The leftist obsession with "the great man theory of history"

[Os Cangaceiros]

Ok, this is something I've never really "got". I understand historical materialism and all that, but anyone who's ever taken a history class in college (or history in high school for that matter) probably realizes that the dominant view in academia (as far as history goes) is in fact one in which social, economic and historical context dominates. I assume that most people here have taken at least one such class in their lives, so I'm not sure why there's frequent ranting about this concept. Honestly a lot of it's overboard, ie "Albert Einstein didn't come up with any ideas you idiot, that's the great man theory of history! It was the masses who thought those ideas!" and so on.

If you look at the wikipedia article on the subject, it would appear that "GMT" died out around the beginning of the 20th century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

[Raúl Duke]

You're absolutely right. In university level academia, this is the truth. "GMT" is dead and has been dead for a long time, especially since 1960s/1950s. I major in History, and our class on "theories/methods of historiography" puts this in place.

However, at an ideological level, there's still a bit of this GMT and other non-sense...particularly in school level history and the regular person also uses a bit of GMT when discussing history (for example, examine the way that liberals understand Ghandi and Indian independence), perhaps partially due to the way that history is taught in schools.

[Revolution starts with U]

Yup ^.
Many of us don't have our heads thoroughly buried in the sands of academia. My college level history classes were actually quite good, and in fact the first such history class to recommend literature about how commoners lived.

Nevertheless, GMT of history still reigns supreme in popular culture, and even Zahi Hawass (:cursing:) says dumb shit like "Khafra carved the Sphinx." ... which even were the Sphinx contemporaneous with Khafra, I'm almost certain he did no actual carving.

[Blanquist]

Great men are able to play a huge role in history, in speeding up a process or blunting it.

Lenin was great man. Trotsky was a great man. The Russian Revolution would not have happened without them, and history would be very different.

Revolutions need great men.

[Raúl Duke]

The Russian Revolution would not have happened without them, and history would be very different.

History may have been different without them...
but for all intents and purposes the Russian Revolution ("February Revolution") started without them...

[Blanquist]

History may have been different without them...
but for all intents and purposes the Russian Revolution ("February Revolution") started without them...

many "February Revolution's" happened in many countries. it took great men to make an October Revolution.

[Revolution starts with U]

Nah, "great men" usually just hijack popular movements and start claiming everything as their creation.

[Jimmie Higgins]

If you look at the wikipedia article on the subject, it would appear that "GMT" died out around the beginning of the 20th century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theoryHeh, not in mid-century Russia of course.

During the years Stalin was in power, there was a conscious policy to move away from the post-Revolution history textbooks which focused on a history of material developments and class struggles to a history which emphasized Russia's glorious and heroic national history - including powerful Tsars. And of course there was also the fetishization of Marx and Lenin: Marx developed theory from his natural genious and Lenin guided the Revolution because of his singular greatness.


many "February Revolution's" happened in many countries. it took great men to make an October Revolution.Like I said above - the great man theroy still has some even on the left convinced.:) They played positive roles, but I think this is an upside-down way to look at the role of individuals. Great individual figures (or even groups of people) don't produce struggle, great struggles produce great figures. The advantage that someone like Lenin and the Bolsheviks as a whole had was a rapid period of major struggle in Russia; the whole working class and the peasant struggles learned a great deal through these experiences and so people like Lenin and Trotsky were able to find effective lessons from these struggles. We in turn can learn from this experience - positive and negative lessons.


Ok, this is something I've never really "got". I understand historical materialism and all that, but anyone who's ever taken a history class in college (or history in high school for that matter) probably realizes that the dominant view in academia (as far as history goes) is in fact one in which social, economic and historical context dominates. I assume that most people here have taken at least one such class in their lives, so I'm not sure why there's frequent ranting about this concept. Honestly a lot of it's overboard, ie "Albert Einstein didn't come up with any ideas you idiot, that's the great man theory of history! It was the masses who thought those ideas!" and so on.Yeah I think you're right about most academia, though it is still there either explicitly or in effect sometimes, but it's not dominant like it once may have been.

But it is still common and nearly dominant in mass consciousness (in elementary and high school as well as in popular culture and media). In general modern society is saturated with idealism. Even in academia this is the case aside from the hard sciences. So in mass culture it is even more the norm to see idealism, even the "great man" sort. Just the idea that Obama as an individual determines what happens in the executive, as if that position wasn't connected to the whole system, shows how common it is. Or "Lincoln freed the slaves". The idea of "what if they killed Hitler as a baby, then the war never would have happened" is another common example.

Historical fiction is more often than not a kind of "great man" view of history. So and so was a genius, so and so "taught the natives to rebel" etc.

[Revolution starts with U]

Also... what a ridiculous assertion that anti-GMT people would say the "masses thought up relativity." That's just as ridiculous as asserting Einstein did it. Neither side is really acknowledging the previous research into the field, and the general progressive nature of research; ie, that discovery doesn't happen in a vacuum, and no scientist has truly revolutionized a field (rather than revolutionizing the acceptance of previous guesses).

It's like when people talk about "scientists thought the earth was flat for thousands of years." No, they didn't, shut up and put your nose in a book.

[A Revolutionary Tool]

Gmt is alive and well. Just look at the way people look at Hitler, Stalin, etc.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Moved to History

[Invader Zim]

I don't think it has died. One of the most popular topics at the moment in the field I study - the Britain in the Second World War - is Bletchley Park and the Government Code and Cypher School. I was at a public lecture just yesterday, following the recent publication of a book on the agency, and the event filled literally within a couple of hours f it being announced on Twitter. But study of the agency, since it became publically known in 1974, has been littered with great man narratives. Even studies which have discussed the role of the workers at the agency still pay huge amounts of time talking about the big fish in the pond - particularly Alan Turing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing).

Of course, this is a partial exception primarily because Turing was indeed a genius and did provide a massive individual contribution to the process of breaking the German Naval Enigma and the development of the 'bombe' machine - a key device in discovering 'Enigma' machine rotor settings. Furthermore, it is also a topic with popular appeal, and like it or not, the books that the general public tend to consume are ones which provide nice easy narratives of events with plenty of hero characters to celebrate. So if you want people to read your books you have to add those elements that lend it popular appeal.

I think academic history is also moving in that direction because of the direction academia is moving in general. Now, research is graded, and one of the key elements of that grading system is in 'impact'. And obviously, if your book is a best seller it demonstrably has had impact. So there is that.

I also think that there has been a demonstrable rexamination of the role of individuals away from the hyper-structualist theorys popular particularly in the 60s, which suggested that everything down to environment and underplayed the impact of individuals. Rather I think historians have come to accept a form of synthesis in which individual contributions to the formation of events are contextualised within structures. Thus individuals play functional roles within structures. That notion really came to the fore in the 1980s regarding the debate surrounding Hitler's personal role in Nazi policy towards Jews culminating in the Holocaust - navigating a middle course between the intentionalists saying that Hitler planned the whole policy as early as 1919 and those on the other side of the debate suggesting that it was all down to German culture.

So I guess I'm saying that the field of history works rather like a pendulum swinging between two extremes. And while it swung towards Great Man narratives for much of the early 20th century, it began swinging the other way in the 1930s following the growing move away from diplomatic/political history and towards social history, culminating in the popularity of Marxist historiography in the 60s, it was been gradually swinging the opposite direction. Though, of course, the irony here is that I'm generalising and most historical study is built looking at nuances that discredit generalisations.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Also... what a ridiculous assertion that anti-GMT people would say the "masses thought up relativity." That's just as ridiculous as asserting Einstein did it. Neither side is really acknowledging the previous research into the field, and the general progressive nature of research; ie, that discovery doesn't happen in a vacuum, and no scientist has truly revolutionized a field (rather than revolutionizing the acceptance of previous guesses).

It's like when people talk about "scientists thought the earth was flat for thousands of years." No, they didn't, shut up and put your nose in a book.

Oh brother. My comment regarding Einstein was obviously hyperbole. :rolleyes:

But the point of it had to do with the fact that some people have a tendency to completely negate individual contributions to a historical timeline (unless it's one of their heroes, of course), when I don't think you can do that.

[Firebrand]

"Man makes his own history, but not under conditions of his own choosing"
The situation in society produces so called "great men", not the other way around.
Unfortunately most school education blithely ignores this fact.

[Sixiang]

I don't think that it's completely died out. Liberals use it all the time. In the U.S., liberal historians revere their favorite presidents and other politicians, capitalists, and reformist political activists. It is true that individuals make important contributions and discoveries and whatnot, but the point is that GMT will treat these people like god men. They will treat the matter as if like this "X person was so wonderful for bestowing upon the humble masses this great piece of legislation/scientific discovery/etc., and there's no way anyone else could have come up with that." As far as science goes, I had a great Evolutionary Ecology professor who was against GMT in science history and he had a great insight on the matter, his thought was that "Maybe Darwin came up with evolution or Einstein came up with relativity, but even if they hadn't, someone else would have likely came up with the same thing some time soon after that." It is a fact that other scientists had already come up with very similar ideas to Darwin right around his time. There is this one scientist whose name I forget who basically came up with a lot of the same things as Darwin within a few years of him (maybe he just never read Darwin before then I think). Science is a collaborative process and comes from all these different background influences.

History is the same way. People are shaped and molded by the material historical conditions that they live under and all the background surrounding that. We can appreciate someone without turning them into deities and ignoring the importance of the masses.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Man creates history, but not in the conditions of his choosing.

This seems to be common sense, and anyone who places more emphasis on conditions or man is wrong in one way or another.

[Qavvik]

I've honestly never taken a class on the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that was not majorly influenced by the Great Man Theory. It just seems that college professors can't help but apply that theory to Napoleon and Robespierre.

[Geiseric]

The large sections of the american working class who thought that Obama would "fix everything," are more under the control of the GMT than most "Leftists." (Oh I hate that term...) In America it's awful with the idealism that surrounds JFK, the "Founding Fathers," and capitalists in General.

Capitalists need this theory more than Socialists because what other justification is there for a "Brilliant inventor/capitalist," to steal from his workers, other than "He invented it, and it wouldn't exist without him." The lack of sociological outlook is the result of FOX news and the Capitalist media/schooling systems (Hint: It's the same thing).

[Art Vandelay]

Man creates history, but not in the conditions of his choosing.

This seems to be common sense, and anyone who places more emphasis on conditions or man is wrong in one way or another.

Interesting. This is something that I have been pondering for a long time and unable to form my own opinion about, however I was leaning towards placing more emphasis on the material conditions; still not sure what I think.

[Desperado]

I think what also needs to be considered is what "history".

Whilst I agree that GMT is pretty crap for any history, this is even more true for the history we are looking at. So the precise party politics of 19th century Britain does have a lot to do with big figures, but we're not really interested in such apparently dramatic developments in Parliament as we are in the development of the working class and their antagonism against capital.

We need to realise that when we are debating these driving forces of history, we are also often talking about different histories. Great man theorists are also concerned with the history of... great men. It's not just that history is the history of class struggle (which I don't deny), but that the important history is that of class struggle - a far less grand claim we can back up with our political beliefs rather than historical evidence.

These disagreements are partly arguments about what drives history, but partly far less grand arguments about emphasis in history - what constitutes the important bits. Of course, the ideological reasons for emphasising great man history are the same as those for holding great man theory, but the debate is slightly less serious. It can just be a matter of benign taste, as some are interested in military history and others in the precise parliamentary drama of Robert Peel or revolutionary life of Lenin. You might admit to the materialist conception of history and just prefer reading about some dramatic lives of big figures.

Hell, imagine trying to make a historical HBO drama in which the characters are "Prole", "Bourgeoisie" and "Petite-bourgeoisie" and "Peasant".

[Imposter Marxist]

Anyone -could- have written about the nature of 'socialism' in the 20th century, but it was tony cliff who popularized it. He was the one who did it. He deserves some credit.
Thats just an example, though.

[Prometeo liberado]

Great men are able to play a huge role in history, in speeding up a process or blunting it.

Lenin was great man. Trotsky was a great man. The Russian Revolution would not have happened without them, and history would be very different.

Revolutions need great men.

I partially disagree. First the Russian Revolution would still have happened, just not in a way in which we can currently envision it. Often great people of history have done nothing more than codify or organize the diverse or unleash the static. Now are these people just great managers of situations or true builders, producing in a vacuum? Do historic situations demand great men or have these people always been with us waiting for the right situation in which to harness, bend, direct the unstoppable will of history?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Anyone -could- have written about the nature of 'socialism' in the 20th century, but it was tony cliff who popularized it. He was the one who did it. He deserves some credit.
Thats just an example, though.Well there are certain individuals who play a singularly important role, but it's not as though anyone really just pulls something from their head. Any worker can decide that capitalism is a raw deal and many will develop revolutionary ideas out of their own experience (objective conditions), but it takes someone with time and certain developed skills to be able to take our daily struggles and generalize them into a larger context (subjective actions in regard to history and theory anyway). Most workers aren't going to go off to the Library like Marx did just because they can't live the way he did. So it takes some intellectuals who've sided with out side or dedicated workers with a drive to develop these ideas.

So most worker's probably wouldn't have had the background and time to study what Marx did, but Marx wouldn't have studied what he did or develop his ideas if it wasn't for actual workers struggles from the Democracy movement to English workers struggles to 1848 to the Paris Commune.

So there's a back and forth dynamic I think between the objective material conditions and what individuals can do under those conditions and how they respond. Obviously, more than theory, action displays this. A working class that has gone through a lot of struggle has organically learned some lessons about how to fight and have developed a certain amount of class-consciousness. Right now we are in the opposite situation and there are any number of workers who could be the organic leaders of movements today -- except there have hardly been such movements!

[MarxSchmarx]

I don't think that it's completely died out. Liberals use it all the time. In the U.S., liberal historians revere their favorite presidents and other politicians, capitalists, and reformist political activists. It is true that individuals make important contributions and discoveries and whatnot, but the point is that GMT will treat these people like god men. They will treat the matter as if like this "X person was so wonderful for bestowing upon the humble masses this great piece of legislation/scientific discovery/etc., and there's no way anyone else could have come up with that." As far as science goes, I had a great Evolutionary Ecology professor who was against GMT in science history and he had a great insight on the matter, his thought was that "Maybe Darwin came up with evolution or Einstein came up with relativity, but even if they hadn't, someone else would have likely came up with the same thing some time soon after that." It is a fact that other scientists had already come up with very similar ideas to Darwin right around his time. There is this one scientist whose name I forget who basically came up with a lot of the same things as Darwin within a few years of him (maybe he just never read Darwin before then I think). Science is a collaborative process and comes from all these different background influences.

History is the same way. People are shaped and molded by the material historical conditions that they live under and all the background surrounding that. We can appreciate someone without turning them into deities and ignoring the importance of the masses.

I suspect you're thinking of Alfred Wallace who came up with the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin (also from reading Malthus) and, from the jungles of Malaysia, had sent a manuscript describing how natural selection changes species to Darwin, asking his opinion on the idea (Darwin was already well known in scientific circles for his work on corals). When he read it, Darwin had already been working on natural selection for several years, and Darwin's colleagues urged Darwin to finally go public with his idea, so Darwin and Wallace shared the credit as co-discoverers. When the idea was announced at a joint paper by Wallace and Darwin at a scientific meeting it was largely ignored, and it wasn't until "The Origin of Species" came out that people freaked out about it. But both Wallace and Darwin had a sense of respect for the other and this was a surprisingly amicable collaboration, although Darwin certainly had the upper hand in the whole affair.

However, what's telling is that the theory of evolution by natural selection had been around for some time before either or Darwin or Wallace came upon it. The most "famous" of this is a 9th century Islamic philosopher from Basra named Al Jahiz who wrote in his "Book of Animals" that:


Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring.

There is a debate right now about whether al Jahiz was really an advocate of inheritance of acquired characteristics, or whether he saw the environment as determining the ability of individuals to survive, which is ambiguous in this passage.

This is perhaps the first documented discussion of natural selection. His ideas were well known in the scholarly Islamic world and apprently even in the west - in the 1870s German "orientalists" discussed the "darwinism" of Arab thought.

al Jahiz's fate of current utter obscurity, especially relative to Darwin or even Wallace, is immensely telling about how social constructs create the great man.

[Sixiang]

The large sections of the american working class who thought that Obama would "fix everything," are more under the control of the GMT than most "Leftists." (Oh I hate that term...) In America it's awful with the idealism that surrounds JFK, the "Founding Fathers," and capitalists in General.

Capitalists need this theory more than Socialists because what other justification is there for a "Brilliant inventor/capitalist," to steal from his workers, other than "He invented it, and it wouldn't exist without him." The lack of sociological outlook is the result of FOX news and the Capitalist media/schooling systems (Hint: It's the same thing).
Yes indeed. American elementary and high school history teachers are expected to promote GMT in teaching U.S. history and government. I know my history teachers were into that method for sure. The things that are hammered into children's heads in U.S. schools are to memorize the names of certain people deemed important for their bourgeois ideology (George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., JFK, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and so on and so on, mostly being presidents and a few other famous public figures of bourgeois mindset) and some important dates or events associated with them. These people are given almost godlike powers in their ability to solve some problem or cause some massive result. For instance, they say things like "Lincoln freed the slaves" and "When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, everyone in America wanted to be free." These are of course logical fallacies in and of themselves, and they also try to obscure what is important (the role of the masses) in the process.


I suspect you're thinking of Alfred Wallace who came up with the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin (also from reading Malthus) and, from the jungles of Malaysia, had sent a manuscript describing how natural selection changes species to Darwin, asking his opinion on the idea (Darwin was already well known in scientific circles for his work on corals). When he read it, Darwin had already been working on natural selection for several years, and Darwin's colleagues urged Darwin to finally go public with his idea, so Darwin and Wallace shared the credit as co-discoverers. When the idea was announced at a joint paper by Wallace and Darwin at a scientific meeting it was largely ignored, and it wasn't until "The Origin of Species" came out that people freaked out about it. But both Wallace and Darwin had a sense of respect for the other and this was a surprisingly amicable collaboration, although Darwin certainly had the upper hand in the whole affair.

However, what's telling is that the theory of evolution by natural selection had been around for some time before either or Darwin or Wallace came upon it. The most "famous" of this is a 9th century Islamic philosopher from Basra named Al Jahiz who wrote in his "Book of Animals" that:



There is a debate right now about whether al Jahiz was really an advocate of inheritance of acquired characteristics, or whether he saw the environment as determining the ability of individuals to survive, which is ambiguous in this passage.

This is perhaps the first documented discussion of natural selection. His ideas were well known in the scholarly Islamic world and apprently even in the west - in the 1870s German "orientalists" discussed the "darwinism" of Arab thought.

al Jahiz's fate of current utter obscurity, especially relative to Darwin or even Wallace, is immensely telling about how social constructs create the great man.

Yes that's the one. Thank you. And I also remember, since we're on the subject, hearing about a few other precursors to Darwin. One of them claimed that organisms gain traits in life. His famous example being that giraffes grow out their necks by stretching and then it was passed on. That of course isn't necessarily the case, but when evolutionary biologists looked back at that, they saw that it could be associated with mutations that occur during an orgasms' life and can be passed on to offspring.

[MarxSchmarx]

And I also remember, since we're on the subject, hearing about a few other precursors to Darwin. One of them claimed that organisms gain traits in life. His famous example being that giraffes grow out their necks by stretching and then it was passed on. That of course isn't necessarily the case, but when evolutionary biologists looked back at that, they saw that it could be associated with mutations that occur during an orgasms' life and can be passed on to offspring.

Probably the most famous of the advocates of acquired characteristics is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who I believe was the one who came up with the giraffe example.

Lamarck is a somewhat strange case, because like Darwin's maternal grandfather, they were essentially concerned with the religious question of how organisms came to perfectly "fit" their divinely oriented environment (from whence we get the phrase "survival of the fitted" and the word "fitness"). Thus although they recognized a central pillar of Darwinian philosophy - that offspring resemble their parents - this line of argument failed to realize another pillar - that there was differential reproductive success and the "winners" as it were passed on their acquired traits whilst the "losers" did not. Lamarck and his ilk essentially argued that because all giraffes needed longer necks, all new born giraffes would get longer necks.

Modern epigenetics has produced some insights that seem to be consistent with this view, but again, that too ultimately has a Darwinian foundation. In comparison to genes that were not capable of adjusting themselves to new environments, genes that were (like the "lamarckian" genes) are more succesful at passing on their descendants (the differential reproductive success). This is why modern epigenetics is quite probably also an epiphenomena - it suggests alternative mechanisms of evolutionary change, but it does not explain ultimately why such patterns should arise. It may suggest that a lions share of the diversity we see is attributable to such acquired change, but in the most conspicuous traits of most organisms analyzed so far its contribution to generating biological differences hasn't been terribly impressive. Only the combined effects of natural selection and random contingencies combined are able to do so.

Incidentally, Lamarck too is a "great man of history" problem because his ideas had been floating around by the time he sat down to write his arguments at the turn of the 19th century. That an ideology "Lamarckism" however scorned is named after somebody whose marginal contributions were so patently minor is, perhaps not as much as Darwin, but another substantive example of how this idea of great men persists in the natural sciences, and perhaps in biology and chemistry more than physics or geology.

[Geiseric]

I aggitated in my U.S. history class, saying stuff like, "Jefferson was a douchebag and I'll hate him always because he owned slaves." But they say stuff like "It was kinda impossible for him not to," and I said, "He could of worked on his farm or something." and they were speechless. Great Men in history like Pyotr the Great of Russia, Queen Victoria (Great Woman I suppose), Napoleon, Churchill, and in Leftist politics the RCP thinks Bob Avakian is a "Great Man," leads to an unrealistic and cultish adherance to anything they've said or done that we'd connect with imperialism or racism because of some "greater," thing that only they were able to do. The fact of the matter is that Lincoln freed slaves because of Capitalism (the Union Army was revolutionary although, as were John Brown and other radical abolitionists), Napoleon got to where he was by massive bloodshed and ruthlessness, and Churchill was an alcoholic, racist, quasi fascist dictator of England who laughed at several million indians dying of famine!

[La Comédie Noire]

If you look into the Marx and Engels Reader by Robert C. Tucker. You can find some letters where Engels talks about how they really over emphasized the material forces of history in order to combat the great men of history theories floating around at the time and how it wasn't as much of a problem anymore (He was writing this in the 1890s)

The social sciences and history owe a really big debt to Marx and whether they realize it or not have absorbed a lot of marxist methods of analyzing history. Of course you still have the popular histories and biopics, but they usually don't find quarter in serious academia.

So do personalities matter in history? Of course they do. If you look into Trotsky's three volume history on the Russian Revolution he talks about the decisive influence of Lenin's April Theses in making the Bolsheviks the most attractive party in Russia to the working class. It really can't be stressed enough how far out this document seemed at the time and how much future events confirmed it's correctness.

Whether or not it was just a shot in the dark or the work of great political foresight is a debate for another thread.

[TheRedAnarchist23]

Surely before a great man invented a theory, someone, somewhere, already thought about it and either did not have the means to prove it or thought it was ridiculous himself.

I don't support this great man Theory.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

And of course there was also the fetishization of Marx and Lenin: Marx developed theory from his natural genious and Lenin guided the Revolution because of his singular greatness.

OK, so you are saying that the country of 90% serfs and peasants should have gathered all in an intellectual debate and said "Karl Marx came from this background and these material conditions to document (i always like to refer personally to Marx as a great journalist as i think he precisely documented and was in a position to explain what was going on then) what is hapening and will happen to help people rule themselves" Bloody hell mate, you tell that to a German proletarian who was even literate in 1919 and he won' be able to comprehend it (read books about how ignorant the mass of people were then), but a russian 1917 SERF?! Ridiculous, the goal was to Feed people, clothes them, proletarianise the population and advanace the productive forces.

You fail to see the reality of what the state is: The modern state is an instrument for social engineering. In Germany this is best visible, when students enter fifth grade one third goes to the Hauptschule, one third to the Realschule and one third to the Gymnasium. It's social cleansing; the capitalist economy of Germany has needed 1/3 uneducated hierarchy-accepting low level proletarians that pull a lever all day. Another 1/3 has been needed for skilled labor, get a quick training to operate some machines, drive a truck, or sell some goods. The top 1/3 of society is needed to control the other 2/3, they go to university, are hence highly indoctrinated, get good paying jobs with career opportunities; to control the rest 2/3 of uneducated people.

Germany is being forced to get rid of the lower Hauptschule and are pressing people to earn degrees and go to university; because the modern current productive forces are rapidly outgrowing the capitalist insitutions, and changing them is not always wanted by the ruling classes...

Now, this institutionalised system to turn human society into productive members of society is a development of the material conditions of capital; institutions in the interst of capitalism.

Take a look at the USSR 1917 and think. Was the goal to start a classless communist society, or was the goal to develop the country and protect the revolution?

Yes, it is sad, but it is necessary to insitutionalise class society so long there is capitalism/Imperialism. Only when the capitalist system outgrows its historical usefulness and becomes unable to reproduce and expand material societal wealth (or overthrown world wide), can there be the talk of the beginning of a classless communist society.

We are very close to the beginning of complete automation of production, i.e. the end of the exploitative class system of capitalism and beginning of real freedom where everyone in society is a person of social responisbility and the gap between think and manual work is closed. The transition (Socialism) to complete automation (classless communist society) will need to though be one with accumulation of surplus (labor vouchers for instance) until like said, the material conditions allow all humans to do minimal labor time.

EDIT: By the way, i have calculated how long complete automation would likely take for Germany. From 1992 to 2010, workers productivity has increased a whooping 34% for german workers. Even IF capitalist states were still around, one could estimate that within a time frame of twenty years production output (solely from workers increased productivty!) could increase 1% a year (more than any capitalist states in the last 10 years average) and STILL cut work hours by 20% over twenty years, 1% each year less work time to produce even more tan the previous year. And imagine what would happen when new plans would be made by germany to subsidise the technology and science departments more!... So, easily within a time frame of the next 100 years, complete automation, and thereby the material conditions for communism, could exist. I will bet though that we will already see socialism in Europe within the next 50 years, and with the current advancment of the productive forces, that could quickly (20-60 years) transform into a (classless, work-less, money-less) communist society.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I feel that i have slightly missed the point i wanted to make to defend the hierarchical stalinist russia: the majority of people in Russia 1917-1945 were just serfs turned peasants. The goal had to be to develop the country; first create a majority population of proletarians, work them hard and turn them into productive members of society to then advance the countries productive forces to then reach a point of potential radical cutting of work hours and automation of production to then begin the process of turning all members of society into intelligent thinking and minimally labouring humans; classless communist society.

[Firebrand]

There is this one scientist whose name I forget who basically came up with a lot of the same things as Darwin within a few years of him (maybe he just never read Darwin before then I think). Science is a collaborative process and comes from all these different background influences.

His name was Wallace I believe and actually he and Darwin came up with the idea pretty much simultaneously, but Darwin was upper class and wealthy so he got all the credit, thats the way it goes.