Matter matters only as socially organized for production

Evidence

Clearly, for the philosophy of praxis, “matter” should be understood neither in the meaning that it has acquired in natural science (physics, chemistry, mechanics, etc.-meanings to be noted and studied in the terms of their historical development), nor in any of the meanings that one finds in the various materialistic metaphysics. The various physical (chemical, mechanical, etc.) properties of matter which together constitute matter itself (unless one is to fall back on a conception of the Kantian noumenon) 579 should be considered, but only to the extent that they become a productive “economic element”. Matter as such therefore is not our subject but how it is socially and historically organised for production, and natural science should be seen correspondingly as essentially an historical category, a human relation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1647

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘matter’ in the philosophy of praxis as a productive economic element, not physical stuff—a foundational move for historicist analysis.
• XREF: This anticipatesthe anti-essentialism that later cultural theory (Hall, Said) applies to race and identity categories—directly usable for the Islamophobia toolkit. — connects to: Material things matter to praxis only as social relations embedded in production — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1648
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1647