 Some might wonder, with the scale of the crises and instability that we're facing across the world at present, why we, as Marxists who've set ourselves the task of preparing for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, are dedicating so much time to this question of philosophy. Is this a bit of a luxury or an indulgence? What relevance does this have to the class struggle? And that skepticism is understandable, given the manner in which philosophy is presented to most people today, which is largely in the form of dense, convoluted, and obscure discussions that tend to begin and end within the walls of university libraries and seminar rooms and seem almost purposefully unintelligible to people outside of those circles. And that might lead some to dismiss the whole endeavor of philosophy as completely inconsequential or unnecessary. But this would be a mistake, because as Marxists, our approach to philosophy is not a purely academic pursuit, but it's also a guide to action, a vital weapon in the task we have set ourselves of changing the world, of liberating the great mass of humanity. And if we're going to be successful in that task, we have to be clear and consistent in our worldview. We can't afford to be muddled and unprincipled in our ideas or get distracted by short-term trends. And this kind of long-term understanding means that we have to take a serious approach to philosophy. And ultimately, a philosophy is something that everyone has, whether or not they realize it. Those that claim that they have no philosophy or don't need a philosophy will actually often tend to merely kind of absorb and reflect the prevailing ideas and prejudices that are common in the society that they live in. As Marx and Engels wrote in a work called The German Ideology, quote, the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch, the ruling ideas. They are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships. And these dominant ideas are conveyed to each of us on a daily basis through the media, through schools and universities, through entertainment. And in the context of our contemporary society, in which the global capitalist system is all over in a state of malaise and stagnation, those prevailing ideas tend to be overwhelmingly conservative, pessimistic, and wholly unimaginative. And this is not accidental. The bourgeoisie, the ruling class, the dominant class in our society, have precious little faith in their ability to offer any kind of appealing future to humanity. And as such, bourgeois philosophy cannot offer nothing remotely inspiring or insightful. It offers no hope to the future, so it kind of contents itself with just attempting to ward people away from any kind of revolutionary alternatives with either tired conservative platitudes or kind of obscure kind of convoluted examinations of largely obscure questions. And these ideas might often come dressed up in kind of erudite or sometimes even radical language, but their essence is the same. We're repeatedly told that there's no real such thing as progress, that humans are naturally greedy and selfish, that the present society is the best we can hope for, and that attempts to change it are doomed to failure. Now, the fact that you've all gathered in this room today tells me that you're not entirely satisfied with those conclusions and you're not alone. That all over the world, millions of workers and youth are searching for a way out of this bankrupt and decrepit system. And if you're looking to understand how we go about finding an alternative, you need a philosophy. You need a framework and a theory that will help you to understand and interpret the world so that you can fight to change it. And the only set of ideas, the only consistently revolutionary philosophy that offers the tools required for this task is the philosophy of Marxism, which is known as dialectical materialism. Okay, so this philosophy of dialectical materialism did not spring fully formed from the minds of Marx and Engels some time in the 19th century. Well, the Marx and Engels themselves were students of philosophy and they based their own ideas on the highest level of development within bourgeois philosophy, which at their time was far more dynamic and revolutionary than it appears to us today. And similarly, those bourgeois philosophers represented the culmination of a long historical process of development within human thought that stretches back thousands of years all the way to the early stages of society. The advent of philosophy in fact coincides with the development of an economic surplus and the division of society into classes. For those of you who attended the talk on historical materialism earlier, you might already have had something of an introduction to these questions. But this development meant that a small layer of people were released from the burden of having to labor to produce the things they needed to survive on a daily basis. Instead, their needs were taken care of by the majority who labored to produce this surplus. And this allowed that layer, this emergent ruling class, the free time necessary to consider questions of science, mathematics, and indeed philosophy. And the most significant instance where a slave society, which is the mode of society that we're examining here, was able to support these kind of breakthroughs in thought in this way was in ancient Greece. Because it was here that we saw the first attempts by philosophers to explain nature purely in terms of nature. So without invoking any kind of religious or spiritual or supernatural entities to explain the world around them. And these philosophers, these early Greek philosophers made incredible discoveries for their time. Some examples are that they measured the circumference of the earth with quite a high degree of accuracy. They developed a limited understanding of matter and atoms. They also discovered a limited form of evolution by studying human embryos. And these achievements rested upon a materialist philosophy. And now materialism in the philosophical sense means something entirely different to how we might use that term in a colloquial everyday sense. It doesn't refer to kind of consumerism or greed or anything else that we might associate that word within our everyday use. A materialist philosophy is one that views the material physical world as primary, as something that exists independently of human perception or sensation or thought. And to illustrate this, we might consider the slightly cliche question of if a tree falls in the forest with no one around to here, does it make a sound? Now a materialist would answer unequivocally, yes. The sound generated by the falling trees is not dependent in any way upon an external observer. Matter and the material world exist, whether or not conscious beings are there to perceive it and indeed our own consciousness our being, our ability to perceive things is subject to the material world. It's part of the external world we inhabit. And because matter is primary in this way, we can therefore say that our ideas are secondary to matter, they're products of the material world. They don't exist outside of it or independently of it in the kind of sort of realm or plane of thought that's somehow different from other aspects of our world. So human consciousness, put simply, is merely the result of matter being organized in such a way that it has become conscious of itself. There's more to say on that, which I'll come on to later, but that is really the essence of it. Now, this point of view puts materialism and particularly Marxism, which is a consistently materialist philosophy. This puts that our point of view in opposition to another school of thought called idealism. And philosophical idealism generally holds that thoughts and ideas exist kind of independently somewhat of the material world. All that material reality can't exist without something to perceive it or can't be made sense of outside of our perception. So where idealists would view matter as primary and as the driving force of reality, idealists would tend to see material reality as being kind of subordinate to our ideas or even sometimes as like a projection of our thought. And this school of thought has largely been dominant throughout much of the history of philosophy. And that dominance can be attributed in part to the nature of how philosophy emerged and developed out of class society, which I touched on earlier. So the division of society into classes between those who worked and those who lived off the labor of others created a further division between mental and manual labor. So the ruling class throughout society have tended to be more educated and more concerned with kind of the world of ideas than the laboring classes whose thoughts have been by nature of their position in society more preoccupied with the kind of everyday needs and demands of survival. And as such, the ruling class who are kind of more sort of bound up in this study of ideas and of philosophy in attempting to justify and rationalize their own elevated position in society have also tended to elevate this idea of the world of ideas as being somehow more refined or more significant than the mundane and imperfect material world, which was of course the world of work, the world that was occupied by the laboring masses. And this prejudice in favor of idealism is particularly apparent in a lot of the later ancient philosophy like that of Plato. And also particularly during the era of feudalism where the dominance of the church imposed a kind of expressly religious idealism upon most European philosophy. This begins to change, however, during the Enlightenment period. And during this time, we see the revolutionary bourgeoisie which emerged in countries like France and England and came into conflict with the established feudal order. In this clash, one of the weapons that was wielded by the bourgeoisie in this battle was a revolutionary philosophy, a materialist philosophy. So for them, for the Enlightenment philosophers, all preconceived notions and prejudices were to be stripped of their idealist veneer and measured purely in terms of reason, which was incredibly groundbreaking for its time. It was a significant breakthrough and reflected the confidence and the dynamism of the bourgeoisie at a time when it was revolutionary, when it was driving society forward. But this kind of materialism also had very serious limits. It's what we would describe actually as mechanical materialism, because in their justified opposition to some of the tenets of idealism, these philosophers sort of stress the fact that humans and their thoughts were subject to material forces and were molded by the society in which they lived. Now, this is, of course, true, but in doing so, they treated human consciousness kind of as something inert, kind of just a passive reflection of the material world. And in this formulation, humans weren't really kind of only just really subject to the material world. They didn't really take account for how humans also interact with and engage with the material world around them. And this was a reflection of the wider mechanical nature of this materialism, which tended to conceive of nature and the universe kind of as something static and constant, rather than something in motion and subject to change. And it was in overcoming this mechanical outlook that Marx and Engels were really able to uncover the true revolutionary potential of a materialist philosophy. So in their critique of this older materialism, Marx and Engels explained how humans are not just passively shaped by external material forces, we also act on those forces and we in turn influence the way that those forces develop and affect our world. And it's in this process of kind of acting on the world around us that our ideas about the world take shape and we start to develop new ways of trying to change our surroundings to suit our needs. And this of course doesn't just happen on an individual level, it's a social process that takes place in increasingly wider and more complex ways as society changes and develops to higher levels. And with every step that society takes, every development has its expression in the overall state of consciousness and in the ideas that tend to prevail throughout society. And this shed some light on one of the favorite topics of Marxism's shall we say less imaginative opponents, which is human nature, which I imagine is something comrades encounter quite a lot as a rebuttal or a supposed refutation of Marxism. It's a very common notion in the sort of bourgeois conception of human nature that all humans share in common a kind of rigid immutable and unchanging set of characteristics or psychological traits, which usually includes greed, selfishness, laziness and that these remain unchanged throughout history. And Marx actually answers this contention in a very short work called Theses on Feuerbach in which he writes, human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of social relations. And what he means by that is human nature to the extent that we can discuss such a thing in a kind of definitive way. Human nature is not fixed, it's a product of history and of society and it's therefore it responds to changes in society and disruptions in those dominant social relations. And so all of these elements taken together demonstrate precisely why it is fundamental that any revolutionary philosophy, any philosophy that can act as a guide to changing society has to have a materialist basis because materialism shows us that we don't actually exist apart from the material world and we're also not just passively subordinate to it. We're active participants in the world that we live in and through our actions, we can change the world, we change society, change nature and we also change ourselves. Now this process whereby we interact and engage with this kind of living world and how this process drives change also brings us to the second major characteristic of Marxist philosophy which is dialectics. So Engels said that dialectics is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought. So this is quite an ambitious statement, I think comrades will agree and it's become quite fashionable among the ranks of modern philosophers to kind of scoff at the notion that philosophy or theory can offer us this kind of level of insight. But I hope nevertheless that I'll be able to demonstrate that dialectics very much lives up to this assertion by Engels. It's a rigorously worked out scientific method that is a vital tool in understanding hugely important aspects of our world. Essentially what it is is a philosophy that's based on the kind of interdependent processes that govern society and nature and the universe and it seeks to understand those processes not as insular and static things but in their motion in the way they interact with other processes and other things. And through that understanding, it reveals once again the role that we can play as human beings in intervening those processes influencing the direction of the motion that they take. So at the beginning I referenced an attitude you encounter among some people who feel that they either don't need or don't have a philosophy. And these people will often tend to limit their outlook to what is sometimes termed common sense. In actuality, I would say common sense or what we tend to define as common sense does actually relate to a very specific branch of philosophy which is called formal logic. And formal logic is probably something that all of you use every day. It's generally based on a kind of simple set of axioms and propositions, the oldest of which are associated with Aristotle. But the most basic of these kind of propositions is that A is always equal to A. So that means basically a thing is equal to another thing of the same quantity and type. And formal logic is extremely useful for a lot of everyday matters. And it's the foundation of much of the modern sciences and mathematics, et cetera. It propelled a lot of the advances in scientific inquiry, particularly those that began during the Renaissance period and continued through the Enlightenment, which allowed a massive wave of investigation into different elements of nature. And these elements were dissected and broken down into their individual parts, which were placed into distinct classes and categories, providing a lot of the foundation for the categorizations that we still use today. And this kind of provided an enormous wealth of data and knowledge, and without this our understanding of much of the whole array of natural phenomena would not be possible. But once again, like mechanical materialism, this mode of inquiry has its limits because it ultimately produces a narrow, what we would call a metaphysical mode of thought that views things in terms of fixed and rigid categories. The focus on cataloging static individual components and their properties ultimately really gives very little sense of how these individual components interact with one another. And it's therefore completely inadequate when considering broader, more complicated processes because closer examination shows that the things that make up these categories and classifications that we use are not actually simple or fixed or absolute, they're riddled with contradictions and variations. And Trotsky described this mode of thought very well. He said that, quote, the fundamental flaw in vulgar thought, as he called it, lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of reality which really consists of eternal motion. And by contrast, dialectics allows us to understand the world in motion, not as a kind of complex of fixed and absolute categories, but as in terms of processes where things are in a constant state of flux and transformation. Now, dialectics is not a new idea. As far as dialectics was put forward as a scientific idea, we can trace its origins back once again to the earliest Greek philosophers who I mentioned earlier. And particularly a philosopher of particular importance to this question is someone called Heraclitus who's famous for having kind of very sort of obscure and complex ideas, but they were also very profound ideas as well. Engels described Heraclitus's thought in this way. He said, everything is and is not. For everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away. And this statement is, of course, completely at odds with that axiom of formal logic we talked about earlier where A is always equal to A. Because that has to mean, if A is always equal to A, that has to mean that A is constant and static. But in reality, if we look closely, we have to recognize that there's no object or entity actually in existence that is always constant and always equal to itself from one moment to another. We have to ask ourselves, is a table or a pound of sugar or a human being really the same from one moment to the next? And the answer on a kind of micro level is no. They're subject to constant processes of internal and external pressure and transformation. And these changes might not be apparent, necessarily from one moment to another, but over time, their kind of cumulative effects will become very clear. The wood and metal on this table will rot and corrode, the sugar will crystallize, the cells of the body will die off while others are renewed. And this is really the essence of dialectical thought that Heraclitus discovered. Everything is changing, is constantly in flux. We step and we do not step into the same stream, he said. We are and we are not. So there's a contradiction that lies at the heart of all existence, particularly the existence of living things, of organic matter. And that's a contradiction between continuity and change, between kind of being and not being. So in many respects, when I finish speaking, I'll possess many of the same attributes, appearance, memories as I did when I first started speaking. But in actuality, I'll have gone through a vast number of changes, mostly invisible, during that time. And this contradiction is really the essence of existence. The tension generated by this contradiction is what gives movement and dynamism to all matter. It's, as Engel said, it's the law of motion within the natural world, but also within human society. Now, this kind of constant state of flux doesn't necessarily mean that change takes place in an even manner in a way that we can necessarily just easily predict from one moment to the next. So it's quite a common misconception actually that significant changes in the natural world or in human society happen gradually. This has been a prejudice held actually by some of the great minds of history that change happens on a gradual and steady basis. For instance, Charles Darwin believed that his own theory of evolution indicated a slow gradual process by which one species transitioned into another, a kind of measured and consistent pace. And this view remained prevalent in evolutionary biology until quite recently. It's probably how, if you are someone on the street, how a lot of people maybe still think about evolution. And this notion that change occurs slowly and gradually without sudden and unexpected disruptions or disturbances can be quite comforting in a way. And as such, that notion has its reflection in politics. You have people who are kind of alarmed by the thought of stormy struggles and battles between classes and they prefer to place an emphasis on kind of painstaking and piecemeal changes where society gradually transitions from kind of progressively to a more just state of being without the need for kind of drastic or revolutionary action. And this trend has a name, it's reformism. And actually it's quite common for people of this persuasion to say precisely that they favor an evolutionary approach to change rather than a revolutionary one. And this is quite ironic. Given that contrary to the assumptions of many people and indeed contrary to Darwin's own understanding, evolution is actually anything but a slow, gradual and peaceful process. It's actually periodically beset by all manner of disruptions and accelerations of great flowerings of biodiversity like the Cambrian explosion, followed by devastating calamities that wipe away millions of species like with the end of the dinosaurs. And indeed the same process is at play in many aspects of the natural world. And also in human society. And it's through an examination of these processes that we see that the fundamental laws of dialectics which I'll explain in a moment are continually being proven by the discoveries of modern science. So the old gradualist understanding of evolution was ultimately overhauled by the discoveries of an American scientist called Stephen Jay Gould who put forward a theory called punctuated equilibria. And this showed that evolutionary development was characterized by long periods of stasis interrupted by sudden swift and drastic changes that launched the whole process forward by great leaps. And the same principles can be applied to human history. We often see long relatively undisturbed periods where change seems to occur at a very slow pace but these periods are also punctuated by sudden abrupt changes through wars or disasters or indeed revolutions. And yet this is not to say as some adherents of theories like postmodernism do. This is not to say that history is therefore just kind of random chaos. That it's a kind of series of unpredictable changes that we can't really decipher any sense from. On the contrary, the dialectical method whether applied to nature or to society allows us to decipher order from chaos. It allows us to understand how sudden and unpredictable changes actually have their roots in the accumulation of smaller changes taking place below the surface. And the philosopher responsible for rescuing this dialectical mode of thought and kind of giving a scaffolding to this method was the German philosopher Hegel. And basing himself on the philosophical and scientific discoveries of the past, Hegel was able to develop a profound understanding of the nature of change and the forces behind it. And his philosophy despite its shortcomings which I will explain was perhaps the single greatest influence on Marx's own ideas. In his inquiries into the natural sciences Hegel was able to overcome kind of empiricism that kind of reigned at the time he was writing which tended to view things kind of in stasis and denied the existence of sudden great leaps forward in nature, the same kind of gradualist understanding I talked about earlier. But Hegel was able to recognize that change actually doesn't take place in a straight line but that a series of small, seemingly unremarkable changes could eventually give rise to sudden breaks in continuity. And he defined this as the law of quantity transforming into quality. And it can be observed in all manner of natural phenomena, great and small. So for example, a gradual quantitative change in the temperature of water can eventually result in a sudden qualitative change from solid to liquid, liquid to gas and vice versa. And to use another example that potentially a bit close to the nerve, the emergence of new COVID variants also shows how small quantitative changes in the form of accidental mutations in the biological makeup of the virus can under the right circumstances give way to a qualitative change in the nature of how the virus spreads. And this example also illustrates one of the other key principles of Hegel's dialectical method for understanding change which is what he called the, which is the interplay of what he described as accident and necessity. So this transformation of quantity into quality can be triggered actually by purely accidental phenomena or events provided the existing kind of build up of quantitative change and tension is sufficient that you only need a small catalyst for the change to become qualitative. And these laws of development within nature apply also to the class struggle. You might see that within a single workplace or even within an entire country the situation may face long periods of ebb in struggle where all manner of attacks and degradation seemingly are met with no response from the workers but eventually a strike or a mass movement can be triggered by seemingly accidental or even trivial matters. But actually it's the proceeding accumulation of tension through wage cuts, redundancies, worsening conditions, aggressive treatment from bosses. These all create the conditions where this one accidental factor can be decisive. And this is, so in this sense all situations, all natural and social orders, however stable and consistent they may seem contain with them a wealth of contradictions. And the growing weight of these contradictions prepares the ground for the emergence of a new order that then negates the existing one. Now Hegel examined this process primarily through the development of human thought and philosophy. So he didn't see his own thoughts or that of other philosophers as simply emerging fully formed from the minds of individual human beings. He really saw the whole development of philosophy and scientific thought as a progressive unfolding of truth and knowledge from low to higher levels. And within this process, each philosophy played a progressive role in developing our understanding of the world and the role we have within it. But they also carried with them their own contradictions. So once this progressive role had been fulfilled, it would ultimately collapse or reach a point where the inherent tensions within this mode of thought meant that it couldn't go any further. And that is until it was negated by a new mode of thought that could overcome these contradictions. But even in that process of negation, the rational kernel of each philosophy is preserved and built into the future development of human thoughts while the kind of accidental or irrelevant appendages are discarded. And this leads to a kind of continual unfolding of development from lower to higher levels, as I said. And as with all forms of philosophy prior, this process is also evident in the way that Marx's philosophy emerged out of a set of contradictory tendencies within philosophy. Now because of the mechanical nature of the enlightenment influenced materialism, a lot of the most significant advances in philosophy made just before Marx and Engels became active were actually developed through the idealist school of thought, most notably in the philosophy of Hegel himself. So the limited nature of the materialism of his day meant that Hegel's dialectic was actually channeled through the kind of prism of idealism, which distorted or limited some of his conclusions. Hegel, who was actually a very consistent idealist, viewed ideas not only as the driving force of reality, but he also considered all reality to be attributable to kind of independent, what you called absolute idea that was primary in all things. It's a very complicated kind of concept to get your head around. And as such, it kind of blunted a lot of the weight of Hegel's dialectical conclusions. But the material world in Hegel's view was merely an expression or a reflection of this absolute idea. But his philosophy, and for this reason, his philosophy was actually somewhat reviled by the German bourgeois kind of radical contemporaries of Marx and Engels, who viewed him as this kind of esoteric philosopher and associated him with the absolutist state of Prussia at the time. But by contrast, Marx and Engels recognized that there were revolutionary implications in Hegel's dialectical method, but that it had been turned on its head by his idealist worldview. Now this kind of process by which they sought to unpick the basis of these areas is explained in detail by Engels in a work called Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. But in essence, what it explains is that Marx and Engels were able to fulfill the full potential of the dialectical method by placing it on a materialist footing, essentially reversing Hegel's idealist formulation. Marx explicitly describes this. He said that to Hegel, the life process of the human brain, the process of thinking, which under the name of the idea, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the creator of the real world. And the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of the idea. With me, on the contrary, with Marx, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected in the human mind and translated into forms of thought. And this is a clear demonstration of the very process of negation that Hegel had laid out as the basis for this kind of progressive unfolding of knowledge from lower to higher levels. So Marx and Engels first of all negated mechanical materialism by giving their materialism an appreciation for the dialectical way that contradiction drives change and motion and development. And they also negated Hegel's dialectic by essentially turning it the right way up by placing it on a materialist basis and by recognizing the true relationship between the material world and ideas. So in this process of negation by merging the dialectical and the materialist approaches, both strands of philosophy were enriched and developed to a higher level. And I think this should be a clear illustration as any as to why we place so much emphasis on our understanding of philosophy because it was only through clarifying their own philosophy and developing the contributions of their predecessors while also correcting their mistakes that Marx and Engels were able to fashion a revolutionary theory that could act both as a tool for analyzing society but also as a guide to practical action which is ultimately what Marx's philosophy is. So Marx and Engels in the same way that Hegel had demonstrated in the realm of philosophy, Marx and Engels demonstrated that each mode of production and its kind of attendance society and ruling class in history had one time played a rational and progressive role but over time that progressive impetus turns into its opposite and the society enters a state of decay and decline and this is true for our own society just as it was once true for slave society and for feudalism. The logic of the capitalist system and the profit motive which once played a highly progressive role and expanding and concentrating the productive capacity of humanity. This has been in the course of developing the productive forces to such monumental heights. This progressive development has now turned into its opposite and it has plunged the capitalist system into crises of overproduction and the very impulses that lent capitalism, its dynamism and its vitality have now become the sources of its own decline. Yet at the same time, and I'll come to the end here, these contradictions bring forth the seeds of a new society that can now negate capitalism while retaining its progressive essence in the form of a massive expansion of human production and capacity but that can now be turned to the genuine interest of human need and this application of the dialectical method to history is really what sets Marx and Engels apart from kind of other socialist thinkers who are more kind of motivated by kind of moral indignation with capitalism. Marx's theory of historical materialism which is the philosophy of dialectical materialism applied to human society shows that it's precisely through the progressive development of the old order, the old mode of production that the seeds of the new society are planted and it is through the kind of abundance developed by centuries of capitalist accumulation that socialism becomes attainable. And a socialist revolution therefore doesn't just undo capitalism, rather it clears away the rot and the irrationality of the old system while retaining this abundance and but reorganizing that abundance on a planned, a scientific, a democratic basis. And this is the goal of achieving that that many of us in this room have dedicated ourselves to as Marxists. By the end of this weekend, there'll be even more of you who are committed to that goal. And to that end, we have to recognize the importance of a clear and consistent philosophy as a tool to understand and interpret the world but also most importantly to change it. Thanks for that.