This idea, from which all the rest of structuralism follows, produces a lot of brilliant analysis (which I think Jameson does a better job highlighting), but for Anderson this conceit also has crippling and ultimately disqualifying limits, such as what he terms "a gradual megalomania of the signifier" wherein external reality gradually disappears and everything becomes about the continual play of signifiers.

But some of the ways that Anderson judges structuralism as inadequate are ones that it actually shares with Marxism, and one of the surprising insights of this book is the inversion of the thesis that postructuralism "killed" Marxism. Instead, for Anderson, it could only gain the prominence it did because Marxism was already suffering under internal intellectual problems (for instance, the dichotomy between agency and structure) and its loss of a living connection to a revolutionary workers' movement in most of the developed world--which ties this back into the companion book Considerations on Western Marxism, where Anderson provides his own interpretation of the strengths and weaknesses of non-Soviet Marxism. In fact, one of the more invaluable parts of this book, which is technically unrelated to what its about, is the afterward where he discusses the predictions he made in Considerations. Spoiler: turns out May '68 didn't solve everything after all!!!!