Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

  It is for this reason that one must take Marx's celebrated eleventh thesis on Feuerbach with a pinch of salt. The philosophers, he writes there, have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it. But how could you change the world without interpreting it? And isn't the power to interpret it in a particular light the beginnings of political change?

  ''It is social being,'' Marx writes in The German Ideology, ''which determines consciousness.'' Or as Ludwig Wittgenstein put the point in his work On Certainty: "It is what we do which lies at the bottom of our language games.''12 This has important political consequences. It means, for example, that if we want to change the way we think and feel radically enough, we have to change what we do. Education or a change of heart are not enough. Our social being sets limits to our thought. And we could only break beyond these limits by changing that social being—which is to say, our material form of life. We could not get beyond the limits of our thought simply by taking thought.

  But doesn't this involve a false dichotomy? If by ''social being'' we mean the kinds of things we do, then this must already involve consciousness. It is not as though consciousness lies on one side of a divide, and our social activities on the other. You cannot vote, kiss, shake hands or exploit migrant labour without meanings and intentions. We would not call a piece of behavior from which these things were absent a human action, any more than we would call tripping over a step or a rumbling in the gut a purposeful project. Marx would not, I think, deny this fact. As we have seen, he sees human consciousness as embodied—as incarnate in our practical behavior. Even so, he still holds that material existence is in some sense more fundamental than meanings and ideas, and that meanings and ideas can be explained in terms of it. How are we to make sense of this claim?

  One answer, as we have seen already, is that thinking for humans is a material necessity, as it is in a more rudimentary way for beavers and hedgehogs. We need to think because of the kind of material animals we are. We are cognitive beings because we are corporeal ones. Cognitive procedures for Marx grow hand in hand with labour, industry and experiment. ''The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness," he writes in The German Ideology, "is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.''13 If Nature simply dropped its luscious treasures into our gratefully gaping mouths, or if (perish the thought) we only needed to eat once in a lifetime, we might not have to do much thinking at all. Instead, we could just lie back and enjoy ourselves. But Nature, alas, is a good deal more niggardly than this, and the human body is racked by wants it must perpetually satisfy.

  To begin with, then, it is our bodily needs which shape our way of thinking. And this is one sense in which thought is not paramount, even though a lot of thought likes to think it is. At a later stage of human development, Marx argues, ideas become much more independent of these needs, and this is what we know as culture. We can begin to relish ideas for their own sake, not for their survival value. Thought, as Bertolt Brecht once remarked, can become a real sensuous pleasure. Even so, it remains true that reasoning, however elevated, has its humble origins in biological need. As Friedrich Nietzsche taught, it is bound up with our exercise of power over Nature.14 The drive to practical control of our environment, which is a life-or-death affair, underlies all our more abstract intellectual activity.

  In this sense, there is something carnivalesque about the thought of Marx, as there is about the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud. The low is always a shadowy presence lurking within the high. As the critic William Empson remarks, ''The most refined desires are inherent in the plainest, and would be false if they weren't.''15 At the root of our most lofty conceptions lie violence, lack, desire, appetite, scarcity and aggression. It is this which is the secret underside of what we call civilisation. Theodor Adorno speaks in graphic phrase of ''the horror teeming under the stone of culture.''16 ''The class struggle,'' writes Walter Benjamin, '' . . . is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.''17 We should note that Benjamin is not out to deny the value of ''refined and spiritual things,'' any more than Marx is. He is concerned to put them in historical context. Like many a carnivalesque philosopher, Marx is a giant of a thinker with a heartfelt distrust of exalted ideas. Conventional politicians, by contrast, tend to speak publicly in earnestly idealist terms and talk privately in cynically materialist ones.

  We have already touched on another sense in which ''social being'' has the edge over consciousness. This is the fact that the sort of understandings that really stick usually arise from what we actually do. In fact, social theorists speak of a kind of knowledge—tacit knowledge, they call it—which can only be acquired in the act of doing something, and which therefore cannot be handed on to someone else in theoretical form. Try explaining to someone how to whistle ''Danny Boy.'' But even when our knowledge is not of this kind, the point remains valid. You could not learn how to play the violin from a teach-yourself book, then grab the instrument and dash off a dazzling rendition of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor. There is a sense in which one's knowledge of the concerto is inseparable from the capacity to perform it.

  There is another sense in which material reality has the edge over ideas. When Marx speaks of consciousness, he is not always thinking of the ideas and values which are implicit in our daily activities. He is sometimes thinking of more formal systems of concepts such as law, science, politics and the like. And his point is that these forms of thought are ultimately determined by social reality. This, in fact, is the famous, much reviled Marxist doctrine of base and superstructure, which Marx outlines as follows:

  In the social production of their existence, men invariably enter into definite relations which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of the 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.18

  By the ''economic structure'' or ''base,'' Marx means the forces and relations of production; by the superstructure, he means institutions like the state, law, politics, religion and culture. In his view, the function of these institutions is to support the ''base,'' meaning the prevailing class-system. Some of them, like culture and religion, perform this task largely by producing ideas which legitimate the system. This is known as ideology. ''The ideas of the ruling class,'' Marx writes in The German Ideology, ''are in every epoch the ruling ideas.'' It would be odd to come across a thriving feudal society in which most of the ideas in circulation were vehemently antifeudalist. As we have seen, Marx thought that those who controlled material production tended to control mental production as well.

  The claim has even more force in an age of press magnates and media barons than it had in his own time.

  Since the base-superstructure model has been much derided by some of Marx's critics, and even by some of his adherents, I will perversely put in a good word for it here. It is sometimes objected that the model is too static; but all models are static, as well as simplifying. Marx does not mean that there are two entirely distinct slices to social life. On the contrary, there is a good deal of traffic between the two. The base may give rise to the superstructure, but the superstructure is important for the base's continued existence. Without the support of the state, the legal system, political parties and the circulation of pro-capitalist ideas in the media and elsewhere, the current property system might be somewhat more shaky than it is. In Marx's view, this two-way traffic was even more evident in precapitalist societies, where law, religion, politics, kinship and the state entered crucially into the business of material production.

  Nor is the superstructure secondary to the base in the sense of being somehow less real. Prisons, churches, schools and television stations are every bit as real as banks an
d coal mines. Perhaps the base is more important than the superstructure; but more important from what viewpoint? Art is more important for the spiritual well-being of humanity than the invention of a new chocolate bar, but the latter is usually seen as part of the base while the former is not. The base is more important, Marxists would argue, in the sense that truly epoch-making changes in history are largely the result of material forces, not of ideas or beliefs.

  Ideas and beliefs can be formidably influential; but the materialist claim is that they take on truly historic force only when they are allied with powerful material interests. Homer may see the Trojan war in terms of honour, valour, divine providence and the like, but the ancient Greek historian Thu-cydides, a full-blooded materialist in his own way, soberly points out that it was a shortage of resources, along with the Greeks' habit of breaking off warfare to embark on land cultivation and plundering expeditions, which spun out the conflict for so long. Thucydides also sees the whole system of Hellenic power as based on the development of navigation, and the commerce and accumulation that this enabled. Materialist theories of history stretch back long before Marx.

  There are also a fair number of institutions which might be said to belong to both base and superstructure at the same time. Born-again churches in the United States are powerhouses of ideology but also immensely lucrative businesses. The same is true of publishing, the media and the film industry. Some U.S. universities are massive business enterprises as well as knowledge factories. Or think of Prince Charles, who exists largely to inspire deference in the British public, but who also makes a sizeable profit out of doing so.

  But surely the whole of human existence cannot be carved up between base and superstructure? Indeed not. There are countless things that belong neither to material production nor to the so-called superstructure. Language, sexual love, the tibia bone, the planet Venus, bitter remorse, dancing the tango and the North Yorkshire moors are just a few of them. Marxism, as we have seen, is not a Theory of Everything. It is true that one can stumble on the most improbable connections between class struggle and culture. Sexual love is relevant to the material base, since it quite often leads to the production of those potential new sources of labour power known as children. Dentists during the economic recession of 2008 reported a notable increase in jaw pains, brought on by teeth-gritting caused by stress. Clenching one's teeth in the face of catastrophe is apparently no longer a metaphor. When the novelist Marcel Proust was still in the womb, his genteel mother was greatly distressed by the outbreak of the socialistic Paris Commune; and some speculate that this distress was the cause of Proust's lifelong asthma. There is also a theory that Proust's immensely long, sinuous sentences are a kind of psychological compensation for his breathlessness. In which case there is a relation between Proust's syntax and the Paris Commune.

  If the model suggests that the superstructure actually came into existence to serve the functions it does, then it is surely mistaken. This may be true of the state, but it is hardly true of art. Nor is it true to say that all the activities of schools, newspapers, churches and the state support the present social system. When schools teach infants how to tie their shoelaces, or television stations broadcast weather forecasts, there is no sense in which they are behaving ''superstructurally.'' They are not buttressing the relations of production. The state sends its special forces to club peace demonstrators, but the police also search for missing children. When tabloid newspapers denounce immigrants, they are acting ''super-structurally''; when they report road accidents they are most likely not. (Reports of road accidents, however, may always be used against the system. It is said that in the newsroom of the Daily Worker, the old British Communist Party newspaper, sub-editors would be handed reports of road accidents with the instruction ''Class-angle that, comrade''). So to announce that schools, churches or TV stations belong to the superstructure is misleading. We may think of the superstructure less as a place than as a set of practices. Marx himself probably did not think of the superstructure in this way, but it is a useful refinement of his argument.

  It is probably true that anything can in principle be used to prop up the current system. If the TV weatherman makes light of an approaching tornado because the news might depress viewers, and listless citizens are unlikely to work as hard as cheerful ones, he is acting as an agent of the ruling powers. (There is a curious belief that gloom is politically subversive, not least in the pathologically upbeat United States.) In general, however, we might say that some aspects of these institutions behave in this way, and some do not. Or some may behave like this at some times and not at others. In which case an institution can be ''superstructural'' on Wednesday but not on Friday. The word ''superstructure'' invites us to put a practice in a specific kind of context. It is a relational term, asking what function one kind of activity serves in relation to another. As G. A. Cohen argues, it explains certain non-economic institutions in terms of the economic.19 But it does not explain all such institutions, or all of what they get up to, or why they came into existence in the first place.

  Even so, Marx's point is a sharper one than that suggests. It is not just a question of declaring that some things are superstructural and some are not, as some apples are russet and some are not. It is rather that if we examine the law, politics, religion, education and culture of class-societies, we will find that most of what they do lends support to the prevailing social order. And this, indeed, is no more than we should expect. There is no capitalist civilisation in which the law forbids private property, or in which children are regularly instructed in the evils of economic competition. It is true that a great deal of art and literature has been profoundly critical of the status quo. There is no sense in which Shelley, Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bronte, Dickens, George Orwell and D. H. Lawrence were all shamelessly pumping out propaganda on behalf of the ruling class. Yet if we look at

  English literature as a whole, we find that its critique of the social order rarely extends to questioning the property system. In Theories of Surplus Value Marx speaks of what he calls ''free spiritual production,'' under which he places art, as opposed to the production of ideology. It might be more accurate to say that art encompasses both.

  In Thomas Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure, Jude Faw-ley, an impoverished artisan living in the working-class area of Oxford known as Jericho, reflects that his destiny lies not with the spires and quadrangles of the university, but ''among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers could not read nor the high thinkers live'' (Part 2, Ch. 6). Are these poignant words a statement of Marx's base/superstructure doctrine? Not exactly. In materialist spirit, they draw attention to the fact that there can be no mental labour without manual labour. Oxford University is the ''superstructure'' to Jericho's ''base.'' If the academics had to be their own cooks, plumbers, stone masons, printers and so on, they would have no time to study. Every work of philosophy presupposes an obscure army of manual labourers, just as every symphony and cathedral does. But Marx means more than this, as we have seen already. It is not just that in order to study Plato you have to eat. It is also that the way material production is organised will tend to affect the way you think about him.

  It is the nature of the thinking carried on in Oxford, not just the fact that thinking goes on there at all, which is the point at stake. Like anyone else, Oxford academics find their thought shaped by the material realities of their age. Most of them are unlikely to interpret Plato, or for that matter any other writer, in a way which undermines the rights of private property, the need for social order and so on. When Jude writes a desperate note to the Master of one of the colleges asking how he might become a student there, he receives back a note suggesting that a working man like himself would be better off not trying. (The irony is that Hardy himself probably agrees with this advice, though not with the reasons for which it was given.) />
  Why should there be a need for superstructures in the first place? This, note, is a different question from asking why we have art or law or religion. There are many answers to that. It is asking, rather, ''Why should so much art, law and religion act to legitimate the present system?'' The answer, in a word, is that the ''base'' is self-divided. Because it involves exploitation, it gives rise to a good deal of conflict. And the role of superstructures is to regulate and ratify those conflicts. Superstructures are essential because exploitation exists. If it did not, we would still have art, law and perhaps even religion. But they would no longer serve these disreputable functions. Instead, they could throw off these constraints and be all the freer for it.

  The base-superstructure model is a vertical one. Yet one can also think of it horizontally. If we do, the base can be seen as the outer limit of political possibility. It is what ultimately resists our demands—what refuses to yield even when every other kind of reform has been conceded. The model thus has a political importance. Someone who supposed that you could change the fundamentals of society simply by changing people's ideas or launching a new political party might find it instructive to be shown how these things, while often of key significance, are not what men and women ultimately live by. He might accordingly redirect his energies to some more fruitful goal. The base represents the final obstacle against which a socialist politics continually presses up. It is, as Americans say, the bottom line. And since by the bottom line Americans sometimes mean money, this just goes to show how many citizens in the Land of the Free are unwitting Marxists. That this is so became obvious to me some years ago, when I was driving with the Dean of Arts of a state university in the American Midwest past thickly blooming cornfields. Casting a glance at this rich crop, he remarked "The harvest should be good this year. Might just get a couple of assistant professorships out of that.''