Mature Marx employed structural rather than sequential causality

Evidence

Marx’s “materialism” adds to this premise at least one other requirement: that the relationship must be thought within determinate historical conditions. It must be made historically specific . It is this second requirement which distinguishes a historical materialist theory of human society and culture from, say, a materialism grounded in the simple fact of man’s physical nature (a “vulgar,” or as Marx calls it, an undialectical materialism) or one which gives the determining instance to technological development alone. What Karl Korsch, among others, has called “the principle of historical specificity” in Marx’s materialism is clearly enunciated in The German Ideology (where Marx’s theory becomes, for the first time, fully “historical”) and afterward in his mature work. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 881 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Marx’s later development changed how production determines, not whether it does — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 497; Modernisation theory sees development as linear industrial progression from primitive to developed — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 11; Marxist theory requires holding both relative autonomy and economic determinacy at once — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 371 (+7 more)

Related

• Marx’s concept of historical specificity deepened between German Ideology and Capital (similarity 0.91)
• Historical specificity, not mere materialism, defines Marx’s theory of culture (similarity 0.87)
• Historical specificity distinguishes Marx’s materialism from vulgar or technological determinism (similarity 0.87)
• Marx’s later development changed how production determines, not whether it does (similarity 0.87)
• Marx treats culture as accumulated human mastery over nature, not mere description (similarity 0.86)
• Marx rejected any universal concept of production outside history. (similarity 0.84)
• Historical materialism is fundamentally historicist, not metaphysical (similarity 0.84)
• Marxist analysis needs both material grounding and historical specificity to avoid twin errors (similarity 0.83)
• Marx’s mature thought held that economic determinacy persisted but was conceived differently (similarity 0.83)
• Marx defined the economic structure as objective conditions independent of human will (similarity 0.82)
• Marx held that production methods determine an epoch’s culture (similarity 0.82)
• Althusser read mature Marx as employing structural not sequential causality (similarity 0.82)
• Historical materialism requires no metaphysical-materialist foundation (similarity 0.82)
• Marx’s method jointly requires material grounding and historical specificity (similarity 0.81)
• For Marx, human labor’s relation to nature is always socially organized and mediated. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Historical specificity distinguishes Marx’s materialism from vulgar or technological determinism #expands (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 881
• Marxism reads social formations as overdetermined unities with relatively autonomous levels #complicates (0.60)