Comments on Terry Eagleton's "Base and Superstructure Revisited"

Let me first confess that, remarkably, I am also one of those people who is skeptical about alien abduction but do suspect that there is something important about the distinction between base and superstructure. Based on Eagleton's estimate, I calculate that the probability of two such people speaking at the same session is comparable to the chance of winning the lottery and, paradoxically enough, somewhat less than the chance that there really are alien abductions. However, I do still have some doubts about how this distinction should best be understood, some of which remain despite the many illuminating ideas in Eagleton's paper.

Let me approach the issue in an obvious if possibly plodding way, by saying a few words about the three obvious questions: What is the Base? What is the Superstructure? And how are they related?

A society's base, I take it, is the sum of its productive and reproductive resources, and would include at least the means of production and the relations of production. As Eagleton notes, there can be no doubt that this is fundamental to society in the sense that there would be no society without production of, at the very least, the necessities of human life. But of course there is more than this banal truth involved in taking seriously a doctrine of base and superstructure.

The superstructure is a more slippery concept. Sometimes it is understood as meaning simply culture. As Eagleton nicely remarks, the concept of culture tends to vacillate between the broadly anthropological and the narrowly aesthetic, neither of which is of much use for the present purpose. Eagleton, at any rate, presents a more interesting concept of superstructure as that part of culture the function of which is to contribute to the legitimation of the state. One important consequence of this definition is that it clearly does not constitute base and superstructure as exhaustive categories. Eagleton notes that a literary work can be studied infrastructurally, as part of material production, or superstructurally, as collusive with dominant power. And there is also the possibility of reading it neither way: it may be scrutinized for symptoms of subversion of the dominant power; or perhaps even treated as a purely aesthetic object. There is also a problem that begins to surface here. If we think of the state as existing primarily to defend the relations of production, and hence of the ideological function of the superstructure as being to defend the relations of production, then the superstructure will have been defined in relation to the base. This will threaten some claims about the relation between the two with triviality.

So what of the relation between the two? Often, the Marxist doctrine is taken to be that base determines superstructure. But this is not easy to interpret. Certainly we shouldn't understand, for example, any straightforward statement of efficient causation. A sufficient reason for this is that the ideological function assigned to the superstructure could, presumably, be served by a wide variety of different ideological structures. One more promising line might be the following. The function of the state is to preserve the means of production and social relations of production. This function is carried out both by exercises of physical force and by ideological methods. The latter, more or less, constitutes the superstructure. The base, then, determines the superstructure in the sense that what counts as superstructure depends on the nature of the economic base: the superstructure is whatever serves to give ideological support to whatever in fact constitutes the economic base.

The problem with this interpretation is that it is merely analytic, whereas we presumably were looking for a substantive claim about how societies operate. Put another way, the claim about base determining superstructure simply falls out of Eagleton's perhaps rather idiosyncratic definition of superstructure. What this gives us is a suggestion as to what should make something count as an item of superstructure, but no idea...