June 11, 2009:

Draper and Althusser.

In his great essay "The Two Souls of Socialism", Draper sketches the problematic which has "socialism" as its object, showing that the principled dividing line between currents and strategies is not between reform versus revolution, or violence versus nonviolence, but between self-emancipation versus emancipation-by-someone-else. He shows where the major historical socialist currents lie within the problematic, and that the notion of socialism-from-above has been historically "dominant" (his term).

Draper doesn't have the Althusserian term "problematic" available to him. In another context, his essay "Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformists", Draper uses the term "framework" where Althusser would use "problematic". When he writes, "the form [of a particular set of ideas] taken within the framework of socialism", that "framework of socialism" is what Althusser would have termed the problematic of socialism. Draper demonstrates how the complex of ideas he's discussing originates outside of socialism; then, when it becomes part of the socialist problematic, is forced by the logic of the problematic to take on changed meanings.

In Althusser, "problematic" is a concept, while in Draper "framework" is a word. Draper's term is essentially descriptive. They're both trying to think the same logic. Althusser has developed a concept for it, Draper hasn't.

From "In Defense of the New Radicals" (1964): "Politics abhors an ideological vacuum. The new-radical knows, just knows, that racial discrimination is wrong because he has already absorbed and internalized this consensus-idea from his milieu. Just as people who 'don't believe in theories' merely mean that they accept the current theories of the status quo without examination and uncritically, so also the new-radical ideological vacuum is inevitably filled with unexamined content." Draper and Althusser both learned from Lenin that so-called spontaneous ideology is simply the dominant ideology unexamined. Althusser develops the concept, Draper doesn't.

Again from "In Defense of the New Radicals": "It is an old story: Hayden and Lynd see anti-Communism solely in terms decided by the Estabslishment; they accept the same frame of reference and put a different sign in front of it. It is the Establishment's ideology they are working with; and isn't this inevitable as long as they eschew a consciously thought-out one of their own? The vacuum is going to be filled, one way or the other."

Note the subjective-idealist terminology: "frame of reference". This is Thomas Kuhn and the "paradigm" which eventually "shifts". Because Althusser formulates concepts while Draper formulates descriptions, Draper's language is more vulnerable to the dominant idealism of his culture.