Book review: Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism, Franz Jakubowski

Every so often a book slaps me upside the head and forces me to think. “Ideology and Superstructure” is such a book.

In 1936, Jakubowksi, a 26 year old Polish Trotskyist in Danzig, was trying to figure out how Marxism fit with Stalinism. The answer: it didn’t. Stalinism was a complete distortion of Marx’s original aims. In “Ideology and Superstructure” Jakubowski goes back to Marx’s early writings and discovers the humanist streak throughout them. Stalinism succeeded in part because it separated Marx’s economic critique from real people. History became the movement of social forces, acting upon the working class. Yet everything – the legal system, morality and ideology that Marxists call the ‘superstructure’ of society – comes from people. Yes, they rest on an economic ‘base’ that determines them. But the base & superstructure aren’t separate, nor are they even linked. They’re two moments of the same movement, separated for the purposes of analysis.


Danzig - inspiration for heavy metal & Marxism

Where do ideas come from?

None of this – neither the laws of a society nor its factories – can be considered apart from what real people do. Non-Marxists often accuse us of reducing ideas to economics. How can Marxists say social class determines what people do? Don’t we all act according to what we have in our heads – and since we don’t have factories in our heads, aren’t we all free-thinking individuals coming to conclusions and acting on those?

But Marxism doesn’t treat ideas as economic byproducts. It roots both ideas & economics in the social & historical activity of the working class:

Historical materialism itself is not a theory of motivation. It is based on the thesis that social life is determined by economic relations; it must not be confused with a science that regards economic interests as the only historically effective motive… Marxism in no way denies the existence of non-economic motives. Although the term ‘economic causes’ may be used, ‘economy’ is not seen as a subjective, psychological motivation but as the objective condition of human life.

Of course, Stalinists and social democrats had an interest in promoting the opposite view. If people were simply economic units to be moved about, this meant socialism could be built by growing the economy. Increase the forces of production, material needs would be met and everyone would be happy. This sorry legacy led to parliamentary socialism and the horrors of forced collectivization, both poisonous to the working class because they removed democracy from socialism. You can see this reflected in any number of radical movements, which tried to force socialism onto society from above.


'The peasants aren't revolting.' 'That's OK, we'll do it for them'.

What are you thinking?

Of course, Jakubowski doesn’t stop there. He critiques capitalist ideology, trying to answer the question, “If capitalism is so awful, why aren’t there more socialists?” He doesn’t succumb to elitism (“People are too stupid to see it”), or relativism (“No ideology is truer than any other”). He starts from ‘false consciousness’ – socialists have a deeper grasp of social relations than non-socialists. But this doesn’t mean non-socialists are blind, misled. It means people reflect the ideology of their class.

Ideology, however, is more than false consciousness. It is not a mere subjective fantasy but a ‘conscious’ expression of the objective appearance assumed by capitalist reality.

The bourgeoisie view everyone as rational self-interested individuals – and they’re right, to the extent that they themselves are rational & self-interested. But they can’t recognize the relations of exploitation their self-interest rests on, because to do so would be to admit the partial nature of their ideas. When, of course, the capitalist dream is supposed to represent everyone: we all follow ‘the American dream’, we can all succeed if we want to.

Only the working class can have a view of society in its totality: not because it wants to, but because it’s reduced to a commodity, selling its labour power. It sees through the separation of ideas & reality (‘reification’) because it’s the thing being separated. Workers’ dual role, as commodity and human being, lead to a contradiction, an unwillingness to accept capitalist exploitation as it is. This is true: it’s hard to feel good about capitalism when you’re paid shit wages for shit work, watching your boss reap the rewards.


I want you to think about your boss for a moment... Isn't he a stupid git? - Alexei Sayle

From that contradiction comes revolutionary consciousness. It’s the job of socialists to stoke the fire: generalize the contradictions that people live. Socialists themselves don’t ‘bring’ those ideas to the workers; their ideas come from a synthesis of the reformist struggle for living conditions, and the anarchist, utopian desire for change:

Marxism… joins with the day-to-day struggle of the proletariat and demonstrates that at a certain point it must turn from a struggle within capitalism to a struggle against capitalism. Marxism does not regard evolution and revolution as opposites. The revolution is a moment in evolution… theory is not introduced into the workers’ movement arbitrarily. Marxist theory is only capable of taking hold of the masses because it is attached to the consciousness of the masses.

That Jakubowski saw through this, putting human activity at the centre of Marxism where it should be, is a testament to both his intellect and Marxist theory itself. In the darkest days of the 20th century, he could apply Marxist theory to find the basis of a truly democratic, emancipatory movement. Good philosophy – which this book is – isn’t just good ideas. It’s an abstraction from everyday life, applied back to the life it’s observing.