The Social Formation and its Contradictions

Abstract

The main theoretical concerns of this book are, first, the nature of social formations like Jamaica as totalities, and, second, the ways in which human actions are determined within them. The two themes conjoin in the concept of practice, human activity in history, the forms of which are determined at any point in time by the way in which practices are structured in the totality. Economic, cognitive and political practices are the crucial human activities. Economic practice may be defined as the production and reproduction of the material conditions of human existence, cognitive practice as the production and reproduction of the consciousness of that existence, and political practice as the production and reproduction of class power.¹