Mode of Production Vs. Base/Superstructure: Grasping the Social Totality

Introduction

Throughout the history of Marxism, there arguably hasn’t been a concept as debated as the infamous base-superstructure metaphor. Schematically, it refers to the idea of society having some sort of ‘base’ set of relations or practices upon which secondary practices, such as cultural ones, are built upon as a “superstructure.” But what exactly makes up either the base or the superstructure is always up for debate. Is the base equivalent to the mode of production, or is it just the production relations alone (i.e., the social terms producers relate to each other through, which are only an aspect of the mode of production)? On the other hand, what exactly makes up the superstructure? Is family a superstructure? What about language? Could social consciousness be designated as a superstructure, or is it limited to explicitly formal juridical relations?

Elaboration of the base-superstructure metaphor has taken a myriad of different forms, usually with the express purpose of fighting against allegations that Marxism is a theory of simple economic determinism, in which all matters of state, culture, and human consciousness are explained by economic factors. Marxists like Friedrich Engels and Louis Althusser are quite notable for subscribing to the idea that all social change can’t be explained through the base alone; rather, as the latter puts it, the base determines society not immediately but only “in the last instance”. Althusser especially has done the unrewarding work of hammering out a structuralist view of society in which all types of apparatuses, repressive and ideological, are conceptualized in a way where they rest upon the base and serve to reproduce this base. This structuralist view accords varying degrees of autonomy and importance to the different elements of the superstructure, but all are understood to be connected to the base which acts “in the last instance,” i.e., as the ultimately determining factor.

Less praised for his theoretical rigour, but even more influential, is controversial political leader Joseph Stalin. During Stalin’s life, and afterwards in places like China, his understanding of Marxism and dialectics informed the conception of communists. In his 1950 article Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, Stalin writes: “The superstructure is the political, legal, religious, artistic, philosophical views of society and the political, legal, and other institutions corresponding to them.”1 Under Stalin, the USSR formalized their own version of historical materialism (DiaMat), which assumed a position of orthodoxy within the communist movement and guided Soviet policy. This interpretation of the base-superstructure metaphor is probably the most common, at base, for Marxists. By both proponents and critics, this is often assumed to be the framework in which Marxists view society as a whole. For us, it consequently guides much of our praxis and ideas of socialist construction, while, for the ideological enemies of Marxism, the metaphor is an Achilles’ heel which Marxists can’t seem to properly mend, regardless of how much one may talk of “overdetermination” or determination “in the last instance”.

In many ways, these enemies are right–but the base/superstructure metaphor is not integral to Marxism, and is actually just one of many reductive versions of Marxism. I propose that a break from this limiting metaphor as the centerpiece in Marx’s theory of social reality is much needed. This can only be done through a close examination of its actual use within Marx’s work. Marxist literary scholar Edara Dileep has done this quite thoroughly in his own 2016 work Biography of a Blunder, but his book is still very under-read, and its main theses have seemed to not reach the American Left. I hope that through this brief article I can shed light on the work of Dileep while also pushing for his break with the base-superstructure thesis within the American left today.

What is the Base-Superstructure Thesis?

Marx’s famous 1859 preface will serve as a good starting point, since it is arguably the text in which he most succinctly lays out his conception of the base and superstructure. Here, Marx provides the clearest version of the base/superstructure metaphor. He states:

“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” [my emphasis].2

We are first told that the base is the totality of productive relations which make up the economic structure of a society. We are then told that upon this base arises a superstructure of legal and political institutions. This provides us with a basic framework to analyze.

The term “arises” is  very important here. It implies that the political and legal institutions are genetically linked and grow directly from the base. The conclusion to be drawn here is that the judicial and political structuring of the state aren’t abstract forms of truth imposed on humanity from without. Nor is the state itself a transhistorical form of social organization needed to mediate the excesses of “human nature”. Rather the state and its corresponding legal structures arise from the real relations of production as a coercive body of control, maintaining the economic and political dominance of the ruling class. But what’s more interesting and unfortunately overlooked are the following lines, in which Marx states that to these superstructures “correspond definite forms of social consciousness”. A reader who values the specificity of the wording will note that Marx did not mention definite forms of social consciousness in the same breath as the legal and political superstructures. In other words, whereas Marx explicitly establishes a genetic link between politico-legal spheres and productive relations on the one hand, he uses the relation of passive correspondence to forms of social consciousness on the other. The word “definite” also carries weight as a limiting term. It can’t be said that we are dealing with social consciousness in general, but only the definite forms thereof. Furthermore, it's doubtful whether social consciousness even encompasses the totality of consciousness itself. Could one also speak of natural consciousness, in that much art, poetry, and culture is also inspired by man's interaction with the natural world?

Whatever the case, the takeaway should be that Marx's usage of the base-superstructure metaphor is very limited. The base speaks of productive relations while the superstructure only speaks of the state and law. The all-encompassing theory of the superstructure subsuming all forms of culture, religion, art etc. cannot be found in this restricted usage. For those who see the base-superstructure model as the center of Marx’s theory this may appear as a massive defect. But for those with a proper understanding of the distinct relation that the metaphor is meant to highlight, it’s only natural that it be relegated to a lesser role. So the question then becomes: how do we properly understand consciousness, art, mass media, schools, the family, language etc.? To do that we must shift our attention to the mode of production.

Mode of Production Thesis

In the 1859 preface, Marx states that “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life”. Here we are presented with a nearly all-encompassing conception of a given society. We are told that the mode of production of material life has a conditioning effect on the separate spheres of life processes, whether they be political, social, or intellectual.

“Conditions” is a key word here. These separate spheres of human expression don’t arise from the mode of production in a mechanistic manner, but, rather, the general process of these separate spheres are conditioned by the specific mode of production. The most important thing about the Mode of Production thesis is its insistence on the centrality of human activity. Edara Dileep is quite right in saying that the mode of production thesis is a “praxiological paradigm, since the concept of praxis informs the thesis, in a crucial way”.3 Society here is treated in a holistic sense, as an articulated totality of the various spheres of life. The totality of society is made up of socially organized human beings whose life is equated with their life-processes, which are inevitably done in conjunction with others. School, work, and church are all their own particular modes of production in the sense that all of these are constituent parts which contribute to the reproduction of society as a whole, and each maintains its own internal logic despite being conditioned by the general capitalist mode of production. The relations of production of the means of subsistence are only an aspect of this broader whole which undoubtedly play a crucial role. So if we want to talk about consciousness and ideology it is not sufficient to only analyze the production relations or to see matters of ideology as arising from production relations. Productive relations play a role in conditioning consciousness due to their social nature, but so does the education system or the books one reads in a library. The point of Historical Materialism isn’t to deny the importance of these different functions of human activity. More so it is to say that none of these functions could be carried out independently of a society that is structured and reproduced through the process of production and an extensive division of labour. Radical change may be sparked through the publishing of a pamphlet or an album, but how does an artist acquire the materials necessary to record their work? Who owns the exchange lines and factories? The process of production is very much present throughout all these different social functions because it is only due to the fact that humans produce their means of subsistence that any other form of social production can take place. It forces us to treat these varying social forms, not as transhistorical, but as socially mediated through our appropriation of nature and physical organization amongst each other. Through what means can an author actually publish their work on a mass scale? How are the libraries sustained and where do the raw materials for the authorship of a library book even come from in the first place? The special causality of the relations of production lies chiefly in the fact that they are a constituent part in the mode of production, while also determining the political and legal structure of the state. This is precisely where the B/S metaphor does hold serious weight, because Marx is trying to get us to think about the state, not as an alienated force that stands beyond class, but as a coercive apparatus of class rule grounded in the extensive division of labor and class distinctions. Consciousness on the other hand exists, not necessarily independent of class, since the relations of production are still social, and therefore play a major role in shaping one's life and general outlooks, but it is by no means solely determined by them (whether that be directly or ‘in the last instance’). Consciousness after all is present within every aspect of human life. It is not something that is distinctly tied to class in a mechanistic way. If it were, we'd perhaps see proletarians act within their class interest much more often, but history has shown plenty of times they do not. The impetus for rebellion or radical reappraisal of the social organization of production often comes from outside forces, whether that be through socialist literature or the presence of an organized socialist party. It never buds spontaneously from letting the process of production play out on its own. and does not transform as a result of new productive relations alone. The same can be said about religion, culture, patriarchy, prejudice among the masses etc. Such changes in the base most definitely have a long term conditioning effect, but not an ontologically linked effect.

Forces of Production and Productive Relations as aspects of the Mode of Production

The commonly held view when speaking about what exactly constitutes a mode of production is that a mode of production represents the equilibrium between a definite stage of development in the productive forces and corresponding productive relations. For example, the Soviet work Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism states “This unity of the productive forces and production relations is expressed by historical materialism in the concept of mode of production.”4 This isn’t necessarily wrong, since it would be impossible to speak of modes of production if there was not a unity between the forces and relations of production, but I do feel like further elaboration is needed. Relations and forces of production are two crucial aspects of the mode of production, but I’d argue that leaving the explanation here does not give full credence to the depth of the concept. A mode of production is at its core speaking of an activity, a process. The existence of man is expressed through their praxis, manifesting in all spheres of life. The church, as a defining institution during the middle ages, is just as much a part of the feudal mode of production as the specific unification of forces and relations of production. Here I think it is valuable to make clear the dualistic nature of how ‘mode of production’ as a term appears in Marx.

‘Mode of production’ may appear in the holistic sense when Marx wants to talk about the entire way of life, or conversely it may appear in the more narrow sense of material production of the means of subsistence. It’s important not to treat these two senses as opposing or distinct from each other, but rather as overlapping usages in which one can’t be conceived without the other. In Capital Vol. 1 there's a fascinating footnote in the section on commodity fetishism in the first chapter, in which Marx responds to the criticism by bourgeois economist M. Bastiat that material production may be dominant in the current epoch, “but not for the middle ages, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics reigned supreme.” To this Marx responds: “the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part. For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property.”5 The power in this response is the claim that the relative importance of the different spheres of society in a given epoch can’t be separated from the “mode in which they gained a livelihood”. Catholicism found profound influence on feudal society in relation to the ways in which its character was conditioned by the prevalence of landed property and feudal subjugation. Catholicism as a religion most definitely has existence beyond the existence of feudal relations, but it’s also no coincidence that its emphasis on hierarchy, tithes, and loyalty found great synergy with the nobility of the feudal epoch. The conclusion to be drawn here is that a major thesis in Marx is to say that the specific mode of material production, i.e. the specific way in which a unity of productive forces and productive relations is achieved, has a central place in articulating the general process in which the defining life processes of a mode of production are expressed.

Culture as practice or superstructure?

A major benefit in centering the mode of production thesis is that the sphere of cultural production is given real weight which is not as afforded under a rigid base-superstructure framework. If one is to follow the topological interpretation in which the economy is the base, and then ideological forms are ‘superstructures’, we risk falling into faulty conclusions about the relative importance of culture within a given society. When treated as a reflection of an economic base, culture is often reduced to its function as an ideological tool to either lend the class composition of a society support, or a form of mystification to pull the wool over people’s eyes. A sort of ‘false consciousness’ if you will, or a worldview that isn't materially grounded. What this distorts however is that culture is materially woven into the broader mode of production. It is through the processes of production over generations in which humans have produced their own cultural ideas, religions, and rituals. As a distinct sphere of human activity, the moral, religious, and ideological values of a people are the direct efflux of their praxis. Such praxis is not embedded in the production relations alone, but every sphere in which human activity is realized in society. Such emphasis on praxis and the centrality of human activity is often falsely maligned as a defect of Marx’s younger days, in which he was still under the spell of Hegelian mysticism. But it was also Marx in his 1863 manuscripts on surplus value who stated,

“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 (my emphasis).”6 

The last sentence in particular carries immense value in that it states all functions of socially organized individuals have an influence on the realm of material production. Vice versa, we may also state that material production has an important influence on spheres of intellectual and cultural production. To try and categorize any of them within a rigid topology doesn’t work due to the loose, intermingling effect they have on each other as respective spheres of concrete human activity. Cultural production slides into material production, while material production slides into cultural production. A major defect in Stalin is his treatment of ideology and culture as a superstructure lead to instrumentalist implementations of proper modes of behavior within soviet society. The forwardness of this attitude is in full display in Stalin's 1934 report to the seventeenth party congress in which he states “The facts show that we have already laid the foundations of a socialist society in the U.S.S.R., and it only remains for us to erect the superstructures—a task which undoubtedly is much easier than that of laying the foundations of a socialist society.”7 Stalin's insistence that the erection of the superstructure (which we already noted earlier as including ideology and culture in Stalin's view) is quite striking, but also elucidatory of the heavy handedness in which the imposition of a distinct “proletarian culture” was carried out. Through a network of control mechanisms (social science institutes, housing inspectorates, the Commissariat of Education) the Soviet state developed a vast bureaucracy of cultural producers, artists, and officials tasked with the creation of the “new Soviet man”. This is not necessarily a problem in itself, as a revolutionary government ought to dare to build a new “common sense” in the Gramscian sense, and the transition from the capitalist to the communist mode of production is bound to include a vast revolution in the entire way of life in society. The problem is that as someone who saw ideological ‘superstructures’ as arising from the establishment of socialist production relations, Stalin vastly underestimates the difficulty of this task, distorting its complexities, and in practice oversaw the forced creation of a fragile social unity, that only buried existing contradictions among the people rather than meaningfully solving them. We may think of the forced proselytization of a number of non-Marxist intellectuals who were now forced to fit their own non-Marxian theories within the framework dictated by soviet policy. This could only result in the muddling of Marxist theory and stifling of intellectual production under a bureaucratic system of strict censors, rather than genuinely building a new common sense and lively theoretical discussion. This is because the change in cultural and intellectual attitudes is interwoven with changes in people's material praxis and mode of living. It's a change that is deeply bound with questions of pacing and the long term transformation of society. A major point in Marx is to say that the lower stage of communism arises from the ashes of capitalist society and is therefore marked with the moral, intellectual, and cultural birthing pangs of the old order. Changes in production relations or who holds state power can be an enabling factor, but not an instantaneously determinate one. Old prejudices, ways of life, and attitudes will still exist to the degree that the communist mode of production (mode of production as a conditioning conditioned totality!) is still in its infancy. This more dynamic attitude is reflected in Lenin when he writes:

“A cultural problem cannot be solved as quickly as political and military problems.

In a period of acute crisis it is possible to obtain political victory within a few weeks. It is possible to obtain victory in war in a few months. But it is impossible to achieve cultural victory in such a short time. By its very nature it requires a longer period; and we must adapt ourselves to this longer period, plan our work accordingly, and display the maximum of perseverance, persistence and method.”8 

A dynamic attitude presupposes a deep understanding that the persistence of contradictions among the people under a socialist formation is completely natural, as our goal is to build the material forces necessary for the long term transformation of the entire way of life, rather than merely imposing what we champion as most “correct” within our immediate or still limited conditions.

Evald Ilyenkov: Creative Marxism and the Production of the Ideal

A common outlook is that Soviet Marxism was hopelessly controlled, censored, and dogmatised starting with the 30s and remaining such until its dying breath in the early 90s. There definitely is a lot to be said about the widespread ideological degradation and bureaucratic mismanagement which hindered the creative life of Soviet theoretical production, but it is worth noting that within the Union there was also a current of “creative Marxism” which sought to radically reinforce the fluidity of Marx’s materialism and the ‘ideal’ as a driving social force. These theories developed alongside and in opposition to Soviet DiaMat at times, especially during the Khrushchev era as the CPSU sought to ease its control on various sectors of intellectual and cultural production. Arguably the figurehead of this intellectual current was the prolific Evald Ilyenkov (1924-1979), whose writings are of great importance for anyone trying to restore the subjective and dynamic nature of historical materialism, as opposed to the often internalized mechanistic interpretation. Ilyenkov's fight for the restoration of the ideal was in response to naturalistic materialism which believed the ideal could merely be identified with neuro-physiological processes within the brain. Ilyenkov takes a much different view, calling this approach out as more akin to naturalistic, vulgar materialism rather than the socially conceived historical materialism of Marxism. For Ilyenkov, the ideal is not just a reflection within the head, but is the faculty of human activity itself. The subjective form of objective activity if you will.

As a socially determined form of human activity, the ideal is registered through material processes in the brain, but for Ilyenkov and Marx, we are not dealing with the ideal as a matter of individual consciousness and brain processes. Rather we are concerned with the ideal on a socio-collective scale. Man thinks, not just in unity with nature (as Feuerbach would state), but instead in unity with the social and historical collective which is given to him and has been developed over the course of generations. The ideal is posited not just as a passive internalization of the outer world. It is the inner need, the yearning which motivates human action and becomes crystallized in forms of culture. The mistake of the idealist camp is to see these forms as above and against concrete social relations. The idealist will look at the variety of cultural forms and institutions and see them as the works of logic objectifying itself in the world. Historical materialism corrects this by stating it is the action of real human life, organized and conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces, which create the world of ideas. The mistake of the vulgar materialist (even those within the marxist camp) is to fall in the neuro-biological determinism that devalues the subjective element of dialectics and the real social ramifications of the ‘ideal’ as something which exist not just within the human mind, but outside of it as well. It is a force orienting and enabling our practice. The ideal and various ideological forms in which class war is fought is how we assert our agency. It’s also conducive to the active construction of a political subject, one conscious of its historic task of social revolution, abolition of the systems of wage labor, and state coercion. Labour is the mediating link here because again, the materialist method demands that we look at the ideal as something produced and rooted in the social conditions of labor, not abstractly apart or over the reproduction of society's subsistence and life force. To quote Ilyenkov himself:

“All general Images, however, without exception, neither sprang from universal schemas of the work of thought nor arose from an act of passive contemplation of nature unsullied by man, but took shape in the course of its practical, objective transformation by man, by society.”9

Ilyenkov is useful to us today for the very fact that he devoted so much of his life’s work to demonstrating the dynamic fluidity of historical materialism as a theoretical paradigm. Not one which is all knowing, or tries to explain all matters of action through a narrow scope, but one which can ground society, culture, morals, and laws as being grounded in real human activity. It is to say that we are a force of nature which also transforms it in unity with a definite level of development in our productive forces. This brings us much closer to understanding the mode of production thesis where Marx claims that the mode of production conditions the general life processes of politics, intellect, and society at large. We are once again thinking holistically to grasp the social totality as interpenetrating, with human consciousness present in all forms, even those existing outside the mind itself. From the psychological standpoint Ilyenkov treated consciousness as socially embodied, as united with nature and society. Not just any nature or any society, but a historically conditioned nature and a historically conditioned society. For Gramscians this may sound strikingly similar to the concept of historical bloc where the material conditions of a society fuse with the ideas of a society to create an authentic social force capable of overturning a given social order. In both cases this has implications for our practice today, as treating consciousness and the process of production (relations and productive forces) as deeply embedded and interpenetrating means we must direct our action towards the real material conditions and systems which reproduce servility to capitalism on a mass scale. We need concrete political exposures.

The Need for concrete political exposures: neither economism nor abstract critique

A proper clarification and appreciation of the mode of production thesis is needed to enhance Marxism’s theoretical rigour, consistency, and rejection of economism. All the great Marxists of history criticized the trappings of economism which attempted to essentially reduce Marxism to a theory of economic struggle. Economism as a phenomenon could not set its sights on revolution because it is hopelessly trapped in a narrow conception of society that devalues active political intervention into every aspect of human life. But even Lenin and Gramsci aren't entirely free from the extended model of the base/superstructure metaphor critiqued above. This is especially true for Gramsci who, rather than rejecting the model, seeks to elaborate and refine it as a broad, interactionist framework. The proposition of Edara Dileep, by contrast, is to say that the best parts of subsequent Marxist theory have tried to capture its holistic nature, as opposed to narrower interpretations (interpretations which are widely weaponized by Marxism's ideological enemies). For Dileep, using contemporary models, which are more congruent with the mode of production thesis than B/S, is imperative in order to carry on the critique of economism through a corrected mode.10 

When looking through the lens of mode of production we are looking at the organization of societies as articulated wholes. The centrality of human activity in all its forms is reasserted. Particular categories and factors are now just different manifestations of human activity. They don't stand above real human beings, but only exist inasmuch as they are the products of human beings within their natural world. Therefore the relations with nature as co-constituent with production relations and other forms of social mediation also becomes more clear under this framework. In our modern context it helps reassert the need for concrete political intervention—an intervention which could never be satisfied with the hollow deliverism which still prevails in much of the U.S left today.

As the left grows in prominence and builds a socialist pole within the halls of congress, economism’s dangers will continue to present themselves, exemplified in the pragmatist and “sewer socialist” forms of politics that have trouble thinking in terms that aren’t seemingly immediate to productive relations. Even as the oppressed masses are being brought into political life and contemplation on a larger scale than decades prior, the popular conception of socialism is still rather narrow and does not do enough to extend past the basic propositions of European social democracy or even New Deal Democrat reforms. This is the contradiction that must be overcome in  the current phase of struggle. If we see the idea of socialism in America as still embryonic within the minds of the broad masses, then it can only follow that the goal of communists is to exploit ruptures within the social fabric and embark on a permanent struggle to push the contradictions between mass popular energy and bourgeois leadership to the fore. If we recognize consciousness and ideology not as a farce that floats above material activity, but rather as deeply bound with it in all forms of human life, then the solution is immanent to the active political life of masses of people, not a special knowledge imparted to them by socialists.

American communists must conduct the takedown of deliverism by making its issues salient. In a period where deliverism is still in its ascendancy with growing mass appeal against the establishment forces (democratic managerialism and republican nationalism), it is important to embed ourselves within the various mass movements and build real leadership. Embedding oneself in the mass movements does not just mean immersion into activism, but rather engaging with a number of particular struggles where a potential rupture with the capitalist mode of production is already in embryo.

The fight of immigrants for their rights to sovereignty as well as the movement for trans liberation are both very good examples of such mass movements. Capitalism is an objective system but for millions of people of varying backgrounds, sexual orientations, and histories it carries subjective, particular forms of oppression. The oppression a trans person faces is qualitatively different from that of an immigrant who's been stripped of their due process. Yet they both represent potential rupture points with the objective system of capitalism. In the one case as a rejection of the nuclear family which acts as one of the units of societal reproduction, and in the other case the struggle against being relegated to the hyper-exploitation of racialized labor markets where many immigrants find their source of subsistence. It would be a mistake to treat these as merely particular because within both also lies a universal: a universal discontent with the system, a universal outcasting from the realm of “normalcy”, a universal state of oppression; just experienced in subjectively different ways. Communists look at this and see neither the simple expression of an underlying economic relationship, nor the flattening of the experiences as ‘oppression’ writ large; but as features of a mode of production at a particular point in history. The political tasks we identify, which may be considered the tasks of the mass party, must flow from our analysis of this mode and the points of rupture already evident within it.

This orientation will put us into a degree of conflict with the still-predominant deliverist current within DSA, which as we have seen orients itself towards gradual reforms, reaffirming the Democratic Party (such as nods to a return to New Deal politics), and the insistent need to distance oneself from the “excesses” of wokeness. The most prominent crystallization of this trend is that of the platforms presented by AOC and Zohran Mamdani. Valuable as they may be in driving political mobilization, it is also evident that they are only one constituent part of this movement, whose reliance on bourgeois methods of leadership is both its source of immediate power and a limit on its  potential to become a truly ruptural force in society. Just as the French Revolution needed the Jacobin to push the Revolution to its climactic peak, so does the DSA need its own set of disciplined radicals capable of pushing the moment further than what may seem immediately possible.

While it is hard to say whether or not AOC or Zohran filter their policies through a version of the B/S metaphor (either in its limited or expansive form), one can draw certain parallels to the 2nd international or the SPA of old, which undoubtedly did have an economist outlook as conditioned by their mechanistic, narrow reading of Historical Materialism. The SPA for example was riddled with chauvinism and racist attitudes when it came to the question of black liberation. Some were outright hostile to it, while others took the passive attitude that saw the race question as secondary. As erroneous a viewpoint as it may seem, it’s also one that would make sense filtered through a narrow view of economic causality, where changes in the productive relations are the determinant factor in every situation. From this perspective, it is rational to subordinate diverse social struggles to the more fundamental struggle within the relations of production. While not a complete recapitulation of this theory of socialism (Zohran, for example, has been an outspoken proponent of Palestinian rights), the contemporary ‘deliverist’ and sewer socialist strategies do seem to inherit some of its basic assumptions, evidenced by a lesser emphasis on issues such as combating racist policing, and a greater emphasis on winning back surplus value in the form of access to childcare or better public transportation.

If, however, we adopt Dileep’s ‘corrected’ model of historical materialism, with its appreciation for the primacy of the totality of relations under capitalism, we may escape the confines of the choice between deliverism and a generic activism that loses touch with the necessity of choosing our battles strategically. If all forms of social determination are embedded within the mode of production and division of labour and therefore conducive to its destruction, building a revolutionary subject is not reducible to soap box speeches about the ‘true nature’ of oppression, in the midst of a struggle whose own particularity must be respected. But then how does a spontaneous struggle, which may break out at any point in the vast mode of production, translate into a socialist rupture? While there is no universally correct answer, we can say that our tasks will involve the expansion of struggles into a struggle against the totality as such, requiring the reforging of a new Ideal and new forms of class consciousness. When we attack deliverism, we must at the same time strike at the heart of the social fabric and mold the revolutionary subject of our time. Every moment where a moderate elected fails we’ll be right there alongside the mass movements to redirect their disappointment to the realm of revolutionary politics. We will deliberate on concrete matters of strategy and demands. We will be in a position to actually direct the class struggle and make our positions salient as the contradictions of mass politics and bourgeois leadership begin to show. A concrete political exposure doesn't just announce that the people's interests lay elsewhere, it actively shows that their interests run deeper. Only then do real lines of demarcation and new crystallizations become historically concrete.

Even if similar strategic points have been explicated elsewhere, including in other works of Geese Magazine, perhaps an understanding of the mode of production thesis and of society as a concrete social totality may help enhance our understanding of such strategies. A ‘corrected model’ offers the necessary reminder that what we are fighting for isn't just domination over this or that party, or this or that section of the ruling class, but the entire mode of social organization on which everything rests. There can be no more room for centering the relations of production over essential struggles like black liberation, the destruction of patriarchy, the destruction of the American empire, land back, or prison abolition. These aren't secondary, or factors that merely arise out of the production relations, but are socially concrete realities undoubtedly conditioned by the relations of production (due to the latter also being social in nature) but also conditioning them back. If we recognize that Marxism is closer to a social determinism than an economic determinism, then we are one step closer to grasping the complex totality of capitalist society and the broad forms of struggle necessary to topple it.

Endnotes

1 Joseph Stalin, "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics," Pravda, June 20, 1950.

2 Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859; repr., Marxist Internet Archive).

3 Edara Dileep, Biography of a Blunder: Base and Superstructure in Marx and Later (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 70.

4 Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1963), 120.

5 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Friedrich Engels (1887; repr., Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1999), chap. 1, sec. 4.

6 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (1863; repr., Progress Publishers).

7 Joseph Stalin, Report to the Seventeenth Congress on the Work of the C.P.S.U.(B.) (1934).

8 Vladimir Lenin, "The Tasks of the Political Education Departments," in Collected Works, vol. 33 (Progress Publishers, 1965), 60–79.

9 Evald V. Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic: Essays on Its History and Theory (Aakar Books, 2008), 256.

10 Dileep, Biography of a Blunder, 248–49.