Capital’s self-expansion governs the tempo and limits of superstructural development.

Evidence

One way is to take the law and tendencies of “the self-expansion of capital,” not as specifying in detail the content and forms of the superstructures and thereby “determining,” but as providing the governing movements (including the contradictions and crises in that self-expansion, and the “solutions” which permit capital to continue to accumulate while reproducing its antagonisms at a more advanced level of composition), dictating the tempo and rhythms of development in the other parts of the social formation: setting limits, as it were, to what can or cannot be a solution adaptable to capital’s self-expanding needs, and thus as determining through the repertoire of solutions (political, social, ideological) likely to be drawn on in any particular historical moment of conjuncture. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 515

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall’s positive account of how ‘determination in the last instance’ should actually be theorized — a more sophisticated position than either pure correspondence or total autonomy.