Capitalism isn’t the specific cause of every thought or action, but material forces undergird social and political institutions through material history, and ultimately “determine” institutions in the sense that they place a limit on their ultimate possibilities

We have seen already that scarcely anybody imagines that there are no intelligible patterns in history at all. It is rare to find someone who sees history as simply one shambolic heap of chaos, chance, accident and contingency, though Friedrich Nietzsche and his disciple Michel Foucault sail close to this view at times. Most people accept that there are chains of cause and effect in history, however complex or hard to fathom, and that this lends it some rough kind of pattern. It is hard to believe, for example, that various nations began to collect colonies at a certain historical point for reasons that had nothing whatsoever in common. African slaves were not transported to America for no reason at all. That fascism emerged at more or less the same time in various twentiethcentury nations was not just a copycat affair. People do not suddenly hurl themselves on open fires just for the hell of it. There is a remarkably uniform pattern across the globe of people pointedly not doing so. The question, surely, is not whether there are patterns in history, but whether there is one predominant pattern. You can believe the former without crediting the latter. Why not just a set of overlapping designs that never merge into a whole? How on earth could something as diverse as human history form a unified story? To contend that material interests have been the prime mover all the way from the cave dwellers to capitalism is a lot more plausible than believing that diet, altruism, Great Men, pole-vaulting or the conjunction of the planets has been. But it still seems too singular an answer to be satisfying. If it is satisfying to Marx, it is because he considers that history has been by no means as varied and colourful as it may appear. It has been a much more monotonous story than meets the eye. There is indeed a kind of unity to it; but it is not one that should yield us any pleasure, as the unity of Bleak House or High Noon might. For the most part, the threads that leash it together have been scarcity, hard labour, violence and exploitation. And though these things have taken very different forms, they have so far laid the foundation of every civilisation on record. It is this dull, mind-numbing recurrence that has lent human history a good deal more consistency than we might desire. There is indeed a grand narrative here, and more’s the pity. As Theodor Adorno observes, ‘‘The One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.’’ The grand narrative of history is not one of Progress, Reason or Enlightenment. It is a melancholic tale which leads in Adorno’s words ‘‘from the slingshot to the atomic bomb.’’≥ It is possible to agree that violence, hard labour and exploitation bulk large in human history without accepting that they are the foundation of it. For Marxists, one reason why they are so fundamental is that they are bound up with our physical survival. They have been abiding features of the way we maintain our material existence. They are not just random events. We are not speaking of scattered acts of savagery or aggression. If there has been a certain necessity to these things, it is because they are built into the structures by which we produce and reproduce our material life. Even so, no Marxist imagines that these forces shape absolutely everything. If they did, then typhoid, ponytails, convulsive laughter, Sufism, the Saint Matthew Passion and painting your toenails an exotic purple would all be the reflex of economy forces. Any battle not fought for directly economic motives, or any work of art which is silent on the class struggle, would be inconceivable. Marx himself occasionally writes as though the political is simply the reflex of the economic. Yet he also often investigates the social, political or military motives behind historical events, without the faintest suggestion that these motives are just the surface manifestations of deeper economic ones. Material forces do sometimes leave their mark quite directly on politics, art and social life. But their influence is generally more long-term and subterranean than this. There are times when this influence is only very partial, and other times when it scarcely makes sense to speak in these terms at all. How is the capitalist mode of production the cause of my taste in neckties? In what sense does it determine hang-gliding or the twelve-bar blues? So there is no reductionism at work here. Politics, culture, science, ideas and social existence are not just economics in disguise, as some neuroscientists hold that the mind is just the brain in disguise. They have their own reality, evolve their own histories and operate by their own inner logic. They are not just the pale reflection of something else. They also powerfully shape the mode of production itself. The traffic between economic ‘‘base’’ and social ‘‘superstructure,’’ as we shall see later, is not just one way. So if we are not speaking here of some mechanistic determinism, what kind of claim is being made? Is it one so fuzzy and generalized as to be politically toothless? The claim is in the first place a negative one. It is that the way men and women people produce their material life sets limits to the kind of cultural, legal, political and social institutions they construct. The word ‘‘determine’’ literally means ‘‘to set limits to.’’ Modes of production do not dictate a specific kind of politics, culture or set of ideas. Capitalism was not the cause of John Locke’s philosophy or Jane Austen’s fiction. It is rather a context in which both can be illuminated. Nor do modes of production throw up only those ideas or institutions which serve their purposes. If this were true, then Marxism itself would be impossible. It would be a mystery where anarchist street theatre comes from, or how Tom Paine came to write one of the best-selling books of all time—the revolutionary Rights of Man—at the heart of the repressive police state that was the England of his day. Even so, we would be astonished to discover that English culture contained nothing but Tom Paines and anarchist theatre groups. Most novelists, scholars, advertisers, newspapers, teachers and television stations do not produce work that is dramatically subversive of the status quo. This is so glaringly obvious that it generally fails to strike us as significant. Marx’s point is simply that it is not an accident. And it is here that we can formulate the more positive aspect of his claim. Broadly speaking, the culture, law and politics of class-society are bound up with the interests of the dominant social classes. As Marx himself puts it in The German Ideology, ‘‘The class that is the ruling material force of society is at the same time the ruling intellectual force.’’ Most people, if they pause to think about it, would probably accept that the business of material production has loomed so large in human history, absorbed such boundless resources of time and energy, provoked such internecine conflicts, engrossed so many human beings from cradle to grave and confronted so many of them as a matter of life or death, that it would be amazing if it were not to leave its mark on a good many other aspects of our existence. Other social institutions find themselves inexorably dragged into its orbit. It bends politics, law, culture and ideas out of true by demanding that rather than just flourish as themselves, they spend much of their time legitimating the prevailing social order. Think of contemporary capitalism, in which the commodity form has left its grubby thumbprints on everything from sport to sexuality, from how best to swing oneself a front-row seat in heaven to the ear-shattering tones in which U.S. television reporters hope to seize the viewer’s attention for the sake of the advertisers. The most compelling confirmation of Marx’s theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which his case is becoming truer as time passes. It is capitalism, not Marxism, which is economically reductionist.