 Within the Marxian tradition, not only is there the essentialism of rationalism and empiricism that Marx and others struggled against, but that's present within that tradition as well. But there's also this essentialist theory of society in which economics is deemed the most important cause. Marx and especially Engels had the following idea. They thought society could be decomposed into the following kind of metaphor. At the base of society, so let me draw this, at the base of society was economics. And the rest of society was built upon this base. So here was economics, the foundation of society, the ground for society, and up here was everything else which they called the superstructure, politics and culture. So politics and culture rest upon are caused by economics. You can see where this is going to go. In economics, there were two parts of the economy which were the ultimate cause of all of economics and the ultimate cause hence of the superstructure. In here, I'll put it down here, in the base there were two. One was relations of production and the other forces of production. Two aspects of the base determined the rest of the economy, the circulation, the markets and so forth, which in turn then determined everything else. You can see these are no minor causes. Relations of production had to do with who owns what. So the distribution of ownership over the means of production, the tools, the factories was the relations of production. The forces had to do with how we produced, the technology of society. So Marx and especially Engels argued that the interaction between the relations and the forces of production determines the economy, which in determines everything else. And this is called in the literature, economic determinism. Notice the adjective. There is an ultimate causation in society, which is that of economics. In everything else, the music that we play, the literature that we see, the advertising, the production and circulation of goods, is ultimately grounded in the relations and forces of production. That was so important that they put a label on this and it was called the mode of production. So the idea was that the mode of production is the ultimate cause. It's the essence of society. So if you understand how the mode operates, the relations and forces, you understand everything. That's a powerful theory. That's really modernism. You have now the two essential aspects in the tools with which and by which to figure out what is really going on. That's their modernist theory. Notice, however, that violates the dialectic, this notion of over-determination. Because we've found the ultimate causes. We've found the two essences, relations and forces. So even when Engels and Marx went to work in presenting this, it wasn't too long after they did this, if I remember correctly, Marx had just died. So someone writes Engels and says, they missed the Engels. As students of history, referring to Engels and Marx, I'm paraphrasing because I don't exactly remember it, but as students of history, you understand that the politics and culture of society shaped the mode of production. Causation goes that way, too. I mean, it would be silly to think that the mode of production, our relations and forces, are independent of the way we think, our laws and rules and so forth. And Engels writes back and says, you're right. I understand that what I think is this ultimate cause is itself caused ED. And he had to say that because Engels was a student of the dialectic. But then Engels answered that letter by saying, I understand this, but I think how this causation works is determined in the last instance by economics. And that's been called ever since determination in the last instance by economics. But this is a trick that Engels played because he defends, he accepts the critique that the mode of production is an effect of the superstructure. So he accepts that. But then he attacks it by saying that the way the superstructure causes the mode of production is itself caused by the mode of production. So to make a long story short, he's still affirming a kind of essentialism. And that problem, that economic determinism, has been a problem within the Marxian tradition ever since Marx and Engels presented it. So for the last 130 years, people have been struggling over this, and that's in your reading. And it has very, very important implications across the 20th century in these socialist experiments that were adopted starting with the Soviet Union, many of which, if not all of which, adopted this kind of economic determinism. The last part of this lecture, what I want to talk about, which I said would, is this few pages in which Marx presents his method that's in the assigned reading. So I want to talk about, because it's a good summary of how what we have done here before bears upon this. In this reading, Marx presents two kinds of concrets, the thought-concrete and the concrete-real. The wording is difficult here. The thought-concrete is a result of theorizing. So you think of people thinking, and they produce a theory of society. He calls that the thought-concrete. The concrete-real refers to reality, or the word that was used in his day, materiality. Marx theorizes the concrete-real as a totality, as a site of determinations emanating from political, economic, and cultural, and natural processes. Hence, he produces a particular thought-concrete of the concrete-real, which is, I'm going to use not his language, our language, which is an over-determined totality, which exists in contradiction. I'm using what we just talked about. That's the way Marx produces his thought-concrete of reality. So once again, reality is the site of these different determinations, which are pushing a bullet in different directions. Hence, it exists in change. One response to these contradictions, that's one response to the diverse determinations, which emanate from society for materiality on us, is our thinking. So the concrete-real feeds back and affects how we think. I mean, what do we have now? I mean, we put it together. We produce thought-concretes as human beings about how society and nature exists, how it impacts us, and so forth. So our thinking, our thought-concretes, which are a result of our thinking, help to create the concrete-real in two ways. Our thinking is part or our thought-concretes are part of the concrete-real. So to think and to change the way we think shapes the concrete-real because we are changing one aspect in the concrete-real, which is our thoughts, our theories. But it also changes everything else in the concrete-real because everything else is a complex effect of how we think. So to think and to change our thinking impacts society, or this concrete-real, in these two ways. It changes something out there. And it changes everything else out there because everything else interacts with our thinking. And hence, it creates impacts upon us. So we're left with the following idea. The ceaseless dialectic of life, what's this called? To change a thought-concrete, which don't forget what that is now, to change a particular theorization of the world, is to change the world in these two ways. And that change in the world feeds back to change our thinking. And you have this ceaseless dialectic of life in which thought-concrete and concrete-real shape one another. Neither one is independent of the other. Hence, neither one can serve as the essence of the other. And that's another attack on rationalism and empiricism. And that's the end of today's presentation.