Structural Marxism

Marxist philosophy led by Louis Althusser

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Structural Marxism" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

|

Part of a series on

Marxism
Outline

Theoretical works

* Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
* The Condition of the Working Class in England
* The German Ideology
* The Communist Manifesto
* The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
* Grundrisse
* Capital
* Critique of the Gotha Programme
* Dialectics of Nature
* The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
* What Is to Be Done?
* The Accumulation of Capital
* Philosophical Notebooks
* Terrorism and Communism
* The State and Revolution
* Essays on Marx's Theory of Value
* History and Class Consciousness
* Prison Notebooks
* The Black Jacobins
* On Practice
* Dialectic of Enlightenment
* A Critique of Soviet Economics
* The Long Revolution
* Guerrilla Warfare
* The Wretched of the Earth
* Reading Capital
* The Society of the Spectacle
* Pedagogy of the Oppressed
* Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
* Ways of Seeing
* How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
* Social Justice and the City
* Women, Race and Class
* Marxism and the Oppression of Women
* Imagined Communities
* Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
* The Sublime Object of Ideology
* Time, Labor and Social Domination
* The Age of Extremes
* The Origin of Capitalism
* Empire
* Late Victorian Holocausts
* Change the World Without Taking Power
* Caliban and the Witch
* An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital
* Capitalist Realism
* Capital in the Anthropocene

Philosophy

* Alienation
* Dialectical materialism
* Ideology
* Philosophy of nature
* Philosophy in the Soviet Union
* Reification
* Marxist ethics

Critique of political economy

* Capital (accumulation)
* Crisis theory
* Commodity
* Concrete and abstract labor
* Factors of production
* Falling profit-rate tendency
* Means of production
* Mode of production
* Capitalist
* Socialist
* Productive forces
* Scientific socialism
* State monopoly capitalism
* Surplus product
* Socially necessary labour time
* Value-form
* Wage labour

Sociology

* Base and superstructure
* Bourgeoisie
* Class
* Class consciousness
* Classless society
* Commodity fetishism
* Communist society
* Critical theory
* Cultural hegemony
* Democracy
* Dictatorship of the proletariat
* Soviet
* Radical
* Democratic centralism
* Exploitation
* False consciousness
* Human nature
* Immiseration
* Imperialism
* Lumpenproletariat
* Metabolic rift
* Proletariat
* Private property
* Relations of production
* State theory
* Working class

History

* Class struggle
* Historical determinism
* Primitive accumulation
* Proletarian revolution
* World revolution
* Theory of historical trajectory

Aspects

* Aesthetics
* Archaeology
* Criminology
* Cultural Marxism
* Cultural Studies
* Ethics
* Film theory
* Geography
* Historiography
* Literary criticism
* Marxism and religion
* Sociology
* Philosophy

Common variants

|  Structural

* Autonomist
* Marxism–Leninism
* Guevarism
* Maoism
* Neo-Gramscianism
* Regulation school
* Third-worldist
* Titoism
* Trotskyism

Hegelian

* Budapest School
* Frankfurt School
* Humanist
* Neue Marx-Lektüre
* Open
* Praxis School

Both

* Black
* Classical
* Communization
* Feminist
* Leninism
* Neo
* Post
* Western

Other variants

* Analytical
* Austromarxism
* Hispanic marxism
* Centrist
* Eurocommunism
* Instrumental
* Marxism–Leninism–Maoism
* Nkrumaism
* Political
* Revisionist
* Situationist
* Socialism with Chinese characteristics
* Wertkritik

People

* Marx
* Engels
* Morris
* Lafargue
* Rubin
* Kautsky
* Plekhanov
* Du Bois
* Connolly
* Lenin
* Luxemburg
* Liebknecht
* Kollontai
* Stalin
* Trotsky
* Grossman
* Zinoviev
* Bloch
* Lukács
* Korsch
* Bukharin
* Ho
* Serge
* Gramsci
* Pashukanis
* Bordiga
* Benjamin
* Mao
* Basu
* Mariátegui
* Horkheimer
* Dutt
* Brecht
* Marcuse
* Kalecki
* Fromm
* Cox
* Lefebvre
* James
* Adorno
* Padmore
* Sartre
* Deutscher
* Beauvoir
* Sombart
* Nkrumah
* Sweezy
* Emmanuel
* Hill
* Bettelheim
* Draper
* Jones
* Hobsbawm
* Althusser
* Hinton
* Williams
* Freire
* Cunhal
* Lara
* Mandel
* Sivanandan
* Miliband
* Cabral
* Thompson
* Bauman
* Fanon
* Berger
* Castro
* Guevara
* Liebman
* Heller
* Guattari
* Mészáros
* O'Connor
* Wallerstein
* Mies
* Tronti
* Debord
* Amin
* Hall
* Nairn
* Parenti
* Negri
* Jameson
* Dussel
* Harvey
* Laclau
* Bahro
* Poulantzas
* Vattimo
* Badiou
* Harnecker
* Altvater
* Ismail
* Anderson
* Löwy
* Vogel
* Sison
* Easthope
* Rancière
* Berman
* Przeworski
* Cohen
* Therborn
* Losurdo
* Postone
* Rodney
* Bannerji
* Spivak
* Newton
* Wood
* Federici
* Wolff
* Balibar
* Eagleton
* Kurz
* Rowbotham
* Mouffe
* Geras
* Brenner
* Davis
* Massey
* Cleaver
* Bishop
* Haraway
* Panitch
* Clarke
* Jessop
* Davis
* Wright
* Fraser
* Burawoy
* Holloway
* Rose
* Screpanti
* Tamás
* Hampton
* Cano
* Žižek
* Berardi
* Sankara
* Hennessy
* McDonnell
* Douzinas
* Roediger
* Foster
* West
* Ghandy
* Marcos
* Heinrich
* Prashad
* Kelley
* Dean
* Lordon
* Linera
* Fisher
* Li
* Prestes
* Coulthard
* Malm
* Seymour
* Toscano
* Bhattacharya
* Moufawad-Paul
* Srnicek
* Horvat
* Hamza
* Saito

Journals

* Antipode
* Capital & Class
* Capitalism Nature Socialism
* Constellations
* Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory
* Historical Materialism
* Mediations
* Monthly Review
* New Left Review
* Race & Class
* Rethinking Marxism
* Science & Society
* Socialist Register

Related topics

* 21st-century communist theorists
* Anarchism
* Creative destruction
* Conflict theory
* Criticism of Marxism
* Communism
* Communalism
* Economic determinism
* History of communism
* Left-wing politics
* Marxian economics
* New Left
* Old Left
* Municipalism
* Political ecology
* Socialism
* Authoritarian
* Democratic
* Market
* Reformist
* Revolutionary
* Social
* Utopian
* Left-wing populism
* Universal class
* Vulgar Marxism
* Economism
* Worker cooperative
* Workers' council

* Communism portal
* Economics portal
* Philosophy portal
* Politics portal
* Socialism portal

* v
* t
* e

Structural Marxism (sometimes called Althusserian Marxism) is an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and sociologists outside France during the 1970s. Other proponents of structural Marxism were the sociologist Nicos Poulantzas and the anthropologist Maurice Godelier. Many of Althusser's students broke with structural Marxism in the late 1960s and 1970s.[1][2]

## Overview

[edit]

Structural Marxism arose in opposition to the instrumental Marxism that dominated many western universities during the 1970s.[citation needed] In contrast to other forms of Marxism, Althusser stressed that Marxism was a science that examined objective structures,[3] and he believed that historicist and phenomenological Marxism, which was based on Marx's early works, was caught in a "pre-scientific ideology".[4]

Toward the middle of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Marxist theorists began to develop structuralist Marxist accounts of the state, law, and crime. Structuralist Marxism disputes the instrumentalist view that the state can be viewed as the direct servant of the capitalist or ruling class. Whereas the instrumentalist position is that the institutions of the state[5] are under the direct control of those members of the capitalist class in positions of state power, the structuralist position is that state institutions must function so as to ensure the viability of capitalism more generally. In other words, state institutions must reproduce capitalist society as a whole. The debate between structural and instrumental Marxists was characterized by the Miliband–Poulantzas debate between instrumentalist Ralph Miliband and structuralist Nicos Poulantzas.[6]

Structuralists view the state in a capitalist mode of production as taking a specifically capitalist form, not because particular individuals are in powerful positions, but because the state reproduces the logic of capitalist structure in its economic, legal, and political institutions. Hence, from a structuralist perspective one would argue that state institutions (including legal ones) function in the long-term interests of capital and capitalism, rather than in the short-term interests of members of the capitalist class. Thus the state and its institutions have a certain degree of independence from specific elites in the ruling or capitalist class.[7]

## Long- versus short-term class interests

[edit]

Structural Marxism posits that the state functions to serve the long-term interests of the bourgeoisie. Building upon the works of Engels, structural Marxists posit that the state is a mechanism for regulating class conflict, the irreconcilable tension between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.[8][9] By regulating these antagonisms —rather than eliminating them which is thought impossible without violent revolution[8]—the state serves to stabilize the capitalist system as a whole and preserve its existence.[10]

Structuralists differentiate between the long-term and short-term interests of the capitalist class in order to describe the necessity of the state to the capitalist system. Short-term interests of the bourgeoisie include policies that affect capital accumulation in the immediate future such as tax breaks, reduced minimum wages, government subsidies, etc. They maintain that when the state does not benefit the bourgeois class' short-term interests, it is acting on the behalf of its future interests. Accordingly, when the state seems to act on behalf of the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie (raising minimum wage, increasing labor rights, etc.) it is serving capitalist interests by meeting the demands of workers only enough to prevent an uprising that could threaten the system as a whole. Because the interests of the proletariat and the capitalist classes are counter to one another, the state is seen as necessary to regulate the capitalist system and assure its preservation by forcing capitalists to agree to demands of workers to which they otherwise would not succumb.[9]

## Criticism

[edit]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

|

Similar arguments have been made concerning structural theories of the capitalist nature of the state. Claus Offe suggested that the class-character of the state could only be observed in an ex post perspective. In other words, the class character of the state can only be shown after policies are put in place and the outcome is observed. Because of this, he criticized structural theories which attempted to prove the capitalist character of the state, claiming they do so on an unfounded basis: because outcomes of the state's policies are empirically capitalist, it does not make the State a capitalist enterprise in its nature.: 45–46 [11][failed verification]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Benton, Ted. The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and His Influence. Palgrave Macmillan.
2. ^ Smith, Steven. Reading Althusser: An Essay on Structural Marxism.
3. ^ Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and Philosophy. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. NY: Monthly Review Press.
4. ^ Heine Andersen and L. B. Kaspersen (ed.). Classical and Modern Social Theory, Blackwell publishers, Oxford, 2000.
5. ^ Smith, Steven (1984). Reading Althusser.
6. ^ Poulantzas, N. & Miliband R. (1972). The Problem of the Capitalist State. In R. Blackburn (ed.) Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory. NY: Pantheon Books, pp. 238–262.
7. ^ Benton, Ted (1984). The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and His Influence. Palgrave Macmillan.
8. ^ a b Lenin, V.I. (2004/1917). The State and Revolution. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.
9. ^ a b Offe, Claus (1974). Structural Problems of the Capitalist State: Class Rule and the Political System. In Klaus von Beyme (ed.) German Political Studies, vol. 1. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publishing.
10. ^ Van den Berg, Axel (1980). "Critical Theory: Is There Still Hope?" The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 86 No. 3 (Nov 1980), pp. 449–478.
11. ^ Kołakowski, Leszek (1971), "Althusser's Marx". Socialist Register 1971, pp. 111–28.

*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template