Base and Superstructure

Changes in the way material production takes place lead changes in the relations of society in general.

And even relations between people which do not arise out production – the games people play with each other, the forms sex takes, the relations of adults and young babies – will affected.

Marx does not at all deny the reality of relations other than directly productive ones. Nor does he deny that they can influence the way production itself takes place. As he puts it in Theories of Surplus Value:

‘All circumstances which… affect man, the subject of production, have greater or lesser effect upon his functions and activities, including his functions and activities as creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this sense it can be truly asserted that all human relations and functions, however and wherever they manifest themselves, influence material production and have a more or less determining effect upon it.’[29]

This is even true in pre-class societies. There is a tendency for old patterns of working and living to crystallise into relatively inflexible structures. They become ‘sanctified’ with the development of systems of religion, magic, taboos, rituals and so or At first these systems are carried on even in ‘bad times’, when the short term needs or desires of the individual might lead ti actions which ruin the long term interests of the social collectivity. But, by this very fact, they discourage innovation and move to new forms of production, which would be of long-term as well as short-term benefit.

Exploitation and the superstructure

Something more is needed than simple cooperation between people for the forces of production to develop beyond a certain point. Exploitation is also needed.

While the surplus left after the satisfaction of everyone’s minimal needs is small, resources can only be gathered together for further development of the forces of production if the surplus is controlled by a small, privileged minority of society. Hence it is that wherever there is the development of agriculture proper out of horticulture, the growth of trade, the use of dams and canals for flood prevention and irrigation, the building of towns, there are also the beginnings of a polarisation within society between those who exploit and those who are exploited.

The new exploiting group has its origins in its role in production: it is constituted out of those who were most efficient in introducing new methods of agricultural production, or those who pioneered new sorts of trade between one society and its neighbours, or those who could justify themselves not engaging in backbreaking manual labour because of their ability to foresee flood patterns or design waterworks. But from the beginning the new exploiting group secures its control by means other than its role in production. It uses its new wealth to wage war, so further enhancing its wealth through booty and the taking of slaves. It establishes ‘special bodies of armed men’ to safeguard its old and its new wealth against internal and external enemies. It gains control of religious rites, ascribing the advance of the social productive force to its own ‘supernatural powers’. It rewrites old codes of behaviour into new sets of legal rules that sanctify its position.

The new exploiting group, in short, creates a whole network of non-productive relations to safeguard the privileged position it has gained for itself. It seeks through these political, judicial and religious means to secure its own position. It creates a non-economic ‘superstructure’ to safeguard the source of its own privileges in the economic ‘base’.

The very function of these ‘non-economic’ institutions means that they have enormous economic impact. They are concerned with controlling the base, with fixing existing relations of exploitation, and therefore in putting a limit on changes in the relations of production, even if this also involves stopping further development of the productive forces.

In ancient China, for example, a ruling class emerged on the basis of certain sorts of material production (agriculture involving the use of hydraulic installations) and exploitation. Its members then sought to preserve their position by creating political and ideological institutions. But in doing so they created instruments that could be used to crush any new social force that emerged out of changes in production (eg out of the growth of handicrafts or trade). On occasions that meant physically destroying the new productive means.

So great is the reciprocal impact of the ‘superstructure’ on the base, that many of the categories we commonly think of as ‘economic’ are in fact constituted by both. So, for instance, ‘property rights’ are judicial (part of the superstructure) but regulate the way exploitation takes place (part of the base).

The way the political and judicial feed back into the economic is absolutely central to Marx’s whole approach. It is this alone which enables him to talk of successive, distinct ‘modes of production’ – stages in history in which the organisation of production and exploitation is frozen in certain ways, each with its distinctive ruling class seeking to mould the whole of society to fit in with its requirements.

Far from ignoring the impact of the ‘superstructure’ on the ‘base’, as many ignorant critics have claimed for more than a century, Marx builds his whole account of human history around it.

Old relations of production act as fetters, impeding the growth of new productive forces. How? Because of the activity of the ‘superstructure’ in trying to stop new forms of production and exploitation that challenge the monopoly of wealth and power of the old ruling class. Its laws declare the new ways to be illegal. Its religious institutions denounce them as immoral. Its police use torture against them. Its armies sack towns where they are practised.

The massive political and ideological struggles that arise as a result, decide, for Marx, whether a rising class, based on new forces of production, displaces an old ruling class. And so it is an absolute travesty of his views to claim that he ‘neglects’ the political or ideological element.

But the growth of superstructural institutions not only freezes existing production relations, it can also have profound effects on the relations between the members of the ruling class themselves, and therefore on the way they react to the other classes in society.

Those who command the armies, the police and the priesthoods live off the surplus obtained by exploitation just as much as do the direct exploiters. But they also develop particular interests of their own: they want their share of the surplus to be as great as possible; they want certain sorts of material production to take place to suit the particular needs of their institutions; they want their sort of lifestyle to be valued more highly than that of those involved in direct production.

Their attempt to gain their own particular aims can lead to the building of ever more complex institutions, to elaborate rules about social behaviour, to endless battles for place and influence. The end result can be labyrinthine structures in which the source of wealth and privilege in material production is completely forgotten.

When this happens, the superstructure can go beyond simply freezing the economic activities on which it is based. It can become a drain on them that prevents their reproduction – and, in doing so, destroys the resources upon which the whole of society, including the superstructure itself, depends. Then material reality catches up with it and the whole social edifice comes tumbling down.

But none of these developments take place without massive political and ideological struggles. It is these which determine whether one set of social activities (those of the superstructure) cramp a different set of social activities (those involved in maintaining and developing the material base). It is these which decide, for Marx, whether the existing ruling class maintains its power until it ruins society, or whether a rising class, based on new forms of production, displaces it.

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’, wrote Marx and Engels at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto. But the class struggle is precisely the struggle between those who use the political and ideological institutions of the superstructure to maintain their power over the productive ‘base’ and exploitation, and those who put up resistance to them.

The superstructure exists to defend exploitation and its fruits. Any real fight against the existing structures of exploitation becomes a fight against the superstructure, a political fight. As Lenin put it, ‘Politics is concentrated economics.’

Marxism does not see political struggle as simply an automatic, passive reflection of the development of the forces production. It is economic development that produces the class forces that struggle for control of society. But how that struggle goes depends upon the political mobilisation that takes place within each class.

The key role of changes in production

We are now in a position to reassess Engels’ statement that’ various elements of the superstructure… also exercise their influence on the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their forms’.[30]

Under any form of class rule a range of structures are built to reinforce and institutionalise exploitation. Those in control these institutions have interests of their own, which influence everything else which happens in society – including the nature of material production itself.

However, that cannot be the end of the matter, as the ‘voluntarist’ rendering of Engels’ remarks implies. There is still I question of where the superstructural institutions themselves come from. And there is the all-important question of what happens if the superstructure develops in such ways as to impede the reproduction of its own material base.

Marx insists that simply to assert that everything in society influences everything – the superstructure the base as well as vice versa – leads nowhere. He takes the point up in The Poverty Philosophy, his polemic against Proudhon, written soon after The German Ideology:

‘The production relations of society form a whole. M Proudhon considers economic relations as so many social phases engendering one another, resulting one from the other… The only drawback to this method is that when he comes to examine a single one of these phases, M Proudhon cannot explain it without having recourse to all the other relations of society; which relations he has not yet made his dialectical movement engender.’[31]

In his writings Marx points to three different consequences of such a view of society as an undifferentiated whole, with everything influencing everything else.

Firstly, it can lead to a view in which the existing form of society is seen as eternal and unchanging (the view which Marx ascribed to bourgeois economists, seeing social relations as governed by ‘eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any’; it is the view that underlies the barrenness of the modern pseudo-science of society, sociology).

Secondly, it can lead to viewing the dynamic of society as lying in some mystical force that lies outside society (Hegel’s ‘world spirit’ or Weber’s ‘rationalisation’).

Thirdly, it can lead to the view that what exists today can only be grasped in its own terms, through its own language and ideas, without any reference to anything else (the position of those idealist philosophers who followed Hegel in 19th century Germany, and of more recent thinkers like Collingwood, Winch and the ex-Althusserians).

Marx’s way out of this impasse is to locate the one element in the social whole that has a tendency to cumulative development of its own. This is the action of humans in working on their environment to get a living for themselves. Past labour provides the means for increasing the output of present labour: both material means (tools, machines, access to raw materials) and new knowledge. But in adopting the new ways of working, humans also adopt new ways of relating to each other.

These changes will often be so small as to be barely perceptible (a changed relationship between two people here, an additional person engaged in a particular labour process somewhere else). But if they continue, they will bring about systematic molecular change in the whole social structure. The succession of quantitative changes then has a qualitative impact.

Marx does not deny the possibility of changes in other aspects of social life. A ruler may die and be succeeded by another with a quite different personality. People may tire of one game and start playing another. The accident of birth or upbringing may produce a gifted musician or painter. But all such changes are accidents. There is no reason why they should lead to cumulative social change of any sort. They can produce random change in society, but not a dynamic which moves society in any specific direction.

Material production, on the other hand, does have a tendency to move in one direction rather than another. Its output is wealth, the resources that allow lives to be free from material deprivation.

And these resources can be piled up in ever greater quantities.

This does not mean that forces of production always develop as Kautsky, Plekhanov and, more recently, G A Cohen have claimed. As we have seen, the clash between new ways of producing and old social relations is a central feature in history.

Marx noted in The Communist Manifesto that ‘conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was the first condition of existence of all earlier industrial classes’.[32] The outcome of the clash between the new and the old did not have to be the defeat of the old. It could be the stifling of the new. There could be the ‘mutual destruction of the contending classes’.[33]

‘Regression’ (from more advanced forms of production to more backward) is far from being exceptional historically. Civilisation after civilisation has collapsed back into ‘barbarism’ (i.e. agricultural production without towns) – witness the dead ‘cities in the jungle’ to be found in Latin America, south east Asia or central Africa; there are several instances of hunter-gatherer peoples who show signs of once having been horticulturalists (eg some tribes of the Amazon).[34] It depends upon the particular, historically developed features of any society whether the new forces of production can develop and the classes associated with them break through. At one extreme, one can imagine societies which have become so sclerotic that no innovation in production is possible (with, for instance, closely circumscribed religious rites determining how every act of production is performed). At the other extreme, there is modem capitalist society where the be all and end all of life is meant to be increasing the productivity of labour.

In fact, most human societies have been somewhere in between. Because human life is harsh, people have wanted to increase the livelihood they can get for a certain amount of labour, even though certain activities have been sanctified and others tabooed. Generally speaking, there has been a very slow development of the forces of production until the point has been reached where a new class begins to challenge the old. What has happened then has depended on the balance of class forces on the one hand, and the leadership and understanding available to the rival classes on the other.

However, even if the development of the forces of production is the exception, not the norm, it does not invalidate Marx’s argument. For those societies where the forces of production break through will thrive and, eventually, reach the point of being able to dominate those societies where the forces of production have been stifled. Very few societies moved on from the stage of barbarism to that of civilisation; but many of those that did not were enslaved by those that did. Again feudal barons and oriental despotic gentry were usually able to beat back the challenge of urban tradesmen and merchants; but this did not stop them all being overwhelmed by the wave of capitalism that spread out from the western fringe of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It did not matter, at the end of the day, how grandiose or elaborate the superstructure of any society was. It rested on a ‘base’ in material production. If it prevented this base from developing, then the superstructure itself was eventually doomed. In this sense Engels was right to say that the ‘economic element finally asserts itself as dominant’.

As a matter of historical fact, the forces of production did succeed in breaking down and transforming the totality of social relations in which they grew up.

Base, superstructure and social change

Much of the confusion which has arisen among Marxists over the interpretation of Marx’s Preface to A Critique of Political Economy lies in the definition of the ‘base’ on which ‘the legal and political superstructure’ rises.

For some people the ‘base’ has, in effect, been the material interaction of human beings and nature – the forces of production. For others it has been the social relations within which this interaction occurs, the social relations of production.

You can justify any one of these positions if you take particular quotations from the Preface in isolation from the rest of the passage and from Marx’s other writings. For at one point he talks of the ‘sum total of these relations of production’ as ‘the real basis on which arises a political and legal superstructure’. But he says earlier that ‘relations of production… correspond to a definite form of development of their material productive forces’, and he goes on to contrast ‘the material transformation of the material conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science’ and ‘legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophical forms’. It is the ‘material productive forces’ which come into conflict with ‘the existing relations of production’.

In fact he is not making a single distinction in the Critique between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. Two distinctions are involved. There is the distinction between the ‘forces of production’ and the relations of production. And then there is the distinction between the relations of production and the remaining social relations.

The reason for the confusion is this. The ‘base’ is the combination of forces and relations of production. But one of the elements in this combination is ‘more basic’ than the other. It is the ‘forces of production’ that are dynamic, which go forward until they ‘come into conflict’ with the static ‘relations of production’. Relations of production ‘correspond’ to forces of production, not the other way round.

Of course, there is a certain sense in which it is impossible to separate material production from the social relations it involves. If new ways of working do involve new social relations, then obviously they cannot come into existence until these new social relations do.

But, as we saw above, there are reasons for assigning priority to the forces of production. Human groups who succeed in changing the ways they work in order to develop the forces of production will be more successful than those that don’t. Small, cumulative changes in the forces of production can take place, encouraging changes in the relations between people which are just as small but also just cumulative. People change their relations with each other because they want to produce the means of livelihood more easily: increasing the means of livelihood is the aim, changes in the social relations of production the unintended consequence. The forces of production rebel against the existing relations of production, not the other way round.

So, for instance, if hunter-gatherers decide to change their social relations with each other so as to engage in horticulture, this is not primarily a result of any belief that horticultural social relations are superior to hunter-gatherer social relations; it is rather that they want access to the increased material productivity of horticulture over hunting and gathering.

In the same way, it is not preference for one set of relations around the production process rather than another that leads the burghers to begin to challenge feudal society. It is rather that for this particular grouping of people within feudalism, the only way to increase their own control over the means of livelihood (to develop the forces of production under their control) is to establish new production relations.

Even when the way one society is organised changes, because of the pressure of another society on it (as when India was compelled to adopt a European style land tenure system in the 19th century, or when hunter-gatherers have been persuaded by colonial administrators and missionaries to accept a settled agricultural life), the reason the pressure exists is that the other society disposes of more advanced forces of production (which translate into more effective means of waging war). And the ‘social relations of production’ will not endure unless they are successful in organising material production – in finding a ‘base’ in material production – in the society that is pressurised into adopting them. Where they do not find such a ‘base’ (as with the Ik in Northern Uganda) the result can even be the destruction of society.[35]

Expansion of material production is the cause, the social organisation of production the effect. The cause itself can be blocked by the old form of organisation of society. There is no mechanical principle which means that the expansion of material production – and with it the changes in social relations – will automatically occur. But in any society there will be pressures in this direction at some point or other. And these pressures will have social consequences, even if they are successfully resisted by those committed to the old social relations.

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