choice. Western Marxism, primarily outside the circles of Communist parties (but also sometimes within, as in Britain and Italy), was in a constant struggle with the looming presence of the Soviet Union and unable to ignore the often perverse influence of actually-existing socialisms. More concerned with the defeats of socialism in its more democratic form in the West than with the successes of Soviet socialism, Western Marxism, despite the plurality of different theoretical positions and practices, was to some extent a Marxism of despair.5
In the late 1950s and 1960s, significant intellectual defections from Soviet-style Communist parties in the West (for instance, E. P. Thompson and the “New Left” leaving the Communist Party of Great Britain) and an appeal by some to the socialist humanism of the young Marx turned attention to Marx’s early “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” and the newly translated Grundrisse. With the appearance of the New Left, Western Marxists—György Lukács, Karl Korsch, the Frankfurt School, various strains of Trotskyism, and, most notably, Antonio Gramsci—were able to renew and refine earlier discussions of critical Marxism. Among Communist parties, Khrushchev’s liberalization permitted national roads to socialism, and a healthy pluralism and lively discussion re-entered the petrified official Marxism of the Stalinist era. On one side of the discussion were those influenced by the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, which was highly critical of socialist humanism and attempted to return the discussion to the great economic works, Capital and Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations.6
Althusser interrogated the relation between structure and subject in history and society—a theoretical conundrum central to the problem of class formation. Already in Marx, there was an unsteadiness, an oscillation between structural causality and human agency; between the contradiction of the forces of production and the relations of production in Capital, on the one hand, and his more political analyses of class, particularly in his historical works, such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Lenin’s later attempt to deal with this problem on the practical level, through the agency of the party, combating at one and the same time the passivity of Second International reformism and revisionism and the multifaceted spontaneity of the “masses” themselves, left the New Left unimpressed as they searched for more communitarian and less elitist forms of organization. For much of the short twentieth century, Marxists divided between those who emphasized the primacy of structure (including Nikolai Bukharin, and later Althusser) and those who emphasized human agency (including many Trotskyists and Marxist humanists). With the triumph among French intellectuals of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Structuralism in the 1960s, Marxists like Althusser eliminated the subject, “save as the illusory effects of ideological structures,” radically rejecting any volition of the individual or collective.7 “History,” Althusser claimed, “is a process without a subject.” Men and women are simply the “supports of the means of production.” Althusser’s former student Michel Foucault carried the flag into post-structuralism and described Marxism itself as an involuntary effect of an old-fashioned Victorian episteme. His erasure of the subject and elevation of discourse contributed powerfully to what would be termed the “cultural turn.”
Although there are many ways to tell the story of structure and agency and the revival of culture, the discussion that took place with the appearance of the influential work of E. P. Thompson offers a bridge from the moment of social history to the fascination with cultural studies. For Thompson, Althusser’s structuralism represented an outmoded kind of Marxism, one in which “process is fate,” and he and his comrades sought to revive an alternative tradition in which men and women are the “ever-baffled and ever-resurgent agents of an unmastered history.” Rather than a process without a subject, Thompson argued, history is the arena in which humans transmute structure into process. Through experience (Thompson’s key term) individuals make themselves into social classes, groups conscious of differences and antagonisms and conflicting interests. In his famous formulation—“Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think and to value in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-making, although under conditions which are ‘given’”8—Thompson presented human beings as part-subjects, part-objects in history, voluntary agents of involuntary determinations. What seemed so transparently to have been resolved by Marx—either in the version of the “bottom line,” that in the final instance it’s the economy, stupid, or in the formula of “man making history but not under conditions chosen by himself”—were now seen to contain theoretical and methodological ambiguities.
Thompson’s introduction of the concept of experience as the mediation through which “structure is transformed into process and the subject re-enters into history” implied a further “necessary middle term”—culture.9 “For people do not experience their own experience as ideas, within thought and its procedure … They also experience their own experience as feeling, and they handle their own feelings within their culture, as norms, familial and kinship obligations and reciprocities, as values or (through more elaborated forms) within art or religious beliefs.”10 Thompson’s beautifully crafted account of working-class experience in England up to 1832 presented class formation as the product both of the objective advent of the factory system and of the self-constitution of class by workers themselves. Agency took the form of a collective experience that was converted into broad social consciousness by workers themselves. In an often-quoted introductory paragraph, he tells us,
Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations in which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class consciousness is the way in which the experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class consciousness does not … class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.11
Here, Thompson held on to a notion of interest as latent, given by the structure of social relations, and to be realized fully through experience. Thompson, of course, never abandoned the materialism that had always been part of Marxism. In his later studies of the eighteenth century, he proposed that class in the sense he used it in earlier works is a nineteenth-century phenomenon and that the more universal category is class struggle.
People find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues, and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class consciousness.12
Here, very clearly, Thompson exposes his own objectivist side. Class exists immanently as a template into which experiences arrange people. Not so much a construction, as it would become later with post-structuralism, class is a discovery.
For Thompson, experience as well was sometimes something external to the subject, something that “walks in without knocking at the door and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve: their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned: in prison they meditate in new ways about the law.”13 Historical events, actualities, teach lessons that are true about the real world. As Perry Anderson points out (critically), for Thompson experience was many different things: the actual living through events by participants and the effects they have on people; “the mental and emotional response, of an individual or of a social group, to inter-related events or the many repetitions of the same kind of event”; and the process of learning from such events, “a subjective alteration capable of modifying ensuing objective actions.”14 Thompson conflated these different aspects (or kinds) of experience, maintaining what he calls a dialogue between social being and social consciousness.
