Ideology and Mode of Production

Mathew Forstater

Economics and Black Studies

Marxist Approaches to Ideology

Traditional Historical Materialism (THM), e.g., Plekhanov, took a position that could be described as economic determinism. The economic base determined the political, ideological, and cultural superstructures of the mode of production.

Mode of ProductionA particular articulation of the forces of

production and relations of production.

The “mode of production controversy” was stimulated by several developments:

Mode of ProductionA particular articulation of the forces of

production and relations of production.

The “mode of production controversy” was stimulated by several developments:

1) The English publication of Marx’s Grundrisse (Formen, 1964; full text, 1973)

Mode of ProductionA particular articulation of the forces of

production and relations of production.

The “mode of production controversy” was stimulated by several developments:

1) The English publication of Marx’s Grundrisse (Formen, 1964; full text, 1973)

2) Althusser’s “reading” of Capital (1968, 1970)

Mode of ProductionA particular articulation of the forces of

production and relations of production.

The “mode of production controversy” was stimulated by several developments:

1) The English publication of Marx’s Grundrisse (Formen, 1964; full text, 1973)

2) Althusser’s “reading” of Capital (1968, 1970)

3) Advances in economic anthropology (especially since Marx’s time)

Developments in Marxist theory

The new alternative view that resulted rejected ‘economism’, including the:

Developments in Marxist theory

The new alternative view that resulted rejected ‘economism’, including the:

1) Interpretation of the superstructure as a mere “reflection” of the economic base;

Developments in Marxist theory

The new alternative view that resulted rejected ‘economism’, including the:

1) Interpretation of the superstructure as a mere “reflection” of the economic base;

2) Mechanistic vision of society and social change;

Developments in Marxist theory

The new alternative view that resulted rejected ‘economism’, including the:

1) Interpretation of the superstructure as a mere “reflection” of the economic base;

2) Mechanistic vision of society and social change;

3) Linear view of “stages” of development (primitive communism, antiquity, feudal, capitalism, socialism, communism, with Asiatic mode at a “tangent”)

‘Last Instance’ Determination

Many of these formulations tended to stop short of entirely vacating the position of identifying the economic base as the location of ultimate primacy. Instead, the economy is said to determine the superstructures, “in the last instance.”

Last instance determinism

Samir Amin, e.g., writes that:

“Of course, whatever the mode of production may be, the economic instance is the determinant one in the last analysis, if we accept the fact that material life conditions all other aspects of social life.” (1976, p. 24)

Economism, materialism, and social transformation

Implicit in Amin’s statement is the notion that what is ‘economic’ is ‘material’, but that the rest of ‘social life’ is not.

The purpose of this presentation is, in part, to challenge this view, and to investigate whether an alternative one can assist in understanding societal transformation.

Revised Historical Materialism (RHM)

The most rigorous formulations of last instance determination are largely associated with the names Althusser and Godelier, although the concept can be traced back through the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Lukacs, and Korsch, among others, to Engels, who wrote that he and Marx often overstated their economism as a rhetorical device intended to clearly distinguish their position from the dominant idealist and bourgeois interpretations of history.

Antonio Gramsci

Gramsci, e.g., wrote that:

The claim presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism, that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the [economic] structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism.” (1971 [1930-32])

Louis Althusser

Althusser’s position is neatly summarized by Balibar:

“The economy is determinant in that it determines which of the instances of the social structure occupies the determinant place.” (1970, p. 224)

‘determinant’ versus ‘dominant’

Jonathan Friedman’s (1975) translation of the last two words of the previous sentence as “dominant position” (instead of “determinant place”), highlights (where Brewster’s does not) Althusser’s crucial distinction between ‘determinant’ and ‘dominant’.

Example of feudalism

The political instance may be dominant in the feudal mode of production, but it is because the specificity of that mode of production requires that particular ‘non-economic’ means of guaranteeing the relations of production necessary for its reproduction. The economic base thus determines that the political instance is dominant in feudalism.

kinship-based and capitalist systemsIn many pre-capitalist modes of production,

kinship occupies the dominant position, but Althusser argues that this dominance is ultimately determined by the economic base.

For Althusser, in capitalism the economic base determines that itself is dominant and thus the capitalist mode is one in which the base is both determinant and dominant.

Maurice Godelier

Godelier (1978) criticizes Althusser’s version of last instance determinism for:

1) reifying the economic ‘instance’

2) being ahistorical

3) failing to draw the crucial distinction between institutions and functions

Maurice Godelier

Godelier (1978) criticizes Althusser’s version of last instance determinism for:

1) reifying the economic ‘instance’

Althusser presents his analysis as though the economy ‘selects’ the instance to be dominant, ascribing the power to choose to a theoretical category.

Maurice Godelier

Godelier (1978) criticizes Althusser’s version of last instance determinism for:

2) being ahistorical

Many have criticized Althusser’s method as super-theoretical, lacking the necessary grounding provided by the historical approach.

Maurice GodelierGodelier (1978) criticizes Althusser’s version of

last instance determinism for:

3) failing to draw the crucial distinction between institutions and functions

Most importantly, this failure prohibits Althusser from seeing how, in particular social formations, political and ideological institutions function as relations of production and therefore as infrastructure. This is what Marx shows in the Grundrisse.

IdeologyRaymond Williams three ‘common’ definitions:

(i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group;

(ii) a system of illusory beliefs—false ideas or false consciousness—which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge;

(iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

Ideology as ‘false consciousness’

This is the bourgeois presentation of Marx and Engels, and can be found in some of their early writings (e.g., The German Ideology), but a broader idea of ideology can be found in Marx that is closer to versions (i) and (iii).

“consciousness and its products”

“are always, though in variable forms, parts of the material social process itself: whether in what Marx called the necessary element of ‘imagination’ in the labour process; or as the necessary conditions of associated labour, in language and in practical ideas of relationship; or, which is so often and significantly forgotten, in the real processes—all of them physical and material, most of them manifestly so—which are masked and idealized as ‘consciousness and its products’ but which, when seen without illusions, are themselves necessarily social material activities.” (Williams, 1977, 61-62)

Stephan Feuchtwang

“The separation of consciousness or the ‘ideal’ from non-consciousness or the ‘social’ as independent factors of human reality either takes ideas and consciousness out of social reality or divides every social unity into two ‘aspects’ along the same categorical lines…Marx’s materialism precisely is not a fundamental categorical separation of thought from material human being.” (1975)

Feuchtwang, ‘Investigating Religion’

“Ideological production, the production and communication of ideas, is no more purely ideal a practice than economic production is purely material. It is nothing if it is not social…Since [ideologies] are social, they are qualities of historically specific relations between concrete individuals, and so they are material.”

Keith Tribe, 1978“What is the history of economics the history of?”

“The economy is presented as prior to or independent of its discursive characterizations and the latter conceived as an adequate or inadequate reflection of it. But how can this economy be presented as independent of discursive characterization and thus given privileged status as a measure of the discourse(s) that succeed or fail to reflect it? Only on the condition that some dubious metaphysical distinction is made between the ‘real world’ and the ‘world of ideas’. However, a sleight of hand intervenes whenever this form of distinction is invoked, for it is not in fact ‘the economy’ which governs the periodisation of ‘economic thought’ but a certain description of it, a particular discursive form. The pretended privilege of the real world over the world of ideas is nothing more than the privilege of one discursive order over another in which unconditioned descriptive statements condition theoretical ones; since the confrontation takes place within discourse, it cannot be anything else. What is particularly insidious about this procedure is that it is assumed that since the economy is ‘real’ and ‘material’, mere reference to the texts of economic histories is sufficient for the character of the economy in question to be established.”

Marx’s Grundrisse – the Formen

Contrary to the traditional lineal view of successive modes of production, in the Formen, Marx posits alternative possible paths out of primitive communalism. Two of these are the Asiatic and the Germanic.

In these, the relationship between the individual, the means of production, and the community differ.

Asiatic and Germanic Modes

Whereas in the Asiatic MOP, the individual (household or extended family) has access to the means of production as a result of their membership in the community, in the Germanic MOP individual membership in the community is mediated by possession of means of production.

Germanic Mode of Production

As Marx emphasizes, in the Germanic mode, the individual household made up of the extended family (or homestead of several families) is the unit of production. There is no central political authority. The community only exists in its assembly. Often this takes the form of kinship or age-set organization, ideological (religious or ritual) institutions that function as relations of production.

Germanic ModeA[nother] form of the property of working individuals,

self- sustaining members of the community, in the natural conditions of their labour, is the Germanic. Here the commune member is neither, as such, a co-possessor of the communal property, as in the specifically oriental form (wherever property exists only as communal property, there the individual member is as such only possessor of a particular part, hereditary or not, since any fraction of the property belongs to no member for himself, but to him only as immediate member of the commune, i.e. as in direct unity with it, not in distinction to it. This individual is thus only a possessor. What exists is only communal property, and only private possession. (pp. 476-477)

Community in GMOP

Among the Germanic tribes, where the individual family chiefs settled in the forests, long distances apart, the commune exists, already from outward observation, only in the periodic gathering-together [Vereinigung] of the commune members, although their unity-in-itself is posited in their ancestry, language, common past and history, etc. The commune thus appears as a coming-together [Vereinigung], not as a being-together [Verein]; as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity. (p. 483)

Articulation of domestic and communal forms of production

Individual property does not appear mediated by the commune; rather, the existence of the commune and of communal property appear as mediated by, i.e. as a relation of, the independent subjects to one another. The economic totality is, at bottom, contained in each individual household, which forms an independent centre of production for itself. (pp. 483-484)

‘complementary’ communal propertyTrue, the ager publicus, the communal or people's land, as

distinct from individual property, also occurs among the Germanic tribes. It takes the form of hunting land, grazing land, timber land etc., the part of the land which cannot be divided if it is to serve as means of production in this specific form. But this ager publicus does not appear, as with the Romans e.g., as the particular economic presence of the state as against the private proprietors, so that these latter are actually private proprietors as such, in so far as they are excluded, deprived, like the plebeians, from using the ager publicus. Among the Germanic tribes, the ager publicus appears rather merely as a complement to individual property, and figures as property only to the extent that it is defended militarily as the common property of one tribe against a hostile tribe. (p. 483)

‘an initial, naturally arisen spontaneous community’

• Family, and the family extended as a clan [Stamm], [63] or through intermarriage between families, or combination of clans. Since we may assume that pastoralism, or more generally a migratory form of life, was the first form of the mode of existence, not that the clan settles in a specific site, but that it grazes off what it finds -- then the clan community, the natural community, appears not as a result of, but as a presupposition for the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of the land.

• (p. 472)

cultural-historical mediatorsWhen they finally do settle down, the extent to which

this original community is modified will depend on various external, climatic, geographic, physical etc. conditions as well as on their particular natural predisposition -- their clan character. This naturally arisen clan community, or, if one will, pastoral society, is the first presupposition -- the communality [Gemeinschaftlichkeit] of blood, language, customs -- for the appropriation of the objective conditions of their life, and of their life's reproducing and objectifying activity (activity as herdsmen, hunters, tillers etc.). (p. 472)

Ideology and communal relations of production

• In the Germanic form…[the] basis [is] rather the isolated, independent family residence, guaranteed by the bond with other such family residences of the same tribe, and by their occasional coming-together [Zusammnenkommen] to pledge each others' allegiance in war, religion, adjudication etc. (p. 484)

Age-set organization

The clan system in itself leads to higher and lower ancestral lineages [Geschlechtern], [64] Geschlechter may also refer to the sexes, linguistic groups, generations, etc. It is not entirely certain which of these distinctions Marx had foremost in mind here. (p. 474)

Ideology functioning as relations of production

obligation of all members of the gens to help those of their own who require this, to carry unaccustomed burdens. (This occurs originally everywhere among the Germans, remains longest among the Dithmarschen.) (p. 478)

Communal form of production

the commune, on the one side, is presupposed in-itself prior to the individual proprietors as a communality of language, blood etc., but it exists as a presence, on the other hand, only in its real assembly for communal purposes; and to the extent that it has a particular economic existence in the hunting and grazing lands for communal use, it is so used by each individual proprietor as such, not as representative of the state (as in Rome); it is really the common property of the individual proprietors, not of the union of these proprietors endowed with an existence separate from themselves.

(p. 484)

Cultural-historical mediators

these different forms of the commune or tribe members' relation to the tribe's land and soil -- to the earth where it has settled -- depend partly on the natural inclinations of the tribe, and partly on the economic conditions in which it relates as proprietor to the land and soil in reality, i.e. in which it appropriates its fruits through labour, and the latter will itself depend on climate, physical make-up of the land and soil, the physically determined mode of its exploitation, the relation with hostile tribes or neighbor tribes, and the modifications which migrations, historic experiences etc. introduce (p. 486)

definite mode of life—cultural historical mediators

From The German Ideology:

“The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce” and conscious choice within a cultural-historical context.

This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.

The German Ideology

Grundrisse: Marx’s mediators

“The study in detail of the materialist dialectic in the Grundrisse would have to be a study of Marx’s mediations.” (Nicholaus, p. 40)

The Formen

1) There are multiple possible paths of historical social transformation;

2) There are a plurality of instances capable of functioning as infrastructures (i.e., relations of production)

Socialist transformation

What lessons are there in the Formen for potential paths out of capitalism and the possibilities for socialism or other post-capitalist possibilities?