From Return to Rupture: Althusser and the Post-Marxist Tradition

This paper seeks to articulate the theoretical development of Marxism to post-Marxism by examining Louis Althusser’s influence on post-Marxist theory. I divide this paper into three parts and ask the following question: how did Althusser’s “return to Marx” conceptually prepare the rupture with Marx found in Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism? The first part contextualizes the debate between economic determinism and Marxist humanism by elaborating on their main positions through Marx’s texts and his interpreters. The second part provides a discussion of Althusser’s critiques of both economic determinism and humanism with the concept of “overdetermination” and thesis of the subject’s constitution through interpellation. The third part explores the Leninist and Gramscian backgrounds of the notion of “hegemony” and its reconfiguration through Althusser’s theoretical framework as found in the works of Laclau and Mouffe. I show that Althusser laid the groundwork for post-Marxism to develop out of Marxism through anti-essentialism that disputes the primacy of the forces of production and repudiates the constitutive subject’s alienated labor as an underlying principle of critique.