o maintain their material lives, human beings are forced to act on the world in certain ways - to engage in material production. But that requires certain forms of cooperation between them. p> These core relationships provide a framework which everything else humans do has to fit on to. Everything else is, in this sense, based on them. They provide the limits to what is possible in any society. p> So, for instance, a hunter-gatherer society does not have the means to store food for more than a few days, and can only survive if its members are continually on the move looking for more foodstuffs. It is therefore restricted in a number of ways: it cannot be made up of bands of more than 20 or so people; the women in it cannot bear more than one child every four or five years, since the children have to be carried when the band looks for food; there is no means by which one section of society could be freed from labour in order to engage in writing, reading, higher arithmetic, etc.
This is the narrowest way in which you can grasp Marx's argument. But he sees it as having even wider implications than this. The relations of material production not only limit the rest of relations in society, they are also the source of the content of these wider relations as well.
The history of society is the history of changes in the ways in which production takes place, each associated with changes in the relations between human beings immediately around the productive process. And these changes in turn then exert a pressure on all the other social relations. p> If, for instance, a band of hunter-gatherers adopts a me of radically increasing the food available to them (by, say planting root vegetables for themselves instead of having search for them) and of storing food for long periods of time (for instance, in earthenware pots), this necessarily changes their social relations with each other. Instead of continually moving, they have to stay in one spot until the crop can be harvested; if they are staying in one spot, there is no longer any necessity for restriction on the number of children per woman the crop becomes something which other bands of people can seize, so providing, for the first time, an incentive for warfare, between rival bands.
Changes in the way material production takes place lead changes in the relations of society in general.
And even relations between people which do not arise out production - the games people play with each other, the forms sex takes, the relations of adults and young babies - will affected.
Marx does not at all deny the reality of relations other than directly productive ones. Nor does he deny that they can influence the way production itself takes place. As he puts it in Theories of Surplus Value:
'All circumstances which ... affect man, the subject of production, have greater or lesser effect upon his functions and activities, including his functions and activities as creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this sense it can be truly asserted that all human relations and functions, however and wherever they manifest themselves, influence material production and have a more or less determining effect upon it. '[29]
This is even true in pre-class societies. There is a tendency for old patterns of working and living to crystallise into relatively inflexible structures. They become 'sanctified' with the development of systems of religion, magic, taboos, rituals and so or At first these systems are carried on even in 'bad times', when the short term needs or desires of the individual might lead ti actions which ruin the long term interests of the social collectivity. But, by this very fact, they discourage innovation and move to new forms of production, which would be of long-term as well as short-term benefit.
Exploitation and the superstructure
Something more is needed than simple cooperation between people for the forces of production to develop beyond a certain point. Exploitation is also needed.
While the surplus left after the satisfaction of everyone's minimal needs is small, resources can only be gathered together for further development of the forces of production if the surplus is controlled by a small, privileged minority of society. Hence it is that wherever there is the development of agriculture proper out of horticulture, the growth of trade, the use of dams and canals for flood prevention and irrigation, the building of towns, there are also the beginnings of a polarisation within society between those who exploit and those who are exploited.
The new exploiting group has its origins in its role in production: it is constituted out of those who were most efficient in introducing new methods of agricultural production, or those who pioneered new sorts of trade between one society and its neighbours, or those who co...
