Now, please proceed to forget all of that. The matter is much simpler than you’d assume reading individuals like Althusser or Eagleton. The answer is found in this oft-cited but rarely understood section from Marx’s 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: 

“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. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. 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 within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”¹

Let us narrow in on the key phrase, this time with some asterisks at the end of key words, and with a slash inserted in a key element: “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.” 

Read carefully and you will see why I have highlighted these words. The “real foundation,” the “base,” refers precisely and exclusively to the relations of production. No means. This has a very important consequence: The base is social. It is interrelational, interpersonal, describing real relations between real individuals. Production itself is a social activity. Therefore, the importance of economics is not “economic determinism,” it is social determinism. Social in a collective sense, beyond any single person’s will, but still social. 

And the superstructure is “legal and political.” If the base is the relations of production, it becomes necessary to point out that Marx has said that property relations are merely the same thing as relations of production but in the legal sphere. That appears to be the identity of our superstructure: The legal and political mechanisms by which the relations of production are made stable, which organically arise from the activities of the economy. 

So what about ideology, culture, so on and so forth? These are relegated to the third category, “social consciousness.” This “corresponds” to the base, rather than arising from it. That should not be too shocking: Just as language does not change overnight when feudalism becomes capitalism, because language is a medium of communication regardless of class, social consciousness in general exists regardless of class. The concerns of consciousness are inevitably tied into class, however. This is because, as pointed out, the base is already social. The activity of labor, as such, has a huge impact on a person’s consciousness. But so too does everything else a person does. To quote Marx again, this time from Theories of Surplus Value: 

“Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of any other production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which affect man, the subject of production, more or less modify all his functions and activities, and therefore too his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this respect it can in fact be shown that all human relations and functions, however and in whatever form they may appear, influence material production and have a more or less decisive influence on it.” ²

So what does this mean? It means, functionally, that the base/superstructure model is massively overblown. The base is taken to mean “the entire economy,” when it really means “the relations of production.” The superstructure is taken to mean “everything that is not economic,” when it really just means “legal-political structuring of productive relations.” It’s a metaphor which is very limited in scope. Before you cite Engels, keep in mind that Engels and Marx were not one person. They neither agreed all the time nor disagreed all the time. At any rate, the expansive version of the superstructure used by Engels was used by Marx, but only early on, and after that, he consistently maintained this legal-political definition. Engels simply did not realize this in his own later writings, and used the version Marx had already moved on from. The notion that expansive version is an advancement of the 1859 version is contradicted by the fact that Marx moved from the expansive version to the 1859 version. 

As for the forces, the instruments of production, their relationship to the relations stay more or less the same. Their exclusion from the base/superstructure model does not mean they float freely in the void. The only real note is that any notion of determinism stemming from them is undermined by the social nature of the relations of production, social in a manner which is very much impacted by ideology and culture. Culture has genuine weight here. Economics are normative from the start. 

The mode of production, often flattened into merely “mode + relations of production,” is much more than economics. It is an overall organic whole of relations which produce societies as wholes. The entire concrete totality of a given society in a given moment. There is no pure “capitalist mode of production.” There is only a self-differentiated social totality laden with endless determinations from economic to legal to conscious, with no separating topology. Social consciousness interpenetrates all elements of life because humans, as a collective, live every element of life. Determination, at best, exists in a law of large numbers. It does not magically come from the existence of a fancy new way of making shoes, even if that is an enabling factor. In practice, productive relations always flow into seemingly non-productive relations and vice versa. 

The mode of production as a social totality, which includes all factors which influence production and reproduction of the society writ large, with the economy as the conditioning factor which is nevertheless always already social, ideological, cultural, is the solution. 

As for operationalism, I am not demanding one abandon heuristic models for abstracting one element out and examining it. In fact, I’d very much still recommend splitting analysis into matters which are economic, legal-political, and what I call “interpersonal” (such as culture and ideology) for ease of use. But this should be done delicately and temporarily only. Why? Because this model risks implying that the economic and legal-political spheres of society are not interpersonal, are not social, are not ideological. The idea that they are not is precisely the sort of error Marx identifies in commodity fetishism. Treating the economy like it is self-contained and that everything else is merely epiphenomenal is an error we make at our own peril. As such, every effort should be made to be able to interconnect these spheres, in truth mere elements of one sphere, fluidly in analysis once the heuristic separation has outlived its usefulness. Marx’s own analyses never treated these issues as separable. Neither should ours.

1. Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,’ 2. ︎
2. Marx, “Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1,” 288. ︎

We’ve written a lot about the masses; we’ve written a lot about the advanced, the middling, the tailing — that is, what portions of the great mass of U.S. workers and small professionals are discovering their existence as a collective group with shared interests and goals. What we haven’t written about is the way in which people who are becoming disillusioned with capitalism, people who can see and feel that the social system and the way we live is wrong, brutal, inhuman, can be brought together. That task, the awakening of the discontented to the possibility of another world, another way of living, a real existence where people no longer exploit each other for economic gain, is fundamental to our mission of bringing about the advent of such a society.

Before learning theory, before studying Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Gramsci, Rodney, Cabral, people must want to learn. They must feel deeply that society as it exists is unjust.

The society we live in has worked out a kind of self-defense mechanism to deal with people who realize this. They get called burn-outs, idealists, unrealistic. The child of a professional family who doesn’t want to go into business as a CPA or a doctor or a lawyer is “troubled.” Because they’re told by everyone they know that what they feel is abnormal, that most people know the world is an unjust meat grinder, that they know the lifestyle the great majority of the people in the U.S. is based on the misery of others and they just choose not to think about it — this causes a kind of socially-induced sickness. The people who feel the most deeply and most humanly are constantly told that, far from being the most ordinary, they are defective.

In a sense, this is true. They are defective from the point of view of the architects and engineers of society. They are gears with broken teeth in the eyes of the ruling class, the capitalist class, that group of bankers and industrialists who own everything yet do nothing. In ever-greater numbers, people are beginning to realize that their feelings of discomfort are valid — that they should feel moral outrage at the existence of sweatshops making fast fashion and child-slaves in the Congo mining minerals for their iPhones. Allowing yourself to feel that feeling is the first step on the road to awakening class consciousness. The second step is making the connection between that feeling and the way society is structured. The third step on that path is the realization that it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can do something about it.

In an ideal world, one where we’d already built a powerful working-class party that had gathered up all the theoretically advanced Communists together, we would have not one but many newspapers. There would be a mass paper solely to address those people that are still waking or who are awake but not yet willing (or able) to take the last steps to being militant Communists and then a theory journal for those militant Communists to  debate the truth, the best way to overthrow capitalism, etc. Because our movement isn’t unified behind that kind of party (despite what the poseurs at CPUSA say), we have been mixing those types of articles here at the Clarion. Our core readership is mostly already-committed Communists.

But we can’t rely on people coming to Communism spontaneously. We have to reach the group of people who are being torn out of their social positions — people being sidelined. Revolutionaries going back to Lenin have been warning about the pitfalls of relying on spontaneous action; it was only through conscious development that the revolution of October was possible. Without intervention, lots of those children of professionals or the relatively well-to-do will do what comes naturally as the inevitable result of spontaneity: burn out, become despondent and chronically depressed, or turn into anarchists.

In all likelihood, that means you, the reader, are either the Communist militant who has the task of helping people you know move from realizing that capitalism is a theater of horrors to real class conscious Communism or you are someone who has seen that things are bad and getting worse. Maybe someone sent you this article so you could know that you are not alone.

The next steps won’t feel like doing much at all because the truth is that this realization alone is not enough. You have to study. You’ve got to develop your understanding of how the capitalist machine works so you can help us all build weapons to take it down. Studying isn’t fun and it isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel like accomplishing anything, much less setting out to make a revolution, but it is necessary. We can’t avoid our mistakes without reviewing them and we can’t bring down an enemy that we don’t understand.

We’ve got to get together, not just on our own, but in groups, and start to put together an organization that spans the entire U.S.-canadian empire, examine and report on its local conditions in each region, and create a plan to annihilate it root and branch. We have to plan to unite with all the oppressed peoples — each of the Indigenous nations, the Black nation — and get ready to strike.

The work has already begun: the All-Empire Workers’ League and other similar groups are preparing to create a Decolonial Communist Party.

You should join us.

You are not alone.