Althusser reinterprets the work of Marx using Freudian and structuralist concepts, supporting the idea of a radical break between the young and the old Marx.[3] He proposes that scientific knowledge is not a matter of grasping realities, but of purely conceptual breakthroughs: each science is formed by a problematic, an implicit set of issues that arises from the confused conceptual situation that preceded it.[4] Althusser rules out of consideration early works of Marx such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, asserting an epistemological break between these Hegelian works and Marx's mature scientific works, such asCapital.[5]
The history of Marxist philosophy in France, both academic and communist, is viewed negatively by Althusser. He observes that for most of its existence, the French Communist Party (PCF) relied on the meager theoretical resources provided to it by the Comintern and the Cominform, which resulted in the party first reducing philosophy to science and then reducing science to ideology. Althusser believes the PCF adopted this position because there was no native tradition of French Marxist thought, equivalent to that of Antonio Gramsci in Italy or Rosa Luxemburg in Poland, that might have allowed it to resist Stalinist domination. He further maintains that there had always been structural and historical obstacles to the development of Marxist thought in France. Due to the legacy of the revolution of 1789, most radical intellectuals believed that they could have an effect on the political process by persuading the bourgeoisie to support their opinions. Most consequently felt no need to identify themselves with the working class in order to foment social change.[6]
Those intellectuals who did identify with the working class and joined the PCF were then abused for not being workers and were driven away. The PCF thus either never attracted or was unable to retain the first-rate intellectuals who might have provided it with the theoretical work it needed. Those thinkers it did attract were, like Georges Politzer, "sacrificed to urgent economic tasks", or like Auguste Cornu, were ignored by a party too impatient to pursue its political agenda to spend time considering the philosophical justification of its actions. Althusser argues that the work of academic Marxists was severely compromised by the poverty of the theoretical material they had to work with.[7]
