Reading this essay from Issue 3, I found my heart racing through some of its passages. Soutar argues for a framework of understanding “the economy” as composed of interpenetrated material and social apparatuses, in contrast to the economists rationalizing capitalism who focus almost exclusively on its social dimensions (financial markets, prices, money, institutions) with no grasp or even interest in the actual stuff of producing things or feeding, housing, and caring for people. While the author’s focus is on drawing the outlines of an analytic lens, coursing underneath the piece is the radical sensibility that David Graeber returned to again and again: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” More important than being a means of analyzing or describing the existing economy, I think, is this piece’s nudging to imagine a real communist possibility, if we are able to assemble the appropriate and adequate social dimensions of a new economy.
I do need to point to an important and (I think) quite glaring error it contains, however. Soutar writes:
This distinction of mine between the social aspects of the economy and its material aspects partially corresponds to the Marxist notion of the base and the superstructure. In both cases (at least ostensibly) there’s a focus on the interactions of the two “layers” of an economy, their mutual co-constitution, despite there being in the Marxist case a perceived deterministic primacy of the base. There is, however, an important and ultimately insurmountable distinction: most Marxist literature I’ve encountered is startlingly scant on investigations into anything other than property relationships when outlining its rendition of materialism. In fact I get the impression that to most Marxists the “material base” of the economy equals ownership dynamics. This has always been perplexing to me given that property, like all the other social institutions I examined above, has an intersubjective character – absent humans, it ceases to exist.
This, unfortunately, is quite confused about some basics of Marxist theory. It is absolutely true that there is a clear parallel between Soutar’s social-material binary and another constructed by Marx. It is not, however, the base and superstructure distinction. This is in fact quite irrelevant here. Everything Soutar describes within the socio-material lens falls, most unambiguously, into the Marxian category of “the base.” The parallel, instead, is with what Marx terms the forces of production and the relations of production.
The forces of production are human technological capability, including our scientific or technical knowledge, our tools and productive instruments, our access to raw materials, and the human labor available to put these all to use. Taken as a whole, Marx conceives of the forces of production as the extent to which humans control nature. With little modification, this is the same category that Soutar calls “the material economy” or “the material apparatus.”
The relations of production are the social relations through which production, exchange, distribution, and consumption are structured. These can be relations in a technical sense, in terms of the kind of division of labor deployed in and across industries, but also encompass the larger social structure and relations of power through which production is organized. That would include things like the institution of private property, or instead communal land tenure, or the accepted norms of trade and exchange, or relationships of economic subservience of one sort of person to another. Relations of production govern access to and control over the means of production, and access to and control over what is produced. A serf’s obligations to their lord and the distribution of returns on investment to shareholders are relations of production in manorial and capitalist economies respectively. This Marxian concept, in other words, corresponds quite exactly to what Soutar terms the “social apparatus” of the economy.
Taken together, the forces and relations of production constitute what Marx terms a “mode of production,” the material base of any given society. It is out of this unity of the forces and relations of production that Marxists see the sprouting of the “superstructure”: culture, ideas, political systems, etc. Soutar has seemingly garbled the categories of superstructure and relations of production together, drawing false distinctions between Marxism and the socio-material lens. Framed as a critique of Marx, the socio-material lens inadvertently reveals itself as essentially the same thing as the mode of production concept, though deployed to different analytic aims and rid of the dialectical thinking structuring it. I don’t believe we owe any particular allegiance to Marx’s choices of terminology, but in misunderstanding them, we risk confusing the underlying ideas themselves.
Mason Herson-Horvath
