Structural Marxism Research Articles

Toussaint Louverture and the Undermining of the Haitian Revolution

This work using a structurationist, structural Marxist, phenomenological structuralism, understanding of practical consciousness constitution, explores the origins and basis for the Haitian Revolutionary leader, Toussaint Louverture’s (May 20, 1743-April 1, 1803), social, political, and economic policies. The eldest son of an Arada King, Toussaint Louverture, was a creole-slave born on the island of Saint-Domingue/Haiti. As the eventual leader of the Revolution from 1794-1801, Louverture attempted to have the island remain an independent French territory where slavery was outlawed, but the export-oriented plantation economy, with the slave trade, persisted. He, essentially, adopted the position of the French Royalists, the white plantation owners who wanted more autonomy from France and its “exclusif” mercantile economic system, which forced them to trade and do business exclusively with French merchants and bankers. Although, Louverture’s demeanor and position is typically juxtaposed against his successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, all subsequent leaders, I argue here, would go on to adopt Louverture’s policies, the export-oriented agricultural economy, with variations based on who (mulattoes or members of the black grandon class) should serve in the position of the white planters once independence was declared from France in 1804. This decision, to maintain Louverture’s political and economic policies as opposed to redistributing the land to the African masses so that they can pursue their subsistence agriculture and komes, I conclude, has undermined the Revolutionary impetus of the Haitian Revolution and converted Haiti into the so-called poorest (periphery) country in the Western Hemisphere.

The Long Shadow of Structural Marxism in International Relations: Historicising Colonial Strategies in the Americas

Over the past decades, Marxist-inspired approaches from the field of International Historical Sociology (IHS) have theorised the relationship between 16th and 17th Century European colonial expansion and the development of relations of production and economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article, we argue that such attempts – from Dependency Theory (DT), World-Systems Theory (WST), and Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) – are premised on a structuralist perspective which overextend the notion of capitalism and under examine the sphere of production, rendering divergent and distinct strategies of European colonialism a homogenous and under-historicised process. Embracing theoretical innovations from Geopolitical Marxism (GPM), we dispute this unitary logic of expansion, instead applying a radical historicist methodology to demonstrate that British and Spanish colonial strategies in the Americas (intra-imperial free trade vs. mercantilism) were shaped by nationally specific class relations (capitalism vs. feudalism/absolutism), generating unique patterns of settlement on the ground (mineral extraction vs. cash-crop production). Promoting historicism thus allows Marxist International Relations to better recognise the “making of” international order during the period of European colonial expansion from the 16th century onwards, and, in doing so, further understand its enduring legacies.

Income Inequality and Social Mobility in Brazil

Purpose: The aim of the study was to analyze the income inequality and social mobility in Brazil. Methodology: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: Income inequality in Brazil is among the highest globally, leading to significant barriers to social mobility. Limited access to education and employment opportunities exacerbates this issue. Despite government efforts, intergenerational mobility remains constrained, necessitating comprehensive reforms for economic inclusion. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: Human capital theory, structural marxism & intersectionality theory may be used to anchor future studies on analyze the income inequality and social mobility in Brazil. Prioritize investment in education at all levels, with a focus on improving access to quality schooling, reducing dropout rates, and enhancing vocational training programs. Implement progressive taxation policies that redistribute wealth and reduce income inequality.

PISA and teachers’ reflexivities. A mixed methods case study

ABSTRACT Neoliberal educational reforms include extensive use of standardized tests. We examine the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) initiated and developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Examining previous research on teachers’ reactions to neoliberal reforms altering their work context, we have identified three theoretical frameworks in use: labour process theory, derived from structural Marxism; post-structuralism, relying primarily on Foucault’s conceptualizations; and ‘new professionalism’, which has emerged from the theory of professions. A major weakness in these frameworks is their inability to account for different reactions to the same structural and cultural conditions. Therefore, we suggest utilizing Archer’s theories of reflexivity and reflexive modes to understand these reactions. Presenting one Norwegian lower secondary school teacher’s reflexive engagement with PISA in the Norwegian school context as an example, our mixed methods case study indicates autonomous reflexivity as the prevailing mode. Meta-reflexivity rates second in prevalence.

Stuart Hall and the Introduction of Althusser in Cultural Studies: A Thinker of Difference

This article focuses on Stuart Hall’s reading of Louis Althusser’s main theoretical works. Since the early 1970s, Hall has undertaken a critical confrontation with Althusser’s ‘structural Marxism’, rescuing those useful concepts to think cultural difference and identity, without failing to criticize his ‘superstructuralist’ interpretation of Marx. However, what Hall will retain as Althusser’s most important contribution is, above all, his theory of ideology. In this context, I follow an idea formulated by Hall that could be read as summarizing the theoretical and political scope of Althusser’s contribution to Cultural Studies: ‘he enabled me to live in and with difference’. By complicating classical interpretations schemes in the Marxist tradition, Hall’s Althusser may be read as a ‘thinker of difference’ who opens up a whole research program to reconsider class conflicts as traversed (or ‘overdetermined’) by gender, racial or colonial conflicts.

Sève and Alienation – A Biographical Preface

Abstract Lucien Sève devoted his life to the development of a Marxist theory of the personality. In so doing, and as part of a theoretical debate with both Marxist humanists and structural Marxists within the Parti Communiste Français, he was inevitably drawn to analyse alienation as a category of Marxist analysis. His conclusion was that although Althusser had been right to argue for the ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s thought, it was wrong to suggest that Marx abandoned the concept of alienation in his later work. Far from it: a transformed conception of alienation derived from historical materialism remains the key to understanding Marxism.

The Law of Political Economy as Transformative Law: A New Approach to the Concept and Function of Law

This article outlines a new approach to the law of political economy as a form of transformative law, a new approach that combines a focus on the function of law with a concept of law encapsulating the triangular dialectics between the form-giving prestation of law, the material substance the law is oriented against, and the transcendence of legal forms—that is, the rendering of compatibility between forms. Transformative law thereby serves as an alternative to both law and economics and recently emerging culturalist and neo-Marxist approaches. The timing of this publication is not coincidental. The era of neoliberalism—that is, of structural liberalism, which started in the 1970s and experienced its breakthrough in the 1980s and 1990s after the collapse of structural Marxism—is ending. This makes the question of what will succeed the neoliberal episteme pertinent.

The neo‐nationalist ascendency: further thoughts on class, value and the return of the repressed

The neo‐nationalist ascendency: further thoughts on class, value and the return of the repressed

LOUIS ALTHUSSER: MARXIS STRUKTURAL

Louis Althusser has been called a structuralist or precisely as a structural marxist. Althusser himself does reject the name structuralist, but in some terms he uses, such as structure, structural, anti-humanism, anti-historisism, makes himself close to the structuralistic terminology. The emphasis it should have on his thinking of theoretical humanism was the attempt to avoid any misconception that he was opposing humanism, emphasizing human dignity and human rights. Though he merely rejected the stand that made man the center of history and the center of reality. For Althusser, this establishment was a humanism to the theory of Marx and Lenin, of history.

The Transformation of the ‘Flaneur’ Figure to Bourgeois in Julian Barnes’s Metroland: A Critical Analysis

Charles Baudelaire employs the notion of flaneur as an idle wanderer and a passionate observer of the city life in the context of nineteenth-century Paris. Walter Benjamin in the twentieth century revisits the same notion in a slightly different manner. For Benjamin, flaneur, on the one hand, can be overwhelmed by the phantasmagoria of the city life and can develop a ‘shock experience' and on the other hand, can respond to the stimuli of the urban ambiance and can exhibit instrumental means of thinking to cope with the altered environment. In this circumstance, the latter, as Benjamin argues, is also evocative of the prospect of the flaneur’s conversion into a commodity. Following the argument of Walter Benjamin, the present paper aims to analyze the mobility and transformation of the central character, Christopher, in Julian Barnes’s novel Metroland (1980). This paper also reinforces that the character’s transformation is influenced by the societal structures as propounded by the structural Marxists like Louis Althusser.

A concepção de classe social segundo Nicos Poulantzas

This article aims to: 1) present and analyze the theoretical explantions elaborated by Poulantzas – one of the most renowned representatives of structural marxismo – about the social classes and which led him to call “new small bourgeoisie” salarieda workers who are not workers and also do not own the means of production, but whose political and ideological practices tend to be equal or similar to those of the traditional bourgeoisie due to their special positions in the economic structure. But, according to Marx, in capitalist societies the determining structure of social classes is , because, fornot the economic structure?; 2) to demonstrate that the theoretical and methodological postures of structural Marxism, especially those of Poulantzas, suppress the subject of history, because, for its authors, history has ceased to be a human process in realiazation to become a realization of structures. And yet this is na inescapable fact: individuals, human beings, people, with their motivations, interests, preferences, beliefs, atitudes and behaviors are the producers of history. They produce it, it is true, under given conditions: in the conditions produced and bequeathed by other individuals, from which they deliberate about their own lives, creating new conditions according to the choices of alternatives that could take effect; 3) and to reaffirm that, by distorting Marx’s genuine explanations, structural Marxism does not offer any congtribution to the investigation, analysis and explanation of the social reality that, emptied of historical contente, tried to portray with the formalism of a world of definitions and subdefinitions.

Pioneers of the plantation economy: militarism, dispossession and the limits of growth in the Wa State of Myanmar

The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on their particular adaption to an ecological environment: swidden cultivation of tubers on mountain slopes. This ecology corresponded to cosmologies in which potency was limitless, or at least had no fixed and delimited precinct (as did the rice paddies and Buddhist realms in the valleys). Military state building, modern transport, and new crops and agricultural technologies have effectively ended swidden cultivation. In this article, I follow the pioneers of the plantation economy in the Wa State of Myanmar, who dispossess local populations of their land and employ them as plantation labour. The limits of growth and potency they encounter are (a) in the natural environment and (b) in the resistance of local populations. Yet, even though there are such limits, the potency to which these pioneers aspire is still limitless. It is however channelled through a new economy of life, epitomised in the plantation, nourished in excessive feasting, and maintained by the kinship dynamics of capture and care.

Study of Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Network Actors and Their Relevance to Islamic Education

Important developments related to the recent history of social theories, including the soci- ology of education, are revolutions that take place in linguistics and lead to the search for structures that underlie language. Structuralism, as the name of the revolution, later influenced various fields of social science, such as the anthropology of Levi-Strauss and Marxian theory, Structural Marxism. The most important post-structuralist is Michel Fou- cault. The latest theory derived from semiotics, structuralism, and post-structuralism is the actor-network theory, seeing social processes and human actors as entities whose characteristics are born from circulation through a network of relations. In Islamic educa- tion, the study of the structure of language becomes very important, because language is a communication tool of the education and learning process, besides that it is also a publication for the development of education to the wider community.

The contribution of J.R. Commons to migration analysis

The complexities of migration have exposed fundamental problems in how mainstream economists understand migration and shown the limitations of the neoliberal migration policies typically proposed as panacea to overcome the migration crisis. Therefore, political economy must provide both a critique of and alternative to mainstream economics theories and policies of migration. Yet, while the canon of mainstream migration theories is vast, the radical political economy challenge is relatively undeveloped or narrowly centred on structural Marxist political economy. To broaden the radical challenge to the mainstream, this essay highlights and clarifies a simple institutional economics framework based on the notes provided by J.R. Commons in his 1907 classic: Races and Immigrants in America. Commons’ approach is radically different from the mainstream in terms of its unit, scale, and concept of labour. Grounded in trans-actions rather than homo economicus and multi-scalar and historical instead of mainstream ahistoricism and spatial separatism, this approach does not consider labour as ‘capital’ in which to ‘invest’ to produce more goods or commodity merely to be sold. In turn, its policy orientation is also entirely different. This institutional framework has much in common with the Marxist alternative, for example, in terms of emphasising the class basis of migration. However, it is sufficiently different from the Marxist approach to constitute a distinctive paradigm that can help to better understand and transcend migration. Although the institutional economics framework has major drawbacks, including its sympathies with eugenics or ‘scientific racism’, these problems can be addressed without losing the essence of the approach: offering a critique of and alternatives to mainstream economics while evolving into a full-scale institutional economics migration approach.

Faith and reason: An analysis of the homologies of Black and Blue Lives Facebook pages

Highly publicized deaths of Black men during police encounters have inspired a renewed civil rights movement originating with a Twitter hashtag, “Black Lives Matter.” Supporters of the law enforcement community quickly countered with an intervention of their own, using the slogan, “Blue Lives Matter.” This project compared the discourses of their respective Facebook groups using cultural discourse analysis that considered words, images, and their symbiosis. Based on a foundation of structural Marxism as articulated by Althusser, this project found that the two groups’ symbol systems are homologous with larger, ideological tensions in American culture: faith and reason.

Mute Cries: Louis Althusser Between Roberto Álvarez Ríos and Wifredo Lam

Abstract This introductory essay examines the role of two articles on the Cuban painters Roberto Álvarez Ríos and Wifredo Lam, “A Young Cuban Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos” (1962) and “Lam” (1977), in the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser's writing on art. It argues that these largely ignored articles offer snapshots of two key shifts in Althusser's thought: his transition, during the early 1960s, from Hegelian Marxism to structural Marxism, and, during the late 1970s, from structural Marxism to so-called aleatory materialism. It contextualizes the articles in the social and political milieu of French philosophy during the 1960s and 70s and shows how his articles on the Cuban painters, specifically, and art, more generally, are largely concerned with contemporary developments in the third world, a subject that receives scant attention elsewhere in his work. The articles not only register Althusser's reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the nature of language, and the philosophy of history, but also reveal that his connections with Latin America to exceed mere questions of intellectual reception.

Critical Theory in the Postmodern

Whether there is such a thing as humanity, for whose better future condition the youth of today, or of any day, for that matter, ought to, or are able to, be educated, is something that has been called into question by theoretical developments in the past few decades. Philosophers as varied as Althusser, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Derrida, inter alia, espousing a theoretical anti-humanism, have taken exception to the claim that there is something that can even be called humanism, and even if there was, that it was oppressive, unhelpful, and should be combated, or that it was something that would be erased “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of a sea” (Foucault 1971). The aforementioned authors, if one is still allowed to call them that in an age of the trace, simulacra and simulation, hyperreality, intertextuality, and the creation of subjectivity by complexes of power and knowledge, could certainly not be called apologists for the existing order, since they were, and are still, seen as radical, critical, and concerned with liberation from subjugation in their varied ways. Though they are all, other than Althusser, who is labeled a structural Marxist, brought into any discussion having to do with postmodernism or poststructuralism, and their theories are by any account critical of existing society and its oppressive nature, other authors, who carry the flame of critique, have nevertheless labeled them as young conservatives, who, “emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness, and with modernistic attitudes...justify an irreconcilable anti-modernism (Habermas and Ben Habib 1981). While Habermas strives to complete the unfinished project of modernity, which could still perhaps be salvaged by a Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1981), he dismisses postmodern or poststructural approaches as liquidating any hope of ever completing this project, thus diametrically opposing himself, as the heir of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, against more recent theoretical developments. Whether it is fair to call an aspect of French philosophical thought post les evenements des Mai 1968 conservative is not exactly clear, as postmodern approaches are able to be interpreted as radical, concerned with liberation, anti-establishment, and, above all, critical. Althusser was a convinced Marxist; Lyotard was a member of socialisme ou barbarie before becoming the founder of postmodern discourse; Foucault famously fought for the rights of prisoners and against institutions such as psychiatry; Baudrillard (1995) thought that existing society was not even real; and even Derrida came around to see Spectres of Marx (Derrida 1994) in his later years. Nevertheless, it can be discerned that postmodern or poststructural theoretical developments can be appropriated by conservative forces, as poignantly pointed out by Karl Rove, the presidential aide, who infamously stated that the Empire created its own reality. One of the difficulties postmodern approaches pose is the lack of foundation and thus, at first glance, the validity of any approach being as good as any other. The lament of progressives is exactly that by destabilizing philosophy, postmodernism has opened the door to equivocation by vested interests. Thus the question poses itself, whether a critical theory of society is still possible in the postmodern world, or whether any reality is as good as any other reality, and one should consequently abide to the power of those who have the ability to create it.

The Death of Imhotep: A Hermeneutical Framework for Understanding the Lack of Black Males in STEM Fields

In Afrocentric circles in the United States, ancient Kemetic (Egyptian) scientist Imhotep is considered the Black father of medicine. In this article, I use his name in the title as an allusion to highlight the lack of Black males matriculating in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs or fields in the United States. The work offers a more appropriate structural Marxist hermeneutical framework for contextualizing, conceptualizing, exploring, and evaluating the locus of causality for the Black/White and Black male/female academic achievement gaps in general, and the lack of Black males in STEM programs in the United States of America in particular. The two I argue are interrelated. Positing that in general the origins of the Black/White and Black male/female academic achievement gap is grounded in what Paul C. Mocombe refers to as a “mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function.” Within Mocombe’s structural Marxist theoretical framework, the lack of Black males in STEM programs is a result of the social class functions associated with prisons, the urban street life, and athletics and entertainment industries where the majority of urban Black males are interpellated and achieve their status, social mobility, and economic gain (embourgeoisement) over education and academic professionalization.

Inside Out: A Diasporic Narrative

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Stuart Hall’s writing began to take a biographical turn. For readers such as myself, then a mature undergraduate pursuing an American Studies degree in New Zealand, this was somewhat of a revelation. The surprise was not so much Hall’s shift from the somewhat dry prose of structural Marxism to the rather more vital style of a postcolonially inflected poststructuralism, but the fact of Hall’s Caribbean background when I, along with no doubt many other geographically distant readers, had assumed him to be exworking class, British and white. Some seven years later, while wrestling with a PhD on the history of cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, I found myself writing an essay for Arena using the question of Hall’s diasporic identity to explore ‘the relations between knowledge production and cultural identity/location.

On the Radical Historicity of Literature: Althusser versus Bhaskar

The present article takes as its point of departure the recent tributes to Bhaskar published on the occasion of the latter's death. Laudable and understandable though it was to prioritize the career trajectories of younger scholars, one of the unforeseen consequences was to marginalize those of their more mature colleagues. The latter perforce arrive upon the scene of critical realism already burdened with their own overdetermined legacies, which demand rather more in the way of complex renegotiation. Taking as exemplary his own career path, from a traditional ‘lit crit’ of empiricist and Hegelian extraction, through psychoanalysis, to structural marxism, the author of the present article focuses upon his own ‘Bhaskarian moment’, upon the benefits accrued therefrom, but finally upon the difficulty in reconciling structural marxism with critical realism, insofar as the former prioritizes the notion of a social formation, structured on the basis of a mode of production, the latter the individual/structure dichotomy. Bhaskar's subsequent spiritual turn, it is argued, further aggravated the paradigmatic incommensurabilities, with damaging consequences for those younger scholars attempting to steer a course between both traditions.