What is base and superstructure in marxism?

Friedrich Engels, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Friedrich Engels answers

The materialist conception of history rests on a distinction that is simple to state and endlessly misread. The economic structure of society — the relations of production and exchange, the way human beings organize the making and appropriating of their material life — forms the real basis, the base, from which the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions, as well as the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period, is to be explained.¹

What belongs to the superstructure? Political forms of the class struggle and its results — constitutions, legal systems, the state apparatus. And beyond these, the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants: political theories, juridical doctrines, philosophical systems, religious views and their further development into bodies of dogma.²

The superstructure is not mere illusion; it is real, and it acts back upon the base. There is an interaction of all these elements, and in many cases the superstructure predominates in determining the form that historical struggles take.³ Here is where the misreading begins, and I have had to correct it more than once in correspondence. When someone takes the proposition that the economic element is the ultimately determining factor and converts it into the claim that it is the sole determining factor, he has transformed a living analytical instrument into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.⁴

Neither Marx nor I ever maintained that. The economic movement asserts itself as necessary — but through an endless host of contingencies, through the reciprocal action of all the elements upon one another, not through a mechanical one-way causation running from base to superstructure and stopping there.⁵ The distinction also has a historical dimension that the formula alone conceals.

It was the actual class struggles of the early 19th century — the Lyons uprising of 1831, the English Chartist movement of 1838 to 1842 — that forced the new examination of history, because the old idealist conception knew nothing of class struggles based on material interests and treated production and economic relations as merely incidental elements in the "history of civilization." The base-superstructure framework is not a philosopher's invention imposed on history from outside; it is what the facts of industrial class conflict demanded of theory.⁶

Sources

1. the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained.

   Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, p. 62

2. political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles

   Selected Correspondence, pp. 2934–2935

3. There is a reciprocity between all these factors in which, finally, through the endless array of contingencies... the economic movement asserts itself as necessary.

   Selected Correspondence, pp. 3449–3450

4. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.

   Selected Correspondence, pp. 2934–2935

5. the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

   Selected Correspondence, pp. 2934–2935

6. In 1831, the first working-class uprising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the first national working-class movement, that of the English Chartists, reached its height... the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based on material interests, indeed knew nothing at all of material interests; production and all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the 'history of civilization.'

   Anti-Dühring, pp. 24–25