Gramsci also made some remarks on economic analysis which anticipate recent work in institutional economics. I begin with these methodological remarks. Although Gramsci saw the discipline of economics as being largely concerned with 'value', he also located economic problems in their broader political, intellectual, and moral context. His economic analyses went far beyond any narrow concern with 'the relationship between the worker and the productive forces'. Classical economists reified the various elements of the market and treated its laws as 'eternal' and 'natural'.
Economic laws are always tendential.
They laws are always grounded in specific historical and material conditions. Most historical materialists share these arguments. But Gramsci goes well beyond such views to provide a much richer account of the historical specificity and material foundations of these economic laws. Thus Gramsci linked them to wider social relations and class struggles. Many institutional economists and economic sociologists emphasize this nowadays in their studies of the socially embedded, socially regularized nature of the economy.