How does historical materialism account for those rare significant individuals that really do drive major movements and...

This. Reading "Why Marx was Right" by Terry Eagleton helped me understand that 'determined' means 'set between specific boundaries', not that the universe or society is exactly determined in the sense of Laplace's demon.

So how did the capitalist mode of production determine whether I had coffee or tea with my breakfast this morning?

Ludwig: Marxism denies that the individual plays an outstanding role in history. Do you not see a contradiction between the materialist conception of history and the fact that, after all, you admit the outstanding role played by historical personages?

Stalin: No, there is no contradiction here. Marxism does not at all deny the role played by outstanding individuals or that history is made by people. In Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy and in other works of his you will find it stated that it is people who make history. But, of course, people do not make history according to the promptings of their imagination pr as some fancy strikes them. Every new generation encounters definite conditions already existing, ready-made when that generation was born. And great people are worth anything at all only to the extent that they are able correctly to understand these conditions, to understand how to change them. If they fail to understand these conditions and want to alter them according to the promptings of their imagination, they will land themselves in the situation of Don Quixote. Thus it is precisely Marx's view that people must not be counterposed to conditions. It is people who make history, but they do so only to the extent that they correctly understand the conditions that they have found ready-made, and only to the extent that they understand how to change those conditions. That, at least, is how we Russian Bolsheviks understand Marx. And we have been studying Marx for a good many years.
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/dec/13.htm

good post

Hist-mat explains why have that choice to begin with not which of those you will choose.
Obviously those are commodities that exist because they were produced for exchange on the market. If we still lived under feudalism you probably wouldn't have access to either

if you don't know about dialectical and historical materialism, uncle joe got you covered yet again with a very simple to read and understand introduction to the issue, approachable by anyone who can read
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

of course, as usual with "stalinist" texts, they are meant to entice and give a rough idea before diving into the heavy weight stuff, which shouldn't be neglected however since Stalins texts can't be a substitution for actually studying his sources

I know, but my point is that as we approach smaller and smaller levels of analysis, histmat breaks down as a tool for predicting human behaviour. However this has far reaching implications for the development of society, since it often comes down to policies and decisions made by small groups of individuals that can create radically different outcomes. For example, historical materialism can tell us that the triumph of liberalism in France was inevitable, but it was arguably the decisions of certain individuals that delayed that triumph to the 1870s instead of it being accomplished in the 1790s. In essence I agree with this poster however I think it’s important to emphasize that while histmat creates the framework in which individuals operate, that framework leaves a LOT of room for decisions that can radically alter the course of history. Thus while it’s extremely effective at he macro level, at a smaller scale the greater significance of (effectively unpredictable) actions of individuals makes it less useful as an analytical tool.

I've come to appreciate Stalin's writing because he presents everything like an acessible textbook, and breaks down concepts very well. He's not a heavy-duty theorist like Marx, Engels or Lenin but he didn't need to be (and he never presented himself as such, a marked difference to Trotsky IMO). You can totally see younger people reading his stuff and coming to a good understanding before diving into the above figures.

Read Althusser.

Pretty sure either Lenin, Stalin, or both (and maybe Marx and/or Engels) addressed this point in their works, can't find it though.

The funny thing about this shit is that it is completely idealistic. According to this perspective there's the play-doh masses on the one hand and le epic bolshies (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc.) on the other.

Nothing could be further removed from the truth. Lenin&co. would have amounted to nothing without "average Joe no.631" that spread socialist newspapers in the iron factory of Shit town.no.4 in Russia's district 5, and vica versa.

"Le big man history" has a similarly delusional counterpart, "le small man history": in reality these two are interconnected, inseparable. Without Lenin, there's no Sergei reading socialist newspapers to his illiterate comrades in the factory; without Sergei, there's no Lenin.

How does one address the criticisms that histmat
is historicism, pseudoscience, unfalsifiable, etc.?

this demands its own thread, please fuck yourself

karl popper pls go

Would if I could, buddy

Why is he right/wrong though?

I haven't read Popper in a long time but I will say this: Popper's own method of arguing was to take out-of-context quotes from other thinkers then stitch them together ("quilt quotes") in a way that makes their arguments look stupid and/or wrong.

Popper's work should be discarded on the basis of his own intellectual dishonesty at the outset.

The Great Man Hypothesis is almost always very wrong. Lenin is like the one exception (though one could argue that Russia is in the same place today it would've been had Lenin never existed).

Falsification as the basis for science vs pseudoscience seems like a pretty solid position to me.

The more I read about Lenin the more I feel like he was some kind of avatar or incarnation of some divine force.

You are conflating individual decisions on consumption with mode of production, and mode of production with historical materialism, demonstrating that not only:

But you have no idea what Marxism is about.

Stop pretending that you know anything.

Historical Materialism does not predict human behaviour. It presents guidelines societies have to follow (or else); interactions between humans, not individual choices.

It is a development of the idea that you need economic basis for any social function to exist, that people have to be first orrganized for production - and it is this organization that conditions their social relations.

By arguing against those criticisms and proving them wrong. HistMat is not historicist, nor pseudoscientific. It is also properly falsfiable.

NB: In case there is any doubt, you have to actually present those criticisms to get an answer.

tl;dr would be this

For example, to refute Marxism Popper does not address Marxism itself (I did not see evidence that Popper is actually aware of what Marxism is about), but cherry-picks (very few) opinions some of Marxists had, and then proceeds to claim that since those opinions were wrong (ex. success of Russian Revolution was not anticipated by many), the entirety of Marxism wrong.

He doesn't attempt to show what reasoning was behind those opinions, or if it was Marxist.

If you want more, go read Cornforth's "Reply to Popper" (first part is good, second is passable, and I don't fully agree with third; I say it was influenced by Khruschev's Revisionism).

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Napoleon? Khomeini? Philip/Alexander? It's undoubted that certain outcomes are going happen based on material conditions like capital accumulation, falling rate of profit, etc but it takes men of character resolution to exploit those conditions and lead a revolution.

there are no significant individuals, only people filling historically significant roles

In other words, it offers a model for how humans behave in large groups over long periods of time. It's a theory of sociology.
I'm not denying that, what I'm saying is that humans tend to act in ways inconsistent with histmat more often at smaller scales, and are more likely to behave in a way that is effectively random. I'm also arguing that individual decisions (which have major element of randomness) can have far reaching historical consequences as dramatic as preventing or causing social revolutions. Something as simple as the wrong tactical decision can cause a revolution to be lost. In other words at smaller scales (ie smaller numbers of people in a smaller time frame) there is a higher degree of randomness, and thus histmat is less useful as a tool of historical/sociological theory.

That's not great man theory though, since those individuals do not make history. They only act according to certain conditions while also being a product of those conditions. However their importance can't be underestimated. Material forces of history create a set of conditions, but its up to individuals to act upon them appropriately. The importance of individuals is inversely proportional to the weight with which history moves towards a particular outcome. For example if there were to be a total collapse of global capitalism, one that was so complete that even basic goods were unavailable and all capitalist states were to become failed states, then socialism would probably be a foregone conclusion. You wouldn't need a Lenin or a Castro to skillfully maneuver towards it, since the failure of capitalism would be so complete that socialism would be the only option. On the other hand, a scenario where there is only a partial collapse, say in a single country, any revolution will be far more precarious. The skill of individual leaders will be far more important and could spell the difference between success and failure.

If you look to a single narrative to explain all of human history, you're going to find things which don't fit. You can twist and bend and rationalise the facts until they fit, or you can accept that the universe is too complex to be fully captured by something as simple and reductionist as historical materialism.