The economy can never act independently of political and ideological practices.

Evidence

Some of Althusser’s most effective polemical passages are indeed reserved for taking the base/superstructure metaphor literally : and thus showing the absurdity of waiting for a historical moment when the determining level—His Majesty, the Economy—could detach itself from its more incidental and epiphenomenal superstructural forms, and exert its “determination” over a social formation on its own! Neither in time nor history can “determination in the last instance by the economic” be so read as to suggest that the level of economic practice could stand free and appear denuded of political and ideological practices. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 532

Categorization

• XREF: Althusser’s rejection of the topographical base/superstructure metaphor and the claim that the economy never stands denuded is the key anti-reductionist move connecting to Hall’s cultural economics.