Historical tasks arise only when their material preconditions already exist

Evidence

1. Mankind only poses for itself such tasks as it can resolve; … the task itself only arises when the material conditions for its resolution already exist or at least are in the process of formation. … A social order does not perish until all the productive forces for which it still has room have been developed and new and higher relations of production have taken their place, and until the material conditions of the new relations have grown up within the womb of the old society. Only on this basis can all mechanicism and every trace of the superstitiously “miraculous” be eliminated, and it is on this basis that the problem of the formation of active political groups, and, in the last analysis, even the problem of the historical function of great personalities must be posed. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1538

Categorization

• DEFINE: This states the two core Marxian historical-materialist propositions (from the 1859 Preface) that Gramsci treats as the crux of the philosophy of praxis: determinable tasks and the non-perishing of social orders.
• XREF: This is the anti-determinist mechanism that connects forward to hegemony theory and how Gramsci reads ideology as active force rather than mere reflection — relevant to the Islamophobia field’s use of Gramsci. — connects to: Natural forces become historically operative only when production harnesses them — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1649