Structuralist Marxism erred by splitting society into autonomous discrete instances

Evidence

Against the structuralist emphasis on the specificity and “autonomy” of practices, and their analytic separation of societies into their discrete instances, Williams’s stress is on “constitutive activity” in general, on “sensuous human activity, as practice,” from Marx’s first “thesis” on Feuerbach; on different practices conceived as a “whole indissoluble practice”; on totality. “Thus, contrary to one development in Marxism, it is not ‘the base’ and ‘the superstructure’ that need to be studied, but specific and indissoluble real processes, within which the decisive relationship, from a Marxist point of view, is that expressed by the complex idea of ‘determination.’ ” 15 At one level, Williams’s and Thompson’s work can only be said to converge around the terms of the same problematic through the operation of a violent and schematically dichotomous theorization. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 188

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Marxism reads social formations as overdetermined unities with relatively autonomous levels; Marxism conceives society as overdetermined relatively autonomous levels, not a simple unity; Marxist theory requires holding both relative autonomy and economic determinacy at once — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 371 (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Marxism reads social formations as overdetermined unities with relatively autonomous levels; Marxism conceives society as overdetermined relatively autonomous levels, not a simple unity; Marxist theory requires holding both relative autonomy and economic determinacy at once — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 371 (+3 more)