Base and superstructure

The metaphor of base and superstructure that Karl Marx used in the preface to his Contribution to a critique of political economy is one of the most often misunderstood metaphors, which is no wonder since a vast number of people don't bother to read anything besides this preface and perhaps Engel's letter to Borgius. Engels was - like Althusser - interpreting this metaphor as a determination in the last instance, a indirect and mediated determination, but a one-way determination none the less. The obvious problem with such a conceptualization is that it negates entirelly the radical political moment of marxism - philosophers would be doomed to merely interpret the world. We should not be taking this metaphor too seriously, since with it Marx was summing up his thinking from the time he was writing his Contribution to a critique of Hegel's philosophy of right. The obvious path would be then to look at this text to make sense of the metaphor. The preface already shows that a one-way determinism is not what Marx meant with base and superstructure. He claims that only by having philosophy reveal the laws of historical development will the proletariat be able to become a revolutionary force - hence the upheaval of the base is dependant upon action from the superstructure. A further point can be made if we look at Marx' critique of religion. He claims that religion is in a functional connection to social praxis:

Religious misery is in a sense an expression of real misery and in another a protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the tormented creature, the conscience of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of bleak circumstances. It is the opium of the people.

A second important point is made in the Feuerbach part of the German ideology. Here Marx and Engels claim that social consciousness was originally merely directly registering praxis. As material and intellectual production split, consciousness itself gained autonomy. The important point is that the relationship of base and superstructure is not a constant but historically variable. We could therefore speak of a one-way determinism only in societies that did not yet develop speech and where intellectual production is fully integrated into material production. Since we have instances of technically accomplished cave paintings - that is to say paintings done by someone with artistic training, hence someone who specialized in intellectual work - from as early as the late paleolithic, this pure determinism is a very distant historical state.