He's a product of the structuralism which dominated the industrial era philosophy. It's incredibly obvious if you study political science even a little bit, and it's the easiest angle of criticism towards any orthodox theory of the era. Stalin and Mao are very much in that same modernist camp. That's why I just roll my eyes at internet communists who consider themselves well read because they have Marxist.org bookmarked. These are people who think the biggest problem with Jacobin is not enough fan service.
All this stuff is just laughably outdated. The most annoying part is that it has been updated to reflect more modern philosophy, but they never want to hear it. They see contemporary leftist thought as Marxist revisionism and just compromising with liberals, which is the worst sin imaginable.