Base And Superstructure Quotes

All superstructures, including the family, rest on the base of one thing, and one thing only – economics. The family is the first and the primary unit of oppression and exploitation.

Bolshevik intellectuals did not confine their reading to Marxist works. They knew Russian and European literature and philosophy and kept up with current trends in art and thoughts. Aspects of Nietzsche’s thought were either surprisingly compatible with Marxism or treated issues that Marx and Engels had neglected. Nietzsche sensitized Bolsheviks committed to reason and science to the importance of the nonrational aspects of the human psyche and to the psychpolitical utility of symbol, myth, and cult. His visions of “great politics” (grosse Politik) colored their imaginations. Politik, like the Russian word politika, means both “politics” and “policy”; grosse has also been translated as “grand” or “large scale.” The Soviet obsession with creating a new culture stemmed primarily from Nietzsche, Wagner, and their Russian popularizers. Marx and Engels never developed a detailed theory of culture because they considered it part of the superstructure that would change to follow changes in the economic base.

The economic base of a social formation, the infrastructure, includes the social relations of production the produce the material necessities of life. In doing so, it produces the superstructure, that is, ideology, belief, religion, and juridical controls.

Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work.

When Marx and Engels applied the law of contradiction in things to the study of the socio-historical process, they discovered the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, they discovered the contradiction between the exploiting and exploited classes and also the resultant contradiction between the economic base and its superstructure (politics, ideology, etc.), and they discovered how these contradictions inevitably lead to different kinds of social revolution in different kinds of class society.

While the Habsburgs of Austria, the Bourbons of France, the Tudors of England, and every other ruling house of Europe strove to impose centralised government, ideological unity and increasing control of the individual through a growing administration, Poland alone of all the major states took the opposite course. The Poles had made an article of faith of the principle that all government is undesirable, and strong government is strongly undesirable. This was based on the conviction that one man had no right to tell another what to do, and that the quality of life was impaired by unnecessary administrative superstructure.

If I walk along a shore towards a ship which has run aground, and the funnel or masts merge into the forest bordering on the sand dune, there will be a moment when these details suddenly become part of the ship, and indissolubly fused with it. As I approached, I did not perceive resemblances or proximities which finally came together to form a continuous picture of the upper part of the ship. I merely felt that the look of the object was on the point of altering, that something was imminent in this tension, as a storm is imminent in storm clouds. Suddenly the sight before me was recast in a manner satisfying to my vague expectation. Only afterwards did I recognize, as justifications for the change, the resemblance and contiguity of what I call ‘stimuli’— namely the most determinate phenomena, seen at close quarters and with which I compose the ‘true’ world. ‘How could I have failed to see that these pieces of wood were an integral part of the ship? For they were of the same colour as the ship, and fitted well enough into its superstructure.’ But these reasons for correct perception were not given as reasons beforehand. The unity of the object is based on the foreshadowing of an imminent order which is about to spring upon us a reply to questions merely latent in the landscape. It solves a problem set only in the form of a vague feeling of uneasiness, it organizes elements which up to that moment did not belong to the same universe and which, for that reason, as Kant said with profound insight, could not be associated. By placing them on the same footing, that of the unique object, synopsis makes continuity and resemblance between them possible. An impression can never by itself be associated with another impression.

The key question, as Williams reminds us, is whether the ‘formula’ of the base/ superstructure—which in various formulations has framed Marxist accounts of culture—was meant as a literal reading or ‘no more than an analogy

It is, however, of little avail yet to attempt to undeceive the multitude; their superstition is based on ignorance, and until the foundation is taken away, the superstructure, however crazy and rotten, will hold together.57

It is commonly said that Marx divided society into two elements, the ‘economic base’ and the ‘superstructure’, and maintained that the base governs the superstructure. A closer reading of the passage just quoted reveals a threefold, rather than a twofold, distinction.

Marx describes social change from lower to higher modes of production distinguishing the economic base of a society from the relative superstructure arising from it. The base contains the forces of production: tools/techniques/labour power and relations of production: division of labour, forms of cooperation and subordination constructed to maintain production. The relations of production correspond to the appropriate development of the material forces of production, with the totality of these productive relations forming the base of any society. It is upon this base that a superstructure arises containing all social, religious, cultural and political institutions collectively acting as the foundation of social consciousness.

The base-superstructure metaphor when misunderstood as a causal rather than reciprocal relationship often leads to characterisations of historical materialism as determinist. The superstructure doesn’t just reflect the base but has a reciprocal relation with the superstructure often enabling the base, i.e. the forces of production require property rights which are reliant upon political decisions at the level of the superstructure. The material base of every society is capped by an “ideological superstructure” that serves to legitimise and justify the arrangements and institutions in that society. It is from this superstructure that emanates ruling-class ideas and ultimately social consciousness, and thus we can see that the consciousness determined by the superstructure justifies and maintains the economic structure found in the base.

ஒரு சமுதாயத்தின் உற்பத்தி உறவுகளே அதன் அடிப்படை ஆதாரம் (Base) . ஒழுக்க விதிகள், சமுதாய நிறுவனங்கள், மதம் போன்ற அனைத்தும் அதன் மேல் கட்டுமானங்களே (Superstructure).

Finance capital subordinates the Canadian State more and more directly to its interests and control. State-monopoly capitalism — the integration or merging of the interests of finance capital with the state — is a new stage in the extension of corporate control to all sectors of economic and political life. The government, while seemingly independent of specific corporate interests, has become predominantly the political instrument of a small group comprising the top monopoly capitalists for exercising control over the rest of society. Finance capital uses the state to provide orders, capital and subsidies, and to secure foreign markets and investments. Monopoly capital supports the expansion of the state sector — both services and enterprises — when that serves its interests, and at other times it uses the state to cut back and privatize. The state is also used to redistribute income and wealth in favour of monopoly interests through the tax system, and through legislation to drive down wages and weaken the trade union movement. State-monopoly capitalism undermines the basis of traditional bourgeois democracy. The subordination of the state to the interests of finance capital erodes the already limited role of elected government bodies, federal, provincial and local. Big business openly intervenes in the electoral process on its own behalf, and also indirectly through a network of pro-corporate institutes and think tanks. It uses its control of mass media to influence the ideas and attitudes of the people, and to blatantly influence election results. It corrupts the democratic process through the buying of politicians and officials. It tramples on the political right of the Canadian people to exercise any meaningful choice, thereby promoting widespread public alienation and cynicism about the electoral process.

Wages Against Housework,” a pamphlet central to a feminist campaign in the 1970s condemning the unpaid labor of housework and caregiving. The theoretical import of the 1970s campaign was huge at its time – “Wages Against Housework” challenged certain historical materialisms that relegated power and social reproduction to a superstructural level altogether separate from the material base of production. Extending the “social factory” approach to value production, this materialist feminism demonstrated why the cultural, corporeal, and subjective dimensions of social reproduction are just as fundamental to the material structure of capitalism as economics.

Satori-awakening as Dogen viewed it was not the be-all and end-all. Rather he conceived it as the foundation for a magnificent edifice whose many-storied superstructure would correspond to the perfected character and personality of the spiritually developed individual, the woman or man of moral virtue and all-embracing compassion and wisdom. Such an imposing structure, Dogen taught, could be erected only by years of faithful zazen upon the solid base of the immutable inner knowledge which satori confers.

Men with strong religious beliefs tend to form into two broad categories, and constitute churches accordingly. One category, among whom the archtetypal church is the Roman Catholic, desire the certitude and tranquility of hierarchical order. They are prepared to entrust religious truth to a professional clergy, organized in a broad-based triangle of parish priests, with an episcopal superstructure and a pontifical apex. The price paid for this kind of orthodox order is clericalism—and the anticlericalism it provokes. There was never any chance of this kind of religious system establishing itself in America. If there was one characteristic which distinguished it from the start—which made it quite unlike any part of Europe and constituted its uniqueness in fact—it was the absence of any kind of clericalism. Clergymen there were, and often very good ones, who enjoyed the esteem and respect of their congregations by virtue of their piety and preachfulness. But whatever nuance of Protestantism they served, and including Catholic priests when they in due course arrived, none of them enjoyed a special status, in law or anything else, by virtue of their clerical rank. Clergy spoke with authority from their altars and pulpits, but their power ended at the churchyard gate; and even within it congregations exercised close supervision of what their minister did, or did not, do. They appointed; they removed. In a sense, the clergy were the first elected officials of the new American society, a society which to that extent had a democratic element from the start—albeit that such electoral colleges were limited to the outwardly godly.

call this the “bottom-up” theory of the evolution of social complexity, because it treats social complexity as a sort of “superstructure” on the material resource base. In other words, if you stir enough resources into your evolutionary pot, social complexity will inevitably bubble up. The problem with the bottom-up theory is that in several places where we can date the key stages in this process, we see a different sequence of events. The two sites with early monumental architecture that we discussed in Chapter 1, Göbekli Tepe and Poverty Point, arose before agriculture. So here we have an inverted sequence of events. First, a fairly large-scale society arises, with quite sophisticated ritual activities and buildings requiring the mobilization of large numbers of workers. Only later comes agriculture. Has the standard theory reversed cause and effect? Second, hunter-gatherer societies share food.

Gradually, then rapidly and ever more widely, the Industrial Revolution changed the economic form and moral superstructure of European and American life. Men, women, and children left home and family, authority and unity, to work as individuals, individually paid, in factories built to house not men but machines. Every decade the machines multiplied and became more complex; economic maturity (the capacity to support a family) came later; children no longer were economic assets; marriage was delayed; premarital continence became more difficult to maintain. The city offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus and facility for sex. Women were “emancipated”—i.e., industrialized; and contraceptives enabled them to separate intercourse from pregnancy. The authority of father and mother lost its economic base through the growing individualism of industry. The rebellious youth was no longer constrained by the surveillance of the village;

Like all ideology, aesthetic and literary criticism is in the last analysis determined by the economic structure of society.