Consciousness Determined from Material Conditions

social relations are the Grundlage = foundation (of a culture) (398).

Überbau = spiritual superstructure found in cultural ideology

“the ideology of a society will be consistent with and supportive of its dominant material basis” (398).

“All the implicit contradictions within the economic base are likely to find some sort of expression within the ideological superstructure” (398).

“merely representing the world as it is as a coherent social structure has the conservative force of making the present into an icon: It implies that, since things are thus, they cannot be otherwise” (399).

“Art and literature are therefore dependent ideological features of the dominant socioeconomic system, changing as the base changes but usually reflecting the values of the hegemonic class” (399).

Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions

“By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life” (406).

“As individuals express their life, so they are” (406).

“What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce” (406).

“The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production” (406).

“The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and a clash of interests between them. It’s further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labor. At the same time through the division of labour there develop further, inside these various branches, various divisions among the individuals cooperating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry, and commerce” (406).

“The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership” (407).

“the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour” (407).

forms of ownership:

1. tribal, “undeveloped stage of production”
2. communal, “union of several tribes into a city”
3. feudal, “hierarchical system of land ownership”

“Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (409).