the political form of sovereignty and dependence, in short
the corresponding specific form of the state.”
Note that in the first quote above, Matx says the economic basis of society
is the “sum total” of the social relations of productin, and that this determines
the “legal and political superstructure” and the “social and intellectual” life of
society in general. This is among the most controversial propositions of
historical materialism, which is the topic of section B.
Section B: Base and superstructure
6. How the different “bits” of society fit together
Marxists are generally accused of srtressing too much the role of economic
factors. In order the probe this point it is worth considering some concrete
examples. A goof place to start is the present legal system in Australia. If
you sign a mortgage agreement and don’t keep up the payments, either your
house will be taken back by the bank or you will be taken to court (or both).
If you are taken to court, the judge will find against you and your would be
on the street.
But why? Why doesn’t the judge say you have the right to keep your house
and not pay for it? The answer of course is that the whole of Australian law
is founded on protecting private property, and that “corresponds” with the
basic type of society we have – capitalism. If we had a legal system based
on hostility to private property, then the whole thing would begin to break
down. Nobody would be able to enforce a contract or collect any debts.
Shoplifting would be legalised, Banks and companies would collapse. A
moment’s thought shows this is obvious: the legal system has to “fit” the
property system, the existing class system.
Capitalist law is designed to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. This is
recognised in the common sense saying that “there’s one law for the rich,
another for the poor”: of course there is, that’s what it’s there for!
Now, let’s think about the political system. Look at any major capitalist
country the US, France or Germany. All the government parties in these
countries are pro-capitalist parties. The newspaper and TV channels are all
owned by big business and churn out capitalist ideas. An idea that doesn’t
make a profit for somebody, doesn’t get a look-in. The whole political
culture, with the exception of socialist parties trying to fight the system, is
pro-capitalist: the political system “fits” together with the economic system.
This is what Marx means by the “political and legal superstructure” which
rises on the economic base. The legal and political system of course are very
direct products of the economic system, in which it’s easy to trace the
infterests of the ruling class. We can go back and look at the legal system
under feudalism and the prevailing form of politics, and see how it defended
the landed aristocracy and the king.
But there are many more complicated things in society in which the
domination of the ruling class is more complicated. Marx said: “The ruling
ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class”. Is this true – and what
ideas? Let’s start with Australia in 1996. Open up a copy of any major
newspaper. They have lots of debates among themselves, but you will not
finmd a single daily paper in favour of maintaining workers’ Awards, let
alone the abolition of capitalism! Ruling class ideas are propagated by ruling
class control of the means of mass commmunication.
But direct propaganda is not the sole way that ruling class ideas are
purveyed, even in the newspapers. Ruling class ideas – what we call
ideology – is spontaneously reproduced in every section of society,
including the working class. Often it goes in the form of what is known as
“common sense”. Think of a few common sense ideas – let’s list a few:
“Men are stonger than women”
“You should get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”
“Inequality between people is only human nature”
“There’ll always be rich and poor”
“Trade unions are bad for the economy”
“Gay sex is unnatural”
These ideas fit together with the common assumptions of capitalist law and
politics: they are part of the ideology which has grown up around capitalist
society. Of course, under capitalism these kind of ideas are fought against by
socialists and sometimes by other radical groups like the Greens. Over time,
the ruling class ideas change to meet changing circumstances, and also
because of struggle against them. For example, 100 years ago the following
statements would have been widely accepted in Australia:
“It’s only natural that white people should rule the world”
“Britons are superior to other races”
“Black people are inferior”
“Men are superior to women both physically and intellectually”
Now these are not commonly accepted, althuogh there are many people
who do believe in them – but you will rarely find these ideas publicly
advocated in newspapers and by leading politicians. Why?
First, of course because there has been a struggle against these ideas. But,
vitally, material conditions have changed. The British Empire has gone.
Britain no longer rules 30% of the world. The ruling class has had to come to
terms with being a third rate power: ideas about the white man’s role and
Britain’s superiority have changed with the changing conditions. Women
have entered the workforce on a massive scale: ideas about the complete
inferiority of women no longer “fit” the changing circumstances – although of
course women’s oppression and sexism still exist.
In all the ideas we have discussed here, we can see a direct link between the
social relations of production (capitalist), the ruliong class (the capitalist class
or bourgeoisie), the legal and political superstructure (pro-capitalist), and the
ruling ideas, ideology (pro-capitalist, anti-working class, racist and sexist).
They all “fit” together. Once they no longer fit together in a more or less
harmonious way, society begins to go into crisis.
There is another aspect of ruling class ideology which we should take into
account. There are of course disagreements among the capitalist class itself -
although not on fundamentals. There are different interest groups among the
capitalists: for example those based on finance and banking do not always
have the same interests as those based no manufacturing industry. Beyond
the different interests, there are different assessments of how best to advance
the needs of the capitalist system, how many concessions to make to the
working class and so on. These sorts of differences are reflected in different
ideological trends in capitalist thinking – liberalism and conservatism for
example – and in immediate practical political differences. Sometimes these
differences can become very sharp, without ever going beyond the bounds
of capitalist ideology.
Of course, there are many ideas and fields of intellectual activity in society
which are not so easy to analyse. For example, what about cinema, music,
painting, TV dramas, pop music, the arts in general? Do they all have
pro-capitalist ideology embedded in them? This is a complicated question
and very controversial among Marxists. The answer is “yes and no” – it
depends. Let’s take an easy example – James Bond movies. These are
permeated with pro-capitalist ideology which is absolutely transparent. On
the other hand, it would be difficult to argue that the American school of
painters called the Abstract Impressionists, or a particular piece of jazz
music is a piece of “bourgeois ideology”. Nonetheless, it is possible to
explain how these forms of artistic expression grew up at this particular point
in time, and what developments in society gave rise to them. For example,
the “youth culture” of the 1960s grew up on the basis of a generation of
young people who had a lot of money to spend – “flower power” wouldn’t
have got very far in the 1930s!
Marx’s ideas about how the law, politics and ideas in general fit together
with the economic basis of society are not just applicable to capitalism. For
example, Marxists have analysed the role of the Catholic Church under
feudalism as a key factor in the ideological “cement” of feudal society,
justifying the rule of the landed nobility and the role of the crown,
None of this should lead us to conclude that it is possible to predict exactly
every aspect of law, politics and art just on the basis of knowing that a
society is feudal or capitalist: it can only tell us the general parameters. For
example, the French legal system is very different from the British. In France
you are (more or less) guilty until proven innocent. In Britain you are (in
theory) innocent until proven guilty. In order to explain this difference, we
have to study the history of these legal systems in detail. Thefact that Britain
and France are both capitalist won’t help us much in explaining these
differences: but one thing is noticeable. Both British and French system are
ounded on defence of private property. They both “fit” the basic relations of
production.
7. The state
One thing we have left out so far, in discussing the evolution of class society
and the legal-political superstructure, is of course the state – the entire
bureaucratic apparatus which guards the domination of the ruling class. The
role of the state is explained in a separate paper in this pack. For the
moment it is enough to note the following propositions of Marxist theory:
1.The state is an apparatus to defend the continued rule of the ruling
class.
2.The state is ultimately a body of armed people – in other words, the
core of the state when it comes to the crunch are the police and the
armed forces.
3.The state did not exist before class society, but only came into
existence with the division of society into classes.
Section C: The ruling class and revolution
8. The ruling class and revolution
How does one type of society get transformed into a completely new type
How is it that feudalism came to an end and was replaced by capitalism -
why aren’t we still living under feudalism? Marx approaches the problem this
way in the next passage from one of his writings quoted above (the 1859
Preface to the Critique of Political Economy):
“At a certain stage of development, the material
productive forces of society come into conflict with the
existing relations of production or – this merely expresses
the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations
…From the forms of development of the productive forces,
these relations turn into their fetters”.
What does this mean? Here we have to remind ourselves of the way that
society fits together.
A certain level of production technique gives rise to definite social relations
of production. Let’s think about this point. Remember the hunter-gatherer
society we talked about above. We noted that there were different ways the
people there could organise themselves on the basis of thier production,
which consists of hunting, fishing, picking fruit and a few handicrafts (the
exact details don’t matter for our purposes). However, we also said that
capitalism couldn’t exist there, because to get capitalism you need a money
economy, capital, industry, banks, a developed division of labour, etc. This
is impossible in our very under-developed desert island (so long as it remains
isolated from the rest of the world). The level of productive tecnique, or to
put it another way, the level of development of the productive forces, sets
definite limits to the type of society you can have.
In a book he wrote in 1845, ‘The Holy Family’, Marx presented this in a
very sharp manner when he said: “The hand mill (for grinding flour – Ed.)
gives you the feudal lord; the steam mill gives you the industrial
capitalist”. There is a large element of truth in this, but painted so boldly it is
an overstatement. The development of the productive forces places definite
limits on the type of social relations you cna have, but does not absolutely
determine them in detail. We know that the level of productive technique
associated with feudalism – mainy based on the agriculture of rural peasants
– in other parts of the world gave rise to a different type of society based not
on the rule of lords based in the countryside as in Britain, France and
Germany, but to the rule of a centralised state bureaucracy under a king (or
in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and North Africa, a Sultan).
But overall, the level of productive technique and the type off social relations
have to fit together more or less harmoniously, and this in turn has to fit
together with the legal, political and ideological “superstructure”. But what
happens if the “fit” begins to break down?
In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the growth of the productivity
of agriculture created the basis for sections of the peasants to move off the
land into the towns. The growth of trade and commerce began to create
merchants in the towns with huge amounts of money capital to invest: the
conquest or pillage of colonial lands like South America concentrated new
ealth, including huge amounts of precious metal like gold and silver, which
could be used as coins. The scene was set for the development of a
manufacturing, capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – developing within
feudalism. As production developed, the development of the productive
forces came into conflict with the existing relations of production – those of
the domination of the feudal lords, the landed aristocracy. As Marx notes:
“A period of revolution then ensued”.
This period of revolution was of course the period of the bourgeois,
capitalist, revolutions against feudalism – most notably the French Revolution
of 1789, the English Revolution of 1641 – 9, which destroyed the monarchy
and brought Oliver Cromwell to power, the unification of Italy (the
Risorgiamento) led by Garibaldi in the 1840s. The United States has had
TWO bourgeois revolutions – first George Washington’s revolt against the
British Crown, leading to the Declaration of Independence in 1778, and
second, the Civil War of 1861 – 5, in which the northern industrial capitalists
united the country, by destroying the slave mode of production in the south,
and creating a unified country based on capitalist production relations.
By clearing away feudal and pre-capitalist social relations and state
structures, the bourgeois revolution creates the basis for extending and
ensuring the domination of capitalism. The feudal aristocracy was either
destroyed, or integrated into a reconstiuted capitaist class (as happened in
Britain). Huge sections of the serfs, the rural peasantry, are driven off the
land and forced into the towns to become wage labourers, proletarians, the
core of the new working class. The transformation from feudalism to
capitalism takes place via revolution. As Marx says: the bourgeois emerges
on to the historical stage as a most revolutionary class.
Section D: Freedom and determinism
9. Freedom and determination
According to Marx: “Men make their own history, but not in conditions of
their own making”. This has to be put together with two other statements by
Marx: that production relations are “indispensable and independent of their
(human beings’) will”, and the notion that what distinguishes human beings
from animals is consciousness.
Imagine a peasant serf in feudal England who believes in the socialist
Commonwealth and hates the system – a very advanced and far-seeing serf!
That doesn’t stop the serf being trapped in a set of feudal social relations,
dominated by his feudal lord. However, being a conscious being, het serf
could have taken conscious action: for example, by organising a peasant
uprising. But not in conditions of his own choosing – an individual peasant
could not wish away feudalism by an act of will. Human beings have choices,
they have free will: but their field of action is strictly limited by the economic,
social and political circumstances in which they find themselves.
However, despite the limitations of circumstances, history works throughh
active human agencies who have free will. People have choices. The idea of