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In Britain in the 1970s there were effectively two possible positions for Marxist literary critics, symbolized by two names, E.P. Thompson and Louis Althusser, and by two rival annual gatherings, the Oxford History Workshop and the Essex Sociology of Literature Conference. In intellectual terms they could be characterised as the Marxist humanism developed by the New Left after the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress in the USSR and the anti-humanist structuralist Marxism advanced in the late sixties and seventies. The arguments between the two camps, finally devolving onto the question of the poverty or necessity of theory, only ceased with the autocritical self-destruction of Althusserianism by the Althusserians.'