Marx’s method jointly requires material grounding and historical specificity

Evidence

In this respect, at least, the theoretical advances briefly outlined here have the merit of respecting what we would call two cardinal premises of Marx’s “method.” The materialist premise—that the analysis of political and ideological structures must be grounded in their material conditions of existence; and the historical premise—that the specific forms of these relations cannot be deduced, a priori, from this level but must be made historically specific “by supplying those further delineations” which explain their specificity. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 612

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distills Marx’s method into its two cardinal premises, a usable formulation for analyzing any social phenomenon including racism.
• XREF: Hall here explicitly deploys the articulation theory he develops throughout these essays — the dual premise mirrors the hesitation between economism and relativism seen in the Frankfurt/Marxist debates read earlier.