Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism

by Franz Jakubowski, Iain MacKenzie (Editor)

Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, History

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 1978

About the author

Franz Jakubowski (1912, Posen, Province of Posen, Prussia, Germany, now Poznan, Poland – 1970, U.S.) was a Marxist theorist. Born in Prussia, he grew up in what was then the Free City of Danzig. His father was a doctor. From 1930 to 1933 he studied law in Heidelberg, Berlin, Munich and Breslau, before completing his studies in political science at Basel University. After student activism and the agitational role he would briefly play in Danzig, Jakubowski abandoned Europe, and settled in the USA, changing his name to Frank Fisher and marrying Elisabeth Spanjer. There he would play a part in establishing the Alexander Herzen Foundation, a publisher of samizdat soviet literature.

Reviews

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

All economic booms are followed by economic bust, revolutions by conservatism, and in this case, the subsequent tragedy of Jakubowski’s excellent work, is that he never wrote anything else. Ideology and Superstructure In Historical Materialism, is a book publication based upon his doctoral thesis.

This book was published in 1936, and was already a clarion call to restore Marxist Humanism against the backdrop of a deterministic, mechanical, materialist philosophy, and repressive Soviet State-Capitalist economy. Oddly Althusser never mentions this author, perhaps because doing so would quickly refute his anti-humanist thesis.

Jakubowski does several interesting things with Marxism. First, there's a long-standing tension between Marx and Engels, regarding how accurate Engels’ depiction of Marx's philosophy - after Marx's death - was. Should Engels be believed entirely, a little, or not at all? I've always taken Engels with a grain of salt, disregarding him often, especially on his theory of nature. However, Jakubowski is able to blend their quotes together in his work in a way that leads the reader to A. Not know if he's reading Marx or Engels (usually the difference is easy to detect), and B. Believe that whether or not Marx and Engels should be conflated, there is true philosophical progress to be found in the works of Engels.

Jakubowski wants to limelight several truisms about Marxism that were rapidly distorted after Marx died. First of all, Marx did not replace Hegel's absolute with Materialism, as it is commonly understood. That is, Materialism for Marx is not some abstract conception that actually governs reality, as it is for most scientist and scientific metaphysics. Marx was not taking the movement of the Idea or the Absolute, and replacing it with an equally abstract concept: matter, but was taking the movement of history and placing social-man, or social-being, at its focal point. For Hegel, the Idea and Consciousness are the primary subjects of history, and man is a predicate. For Marx, Social-Man is the subject, and consciousness is both a necessary predicate but also necessarily unified with the subject. Thinking and Being are distinct, but unified. This, in a nutshell, is Jakubowski's thesis. A thesis Lukacs was later to take up, but never consummate, in his Ontology of Social Being (a work far more abstruse, and less clear than Jakubowski's). Moreover, it is with the division of labor, when labor divides itself between mental and physical task, that the mental elite begin to conceive of mind as severed and distinct, and ontologically primary.

Using quotes and citations dating from The Holy Family, all the way through to Capital III and Engel's last letters, he reveals neither theoretician wavered from this ontological position. Materialism is humanism, and humanism, is an ontological beginning and ending. When Lenin, Kautsky, and other Marxists begin to abstract about materialism - often in the scientific vein - they have stepped away from Marxism, and entered obfuscating territories.

The next major claim Jakubowski makes, which is even better stated by Frank Furedi's Introduction (an author I had never heard of, but now desire to read more of) is that just as thought and being were made distinct, and separate, base and superstructure have suffered the same fate. It is the base that is real, and the superstructure is some nebulous, unreal chimera, that arises from and confuses our understanding of the base. And this is certainly true because Marx said it in one paragraph, to a preface. Jakubowski takes this paragraph to task, providing a wider context for Marx's views on the base and superstructure, incorporating Engels again, and Marx’s political writings. Often times the base and superstructure dichotomy is refuted by such statements as "how come our bases are the same, but you're a christian nation, and we are more of an agnostic one," or "there's sex on your TV during prime time, and no murder, but murder on ours, and no sex." These are refutations, only if one presumes the dichotomous relationship. Instead, for methodological purposes, Jakubowski recommends we see the political, legal, and ideological parts of the superstructure both as totalities within themselves, but also, like thought and being, predicates of the base. This allows for dialectical change, and degrees of autonomy within each 'mode,' without necessarily a complete severing of one from the other. Thus "material relations are what they are only in conjunction with the ideas which correspond to them." Being must always be dynamic, and dialectical, and therefore capable of divergence and unity.

There's much more to this text than I've mentioned, but these are the primary positions that are unique, and an advancement of Marxism. It's a shame this book mostly fell into the dustbin of history, when it had the potential to waken Marxism from its Stalinist slumber.

[Quin Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really excellent, accessible, and short book that clarifies the fundamentally humanist character of Marxism. In doing so, it sweeps away many basic (and still current) myths and misconceptions about Marxist thought. Unfortunately, it is somewhat dated, and I’m not sure how to translate some of the claims about the proletariat‘ sole capacity to transcend the reification and ideology of capitalist society into a context that also centrally acknowledges the rightness and radicalness of feminist, anti-racist, and other struggles. There is now a rich Marxist-feminist literature that I wish Jakubowski would have been able to dialogue with; hopefully this work will be taken up by others.

[Amar · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is of little wonder why this work never became popular. The ideas it promotes have never been ripe. The rise of Althusser's work, particularly in the vein of anti-humanism, ensured that a work like this would have never come to the forefront. Moreover, as of now, this work is clearly dated--both in form and content.

Nevertheless, I still think there are many valuable points one may extract from this work. It does a very good job of outlining the theory of historical materialism. It also does a very good job of dispelling the bourgeois myth of Marxism as a merely descriptive theory--an idea propagated by the likes of Hilferding and Kautsky.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jakubowski was a a follower of Lukacs and a Trotskyist imprisoned by the Nazis. Great book of Marxist philosophy.