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