Base and Superstructure
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e. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 words 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.
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 mens material life process, which can be empirically established and which is bound to material preconditions.
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”.
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.
Or, as he puts it elsewhere, language is the immediate actuality of thought.
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.
Marxs 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 individuals 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 develop