The failure of 1848’s revolutions made Marx abandon economic determinism

Evidence

Before briefly looking at each of these moments, in turn, we can usefully sum up here the direction in which this incomplete clarification points. Crudely put, the relation of base to superstructure is thought, in The German Ideology , as some kind of fairly direct or immediate correspondence—i.e., within the framework of an identity theory. Marx progressively criticizes and departs from identity theory. Essentially, two things provoke this “break.” Historically, the antagonisms multiplying at the economic level fail, in the revolutions of 1848, to produce their “corresponding” political resolutions. Marx is therefore forced, not only to abandon the perspective of “immediate catastrophe” which had been ringingly tolled out in The Communist Manifesto , but to look again at the much more complex interplay between the political and the economic; and to consider the ways in which “solutions” could be found, at the political level, which thwarted, modified, or even displaced the contradictions accumulating at the economic level—taking them forward, in their contradictory form, to a higher level of development. … The Eighteenth Brumaire is the classic instance of such an analysis of the “effectivity” and specificity of the political instance in relation to the economic. “Here Marx began, for the first time, to develop a systematic set of concepts for coming to grips with the phenomena of a politics which is certainly that of class struggle—the struggle of groups and interests are defined by the relations of production—but which is nevertheless politics , practised in the field of ideology and coercion that gives it its specific character” (Fernbach). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 506

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains identity theory as the base-superstructure correspondence model Marx moved away from.
• XREF: Connects to why the economic base does not mechanically determine politics — relevant to understanding Hall’s later articulation theory and cultural studies debates.