Structural Marxism

This chapter provides an introduction to two generic ways of seeing within the broader designation of Marxist perspectives that have been widely subscribed to within critical accounting research: the political economy perspective and the labour process perspective. Structural Marxism is generally more focused on the 'base' while radical humanism is more concerned with the 'superstructure', an opposition that Marx himself first identified in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Using a conceptual framework that draws extensively on previous contributions from both political economy and labour process perspectives, Armstrong presents a detailed analysis that demonstrates that the generic problem of agency is the result of the contradictions embedded within the capitalist agency relationship itself, which in turn ensure that such problems cannot ever be resolved within capitalist society. The establishment of a new journal, Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA), in 1990 meant that critical accountants now had a further highly credible vehicle for publishing their work.