Understanding Society: Infrastructure, Superstructure, and Ideology
Socioeconomic Infrastructure and Economic Structures
The material base of society determines its social structure, social change, and development. This includes the productive forces and production relations. It is dependent on the framework. The clearest Marxist theses relating to the infrastructure are as follows:
- It is the fundamental factor determining the historical process and social development and change. In other words, when you change the infrastructure, you change the whole society (social relations, power, institutions, and other elements of the superstructure).
- It makes up the productive forces (natural, technical, and workforce) and the relations of production (social relations established between people based on how they are linked with the productive forces, for example, social classes).
- The superstructure (legal and political forms, philosophy, religion, art, science, etc.) depends upon it.
Superstructure
The superstructure is the joint elements of social life dependent on the infrastructure. This set includes religion, morality, science, philosophy, art, law, and political and legal institutions. A basic thesis of historical materialism is that the superstructure depends on the economic conditions in which each society lives, the means and forces of production (infrastructure).
The superstructure does not have a history of its own, independent, but is a function of the class interests of the groups that have created it. Changes in the superstructure are the result of changes in the infrastructure. This theory has important consequences:
- Firstly, a complete understanding of each of the elements of the superstructure can only be achieved with an understanding of the structure and economic changes that are at its base.
- Secondly, the idea of the possible independence of the human mind, thought, from the economic world in which people are engaged can promote relativism.
In the case of philosophy, this means that the history of philosophy cannot be an internal history of thought (something like the story of how philosophical systems give rise to others). It must appeal to something outside itself, such as the economy, to understand philosophy. Philosophical theories are the result of economic circumstances and the class struggle in which the society each philosopher lives in is immersed.
Ideology in Marxism
Marxism added the following characteristics to this general concept:
- Ideology is understood so widely that ideology is identified with culture. In the Critique of Political Economy, Marx tells us that ideology includes law, politics, religion, art, philosophy, and (suggested) even science.
- Ideologies do not describe man and his situation in the world and society in the right way, but in a distorted, false way.
- The deformation in the description of man is in the interest of the ruling class to maintain its dominant position. As Marx says in The German Ideology, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” The ruling class has the means of material production, but also the control and production of spiritual goods, the production of culture. Therefore, the ideas that will succeed in a society are those that the rulers want to dominate.
- Ideologies are a “social product”: the thoughts of men are a consequence of their society, particularly the current economic order.
- As a result of the above thesis, the various forms of ideology (religion, politics, philosophy) have no history or self-development. This means, for example, that a history of philosophy that explains the different philosophical systems based on the problems and solutions that philosophers have submitted (a story “inside” philosophy) is a bad history of philosophy. The “good” history of philosophy must show the relationship between the philosophical systems that appear throughout history and the economic circumstances that they reflect.
Given this interpretation of ideology as a form of alienation, a fundamental task of philosophy will be to expose the supposed objectivity of ideological descriptions. Philosophy is conceived essentially as a critical philosophy. This is what Marxism intends, for example, in its criticism of religion and classical political economy.
It is also leading Marxism to believe that one of the most difficult tasks will be to instill class consciousness in the proletariat because, given its control of the exploiting class over different forms of intellectual production, it is likely that the proletariat itself will defend ideas that do not suit it, ideas that are in the ruling class’s interests for it to think. The final overcoming of ideology can only be achieved with the disappearance of the exploitation of man by man.