Economic base

In Marxist theory, human society consists of two parts: the base (or substructure) and superstructure; the base comprises the forces and relations of production—employer–employee work conditions, the technical division of labour, and property relations—into which people enter to produce the necessities and amenities of life. These relations determine society’s other relationships and ideas, which are described as its superstructure. The superstructure of a society includes its culture, institutions, political power structures, roles, rituals, and state. The base determines (conditions) the superstructure, yet their relation is not strictly causal, because the superstructure often influences the base; the influence of the base, however, predominates. In Orthodox Marxism, the base determines the superstructure in a one-way relationship.

Note that in some non-Western languages, this concept is rendered as "Infrastructure and Superstructure" which could lead to a malapropism. It has only a vague conceptual relatedness to the English sense of infrastructure.

In developing ’s observations, Marx identified civil society as the economic base and political society as the political superstructure. Marx postulated the essentials of the base–superstructure concept in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):

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