What is to be Done?

Louis Althusser, G. M. Goshgarian

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509538614, 9781509538607
• eBook ISBN: 9781509538621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What is to be done? This was the question asked by Lenin in 1901 when he was having doubts about the revolutionary capabilities of the Russian working class. 77 years later, Louis Althusser asked the same question. Faced with the tidal wave of May '68 and the recurrent hostility of the Communist Party towards the protests, he wanted to offer readers a succinct guide for the revolution to come. Lively, brilliant and engaged, this short text is wholly oriented towards one objective: to organise the working class struggle. Althusser provides a sharp critique of Antonio Gramsci's writings and of Eurocommunism, which seduced various Marxists at the time. But this book is above all the opportunity for Althusser to state what he had not succeeded in articulating elsewhere: what concrete conditions would need to be satisfied before the revolution could take place. Left unfinished, it is published here in English for the first time.

1
The ‘What’ in ‘What Is To Be Done?’

What is to be done?

That old question of Lenin’s, which initiated the construction and the practices of the Bolshevik Party, is not, for a communist who knows Marxist theory, a question like any other. It is a political question. What is to be done to help to orient and organize the workers’ and the people’s class struggle so that it carries the day against the bourgeois class struggle?

We should weigh all the words in this simple question.

What is to be done to help to orient and organize the workers’ and the people’s class struggle? It can be seen that orientation, or the political line, comes before organization. This is to affirm the primacy of the political line over the party, and the construction and organization of the party as a function of the political line.

What is to be done to help to orient and organize the workers’ and the people’s class struggle? It can be seen that orientation (the line) and organization (the party) depend on the workers’ and the people’s class struggle. Thus the party is the instrument of the political line, and the political line itself is the expression of the current workers’ and people’s class struggle, that is, of its tendency, antagonistic to the tendency of the bourgeois class struggle.

Everything depends, therefore, on the ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’¹ of the current tendency of the workers’ and people’s class struggle in its antagonism to the bourgeois class struggle. Hence everything depends on the concrete analysis of this antagonism, which constitutes the bourgeois class as a dominant, exploiting class and, simultaneously, the working class as a dominated, exploited class.

If it is true that Marx upheld, at least with respect to the capitalist mode of production, the thesis of the primacy of contradiction over the contraries, that is, of the class struggle over the classes, then it is this antagonism itself which must comprise the object of ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation’. Otherwise, we lapse into ‘vulgar sociology’. Otherwise, we will analyse the bourgeois class on the one hand and the working class on the other, in the belief that we can come to know them separately. It is as if we believed that we could understand a game of football by ‘analysing’ the line-ups of the teams, not their match-ups, without which there would not be a single football team on earth.²

When we say ‘primacy of contradiction over the contraries’, ‘primacy of the class struggle over the classes’, we are merely stating an abstract principle. For we have to go to the field, in the ‘concrete’, to see, in detail, what forms this antagonism historically takes, and what historical forms it confers on the classes that it constitutes. In order to understand the significance and fecundity of these principles, then, we cannot dispense with going ‘to the field’ and analysing things down to the smallest detail.

How can we carry out this ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’? How can we learn in detail what goes on, for example, in the conditions of life, work, and exploitation of a metalworker or petrochemical worker, a worker on a ‘family’ farm or an industrial farm, a rail worker, bank clerk, social security employee, and so on?

Some people believe that it is enough to address an appeal to those involved, to ask them to talk about their lives, their jobs, how they are exploited, and the like. That is what L’Humanité Dimanche, for example, has done by appealing to all its readers to whom the word applies to tell it about ‘poverty’.³ And the newspaper has received a considerable number of letters, which are, incidentally, slumbering in its managing editor’s office.⁴ Well and good. The workers are writing, they are saying a great many interesting, incredible, overwhelming things. This can provide some material for a concrete analysis. It is not a concrete analysis.

Some people believe that it is enough to head for the field, without preparation, and interview the workers. Either they ask them questions (but everyone knows that spontaneous questions aren’t spontaneous, that they are biased by the ‘ideas’ that the person asking them has in mind) and the workers say what they feel like saying; or else they arrange matters so as to let the workers talk, interfering as little as possible themselves. In that case too, however, the workers say what they feel like saying. Assuming they say everything they know, one thing is certain: they always know much more (or much less) about things than they think they do. They do not say this ‘much more’, because they do not know that they know it. As for this ‘much less’, it is masked by what they think they do know.⁵ These ‘interviews’ too can provide some material for a concrete analysis. They are not a concrete analysis.

One cannot dispense with going to the field and listening carefully to the workers – but neither can one dispense with preparing for this encounter. It is not a question of psychological preparation for the purpose of establishing ‘good personal contact’ (of the kind that ‘the human relations approach’ manufactures). It is a question of theoretical and political preparation. That is why it is possible to say that a concrete analysis and the Marxist theory or political consciousness of the conditions for knowledge are one and the same thing. All that differs is the scale of the object.

Lenin was in the habit of saying that the working class must take the greatest possible account of what goes on outside it, in the bourgeois class, not just to know itself, but to constitute itself as a conscious class (that is, as a class endowed with a party that orients, unifies and organizes its struggle). It cannot be satisfied with knowing what is going on in its own domain, that is, with knowing itself; it must also see and understand what is going on on the other side. This is not a question of simple curiosity; it is a question of grasping the two poles of the antagonism at the same time in order to be able to grasp the antagonism as that which constitutes the two poles, in order to grasp the class struggle as that which constitutes the classes by dividing them into classes. Otherwise, the working class will be penned within its own horizon, that of its exploitation, of its revolts with no morrow, doubled by its utopian dreams; and it will, in this captivity, be subject to all the pressures and manoeuvres of the bourgeois class struggle.

To succeed in grasping the antagonism, to succeed in understanding the mechanism of this class struggle that divides the classes into classes, mere ‘self-consciousness’ is not enough. Italian television recently interviewed Alfa Romeo workers at their workplace.⁶ These were vanguard workers with extraordinarily high consciousness. The audience saw everything they did at work; the workers said everything they knew. They were workers in a separate workshop who held a simple place in Alfa Romeo’s immense labour process. Isolated though they were, in their shop, in their work, they had nevertheless managed to arrive at an idea of the structure and mechanisms of the process of production in their plant, and not just the labour process in their own plant, but also the subcontracting going on outside it, and even Alfa Romeo’s economic and financial policies, its investments, markets, and so on. These workers had even acquired – this is extremely unusual – a certain consciousness of the effects produced on them by this system: on their own working conditions, their exploitation, the relation between this exploitation and the conditions for the reproduction of their own labour-power (their housing, their families – the wife and children – school, social security, transport, their car, and so on). They had even understood, to a certain extent – this is still more surprising – that their isolation as well as the ignorance of company policies in which the monopoly Alfa Romeo keeps its workers, including ignorance of its organization and its division of labour, were part and parcel of the conditions of their exploitation, since this isolation and ignorance were one of the forms of the bourgeois class struggle, intended to keep them from attaining accurate collective consciousness, and thus from carrying out effective industrial action or political action.

Thus these workers had gone a very long way in ‘developing their consciousness’ [dans leur ‘prise de conscience’]⁷ – and I insist that what is involved here is a case of exceptional ‘consciousness’, incomprehensible outside the context of the struggles of the Italian metalworkers, who have, for years, ventured well beyond the bounds of traditional trade union demands (the defence of wage levels, the fight against speed-up, and so on) in order to intervene in the organization of the labour process and workers’ control over it, and even in the investment policies of the trust that employs them. In France, we are far, very far, from having an example of this kind.

Yet the very same workers who displayed this extraordinary capacity for analysis ran up against an insuperable problem. While they knew what was going on in their plant and trust, they had no comparable idea of what was really going on at Fiat, that is, in the same branch of production; and they had absolutely no idea of what was going on in the other branches of production in Italy: metalworking, textiles, the petrochemical industry, mining, agriculture, transport, the financial trusts and the trusts that control commercial distribution, and so on. It is, however, absolutely impossible to arrive at an idea of what determines what goes on at Alfa Romeo unless one has as comprehensive an idea as possible of Alfa Romeo’s position not just in the production of automobiles, and the market for them, but also in metalworking, textiles, the plastics industry, the petrochemical industry and the rubber industry – industries directly relevant to automobile production, because they provide the automobile industry with their finished products, which serve as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• 1 The ‘What’ in ‘What Is To Be Done?’
• 2 The Absolute Empiricism of Antonio Gramsci
• 3 Gramsci or Machiavelli?
• 4 Gramsci, Eurocommunism, Class Dictatorship
• Index
• End User License Agreement