Marx qualifies the superstructure' in the Preface as legal and political'. He also refers, independently, to definite forms of social consciousness'. He fails to make clear whether the latter are part of the superstructure, though his language in this instance suggests otherwise, This is what has led Cohen to argue they are not. Elsewhere, however, Marx – like Engels in the letters discussed above – frequently describes the entire superstructure as ideal' or ‘ideological', and explicitly includes forms of consciousness within it. Indeed, as we shall see in chapter 4, in some passages where the term superstructure is used we would be justified in concluding that its primary, if not exclusive, reference is to consciousness. The sentence later in the Preface itself, which distinguishes the material transtormation of the economic conditions of production’ from the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out' might be taken to support this latter interpretation. On the other hand, the reference in the preceding paragraph to legal relations as well as forms of state' having their roots in the material conditions of life' might incline us to the more restrictive institutional definition favoured by Cohen.
But again, Marx's apparent curtailment of the scope of the category at this point in the Preface may have a simple explanation. He is here recapitulating a stage in his own intellectual biography, the critique of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie which he undertook in 1843. Hegel's central concerns in that work were with law and state, and Marx embarked upon his critique to clarify his own views on the state following his personal encounters with Prussian officialdom as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung.2 The Hegelian background, however, muddies the waters still further with Marx's introduction of the term ‘civil society' as a synonym for the totality of the material conditions of life', whose ‘anatomy . . . has to be sought in political economy'. Is civil society' as used here merely another expression for economic structure', or an intermediary level between base and superstructure? At all events, there is considerable room for uncertainty over what exactly, for the 1859 Preface, the superstructure' comprises - or excludes.
This problem of the meaning of the key terms in this most pregnant' summary of historical materialism is not, I believe, generally raised in commentary for a very simple reason. We all think we know what Marx means when he uses these concepts. But it should be clear by now that it is not the text itself which gives us warrant for this presumption.³ Nor is our interpretive confidence as a rule founded on any sort of scholarly examination of how Marx uses such concepts elsewhere, the study of the theory' in its concrete applications of the sort recommended by Engels. It is in fact simply the authority of the long tradition of 'orthodox Marxism' which has accustomed us to understand these concepts, without demur, in particular ways. With minor caveats, these are the ways advocated by Cohen and outlined above.
But much hangs on this apparently semantic question. Lucio Colletti, for instance, in his justly famous essay on the Marxism of the Second International - a Marxism not unlike Cohen's - has argued that the orthodoxy of Kautsky and Plekhanov and the revisionism of Bernstein equally vulgarized Marx's understanding of production itself. Engels's ‘testament', in his view, unwittingly succoured this vulgarization. For although Engels argued against outright economic determinism, the way in which he did so - conceding the ‘inherent relative independence', and therewith the separability, of superstructures from their economic bases - inadvertently reinforced an economistic, technologistic conception of the latter. Hiving off superstructures drained production itself of its social and cultural dimensions, for Colletti Marx's crucial insight. In Colletti's own words:
what Bernstein shared with Plekhanov, and what Engels's self-criticism' could not correct but only confirm, was the profound adulteration of the concept of the economy', or, better still, of ‘social relations of production', precisely the core and foundation of Marx's entire work. The so-called economic sphere' - which in Marx had embraced both the production of things and the production (objectification) of ideas; production and intersubjective communication; material production and the production of social relations (for Marx, the relation between man and nature was also a relationship between man and man and vice versa) - was now seen as one isolated factor, separated from the other moments' and thereby emptied of any effective socio-historical content, representing, on the contrary, an antecedent sphere, prior to any human mediation. Social production is thus transformed into production techniques'; the object of political economy becomes the object of technology. Since this technique', which is material production' in the strict sense of the term, is separated from that other simultaneous production achieved by men, the production of their relations (without which, for Marx, the former would not exist), the materialist conception of history tends to become a technological conception of history. (1972: 65)
16
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
17