So one thing I’m trying to understand with the base and the superstructure is with respect to tech startups and the approach to engineering that they take. Basically:
- Start ups are in a constant cycle of chasing venture capital funding, needing to show constant growth of users/customers at fairly regular intervals
- This leads to a myopic focus on quality in engineering, as it is (incorrectly) deemed as a hindrance to delivering new features that would allow for increased growth. (In reality, the initial cost of focusing quality is quickly surpassed by the drag of poor code and technical decision making forever increasing as it is left unaddressed, but I digress).
- Further to that, early employees of the company are strongly incentivized in the short term, by relatively large stock option grants. These grants are generally exercisable after 1 year, and most folks will move on to another company after 2 years. As such, there is no incentive for them to fix the engineering mess they have created if the company is growing - someone else will be employed at a later date to solve that problem, for significantly less equity in the company. These later employees are effectively doing the work of repairing the poor work that the early employees left in their wake. A technical debt Ponzi scheme, if you will.
So given all that - where is the base and the superstructure? Is it all base, as it is a combination of means and relations of production? Is tech bro “fuck quality” culture the superstructure here?
Sorry if this makes no sense or is baby brained, I’ve been stewing on this idea of tech debt being a Ponzi scheme for a while and I want to be able to talk about it correctly from a materialist perspective. And I’m not the brightest at this stuff :comfy:
The relations and means of production are all the coding/incentives/stock options, etc. Meanwhile (and this shows the spiral shape), the fuck quality culture comes out of those material conditions and, in turn, begins to reflect back upon the material conditions that produced it.
Basically, keep in mind that neither arrow in the circuit is deterministic or either the base or superstructure is homogenous. Raymond Williams talks about the idea of "dominant, residual, and emergent," basically that just because the dominant mode of production might be capitalist, it doesn't mean there aren't residual ideological and material (base) formations from feudalism or other material settlements.
In short I think you're already on the right track here
this diagram was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me i think. in feudalism the superstructure was like kings and nobles and the church and shit and now it's news media and billionaires and hillary clinton and shit. also jeff bezos is a product of the base but also has become part of the superstructure, shaping and maintaining the base. it's why you can't just get rid of bezos and musk and everything will be fine, but also why they are bad because they are a product of the exploitative capitalist base but have now become part of the architecture to maintain it (bezos + musk being shorthand for the ruling class essentially in this example).
I like to think of the superstructure as the necessary scaffolding that empowers the base and lets it continue existing. Industrial capitalism needed literate workers so we got schools. Private industry didn't want to foot the bill on that so we got public schools. Technology didn't exist so that trades could be totally eliminated, so we got trade schools. Rich kids wanted the best education and it served as a networking tool for industry so we have private schools. It's not that schools wouldn't exist under any other mode, or didn't exist before capitalism, it's just that the particular flavor of schooling exists because capitalism needed it.
I think Psychology is a great one because it developed almost entirely out of early capitalism's need to understand and control those who didn't want to work. I'm not saying it's invalid and we shouldn't study people's minds. I myself have benefited from psychology and psychiatry. But it's origins come from people not wanting to work and capitalism trying to pathologize that rather than address why work was unfulfilling and caused psychic damage.
in feudalism the superstructure was like kings and nobles and the church and shit and now it’s news media and billionaires and hillary clinton and shit
That's where Debord becomes interesting. Historical materialism works as far back as you can reasonably deduce some division of labour. The economic structures generating the social ones have been around since the first time one person needed to manipulate another into accepting less for more. When you understand base and superstructure as spectacle, the mechanics of that seduction and its parasitic attachment to our needs and its substitution of them for imagery representing them, it feels as holistic to me as ecology.
And in the US, the church (not Church, necessarily) is still very much a part of that superstructure. From that "Protestant work ethic" of the pilgrims to laundering our desire to steal native land through a belief in "saving" their souls, to today's white evangelicalism and their supply side Jesus.
Right now liberation theology and other cooler forms of Christianity are a small minority, but under a socialist base I believe they would naturally become the dominant form of Christianity over the current reactionary form of it we have now. Or it withers away.
I'm glad that relations of production are included in the base. I think that's an easy noob mistake to make - to think the base is just material things you can feel and hold.
The base shapes and maintains the superstructure while it maintains and shapes the base?
What is this a contradiction? :stalin-stressed:
dam... makes u think... the superstructure really does reinforce the base... dam
