One Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture

"This book consists of four papers which have emerged from very different contexts and which have very different motivations. What they have in common is a rejection of the Althusserian interpretation of Marx and a reassertion of those elements of the marxist tradition that have been suppressed by Althusserianism.

These elements can be summed up by the three terms used by Althusser to describe the major deviations from marxist "orthodoxy": "humanism", or a belief in the creative potential of human beings, a creative potential that is stunted and alienated under capitalism; "empiricism", or the belief that there is no higher basis for knowledge than experience, so that the basis for a critique of capitalist society can only be the experience of the mass of the people oppressed and exploited under capitalism; and "historicism", or the belief that knowledge, being based on socially mediated experience and being validated through social practice, is necessarily the product of social conditions at a particular time and place, conditions which are historically relative and which can be changed by those who live under them. These ideas have always been subversive of dogmatic marxism, which attempts to abstract marxism from the historical experience from which it derives and attempts to give marxism an absolute authority as source of a knowledge of history that is inaccessible to those who live and make that history."