/lit/ - Literature

Ugly uneducated retard steel workers should control society.

Art and culture effect the material conditions of society and the material conditions of society effect art and culture

It should be obvious.

When Gillette has a commercial that says "The Best A Man Can Get", they don't really mean the content of the words, they are using ideology as a tool to convince you to buy their product.

Another example is here in my own country where there was a case of a small newspaper that got obscene amounts of subsidy from the state compared to other newspapers, and the newspaper didn't respond by saying that they just liked the money, they invoked "democracy" and "media diversity", and stressing how important it was society that they got the subsidies.

>>12496881
Base is the substratum that contains the modes of production, labour power, relations of labour, resources, capital, etc. Superstructure is kind of like the cultural monolith that emerges out of these material forces. Of course it isn’t as straightforward as “base gives rise to superstructure” - it’s important to note that they’re constantly interpenetrating each other. For example, the availability of a particular resource can affect what is considered fashionable at that time and within a particular culture, while the popularity of certain ideological structures (religion, cultural trends, etc.) can incentivise the base to adapt and construct commodities to suit these preferences. Industry creates culture and vice versa.

>>12496881
He meant he was perpetually comfortable in his autismbux state sponsored by his sugar daddy Engels, while posing as a scientifically minded economist who literally manipulated data and relied on outdated reports to present his argument.

>>12496881
>According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

>>12496902
>effect
>effect
Pretty good bait.

>>12496928
no bully is hard to rite

>>12496881
Under the capitalist mode of production, wealth takes the form of a commodity, and production is aimed at exchange instead of use.
In order for a capitalist to become wealthier, his products need to be sold on a large scale, and as such appealing to a wider variety of people, something you can see reflected in our society's stance against racism/xenophobia.. and the model of inclusion that not only activists push, but also corporations.
The same analysis can be projected onto mass immigration, under capitalism, the capitalist is always trying to minimize his costs, and that can be done by inviting cheap labor or delocalizing factories...
These production requirements are then justified in our society through media, art, politics and education under different guises (multiculturalism, diversity...)
The base shaped the superstructure, which in turns justifies the base's current existence

>>12496936
Brainlet reductionist take on Marx, this is what happens when /pol/tards find bits they like in Marxism and try to twist them into their worldview.
Read >>12496924

>>12496918
>everything influences everything else
Wow, what a deep theory

>>12496953
Well he's not wrong even if it is a reductionist view. It's not like multiculturalism, diversity, gender equality and anti-racism are ideas that are threatening to capitalism; the recent Gillette ad should show as much.

>>12496881
That the sociatal aspect of culture and humanity are constructs that supervenes on material means of power.

>>12496928
That's the right usage if the word you fucking retard

Society's institutions, social and politics arrangements, values, customs and so on have to come from some place right?

The answer most people give is that either this is all a manifestation of human nature, or that we gradually arrived at where we're at through the power of reason and reflection, simply trying things out and figuring out our society through trial and error.

Marx says that the determining (but not sole) factor is our economic means of life. How do we work? What are our tools? What technology do we have available? What is the availability of resources like? What and how do we extract from nature? And more importantly, how do we organize production, in the sense of who is working at a given productive unit and who is owning them, and what is this ownership and this labor like?

From these factors, society as a whole (the superstructure in your pic) is gradually built and re-built, since they're always changing. The class that owns these productive units becomes dominant, and society as a whole gradually conforms to them. Social and political institutions preach their values, the state is reorganized to suit that type of production and distribution, popular customs that don't suit the form of labor and livelihood that suits this production are slowly discarded and new ones replace them. This is all happens organically, because effectively it's society conforming to its production.

And obviously, Marx thought that this transformation was not a gradual process but one riddled with conflict. A given social structure, and its corresponding ruling class, eventually create new technology, produces new science and develop the tools of labor to the point where they've effectively set the stage for a new type of production. A new type of production, however, calls for a new class arrangement, and the old class can't simply stand idle as a nascent one threatens them. This is why class struggle is key to understanding those social transformations.

Anyway, I think that's it. It's been a while since I read Marx and I'm not really a Marxist so some things might be wrong, but I think that's the essence of it.

>>12497081
>if

>>12497095
>Social and political institutions preach their values, the state is reorganized to suit that type of production and distribution, popular customs that don't suit the form of labor and livelihood that suits this production are slowly discarded and new ones replace them.

This is actually both true and wrong at the same time. It's true that institutions protect capitalism formally speaking, e.g private property is inscribed in laws and such.

But capitalism is way more sinister than that. Capitalism is actually a hydra where cutting off one head(e.g criticizing some factor of it), just grows more heads(e.g the criticism just becomes another commodity to be bought and sold).

The fact is that social and political institutions don't even need to formally defend capitalism because by its very nature it will defend itself by selling anti-capitalism as just another good in the market.