This summer I had an interesting conversation about whether there is any space for agency in Marx's theory. I was confronted with the idea that there is none, since he seem to envision a one-way determination of the superstructure by the base, and even if this determination can be indirect as Engels later noted, it is still true that the determining factor (the base) is determining the determined (superstructure). The fallacy of this argument is that it conflates this distinction with the one that separates structure and agency. The point is that agency is hard to be seen with Marx, because for him in society there exists nothing but agency. One of my favourite metaphors in the whole of philosophy is the one found in The capital, claiming that capital leads a vampire like existence: it is dead labour that can survive only by sucking up living labour. The whole point of the idea of commodity fetishism is that, although economic forces certainly seem abstract and objective to us, they are in the end expressions of social relation, of relations between people, yes, of agency . Capital is nothing more than the expression of social relations. Marx put this notion forward most bluntly at the beginning of the eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (the title refers to the date of the coup d'etat by Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis' famous uncle):
"Die Menschen machen ihre eigene Geschichte, aber sie machen sie nicht aus freien Stücken, nicht unter selbstgewählten, sondern unter unmittelbar vorgefundenen, gegebenen und überlieferten Umständen. Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne der Lebenden."
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
This means there is nothing solid about the base, it is nothing more than yesterdays agency, and it seems so solid just because we have been so accustomed to think in terms of commodity fetishism.
One must not forget Marx's utopian vision: we have lost sight of the long-term consequences of our actions, thinking of them as ossified structures, when they were once organic products of social relations. And the ultimate goal of history (history being very much a conscious human endeavour) is to understand the seemingly ossified base as just that - the expression of social relations - whereby we can once again reappropriate our own forces that have been scattered, bringing them under our sway and in the end truly being masters of our destiny.
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