing the world, just as a woodcarver does not represent a tree when he carves from it a figurine.
Villarreal accuses Geese of claiming that the object of thought is in no relation to the external world. This is not a position we hold: instead, we hold that thought is a practice or a production that engages with the world in the same fundamental way as any other practice or production. This does not mean, as Villarreal bizarrely claims, that we think all actions are the same (such as the “migration of geese” and human thinking), but, quite simply, that we think thought is not an exceptional substance that transcends the structure of the world. Naturally, this does not mean thinking is the same as flying, any more than it means that Villarreal believes that flying is the same as organizing a union because both are types of actions.
Naturally, I assume Villarreal (and others) are still confused as to Althusser’s position. And it is only because of the ceaseless slop put out by ‘theoreticians’ sine theory that such confusion exists, insofar as Villarreal and the current crop of Marxist intelligentsia in general continue to mistake their own affections for common sense and easy answers for difficult theoretical work.
The central point of confusion comes in through Althusser’s concept of science. It is easy to see that he has a concept of science, and is serious about it. This lends one to believe that when Althusser says “science,” he means what I think science means. This, obviously, is not a useful way to understand him. In fact, while Althusser is happy to call Marxism a science, his concept of science is as radically different from Villarreal and objectivist Marxism’s understanding of the concept as geese are different from space explorers. Althusser’s notion of science is so radical because he breaks with centuries of idealism and representationalism, not because he reinforces it. And to understand his approach, it will merit looking at his concept of knowledge as a production/practice.
For Althusser, the object of knowledge (or knowledge-as-production) is different from the ‘real’ object. But at the same time that knowledge-as-production possesses its own object, so, too, does it possess its own production process. If Villarreal is looking for an explanation for how thought can both be a practice and yet be distinct from other individual practices, he only has to turn to Reading Capital: Althusser explains the distinction between knowledge as a practice and other forms of practice as precisely the difference in the particular production process that characterizes it, which Althusser calls the practice’s structure:
As such, [knowledge] is constituted by a structure which combines (‘Verbindung’) the type of object (raw material) on which it labors, the theoretical means of production available (its theory, its method and its technique, experimental or otherwise) and the historical relations (both theoretical, ideological and social) in which it produces.
Knowledge, in other words, is not performed by abstract rational subjects but by particular and historic ones. Not only is the theoretical material available to them strictly defined by history, but so also is the identity of the inquiring subjects, their beliefs, models of reasoning, conceptions of the world, etc. These subjective aspects are not outside history, they are part of it—rendered in objective terminology, they are literally the “theoretical means of production.”6 And, just like every other set of means of production, their origin is not in truth reached through contemplation but the evolution and development of the historical process in general. Thought has no more special claim to ‘limn the true structure of the world’ any more than pottery or revolutionary organizing does. Thought is defined by its particular historical position, and thought changes not as we reach higher and higher truths (and closer and closer approximations of ‘true reality), but as the structure of the production of thought changes throughout history.
What is important for us here is that it is not only that ideas change throughout history but the thinking itself. There is no abstract logic—logic is this logic, logic is the logic of these thinkers. A number of key concepts follow from this.
In the first place, Althusser specifies the means of production of knowledge-as-production as something he calls a “problematic.” The problematic is the system of concepts that a given inquirer possesses in their engagement with an object. It determines the way he understands the material he thinks about, the connections he draws between them, and so on. It is in this sense similar to a worldview or a paradigm.
Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) puts forward his concept of ‘paradigm’ in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn is concerned, like Althusser, in grappling with what it would mean to reject the philosophical model of knowledge, correspondence. He does this in the field of philosophy of science. Kuhn argues that the traditional view of science as the gradual accumulation of scientific truth-proposition through the ‘scientific method’ does not account for the real process of scientific practice. Kuhn argues that there is no single ‘scientific’ method nor any neutral accumulation of Truths. Rather, every particular researcher enters his field with a preexisting worldview and set of beliefs that define his scientific practice, inculcated by formal education and the attached “textbook” tradition. This preexisting worldview is his paradigm. He writes:
Successive paradigms tell us different things about the population of the universe and about that population’s behavior. They differ, that is, about such questions as the existence of subatomic particles, the materiality of light, and the conservation of heat or of energy. These are the substantive differences between successive paradigms […] But paradigms differ in more than substance, for they are directed not only to nature but also back upon the science that produced them. They are the sources of the methods, problem-field, and standards of solution accepted by any mature scientific community at any given time. As a result, the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science. (103)
These paradigms, learnt in the classroom, become the scientists’ ways of viewing the world. They determine what his objects (or “population”) are, his “methods,” and what is considered a correct or incorrect “solution.” This means that, contrary to intuition, they determine what is actually ‘observed’ as an object: what, for example, was observed as an “epicycle” under Ptolemaic astronomy is, after Kepler, seen instead as elliptical orbits. The factual stimuli in a certain sense remains the same, but the factual data, i.e., the actual objects we identify when presented with stimuli, is, under different theories, not only given different meanings but is actually a different set of objects altogether.
Kuhn also compares a change in paradigm to ‘gestalt switch,’ or one of those images that can be seen as two things alternatively without itself changing. (Trendy examples might be of the dress that can be seen as both blue and black and white and gold, or, in audio, the voice clip that can be heard as either “yanny” or “laurel.”) A scientist who undergoes a paradigm shift undergoes a similar effect: at one point he sees one thing; the next, another. While the Aristotelian theory of motion was dominant, for example, an object swinging on a rope was simply “falling with difficulty,” i.e. the rope was seen as inhibiting the ability of the object to come to rest and properly fall and the entire process was a “constrained falling.” “Galileo, on the other hand, looking at the swinging body, saw a pendulum, a body that almost succeeded in repeating the same motion over and over again ad infinitum” (119). This ‘gestalt switch’ of seeing a pendulum where previous scientists had seen a falling object meant he could analyze physics in new ways, deriving “full and sound arguments for the independence of weight and rate of fall, as well as for the relationship between vertical height and terminal velocity of motions down inclined planes.” What is key for us, however, is not the particular scientific innovations made, but that this was genuinely a new way of looking at things. Kuhn writes:
Until that scholastic paradigm was invented, there were no pendulums, but only swinging stones, for the scientist to see. Pendulums were brought into existence by something very like a paradigm-induced gestalt switch. (120)
In other words, the Aristotelians did not observe a pendulum, and then describe it as a “constrained falling,” but did not see a pendulum in the first place. Prior to a new paradigm, scientists, lacking the new paradigm’s novel concepts and its qualitatively different ways of looking at things, lived, at least in some sense, in a substantively different world. Science is not a simple process of accumulation, but a series of mutually incommensurable paradigm shifts each of which carries their own way of looking at the world.
Althusser follows this same approach in his understanding of problematics—and theoretical practice generally. In fact, because Althusser does not limit his inquiry to the history of science, he theorizes thinking in general as a practice, which means, also, that his specific understanding of theoretical practice contains general claims about the objects of knowledge in general, its objects, etc. We will leave aside for now a deeper dive into Althusser, Kuhn, and Marxist epistemology (see “Kuhn, and Marx’s Model of Scientific Practice” for more in this vein).
We just saw, for example, how for Kuhn the objects of scientific practice are not given as neutral representations of observed phenomena, but are determined as observed phenomena through subjective understanding (or ‘paradigms’). This is not equivalent to a purely subjectivist understanding of scientific practice. In the same way that the Aristotelians did not choose see ‘constrained falling’ rather than a pendulum, we do not choose to see one object instead of another.7 Rather, just as thinking as a production possesses an object which it works on, so, too, it also possesses a distinct and particular means of production that determines it. Althusser writes:
This thought is the historically constituted system of an apparatus of thought, founded on and articulated to natural and social reality. It is defined by the system of real conditions which make it, if I dare use the phrase, a determinate mode of production of knowledges. As such, it is constituted by a structure which combines (‘Verbindung’) the type of object (raw material) on which it labors, the theoretical means of production available (its theory, its method and its technique, experimental or otherwise) and the historical relations (both theoretical, ideological and social) in which it produces.
Not only are concepts a historical means of production, but reasoning itself is, too (as “theory,” “method,” and “technique”).
Many followers of Althusser understand his method as the pop scientific experimental method. As is already seen in that quote, that is manifestly untrue. Like Kuhn, Althusser does not believe there is a neutral method or body of concepts for science—every aspect of thinking is a practice, and no aspect stands outside production as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of objective Truth. Like Kuhn, consequently, this means that the objects of perception in Althusser are determined by the problematic/paradigm rather than being simply observed. He writes:
Any object or problem situated on the terrain and within the horizon, i..e, in the definite structured field of the theoretical problematic of a given theoretical discipline, is visible. We must take these words literally. The sighting is thus no longer the act of an individual subject, endowed with the faculty of ‘vision’ which he exercises either attentively or distractedly; the sighting is the act of its structural conditions, it is the relation of immanent reflection between the field of the problematic and its objects and its problems. (24)
In other words, the concept of ‘seeing’ unambiguously—of observing the ‘real’ world and then copying it in our brains—is fundamentally at odds with Althusser’s understanding of theory and practice. Concepts—all concepts—do not directly correspond to an inner Truth of the world: they are the real product of intellectual practice—they are produced by a historical subject within a specific problematic/means of production, and nothing else.
Yes, this does mean the concepts of Marxism, too!—and here is probably where Villarreal is (naturally) most confused. Yes, Althusser does consider Marxism a science. But, within Reading Capital, he is more than clear that his understanding of science is radically different from the popular understanding of it as a system of representational truth. Coupled with his rejection of the identity of thought-objects and real-objects is Althusser’s rejection of the notion that there is an objective, truth-finding process that stands outside history. This is why Althusser’s approach cannot be reconciled with experimentalism or verificationism—the guiding philosophies of activism—but must be placed in opposition to these. Villarreal claims that Geese believes “there is no relationship between the real object and the object of knowledge”—but it is precisely the particularity of this relationship that we are developing, and have been developing. Our only difference is that we do not believe the relationship between thinking and the external world is defined by “resemblance,” and neither does Althusser.
In other words, Althusser (and Marx) do not believe they are describing the world—they are not ‘in the position of contemplation’—they believe that they are in the world—even when they are ‘thinking’!
It is absolutely astounding, for example, that Villarreal accuses Geese of misappropriating Althusser for political ends when he himself so blatantly denies every core principle of Althusser’s approach to epistemology. Take this astounding ‘Althusserian’ position, for example: “The more rigorously we develop our ideas,” Villarreal writes, “the better we can refine them when we act in the world, and receive feedback for them.” Here again is the basic model of representationalism and verificationism: we act, we ‘test’ our actions, and then adjust them. This popular approach has nothing to do with Marxism (and everything to do with the residual hangover from Karl Popper and the lessons drilled into our brains in 6th grade Biology).
Against this, Althusser asserts that Marx’s theory is scientific solely because it adequately conforms to the prevailing norms of what constitutes a ‘scientific’ work, not because Marxism is ‘true’ or a real ‘representation.’ He writes, explicitly drawing an impassible line between himself and verificationism, that:
Later historical practice cannot give the knowledge that Marx produced its status as knowledge; the criterion of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges produced by Marx’s theoretical practice is provided by his theoretical practice itself, i.e., by the proof-value, by the scientific status of the forms which ensured the production of those knowledges. Marx’s theoretical practice is the criterion of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges that Marx produced; and only because it was really a matter of knowledge, and not of chance hypotheses, have these knowledges given the famous results, of which the failures as well as the successes constitute pertinent ‘experiments’ for the theory’s reflection on itself and its internal development. (62) [my emphasis]
The only way to say that a theory is ‘true,’ if we stick fast to the distinction between thought and reality, is to say that it fulfills the ‘norms of scientificity,’ i.e., to say that it follows the procedures that are at a certain point of time the most advanced procedures of analysis. These norms are determined historically, and constantly evolve. This has no bearing to whether the ‘truths’ produced in knowledge are valuable or useful—it only means that they are not transhistorical, either in their method or in their conclusions.8 These ‘norms of scientificity’ are the key to understanding Althusser’s notion of science, and they mean that the method of evaluation of scientific practice is determined by history, not by correspondence to a static concept of ‘truth’.
Before moving forward, we can express the conclusions of this brief examination in more familiar terms for the sake of clarity: what Althusser and Kuhn teach us is that there is a distinction between our understanding of the world and the world as it actually is. Further, this distinction is unbridgeable. This does not mean that there is no ‘truth,’ or that there is no use to theory, it only means that our understanding of both concepts are not adequately understood by use of the theory of correspondence. Men have worldviews—they do not just form attitudes about objects, but those attitudes, those objects, and the process of reasoning itself, are all determined historically. What an attitude is, then, cannot be understood by examining its relation to the object but by examining the structure that characterizes the entire knowledge-production process itself.
This does not mean abstraction is ‘not real,’ it means that it is a practice just like any other practice. And this is Althusser’s radical insight; and how radical it is, can be seen even today by how even Althusser’s professed defenders, without shame, invoke his name to criticize his own ideas! What is remarkable is how blatantly idealist this position is. If we understand thought as practice, Villarreal argues, we lose the ability to explain things that happen. He writes:
The point of this maneuver is to shut down contemplation as such, as Gandakin makes clear. This project intends to dispense with the idea of Marxism as a system or science altogether. Marxism is therefore just a sort of action, just like any other. There is no difference between Marxism and the action of migration by geese, both are simply a certain habit that a certain type of creature acquires. Why, precisely, is the habit acquired? Why must the creatures act?
It is hard not to read this as sheer theology—as the desire for an Intelligent Design that gives purpose to all actions and occurrences. Geese do not migrate because of the existence of thought as a distinct entity from matter. Geese adopt their habits, from what we currently understand, through the process of evolution, which, described by Darwin, rejects the idea that thought or reason exists behind nature rather than arbitrary variation coupled with natural selection. In other words, geese don’t need the preexisting concept of “flight” to fly any more than we need the Word of the Bible to justify our own actions.
Take his other critique of Scottie O.’s engagement with the concept of truth. Returning to the pragmatic and materialistic roots of Marxism, Scottie defends the notion of truth as practice—the position that truth is not the good ideas we have in our head, but what is actual. Or, that the content of Christianity is not the Holy Trinity–but the millions who believe in it. Like any good priest, however, Villarreal cannot stand this hereticism.. He writes in response:
[This is a] statement which borders on nihilism. The poor, destitute, and enslaved might have hoped that there was perhaps something that the powerful could not take away; that they could not truly snuff out the stars in the sky, break the logic of arithmetic, or take away from them the few moral truths that they hold dear. But alas, it was not to be.
Alas, it was not to be! Were it not for Geese Magazine, the poor, destitute, and enslaved would be doing cartwheels and backflips to celebrate the epistemological position that math is an exact and accurate description of reality! How cruel we were to take this final comfort from these suffering peoples, all because we think knowledge is a tool and a practice…
This is the exact attitude that Geese is criticizing. The modern Marxist activist and intellectual prides themself on being “right” (political revolution is, of course, secondary). It is impossible to find a better representation of the communist chauvinism (discussed in “Good for the Gander”) than this paragraph. Solace for the poor and oppressed, that, while they may not have revolution, at least they have the ideas of Nicholas Villarreal! For the rest of us, we prefer more pragmatic fare.
In short, the debate over Althusser who has the correct interpretation of him—but about reclaiming Marxism as an active, transformative practice rather than as a static system of representational ‘knowledge.’ Althusser’s radical re-conception of knowledge—as a historically embedded production rather than a mirror of reality—forces us to reject the dogmas of representationalism and treat theory as a way we exist rather than something to ‘figure out’ or formally ‘learn’ in the classroom. While this essay has focused on clarifying what is living and radical in Althusser, the questions of the role of abstractions, thought, etc. (which are treated extremely superficially by contemporary theory) are theoretical questions which are resolved not by theoretical answers, but by theory as a practice. At the most abstract level, the ‘correct’ theory of revolution is not the correct description of how to do revolution—but the theory that actually drives it, thought as an existential pathos. This is not a denial of the abstract in favor of the concrete, or vice versa: it is the materialist understanding that both the abstract and concrete are ‘pragmatic’ terms we use to make conversation intelligible, not ultimate and final descriptive truths about the structure of the universe and reality.
P. S. One Final Objection
In On Bird-Brained Readings of Althusser, Villarreal additionally weighs in on the concept of truth and falsity. The passage is as follows:
“There is only human practice” honks the goose, renouncing its former birthright, the majesty of nature. And with this renunciation, the goose abandons its lowly capabilities to reason, for what use is “true” or “false” when one has practice?9
What other appeal does traditional and inertial metaphysics have, except for tradition and inertia? Where, if not in Marx, can it find its origin except in common sense? How dare you criticize the concept of truth, fumes Villarreal,—what’s next? Marxism isn’t true? Science isn’t true?
Unfortunately, enraptured with his knowledge, Villarreal forgets that we are proponents of historical materialism, not knowledgeable knowledgeablism. And where they conflict, we prefer the former. Alas that the world does not conform to the categories of thought!—so sighs Villarreal and Philosophy… and where do Marx and Engels stand? Are they also so beholden to the concept of truth—and that they possess it?
If there remain doubts on this score in the direction that we are veering towards idealism or ‘postmodernism,’ the only response is that our critics are the ones not only veering toward but full-throatedly adopting idealism, and without the self-awareness to know that they are doing so. Dialectical materialism does not seek to reify the position of “contemplation” but exceed it. “True” or “false” are attributes of ideas when those ideas are taken in themselves as being related to external reality. But practice, which is not about bringing ideas into correspondence with external reality, but is about existence, subordinates these terms. And there is no place left to look to justify this argument at this point other than Marx and Engels themselves, f.e., the following from Anti-Duhring:
Truth and error, like all concepts which are expressed in polar opposites, have absolute validity only in an extremely limited field… As soon as we apply the antithesis between truth and error outside of that narrow field…it becomes relative and therefore unserviceable for exact scientific modes of expression; and if we attempt to apply it as absolutely valid outside that field we then really find ourselves beaten; both poles of the antithesis become transformed into their opposites, truth becomes error and error truth.
Let’s remember that “true” and “false” are relations of people to the world, not things that exist in the aether. The ‘round Earth’ is not true: our belief that the Earth is or is not round can be evaluated as ‘true’ or ‘false.’ Revolution is not ‘true’—revolution is. Removing the concepts of reason and contemplation from their limited sphere and attempting to treat them like truths outside practice is an abandonment of Marxist materialism. The ideal is the existential pathos of practice but, in that role, it is part of practice, not superior to it. Practice comes first. Rational argumentation is not sufficient. As Engels writes:
Now, this [idealist] line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation there was action. In Anfang war die Tat. And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it.
“Human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it,” and the attempt to understand reality sheerly through the categories of human contemplation, and then, without a hint of irony, to call this dialectical materialism and a rejection of idealist philosophy—this, also, is ingenious!
____________________________________
1 – Activism, Amadeo Bordiga, 1952
2 – What actually distinguishes idealism from materialism is its affirmation of the ultimately conceptual character of the real; for example, in Hegel, the assertion that everything that is real is rational. Idealism, in its sense of opposition to materialism and not to realism, is the affirmation not that there do not exist objects external to the mind, but rather that the innermost nature of these objects is identical to that of mind—that is to say, that it is ultimately thought. (Not thought of individual minds, of course; not even of a transcendent God, but objective thought.) Now, even if idealism in this second sense is only given in a fully coherent and developed form in Hegel, philosophers of antiquity are also predominantly idealist. Both Plato and Aristotle identified the ultimate reality of an object with its form—that is, with something ‘universal’, and hence conceptual. If I say that this object which is in front of me is rectangular, brown, a table, an object, etc. each of these determinants could also be applied to other objects—they are then ‘universals’, that is form. But what about the individual ‘it’ that receives all these determinations? Obviously, it is irrational and unknowable, since to know it would be to subsume it under a universal category. This last individual residue, which is irreducible to thought, is what the ancient philosophers called matter.
3 – The knowledge relation between knowledge of the real and the real is not a relation of the real that is known in this relationship. The distinction between a relation of knowledge and a relation of the real is a fundamental one: if we did not respect it we should fall irreversibly into either speculative or empiricist idealism. (Reading Capital, p.233)
4 – This thought is the historically constituted system of an apparatus of thought, founded on and articulated to natural and social reality. It is defined by the system of real conditions which make it, if I dare use the phrase, a determinate mode of production of knowledges. (Ibid., p.42)
5 – By thus defining his object with this merciless distinction, Marx provides us with the wherewithal to pose the problem we are concerned with: the problem of the cognitive appropriation of the real object by the object of knowledge, which is a special case of the appropriation of the real world by different practices, theoretical, aesthetic, religious, ethical, technical, etc. (Ibid., p.69)
6 – This thought is the historically constituted system of an apparatus of thought, founded on and articulated to natural and social reality. (Ibid., p.42)
7 – The fact that this ‘change of terrain’, which produces as its effect this metamorphosis in the gaze, was itself only produced in very specific, complex, and often dramatic conditions; that it is absolutely irreducible to the idealist myth of a mental decision to change ‘viewpoints’; that it brings into play a whole process that the subject’s sighting, far from producing, merely reflects in its own place; that in this process of real transformation of the means of production of knowledge, the claims of a ‘constitutive subject’ are as vain as are the claims of the subject of vision in the production of the visible[…]—all these are questions that cannot be studied here. (26)
8 – We showed that the validity of a scientific proposition as a knowledge was ensured in a determinate scientific practice by the action of particular forms which ensure the presence of scientificity in the production of knowledge, in other words, by specific forms that confer on a knowledge its character as a (‘true’) knowledge. (70)
9 – As a side note, Villarreal also badly misunderstands Marx’s concept of nature. Ultimately, I think the error lies in treating practice as subjectivity, rather than treating subjectivity objectively (as ‘one’ side, as an abstraction ‘from’, etc.) The complaint that Geese’s emphasis on human practice displaces the role of nature is similarly laughable in light of what Marx has to say about nature absent practice: “Nature as nature – that is to say, insofar as it is still sensuously distinguished from that secret sense hidden within it – nature isolated, distinguished from these abstractions is nothing – a nothing proving itself to be nothing – is devoid of sense, or has only the sense of being an externality which has to be annulled” (166, 1844 Manuscripts).