Wednesday, July 15, 2015

What do you understand by superstructure in Marxist Criticism?

Marx thought that everything about a society could be understood in terms of looking at the economic base—the means of production. So in an agricultural society, everything—culture, social interactions, gender roles, and so on—were not just shaped, but were dependent on, the way that agricultural labor was done. This is why the Industrial Revolution was so important. The economic changes it entailed had dramatic effects on society. If the means of production and its ownership constituted the economic base, everything else was what Marx and others he influenced called "superstructure." Into this category Marx placed government, religion, art, literature, gender roles, etc. The important thing to understand is that the superstructure was determined by the base. So in understanding history, Marx would not look, for example, at the Protestant Reformation as a seminal event in its own terms. Rather, he would look for the ways that economic change led to the Reformation. Marxian scholars thus look at changes in the relationship between workers and the means of production to explain events in history, trends in literature, changes in gender roles, and so on. It could not, according to Marx, work the other way. The base dictated the superstructure, not the other way around, because the superstructure was built upon the base.
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/what_is_marxism.php

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