 Marx is said to understand history as, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power, maintaining that forms of society, which are organised around economic structures, “rise and fall according as they enable and promote, or prevent and discourage, that growth” (G. Cohen 1988: 3). The canonical text for this interpretation being Marx’s “1859 Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which is treated not as one piece of evidence amongst many, but as the text providing the clearest theoretical statement of historical materialism.