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p Structuralism is a very recent phenomenon in the ideological life of a number of capitalist countries, first and foremost, France.  [131•2  A real “volte-face” was executed in France in the sixties: existentialism, which had dominated for a long time among bourgeois philosophers, retired to the background under the onslaught of a new rival which appeared at first glance to be based on diametrically opposed principles. The turn was a very acute one indeed—instead 132 of the freedom and subjectivity, of “that which is experienced" there appeared structure, objectivity and scientific strictness as the main categories. Everything appears to be reversed. Existentialism despised science, considering it incapable of , understanding man and his free activity; structuralism not only recognises science but actually sets itself the task of turning the humanities, the sciences about man, into spheres of knowledge as strict as physics or chemistry. But suddenly the “point of contact" has revealed itself: existentialism did not recognise regularity in history and rejected historical forecasting, and so does structuralism.

p In a recent structuralist work entitled Keys to Structuralism, the author, J.-M. Auzias, criticises Sartre for saying that structuralism is the ideological reaction of a technocratic society. No, he insists, structuralism is not technocratic. For in order to run things the technocrat has to be able to predict, but structuralism cannot predict.  [132•1  Let us leave it to the author to answer for his rejection of the link between structuralism and technocracy and turn to his argument. Structuralism, says Auzias, prefers the study of closed systems to prediction. It studies these systems from the inside and divorces them from the process of creating these systems, from practice and from ideology. The reward is the obtaining of “strictly scientific results”.

p Here we see the familiar motifs of the idealist world view—the contrasting of “pure and impartial" science with “contaminated” practice and “partial” ideology. The views which have been expressed many times on this subject in Marxist criticism may be justifiably repeated in respect of structuralism. This is not specific to structuralism, however. Another distinction demands attention: the study of systems or structures in a static, unchanging state is contrasted with the study of the process of their emergence and their transition from one to another. “Process and structure,” writes J.-M. Auzias, “have an indeterminate relationship with each other,"  [132•2  which, in his opinion, is analogous to Heisenberg’s correlation of indeterminates. “When we understand a structure, we do not understand the process of its formation. When we comprehend the process, we do not comprehend 133 the structure."  [133•1  For his part, J. Pouillon sees a similar correlation between structure and practice. But the main point here is that the elements of these new “correlations of indeterminates" are by no means equal. Whereas structures in a static state lend themselves to systematisation, formalisation and mathematisation and, consequently, are the subject of strict science, the processes of their formation and practical transformation are removed from the province of strict science. Pouillon suggests resolving the resultant dilemma by the principle of the division of labour: the variable and dynamic to existentialism and the invariable and static to structuralism. It is not impossible that this will guarantee the peaceful coexistence of the two “ mutually complementary" idealist world views. At present they are far from solving their differences, however, and in sharp conflict with each other.

p However, even if the conflict does end in a peace treaty, this will not mean the solution of the problem. The development of society is a single, integrated process, which cannot be explained partly by existentialism, proceeding from the free activity of the individual, and partly by structuralism proceeding from structures independent of the individual. This is realised by many bourgeois thinkers, and it is not surprising that the discussion on the relation between the structural and the historical approach to society should have assumed such proportions in France and certain other countries.  [133•2  The attempts of a number of scientists to make wider use of structuralist methodology in order to elevate the social sciences to the level of the precise, natural sciences are unquestionably sincere. But equally unquestionable is the striving of a number of bourgeois ideologists to use the new ideas in the struggle against Marxism, and in particular against the materialist dialectics, against the principle of historism, against recognition of historical laws and the scientific prediction of the development of society from capitalism to socialism.

p The main fields in which structuralist studies are being carried out at the present time in the West are linguistics, ethnology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism and the history 134 of culture. There are also attempts to give a structuralist explanation of society as a whole, many discursive articles and, more recently, generalising and popularising works.

p Some specialists take the view that structuralism is first and foremost a definite philosophy which regards the category of relation as the basis of understanding the world. The structuralists themselves do not agree with this, as a rule, and insist that structuralism should be understood as a method which enables one to obtain strictly scientific results in certain concrete spheres. However, the fact that this method is carried over from one field to another thus becoming widely used demands philosophical analysis.  [134•1 

p The first of these spheres is linguistics, in which the problem of interest to us was born, that of the structural and the genetic, the synchronic and the diachronic. Even before the formation of structural linguistics in the 1920s, the famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure suggested that in the study of language a strict distinction should be made between two perpendicular axes—the diachronic, i.e., the axis of historical development, and the synchronic, i.e., the axis along which language phenomena are connected at a given moment in time. Moreover, whereas comparativehistorical linguistics which prevailed in the 19th century concentrated entirely on the facts of the evolution of language, and in particular on reconstructing the Indo– European parent language by means of seeking phenomena in related languages of different ages, de Saussure turned linguistics to face the present day. “It is clear,” he wrote, “that the synchronic aspect-is more important than the diachronic, because for the talking mass it is the true and only reality."  [134•2  Of particular importance here was the fact that the emphasis in the synchronic approach was clearly on the systemic nature of language, which had been lost sight of in the historical comparison not of languages as a whole, but only of individual comparable groups of 135 linguistic phenomena. De Saussure deduced from this that only the synchronic aspect of language was systemic, and not the diachronic aspect. It is in this synchronic aspect that language functions as a system of communication, a sign system, which enables people to understand one another. Since language signs are arbitrary, according to de Saussure, that is, they do not have a necessary link with the things which they denote, they must be studied in their mutual synchronic relation with one another; it is this mutual relation in the system which determines the role of each element.

p De Saussure’s ideas were taken up and developed (and partially corrected) by various trends of linguistic structuralism. Thus, the Prague school of linguistics (N. S. Trubetskoi, R. O. Yakobson and others) developed a new linguistic discipline, by separating phonology from phonetics and systematising the sounds of human speech from the point of view of their distinctive function according to the principle of binary opposition. Subsequently the distinctive units, or phonemes, were subjected to further analysis, on the basis of which a system of 12 binary distinctive features was constructed, enabling the phonetic systems of practically all the languages in the world to be described by various combinations.

p Here it is important to note that the phonological system of this or that language is not only smaller than its phonetic system (since not all sound changes have a distinctive meaning), but also more set: in the course of development of a language the concrete sounds may change, but their comparison may perfectly well turn out to relate to the same type and the phonological system will remain unchanged. The phonological system may be the same for two different languages not possessing a single common sound. As can be seen, the system of distinctive features is even more general and abstract. The most important feature of phonological systems is their qualitative-discrete nature. Whereas phonetics studies the minute, gradually growing changes in sounds, phonology breaks up the continuous curve into distinctive units which are contrasted with one another. There are no quantitative gradations in these comparisons: they either exist or do not exist in the given concrete language (i.e., some exist, others do not). This breaking up and 136 contrasting is done unconsciously by everyone making use of language, and it enables them to distinguish any words that sound alike (pen and pan, for example).

p But language does not consist only of phonetic and phonological systems. It has a whole hierarchy of systems—sound, grammatical, lexical and stylistic. And in these fields the structuralists of the Prague school and other schools have done a great deal of research directed for the most part towards one basic goal: to determine the way in which different languages use different methods to solve one and the same task—to organise human communication and understanding. These different methods turned out to be not so different after all. By separating their formal aspect and generalising them according to types of interrelations— correlation and opposition—it became possible to determine certain general schemes appearing in different variants. This naturally gave rise to the idea of the deductive approach to linguistic structures and their study by mathematical means.  [136•1 

p We do not propose to describe here the views of the various exponents of structural linguistics, or to become involved in the heated controversy between the structuralists and traditionalists. We would simply note that the discoveries of structural linguistics are of particular interest for developing cybernetic devices, for machine translation, for improving means of communication, etc. However, it is important for us to have a concept, albeit a general one, of the new ideas produced by linguistic structuralism, because it was from linguistics that structural ideas spread to other fields of knowledge.

p In general, one might say that it is not simply understanding language as a connected system (which was clear long ago), but searching in language for certain hidden, more abstract and more general systems by means of turning the attention from the elements of the system to their relations with one another which, in their entirety, also form the structure. The most consistent (from the viewpoint of the structuralists themselves) and the most extreme (from the viewpoint of their opponents) structuralists strive to 137 present linguistic systems as a collection of “pure relations”, in which the elements are determined entirely by relations and do not possess any content of their own (they are simply “bundles of relations”). We would note that, generally speaking, this idea is correct for artificial sign systems, but not for natural language as such, which, as a whole, is a “sign system of a special kind”. The identification of language with an artificial sign system (de Saussure, for example, compared language with chess) logically leads to the problem of development being removed from linguistics. The point is that such systems do not develop: they lack inner stimuli for development, and external stimuli are regarded as being outside the framework of their competence. As a result the synchronic aspect of language began to be regarded not as a “momentary cross-section" showing the condition and function of the language at a given stage in its development, but as the revelation of universal, eternal structures making possible communication. Synchronic became identified with static. The members of the Copenhagen school of structuralism led by Louis Hjelmslev tried to present all modern and dead languages as variants of a single structure which does not develop in the course of the development of the language, but is merely reconstructed, regrouped. Some structuralists attempted to base their ideas on behaviourist psychology, others on Rudolf Carnap’s studies in logic or Edmund Plusserl’s phenomenology.

p As we can see, structuralism not only stimulated philosophical constructions, but itself, to a certain degree, made use of idealist philosophy. Such a “bilateral relation" naturally puts one on one’s guard, but in itself it cannot serve as the basis for a flat rejection of the concrete ideas of structural linguistics. Analogous phenomena were observed, it will be remembered, in the theory of relativity, genetics and cybernetics. In the final analysis the link between the young, developing sciences and idealist philosophy is a temporary one. In the period of impetuous advancing of hypotheses, when firm proof is lacking and the limits of application of this or that theory are blurred, some idealist constructions “turn up at an opportune moment" as the wider, logically based context on which one can rest. But as soon as the concrete-scientific theories can stand on their own feet and show their limits, idealist philosophy is seen to be a 138 superfluous “make-weight” and is either discarded or retained for clearly unscientific considerations. This recurs at new stages and in new fields of knowledge.

p The same thing is taking place at present in a number of structuralist studies concerning society as a whole or its individual groups by C. Levi-Strauss, M. Foucault, L. Sebag and others.

p Claude Levi-Strauss is a well-known specialist in the field of ethnology—a science which has roughly the same relation to ethnography as phonology to phonetics (in other countries the terms “social” or “structural anthropology" are used instead of ethnology). Whereas the ethnographer collects, describes and classifies all material relating to the life of primitive tribes and peoples, the ethnologist tries to find inner connections, dependences and structures in them. Inspired by the example of structural linguistics, and phonology in particular, Levi-Strauss began to search in society for hidden structures differing from the directly given sum of social relations and representing a kind of lingual code. In this way he reduced a vast number of different systems of kinship existing in primitive societies to a few simple types of the exchange of womenfolk. With the help of structural analysis Levi-Strauss also studied certain other “ superstructural”, as he put it himself, spheres of life of primitive societies—totemism, rituals, magic and myths. Here also the structuralist principle of the primacy of relations over elements was applied. Thus, in myths the individual images and symbols were not interpreted, but their interrelation, the place occupied by them in the story, was compared, making it possible to discover a whole series of correspondences and to generalise the most diverse myths.

p In short, the application to other spheres of certain principles and methods of structural linguistics, more precisely, of the theory of sign systems, semiotics, produced some most interesting results and naturally gave rise to the question: what was the possibility of this application to other spheres based on, what did these different spheres of social life have in common? This common base, replies LeviStrauss, is the activity of the human spirit, in relation to which language and culture are “two parallel modalities".  [138•1  139 This activity of the spirit is neither free nor conscious, however. It is unconscious, it is certain “structural laws" imposed by the unconscious sphere of the human intellect on the most varying contents. Thus, on a new level there arises something in the nature of Kantianism—“ Kantianism without the transcendental subject”, as Paul Ricoeur put it.

p True, Levi-Strauss does not want to admit that he is an idealist; he has a great respect for Marx and believes that his “structural dialectic”, developed on the level of the superstructure, does not contradict the basic tenets of historical materialism. L. Sebag, however, who is following roughly the same lines, makes a direct contrast between the structuralist interpretation of society and the Marxist one. He rejects the primacy of economics, and ideology as a reflection, and the laws of the dialectic. For him society is a collection of spheres, equal in principle, each of which embodies in its structure some variant of “an intellectual system".  [139•1 

p This concept of society as a kind of “spherical” whole without beginning or end, without the primary or secondary, is by no means the invention of a few structuralists. It is widespread in modern bourgeois philosophy and sociology. The structuralist method proceeding from linguistics is used in this case to give it “scientific” support.

p On the other hand, ethnographical studies are also used for support, particularly those pursued in the USA in so-called cultural anthropology. No matter how empirical the numerous works of American ethnographers are (and, to a large extent, thanks to this empiricism), the general idea of cultural relativism stands out in them very clearly. The various achievements of this or that people, whether they be in the field of technology, art, complex systems of kinship, etc., are regarded as facts of culture, equal in principle, which demonstrate only a difference in direction of interests. Moreover, from this point of view the difference between “civilised” and “primitive” societies is relativised: the more advanced technology of the former, for example, is contrasted with the more advanced systems of kinship of the latter.

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p It is interesting that when Levi-Strauss’ views were criticised by French Marxists together with those of American cultural anthropologists, he found it necessary to disassociate himself from his American colleagues, announcing that “static relativism" was indeed a constant danger for the ethnologist.  [140•1  It cannot be denied, however, that he himself to a certain extent encouraged the spread of this danger. Replying to his critics, Levi-Strauss rightly refers to the need to differentiate between scientific results and their political and ideological use: he wants to be judged by his scientific results and not by the psychological and sociological hypotheses which serve merely as “ scaffolding”. But it is precisely these broad hypotheses which generally spread outside scientific circles among the general public. The tenor of these hypotheses is such that the “ statically relativistic" idea about society is becoming increasingly widespread.

p Levi-Strauss does not deny social progress, but he restricts the sphere of its action to the rapidly developing civilised societies. The transition from primitive stagnation to progress occurred, in his opinion, as the result not of natural, regular development, but of “the luck of the draw" which landed on one of the many variants of primitive society. Levi-Strauss does not reject history, but, contrasting it to ethnology as the synchronic aspect to the diachronic, he concentrates on searching for universal structures independent of time or, as he says, acting within the framework of “mechanical”, reversible time. This means that if these structures somehow transform themselves and vary, the variations cannot be placed in the time sequence in which each successive term arises out of the preceding one. They are simply various combinations of invariable elements in which one and the same invariable scheme manifests itself in different ways.

p Levi-Strauss does emphasise, it is true, that these schemes and structures are not something which exists empirically, not a collection of social relations, but a mathematical model used as a means of study. However, a model works only when it objectively reflects some essential relations of the modelled object. And Levi-Strauss has good reason 141 to insist on the objectivity of his methods and his scienceethnology. But what does he regard as the guarantee of this objectivity? The fact that ethnology studies the unconscious mechanisms of the intellect which form the structure of social reality. Moreover ethnology which studies peoples who do not possess a written language has an advantage in this: people’s consciousness of their actions in these tribes does not distort or rather obscure the functioning of the unconscious structures which act in the modern world too.

p We shall now return to the problem of historical prediction. The fundamental difference between ethnology and history (and also sociology), Levi-Strauss maintains, is that ethnology attains objectivity by abstracting the consciousness factor. History, on the other hand, studies conscious human activity. Consequently, as Levi-Strauss cautiously expresses himself, historical development “may be unpredictable, since it is never arbitrary”.

p How one is supposed to understand this impossibility to predict and this non-arbitrariness, has been indicated with the use of modern historical material by another eminent structuralist, Michel Foucault, whose book Words and Things provoked a heated debate in the French press.  [141•1  What Foucault was trying to do undoubtedly merits attention in itself, namely, to reveal certain general principles at the base of the most varied spheres of knowledge at a certain stage of social development. Taking the period of European social development from the 16th to the 19th century, Foucault detected in it three alternating unconscious structures or “epistems”, which condition not so much this or that solution of scientific problems as the very possibility of posing them, the framework beyond which the people of the given period could not go. These “epistems” are actually sign systems, characterised by this or that correlation between words, ideas and things. But, as we know, systems which are extracted in their pure form can only vary discretely, but not develop from the lower to the higher. And Foucault is merely noting the existence of different systems in different periods, and also the rift between them, which, from his point of view, is inexplicable and even “enigmatic”.

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p At the ideological level structuralism began to be regarded as a philosophy confirming the dominance of the system, the structure, over man, the priority of that which is stable and unchanging, over that which is current and historical. Structuralism is accused of serving as an apology for the existing situation and of affirming man’s weakness. It must be said that such accusations are not groundless, in spite of the fact that the structuralists themselves, for all the inconsistency of their philosophical extrapolations, do not generally belong to the reactionary elements in society. By identifying the historical approach with “ unscientific historicism”, structuralism as an ideology has given shape and some support to certain attitudes of mind—the fact that part of the French intelligentsia has turned its back on history, which incidentally suits the ruling sections of capitalist society very well.

p By using the Marxist dialectic method, one can easily demonstrate the one-sidedness of such an approach.

p How does Marxism solve this problem? First of all, it denies the division into “scientific synchronism" and “ unscientific diachronism”. Marx’s great discovery which has become an everlasting part of the treasury of the social sciences is his discovery of the regular, necessary transition from one socio-economic formation to another and, accordingly, the prediction of such a transition. This transition is necessary because of the contradiction rooted in the very process of development, which demands to be resolved. This transition is regular, because the resolution of the contradiction gives a definite direction to the whole process. Hence it follows that the diachronic aspect is no less subject to the jurisdiction of science than the synchronic aspect.

p In its transition from one formation to another, the social structure is not reconstructed at random or into one of the possible variants on the same level. It moves to a higher stage of development because, thanks to the resolution of the basic contradiction between productive forces and production relations, and the other contradictions connected with it, new possibilities for development are opened up—not only in the sphere of production, but in all other spheres.

p The progressive development of mankind may be traced along many separate lines—the growth of productive forces, 143 including the abilities of man himself, the interest of the masses in scientific knowledge, the educational level of the population, the evolution of justice and morality, etc. Since they are relatively independent these lines of development each have their own problems, their own contradictions and their own laws. On these grounds Louis Althusser even considers it possible to speak of one’s own special time in which each of these lines develop. This idea appears dubious to us, to say the least: the interaction of these lines, if such remains possible, that is, ceases to be necessary in this case and assumes the form of random, chaotic intertwinings. At the same time none of these lines is self-sufficient, none exists by itself, for itself, since it is linked with others by the necessity of fulfilling definite functions as part of the whole. Naturally, the connection between them is not like the connection between the parts of a well-oiled machine. There is lagging behind, bypassing, friction and contradiction. But the concepts themselves only make sense against the background of a fundamental unity: lagging behind or lack of correspondence between two phenomena is possible only in the framework of identical time and necessary connection.

p Thus, the social system retains its integrated character not only in the synchronic aspect, but also in the course of development—diachronically. Regular development is inherent in the social system as a whole. This is what Marx and Lenin called the natural historical process of the development of social formations.

p But this process is not just a series of qualitative transitions. Each transition is prepared by a quantitative growth. This aspect is entirely ignored by structuralism or, to be more precise, it is excluded by the very principle of structural analysis, which takes account only of the presence or absence of definite relations between the elements of the system. But as a result of this, firstly, the qualitative transition itself becomes incomprehensible, inexplicable, and, secondly, the criterion for comparing the different qualitative states of the system and determining their degree of progressiveness is lost.

p From the Marxist point of view, as we see it, even at an extremely abstract level it is possible and necessary to take account not only of qualitative, but also of 144 quantitative changes and their transition to each other. For a change to become possible, a change which is understood as the severance of connections between certain elements and the formation of new connections, the severed connections must first change, stretch and transform themselves from indirect to direct ones.

p This is precisely what takes place in the course of the development of capitalism which is undergoing a transition to its highest and final stage, that of state monopoly. The connection between the means of production and the owners, the capitalists, is effected through the agency of banks, the state, managers, and assumes a different character to the extent that the entrepreneurs are letting go of one function after the other and turning into a totally parasitic class. But this connection will not be broken as long as the capitalist owners appropriate surplus value for themselves and direct the development of production in their egoistic interests. The breaking of this connection—the socialist revolution—is a transition from quantitative change to qualitative, a regular and necessary transition because it has been prepared by the whole of preceding development.

From all the foregoing it does not follow that the Marxist solution exhausts all problems and puts an end to further research. Marxism has shown that there are laws in history and, consequently, that historical forecasting is possible. However, the cognition of these laws and of the mechanism of their concrete manifestation is constantly being deepened and enriched by the creative development of Marxist science.