Althusser, “levels” and a scholarly dialogue

To mark PPE@10 this feature continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014. 

One of the true joys of scholarly life is a genuine discourse between fellow travelers that is both unplanned yet organic. Last year, over a period of some weeks, we were both privileged to share such a discourse. We have decided to craft a post here based on that discourse, not necessarily because it has resulted in radically new concepts or methodologies, but because it captures a (hopefully) productive effort to work through common problems.

Now, for some context. Both of us are researchers who are deeply influenced by the work of French philosopher Louis Althusser. Responsible in large part for a vigorous approach to Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s (dubbed “structural Marxism”), Althusser the scholar was always controversial. Whereas he was hailed by some as renewing Marxist theory through a fundamental re-reading of Marx and the introduction of a suite of new concepts (including “overdetermination”, “structural causality” and “ideological state apparatuses”), others assailed his work as obscurantist, functionalist and dismissive of human agency. It is not our purpose here to recapitulate these debates; suffice it to say both of us hold to the former view and have found Althusser to be indispensable to our work on literary theory (Heino 2021a; 2021b; 2024) and education (Backer 2019; 2022).

However, in the context of his work on literature, which relies heavily on Althusser’s understanding of ideology, Brett began to think through some of the implications of Althusser’s understanding of a social formation as being composed of different “levels” or “instances.” Étienne Balibar, one of Althusser’s co-contributors to the monumental Reading Capital, summarises this conception thus:

the social formation is presented as constituted out of different levels (we shall also speak of them as instances and practices). Marx lists three: the economic base, the legal and political superstructures, and the forms of consciousness (2015: 362).

This conception was a complexification of the traditional base-superstructure model of orthodox Marxist theory. In particular, Althusser stressed that, contrary to the understanding of an economistic vision of Marxism, the political and ideological levels could not be reduced to epiphenomenal reflections of the economic. Rather, these political and ideological levels had their own logics and forms of effectivity. Moreover, each level is associated with a particular form of practice, whereby humans labour to produce certain results. These levels exist in a relationship of overdetermination, whereby they constitute a global structure organized in complex relationships of dominance. Causality here is not a linear “A causes B” or an expressive “B is a phenomenal form of A”. Rather, causality is structural in the sense that the relationship between A and B cannot be plotted without understanding the broader structure within which A and B relate.

At an intuitive level, this vision of a social formation makes eminent sense to both of us. However, what led to Brett’s initial overture was criticism about this conception of levels. In Alex Callinicos’ Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory (previously reviewed by Brett on this blog), a work otherwise sympathetic to Althusser, it is argued that this notion of levels, together with a complexified notion of economic determination in the last instance, serves to universalise the separation of economy and polity that is characteristic of capitalism to all social formations. The “political Marxism” of (amongst others) Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood shares this view, with the latter arguing that, in common with more orthodox base-superstructure models, theories of levels map onto ‘qualitatively different, more or less enclosed and ‘regionally’ separated spheres’ (Meiksins Wood 1981: 68). From this perspective, to employ the Althusserian notion of levels is to illegitimately view precapitalist societies through the prism of capitalist categories.

As mentioned, it was queries around these challenging, weighty arguments that was the basis for our initial dialogue. Through a series of back-and-forward emails (in true Althusserian terms, dare we say as the result of our own theoretical practice?), we developed a set of propositions designed to both defend the Althusserian notion of “levels” as a tool to explore both capitalist and precapitalist societies, and to remedy some conceptual confusion in the notion as originally developed by Althusser and his followers. In doing so, we stress that we are heavily indebted to the work of structural Marxist anthropology.

1. All societies, whether capitalist or precapitalist, engage in various forms of practice. Practice, in the Althusserian sense, refers to social processes by which agents are put ‘into active contact with the real and produces results of social utility’ (Althusser 2017: 81). These agents work various forms of raw material into products through the application of physical and intellectual labour. The list of practices are non-exhaustive, but Althusser, basing himself on Engels, identifies three as fundamental, namely economic, political and ideological practice. The most foundational is economic practice (which David refers to as a ‘special third’ of the aforementioned trinity of practices), the means by which humans transform nature to provide the necessaries of life. Ideological practice, the means by which societies transform consciousness into organised systems of representation allowing social reproduction, is also common to every social formation. At the stage of development where the state enters historical existence as a repressive force, we also get political practice, which transforms social relations through the action of the state. At the level of empirical existence these practices are very clearly intertwined, but we would argue that they are just as clearly conceptually distinct and invested with distinct logics. Consequently, practices have degrees of relative autonomy and are not reducible to one another. Rather, they cohere in complex constellations of dominance in social formations.
2. These practices generate forces that work within the social formation. It is in this specific sense, the union of practices with forces, that we believe it makes sense to talk of the economic/political/ideological “level.” In Althusserian terms, we would hold these as structures, not in the sense of being visible, discrete and delimited institutions, but as bundles of conceptually distinct relations that operate below the surface so to speak, detectable as absent causes. In the initial deployment of these terms, structural Marxist analyses sometimes tended to hedge, treating the levels sometimes as structures in this sense, sometimes as a catalogue of institutions.

We believe it is crucial to a genuinely Marxist political economy that some determining capacity is attributed to the economic structure/level, although it is necessary to state immediately that this need not reify that level into something outside of history (a claim often levelled against structural Marxism); rather, this economic level is also subject to that history (such as when Althusser takes up Lenin’s thesis that the state will wither away in communism). Poulantzas (1979: 198) gets to the heart of this issue:

One must know whether one remains within a Marxist framework or not; and if one does one accepts the determinant role of the economic in the very complex sense; not the determination of forces of production but of relations of production and the social division of labour…if one is Marxist, the determinant role of relations of production, in the very complex sense, must mean something.

It seems to us that this touchstone of Marxist political economy has been occluded in some influential contemporary theories, such as the theory of “internal relations” (where hierarchies of determination between different social relations are not clear) and “political Marxism” (where the generative tension between the forces and relations of production are occluded). There is often a sleight of hand in such analyses, whereby the prime determining force is identified rather indiscriminately as “capitalist social relations”, which risks reducing itself to the tautology of the capitalist whole being caused by the capitalist whole. We argue that the economic level, defined as the union of the relations and forces of production in economic practice, does have some determining capacity in the last instance, but this should be conceived in a structural way; that is, economic determination is exercised through ascribing bundles of relations their place in the social formation, as opposed to a crude, linear determinism. This can involve fixing other social levels as the dominant one, as Marx observed in relation to the role of politics in antiquity and religion in the Middle Ages (an observation Callinicos dismisses in Making History as obiter dictum, a conclusion we do not share).

3. The two preceding points describe analytical concepts which, by their nature, are too abstract to describe the concrete structure of any past or existing social formation. Callinicos makes a very useful point in Making History that is apropos here; analytical concepts are designed to elucidate and help us think through causal relationships, rather than providing a set of empirical observations about this or that social formation. There is a missing middle term which is crucial to articulate these concepts with a concrete object: institutions. Our social levels (practices + forces) crystallise into institutions, but the process is complex and does not neatly pair a level with a specific institution. This is particularly the case with pre-class and early-class societies possessing only a rudimentary division of labour. Structural Marxist anthropology identified how, in such societies, concrete institutions can be the bearer of multiple elements of these structures e.g. for example, Godelier notes how kinship relations serve as both economic infrastructure and political/ideological superstructure in certain indigenous Australian societies.

However, that being the case, there does appear to be structural development in human society whereby, over time, the institutions and the structures do tend to coincide. In our pre-class, primitive-communist society, there is no identifiable political/ideological institutional superstructure. In feudal society, however, there is a more-or-less distinct state and ideological state apparatuses e.g. the Church. However, due to the structure of economic practice, this state and ideological apparatuses are deeply imbricated in that practice in the form of extra-economic exploitation. Within capitalism, we argue that structures and institutional forms do tend to coincide e.g. we have an institutionally separate economy, polity, ideological apparatuses etc. In terms of this relationship between structures and concrete institutions, there is a quote by Poulantzas (1978: 115) that might help us conceptualise it better. He notes that:

the concept of structure covers the organizing matrix of institutions. Through the functioning of the ideological, the structure always remains hidden in and by the institutional system which it organizes…Yet we should add that structure is not the simple principle of organization which is exterior to the institution: the structure is present in an allusive and inverted form in the institution itself, and it is in the reiteration of these successive, hidden presences that we can discover the principle of elucidation of the institutions.

To bring together the preceding points, we would note a comment of Althusser’s in his contribution to Reading Capital regarding the relationship between economic infrastructure and political/ideological superstructures, based upon his observations of how a society sorts, or does not sort, agents of production into the roles of direct worker and master:

certain relations of production presuppose the existence of a legal-political and ideological superstructure as a condition of their peculiar existence, and…this superstructure is necessarily specific (since it is a function of the specific relations of production that call for it). It also shows that certain other relations of production do not call for a political superstructure, but only for an ideological superstructure (classless societies). Finally, it shows that the nature of the relations of production considered not only calls or does not call for a certain form of superstructure, but also establishes the degree of effectivity delegated to a certain level of the social totality. Irrespective of all these consequences, we can draw one conclusion at any rate where the relations of production are concerned: they relate to the superstructural forms they call for as so many conditions of their own existence. The relations of production cannot therefore be thought in their concept while abstracting from their specific superstructural conditions of existence (Althusser 2015: 331-332).

Here is established the fundamentals of the relationship between different social levels. Political and ideological relations simultaneously are key to the very constitution and reproduction of economic relations, but the latter determines the type and degree of effectivity accorded those relations. This understanding is completely commensurable with a vision of pre-capitalist societies in which the various social levels appear as an agglomerated, amorphous mass, and an understanding of capitalism as a more-or-less stratified structure where an institutional political and ideological superstructure sits atop the capitalist economic infrastructure.

We would again stress that individual elements of these propositions appear very strongly in works of structural Marxist anthropology and in Callinicos’ Making History. However, we believe that by crafting this set of propositions, we have shown the utility of the Althusserian conception of social levels to analyse both capitalist and precapitalist societies. Given that Althusser’s work seems to be more impactful today then it has been for many years, we hope that dialogues such as ours can continue to invigorate and develop the Althusserian tradition.