I have a question about base-superstructure theory.

[Os Cangaceiros]

This is something I've wondered for a while, and feel free to tell me if I'm totally off-base, if I am:

According to base-superstructure theory, the economic base of society is the dominant economic mode (today it's capitalism), and the superstructure is everything that has sprouted up out of that mode (government, law, cultural institutions, religion, etc.) I've also heard it put forth that, while people are often influenced by the superstructure, it cannot fundamentally change the base.

Now, moving on to the state. The modern nation-state was originally forged as a weapon for capital. Engels said about the same in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:


And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital.

So, my question is this: how can a "worker's state" contribute to the fundamental re-organization of the economic mode of production?

[bailey_187]

The Workers State does not change the economic mode of production but the workers themselves do. People are not part of the superstructure.

[Belisarius]

According to base-superstructure theory, the economic base of society is the dominant economic mode (today it's capitalism), and the superstructure is everything that has sprouted up out of that mode (government, law, cultural institutions, religion, etc.) I've also heard it put forth that, while people are often influenced by the superstructure, it cannot fundamentally change the base.
i don't think this is necessarily true. the base and superstructure are interwoven in such a way that the one demands the other. if you want a revolution in the base, a revolution in the superstructure is necessary and vice versa. both should come at approximately the same time.

[syndicat]

Base versus superstructure was just a metaphor...and a not very useful one either. It should be tossed out. The state is very much a material reality. The state contains the means of destruction (armed bodies and their military & police technologies) which are as much a material force as the means of production. The state is also a base for a part of the bureaucratic class...the administrators, experts, politicians in the state.

[which doctor]

While I don't know if this answers your question about how a workers state can reorganize the economic mode of production, hopefully it will help you better understand how base and superstructure are interrelated. The most important thing is to avoid a deterministic understand of base-superstructure -- the belief that base creates the superstructure. In fact, the reality is much more complicated and base and superstructure inform each other a great deal. Since others have said it better than me, I'll provide a few quotes from Cliff Slaughter's What is Revolutionary Leadership. (http://marxists.org/history/etol/writers/slaughter/1960/10/leadership.html)


Although this argument takes various forms (Lenin’s type of party was suited to autocratic Russia but not to democratic Britain; leadership will emerge naturally from the working class; all organizations develop bureaucracy; the success 1917 was a ‘historical accident’ taken advantage of by a brilliant Bolshevik elite; Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky predicted the degeneration of the party etc., etc.), it is always underpinned by a false conception of the role of theory and consciousness in history, a tendency towards economic determinism, a notion that the laws of social development are something ‘natural’, standing above men and deciding their destinies. Political events and tendencies are seen as the ‘natural’ and inescapable reflection of economic interest; Marx’s concept of the political and ideological superstructure on the economic basis becomes a ‘mere superstructure’ of the economic struggle, as one of the founders of the new ‘Workers’ Party’ recently put it. This implies that politics is only the froth of history, whereas Marx was quite clear that it is in the sphere of politics that men become more or less conscious of the economic contradictions and fight out the issues. Precisely in politics, in the struggle for state power, is the decisive conflict fought out. Trade union and industrial struggle is a school of politics for the working class, in the older capitalist countries decades of trade union struggle were a necessary prelude to real class conflict; but the overthrow of political power and the institution of proletarian dictatorship is a qualitatively different question. For this, organization of a more advanced character, and therefore theory of a much wider and deeper character, is required. This means a political party which subordinates all partial struggles to the construction of a leadership firmly welded to the working class and completely devoted to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Such a task requires the ability to learn from all past class struggles in society, particularly the failures and successes of the working-class movement, and an understanding of this history in relation to the total existing structure of society, not only in relation to the daily experience of the working class. The consciousness and organization required to achieve the greatest social overturn in history, these are the basic reasons for what has come to be known as democratic centralism, the bogey of so many ‘Left-wingers’.
Just when the crisis in the British working-class movement approaches precisely its political peak, just when the contradiction between Social-Democracy and the historical needs of the working class is most sharply expressed in the issues of public ownership, defence and the relation between the organized working class and the Labour Party – at this point the cry goes up: abandon ship! It is the industrial struggle that matters above all! ‘Reformism is best exposed at the point of production’! – once again those who fail to grasp the nettle of political action explain their failure with the most resounding of ‘Marxist’ phrases. Precisely by clinging to such abstract generalities do men get left behind by historical development. The essence of dialectics is not the ability to stand by and pronounce what is base and what is superstructure, but to know when, where and how to act.

I know this may not be exactly what you're looking for, but hopefully it helps.