 I think I ought to admit from the outset that it was quite a daunting prospect trying to prepare a lead-off on the introduction to the Marxist theory of history. Because once you start getting into the Marxist theory of history and reading up the various texts it becomes such a rabbit hole that such a treasure trove of ideas is difficult to draw out the ones that you can condense into a 40-minute talk. So I'll do my best and I'll try and draw out the general most important points and try to furnish them with some more concrete examples and hopefully from them we can have a great discussion. The first point that I want to kick off with is the question of why it's so important that we have a Marxist view of history, why Marxist historical materialism is such an important part of our struggle and our movement. And I would say that Marxist contribution to historiography and historical thought is immense and probably equal to his contribution to the world of philosophy. And I'm not just saying that because my talk's on history and there's a rival talk going on elsewhere, but you're trapped now anyway so it doesn't matter. But it's actually because up until Marx and arguably after him, especially in the case of bourgeois historians, the kind of the telling and explanation of events, the actual kind of historical narrative, was dominated by at best kind of a cataloging event, which although admittedly very helpful for this sake of collecting data, didn't really tell us anything about why things happened. And then when they tried to venture to tell us, explain to us why one thing happened rather than another, to kind of explain, to try and reach for the underlying laws of historical development where they acknowledged them, it would often reduce itself to effectively gossiping and often what Trotsky described as a preconceived moral. Obviously the Bible is a perfect example of that. All the historical narrative that goes on in the Bible is designed to back up a certain ideological religious preconceived moral. The most immediate example that I can think of is anybody who went to school here in Britain or England at the very least, I won't venture to speak for the Scots, will be familiar with the story of the period of Henry VIII, basically the Tudor period, which can be reduced to six words. Divorce beheaded died, divorce beheaded survived. That's basically the only thing we're taught about the history of the Renaissance in Britain. And the way it's taught is effectively that one day Henry VIII woke up and decided he wanted to divorce his wife. The Pope said no you can't and so he had a religious reformation and that was basically it, that the marital tastes of a portly monarch basically determined the development of capitalism ultimately in Britain. I personally find that extremely dissatisfied but it also has an even more insidious purpose that in many of the other histories told from ancient history up until the present day. The kind of moral that forces its way through all of those is it was always this way. People were always greedy, they were always kings, they were always states, women and men always had the same kind of power relationship. And so in that case it can never change and so your purpose is really just to understand what's gone before but ultimately to accept your position in the world and your position in history. Well Marxism throws all that out out and he doesn't throw it all out just for the sake of it but actually strives towards a genuine objective scientific understanding of the historical process. And the way it by which it achieves that is by trying and I would say succeeding in applying a materialist method. So the methods that I very briefly characterise the kind of the more gossipy and individualist methods I would characterise as idealist. Often the, and Kowski describes this as the traditional conception of history in his words, sees political movements as nothing more than the battle over definite political institutions, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy etc. Which in turn are the result of definite ethical ideas and aspirations. In other words the historical process can be reduced to a battleground of ideas. But it never really comes to answer the question of why these ideas come to being in first place, why did they develop, why did some went out over others. And the place where Marxist look for answers to that crucial question for the kind of the riddle of human history is in the development of our material conditions, in the development of the productive forces Marx called it. And here I'd like to mention not a Marxist but somebody who in a way plays a role in this and that's Charles Darwin. Marx was an immense fan of Charles Darwin, he felt that his origin of the species was in a sense like a revolutionary document. In part because when it was released in the 1850s it caused quite a stir because in tracing the development of species and most importantly from our point of view our own and saying that we were actually the product of a immensely long period of biological development, products in a sense of our conditions and that we were ultimately descended from apes or related to apes. Of course such a stir because not just because people didn't like the idea of being related to apes although the Victorians were a bit annoyed by that. But even more importantly it cuts across and effectively threw out everything that for the past roughly 4,000, 5,000 years people have been told about the way the world works. And so that was an immense psychological shock to the system and I would say that Marx's view of history played the same role. And in the same way that Darwin rooted the development of species in their interaction with the material world, with the natural world and their ability to survive and reproduce, pass on their genetic material. Marx has a similar conception for the way that history develops although it's not in the natural science perspective ultimately it can't be quantified in the same way but it tries to root it in the same process. So Marx acknowledged the fact that each and every one of us by virtue of being a living human being are constantly needing to interact with the world around us in order to get the necessities of life. And around that process, that absolutely necessary life process, there develops certain relations and forces of production. In other words technological developments but also social developments forming themselves coagulating if you like around those productive forces that effectively set the stage for the historical drama. There's a particular paragraph in his preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy, perhaps the clunkiest title of any work I've ever read, which sums all this up in a single paragraph. It's quite remarkable and I'll read that out in full now. In the social production of their existence men inevitably enter into definite renations which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness. So there's actually quite a lot of ideas packed into that single paragraph and what I'll try to do over the course of this introduction is unpack them a little bit. I would say that there are more ideas in that one paragraph than in most of the history textbooks that are sold to schools and that's where the real dynamic power of the Marxist view of history comes into play. But this cuts across another quite fundamental idea of many other views of history which is the question of human nature. I'm sure many of the people in this room when discussing this question of socialist politics of Marxism with friends or enemies alike, it doesn't really matter. You come up against this argument, well what about human nature? Aren't all humans innately greedy so therefore isn't the greed and waste and oppression of capitalism a natural expression of our innate human urge to oppress one another? And on the face of it, on a superficial level that seems like quite a powerful argument because as far back as we can remember and as far back as whatever generations we may have had contact with can remember that has been the history of human society. It actually requires a scientific method and the kind of analysis that the development of science itself including the natural science has given us to cut across that viewpoint. And Placarno deals with this question specifically and he makes what I believe to be a quite compelling argument, quite a simple one. Human nature can no longer be regarded as the final and most general cause of historical progress. If it is constant then it cannot explain the extremely changeable course of history. It is changeable then obviously its changes are themselves determined by historical progress. And I think that that makes a lot of sense immediately for any of us who have even a casual relationship with humanity which I would hope is all of us. And even those of us who have read a single novel see the great range of different observable characteristics that are present in even every human individual but most importantly of all within the human species as a whole. Constantly the task of fiction always holds itself out to be to examine the human condition. There's a reason for that. There's almost an infinite number of variables of different kind of expressions of humanity. And from that inexhaustible source of material you can see that certain characteristics are expressed more forcefully in certain conditions. And that's something that really goes back to Darwin's ideas although I must say that Marx had already worked out many of his ideas, his fundamental philosophical and historical ideas. He saw in Darwin kind of a confirmation of proof of what he was saying. He referred to Darwin as an unconscious dialectician. And so if we accept this that the human beings, so from basically the beginning of the origin of our species, homo sapiens, actually we can go even further back into the other human species like Neanderthals. If we say that there has been, in the case of homo sapiens, if we can say that there has been no significant, obviously there has been genetic development, but no significant genetic difference or change between us and the first ever human beings, then of course physically speaking and genetically speaking there has been no change of human nature except the way that we live and the way that we relate to each other has changed immensely over the course of the human story. And that in a way, that in itself is progress, that we simply by virtue of our own existence whether we want to or not come into constant contact with the natural world, with our material surroundings and in order to survive and what stems from that develops alongside and that is kind of the material basis of progress. And so the argument that we can't move beyond capitalism or that we can't move beyond a system of private property because it has existed for as long as we can remember basically falls down on this because if we look at the earliest human societies and what we know about them, then from what we can see from the material evidence, obviously they didn't write things down, but what we can see from the evidence that presents itself is that those communities would have had no concept, no notion of private property beyond elementary personal possessions whatsoever, especially not things like the ownership of land which is quite an important aspect of any class society really. In fact the reason for that isn't just a kind of cultural or ideological notion that those people had a certain culture and that's why they never moved into the realms of private property. Actually the cultural social element itself stemmed from the material conditions because the level of technology and the level of technique at that time, although it was still developing in that period, was simply too low and too rudimentary to be able to extract from the land living a migratory nomadic existence almost all the time, having to survive on basically whatever you could find. Was unable to produce a sufficient surplus to be able to talk about such things as inheritable wealth or talk about the question of who appropriates a surplus. If there is no surplus then is it possible for one class to exploit another? I think the proof of that is in the fact that we've not seen any evidence of class exploitation in these primitive hunts-a-gatherers societies. But as we know that changed, human society no longer lives like that although we do have societies that still do, but in the main human society does not function in that way. And what happened was, well what the archaeologist Gordon Child who was himself a Marxist described was a revolution, the Neolithic revolution. If we take a broad definition of revolution and not just see it as a political revolution, like the French revolution, then it was very, in fact it was probably the greatest revolution in the history of human existence. Because it completely transformed the relations of human society, human culture and human production. But I want to stop here briefly and talk a bit more detail about this. Often when we do a brief introduction we're only really able to say agriculture developed from there we had a surplus, from there we had class society. But I think that it's important to examine it just a little bit more closely. Because I've mentioned the materialist aspect of the Marxist view of history, but not an equally if not more important aspect which is that it's an application of Marxist dialectical philosophy to the development of human society. Now there are going to be other talks on philosophy so I don't want to eat into my own time to describe that too deeply. But what I would like to point out is that it emphasises the centrality of motion and change in absolutely all things. And one of the ways in which this change takes place is contradictory, by contradiction, by the unity of supposedly opposing phenomena. And we can see this actually in the Neolithic revolution. Looking at it from so far away we can sometimes make the mistake of thinking that it just happened gradually that at one point someone noticed that grass would grow in a certain place and one day worked out oh well we can just plant that and then you had agriculture. It didn't quite happen like that. Actually the evidence seems to suggest that it came about as a result not only of the development of very slow and gradual development of the productive forces in terms of starting to use flint sickles. I won't use up all my time giving a lecture on the development of domestical wind that might be a waste of time. But also by a crisis caused by climate change in the wake of the ice age which actually made it harder to live in those areas. Because when people were able to live quite comfortably on the basis of hunter gatherer production, if you call it that, they tended to stick with it. We see evidence of hunter gatherer populations that were in constant contact with the first settled agricultural communities, places like Indonesia as the example I'm thinking of. And they didn't bother because they didn't see the need to bother. Why would they actually if they can obtain the means of life then they don't have this abstract notion of well historical progress dictates that I settle and suffer what might actually be a harder tougher life. Whereas in places such as the fertile crescent, which wasn't actually the most fertile place on earth, that's kind of why it developed there. People are forced to completely radically change and transform their mode of existence. I mean imagine, there must have been people who first settled down saying we're going to be here for every single year, year on year for the rest of time. And there have been other people in their community that probably said the equivalent, what on earth are you doing? We've always done, we've always moved from place to place. What you're doing is against human nature. Maybe they didn't have that exact conversation but I'm sure a similar thought may have crossed their minds. And so what you can see is a radical, a change in the material conditions, a change in the necessary material conditions of life. Therefore having a profound effect on all the other elements of society. But not in a mechanical sense because in turn the change that came about with the advent of agriculture changed history altogether. And actually, I'll move on to argue, actually created history as we understand it with the development of agriculture. But for the first time ever in history it was possible to obtain, to extract from the earth, a reliable, relatively reliable surplus product. Surplus grain for example although of course they made other things. And on the basis of that all of a sudden questions, first of all it's possible to sustain a large population so we have the rise of cities and urban centres. But perhaps more importantly the question of where that surplus goes, how it's controlled and by whom arises, very forcefully. And so we have the rise of the first kind of ancient urban empires in places like Sumer in ancient Egypt. We have the development of a class of people for the first time that don't work the land, don't really have any direct role in the production of the needs of life. And rather you have if you like the division of labour between the hand and the head, the emergence of a priest class, a literary class that had control and direction over the surplus that was produced. And in short the beginning of the class struggle. A surplus produced by one, the vast majority of society, which is then taken often by course by another smaller class which kind of has control and directorship over society. And Lenin characterised this struggle over the surplus, that surplus product as the class struggle. So the class struggle it doesn't necessarily have to be the way that we see it in the capitalist system, there's a reason it's developed it the way it has in the capitalism. It wouldn't have been the same in ancient Rome or in feudal England or in ancient Egypt. They express themselves in a different way because the level of the development of the productive forces, for example the kind of organisation and relations that revolved around bronzes technology for example were dramatically different from the relations that originated from the industrial revolution. This is another part of the Marxist view of historical progress. But something interesting also happens with the extraction of the surplus. From that it's not just more people can live and that some people are richer than others. Effectively it gave birth to all of the vast culture and science and politics that we consider to be civilisation, that we consider to be wrapped up in this world's civilisation. Which in itself a contradiction and not very comfortable one actually because it was in the subjugation and exploitation of the vast majority of the population that many of the things that we take for granted as civilised and are worthwhile conquests by humanity came into being. And what's interesting is actually probably the greatest minds of the ancient world were very much aware of this. Aristotle was perfectly aware of this and he was no Marxist, it was a bit early for Marxism in those days. And he said, man begins to philosophise when the needs of life are provided. He's effectively admitting on his own path that his ability to be, he might have not thought of himself as a genius, his ability to be a philosopher and think about the essence of truth and the world around him was based on the labour of at that time in that community slaves, chattel slaves, who produced a surplus for him which he lived off. That is in effect the essence of the class struggle. And he also points out that mathematics and astrology were discovered in Egypt because the priests did not have to work. So he'd already discovered this point thousands of years before Marx came onto the scene. What Marx did is joined it up into the entire kind of historical scope of humanity. And actually we can even go further, further than astrology, further than mathematics, to history itself. History is in effect a product of history and a product of the class struggle in the form that when people distinguish between prehistory and history they're almost always talking about the difference between writing and before writing. So the kind of histories that we're familiar with, the list of the deeds of kings, the speeches, the code of laws of Hammurabi, the historical documents are themselves the product of history of the development of the surplus and the development of the class struggle. Writing is itself a product of the development of the economic basis of society and of the class struggle. Where it actually, in Mesopotamia at least, I'm not sure about all other places, but it actually emerged as a means of counting sheep. One person had been able to press into Calais a picture which said, I've got ten sheeps, they didn't actually have to get them out and show them to the other guy with whom he's trading. Also that requires a certain level of surplus if you're going to have that level of trade anyway. And from that pictographic form of writing we eventually had the amazing cuneiform script that was going to carve the code of laws of Hammurabi. So in a sense, all the great works of literature, the epic of Gilgamesh, the poetry of Shakespeare, all the great scientific papers like The Origin of Species and the works of Marx have their origin in the kind of grubby development of the trade of cattle and goats in Mesopotamia and other parts of the world. In that sense, the poet and the accountant have the same mother historically speaking. And so that what I would say is an example of the materialist underlying process of history, making itself felt. And so another, a great achievement of Marx's view of history therefore is it puts history in its place. If you like Darwin put humanity in his place by explaining how it came about and perhaps, you know, intimating where it's going. Marx did exactly the same about history and society and about class. And he also put other very important social institutions in the place. Things like religion, something that seemingly for basically the history of class struggle had seemed to stand above society and basically dictate to society from without, saying that all that happened was God's will. And so what you'd have to do was just listen to God's will as dictated as interpreted by a priest. And that's the moral of history. Well, Marxism has a slightly different view, as you can probably imagine. It tries to put it on a material basis. And I'd recommend that the comrades try and have a read of Kowski's work, actually Foundations of Christianity, in which he tries to draw out not only the material kind of economic processes, but also the very intense class struggles that was going on in the Roman Empire at the time of Christ's life. Assuming Christ had a life when he was there. We don't need to get into that debate. But it basically draws out this question that religions themselves and the ideas of religions, these spiritual ideas that supposedly have nothing to do with the earth and actually come down to the earth from without, actually came themselves from the historical process and from the class struggle. And also these institutions once this had arisen themselves play a class role. The role of the church in medieval Europe and even today in places like Ireland plays a role in the class struggle. It's a means of class subjugation, a very important means of class subjugation. Not only on a ground level, but also in general it has affected the way in which we look at the world as a culture. And Marxism, one of the great benefits of the Marxist view of history is, I would say, it breaks with that, which is an important step forward in my opinion. Also, the family, something that's considered to be completely innate to human nature, surely we've always lived in the same kind of family environment throughout the whole of our history, regardless of how long you think that goes back. Surely this is something that goes beyond the class struggle, goes beyond near economics. Surely this is more important than that. Well Engels begs to differ. In his book, The Origin of Private Property, The Family and the State, Obviously, no Marxist questions that men and women have children and raise that, and that's kind of how we've got to this point. But in terms of the actual relations, the gender relations, the oppression of women, Engels puts forward the argument that it's not something that's always existed. Men have never been always superior to women in society and always bearing down women. In fact, sometimes you even have matriarchal societies for reasons that I don't really have time to go into. But at a certain stage, with the development of private property, with the need to determine basically the passage of property from one generation to another, with the need of men to be able to be sure that their offspring were indeed theirs, we have the kind of the locking, the marriage contract, which is effectively a property deal, the locking of women into that kind of nuclear family as we understand it, and in a sense the beginnings of women's oppression. I recently watched a film in which an academic says that in his view, based on his research, the condition of women in ancient Athens, with all the things we know about the democratic political system apparently of ancient Athens, was comparable to the condition of women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Women would be pelty with stones in the street if they didn't wear the veil in ancient Athens. So we see also here the contradictory development of society that I would consider ancient Athens to be a progressive society compared to what came before it, and it gave us many of the kind of ideas that we still, for example, we're going to tomorrow have a session on the materialist dialectics of ancient Greece. But at the same time it did so on the basis of class oppression and also gender oppression, and he hypothesises that this is not a permanent aspect of the human condition that actually if society develops further beyond private property, which is something that we are fighting for as communists, then we can also see a future in which we have the liquidation of the bourgeois family, as he called it, which is also called Poor and the Communist Manifesto, and the genuine liberation of men and women from this ridiculous system. To just give another example, a concrete example of this, I did a law degree and I remember learning in English legal history that back in even a period of the Renaissance, and as late as the 17th century actually, so when not democracy, but capitalism and the ideas of capitalism of free enterprise and liberty and all this were still developing, rape was not actually a criminal sexual offence, it was actually a property claim brought by the father, for effectively the theft of his property, his daughter, presumably he was going to want to marry on. In other words, women were literally considered in the eyes of the law a piece of property, and that arises not just from the British or the English in particular, had this false interpretation of the real situation between men and women, but rather it came from private property itself, the ideas reflect the base. But I ought to move on and then also in terms of these all powerful institutions, the state of course, Hegel thought that the state was the embodiment of pure reason, that the state was something that was almost slightly outside of society that as a result of the constant debate and contradiction, he was a dialectician of course, within a parliamentary system, that state would eventually reach the state of Nirvana effectively where it would embody the pure reason of a given culture. Marx didn't quite see it like that, he was a big fan of Hegel but he didn't follow him on that point particularly. He and Engels also, and almost really, saw the state once again as a product of society at a certain level, stage of development, one in which the class struggle, class differentiation and class oppression emerges and once again provides a tool of that oppression. Frankly, things like the question of the family and the state all deserve full discussions themselves so I can't really go into much detail but what I can do is quite a passage from Engels which I think sets it out very clearly. Society at a certain stage of development is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is split into irreconcilable antagonisms which is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of order. This power, a risen out of society but placing itself above it and alienating itself more and more from it is the state. We can see this emerge in the way that the first city states emerged actually, once again I don't have time to go into detail on it, but they basically literally came into being as armed bodies and men. They had to be sent into communities of peasants in order to extract the surplus. This is something that Engels would not have known, actually, of archaeological data at the time, that has been subsequently proven. His analysis has been proven 100% in the general terms. Just to move on, really, we've talked about the material base of society, its importance and the kind of effects that it has on the rest of society. But there's also this question of how things move forward. Mark's talked about the totality of the relations of production. They constitute the economic base, the base structure as it's also referred to, and that the kind of political, cultural entities are the so-called superstructure. This is what something I want to deal with briefly, because it's one of the points on which Marxism is attacked. Critics of Marx and Marxism say that Marxism is an economic determinist theory because it holds the economic base as central and determinant. They accuse it basically of painting history as these developments of the productive forces and then things just happen purely, mechanically as a result of that. In other words, the decisions, the military victories, the decisions of monarchs all just stem, not from their own individual will or any cultural factors, but purely from the state of farming in a given society or something like that. That's a ridiculous idea, and it's something that Engels and Marx themselves both argued against. Actually, the relationship between the so-called superstructure and the base is a dialectical one. We must remember that Marxism is a dialectical theory. What I mean by that is it isn't this kind of mechanical apparatus which responds in exactly the same way in given conditions. Society clearly doesn't work like that. Rather, it's an organic relationship and a feedback loop one onto the other. It's perfectly possible, and we've seen throughout history, and actually the history of revolutions, the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and the history of the Soviet Union, which clearly I don't have time to go into in this introduction, is evidence of that. Evidence of the state power actually influencing, in a fundamental sense, the economic base. If Marxism was an economic determinist theory, then that simply wouldn't be possible in the way we view the world. In fact, it's crucial. If you look at revolutions such as the French Revolution taking hold of the state, capitalism had already begun to develop in the French old regime at that time, but you still had feudal privilege, feudal property relations. It took a revolutionary party to clear away all that feudal rubbish and institute bourgeois land relations. It required the input of the state back on the economic base. But the reason why the economic base still determines is because, first of all, in general, which came first, it was the development of that surplus which gave birth to all of these things. But more importantly than that, it's not just about who came first. It's also the question of which decides. What the economic base does do is it sets a limit, if you like, or a framework to the field of development. Marx said that men make their own history, but they do not do so as they please. In other words, the ideas, the individuals and the movements that are successful that are able to actually carry out their ideological aims are in some way determined by a process of natural selection, if you like, in the sense that what can be achieved on a given level of development. That's why the Roman Republic didn't suddenly just become communist despite the fact you had slave rebellions like under Spartacus and you had a great deal of an accumulation of wealth and capital. Capitalism or socialism or anything else didn't just spring from that because the limits set by the economic base meant that that was ultimately impossible in a general sense. So ultimately, the economic base does decide, but it does not do so in a rigid and formalistic mechanical way. I think that's an important point of stress. But what does happen is, at certain points, this economic base can come into conflict and contradiction with the superstructure which it has itself conditioned. Society, history, life doesn't just stay still. It doesn't stay the same all the time. In fact, actually, by virtue of trying to stay the same, by virtue of trying to continue, it constantly changes. Marks in the Grundriser, the collection of notebooks, some of which were going to be used in his volumes of capital, makes this point that basically a community, a social organism, if you like, has to replicate itself, both in terms of the individual elements as in us, the individuals who make it up, who go about their daily lives, but also in terms of the set of relations that makes it what it is in the same way that an organism doesn't just replace its cells, it also replaces the framework, which makes it what it is. Simply by doing that, actually, it starts to undercut and undermine its base. We can see this in the history of the Roman Republic, how the origin of the big slave farms, the Latifundia, actually impoverished the peasantry, created the ancient proletariat in the cities, which did not play the same role as the modern urban proletariat, and created the kind of social stripe that led ultimately, firstly to the institution of the empire, but ultimately, actually, to the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Also, most graphically and most importantly for our purposes, let's look at capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally the same system, but it has changed and it has developed over the last 200 years, since the institution of capitalist commodity industrial production and capitalist competition. First of all, we've seen the rapid expansion of the capitalist market and capitalist production all over the globe, the creation of the global market, the creation of the working class, which had never existed before in history. But also, through that very same process of competition, monopoly, it's opposite. It's turned into its opposite, imperialism, which is a domination of monopoly finance capital, as characterised by Lenin in his book on imperialism, is still capitalism, but having transformed itself completely and turned itself into its opposite as an inevitable consequence of simply being capitalism. It's part of the inherent laws of capitalism. And so by this process, the actual superstructure ceases to be so conducive for the kind of healthy running of the economic base. We saw this most graphically in the old absolutist feudal regimes, like the old regime in France, where you had a combination, basically, of a huge layer of merchant capital that was really starting to rule the roost, still feudal privilege, the priests owning being some of the biggest landowners in the country, and a heavily oppressed mass of people, particularly peasants in the countryside, who died starving in their millions in the years before the French Revolution. In other words, a system, which now was not only no longer moving things forward, but actually dragging things back. It was almost like society could no longer live with this system. And Marx says in the manifesto that the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces. They became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder. They were burst asunder. The political and social movements that emerged out with the decline and the crumbling of feudalism in that period were in some ways a law of history, in some ways it was society itself crying out with rage and trying to break free from the fetters imposed by a system of its own creation. In other words, it's a dialectical contradictory process that life is constantly going through and will not cease to go through that process, even if we have a social, and hopefully we will, a successful socialist overtime. So how do we apply this to capitalism? It's still exactly the same process going on. In some ways, in some respects, perhaps it's even further gone. We saw the inability of capitalism to move civilization forward and ultimately develop the productive forces in that sense. I would argue with the finished article of imperialism and the coming of the First World War. Millions of people slaughtered for effectively no reason other than to carve up the globe into spheres of influence. That indicates to me a system which is no longer moving society forward. Now, we leap forward literally 100 years and we reached the point where, in Trotsky's words, and obviously he wasn't even writing about this period, he was writing about decades in the past, the conditions for socialism, the conditions for the overtime of capitalism are overripe, in fact they are getting somewhat rotten in his words. We see this crisis of overproduction, this organic crisis which is based within capitalist production itself. Once again, I don't know if it's coterminous with this one, but we have a session on work exploitation and profit which will probably deal with it. We had one on the crisis this morning, so I won't touch on that too deeply, but we have a crisis which is of capitalism, the capitalist system's own making, creating a situation in which we have huge containers piling up on docks and we have oil stocks piling up and piling up and yet we also have people who are homeless, people who are starving to death in all countries of the world and we have whole regions of the earth into pure barbarism as a result of the capitalist crisis and also the intervention of imperialism. That is a sign of a society which is based or a system that has become a fetter on the development of society. But it's not simply put in the negative. Also capitalism, in Marx's words, create the conditions for its own overthrow. It creates its own grave diggers by which I mean it creates the working class. It creates a class of people thrown into the cities quite literally, thrown together into the new modern industrial factories often educated in order to be able to perform their role in society who most importantly of all literally hold in their hands, literally hold in their hands the levers of the economy, the things that make things work. It's for this reason, not out of romantic idealism or poetic justice, Marx is concentrating on the working class as the revolutionary class and this brings me to another aspect of Marx's view of history which is the question of the history of the working class itself. You'll notice in Marx's writings and a lot of writings by the IMT and all other Marxists really, we concentrate on not entirely, but a great deal on struggles of workers against capitalism and we don't do that because out of some kind of fetish. We do that because it is kind of the crystallisation and the generalisation of all the lessons learned by those workers who go out in struggle against capitalism. That was really the communist programme worked out by Marx. He didn't a priori suck it out of his thumb and say this is how a socialist society should look. It was after the Paris Commune in particular which he analysed in great detail where he pointed to that particular event and said this is an indicator of a future society. This is what the dictatorship of the proletariat should look like and Lenin too drew his kind of principles of how a socialist society should be organised from the Paris Commune. But just to kind of leap back briefly to this question of how much can the state do in relation to the economic base, we see it there in the Soviet Union that the economic base, the contradictions latent in imperialism meant that a country is backward as Tsarist Russia, but with some of the most advanced factories in the world at that time with a small proletariat was actually able to overthrow capitalism. A small proletariat relative to the total population was able to take power and overthrow capitalism. But does that mean, just because it managed to do that the economic base was sufficiently developed in Russia to be able to implement socialism? I think the whole history of Stalinism of course we had a meeting last night on the Troski biography of Stalinism I would say the whole history of Stalinism in the Soviet Union the degeneration of the Soviet Union militates against that self-same idea that actually that you had a worker state trying to build socialism in conditions that were incapable of doing so. And so the answer that Troski gives and the answer that Marx would have given and analyse these events, I'm absolutely sure of it was that in order to overthrow a global system like capitalism socialism too must be global and this actually doesn't just apply to capitalism all human societies are in constant interaction with each other whether it be by trade or war or whatever they constantly influence each other. So the idea that one given country kind of goes through these levels of development like it wraps up a score of the development of productive forces and then goes up levels like a video game is completely false and it's quite formalistic rather you often find development on the periphery Marx argued that one of the reasons why English feudalism for example was so kind of perfected in his words was because it came later than everyone else likewise the grip of the feudal lords in England was weaker and so the development of the bourgeoisie was assisted in that respect. So if we look at Tsarist Russia where you had a bourgeoisie that was completely tied handed foot to imperialism and incapable of playing any kind of progressive role and yet a proletariat that which politically, economically might not have been as advanced as the British but politically was even more advanced because it had come straight into the arms of Marx's theory effectively. It was able to effectively leapfrog. This is actually part of, it's not an exception to history it's part of one of the laws of development of the historical process and so there's also another point that I do want to very briefly touch on because I'm already running out of time and that's the question of the role of the individual because another accusation that's levelled at Marx and Marxism is that it focuses so much on these kind of objective material processes that effectively negates any kind of human agency and that we're all just robots effectively playing out a script which has been written by some unknown historical force and I would say that's false as well and Marx himself wrote against that but once again it's similar to the relationship between the base and superstructure what decides you can see this in the role of these kind of great individuals themselves these figures like Bonaparte to use that concrete example about two days before Napoleon was supposed to storm the National Assembly and basically take power to reclaim himself consul he fell off his horse and banged his head and he slipped into a coma and so everyone was simply he was in god's hands effectively they had to just wait and see if he woke up obviously he did and the rest is history but what if he hadn't woken up does that mean that the entire course of French European world history after that point would have been fundamentally changed it would have changed history because his achievements and the way that he coloured them the way that he carried out his role in historical process would obviously have been changed but does that mean that no one would have taken that role I think and I would argue and I think that Marx also in fact Marx in his own writings on this question of Bonaparte hasn't made the same argument that society especially in a revolutionary period has exhausted itself by fruitless class struggle and that reminds me actually of the quote that I read out from Engels when you have this revolutionary period this up swing followed by an ebb and a white reaction and basically classes fighting out on no one be able to land a killer blow in that particular example in France at that time much of society but especially the rich bourgeois who just wanted to settle down and make some profits now they've had enough of their revolution we're crying out for order French society was effectively crying out for a Bonaparte and if Bonaparte himself had died having fallen off that horse he would have found another one that or the Bonaparte might not have been such a successful general that would have of course altered European history in that sense but fundamentally the consolidation of bourgeois property relations which was the underlying achievement of that revolution would certainly have still occurred and we probably would have also seen the restoration of the monarchy so we can see that the individuals do have a role but they don't as Marx said they don't do it as they please they can't just impose on events their own will power and so where does that leave us those individuals we are an organisation are we fatalists did Marx and do we think that well socialism is just inevitable because capitalism kind of makes it inevitable capitalism has entered into crisis and so we just need to wait for socialism to happen obviously not otherwise we wouldn't be having this event there would be no point in us organising we could just basically sit back and wait for it all to happen likewise Marx spent his entire life building organisations like the first international living in poverty in order to build a movement on the fatalists and surely he could have just buried his writings in a time capsule and then got a cushy job as a professor clearly he didn't do that he actually believed that there was a wonderful question actually from something called the holy family that he wrote with Engels history does nothing it possesses no immense wealth it wages no battles is man real living man who does all that history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his own aims but out of this kind of concatenation out of this swirling mass of victory aims of all these different individuals you do see sort of tendencies and historical laws selective pressures if you like beginning to emerge and so there you see the relationship between the individual and the overall objective scope and what we see now today in the crisis of capitalism is an objective historical need for the working class to take power and transform society that of course depends on the working class doing so now we already see we've seen in the history of many revolutions the crying contradictions the inability to continue suffering under the system workers have risen up without a Marxist leadership and they've even taken power the kind of the history of the post-colonial revolutions after the Second World War shows this that in many cases for example in the Cuban revolution Fidel Castro did not lead it on a Marxist programme and yet it moved in a communist direction we can see that those kind of objective pressures that sometimes can become completely overwhelming but what we can also see and the history of the Arab spring and the Egyptian revolution in particular for example this that these spontaneous revolutions without given a clear sighted revolutionary Marxist leadership will not result in the creation of socialism and what that requires is for the working class to kind of reach a full level of consciousness as to its historical tasks in other words to become a class both in and for itself to start to come to terms of the fact of its own class oppression that comes all over the world but also to see the tasks above to look history full in the face and not through the corner of its eye or over its shoulder and that in a sense is the main task of the Marxist view of history that is our task and just to finish Ted Grant once said that the brain is matter made aware of itself I would say that the Marxist view of history Marxism is class made aware of itself and revolution lies at the heart of Marxist theory but unlike perhaps revolutions in the past given the French revolution which was more semi-conscious in terms of its historical role what is required to overthrow a global system like capitalism by a class like the working class is the conscious intervention of a working class with revolutionary Marxist consciousness and that is the task that we've set ourselves effectively the famous Greek thinker Archimedes said give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world well I would say that this Marxist theory is our lever and it is our historic task to use it to bring it to take it into the working class to view the class with the ideas of Marxism and to finish on a quote from Marx which I believe would be the most appropriate thing philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world the point however is to change it thank you very much