00162--Karl Marx’s concept of the BASE.

BASE = PRIMARY ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES

According to Marx social reality can be illustrated using the metaphor of a building.  A building has two part: 

                                        

                                        a) a base or a structure [foundation,pillars etc.]

                                        b) a superstructure [structure erected upon the foundation]

The base is all the economic activities that take place in the society.  This base determines the people’s lives in each and every phase of life.  This base draws lines within which the whole of social existence is confined, and is the back born of physical existence. This social structure, fully controlled by the economic factors, compels human beings to follow the laws of production so that they may enjoy all the material advancements aimed at improving the day to day life.

The base includes the very force of nature, and thus it is not exclusively individual made.  The base manifests the planned collective labour of men and women under a social frame work.  In the base people fight for survival and so become conscious of its nature in their minds.  This awareness constitute the are of superstructure. 

    

00161--Base and Superstructure [Marxian Principle]

Karl Marx

The most common concept and set of terms associated with Marxist thought would be Base and Superstructure.

In Marxism the social and cultural aspects of life are believed to be dependent upon the economic ones.  This is essentially the base superstructure model.  The economic conditions in a society constitute the ‘base’ because they determine the nature and character of the social and cultural forms.  The cultural aspects constitute the superstructure. 

Superstructure = culture, lifestyle, arts, literature, religion etc.

Base = Factors and relations of production [primary economic activities].

The nature of the base will be crucial in determining what kind of cultural form emerge in any society.  This means cultural forms have a material basis.

Class conflict, exploitative capitalism and the domination of the bourgeois class will manifest as political power.  Once capitalists acquire political power then they seek to introduce measures that will help them reinforce and expand their power.  In other words, the base, which provides a superstructure, will in turn be strengthened by the superstructure.

  

Louis Althusser’s comment

Though this concept assures the dependency of culture on economy or superstructure on base, Louis Althusser and the later Marxists proposed that the cultural realm enjoys a certain degree of autonomy from the economic base.

It is indeed determined by the base, but it’s determined only in the last instance.  That is, the economic base only provides a general frame work within which cultural practices and forms appear.

00154--What Marxist Critics do.

1)        They make a division between the 'overt' (manifest or surface) and 'covert' (latent or hidden) content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism.  Thus, the conflicts in King Lear might be read as being 'really' about the conflict of class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal overlords)

2)        Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author.  In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those mode by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.

3)        A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it.  For instance, The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, relates the growth of the novel in the eighteen century to the expansion of the middle classes during that period.  The novel 'speaks' for this social class, just as, for instance, tragedy 'speaks for' the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad 'speaks for' for the rural and semi-urban 'working-class'.

4)        A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism.

5)        A fifth Marxist practice is the 'politicisation of literary form', that is, the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstances.  For instance, in the view of some critics, literary realism carries with it an implicit validation of conservative social structures: for others, the formal and metrical intricacies of the sonnet and the iambic pentameter are a counterpart of social stability, decorum, and order.