after trying to advocate marxism to my working class friend who is tragically still taken in by liberal propaganda, it seems that the base and superstructure concept sparked his curiosity the most. does anyone have any favorite explanations, whether it's your own or someone else's, that would be good to share with them? Memes or illustrations would be good too!
I ended up writing an entire essay about this lol: https://joeybuttafoucault.substack.com/p/base-and-ideological-superstructure?sd=pf
Took fucking psychic damage from that
wow thank you very very much! I read the whole thing and it was extremely helpful and interesting just for my own understanding. I hope I can do it justice for my friend, who seems a little adverse to anything resembling long-form, lol. I especially appreciated how well you linked art production to the economic base, going all the way back to 'cave art'...so fascinating. Maybe I should read some Lacan!! By the way I also have read your article about maine lobstermen and I loved it!
Haha thank you. Lacan is a deliberately bad writer so I recommend reading about him rather than reading him himself? I found this article pretty helpful:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/
I don’t actually know how accurate it is but one day I managed to set aside a few hours to tear through it, take notes, and google anything I didn’t understand. Afterward I felt like I knew his jargon a lot better. It was also helpful for understanding his ideas about psychology, and they work well with Marxism (but just become idealism without it). There are other good books about him too.