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!
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