Base and superstructure
BY TOM O’LINCOLN
A 1990 talk
to an International Socialist Organisation educational.
One of the readings was an article by Chris Harman, which explains the passing
references to Chris in the text.
SOON AFTER you enter
socialist politics, you’ll probably hear that society has a base and
superstructure, and someone may tell you that the economic base determines the political and
ideological superstructure. This can be a useful shorthand for the central ideas of Marxist
materialism, which usually
begins a social or political analysis with the economic factors.
For example, when we
do a perspective document at conference, we start with economic trends, then we look at the
class struggle, and then from there we move along to politics, and this seems broadly
compatible with the idea of an economic basis to society which determines other
things.
But there are dangers
in this metaphor, too. It always conjures up in my mind an image which is
slightly ridiculous. At the bottom of society is the base, a sort of heavy
metal block, probably gun metal grey, with lots of heavy machinery inside it,
letting out clouds of steam. On top of that are social relations,
political structures, legal structures, and the like. I guess that’s all made of wood. Perched
atop the scaffolding are human beings. And above them like banners or flag
flapping in the breeze of social progress we get ideas, religions, ideologies,
the products of the
human mind.
From the bottom,
flowing eternally upward, goes a continuous surge of determination. Base determines
superstructure. Or as Nigel Harris once put it, “gasometers
produce poetry via men”.
That can give you a
world completely devoid of human freedom, with people the slaves of economic
trends. This view became so dominant in the socialist movement after the death
of Marx and Engels that people began to worry about just what was the role of
the individual in history.
And one of the leaders, Karl Kautsky, basically
answered that individuals didn’t have much role to play.
He based himself on
some quotes from Marx, and there’s one in particular that’s worth quoting. In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx writes:
In acquiring new productive forces people change their mode of
production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing their way of earning a
living, they change all their social relations. The handmill gives you society
with a feudal lord; the steam mill society with an industrial
capitalist.
If you consider the
whole quote, you realise Marx starts out with people acting, intervening in the world,
changing their mode of production. But it was easy to get fixated on the handmill and the steam mill shaping society, and from there you could end
up with a very mechanical view of how society works.
Kautsky compounded this misunderstanding. For him,
history development had
inevitably produced each kind of economy in turn — ancient slave society,
feudalism, capitalism — and socialism was just the next station on the railway line.
Intervention by people couldn’t alter the trend. “The direction of social development,” said Kautsky, “does
not depend on the use of peaceful
methods or violent struggles. It is determined by the progress and needs of the
methods of production.” And another famous socialist of the time, the Russian Plekhanov, was
emphatic that individuals were peripheral:
No matter what the qualities of a given individual may be they cannot eliminate the given
economic relations if the latter conform to the given state of the
productive forces. Talented people can change only individual features of
events, not their general trend.
Later
on Stalin took up the same sort of refrain in
The
irony is that Karl Marx had cut his teeth by attacking mechanical materialism of this kind. For
example, Ludwig Feuerbach argued that people were simply products of their
material circumstances. Marx attacked this view in his Theses on Feuerbach, and
he made two points that
are really fundamental to our politics. First of all, he says:
The materialist
doctrine that people are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that
therefore changed people are produced of other circumstances and changed
upbringing, forgets that it is people that change circumstances.
Then
he addresses a second point: philosophers who think you or I are just pawns of
material circumstance, with no free will, always make an exception for
themselves. They see themselves are an enlightened elite, and they intend to
re-shape us by a process of education. Marx replies:
Feuerbach forgets
that it is people that change circumstances, and that the educator himself
needs educating. Hence, this doctrine
necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is
superior to society.
Marx’s
alternative to this elitist picture is a world in which people are constantly
acting to transform the situation they’re in:
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity
can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
The
masses of people, and workers in particularly, will
learn to fully understand their situation and thoroughly transform it through revolutionary action. That is
what the famous final thesis is all about, the one where Marx says, “the
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the point is to
change it.”
You
see, this is not a philosophy of fatalism, where people are the pawns of gasometers.
Yet fatalism took hold in the old socialist movement before World War I because that movement was
falling increasingly under the control of parliamentarians and union officials, whose entire
approach was one of gradual, peaceful change with no room for revolutionary elements to go
around stirring up trouble.
In
rebellion against this kind of vulgar determinism, some of the people who did want to stir up trouble
went to the other extreme. There were anarchists and syndicalists
and various kinds of romantics who tried to argue a voluntarist
conception: you can do anything if you put your mind to it. All you need is the
political will.
In the 1960s, in reaction to bureaucratic
Stalinism, the New Left went in for this sort of voluntarism. The students of
the sixties were impatient with the population around them,
and impatient with the working class; and were attracted to various shortcuts.
Some of them denied that economics and the class struggle were central, and
thought student vanguards
could achieve socialism. Later on, when they got their PhDs, a number of them believed that
something called “theoretical practice” — the work of academics —was as important as
what happened in industry. __
This
voluntarism — the flip side of vulgar determinism –- reflected their social position. Lacking in
social power, they tried to substitute will power. Not forced to confront the realities that
workers face, they could
kid themselves for a while that this was enough.
So
both vulgar determinism and voluntarism, tend to correspond to the social
position of the groups that adhere to them. And Stalinism in
Chris
basically says that Stalinism relied on mechanical determinism: the view that socialism was inevitable,
Marxism was a set of laws, the individual was nothing.
Well, that is true but it’s not the whole story. At the same time you find in Stalinism an
incredible voluntarism. We can fulfill any quota, we will overtake the west in 20
years; there is no fortress the Bolsheviks cannot storm.
The
combination of determinism and voluntarism corresponded to the position of the various classes
in society: a crushed peasantry and, a powerless working class were offered mechanical
determinism. What is happening is inevitable. But the cadres of the ruling
party, fighting desperately to industrialise the
country, were offered a wild voluntarism.
Once again,
ideologies match up with underlying social phenomena, and seem to be shaped by
them. We don’t accept that this is a matter of mechanical determinism. So how do we put
together a picture of society that allows for human intervention, human freedom, and yet remains materialist?
****
We
start where Marx does, with labour. Human beings do a
lot of things in their lives, but some activities are very obviously more
important than others. There is a core activity we can never get away from: to survive, we have to perform work
on the material world: planting seeds, harvesting grain, herding cattle, pounding nails
or tapping on computer keyboards. This core activity is our starting point.
You will notice: we have started with the conscious
activity of human beings
in changing the material world, not with the material world itself.
This activity is necessarily collective. There are no
Robinson Crusoes in real life. Human beings have
always worked in groups, and they arrived at an elementary division of labour very early. This collective work activity leads to structured relations
between people, and it does this in two ways:
Firstly, it limits our options. For example, when
people were at the hunter-gatherer
stage of development, they had to confine themselves to small groups of people,
so they would be mobile. Secondly, the type of work we do shapes the
social relations we enter into in a positive sense. When
people discovered agriculture, and decided to settle down and farm, they
created settled villages that suited the new circumstances.
The
social relations immediately associated with productive labour
are, in their turn, quite important in developing production. In fact, it can
be argued that some of them, like specific forms of cooperation on the job, are
themselves forces of production as well as relations of production. So there is some
overlap between these two categories, and a lot of subtle interconnections.
The
activity of labour, social labour
as we can already call to it, has a cumulative quality. What skills we learned yesterday
we can apply again today, while learning still more skills. As our skills
improve, we can produce not only enough to keep us alive but a surplus above
and beyond that. And
this cumulative aspect is of gigantic importance, both because it begins to give some logic and
direction to human experience and human history – we’re going somewhere — and also because it makes possible something extremely
important: When labour productivity gets high
enough, and the surplus we produce gets big enough, society can support people who don’tt actually work.
The division of labour,
which previously only separated out different people doing different
productivity tasks, can now include full time planners, rulers, and priests and
artists.
And
from here it is only a short step to ruling classes and exploitation. The rulers, the
priests, this new layer in society arises from productive labour,
but now it begins to organise itself to control that productive activity. On the
job, those relations of production that were previously fairly harmonious,
begin to take on a sharp division. Some people control the production process,
others are subordinated to it. Those who control begin to systematically
exploit those who are
subordinated.
And
to safeguard their position, they make use of other people who, like themselves, live off the surplus
produced by the labouring population: Police,
soldiers, magistrates. To introduce some order into the system of control they create laws. To
convince the masses that this is all a good idea, or at least inevitable, they use
ideologists, maybe priests, maybe economic theorists, maybe artists, to promote
ideas which justify the status quo. This is the sort of thing that Marxists
mean when they talk
about the superstructure of society.
Naturally,
the new ruling class believes that the system they preside over is the best of all possible
worlds. Typically, they portray it as the end of history. Right now in
And
I should mention that the development of class society was historically
necessary and progressive. Without it, it would not have been possible to pull together
the tiny surplus produced by each labouring person and use it in concentrated fashion for
social development. But history doesn’t end with the consolidation of a given
form of society, because that cumulative process of productive labour, and the growth of new methods of producing, new modes
of production, as the Marxist jargon puts it, continues. New modes of
production are associated with new groups of people who use them, and who seek
to change society to
ensure their own domination. So economic progress can become
a threat to the rulers.
Not
all economic progress is a threat. On the contrary, the ruling class of a society often uses the
superstructure to push ahead economic development. You only have to think of the industry plans put forward by the current
government. But whole new modes of production are a threat.
So when society has
reached the point where new modes of production are available that can bring
about a major leap forward, when just making small advances on the basis of the old ways is
virtually a waste of time by comparison, we now find that the ruling class, its administrative
apparatus, its thinkers and its orators, the whole set of structures that have been built up by the
advance of productive labour — they become an obstacle to progress in
society.
Please note: just as
we began defining the economic base of society by talking about human activity,
so we now begin our discussion of the superstructure by pointing out how it too
involves the conscious activity of people -- the rulers and their supporters — in holding back the development of the economic
base.
So far, it’s simple. We have a given mode of
production, giving rise to a ruling class, which exploits the working
population, and to superstructures which help entrench the position of that
ruling class. When any other social class – whether an oppressed class, such as
slaves or serfs, or a new aspiring ruling class, like the rising bourgeoisie
during the late middle ages — or the working class, which combines both
categories — whenever any other social class threatens the status quo, the superstructure
is there to defend it. But of course in real life there are complications.
The superstructure
itself has different parts, in fact we can talk of superstructures in the plural if
we want. There are the cops, the courts, the tax collectors, the ideological structures like religion and
schools, and the
people who control each bit begin to develop conflicting interests. All of them
tend to develop interests different from that section of the ruling class that
directly controls the means of production. We can see this today by looking at
our daily papers: politicians quarrel with industrialists, who quarrel with
bankers, who look with contempt
on the professors at the university.
So in addition to
the class struggle between the rulers and other classes, you get battles within
the dominant establishment. At this point the actual machinery of state gains a certain autonomy from the ruling class itself, because it
has to be able to mediate between different sections of that ruling class.
But ultimately, the
role of the state like most of the superstructures is to preserve existing
social relations. Attempts at radical change inevitably run into it. And that is
why a revolutionary struggle is normally needed to ensure the triumph of a new
ruling class and a new way of organising production.
You
will note that once again we find ourselves talking about the intervention of
people, this time in the form of revolutionary struggle. There is never, at any
stage, a hint of mechanical determinism in the Marxist analysis.
By
this stage we can abandon our initial, static image of base and superstructure.
Society is not a building, with a series of horizontal layers. It is a moving,
growing, changing organism. As human beings develop the forces of production,
they also create social relations corresponding to the way in which production
is carried out. In class society these include both the direct relations of
domination and exploitation, and the superstructures that administer society as
a whole.
Any
attempt to radically change society, to ensure the triumph of a new mode of
production and a new ruling class, will be resisted by the existing rulers who
will draw on these superstructures to help them. Their last resort will be the
open use of the armed forces of the state.
Here
we reach a point where I have a slight difference with Chris Harman’s
presentation of the question in the IS journal. Chris presents the
superstructure as equivalent to all the fundamentally conservative structures
in society. Production relations are defined as more readily changeable,
because they are close to production itself. I don’t entirely accept that. I
think that control of the means of production by the ruling class is a
production relation, and this is just as much an obstacle to revolutionary
change as the machinery of the state.
In
the French revolution, the rising bourgeoisie needed both to shatter the old
feudal superstructures, and also to encourage the peasants to seize their land
of the aristocracy. Both the state, and the old production relations, had to be
smashed. In a socialist revolution, the seizure of state power will have to be
accompanied by a challenge to the bosses on the job. If we control the state
but are weak in industry, our political power can be undermined.. Conversely if we establish workers’ control throughout
industry but don’t smash the capitalist the state, then it’s only a matter of
time before the police come along to hand the factories back to their original owners .
But
I don’t think there is some major disagreement here. Chris is focussing on a
feature of human society which is at the heart of Marx’s entire analysis, both
in those writings where he uses the base and superstructure analogy a lot and
those, like Capital, where it seldom
appears.
The
ironic tragedy, or tragic irony of human society at least until we achieve
socialism is that our labour while producing wealth, and making progress
possible, also produces social relations and structures which hold us back,
stop progress, and are increasingly oppressive.
If
were talking about economics, we would spend some time on Marx’s analysis of
capital, how capita1 oppresses labour, but capital is the product of labour.
And having created it, we have to smash it. Capital is a social relation; it is
among other things a relation of production, and it is a fetter on human progress today.
Similarly, the superstructures
of capitalist society are by and larger barriers to progress,
and they have to be smashed.
*****
Now where do ideas
come in? You’ll recall I started out with ideas sitting up at the top of the superstructure.
But that isn’t right at all.
Ideas are an integral
part of production. We’re not beavers making dams, or bees building hives. In human labour we think about what we’re going to do, often we design it. Ideas are part
of the economic base. But of course, they are also part of the superstructure.
When ideas are being
practically applied they can be part part of the base, but when people are
engaging in systematic development of ideas — at universities, for example — this is often
closely tied to the superstructure
of society. They develop a conservative quality as a society is consolidated and increasingly used to
preserve the status quo.
Ideas are also part
of the revolutionary struggle to change society. So we find that ideas correspond, in different
ways, to different aspects of society. There is one distinction between systems of ideas that is particularly important
here, and that is the distinction between ideology and science.
Ideologies are
systems of ideas that reflect the interests of groups in society. In a broad sense they
correspond to the interests of social classes, and that’s what we mean when we talk about
bourgeois ideology, but
you could also talk about ideologies representing other groups; for example we talk about the
ideology of feminism, or black nationalism; and we could also talk about the ideology of groups within the bourgeoisie. The former may
represent attempts to fight for liberation, but they don’t transcend
bourgeoisie ideological frameworks.
Marxists usually
define an ideology as a systematic false consciousness. It’s more than a wrong
idea, and certainly much more than just a pack of lies. It has a basis in reality, as that reality
is seen by a certain group, so it hangs together fairly well and to a degree it
works. Bourgeois ideology explains the world well enough to convince most
people most of the time, feminism convinces large numbers of people despite the most sophisticated
critiques we can throw at it.
And even the
absurdities we may see in an ideology are not just foolishness,
they have a material basis in the absurdities of
capitalist society. My favourite example is the real estate agent who told me in
all seriousness that his office was the place where something called the “value creating process” took
place. Now you and I know that the value of a house is the product of the labour of the building workers. But in the capitalist market, what
happens? If you sell your house you go to an agent, who does a valuation and presides
over the setting of a price. You see, without a Marxist analysis, even the ideology of the real estate agents makes a certain
amount of sense.
Nevertheless, an ideology is ultimately false,
and it is ultimately apologetic in the sense that is role is to defend a vested
interest rather than to seek the truth. On the other hand science is by
definition non-apologetic. It seeks the truth through a rigorous inquiry, testing its
theoretical conclusions against practical results. If over time the facts don’t
support our theory, we revise or scrap the theory. In this sense Marxism is, or
tries to be, scientific.
In Marx’s words:
There can
be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: - a ruthless criticism of the existing order
... that will shrink neither from its own discoveries nor from conflict with
the powers that be.”
Science
corresponds to the need for progress, and therefore is naturally suited to
advance the development of the productive forces. Consequently, only those groups in society which
have an interest in that development are capable of being consistently scientific.
Modern
science was created by the rising bourgeoisie. Its greatest triumph is
undoubtedly natural science. The old superstructures of feudal society resisted
the triumph of natural science because its triumph meant the victory of modern industry,
and therefore the victory of the new capitalist mode of production. That’s why
it’s not just the stupidity
of the
The
bourgeoisie was also the initial bearer of social science, including economics. Political economy was
the economic science of the rising capitalist class, and writers like Adam Smith and
David Ricardo achieved scientific insights which Karl Marx was able to build
on.
But
once the bourgeoisie was in power, and its political and other superstructures began playing the
role of preserving rather than changing the status quo, its economists began to
play the role of apologists
more and more.
That doesn’t
mean that individual writers, or individual disciplines, aren’t trying to be
scientific. Often they are, and we can learn a great deal from bourgeois
economics. But capitalist economics today always starts out from assumptions
that take the status quo for granted. In particular, they have abandoned the labour theory of value developed by the early political
economists, and they never start their theories from the process of production
where the most profound contradictions of capitalism arise. Instead they always
start with the realm of exchange and distribution.
Which means they are programmed not to get to the root of things. This in turn means they can’t establish the
overall picture, and for a very long time -- since Hegel really -- bourgeois
thinkers have stopped trying to analyse the world as
a totality. You get a series of fragmented disciplines, and philosophers give
them each their own special box. They might establish a few “interdisciplinary”
links, but it’s a bit like diplomatic relations and cultural exchange between
countries. Capitalist science these days is fragmentary by nature, and in that
sense it isn’t thoroughly “scientific”.
So who is going
to put together a truly scientific view of the world? This requires a new,
rising social class which seeks to ensure a new leap forward in the way
production is organized and carried out. That is, it depends on a revolutionary
working class.
Of course,
today such a class is lacking. Instead we have a reformist-minded or even
overtly pro-capitalist working class, which accepts the logic of bourgeois
social theories. There is a very limited degree to which we can try to fill the
gap. While we try to develop Marxist theory scientifically, the reality is that
our efforts are fragmentary.
For that reason,
I think it’s more meaningful to say that we are fighting to create a Marxist
science than to claim that we possess one. But the principle of the thing is
that we can only have science as opposed to ideology – especially in the area
of social theory where political implications are so directly involved – if we
have a social class that has an interest in radical change rather than
defending the status quo.
So ideology –
systematic false consciousness with an apologetic tendency – is linked to THE superstructure, and to social
relations of control. It helps defend the status quo. Science might be
considered A superstructure, at
least where it’s institutionalized, say in the editorial board of a Marxist
theoretical journal, but it is nevertheless dedicated to advancing the forces
of production and this brings it into conflict with the political and
ideological superstructures of capitalist society.
Neither
science, nor a new mode of production more advanced than capitalism can triumph
without a struggle. So once again we find that our materialist analysis of social development
brings us up against the central importance of conscious intervention by human beings.
In
the socialist movement of Kautsky’s time, the
question of human intervention
was often posed in terms of the individual: what was the role of the individual given the vast
panorama of economic and social forces that drove history forward. This was something
both the determinists in the movement, and their opponents, found hard to come to terms with.
a leading intellectual like Kautsky or Plekhanov
hardly wanted to say there was no role for individuals, if only because it deprived them of any importance. So they would tend to say,
well, individuals can speed things up a bit, or give them a different flavour. Rosa Luxemburg, who wanted to ground Marxist theory on rank and file
activity by workers,
nevertheless ended up with a very similar formulation in practice: you have to find your
place in the historical process, she said, and help to drive the wheel of
history forward. But it still seems to be a bloody big wheel.
Sometimes,
of course, it is like that. Right now, history is rolling along without taking much notice
of us. Economic and social developments can make even a significant intervention by socialists, let
alone our victory, impossible.
On
the other hand, at times a window of opportunity opens up where we can make a difference. The
revolutionary crisis in
Even
important individuals in the ruling class, Malcolm Fraser or Bob Hawke or Peter
Abeles, can only make a difference because they have organisations behind them. This is going to be far more true of an individual revolutionary trying to fight against all the forces of
capitalist society.
We
need to develop a scientific theory and root it in a living movement. Only with that movement can
Marxist science really flower, and only with a scientific outlook can the
movement seize the historic opportunities as they open up.