In Marx, the base is society's economic structure, its forces and relations of production; the superstructure is the legal, political and ideological forms resting on it. In the lecture, the base determines the superstructure, consciousness included.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
For Marx, your place in the socioeconomic structure, the base, determines your thinking; consciousness, culture and art, the superstructure, derive from it.
Put simply Marx: your place in the economy (the "base") determines how you think. Your ideas, culture and art (the "superstructure") grow out of it.
Where to read it Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859); Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch, 21–September 22, 1890.
Freud is in many ways Marx's opposite pole yet asks a very similar question: both are theorists of modernity, trying to explain why modern life leaves people so miserable.
Put simply Shore: Freud is in many ways Marx's opposite, yet he asks much the same question. Both try to explain why modern life leaves people so miserable.
Shore's closing contrast: unlike Marxism, psychoanalysis offers no exit; it may ease some symptoms, but no reordering of society can promise a happy ending.
Beauvoir finds Marxism too reductive on women: private property alone does not explain their oppression, and sex relations are not just a class struggle, even if economics and class matter.
Put simply Beauvoir: Marxism reduces too much to economics when it comes to women. Private property alone does not explain their oppression, and relations between the sexes are not just class struggle, though economics and class matter.
1 link between claims that both use the term. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
MarxFor Marx, your place in the socioeconomic structure, the base, determines your thinking; consciousness, culture and art, the superstructure, derive from it. L5 · 46:02
BeauvoirBeauvoir finds Marxism too reductive on women: private property alone does not explain their oppression, and sex relations are not just a class struggle, even if economics and class matter. L16 · 40:32
Women's oppression cannot be derived from property or reduced to class
Throughlines that pass through one of these claims.
Terms that appear in the same claims.