Revisiting the Althusser/E. P. Thompson-Controversy: Towards a Marxist theory of communication

Introduction

In contemporary society, there is much talk about the role of communication in society. One can hear and read a lot about social media, the information economy, the creative industry, the cultural industries, the digital economy, digital labour, the information society, information work, and so on. A critical theory of communication can guide our understanding of how communication shapes and is shaped by contemporary society’s power structures. Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communication takes a dualist approach that separates communication and power (see Fuchs, 2016). It is therefore appropriate to explore how an alternative critical theory of communication can go beyond Habermas, and for doing so, draw on various traditions of critical thought. This article makes a contribution to this task by dealing with the question: How can Louis Althusser and Edward P. Thompson’s controversy on base/superstructure and structure/agency inform a critical theory of communication?

The base/superstructure problem deals with the question of how the economic and the non-economic are ontologically related. The structure/agency problem is about the relationship of human subjects and their practices with society’s structures. To find answers, we need theories about society. In one way or another, all social theories have to deal with these two problems. But Marxist theories have given particular attention to these questions because they are especially concerned with the role of the capitalist economy in society, capitalism’s structural contradictions, and class struggles. Althusser and Thompson have made two distinct contributions to this debate. The world of ideas and the communication of ideas have in Marxist theories especially been reflected in the categories of class-consciousness and ideology. The base-superstructure problem also poses questions about the relationship of the material and the ideational in society. One of its concerns is what role ideas have in relation to the economy and society. If we want to establish foundations of a critical theory of communication, it is therefore worthwhile to revisit discussions about the relationship of the economy and culture, the economic and the non-economic and structure/agency.

Louis Althusser’s works on Marxism are among the 20th century’s most influential French contributions to critical theory. His most well-known works are For Marx (Althusser, 1965/2005), Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar, 1968/2009) and the essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser, 1971, pp. 127–186). Althusser’s approach of structuralist Marxism has influenced among others Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, Ernesto Laclau, Étienne Balibar, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Manuel Castells, Michel Foucault, Nicos Poulantzas, Régis Debray, Stuart Hall and Slavoj Žižek.

Edward P. Thompson is one of Britain’s most well known historians and Marxist scholars. Carl Winslow, editor of E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, a collection of important essays of Thompson, characterises this influential Marxist scholar in the book’s introduction as ‘one of the great figures of the post-Second World War left’ (Thompson, 2014, p. 9). His best-known works are The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson, 1963) and a biography of William Morris (Thompson, 2011). Thompson was a humanist socialist who questioned structuralism’s theoretical and political implications. Given Althusser’s structuralism and Thompson’s humanism, we can expect these authors to approach the base/superstructure problem and the structure/agency-question in quite different ways. And this difference gave rise to a controversy expressed in Thompson’s (1978) book The Poverty of Theory. This work became one of the most well known criticisms of Althusser. For example, it inspired Perry Anderson (1980) to write a 200-page-long constructive engagement that discusses the commonalities of and differences between Thompson and Althusser.

This essay proceeds by introducing the background (section ‘Background’), discussing Althusser’s conception of base and superstructure (section ‘Louis Althusser’), engaging with Thompson’s critique of Althusser (section ‘Edward P. Thompson’), and an outline of foundations of how a critical theory of communication can draw from and go beyond the Althusser and Thompson-debate (section ‘Towards a critical theory of communication’).

Thompson is not just a historian but is also considered as a representative of cultural studies. There is a close relationship between cultural studies and communication studies. We therefore want to briefly discuss aspects of communication in cultural studies as background to the engagement with Thompson’s works.

Background

Culture is a system of meaning-making, whereas communication is the process of (re)producing social relations, sharing and co-constructing meanings. Wherever there is culture, there is communication. Whenever we communicate, we create culture. Cultural studies and communication studies are therefore two closely related fields of study. Stuart Hall (1980) argues that cultural studies is based on two paradigms: The ‘culturalism’ of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and E. P. Thompson on the one hand, and Althusserian structuralism on the other. Hall (1980) characterises Thompson’s work as focusing on ‘classes as relations, popular struggle, and historical forms of consciousness, class cultures in their historical particularity’ (p. 61). Hall (1980) argues that for both Williams, Hoggart and Thompson, culture is ‘interwoven with all social practices’ and ‘sensuous human praxis’ through which ‘men and women make history’ (p. 63). The ‘creative’ and ‘historical agency’ constitute ‘the two key elements in the humanism’ (p. 63) of what Hall terms culturalism. In contrast, structuralism foregrounds language, the whole, the mode of production and ideology as social structures and the human being as a bearer of structures. It stresses the ‘articulation of parts within a structure’ (p. 65) and ‘determinate conditions’ (p. 67).

Hall (1980) argues that he wants to ‘think forwards from the best elements in the structuralist and culturalist enterprises’ (p. 72). But in fact his own work was more influenced by Althusser’s and Laclau’s structuralism than by so-called ‘culturalism’. This becomes evident in one of Hall’s most read and cited works, the Encoding/Decoding-essay. In this essay, Hall applies Marx dialectic of production, circulation and consumption to the means of communication. ‘Thus – to borrow Marx’s terms – circulation and reception are, indeed, “moments” of the production process in television’ (Hall, 1973, p. 3). Hall’s (1973) paper visualises the communication process as a process of encoding and decoding that consists of structures of production, technological infrastructures, knowledge frameworks, meaning structures, discourses and programmes (p. 4). So for Hall, communications are structures for the articulation, encoding and decoding of meanings and discourses. The human being and its work, creation and social production process are missing in this structuralist model.

Raymond Williams (1976) distinguishes between communication and communications: While communication for Williams means ‘the passing of ideas, information, and attitudes from person to person’ (p. 9), a definition that foregrounds human beings and their relations, he sees communications as institutions, forms and systems, that is, structures of communication. In Williams’ terms, Hall focuses more on communications than communication.

Policing the Crisis is the work where Hall’s Althusserian structural Marxism comes to its height. Let us consider two brief, but typical passages: The state ‘organises ideologically, through the cultural sphere and the education system – once again, progressively expanded and complexified as the productive needs it serves develop; through the means and media of communication and the orchestration of public opinion’ (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978, p. 205). ‘Events, as news, [ … ] articulate what the audience is assumed to think and know about the society’ (p. 56). Hall argues here that the ideological state apparatuses of the education system and the media system organise ideology and that news events articulate ideology. The point here is that cultural structures and not humans are said to act. Hall (1989) says that in communication, meaning and ideology, ‘discourse is articulated to power’ (p. 48). Not humans are the subjects, but discourse is a subject that acts. Hall (1982) writes that humans are positioned and languaged (p. 80), ideological discourses win their way (p. 80) and discourse speaks by itself through him or her (p. 88). For Hall (1997), ‘representational systems’ such as language and music ‘communicate feelings and ideas’ (p. 5).

The problem with all of these formulations is that they neglect the mentioning of active human beings who communicate with each other and so produce social relations. For Hall and structuralism, it is not humans who communicate ideology, ideas, discourse, feelings, and so on through language, music, news media and other representational system. He rather assumes structures and systems language, speak, communicate, and so on. Human communication is subsumed under communications, that is, structures and systems of communication. Communication is reduced to the status of a structure. Such an approach misses that communication is a social process that connects humans and establishes and maintains relations between them. It is the social practice, in which humans produce and reproduce sociality and social relations by making sense of each other and the world. It is no surprise that the term ‘human’ is not mentioned once in Hall’s Encoding/Decoding-paper. Hall misses that discourses, communication and ideology are the processes that relate humans and help in constituting particular power relations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the major theoretical influence on Hall’s approach was no longer exerted by Althusser’s structural Marxism, but by Foucault’s post-structuralism and Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism. Hall’s cultural studies thereby undertook a ‘shift away from its encounter with marxism’ (Sparks, 1996, p. 95). What remained was the structuralist outlook, which becomes, for example, evident in Hall’s later works, such as the 1997 book Representation. While Althusser is not mentioned a single time, Hall conceives representation based on Foucault’s concepts of discourse, power and knowledge, as well as Saussure’s and Barthes’ semiotics. Dealing with the question of the subject, Hall (1997, p. 54) argues that Saussure ‘tended to abolish the subject from the question of representation’ and that for Foucault, it is ‘discourse, not the subject, which produces knowledge’. Just like earlier in the 1970s, Hall (1997) also here takes a structuralist position and argues that it ‘is discourse, not the subjects who speak it, which produces knowledge’, that the subject is merely ‘produced within discourse’ and ‘subjected to discourse’, and that the subject is ‘the bearer of the kind of knowledge which discourse produces’ (p. 55). In contrast to Hall, E.P. Thompson (2014) takes a socialist humanist position. He explains in his essay Socialist Humanism that in this approach ‘real people’ (p. 73) and the ‘creative agency of human labour’ (p. 76) form the ‘centre of [ … ] aspiration’ (p. 73) and ‘man is human by virtue of his culture’ (p. 59). While for Thompson, the human being’s agency is at the core of attention, for Hall it is structures and not humans that act as subjects. Thompson’s approach is grounded in Marx’s ‘new humanism’ that struggles for a society in which every individual can fully and freely develop (Dunayevskaya, 2000, p. 125) and where the ‘ultimate creation of freedom rests upon the shortening of the working day’ (Dunayevskaya, 2000, p. 89).

The analysis of structures is not unimportant, but it is insufficient to focus on how structures are articulated with each other and how they condition practices. There is a dialectic of structure and agency that any analysis of communication must take into account. The approach that I take is much closer to humanism, that is, an approach that according to Marx starts from ‘the existence of living human individuals’ (Marx & Engels, 1845–1846, p. 31) who produce in common. And to produce also means to communicate.

This approach constructs a critical theory of communication through the reading of humanist Marxist works from a communication perspective. This method also takes into account the dialectic of structure and practices, but starts from human beings and their social relations of life and production. On the one hand, the approach I use focuses on more well-known works, such as Raymond Williams works on communication, to argue for a communicative materialism (Fuchs, 2017). On the other hand, it also tries to reconstruct lesser known works or elements in works from a communications perspective. E.P. Thompson is remembered as one of the primary historians of the English working class. He practised history as history from below, which means that he tells the history of the working class through the analysis of workers’ everyday culture, customs, practices, experiences and struggles. By doing so, the question arises, ‘what is the role of communication in these processes?’ A reading of Thompson’s work and its relation to Althusser is one of the several entries into and starting points for a critical theory of communication. In his discussion of Williams’ Long Revolution, Thompson warned about the assumption that ‘the central problem of society today is not one of power but of communication’. This means that communication must in a critical analysis, always be related to issues of power and class.

While Thompson and Williams were lifelong Marxists, Hall’s relation to Marxian theory was ambivalent, ‘contingent and transitory’ (Sparks, 1996, p. 97). Furthermore, Thompson and Williams understood themselves explicitly as socialist humanists. These are two reasons why Thompson is one of the appropriate starting points for critical theory that stands in the traditions of humanism and Marxism. Given the outline of some background, we can engage next with the Althusser/Thompsondebate.

Louis Althusser

Althusser (2005) sees a social formation as consisting of various levels and instances (p. 101) that together form an organic totality (p. 102). He distinguishes between the economic mode of production and ‘the superstructures, instances which derive from it, but have their own consistency and effectivity’ (p. 100). The mode of production consists of the forces and relations of production (p. 110) that form contradictions and are the social formation’s ‘conditions of existence’ (pp. 100, 110). The superstructure includes ‘the State, the dominant ideology, religion, politically organized movements, and so on’ (p. 106). The superstructure for Althusser consists of a political and an ideological level – ‘the State and all the legal, political and ideological forms’ (p. 111; see also Althusser, 1971, p. 134). ‘So in every society we can posit, in forms which are sometimes very paradoxical, the existence of an economic activity as the base, a political organization and “ideological” forms (religion, ethics, philosophy, etc.)’ (Althusser, 2005, p. 232). In the essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser (1971, pp. 135–136) uses the metaphor of an edifice with different floors for describing the relationship of base and superstructure. It is ‘the base which in the last instance determines the whole edifice’ (p. 136).

In Althusser’s (2005) theory, we find a ‘relative autonomy of the superstructures and their specific effectivity’, but there is the ‘determination in the last instance by the (economic) mode of production’ (p. 111). All levels are related, and influence each other, but the economy is the over-determining factor. Althusser says there is a ‘mutual conditioning’ of levels and contradictions (p. 205). ‘The superstructure is not the pure phenomenon of the structure, it is also its condition of existence’ (p. 205). Althusser takes from Mao (1937) the idea that there is always one over-determining, principal, dominant, leading contradiction and structure (Althusser, 2005, pp. 101, 211). It would not in advance and eternally be determined what the ‘determinant-contradiction-in-the-last-instance’ is, but the economy would in the last instance overdetermine other levels in the selection of the structure in dominance (p. 213). ¹ For Althusser, one contradiction dominates other contradictions. One level dominates other levels. Althusser speaks of the structure in dominance (p. 200). In capitalism, the contradiction between forces and relations of economic production is for him the ‘principal contradiction’ (p. 208).

The problem of the Althusserian approach is not just that it makes the economic the causally determining factor of society. It simultaneously underestimates and overestimates the role of the economic. The separation of society into economic, political and cultural levels underestimates the economy by ignoring that it operates in all social systems in the form of human production and work. Rules and ideologies do not simply exist. Humans produce and reproduce them. The political and the cultural are economic and non-economic at the same time (Fuchs, 2015, chap. 2 + 3). But not just are culture and politics economic, the economic is also cultural and political. Althusser underestimates the operation of the non-economic in the economic realm. An example is that the ideologies of individual performance, developing the self, loving your work, and so on. operate at the workplace. The cultural industries are a realm of the organisation of the economy, in which news, music, films, software, entertainment, art and other forms of knowledge are produced. These industries today form a significant part of the capitalist economy and are another example of culture operating inside of the economy. Althusser’s separation of levels cannot adequately explain the dialectics of the economic and the non-economic.

That Althusser is a post-humanist philosopher becomes evident by the fact that in the language he uses (dominant structures, levels, instances, modes of production, contradictions, etc.), humans and their conscious agency are missing. Socialist humanism is a theoretical and political movement. During Soviet times, it formulated a critique of the Soviet-style regimes that aimed at the humanisation and democratisation of socialism. Its most important political moments were the 1956 Hungarian revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring. The Soviets crushed both uprisings militarily. In Marxist theory, humanism was a theory movement including the Yugoslav praxis group and writers such as C.L.R James, Erich Fromm, Georg Lukács, Henri Lefebvre, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karel Kosík, Lucien Goldmann, or Raya Dunayevskaya. In Britain, E. P. Thompson was the main representative.

Althusser (2005) was critical of Marxist humanism in several respects: At the time when he wrote For Marx and Reading Capital, he saw humanist potentials in Chinese and Soviet socialism (pp. 222, 236–239). Other than Marxist humanists, Althusser considered Marx’s early philosophical writings as esoteric, ideological and unscientific. He propagated the existence of an epistemological break in the work of Marx that constitutes a division between an ideological Marx and a scientific Marx (Althusser, 2005, p. 13). ‘In 1845, Marx broke radically with very theory that based history and politics on an essence of man’ (Althusser, 2005, p. 227). Marx would from then on have advanced a theoretical anti-humanism (p. 229) and have focused on using ‘new concepts, the concepts of mode of production, forces of production, relations of production, superstructure, ideology, etc’ (p. 244).

Althusser overlooks the continuity of the notion of the human as social being in Marx’s works. In the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx (1988) speaks of the human species being a ‘social being’ (p. 105). Society is ‘the social fabric’ of humans (Marx, 1988). In class society, the exploitation of labour limits and cripples humanity, sociality and society. Only a fully developed communism ‘equals humanism’ (p. 102). In 1845, Marx formulated the importance of human sociality in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach when he wrote that ‘the essence of man’ is ‘the ensemble of social relations’ and that the species ‘unites the many individuals’ (Marx, 1845, p. 570). The old Marx did not, as Althusser claims, abolish this insight, but applied it to the study of capitalism. Capital is a critique of political economy in that it shows the social and therefore historical character of commodities, labour, money, capital and class. Marx criticises capitalism’s fetishistic structure that makes capitalist society’s structures appear as non-social and natural. Capital also criticises bourgeois thought that reifies capitalist categories in its theories. Marx elaborated a critical theory of capitalism that is a critical theory of fetishistic society and thought. His analysis of capitalism in Capital is based on the insight that the majority of humans in capitalism produce goods and value that is not their property, but that the dominant class owns as capital and private property. In his early works, he for this phenomenon coined the term alienation.

The alienation of the social in capitalism is not just indirectly present in Capital in the form of the critique of fetishism, but also directly as the concept of alienation. Marx writes,

On the other hand, the worker always leaves the process in the same state as he entered it – a personal source of wealth, but deprived of any means of making that wealth a reality for himself. Since, before he enters the process, his own labour has already been alienated [entfremdet] from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him [fremdem Produkt]. (Marx, 1867a, p. 716)

He also says in Capital that the production process is in capitalism a ‘pestiferous source of corruption and slavery’, but will ‘under the appropriate conditions turn into a source of humane development [‘Quelle humaner Entwicklung’ in the German original]’ (Marx, 1867a, p. 621). Marx neither dropped the notion of alienation nor the concept of communism as humanism, but developed both as part of a critical theory of capitalism. It is simply wrong that alienation and humanism are ‘ideological’ concepts ‘used by Marx in his Early Works’ (Althusser, 2005, p. 249) and that they are only the ‘characteristic feature of the ideological problematic from which Marx emerged’ (p. 251).

Althusser is a relational thinker. He conceives a mode of production in relational terms as a specific set of ‘relations between men and relations between things’ and as ‘relations between men and things’ (Althusser & Balibar, 1968/2009, p. 193). He coins in this context the notion of the combinatory (p. 194) for stressing the ‘combination (Verbindung) of a certain number of elements’ (p. 193). Also society is for Althusser relational, it is an ‘articulation’ of the ‘region of the economic [ … ] with other regions, legal-political and ideological superstructure’ (p. 198). Balibar argues that articulation means the ‘construction (Bau) or mechanism of “correspondence” in which the social formation is presented as constituted out of different levels’ – ‘an economic base, legal and political forms, and ideological forms’ (p. 228).

Étienne Balibar’s section in Reading Capital is a more thorough engagement with Marx than Althusser’s part. By and large, Balibar takes over Althusser’s basic assumptions. He describes the mode of production as a connection of two connections (Althusser & Balibar, 1968/2009, p. 241): the relations of production (a property connection between humans, that is, in capitalism between capital and labour) and the productive forces (a real/material appropriation connection between humans and nature).

The Althusserian concept of articulation is always either an articulation between structures or a determination of humans by structures. This becomes evident when Althusser writes that there is ‘a certain attribution of the means of production to the agents of production’ (p. 193). Relations of production determine ‘the places and functions occupied and adopted by the agents of production’ (p. 198) so that ‘they are the “supports” (Träger) of these functions’ (p. 199). Humans are for Althusser not society’s subjects. ‘The true “subjects” are these definers and distributors: the relations of production’ (p. 199). Also for Balibar, the combination of elements forms society’s subject of history (p. 280). Humans are for Balibar ‘supports for the connexions implied by the structure’; they ‘fulfil certain determinate functions in the structure’ (p. 283).

So in Althusserianism, humans are always subordinated bearers of structures. This approach does not give attention to how structures need to be produced and constantly reproduced through human practices. Societal relations are not abstract, but lived by humans in everyday social relations. Communication is humans’ concrete production and reproduction of social relations. Human communication is the process, in which humans connect societal structures to their lived experiences and these lived experiences enter societal structures. Given that humans and their practices have a subordinated role in Althusser’s approach, it is no surprise that communication is not a relevant concept. In For Marx, the term communication is not used a single time. In Reading Capital, the term communication appears twice. Once in a Marx quote that mentions means of communication (Althusser & Balibar, 1968/2009, p. 245) and another time in respect to the question of how to read Marx (p. 355).

In the collection Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Althusser (1971) uses the term communication for the presentation of a philosophical contribution (pp. 23, 26–27) and in the context of ideological state apparatuses. The communications ideological state apparatus (ISA) is for Althusser one of eight ISAs (Althusser, 1971, p. 143). It includes ‘press, radio and television, etc’. (p. 143). Althusser discerns communications from the cultural ISA that includes ‘Literature, the Arts, sports, etc’ (p. 143). Theatre, live music, sports entertainment certainly are also forms of communication just like the press, radio and television are forms of culture that communicate information that allows humans to reproduce their minds.

Overall, the notion of communication hardly plays a role in Althusser’s works. In an anti-humanist approach that denies that humans are society’s subject, it does not come as a surprise that there is no place for communicative practices. In the single instances where communication is mentioned in Althusser’s works, it is reduced to ideological structures and is pluralised as communications (= communication systems).

In capitalism’s economic mode of production, workers through communication co-operate in the production process, managers through authoritative communication command labour, money and exchange-value are the ‘language of commodities’ (Marx, 1867a, p. 143) that acts as means for communicating prices, and so on. In the political system, parliamentary debates, election campaigns, demonstrations and programmes are specific forms of political communication. In the cultural system, an ideology communicates dominant ideas to the public to try to gain and secure hegemony. Production, control, exchange, politics and ideology do not simply exist as structures, but are only possible through concrete communicative practices, in which humans relate to each other, make meaning of each other and the world, and produce and reproduce use-values and social structures. Althusser’s theory remains too abstract and structuralist for making sense of communication.

Edward P. Thompson

The Poverty of Theory is Thompson’s (1978) more than 200-page-long critique of Althusser and Althusserianism. Thompson (1978) argues that the notion of ‘men as träger’, as bearers, supports and carriers of functions, was already during Marx’s lifetime an ideology that ‘sought exactly to impose this structure upon the working class, and, at the same time, to convince them that they were powerless to resist these “immutable” laws’ (pp. 147–148). ‘Althusser has simply taken over a reigning fashion of bourgeois ideology and named it “Marxism”’ (p. 153). The problem is that structuralism sees humans as passive and not active beings. In this approach, humans ‘are structured by social relations’ and ‘thought by ideologies’ (p. 153). Althusser overlooks the ‘dialogue between social being and social consciousness’ that ‘goes in both directions’ (p. 9).

One should note that Marx does not exclusively use the term Träger (bearer) in respect to humans. He for example also writes that use-values are bearers of exchange-value (Marx, 1867a, p. 126) and ‘bearers of value’ (p. 138). And he describes machinery as a ‘repository [Träger] of capital’ (p. 526). And Marx does indeed, as indicated by Thompson, not describe capital and labour as constituted by passive humans without subjectivity. An example is a passage, where Marx writes about the movement of capital:

As the conscious bearer [Träger] of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts, and to which it returns. The objective content of the circulation we have been discussing – the valorization of value – is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist; nor must the profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather the unceasing movement of profit-making. This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser (Marx, 1867a, p. 254).

The capitalist (as well as the worker) is for Marx conscious, purposefully acting, wilful, passionate, and rational. Workers and capitalists are active subjects in the production and reproduction of capitalism. The labour contract between capitalist and worker is a structural form of violence that compels the worker to enter a relationship of exploitation. The point is that within capitalism, the worker has difficulty to escape the fact she or he has to sell his or her labour-power because the market is an institutionalised form of economic violence or what Marx (1867a, p. 899) terms the ‘silent compulsion of economic relations’. Exchange-value and markets are principles that force the worker to actively seek to sell his or her labour-power on the market to be exploited. Class society’s institutionalised violence conditions the possibilities and rights of classes and their members. The key aspect is the right to private ownership of the means of production that the bourgeois state defends. Capitalism’s structural violence of markets and the state results in workers’ actively seeking to sell their labour-power and capitalists’ actively controlling the production process: The capitalist

proceeds to consume the commodity, the labour-power he has just bought, i.e., he causes the worker, the bearer of that labour-power, to consume the means of production by his labour. [ … ] First, the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs; [ … ] Second, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer. (Marx, 1867a, pp. 291–292)

Thompson (1978) criticises two aspects of Althusser’s and Althusserians’ model of society: (a) The dualistic separation of levels is undialectical and (b) The causal reduction of levels to the economy is mechanistic, reductionist, and static. Levels are ‘empty of all social and historical content’ (p. 95). Instances and levels ‘are in fact human activities, institutions, and ideas’ that humans experience (p. 97). For the British socialist thinker William Morris, culture would in contrast to Althusser not have derived from the economy. Rather, capitalist society is ‘founded upon forms of exploitation which are simultaneously economic, moral and cultural’ (p. 294). Thompson here forgot to mention the political. The reduction of the social to the economy is for Thompson not society’s ontology, but a capitalist strategy. He therefore speaks of ‘capitalism’s innate tendency to reduce all human relationships to economic definitions’ (p. 294). Althusser propagates a ‘total collapse of all human activities back into the elementary terms of a mode of production’ (p. 97) and constructs a ‘conceptual prison’, in which ‘mode of production = social formation’ (p. 163).

Perry Anderson (1980) interposes to Thompson’s critique that Balibar and Althusser see a plurality in the modes of production active in a social formation (p. 67) and that Thompson’s account of society is not so different from Althusser’s: Thompson in The Poverty of Theory would just like Althusser break down society into the regions of the economy, polity, and culture (p. 70). The difference that Anderson overlooks is, however, that for Althusser these realms are much more separate from each other and determined by the economy, whereas Thompson argues that they dialectically operate in each other and that the economic mode of production is not determining society. Formulated differently, we can say that a societal formation is a totality, in which human agency produces, reproduces and is conditioned by dialectically interconnected and overgrasping economic, political and cultural systems, institutions and structures. Thompson’s approach comes much closer to a structure/agency-dialectic than the one of Althusser.

Thompson (1978) argues that ‘Althusserianism is Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of theory’ (p. 182) and ‘the attempt to reconstruct Stalinism at the level of theory’ (p. 131). Althusser says that when he entered the Parti communiste français (PCF), philosophy was impossible. It would have been Stalin who ‘reduced the madness to a little more reason’ (Althusser, 2005, p. 22) and delivered ‘the first shock’ (Althusser, 2005, p. 27) so that Marxist philosophy became possible in the PCF. Thompson argues that Althusser here refers to Stalin’s (1950/1972) Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics, a text for which Althusser ‘has always shown unusual respect’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 79).

Thompson was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from 1942 until 1956 (p. 131), Althusser a member of the Parti communiste français (PCF) from 1948 onwards (p. 131). The CPGB suspended John Saville and E. P. Thompson after they had founded the socialist humanist journal The Reasoner. Its subtitle was A Quarterly Journal of Socialist Humanism. Thompson and Saville commented,

The Executive Committee’s statement makes it clear that a decisive factor in their action was our editorial condemning Soviet intervention in Hungary. The meaning of the Executive’s decision is this: despite our own attempt to find some way for compromise, the leadership of the British Communist Party is determined not to permit discussion to develop in the party free from their control, since they fear that such discussion might lead on to the “de-Stalinisation” of the British party – the ridding of the party of authoritarian methods and attitudes, and of political subservience to the Soviet leadership. [ … ] We do not intend to appeal against the Executive’s decision, and we have both decided to resign from the party at once. (Saville, 1994, p. 31)

Thompson (1978) asks, ‘So where was Althusser in 1956?’ (p. 132). In 1956, Althusser was a member of the PCF, whereas Thompson left the CPGB. ‘In 1956 it was, at length, officially “revealed” that Stalinism had, for decades, been swatting down men like flies’ (p. 132). In 1946, the Soviet military also crushed the Hungarian uprising. PCF leader Maurice Thorez, who saw Stalin as ‘an eminent Marxist theoretician, a great organizer’ (Thorez, 1960b), argued that the Hungarian rebellion posed the threat of ‘fascist barbarism’ (Thorez, 1960a) and that Soviet military intervention was therefore needed. Thompson (1978) argues that Althusser’s reaction to 1956 would have been a critique of socialist humanism (p. 132). Socialist humanism was ‘the voice of a Communist opposition, of a total critique of Stalinist practice and theory’ (p. 132). Thompson argues that at the time when Althusser denounced socialist humanism, this was a typical move in defence of the Soviet regime (pp. 128–130). Althusser would have used a trick, in which ‘resurgent Stalinism presents itself as anti-Stalinism’ (p. 128). In contrast to Thompson, Althusser saw human potentials in Soviet socialism under Khrushchev and Brezhnev and in Chinese socialism under Mao.

Perry Anderson (1980) defends Althusser by arguing that he was not a Stalinist, but a Maoist (pp. 107–110), and that in the 1970s he spoke out against Stalinism and was in favour of the Workers’ Defence Committee in Poland (p. 111). Anderson misses that Thompson’s main point is about the parallels between Stalin’s and Althusser’s theoretical approaches and their political implications.

Stalin was ‘a mixture of Marxist theorist, pragmatist, and hypocrite’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 141). For Stalin, history is a process without subject and human agency, humans are only ‘supports’ or ‘vectors of ulterior structural determinations’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 79). Stalin (1939) describes the development of society based on Engels’ dialectics of nature in correspondence to natural laws. He sees history as a linear succession of modes of production determined by the economy. It is a ‘process of development from the lower to the higher’ (Stalin, 1939, p. 109):

This means that the history of development of society is above all the history of the development of production, the history of the modes of production which succeed each other in the course of centuries, the history of the development of productive forces and people’s relations of production’ (p. 121)

The economic mode of production would determine the superstructure:

Whatever is the mode of production of a society, such in the main is the society itself, its ideas and theories, its political views and institutions. Or, to put it more crudely, whatever is man’s manner of life, such is his manner of though. (p. 121)

Given the natural development of society, the October Revolution would have necessarily resulted in the establishment of a socialist society: ‘[T]he U.S.S.R. has already done away with capitalism and has set up a Socialist system’ (Stalin, 1939, p. 119).

The implication of these theoretical assumptions was for Stalin that anyone who was critical of him was a counter-revolutionary who opposed socialism and wanted to establish capitalism in Russia and therefore needed to be killed. This became, for example, evident when Stalin commented shorty after Nikolai Bukharin, one of the main Bolshevik theorists, had been arrested in 1937. Bukharin was put on trial together with others, was convicted to death for planning a conspiratorial coup, planning terrorism and for anti-Soviet espionage. He was executed in March 1938. Stalin said,

I think it is clear to everybody now that the present-day wreckers and diversionists, no matter what disguise they may adopt, either Trotskyite or Bukharinite, have long ceased to be a political trend in the labour movement, that they have become transformed into a gang of professional wreckers, diversionists, spies and assassins, without principles and without ideals. Of course, these gentlemen must be ruthlessly smashed and uprooted as the enemies of the working class, as betrayers of our country. (Stalin, 1937, p. 277)

Stalin’s mechanistic interpretation of history and society justified the killing of his opponents. Mao (1937) was in his analysis of dialectical contradictions full of praise for Stalin’s theory and politics: ‘Stalin’s analysis provides us with a model for understanding the particularity and the universality of contradiction and their interconnection’ (p. 330):

The history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union shows us that the contradictions between the correct thinking of Lenin and Stalin and the fallacious thinking of Trotsky, Bukharin and others did not at first manifest themselves in an antagonistic form, but that later they did develop into antagonism. (p. 344)

Thompson was concerned about the parallels between mechanistic conceptions of society by the likes of Stalin and Mao and Althusserianism’s concept of society that for example argues that ‘every mode of production necessarily induces the existence of the (superstructural) instances that specifically correspond to it’ (Althusser, 2003, p. 23) or that the ‘history of society can be reduced to a discontinuous succession of modes of production’ (Althusser & Balibar, 1968/2009, p. 229). Thompson criticised both the theoretical homology and the political abuse that such theorising entails.

At this point, it will have become evident to the reader that my theoretical and political sympathies are with humanism and not structuralism. Thompson’s approach has advantages and at the same time certain limits. His key category is class experience. Experience arises because humans are rational beings who ‘think about what is happening to themselves and their world’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 8). Changed experience ‘exerts pressures upon existent social consciousness’ (p. 8). Experience includes culture, ideas, instincts, feelings, norms, obligations, values, beliefs, affects, morals (Thompson, 1978, p. 171), needs, interests, consciousness (p. 164), myth, science, law, ideology (p. 9), and thought (p. 98). Experience in relation to class has to do with class-consciousness expressed in a class’ culture, traditions, values, ideas and institutions (Thompson, 1963, p. 10). Popular culture derives from common experience and customs in common (Thompson, 1993).

It is evident that some of the terms that Thompson associates with experience relate to individual subjectivity, others to collective subjectivity, and some have to do with both. Experience is both social and individual. The theoretical problem that arises is when Thompson (1978) argues that experience is a ‘middle term between social being and social consciousness’ (p. 98) and that ‘as being is thought so thought is also lived – people may, within limits, live the social or sexual expectations which are imposed upon them by dominant conceptual categories’ (p. 9).

The theoretical problematic is to discern the individual’s thoughts from the everyday relations, in which humans live and act. Experience certainly includes both dimensions, but a term seems to be missing that allows us to distinguish human social experience from individual experience as well as collective from individual subjectivity. Whereas cognition and thinking are always ongoing in the individual’s brain, they are only possible through and at the same time constitute the foundation of communication. Through communication humans live, produce, and reproduce society’s structures in everyday life and do so based on their individual subjectivity that in the communication process is symbolically externalised in mutual interaction with at last another human subject. Communication is a necessary condition for the formation of collective subjectivity (shared identities, norms and values, rules, common practices). Communication is the missing link in Thompson’s work, the category that allows us to discern between individual subjectivity and collective subjectivity. Communication is the process, in which humans’ individual subjectivities meet, share knowledge, and produce and reproduce a collective subjectivity.

Class is for Thompson (1963, p. 9) not a structure or category, but a historical and human relationship. Class happens ‘when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs’ (Thompson, 1963, p. 9). ‘Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition’ (Thompson, 1963, p. 11). Classes ‘arise because men and women, in determinate productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think, and to value in class ways’ (Thompson, 1978, pp. 106–107). Perry Anderson (1980) importantly points out that it seems that for Thompson ‘class = class consciousness’ (p. 42). Thompson’s understanding of class faces the problem that classes “have frequently existed whose members did not ‘“identify their antagonistic interests” in any process of common clarification of struggle’ (Anderson, 1980, p. 40) and that it implies the possibility of class struggle without class and of class struggle operating only with the existence of a ruling class (p. 42). That humans’ position in the relations of production determines class status does not mean that class is an abstract structure. Rather class is lived in everyday economic relations in one’s own class and between classes. And these social relations are established in and through communicative processes. Through communication, humans (re)produce social relations, including class relations. The decisive question is if the dominated class communicates politically and consciously about its class position and based on this conscious communication organises itself politically. Class is always objective (a class structure in society) and subjective (lived through communication) at the same time (class objectivity subjectified, class subjectivity objectified), but it is not always politically organised.

Ideology is certainly not a key category for Thompson, which means that an important form of subjectivity and consciousness is rather missing in his approach. He criticises that for Althusser ideology is in the form of ideological state apparatuses ‘imposed upon the innocent and utterly passive, recipient, man’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 174). Thompson argues that moral values are not mechanically imposed and ‘hailed’, but ‘lived’ (p. 175). He does not reject the notion of ideology, but stresses that ideology not just works top-down, but has a bottom-up hegemonic dimension:

This is not to say that values are independent of the colouration of ideology; [ … ] But to suppose from this that they are ‘imposed’ (by a State!) as ‘ideology’ is to mistake the whole social and cultural process. This imposition will always be attempted, with greater or lesser success, but it cannot succeed at all unless there is some congruence between the imposed rules and view-of-life and the necessary business of living a given mode of production. (p. 175)

Ideologies are situated in ‘the people’s way of life’ that is ‘culture’s material abode’ (p. 176).

Thompson well points out ideology’s subject/object-dialectic. But the problem is that he assumes a certain determinism of resistance against ideology: ‘Moreover, values no less than material needs will always be a locus of contradiction, of struggle between alternative values and views-of-life’ (p. 175). ‘Conflicts of values, and choices of values, always take place’ (p. 175). Ideology is always a communication process, in which dominant groups try to justify and impose their moral values on others. If this attempt is (un)successful, partly (un)successful, or temporarily (un)successful depends on many factors, including the availability and distribution of power. If the dominant class can mobilise means of power (such as the mass media, public discourses, money, influence, reputation), then it can increase the likelihood to successfully impose ideologies. The ideological communication processes’ outcomes are not arbitrary, but subject to power dynamics and asymmetries that confront dominated groups.

In the 832 pages of The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson (1963) uses the terms communication(s) and to communicate less than 30 times, always in theoretically unreflected manners (see pages 24, 134, 195, 219, 378, 385, 442, 503, 516, 543, 597, 598, 609, 616, 651, 652, 684, 701, 746, 749, 758, 786, 808, 818). The one communication issue that Thompson is more interested in is militant working-class movements’ forms of underground communication. He speaks of an ‘underground chain of communication’ (p. 698), enciphered communication (p. 169), and the Luddites’ secret, masked and disguised communications (pp. 554, 565, 478). In The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays’ 404 pages, Thompson (1978) mentions the words communication, communications and to communicate 14 times (on pages 110, 136, 174, 191, 221, 262, 266, 273, 336, 386, 391, 393). The analysis allows us to conclude that communication is a largely absent theoretical category in Thompson’s works. His theoretical limit is that he ignores the role of communication in respect to experience, class and ideology.

Communication is the blind spot of both Althusser’s and Thompson’s approach and many other Marxist works and theories. A Marxist theory of communication is needed. What we can learn from the controversy between Althusser and Thompson is that thinking about the relationships between the economic and the non-economic and between structures and agency poses key theoretical questions for any social theory, including a Marxist theory of communication.

Towards a critical theory of communication

Conclusion

Althusser’s structuralist theory is anti-humanist in character, which results in a theoretical subordination of humans under structures and the assumption that economic structures determine society. As a consequence, there is no space for communicative practices in this approach. Thompson’s humanist Marxist approach foregrounds the notion of human experience. It takes the structure/agency- and base/superstructure problems into dialectical directions, but fails to differentiate between individual and collective subjectivity, faces the dangers of a subjectivist notion of class and overestimates resistance. Communication is the missing link in this approach.

A Marxist theory of communication needs to relate the notion of communication to the study of society, class, capitalism and the commons. Communication is the process in which humans produce and reproduce social relations, and thereby live, reproduce and potentially challenge societal relations (structures) in their everyday life by making meaning of each other and (re)producing the social and societal world. They do so based on their individual subjectivities that meet in the communication process. Communication does not stand outside of domination, but shapes and is shaped by structures of class, violence and resistance. It is the intermediate process that organises the dialectic of objective structures and human subjects in society as well as the dialectic of individual and collective subjectivity. The communicative production of sociality explodes the base/superstructure distinction and constitutes interwoven dialectics of the economic and the non-economic. A forgotten meaning of communication is that it is the very process of commoning. Communication shares knowledge, but can as a principle of organising society, also point towards a commonist society.