METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF STRUCTURALIST MARXISM

A. A structure is part of reality but not of visible relationships

Implications:

1. There are two levels of social reality: the level of visible social relationships and the level of invisible structures whose laws of functioning and transformation account for changes at the observable level.
2. The aim of scientific study is to discover those hidden structures. Marx's project was precisely that of the discovery of the structures and laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production concealed by the visible reality produced by its functioning.
3. The systematic study of appearances cannot provide a scientific knowledge of social reality.
4. This failure to attain knowledge taking appearances as starting point is not a cognitive failure. The concealment of the structure by appearance is inherent in the nature of the structure itself. Structures are made up of social relations which cannot be directly apprehended, for they vanish behind forms of physical or social objectification. For example, capital appears as machines, money, etc.
5. To each structure corresponds a form of appearance. And scientific study must take into account both, explaining the appearance in terms of the structure.
6. To each structure corresponds a form of consciousness or spontaneous repreentations held by individuals whose activities reproduce the structure. The systematic study of those represntations, far from disclosing the underlying logic of the structure, can only reproduce, at the level of theory, the mystifications created by the very functioning of the structure.
7. The study of the internal functioning of the structure must precede and will throw light on the study of its coming to being and subsequent evolution.

B. The historical study of the emergence of the constituent elements of a structure and their interrelations presupposes a prior knowledge of the structure, its processes and contradictions.

     It would be impractical and wrong to arrange the economic
     categories in the order in which they were the determining
     factors in the course of history.  Their order of sequence is
     rather determined by the relation which they bear to one
     another in modern bourgeois society, and which is the exact
     opposite of what seems to be their natural order or the order
     of their historical development.... we are interested in their
     organic connections within modern bourgeois society"
     (Marx, 1972: 41-42)

HISTORICAL CONCEPTS

1. Mode of Production

It is a theoretical construct that denotes the historically specific combination of the elements of the production process (laborers, non-laborers, and means of production) in the context of structurally compatible political, legal, and ideological structures.

2. Social Formation

Empirically, modes of production are found within social formations and in varied combinations with other modes of production. In the structuralist reading of Marx, the alternative to the abstract notion of "society" is the concept of social formation, a complex structured whole where the mode of production is determinant in the last instance, and the other structures are relatively autonomous (Althusser).

The articulation of modes of production is hierarchical as well as the articulation among their corresponding superstructures. The structure of the superstructure, which constitutes a set of conditions for the reproduction of the structure overdetermines in the process, modifying the effects of the structure; hence the notion of determination "in the last instance."

DIALECTICS

"Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there dialectic is at work. It is also the soul of all knowledge which is truly scientific." Hegel

"Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. This law operates universally, whether in the natural world , in human society or in man's thinking. Between the opposites in a contradiction there is at once unity and struggle, and it is this that impels things to move and change." Mao Tse Tung

"Dialectics is not a mere absurdity but a philosophy, a logic, a way of seeing the world. And the opposing point of view is not simply common sense, pure reason or logic just as such, but rather an opposing philosophy, logic and way of seeing things.....what Hegel and Marx have called the 'metaphysical' world-view.

The metaphysical outlook is succintly summarized in Bishop Butler's saying, 'Everything is what it is and not another thing.' Achair is a chair... in general A=A and A cannot at the same time be notA. These seem such obvious and evident truths that it would be futile to deny them. And of course it is true that everything is identical with itself; dialectics does not deny this triviality. Hegel, for example, says:

     The subsistence or substance of anything that exists is its
     self-identity; for its want of identity, or oneness with
     itself, would be its dissolution.  But Self-identity is pure
     abstraction.

Everything has self-identity, being in itself, but the matter does not end there; for nothing is merely self-identical and selfcontained, except what is abstract, isolated, static and unchanging. All real, concrete things are part of the world of interaction, motion and change; and for them we must recognize that things are not merely self-subsistent, but exist essentially in relation to other things"

From Sean Sayers, The Marxist Dialectic. Radical Philosophy, no. 14, Summer, 1976, pp. 9-19.

MATERIALISM

Materialism in its broadest sense, contends that whatever exists just is, or at least depends upon, matter.

Ontological materialism - asserts the emergence of the social upon the biological and physical.

Historical materialism - asserts the causal primacy of the modes of production and reproduction (physical and social) in the development of human history. Historical materialism entails a) denial of the autonomy of ideas and primacy of ideas in social life; b) methodological commitment to concrete historiographical research rather than abstract theorizing; c) the centrality of labor and human activity in the production and reproduction of the social world through the transformation of nature. The relationship between man and nature is asymmetrical; man is essentially dependent on nature but nature is essentially independent of man.

Adapted from Roy Bhaskar's contribution to T. Bottomore, editor, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.