follower, like Saussure’s Course, is of little importance: ‘Althusser’ is here the
name of a collective assemblage of enunciation. The journal was the organ
of the Communist Students Union society at the École normale supérieure,
which shortly afterwards gave rise to the Maoist sect called the UJC (M-L).
The text therefore pertains to a period prior to the rupture between Althusser
(who always refused to leave the French Communist Party) and his Maoist
followers. It reflects the climate of the time in that the object of analysis is
what the text calls Leninist ‘sciences’.
Althusser identifies the heart of Leninist science in the concept of conjuncture:
the sole objective of Lenin’s thinking is the correct description of the conjuncture,
its class determinations, the balance of forces operative in it, and the precise
moment in which the analyst finds himself. The concept is only another name
for the dialectic of general scientific principles and the analysis of concrete
situations, which is Lenin’s specific contribution to Marxist theory. Hence the
structure of the three ‘sciences’ of Leninism.
First of all, there is the main science – the science of concrete analysis,
which proceeds in five stages: (i) description of the elements of the conjuncture,
furnished by class analysis; (ii) determination of the limits of the conjuncture,
of what dictates its violent transformation; (iii) acknowledgement of the
impossibility of certain combinations of these elements (some alliances are
unnatural, which a contrarioestablishes the possibility of other alliances); (iv)
determination of the variations of the conjuncture, which supplies a guide to
political action; and (v) consideration of the constraints imposed by the strategic
perspective of the proletariat. Analysis of the conjuncture therefore operates
a dual constraint: that of the limits of the conjuncture itself and that which
a strategic perspective imposes on it.
The principal science is insufficient: it is complemented by two secondary
sciences, which govern its application to political practice: the science of
slogans (or, rather, of their articulated system through which the conjuncture
is named) and the science of political leadership (or how to bring the masses
to understand that the slogans are correct). Leninist science is therefore an
articulated hierarchy of disciplines or fields, which enable the revolutionary
successfully to implement the party programme according to its three levels:
the general level of the theory of revolution (i.e. the principles on which the
communist programme is based: the theory of modes of production, the laws
of tendency of capitalist development, stage of development of society); the
100 • Chapter Four