Marx’s concept of necessity derives from Ricardo’s determined market, not natural science

Evidence

How did the founder of the philosophy of praxis arrive at the concept of regularity and necessity in historical development? I do not think that it can be thought of as a derivation from natural science but rather as an elaboration of concepts born on the terrain of political economy, particularly in the form and with the methodology that economic science acquired from David Ricardo. Concept and fact of determined market: i.e. the scientific discovery that specific decisive and permanent forces have risen historically and that the operation of these forces presents itself with a certain “automatism” which allows a measure of “predictability” and certainty for the future of those individual initiatives which accept these forces after having discerned and scientifically established their nature. “Determined market” is therefore equivalent to “determined relation of social forces in a determined structure of the productive apparatus”, this relationship being guaranteed (that is, rendered permanent) by a determined political, moral and juridical superstructure. After having established the character of these decisive and permanent forces and their spontaneous automatism (i.e. their relative independence from individual choices and from arbitrary government interventions), the scientist has, by way of hypothesis, rendered the automatism absolute; he has isolated the merely economic facts from the combinations of varying importance in which they present themselves in reality; he has established relations of cause and effect, of premisses and conclusions; and he has thus produced an abstract scheme of a determined economic society. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1459

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the ‘determined market’ concept central to Gramsci’s account of necessity.
• XREF: The base-superstructure mechanism here prefigures the later Islamophobia readings on how economic structures are guaranteed by political, moral, and juridical superstructures. — connects to: Marx’s concept of natural history is critical, not naturalist — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1344; Ricardo’s comparative-advantage case targeted profit, not welfare. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 391
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1459