Base and Superstructure

The distinction between forces and relations of production is prior to the second distinction, between ‘economic base’ and the superstructure. The development of the forces of production leads to certain changes in the relations of production. These in turn result in changes in the other relations of society being made, until a whole range of institutions of a non-economic sort help reproduce existing economic relations (and so resist further economic change).

The point of these distinctions is to provide an understanding of how society changes. If the forces of production are static, then there is no reason why any society should undergo systematic change at all. The existing social relations will simply tend to reproduce themselves, so that at most there can be random, accidental changes in the relations of people to each other. Neither the social relations of production nor the wider social relations will provide any impetus to the revolutionary social changes that do occur (eg from societies of small bands to those of settled villages, or from those of medieval feudal manors to those of advanced industrial capitalist cities).

There is a further confusion in some of the discussion on forces and relations of production. This concerns what the ‘relations of production’ are.

At one point in the Preface Marx equates the social relation of production with property relations. People like Cohen have given this view a central place in their own accounts of historical materialism.

It seems to me to limit the notion of the ‘social relations c production’ far too much. Much of the power of Marx’s account of history lies in the way in which it shows how small changes in the forces of production lead to small, cumulative changes in the social relations arising directly at the point of production, until these challenge the wider relations of society. These small changes might involve new property relations, but in many, many important cases do not.

For instance, an increase in the number of journeymen working for the average master craftsman in a medieval city is not change in property relations. But it does change the social relations in the town in a way which may have very important implications. Similar considerations apply with many other significant historical developments, from the first planting of seed by hunter-gatherers to changes in production methods in capitalist countries today.

To sum up the argument so far. There is not one distinction in Marx, but two. The forces of production exert pressure on the existing relations of production. And those in turn come into conflict with the existing superstructure.

Once this is grasped, it is possible to deal with the questions which are sometimes raised as to whether particular institutions belong to the base or the superstructure.

There is a sense in which the questions themselves are misframed. The distinction between base and superstructure is not distinction between one set of institutions and another, with economic institutions on one side and political, judicial, ideological, etc institutions on the other. It is a distinction between relations that are directly connected with production and those that are not. Many particular institutions include both.

So, for instance, the medieval church was a superstructural institution, defending ideologically existing forms of feudal exploitation. But it acquired such large landholdings of its own that no account of the economic structure of medieval society can ignore it. In the same way, modern capitalist states arose out of the need for ‘bodies of armed men’ to protect particular capitalist ruling classes. But such protection has rarely been possible without the state intervening directly in production.

In pre-capitalist societies, even the question of the class people belong to comes to depend upon superstructural factors. The attempt to preserve existing relations of production and exploitation leads to elaborate codes assigning every individual to one or other caste or estate. This, in turn, determines the productive activity (if any at all) open to them. As Marx put it: ‘… when a certain degree of development is reached the hereditary nature of castes is decreed as a social law’.[36] And ‘in the estate… a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner a commoner, apart from his other relations, a quality inseparable from his individuality’.[37]

There is a sense in which it is true to say that only in bourgeois society do there exist ‘pure’ classes – social groupings whose membership depends entirely upon relations to exploitation in the productive process, as opposed to privileges embodied in judicial or religious codes.[38] Of course, these codes had their origin in material exploitation, but centuries of frozen social development have obscured that fact.

The situation with the capitalist family is somewhat similar to that of the medieval church or the modem state. It grew up to preserve and reproduce already existing relations of production. But it cannot do this without playing a very important economic role (in the case of the working class family, organising the vast amount of domestic labour that goes into the physical reproduction of labour power, in the case of the capitalist family defining the way in which property is passed from one generation to the next).[39]

This has led to attempts to assign it to the ‘base’ because of its economic role.[40] But the distinction between base and superstructure is a distinction between social relations which are subject to immediate changes with changes in the productive forces, and those which are relatively static and resistant to change. The capitalist family belongs to the latter rather than the former category, even in its ‘economic’ function of reproducing the labour force.

Changes in the way reproduction is organised in general follow changes in the way production takes place. The simple fact is that the ‘forces of reproduction’ do not have the tendency to cumulative change that the forces of production do. The possible ways of restricting the number of births hardly changed from the hunter-gatherer societies of 30,000 years ago until the 20th century – whether these means were used depended not on the sphere of reproduction at all, but on the sphere of production. (For instance, while a hunter-gatherer society is forced to restrict the number of births, many agricultural societies have an interest in as many births as possible.) The material conditions under which children are reared do change – but as a by-product of material changes taking place elsewhere in society.[41]

Finally, these considerations also enable us to dispose of another argument that is sometimes raised – the claim that all social relations are ‘relations of production’.[42]

All parts of any social structure owe their ultimate genesis to the realm of production. But what Marx quite rightly emphasised by talk of the ‘superstructure’ was that, once generated, some parts of the social structure have the effect of constraining the development of others. The old stand in contradiction to the new. The old form of organisation of the state, for instance, rose out of the needs of exploitation at a certain point in history and has continuing effects on production. But it stands in contradiction to the new relationships that are continually being thrown up by further developments of production. To say that all social relations are ‘relations of production’ is to paint a picture of social development which ignores this important element of contradiction.[43]

Base and superstructure under capitalism

So far this article has been about the relationship of base and superstructure in general. But there are certain peculiarities about their relation under capitalism that deserve a brief mention.

First is the peculiar effect of relations of production on the forces of production. Marx stresses that, for pre-capitalist societies, the established relations of production tend to retard the forces of production. Under capitalism, by contrast, the survival of each individual capital depends upon expanding the forces of production at its disposal more rapidly than its rivals:

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society… Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.’[44]

Marx holds that the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production still comes to the fore eventually, but in a quite specific way.

The growth of the social productive forces of humanity – increased productivity – involves combining ever greater amounts of past labour to each unit of present labour. Under capitalism this takes the form of an increase in the ratio of investment to the workforce. Investment grows more rapidly than the source of all potential profit, living labour. Yet the mainspring of production in this system is the rate of profit, i.e. the ratio of profit to investment.

The contradiction between the drive to invest and the low level of profit to sustain investment finds expression, for Marx, in a growing tendency to stagnation in the system, ever greater disproportions between the different elements of the economy, and ever deeper economic crises. For those of us who live in the 20th century, it also means an ever present tendency for economic competition to turn into military conflict, with the threat of the forces of production turning into full fledged forces of destruction.[45]

A second difference lies in the way in which under capitalism there is not only a conflict between the development of economic relations and non-economic constraints on them, but also a conflict between different elements of the economy, some of which are seen by Marx as ‘more basic’ than others. The source of surplus value lies in the realm of production. But growing out of the realm of production are a whole range of activities to do with the distribution of this surplus between different elements of the capitalist class – the buying and selling of commodities, the credit system, the stock market, and so on. These take on a life of their own in a similar way to the different elements in the political and ideological superstructure, and that life affects what happens in the realm of production. Yet, at the end of the day, they cannot escape the fundamental fact that the surplus they dispose of comes from exploitation at the point of production – something which expresses itself in the sudden occurrence of cyclical crises.

None of this means that the distinction between base and superstructure is redundant under capitalism. What it does mean is that there are even more elements of contradiction in this system than previously. Analysing these concretely is a precondition for knowing the way the system is moving and the possibilities of building a determined revolutionary opposition to it.

Superstructure and ideology

What is the relationship of ideas and ideology to the dichotomy of base and superstructure?

Marx is insistent that ideas cannot be divorced from the social context in which they arise. He says: ‘Definite forms of social consciousness correspond to…the economic structure, the real basis’, ‘the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general’, ‘social being… determines… consciousness’ [my emphases].

To understand these strong assertions you have to understand how Marx sees ideas and language as developing.

Ideas arise, for him, out of the material interaction of human beings with the world and each other:

‘The production of ideas of conceptions of consciousness is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the material intercourse of men appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religions, metaphysics, etc of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc – real active men, as they are conditioned by the development of their productive forces and the forms of intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process.’[46]

Every idea can be shown to have its origin in the material activity of humans:

‘We set out from real active men and on the basis of this we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms of the human brain are necessarily sublimates of men’s material life process, which can be empirically established and which is bound to material preconditions.’[47]

He implies there are a number of stages in the development of consciousness. Animals do not possess consciousness; at most they are immediately aware of fleeting impressions around them. Humans begin to move beyond this stage of immediate awareness only as they begin to interact socially with each other on a regular basis, in acting collectively to control their environment. So he argues that it is only when humans have developed to the stage of ‘primary historical relations do we find that man also possesses “consciousness”.’[48]

In the process of acting together to get a livelihood, humans create for the first time a material medium that enables them to fix fleeting impressions as permanent concepts:

‘From the start the ‘spirit’ is afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short in language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exits for other men and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language like consciousness only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men.’[49]

Or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘language is the immediate actuality of thought’.[50]

Knowledge, then, is a social product. It arises out of the need for communication, which in turn is a product of the need to carry out social production. Consciousness is the subjective expression of objectively existing relations. It originates as consciousness of participation in those relationships. Its embodiment, language, is a material process which is one of the constituents of these relationships. ‘Ideas and thoughts of people, then, are ideas and thoughts about themselves and of people in general…for it [is] the consciousness not merely of a single individual but of the individual in his interconnection with the whole of society’.[51]

Marx’s materialism amounts to this. Mind is developed upon the basis of matter. It depends for its functioning upon the satisfaction of the needs of the human body. It depends for the form of its consciousness upon the real relationships between individuals. The content of the individual mind depends upon the individual’s material interaction with the world and other people.

But the human mind cannot simply be reduced to matter. The individual human being who thinks has the ability to act. The subjective develops out of the objective, but is still real.

As Marx put it in the first of the Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of an object of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, not subjectively … Feuerbach does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity.’

However, if Marx asserts the reality of individual thought and activity, he also emphasises their limits. Thought arises from activity. And as soon as the link with activity is broken, thought is seen to lose some of its content: ‘Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking, in practice.’

So thinking is only ‘real’ in so far as it has practical application, insofar as it alters the world. There is an objective reality apart from human awareness. But it is only through their activity that humans can make contact with this reality, link their consciousness to it ‘The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question… the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question’.[52]

It is in the coming together of humanity and the world in activity that both the reality of the world and the truth of thought are determined.

Marx’s historical materialism does not hold that will, consciousness and intention play no part in history. Human action is continually changing the world in which human beings find themselves, and their relationships with each other.

The mechanical materialist Kautskyite interpretation of Marxism makes the very mistake Marx himself ascribes to Feuerbach. It fails to see that history is the history of human activity. But social activity involves consciousness.

It is human beings with particular ideas who invent new tools, challenge existing ways of living, organise revolutionary movements or fight to defend the status quo. The contradictions between the forces of production and the relations of production, between the base and the superstructure, find expression in arguments, organised disagreements and bitter struggles between people. These are part of the real development of society. To deny that is to present a picture of society in which explosive antagonisms no longer exist.

But consciousness never arises in a void. It is a subjective link between objective processes. The ideas of any individual or group develop on the basis of material reality and feed back into that reality. They cannot be reduced to that reality, but neither can they be divorced from it.

It is this link which enables us to make sense of Marx’s notions of ‘false consciousness’ and ‘ideology’.

False consciousness

When people are engaged in material practice they have an immediate awareness of their action and of the part of the world it impinges on which is unlikely to be false. Unless they are blind or deranged they know they are digging into the ground or aiming rifles at other people, or whatnot. At this level their activity and their consciousness coincide. But the content of this consciousness is minimal. In fact it hardly deserves the name ‘consciousness’ at all.

But alongside such immediate awareness there is always a more general consciousness. This attempts to go beyond that which people immediately know and to provide some overall conception of the context they find themselves in. It tells them, for instance, that they are not simply digging, but are providing themselves with a future livelihood, or that they are not simply aiming their rifles, but are defending their ‘fatherland’.

There is no guarantee of the ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ of this general consciousness. An economic crisis can mean that, however hard you dig, you won’t be able to sell the crop you grow and gain a livelihood; your rifle may be defending the profits of a multinational, not some alleged ‘fatherland’.

Whereas immediate consciousness is part and parcel of your activity and therefore must be ‘real’ in certain very limited senses, general consciousness can be no more than a blind accompaniment to activity. In this sense it finds no expression in the world. It has, in Marx’s words, no ‘this-sidedness’ and no ‘reality’. Or the outcome of the activity it guides is different to what is expected. Its objective content is different to its subjective content. It is at best partially ‘real’.[53]

Yet Marx is insistent that even ‘false’ general consciousness originates in real activity. So in criticising one particular form of ‘unreal’ consciousness, the ‘German’ ideology of idealist philosophy, he writes:

‘The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language from which it is abstracted to recognise it as the distorted language of the actual world and to realise that neither thought nor language in themselves form a reality of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life…

For philosophers one of the most difficult tasks is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they had to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language in which thoughts in the form of words have their own context. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.’[54]

‘We have seen that the whole problem of the transition from thought to reality, hence from language to life, exists only in philosophical illusion.’[55]

Such a view of abstract philosophical thought leads straight to the contempt for it expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach: ‘Social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the contemplation of this practice.’

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