system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What are the main theoretical issues with Structural Marxism?

I've been reading a few of Althusser's essays over the past few months and was surprised to learn his theoretical method was heavily criticized and largely abandoned by the turn of the century. Why is that? Besides the potential (albeit understandable) factor of him killing his wife.
gpt
One of Althusser's brightest students, Jaques Ranciere, turned out to be one of his strongest critics, a position he adopted during the May 68 protests in France. Very briefly put, in his book "Althusser's Lesson", Ranciere denounces Althusser's claim that a Marxist revolution requires the guiding hand of the intellectual. In particular, he calls Althusser's theory

"A discourse that allows one to speak for others, that cancels out the place and subject of its own speech: such is the mechanism that has found its paradigmatic form in Althusserian discourse, founded as it is on the denial of the place from which it speaks, of what is speaks about, and of who it speaks to. (p. 122)

This was Ranciere's first book, and he goes much further later in his career to develop a radical egalitarianism / theory of equality that centers the process of subjectivization within the subject itself, (not unlike Foucault's work on the subject) as opposed to a deference to the worker as some indelible subject discovered by Marx and protected by the living intellectual. So to answer your question through the work of Ranciere is to say that Althusser had no business and no ability to claim authority over a movement from his position in the ivory tower. Different critics include Badiou and Balibar, also former students of Althusser's.

Also had no idea he killed his wife. Wtf.