In his 1953 essay, Amadeo Bordiga argues for a very broad conception of economic structure and the means of production
:
The concept of the ‘economic base’ of a given human society thus extends far beyond the limits of a superficial interpretation confining it to the facts of the remuneration of labour and commercial exchange. It encompasses the entire field of the forms of reproduction of the species, i.e., family institutions; moreover, while the resources of technology and the provision of material instruments and tools of every kind form an integral part of it, its scope is not limited to that of a product showroom, but includes every mechanism available for the transmission from generation to generation of social ‘technological knowledge’. Accordingly, writing, song, music, the graphic arts, and the press, as general networks of communication and transmission, must be considered and counted among the means of production alongside spoken language, in so far as they serve as a means of transmitting the productive inheritance. In the Marxist view, literature, poetry, and science are all superior and differentiated forms of the means of production, which meet the same need of society's mediated and immediate life
.
It should come as no surprise that poetry, song, and music are mentioned alongside science; Bordiga refers to mnemonic choral singing
, of a magical-mystical-technological nature, as the earliest means of transmitting social inheritance
: when knowledge was still entirely or predominantly passed down orally, chanting, rhythm, and repetition in rhyme were means of memorisation.
The next step is more complex. Stalin, in Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, had argued that language does not have the same fate as either the productive base or its superstructure. His aim, Bordiga argues, was to bring language little by little, together with national culture and the cult of the fatherland
, out of the turbulent river of history
— precisely out of the realm of the productive base, and out of that of its political and ideological derivations
. At stake was the legitimisation of the USSR as a socialist homeland — so crucial to Russian imperialism's participation in the Second World War and the subsequent Yalta partition — as well as the dominant role played by Great Russia in relation to the multiplicity of languages and nationalities that made up the USSR.
What interests us here is the theoretical aspect of this challenge to Stalin’s theses. Dialectically
, writes Bordiga, language can be both superstructure and means of production. Language in general, and its organisation into verse in general, are instruments of production. But a given poem, a given poetic school, relating to a country and a century, form part — distancing themselves from those that came before and those that followed — of the ideological and artistic superstructure of a given economic form, of a given mode of production
.
Here too, Friedrich Engels is called upon as a witness, from The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: the higher stage of barbarism begins with the smelting of raw iron and completes the transition to civilisation with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use for literary transcriptions [...] its highest flowering is presented to us in the Homeric poems, chiefly in the Iliad
. In the same way, Bordiga continues, one can see in the Divine Comedy the elegy of feudalism
, its funeral ode, or in Shakespeare’s tragedies a prologue to capitalism
.
Thus, language at all times is a means of production, but individual languages are superstructures, as when Alighieri does not write his poem in the Latin of the classics or of the Church but in the Italian vernacular, or as in the Reformation, with the definitive abandonment of Old Saxon in favour of modern literary German
.
Here, perhaps, the exposition becomes too confined within its framework. A formulation more in keeping with historical development is that individual languages are also superstructures. Carlo M. Cipolla, in Istruzione e sviluppo (Education and Development
), cites Giovanni Villani's Cronica to document that in 14th-century Florence, 8,000-10,000 boys out of a total of 23,000 attended school, with a literacy rate of around 40%. On the other hand, again in Florence, it was taken for granted that a craftsman should know how to ‘write, read, and do arithmetic’
.
Thus, the nascent single language
of Italian, the vernacular
consecrated by Dante in the Divine Comedy, was indeed the ideological and literary reflection of the transition from feudal society to the dawn of the urban bourgeoisie, but it was at the same time a means of production for the commercial activities of that same bourgeoisie.
In fact, this is not the only instance in which Marxist science has had to grapple with this dual nature of such phenomena in capitalist society. Our Theses on Leninist Tactics in the Educational Crisis
state that the educational institution is a dual organisation: it is an organisation for analysis and dissemination of ideologies on the one hand, and of education on the other
; in this educational function, the school is one of the sources of the valorisation of labour and labour-power
.
In our studies of mass media giants and the role of major telecommunications conglomerates, we have described these groups as centaurs
: on the one hand, large corporations competing with one another in the advertising, entertainment, and information markets; on the other, actors and conduits of political struggle within the new forms of television democracy. By extension, the same can be said of the platforms operating through social media in the digital market, and also of the artificial intelligence systems now linked to them. These platforms play multiple roles: as means of production; as commercial intermediaries and as consumer goods themselves offered through smartphone applications; and, finally, as disseminators of political and ideological content, which may be tailored to individual users or simply gleaned by probabilistic algorithms from the infinite array of material on the web.
Analysing these features of cyberspace — as the bundle of relations within the digital world and the internet has come to be known — is a necessary step towards understanding its impact on production, social relations, and human nature itself, an impact that promises to be, or at least is proclaimed will be, colossal. Marxist theory possesses the tools to understand the new, to demystify its ideologies, and also to resist religion’s claim that its ethical precepts can contain its contradictions.