Far from being a stalinist, Althusser lacked direct political orientation. Throughout the 1960s his theoretical anti-humanism remained a scholastic exercise of reinterpreting Marx’s texts, calling for an extreme separation of theoretical practice and political practice and suggesting if anything a political struggle within the Communist Party between the functionaries and the intellectuals. The political import of althusserianism worked to reassert the autonomy of the Communist Party intellectuals against the dominance of the politicians, the same principle that Sartre had advocated since 1946.1