Marx's Literary Style by Ludovico Silva

Author:Ludovico Silva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

‘Reflection’ as Metaphor

In the fragment of the 1859 Preface we have analysed, Marx discreetly introduces a verbal dichotomy that can serve as a bridge between our discussion of the superstructure metaphor and the metaphor of ‘reflection’. We have seen that in the terms of an analogy there are two pairs: the first of these, Economic Structure/Ideology, is the scientific expression of the theory, while the second, Base/Edifice, which has a linear correspondence with the first, is its metaphorical expression. This verbal dichotomy becomes even clearer if we remember the German terms employed by Marx: ‘Economic Structure’ is ökonomische Struktur, while ‘edifice’ or ‘superstructure’ is not Superstruktur but Überbau. It is symptomatic that in the scientific expression Marx uses Struktur – a Latin-derived word designating a concrete epistemological concept that has an enormous theoretical importance in Marx’s mature works, especially in Capital, as demonstrated by Maurice Godelier in his essay ‘System, Structure and Contradiction in Capital’, which goes so far as to categorize Marx as a forerunner of contemporary structuralism.43 And it is no less symptomatic that in the metaphorical expression Marx employs a German term, Überbau, which is not a scientific concept in itself but is rather its corresponding analogical term. Given that Marx, at the beginning of Capital and elsewhere, makes a point of spotting verbal dichotomies of this kind in the English authors of the seventeenth century – who tended to use a German-derived term, ‘worth’, for use-value, and a Latinate one, ‘value’, for exchange-value – what keeps us from making these same kinds of observations about Marx’s own prose?

All of this makes us wary of the danger of thinking of Marxist theory in terms of ‘superstructure’, a word that forces us to imagine the world of ideology as superior and apart, as an independent realm floating above the social structure. The inverse is true: ideology lives and develops in the social structure itself: it is its interior continuation and plays, within it, an active everyday role. In accordance with an economic structure dominated by exploitation, ideology has until now justified this exploitation; it is also a form of exploitation itself, if one accepts the idea of ideological surplus-value which I have laid out in another book.44

When Marcuse tells us that today ‘the ideology comes to be embodied in the process of production itself’,45 all he is doing is correctly restating the Marxist theory of ideology as something not separate from, but immanent within, the social structure; something produced by that structure and active in its interior. When, for example, the state applies the legal ideology of private property to justify the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few and its unequal distribution, is this not a case of ideology acting within and from the social structure? The fact that ideology is a product of the material situation in no way implies that it, ideology, is constituted in a world that lies ‘above’ the material situation: ideology remains tied to the social skeleton or, to use a metaphor of Althusser’s, it acts as social ‘cement’.

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