Base and superstructure

1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias In Marxist theory, societies consist of two parts: the base (or substructure) and superstructure.

The superstructure refers to society's other relationships and ideas not directly relating to production including its culture, institutions, roles, rituals, religion, media, and state.

The historian E. P. Thompson argues that:Meanwhile in serious intellectual circles the argument about basis/superstructure goes on and on and on... A whole continent of discourse is being developed, with its metropolitan centres & its villas in the mountains, which rests, not upon the solid globe of historical evidence, but on the precarious point of a strained metaphor.

[5]Ellen Meiksins Wood says: 'The base/superstructure metaphor has always been more trouble than it is worth',[6] while Terry Eagleton describes base and superstructure as 'this now universally reviled paradigm'.

For example, in Paul Thomas' words: "Without Marx's juxtaposition of base to superstructure we would probably not be speaking of social contradictions at all but would instead be discussing science, technology, production, labor, the economy, & the state along lines very different from those that are commonplace today".

[11] The latter work, Hall argues, offered a more sophisticated picture of the interaction between base and superstructure and showed Marx was concerned with the "necessary complexity of the social formations of advancing capitalism and of the relations between its different levels".

In summarizing results from his East Elbia research he notes that, contrary to the base and superstructure model "we have become used to," there exists a reciprocal relationship between the two.

[14] Walter Rodney, the Guyanese political activist and African historian, in the 1970s discussed the role of Marx's superstructure in the context of development cycles and colonialism.

In China, religious, educational and bureaucratic qualifications were of utmost importance, and government was in the hands of state officials rather than being run by the landlords on their own feudal estates.

[16] Rodney died in 1980, however, and did not have time to witness the effects of the Chinese economic reform of the 1980s ("socialist market economy") that arguably had made China the greatest capitalist country of the world by 2016.

Freudo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich's discipline of analysis known as sex economy is an attempt to understand the divergence of the perceived base and superstructure that occurred during the global economic crisis from 1929 to 1933.

Reich focused on the role of sexual repression in the patriarchal family system as a way to understand how mass support for Fascism could arise in a society.

It's a perfect way to ignore how desire works within the infrastructure, how it invests in it, how it takes part in it, how, in this respect, it organizes power and the repressive system.

Law regarding slavery likewise concerned mainly rules for relations between slave-holders (buying and selling, warranties, etc.

Conversely, in modern societies, domestic labour is barely addressed by law; plainly this is not because it is not prevalent, but because it is not sufficiently contentious to become a matter of significant political dispute, and therefore to require a legal form.

[27] Colin Jenkins provides (2014) a critique on the role of the capitalist state in the era of neoliberalism, using base and superstructure theory as well as the work of Nicos Poulantzas.

Thus Sesardic argues that Marx's claim ultimately amounts to nothing more than a trivial observation that does not make meaningful statements or explain anything about the real world.