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Structural Marxism is an approach toMarxism based onstructuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopherLouis 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 thehumanist Marxism that dominated many universities in the West during the 1950s and 60s. In contrast to the humanist focus on the early works of Marx, structural Marxism emphasizes the later, more structural works, such asDas Kapital, which Althusser argued represented a scientific break fromKarl Marx's earlierHegelian humanism.

Because Althusser's thought was deeply rooted in the history of theFrench 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 ofFerdinand de Saussure, the anthropology ofClaude Lévi-Strauss, and thepsychoanalysis ofJacques Lacan), creating a "third way" between the dogmaticdialectical materialism of theStalinist era and the various humanist andexistentialist Marxisms. His project was to re-establish Marxism as a science—"historical materialism"—by purging it of what he saw as its ideological, humanist andhistoricist 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 ofoverdetermination and relative autonomy of thesuperstructures 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 asNicos Poulantzas,Étienne Balibar, andPierre Macherey. However, it faced sustained criticism from other Marxist traditions, notably from historians likeE. 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 ofpost-structuralism, with many of Althusser's own students becoming prominent critics.

Louis Althusser's project emerged from a specific intellectual and political conjuncture in post-war France, defined by the political crises of the Communist movement and major shifts inFrench philosophy.^[1]

AfterWorld War II,Marxist philosophy in France was largely divided between two trends. The first was the "orthodox" Marxism of theFrench Communist Party (PCF), which was codified into a dogmatic system known asdialectical materialism or "diamat".^[2] After beingejected from government in 1947 and with the onset of theCold War, the PCF retreated into a "Stalinist fortress", loyally executing the demands of theCominform and promoting a quasi-"third-period" rhetoric.^[3] This system treatedMarxism as a universal "world-view" with laws applicable to both nature and history, often serving to legitimize the political line of theSoviet Union. The official philosophy of the PCF left little room for serious philosophical work, instead subordinating theoretical inquiry to the legitimation of party policy.^[4]

The second trend was a reaction against this orthodoxy, taking the form ofMarxist humanism and often blending Marxism withexistentialism andphenomenology. Thinkers likeJean-Paul Sartre andMaurice Merleau-Ponty, particularly after their experiences in theFrench Resistance, sought to develop a Marxism that emphasized human subjectivity, lived experience, and creative practice (praxis).^[5] This approach was part of a broader "Hegelian Marxist" current that emerged afterWorld War I with the work ofGeorg Lukács andKarl Korsch, who reacted against themechanistic anddeterministic Marxism of theSecond International by returning to Hegel and emphasizingclass consciousness.^[6] This trend was given a new impetus by the discovery and publication in the post-war years ofKarl Marx's early works, particularly theEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and theGrundrisse, which were saturated with Hegelian andhumanist themes.^[7] The humanist Marxists rejected the scientific and determinist "iron laws" of dialectical materialism, arguing that Stalinism's theoreticalnaturalism denied the specificity of human history as the product of creative human agency.^[8] Their philosophy was "subject-centered", rooted in the lived experience of the historical actor as the source of both history and knowledge.^[9] Another important influence on post-war French Marxism wasAlexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel, which interpreted Hegel through a Marxist lens and emphasized themes such as theend of history and themaster–slave dialectic.^[10]

This intellectual environment was transformed by two major political events. First,Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" at theTwentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, which denounced the crimes of the Stalin era, created a crisis within Western Communist Parties that Althusser later described as an "earthquake".^[11] This "de-Stalinization" opened up a new space for criticism and intellectual freedom, allowing for critical encounters with both Marxist orthodoxy and non-Marxist traditions.^[12] Second, theSino-Soviet split provided an alternative model of socialist construction in China and introduced the theoretical work ofMao Zedong into European debates. For many commentators, the Sino-Soviet dispute was the "real political background" to Althusser's work.^[13]

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the intellectual tide in France turned away from the subject-centered philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology towardstructuralism.^[14] This shift was characterized as a move from the legacy of the "three H's" (Hegel,Edmund Husserl, andMartin Heidegger) to that of the three "masters of suspicion" (Marx,Friedrich Nietzsche, andSigmund Freud).^[15] The principal source of this movement was thestructural linguistics ofFerdinand de Saussure, which emphasized that language is a system of signs whose meaning is determined not by reference to an external reality or the intention of a speaker, but by the internal relations of difference within the linguistic system.^[14]

This approach was extended to other fields, radically challenging the idea of the autonomous, meaning-creating human subject:

• In anthropology,Claude Lévi-Strauss analyzed myths, kinship, and other social practices as "codes" governed by underlying structural rules, analogous to language. History was not the product of conscious human projects but was determined by the totality of these rule systems.^[16]
• Inpsychoanalysis,Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud through structural linguistics, arguing that "theunconscious is structured like a language". The sovereign, conscious self ofCartesian philosophy was displaced by a subject constituted through its entry into a pre-existing "symbolic order".^[17]

The common theme of structuralism was the "decentering of the subject": the human subject was no longer seen as the source of meaning, but as an effect, a "prisoner of meaning" constituted by external structures (linguistic, cultural, or unconscious).^[18] This provided Althusser with powerful tools to criticize the humanist Marxisms of Sartre and others.^[19]

Althusser's work in the early 1960s, collected inFor Marx andReading Capital (both 1965), constituted a decisive intervention into this context. As a philosopher and member of the PCF, he sought to chart a "third way" that was neither the dogmatic scientism of Stalinism nor the philosophical humanism of its critics.^[20] According toHarry Cleaver, his aim was to "revitalize dialectical materialism as an ideology to mediate the widely discredited political practices of the French Communist Party".^[21] He did this by denying that humanist Marxism was authentically Marxist at all. Instead, he argued that Marxism was a science—historical materialism—and that its scientificity had been established by Marx himself in a radical break from his early humanist and Hegelian writings.^[22]

To make this case, Althusser allied with structuralism and another French intellectual tradition, the "historicalepistemology" of philosophers of science likeGaston Bachelard.^[23] From Bachelard, he borrowed the concept of the "epistemological break" (coupure épistémologique), a discontinuous rupture that separates a new science from its ideological prehistory.^[24] Althusser's project was to use these tools to purify Marxism of its ideological elements and re-establish it on a scientific footing. This intervention was simultaneously political: it was conceived as a left-wing critique of Stalinism that, unlike humanism, did not abandon the theoretical tools needed to analyze Stalinism as a historical reality, and as a theoretical opposition to the "rightist" tendencies of reformism and opportunism which he saw growing within the PCF.^[25]

Althusser's project involved a fundamental re-reading of Marx and a re-conceptualization ofhistorical materialism as a science. This produced a distinct set of theoretical concepts that defined the structural Marxist school.

The central theoretical move in Althusser's work is a rigid distinction between science and ideology.^[26] Drawing on the historicalepistemology ofGaston Bachelard, Althusser argued that science is not the opposite of ignorance, but of a "tenacious web of error" embodied in ideology.^[27] This distinction is elaborated through two key concepts:

• Epistemological break (coupure épistémologique): Althusser argued that the history of a science is marked by a radical, discontinuous "break" that separates the new scientific field from its "pre-scientific" ideological past.^[28] He located such a break in Marx's own intellectual development around 1845, with works likeThe German Ideology and theTheses on Feuerbach. According to Althusser, these texts mark Marx's definitive rupture with his early, "ideological" works, which were dominated byHegelian andFeuerbachian humanism, and the founding of a new science: historical materialism.^[29] Consequently, the early writings of Marx (such as theEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) were not to be considered part of scientific Marxism, but belonged to its prehistory.^[30] One political interpretation of this theoretical move is that it allowed Althusser to "neatly eliminate" questions concerningalienation and the nature of work which were "embarrassing to the Soviet state".^[31]
• Problematic: The epistemological break is understood as a change in the fundamental "problematic" of a discourse. A problematic is not simply a set of ideas, but the underlying theoretical framework—the "objective internal reference system...the system of questions commanding the answers given"—that determines what can be thought and said within a particular discourse.^[32] A scientific problematic is "open," capable of development, whereas an ideological problematic is "closed," dominated by its service to extra-theoretical, "practico-social" functions.^[33] The break in Marx's work was therefore a shift from the humanist problematic of alienation and human essence to the scientific problematic of concepts likemode of production, social formation, andclass struggle. To identify a text's problematic, Althusser proposed a method of "symptomatic reading", borrowed from Freud, which seeks to uncover the text's unspoken assumptions, "silences", and the "undivulged event" that structures its content.^[34]

Based on this epistemological break, Althusser mounted a critique of two tendencies he saw as ideological deviations within Marxism: theoreticalhumanism andhistoricism.

• Theoretical anti-humanism: Althusser famously declared that Marxism is a "theoretical anti-humanism".^[35] He rejected the idea, central to both Feuerbach and the early Marx, that history is the story of the alienation and eventual self-realization of a universal "human essence". For scientific Marxism, concepts like "Man" and human nature are ideological, not scientific. Instead, history must be understood as a "process without a subject".^[36] Individuals are not the autonomous creators of history; they are the "bearers" (Träger) or supports of objective social relations and structures. Subjectivity itself is an effect of ideology.^[37]
• Anti-historicism: Closely related is Althusser's critique of historicism, which he defined as anyteleological conception of history as a linear, continuous process moving toward a pre-determined goal.^[38] He argued that the Hegeliandialectic, even when "inverted" by Marxists, retained this structure, viewing history as the self-development of a simple, inner principle (whether the Idea, "Man", or theproductive forces). Althusser argued that this "expressive totality", where each part of society is seen as an expression of a single essence, was incompatible with the scientific Marxist concept of a complex, decentred social formation.^[39]

Althusser proposed a new conceptualization of the social whole (or "social formation") based on his reading ofCapital.

• Levels and practices: The social formation is a complex, structured whole consisting of distinct levels or "instances": the economic, the political, and the ideological.^[40] This totality is not unified by a central essence but is a "de-centred structure in dominance".^[41]
• Relative autonomy and determination in the last instance: Againsteconomic determinism (or "economism"), Althusser argued that the political and ideological levels have a "relative autonomy". They are not mere passive reflections of the economic base but are themselves effective structures that are conditions of existence for the economy.^[42] The primacy of the economy is maintained through the concept of "determination in the last instance", which means the economy determines which level will be dominant in a given mode of production (e.g., politics in feudalism, ideology in some pre-capitalist societies, and the economy in capitalism).^[43] The dominance of the economy is therefore never direct or simple; as Althusser puts it, "the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes".^[44]
• Overdetermination: Borrowing frompsychoanalysis, Althusser used the concept of overdetermination to describe the complex causality at work in a social formation.^[45] Each level has its own "peculiar time" and rhythm of development.^[46] A contradiction (such as the one between capital and labor) is never simple but is always "overdetermined"—shaped, displaced, and specified by the other contradictions and effectivities of the different levels of the social formation. A revolutionary "rupture" occurs not from the simple maturation of the economic contradiction, but from a "condensation" or fusion of a multiplicity of contradictions into a "ruptural unity".^[47]
• Structural causality: To conceptualize the determination of the elements of a structure by the structure itself, Althusser proposed a new concept of "structural causality". Drawing onBaruch Spinoza's idea of an "immanent cause", he argued that the structure is not an external cause (like in mechanics) or an inner essence expressing itself (like in Hegel), but is a cause that is immanent in its effects. The structure is nothing other than the totality of its effects, "present only in and as its effects", and its existence is secured by the mechanism that produces those effects.^[48] It is an "absent cause" that is not directly visible but can be inferred from its effects, analogous to the Freudianunconscious.^[49]

In the late 1960s, influenced by the political events ofMay 68 and theCultural Revolution in China, as well as by criticisms from his own students, Althusser undertook a significant self-criticism and revision of his earlier positions.^[50]

Althusser abandoned his earlier definition of philosophy as a "Theory of theoretical practice".^[51] This earlier formulation, he argued, was "theoreticist" and "positivist," as it wrongly treated philosophy as a science above other sciences, capable of guaranteeing their truth.^[52] He proposed a new definition: philosophy is, in the last resort, "class struggle in the domain of theory".^[53]

According to this new view, philosophy has no object of its own and produces no knowledge. Instead, it is a political intervention. It represents the political line of the class struggle within the field of theory (for example, defending scientific materialism against idealist ideologies), and it represents scientificity in the field of politics (defending "correct" political positions against "deviations").^[54] The entire history of philosophy is seen as a struggle between two tendencies, materialism and idealism, which ultimately represent the class outlooks of theproletariat and thebourgeoisie, respectively.^[55] From this new perspective, Althusser admitted his earlier work had largely ignored class struggle, thoughHarry Cleaver argued this revision still limited the concept to the "ideological battles of leftist intellectuals".^[56]

In his influential 1970 essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", Althusser offered a new theory of ideology that moved away from the earlier science/ideology pairing.^[57] This essay was drawn from a larger, unpublished manuscript written in 1969,On the Superstructure.^[58] Althusser argued that the reproduction of therelations of production is the primary function of the state. The state achieves this not only through overt coercion via the "Repressive State Apparatus" (RSA)—the government, police, army, courts, prisons—but also, and primarily, through ideology via "Ideological State Apparatuses" (ISAs).^[59]

The ISAs are a plurality of seemingly private institutions—such as the church, the family, the educational system, the media, trade unions, and political parties—that function to secure the reproduction of the relations of production by inculcating the dominant ideology.^[60] Whereas the RSA functions primarily by violence, the ISAs function primarily by ideology. Althusser argued that in pre-capitalist formations the dominant ISA was the Church, but that under capitalism, this role was taken over by the educational system.^[61] He contended that ideology is an "organic part of every social totality", a permanent and necessary feature of all societies, including communist ones, because it serves the indispensable function of social cohesion.^[62]

Within this framework, Althusser proposed a new theory of how ideology functions to constitute individuals as subjects. He argued that "ideology has a material existence" in the practices and rituals of the ISAs.^[63] Individuals are integrated into ideology through a process he called "interpellation" or "hailing".^[64]

Ideology functions by "hailing" concrete individuals as concrete subjects. In recognizing themselves as the one who is hailed (for example, by a policeman shouting "Hey, you there!"), the individual becomes a subject who freely accepts their subjection to a higher Subject (God, the State, Capital).^[65] Drawing onLacanian psychoanalysis, especially the concept of themirror stage, Althusser argued that this constitution of the subject in ideology is a process of (mis)recognition, where the subject perceives their ideological subjection as a form of free will and self-transparency.^[66] This mechanism ensures that individuals willingly fulfill their roles within the relations of production, giving them the illusion that history was madefor them, while in fact they are merely agents in a "process without a subject".^[67]

Structural Marxism proved to be an enormously influential, though controversial, theoretical current in the 1970s. Its concepts were applied and developed in a wide range of fields, including political theory, anthropology, class analysis, and feminist theory.

The most prominent theorist to develop Althusserian ideas in political science wasNicos Poulantzas. In works likePolitical Power and Social Classes (1968), Poulantzas applied the concepts of relative autonomy and structural determination to the analysis of the capitalist state and class structure.^[68]

Poulantzas argued that the state in capitalist societies is not a simple instrument of the ruling class. Because the capitalist class is itself divided into competing "fractions" (e.g., industrial capital, finance capital), the state must have relative autonomy from any particular fraction in order to organize the long-term political interests of the capitalist class as a whole (the "power bloc").^[69] The function of the state is to maintain the cohesion of the social formation, and it does so through organizing the "hegemonic" leadership of the power bloc and disorganizing the dominated classes.^[70] Poulantzas also developed a complex theory of class determination, arguing that classes are defined not just by their economic position, but by their position in political and ideological structures as well. This led to his controversial analysis of the "newpetty bourgeoisie".^[71] The Althusserian tradition also influenced the state theory ofGöran Therborn and the work on ideology and populism byErnesto Laclau.^[72]

Althusser andÉtienne Balibar's reconceptualization of themode of production had a major impact on Marxist anthropology. Their abstract, trans-historical concepts were seen as a tool for analyzing pre-capitalist societies without imposing aEurocentric or evolutionary schema.^[73] French anthropologists likeEmmanuel Terray andClaude Meillassoux used this framework to analyze lineage-based societies in Africa. Terray, for instance, re-analyzed Meillassoux's work on theGouro people to argue that kinship relations were the "realisation" of the economic, political, and ideological determinations of a specific "lineage mode of production".^[74]

This work gave rise to the influential concept of the "articulation of modes of production," which theorized how a single social formation could be composed of a complex combination of several modes of production (e.g., a capitalist mode articulated with a pre-capitalist or "domestic" mode). This concept was widely used to analyze colonial and post-colonial societies,imperialism, and historical transitions, such as the transition fromfeudalism to capitalism.^[75] The Althusserian use of this concept was deployed by Communist Party theoreticians as a "counterattack" againstNew Leftdependency theorists such asAndre Gunder Frank, who, according to the Althusserians, had failed to adequately theorize the specificity of production relationships in theThird World.^[76] The Althusserian school has also influenced concrete historical analyses by figures such asGuy Bois,Robert Linhart,Perry Anderson, andGareth Stedman Jones.^[77]

Several concepts from structural Marxism were taken up by feminist theorists in the 1970s as a way to theorizepatriarchy and the oppression of women within a materialist framework.^[78]

• The "domestic labor debate" drew on the Althusserian focus on reproduction. Theorists analyzed the family and domestic labor as a distinct mode of production (the "domestic mode") responsible for the production and reproduction oflabor power, a function essential for the capitalist mode of production with which it was articulated.^[79]
• The theory of Ideological State Apparatuses was used to analyze the family and schools as key sites for the reproduction of gender ideology and the constitution of gendered subjects.^[80]
• The theory of interpellation was linked withLacanian psychoanalysis to provide a theory of the constitution of gendered subjectivity.Juliet Mitchell'sPsychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) famously used this framework to argue that patriarchy, as a universal ideological structure, is established through the entry of individuals into thesymbolic order via theOedipus complex.^[81]

Structural Marxism came under sustained attack from multiple directions, and its influence waned significantly by the early 1980s. The critiques focused on its theoretical inconsistencies, its political implications, and its alleged philosophical flaws.

A widespread criticism was that Althusser's framework, particularly his theory of reproduction, was a form ofstructural functionalism.^[82] Critics argued that Althusser explained social institutions (like the ISAs) in terms of their "function" in satisfying the needs of the system (the reproduction of the relations of production). This was seen as a "systemsteleology", where the needs of the system magically call forth the institutions that fulfill them.^[83] This functionalist logic, combined with the concept of structural causality, was said to produce a static model of society as a self-perpetuating system in which historical change, particularly revolutionary change initiated byclass struggle, became theoretically inconceivable.^[84] While Althusser later introduced "class struggle" as the "motor of history," critics argued that this was anad hoc addition that was not integrated into the rest of his theoretical framework.^[85] A related critique, leveled byAlex Callinicos, is that Althusser's insistence on the necessity of ideology for all societies, including post-revolutionary ones, transforms Marxism from a theory of class struggle into a general theory of "social cohesion", more akin to the sociology ofÉmile Durkheim than to Marx.^[86]

One of the most powerful critiques came from Marxist historians, most notablyE. P. Thompson in his polemical essayThe Poverty of Theory (1978). Thompson accused Althusserianism of being a new form of idealism, a "theology" that imposed a pre-conceived theoretical schema (the "orrery") onto the real flow of history.^[87] He argued that Althusser's anti-empiricism and his dismissal of "experience" were a rejection of the historian's craft and an assertion of intellectual elitism.^[88] Thompson defended a conception of history as an open-ended "process" shaped by the conscious agency of human beings. He charged that Althusser's structural determinism, by reducing humans to mere "bearers" of structures, eliminated human agency from history and led to a theoretical justification forStalinism, famously calling it "Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of Theory".^[89] Another line of critique came fromautonomist Marxists such asHarry Cleaver, who characterized Althusser's work as a "born-again orthodoxy" and a "sterile and dogmatic ideology of domination" which presented a "lifeless sociological taxonomy of modes of production" notable for the "absence of class struggle".^[90]

Other critics, while accepting the force of Thompson's argument against Althusser's determinism, considered the charge of Stalinism to be unsubstantiated and "remarkably flimsy".^[91] They noted that Althusser himself wrote against "the massive edifice of Stalinism" and that his works were received with "extreme skepticism, if not hostility" by the leadership of the PCF.^[92] From this perspective, while Althusser's philosophical denial of human agency was a serious theoretical problem, to see in it a rationale for mass liquidation was an "unwarranted" leap.^[93]

The theoretical foundations of Althusserianism also came under attack, often from his former students who went on to form the core of thepost-structuralist movement. Critics argued that the very attempt to establish a definitive epistemological criterion to distinguish science from ideology was untenable.^[94] The reliance on structuralism andconventionalist philosophy of science, they claimed, led to a form of relativism that was incompatible with Althusser's claim that Marxism was an objective science. The rigid distinction between the "real object" and the "object of knowledge" created an unbridgeable gap, making it impossible to validate knowledge claims about reality.^[95] Althusser's coherence theory of truth was accused of being a form of idealism, unable to distinguish between internally consistent theories and thus risking "epistemological agnosticism".^[96]

Thinkers likeMichel Foucault rejected the science/ideology distinction altogether, instead analyzing all discourses, including scientific ones, as "regimes of truth" inseparable from institutional power.^[97] TheNouveaux Philosophes, many of them formerMaoist-Althusserians likeAndré Glucksmann andBernard-Henri Lévy, went further. Emerging from the disillusionment with Maoism following the exposure of theGulag byAleksandr Solzhenitsyn, they denounced structural Marxism as a totalitarian "master discourse" that completed the oppressive trajectory of Western rationality, leading logically to the Gulag.^[98] This "rebellion of subjectivity" marked the definitive end of structural Marxism's intellectual hegemony in Paris and contributed to its broader decline.^[99]

• Benton, Ted (1984).The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and his Influence. London: Macmillan Education.ISBN 978-0-312-68375-7.
• Callinicos, Alex (1976).Althusser's Marxism. London: Pluto Press.ISBN 0-904383-02-4.
• Cleaver, Harry (2000) [1979].Reading Capital Politically. Edinburgh & Leeds: AK Press & Anti/Theses.ISBN 1-902593-29-4.
• Elliott, Gregory (2006).Althusser: The Detour of Theory. Leiden: Brill.ISBN 978-90-04-15337-0.
• Smith, Steven B. (1984).Reading Althusser: An Essay on Structural Marxism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.ISBN 0-8014-1672-8.

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