ABSTRACT
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. Yeats, ‘Byzantium’
‘Logic and politics’ tackled the relationship between stratificationism and historical class analysis. But for a good many people that issue was already passe. In the early 1970s a remarkable number of English-speaking socialist intellectuals began to abandon ship for another life-raft, structuralism. More and more students who were concerned with class analysis were now taking it to mean exegesis of Althusser, Poulantzas, and their followers.
The reasons for this shift are complex. Some people who had been radicalised in the student movement and the campaign against the Vietnam war were dissatisfied with a vague radicalism and were in search of a more rigorous analysis of capitalism. Some were no doubt attracted by the splendid air of confidence with which age-old problems were solved. And structuralism was in the air—Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Chomsky in linguistics, Piaget in psychology, and structuralist literary critics, were all reaching the peak of their influence in the Anglo-Saxon world about this time.
99I was, frankly, exasperated by the fashion for structuralist marxism. For a few, who could clamber through the maze and come out the other end with some useful experiences and still able to think for themselves, it was exhilarating. For most, it was a retreat into dogmatism, a refusal of both experience and history, and very often a refusal of real politics. But I didn’t have much success in conveying these reactions. In April 1978 the students in our Class Analysis course asked me to explain them in detail, and the result was the first version of this essay. It was shorter, and much more irritable, than the version presented here. Discussion showed that many points needed to be worked out in detail, given the complexity of the texts. And some of the exasperation was worked out in the process of writing the critique. I still think the structuralist episode of the 1970s was a disaster for radical intellectuals, and that many intelligent and active people are still trapped in its by-ways and aftermath.
Since what follows is a close argument about a set of texts, questions of sequence are sometimes important. It should be borne in mind that the dates in the citations are those of the English translations, not the French originals which are sometimes referred to in the text. I should also note, since what follows is very negative, that there are some insightful and useful passages in Poulantzas’ work, especially in his last two books when he was moving rapidly away from the theoretical framework discussed here. It is a pity the earlier texts are still the ones by which he is mainly known.
