Marx’s life work was a Critique of Political Economy. We can only regret he didn’t set himself tighter deadlines, because he did not complete the full work, only part one. Marxism is a critical philosophy, a critique of capitalism. So long as capitalism is ongoing Marxism is open-ended, unfinished.
It is a critique based on the point of view of wage workers. When wage workers act as a conscious, independent class with interests they also critique capitalism, but in a different way. A mass strike just as effectively demonstrates the origin of value is labour, the origin of profit is exploitation.
We do not hold with the notion of autonomous anti-capitalist space or with the concept of gradual socialist transformation. The transformation is either a revolutionary critique or an accommodation to the logic of capitalism. Socialism is immanent within capitalism. Realising socialism is a struggle within the context of global capitalism.
So far so base, what about superstructure? We are talking about the Marxist concept that each society produces forces of production, how people work, and relations of production, how they consent to do this. Though the latter arises out of the former they both inform each other, they are two aspects of the same thing.
Culture is a key aspect of capitalist superstructure. We may have left-wing art but we always have capitalist culture. We do not advance our cause by promoting socialist culture but through a socialist critique of culture. There is no such thing as a ‘culture of resistance’.
We do this because we must arm ourselves against bourgeois ideology, capitalism’s second line of defence, a set of presumptions often so embedded that often people don’t recognise them for what they are (the ‘non-ideological’ are the MOST ideological).We also do this because we are trying to raise our cultural level, and the level of those around us. Culture is precious and expensive both in time and money, things working people are often short of. Working class people are the future ruling class, the defenders of human civilisation. They are entitled access to the full back-catalogue of human cultural achievement.