Debasing the Superstructure

In orthodox Marxism, the base-superstructure distinction was understood as a means to demonstrate that material reproduction was the primary causal and moral driver of social transformation. This orthodox conception has been supplemented by more nuanced accounts, and also criticised for neglecting non-material aspects of social reproduction. Existing critiques, however, overlook the possibility that Marx's primary concern was not to define the relationship between material and ideal dimensions of social life, but to debase a superstructure of academic theory that understands itself as a "voice from nowhere", operating outside the social practices it analyses. In this paper, I show how Marx recurrently debases academic theory by demonstrating how it relies on forms of subjectivity generated in everyday social practice. He thereby provides a subtle, practice-theoretic, account of the mutual implicatedness of theory and practice that is compatible with recent theories of embodied cognition, and suggests productive directions for contemporary social theory.