zing the economic activities on which it is based. It can become a drain on them that prevents their reproduction - and, in doing so, destroys the resources upon which the whole of society, including the superstructure itself, depends. Then material reality catches up with it and the whole social edifice comes tumbling down.
But none of these developments take place without massive political and ideological struggles. It is these which determine whether one set of social activities (those of the superstructure) cramp a different set of social activities (those involved in maintaining and developing the material base). It is these which decide, for Marx, whether the existing ruling class maintains its power until it ruins society, or whether a rising class, based on new forms of production, displaces it.
'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle ', wro te Marx and Engels at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto. But the class struggle is precisely the struggle between those who use the political and ideological institutions of the superstructure to maintain their power over the productive 'base' and exploitation, and those who put up resistance to them.
The superstructure exists to defend exploitation and its fruits. Any real fight against the existing structures of exploitation becomes a fight against the superstructure, a political fight. As Lenin put it, 'Politics is concentrated economics.' p> Marxism does not see political struggle as simply an automatic, passive reflection of the development of the forces production. It is economic development that produces the class forces that struggle for control of society. But how that struggle goes depends upon the political mobilisation that takes place within each class.
The key role of changes in production
We are now in a position to reassess Engels ' statement that 'various elements of the superstructure ... also exercise their influence on the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their forms '. [30]
Under any form of class rule a range of structures are built to reinforce and institutionalise exploitation. Those in control these institutions have interests of their own, which influence everything else which happens in society - including the nature of material production itself.
However, that cannot be the end of the matter, as the 'voluntarist' rendering of Engels 'remarks implies. There is still I question of where the superstructural institutions themselves come from. And there is the all-important question of what happens if the superstructure develops in such ways as to impede the reproduction of its own material base.
Marx insists that simply to assert that everything in society influences everything - the superstructure the base as well as vice versa - leads nowhere. He takes the point up in The Poverty Philosophy, his polemic against Proudhon, written soon after The German Ideology:
'The production relations of society form a whole. M Proudhon considers economic relations as so many social phases engendering one another, resulting one from the other ... The only drawback to this method is that when he comes to examine a single one of these phases, M Proudhon cannot explain it without having recourse to all the other relations of society; which relations he has not yet made his dialectical movement engender. '[31]
In his writings Marx points to three different consequences of such a view of society as an undifferentiated whole, with everything influencing everything else.
Firstly, it can lead to a view in which the existing form of society is seen as eternal and unchanging (the view which Marx ascribed to bourgeois economists, seeing social relations as governed by 'eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any '; it is the view that underlies the barrenness of the modern pseudo-science of society, sociology).
Secondly, it can lead to viewing the dynamic of society as lying in some mystical force that lies outside society (Hegel's 'World spirit' or Weber's 'rationalisation'). p> Thirdly, it can lead to the view that what exists today can only be grasped in its own terms, through its own language and ideas, without any reference to anything else (the position of those idealist philosophers who followed Hegel in 19th century Germany, and of more recent thinkers like Collingwood, Winch and the ex-Althusserians).
Marx's way out of this impasse is to locate the one element in the social whole that has a tendency to cumulative development of its own. This is the action of humans in working on their environment to get a living for themselves. Past labour provides the means for increasing t...
