In accordance with this theory, Marx asserts that every social revolution develops in the following way. The material conditions of production grow and mature until they begin to conflict with the social and legal relations, outgrowing them like clothes, until they burst. ‘Then an epoch of social revolution opens’, Marx writes. ‘With the change in the economic foundation, the whole vast superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed … New, more highly productive relationships’ (within the superstructure) ‘never come into being before the material conditions for their existence have been
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