ABSTRACT
In 1870 the British economy faced a choice: either to develop new industries— chemicals, even the new electrical industry— and compete there with the rising economies of Germany and the United States; or to sell its existing commodities to the protected market of the Empire. In 1974 British Marxism reached its peak, both in theory and practice. Since that is the parent culture onto which post-structuralism became grafted, this chapter attempts to give a schematic and provisional outline of its main features (an adequate history of British Marxism from 1960 to 1985 has yet to be written). Two separate currents of British Marxism flow into the conjuncture of 1974. One, typified by the work of Raymond Williams, was left-liberal, culturalist and empiricist; another, deriving from the promotion of Althusserian Marxism by the New Left from the mid-1960s on, seeks to be, in contrast, theoretical, scientific and rationalist. Two areas of controversy between them come to impinge particularly on post-structuralism.
