Engaging with a critical analysis of the base and superstructure thesis, regarding which a surprising number of reputed Marxist thinkers betray a perpetual ambivalence - by frequently deploying it in a variety of contexts, but simultaneously airing various reservations about it - this book proposes a radical departure from the presently predominant understanding of it. The popular view of the base as comprising economics, and superstructure as encompassing almost all other spheres of social life, is criticised as "panoramic", or "panoptic", or the "extended" version, to which Marx's rigorously
