Base and Superstructure in
Marxist Cultural Theory
3
Raymond Williams
Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering
the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure. From a
strictly theoretical point of view this is not, in fact, where we might choose to
begin.1 It would be in many ways preferable if we could begin from a proposi-
tion which originally was equally central, equally authentic: namely the propo-
sition that social being determines consciousness. It is not that the two proposi-
tions necessarily deny each other or are in contradiction. But the proposition of
base and superstructure, with its figurative element, with its suggestion of a
definite and fixed spatial relationship, constitutes, at least in certain hands, a very
specialized and at times unacceptable version of the other proposition. Yet in
the transition from Marx to Marxism, and in the development of mainstream
Marxism itself, the proposition of the determining base and the determined
superstructure has been commonly held to be the key to Marxist cultural
analysis.
Now it is important, as we try to analyse this proposition, to be aware
that the term of relationship which is involved, that is to say ‘deter-
mines’, is of great linguistic and real complexity. The language of
determination and even more of determinism was inherited from ideal-
ist and especially theological accounts of the world and man. It is
significant that it is in one of his familiar inversions, his contradictions of
received propositions, that Marx uses the word ‘determines’. He is
opposing an ideology that had been insistent on the power of certain
forces outside man, or, in its secular version, on an abstract determin-
ing consciousness. Marx’s own proposition explicitly denies this, and
puts the origin of determination in men’s own activities. Nevertheless,
the particular history and continuity of the term serves to remind us
that there are, within ordinary use—and this is true of most of the
major European languages—quite different possible meanings and
implications of the word ‘determine’. There is, on the one hand, from
its theological inheritance, the notion of an external cause which totally
predicts or prefigures, indeed totally controls a subsequent activity.
But there is also, from the experience of social practice, a notion of
determination as setting limits, exerting pressures.
Now there is clearly a difference between a process of setting limits and
exerting pressures, whether by some external force or by the internal
laws of a particular development, and that other process in which a
subsequent content is essentially prefigured, predicted and controlled
by a pre-existing external force. Yet it is fair to say, looking at many
applications of Marxist cultural analysis, that it is the second sense, the
notion of prefiguration, prediction or control, which has often ex-
plicitly or implicitly been used.
Superstructure: Qualifications and Amendments
The term of relationship is then the first thing that we have to examine
in this proposition, but we have to do this by going on to look at the
related terms themselves. ‘Superstructure’ has had most attention.
People commonly speak of ‘the superstructure’, although it is interest-
ing that originally, in Marx’s German, the term is in one important use
plural. Other people speak of the different activities ‘inside’ the super-
structure or superstructures. Now already in Marx himself, in the later
correspondence of Engels, and at many points in the subsequent
Marxist tradition, qualifications have been made about the determined
character of certain superstructural activities. The first kind of qualifi-
cation had to do with delays in time, with complications, and with
certain indirect or relatively distant relationships. The simplest notion
of a superstructure, which is still by no means entirely abandoned, had
been the reflection, the imitation or the reproduction of the reality of
the base in the superstructure in a more or less direct way. Positivist
notions of reflection and reproduction of course directly supported
this. But since in many real cultural activities this relationship cannot be
found, or cannot be found without effort or even violence to the material
or practice being studied, the notion was introduced of delays in time,
the famous lags; of various technical complications; and of indirect-
1 Revised text of a lecture given in Montreal, April 1973.
4
ness, in which certain kinds of activity in the cultural sphere—philo-
sophy, for example—were situated at a greater distance from the
primary economic activities. That was the first stage of qualification of
the notion of superstructure: in effect, an operational qualification. The
second stage was related but more fundamental, in that the process of
the relationship itself was more substantially looked at. This was the
kind of reconsideration which gave rise to the modern notion of ‘medi-
ation’, in which something more than simple reflection or reproduc-
tion—indeed something radically different from either reflection or
reproduction—actively occurs. In the later twentieth century there is
the notion of ‘homologous structures’, where there may be no direct or
easily apparent similarity, and certainly nothing like reflection or
reproduction, between the superstructural process and the reality of the
base, but in which there is an essential homology or correspondence of
structures, which can be discovered by analysis. This is not the same
notion as ‘mediation’, but it is the same kind of amendment in that the
relationship between the base and the superstructure is not supposed to
be direct, nor simply operationally subject to lags and complications
and indirectnesses, but that of its nature it is not direct reproduction.
These qualifications and amendments are important. But it seems to me
that what has not been looked at with equal care, is the received notion
of the base. And indeed I would argue that the base is the more im-
portant concept to look at if we are to understand the realities of cul-
tural process. In many uses of the proposition of base and superstruc-
ture, as a matter of verbal habit, ‘the base’ has come to be considered
virtually as an object, or in less crude cases, it has been considered in
essentially uniform and usually static ways. ‘The base’ is the real social
existence of man. ‘The base’ is the real relations of production corres-
ponding to a stage of the development of material productive forces.
‘The base’ is a mode of production at a particular stage of its develop-
ment. We make and repeat propositions of this kind, but the usage is
then very different from Marx’s emphasis on productive activities, in
particular structural relations, constituting the foundation of all other
activities. For while a particular stage of the development of produc-
tion can be discovered and made precise by analysis, it is never in prac-
tice either uniform or static. It is indeed one of the central propositions
of Marx’s sense of history that there are deep contradictions in the
relationships of production and in the consequent social relationships.
There is therefore the continual possibility of the dynamic variation of
these forces. Moreover, when these forces are considered, as Marx
always considers them, as the specific activities and relationships of real
men, they mean something very much more active, more complicated
and more contradictory than the developed metaphorical notion of ‘the
base’ could possibly allow us to realize.
Base and Productive Forces
So we have to say that when we talk of ‘the base’, we are talking of a
process and not a state. And we cannot ascribe to that process certain
fixed properties for subsequent deduction to the variable processes of
the superstructure. Most people who have wanted to make the ordin-
ary proposition more reasonable have concentrated on refining the
5
notion of superstructure. But I would say that each term of the propo-
sition has to be revalued in a particular direction. We have to revalue
‘determination’ towards the setting of limits and the exertion of pres-
sure, and away from a predicted, prefigured and controlled content. We
have to revalue ‘superstructure’ towards a related range of cultural
practices, and away from a reflected, reproduced or specifically depen-
dent content. And, crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from
the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and to-
wards the specific activities of men in real social and economic relation-
ships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and there-
fore always in a state of dynamic process.
It is worth observing one further implication behind the customary
definitions. ‘The base’ has come to include, especially in certain 20th-
century developments, a strong and limiting sense of basic industry. The
emphasis on heavy industry, even, has played a certain cultural role.
And this raises a more general problem, for we find ourselves forced to
look again at the ordinary notion of ‘productive forces’. Clearly what
we are examining in the base is primary productive forces. Yet some very
crucial distinctions have to be made here. It is true that in his analysis of
capitalist production Marx considered ‘productive work’ in a very
particular and specialized sense corresponding to that mode of pro-
duction. There is a difficult passage in the Grundrisse in which he argues
that while the man who makes a piano is a productive worker, there is
a real question whether the man who distributes the piano is also a pro-
ductive worker; but he probably is, since he contributes to the realiza-
tion of surplus value. Yet when it comes to the man who plays the
piano, whether to himself or to others, there is no question: he is not a
productive worker at all. So piano-maker is base, but pianist super-
structure. As a way of considering cultural activity, and incidentally the
economics of modern cultural activity, this is very clearly a dead-end.
But for any theoretical clarification it is crucial to recognize that Marx
was there engaged in an analysis of a particular kind of production,
that is capitalist commodity production. Within his analysis of that
mode, he had to give to the notion of ‘productive labour’ and ‘produc-
tive forces’ a specialized sense of primary work on materials in a form
which produced commodities. But this has narrowed remarkably, and
in a cultural context very damagingly, from his more central notion of
productive forces, in which, to give just brief reminders, the most import-
ant thing a worker ever produces is himself, himself in the fact of that
kind of labour, or the broader historical emphasis of men producing
themselves, themselves and their history. Now when we talk of the
base, and of primary productive forces, it matters very much whether
we are referring, as in one degenerate form of this proposition became
habitual, to primary production within the terms of capitalist economic
relationships, or to the primary production of society itself, and of men
themselves, material production and reproduction of real life. If we
have the broad sense of productive forces, we look at the whole ques-
tion of the base differently, and we are then less tempted to dismiss as
superstructural, and in that sense as merely secondary, certain vital pro-
ductive social forces, which are in the broad sense, from the beginning,
basic.
6
Uses of Totality
Yet, because of the difficulties of the ordinary proposition of base and
superstructure, there was an alternative and very important develop-
ment, an emphasis primarily associated with Lukàcs, on a social
‘totality’. The totality of social practices was opposed to this layered
notion of a base and a consequent superstructure. This totality of
practices is compatible with the notion of social being determining
consciousness, but it does not understand this process in terms of a
base and a superstructure. Now the language of totality has become
common, and it is indeed in many ways more acceptable than the notion
of base and superstructure. But with one very important reservation.
It is very easy for the notion of totality to empty of its essential content
the original Marxist proposition. For if we come to say that society is
composed of a large number of social practices which form a concrete
social whole, and if we give to each practice a certain specific recogni-
tion, adding only that they interact, relate and combine in very compli-
cated ways, we are at one level much more obviously talking about
reality, but we are at another level withdrawing from the claim that
there is any process of determination. And this I, for one, would be
very unwilling to do. Indeed, the key question to ask about any notion
of totality in cultural theory is this: whether the notion of totality in-
cludes the notion of intention. For if totality is simply concrete, if it is
simply the recognition of a large variety of miscellaneous and contem-
poraneous practices, then it is essentially empty of any content that
could be called Marxist. Intention, the notion of intention, restores the
key question, or rather the key emphasis. For while it is true that any
society is a complex whole of such practices, it is also true that any
society has a specific organization, a specific structure, and that the
principles of this organization and structure can be seen as directly
related to certain social intentions, intentions by which we define the
society, intentions which in all our experience have been the rule of a
particular class. One of the unexpected consequences of the crudeness
of the base/superstructure model has been the too easy acceptance of
models which appear less crude—models of totality or of a complex
whole—but which exclude the facts of social intention, the class charac-
ter of a particular society and so on. And this reminds us of how much
we lose if we abandon the superstructural emphasis altogether. Thus I
have great difficulty in seeing processes of art and thought as super-
structural in the sense of the formula as it is commonly used. But in many
areas of social and political thought—certain kinds of ratifying theory,
certain kinds of law, certain kinds of institutions, which after all in
Marx’s original formulations were very much part of the superstruc-
ture—in all that kind of social apparatus, and in a decisive area of
political and ideological activity and construction, if we fail to see a
superstructural element we fail to recognize reality at all. These laws,
constitutions, theories, ideologies, which are claimed as natural, or as
having universal validity or significance, simply have to be seen as
expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class. Indeed
the difficulty of revising the formula of base and superstructure has had
much to do with the perception of many militants—who have to fight
such institutions and notions as well as fighting economic battles—that
if these institutions and their ideologies are not perceived as having
7
that kind of dependent and ratifying relationship, if their claims to
universal validity or legitimacy are not denied and fought, then the
class character of the society can no longer be seen. And this has been
the effect of some versions of totality as the description of cultural pro-
cess. Indeed I think that we can properly use the notion of totality only
when we combine it with that other crucial Marxist concept of ‘hege-
mony’.
The Complexity of Hegemony
It is Gramsci’s great contribution to have emphasized hegemony, and
also to have understood it at a depth which is, I think, rare. For hege-
mony supposes the existence of something which is truly total, which is
not merely secondary or superstructural, like the weak sense of ideo-
logy, but which is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to
such an extent, and which, as Gramsci put it, even constitutes the
limit of common sense for most people under its sway, that it corres-
ponds to the reality of social experience very much more clearly than
any notions derived from the formula of base and superstructure. For
if ideology were merely some abstract imposed notion, if our social
and political and cultural ideas and assumptions and habits were merely
the result of specific manipulation, of a kind of overt training which
might be simply ended or withdrawn, then the society would be very
much easier to move and to change than in practice it has ever
been or is. This notion of hegemony as deeply saturating the conscious-
ness of a society seems to be fundamental. And hegemony has the
advantage over general notions of totality, that it at the same time
emphasizes the facts of domination.
Yet there are times when I hear discussions of hegemony and feel that it
too, as a concept, is being dragged back to the relatively simple, uni-
form and static notion which ‘superstructure’ in ordinary use had
become. Indeed I think that we have to give a very complex account of
hegemony if we are talking about any real social formation. Above all
we have to give an account which allows for its elements of real and
constant change. We have to emphasize that hegemony is not singular;
indeed that its own internal structures are highly complex, and have
continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same
token, that they can be continually challenged and in certain respects
modified. That is why instead of speaking simply of ‘the hegemony’,
‘a hegemony’, I would propose a model which allows for this kind of
variation and contradiction, its sets of alternatives and its processes of
change.
But one thing that is evident in some of the best Marxist cultural
analysis is that it is very much more at home in what one might call
epochal questions than in what one has to call historical questions. That is
to say, it is usually very much better at distinguishing the large features
of different epochs of society, as between feudal and bourgeois, or
what might be, than at distinguishing between different phases of
bourgeois society, and different moments within the phases: that true
historical process which demands a much greater precision and delicacy
of analysis than the always striking epochal analysis which is concerned
with main lineaments and features.
8
Now the theoretical model which I have been trying to work with is
this. I would say first that in any society, in any particular period, there
is a central system of practices, meanings and values, which we can
properly call dominant and effective. This implies no presumption
about its value. All I am saying is that it is central. Indeed I would call
it a corporate system, but this might be confusing, since Gramsci uses
‘corporate’ to mean the subordinate as opposed to the general and
dominant elements of hegemony. In any case what I have in mind is the
central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which
are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived. That is why
hegemony is not to be understood at the level of mere opinion or mere
manipulation. It is a whole body of practices and expectations; our
assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of
man and of his world. It is a set of meanings and values which as they
are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus
constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of
absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult
for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives.
But this is not, except in the operation of a moment of abstract analysis,
in any sense a static system. On the contrary we can only understand an
effective and dominant culture if we understand the real social process
on which it depends: I mean the process of incorporatio
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