Theorist and Key Works

Developed by French thinker Louis Althusser and his followers, Structural Marxism is a method
of analyzing Marxist theory from a structuralism perspective. It had a big impact in France in the
period of 1970s, and in the 1980s it began to have an impact on sociologists and political
theorists all around the world.
At response to the instrumental Marxism that was prevalent in many western institutions in the
1970s, structural Marxism emerged. Althusser, in contrast to other types of Marxism,
emphasized that the historic as well as phenomenology Marxism, that was centered on Marx's
previous studies, was a science that explored actual processes which was trapped in a "pre-
scientific ideology."
Analytical Logic of the Theory
Modernist structural causality provides the framework for Structural Marxism's conception of
economic determination.1 The synthesis of economic, political, and normative external factors
that take shape in stable social institutions and interactions is what we mean when we talk about
social formation. Though the significant contribution to the economy may be more important, all
three distinct frameworks and connections - economic, political, and normative actively at work
as a integrated entirety, the social formation. In addition, the Structuralist Marxist view of social
formation does not have any sort of philosophy or aim at which economic tenacity is working.
The term "economic determination" is used to describe the impact of the historical whole of the
social formation on specific structures and relationships.2 That is to say, the social formation is
both the past framework and the attributive conditions of existence of individual structures, and
it is the "complex unity" of present or transitive affectivities. In the grand scheme of things, the
economic function is always significant, therefore all social institutions and activities have
positions and functions that are defined indirectly, or ultimately, by the economy (but not
necessarily predominate as a separate institutional structure).

1
Homer, Sean. Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism. Routledge, 2018.
2
Easthope, Antony. British post-structuralism: Since 1968. Routledge, 2019.