People do not use Marxist terminology, my impression is that analyzing the
superstructure in relation to changes in the economic base, is so
widespread that most commentators do not notice that this is Marxist.
Chris Burford
I concur.
Marx method and theoretical standpoint has triumphed in every field of social inquiry. Stockbrokers are told to read the Communist Manifesto and no historian worth his salt can speak of history without describing the physical properties of the mode of production of material life. The average "Joe" on the world streets speaks of "contradictions" in social life and antagonism.
A point of departure is necessary.
Just as many young men pattern the first young women they fall in love with after qualities associated with their mother - and young women do the same in respect to their father or his absence ore his negative behavior, my particular form of theoretical Marxist patterns the beachhead established by Frederick Engels. My introduction to theoretical Marxism was Engels "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy." This was my first "theoretical girl friend."
Brother Engels wrote extensively on the material conception of history as a conception with distinct features. His contemporaries of course dubbed Engels "The General" because he understood the practical demands of the working class movement as well as the organizational demands of the Marxist in relationship to the working class movement in front of him.
I have in mind Engels letter to J. Bloch in Konigsberg, dated September 21, 1890, although his letter to C. Schmidt in Berlin, October 27, 1890 is "off the scale." Engels "Anti Duhring" is an authentic tour de force. His "The Role of Force in History" is absolutely nasty. "The Housing Question Parts I and II," "On Authority," which deals with the anarchist doctrine and his "On The History of the Communist League" makes me want to cut both my hands off and never write.
Many of our intellectuals have read Engels "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," which is subtitled "In the light of the research of Lewis H. Morgan," and think they know Engels.
Everyone forgets the subtitle and some of our folks dealing with the all-important Women's Question, pigeon hold Engels and convert his conclusion into some kind of frozen category unexpanded with the advance of science.
I don't know if everyone understands the Engels wrote the initial draft of what became the "Communist Manifesto" in an article that is called "Principles of Communism." If one compares the "Principles of Communism" with the Communist Manifesto, the only conclusion is that the damn Karl Marx was "out cold" - boy was he a genius. And Engels did not come up short on any question.
This brings us back to the "base and the superstructure" and the materialist conception of history, which is talked about in Engels letter to J. Bloch in Konigsberg, dated September 21, 1890.
The base of society that we are leaving and that is in transformation is not called capitalism but industrial economy. Look, the word "ism" means the belief in something and we are not talking about a belief system as such but the base of a given society. Industrial society is the base. Industrial society is being transformed in front of us but we cannot fight matters out in the economic based of society - on the basis of the exchange of the social product, its tools and instruments of production and this includes the sell of labor power. The reason is because it is impossible to organize a new economy as such without the political control and authority in society. So we have to fight in the realm of politics - the superstructure.
In other words, we cannot fight the "good fight" out in the evolution of the infrastructure - the base, because it is the injection into the base of a new qualitative ingredient that cause and compels society to reorganize itself and debate the economic and social issues of the day. The injection into the infrastructure - the base, of a new qualitative ingredient called advanced robotics, computerization and digitalized production process demands that the base - infrastructure, be reorganized around these new processes.
What unfolds in society is a period of transition to something new - social revolution, and this is called a period of revolution.
I concur, "most commentators do not notice that this is Marxist" because they have never read Marx and those that have, experience difficulty with the practical politics of the transformation in the mode of production or the "base."
It becomes more complex because the transformation of the base occurs as the result of a new technology injected into the production process that renders the thinking and ideology of the industrial era obsolete. All the classes and strata of society start blaming each other for the instability in social life. "It's the immigrants," screams the newly arrived immigrants of 1980" and it are those lazy bastards who do not want to work scream another sector.
"No, it is a lack of tax cuts," scream one sector and "it is to many tax breaks for the rich" scream another. "The welfare state is the problem," screams a huge section of society and a bigger section of society says it is the "war economy."
"Those goddamn kids being born out of wedlock" and a lack of patriotism is the issue for some. The problem is "big government" and this covers everything for a smaller section of the population. The workers want a certain kind of society and the technicians want another kind of society. The homeless have a certain collective vision and so does the retired workers.
Is it not clear that something is wrong - in transition, in the economic base of industrial society? And we are fighting this out in the superstructure and its ideological forms?
But then we need a modern explanation of the "base and superstructure." Stating that the current society is industrial is a starting point everyone agrees with, no matter what the mode of accumulation.
Melvin P.
