'The personality of every one who has attained eminence in the intellectual or social field belongs to those chances whose appearance does not conflict in any way with the tendency of the average line of the intellectual development of mankind to follow a course parallel to that of its economic development.'
Gregor Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism [1908] (International, 1928), p. 70.
_________________SDF: What Marx left of value was the notion of historical materialism, the idea that history could be judged not by the "great men of history" whose deeds are still worshipped in American public schools today, but rather that history was an evolution of material conditions of human existence guided by the social accumulation of technologies.
Well put.
Such a Marxian tenet, of course, makes the Good Lenin/Bad Stalin thesis untenable. According to historical materialism (as elucidated by Plekhanov), Stalin could have been anyone---and, indeed, his was: he was a low-ranking party member who displayed no notable characteristics of 'leadership prowess' until the system permitted him the chance to seize the entire party apparatus. The design---or lack of design, if you will---was the creation of Lenin, was it not? Poor cultural engineering. Do not blame Stalin, blame the engineering that made him possible.
(All this, by the way, is quite compatible with behavioristic interpretation, i.e. the individual is shaped by the individual's interactions with the environment...)
None.
