 The first question that perhaps we should ask is why, why a philosophy? Do we need a philosophy? Well, I mean the answer is very simple. Of course for everyday life and for a whole host of everyday operations of course. You do not need a philosophy, you do these things quite automatically. As people have done for the last 100,000 years. But you see philosophy is a kind of thinking which is different to the kind of everyday practical thinking. If you think that the minds of most men and women today in Britain and other countries are absorbed with the immediate demands and the struggle for life. They are obsessed with ideas like will I be able to pay the rent at the end of the month? Will I have enough money to pay my bills at the end of the month? Will we find a school for our kids and so on and so forth? This kind of thinking is not philosophical thinking. And if you think about it, it is rather humiliating that human beings should have their minds absorbed with petty considerations of this nature and problems of this nature. Philosophy is a different kind of thinking because it raises your horizons, raises your mental horizons to think about the big things, the big questions, the really important questions of life. By the way, there are very few people that one time or another in their life, even the most illiterate person will have considered these questions. What is the meaning of life? Why do we live? We are born, we live, we die, so what? What's the meaning of it? This brings us to the traditional answers which of course fall into the realm of religion. A life after supposed existence of a life after death and so on and so forth. But these big questions have occupied people's minds right from the beginnings of our species, I would argue. Now of course there are people who say, I don't have a philosophy when I got news for you. You think you don't have a philosophy? Everybody in this planet has a philosophy. And those who say, I don't have a philosophy, I don't need a philosophy, all of that tells me that this person will just repeat thoughtlessly, mindlessly, mechanically like a parrot. The ideas, the religions, the politics, the morality, the prejudices of the society that surrounds them from the moment they are born to the moment they die. Now if you are satisfied with this present society in which we live and its morality and its religion and its values, then I have nothing further to say to you, you may leave. But if, like myself, you're not satisfied and like Karl Marx, even as a young man, you're not satisfied and you want to change the world, then you need a philosophy. You need a different philosophy that challenges the existing order of things and its values and its modalities and all the rest of it. And the only consistent revolutionary philosophy that I know of is the philosophy of Marxism, which is known as dialectical materialism. Now please don't be frightened by this, some people are frightened by it, but you see philosophy like any other branch of human thought, science or anything else, any other discipline if you like, has its own specific terminology, which may be quite different to the everyday use of language, for example materialism and idealism. I mean if I say to you somebody is an idealist, what sort of impression do you have? You have a man or a woman of high ideals who doesn't use bad language, who doesn't eat or drink to excess, who helps old ladies to cross the road, who doesn't kick the cart and so on and so forth. An idealist, you know? If I say on that, oh some is a materialist, then you've got a really horrible impression. Somebody eats too much, drinks too much, swears too much, commits other bodily excesses which shall remain nameless here too much, a thoroughly disreputable individual. Well of course that may be so in everyday language, but it's nothing whatsoever to do with the philosophical idea of philosophical idealism and philosophical materialism. The two great schools of thought that have been contained in philosophy from the very beginning, Michelle Endeavour, if I have time to explain the difference between the two. Now Karl Marx, and this is the point, this is why we're starting with philosophy, Marxism started as a philosophy. The young Karl Marx, before he became a communist, before he became conscious of the need for a revolutionary overturn of society, although he was a revolutionary democrat from the very beginning. When he was a young man like most of you, went to university in Berlin and he fell under the spell, I can't use any other, he was bowled over. He was bowled over by the spell of the ideas of one of the giants of philosophy. Yes, there have been many giants over the last 1,300 years, many giants of only great thinkers that have really advanced human thought and human civilization, as opposed to today where there are no giants, I would say. Rather there's an army of pygmies and dwarfs who inhabit these places, like the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings, they live underground and they've got furry feet, but they're rather attractive to the fellas. Not so the modern philosophers, so called, the bourgeois philosophers, who frankly, and I'm very sorry to disappoint you, those who mistakenly have chosen to study philosophy at university, you've made a big mistake, as you'll soon find out. These are mental pygmies who have nothing to say whatsoever, because the bourgeoisie has got nothing to say. Capitalism, oh the latest fadden now is postmodernism, I won't dwell on that, my friend Daniel will tell you what about that. Suffice it to say, a German expression comes into my head that it's kind of philosophy that's in a Crancheid. That is not a philosophy, it is a sickness. Postmodernism, come on, this is rubbish of the first order. And what is so is that they have nothing to say. One of the ideas of the postmodern clever people who infest university seminars these days and tried to demoralise young people by all the means that they had disposal, there is no ideology, can't have ideology, therefore of course can't have Marxism, because Marxism is an ideology. Yes of course, in the early days the bourgeoisie had an ideology and it was a revolutionary ideology, it's what created the French revolution, even in the English revolution that was an ideology of Cromwell and the Puritans and so on, very courageous, people with courageous thought who challenged it, no no, no more ideology, why, because they're not capable, they don't have an ideology. They're pessimistic about the future of their system for obvious reasons. I also am pessimistic about the future of capitalism, not of socialism however, you know. Oh yes, oh no progress, can't talk about progress any more. Yes of course, because under capitalism there is no progress and there cannot be any progress, that's the reason, but they don't say that. Oh no, this system is exhausted itself economically, philosophically and morally exhausted and bankrupt and therefore we have no ideas to offer you any more. That's what they ought to say if they were truthful but they can't say that, oh no no no, in general there's no progress and there's no ideology. But let's leave them alone in the words of Jesus Christ, let the dead bury their dead and these are very dead people. Philosophy nowadays has got a very bad reputation, justifiably so, because philosophy today has got nothing whatsoever to say to the people in this world and the people in this society. And therefore of course, people regard philosophy with disdain and contempt, well merited disdain and contempt, nothing to say to them but we have nothing to say to philosophy either. Wasn't so in Marx's day and here's a great paradox, I said that Hegel, this giant, this genius was one of those towering giants of philosophy of human thought which the young Marx was very much influenced by his thought and yet, paradoxically, one of the great paradoxes, Hegel was politically a conservative whose idea, the absolute idea, was the Prussian state, I want to enter into that. But here's the paradox, this man was a politically conservative although be careful about that and his youth Hegel was a supporter of the French Revolution. And I suspect that to a large extent his conservatism was in order to protect himself against arrest under the very repressive regime that existed in Prussia at that time. Yes, but if you read Hegel carefully, here is a very revolutionary idea, it is a dialectical idea. The great contribution of Hegel is that he rescued dialectics which had been forgotten, neglected since a long time. And this dialectics is the heart and soul, not just of Hegel's ideas, it's the heart and soul of Marxism. Without an understanding of dialectics you won't get very far in your understanding of any other aspect of Marxism, it's all based on Marxist philosophy. So I say dialectics and materialism, dialectical, let's analyze both, if possible, separately and then we'll try to pull them together. What is dialectics? Well dialectics you know is not a new idea, was not invented by Hegel, as a matter of fact it is a very ancient idea, you can even see it in a kind of embryonic form, very embryonic form, mystical form if you like, in some of the early religions. By Hinduism and Buddhism in particular contain the elements of dialectical thought, it's quite interesting. But dialectics as a scientific idea was first put forward by the earliest Greek philosophers, philosophers born in Greece. Why? Because up until then all the attempts to explain the universe and nature and the origin of where we come from was religious in Babylonian thought and Egyptian literature. Everyone you can imagine, it was a religion, the Babylonians, the creation myth was that Marduk created the world. Well here were the Greeks for the first time a great revolutionary leap in consciousness. Men, it was mainly men at the time, there were some women but that came a little bit later. Men for the first time tried to explain nature in terms only of nature, without having access or recourse to any supernatural force or being or gods or goddesses. No, only nature. They were actually materialist, that's what materialism means. People who tried to explain nature in terms of nature and nothing else. A great step forward in human thought. One of these great, again geniuses, people who by the way didn't have any of the technology we have today. The Greeks had none of this technology. They didn't have mobile phones or Facebook, just imagine that. No Facebook, how could they survive without Facebook? Or any of the other X-rays or any of the other powerful telescopes. No, no, no. They only had one instrument. The most powerful instrument of all, this, the human brain. And they made astonishing discoveries. They knew that the Earth was round. They even measured its circumference quite accurately. Imagine that. With the primitive technology at their disposal. They knew that the Sun was molten rock and so on. Marvelous. They even discovered the theory of evolution. Over a thousand years before Carl Charles Darwin, one of the Greek philosophers, Anaximander, discovered that man had developed from a fish. Because he studied fossils and then human embryos. Because the human embryo has got all the phases of evolution in it. One time we had a tail and gills and so on before becoming the handsome creatures that we now think ourselves to be. But one of the greatest of these thinkers was a man called Heraclitus. I suppose he was a bit like Hegel because Hegel is quite a difficult person to read. But inaccessible. He was known as Heraclitus the Dark. The Dark because his writings were dark, they were difficult to understand. People couldn't make head or tail of his writings and he couldn't care less by the way. I think he, like Hegel I think I'm sure. I sometimes think he deliberately wrote an excuse for me to say, there you are, see what you can make of this. I don't care whether you understand me or not. He actually said that to Heraclitus. But what did he say? Well he said, everything is and is not. Get a road of that. Because everything is in flux. Everything is fluid. That's an astonishing thought. And it flies in the face of common everyday thought. It is counterintuitive. What do you mean? Everything is fluid. He said, we step and do not step in the same stream. No man steps in the same stream twice. You try. The moment you put your toe in the river is gone. It's no longer the same river as what it was. We are and are not. What do you mean? Are and are not. I am me. No. You are you. No. Well not necessarily. The other day somebody tried to embarrass me by showing me a photograph of myself as a baby. A rather handsome baby I thought but there we are. But you see this baby that I'm looking at, is it me? This baby is gone. It's dead. It doesn't exist anymore. Instead you've got me. Well like it or not. May consider to be an improvement or not. But we are constantly changing this idea. Everything is fluid. Now what do you mean everything is fluid? The table is not fluid. It's solid. The ground is solid. I am solid. You are solid. Some people are more solid than others. Okay so not true. Modern science has demonstrated. I don't know argument about this. This table is not solid. I am not solid. You are not solid. This floor is not solid. You will deal with that in a moment. On the contrary everything is precisely fluid and changing. Constantly changing. This is the fundamental idea of dialectics. Get your head on that. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing is fixed ever. But in a constant state of change. This apparently solid table which is mainly air by the way consists of atoms which in turn can be subdivided into subatomic particles in a state of constant motion at unimaginable speeds. Close to the speed of life. You can't see it but it's there. It's a fact. You know there's an English proverb. I usually cite this. Excuse me if I repeat myself. A solid is the ground under my feet. Yes it seems very solid doesn't it. Very comfortable. Let me make you feel a little bit less comfortable. This ground is not solid. Beneath the surface and it's a very thin surface of rock and earth there's a seething mass of molten rock moving at unimaginable temperatures and unimaginable pressures. You can't see it but it's there and it is seeking a way out. There's a conflict. There's a contradiction between this enormous pressure and the earth's surface which is holding it down. But sooner or later sooner or later this mass of molten seething material will find a weak spot in the earth's surface and suddenly it will happen suddenly without any warning they can't predict these things. There will be the most cataclysmic events known to humankind. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The city of San Francisco is based on a fault. We know this and it's destined to be destroyed. We don't know when. Could be next week, it could be in ten years time but it will be destroyed. We know that. You can't be precise about the timing. So here you have the idea of constant changes. Evolution is discovered by Charles Darwin. So decisively, although the church did everything in its power to oppose this by the way, even in America at this stage the creationist movement is doing its damnedest to force American schools against the constitution by the way, not to teach the theories of Darwin but to teach the theories of the first book of Genesis. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and so on. Even today that's the case. That's the backwardness of consciousness. Yes, but Darwin showed that there was evolution and that of course today is demonstrated. There's no argument about this anymore except of the blindest of the blind. We know because of the human genome project which shows that we share our genes. Well, it's been known for some time that the difference between ourselves and Banobo chimpanzees is less than 2%, okay? Less than 2%. Yes, but that 2% is decisive. It's very decisive. It's a leap, a qualitative leap. But I'll deal with that in a moment. Not only with the chimpanzees do we share our genes, we share the same genes as fruit flies. How do the creationists explain that? God seemed to have made a bit of a mistake there. Fruit flies and bacteria and beings more primitive than bacteria. We share our genes with these people. Therefore there's no argument about this. We are animals but we are a very particular type of animal. Now then, so that the idea, the fundamental idea of dynamics, the first idea is constant movement, constant uninterrupted. Yes, but that's not the end of the matter. Nowadays most educated or semi-educated people will accept the idea of evolution. Yes, but they don't understand evolution. No, because Charles Darwin also didn't understand evolution. That's the fact of the matter. He saw evolution as a gradual slow change without any sudden leaps, okay? And that's the idea most people today have got of evolution. Slow, gradual, incremental change, okay? People can accept that as a comforting idea. No violent explosions, no violent changes, at all, slow, gradual change. Because in politics that's got a name, isn't it? Now we begin to see the relevance of philosophy to politics. It's called reformism. You know, the idea that slowly, gradually, peacefully it is possible to change the capitalist system into something better, something different. Well, not so. Because if you look at human history, for example, yes, you find long periods of peace and slow change, but you also find sudden changes, sudden abrupt changes known as revolutions and wars, similar phenomenon, that the French revolution, the Russian revolution and so on. And it's these revolutions that actually impair things forward. But let's go back. We're anticipating too much. It isn't just that the slow change. Yes, nature knows slow changes, but it also knows other kinds of changes, sudden, abrupt, violent changes. That's true of evolution also. Although Darwin couldn't accept it. There's one thing he couldn't understand to his dying day. He couldn't understand. A phenomenon known as the Cambrian explosion, which is a very important event, because it's the beginnings of multi-cellular complex life forms on Earth. And it happens suddenly. Oh, by the way, when I'm talking about geological time, we're talking about many millions of years. And therefore a sudden could be half a million years. But that's sudden in the context of geology. And there have been many such violent changes. For example, the best known is the extinction of the dinosaurs, which paved the way for the rise of new species. That's the point. There are cataclysmic events in evolution, characterised by the disappearance of certain species, which were previously dominant, and the emergence of new species from apparently nowhere. Now, Darwin couldn't understand this Cambrian explosion because it didn't fit his ideas. He said, well, the only possible explanation is we lack the fossil evidence. You get more fossil evidence, and it will be seen to be a gradual slow process. Well, not so. In the last 50 years, it should be said, the last 40, 30 years in effect, there's been a revolution in our understanding of evolution, mainly led by a great American scientist who unfortunately deceased Stephen Jay Gould. I quote him a lot in my book Reason and Revolt with Stephen's with these questions. Stephen Jay Gould did an extensive research into this, into the Burgess Shale in Canada, it's called, and he showed precisely that there appeared, yes, there are long periods of what's known as stasis, where nothing much apparently changes. And suddenly there's a leap, a catastrophic leap, and he proved this, and therefore there's a new theory now, which is generally accepted by paleontologists, which is called the theory of punctuated equilibria. That's the long periods, in which apparently nothing happens, then a sudden cataclysmic revolution, because that's what we're talking about here. Let's take it to another common example, the one that's always quoted. You can take water, I just took a sip. You can heat water from 0 degrees centigrade to 100 degrees centigrade. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. That's my phone, never mind about that, it'll go off eventually. You can heat water to 100 degrees centigrade and what occurs, it doesn't gradually turn into something else. It reaches the 100 degrees centigrade and precisely at that point it turns, it's a change of state. It changes into a vapour steam, which has got different qualities, okay? As a matter of fact, if you continue to heat the vapour to a very high temperature, I've forgotten the actual amount of degrees, but it's a lot. There's a further leap, quality leap, into another state, which is plasma, which has got other features. Plasma physics is one of the important areas of modern physics. Now you see, the same goes when you cool water from 100 degrees centigrade to 0 degrees centigrade, what happens? Does it first of all turn into a paste, and then into a jelly, and then finally it ends up, no it doesn't. It remains liquid, the molecules remain in the state of a liquid, till precisely 0 degrees centigrade. In fact there's an experiment, I've never seen it done, but I understand it's correct. The scientists can just tap the glass with a rod, and that energy is sufficient to make this leap, this qualitative leap, into a solid state, which is ice. Now what I'm describing here is known in modern physics, and it's a particular branch, an important branch of modern physics, as phase transitions. But to put it in Marx's term, in Hegel's terminology, because Hegel discovered this long before chaos theory was ever thought of, it is that the transformation of quantity into quality, that is to say, slow, gradual incremental changes reached a certain critical point where there's an explosion, but there's a sudden development. Workers know this by the way, let's see the application of this. You see this in any strike. You can have a factory where there hasn't been a strike for 10 years, 20 years maybe, and the workers have accepted everything. They accept wage cuts and they do nothing and they don't react because they're afraid of losing their jobs. And the small minority of activists lose, they go crazy. What the hell is that? Nothing's ever happened, you know, I go to the branch meeting, nobody ever comes. Where are these people, you know? That could go on for some years. Then suddenly a strange thing can happen. A small incident may be a form and swears at a woman worker, or maybe the tea is cold in the canteen. There's some trivial incident, there's some small incident, and bang, there's a strike. And when there's a strike, you get not a handful of people turning up, you get a thousand people turning up at the mass meeting, angry people demanding solutions. By the way, every strike is a revolution in miniature. That's what I think about that. All the elements, you see all the elements in a revolution, you can see that in a strike. And people become transformed in a strike. Instead of the old slavish mentality, servile mentality, passive mentality, they become active participants, active protagonists in the process. That's what a revolution is precisely. Now, what I'm describing to you is the dialectical theory, or the dialectical law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Incidentally, there's another law which you can deduce from that, which is the question of the relationship between accident and necessity. Necessity Hegel explains, necessity can express itself through accident, that's what I'm describing. The reason why the workers have suddenly exploded is not because of that trivial incident. That's the accident. It's a mere accident. It could have been anything. But the fact that for years and years, a whole series of small impositions, injustices, oppressions, cuts, insults, humiliation, gradually leads to the point where people say, that's enough. No more. They reached a critical point where quantity becomes transformed into quality and at that point even the slightest accident can cause an explosion. Accidents can cause wars. You had the anniversary a couple of years ago of the First World War. It is said that the First World War was caused by the assassination of an Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo by a Bosnian nationalist. Well, not so. That was an accident. In other words, the assassination of that man cruelty, what if the assassin would have missed? Would that have avoided the First World War? It would not. It would have been another accident that would have provoked because all the conditions for a conflict between the great powers already existed. Now, to go back. How does one define dialectics? Let me tell you the most extraordinary definition of dialectics by Frederick Engels. Marx's great comrade and friend and companion, who by the way did arguably more than Marx to develop the philosophical side of Marxism in books, marvellous books like the dialectics of nature, particularly anti-during, which you should make an effort to read. Engels has the following. I read this when I was a young man and it struck me. Dialectics is the general laws, get a load of this, the most general laws of nature, human society and human thought. Now then, that is some claim. The general laws of nature, that's the whole universe. All of nature, all of human history and all of human thought. Get a load of that. Now I must make a small confession here. I was about 16 years of age when I read anti-during. I was bowled over by it. And I was impressed by the arguments in favour of dialectics. I thought that it was clearly correct. But I must confess one thing. I never believed, it never seemed conceivable to me, that that could ever be proven, at least of all proven mathematically. I didn't think it was possible. I thought it was true but difficult to prove. You know something? It has been proved in the recent period, not by Marxist but by bourgeois scientists. There's an enormous, very fertile branch of modern science known as chaos theory and its derivatives complexity. And also there's an idea called ubiquity, which I'll deal with in a moment, which conclusively damages the correctness of dialectics. And particularly that law of quantity and quality, it's so accepted now by bourgeois scientists. There's a book which I urge you to get hold of by an American scientist, not a Marxist, an American scientist called Mark Buchanan called ubiquity. What does ubiquity mean? It's from the Latin word ubiqui. Who knows Latin here? Put your hand up. One person, wonderful. What does ubiqui mean? Like ubiquity is something that exists everywhere? Correct. Marvelous, marvelous. Take this communist name. Yes, but you're the only one. Nobody knows Latin. What's the matter with the education system in this country? In my day it was compulsory five years of Latin. You know what we used to say when I was a kid at school? Latin is an ancient language as old as old could be. It killed the ancient Britons and now it's killing me. Anyway, it's a fine language. Ubiquity, the name of the book is ubiquity. Ubiquity means everywhere, everywhere. This man, Mark Buchanan and other scientists have done experiments and they've discovered that the most disparate, the most different branches of science show the existence of this dialectical law. Let me give you a few examples and just imagine how different they are. Avalances, forest fires, heart attacks, the rise and fall of animal populations, the growth of cities, the flow of traffic, stock exchange crises, the outbreak of wars and I add revolutions which is the same process and even new trends in fashion, music and art. Get a load of that. This is just a small amount of the vast range of areas where this dialectical law applies and it's an iron law which knows no exceptions. It can be expressed mathematically as an equation which is known as a power law. Now don't ask me what a power law is because I was always bothered by the class in maths. My maths doesn't extend that far. But what I'm trying to impress upon you is the fundamental ideas of dialectics now more than ever, more than in Marx's day are generally applicable and applied to many scientists at the present time. Well, from dialectics, of course, there are other laws like the unity of opposites which apply, in other words, underlying the whole of nature and the whole of everything else, there's a tension, I use that expression, there's a tension between opposing forces. I've already mentioned the tension, the opposing forces, the surface of the earth and the mass of molten rock which is striving to come out. This is a conflict which must be resolved sooner or later. There's all kinds of the unity of opposites, you could even say men and women. It's the unity of opposites from which we all come through a process of quantity and quality, but that's another matter. This exists at all levels, from the smallest level like the individual atom where there's a constant struggle between the weak force and the strong force, I think it's called, between the nucleus which is trying to hold the thing together and other forces which is pulling it apart. And that same process is a tiny level, but it also exists in our sun, a very interesting programme on the TV there about the origin and the end of the solar system, that the core of the sun, the solid core of the sun is struggling to contain the mass of superheated gases which is struggling to burst out and does burst out in solar flares and so on. And thank goodness it is being contained because we survive on the basis of this. However, in about, I don't want to alarm anybody, but I'm talking about maybe four billion years time when few of us I think will be around. Four billion years time is a long time, but anyway, in four billion years the sun will expand, the force will be overcome, it will expand, absorbing mercury, venus and the earth will cease to exist, it will be absorbed, sucked in into this and that's, and eventually of course the whole thing will explode. Outwards. Who we are by the way we've come from? We are stardust, isn't that a nice poetical idea? We are stardust, yes. We, the earth, everything are the products of an exploding star in the past a long time ago, exploded, gradually crystallising into new galaxies and gradually the conditions for life comes into existence. Why do we have iron in our blood? Well iron is the main component of this explosion of a star, the content of the earth's centre consists of an iron core which explodes. So we are the creatures of, we come from nature, we'll go back to nature. There's no question about that, but this brings me to the second question. Materialism and idealism. Well, you know there's always been an idea, you could say a superstition, that there is something inside us which is separate from our material bodies. Even early primitive society, people believe this. Why do they believe it well? It's very simple. If you think of when you're asleep in your beds at night, you get up and walk around and do all sorts of incredible things, some of which don't deserve to be mentioned, but there we are. Dreams. Dreams. The idea that, oh no, what's the explanation of a dream? Well, if I get up and walk around when I'm clearly asleep, everyone tells me I'm asleep, then there must be something in me which does this and this is separate from our material body. It is the soul. You heard of the soul? The soul which is supposed to be separate from the material body. Now, in reality, of course, that is not the case. There is nothing separate from the material body. We live. Ideas, imaginings, dreams, you call it what you like, are all the product, the mode of existence, if you like, of our material brain, which depends on a material nervous system, which depends on a material body, which depends on food and depends on a material environment. Nevertheless, this idealist concept has continued to exist and persist. It's very persistent and forms the basis of religion. The idea that there's some kind of extraordinary being existing before the world, this being created the world in the book of Genesis, God in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth and so on and so forth. Well, you can believe this if you wish. The idealist conception is then translated into philosophy. It's a religious idea, but it enters the realm of philosophy. At a certain stage, a Greek philosopher, namely Plato, there were others, but Plato was a great thinker, a great genius, but he argued this. He said, what is the nature of the world? What's the fundamental essence of existence? He said, it's form. Everything has form, does it not? We all have forms, some more than others, but we have form. Everything has form. It's round, it's square, it's a triangle, circle, whatever. Yes, but if you look at these material forms, these material objects, this table is supposed to be a rectangle, but if you look at it, you find that it's imperfect, all kinds of imperfections. And that's true of every material thing. Therefore, he said, there must be a perfect circle, somewhere in existence outside of our comprehension, a perfect circle, a perfect triangle, a perfect square, of which this material reality is merely a crude, unsatisfactory reflection. That's all. Now, this, of course, we would say, as materialists, is standing everything on its head. It's the other way round. In other words, what's the origin of the idea of roundness? Well, long before men and women thought of the word round, took them a long time to come to that conclusion. They must have seen many round objects like the sun, the moon, cut the tree in half. It's round, and eventually you get the abstractly roundness, round circle, which doesn't exist in reality, this abstract circle, and square, and all the other conceptions. All of our ideas, first of all, all our ideas come from a material brain, in a material body. Secondly, the content of all our ideas, even the most abstract ideas, also ultimately derived from material things. For example, the most abstract of all sciences is, I suppose, mathematics. Yes. Some mathematicians imagine it's got nothing to do with the physical world. Well, not so. The very word calculus, which is higher mathematics, comes from the Latin word for a stone, a little pebble. It's an abacus. Have you ever seen anyone counting on an abacus? When I was studying in Russia years ago, they did this with extraordinary speed. Of calculating was moving stones. Then again, why do we count up to ten? What's this business about the decimal system? What's so good about counting up to ten? Is it superior? Is it the best form? No, no, you ask any professional mathematician. Neil will tell you, it's not the best system. The best system will be based on twelve, because ten can only be divided by five and two. Twelve can be divided by two, three, four and six. So it's a superior system. But we persist in insisting on this, counting up to ten. Why? You know why? The kids in school got their fingers. The Roman numerals are fingers. The latter five is probably that. There's one exception, and that's the Mayans. They counted up to twenty. You know why? He says, they didn't wear shoes. You can't do the toes as well. In other words, all of our ideas come ultimately from this wonderful material world that we live in. By the way, the idea that God created the world is that modern physics deals with that quite neatly. The most fundamental law of modern physics is the conservation laws. Conservation laws teach us that matter, and by the way, we don't just mean solid things. Einstein's stated, in 1905 he worked out the special theory of relativity, that matter and energy are the same. Not similar, they are the same. Light is energy. The photons are coming down on me and so on. These are material things. These are subatomic particles. OK? They have mass. But the idea that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. That's a fundamental principle of physics. Fundamental principle. And throughout the whole of eternity, that's a long time. Forever and ever, nothing has ever been destroyed. Changed, yes. It changes constantly. That's the law of dialectics. Changed, one particle can become transformed into another particle. But created or destroyed, no, just change. A permanent process of change. Now once you accept that idea, by the way, it's quite interesting, certain things flow from that. God and the devil, heaven and hell, the Virgin Mary and all the other stuff goes flying through the windows. Modern technology isn't it wonderful? And you're left. You're left with what? Well, the ideal is this horrible, crude, imperfect material world. The sooner we leave this, the better. Yes, religions teach us that. The sooner that we get rid of this crude material body and return to the soul and to our eternal Creator, and we'll all be happy forever and ever, listening to this dreadful religious music. If I was God, I'd be feathered by that after 2000 years. Get it every day on Radio 3. But no, a serious point. No, no, no, listen. There's one thing you have to understand. We only live once. This wonderful thing, this beautiful thing called life, is only given to us once. And once you understand that, you have to live in such a way that your life becomes meaningful and worthwhile. No, but for the religious mind, it's different. No, no, this is just a miserable waste of time. Everything is horrible and we are ugly and we are sinful, you know? Eternals, especially women. Oh, the women are very sinful. That's in all religions. Profoundly misogynistic. Eve. Adam was quite happy sitting in the garden of Eden, you know? He didn't have to work or anything. He wasn't complaining. He was poor chap, you know? Then God comes along when I reached and he's asleep. I mean, that's really unfair, you know? He wasn't consulted about the question. Took a rip out of his sight, no anaesthet, he knew nothing. And plants this woman in the garden. And this woman, being a woman, of course, offers him an apple. And like a fool, he accepts this damned apple, you know? And God was very annoyed about that and never worked out why he was annoyed, but he was damned annoyed about it anyway. The moral of this story, folks, is that men never accept apples of strange women. You know? And as a result of that, we were kicked out of the garden of Eden and the rest are condemned to spend the miserable existence of the men toiling and the women suffering from menopause, menstruation, suffering in childbirth and stuff like that. Of course, all of these things do have a materialist explanation, but I'm impinging upon the next session on historical materialism, which is an application of these ideas to society specifically. But to go back to what I was saying, we only live once. And do you really need a paradise? Do you really want to live forever? It's a little bit selfish. We need to leave some space for the new generations, you know? Yes, we're born, we live, we die. We can continue to aspire for immortality, yes, but the only immortality that we are entitled to is either through our children or through working for some great cause, which is higher than ourselves, which will ensure the happiness of future generations. Why should we be so egotistic and so selfish to cling to the last vestiges of life when life is no longer sustainable? No, no, no, we live. If we live a full and useful life, then of course we should be prepared and soon related to give it up to make room for the new generations. Why not? But it's this great cause that's the point that gives life. And this world is it really an ugly, crude veil of tears? Well, it shouldn't be. It should not be. This world is beautiful, the blue planet, everyone says this. Looking down at this special planet, well it's special in this galaxy it seems, but it's not special in the universe. This wonderful place full of green plants and oceans of course, of course soon related will cease to exist, but we're talking about four billion years, so we can let that take care of itself. Incidentally, this wonderful world and this wonderful life, as Trotsky said, it must be purged of all evil and oppression and exploitation and made fit for human beings to live in and to live their lives in pleasure, in contentment, in happiness. Developing themselves freely, not just having enough food to live upon, but also it's in the Bible, isn't it? Not by bread alone shall man live. That's true, not by bread alone. It's much more than that that we're fighting. We're fighting to raise humanity to a higher level, a higher spiritual level if you like, such that life on earth becomes a heaven on earth. We don't need any future heaven. When you're dead, you're dead, you worry about that then, it's too late. But to make this life a beautiful place. And this is just one final thought. Engels understood that sooner or later this planet will cease to exist. He knew that. He said yes, but the life will re-emerge. Life always will re-emerge when the conditions are opposite in different planets in different parts of the universe. Yeah, we can go a little bit further than Engels. Just think of all that we've achieved in the last one, despite the capitalist system and its horrors. Think of all the technological advances, the spaceships, when I was a kid, things you dream of. You think you read about this in the comics, Dan Der. He was my hero in the Eagle comic. I was disappointed to learn there's no little green men living on Venus. There's nothing on Venus. But anyway, things you could only dream of are now a fact. This is just in 100 years. Just imagine. If capitalism is abolishing, you have a genuine, harmonious, democratic, socialist society which decides the real priorities. Just imagine the sky is the limit. You know, we can make this world a paradise. A paradise in this world. That should be our aim. Yes, and when finally the time comes in, we've got one billion years to think about this, folks. I think it's time enough, you know. Think of all the technological improvements. And even if the sun does expand, this is this interesting programme on TV, the life zone will expand outwards to places like Mars and even more distant planets. With modern technology we could probably arrange what our ancestors did when they came out of Africa. A migration, only a migration to other parts of the solar system. So even that is not such a fatal ending to the human species. I've finished because I've run out of time. I've not run out of material to use. But you see, this is a dream. But it's not a dream. I don't like this expression. Oh, it's a dream. A dream is a thing of air, a thing which can't exist, which has no reality, which has no necessity to what I'm describing to you. It's possible, absolutely possible, 100% possible, on one condition that we carry out this leap, if you will, this qualitative leap. As Engels put it, from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, of genuine freedom for the whole of the human race, a new level of human society. That's what we're fighting for. That's the meaning of socialism and that's the meaning of the life of Karl Marx.