In this connection, it is worth pausing over a much discussed footnote to Capital I. Marx is defending his formulations in the 1859 Preface, against the charge that all this is very true for our own times, in which material interests predominate, but not for the Middle Ages, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme'. He goes on:
this much, however, is clear, that the Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which thev gained a livelihood which explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part. (1867a: 82n)
Certainly there is room for argument as to exactly how the mode in which they gained a livelihood' explains why religion and politics respectively played the chief part' in the life of these societies. Althusser for instance invokes this passage in defence of his structural causality'. My point, however, is that nothing Marx says here denies that politics in antiquity, and Catholicism in the Middle Ages, actually did reign supreme'.
Marx's argument, then, is about how law, the state, religion and so forth should be conceived. It is not, or at least not primarily, about their causal status - determinate or determined - in history. That they are denied causal primacy is a consequence of Marx's prior denial of their very separability. If they cannot in themselves determine or explain historical development, this is because they have no separable existence in themselves. But this does not mean that when properly conceived - not in themselves', but as organic related' (1857: 88) to people's productive activities - they lack causal efficacy. Engels makes this very clear in one of the letters I cited in chapter 1. He says it is ridiculous' to assume that because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres which play a part in history we also deny them any effect on history' (1893: 92, Engels's emphasis).
The structural similarity between Marx's critique of idealism and his analysis of ‘ideological spheres' is striking. I believe this to be more than a mere coincidence. Marx attacks the independence of
superstructures’ in the same terms as he does idealism's fictitious historical subjects, because he believes superstructures’ actually to be idealizations comparable to the philosophers'‘speculative constructions'. They are constituted in the same way as Hegel's Geist or Stirner's ‘self-consciousness'. Law, state, religion, and so on can be conceived as independent, self-acting spheres, only by virtue of a reification of exactly the sort idealism engages in with regard to consciousness. In reality, they do not exist outwith people's materialistic connection'. For Marx, ‘superstructures’ are not, as they immediately appear to be, levels of reality which are substantially separate from the ‘base'. They are, rather, ideological forms of appearance – Erscheinungsformen, to use his own concept – of the totality of social relations which make up that base itself, and their ideologicality consists precisely in their appearance of real independence. The proper interpretive context for Marx's metaphor of basis and superstructure, then, is that of his critique of ideology. Superstructures, contrary to Cohen, are the ‘social forms of consciousness' in which the essential relations' of society are immediately grasped, and their analysis is coterminous with Marx's critique of immediate appearances.
Alasdair MacIntyre argued similarly (and correctly drew attention to the relevance here of Marx's Hegelian background) long ago:
As Marx depicts it the relation between basis and superstructure is not only not mechanical, it is not even causal. What may be misleading is Marx's Hegelian vocabulary. Marx certainly talks of the basis determining' the superstructure, and of a correspondence' between them. But the reader of Hegel's Logic will realise that what Marx envisages is something to be understood in terms of the way the nature of the concept of a given class, for example, may determine the concept of membership of that class ... The economic basis of a society is not its tools, but the people co-operating using those particular tools in the manner necessary to their use and the superstructure consists in the social consciousness moulded by and the shape of this co-operation ... Creating the basis, you create the superstructure. These are not two activities but one. (quoted in Thompson, 1973: 189n)
If this reading is correct, to construe the base/superstructure metaphor as a model of the relation between substantially discrete levels, practices or ‘instances' within the social formation, and conceptualize that relation in causal (or functional) terms, is to replicate exactly the ideological illusion of superstructural separability Marx is above all concerned to confute. Such constructions spectacularly miss the central point of his argument. The base/superstructure metaphor applies to the relation between social being and social consciousness, it is not a putative model of societal 'levels' at all. We might recall, here, the several occasions in Engels's late letters - and comparable passages can aiso be cited from Marx³ – on which he relates base and superstructure as, respectively, content and form. 4
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IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
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