Raymond Williams begins his essay, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” by stating that, “Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure” (130). Williams, however, states that he would prefer to start from the proposition that “social being determines consciousness” (130). Directly Williams steps away from the structural arguments of his peers, rejects accusations against Marx over fixed and definite
Williams looks at the “language of determination” linking the base and superstructure in Marx’s writing; in describing this, Marx often uses the German word “bestimmen”, which becomes “determines” in English (130). Williams points out that the language of determination during Marx’s time was steeped in history of idealist and theological accounts of the world, but that Marx was opposed to an “ideology that had been insistent on the power of certain forces outside man, or, in its secular version, on an abstract determining consciousness”, but instead puts the “origin of determination in men’s own activities” (130). Therefore Williams constructs that there are at least two senses of determination, one that rests on an external cause and predicts or prefigures activity, and another notion of determination as “setting limits, exerting pressures” (131). Williams argues that determination must be revalued toward the latter, and in doing so we must also revalue “the base” away from an abstraction of a fixed economy and towards “the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships” and within those activities, contradictions and variations exist where in the base within a state of active process (132). The contradictions between relationships of production and the consequent social relationships forms the foundation of Marx’s historical materialism and is the source for Williams’ argument for a dynamic, active base and the possibility for change in both the base and superstructure. A further idea Williams takes on, which becomes important for his argument, is the notion of productive forces, not those limited within capitalist economy, but rather productive forces as a production of society itself. This, according to Williams, follows Marx’s claim that “most important thing that a worker ever produces is himself, himself in the fact of that kind of labour, or the broader historical emphasis of men producing themselves and their history” (133). This broader formulation of productive forces expands understanding of the base and weakens the inclination to label some social forces as simply “superstructural”, and therefore fixed. (133)
Williams moves onto a discussion of Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist Georg Lukács and the concept of social “totality”. As with the layered notion of base and superstructure, social totality fits Williams’ claim that “social being determines consciousness” (133). Totality recognizes that “society is composed of a large number of social practices which form a concrete social whole” and additionally that these practices interact, relate and combine with one another in complicated ways (134). Williams argues that the notion of totality misses any process of determination, and that by acknowledging these practices without recognizing a specific organization or structure “directly related” to social practices, is to falter: Williams goes so far to say that in doing so “we fail to recognize reality at all” (134). Without a superstructural element, we are unable to recognize social intentions present in every society, intentions which “in all our experience have been the rule of a particular class” [emphasis added] (134). Williams argues for the necessity of a superstructural element as a means of denying the natural and “universal legitimacy” of bourgeois laws and ideologies and maintaining the agency to question social intentions.
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