/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14637123]

Where does he talk about his anthropology and base/superstructure? Can a Marxist bro please help me out?

[Anonymous No.14637489]

base/superstructure shit is from the 1959 preface's introduction. That's pretty much the only place in his entire oeuvre where it's talked about in these terms which makes it pretty funny how people seem to think it's some sort of key to marxist thinking.

Hegel already explained this, you can't impose mental schema into the content and consider it explained. The structure is only ever supposed to be a reflection of the actual content unfolding itself. Or, in the words of Engels, "historical materialism is a guide to study, not an excuse for not studying history"

You should read chapter 1 of the German Ideology and see if you understand what is being talked about

[Anonymous No.14637502]

Read Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism vol. 1, it will help

[Anonymous No.14637735]

>>14637489
>some sort of key to marxist thinking.
The sentiment necessarily finds its expression throughout Marx's thought though. It's not like he thought political structures to be primary to the means/relations of production. Does he ever to talk about this with explicit reference to the liberal tradition's theories of the origins of political structures? e.g. Smith's "land of barter".

[Anonymous No.14637808]

>>14637735
he talks about it all throughout his writings, but you have to piece it together. The point is that attuning your mind to a basic scheme like "base/superstructure" is a poor way to grasp what is essential to Marx's work. You have to follow the movements of thinking and understand the standpoint it comes from, not treat it like a textbook which gives you ready-made solutions to whatever deadlock you have in your understanding.

[Anonymous No.14637821]

>>14637489
>read chapter 1 of the German Ideology
actually a good answer and will illustrate why the base/superstructure thing isn't the best way to describe the dialectic

[Anonymous No.14637985]

>>14637808
I'm neither using it as some sort of skeleton key by which to understand him, nor do I have a deadlock in my understanding of it. I simply wan't to know where (if) it is discussed by him, explicitly or otherwise, preferably with reference to the liberal tradition. Specific works, experts, chapters, pages, lines, anything.

[Anonymous No.14637997]

>>14637123
>base/superstructure
he never actually uses these terms, and they're kind of misleading anyway. Even though the explanation of it shows that influence moves in two directions, the distinction between base/superstructure presupposes a hierarchy to that arrangement before we've examined it in any closer detail. We're not truly understanding the reciprocal movement between cultural and material production if we see culture as merely an outgrowth of the means of production.

[Anonymous No.14638015]

>>14637997
Marx believed the two to exist reciprocally, but the base to be primary, yes? Cultural forms change by virtue of change in the productive form(s).

[Anonymous No.14638034]

>>14637985
I can't be bothered to do the work of looking up the specific places, because it comes down to paragraphs/lines within huge texts like the grundrisse or capital. But almost every time Marx is talking about political economy, he is engaging with the liberal tradition (Smith, Say, Mill, Bentham, etc. are quoted constantly).

[Anonymous No.14638056]

>>14638015
"Culture" understood broadly i.e. the world of ideas is the only medium through which society -including the relations of material production- actually changes. The distinction being emphasized is not to do with choosing some sort of 'correct' scheme of causation, but with understanding what is the grounds for historical change in the first place. Really it's impossible to grasp Marx on this, solely by reading his writing, if you're not familiar with german idealism, Hegel, the historical tradition up to the 19th century etc. otherwise, when Marx mentions "idealism" you conjure ideas in your head of Berkeley, weird thought experiments about perception, and all that bullshit which is so far below the level we're dealing with here. Likewise for materialism, which in Marx has very little to do with the "physicalism" of 20th century analytical philosophy of mind, and much more to do with the french materialists from the 18th century and Feuerbach.

[Anonymous No.14638185]

>>14638056
Even if it's just a provisional answer, Marx would say that this ground is the means and relations of production, yes?

[Anonymous No.14638236]

>>14638015
But the point of the base/superstructure diagram is to show how the two interpenetrate each other, it’s a more complex kind of relationship than what Marx was describing. Yes the base is primary but he never actually used those terms, they came later from Marxist critics seeking to reformulate his explicitly material concerns in terms of hyperreal media objects. Or at least that’s how it was taught to me when I was studying it

[Anonymous No.14638283]

>>14638236
>Yes the base is primary
This is the object of my investigation. It's this detail that seems to let the Marxist edifice hold onto the idea of revolution.
>but he never actually used those terms
He uses "superstructure" in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
>The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure.
It hardly matters though. Either way Marx seems to set up this (minimally) reciprocal binary. The words "base" and "superstructure" just happen to map onto it well.

[Anonymous No.14638411]

Read Gramsci, he expands on Marx's conception of base and superstructure.

[Anonymous No.14638412]

>>14638411
Gramsci is an idealist.

[Anonymous No.14638421]

>>14637123
You won't get any specific references. You just have to read his main works (conceived broadly) in their entirety (which I consider a fantastic pleb filter). Here's a fragment from The Eighteenth Brumaire, for example:
>Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the party of Order. Was what held these factions fast to their pretenders and kept them aprart from each other nothing but fleur-de-lis and tricolor, Horse of Bourbon and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism — was it all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditons of existence, two different kinds of property; it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivarly between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. [...] And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

[Anonymous No.14638429]

>>14637123
>>14638421
And by "pleb" I mean "not genuinely interested in communism", to be clear.

[Anonymous No.14638778]

I'm just going to leave this here, because I think that a particular strain of Marxists are trying to feed the OP obfuscatory bullshit.
https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5334/2235

[Anonymous No.14638839]

>>14638778
Curious that you linked that, because most of the posts in this thread are exactly the opposite of what Kolakowski understands as "Althusserian" marxism.

If your intent is to quote Kolakowski to say "stop caring about marxism because it's bullshit" then you're over your head; if someone was swayed about marxism and communism by reading third-rate scholarship like Kolakowski's without ever going to the primary texts, they were never serious to begin with.

[Anonymous No.14638889]

>>14638778
Who the fuck cares about Althusser?

[Anonymous No.14638962]

>>14638839
I wasn't attributing the obfuscation to the anons ITT.

[Anonymous No.14638971]

>>14638839 #
I wasn't attributing the obfuscation to the anons ITT, though I am curious to hear what you consider to be "first rate" Marx scholarship.

[Anonymous No.14638991]

>>14638889
If OP is being fed some sort of vanguardist apologia in the guise of academic scholatship as this post >>14638283 seems to indicate, it's probably secondhand Althusser.