ABSTRACT
Non-reductionist historical materialism is possible, I have argued in the preceding chapter, if we take ‘the economy’ to be, not an asocial sphere of ‘material’ relations, but a particular form of social organization that emerges, along with other specifically capitalist social forms, when capitalist class relations come into existence. While this approach does locate the very possibility for an ‘autonomous’ economy and an equally ‘autonomous’ state to exist in particular class relations, it does not maintain that everything about the economy or the state has thereby been said. It certainly does not imply that particular economic or political processes can be explained directly by reference to the interests of the dominant class.
