Substrate, Base, & Superstructure
Rectifying Marxism's blank-slate blind spot
I recently took this essay down due to a personal concern that has since passed. It was originally published in June of 2025 and has not been altered from its original form.
Marx as Social Darwinist
Previous Marxist theory has treated race, sex, homosexuality, and transsexuality as though they were entirely superstructural, i.e., based solely on social conditions or constructs downstream from relations to production rather than as biological phenomena that complicate the social makeup of societies. Modern biology, genomics, and anthropology have been able to do away with some (but not all) of these interpretations, revealing complexities that cannot be fully explained through social conditions alone.
Marx and Engels openly advocated the abolition of racially discriminatory laws, both in Germany and abroad. It was their belief that such race laws served to obscure class relations, fragment the working class, and reinforce national consciousness at the expense …
