Also : Disaster Nationalism:The Downfall of Liberal Civilization by Richard Seymour <https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/authors/seymour-richard> , 288 pages / 29 October 2024 , https://www.versobooks.com/products/3147-disaster-nationalism?srsltid=AfmBOoqJFagFkaiUHoPM4fq05Pm7olfVjsKjmlB8diDd0w7uK0zWieWT
From: Richard Seymour (via Patreon) <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Aug 22, 2024 at 11:12 AM Subject: The revenge of the superstructure The historian Anton Jäger faults me for an excessively superstructural account of our recent Poujadist ebullitions. He agrees with my assessment of th... ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ <https://www.patreon.com/richardseymourwtf?utm_id=19d34e52-88eb-4c43-84a0-b4dd0cbafe1d&utm_medium=email> Richard Seymour <https://www.patreon.com/richardseymourwtf?utm_id=19d34e52-88eb-4c43-84a0-b4dd0cbafe1d&utm_medium=email> The revenge of the superstructure <https://www.patreon.com/posts/revenge-of-110595756?utm_campaign=patron_engagement&utm_source=post_link&post_id=110595756&token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJyZWRpc19rZXkiOiJpYTI6YzM2MGE5N2MtMDI3Mi00OWUxLTlhMTYtNTI0YTFiYTdlYjU3IiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTEwNTk1NzU2LCJwYXRyb25faWQiOjMxMDc2ODQxfQ.NEIaWPUU7TpFIg1WRdSnmkvRvnrVkAKY34wNykhPug4&utm_id=19d34e52-88eb-4c43-84a0-b4dd0cbafe1d&utm_medium=email> View in app <https://open.patreon.com/posts/revenge-of-110595756?utm_campaign=patron_engagement&utm_source=post_link&post_id=110595756&token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJyZWRpc19rZXkiOiJpYTI6YzM2MGE5N2MtMDI3Mi00OWUxLTlhMTYtNTI0YTFiYTdlYjU3IiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTEwNTk1NzU2LCJwYXRyb25faWQiOjMxMDc2ODQxfQ.NEIaWPUU7TpFIg1WRdSnmkvRvnrVkAKY34wNykhPug4&utm_id=19d34e52-88eb-4c43-84a0-b4dd0cbafe1d&utm_medium=email> The historian Anton Jäger faults me <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/into-the-void> for an excessively superstructural account <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/dreaming-of-downfall> of our recent Poujadist ebullitions. He agrees with my assessment of the malignant passions of British pogromism but thinks I really ought to anchor those reflections in some sort of *class analysis*. Why, for instance, don’t I mention the underlying patterns of deindustrialisation followed by austerity? Is it a coincidence that the riots erupted in towns and cities most damaged by “Cameron’s cutbacks”? What about the political economy of neo-Powellism? British capitalism has been restructured around a growth formula predicated on low wages, precarity, and insecure migrant labour, which has been managed in part with a contradictory strategy of ramping up border aggression while conserving the formula. Even if the riots aren’t remotely recuperable as displaced rebellion, they arise from a “universe of misery” produced by the latest stages of capitalist development that the Left exists to analyse and negate. To that end, we need more political economy, less mass psychology. If this were just a complaint about what I neglect to mention in a short diagnostic essay, I could simply refer Jäger to my upcoming book, Disaster Nationalism <https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3147-disaster-nationalism?srsltid=AfmBOoqJFagFkaiUHoPM4fq05Pm7olfVjsKjmlB8diDd0w7uK0zWieWT>, which addresses these points in a more global context, and leave it at that. But his criticism, touching on this troubled topography of ‘base and superstructure’, is an opportunity to think through a methodological problem. For the thrust of Jäger’s strictures is that, when I discuss racism and ethnonationalism as ways of organising and responding to the phenomenological absurdity of late capitalist life and its pervasive affects of failure, decline and paralysis, I restrict myself to assaying the forms of social consciousness without reference to corresponding changes in the economic base. I foresake the terrain on which class organisation could begin to drain the swamp of misery. And perhaps I also succumb, whisper it, to *idealism*. This base-superstructure metaphor has caused havoc. There is no general agreement as to exactly what relations of causality are being asserted when Marx uses this trope, and there has been no end of haggling, rebuttal and reinterpretation. I have always been, and remain, somewhat ambivalent about it. In what way does the ‘base’, comprising the forces and relations of production, determine (‘bedingen’, ‘bestimmen’) the ‘superstructure’, comprising law, politics and corresponding forms of social consciousness? Does the base directly ‘give rise’ to the superstructure, as is implied in the famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm>? That formulation has lent itself to ‘mechanical’ interpretations, where there is a unilinear, external causal relation between two ‘levels’ or ‘regions’ of the mode of production. But, tellingly, even the most fundamentalist readings are compelled to assert that the superstructures can ‘react back’ on the base. A weaker version of this mechanical relation could be derived from Marx’s quip about Don Quixote in a footnote <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm> to volume I of *Capital*, which suggests that the productive relations determine the superstructures simply by selecting against whatever is incompatible with the base. Alternatively, does the base form the “innermost secret <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm>” of a mode of production whose logical possibilities for political and social consciousness are actualised in the superstructure in a relation of conceptual entailment, as told in volume III of *Capital*? In this teleological reading, it is the hidden movements of the concept of capital toward its ultimate horizon that elicits the growth of superstructural organs. Or do the base and superstructure, as one could infer from the Grundrisse <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm>, rather form “moments” in the “totality” of a social formation, governed by “mutual interaction”, as in “every organic whole”? This would be compatible with the philosophy of ‘internal relations’ <https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p071188> advocated by Bertell Ollman, in which the whole is not only “the structured interdependence of its parts” but also regulates and assigns “meaning and relative importance” to the parts. From that point of view, it is not so much the economy that determines in the ‘final instance’, but the totality. This seems surprisingly redolent of the Althusserian claim that Marx actually discovered ‘structural causality’ <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/reading-capital/ch02.htm>, wherein the global organisation of the mode of production assigns to each level its specific effectivity; but that is a superficial similarity. The ‘whole’ in the philosophy of internal relations can only be what Althusser would condemn as a ‘spiritual unity’, whereas the Althusserian ‘whole’ is an accidental unity produced by an aleatory encounter of the elements. In the investigation of such an historical process, it would not be possible to make a vertical break, a *coup d’essence*, revealing an immediate, expressive relationship between the elements. One would not find an economic essence secretly animating the process. Determination by the economy in the final instance would only mean that the form of surplus extraction decided, for any of mode of production, which of the levels was dominant (politics for feudalism; economy for capitalism). We would be free, then, to adopt as radically ‘politicist’ a reading of events as we saw fit. Whatever the merits of the contending interpretations, each yielding utterly different possibilities for investigation, it’s clear that Marx was an essentialist and teleological thinker, that the ‘base and superstructure’ figure really does mean that production is of the essence, and that this is congruent with Marx’s anthropology in which history is the process of humanity’s self-making through social labour. Problematically, the trope also implies a passive, mechanical, bottom-up causality that it is not clear Marx intends. It would be strange, in the first place, to describe the ‘concept of capital’ as a blind, nonrational material cause. We are not speaking of reduction of the superstructures to the passive effects of bottom-up causation but of rational relations of a perverse kind that direct the processes of material production toward a cataclysmic horizon. The ‘laws of development’ are not mechanical or physical, but organic and goal-directed: formal and final causes that draw the organic whole toward its developmental peak and then toward decay and death. The superstructures, from this point of view, are the apparatuses of social consciousness in which are pursued the more collective and long-term human desires, but under conditions that are limited and guided by the unconscious rationale of the system and the hierarchal functions it establishes. Strange to relate, the base doesn’t really belong at the base. A further complication is that some of the ambiguities in Marx’s conceptualisation arise from different levels of concreteness. The ‘economic basis’ described in volume III of *Capital*, for example, is explicitly an abstraction. In tracking the occulted movements of the concept of capital, Marx is not attempting to describe the real social formation in which its tendencies are actualised, impeded, diverted, and hijacked by contingencies. He is identifying only the essence of a system, which is capable of various historical iterations and expressions. In concrete investigations, the real economic basis encompasses the entire ensemble of productive and reproductive relations modified by innumerable empirical circumstances and constituted by the superstructural ‘instances’ or ‘levels’ that arise to direct the process. In concrete investigations, we should indeed expect to find the “mutual interaction” of “moments” in the organic whole, and the more concrete we become, the more interpenetrated will be ‘base’ and ‘superstructural’ phenomena. We should find, as did E P Thompson <https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1957/sochum.htm>, that the superstructural phenomena are to be found in the base, and that the superstructures are pervaded by productive relations. I therefore doubt if any real social phenomenon, be it a riot, a strike, or a war, belongs purely to the economic base or purely to a political superstructure. Now this complicates things. One would expect, based on this ontology, that today’s incipient fascist energies are at the most abstract level of analysis expressive of capital’s *phthorá*: a superstructural metastasis of tendencies toward decadence in the relations of production. We should be able to trace aetiologies of class discontent emanating from dysfunctions in productive and reproductive relations and then moulded into ethnic or moral rivalries by superstructural practices (housing segregation, policing, geopolitics, ideological representations). As we ascend to the level of the concrete, however, we should find that specific phenomena like racism operate in and combine the properties of both base and superstructure. And isn’t this what we find with the patterns of plebeian political violence we see today? Let us put aside the Brit pogroms for a second, because we need more research there before drawing firm conclusions. It is unclear, for instance, how far austerity prepared the psychic terrain by intensifying the contradictions in the base, why the riots hit mainly in northern England and Northern Ireland and scarcely registered in Scotland and Wales, who the organisers and activists were and what caused their politicisation, etc. As the Greek writer Pavlos Roufos says in a commentary <https://x.com/PRoufos/status/1824101156341084529> on this debate, if austerity were the main factor the question would be why, instead of anti-austerity riots we saw assaults on refugees, Muslims and people with brown skin. It seems the volatility was strongest in areas where there is a history of far-right agitation over ‘asylum hotels’, but that only points to the obvious formative effects of prior superstructural action. So consider, instead, today’s frequent outbursts of state-enabled plebeian terror. Collective violence turns out to be an indispensable part of the far-right’s political economy. This is hardly new: in the Third Reich, antisemitic exclusions building to Kristallnacht were acceptable to the German middle class as a type of economic reform that did not threaten property. But today, in the Philippines, the death squads are recommended to the public as a means of economic uplift. In the West Bank, settler-soldier pogroms are the sharp end of a programme of colonial economic reform. In India, the ‘Gujarat model’ is predicated on ethnic terror. This collective violence is not simply ‘caused’ in an external manner by the class injuries of the declining parts of the working class and petty bourgeoisie. It is a form of rightist class politics, in which a version of economic reform is coextensive with a violent adjustment to the demographic composition of the nation. It is simultaneously an intervention in both the relations of production and reproduction and in the political and legal superstructures. Conversely, insofar as such collective violence is a kind of predominantly superstructural action, it also has its own autonomous drive that far exceeds its aetiological origins in disturbances at the base, and its own innate rationale that transcends any economic motives. The syncopated spasms of vigilante and mob violence today could not possibly be explained by any practical material benefits, but they do raise morale by achieving a redistribution of humiliation based on a re-drawing of moral boundaries: arguably the unique selling point of contemporary rightist politics. Historically, where this logic becomes institutionalised, we find it pursued well past the point where it is injurious to capital accumulation, to social functioning, and to the ‘material interests’ of perpetrators. At that point it is pursued not because of prior material privations, but despite the costs it incurs. An example of this today would be the Israeli state’s pursuit of genocidal war in Gaza, against all military rationality and in spite of enormous economic costs. There, genocide appears as a temporary superstructural fix to a superstructural problem: the growing fissiparousness of the Israeli state and the decomposition of civic unity. Alberto Toscano, responding to Trump’s election in 2016, wrote of the “intensely superstructural <https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/notes-on-late-fascism/> character of our present’s fascistic traits”. And that accurately described how inchoate fascism would subsequently unfold: although in the global North its advocates dabbled in trade wars, tariffs and protectionism, it has aimed far less to transform political economy than to upend the constitutional and cultural conditions in which political struggle is waged. But from another point of view, fascism just is superstructural hypertrophy. Its drive is to politically subordinate capitalism to, and impregnate the state with, the priorities of ‘the nation’ and its biological, cultural and spiritual reproduction. Up to a point it harnesses both capital and the state to the pursuit of its goals, but ultimately will pursue them beyond the point where they endanger capital, the state and even biological survival. It is the superstructure amok, the runaway superstructure: the revenge of the superstructure. 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