STRUCTURAL MARXISM
LOUIS ALTHUSSER
STRUCTURAL MARXISM
Equally opposed to Hegelo-Marxism, but much more influential
was the structuralist version of Marxism, arose in France in the
mid 1960s
Marxism as a science that examined objective structures and
rejected the humanistic, historistic and phenomenological
Marxism
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1970s-80s Structural Marxism dominated
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Louis Althusser- major proponent
LOUIS ALTHUSSER
Louis Pierre Althusser (1918-1990)
Most influential Marxist philosopher of the 20th century
A leading intellectual figure in the French Communist Party and key Parisian academic
Incorporated a more nuanced understanding of culture and human subjectivity into the
legacy of Marxian thinking
He equated humanism with individualism and considered both of them to be sins of
bourgeois thinking; tried to accommodate a cultural perspective within the framework of
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the “scientific” later Marx
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Althusser’s work has a strong resemblance to the structuralist project of Levi-Strauss,
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which also saw itself as scientific
Founder of Marxian structuralism and calls himself as scientific Marxist
According to him, Neo-Marxist have not interpreted Marxian works
correctly; so he thought of developing a correct reading of the works of
Marx and this has led to his concept of “epistemological break”
He argued that Marx had undergone an epistemological break during his
life; Marx’s early writings were humanistic and subjectivist and were still
infected with Hegelian idealism
By contrast, in his later work, such as Capital, Marx advocated an
objective and scientific approach; Althusser believes that this later, more
materialist vision is the superior one
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He sees it as broadly structural in orientation and intellectually powerful
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Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) as an
inferior and immature
Althusser left himself with the task of developing a cultural
theory from the later works constructed from within the
tradition of dialectical materialism; in order to do so, he turned
towards structuralism for a solution
He also read Marx’s late works carefully and claimed to derive
from them the basis for a structural model of society which gave
culture and politics an independent role; assessed that there was
an economic base (the mode of production, means of production
etc) and a superstructure, consisting of a political and legal
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structure (the state and the legal system) and an ideological
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structure (the church, political beliefs, etc)
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According to Althusser, the superstructure worked to help
generate the conditions necessary for the survival of capitalism-
its major function then was to allow for the reproduction of
capitalism
“the state and legal system are a machine of repression which enables
the ruling classes… to ensure their domination over the working class”
(1971:137)
They are only concerned with regulating the supply of labour,
dealing with social discontent and ensuring that the economy ran
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in ways that facilitated the accumulation of capital by the
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dominant class
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The ideological system provided legitimation for capitalism and
offered people identities and roles that were necessary for the
reproduction of the capitalist system
Taking a structuralist position, Althusser stressed the ways that
these systems were interlinked, each one performing a vital social
function and each one messing with the others to form a
seamless, smoothly functioning industrial capitalist society
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THE IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUS
AND SUBJECT POSITIONS
Emphasised the role of the state in cultural life
In his collection entitled “Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays”, Althusser argued that in working to reproduce capitalism
the state made use of two kinds of system: The ISA and RSA
The Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) consisted of institutions
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which made use of coercive force. Eg. Police, Military, prisons etc;
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these might be used to crush protest and dissent on the streets
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to brea strikes and to suppress left-wing military insurgencies
The Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) consisted of institutions
that promulgated illusions about the nature and organisation of
society. Eg. the media, church and above all the school
All of these have links to the state via regulation, funding or
administration
In pre-capitalist society, Church was the most important ISA,
today it is educational system
It provided the trained, passive, and compliant workforce
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required by capitalist enterprise
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“All ideology has the function…of constituting concrete individuals as
subjects”
According to Althusser, the needs of the economic base
determine the kinds of “functions” that individuals must fulfil- as
workers, administrators and so on; people are unaware of their
objective identities as functionaries within a capitalist system
Instead they inhibit Subject positions and identities which are
propagated and allocated by the ISAs
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CRITIQUES OF ALTHUSSER
Succeeded in providing an understanding of culture and cultural
autonomy within a structural Marxian framework
However, critics argue that his work fails to reconcile historical
materialism with an understanding of the autonomy of culture
and subjectivity
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E.P Thomson, a British Neo-Marxian Historian criticised
Althusser in his Essay “The Poverty of Theory”, on the basis of
several strands:
1. Althusser’s work was too abstract and failed to engage with
concrete data about the real struggles of real people
2. He was a master of complex word games, but failed to deliver
genuine theoretical innovation
[Link] vision of social process was too deterministic
4. His vision of social life was one which denied the potential for
human freedom and creativity-specifically the potential for people
to make their own history
Althusser’s work reached its peak of influence in the late 1960s
and 1970s among left wing academics
But replaced by the works of Gramsci, Foucault, and Bourdieu
during the 1980s
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WRITING ACTIVITY
Explain the structural Marxism by Louis Althusser.
Define ISA & RSA
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REFERENCES
(21st Century Sociology) Philip Smith - Cultural Theory_ An
Introduction-Wiley-Blackwell (2001).pdf
David Mclellan - Marxism After Marx-Palgrave Macmillan (1998)
pg 328-336
