Riffing off a Michael Berube post, Brad Delong muses the "structural" and "idealist" Marxism of Louis Althusser, and in the process tosses out a great line:
at least one of Karl Marx’s own Marxisms was a "structuralist Marxism" from the very beginning.
I suspect Delong is confusing “structural” with “structuralist” — which doesn’t hurt his main point but means he may be talking at cross-purposes with Berube.
Quasi-Marxism is everywhere on the left — its vision of power as reflecting money, its totalizing view of a global finance and trade system, and its fondness for revolutionary, non-incremental political gesture — but it strikes me that this structuralist Marxism is missing in their analysis. I’ve made this complaint before, but to be fair, thinking structurally is not easy. It’s a counter-intuitive way of understanding actions not in their individuality and as moral choices, but rather as large scale. It requires thinking about political agency in the face of overdetermination. Further, it’s self-consciously an objectivist model of the social world imposed upon our subjective understanding.
Still, I think it’s worth remembering that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. This wasn’t happenstance, or a stretch: Marxism differed from utopian socialism in trying to describe social dynamics that capitalism fostered in the modern world. Its claim to being science has taken a bruising by the discipline of economics. (As Paul Krugman writes in a piece highly critical of Marx, "it was Keynes, not Marx, who cracked the code of crisis economics.") Its dialectical materialism has been disproven by the march of history; perhaps only the materialism remains intact. But sociology, history and even political science owe some foundational insights to Marxism, whose influence on these can properly be said to be "scientific."
Pierre Bourdieu was fond of saying that we need to think "with Marx, against Marx." That means taking seriously status in our discussions of class, or productivity in our discussions of the economy. It means taking that planned inscription to Darwin to heart, and following the explanations that structural thinking can provide where they go, regardless of whether it corroborates political stances traditionally conceived of as "Marxist."
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