Tradition
Structural Marxism
Overview
Structural Marxism (or structuralist Marxism) is an approach to Marxism based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the late 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and sociologists outside France during the 1970s. Structural Marxism arose in opposition to the humanist Marxism that dominated many universities in the West during the 1950s and 60s. In contrast to the humanist focus on the early works of Karl Marx, structural Marxism emphasizes the later, more structural works, such as Das Kapital, which Althusser argued represented a scientific break from Marx's earlier Hegelian humanism.
Because Althusser's thought was deeply rooted in the history of the French Communist Party (PCF), structural Marxism is often considered a politically-motivated theoretical intervention. Althusser's aim was to reconcile Marxism with the structuralist sciences of his day (such as the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan), creating a "third way" between the dogmatic dialectical materialism of the Stalinist era and the various humanist and existentialist Marxisms. His project was to re-establish Marxism as a science—"historical materialism"—by purging it of what he saw as its ideological, humanist and historicist elements.
Key concepts of structural Marxism include the idea of an "epistemological break" in Marx's thought, an anti-humanist view of history as a "process without a subject", and the concepts of overdetermination and relative autonomy of the superstructures from the economic base. In his later work, Althusser developed his theory of ideology and the process of "interpellation" to explain how subjects are constituted within social structures. The school of thought had a significant influence on figures such as Nicos Poulantzas, Étienne Balibar, and Pierre Macherey. However, it faced sustained criticism from other Marxist traditions, notably from historians like E. P. Thompson who accused it of being a form of idealism and Stalinism. By the late 1970s, the movement declined due to both internal theoretical problems and the rise of post-structuralism, with many of Althusser's own students becoming prominent critics.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer. In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent…
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
States what Structural Marxism is; the author is tied to Structural Marxism in the knowledge graph.
They have pre-suppositions; and their style of cognition is that of understanding, proceeding under the canon of formal identity. In Spinoza, who was especially addicted to the use of the geometrical method, we are at once struck by its characteristic formalism. Yet his ideas were speculative in spirit; whereas the system of Wolf, who carried the method out to the height of pedantry, was even in subject-matter a…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Structural Marxism is; the author is tied to Structural Marxism in the knowledge graph.
In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian. Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture, patriarchal relations in agriculture. Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues. _C. German, or “True,” Socialism_ The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated…
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
The author is tied to Structural Marxism in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Structural Marxism
Related ideas
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Feudalism
- Productive forces
- Perry Anderson
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Cartesianism
- Historicism
- Imperialism
- Jacques Lacan
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Karl Marx
- Marx's theory of alienation
- Eurocentrism
- Structural linguistics
- Marxism
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Mao Zedong
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Patriarchy
- Psychoanalysis
- Post-structuralism
- Sigmund Freud
Place in the tradition
Part of Determinism.