Marx and his disciples have a special theory concerning the role of the individual in history.  The gist of it is that the movement of history is governed by laws of a purely materialistic (economic) nature in which there is no room for man's will.  The whole history of the human race, from the time man lived by gathering the berries and roots that grew wild in the forest (before the invention of hunting implements in the Stone Age), moving on to the stages of hunting, animal husbandry, land cultivation and from there to the great stages in the progressive development of mankind, from the primitive-communal system through the systems of slavery and of feudalism and serfdom, to the stage of early industry, on to the industrial revolution, the stage of capitalism and the socialist and communist stages to come, along with  all events, political developments, religious and intellectual movements, etc., all this, according to Marxist theory, is governed by purely materialistic laws.

As the movement of history proceeds according to economic materialistic determinism, or necessity, it follows that the individual plays a very minor role in influencing the course it will take, and even that minor role is a natural and inevitable result of economic materialistic laws.  This applies to all the great  figures of history, from military commanders like Alexander the Great, Ramses, Marc Anthony and Napoleon, to social reformers like Martin Luther, and to prophets like Moses and Jesus.  It also applies to Lenin, in the sense that it was not he who brought about a fundamental transformation in contemporary history, but the socio-economic conditions which produced him and determined that he should lead the proletarian revolution.  According to Marxism, the same is true of all those who have made their mark on the history of mankind through the ages: they were natural and inevitable products of the socio-economic conditions prevailing in their society at a given time.  If not them, then others would have emerged to play the same roles assigned to them by the materialistic laws of history.

This perception of the role of the individual in history is the one Marxist tenet which has never been challenged by any 'deviationist' trend.   From Marx to Carillo, through tens of official and unofficial Marxist theoreticians and interpreters, it has remained constant, unlike many of the other orthodox Marxist theories which have fallen by the wayside.  The most eloquent description of this theory is to be found in "Theory and Application in Communism", by Carew Hunt, where he quotes the following words of Trotsky: "Homer sang, Plato philosophised, Jesus and Peter changed man's moral consciousness, and they all did what they had to do without realizing that they were merely tools in an economic process which dictated all their actions.  To say that they and others like them have made history is contrary to  the principle that history is determined by economic forces and that those forces have led to their emergence".  Carew Hunt adds: "Hence the affirmation by Husson that Newton did not discover the law of gravity because an apple fell on his head, but because the economic requirements of the age made it imperative that the law of gravity be discovered."

This theory is the clearest example of the radical difference between Marx's philosophy of historical materialism and Hegel's philosophy of objective idealism.  It was Hegel who said that Napoleon on his horse at Iena represented the spirit of the world and that if there had been no Napoleon, the supreme spirit would have placed someone else astride his horse. ²¹⁶  Thus the Marxist view is entirely different from the traditional view of  heroism and heroes, it maintains that, in fact, there are no  heroes, just roles dictated by materialistic,  economic inevitable necessity. ²¹⁷

Although Marxists cherish the theory of historical materialism as one of Marx's greatest achievements - indeed, Engels considered it to be as important as Darwin's theory of evolution - history itself offers irrefutable proof of its in­validity. For the study of history reveals the importance of the role of the individual.  Throughout the ages, certain individuals have been pivotal in determining the course of history, and many events and major historical transformations cannot be explained in isolation from human volition.

The works of Abbas Al Aqad, Arnold Toynbee and Bertrand Russell and my own personal observations in the course of my studies and extensive travels led me to embrace a view of the role of the individual in history that is diametrically opposed to the Marxist view. Their dismissal of the role of great men and of chance in history is refuted by countless examples to the contrary:

Had Adolph Hitler not existed at a given point in time, the political map of our time would have been very different.  If it had not been for Kemal Ataturk, the history of modern Turkey would have taken a very different course.  Napoleon Bonaparte changed history.  So did Gamal Abdel Nasser -for better or for worse - not only in Egypt, but throughout the Middle East and Africa and the Third World.

But for the decisive role played by Lenin, the Bolsheviks would not have succeeded in seizing power from the Mensheviks and we would have  seen none of the enormous transformations brought about by the downfall of the bourgeois democratic Republic in Russia and the instauration of the dictatorship of the proletariat. ²¹⁸ Had it not been for Karl Marx, the political landscape of the modern world would not have been the same.  The decisive role played by Plekhanov in the dissemination and victory of Marxism in Russia is indisputable.     Saudi Arabia as we know it today would not have existed but for the personal role of King Abdul Aziz Al Saud. ²¹⁹ The outcome of the Crusades would have been very different without the personal role of Saladdin and his military genius.

Without Sun Yat-sen and Mao Tse-tung after him, an underdeveloped agricultural society like China would never have adopted and implemented such a revolutionary theory as it did.

If we set aside the role of the individual in history and turn to that played by chance, a role that is entirely denied by Marxists, again we would find a series of events where chance played a decisive role.  Bertrand Russell gives several irrefutable examples of this:

If the German government had not allowed Lenin to return to Russia, events would have taken a very different course.  If the sovereignty of Corsica had not been sold by Genoa to France in 1768, just one year before Napoleon Bonaparte's birth, he would  not have been born French.  Had the Czarist authorities executed Lenin as they did his older brother, instead of exiling him to Siberia, Russia would not have come under communist rule in 1917.  Had Hitler reached agreement with Britian on taking joint action against the Soviet Union, the map of the contemporary world would have been different.  Had the lords of Quraish assassinated the prophet Mohamed the night he fled to Medina, the entire area would not have stepped from the darkness of the Jahiliyya into the light of Islam.

I remember that during meetings of the Egyptian Komsomol (an appellation which, because of its association with the Soviet youth organization of the same name, was a source of great pride to the young comrades), we were constantly being warned against the works of William Shakespeare, who  was described by L.K. as "the enemy of the people" and by A. Sh., the ideal of young Marxist writers at the time, as "the poet of the nobility and the exploiters."  While I did not understand what lay behind these violent attacks against the greatest dramatist the world has ever known, I, like all my comrades, blindly accepted everything our militant mentors told us as gospel truth. 

However, after reading Shakespeare in the original, I came to understand why he aroused such hostile feelings among the communists.  Many of his  works exalt the role of the individual and revile the morals of the masses, or mob, as he called them.  Both points are vigourously made in "Julius Caesar", where Shakespeare uses Anthony's speech following Caesar's assassination to show, one, the importance an individual can have in influencing events and, two, how fickle the masses are and how easily they can be swayed by a skilled orator.  The `official' Marxist displeasure with this side of Shakespeare is reflected in  countless reviews of his works by  Soviet literary critics - many of which  the author has read in their English translation - as well as in Soviet productions of his plays, particularly "Hamlet". This greatest of all Shakespeare's tragic heroes is portrayed as a weakling in most Soviet productions.

As I have previously mentioned, the writings of Abbas Al Aqad were instrumental in revealing to me the flaws in the Marxist theory of history,  where the role of individuals is seen as marginal and of chance as non-existent.  His biographies of the great figures of history in general and of Islamic history in particular prove that just the opposite is true; the role of individuals in history is a central one.  In fact, the dismissal of the role of the individual is, like many secondary Marxist theories, a blind application of the philosophical generalities of the ideology.  Obviously when an ideology holds that matter is the driving force of all human endeavour, regards ideas as a reflection of objective reality,    (i.e. of economic relations according to Marx's theory of basis and superstructure), and accuses philosophical schools that put ideas before matter of turning history on its head, it follows that commitment to such an ideology entails denying any role for the individual in history.

Just as Marx and his followers had to concoct tens of theories to substantiate their philosophy, like their shoddy theory on art and literature, so too they had to come up with their own theory on the role of the individual in history, a theory which, as it happened, was very much in keeping with the character of Karl Marx himself.  For those who have studied the life of Marx and his psychological makeup, it is easy to under­stand his loathing of greatness and the great, of heroism and heroes.  His was an envious and bitter character, inherited from generations of Jewish ancestors who hated society for treating them like outcasts.  The violent and vindictive streak in his character was given full play against those of his contemporaries who dared oppose him in any way.  Small wonder then that the great men of history, none of whom shared his views, should have been dismissed by Marx as irrelevent in the scheme of things.

None of his close collaborators or disciples was allowed to share the limelight, and anyone suspected of being a potential rival was exposed to the full brunt of his fury.  A case in point is Bakunin, towards whom Marx's attitude has been described as despicable by many authorities.  The only exception was Engels, who posed absolutely no threat to Marx.  On the contrary, he sys­tematically glorified Marx’s role and minimized his own, repeat­ing had nauseum that whatever he had done was nothing compared to Marx's great achievements. ²²⁰  Even in such books as “The Condi­tion of the Working Class in England”, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" (1884), "Dialectics of Nature" (1875-76), "Anti-Duhring" (1880), "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" (1880), "The Peasant War in Germany" (1874), "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy" (1886), all of which Engels wrote alone, he made a point of mentioning that the main ideas were those of Marx.  Thus Marx knew   he had nothing to fear from Engels, who was in no way a competitor but, rather, his most ardent  admirer and eulogist.  Another factor that certainly figured in Marx's calculations was the fact that Engels was his meal ticket.  For over a quarter of a century, Engels paid Marx a regular income, thus allowing him to devote all his time to research and writing. 

The Marxist denial of the role of the individual in history finds its greatest challenge in the history of the communist movement itself.  Having studied  the inner workings of communist organizations, having been personally involved with those in Egypt (1962-1972), Algeria (1973-1976) and Morocco (1976-1979), I can say that from the days of Karl Marx to the present time, the role of the individual in the communist movement has been a decisive one.  Marxists would argue that this is a superficial way of looking at things, since those individuals are no more than the products of given socio-economic conditions, as though this magical incantation will settle the matter once and for all.  For the uninitiated, however, this is a far from satisfactory ex­planation. One might well  ask how the disparate socio-economic conditions of countries like Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, South Yemen, Italy, France, Ethiopia, Iran and Cambodia could possibly have spawned communist movements sharing the same ideology.  How can anyone claim that the medieval socio-economic structure of South Yemen is conducive to the emergence of a communist avant-garde, exactly like the communist avant-garde in Italy or France were produced by the socio-economic conditions prevailing in those two countries?  Indeed, the use of such an argument not only strips the term `socio-economic conditions' of all significance, it invalidates the twin Marxist theories of socio-economic determinism and historical materialism.

If we were to reverse the concept and say, as the Bolsheviks did following their victory in 1917 (and as Mao Tse-tung did forty years later), that it was the superstructural formations  (revolutionary ideas) of the communist avant-garde that brought about  the great upheaval  in Russia, would this not be to attribute to non-material factors the decisive role in a major historical event?  Let us, for the sake of argument, accept the Marxist proposition that the superstructure (ideas, organizations, institutions) is brought into being by, and is a reflection of, the infrastructure (the production forces and relations that make up the economic basis of society), and that, although the superstructure does affect the infrastructure, the latter remains primordial.  This proposition admits, however grudgingly, that a feedback process exists between the two ²²¹, which brings us to a question that I have often put to experienced communists in Europe and elsewhere:  Is it the general rule that all changes in the  infrastructure are brought about by the superstructure (i.e., revolutionary ideas), or is it that, since the superstruc­ture is no more than a reflection of the infrastructure, no radical changes can be brought in the economic basis of society by superstructural revolutionary ideas?  The answer to that question can only be one of two things:

-      Either to admit that the general rule is that radical changes in the infrastructure are brought about by the super­structure (thereby admitting that ideas can change material things); Or to hold that the general rule is that the infrastructure leads and directs the superstructure, which is no more than its reflection, while admitting that in certain exceptional cases radical changes may be brought about by the superstructure (again admitting that ideas can change material things).

No Marxist in the world can accept the first formulation, because to admit that ideas shape matter would be to destroy the theory of dialectical materialism on which Marx's whole philosophy is founded.  This leaves the second formulation, which is the one to which Marxists subscribe.  It was consecrated by Engels himself a few months before his death. ²²² In a letter to H. Starkenburg dated January 25, 1884, Engels says:"

"...two points must not be overlooked: a) Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development.  But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis...It is not that the economic condition is the cause and alone active, while everything else is only a passive effect...So it is not, as people try here and there conveniently to imagine, that the economic condition produces an automatic effect. No. Men make their history themselves, only they do so in a given environment which conditions it and on the basis of actual conditions already existing, among which the economic relations..." ²²³

What lent this second formulation further credence in communist eyes was the success of the Bolsheviks, under Lenin's leadership, in establishing the first dictatorship of the proletariat in 1917.  The Bolshevik experience was a clear example of revolutionary ideas (i.e., the superstructure) bringing about a radical change in the economic basis, or infrastructure, of Russian society.  No Marxist can claim otherwise, first, because Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and other Marxist authorities have admitted this openly and, second, because in many of his writings Lenin admitted - particularly after his abortive bid for power in 1905 - that the objective (economic) conditions for revolution were not yet ripe in Russia, which, still at the early stages of capitalist development and industrialization, was a predominantly agricultural, semi-feudalist society.

But if the first formulation carries within it a negation of Marxist ideology in its entirety, so too does the second, albeit in a different form. The second formulation assumes that the general rule is that the economic basis asserts itself on ideas - political, moral, legal, etc. - while admitting the possibility that, by way of exception, ideas can  affect and change the economic basis.  But how true in fact is this general rule?  Judging from practical experience it is totally false.  The socialist revolution which Lenin launched in Russia is a typical case of the superstructure transforming the infrastructure.  Mao Tse-tung himself admits that the same is true of the Chinese revolution.  This was also the case in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Cambodia, Mongolia and South Yemen, where the transformation to socialism came about as a result of the role of the communist avant-garde and their revolutionary ideas (components of the superstructure), and not because these societies had reached the highest stages of capitalist development, where the contradictions between the capitalist class and a class-conscious proletariat explode in a bloody confrontation through which the proletariat seizes political power.  If all those cases are exceptions to the general rule, where can the Marxists point to the one example that confirms the rule?  Does not the fact that socialist transformation has always come about through exceptional means arouse some scepticism as to the validity of that cornerstone of Marxist ideology, socialist transformation through the dictatorship of the proletariat?  All the cases cited above attest to the decisive role played by the individuals making up what is dubbed the communist avant-garde in bringing the communists to power.

Actually, the Marxist position in this debate is an untenable one, as I mentioned in "Marxist Ideas in the Balance".  Marxists are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, as it were: if they concede  that the general rule is that socialist transformations take place in non-industrial societies, they come up against Marx's concept of historical stages based on economic divisions; if they admit the role of individuals as embodied in the communist avant-garde in the countries where socialist  transformations have taken place, they come up against the theory of historical materialism itself.   ²²⁴

We cannot accept the argument that the experience of the European communist parties shows that Marxism has developed itself and changed some of its concepts.  This argument is persuasively advanced by Santiago Carillo in “Eurocommunism and the State”, and in countless declarations made by Berlinguer, Marchais and Althusser.  However, I am one of many who believe that Eurocommunism comes under the banner of Social Democracy, and is closer to Kautsky and Bernstein than it is to the original Marxist ideology.  So too, apparently, does Moscow, judging by the accusations of revisionist heresy hurled at the Eurocom ­munists by the Soviet mass media. ²²⁵ Moreover, Marxism is an integrated and comprehensive doctrine that does not allow for selective   derivations.  Otherwise we would have revolutionary officers in Third World armies, with the usual military mentality ²²⁶ and meager educational and philosophical background, using this as a precedent to select Marxist economic and social concepts while rejecting Marx's views on religion (!!).

     We have sought with all the above arguments to disprove not only the Marxist theory of historical materialism, but also one of its main offshoots, namely, the theory of the role of the individual in history.  As we have seen, individuals have been of paramount importance in shaping the history of communist movements all through - which makes the denial by Marxists of the role of individuals in history all the more strange.  We see in this denial of the greatness of humanity as embodied in the great figures of history a denial of what sets man apart from other animals, as well as ingratitude for the contribution of these figures to our common heritage.  It also denotes a curious spiritual blindness that equates the great and constructive roles played by some with the destructive roles played by others.