ABSTRACT
This chapter describes, in a fairly technical and detailed way, some negative consequences of too readily discarding basic Marxist insights. In place of Marxism, Anthony Giddens’ A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism offers a “theory of structuration.” In the theory of structuration, transformation/mediation relations, as embodied in concrete social practices and definite forms of society, take the place of the concept of “labour” as traditionally invoked in many versions of “historical materialism.” Giddens’ attempt to replace class conflict rooted in the mode of production with a “dialectic of control,” in which human agents engage in more general “power relations” of dependence and autonomy, is not successful. Adopting a quasi-scientific confidence that revolution will occur, it inevitably ignores the moral basis of the varied forms of radical political activity. Capitalism is the structure-in-dominance in the historical dialectic of multilayered reality. Marx claims that the goal of these communities is stable self-reproduction.
