The great strength of the structuralisms is their stress on “determinate conditions.” They remind us that, unless the dialectic really can be held, in any particular analysis, between both halves of the proposition—that “men make history … on the basis of conditions which are not of their making”—the result will inevitably be a naive humanism, with its necessary consequence: a voluntarist and populist political practice. The fact that “men” can become conscious of their conditions, organize to struggle against them, and in fact transform them—without which no active politics can even be conceived, let alone practiced—must not be allowed to override the awareness of the fact that, in capitalist relations, men and women are placed and positioned in relations which constitute them as agents. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” is a better starting point than a simple heroic affirmation. Structuralism does enable us to begin to think—as Marx insisted—of the relations of a structure on the basis of something other than their reduction to relationships between “people.” This was Marx’s privileged level of abstraction: that which enabled him to break with the obvious but incorrect starting point of “political economy”—that of bare individuals.