Material forces of production determine the superstructure and drive social revolutions
Evidence
In the social production of their life men enter into relations with each other which are determined, necessary and independent of their will, that is into relations of production, which correspond to a given level of development of the material forces of production. The ensemble of these relations constitutes the economic structure of society, in other words the real base on top of which is raised a political and juridical superstructure and to which correspond given social forms of consciousness. … At a given point in their development, the material productive forces of society enter into contradiction with the pre-existing relations of production (that is the property relations, which is the juridical equivalent of that expression) within which these forces had previously moved. These relations of production, from a form of development of the productive forces, are converted into an obstacle to them. And then there arrives an age of social revolution. With the change in the economic base the colossal overhanging superstructure is revolutionised and collapses more or less rapidly … A social formation does not perish until all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed and new relations of production do not take their place until the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the existing society. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1628
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: The base-superstructure model of society with its revolutionary transition mechanism.
- XREF: The canonical Marx passage that grounds the whole scaffold Gramsci will rebuild; connects to historical materialism discussions throughout the Notebooks.
Related
- Material forces of production are the measureable skeleton of historical process (similarity 0.82)
- A social order persists until new productive relations mature within it (similarity 0.81)
- Marx derives superstructures from the phenomenal forms of exchange relations (similarity 0.80)
- Social orders only die after their productive forces have fully developed (similarity 0.80)
- Capitalism becomes a whole form of social life through the superstructures, not just production. (similarity 0.80)
- The mode of production’s creation determines whether a society becomes free. (similarity 0.79)
- Marx distinguished scientific determination of material production from ideological forms of consciousness (similarity 0.79)
- Socialism requires a transforming revolution because human experience is material. (similarity 0.78)
- The objective level of productive forces grounds which ideologies are practicable in a society (similarity 0.78)
- Gramsci centers the base-superstructure passage as the root of nonreductionist analysis (similarity 0.78)