Base and Superstructure Revisited

Imagine a visitor from Alpha Centauri who lacked the concept of combining different sorts of goods. In Alpha Centaurian society, some people go in for scuba diving, some build Gothic follies in their gardens, and others have various bizarre shapes cut, topiary-wise, in their voluminous hair, but nobody thinks of doing all of these things together. Arriving in our own culture, this visitor begins by imagining that he has to choose between training as a trapeze artist, eating himself to death, climbing in the Andes, and collecting eighteenth-century silverware. Soon, however, he would come to realize that here on earth these versions of the good life need not be incompatible. For there exists with marvelous convenience a kind of meta-good, a sort of magical distillation of all other goods, which allowed you to shunt between or permutate these other goods with the minimum of effort, and its name of course is money.

Not long after realizing this, the Centaurian would no doubt quickly grasp two other facts about terrestrial money, which together constitute something of a paradox: first, that it was so utterly vital a good that it engaged almost everybody's energies most of the time, and second, that it was held in hearty contempt. The alien would be instructed by earnest-looking bankers that there was a great deal more to life than money, and informed by sentimental stockbrokers that the best things in life were free. Psychoanalysts would tell him that money was a superior form of shit, while maudlin characters propping up the bar at his elbow would remind him that you cannot take it with you and that the moon belongs to everyone. He would soon find himself puzzling over the performative contradiction between what we said about money and what we did with it, or, if you prefer, over a certain discrepancy between material base and moral superstructure.

This discrepancy--one much more marked in hypocritical Britain than in brashly upfront young America (no English academic, for example, is hired)--is not, however, just hypocrisy. Indeed, few forms of hypocrisy are just hypocrisy, just as complete charlatans are pretty rare creatures. The discrepancy signals, rather, a genuine conundrum or contradiction about money's ontological status--the fact that it seems at once everything and nothing, impotent and omnipotent, meretricious bits of metal which some men and women will nonetheless go to almost any lengths to amass. Marx's disturbingly precocious Economic and Philosophical MSS explore these ironies, aporias, and ambiguities with positively poetic relish, though the major theoretical treatise on the matter remains the collected works of William Shakespeare.

One can, however, make rather too much of this enigma, as Shakespeare certainly does. For there is surely one phenomenon which can be both supremely important and utterly banal, and that is a necessary condition. Necessary conditions may be poor things in themselves, but they give birth often enough to momentous consequences, and their status is thus hard to measure. It would be silly to say that a pen was a more important object than King Lear, since without one the play would never have got written, but one sees what this perverse claim is trying to say. Or, to bring the matter a little closer home, the intellectually shoddy brand of culturalism which is now sweeping the postmodern left forgets at its peril that whatever else human beings are, they are first of all natural, material objects; that without that objective status there could be no talk of relationship between them, including relations of objectification; and that the fact that we are natural material objects is a necessary condition of anything more creative and less boring we might get up to.

The great eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson saw very shrewdly just why it was that the desire for wealth and power could so easily be construed by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes as the primary motivations of human life. They are thus misconstrued, so Hutcheson argues in his...