Marx rejected any simple correspondence between economic base and legal superstructure

Evidence

In the same passage, Engels notes how to achieve articulation as a sphere of the superstructure, economic facts must “assume the form of juristic motives,” thereby leading on to the formation of a fully-fledged juridical sphere, a set of complex legal ideologies, with an efficacy of their own. “It is indeed among professional politicians, theorists of public law and jurists private law that the connection with the economic facts, gets really lost” (Engels, Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy ). It is, then, not surprising that it is in relation to legal relations that Marx states his “law of uneven development.” “But the really difficult point to discuss here is how relations of production develop unevenly as legal relations. Thus, e.g. the relation of Roman private law … to modern production” (Grundrisse ). There seems little doubt that, had this point been expanded by Marx at the length of, say, Book One of the first volume of Capital , the one thing it would not have exhibited is a simple law of correspondence between the material base and the forms of the superstructure. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 512

Categorization

• XREF: Previews the Frankfurt School’s rejection of crude economism and deterministic base-superstructure readings (The Frankfurt School volume).