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.An obvious instance is that of Germany in 1918.At a point of extreme ‘necessity’, the German working class did not follow the revolutionary leadership that was available; and it is sufficient to evoke the name of Rosa Luxemburg to suggest that it was available.Conditions, stretching back over many years, did not allow such people to provide the leadership of which they were capable; or, to put the same point somewhat differently, a complex of conditions led the German working class to reject their leadership.This fact, too, can be explained within the framework of historical materialism.But there is no question of the ‘necessity’, at least in a revolutionary perspective, of a leadership which circumstances did not allow to be deployed.In short, and leaving aside the arbitrary and question-begging aspects of the notion of ‘necessity’, it is clear that there is nothing inevitable or automatic about the emergence of ‘great men’ at any particular moment.Nor can great men be so readily invented and mediocrities used for the purpose as the argument would have it.There are certainly conditions and circumstances that make the intervention of individuals more likely, and more likely to be effective, than other conditions and circumstances.But nothing is here ‘inevitable’.The second problem concerns the more or less interchangeable nature of the role of individuals, which is suggested in the formulations which I have quoted earlier.Thus, Engels writes that ‘if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled his place’; and Plekhanov similarly says of Napoleon’s generals that some of them might have performed his role ‘in the same way or almost the same way as he did’.The issue does not, of course, only relate to the case of Napoleon and his generals.It is perfectly reasonable to think that a military dictatorship in France was very likely indeed in the closing years of the eighteenth century, in the aftermath of the Revolution, Thermidor and the Directoire, and in circumstances which gave military men outstanding opportunities for political intervention.In this case, there is everything to be said for the argument that, if Napoleon had not been there, another ‘revolutionary’ or parvenu general would have attempted a coup which might well have succeeded and installed in power some kind of military dictatorship.But to suggest that any such individual would have played Napoleon’s role ‘in the same way or almost the same way as he did’ is something else altogether, and quite unjustified.Napoleon gave specific and particular forms to the rule he established, and it is obvious that anyone else, having assumed dictatorial power, would have ruled differently, perhaps very differently.What significance this has will be discussed later: the important point here is that the substitution of one ruler for another does make a difference, and can make a very considerable difference.Other cases readily come to mind.It has been said, very plausibly, that ‘the disintegration of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism were two distinct if obviously overlapping historical processes’; and that while ‘the collapse of Weimar had become inevitable’ by 1932, ‘Hitler’s triumph had not.’12 However this may be, it seems to me important not only that it was the Nazis who won, but that it was Hitler who was leading the Nazis—and of course it may be argued that the Nazis won because of Hitler.A different right-wing dictatorship could well have come into being in Germany, with the support of major sections of Germany’s dominant class and traditional rulers.But it cannot be said that any such dictatorship would have worked ‘in the same way or almost the same way’ as did the Nazi dictatorship; and it is further to the point that the Nazi dictatorship was given a particular stamp by Hitler, with enormous consequences both internally and abroad.The notion of interchangeability cannot here be taken seriously.Another instance is that of Stalin.There seems to me no real question that some kind of dictatorial rule would have prevailed in Russia after Lenin’s death, as it had prevailed while he was alive, and that this would have happened whoever succeeded him.It is also very likely—though less certain—that this would have turned into one-man rule rather than ‘collegial’ or ‘collective’ leadership.But it is quite arbitrary to claim that any of the individuals other than Stalin who would have filled the role would have filled it as he did, and that they would have given it the same or ‘almost’ the same stamp as he did.A whole world is concealed in this ‘almost’, and there are cases where ‘more or less’ is a matter of unfathomable magnitudes.This is one of them.Stalinism was not simply the work of Stalin: the notion is clearly absurd.But it is only in crude propaganda exercises that the forms which collectivization assumed—and the purges, the trials, the camps and all the rest that makes up the whole story of terror and death that has come to be subsumed under the label of Stalinism—were the ‘inevitable’ or ‘logical’ or ‘necessary’ outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution, or of Leninist doctrine, or of Marxism; and that all that happened had to happen, ‘more or less’ [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]