Social Superstructure Essay

The economy is at the very center of Marx’s theories; economy is to Marx as peanut butter is to jelly. Some of his earliest developments in social and economic theories are in The German Ideology. In it, Marx contends that humans are distinguishable from animals by almost anything, but that they consider themselves distinguished from animals when they begin to produce their own means of subsistence; these resulting means of production determines the nature of individuals and their way of life. Economies form from these means of productions, and result in both the division of labor and forms of property.

To revisit the sub-super structure notion – Marx considered all ideology derived from human consciousness (art, religion, culture, philosophy, law, media, politics, education, etc.) to be part of the social superstructure. The superstructure is in charge of maintaining the economic substructure whilst being shaped by it. The economic substructure consists of the means and relations of production, including both the division of labor and forms of property. The substructure is the more dominant of the two as society cannot stand without an economy, just as a house cannot stand without a strong foundation. The division of labor represents a

The inequalities between the bourgeois ruling class, who own the means of production and all excess capital, and the proletariat class, who provide the labor in an unfair trade, has resulted in a history of class warfare. Marx predicted that continuing class warfare would get so bad as to culminate in a revolution with the end goal being a Communistic economy with class distinctions, and private ownership of the means of production, being abolished and equal for all. Obviously, this hypothesized revolution never came to pass, but that does not make his theories and observations any less