> On Jan 14, 2025, at 12:01 PM, sartesian via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2025 at 01:51 PM, Mark Baugher wrote:
> I can't agree that you have more than half the story here. You're missing the
> dialectical relationship between structure (base) and superstructure.
> 1) OK, if I discern a conflict between means and relations of production as a
> feature common to U&CD and struggles for "self-determination" and that's no
> more than half the story, what's your other half, concretely?
The "other half" is the superstructure. You're describing what Marx and Engels
called the "base," "basis," or "real foundation" and not what they and a long
line of writers including Gramsci call the "superstructure"
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
> Pick a country, Ireland, Indonesia, Angola, Mexico and provide that "other
> half" that leads you to reject (or at least "not see") the connection.
Why not stick to Ukraine? It's the topic of this thread. My position is that
Ukrainians have the right to self-determination in defending their national
sovereignty from an invasion that seeks to end it. And this has nothing to do
with the applicability of permanent revolution (Trotsky's not Marx's). Uneven
and combined development does not somehow link the right of nations to self
determination with the theory of permanent revolution regardless of UCD and the
conflict between means and relations of production. I don't believe anything as
complex as the Ukrainian invasion can be reduced to something that simple:
Gramsci and others disparage that type of analysis as "economism." The
tradition in Marxist literature is to include the "superstructure" in the
model.
> 2) While it's been my experience that when one party introduces a buzzword
> like "dialectical" as an argument. the discussion is pretty much over. But
> my experience might not be more than half the story. I trust your concrete
> analysis that refutes mine will be fully "dialectical" whatever the f**k
> that means. I mean almost everyone uses "dialectical" as a gut-check as in
> "your argument isn't dialectical, but mine is." So what do you mean by the
> "dialectical relationship between structure (base) and superstructure"? What
> are the elements of a dialectical relationship; what makes those elements
> dialectical; what and how do such categories refute Marx's categorization in
> his "Introduction..." ?
It's not a buzzword if you define it and give examples, which I did, but not in
the first two sentences that you reproduced above. In
https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34623, I quoted Engels:
"The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the
superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit:
constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle,
etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in
the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories,
religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also
exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in
many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of
all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is,
of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible
of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic
movement finally asserts itself as necessary."
"There is an interaction" between the elements of a model that include the base
(mode of production) and the superstructure. Thus, reducing everything to the
base contradiction between relations of production and mode of production
misses the other interaction between the mode of production and the
superstructure: Because of this interaction, the fact that the relations of
production are fetters on the productive forces can be counteracted by
cultural, political, or other institutions or practices. That's why Marx's view
on the fundamental contradiction between means and relations of production
could be correct but the reckoning is off by a century or three.
> 3) FWIW My take is that the conflict between means and relations of
> production is precisely the relationship of base and superstructure
Your model differs from Marx, Engels and many later writers who see not only a
conflict within the mode of production, but also between the mode of production
and the legal, political and cultural superstructure.
I agree with the Engels quote in my previous message,
https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34623: "...the ultimately determining
element in history is the production and reproduction of real life." That's the
"ultimately determining element in history." Law, politics, and other human
institutions and practices may therefore immediately determine outcomes despite
the base contradiction.
Mark
>
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