It's common here to criticize Great Man Theory, in that it's not just one person that caused changes, it's many. However, where I'm lost is where they further imply that things happening have absolutely nothing to do with individual choice, and material conditions are the only thing that matters. This really just sounds like predestination with extra steps, as in, your material conditions will choose whatever actions you take, which completely loses me.
The logical conclusion to this mindset is that organization and trying to do political action is pointless, after all, material conditions will either make it happen or not make it happen, which I don't think anyone is trying to say.
A few things here:
- Great Man Theory is the statement that singular individuals shape history. You can believe that classes and groups can change history without believing individuals do. It is the recognition that one person cannot create change on their own, but that with enough comrades, they can change the world today.
- Material conditions are the road upon which we walk - they determine where the option to turn appears, but they are not our feet or minds. We choose whether to take the turn or continue on the road we walk.
- Most of the time, we are overdetermined, but that is why we organize - so in those rare moments when we are not overdetermined, we are prepared to act decisively.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Material conditions set the limits of the possible for what we can achieve and how we can think about what to achieve, but that doesn't mean everything is predestined.
You're not really missing anything: free will does not exist. However to get the outcomes we want we have to pretend that it does. just vibe
Material conditions narrow the field of possible outcomes, but there's still some variation in the outcomes that are left. In some situations, that variation can have a big difference in the quality of life of people who have to live with the result, and people doing more than expected to organize can make a serious difference.
my understanding is that dialectics is the constant interaction of material conditions and the system that "choices" create. People often choose the path of least resistance that material conditions have lead to. On an individual level people can contradict the system but ultimately cannot change the path of least resistance and the actions of others without changing material conditions.
A famous physicist dies and wakes up in front of the pearly gates. St Peter is there to greet him.
"So good to see you" he says to the physicist. "We've been expecting your arrival. I know dying can be a shock, but you should know that the discoveries you made will contribute greatly to easing human misery and suffering long after your brief time on earth."
"Oh, well I suppose that's a nice thought" replied the physicist. "But St. Peter, if you don't mind, I've always had this one burning question in the back of my mind. Does humanity actually have free will?"
With a slight chuckle the saint responds "Well no, but did you miss it?"
Free will might not exist but you've lived plenty of your life without it already and you didn't even notice. Just keep trucking and keep up the good fight comrade. The material conditions you've experienced in your life up to this moment will determine whether you're the type of person who learns this sort of truth and descends into nihilism or whether you're the type of person that embraces that knowledge and continues to act anyway. In either instance though you as an individual are incapable of grasping those conditions clearly enough to know that answer until it's behind you. That critical lack of knowledge, a lack of omnipotence, is what you experience as free will in that you can't know what all the possible outcomes are so you as the individual have to choose as if you are truly free
Aside from what other people here have already said, predestination is an opaque process where you can't truly know God's will until you die. Historical processes, on the other hand, follow natural laws that can be understood scientifically. In that sense they are quite different. One implies that the best we can do is hopeless mystification, while the other implies that knowledge is obtainable, and with it, power over our material conditions.
The way that I'd put it is this - Napoleon obviously had an enormous effect on history. But without the opportunity the revolution afforded him, he would have simply climbed up the ranks as far as a jumped up corsican could, before retiring.
Material conditions determine things most of the times, until the systems fail and things go into freefall. That's when individual decisions change history.
Yeah and conversely the revolution likely would happen without Napoleon there anyway. Human history is a human invention and thus humans can change its outcomes.
Check out Hinge Points that Matt does, it'll give you a good framework for thinking of historical materialism
Saying that materialist explanations of history are deterministic is a mechanical understanding of materialism, not a dialectical one. Material conditions are the basis for why things are the way they are, but don't inherently predict the way things evolve over time because everything is always in motion and changing. Base > Superstructure > Base', remember?
Nature vs nurture. Material conditions restrict how fast/far we can steer things, but we can still steer.
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they choose" Often the first part of that sentence is ignored.
All major theorists and revolutionaries have repeatedly condemned economic determinism as non-marxist and non dialectical, because it is. The base determines the superstructure, the superstructure then acts upon the base, changing it.
