The Hieroglyph of the `Party': Contextualising the Agent—Structure Debate through the Works of Trotsky,C. L. R. James and Althusser

Abstract

Questions about the agency of the Communist Party — especially its failure to effect and support radical social transformations — formed one crucial aspect of the socio-political context in which the agent—structure debate was rejoined by social scientists in the 1960s and 70s. Moreover, the Party had long existed as a hieroglyph for Marxist thought. And deciphering the historical importance of the Party in processes of world development required the theorisation of an inter-societal dimension to the agent—structure problem. I contend that using an Ideas in Context approach to the agent—structure debate in order to consider this pre-existing Marxist literature on the agency of the Party illuminates issues obscured in the progress of the debate in IR. To this effect I examine the seminal writings of Trotsky, C. L. R. James and Althusser in order to reveal how the debate, imported into IR in the late 1980s, was already framed by the problem of analytically and ethically coming to terms with the inter-societal dimension of socio-political transformation, especially when this dimension pushed to the fore the generative nature of inter-societal alterity manifested in the condition of — and `advantage' of — comparative backwardness. Crucially, the attempts made to decipher the hieroglyph of the Party are instructive in that they reveal foundational challenges for the intellectual production of knowledge of inter-societal alterity and its centrality to issues of continuity and change, the identification of structural constraints and sources of transformative agency.