http://davidharvey.org/2010/08/the-enigma-of-capital-and-the-crisis-this-time/
A revolutionary politics that can grasp the nettle of endless compound capital accumulation and eventually shut down the class power that propels it forwards, requires an appropriate theory of social change. Marx's account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism in fact embodies such a "co-revolutionary theory."16 Social change arises, he argues, through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven moments within the social body politic:
a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption b) relations to nature c) social relations between people d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects f ) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements g) the conduct of daily life and the activities of social reproduction. ).
Social theorists often take just one of these moments and view it as the "silver bullet" that causes all change. We have technological determinists (Tom Friedman), environmental determinists (Jared Diamond), daily life determinists (Paul Hawken), labor process determinists (the autonomistas), class struggle determinists (most Marxist political parties), institutionalists, and so on and so forth.17 From Marx's perspective they are all wrong. It is the dialectical motion across the moments that really counts, even as there is uneven development in that motion.
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CB: Not to say that Harvey's theory is wrong, but I don't think he can quite attribute his whole scheme to Marx. Marx himself seems to be class struggle determinist and "conflict- between- relations- and -forces -of -production" determinist; not the whole range spelled out by Harvey.
The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into
definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production. The totality of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain
stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this
merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property
relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
>From forms of development of the productive forces these relations
turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The
changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the
transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm