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.
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.
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.