Note the exact words in which, for instance, he criticizes Proudhon in another text of 1846:
Because M. Proudhon places eternal ideas, the categories of pure reason, on the one side and human beings and their practical life, which according to him is the application of these categories, on the other, one finds with him from the beginning a dualism between life and ideas, between soul and body, a dualism which recurs in many forms. You can see how this antagonism is nothing but the incapacity of M. Proudhon to understand the profane origin and the profane history of the categories which he deifies. (1846b: 192)
It is Proudhon's very dualism, the antagonism' of life and ideas, that Marx rejects. Certainly this has the corollary that history is to be explained from living individuals', and not their consciousness or its products considered in artificial abstraction or isolation. But this is a corollary, and it is the main argument from which it follows that is of most relevance here. For that argument implies, amongst other things, that the sense of ‘determination' in such propositions as social being determines consciousness’ cannot be the standard causal one, in which the related terms are seen as being merely externally or contingently connected.
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Now it is notable (and usually goes totally unremarked in commentary) that the structure of Marx's argument against the historical primacy of (ostensibly) other elements of what is normally taken to be the superstructure - in particular, law and state - is identical with that of his critique of idealism. His denial of superstructural primacy, just as with that of the primacy of the ideal’more generally, rests on a prior denial of superstructural independence – relative’ or otherwise. Thus The German Ideology uncompromisingly avers that:
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness . . . no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. (1846a: 38)
Marx extends the argument quite explicitly to the institutions of politics and law. 'It must not be forgotten that law has just as little an independent history as religion' (ibid.: 80). The idea that politics is an independent sphere of activity, which develops in its own way' is one shared [by] all ideologists' (ibid.: 528). ‘There is no history of politics, law, science, etc., of art, religion, etc.' (ibid.: 671). I shall exemplify this argument in detail with regard to state and law below. But first, let us consider further what kind of argument it is.
If, with Cohen and ‘traditional historical materialism', and with relative autonomy' theorists, we see the ‘economic structure of society' as exclusive of morality, law, religion, science, art, politics, and the rest, then we have to conclude from these curt propositions that Marx was indeed an economic determinist, and a pretty vulgar one at that. This is implausible, given the oft-remarked undeterministic character of any of his substantive historical analyses, like The Eighteenth Brumaire or part 8 of Capital I. What Marx actually says in these passages, however, is rather different. His concern is to deny that law, religion, politics and so on have a history in themseives, which is independent of that of production and its social relations. He does not say these are epiphenomenal, secondary, subordinate, or otherwise marginal factors in history as such. The two claims are very different.
Marx's point – in fact a mirror-image of Acton's criticism of his supposed position - is that law, state, and so on have no existence independent of people's ‘materialistic connection' (ibid.: 41). This is why, like the subjects of idealistic philosophy generally, they cannot in themselves be seen as the motive forces of history. Like consciousness', they have no existence in themselves'; to treat them as independent entities is to reify them. But this does not, in logic or in Marx's texts, entail a denial or downgrading of their historical import as such. Indeed, if they are inseparable from people's material production and material intercourse', and the latter is held to be 'basic' to society and history, such a conclusion would be somewhat self-contradictory.
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IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
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