Marx’s Theories: Infrastructure, Superstructure, and Humanism
Interpreting Marx: Divergences from Engels
Marx and Engels differed on the roles of infrastructural and superstructural elements. Marx’s nuanced view, exemplified in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” contrasts with Engels’s more simplistic interpretation. Weber critiqued both, but highlighted Engels’s development of Dialectical Materialism (DIAM), a concept Marx did not explore. DIAM posits that the laws governing history and matter are identical, a notion absent in Marx’s historical materialism, which focuses on human society’s material conditions.
Scientific Marxism
Marx aimed to create a science of history to understand and transform societal conditions. Unlike utopian socialists, he sought to analyze objective conditions and break historical trends of rulers and ruled. His work, including Capital, provides tools for societal transformation, moving beyond feudal relations.
Means of Production
The means of production encompass tools, machines, and natural forces used in production. These vary across societies and historical periods, shaping the scope of work. Production relations are the dynamics between those who own and those who do not own the means of production, reflecting a master-slave dialectic as noted in the Communist Manifesto.
Ideology
For Marx, ideology shapes individual consciousness but often distorts social relations and production dynamics. It manifests in cultural settings like religion, philosophy, and education.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure (base) supports the social structure and comprises the means of production and relations of production.
Superstructure
The superstructure includes religion, politics, state, arts, and culture, built upon the ideological infrastructure. Society always consists of both infrastructure and superstructure.
Humanist Marxism
Influenced by Hegel, Marx emphasized work’s role in history and the master-slave dialectic. He critiqued capitalism for commodifying work, degrading it from a covenant of loyalty (as in feudalism) to a market commodity subject to supply and demand. This commodification, Marx argued, is akin to prostitution, as everything in capitalism becomes a tradable good.