> Marx pointed the way, long ago, when he wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Unfortunately, this has been a difficult insight for radicals to absorb. They tend to forget about the first five words — “Men make their own history” —and instead remember only that our actions are circumscribed by the past. Even one of my favorite group of theorists, now coming to be known as autonomous marxists, but who I always called anti-Bolshevik com- munists or Western marxists, is guilty all too often of writing about the working class from the outside, rather than from the inside as strategists for abolishing wage slavery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE0neN9mvcY