Significance
Much of the Critique was later incorporated by Marx into his magnum opus, Capital Volume I, published in 1867, as well as the Critique is broadly considered to be of secondary importance among Marx's writings. This does not apply, however, to the Preface of the Critique. It contains the first connected account of one of Marx's main theories: the materialist idea of history, and its associated "base and superstructure" model of society, which divides human social developing into an economic-technological "base" which "conditions"— not determines — the forms of its political-ideological "superstructure". Briefly, it is for idea that economic factors – the way people form the necessities of life – conditions the line of politics and ideology a society can have:
"The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular hit figure or combination. of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond entsprechen definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions bedingt the general process of social, political and intellectual life."
Marcello Musto emphasizes this point: "Even the well-known thesis in the 'Preface' to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy...should not be interpreted in a determinist sense; it should be clearly distinguished from the narrow and predictable reading of 'Marxism–Leninism', in which the superstructural phenomena of society are merely a reflection of the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object existence of human beings."