For Marx the analytic reification of superstructures - like the fetishes considered in chapter 1 - bespeaks a real social process of estrangement. Given his views on consciousness, it would be surprising if this were not the case. Marx sees ideas, categories' as being but the abstract ideal expression of social relations'(1846b: 189). Accordingly, where, as in capitalism, social relations take on the mystifying form of the violence of things' (1846a: 95), their ‘abstract ideal expression’ is likely to be a reified one. The German Ideology explicitly develops this argument:
Within the division of labour relationships are bound to acquire independent existence in relation to individuals. All relations can be expressed in language only in the form of concepts. That these general ideas and concepts are looked upon as mysterious forces is the necessary result of the fact that the real relations, of which they are the expression, have acquired independent existence. (1846a: 406)
The Grundrisse advances a similar thesis. Contrasting the (relatively transparent) personal dependency-relations of precapitalist societies – kinship and Herrschaft – with the objective dependency-relations' of the capitalist market, Marx argues that:
These objective dependency-relations, also appear, in antithesis to those of personal dependency (the objective dependency-relation is nothing more than social relations which have become independent and now enter into opposition to the seemingly independent individuals; i.e. the reciprocal relations of production separated from and autonomous of individuals) in such a way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master. Relations can be expressed, however, oniy in ideas, and thus philosophers have determined the reign of ideas to be the peculiarity of the new age. (1858a: 163–4)
It was at such abstractions', rather than the relations of which they were the expression, that the Young Hegelians characteristically tilted. The objective of Marx's critique was to refocus attention on the relations themselves, to locate the secret of the holy family' in the earthly family' (1845b).
In Marx's later writings, a distinction between the substance of essential relations' and the variously misleading phenomenal forms' in which they present themselves to consciousness is a systematic, organising principle of his critique of capitalism.4 He held that science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided' (1865a: 817), and that in general ‘it is only the direct form of manifestation of relations that is reflected in [people's] brains and not their inner connection' (1867b). In capitalism, though not in all societies, these two diverge. Patrick Murray, criticizing my Marx's Method, has suggested that Marx leans heavily here on Hegel's distinctive logic of essence, which can be typified in the phrase "the essence must appear as something other than itself (namely, the phenomena)"(1983: 496). Under certain conditions, essential relations necessarily appear to their subjects in misleading forms (and Marx's critique of appearances shows why this should be the case, in terms of the character of the underlying relations themselves). In Murray's words, Marx works with a non-traditional model which conceives of the discrepancies between essence and appearance to be a necessary consequence of the very nature of the essence' (ibid.). I have exemplified this above for commodity and capital fetishism. This Hegelian logic of essence is, for Marx, accurately expressive of a specifically alienated social reality: the enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’ of capitalism with its personification of things and conversion of production relations into entities' (1865a: 830). Only such a logic can penetrate this religion of everyday life (ibid.) - again we see Marx's persistent analogy between religious and other fetishes. In this sense Lenin was quite right when he famously observed that Capital could not be fully understood without reference to Hegel's Logic (1916: 180).
It is exactly such Erscheinungsformen which comprise Marx's superstructure'. It is the discrepancy between essential relations and the misleading forms in which they are experientially manifested⁵ which makes sense - I am tempted to say, which alone can make sense - of his repeated characterizations of superstructures as ‘ideal' or ‘ideological'. This argument has an unsurprising corollary, for those who have followed my reconstruction of historical materialism thus far. That the base/superstructure metaphor has been understood in the way it conventionally has is itself readily explicable in terms of Marx's own ‘logic of essence'. It is an ideological consequence of the fact that within capitalism, social relations of production do manifest themselves phenomenally in the form of obstensibly independent economic and non-economicspheres'. Here, as elsewhere, traditional historical materialism' uncritically takes appearance for reality. It grounds its analytic categories on the natural, self-understood forms of social life' of the bourgeois world, whose characteristics it then proceeds unhistorically to generalize to all social formations. It is the depth, the tenacity, the sheer massive obviousness of these capitalist Erscheinungsformen that makes what Marx was saying so eternally difficult to grasp.
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IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
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