Why Marx Was Right (17 page)

We have already touched on
another sense in which ''social being'' has the edge over consciousness. This
is the fact that the sort of understandings that really stick usually arise
from what we actually do. In fact, social theorists speak of a kind of
knowledge—tacit knowledge, they call it—which can
only
be acquired in
the act of doing something, and which therefore cannot be handed on to someone
else in theoretical form. Try explaining to someone how to whistle ''Danny
Boy.'' But even when our knowledge is not of this kind, the point remains
valid. You could not learn how to play the violin from a teach-yourself book,
then grab the instrument and dash off a dazzling rendition of Mendelssohn's
Violin Concerto in E Minor. There is a sense in which one's knowledge of the
concerto is inseparable from the capacity to perform it.

There is another sense in
which material reality has the edge over ideas. When Marx speaks of
consciousness, he is not always thinking of the ideas and values which are
implicit in our daily activities. He is sometimes thinking of more formal
systems of concepts such as law, science, politics and the like. And his point
is that these forms of thought are ultimately determined by social reality.
This, in fact, is the famous, much reviled Marxist doctrine of base and
superstructure, which Marx outlines as follows:

In the social production
of their existence, men invariably enter into definite relations which are
independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a
given stage in the development of the material forces of production. The
totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political
superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
¹⁸

By the ''economic
structure'' or ''base,'' Marx means the forces and relations of production; by
the superstructure, he means institutions like the state, law, politics,
religion and culture. In his view, the function of these institutions is to
support the ''base,'' meaning the prevailing class-system. Some of them, like
culture and religion, perform this task largely by producing ideas which legitimate
the system. This is known as ideology. ''The ideas of the ruling class,'' Marx
writes in
The German Ideology,
''are in every epoch the ruling ideas.''
It would be odd to come across a thriving feudal society in which most of the
ideas in circulation were vehemently antifeudalist. As we have seen, Marx
thought that those who controlled material production tended to control mental
production as well.

The claim has even more
force in an age of press magnates and media barons than it had in his own time.

Since the
base-superstructure model has been much derided by some of Marx's critics, and
even by some of his adherents, I will perversely put in a good word for it
here. It is sometimes objected that the model is too static; but all models are
static, as well as simplifying. Marx does not mean that there are two entirely
distinct slices to social life. On the contrary, there is a good deal of
traffic between the two. The base may give rise to the superstructure, but the
superstructure is important for the base's continued existence. Without the
support of the state, the legal system, political parties and the circulation
of pro-capitalist ideas in the media and elsewhere, the current property system
might be somewhat more shaky than it is. In Marx's view, this two-way traffic
was even more evident in precapitalist societies, where law, religion,
politics, kinship and the state entered crucially into the business of material
production.

Nor is the superstructure
secondary to the base in the sense of being somehow less real. Prisons,
churches, schools and television stations are every bit as real as banks and
coal mines. Perhaps the base is more important than the superstructure; but
more important from what viewpoint? Art is more important for the spiritual well-being
of humanity than the invention of a new chocolate bar, but the latter is
usually seen as part of the base while the former is not. The base is more
important, Marxists would argue, in the sense that truly epoch-making changes
in history are largely the result of material forces, not of ideas or beliefs.

Ideas and beliefs can be
formidably influential; but the materialist claim is that they take on truly
historic force only when they are allied with powerful material interests.
Homer may see the Trojan war in terms of honour, valour, divine providence and
the like, but the ancient Greek historian Thu-cydides, a full-blooded
materialist in his own way, soberly points out that it was a shortage of
resources, along with the Greeks' habit of breaking off warfare to embark on
land cultivation and plundering expeditions, which spun out the conflict for so
long. Thucydides also sees the whole system of Hellenic power as based on the
development of navigation, and the commerce and accumulation that this enabled.
Materialist theories of history stretch back long before Marx.

There are also a fair
number of institutions which might be said to belong to both base and
superstructure at the same time. Born-again churches in the United States are
powerhouses of ideology but also immensely lucrative businesses. The same is
true of publishing, the media and the film industry. Some U.S. universities are
massive business enterprises as well as knowledge factories. Or think of Prince
Charles, who exists largely to inspire deference in the British public, but who
also makes a sizeable profit out of doing so.

But surely the whole of
human existence cannot be carved up between base and superstructure? Indeed
not. There are countless things that belong neither to material production nor
to the so-called superstructure. Language, sexual love, the tibia bone, the
planet Venus, bitter remorse, dancing the tango and the North Yorkshire moors
are just a few of them. Marxism, as we have seen, is not a Theory of
Everything. It is true that one can stumble on the most improbable connections
between class struggle and culture. Sexual love is relevant to the material
base, since it quite often leads to the production of those potential new
sources of labour power known as children. Dentists during the economic
recession of 2008 reported a notable increase in jaw pains, brought on by
teeth-gritting caused by stress. Clenching one's teeth in the face of
catastrophe is apparently no longer a metaphor. When the novelist Marcel Proust
was still in the womb, his genteel mother was greatly distressed by the
outbreak of the socialistic Paris Commune; and some speculate that this
distress was the cause of Proust's lifelong asthma. There is also a theory that
Proust's immensely long, sinuous sentences are a kind of psychological
compensation for his breathlessness. In which case there is a relation between
Proust's syntax and the Paris Commune.

If the model suggests that
the superstructure actually came into existence to serve the functions it does,
then it is surely mistaken. This may be true of the state, but it is hardly
true of art. Nor is it true to say that all the activities of schools,
newspapers, churches and the
state support the present social system. When schools teach infants how to tie
their shoelaces, or television stations broadcast weather forecasts, there is
no sense in which they are behaving ''superstructurally.'' They are not
buttressing the relations of production. The state sends its special forces to
club peace demonstrators, but the police also search for missing children. When
tabloid newspapers denounce immigrants, they are acting ''super-structurally'';
when they report road accidents they are most likely not. (Reports of road
accidents, however, may always be used
against
the system. It is said
that in the newsroom of the
Daily Worker,
the old British Communist
Party newspaper, sub-editors would be handed reports of road accidents with the
instruction ''Class-angle that, comrade''). So to announce that schools,
churches or TV stations belong to the superstructure is misleading. We may
think of the superstructure less as a place than as a set of practices. Marx
himself probably did not think of the superstructure in this way, but it is a
useful refinement of his argument.

It is probably true that
anything can in principle be used to prop up the current system. If the TV
weatherman makes light of an approaching tornado because the news might depress
viewers, and listless citizens are unlikely to work as hard as cheerful ones,
he is acting as an agent of the ruling powers. (There is a curious belief that
gloom is politically subversive, not least in the pathologically upbeat United
States.) In general, however, we might say that some aspects of these institutions
behave in this way, and some do not. Or some may behave like this at some times
and not at others. In which case an institution can be ''superstructural'' on
Wednesday but not on Friday. The word ''superstructure'' invites us to put a
practice in a specific kind of context. It is a relational term, asking what
function one kind of activity serves in relation to another. As G. A. Cohen
argues, it explains certain non-economic institutions in terms of the economic.
¹⁹
But it does not explain all such institutions, or all of what they get up to,
or why they came into existence in the first place.

Even so, Marx's point is a
sharper one than that suggests. It is not just a question of declaring that
some things are superstructural and some are not, as some apples are russet and
some are not. It is rather that if we examine the law, politics, religion,
education and culture of class-societies, we will find that most of what they
do lends support to the prevailing social order. And this, indeed, is no more
than we should expect. There is no capitalist civilisation in which the law
forbids private property, or in which children are regularly instructed in the
evils of economic competition. It is true that a great deal of art and
literature has been profoundly critical of the status quo. There is no sense in
which Shelley, Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bronte, Dickens, George Orwell
and D. H. Lawrence were all shamelessly pumping out propaganda on behalf of the
ruling class. Yet if we look at

English literature as a
whole, we find that its critique of the social order rarely extends to
questioning the property system. In
Theories of Surplus Value
Marx
speaks of what he calls ''free spiritual production,'' under which he places
art, as opposed to the production of ideology. It might be more accurate to say
that art encompasses both.

In Thomas Hardy's novel
Jude the Obscure,
Jude Faw-ley, an impoverished artisan living in the
working-class area of Oxford known as Jericho, reflects that his destiny lies
not with the spires and quadrangles of the university, but ''among the manual
toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself occupied, unrecognized as part
of the city at all by its visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens
the hard readers could not read nor the high thinkers live'' (Part 2, Ch. 6).
Are these poignant words a statement of Marx's base/superstructure doctrine?
Not exactly. In materialist spirit, they draw attention to the fact that there
can be no mental labour without manual labour. Oxford University is the
''superstructure'' to Jericho's ''base.'' If the academics had to be their own
cooks, plumbers, stone masons, printers and so on, they would have no time to
study. Every work of philosophy presupposes an obscure army of manual
labourers, just as every symphony and cathedral does. But Marx means more than
this, as we have seen already. It is not just that in order to study Plato you
have to eat. It is also that the way material production is organised will tend
to affect the way you think about him.

It is the nature of the
thinking carried on in Oxford, not just the fact that thinking goes on there at
all, which is the point at stake. Like anyone else, Oxford academics find their
thought shaped by the material realities of their age. Most of them are
unlikely to interpret Plato, or for that matter any other writer, in a way
which undermines the rights of private property, the need for social order and
so on. When Jude writes a desperate note to the Master of one of the colleges
asking how he might become a student there, he receives back a note suggesting
that a working man like himself would be better off not trying. (The irony is
that Hardy himself probably agrees with this advice, though not with the
reasons for which it was given.)

Why should there be a need
for superstructures in the first place? This, note, is a different question
from asking why we have art or law or religion. There are many answers to that.
It is asking, rather, ''Why should so much art, law and religion act to
legitimate the present system?'' The answer, in a word, is that the ''base'' is
self-divided. Because it involves exploitation, it gives rise to a good deal of
conflict. And the role of superstructures is to regulate and ratify those
conflicts. Superstructures are essential because exploitation exists. If it did
not, we would still have art, law and perhaps even religion. But they would no
longer serve these disreputable functions. Instead, they could throw off these
constraints and be all the freer for it.

The base-superstructure
model is a vertical one. Yet one can also think of it horizontally. If we do,
the base can be seen as the outer limit of political possibility. It is what
ultimately resists our demands—what refuses to yield even when every other kind
of reform has been conceded. The model thus has a political importance. Someone
who supposed that you could change the fundamentals of society simply by
changing people's ideas or launching a new political party might find it
instructive to be shown how these things, while often of key significance, are
not what men and women ultimately live by. He might accordingly redirect his
energies to some more fruitful goal. The base represents the final obstacle
against which a socialist politics continually presses up. It is, as Americans
say, the bottom line. And since by the bottom line Americans sometimes mean
money, this just goes to show how many citizens in the Land of the Free are
unwitting Marxists. That this is so became obvious to me some years ago, when I
was driving with the Dean of Arts of a state university in the American Midwest
past thickly blooming cornfields. Casting a glance at this rich crop, he
remarked "The harvest should be good this year. Might just get a couple of
assistant professorships out of that.''