the death of Stalin as the unitary process of a single ‘enveloping totalization’. The series of concrete investigations finally moves to a theoretical meditation on the personality and role of Stalin himself, of great brilliance—and then abruptly breaks off, the rest of the manuscript swerving away into an ontological discourse of impenetrable abstraction and obscurity, concerned with quite other questions. The reason for this final loss of direction, which perhaps prevented publication of the study, is clear enough. For all the ambition and ingenuity of his exploration of the successive contradictions of Soviet society, Sartre was unable actually to demonstrate how the ravaging struggles of the time generated an ultimate structural unity. In the absence of any extended principle of explanation, the needle of his account swings back to the shortest and simplest answer: Soviet society was held together by the dictatorial force wielded by Stalin, a monocentric sovereignty imposing a repressive unification of all the conflicting praxes within it. Hence the logic of the Critique’s terminus in the figure of the despot himself. The effective upshot is thus paradoxically a totalization with a totalizer—undermining that very complexity of the historical process which it was Sartre’s express purpose to establish. Nowhere spelt out as such, the unhappy silence that suddenly falls across the work bespeaks Sartre’s unease with the conclusion his argument had arrived at. He had lucidly emphasized, indeed, at the outset that the case of a dictatorial society was easier for his task—the more demanding test for Marxist theory being posed by bourgeois democracies, whose class struggles were not compacted together by a police regime.96 But much as Engels had done before him, in confining himself to the USSR he thereby ended by finding in the historical ‘resultant’ what he had put into it in the first place. The general tendency of his response to the problem of order, however, can be discerned in this specialized exploration of it. Confronted with the direct question as to what prevented history from being ‘an arbitrary chaos of inter-blocking projects’ within his conceptual framework, his essential answer was: power.97 In lieu of Parsons’s consensus of moral values, Sartre’s centre of integration was the command of a coercive State.
Althusser, it will be recalled, in criticizing Engels’s paradigm extended his attack to Sartre’s attempt to rework the problem on a much vaster scale in the Critique, linking the two directly: ‘It is only possible to bar Sartre from his path by closing the one Engels opened for him’.98 But the radical rejection in For Marx and Reading Capital of any form of volition, individual or collective, as an epistemological starting-point did not at the same stroke lift the issue of social order. Althusser subsequently found himself confronted with it too, and it is of interest that his initial answer to the question was in effect a hybrid of the positions of Parsons and of Sartre. His vocabulary for posing the problem was, of course, significantly different. Citing Marx’s dictum that ‘a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year’, he asked: ‘how is the reproduction of the relations of production secured?’99 His reply was that the ongoing reproduction of any social formation was essentially assured by the combined operation of the coercive and cultural machinery of the State (the latter interpreted in senso latu). ‘For the most part it is secured by the exercise of State power in the State Apparatuses, on the one hand the (Repressive) State Apparatus, on the other hand the Ideological State Apparatuses’.100 The former are directed by ‘the leadership of the representatives of the classes in power executing the politics of the class struggle of the classes in power’, while the latter effect a ‘massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class’ in the oppressed classes.101 Ironically, these formulations veer close to the voluntarist schema of historical explanation that Althusser had sought to renounce. Perhaps sensing this, in a postscript he stipulated two qualifications: the ‘total process’ of reproduction was ‘realized’ within the processes of production and circulation, through a ‘class struggle’ counterposing ruling to ruled classes.102 Some years later, he proffered a further amendment: ‘The class struggle does not go on in the air, or on something like a football pitch. It is rooted in the mode of production and exploitation in a given class society.’103 Thus ‘the material basis’ of the class struggle was ‘the unity of the relations of production and the productive forces under the relations of a given mode of production, in a concrete historical social formation’.104 Here the emphasis reverts sharply back towards the ‘base’, in the traditional Marxist topography, which possesses and enforces its own ‘unity’.
What view should be taken of these successive adjustments? The logic of historical materialism precludes either the Parsonian or the Sartrean solutions. To contend that social formations typically derive their unity from the diffusion of values, or the exercise of violence, across a plurality of individual or group wills is to reject the Marxist insistence on the ultimate primacy of economic determinations in history. In fact, Marx and Engels directly polemicized in their own time with 19th century versions of precisely these two positions—in the work of Hegel and of Dühring, respectively. The problem of social order is irresoluble so long as the answer to it is sought at the level of intention (or valuation), however complex or entangled the skein of volition, however class-defined the struggle of wills, however alienated the final resultant from all of the imputed actors. It is, and must be, the dominant mode of production that confers fundamental unity on a social formation, allocating their objective positions to the classes within it, and distributing the agents within each class. The result is, typically, an objective process of class struggle. To stabilize and regulate this conflict, the complementary modalities of political power, which include repression and ideology, exercised inside and outside the State, are thereafter indispensable. But class struggle itself is not a causal prius in the sustentation of order, for classes are constituted by modes of production, and not vice versa. The one mode of production of which this will not be true is communism—which, precisely, will abolish classes.
At the same time, of course, the question of order is not exhaustive of the nature of the historical process. Upheaval and disorder equally require explanation. The temptation is to say that these form the peculiar province of the class struggle that is set in motion by the mode of production. This, however, would be facile. For among the most fundamental of all mechanisms of social change, according to historical materialism, are the systemic contradictions between forces and relations of production, not just social conflicts between classes generated by antagonistic relations of production alone. The former overlap with the latter, because one of the major forces of production is always labour, which simultaneously figures as a class specified by the relations of production. But they do not coincide. Crises within modes of production are not identical with confrontations between classes. The two may or may not fuse, according to the historical occasion. The onset of major economic crises, whether under feudalism or capitalism, has typically taken all social classes unawares, deriving from structural depths below those of direct conflict between them. The resolution of such crises, on the other hand, has no less typically been the outcome of prolonged war between classes. In general, revolutionary transformations—from one mode of production to another—are indeed the privileged terrain of class struggle. Here too, however, it is essential to remember the great distance between the relatively blind clashes of the immemorial past, and the recent—very uneven and imperfect—conversion of them into conscious contests in the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus in both reproduction and transformation—maintenance and subversion—of social order, mode of production and class struggle are always at work. But the second must be activated by the first for it to achieve its determinate effects, which on either ground will find their maximum point of concentration in the political structure of the State.
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