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.
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.
