Social orders persist until their productive forces are fully developed

Evidence

A reference to Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy : “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been 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; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or at at least in the process of formation.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2559

Categorization

• DEFINE: Marx’s Preface passage is the canonical formulation of historical materialism’s base-superstructure premise, which Gramsci’s hegemony theory presupposes and revises.
• XREF: Connects forward to Hall’s ‘Marxism without guarantees’ and to the critique of economic determinism in the Islamophobia readings; also links to the reader’s earlier Marxism and Form and Black Marxism highlights on historical materialism.