Young Marx - Althusser's "epistemological Break"

Althusser's "epistemological Break"

Louis Althusser popularized the conception of an "epistemological break" between the Young Marx and the mature Marx, that is the point where Marx broke with ideology to enter the domain of science, a point generally considered to consist in his break with Feuerbach. However, the epistemological break, a concept which Althusser drew out of Gaston Bachelard, is not to be conceived as a chronological point, but as a "process", thus making the question of the distinction between a "Young Marx" and a "mature Marx" a problematic one.

Althusser noted that the interest in the Young Marx, that is in the 1844 Manuscripts and other early works, was no longer a matter of interest only for Western Marxism, e.g. Togliatti, but also of Soviet studies, first of all, that the very discussion of early Marx carries political tones, as the Soviet Union's attitude to the subject is not very approving. He also noted that, as Jahn had noted, "it was not Marxists who opened the debate on Marx's Early Works.", indicating the political stakes surrounding it: "For this attack surprised Marxists on their own ground: that of Marx." Althusser then criticizes the Marxist response to this attack:

To discomfit those who set up against Marx his own youth, the opposite position is resolutely taken up: Marx is reconciled with his youth -- Capital is no longer read as On the Jewish Question, On the Jewish Question is read as Capital ; the shadow of the young Marx is no longer projected on to Marx, but that of Marx on to the young Marx; and a pseudo-theory of the history of philosophy in the 'future anterior' is erected to justify this counter-position, without realizing that this pseudo-theory is quite simply Hegelian. A devout fear of a blow to Marx's integrity inspires as its reflex a resolute acceptance of the whole of Marx : Marx is declared to be a whole, ' the young Marx is part of Marxism ' — as if we risked losing the whole of Marx if we were to submit his youth to the radical critique of history, not the history he was going to live, but the history he did live, not an immediate history, but the reflected history for which, in his maturity, he gave us, not the ' truth ' in the Hegelian sense, but the principles of its scientific understanding.

Thereby, Althusser warns against any attempts at reading in a teleological way Marx, that is in claiming that the mature Marx was already in the young Marx and necessarily derived from him:

"Capital is an ethical theory, the silent philosophy of which is openly spoken in Marx's Early Works. Thus, reduced to two propositions, is the thesis which has had such extraordinary success. And not only in France and in Italy, but also, as these articles from abroad show, in contemporary Germany and Poland. Philosophers, ideologues, theologians have all launched into a gigantic enterprise of criticism and conversion : let Marx be restored to his source, and let him admit at last that in him, the mature man is merely the young man in disguise. Or if he stubbornly insists on his age, let him admit the sins of his maturity, let him recognize that he sacrificed philosophy to economics, ethics to science, man to history. Let him consent to this or refuse it, his truth, everything that will survive him, everything which helps the men that we are to live and think, is contained in these few Early Works. So these good critics leave us with but a single choice: we must admit that Capital (and 'mature Marxism' in general) is either an expression of the Young Marx's philosophy, or its betrayal. In either case, the established interpretation must be totally revised and we must return to the Young Marx, the Marx through whom spoke the Truth. This is the location of the discussion: the Young Marx. Really at stake in it: Marxism. The terms of the discussion : whether the Young Marx was already and wholly Marx.

Althusser then criticizes the "eclectic" reading of Marx's Early Works, which instead of reading the text as a "whole", discompose it in various "elements" which it then judges as either "materialist" or "idealist" elements. Marx shouldn't be read in a finalist and teleological perspective, which would be a return to Hegel's idealist philosophy of history. Thus, he writes:

"From the Hegelian viewpoint, Early Works are as inevitable and as impossible as the singular object displayed by Jarry : ' the skull of the child Voltaire '. They are as inevitable as all beginnings. They are impossible because it is impossible to choose one's beginnings. Marx did not choose to be born to the thought German history had concentrated in its university education, nor to think its ideological world. He grew up in this world, in it he learned to live and move, with it he 'settled accounts', from it he liberated himself. I shall return to the necessity and contingency of this beginning later. The fact is that there was a beginning, and that to work out the history of Marx's particular thoughts their movement must be grasped at the precise instant when that concrete individual the Young Marx emerged into the thought world of his own time, to think in it in his turn, and to enter into the exchange and debate with the thoughts of his time which was to be his whole life as an ideologue. At this level of the exchanges and conflicts that are the very substance of the texts in which his living thoughts have come down to us, it is as if the authors of these thoughts were themselves absent. The concrete individual who expresses himself in his thoughts and his writings is absent, so is the actual history expressed in the existing ideological field. As the author effaces himself in the presence of his published thoughts, reducing himself to their rigour, so concrete history effaces itself in the presence of its ideological themes, reducing itself to their system. This double absence will also have to be put to the test. But for the moment, everything is in play between the rigour of a single thought and the thematic system of an ideological field. Their relation is this beginning and this beginning has no end. This is the relationship that has to be thought: the relation between the (internal) unity of a single thought (at each moment of its development) and the existing ideological field (at each moment of its development). But if this relationship is to be thought, so, in the same movement, must its terms."