system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Did Marx ever use the concept of "base" and "superstructure" or is this just a simplification made popular via the "vulgarmarxism" of Engels?
gpt
Typically "vulgar" Marxism is the view that the economic base fully determines the superstructure. The use of the terms "base" and "superstructure" is common across a lot of Marxist theory.

The terms show up in the Preface to _A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_, and there he lays out what seems like a pretty one-sided deterministic relationship between base and superstructure, but it is a good question as to what extent the overview laid out in the preface is a simplification of the actually theory in the text. 

I don't think one can read Marx's corpus and think he believed in a fully deterministic relation from base to superstructure, or that that is really the theory outlined there.

But, yes, he does use these words sometimes. "Vulgar" Marxism has to do with the relationship between the two structures.