In my recent critique of Geese Magazine, I noted that Gandakin and Scottie O. were making many of the ideological errors that Althusser rails against while also citing Althusser throughout. In particular, what I was trying to get across was that a rejection of scientific investigation and theoretical systems would lead Marxism back into the very status of dogma that they were trying to escape. Gandakin has replied to this critique, and the reply spends most of its words attempting to spin up a further defense for this anti-systemic reading of Althusser. In this, at the very least, Gandakin has illuminated precisely where he’s gone wrong.

Before getting into where Gandakin has led the flock astray, it is worth clearing up a misconception. One thing I am accused of is being an armchair theorist only concerned with predicting how capitalism is going to collapse. Quite an interesting critique from those whose strategy appears to amount to liquidating into the Democratic Party. However, when I say that it is worth spending theoretical effort on understanding just how capitalism will cease to work, I don’t mean simply speculation on how it might collapse under its own contradictions. As I’ve written previously on the meaning of fetters on production, it is not only the internal operation of a system, but whether better, more effective systems co-exist with it. Creating a socialism that works is just as important to seeing the end of bourgeois society as its final crisis.^[1] Equally, it’s very important to note that the overthrow of bourgeois society without the creation of such an alternative “that works” has led to the re-entrenchment of bourgeois society.

Now, to get to the meat of the issue. Gandakin rejects one characterization I made, but accepts another. What is rejected is the idea that Geese hold that there is no relationship between the object of knowledge and the real object:

Villarreal accuses Geese of claiming that the object of thought is in no relation to the external world. This is not a position we hold: instead, we hold that thought is a practice or a production that engages with the world in the same fundamental way as any other practice or production… Concepts—all concepts—do not directly correspond to an inner Truth of the world: they are the real product of intellectual practice—they are produced by a historical subject within a specific problematic/means of production, and nothing else.

What is accepted is that the idea that Geese do not believe in true or false except as subordinated to practice:

'True' or 'false' are attributes of ideas when those ideas are taken in themselves as being related to external reality. But practice, which is not about bringing ideas into correspondence with external reality, but is about existence, subordinates these terms… Let’s remember that “true” and “false” are relations of people to the world, not things that exist in the aether. The ‘round Earth’ is not true: our belief that the Earth is or is not round can be evaluated as ‘true’ or ‘false.’ Revolution is not ‘true’—revolution is. Removing the concepts of reason and contemplation from their limited sphere and attempting to treat them like truths outside practice is an abandonment of Marxist materialism. The ideal is the existential pathos of practice but, in that role, it is part of practice, not superior to it. Practice comes first. Rational argumentation is not sufficient.

To summarize, what is the relationship of the object of knowledge to the real object according to Geese? It is of the part to the whole, theory is a type of action and hence only relates to real objects due to the relationship of theory to its real production process. Now Gandakin provides citations which describe the classic Althusserian position of how ideas are the product of particular systems, institutions, and apparatuses.

Gandakin goes through great effort to show that there are no neutral ideas not shaped by the social labor which create them, as if this would be something shocking to either me or the readers of Cosmonaut Magazine. I can only conclude that Gandakin did not do as I sincerely hoped, and read the blockquotes I included in my article, nor understand what about “representationalism” was actually at issue. The problem is not that ideas actually are mirrored reflections of real objects, and thus free from any sort of mediation, the problem is that there does exist an objective relationship between ideas about real objects and the real objects, an objective distance in how much they resemble those real objects. Once again, I will quote the very same lines from Althusser on this topic as before, and hopefully this time it will be read with careful consideration.

…the fact that the process of production of knowledge necessarily proceeds by the constant transformation of its (conceptual) object; that it is precisely the effect of this transformation, which is the same thing as the history of knowledge, that it produces a new knowledge (a new object of knowledge) which still concerns the real object, knowledge of which is deepened precisely by this reorganization of the object of knowledge. As Marx says profoundly, the real object, of which knowledge is to be acquired or deepened, remains what it is, after as before the process of knowledge which involves it; if, therefore, it is the absolute reference point for the process of knowledge which is concerned with it -- the deepening of the knowledge of this real object is achieved by a labour of theoretical transformation which necessarily affects the object of knowledge, since it is only applied to the latter. Lenin understood this essential condition of scientific practice perfectly -- it is one of the major themes of Materialism and Empirico-Criticism: the theme of the incessant deepening of the knowledge of a real object by incessantly reorganizing the object of knowledge.^[2]

Just as ideas are not neutral, and are produced by a particular historic production process, so too are these production processes not neutral! They produce deeper or shallower objects of knowledge.

When Gandakin points to the production process of knowledge in order to refute the idea that the geese do not believe there is not a connection between the real object and the object of knowledge, this reveals the geese have no idea what that relationship is at all.^[3] For the production process which produces the object of knowledge is almost never the real object which it signifies! The discipline of history does not generally take historians as its object of study, its relationship to its real object is not its relationship to its production process. Just as the idea of a goose doesn’t honk, the thing an idea stands for is not the practice which produces it, except in the rare self-referential case. In other words, the material existence of ideas does not equal the materials represented by those ideas.

When Althusser claims that Marxism is a science, he is saying it is a process for producing knowledge which is deeper in its connection to its real objects than bourgeois social science. He is not claiming, as Gandakin suggests here, that Marxism is a science because it meets certain historical criteria for the norms of scientificity, but because it has created new, better, norms of scientificity.^[4] What Althusser asks us to do is precisely to discern between norms of scientificity as individuals capable of reason and contemplation and trying to escape the limits of bourgeois ideology. As Althusser says:

This requirement poses Marx a problem which is not only a scientific problem, i.e., one that arises from the theoretical practice of a definite science (Political Economy or History), but a theoretical, or philosophical problem, since it concerns precisely the production of a concept or set of concepts which necessarily affect the forms of existing scientificity or (theoretical) rationality themselves, the forms which, at a given moment, define the Theoretical as such, i.e., the object of philosophy [my emphasis].^[5]

In this way, Althusser presents us with a meta-theory of science. One historical period’s science is not as good as any others, for if that was the case we would have no possible way to discern between bourgeois science vs Marxism. This question of why exactly we should prefer Marxism to bourgeois sciences isn’t answered in Gandakin’s theory, just as it remained unanswered why exactly we should be fighting for socialism at all as something distinct from existing bourgeois politics. It’s telling the way Gandakin brushes aside the problem of different types of practice by naturalizing them, geese merely migrate because of evolutionary pressures after all. The revolution is neither true nor false, it merely is. Far from escaping theology, Gandakin has led us deeper into it, for here the truth of Marxism is inscribed into the reality of history itself, it merely is, “I am that I am” so says the holy spirit of Marxism.

This is not to say that the operation of either geese or humans is animated by a pure rational concept. A sign is something that does materially reflect other phenomena through its correlation. When two asteroids collide in space, they change their shape, they become correlated to each other. When we write on a tupperware container “Sugar” and we then use it to store sugar, the sign for sugar and the sweet substance sugar become correlated together. When we learn how to play a sport, our bodies and minds are shaped by it, we as a living human subject, become correlated to a particular practice we experience. When we learn, we are changed. Physically.

The mind is a sort of material which can store many, many correlations inside of it. A goose migrates not just because of some abstract idea of evolution, but because, in particular, the goose has been shaped by evolution to correlate certain things, such as a change in time or climate, with certain actions, such as flying in a direction identified through magnetic sense organs, and this behavior with certain outcomes, such as a more hospitable location. When we say that means of producing knowledge, of producing signs, are not neutral, we are saying that some generalize better than others, some are more capable of creating accurate expectations than others. Say a volcano turns Canada into a very hot climate year round, suddenly the migration of geese loses its meaning, the system of signs that generated this behavior is no longer producing the expected results. This is what a materialist semiotics shows us.^[6]

This brings us to the problem of theoretical practice, the thing which is chiefly neglected by the Geese. It’s worth pointing out that among the things the response did not address was my critique regarding how these attitudes have held back Marxism significantly, that post-structuralism was characterized exactly by this anti-scientific, anti-systemic attitude towards Marxism, and that mindless activism is just as well upheld by those desperate “just to do something” as it is by those whose primary goal is education. When it comes to the question of “what is to be done,” the Geese have chosen some variation of “what is already being done,” just like these activists. Theoretical practice, despite being a practice of contemplation just as well as a practice of writing/other forms of sign production, is different from other types of practice precisely because it makes possible different types of actions. Therefore, it opens the possibility to novel results in the world.

Geese have limited ability to understand their circumstances and change their behavior. If their evolutionarily engrained symbolic system which gets them to migrate were to break down due to a changing environment, who knows, maybe they would go extinct. Humankind, thankfully, has the opportunity to change its behavior in radically different ways due to its understanding of its circumstances. Such a change is urgently required, and therefore, so is theoretical practice an urgent necessity!

-Nicolas D Villarreal

1. Nicolas D Villarreal, “Thesis on the Petty Bourgeoisie as a Revolutionary Class,” Pre-History of an Encounter, October 4, 2023, https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/thesis-on-the-petty-bourgeoisie-as; “See, what makes capitalism meta-stable is its ability to maximize quantities of production through selfish calculation, so long as this is the case (that is, so long it’s actually the maximization), capitalist societies will have greater control over nature, and greater relative capacity for violence, and in general be more attractive to ambitious individuals than non-capitalist societies. What makes commodity fetishism appear natural is not just the various ideological institutions of society, but also the fact that if you want to be a realist in accomplishing your goals, whatever they are, you quickly become a businessman (exactly what the bureaucrats of the USSR did). This is why Marxists discuss the fetters on production implicit in the contradictions of capitalist production: in order for communism to be more meta-stable than capitalism it must be more capable of producing things and using this production to meet human aspirations. If capitalist private property actually inhibits further economic growth then it ceases to be the meta-stable social relation.”

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2. Louis Althusser, “Part II: The Object of Capital,” in Reading Capital, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch02.htm.

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3. “Villarreal claims that Geese believes ‘there is no relationship between the real object and the object of knowledge’—but it is precisely the particularity of this relationship that we are developing, and have been developing.”

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4. “The only way to say that a theory is ‘true,’ if we stick fast to the distinction between thought and reality, is to say that it fulfills the ‘norms of scientificity,’ i.e., to say that it follows the procedures that are at a certain point of time the most advanced procedures of analysis. These norms are determined historically, and constantly evolve. This has no bearing to whether the ‘truths’ produced in knowledge are valuable or useful—it only means that they are not transhistorical, either in their method or in their conclusions. These ‘norms of scientificity’ are the key to understanding Althusser’s notion of science, and they mean that the method of evaluation of scientific practice is determined by history, not by correspondence to a static concept of ‘truth’.”

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5. Althusser, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch02.htm.

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6. Villarreal, “Higher Order Signs, Hallucination and Schizophrenia,” Pre-History of an Encounter, November 1, 2024, https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/higher-order-signs-hallucination; Villarreal, “What is Materialism?,” Cosmonaut Magazine, July 19, 2024, https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/07/what-is-materialism/.

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