File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9706, message 24


Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 22:50:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: BHA: Base & Superstructure


I think the formatting on this may be screwy.  Sorry.  I hope it's readable.

Responding to my earlier post,
 
 > >          Marx uses economic base to refer to the
 > > relations of persons with one another and with the raw materials
 > > and instruments of labor in the process of appropriating nature to
 > > use.  I accept that as an adequate use of the word "economic" and
 > > adequate to what is meant by the "base."
 
Tobin writes:
 
 > Fair enough; but you did argue in the earlier post that "Events are a
 > consequence of a conjuncture of mechanisms, not at all exclusively
 > 'economic.'"  Since you seem to want the "base" to encompass all social
 > mechanisms (or all major ones anyway), then the base is no longer strictly
 > economic (unless of course only economic mechanisms are "major," or you feel
 > it's best to subsume sex and language into economics in this broad sense). 
 > Do I misconstrue the gist of your argument?
 
Yes, you do misconstrue!  Does RTS 2(6) help?  Like Michael you are still missing
the point of the distinction between mechanisms and events.  *Events* as a
conjuncture of mechanisms could never be exclusively economic.  Take the act of
wage labor.  It never occurs except under the influence of ideology and legal
coercion.  Etc.  My question for both you and Michael is this:  does the
base/superstructure express a scientific relationship or something else?  I think
it expresses a scientific relationship of the causal consequence of one set of
mechanisms on others; it invites us to investigate how one set of mechanisms
contributes to bringing about others.  It is not about explaining events.  The
phenomena produced by mechanisms are certainly there to be explained, but the
objects of science are mechanisms, not events (RTS 2(6)).  That is because the
objects of science are what do the explaining.
 
Why do you think I want the base to encompass all social mechanisms?  That
doesn't make any sense and doesn't correspond to anything I said.  The base is
economic in the sense of the appropriation of nature.  Legal relations, which are
social mechanisms, appropriate the will and are not part of the base.  Why do you
think I want to make them part of the base?  As for sex and language, I don't get
your point.  Language, I explained briefly a post or two ago:  all social
relations, whether part of the base or not, are meaningful and therefore language
dependent.  Sex is an aspect of a community's reproduction of itself, as is the
reproduction of its relation to nature.  Plainly sex cannot be reduced to
appropriation of nature structures nor is it emergent from such relations.  I am
a little befuddled by the weight the base/superstructure relationship is thought
to bear.  My guess is this comes from long tradition of not disentangling
mechanisms from events and, as a corollary, not focusing on actually identifying
whatever objects of scientific investigation we might be talking about.  If I
understand correctly, it was Althusser's merit to have understood ideology had
to be constructed as an object of scientific investigation.
 
Howard
 
Howard Engelskirchen
Western State University
 
 
     "What is there just now you lack"  Hakuin
 



     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005