Social orders only die after their productive forces have fully developed
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
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: The foundational Marxian principle that Gramsci’s whole scaffolding chapter builds from.
- XREF: Connects forward to Gramsci’s concept of historical bloc and the preconditions for hegemonic transition — exactly what the Islamophobia readings will presume.
Related
- Social orders collapse only after their productive forces are exhausted (similarity 0.94)
- A social order persists until new productive relations mature within it (similarity 0.89)
- Societies only pose problems they can solve, and orders die only when superseded. (similarity 0.89)
- Historical change arrives only when material conditions are already ripe (similarity 0.84)
- The objective level of productive forces grounds which ideologies are practicable in a society (similarity 0.80)
- Marx distinguished scientific determination of material production from ideological forms of consciousness (similarity 0.80)
- Material forces of production determine the superstructure and drive social revolutions (similarity 0.80)
- Gramsci rejected the deterministic Marxism that forbid revolution before capitalism developed. (similarity 0.79)
- Societies only undertake tasks whose material conditions are maturing (similarity 0.78)