 Whenever you say anything on the internet about Marx's ideas on human development, freedom, or alienation, someone asks the obvious question. What about the break between the early and the later Marx? Didn't Louis Alterser show that the true, later Marx breaks completely with the young Marxist ideas? If we're proper Marxists, followers of the writings like the Communist Manifesto and Capital, why should we bother thinking about the ideas Marx had before he became the Marxist founded Marxism? This video looks at what Alterser actually said, what the differences between the early and the later Marx really are, and what they mean to us. Part 1. Introduction. The idea that Marx developed as a thinker over time was not entirely new with Alterser, of course. Anyone who had read Marx's schoolwork, his PhD thesis, or his early journalism cannot but notice that he changed his mind about things later on. Like every sensible person, as Marx learned more and reflected on what he learned, it changed his mind accordingly. This goes for the slightly later early work, to the more middle work as well, as Marx delved deeper into political economy. Lenin, for example, once wrote that Marx's first mature work was his critique of Prudeau, the poverty of philosophy. The notes that later got compiled into the book The German Ideology were at that time not available, and in many ways Lenin was right here. Among other things, the poverty of philosophy is the first published work where Marx really focuses on political economy. With the rise of the Soviet Union and efforts to compile Marx's collected works, notebooks and drafts that had previously never seen the light of day began to appear. This includes now classic works, like the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology, and the Gründrissa. These had a massive impact on Marx's scholarship, often focusing on questions of human species being, alienation and so on, which by some started to be used to criticise the later USSR. Often, these were used by so-called Marxist humanists, who argued that Marx's account of species being reveals a commitment to an unchanging and unalterable human essence, provides an ethical critique of capitalism, and so on. Althusser's early essays on the young versus late Marx are kind of pushback against this sort of reading. He argues that there is what he calls an epistemological break. We'll talk about what that means later, between the young and the late Marx, and that only the later Marx is truly Marxist in a way that's relevant for us. For Althusser, it's only after shedding his liberal ideology and idealism that Marx takes up the science of history that forms the core of Marxism. As we will see, Althusser raises many points that we think are important to understand and that we agree with. Although we need to focus when we talk about Marx's ideas, we should never separate elements from each other so completely that we lose sight of the whole package. We shouldn't read the old Marx into the young Marx, where that doesn't make sense. We must emphasise the importance of Marx's development and change as a thinker. We were all born ones, and luckily, we change our ideas as we learn and think more about things. Althusser stresses that this is so for Marx as well, and we very much agree. To mention just a couple of examples, even after 1845, where Althusser locates the break between the early and late Marx, Marx changed his mind on his theories of the political economy, on the revolutionary potential of the feudal peasantry, for instance in Russia, and on imperialism and colonialism, where he came to adopt a much more critical stance than he had earlier on. Finally, we agree that we must be careful not to confuse issues of terminology with issues of ideas. Changing the words that you use to express yourself obviously doesn't mean that you're necessarily changing your ideas. With these points of agreement in mind, let's look at what Althusser says. Part 2. What Althusser Says Althusser writes that we need to draw a line of demarcation between the true theoretical basis of the Marxist science of history and Marxist philosophy on the one hand, and on the other, the pre-Marxist idealist notions on which depend contemporary interpretations of Marxism as a philosophy of man or a humanism. This division, Althusser writes, is situated essentially in the terrain of the confrontation between Marx's early works and capital. In other words, his arguments are specifically trying to show that there is a major split, what he calls an epistemological break between the allegedly idealist ideas of the early Marx and the properly materialist Marxist ideas we find in capital. Here, volume 1 of capital is the most important, because it's the only volume of capital that Marx finished writing, finished publishing and finished revising and republishing himself. Althusser locates the epistemological break in 1845, with the writing of the thesis on Feuerbach in particular. This break has two main components. First, the founding of Marx's theory of history, and second, the development of a new philosophy of dialectical materialism. In other words, for Althusser the epistemological break is between a young Marx who's essentially an idealist philosopher and a mature Marx who's developed and embraced a certain philosophy and theory of history, what is often called dialectical and historical materialism. This in turn provides the basis for dividing Marx's work into four categories, the early works, the works of the break, the transitional works, and the mature works, where again, capital is the paradigmatic mature work. Now, there are a lot of nuances and details of Althusser's argument that we won't explore here. In part because he's responding to thinkers we haven't been discussing in this series, and would end up distracting us too much from our main points. I mean, this could go on forever. The people Althusser is responding to have a very different reading of the early Marx than we do, and when they talk about things like Marx's theory of alienation, their interpretation differs quite a bit from ours. That's why we started by pointing out many points where we agree with Althusser, and these are some of the reasons why we also disagree with those people Althusser is responding to. What we will focus on instead is the interpretation of Marx's thoughts on human development and flourishing, freedom, alienation, and communism that we've discussed in our video series. We will see whether Althusser's arguments do anything to show that Marx changed his mind on these things as we understand them. We don't quite know what Althusser himself we think of our views. As we said, he was responding to some very different readings of the early Marx that we generally don't agree with. Why are we focusing on him then? Because almost all the people who insist on there being a split between the young and late Marx tend to refer back to Althusser's arguments. Since Althusser wasn't responding to quite our type of interpretation, we think it's a bit unfair to focus on him, but nobody we know seems to be able to find anyone better. So what we're presenting here won't so much be a critique of Althusser, as it will be us showing that his arguments don't show that our interpretation of the later Marx is wrong. To see what Althusser's arguments actually are, let's begin with the three principles that Althusser offers for providing a Marxist theory of ideological development. His first principle we can call the principle of totality. Every ideology must be regarded as a real whole, internally unified by its own problematic, so that it is impossible to extract one element without altering its meaning. Instead of focusing on individual elements or some individual person's particular claims and ideas in isolation, Althusser says we need to focus on an ideology as a whole that is held together by its own quote-unquote problematic that makes it the kind of ideology that it is. The second principle we can call the principle of material basis. The meaning of this whole of a particular ideology, in this case an individual's thought, depends not on its relation to a truth other than itself, but on its relation to the existing ideological field and on the social problems and social relations which sustain the ideology and are reflected in it. The sense of the development of a particular ideology depends not on the relation of this development to its origins or its end, considered as its truth, but to the relation found within this development between the mutations of the particular ideology and the mutations in the ideological field and the social problems and relations that sustain it. Put differently, every ideology is rooted in a material basis, the social relations and problems that it reflects and responds to. Althusser thinks that when we should try to understand how ideologies develop and change, we should not focus mostly on where the ideology arose out of or what it evolved into, rather we should first and foremost focus on the relations between the changes in the ideology and the changes in the social relations and problems that it is concerned with. From this follows a third principle. We can call this the principle of motive force. The developmental motor principle of a particular ideology cannot be found within ideology itself but outside it, in what underlies the particular ideology. Its author as a concrete individual and the actual history reflected in this individual development according to the complex ties between the individual and this history. What Althusser is saying here is that the driving forces of any particular ideology aren't some of the elements of the ideology itself, rather they can only be found in the concrete lived reality of the people who use and develop it and the social and historical processes they are part of. So according to Althusser, what is the ideological structure of the early Marx? To be honest, that's a bit unclear but roughly speaking it seems to be that his early work and ideas share the same kind of anthropological problematic. Althusser seems to think that the early Marx looks at different things, the state, religion and so on, through the lens of them being objects for humans into which humans project, alienate and seek to reclaim their universal and ahistorical species being. This perspective, Althusser argues, is abandoned in the later Marx. The details are unclear and Althusser changes mind over time basically in response to more and more of Marx's notebooks coming out and other writings being examined in more detail revealing, as the previous videos in this series have mentioned, that Marx in fact uses many of his earlier concepts later on as well. Overall, Althusser argues that if you look at the whole of Marx's work, there is no doubt that there does exist a break of some kind in 1845. In 1845, Marx began to lay down the foundations of a science which did not exist before he came along, the science of history. And in order to do that, he set out a number of new concepts which cannot be found anywhere in his humanist works of youth, mode of production, productive forces, relations of production, infrastructure, superstructure, ideologies, etc. No one can deny that. It is true that Marx several times uses the term alienation, but all this disappears in Marx's later texts and in Lenin, completely. We could therefore simply say, what is important is the tendency, and Marx's scientific work does tend to get rid of these philosophical categories. There's a lot here that we agree with. Certainly, many of the key ideas of what later gets called, Marx doesn't use these terms, dialectical and historical materialism, are things that Marx only really starts developing and using fully from 1845 onwards. There's also a marked shift towards studying political economy that starts in 1844, but really begins to take root from 1845 and 1846 onwards. Part 3 The Evidence The change in focus and emphasis that Althusser mentions, however, doesn't mean that Marx rejects all of his earlier ideas. This is why Althusser adds the aforementioned claim that the later Marx's work does tend to get rid of these philosophical categories. Althusser's main support for his reading was that certain key concepts in the earlier works, like alienation and the negation of the negation, never appear in Marx's mature works. This was quickly shown to be false. Both of these appear in later works, not only in his later notebooks like the Gründrissa, but also in capital itself, Althusser's paradigm case of the mature Marx. Althusser himself, in admirable spirit of honest self-criticism, admitted and pointed this out. In my first essays, I suggested that after the epistemological break of 1845, after this discovery by which Marx founded the science of history, the philosophical categories of alienation and the negation of the negation, among others, disappear. John Lewis replies that this is not true, and he is right. You certainly do find these concepts, directly or indirectly, in the German ideology, in the Gründrissa, to texts which Marx never published, and also, though more rarely alienation or much more rarely negation of the negation, only one explicit appearance, in capital. Althusser also points out that Marx uses many of these ideas less and less, but this isn't quite right, since as he also points out, there are many references to alienation in the Gründrissa. At some points, Althusser makes a lot out of the fact that the works were terms like alienation appear more frequently, or works that Marx never himself published, but this is only partly relevant. You certainly tried to publish some of them, and many of the works that Althusser relies on very heavily, like the German ideology, were never published at all either. In fact, we now know that the German ideology was in fact compiled by later editors, and it's not clear that it was ever written as a single coherent work at all, much less in the form in which Althusser read it. Terrell Carver has written extensively about this. Althusser at times also claims that Marx says there's a complete break between his early and late works, especially between the work up until 1845, and from about 1845 onwards. The problem is that Marx never says anything like this. He says he rejects philosophy various places. He says he really began chaining his mind on his way to socialism when as a young radical democratic journalist, he first came face to face with class struggle. Marx does talk about settling philosophical scores with the people he disagrees with, and talks about devoting himself to political economy and rejecting philosophy. But that's all. He never claims there's a break in his work of anything like the kind that Althusser argues there is, and Althusser never provides a good quote to back this up, which is what you need to do in these cases if you want to prove your point. This doesn't mean that Althusser is wrong to think that there's a break in Marx. It only means that, contra Althusser, Marx never says that there is any such break. Not only does Marx use alienation and its associated concepts in Volume 1 of Capital, he uses it throughout the early drafts and notebooks leading up to it, some proposed additional chapters, and so on. If there was a massive epistemological break between and early Marx, where these ideas were core features, and the later Marx, where they really have no important role, why should Marx keep using them again and again, especially in his own notebooks? Changes in terminology versus changes in ideas. So far, we've looked at changes in terminology and how the evidence Althusser uses doesn't, and he admits it, quite support his conclusion. The same terminology of alienation, etc. carries through to Marx's later works. But we want to look deeper than this. As we saw earlier, Althusser himself points out that we can't and shouldn't look just at individual concepts, but at the broader shifts in one's set of ideas, and here we can find more agreement. We agree with Althusser that the later Marx isn't making arguments about things like shared universal values that all humans agree upon, that he doesn't focus on ethical or normative arguments about what should be the case. This is obvious, since Marx spends most of his later life devoted to scientific research and consciousness raising. As we saw in earlier videos, the later Marx especially says again and again that he isn't talking about justice or morality or ethics. There is also a general shift in terminology in the later works, especially the finished ones. True, alienation and similar words don't disappear, but they get used a lot less. But as Althusser himself said, that's not enough to show that Marx changed his mind about the ideas behind them, and here we think we have something really important to point out. As we've seen in all the previous videos in this series on human development, freedom, alienation and communism, Marx uses the exact same ideas throughout his earlier and later works. In the videos of this series, we have shown, using Marx's own words, that Marx has the very same core ideas about what human development is, what freedom is and why it's valuable, that and how we are impersonally dominated and therefore unfree on the capitalism, and so on. Now sure, Marx doesn't use the German words that get translated into alienation in English in the 1844 manuscripts very much in his later, especially his published works. But there's an obvious reason for this. It's really unclear what alienation means for Marx when you use two words interchangeably to refer to four different things, i.e. the four different kinds of alienation that Marx distinguishes. As the decades of arguments about what Marx really means in the 1844 manuscripts show, that terminology is really hard to deal with for readers, especially because these manuscripts are written in heavily Hegelian language that of course Marx was fluent in, but that most of us don't grow up with or get trained in before we start reading Marx. After all, it's not uncommon to find different ways of expressing your ideas when writing notes to yourself, as Marx did in the 1844 manuscripts, and when writing stuff you want others to understand. As we've shown in this video, and our videos on human development, freedom and alienation from product, Marx's ideas on these things run all the way through from the 1844 manuscripts to capital. Although the terminology changes, the ideas are retained, often with clearer terminology. Let's take just one example here, alienation from product, which we discussed in depth in a previous video. In the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes that to the worker, the object labor produces stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer, which begins to confront him as an autonomous power, that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien. As a result of this, the object becomes an alien object that has power over the worker, so that the more the worker produces, the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital. We must remember here that the product that workers are dominated by, capital, is a social relation, so that workers, on this view, are dominated by capitalist social relations and therefore alienated under them. We can see the exact same idea at work, in what Althusser and We Agree is the paradigmatic example of Marx's later work, Volume 1 of Capital. In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx writes that under free competition, the imminent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him, and talk about this power of money under capitalism, which is impersonal. Again, the laws of capitalist production are those inherent in capitalist social relations, in capital, and they dominate the workers are subject to them and to continually produce and reproduce them through their labour. For Althusser, Marx's use of alienation 1844 serves as a merely philosophical category. For us, however, Marx's theory of alienation is very different from anything that Hegel or Feuerbach talk about under the same term. On our reading, alienation for Marx is instead a key part of his diagnosis of specifically capitalist social relations and the kinds of social divisions, activity and labour that they involve. It doesn't matter whether Marx labels this alienation or not. This isn't about the labels, it's about the ideas, and the ideas here are clearly and obviously the same. For those who are unusually interested in the history of Marxist thought, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Long before either the 1844 manuscript or the Gründerisse were available, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, in the essay Reification and the Consciousness of the Poletariat, managed to reconstruct all four kinds of alienation, drawing only on Marx's published works, especially the later ones, like Volume 1 of Capital. He did this, we should note, without having access to the early works like the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 or the Gründerisse at all, and if you can use only capital and a few other late published works, occasionally some earlier ones that were around, to completely and correctly reconstruct the theory of alienation that Marx uses in the 1844 manuscripts without having access to them at all, then it's hard to say that the later Marx doesn't have and use these same ideas. How can Alterser, who noted so many important things about Marx's development, fail to notice the continuity of these ideas? One reason we think is that he accepted some of the humanists' erroneous readings of the early Marx. If you think that the early Marx believes in some magical, static, ahistorical and universal human essence, then it's obvious that the later, very historical and contextual Marx must disagree strongly. However, we think that it's wrong to think that the early 1844 Marx holds this kind of view. We can see how this is so by looking at another example we've discussed in a previous video, this time on freedom and human nature. There we saw that in the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 Marx writes that, man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species being. Or, rather, he is a conscious being, i.e. his own life is an object for him only because he is a species being. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Marx says the very same thing involving one of capital, writing that, we presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver and the bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in the wax. Man not only affects a change of form in the materials of nature, he also realizes his own purposes in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of. Apart from the exertion of the working organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the work. Marx goes on, also involving one of capital, to emphasize the universality of this, writing that, such labour is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. Now the label of species being isn't the important thing here. Remember, change in terminology doesn't necessarily entail a change in ideas. The important thing here is that for Marx both in 1844 and in volume one of capital itself, humans are distinguished from other animals by their powers of consciousness, that this is fundamentally expressed in their activity of labour, and that this is common across all forms of human society. They are not, however, the kind of static and ahistorical things that Marx criticizes Feuerbach for using. Rather, it's a kind of internal capacity that all humans share, which is developed and expressed differently in different contexts and forms of society. It's only possible for all people to fully exercise these powers to govern ourselves in a society that allows it. We saw in another earlier video that Marx thinks, also from 1844, all the way through to volume one of capital, that this is communism. So in other words, once we properly understand what Marx's early ideas in 1844 at least really were, we can see how they carry through to his very latest works, albeit often with modified terminology that makes them easier to understand. Continuity and discontinuity in Marx's thought. There are many other things that Marx didn't change his mind on after 1844, like his commitment to communism, his rejection of capitalism, feudalism and slavery, and his commitment to the labour and communist movements. He never wavers in his defence of freedoms of speech, press, conviction and association. And he remains committed to, among other things, women's emancipation and the importance of equal rights for all humans regardless of race, gender, ethnicity and so on. This does not, of course, mean that Marx didn't change as he matured and learned more. Of course he did. After 1844 and 1845, he really explored political economy in much greater depth and developed his ideas on political economy much more. Furthermore, he develops a much better and more critical understanding of imperialism and colonialism, he changes his views on the revolutionary potential of non-capitalist societies like Russia, he elaborates his views on history much more, changes and developed his analysis of the state, and even changes his mind on the transition to communism in response to the Paris Commune. He also de-emphasized the normative aspects of his analysis of capitalism. We've seen that he still thinks that capitalism is, for example, unfree, but he doesn't focus his work on arguing for this, but instead focuses on explaining how capitalism in fact works. And he has a reason for doing this. Basically, he doesn't think that criticizing capitalism is going to be very helpful for the working class struggle, replacing it with communism. By contrast, he thinks that understanding and helping others to understand what capitalism is really like and how it really works will help the working classes overthrow capitalism and take us to communism. Since the kind of reading we've defended here is well recognized among Marx experts today, though it's not entirely uncontroversial, but often more controversial on the internet, here's a challenge. If you disagree with us and you'd like to have a conversation about this, please focus on the passages and our interpretation of them and our arguments based on them. If enough things come in, we'll respond in a Q&A video. This marks the end of our first series. Thank you so much for watching. After a Q&A and some response and review videos, our next series will look at Marx's theory of praxis, history, and social change. Have a good summer.