Althusser’s polemical reckoning with the party he belonged to
What the Work Is
Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste — rendered in English as What Cannot Last in the Communist Party — is a book by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. It grew out of a series of articles he published in the newspaper Le Monde, which ran between 25 and 28 April 1978. These articles were subsequently expanded and reprinted in May 1978 by the publisher François Maspero as the book Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste. The work belongs to a period in which Althusser was increasingly turning a critical eye on the French Communist Party (PCF), of which he had been a member since 1948.
What the Book Is About
The book is a sustained critique of the internal functioning and political direction of the French Communist Party. It emerged from a specific conjuncture: the PCF’s twenty-second congress in 1976, at which the party abandoned the notion of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Althusser and his supporters contested the party leadership over this decision. He regarded the PCF’s move as “a new opportunistic version of Marxist Humanism,” and in a lecture given to the Union of Communist Students that same year, he criticized above all the manner in which the decision had been taken. According to Althusser, the party demonstrated a contempt for materialist theory when it suppressed what he considered a “scientific concept.”
The book thus addresses a question of both political substance and political process: what the party had done, and how it had done it. The title itself signals the work’s polemical thrust — an argument that certain features of the party’s conduct and organization could no longer be tolerated.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central theme of the book is the PCF’s abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the broader strategic reorientation it represented. Althusser interpreted this shift as a capitulation to a reformist and humanist version of Marxism, one he had spent much of his career opposing. His objection was not merely to the content of the decision but to the form: the party, in his view, had treated a theoretical concept as something to be discarded at will, without genuine debate or theoretical justification.
This connects to a longer-running concern in Althusser’s work: the defence of what he called “theoretical anti-humanism” against both Stalinism and Marxist humanism. The PCF’s move away from the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its embrace of a peaceful transition to socialism in the European context, appeared to Althusser as a new version of the humanist deviation he had long criticized.
The book also reflects Althusser’s broader frustration with the party’s internal culture. The struggle over the 1976 congress ultimately resulted in the debacle of the “Union of the Left” fraction and an open letter, written by Althusser and five other intellectuals, calling for “a real political discussion in the PCF.” The demand for genuine internal debate — as opposed to decisions imposed from above — is a recurring note in the work.
Structure and Approach
The book originated as a series of newspaper articles, published in Le Monde between 25 and 28 April 1978, and was later expanded and reprinted in book form. This origin in journalism shapes its approach: it is a work of intervention and polemic, addressed to a broad readership of party members and intellectuals rather than a purely academic treatise. The expansion from articles to book allowed Althusser to develop the arguments at greater length than the newspaper format permitted.
Significance and Influence
The book belongs to a period of intense internal conflict within the PCF and the broader European communist movement, against the backdrop of the emergence of Eurocommunism. Althusser’s critique of the party’s direction placed him at odds with the PCF leadership, though he was not publicly censured or expelled. The work stands as a document of the theoretical and political struggles within French communism in the late 1970s, and of Althusser’s own evolving relationship with the party he had joined three decades earlier.
Althusser was born on 16 October 1918 in Birmendreïs, near Algiers, in French Algeria, to a pied-noir petit-bourgeois family from Alsace. His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was a lieutenant in the French army and a bank clerk; his mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, was a devout Catholic and a schoolteacher. In 1930 the family moved to Marseille, where his father became director of the Compagnie Algérienne bank branch. Althusser excelled at the Lycée Saint-Charles and joined a scout group. In 1936 he moved to Lyon as a student at the Lycée du Parc, where he was influenced by Catholic professors, joined the Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne, and wanted to be a Trappist.
After two years of khâgne under Jean Guitton at the Lycée du Parc, Althusser was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in July 1939, but his attendance was deferred when he was drafted into the French Army in September 1939. Captured by the Germans at Vannes in June 1940, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein for the five remaining years of the war. There he was first assigned to hard labour and later reassigned to the infirmary after falling ill, which allowed him to read philosophy and literature. He later described the camp’s experiences of solidarity, political action, and community as the moment he first understood the idea of communism, recalling: “It was in prison camp that I first heard Marxism discussed by a Parisian lawyer in transit—and that I actually met a communist.”
Althusser resumed his studies at the ENS in 1945 to prepare for the agrégation. In 1946 he met Hélène Rytmann, a Jewish former French Resistance member, and began a close friendship with Jacques Martin, a translator of Hegel and Hölderlin to whom he dedicated his first book. Although he remained a Catholic, he joined the “worker-priests” movement and embraced a synthesis of Christian and Marxist thought. His 1947 DES thesis, supervised by Gaston Bachelard, was titled “On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel.”
In 1948 Althusser became a tutor at the ENS rather than teaching in secondary schools. He joined the PCF in October 1948, initially afraid of joining because of the ENS’s opposition to communists, and did so once he was made a tutor. He created the Cercle Politzer, a Marxist study group, at the ENS, introduced colleagues and students to the party, and worked closely with the communist cell of the ENS, while avoiding Marxism and Communism in his classes. He was primarily active in the “Peace Movement” section and kept his Catholic beliefs for a few years; in 1949 he published an article in L’Évangile captif on the historic situation of Catholicism.
In 1954 Althusser became secrétaire de l’école littéraire. He organized lectures and conferences with leading French philosophers including Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, and among his students were Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Michel Serres. He spent 35 years in total at the ENS, working there until November 1980. His first book was Montesquieu, la politique et l’histoire in 1959.
Althusser resumed Marxist-related publications in 1960, and For Marx and Reading Capital, both published in 1965, brought him international fame and made him one of the leading theoreticians of the PCF. He defended what he called “theoretical anti-humanism” as an alternative to Stalinism and Marxist humanism. In 1966, at a conference of communist philosophers in Choisy-le-Roi, Roger Garaudy read an indictment opposing “theoretical anti-humanism”; in March, at Argenteuil, the PCF Central Committee, chaired by Louis Aragon, formally examined the theses of Garaudy and Althusser and decided to keep Garaudy’s position as the official one. Waldeck Rochet said that “Communism without humanism would not be Communism.” Althusser was not publicly censured or expelled, though 600 Maoist students were expelled, and the party’s continued support of Garaudy further reduced his influence in the party.
During May 1968 Althusser was hospitalized with a depressive breakdown and was absent from the Latin Quarter. His initial silence drew criticism from protesters, who wrote on walls: “Of what use is Althusser?” He later called the movement “the most significant event in Western history since the Resistance and the victory over Nazism,” while also adopting the PCF official argument that it was an “infantile disorder” of anarchistic utopianism. The Maoist journal La Cause du peuple called him a revisionist, and he was condemned by former students, mainly Jacques Rancière. He then went through a phase of “self-criticism” resulting in Essays in Self-criticism (1974), in which he revisited some of his old positions, including his support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
In 1970 Althusser published “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in La Pensée. By this time he was very popular in Latin America, where some leftist activists and intellectuals saw him almost as a new Marx. At the turn from the 1960s to the 1970s, For Marx (1969) and Reading Capital (1970) were translated into English.
In the early 1970s the PCF was in a period of internal conflicts on strategic orientation against the backdrop of the emergence of Eurocommunism, and Althusserian structuralist Marxism was one of the more or less defined strategic lines. Althusser participated in various public events of the PCF, most notably the 1973 public debate “Communists, Intellectuals and Culture.” In 1975 he concluded his Doctorat d’État at the University of Picardie and acquired the right to direct research; some time after this recognition he married Hélène Rytmann. In 1976 he compiled essays written between 1964 and 1975 to publish Positions, gave a conference titled “The Transformation of Philosophy” in Granada and Madrid in March 1976, and gave a lecture in Catalonia titled “Quelques questions de la crise de la théorie marxiste et du mouvement communiste international,” in which he outlined empiricism as the main enemy of class struggle.
Between 1977 and 1978 Althusser mainly elaborated texts criticizing Eurocommunism and the PCF. His abandoned 1978 manuscript “Marx in his Limits” argued that there was no Marxist theory of the state; it was published only in 1994 in Écrits philosophiques et politiques I. The Italian Communist newspaper Il manifesto allowed him to develop new ideas at a 1977 Venice conference on “Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies,” resulting in the articles “The Crisis of Marxism” and “Marxism as a ‘finite’ theory,” in which he stressed that “something vital and alive can be liberated by this crisis.” The former was published as “Marxism Today” in the 1978 Italian Enciclopedia Europea; the latter was included in the Italian book Discutere lo Stato, where he criticized the notion of “government party” and defended the notion of a revolutionary party “out of state.”
After the PCF and the left were defeated in the French legislative elections of 1978, Althusser’s bouts of depression became more severe and frequent. In March 1980 he interrupted the dissolution session of the École Freudienne de Paris and, “in the name of the analysts,” called Lacan a “beautiful and pitiful harlequin.” He then underwent hiatal hernia-removal surgery after having difficulties breathing while eating; according to Althusser himself, the operation caused his physical and mental state to deteriorate, and he developed a persecution complex and suicidal thoughts. He later recalled: “I wanted not only to destroy myself physically but to wipe out all trace of my time on earth: in particular, to destroy every last one of my books and all my notes, and burn the École Normale, and also, ‘if possible,’ suppress Hélène herself while I still could.” After the surgery he was hospitalized for most of the summer in a Parisian clinic, and in early October was sent home. In the fall of 1980 his psychiatrist René Diatkine, who was by then also treating Rytmann, recommended that Althusser be hospitalized, but the couple refused.
On 16 November 1980, Althusser strangled Rytmann in their ENS room. He reported the murder to the doctor in residence, who contacted psychiatric institutions; even before the police arrived, the doctor and the director of ENS decided to hospitalize him at the Sainte-Anne hospital, and a psychiatric examination was conducted. He was deemed not to understand the charges or the process, and the psychiatric assessment concluded he should not be criminally charged based on article 64 of the French Penal Code. The report said Althusser killed Rytmann in the course of an acute crisis of melancholy, without even realizing it, and that the “wife-murder by manual strangulation was committed without any additional violence, in the course of [an] iatrogenic hallucinatory episode complicated by melancholic depression.” He lost his civil rights, was entrusted to a representative of the law, and was forbidden to sign any documents. In February 1981 the court ruled him mentally irresponsible, so he could not be prosecuted and was not charged; a warrant of confinement was issued by the Paris police prefecture, the Ministry of National Education mandated his retirement from the ENS, and the ENS requested his family and friends to clear out his apartment. In June he was transferred to the L’Eau-Vive clinic at Soisy-sur-Seine.
The murder attracted much media attention, with several requests to treat Althusser as an ordinary criminal. The newspaper Minute, journalist Dominique Jamet, and Minister of Justice Alain Peyrefitte were among those who accused him of having “privileges” because he was Communist. Roudinesco wrote that from this point of view Althusser was three times a criminal: first, the philosopher had legitimated the current of thought judged responsible for the Gulag; second, he praised the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an alternative to both capitalism and Stalinism; and finally because he had, it was said, corrupted the elite of French youth by introducing the cult of a criminal ideology into the heart of one of the best French institutions. Philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff went further, claiming Althusser taught his students to perceive crimes positively, as akin to a revolution. Five years after the murder, a critique by Le Monde‘s Claude Sarraute had a great impact on Althusser; she compared his case to that of Issei Sagawa, who killed and cannibalized a woman in France but whose psychiatric diagnosis absolved him, and criticized the fact that, when prestigious names are involved, a lot is written about
