Social orders collapse only after their productive forces are exhausted

Evidence

These principles, here quoted from memory by Gramsci, are taken from Marx’s Preface to The Critique of Political Economy : “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve …” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2039

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Gramsci’s verbatim anchor of Marx’s historical-materialist principle that a social order perishes only once its productive forces are exhausted — core scaffold for the toolkit.
• XREF: Connects forward into Islamophobia readings: hegemony and the question of when a dominant order becomes historically exhausted. — connects to: Social orders only die after their productive forces have fully developed; Societies only undertake tasks whose material conditions are maturing; Traditional societies and structures can collapse under external pressures (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2039

Related

• Social orders only die after their productive forces have fully developed (similarity 0.93)
• Societies only pose problems they can solve, and orders die only when superseded. (similarity 0.90)
• A social order persists until new productive relations mature within it (similarity 0.87)
• Societies only undertake tasks whose material conditions are maturing (similarity 0.85)
• Historical change arrives only when material conditions are already ripe (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Social orders only die after their productive forces have fully developed #corroborates (0.98)
• Traditional societies and structures can collapse under external pressures #complicates (0.80)
• Societies only undertake tasks whose material conditions are maturing #expands (0.75)