base\superstructure
By ‘base’ is meant the economic foundations of a society, and by ‘superstructure’ is meant the social, political, and legal relations which are said to be built upon the base.
This topographical metaphor, attributed to Karl Marx, has given rise to much confusion within social and political science, assuming particular importance in discussions of the state in capitalism. The distinction between the ‘economic base/basis/substructure’ of society and its corresponding ‘ideological/political superstructure’ was initially formulated in part one of The German Ideology written by Marx and Engels in 1845-6. It is most clearly stated by Marx in a famous passage in the 1859 Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (part one), where he writes: ‘In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their 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. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life … changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’
Within the Marxist tradition there are two broad ways of interpreting this metaphor. The first, and the dominant, interpretation is to see the base/superstructure metaphor as a characterization of the essence of the materialist conception of history. This view takes literally the notion that changes in production relations give rise to new forms of politics, law, and ideology. In this ‘hard structural determinist’ reading, exemplified by Soviet Marxism-Leninism, the economic base determines the political superstructure, thus rendering a serious analysis of politics redundant. Although Engels later tried to soften this view by introducing the notion of ‘determinant in the last instance’, this has done little to dissuade structuralist Marxists (and technological determinists) that the economy should be awarded primacy when studying social formations. The state in this model is seen as epiphenomenal, its existence reducible to the economic base; changes in state policy are understood as merely reflecting changing economic relations. The notion of relative autonomy has been developed by a number of contemporary Marxists who subscribe to the base/superstructure metaphor but who wish to correct this ‘reductionist’ and ‘monistic’ overemphasis on the economic side of the historical process.
The second way of interpreting the base/superstructure metaphor is to see it as a provisional level of abstraction useful for limited analytical purposes only. This view, found in the ‘softer’ more ‘humanistic’ currents of Marxism (including Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and most versions of Western Marxism) realizes that the metaphor is all but useless as theory and denies that Marx would have accepted its hard structuralist reading. Humanistic Marxists therefore replace this monocausal economism with the dialectical notion that social relations of production only exist in the form of economic, legal, and political relations. It is not simply that each of these relations exercise reciprocal and causative influence, but that antagonistic class relations are always manifest in social, political, and cultural forms. In this way ‘economics’ rests as firmly on ‘politics’ and ‘law’ as vice versa. According to this view, determinists understand ‘economics’ in a technicist apolitical sense and do not give sufficient attention to Marx's stress on the social relations of production. For most Western Marxists the base/superstructure metaphor is more an affirmation of Marx's materialism (in opposition to philosophical idealism) than a guide to historical research. The distinctiveness of Marx's method is not his alleged emphasis on the ‘economic base’ but his insistence on understanding capitalist society in terms of class relations and class struggle.
— Peter Burnham
