Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (1979)

History proceeds in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, and every one of them is in turn made into what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces, which give rise to one resultant - the historical event. This may in its turn again be regarded as the product of a power which operates as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by evenyone else and what emerges is something that no one intended. Engels to Joseph Bloch, London, September 1890

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
/In the books you will find the names of kings./Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?/And Babylon, many times demolished/Who raised it up so many times? in what houses/Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?/Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished/Did the masons go?.../So may reports/So many questions. -Questions from a Worker who Reads (Bertolt Brecht)