Economic structure can only be analyzed after it develops fully

Evidence

1. The difficulty of identifying at any given time, statically (like an instantaneous photographic image) the structure. Politics in fact is at any given time the reflection of the tendencies of development in the structure, but it is not necessarily the case that these tendencies must be realised. A structural phase can be concretely studied and analysed only after it has gone through its whole process of development, and not during the process itself, except hypothetically and with the explicit proviso that one is dealing with hypotheses. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1451

Categorization

• QUESTION: Methodological puzzle worth chasing: how does one study a structural phase while it is still underway, given Gramsci’s insistence analysis is only concrete retrospectively?
• XREF: The retrospective-only analysis of structure echoes the historiographic caution in Horkheimer’s work about reading the present through already-completed trajectories.