My problem with this logic is that you could easily say the exact same thing about the evil things he did. Could another Chinese leader have millions of his people die under his watch? Well, the answer is obviously yes.
Few good things are unique, but that's just as true about most evil things.
I don't think that "another leader we're imagining in our head could do good things too without the bad" is a very useful point to make. I'm not saying this as someone who likes Mao, the deeply harmful ineptitude and anti-intellectualism are pretty unappealing to me, but I don't think this works as an argument.
The thing is... Mao didn't do much good at all.
Like the things he did hurt China's development, retarding it and not promoting it. China mostly benefited when he was sidelined. Every time he had control, he'd actually spend a lot of time wrecking the process of industrial development.
Roman religio should not be included in the same family as the Hellenic religions of Classical Greece. I will do my best to ignore the 35th Marxism discussion. You will have to pry every single word of Marxist discussion from my cold dead hands.
So, how did the romans use the opium of the masses to oppress their proletariat?
But, yes, I agree. Hellenism was merely the most prominent religious group the romans syncretized early on so people mistake it for the basis of Rome's religon as opposed to merely another religious structure they folded into their own beliefs. Although I do believe hellenism had a far larger effect on roman beliefs than almost any other religion they conquered.
Explain to me the Great Leap Forward, again? Mao very much liked the peasants but he still held ideas about industrialization that were entirely in keeping with the average Marxist.
He thought you could create an industrial revolution on the farm without having to cater to those dirty city folks. He thought you could substitute the proletariat with the peasant. Which was utterly against a core concept of marxism and sort of stripped away Marx's historic reasoning and the dialectics he relied on for his philosophy.
This is not something even the soviets did, despite Russia being majority peasant. The soviets were actually embarrassed of the peasantry and spent a lot of time trying to crash build a proletariat. Mao was hostile to the proletariat itself.
As an amateur historian I mostly agree, but as a Rome:Imperator player I absolutely despise this premise.
Well, I think there are some commonalities and appropriations of concepts by Italiose tribes and later the Roman state that provide a shared cultural ground, which cannot be said, for example, about Phoenician religions or Druidic religions or what have you.
Basically, even if Roman gods perform different roles and have an altogether different aesthetic, they still have recognizably Hellenistic roots.
Actually it's less the roots and more the trunk if you will. The Roman public cult was a syncretic one. Hellenism was folded into existing roman beliefs in the early republic, and associated with the existing roman faith.
Hot Take:This thread has devolved into name calling and has lately been more about the poster's opinion on political ideologies than actual historical opinions as of late.
Some people flip their shit at the word marxism and associate it with an increasing amount of all things bad that happen and deny it could have any good ever at all. So when marxist history comes up, well that must be bad right? It uses the bad word.
OK, but that doesn't really address the question I was trying to ask in the post you replied to. I'm going to try to phrase the question more directly, something like:
What did Marx invent, in terms of a toolbox of historical analysis?
[pauses, see's GGG's post, looks it over]
Well, "class analysis" is certainly a solid starting point as an answer.
Yeah, Marx's historic analysis is such a no brainer that it is hard to realize that 170 years ago, people just didn't have those tools. Marxist history is hardly all encompassing and has its blindspots, especially in examining differences in individual cultures along the same rough class, but it is an important and fundamental tool for any historian.
Ehhh, I'm pretty sure things would have kicked off with someone else if not with Freud.
His theories on gravity are accurate to the limit of precision of the available instruments (with the probable exception of the matter of Mercury's orbit). And his observations on optics, as distinct from his theories, are solid.
The point, though, is that Newton's underlying physical models are factually incorrect, which is unsurprising given what he had to work with. They're still good science given the circumstances, and the methodologies he developed are still in use today.
I'm aware of that- but then, it's not like Marx's analysis of his own society was garbage to be thrown out, either.
The point is, claiming that a theory makes incorrect predictions, or is an inaccurate description of the world, because [reasons]... That is not the same as claiming that the underlying methodology was flawed.
I want to note, Freudian history is another historiographic pillar. Especially for the explanations of myth and ritual in history. In a way that Marx glosses over. To marx ritual and myth are tools of the ruling class to control the ruled. For a freudian read on history, myth is the subconscious reaction of humans to try and explain the unexplained, a projection of the underlying psychology of man on the world (which is why most of the stories of zeus involve him getting freaky with ladies). A search for meaning, not a tool for oppression. And also a way to deal with not being able to fuck your mother.
Fruedian history is less impactful because it's a bit more... uh... hard to get a grasp on the psychology of long dead people. And Freud was just super wrong as a psychologist about a lot of things.
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