base
baseA term originating in Karl Marx's reference to a ‘real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’, which appears in the statement of the ‘guiding thread’ for his studies contained within his Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).
Since the 1960s, most Marxist discussion of the term has revolved around two questions: namely, ‘What is the composition of this base?’ and ‘What is its relation to the superstructure?’ Marx himself wrote that the base comprised ‘relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society’. What has been at issue is the meaning of ‘correspond’ and the...
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