The economic level is necessary but not sufficient to explain politics and ideology.

Evidence

At the economic level, this may involve the articulation of a social formation around more than one mode of production. Some of the political and ideological features of such societies can then be explained with reference to this particular combination. … However, we cannot thereby deduce a priori the relations and mechanisms of the political and ideological structures (where such features as racism make a decisive reappearance) exclusively from the level of the economic. The economic level is the necessary but not sufficient condition for explaining the operations at other levels of the society (the premise of non-reductionism). We cannot assume an express relation of “necessary correspondence” between them (the premise of historical specificity). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 621

Categorization

• DEFINE: This passage concisely states the non-reductionist premise that grounds Hall’s whole analytic: economics constrains but never dictates politics and ideology, racism included. Essential for grasping what ‘articulation’ is meant to do.
• XREF: Connects to Althusser’s ‘determination in the last instance’ and to the base/superstructure debates in Marxism that Hall is repositioning; also echoes the economic-thought lens the reader wants. — connects to: Economic reason usurped political subjectivity only near the end of the twentieth century. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 172; Economic interest alone did not produce full nativist ideology — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 305; Subjection is overdetermined, neither purely political nor purely economic. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1712