 Dweud, sut ritheg oedd gan ymgyrch o'i sefyllfa ymarfer o'r Llyfr gefynol wedi'i adrodd Llyfr. Mae'rabb oedd y lle strydd yn eich gweithfynu yn ddod, ac mae'n ymwneud hynny. Mae'n gwneud rhaid i ddod o'r ddaf ni yw'r ideaeth ar gyfer y dyma Caerdydd. G на gynnynu'r yma i ddechrau'r iawn i ddechrau, iまでch gwaith o'r cyfnod, socialism and capitalism. We're going to have a discussion now on Marxism and Postmodernism, and we'll be looking at whether progress is possible with Hamid Lleidonath. This is a really essential topic for us. The ideas of postmodernism are completely pervasive in struggles for women's liberation, anti-racist struggles, LGBT liberation struggles, and yeah, if we're going to be able to combat that and be able to make these struggles things that are capable of actually ending oppression and exploitation, then we're going to, you know, need to understand the ideas thoroughly. So yeah, we'll have Hamid speak now for an hour, then we'll have a discussion for kind of 40 minutes or so, and yeah, then Hamid will come back at the end. After that we'll have a discussion on whether Marxism is fatalistic, so make sure you stick around for that as well. So Hamid, I can't actually see you, but I'll assume that you're ready to go, and I'll unmute you now. Thank you Grace, and thank you Camrys. I thought the previous session was really an excellent session, and as you'll see, the present session is kind of flowing on straight from that discussion. Now, before we start, I think it is important to answer the question, why should we discuss postmodernism? Because I've been met a couple of times with Camrys and, you know, contacts, and so I'm going to say, why is there any need of discussing postmodernism? This was a buzzword in the 80s and the 90s. You had names such as Liwetard and Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guaderie, Derrida, these were big names, and they're not really anymore. Not many people actually discuss these things, not even in academia, although there is still some of it. And even someone like Foucault who was probably the most enduring name of these people, he's kind of lost a lot of his rock star status. But in my opinion, it's kind of like the coronavirus where you have a general disease which is postmodernism. The original strain has kind of died out, but it's really mutated into a vast variety of different ideas and trends and schools of thought throughout academia. You know, we have queer theory, intersectionality, postcolonialism, modern type of feminism, all sorts of identity politics. All of these are based on postmodernism and probably a few more that I don't even know of. Still, this goes even deeper, I would say, throughout the social sciences in the study of history, and even as we heard before, in the natural sciences, and of course throughout politics today, really, we see many, many, many ideas and so-called theories which are all based around the same basic worldview of the original godfathers of postmodernism. Now back then, these people, they were originally kind of on the periphery of academia, they're kind of outside, as you can say, within academia, but today really postmodernism is probably the or at least one of the main ideologies of the established order of capitalism. And the ideas that they put forward might sound very radical and progressive, but in reality, behind all of this confused and convoluted language, what you have is the most reactionary and counter-revolutionary ideas. And as Marxism, as Marxism is very important that we understand this and we understand that we cannot give any concessions to these ideas. On the contrary, it's our duty to go on to the offensive, we need to demolish them and expose the reactionary nature in front of all the workers and the youth that they try to influence. Now the first question you might ask, which is quite a difficult one, is what is postmodernism? And you really look, when you try to, you know, you get a book on postmodernism and you look, you never get a straight answer for anything, let alone this very simple question, because what we're often told is, oh no, this is a, you cannot define it because it's indefinable per definition, right? You can't explain it because it's opposed to explanations. And according to Jean-François Lyotard, who was the person who coined the term, he says he defined the postmodernism as incredulity towards meta narratives. Now, what the hell does that mean? In plain English, it means the rejection of a comprehensive worldview. And you might think, wow, that's very profound. You know, I've never thought about this. But you see, these people are not simplistic like us. They say that it's impossible to have a single worldview. But if you're like me, you know, quite stupid probably, or if you're a child of six, you might scratch your head and be like, hold on a minute. Isn't that a meta narrative itself? Isn't that a comprehensive worldview explained in four or five words? The only difference you see is that postmodernists reject all other meta narratives than their own. And this is really the crux of it. And most importantly, what they reject is Marxism. But we'll get back to this point. Another element which is often connected with postmodernism is this rejection of the notion of progress. Michelle Foucault said that we have to, this is a quote, free historical chronologies and successive orderings from all forms of progressivist perspective, i.e. again translation, that progress is a figment of our imagination. We put this notion of progress on history when we study it. The development of science, of philosophy, there's no progress in it at all throughout history, but only different ways of interpreting the world. And furthermore, this world that all these different people have tried to interpret does not even correspond to our interpretations of them. This is just our, basically, as we talked about before on the question of subjective idealism, is our subjective notions that we impose onto the world. And yet, you see, this is the thing, they say there's no progress in history or in the history of ideas. And yet Foucault and all these other people, they place the rise of their school as the only one who can, who could explain this, right? So I hope you're not confused, but basically what they're saying is there's no progress in history or in the history of ideas. All ideas are as good as any other one, whether it's the ideas of a caveman or Aristotle or Hegel or Marx. None of these were stepped forward for humanity or humanity's understanding of nature and society until postmodernism came about and exposed this whole sham of belief in progress. So nothing is progressive, in other words, except postmodernism. And you might think this is really a joke because it's really childish, but this is actually the type of contradictions that the postmodernism, postmodernism, tie themselves up in at every single turn. But the most fundamental notion underpinning all of this is what we discussed in the previous session, which is subjective idealism. It's the idea that there's no objective reality independent of human consciousness. Now Derrida, one of the postmodernists, for instance, he's famous for having said that there is no outside the text. What does that mean? It basically says that meaning, I acknowledge, is not related to reality, but only to itself. If we have a word that we use, according to him, it's not related to any particular thing that we're trying to refer to. But it's only defined by its relationship to other words and ideas. So if I want to understand something, first I need to understand all the words that give this word a context and so on. If I want to understand human, I need to understand arms, legs, biped, these kind of things, and then I understand human. It's not actually related to any human being in the objective, in the external world. We might have a word for a dog or a cat, but according to Derrida, these things are merely basically creations of these concepts, like creations of the human mind, and they don't really correspond to any real dog or cat. And on this basis, in fact, Derrida goes on to reject the question of concepts altogether, of generalizations altogether, insofar as, in particular, that they correspond to anything objective, to an objective phenomenon. According to him, all concepts are subjective, and in fact, he goes even further. He says concepts, let's say lawfulness and nature, causality, identity, and any other form of generalization that we might have are in fact oppressive, that because they don't have anything to do with reality, what the real function is, is to put a straight jacket over the mind of human beings. And therefore, according to these people, freedom, according to Derrida, he calls it deconstruction. So freedom consists in deconstructing these concepts by changing our language, by using rhetorical tricks in order to liberate ourselves, basically. And this is presented as something really deep and thoughtful. In reality, of course, thank you. Actually, you don't need to give me time, Grace, I have a watch in front of me. But in reality, this is an extremely simplistic and one-sided understanding of human knowledge. If our concepts do not reflect in any shape or form some objective truth that Derrida claims, and if meaning cannot be just generated and deconstructed at any human being, you know, individual whim, then how can we communicate? You know, why does Derrida bother writing texts when there's no objective or kind of a common basis for our language and our concepts? How can we even acknowledge that we're all experiencing the same reality if we're chronically kind of barred from accessing this said reality? Now, what these people would tell us that, oh, these are just, these are two simplistic questions, so we shouldn't, we shouldn't really ask them. But it just really goes to show to the extremely flippant attitude that these people have. Language, in reality, you know, they misify language and discourse and all of these things. But language is a product of the development of human beings. In particular, it's been proven many times that it's directly related to advanced and complex collaboration, i.e., in the production, in labor for the production and reproduction of life. Human beings collaborate with each other, and in order to do so, they need to generalize certain features, how do you say, discover certain general features of nature so they can communicate these things with each other and collaborate. But obviously, these people do not go anywhere near this. Now, Foucault is often, as a postmodernist, taken as being more serious than other postmodernists, because when you write his text, you see that there's heaps and heaps of facts. Of course, most of them are completely irrelevant. A lot of them are made up or completely distorted and taken out of context. But nevertheless, this fact that he has these extremely, you know, these long books of random facts with endless caveats and so on, this gives it like a quasi scientific appearance. But as I think we're going to see, his idea is qualitatively the same as the other postmodernist. Foucault criticized Derrida because he said, well, you're not allowing for a common point of reference for humanity, what we just criticized him for. But instead of drawing the logical conclusion that in order that acknowledging such a point of reference exists in objective reality, instead of doing that, he remained in the sphere of subjectivism. Instead of saying, no, our common point of reference is the objective world, he says, no, it is still the point of reference is in the subjective mind. According to him, man, and this is a quote he says, is the foundation of all positivities and present in the element of empirical things said in a normal language. It means that it is not the material world, i.e. the element of empirical things that form the basis of our knowledge. But it is our viewpoint that is the basis for what we know as the material and external world. In other words, the mind is a primary element and reality is its product. But in order to overcome this problem of Derrida, of humanity not having a common point of reference, Foucault introduces a new concept, which he calls the historical a priori. This is something that I think Thomas talked about before, Kant had these a priori implanted concepts into the human mind that allowed us to reach truth in a certain way. Well, Foucault has what he calls the historical a priori or what he calls epistemies, which is just a fancy way of saying general court culture or discourse of any given historical period. What he says is that our reality, the way that we view reality is determined by these ideas which are implemented, inserted into our minds, basically, by general culture and discourse in any given epoch. But then the question is, where does this culture come from? Well, according to Foucault, it comes from something he calls power. And this power in turn is based on knowledge and on the human relations which produce knowledge. In other words, I know this might sound complicated, but it's really not. Power is created in the human minds and in particular in the minds of scientists, philosophers, cultural influences and so-called thinkers such as Foucault himself. So to sum up, in case you lost the thread, this is how his train of thought is. Reality is created by men and their thoughts, which are created by epistemies or culture, which is maintained by power, which is made by knowledge, which are the ideas created in the minds of men. And there you have it. That's subjective idealism for you there. It's our ideas which create objective reality. Now, Foucault is really a slippery eel. You read him every single book. He just introduces new concepts and new things, new caveats, and he basically moves the goalpost at every single turn. But fundamentally he maintains that reality is created by the mind. And therefore his work is nothing but the most elaborate case for subjective idealism. According to him, thoughts do not reflect objective reality. There's no such thing as truth or falsity and one of the ways that we can see this according to Foucault is by doing drugs. This is not a joke. This is a quote where he says, we can easily see how LSD inverts the relationship of ill-humour and stupidity and thought. It no sooner eliminates the supremacy of categories than it tears away the ground of its indifference and disintegrates the gloomy dumb show of stupidity. Now what does that mean? He says basically that LSD-induced swarming hallucinations help us realise that our scientific categories and notions are just figments of our imagination. And so we're wrong in designating someone as stupid or intelligent because there's no such thing as right or wrong, truth or false, true or false. All we have is a categorical mass. And there you have it. I mean, this is not only extremely stupid, but it's all very, very reactionary because it actually romanticises drug abuse, which is something they do all the time, romanticise the most reactionary and barbaric parts of society. Now, as Marxist, we don't deny the existence of subjectivity. Every human being has their own background and a limited point of view. However, we also understand that there is an objective reality, one objective reality, which exists independently of our subjective point of view. And we're just a small part of this objective reality. But via our activities, we're able to investigate and understand this world that we live in. And the whole history of humanity, in fact, is in essence the history of our increased understanding of this objective reality and our mastery over nature. Now, the postmodernists, as I said in the beginning, they base themselves on this rejection of meta narratives, i.e. rejection of a comprehensive worldview. Well, when they say this, they oppose this exact idea that I just explained. According to them, it's a dogmatic thing to just abide by one philosophy. Instead, what we have to do is pick and choose from all sorts of ideas. I mean, this is quite trendy in academia today. If you're a student university, you're often told, you pick a method and you analyse a particular case as if any method and any theory is equally through. You just say, oh, we're going to go with a little bit of discourse theory here and maybe I'll take a little bit of something else there. So this is the basic fundamental principle of postmodernism. But the point is that they're not telling us to pick the best and most true ideas. The point is that they're telling us to choose deliberately incoherent ideas. And of course, it makes sense because if you accept that reality is subjective, then there's no single method of philosophy which can explain reality. Sorry. For instance, queer theory tells us that we can... Oh, sorry. And if you accept that, you also have to accept that we can also form and change our own reality ourselves as individuals. So queer theory, for instance, tells us that we can basically wish away biological gender. Postcolonialism tells us that in different nations, different parts of the world, there are different realities. We can't assume that it's the same reality which exists for the advanced capitalist countries and the ex-colonial countries and so on and so forth. And of course, the main target of all of these ideas is Marxism because it is the most comprehensive, unified and holistic worldview out there. They try to paint Marxism as some kind of dogmatism. But in reality, Marxism, by definition, is incompatible with all forms of dogmatism. In reality, they are the ones, as a postmodernist who make the most dogmatic, sweeping generalizations and reject scientific thought. Whereas Marxism is based, as a matter of fact, on a synthesis of all the previous schools of thought. This is what we discussed again in the previous session that Marxism has not... We don't think that thinking or philosophy started with us. We place ourselves at the end of a long way of development of thinking of human beings. We base ourselves on the best elements of different schools of thought which, in one way or another, have advanced humanity's understanding of the laws of society and nature. And the fact that these ideas in Marxism can come together as a harmonic holistic worldview is only a reflection that they serve to raise our understanding of the words of this one single world of nature, of objective reality which is lawful and interconnected. Of course, our ideas, human ideas are not absolute. They are generalizations, abstractions you may, of phenomena that we meet in the real world. But again, according to the postmodernist abstraction or generalizations, as such, are oppressive by the very nature. But if that's not in itself the crudest form of generalization, I don't know what is. But the fact is that whether you like it or not, generalization is a main characteristic of all human thought. Hegel once said that you can never describe what you see immediately in front of you. In other words, every word that you use to describe something is just a general concept, is a generalization in itself. When we think about the word human, we don't think about any particular human being. Our understanding is not based on this particular human being, but on all the individual human beings which we have interacted with and experienced during our lifetime. And more importantly, on the basis of the experience passed down to us by former generations of having interacted with other human beings. And therefore, when we meet a human being in the real world, we expect them to interact with us and act in a certain way. Of course, again, with each interaction and with each advance in humanity's knowledge of human beings, our knowledge also becomes deeper and truer in a sense. The real question is not whether we can or cannot generalize. The real question is to what extent do our generalizations correspond with the real objects that we are referring to. The postmodernist, they object and say, obviously they say that nothing corresponds to our general concepts. In other words, there's no such thing as what they call identity. And by identity, what we mean is the characteristics which separate different forms of things. So, for instance, what makes a human or a flower a flower, aside from all the accidental elements which are a part of any given individual human being or flower, what makes it that particular thing? That's what we in philosophy call identity. But Foucault, he says that identity, again, sorry about all these difficult quotes, but I feel like if I don't quote, then we just appear like charlatans just assuming things. So, I will translate this. It says identity is in itself only a parody. It is plural. Countless spirits dispute its possession. Numerous systems intersect and compete. So, what he says basically is that nothing is composed of one thing, but of many things. So, there's no such thing as identity, but only difference, infinite difference. And the postmodernists are completely obsessed with this idea of difference. But once we take a closer look at this again, we see that this is a completely incoherent idea. If something is composed of different things, then surely that implies that those different things have a separate identity themselves. If you talk about reality, just being one mass of different things without any inner differentiation, i.e. without any separate identities, then you're basically saying that reality is just one big undifferentiated lump, one gigantic identity. I mean, these ideas, this is just something that takes you 10 minutes to think about and you're even less, probably 10 minutes because I'm a bit thick. But no more people looking at this could realise this very quickly. But these people, without blinking, they put it forward as like the latest in scientific thought. In reality, we can only talk of different things if we accept that they have separate identities. But at the same time, it's true, you cannot talk about any individual identity without it being composed of different things. Let's just take human beings. 57% of the cells in a human body are actually bacterial cells. They have no human DNA within them. Would that mean that we cannot speak of humanity as a species? Even if we take one individual human being throughout his or her lifetime, let's take Foucault. Throughout Foucault's lifetime, all the cells of his body would have died and been replaced approximately every seven years. And at the same time, his personality and thoughts, we assume, would have been enriched through life experience. Does that mean that that individual seizes to exist every few years or when he goes from child to adult? I don't think so. But at the same time, we can't say that it's the same person either. It is the same individual on a qualitatively higher level. In fact, at all times, everything is itself and something else. Identity and difference are not two separate categories. They interpenetrate one another. And this contradiction lies at the heart of all existence and is a driving force of all development and change. Now, the postmodernists think that our method is very simplistic or simple-minded. But in reality, they are the ones who are extremely simplistic and one-sided. What they cannot understand is that opposites not only exist, but they coexist and interpenetrate each other at all levels of nature. That is the basis of all natural laws. Everything is propelled, all development and existence propelled by its own inner contradictions. That is the essence of lawfulness, all the laws of nature and society. But according to postmodernists, there's no such thing as lawfulness or what we call in philosophy necessity. There's no necessity. There's only accidents in society and nature. Everything is basically arbitrary and accidental. Foucault says about history that it's just the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice box of chance. Wow, that sounds so profound. You just have to... So dramatic, you might say. And if we realize this, if we just realize that everything is accidental, then we can achieve freedom. But the point is this, how can anyone live their lives and attain anything they wish if they could not count on lawfulness? If we can't count on gravity, causality, or in society, society is also governed by laws. How could these people write books and assume, at least, it would have some sort of desired effect unless they had some idea of how it could be received? Yes, it's true that the world is full of accidents which cannot be predicted exactly, but underlying all these accidents and interpenetrating accidents, in fact, we find general laws operating at all levels of nature and society. Laws which express themselves through these accidents, and true freedom, as Hegel said, is the recognition, the understanding of these laws, the better we understand the laws governing nature and society, the more successful we will be in achieving our aims and aspirations. Of course, again, one of the contradictions of postmodernism is that when they reject lawfulness and say, oh, there's no such thing as lawfulness, that is also a way in itself to deduce a certain lawfulness. It's a generalisation in itself. The only difference between our forms of generalisation and their form of generalisation is that theirs are extremely poor. In the end, the postmodernist type of generalisation is amounts to arbitrary classifications. You say, oh, all things to the left. This is just completely random. These things have nothing, no interconnection with each other. But dialectical materialism, on the other hand, does not, we don't limit ourselves to the immediate and accidental determination of things or random determination of things, but what we try to find, when we try to find general concepts, is that we try to define and look for the underlying contradictions, the fundamental principles which lie behind the development and lifecycle of different things. That means that our generalisations, our form of generalisations are far richer than the crude and dead concepts that postmodernism comes up with all the time. Now, you see, what we have here is not just innocent mistakes. You might think, oh, this is just abstract academic stuff, but what the postmodernists are fundamentally saying is that they are opposed, they are vehement, their main enemy is science and systematic thought itself. Foucault in fact says, he says, knowledge is not made for understanding, it's made for cutting, i.e. knowledge is oppressive by its very nature, it's not a good thing, it's a bad thing. This is an extremely reactionary idea for us, as Marxists, the history of humanity is a history of increased understanding, as I said before, and mastery over nature. But according to Foucault, there's no general direction in this development, in the development of society, science, philosophy, there's no such thing as lower or higher levels, but only what he calls the endless repeated play of dominations and the domination of certain men over others. So history is just aimless and arbitrary and not progressive in character. But he goes even further, and I'm going to read a long text, I'm going to translate it for all of you afterwards, but I think it's important to say, he says, the idea that interpretation precedes the sign, by sign for gorgeous means scientific concepts. So the idea that interpretation precedes the sign implies that the sign is not a simple and benevolent being, as was still the case in the 16th century with the plethora of signs, the fact that things resembled each other simply proved the benevolence of God. On the contrary, beginning with the 19th century, beginning with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, this kind of random why he lumps these together, that was the topic of his essay. It seems to me that the sign becomes malevolent. I mean that there is in the sign an ambiguous and somewhat suspicious form of ill will and malice. So translated, he says that philosophy, conceptual thought played a benevolent that a good role in feudal Europe, as long as it was used to simply prove the goodness of God, the benevolence of God. Later on, however, as science advances, we must assume, it becomes malevolent, it becomes evil. And throughout the works of Foucault and many other postmodernists, what you see is an obsession with undermining the achievements of the enlightenment and the achievements of the progressive sides of the bourgeois revolution. When Foucault writes, he writes, he's written a lot about the history of psychiatry, the history of the medical sciences and sexuality, and in all of these things, he really bends backwards trying to find examples and sometimes it just makes up examples, actually, which undermine the advances of science in those fields and the advances that we normally designate to the bourgeois revolution and the science of that time. It's true that capitalism did not bring about any sort of paradise on earth. Marx said that if money comes to the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore with blood and dirt. That's the Marxist view of the rise of capitalism, but the point is that the postmodernists do not criticize any of the truly barbaric sides of capitalism. What they criticize is a progressive and revolutionary role played by the bourgeois revolution in its struggle against the church and feudal reaction in developing materialism and science and technology in modernizing society. Immanuel Kant once wrote that the slogan of the enlightenment was, dare to think. You can say what you want about Kant, but he stood head and shoulders above the postmodernist. Back then, it was the age of reason you had to dare to think and question the established order as opposed to the dark age of superstition of the Middle Ages. But what the postmodernist criticized is reason itself, is precisely the strong points of the and progressive sides of the bourgeois revolution. In doing this, they put themselves at every turn of events on the side of feudal reaction against the bourgeois revolution. In fact, in essence, this is what postmodernism, in my opinion, boils down to. They not only reject the progress, but they fetishize barbarism, they fetishize backwardness in reality. This is a completely and thoroughly reactionary ideology. In its practical consequences today, they reject the class struggle because it's supposedly a way of generalizing things and it is a meta-narrative, something that applies to the whole world and all of society. Instead, what they promote is a micro-analysis and subjective individual struggles, such as the ones that we see in queer theory, intersectionality, all sorts of identity politics. It's all the individual struggle, the atomization of the struggle, and the opposition to a united, collective class struggle. That's the point. It's not that they are passive. I say, well, we can do this. No, they oppose the united struggle. They oppose the class struggle. They also reject materialism because it's a scientific philosophy, because it's based on the proposition that the objective world exists independently of human beings. And because we, as Marxism materialists, we claim that it's possible to discover the underlying laws of this world. And also, finally, they absolutely reject socialism because it implies that such a thing as progress exists. In fact, they would tell you that if you believe in progress, if you fight for socialism, you are oppressing society. You are pulling down your own generalization over the heads of other people. Now, they also claim to criticize liberalism, but in fact, if you can see all of these things, this sentimentalism, moralism, individualism, this is all just the most degenerated and rotten form of liberalism itself. The only true enemy that postmodernism has, and this permeates all of their texts, is Marxism and the working class struggle. And the ruling class is very, very aware of this. There's a very interesting, very interesting CIA report from 1985. This is just about the time where postmodernism was beginning to kind of reach the top of academia. It was declassified in 2011. I actually forgot the title here. I can post it in the chat. But the author of this, I actually, I think everyone should read this because there's a lot of interesting things there. But the author of this report applause people like Foucault and Claude Levy-Strauss because he says that they performed a critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences. And there's a lot of stuff where he goes on to explain how they basically took over academia on the basis of a decline of the class struggle and the defeat of the working class and youth movement of 1968 and so on. It's very interesting, but I don't have time to go into this. But the fact is that the ruling class is aware of the role that postmodernism can play. That was in 1985. Today, postmodernism is becoming an increasingly important weapon for the ruling class in order to divert young people away who are being radicalized under the impact of the crisis of capitalism away from a revolutionary struggle and down safe channels. And what it really reveals at the same time is the complete decay of capitalism and bourgeois philosophy. It's not true, as Alan said before, it's not true that progress is not possible. Progress is not possible under capitalism. In fact, and this is the important point, that all real progress under capitalism, all steps forward for science, all real achievements serve only to show the limitations of this system. The more mass production advances, the more science advances, the whole idea of private ownership of the means of production comes under question. And undeniably, every step forward, every real step forward in science and technology, ideas and so on, raises the idea of the need for socialism. In other words, the productive forces, what we are seeing in this discussion, is a productive forces coming into conflict with the existing relations of production. That, I think, is the material basis for the idealist degeneration of bourgeois philosophy and the rise of postmodernism, as we heard as well before. Capitalism came to the world fighting against everything that was rotten in feudal society. The bourgeois revolution based itself on the most advanced ideas and materialism in particular. It based itself on truth as a means to strike blows against the superstition and obscurantism of the church. Now that was a huge step forward for humanity, but today capitalism has become ossified, it's become reactionary, it's become conservative. And in order to justify its own rule, it is deeply dependent on distorting the truth. That is the role of postmodernism, to cover up the reactionary ideas of the bourgeoisie, to wrap them in a radical sounding rhetoric and feed them to the workers and to the youth, in order to rally them behind the system. Now Marxism on the other hand, as the philosophy of the revolutionary class, can only base itself on truth, on objective truth. Lenin once said that Marxism is almighty because it's true. People think that sounds like a little bit of a religious thing to say. But what it means is that our ideas are based on the accumulated experience of humanity. We reject this idea, this postmodernist idea, that we can superimpose our ideas onto the material reality. But by understanding the laws that govern objective reality, the laws of nature and society, we can achieve our aims and aspirations. That's the essence of dialectical materialism. And just like the bourgeoisie revolution could never have succeeded without a philosophical struggle, the socialist revolution cannot be successful without a determined struggle for dialectical materialism against all of these reactionary philosophies of the capitalist class today. Thank you very much.