Base and Superstructure

Althusser contends that the base/superstructure model is first put forward by Marx as a model that represents the “social whole.”⁵⁷ He is right to assert that the division of social reality into a base and superstructure originates in Marx: in a footnote to the first chapter of Capital, Marx writes that his

view is that each particular mode of production, and the relations of production corresponding to it at each given moment, in short the ‘economic structure of society’, is ‘the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’ and that the

57 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Mapping Ideology, edit. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2012), 104.

‘mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life.’⁵⁸

Marx is arguing that institutions that are not immediately economic in their nature are determined in their character by the mode of production. Furthermore, beyond this institutional level, the superstructure is also made up of “definite modes of social consciousness,” which will also be referred to in this work as

“superstructural effects.” There are, then, three layers or “floors” to social reality, two of which are determined by the economic base: first there is the mode of production itself which then determines the politico-legal level as well as the ideological level.⁵⁹

Asserting that the economic base determines all other layers of society is not to say that superstructural institutions and effects do not play any role in determining of social reality–the effects of the Tsarist state in early 20^th century Russian society, as they were analyzed by Lenin, would serve as an obvious counter example to this. Rather, as Althusser argues, “It is possible to say that the floors of the superstructure are not determinant in the last instance, but that they are determined by the effectivity of the base; that if they are determinant in their own (as yet undefined) ways, this is true only in so far as they are determined by the base.”⁶⁰ This more nuanced interpretation of the determinant character of the superstructure fits well with the discussion of the logic of the necessity of the

58 Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (London: Penguin, 1990), trans. Ben Fowkes, 175n. This quote is actually an amalgamation of two passages from the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The idea is not introduced to socialist political theory in a footnote. I have chosen to cite the footnote in Capital in order to demonstrate that the validity of this social model is maintained by Marx throughout his writing and that it exerts a definite influence on the analyses of Captial.

59 Althusser rephrases this subdivision of “floors” of the superstructure as a division between the

“politico-legal” level of law and the state and the level of “ideology.” Althusser, “Ideological State Apparatuses,” 105.

60 Althusser, “Ideological State Apparatuses,” 105.

vanguard party discussed in the previous chapter. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the capacity of the Russian proletariat to carry out a revolution without the anterior development of bourgeois relations of production can only be possible given the context of Russia’s location within a larger, increasingly global, capitalist system–in other words, bourgeois relations of production and circulation in other countries were naturally beginning to spread to Russia through global networks of circulation and production.

From Althusser’s brief illustration of this social theory of the determinant economic base and the determined societal superstructure I can draw a few key points that will be helpful in setting up the rest of this chapter. First, the whole of the economic mode of production determines or produces the specific character of the societal superstructure. Second, Althusser asserts that the base/superstructure model is a theory of the whole of social reality; therefore, to understand any development of society it is necessary to first understand how it originates from economic relations. Third, the superstructure splits into two levels: an institutional state-centric level and an ethereal and decentered level of ideology, or, to borrow Marx’s phrase, “definite modes of social consciousness.” These floors of the superstructure can be determinant of social relations, but only in so far as the superstructural levels themselves have already been determined by the economic base. Fourth and finally, the economic sphere, I would conclude, is privileged with a high level of autonomy and that all beings produced in other spheres of society are rooted in that autonomous and already determined economic sphere.

The autonomy of the economic sphere with regard to the superstructures is the

only way to explain why it is given such a determinate role in societal formation.

If the superstructure could effect profound changes of the economic base that did not develop from the determinations of the base itself, then it would be impossible to say that the economy is determinate of the social whole. With this argument in mind, let us now turn to Capital and compare the economic theory contained within that text with the topographical model that was just laid out. This will allow me to evaluate the logical compatibility of the principle of economic autonomy against Marx’s own theory of exploitation.