Marx refused to reduce history to a single ultimate economic cause

Evidence

Croce then adds that the founder of the philosophy of praxis never framed his enquiry around the ultimate cause of economic life. “His philosophy was not that cheap. He had not ‘flirted’ in vain with the Hegelian dialectic to go then in search of ultimate causes.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1633

Categorization

• XREF: This refutation of crude economism prefigures Gramsci’s own anti-reductionist move toward hegemony and cultural analysis. — connects to: Marx’s followers suppressed his conditional vision of unified science — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 1662; Historical materialism cannot explain woman’s oppression because it reduces man to the economic abstraction — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 145; Marx never reduced economic development to technical instruments alone — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1633