superstructure of ideas, politics, etc.

[u.s.red]

Can someone give me the names of some writers on the determination of the "superstructure" of modern society based on the Marxist theory materialism?

[Mr. Natural]

I'll offer a very readable work, Joel Kovel's Enemy of Nature (2003). Kovel is a Marxist and the unofficial head of the American ecosocialists, and Enemy does a good job of presenting the basic capitalist infrastructure and its superstructural/social/cultural effects. Kovel also outlines a natural, "ecosystemic" revolutionary organizing process with which we can oppose capitalism.

My red-green, always militant best.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Can someone give me the names of some writers on the determination of the "superstructure" of modern society based on the Marxist theory materialism?Can you be more specific? You mean explaining the relationship of the base and superstructure? Explaining what it is? Analyzing the existing or the development of superstructure? How ideology is connected to the superstructure? It's a big subject and not everyone has the same conception of the dynamics between base and superstructure.

[ckaihatsu]

This is an unorthodox take on 'base' and 'superstructure', but one *may* view the terms relativistically, where 'base' is continuously re-created by whatever societal norms consider to be valid and worthwhile 'production', and vice-versa -- that our 'superstructure' of existing societal norms is based on whatever kinds of production happen to be ongoing. So obviously it's a dialectical / dynamic / interrelated relationship, and is currently bourgeois since the paradigm is one of commodity production.

This thread touches on the subject:


How do you view the development of technology?

http://www.revleft.com/vb/do-you-view-t158907/index.html?t=158907

[u.s.red]

Can you be more specific? You mean explaining the relationship of the base and superstructure? Explaining what it is? Analyzing the existing or the development of superstructure? How ideology is connected to the superstructure? It's a big subject and not everyone has the same conception of the dynamics between base and superstructure.

I thought ideology was the most important part of the superstructure. I guess I mean, how does the superstructure actually, specifically, develop out of the base.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I thought ideology was the most important part of the superstructure. I guess I mean, how does the superstructure actually, specifically, develop out of the base.
Gramsci might be a good place to start. He looks at the ideological side of superstructure and how a sort of bourgeois "common sense" is maintained.

[Lucretia]

Can someone give me the names of some writers on the determination of the "superstructure" of modern society based on the Marxist theory materialism?

So when is the high school essay due? :p