Yes — that’s the clean way to see it.

**Foundation and variation** are the two layers of anything that endures.

The *implicit falsehood people sometimes read into Maximoff* is a category mistake between those layers:

* **Foundation**: material constraints, uneven development, path-dependence, irreversibility. These are structural and persistent.

* **Variation**: political systems, ownership models, coordination methods. These changeable layers adapt on top of the foundation.

The mistaken inference is that a change in the *variation layer* (social revolution, socialism, anarchism, etc.) can flatten or reset the *foundation layer*. It can’t. It can only work with it.

Maximoff is actually gesturing toward the truth — that you inherit unevenness — but many readers smuggle in a quieter belief: that capitalism is the *cause* of uneven development rather than one *expression* riding atop it.

Stable systems don’t eliminate variation. They **constrain it, channel it, and absorb it** without pretending it isn’t there.