Abstract nonsense

 " . . .  this radical relationalism of Marx is immediately translated into idealistic terms. ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ [18] This could be read, of course, as a reintegration of consciousness with existence, but the expression could not be more unfortunate, since if social existence determines consciousness, then consciousness cannot be part of social existence. [19] 

And when we are told that the anatomy of civil society is political economy, this can only mean that there is a specific logic—the logic of the development of productive forces—which constitutes the essence of historical development. In other words, historical development can be rationally grasped and is therefore form.

 It is not surprising that the ‘Preface’ to the Critique of Political Economy depicts the outcome of the historical process exclusively in terms of the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production; nor is it surprising that class struggle is entirely absent from this account. All this is perfectly compatible with the basic premises of Hegelianism and metaphysical thought. . . "

" . . . a relation of determination is transformed into a relation of limitation. Our text does not assert that the State in capitalist society is not relatively autonomous, but rather, that we cannot conceptualize ‘relative autonomy’ by starting from a category such as ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’.