Page 166 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

143 Historical Materialism

mode of production of material life conditions the general process of
social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their existence, but their social existence that deter-
mines their consciousness.27

In every society the forces and relations of production form—in
accordance with the dominant mode of production—an economic
structure by which all other subsystems of the society are deter-
mined. For a long time an economistic version of this theorem
was dominant. On this interpretation every society is divided—
in accord with its degree of complexity—into subsystems that can
be hierarchically placed in the order: economic sphere, admin-
istrative-political sphere, social sphere, cultural sphere. The theo-
rem then states that processes in any higher subsystems are
determined, in the sense of causal dependency, by processes in
the subsystems below it. A weaker version of this thesis states
that lower subsystems place structural limits on developments in
systems higher than themselves. Thus the economic system de-
termines “in the final analysis,” as Engels puts it, the scope of
the developments possible in other subsystems. In Plekhanov
we find formulations that support the first interpretation; in
Labriola and Max Adler, passages that support the second.
Among Hegelian Marxists like Lukacs, Korsch, and Adorno, the
concept of the social totality excludes a model of levels. The
superstructure theorem here posits a kind of concentric dependency
of all social appearances on the economic structure, the latter
being conceived dialetically as the essence that comes to existence
in the observable appearances.
The context in which Marx put forth his theorem makes it
clear, however, that the dependency of the superstructure on the
base was intended in the first instance only for the critical phase
in which a society passes into a new developmental level. It is
not some ontological interpretation of society that is intended but
the leading role that the economic structure assumes in social
evolution. Interestingly Karl Kautsky saw this:

Only in the final analysis is the whole legal, political, ideological ap-
paratus to be regarded as a superstructure over an economic infrastruc-
ture. This in no way holds for its individual appearance in history.