REVIEWS Reconstructing Structural Marxism Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism; The charge of Stalinism, together with the current Althusser and his Influence, Macmillan, London, 1984, state of disarray amongst Althusserians, provides 259pp lI8.00 hc, 1.6.95 pb Benton with one of the two major reasons for writing Rise and Fall; namely to defend Structural Marxism Benton's book has many facets: it is an introductory against post-structuralist and other critics (the other text, a re-evaluation and reconstruction of Structural reason being the need for an introductory text in the Marxism, an argument for theoretical progress lying area). One way in which .8enton accomplishes this def­ through the synthesis of Structural Marxism with do­ ence is by laying bare Structural Marxism'S sociological mains such as the ecological, biological and psycho­ complexi ty. This completely appears as the obverse side logical. Of immediate political relevance is its claim of the process of displacement,· as decentr ing, of human that theorisation of socialist strategy requires a recog­ agency by the Althusserian paradigm. The stratagem of nition by the Marxist tradition of non class-based decentring, an anti-reificatory device, denies that the emancipatory social movements. AU these strands are individual agent is onto logically prior to social. struc­ brought together in the major objective of the book - a tures, events and processes. This refutation of the critical defence of Structural Marxism. 'social substantiality' of the individual subject is the Rise and Fall is divided into three thematic parts. basis of Althusser's anti-humanism. The first centres on questions of epistemology as they surface in Structural Marxism: the science-ideology dis­ Sociological complexity tinction, the epistemological break, the concept of a problematic, Marxism and philosophy. It deals with The decentring of the subject and social totalities, problems in the Althusserian theorisation of structure, Benton indicates, is fundamental to Althusser's theoret­ it also outlines the basic concepts of Marx and the ical project. In fact, the location of the human subject specificity of his method. The concept of relative auto­ as the basic agency of historical change ('humanism') nomy has a central organising role in the second part. and other aspects of 'centredness' are taken as a crit­ Here the sociological complexity or anti-reductionism ical focus not only by Structural Marxism but by the of the Structural Marxist method is elaborated, both as generation of Lacan and Levi-Strauss, and later, the a means of understanding the social formation, and as a post-structuralists. tool of socialist strategy in relation to the state, the There was a tendency towards centredness or rei­ Marxist party and alliances. The third part of the book fication in the pre-Althusserian versions of Historical answers criticisms of the Marxist tradition from socio­ Materialism, and it was in the direction of these tar­ logists, post-structuralists and Marxist-Humanists. gets that Althusser concentrated his critical armoury. Although Althusser held the status of an official Habits of Marxist thought included notions of self­ philosopher in the French Communist Party, his Marx­ present or self-conscious agency, a 'metaphysics' of ism, Benton shows, was inspired by influences outside essences and expressive totalities, a logocentric per­ the canon of Marxist orthodoxy, for example, the form­ ception of the structure of reality, historical teleology, ative structuralist influences of Lacan and Levi­ subjects and social relations seen as sociaUy discrete. Strauss, as well as Bachelard's writings on science. The Althusserian 'revolution' in Marxist thought intro­ Nevertheless, the fact that the human subject has no duced or explicated a range of concepts whose method­ theoretical role within Structural Marxism, and certain ological premise was the decentredness of structures parallels with natural sciences, encouraged the charge and individual subjects. The new conception of social of Stalinism against Althusser, both from Marxist­ reality. included: totalities of structural relations Humanist and post-struct~ralist quarters. (As with the ('structures-in-dominance') irreducible to their constitu­ natural sciences, objects of structuralist study are seen ent elements; transformation of structures as a conse­ not as externalisations of individual subjectivity, but quence of the 'ruptural unity' of diverse influences; rather as being existentially a ... tonomous from human decentred individual subjects through whom, and behind agency, but this doesn't make structuralism a Stalinist whose backs structures 'act'; the mediation of social 'Diamat'.) However, as Benton makes clear, the complex relations within each' other ('overdetermination'); the causality posited by Structural Marxism is a far cry (anti-Iogocentric) distinction between the order of der­ from the monocausal and ineluctable laws of Stalinist ivation of conceptual categories and the order of 'dialectics'. determination of their real objects. 32 This critical array was used to address certain logical behaviour to economic class interests. Benton Marxist theoretical tendencies, in particular, the points out that the political and ideological means of Hegelian-Marxist position as found, for example, in representation (of economic class interests) are them­ Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness. This tend­ selves capable of constituting and defining interests. ency, Benton notes, used a critique of capitalism cen­ Interests which might in an important way be consti­ tral to which was the idea of commodity fetishism. This tuted at this level, it is suggested, are, for example, critical model was used as a panacea for explanatory those of women, ethnk minorities or homosexuals - difficulties: Marxists tended to see every problem as in whose struggles do not relate directly to class strug­ essence an expression of capitalist production relations. gles. Class alliances would also be constituted at this Consequently, Benton argues, Hegelian Marxists tended level, transcending economic differences of interest, to ignore the complexity of social relations, their ir­ e.g. popular or anti-fascist 'fronts', socialist alliances. reducibility to monocausal tendencies. (See below). Althusser rejected the idea of the social totality State and class: the relationship between class as an expressive totality, arguing instead for the view and state power requires an a~preciation of the differ­ that constituent relations of causally unified structures entiation of functions between ~tate agencies and pa~t­ are relatively autonomous. 'Relative autonomy' receives icular fractions of the capitalist class. There is no an early formulation in Althusser's work in terms of simple one-to-one relationship between the economic the concept of overdetermination. Thus aspects of the and political dimensions of class. The fraction of the 'economic', the political, etc., never exist in the pure ruling class in charge of the state apparatuses may be form but only as mediated by ambient structure, and different from the politically hegemonic fraction, which are hence sociologically complex. may differ again from the economically dominant frac­ In Structural Marxism the character of social rel­ tion. The work of Poulantzas, it is argued, shows that ations cannot be identified in a historicist (a priori) the function of the 'class in charge' is not reducible to way, that is, as having a fixed nature. Whilst the con­ representing the interests of the economically dominant ditions of their unity as systemic totalities are formally class, but is the specifically political-ideological hege­ guaranteed by the modes of production through which monic task of unifying the social formation under the they are constituted, the mechanisms which actually dominance of the 'power bloc' (dominant classes). This maintain this unity in existence can only be specified hegemony also demonstrates the autonomy and specific­ by investigation of the particularities which give a ity of the 'superstructures' in the way that juridico­ structural totality its uniqueness, that is, its precise political structures have a detotalising effect on class form of overdetermination. One important consequence allegiance by constituting class members as juridical of this, Benton observes, is that each systemic totality individuals - citizens. (for example, types of intellectual or state-bureau­ cratic milieux, political, etc., 'instances' of a mode) has its own dynamic and rhythm of development. This enables Structural Marxism to develop its notion of contradiction through the idea of uneven development of social formations. This complexity had already been recognised in the work of Lenin and Mao. Following their insights, Structural Marxism theorised the process of transformation or breakdown of social formations as the condensation of diverse contradictions into a rup­ tural unity dispensing with the (teleological) idea of the centrality of revolutionary organisation - pace Lukacs or Gramsci. As a condensation, the contradic­ tions act 'in resonance', so to speak, producing a more 'violent' effect than the sum of their individual effects, and cause a qualitative change in the social system. Following Althusser, Benton suggests that this kind of model of structural systems may be applicable to understanding structures and their breakdown in physics and biology, as well as in society. Throughout