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Aug 2025
41m 24s

Can we really learn anything from histor...

Revolutionary Communist Party
About this episode

Most ‘mainstream’  historians tend to reject the Marxist view that the course of historical development has been fundamentally determined by laws that we can grasp scientifically.  Many also reject the idea of progress as a whole as merely a ‘point of view’. To them, history is little more than a series of accidents, or the choices of great individuals. But if this is the case, then why can we recognise so many common processes across human history, in which similar institutions, events, and even characters arise independently of one another, all over the world? And has there really been no progress at all between stone tools and spacecraft?

Josh Holroyd, leading member of the Revolutionary Communist International and editor of the In Defence of Marxism magazine, discusses the topic.

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