RECONSTRUCTING MARXISM 65
First was the 'Grundrisse Phase3 where he developed a static, anti-historical structure because he "proposed that it was possible not only to identify particular activities as 'economic' but to isolate these as special field of study from other activities (political, religious, legal, moral cultural etc)."1 Such a method of study, where economy (or capital to be more specific) is an operative category which laws its own development (where impingement of politics or law upon economic activity is seen as an improper interference with natural economic process), cannot capture the whole society or real historical process because the later comprises of "many activities and relations (of power of consciousness, sexual, cultural and normative) which are not the concern of political economy and which have been defined out of political economy."2 According to Thompson only that historical materialism which could bring all activities and relations within a coherent view could capture the imbricated social process indissolubly linked in human practice.
However, Marx in his Capital volumes seems to have provided this coherent viewwith his attempt to comprehend capital as a social relation and not an isolated economic category. Capitalist production is fundamentally a social relation based on the disposition of power which enables it to reproduce its conditions of existence and therefore forms the indissoluble part of the production process itself i.e. capitalist production cannot be visualised without these social relations.
In other words, Thompson was critical of all Marxists who "adopted modes of analysis which, explicitly treat the economic base and the legal, political and ideological superstructure which reflect or correspond to it as a qualitatively different more or less enclosed and regionally separated spheres"3. Such epistemological distinctions convert into ontological segregations, thereby capturing historical process not at the moment of unitary co-existence of various human activities within a single material life but in terms of artificial discontinuities. In other words, what is imperative to comprehend is that economic base is not just neglected in and maintained by certain superstructural institutions, but that the N productive base itself exists in the shape of social, juridical and political forms' .
E.P. Thompson seems to have made a distinction between 'economic base' and the'material base' as used by Marx. Marx almost always uses the word 'material,' for instance 'the material forces of production', 'the material transformation of the economic conditions' implying a