• KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    17 days ago

    Great man theory isn’t wrong in that certain people with power and influence didn’t have a huge impact, it’s wrong because it’s just sort of assuming that they’re this a priori source of change instead of themselves being a result of change and broader movements. Lenin did great things and had a huge impact, but he came out of the context of a larger movement that preceded him and existed without him rather than simply manifesting fully formed to create that movement the way liberal Great Man “historians” portray it.

    • LeninsBeard [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      17 days ago

      stalin-pipe

      Marxism does not at all deny the role played by outstanding individuals, nor the fact that history is made by people. In Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy and in other works of his you will find it stated that it is people who make history. But of course, people do not make history according to their own fancy or the promptings of their imagination. Every new generation encounters definite conditions already existing, ready-made, when that generation was born. And great people are worth anything at all only to the extent that they are able correctly to understand these conditions, to understand how to change them. If they fail to understand these conditions and try to alter them according to the promptings of their imagination, they will land themselves in the situation of Don Quixote. Thus it is precisely Marx’s view that people must not be counterposed to conditions. It is people who make history, but they do so only to the extent that they correctly understand the conditions that they have found ready-made, and only to the extent that they understand how to change those conditions.