Moving from mode of production to concrete analysis requires new concepts and added determinations.

Evidence

Gramsci understood that as soon as these concepts have to be applied to specific historical social formations, to particular societies at specific stages in the development of capitalism, the theorist is required to move from the level of “mode of production” to a lower, more concrete level of application. This “move” requires not simply more detailed historical specification, but—as Marx himself argued—the application of new concepts and further levels of determination in addition to those pertaining to simple exploitative relations between capital and labor, since the latter serve to specify “the capitalist mode” only at the highest level of reference. Marx himself, in his most elaborated methodological text (his “1857 Introduction” to the Grundrisse), envisaged the “production of the concrete in thought” as taking place through a succession of analytic approximations, each adding further levels of determination to the necessarily skeletal and abstract concepts formed at the highest level of analytic abstraction. Marx argued that we could only “think the concrete” through these successive levels of abstraction. That was because the concrete, in reality, consisted of “many determinations”—which, of course, the levels of abstraction we use to think about it with must approximate, in thought. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 81

Categorization

• DEFINE: The central mechanism: ‘concrete is many determinations’ — moving down levels of abstraction requires new concepts, not just more detail.
• XREF: This is the methodological bridge that lets downstream Islamophobia readings apply Marx’s political economy to specific cultural/ideological formations — the concrete analysis of a given society adds determinations beyond capital-labor.