Contrary to popular belief, Structural Marxism has never denied the importance of human

subjectivity and has instead invested much in the cultivation of conceptions of both subjectivity
and practice.1 Whereas postmodern and neoliberal opponents accept individual subjectivity as the
foundation of social theory, Althusser and the Structural Marxists place major emphasis on the
social structures and interactions that form social subjects. The primary goal of structural
Marxists is to shed light on the mechanisms and procedures that give rise to social subjects, as
well as the connections between subjectivity, authority, and action. Conflicts involving impulses
of empowerment and factors of submission (inherent in our compliance with the positions and
responsibilities which are assigned to us by community) ("arising from our ability to act as social
subjects by means of these roles and positions") are investigated by structural Marxism. 2 No
social agent is a mindless robot; rather, it is a creative, deliberative actor operating inside a
structured yet malleable and dynamic system of attitudes, discourses, and interests. The
enabling-restricting capacities of this system, or habitus, cannot be reduced to the utilitarian free
will of "man" or to a mechanistic reflection of the relations of production. To sum up, social
subjectivity is a condensate of structural forces, including, but not limited to, knowledge, whose
effectivity (the practice of individual social subjects) is just as open-ended as the conflicts within
and among these forces. Knowing one thing about history necessarily changes history itself; this
indeterminacy principle is unique to the study of history. Structural Marxism improves not only
our historical understanding but also our present-day efficacy by allowing us to grasp the
intransitive and transitive components of social subjectivity (without collapsing one into the
other).

1
Howarth, David. Ernesto Laclau: post-Marxism, populism and critique. Routledge, 2014.
2
Bosi, Lorenzo, and Lorenzo Zamponi. "Direct social actions and economic crises: The relationship between
forms of action and socio-economic context in Italy." Partecipazione e conflitto 8, no. 2 (2015): 367-391.
In contrast to many Western Marxists, Althusser upholds the "vulgar" Marxist notion that "class
conflict is the driver of history."3 The Structural Marxist concept of a mode of production does
not assume that class exploitation is ubiquitous in human society, but it does reveal it where it
occurs, penetrate the many forms it takes, and debunk the many ideologies that serve to
legitimize it. As it turns out, the "orthodoxy" of structural Marxism regarding class conflict is
anything but traditional; it entails nothing less than a rethinking of the very nature of social
objects as class subjects. Structural Marxists consider individuals to be members of a particular
social class not only because of their objective connection to economic structures and relations
(as in the traditional conception of class) but also because of their objective connection to non-
economic forms and interactions. As a result of the primacy of economic functions inside any
given social formation, each of the numerous positions and roles that make up that area is always
ascribed to a particular place and a function. Members of social classes are inevitably generated
from social subjects who absorb this system of interactions and assume these places and duties.4

3
McManus, Matthew. "Some Remarks on Marx’s Philosophy and Philosophical Methodology." Cultural Logic: A
Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice 23 (2019): 25-46.
4
Langer, Ellen J. "Rethinking the role of thought in social interaction." In New directions in attribution research,
pp. 35-58. Psychology Press, 2018.