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).

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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?