Historical forces are determinate but not predetermined, allowing contingency without closed determinism.

Evidence

My task has been to try to think what determinacy means—what I once called “the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture”—but without falling into absolute determinacy. I do not believe history is already determined. But I do believe that all the forces at work in a particular historical conjuncture or a situation one is trying to analyze, or a phase of history or development one is trying to unravel, are determinate. They do not arise out of nowhere. They have their own specific conditions of existence. So the conceptual issue is, is there a way of thinking determinateness which is not a closed determinacy? And contingency is the sign of this effort to think determinacy without a closed form of determination. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1198

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key distinction between ‘determinacy’ (forces have specific conditions of existence) and ‘closed determinacy’ (history predetermined), with contingency as the conceptual bridge.
• XREF: This maps onto Eduard Bernstein/structuralist-Marxist debates on determinism and connects to how the Islamophobia field frames structural causation without fatalism. — connects to: Historical novelty is generated from the contradictions of a specific situation, not from freedom. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 57