It’s useful in a Marxist analysis to flesh out a distinction between ‘material’ and ‘social’ relations. While reflecting on my previous post about conservative disinformation campaigns, I decided it would help to write this out to clarify my own understanding on the material/social distinction; maybe it is helpful for others as well. This has been heavily informed by G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, particularly Chapter 4, ‘Material and Social Properties of Society’. I also owe much of the emphasis on violence to reading David Graeber—violence is one of the few undemocratic actions with highly predictable and controllable material consequences on other people, and it underpins much of our social relations.
Material properties are those practically consequential aspects of the world which are unresponsive to direct ideological / social influences. If I want to float in the air, it doesn’t matter how hard I concentrate, I cannot fly around like a superhero. If I am stuck in a cage, it doesn’t matter what ideology I have, I am materially constrained to the cage. If I want to build a wooden chair, the material fact that I have no wood materially constrains me from doing so. If I want to create a regular plastic water bottle and I have the raw plastic necessary, I would still be materially constrained if I lacked the means to heat and reshape the plastic. If I want to coordinate or communicate with another person on the opposite side of the world, it would be a material constraint to lack telecommunication devices. If a community wants to build a skyscraper, but lack the knowledge of how to manufacture steel, they would be materially constrained by their lack of knowledge / level of technological development.
Social properties are those seemingly non-physical aspects of people’s lives which are both responsive to and informative of people’s decisions. Profit motives, environmental concerns, ideas about race or gender, political ideologies—these are examples of social properties.
Social structures are a complex web of people expressing to others how they would act in certain situations, and people’s decisions being influenced by how they anticipate others to act in response to their decisions. Institutions and norms are rather stable pockets of social properties and social relations within these social structures. They are stable because they are constantly being socially reaffirmed through mechanisms such as democratic deliberations, undemocratic social pressures, social decisions to withhold information, and/or enforced through the exertion of (or the threat to exert) material violence and deprivation.
When in conflict, material consequences are more determinant than social influences in any specific scenario. However, it makes sense to say that society has a lot of influence over which scenarios are likely to occur in the first place. That is to say, I cannot escape a cage simply by expressing my intentions at metal bars; but whether or not I am locked in a prison is highly dependent on the social structure. Or, if people are going to set fire to a forest to burn it down for farmland, that’s a real material consequence, but one which is a result of many overlapping social properties such as the profit motive and environmental protection.
~
Material relations are relationships between objects—including people—as they regard material properties; and which are devoid of explicit information about social relationships.
As Cohen mentions, if two people are carrying a plank of wood together, then they are materially related in that sense. One person is on either side, each lifting a certain amount of weight, both walking in a certain direction at a certain speed. But that doesn’t shed light on any social relationship about why they are carrying the plank of wood. Is there a social hierarchy at play between the two? What made these people decide to carry this plank of wood? Why are they walking in the direction that they are? These are questions about social relationships.
Social relations are those relations between people which are the result of people deciding how they are going to act in accordance to one another, and their expectations of how others will act. These decisions might be heavily coerced by others or materially constrained. Simply saying that social relations are the results of people’s “decisions” does not imply that those decisions were made free from what most people would consider to be improper, immoral influence. On a more optimistic note, social relations can also be the result of highly free and democratic deliberations; or agreements to generally follow mathematical principles meant to promote fairness (such as random selection or rotation of responsibilities).
Let’s return back to the plank-carrying situation from a couple paragraphs prior. Even though we only know the plank carriers’ material relation, we might venture a guess about their social relations: The two people are working together for a shared immediate goal. It is highly unlikely that they both just independently decided to pick up opposite sides of the plank and walk in the same direction.
If we expanded our scope to look at all the nearby material relations, we might notice other people engaged in sawing down trees, cutting wood into planks, and sharing information about what other people are doing. With enough information about all the material relations between people, we would probably be able to infer many of the social relations at play.
Something that would help us infer social relations is the fact that material, physical violence and deprivation (or the threat of violence and deprivation) are often used to keep social relations constrained and coerced. If workers at a lumber mill suddenly decided to act as if they had effective control over the means of production, the capitalist would call in the police for infringing on their capitalist property rights. Or, if an individual worker decided to step out of line, the capitalist would fire them, increasing the risk of the worker and their family becoming materially deprived of some of their basic material needs regarding health and safety. If the worker persisted and acted as if they weren’t fired, then the police would be called to exert material force to enforce the social relationship between capitalist and worker.
~
As gestured at in the previous paragraph, economic classes are social categories/institutions, but the social relation between the classes is reproduced over time by things such as continual material violence, deprivation, and the threats of such. There are many social categories/hierarchies which are reproduced through these kinds of mechanisms. But economic classes are particularly important to consider because economic production is the material mechanism by which we create the material resources which people are threatened of being materially deprived of.
If a minority of people effectively controls economic production through social and/or material mechanisms, they can threaten to materially deprive the majority unless they get their way socially. Classes are defined by their social and/or material relations which result in their class’ degree of effective control over material production. A downstream effect of a class’ degree of effective control over the means of production is that classes have corresponding effective control over the distribution of economic value.
Other social categories/hierarchies also partially sustain themselves through a level of effective control over production. We should nevertheless keep in mind that, by definition, no other social categories will be as directly and implicitly related to control over material production as ‘economic class’. We should strive for rich understandings of economic class, so we can make useful theoretical connections, and so that our whole analysis does not accidentally overlook important not-purely-economic, coercive social hierarchies such as race and gender. Black Marxists and Marxist/socialist feminists have done considerable work to develop such theoretical connections.
~
Marx and Cohen point out that distinguishing between material and social human relations is a potentially revolutionary distinction. There are certain material relations which are necessary to produce the things that we enjoy. But for many social relations, we only carry them forward across generations because of structural and interpersonal violence, deprivation, and threats thereof.
We can remake society if we keep in mind our material constraints. We have developed technology such that, in many ways, we have fewer material constraints than we once did. We can communicate and coordinate much more effectively than before, we have massive computational power, we have far more manufacturing knowledge, and we have a ton of automation. Democratic coordination and fair allocation at mass scale are much more viable in these past few decades than they have been ever before, even while maintaining better lives for the vast majority of people and their descendants.
It will take clever and rigorous organizing to break away from capitalism’s violent social relations, but it is not impossible.
EDIT October 15, 2022:
Violence, material deprivation, and the threats thereof are NOT the only mechanisms that uphold unequal social institutions. People can be tricked into believing things are in their own interests, or not have the information and practice necessary to effectively organize against the unjust social institutions. Capitalist institutions, as they develop in response to working class organizing, develop more of these subtle ways of maintaining their institutions.