La reciproca influenza tra base economica e sovrastruttura

“The conception of superstructure has, however, been never confined to showing two dependent social levels, viz, the state and social consciousness. It had been used by Marx for the consciousness or world view of a class. In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon , Marx had put it thus: “Upon the several forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, a whole superstructure is reared of various and peculiarly shaped feeling, illusions, habits of thought and conception of life. The whole class produces and shapes these out of its material foundation and out to the corresponding social conditions. (…)” (…) The classic formulation of the relationship of the economic basis and superstructure has been given by Marx in a passage in the preface to the critique of Political Economy. “In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of productions which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive force. The sum total of these relations of production constitute the economic structure of society, the real foundations on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life condition the social, political and intellectual life processes in general” (Karl Marx, Preface to A critique of Political Economy). This formulation contains elements that tend to overemphasise aspects of necessity and predetermination in the relationship between economic basis and the superstructural elements. Marx, however, perceived that the conception of determination of the superstructure by the economic basis might lead to a sort of economic reductionism. Keeping this danger in view, Marx asserted that “in order to examine the connection between spiritual production and material production it is above all necessary to grasp the latter itself not as a general category but in definite historical form. Thus, for example, different kinds of spiritual production correspond to the capitalist mode of production and to the mode of production of the Middle Ages. If material production itself is not conceived in its specific in the spiritual production corresponding to it and the reciprocal influence of one on the other” (K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol 1. chap. IV). According to Marx, the specific spiritual production is determined by the specific historical form of material production  but the spiritual production is also capable of exerting ‘reciprocal influence’ on the material production. We, therefore, find that the superstructure was never conceived by Marx as a passive reflection of the economic basis” [Amal Chattopadhyay, Bhupendranath Datta. And his Study of Indian Society, 1994]