The German Ideology, for instance, speaks of the state and the rest of the idealistic superstructure' (1846a: 49), and ‘family and political relations, together with their entire ideological superstructure' (ibid.: 417) – an interesting formulation, since here it seems to be family and political relations, the latter eminently superstructural (and the former ignored) in standard accounts, which serve as base to a superstructure which is entirely ideological. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx writes similarly that upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life, The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations'(1852: 128). With this last quote – incidentally, but a point I shall return to in my final chapter – we are in a different language game to that in which the base/superstructure issue is generally posed. Instead of the silent dance of structural correspondences', we glimpse the creative, and conscious, activity of real individuals.
At the very least then, social forms of consciousness' were certainly part of what Marx understood by the superstructure'. Cohen thinks it a relatively trivial matter whether or not we classify them as such. I do not. For I believe that Marx's references to the superstructure as ideal' or idealistic' hold the key to his entire base/ superstructure metaphor. The superstructure', in brief, is simply the ‘ideal' form in which the totality of material' relations which make up the base' itself are manifested to consciousness, not a substantially separable order of reality at all. Arguing this will take some time. Let me begin with an apparent digression.
II
Marx, of course, held a materialist view of consciousness. For him, ‘life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life' (1846a: 38). In the words of the 1859 Preface, ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness' (1859a).' The problem, however, is what exactly Marx meant by such claims. A common interpretation, epitomized in the works of Plekhanov or the younger Lenin, is to read Marx as inverting the primacy of the ideal’ - consciousness, thought, ideas – over the material' world (allegedly)
asserted in German idealist, and particularly Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy. Where Hegel held that the ideal determined the material, Marx argued the contrary. In a famous formulation, he found the Hegelian dialectic ‘standing on its head', and turned it 'right side up again' (1873: 20). Marx was thus like his materialist philosophical precursors in that, in Lenin's words, he takes matter as primary and regards consciousness, thought, sensations, as secondary' (1908: 46). His specific novelty, and debt to Hegel, consists in conceiving of matter itself 'dialectically'
In my view,² Marx's critique of idealism involves something quite different from, and very much more radical than, this straightforward inversion of-idealism's supposed order of priorities, and the inversion metaphor is in important ways misleading. What Marx does, in criticizing Hegel and his left' followers – Stirner, Bauer, and the rest – is first and foremost to deny the very existence of the ideal as a separable entity. The cunning of reason', the ‘spirit of the age' Hegel's Weltgeist, the Young Hegelians'‘self-consciousness', and so on, cannot for Marx be the subjects of history for the simple reason that they do not exist. They are reifications: philosophers' fictions, abstractions made flesh, speculative constructions, just like in the 'fruit' example we considered in the last chapter. Marx's central criticism of idealist history is that it is ‘an imagined activity of imagined subjects'(1846a: 38).
He ridicules what is involved in thus being German, profound and speculative' (ibid.: 542) on numerous occasions. The most famous of these is probably The Holy Family's discussion of the mystery of speculative construction', on which I drew in the last chapter, Here is another such recipe:
The whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history . . . is . . .
confined to the following three efforts.
No. 1. One must separate the ideas of those ruling for empirical reasons, under empirical conditions and as empirical individuals, from these actual rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas and illusions in history.
No. 2. One must bring an order into this rule of ideas, prove a mystical connection among the successive ruling ideas, which is managed by regarding them as acts of self-determination on the part of the concept' . . .
No. 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this ‘self-determining concept', it is changed into a person - ‘Self-consciousness’ - or, to appear thoroughly materialistic ... into the thinkers', the philosophers', the ideologists, who are once again understood as the manufacturers of history. (1846a: 64)
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IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
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