after trying to advocate marxism to my working class friend who is tragically still taken in by liberal propaganda, it seems that the base and superstructure concept sparked his curiosity the most. does anyone have any favorite explanations, whether it's your own or someone else's, that would be good to share with them? Memes or illustrations would be good too!
The Matrix is a movie about superstructure. You have the material world where humans are kept in pods producing value for the machines and you have the Matrix where they think they live their lives, which is built and maintained by the ruling machines to contain them. The real Earth where machines rule with an iron fist is the base, and the Matrix is the superstructure.
The Matrix is presented to mankind as a natural, material fact, but it isn't. The machines are able to fuck with the Matrix to pursue their own ends within it because it's a mental construct. Superstructure is malleable, and the ruling class will bend it to maintain their power.
Something about living in the Matrix rubs humans the wrong way. Of course it does. It's built with someone else's interest in mind at humans' expense. But they don't know what it is that's bothering them because the controlling Matrix is the only thing they've ever known, it's Normal. But little by little, people who can't abide the Matrix wake up. They realize that it's fake, that things don't need to be the way they are. They learn that they themselves can manipulate the Matrix, and they do so to pursue their own purpose - human liberation.
I ended up writing an entire essay about this lol: https://joeybuttafoucault.substack.com/p/base-and-ideological-superstructure?sd=pf
This post was prompted by a question on hexbear—
Took fucking psychic damage from that
wow thank you very very much! I read the whole thing and it was extremely helpful and interesting just for my own understanding. I hope I can do it justice for my friend, who seems a little adverse to anything resembling long-form, lol. I especially appreciated how well you linked art production to the economic base, going all the way back to 'cave art'...so fascinating. Maybe I should read some Lacan!! By the way I also have read your article about maine lobstermen and I loved it!
Haha thank you. Lacan is a deliberately bad writer so I recommend reading about him rather than reading him himself? I found this article pretty helpful:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/
I don’t actually know how accurate it is but one day I managed to set aside a few hours to tear through it, take notes, and google anything I didn’t understand. Afterward I felt like I knew his jargon a lot better. It was also helpful for understanding his ideas about psychology, and they work well with Marxism (but just become idealism without it). There are other good books about him too.
My go-to is that culture is downstream of economics. A fishing village will sing fishing songs and tell fishing stories, a farming village will do the same, and a war village...
Maybe not exactly the same concept,but people find it easy to understand
no, this is so good! I love how succinct it is, just my sort of speaking style. thank you very much comrade :)
Very cool, thank you. This person does like video games so it could be a great example..however i will take your caution under advisement! :)
I don't really have favorite examples, but you can find them everywhere, as the dichotomy ties together the things that we focus on all the time as commies. The base is (for us) capitalist social relations to production, a dominant force, and the superstructure is the other social relations we have. As a dialectic, they influence one another, both in favor of capital on average, with the base largely determining what is possible and how people can imagine a world in the superstructure and the superstructure, in turn, helping ensure the maintenance of capitalist relations to production.
The recent (almost) rail strike has examples of both and we can all see who won there, and it's a story that plays out all the time: relations to production create the contradictions leading to an impetus for unionization and striking but also forwarding the interests of the owner class (dominant) means that the government (part of the superstructure) will intervene on capital's behalf to crush labor rather than crush capital. The idea that the government would nationalize BNSF or force it into collective ownership is unfathomable in the imperial core. And by crushing worker power via the government, capital is reinforced.
There are other salient aspects of the superstructure here as well. The mainstream media holds vast sway as the only source of information most people seek out, and it unilaterally accepts and forwards the pro-capital narrative that it's rail workers vs. the economy rather than greedy capitalists (or, better, owner class interests) vs. the economy. To try to understand how that can happen, how the obvious and true narrative is entirely absent, we have to understand the influence of the base on the superstructure: why every mainstream editor follows a pro-capitalist strategy when hiring, when editing, and who's on editorial boards. And even before that, why an anti-capitalist analysis is never taught in school and instead one learns fairy tales about meritocracy and material well-being. Why unions don't have the ear of the press. Why the left gets shut out of social media platforms when they get too explicit and too many people start listening. Why we can't mass-mobilize to support striking workers even when we want to (work or die). And because all of those things are constrained in favor of capital, capitalist social relations are reinforced: the union is weaker, the rail companies stronger, working to eat becomes more extreme.
yes this is exactly what I need. your last paragraph especially is what i'm desperate for him to understand! this is a great way to bring all the pieces of evidence together about why i consistently and vehemently appear contrarian to accepted popular narratives, found even in places still often thought as having free and open discussions about politics (reddit etc). thank you so much!!
The easiest way of conceptualizing the base and superstructure is to just say base = economics and superstructure = politics. Avoid the temptation of trying to conceptualize the superstructure as some nebulous notion of culture, arts, or ideology. Jumping immediately to Gramsci is a mistake. They compose part of the superstructure, but the superstructure isn't only that. The superstructure is also political parties, the government, the media, the military, and law enforcement. Religion is part of the superstructure, but it's not just religious text or dogma, but the actual material religious institution and organizations as well.
People internalizing capitalist realism is the capitalist superstructure maintaining the capitalist base, but pinkertons beating the shit out of striking workers so scabs can cross the picket line or pigs destroying homeless encampments and forcing them on a death march is also the the capitalist superstructure maintaining the capitalist base. The superstructure is as material as the base and the way in which the superstructure maintains the base is material as well. Reagan firing striking air traffic controllers and getting the national guard to fill in as scabs is a good example of the superstructure (national guard) maintaining (filling in as scabs) the base (air traffic controllers as a form of wage labor).
It also means socialist art is insufficient towards countering the capitalist superstructure because the capitalist superstructure is not just capitalist art. Producing good socialist art with a principled anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist message isn't stopping the pigs from blinding people with "less than lethal" rubber bullets. For that, you would need to build a counter-superstructure that's more substantial than art.
thank you for the insights, they were very helpful. i appreciate and agree with your point about needing a counter-superstructure more substantial than art.
Halim Alrah is a youtube with incredible videos on Marxist Philosophy which short of just reading Marx is pretty good
"Not me making a state with laws that supports my way of life and secures my wealth"
yes I saw one of those videos, and I loved it! so funny and accurate
Base = The distribution system for food
Superstructure = The man made institutions that support and perpetuate the currently existing distribution system for food
You can expand on those as you see fit, food is the primary commodity, but a more accurate term would be labor values/use values. With our current Base distribution being focused on extraction of surplus value from labor and exchange of use values in commodity form with the superstructural institutions that support that system being Banks, Military, Police, Mass Media, and Public Education.
thank you, this is a perfect and straightforward explanation and I very much appreciate your writing it :) Point taken about the terms labor values/ use values, I should familiarize myself with those some more
