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Ideology and Mode of Production

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Title: Ideology and Mode of Production


1
Ideology and Mode of Production
  • Mathew Forstater
  • Economics and Black Studies

2
Marxist Approaches to Ideology
  • Traditional Historical Materialism (THM), e.g.,
    Plekhanov, took a position that could be
    described as economic determinism. The economic
    base determined the political, ideological, and
    cultural superstructures of the mode of
    production.

3
Mode of Production
  • A particular articulation of the forces of
    production and relations of production.
  • The mode of production controversy was
    stimulated by several developments

4
Mode of Production
  • A particular articulation of the forces of
    production and relations of production.
  • The mode of production controversy was
    stimulated by several developments
  • The English publication of Marxs Grundrisse
    (Formen, 1964 full text, 1973)

5
Mode of Production
  • A particular articulation of the forces of
    production and relations of production.
  • The mode of production controversy was
    stimulated by several developments
  • The English publication of Marxs Grundrisse
    (Formen, 1964 full text, 1973)
  • Althussers reading of Capital (1968, 1970)

6
Mode of Production
  • A particular articulation of the forces of
    production and relations of production.
  • The mode of production controversy was
    stimulated by several developments
  • The English publication of Marxs Grundrisse
    (Formen, 1964 full text, 1973)
  • Althussers reading of Capital (1968, 1970)
  • Advances in economic anthropology (especially
    since Marxs time)

7
Developments in Marxist theory
  • The new alternative view that resulted rejected
    economism, including the

8
Developments in Marxist theory
  • The new alternative view that resulted rejected
    economism, including the
  • Interpretation of the superstructure as a mere
    reflection of the economic base

9
Developments in Marxist theory
  • The new alternative view that resulted rejected
    economism, including the
  • Interpretation of the superstructure as a mere
    reflection of the economic base
  • Mechanistic vision of society and social change

10
Developments in Marxist theory
  • The new alternative view that resulted rejected
    economism, including the
  • Interpretation of the superstructure as a mere
    reflection of the economic base
  • Mechanistic vision of society and social change
  • Linear view of stages of development (primitive
    communism, antiquity, feudal, capitalism,
    socialism, communism, with Asiatic mode at a
    tangent)

11
Last Instance Determination
  • Many of these formulations tended to stop short
    of entirely vacating the position of identifying
    the economic base as the location of ultimate
    primacy. Instead, the economy is said to
    determine the superstructures, in the last
    instance.

12
Last instance determinism
  • Samir Amin, e.g., writes that
  • Of course, whatever the mode of production may
    be, the economic instance is the determinant one
    in the last analysis, if we accept the fact that
    material life conditions all other aspects of
    social life. (1976, p. 24)

13
Economism, materialism, and social transformation
  • Implicit in Amins statement is the notion that
    what is economic is material, but that the
    rest of social life is not.
  • The purpose of this presentation is, in part, to
    challenge this view, and to investigate whether
    an alternative one can assist in understanding
    societal transformation.

14
Revised Historical Materialism (RHM)
  • The most rigorous formulations of last instance
    determination are largely associated with the
    names Althusser and Godelier, although the
    concept can be traced back through the Frankfurt
    School, Gramsci, Lukacs, and Korsch, among
    others, to Engels, who wrote that he and Marx
    often overstated their economism as a rhetorical
    device intended to clearly distinguish their
    position from the dominant idealist and bourgeois
    interpretations of history.

15
Antonio Gramsci
  • Gramsci, e.g., wrote that
  • The claim presented as an essential postulate of
    historical materialism, that every fluctuation of
    politics and ideology can be presented and
    expounded as an immediate expression of the
    economic structure, must be contested in theory
    as primitive infantilism. (1971 1930-32)

16
Louis Althusser
  • Althussers position is neatly summarized by
    Balibar
  • The economy is determinant in that it determines
    which of the instances of the social structure
    occupies the determinant place. (1970, p. 224)

17
determinant versus dominant
  • Jonathan Friedmans (1975) translation of the
    last two words of the previous sentence as
    dominant position (instead of determinant
    place), highlights (where Brewsters does not)
    Althussers crucial distinction between
    determinant and dominant.

18
Example of feudalism
  • The political instance may be dominant in the
    feudal mode of production, but it is because the
    specificity of that mode of production requires
    that particular non-economic means of
    guaranteeing the relations of production
    necessary for its reproduction. The economic
    base thus determines that the political instance
    is dominant in feudalism.

19
kinship-based and capitalist systems
  • In many pre-capitalist modes of production,
    kinship occupies the dominant position, but
    Althusser argues that this dominance is
    ultimately determined by the economic base.
  • For Althusser, in capitalism the economic base
    determines that itself is dominant and thus the
    capitalist mode is one in which the base is both
    determinant and dominant.

20
Maurice Godelier
  • Godelier (1978) criticizes Althussers version of
    last instance determinism for
  • reifying the economic instance
  • being ahistorical
  • failing to draw the crucial distinction between
    institutions and functions

21
Maurice Godelier
  • Godelier (1978) criticizes Althussers version of
    last instance determinism for
  • reifying the economic instance
  • Althusser presents his analysis as though the
    economy selects the instance to be dominant,
    ascribing the power to choose to a theoretical
    category.

22
Maurice Godelier
  • Godelier (1978) criticizes Althussers version of
    last instance determinism for
  • 2) being ahistorical
  • Many have criticized Althussers method as
    super-theoretical, lacking the necessary
    grounding provided by the historical approach.

23
Maurice Godelier
  • Godelier (1978) criticizes Althussers version of
    last instance determinism for
  • 3) failing to draw the crucial distinction
    between institutions and functions
  • Most importantly, this failure prohibits
    Althusser from seeing how, in particular social
    formations, political and ideological
    institutions function as relations of production
    and therefore as infrastructure. This is what
    Marx shows in the Grundrisse.

24
Ideology
  • Raymond Williams three common definitions
  • (i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a
    particular class or group
  • (ii) a system of illusory beliefsfalse ideas or
    false consciousnesswhich can be contrasted with
    true or scientific knowledge
  • (iii) the general process of the production of
    meanings and ideas.

25
Ideology as false consciousness
  • This is the bourgeois presentation of Marx and
    Engels, and can be found in some of their early
    writings (e.g., The German Ideology), but a
    broader idea of ideology can be found in Marx
    that is closer to versions (i) and (iii).

26
consciousness and its products
  • are always, though in variable forms, parts of
    the material social process itself whether in
    what Marx called the necessary element of
    imagination in the labour process or as the
    necessary conditions of associated labour, in
    language and in practical ideas of relationship
    or, which is so often and significantly
    forgotten, in the real processesall of them
    physical and material, most of them manifestly
    sowhich are masked and idealized as
    consciousness and its products but which, when
    seen without illusions, are themselves
    necessarily social material activities.
    (Williams, 1977, 61-62)

27
Stephan Feuchtwang
  • The separation of consciousness or the ideal
    from non-consciousness or the social as
    independent factors of human reality either takes
    ideas and consciousness out of social reality or
    divides every social unity into two aspects
    along the same categorical linesMarxs
    materialism precisely is not a fundamental
    categorical separation of thought from material
    human being. (1975)

28
Feuchtwang, Investigating Religion
  • Ideological production, the production and
    communication of ideas, is no more purely ideal a
    practice than economic production is purely
    material. It is nothing if it is not socialSince
    ideologies are social, they are qualities of
    historically specific relations between concrete
    individuals, and so they are material.

29
Keith Tribe, 1978
  • What is the history of economics the history
    of?
  • The economy is presented as prior to or
    independent of its discursive characterizations
    and the latter conceived as an adequate or
    inadequate reflection of it. But how can this
    economy be presented as independent of discursive
    characterization and thus given privileged status
    as a measure of the discourse(s) that succeed or
    fail to reflect it? Only on the condition that
    some dubious metaphysical distinction is made
    between the real world and the world of
    ideas. However, a sleight of hand intervenes
    whenever this form of distinction is invoked, for
    it is not in fact the economy which governs the
    periodisation of economic thought but a certain
    description of it, a particular discursive form.
    The pretended privilege of the real world over
    the world of ideas is nothing more than the
    privilege of one discursive order over another in
    which unconditioned descriptive statements
    condition theoretical ones since the
    confrontation takes place within discourse, it
    cannot be anything else. What is particularly
    insidious about this procedure is that it is
    assumed that since the economy is real and
    material, mere reference to the texts of
    economic histories is sufficient for the
    character of the economy in question to be
    established.

30
Marxs Grundrisse the Formen
  • Contrary to the traditional lineal view of
    successive modes of production, in the Formen,
    Marx posits alternative possible paths out of
    primitive communalism. Two of these are the
    Asiatic and the Germanic.
  • In these, the relationship between the
    individual, the means of production, and the
    community differ.

31
Asiatic and Germanic Modes
  • Whereas in the Asiatic MOP, the individual
    (household or extended family) has access to the
    means of production as a result of their
    membership in the community, in the Germanic MOP
    individual membership in the community is
    mediated by possession of means of production.

32
Germanic Mode of Production
  • As Marx emphasizes, in the Germanic mode, the
    individual household made up of the extended
    family (or homestead of several families) is the
    unit of production. There is no central
    political authority. The community only exists
    in its assembly. Often this takes the form of
    kinship or age-set organization, ideological
    (religious or ritual) institutions that function
    as relations of production.

33
Germanic Mode
  • Another form of the property of working
    individuals, self- sustaining members of the
    community, in the natural conditions of their
    labour, is the Germanic. Here the commune member
    is neither, as such, a co-possessor of the
    communal property, as in the specifically
    oriental form (wherever property exists only as
    communal property, there the individual member is
    as such only possessor of a particular part,
    hereditary or not, since any fraction of the
    property belongs to no member for himself, but to
    him only as immediate member of the commune, i.e.
    as in direct unity with it, not in distinction to
    it. This individual is thus only a possessor.
    What exists is only communal property, and only
    private possession. (pp. 476-477)

34
Community in GMOP
  • Among the Germanic tribes, where the individual
    family chiefs settled in the forests, long
    distances apart, the commune exists, already from
    outward observation, only in the periodic
    gathering-together Vereinigung of the commune
    members, although their unity-in-itself is
    posited in their ancestry, language, common past
    and history, etc. The commune thus appears as a
    coming-together Vereinigung, not as a
    being-together Verein as a unification made up
    of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and
    not as a unity. (p. 483)

35
Articulation of domestic and communal forms of
production
  • Individual property does not appear mediated by
    the commune rather, the existence of the commune
    and of communal property appear as mediated by,
    i.e. as a relation of, the independent subjects
    to one another. The economic totality is, at
    bottom, contained in each individual household,
    which forms an independent centre of production
    for itself. (pp. 483-484)

36
complementary communal property
  • True, the ager publicus, the communal or people's
    land, as distinct from individual property, also
    occurs among the Germanic tribes. It takes the
    form of hunting land, grazing land, timber land
    etc., the part of the land which cannot be
    divided if it is to serve as means of production
    in this specific form. But this ager publicus
    does not appear, as with the Romans e.g., as the
    particular economic presence of the state as
    against the private proprietors, so that these
    latter are actually private proprietors as such,
    in so far as they are excluded, deprived, like
    the plebeians, from using the ager publicus.
    Among the Germanic tribes, the ager publicus
    appears rather merely as a complement to
    individual property, and figures as property only
    to the extent that it is defended militarily as
    the common property of one tribe against a
    hostile tribe. (p. 483)

37
an initial, naturally arisen spontaneous
community
  • Family, and the family extended as a clan
    Stamm, 63 or through intermarriage between
    families, or combination of clans. Since we may
    assume that pastoralism, or more generally a
    migratory form of life, was the first form of the
    mode of existence, not that the clan settles in a
    specific site, but that it grazes off what it
    finds -- then the clan community, the natural
    community, appears not as a result of, but as a
    presupposition for the communal appropriation
    (temporary) and utilization of the land.
  • (p. 472)

38
cultural-historical mediators
  • When they finally do settle down, the extent to
    which this original community is modified will
    depend on various external, climatic, geographic,
    physical etc. conditions as well as on their
    particular natural predisposition -- their clan
    character. This naturally arisen clan community,
    or, if one will, pastoral society, is the first
    presupposition -- the communality
    Gemeinschaftlichkeit of blood, language,
    customs -- for the appropriation of the objective
    conditions of their life, and of their life's
    reproducing and objectifying activity (activity
    as herdsmen, hunters, tillers etc.). (p. 472)

39
Ideology and communal relations of production
  • In the Germanic formthe basis is rather the
    isolated, independent family residence,
    guaranteed by the bond with other such family
    residences of the same tribe, and by their
    occasional coming-together Zusammnenkommen to
    pledge each others' allegiance in war, religion,
    adjudication etc. (p. 484)

40
Age-set organization
  • The clan system in itself leads to higher and
    lower ancestral lineages Geschlechtern, 64
    Geschlechter may also refer to the sexes,
    linguistic groups, generations, etc. It is not
    entirely certain which of these distinctions Marx
    had foremost in mind here. (p. 474)

41
Ideology functioning as relations of production
  • obligation of all members of the gens to help
    those of their own who require this, to carry
    unaccustomed burdens. (This occurs originally
    everywhere among the Germans, remains longest
    among the Dithmarschen.) (p. 478)

42
Communal form of production
  • the commune, on the one side, is presupposed
    in-itself prior to the individual proprietors as
    a communality of language, blood etc., but it
    exists as a presence, on the other hand, only in
    its real assembly for communal purposes and to
    the extent that it has a particular economic
    existence in the hunting and grazing lands for
    communal use, it is so used by each individual
    proprietor as such, not as representative of the
    state (as in Rome) it is really the common
    property of the individual proprietors, not of
    the union of these proprietors endowed with an
    existence separate from themselves.
  • (p. 484)

43
Cultural-historical mediators
  • these different forms of the commune or tribe
    members' relation to the tribe's land and soil --
    to the earth where it has settled -- depend
    partly on the natural inclinations of the tribe,
    and partly on the economic conditions in which it
    relates as proprietor to the land and soil in
    reality, i.e. in which it appropriates its fruits
    through labour, and the latter will itself depend
    on climate, physical make-up of the land and
    soil, the physically determined mode of its
    exploitation, the relation with hostile tribes or
    neighbor tribes, and the modifications which
    migrations, historic experiences etc. introduce
    (p. 486)

44
definite mode of lifecultural historical
mediators
  • From The German Ideology
  • The way in which men produce their means of
    subsistence depends first of all on the nature of
    the actual means of subsistence they find in
    existence and have to reproduce and conscious
    choice within a cultural-historical context.

45

The German Ideology
  • This mode of production must not be considered
    simply as being the production of the physical
    existence of the individuals. Rather it is a
    definite form of activity of these individuals, a
    definite form of expressing their life, a
    definite mode of life on their part.

46
Grundrisse Marxs mediators
  • The study in detail of the materialist dialectic
    in the Grundrisse would have to be a study of
    Marxs mediations. (Nicholaus, p. 40)

47
The Formen
  • There are multiple possible paths of historical
    social transformation
  • There are a plurality of instances capable of
    functioning as infrastructures (i.e., relations
    of production)

48
Socialist transformation
  • What lessons are there in the Formen for
    potential paths out of capitalism and the
    possibilities for socialism or other
    post-capitalist possibilities?
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