Structural Marxism burst upon the radical 1960s as an aggressively polemical intellectual revolution, announcing that “theoretical anti-humanism” had finally arrived to claim possession of the vast continent of history discovered by Marx. Resolutely rejecting historical teleology, it constructed its bridgehead on the declaration that “history is a process without a subject or a goal” (Althusser 1976: 99), within which human beings acted only as bearers of structural functions. Bitterly resented, and generally misrepresented, Structural Marxism was one of the most fertile and inventive of the twentieth century's efforts to generate a renaissance in historical materialism, based around a principled rejection of the Hegelian legacy in Marxist historiography. Impressed by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's structuralist-influenced “return to Freud”, his compatriot, philosopher Louis Althusser, went for the same sort of angular recasting of social theory. The key to Marxism, Althusser maintained, was Marx's radical break with most of the things usually attributed to him, especially the proletariat as historical subject, the dialectical method and the base-and-superstructure model. Undeterred by the bewilderment and dismay that these declarations generated, Althusser's “return to Marx” proceeded apace, with a startling series of hitherto completely unknown categories – “structural causality”, “imaginary relations”, “absent cause”, “epistemological break” – unveiled as the central discoveries of Marx.

Although the Structural Marxists agreed that social formations consisted of economic, political and ideological levels, they refused to accept that Marx had thought that the economic level always acted as the foundation for the other levels.