Historical conjunctures like Russia 1917 arise from merged heterogeneous contradictions, not one principal one.

Evidence

What we find, in any particular historical conjuncture (his example, in “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in For Marx , is Russia in 1917) is not the unrolling of the “principal contradiction,” evenly, throughout all the other levels of the social formation, but, in Lenin’s terms, the “merger,” “rupture,” condensation of contradictions, each with its own specificity and periodization—“absolutely dissimilar currents, absolutely heterogeneous class interests, absolutely contrary political and social strivings”—which have “merged … in a strikingly ‘harmonious’ manner” (Lenin, Letters from Afar ). Such conjunctures are not so much “determined” as overdetermined, i.e., they are the product of an articulation of contradictions, not directly reduced to one another. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 617

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains ‘overdetermination’ through Lenin’s Russia-1917 example: a rupture where dissimilar contradictions condense.
• XREF: Connects to Hall’s own conjunctural analyses and to Gramsci’s account of how political crises condense multiple struggles.