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The Structure of the Social Jonathan Joseph and Simon Kennedy Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2000; 30; 508 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pos.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/30/4/508

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PHILOSOPHY Joseph, Kennedy OF/ THE STRUCTURE SOCIAL SCIENCES OF THE SOCIAL / December 2000

The Structure of the Social JONATHAN JOSEPH Goldsmith’s College, University of London SIMON KENNEDY

This article seeks to develop the Marxist conception of social structure by incorporating developments within critical realist philosophy. It rejects forms of economic determinism such as the base-superstructure model and those reconstructions—like Cohen’s—that attribute primacy to productive forces in explaining history and society. It argues instead that society is the product of complex, often contradictory combinations of many different structures and mechanisms. They form a structural ensemble, hierarchically arranged, but where each element has its own dynamics and emergent powers. It concludes that society is best understood through critical realist conceptions of stratification, emergence, transformation, and overdetermination.

This article seeks to develop the Marxist conception of social structure by incorporating developments within critical realist philosophy. It rejects forms of economic determinism and those reconstructions that attribute primacy to productive forces in explaining history and society. We propose a stratified conception of the social based on the confluence of numerous structures, mechanisms, and practices. In this way, it is possible to conceive of the duality of structure and agency and the emergent powers proper to each. Many of the rationalizations of a “Marxist” theory of history have had serious flaws. One of the most damaging has been the model of economic determination as expressed in traditional accounts by authors such as Plekhanov ([1895] 1956) and Kautsky (1909). These attempted to systematize Marx’s work into a number of levels of ascending order that could be used to explain the development of society resulting in a mechanical determinism premised on the development of the productive forces as the dominant social factor. This causal relation is restated in more recent work such as G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), in which it is argued that the relations of production can be functionally explained by their Received 24 March 1999 Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 30 No. 4, December 2000 508-527 © 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.

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tendency to promote the productive forces. Here, productive relations organize forces that assume a near autonomous status.

THE PROBLEM OF ECONOMIC PRIMACY IN MARXISM The weakness of what Cohen calls the primacy thesis is wellknown. Marxism has struggled for a long time to rebut Acton’s (1962, 1970) and Plamenatz’s (1954) observations on the confused status of morality and legality in the base and superstructure model advanced by the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx 1971). The inclusion of the juridical in the economic structure seems to render meaningless the proposition that superstructures (which include forms of law) are determined foremost by relations of production. If law is present in the definition of a productive relation, then the distinctiveness of the economic structure is blurred, and the economic base cannot be given priority in a theory of history. When noncapitalist societies are considered, this quandary deepens. Much of Marx’s later work was concerned with precapitalist communal forms of property; here, ties of consanguinity were made constitutive of the labor process. In the ancient Greek polis, citizenship determined property ownership, and under feudalism, “personal dependence characterizes the social relations of material production as much as it does the other spheres of life based on that production . . . relations of personal dependence form the given social foundation” (Marx 1976, 170).1 The first volume of Capital (Marx 1976) describes the decay of feudal relations of production previous to any increase in forces of production. This would indicate the subordinate place of forces of production in determining change. If the feudal relations of production were already in steep decline before the emergence of new techniques, they could not have been a fetter to forces of production; rather, they must have expedited the way. In the transition from petty craft production to manufacture, Marx often makes the allocation of new productive tasks central to the change from feudal mode of production to capitalist mode of production (see, e.g., Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 5, 68-72; vol. 6, 485). Forms of cooperation and forces of production seem coterminus. The growing instance of capital accumulation brought on by the expansion of the market demanded new organization of the factors of production in each unit of production, especially in urban areas. This was accompanied by new ways of


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directing the immediate process of production, that is, a new despotism over workers to maximize surplus value. The changes in work relations and their parallel authority structures are very prominent in Capital. The history of their transformation seems a very social affair, disciplines and patterns of commerce being prominent in their constitution. Cohen’s (1978) ambitious attempt to defend the primacy of the forces of production has to indulge in a labyrinthine and complex set of arguments to get around this fact, postulating first that there can be fettering on forces that do not already exist (p. 177) and later changing the fettering conception to one of optimal use rather than the actual use. In response to criticism, a further set of possibilities are all rejected for that of “net fettering.” It describes how the relations of production act as a fetter on the trajectory of used productive power, this being a multiple of the level of development and the degree of forces of production use. Cohen asks us to accept a growth based on net productive power qualitatively measured. The rise and fall of structures through history according to their promotion of the qualitatively measured net product is both difficult to envisage and a long way from Marx’s preface of 1859.2

CRITICAL NATURALISM AND SOCIAL RELATIONS A major problem with the base-superstructure model is that it reduces social production to economic production. Therefore, the economic base is said to determine the political and ideological “superstructure.” Production is better described as a very basic material relation that entails a whole range of social relations rather than just economic ones. With production comes surplus product, and this in turn entails social relations of appropriation and distribution. These, similarly, have an eminently political character and affect all aspects of the social totality. The process of production itself requires a range of social relations that are not purely economic—education, training, law, and the family, for example. It therefore makes no sense to insist on the separation of forces of production and relations of production or to separate the economic and the political except as an analytical procedure that might help us identify certain social processes, structures, or relations in abstraction. In reality, the productive forces and the economic relations do not stand apart from “society” in an external determining relationship. They are intrinsic to society and are fundamental to the reproduction of social relations.



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The conception we argue for is of a society based on a complexity of different structures, generative mechanisms, and practices, ordered somewhat hierarchically but in a stratified and overdetermined way and where processes are to be understood in terms of emergence rather than reduction. While higher or more complex aspects of reality presuppose the less complex (e.g., matter), they have features that cannot be reduced to them. Against the thrust of mechanistic reductionism and structural autonomy, it is necessary to restore the importance of social agency. However, this should be seen in the context of a structured and stratified society which agents reproduce and occasionally transform. Therefore, Roy Bhaskar (1989b) argues that society is composed of a series of structures (enduring relations) and that all social entities must be understood in relation to these. Furthermore, all social structures—for instance, the economy, the state, the family, language—depend upon or presuppose social relations—which may include the social relations between capital and labor, ministers and civil servants, parents and children. The relations into which people enter pre-exist the individuals who enter into them, and whose activity reproduces or transforms them; so they are themselves structures. And it is to these structures of social relations that realism directs our attention. (P. 4)

Although it may seem straightforward to define social structures such as the family, they in fact entail more complex and abstract sets of relations (property relations, law, the church and state, etc.). Society is a messy ensemble of positioned practices, generative mechanisms, and interrelations. The complexity of the social must be matched by a stratified form of analysis in which different aspects of the social must be studied in abstraction. The operation of structures and generative mechanisms must be studied as tendencies that may or may not be exercised depending on the concrete situation but which are, nonetheless, real and determining factors. We might say, therefore, that capitalist society contains a general “capitalist” structure but that the various economic structures, relations, and institutions vary in their concrete instances from place to place or time to time. We might also describe the general structure of capitalist social relations as containing generative mechanisms that cause expansion and competition, resulting in the rising organic composition of capital. However, the resulting tendency of the rate of profit to fall may or may not be actualized depend-


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ing on concrete circumstances and the effect of countervailing tendencies. We may talk of the capitalist mode of production, the organic composition of capital, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as various instances of social structures. But it is clear that these are different types of structures and generative mechanisms, albeit heavily interconnected ones. A critical, naturalist approach suggests a structured character to the natural world and an emergent character of society in relation to it. The existence and necessity of social structures flows from this and is based on certain fundamental features of the human species as social animals who live in communities, engage in productive activity, and have a developed communicative capacity. As such, the existence of social structures and practices is a necessary feature of human biological existence. Social activity always takes place through social structures that are both the condition for and outcome of human practice. However, while the existence of social structures is a necessary feature of all societies, the specific form of these structures is historically determined. This occurs through the processes of interaction, reproduction, and transformation. The necessarily social nature of humankind is one of the most fundamental tenets of Marxism. Marx (1975) explicitly states in his notes on Adolph Wagner that his method “does not start out from man, but from the economically given social period” (p. 201). There are, in any case, great difficulties in conceiving of entities such as the means of production outside their social form. Is it not precisely their social form that makes them means of production rather than lumps of inanimate material? To understand why means of production are worthy of the name is to make a statement about the nature of the society in which they are located. All attempts to define productive forces cannot avoid taking this on: To qualify as a productive force, a facility must be capable of use by a producing agent in such a way that production occurs (partly) as a result of its use, and it is someone’s purpose that the facility so contribute to production. (Cohen 1978, 32)

An essential ingredient of the productive forces is the purpose of the human beings that use them “to contribute to production.” People’s thoughts and actions make up part of what Marx meant by the reproduction of social life. Work is, as McClelland (1979) points out, partly about people releasing their intentions. It is clearly problematic to



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preclude the entrance of social norms, custom, and belief into the productive forces. Intentionality is the key matter by which Marx (1976, 284) distinguishes humans from animals. It is a constantly altering, mutable, basis of the human condition. Most of all, it is meaningful. To include it in the “material” threatens to misconstrue and disfigure this central feature. Models are notoriously unsuccessful in grasping something that is in continuous motion. The interaction of material and social aspects of production is one such case. The base-superstructure model does not lend itself well to the business of economic production for this is not a simple given. It is always part of some process of transformation (Marx and Engels, 1975, vol. 5, 39). Focus of this aspect would direct attention more on the structured practices than the designation of the raw material, which is transformed. By stressing the active side of things, we can better conceive of the relation of humanity and nature, social and material. The persistence of the natural, outside human agency, suggests that human practice depends to an extent on the given and, therefore, that social science studies objects that are dependent modes of matter. Nevertheless, emphasis should fall on the mode of transformation rather than a posited given material object. The key category here is practice: “a way of transforming a certain sort of pre-existing situation by means of instruments used by labor-power (ultimately at least human labor power)” (Suchting 1986, 56). The most relevant form this concept takes in Marxism is production. The mode of production is a means of reproducing physical being through the interaction of the social and material by redirective labor. A more static, analytic division of these properties into a model of base and superstructure, and of form and content, fails to grasp the dynamism of the process. Mode of production speaks of the ability of people to produce their own means of livelihood outside of animalistic instinct. All social life becomes essentially practical: “all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice” (Marx and Engels 1975, vol. 5, 5).

A REALIST THEORY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES To describe the base as separate and to give it its own laws of motion—for example, an autonomous tendency to develop the productive forces—is to misunderstand the social determination of pro-


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duction. The base-superstructure division describes separately functioning, albeit related, levels that intervene into one another. This separation of the economic was precisely what Marx’s study of political economy sought to overcome—Marx (1981, 956) saw his science very much in terms of stripping away the mystification of forms generated by capitalism. Classical political economy merely “mirrored the facts.” Imprisoned in reflection, it could do no more than articulate capitalist subjectivity; it expressed rather than comprehended capitalist relations. Capital begins with an analysis of the commodity and concrete social forms. Marx then proceeds by way of retroduction from the appearance of the commodity to an examination of the social conditions of commodity production. By identifying the mechanisms and structures underlying the commodity form, Marx shifts his inquiry from appearance to reality. That hypothetical entities cannot be reduced to empirical or phenomenal forms is reflected in the key concepts that Marx puts to use, in particular value and abstract labor. To remain at the level of forms is precisely the ideological error or flat-ontologizing common to those theories (like classical economics and positivism) which remain trapped in the realm of fetishized relations and cannot conceive of the underlying structural mechanisms. Derek Sayer (1987, 123-25) compares the realist distinction between social mechanisms and phenomenal forms with Cohen’s functional explanation of causality and his advocacy of Hempel’s D-N schema in which causes are understood in terms of constant conjunctions with no necessary (or structural) connection. While this approach presents a view of the social that is atomistic and ahistoric, Marx’s retroduction from social forms, while appearing to be an abstraction, is in fact also a socialization and historicization. Economic objects and their attributes are located in social structures and practices. Indeed, the isolation of a particular social relation, followed by retroductive explanation and recontextualization in an open situation, may lead to a subsequent revelation of its dialectical complexity in the continuous process of social reproduction. Production no longer can be described, as it had been by the Physiocrats, as a division of man and nature. It is a social process to which class division is both the premise and outcome. The divorce of the producer from the means of production is social and political, not just economic.3 Labor comes to appear as a commodity bought by capital as part of its drive to accumulate. This occurs because of the presence of rela-



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tions of production that separate the direct producer from the means of production. This separation hides from view the true commodity with the capability of expanding value—labor power.

THE RELATION OF THE SOCIAL TO AGENCY The idea of the social argued for here comprises a complex set of structures, mechanisms, practices, and other social relations that together form a stratified and differentiated totality. Human practices are situated within various relatively enduring social structures that are both the necessary condition and the reproduced outcome of human activity. Society does not consist merely of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand (Marx 1973, 265). Realist conceptions adopt a critical naturalism in relation to these structures; they are, in a most general sense, a necessary condition of all societies. This can be justified through a basic transcendental argument: given that human actions and practice are enduring and intelligible, this presupposes that they exist within a structured context which gives them a socially and historically defined character, something which is therefore possible to investigate. And while they are reproduced though human agency, they are independent of the individual conceptions that these agents may have, often being the unintentional consequence of human action. Because of the structured context, while social actions may certainly be said to be intentional, there is a necessary distinction between intentional actions and the unintentional consequences of such actions. As Bhaskar (1989a) takes the example of wedlock: “people do not marry to reproduce the nuclear family or work to sustain the capitalist economy. Yet it is nevertheless the unintended consequence (and inexorable result) of, as it is also a necessary condition for, their activity” (p. 35). We may say, therefore, that social structures have certain properties and that these structures are dependent on human activity for their reproduction and that this reproductive activity is dependent on human intentions and beliefs. However, we cannot reduce the properties of social structures to these intentions and beliefs. The different aspects of the social stand in a stratified relationship, with causal primacy resting with structures and their properties. This relational conception of social structure can be enlarged on further using a contribution made by Andrew Collier (1989). He pro-


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poses a Spinozist causality of composite individuals in a structured hierarchy of determination, each of which is made up of other composites, which, in turn, consists of more composites. Within each may be found a “conatus,” that is, a tendency to preserve itself. This is a conception of structuration rather than a telos. In simple bodies, this is simply their inertia; in more complex ones, it is “the set of mutual relations of motion and rest between the parts, without which the complex would fall apart” (p. 72). This propensity to cohere is for Spinoza a feature of all systems. A conatus is not “essences” proper, for external causes are able to force a change in the nature of an entity. Each composite structure has its own emergent causality and singular explanatory principles special to itself. The operation of social functions is not given but is emergent out of the set of material conditions within which they operate. The system “functions” in the Spinozist sense that it persists or hangs together in a contradictory codetermination. It is contingent in the sense that we recognize intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of processes and relations. Yet, as Andrew Sayer (1992) points out, The contingently-related conditions are never inert, but are themselves the product of causal processes and have their own causal powers and liabilities. Although the coming together of two or more entities may be contingent, what occurs when they are so combined happens necessarily in virtue of their natures. (Pp. 140-42)

Collier (1989, 85) uses structure to describe the abstract connections of various causal relations and the neologism structuratum to portray the concrete structured entity itself. Structure is therefore more abstract, defined as the set of causal relations between the parts of the concrete structuratum. For example, a building is a structuratum, while the building’s structure refers to the relations between its parts. This necessarily entails a complex relationship since a structure can be shared with other entities—for example, an important part of a capitalist firm’s structure is its relation to various markets, legal systems, and so on—structures which determine many other concrete entities. A structuratum is a composite whose reproduction indicates a tendency to preserve itself, a conatus in the Spinozist sense. The coherence of this composite lies in its reproduction. The conatus of the composite society does not have to be identical to each of its component parts. These each have their own conatus that may be contrary to that of the larger or higher composite of which they are a part. This differ-



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entiation hopefully provides a means of conceptualizing structural change. Perhaps for any change to occur, there must be a counterconative tendency in the structuratum built in to the whole, a liability, for only unchanging—ultimately eternal—things would lack such a tendency. A pathology of counterconative possibilities presents itself. To be a composite is to pose the possibility of decomposition. Social formations are structurata in that they have a concrete structured existence. The vulnerability of the higher-order structurata to antagonistic impulses from below is a particularly enlightening way for Marxists in discussing the question of transition, leaving open the possibility of change springing from a variety of sources, including the relations of production, transformations in the forms of cooperation, and new technology. The monocausal explanation of how forces of production fetter the relations of production can be abandoned. The debate over internal and external causes for the transition to capitalism from feudalism can be posed much more effectively using the idea of complexly related structures and structurata. The various aspects of the totality of social life are hierarchically related to one another so that the internal dynamics of the feudal social formation are constrained and determined by a range of mechanisms, including, crucially, class struggles. In feudal society, preexisting economic structures impede the formation of classes and social collectivities with an interest in productive development. The position of the feudal lord is constructed so as to limit his rational course of action regarding productive progress. His best course, from his position in the network of feudal relations, is always to intensify the extraction of surplus labor from his peasants through extra-economic compulsion. The feudal structures point him as an individual toward intensive rather than extensive development; his constant demands for increasing levels of surplus to manage war machines, administrative expenses, and lavish consumption were a disruption and hindrance to the village economy, blocking the development of specialized productive units, technical innovation, and marginalizing the appeal of reinvestment of surplus while simultaneously reproducing the existing fragmented patterns of ownership. As Brenner (1985) points out, the structure of the feudal social formation therefore had an in-built trend to crisis and decline of labor productivity. His work on the transition to capitalism is particularly important here because it establishes the structural conditioning of class motivation, particularly concerning productive development. Relations of production are


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constitutive of these restrictions. Brenner’s work incorporates the political and economic struggle of peasants into an explanation of the emergence of European states. In the east, lords were able to ensurf peasants in the wake of the seigneurial revenue crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries because of the weakness of these peasant communities. The varying strengths of the two sides also determined the political and economic settlement that resulted in the west: in France, peasants’ fuller property rights weakened the lords forcing a turn to the state for revenue. This contributed to the centralization of power around the monarchy and the rise of the absolutist state. By contrast, English lords escaped the seventeenth-century crisis which struck their continental contemporaries due in large part to the peasantry’s failure to win freehold, which then lay the basis for capitalist investment and enclosure. The economic development of England was shaped by different structurata, such as parliamentary institutions, law, and property rights, which in turn reflected social relations between monarch and landlords and between lords and peasants and, ultimately, the highly successful relation of landlord, capitalist tenant, and wage laborer. In the case of an economic practice, it is the situation of instruments of production and labor power in a certain relation within the embedding political and ideological conditions that count as decisive (Suchting 1986, 20-21). This determinacy of relations in what counts as forces of production exceeds the restrictions imposed by the basesuperstructure model. The differentiation between structures and structurata also helps locate agency more precisely in the process of transformation. As agents, we do not relate directly to the totality or even to the various structures that make up the totality and which are the unconscious product of reproduction. Our more conscious activities are directed through organized human practices at the concrete structurata. However, the stratification of the social totality means that a specific structuratum or social ensemble is intersected by a number of more abstract structures or relations. There exists a stratified and emergent relationship between concrete structurata and underlying structures and generative mechanisms. For example, the structurata of a welfare system intersect with market mechanisms and processes of capital accumulation; short-term political policies and longer-term state strategies; the effects of class struggle; the operation of social democratic, welfarist, or neo-liberal ideological articulation; and the effects of global markets. The attempts by agents to



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change aspects of a welfare system will depend on their location and on their mediation through these various relations.

STRATIFICATION AND METHOD Human actions are related to concrete structurata. However, these structurata involve a complex set of underlying relations. The conscious intentions of human agency at one level of the social have further reaching consequences as determined by the relations between the concrete structurata that are acted on and the underlying structures. These conceptions of stratification and emergence can be applied across the social spectrum. The study of such mechanisms reveals a range of different social determinations. While each level is irreducible and dependent on others, their collective operation produces effects that are quite original. This indicates the possibility of elaborating a scientific method that is able to conceptualize such social stratification. Explaining the enduring properties of the world means identifying causal mechanisms. Once the identification of a mechanism has proceeded, this itself becomes an object for inquiry. Steadily, new underlying mechanisms may be posited as science probes deeper into reality. This ontological depth, explains Bhaskar (1989a), is “grounded in the multi-tiered stratification of reality, and the consequent logic—of discovery—that stratification imposes on science” (p. 13; 1986, 63-65). Once a level of some profundity is acquired, then this knowledge can serve as a superior explanation of the “higher” levels. The critical realist method proceeds as (1) the causal analysis of an event, (2) a theoretical redescription of the component causes, (3) a process of retroduction from the redescribed component events or states to the antecedent processes that might have produced them, and (4) an elimination of alternative causes. The theory must be checked empirically and each level of description should be subjected to renewed scrutiny once further layers or mechanisms have been identified. In open systems, a whole number of these mechanisms operate together. The existence of social structures and mechanisms is not dependent on their exercise. They exist either exercised or unexercised. Whether certain events occur or whether causal powers or tendencies are exercised depends on the particular conditions or social conjuncture, while the activities of certain social layers depends on the structural conditions of their emergence.


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Just as social processes cannot be explained by the laws of physics, is it also not possible to explain social determination simply in terms of economic conditions. Even if we were to accept the primacy of the economic, different social strata have causal powers specific to them and which cannot be reduced to the lower order from which they are emergent. These emergent properties and powers are relational and specific. As Archer (1995, 51) writes, to talk of emergent powers is to refer to a property which comes into being through social combination. Society is composed of a multitude of stratified and emergent structures that interrelate and codetermine one another in complimentary and contradictory ways. Collier (1989) suggests that structurata may be layered in the form of a laminate: a “tree of composition” in which strata are varied by being different types of mechanisms as well as structurata (pp. 98-102).4 Those situated at a “high” level depend for their continued functioning on a range of “lower” mechanisms. Therefore, for science to describe these laminate systems, it must portray them as the outcome of the workings of a range of conjointly operating mechanisms, which, by virtue of their composition, produce the system in question. The production of the higher systems by lower ones is thus a feature of emergence: higher strata are more than the sum of the strata below them. A system emerges from the congress of generative mechanisms. The result is an ontology of real stratified structures. The characteristic of emergence means we can avoid reducing the material to the purely physical or material base. While the physical world is the “brute basis” of the social (Searle 1995, 2), social phenomena including culture, ideology, institutions, and social positions can only be understood in relation to socially emergent mechanisms, each with their own specificities. This laminate image captures far better the multiplicity of levels and mutual determination of structures in a hierarchy than does “base” and “superstructure.” Marx’s image can be portrayed as an instance of stratification, in which upper “superstructural” mechanisms are explainable only in terms of lower, more basic, ones. This “vertical causality” asserts that “the ideological and political mechanisms are what they are because economic (and more generally, material) ones are what they are and not at all vice versa” (Collier 1989, 61). When this is combined with a horizontal causality suggesting the production of events “as a result of a prior operation upon a pre-existing complex of generative mechanisms,” we can move toward a concep-



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tion of various layered practices and their accompanying ideologies instead of beginning from a rather immobile and fixed duality of a foundation opposed to political and ideological superstructure. It means recognition of the mentation and intentionality that is always an indispensable moment of production. This would go a long way to countering the accusations of incoherence made by Acton and Plamenatz regarding the juridical involvement in the economic. The separation suggested now is one of composites in a connected hierarchy, with emergent features. The problem of primacy and the determination of the base are now posed as an object of investigation. Only through this inquiry can the hierarchy be established. While forces and relations of production are the ever-present preconditions of material reproduction, they are also the results of this activity and may, therefore, as a social result, not be assigned primacy.

THE DETERMINATION OF AGENCY Social agency always occurs within a structured context that is, in a sense, prior to the agency involved. It is also true that it is only through human activity that these structures can be reproduced or transformed. Social structures are therefore both the necessary condition and the reproduced outcome of social agency. The emphasis on stratification and emergence has important consequences for how we conceptualize the relationship between structure and agency. A particular form of social activity cannot be viewed as belonging to a specific social structure, as in the real world there is no one-to-one relation between structures and agents. Rather, social activity cuts across a number of social structures which stand in a stratified relationship to such human practices—while a social structure or generative mechanism may be related to a wide range of practices or human activities and have differing effects on each. If we apply this to the transformational model of social activity, we can start to see the complexities involved in processes of social reproduction and transformation. The human activities responsible for the reproduction of the social are mediated through a complex set of structured and stratified relations. The distinction between structures, which are more abstract social relations, and structurata—the concrete structured entities themselves—expresses the stratification of the social between concrete entities and underlying causal mecha-


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nisms. Social agents relate to structurata in a more direct sense, although such relations involve the underlying structures and mechanisms that constitute structurata. If this distinction entails a stratified conception of the social, then so too does the distinction between social structures and the social practices in which human agents are engaged. Bhaskar (1989a) talks of the duality of praxis as involving the conscious production and unconscious reproduction of society (p. 35). While critical realism attempts to uphold the duality of structure and praxis, Bhaskar suggests that a system of mediating concepts is required which can designate the “point of contact” between human agency and social structures: Such a point, linking action to structure, must both endure and be immediately occupied by individuals. It is clear that the mediating system we need is that of the positions (places, functions, rules, tasks, duties, rights, etc.) occupied (filled, assumed, enacted, etc.) by individuals, and of the practices (activities, etc.) in which, in virtue of their occupancy of these positions (and vice versa), they engage. (Pp. 40-41)

Bhaskar calls this relational conception a position-practice system, suggesting that Marx combines this essentially relational conception of social science with a transformational conception of social activity (p. 42). As Archer (1995) argues, just because society is dependent on action does not mean that this action constitutes an unbroken flow. It is necessary to specify whose actions, when and where. Just because the term working class has been used over the course of a long period of structural changes does not mean that we are talking about the same group throughout this period (pp. 73-74). This approach, described by Archer as “morphogenetic,” points to the fact that transformations affect not just structures but agents too. Indeed, the argument that transformational activity changes agents as well as structures upholds rather than denies the primacy of structures since changes in the relations between structures and agents alter the way that these agents are socially determined. Agency is shaped by and reshapes structures while reconstituting itself in the process (p. 274). Therefore, collectivities of human beings are grouped and regrouped as they contribute to the process of reproduction or changing the structure or culture of society. In this way, they also maintain or change their collective



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identities as part and parcel of maintaining or transforming the sociocultural structures which they inherited at birth. (P. 255)

The development of structures and the consequent change in structural properties affects the determination of agency through the development of structural enablements and constraints. Structural location determines the emergent powers of social agents. Although this situation is structurally pregiven, social agents have the ability to act on it. How this develops depends on the stratification of society and the consequent emergent nature of the social powers with which agents are endowed. This in turn determines which agents or social collectivities can move beyond mere agency and become effective social actors.

CONCLUSION Production is socially organized and stands in a stratified relationship to the rest of the social totality. This means that it is impossible to separate the forces of production and the relations of production along the lines advanced by the various models of base and superstructure. While realism argues that it may be necessary to examine specific structures or mechanisms in isolation (for instance, to examine the determination of value), it is always necessary to reexamine these processes in relation to others in an open and stratified context (for instance, under market conditions or through the effects of class struggle). Society should therefore be seen as an ensemble of different structures, generative mechanisms, and practices that operate together in a stratified and contradictory way. Processes should be understood in terms of emergence rather than reduction, and emergent powers should be regarded as a product of social combination. The mode of material primacy left to historical materialism by nineteenth-century science cannot achieve the complexity and subtlety Marxism needs to express the determination of the social. The extension and elaboration of a theory of social determination on this image has proved more destructive than useful. The forces become externally related to what they determine, and all sorts of nonsocial motivators for the forces’ development have to be discovered or invented (varieties of rationality have been particularly popular lately—see Cohen 1978 and Smith 1992). The components of the base


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are granted a life of their own with transhistorical principles of development, given an essential nature unaffected by their relational context, one which can be shown as defining them without extrinsic reference. This is the only way forces of production can be made the prime mover in history. A base and superstructure model of determination results in a mechanistic materialism, one that denies the necessary connection of the parts to the whole. Causal action becomes an external feature: things in mechanisms have a passive, inert lifelessness—they await motion to be applied from without. This description grasps the proposals of authors such as Cohen (1978) and Shaw (1978) very well and explains the difficulties they run into in elaborating a theory of the relationship of the base and superstructure. Fixed models of determination struggle to define processes. The excision of forces of production from the social and economic means explanation must center on the individual unit rather than on wholes. Sayers (1984) calls it a logic of “external relations” (p. 4). This is particularly apparent in definitions of forces of production as things outside of the relations in which they exist. The view of forces of production as self-subsistent things with an intrinsic identity can be contrasted with their relational definition as productive powers whose status is determined by their positioning in a network of structures and practices, an emergent feature irreducible to the sum of their parts. The social totality is not determined by an economic base but is the product of the complex, often contradictory combination of many different structures and mechanisms. The dominance of the economic within this whole highlights the central importance of production and, with capitalism, the driving force of capital accumulation. But rather than representing the basis of society, this is mediated through it. This necessitates a conception of society as a composite or structural ensemble, hierarchically arranged, but where each element has its own dynamics and emergent powers as a result of its intrinsic and extrinsic relations. The production, reproduction, and transformation of the social gives it its historicity. It is also the basis on which we are to understand social activity. The relational theory of production locates political and social action in analyzable determinate social structures. Relational systems condition the powers of their constituents, but these socially situated people are imbued with certain powers that can transform.



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This process is, nevertheless, complexly stratified. Social activity does not simply correspond to a single structure or practice but involves a range of social structures, mechanisms, and practices. The results of social action are stratified across these, either unconsciously or in contradictory ways. Just as there is no simple relation between base and superstructure, so there is no simple relation between structure and agency. In both cases, what is required is a stratified and mediated conception of emergent powers and properties. The critical realist conception of stratification and emergence, the transformational model of social activity, and the idea of a complex, overdetermined totality should be seen as the way of conceptualizing society and its activities. Instead of offering a single principle of development that can be identified as operative throughout the whole of human history, a dynamic Marxism should involve a number of hypotheses and working methodological positions based not on universal judgments and reductionist arguments but on an engagement with reality in all its complexity.

NOTES 1. Amin (1985) suggests that all precapitalist social formations have ideology similarly dominant. Perry Anderson’s (1974, 403-4) claim that the legal structures of precapitalist social formations enter into their base can also be cited. E. P. Thompson (1978) describes them as “imbricated” within property relations (p. 288). “Ownership” in feudal times, for example, was a very different matter from that of contemporary capitalism: a field was “owned” by the serf who worked on it, the lord to whom the serf was bonded, and, in a sense, the local town. 2. Acomprehensive critique of Cohen’s arguments can be found in Kennedy (1994). 3. Ellen Wood (1995) develops this idea. 4. Keat and Urry (1975) suggest that most parts of social life are to be understood in terms of causal mechanisms that are part of structures of production. The “causes and effects of social phenomena are aspects, or applications, of the structural relationships between the elements” (p. 97).

REFERENCES Acton, W. B. 1962. The illusion of an epoch. London: Cohen and West. . 1970. On some criticism of historical materialism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 44 (sup.): 143-56. Amin, S. 1985. Modes of production: History and unequal development. Science and Society 49 (2): 194-207. Anderson, P. 1974. Lineages of the absolutist state. London: New Left Books.


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. 1983. In the tracks of historical materialism. London: Verso. Archer, M. 1995. Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhaskar, R. 1986. Scientific realism and human emancipation. London: Verso. . 1989a. The possibility of naturalism. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester. . 1989b. Reclaiming reality. London: Verso. Brenner, R. 1985. Agrarian class structure and economic development in Europe. In The Brenner debate, edited by T. H. Aston and C.H.E. Philipin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, G. A. 1978. Karl Marx’s theory of history: A defence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collier, A. 1989. Scientific realism and socialist thought. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. . 1994. Critical realism. London: Verso. Kautsky, K. 1909. Ethics and the materialist theory of history. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Keat, R., and J. Urry. 1975. Social theory as science. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. Kennedy, S. 1994. Karl Marx’s theory of history: A realist critique of G. A. Cohen’s historical materialism. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales. Marx, K. 1971. A contribution to the critique of political economy. London: Lawrence and Wishart. . 1973. Grundrisse. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. . 1975. Notes on Adolph Wagner. In Texts on method, edited by T. Carver. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. . 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. . 1978. Capital. Vol. 2. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. . 1981. Capital. Vol. 3. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1975. Collected works. London: Lawrence and Wishart. McClelland, K. 1979. Some comments on Richard Johnson, “Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese, and socialist-humanist history.” History Workshop 7: 101-15. Plamenatz, J. 1954. German Marxism and Russian Communism. London: Longmans, Green. Plekhanov, G. V. [1895] 1956. The development of the monist view of history. Moscow: Progress. Sayer, A. 1992. Method in social science: A realist approach. London: Routledge. Sayer, D. 1987. The violence of abstraction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Sayers, S. 1984. Marxism and the dialectical method: A critique of G. A. Cohen. Radical Philosophy 36: 4-13. Searle, J. 1995. The construction of social reality. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Shaw, W. H. 1978. Marx’s theory of history. London: Hutchinson. Smith, M.E.G. 1992. The value abstraction and the dialectic of social development. Science and Society 56 (3): 261-90. Suchting, W. A. 1986. Marx and philosophy. London: Macmillan. Thompson, E. P. 1978. The poverty of theory. London: Merlin. Wood, E. M. 1995. Capitalism against democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Jonathan Joseph studied politics and English at the University of Wales, Swansea, and has written a Ph.D. on hegemony and critical realist philosophy at Southampton University, UK. He currently teaches cultural and social studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has written a number of articles on critical realism and is on the editorial board of Capital & Class. Simon Kennedy is a teacher of history in London researching contemporary European politics. He studied politics and history at the University of Wales, Swansea, from where he received a Ph.D. which looks at developments in critical realism and analytical Marxism. He has published various articles on British politics. He is currently travelling across Asia by motorbike.


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