Infrastructures, Societies, and History [and Comments]

Abstract

The paper deals with the so-called problem of the dominance of superstructures-kinship, religion, politics-and supports the view that kinship or religion dominates social organization and the thought of social actors when it functions as relations of production and as framework for material action upon nature. Consequently, it becomes impossible to oppose the dominance of kinship, religion, or politics to the hypothesis that everything is ultimately determined by economic relationships. But this is only true if one can see in the distinction between infrastructures and superstructures a distinction of functions and not of institutions as most Marxists and non-Marxists usually do. A society has no top and no bottom, no levels, and the distinction between infrastructure, superstructures, and ideology has nothing to do with the various layers of a cake. Furthermore, "productive forces" include both the intellectual and the material capacities of men to act upon nature and therefore include an ideel and ideological component. The paper deals with ideology and its role in forming and maintaining dominance relationships (between sexes, castes, classes, etc.). When defining those representations which could be classified as ideological, one cannot content oneself with formal criteria alone, with the opposition between "true" and "false" ideas. Nor can one rely only on functional criteria, which classify as ideological the representations which serve to "legitimize" the dominance and exploitation of man by man. In every social relationship there are ideel elements, which are not reflexions after the fact, but an integral part of the relationship and a reason for its existence. Finally, every theory of ideology presupposes a theory of the formation of dominance relationships-of one sex over the other, of one caste or class over the others. The task remains of analyzing the role of violence and consent in this formative process. The consent of the dominated to their own domination rests on the fact that they and those who dominate them share the same conceptions. The question, however, remains: In what circumstances and for what reasons are these conceptions shared, and when and why does the dominance relationship appear as an exchange of "services"?

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