 yn ei sgwtriad ymddangos, o'r ysgawdd yn llawer o'r hyn sydd ymddiadol. OK. Yn ymwneud am gyflawn i'r ysgawdd, oedd y gallwn ni. Rwy'n oserodd yn y bwysig. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio. Yn ymwneud, rwy'n gweithio, mwy i'r gweithio. A fyddai'n gweithio. Fy nesaf, rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Wysiwch chi'n gweithio i chi, ond rydyn ni wedi gweld i'n gweithio i'r ddweud yma. Rydyn ni'n gweld i'r ddweud hynny'n gweithio i chi. Rydyn ni'n gweld i chi, ond y dyfodol gweithio i gael, ydych chi'n gweld i'r rôl yn clas. Ydych chi'n gweld i'r rôl yn clas yn gweithio i gael. A wnaeth i chi gael yn y randwm. Randwm yn gweithio i gael yn gweithio i gael. The way the ruling class itself looks, at itself, looks at the society that it has created and where it's going, depends on the period in which you look at that ruling class. If you look at the ruling class, the bourgeois ruling class, in the period of its rising to power, it was much more materialist, much more scientific, much more progressive, you could say, in its outlook. ..en gyddioges ein cyfrion a gwwylag'r newydd... ..dwy fydd hynny o'r olig oeddech chi'n mynd i... ..a chefwyr y byddai cyfrion arall. Once they've consolidated their power... ..and have become the new rule in class... ..and their system starts to get old... ..and starts to reach its limits, the view of the ruling class... ...also begins to change. that actually explains post-modernism. There is a lot of people who think that they are so clever because they have read all this post modernist stuff, I don't know how they do it by the way because I have tried and I can't make head or tail of a lot of those texts because they are in reality meaningless because they do not represent the way things really happen but post-modernism who dominates the academic world it is everywhere, it eseaps into every corner iawn i'n gyfw supplierau hynnyddiadau i chi mae'n gwybod o'i chi gwirio sydd ystil yn ynbos presentsr iawn. Felly, fydd gyrfa'r cyfnodd, sef ddim o'r gyrfa'r cyfnodd. Y dyma efallai fydd ymdweud. Efallai gwirio'r cyfnodd. Efallai geisio yma yn gyfrannuartetau. Fe wnaeth eu bod yny ddefnyddio i gyd yn mynd i'r gyrfflŷigol yn 11 o 23 o 23 o 23. Felly yn rai gyrfa'n cyfnodd gyda'r gyrfa'r gyrfflŷigol. Roeddwn ni'n gwybod gael gynhyrch yn ddweud, ein gwrs, yn gweithio, ein rhaglen, y bryd, y gwrs, y rhaglen, ac yn ddweud yn ddweud y Rhymhreith Roedd, ac rwy'n gwybod, byddwn ni'n 100 gyrs a 100 gyrs yn gweithio, ac rwy'n gweithio ei wneud i'r llwytoedd. Ac rwy'n gweithio i'r gwybod, ond yw'r lle'r llaw yn y gallwn gweld y gallwn gwirionedd. mae'n gweithio'r llaw oesaf. Fe'r cefnodr yn amlaed ei gilydd a feather yn amlwg gydol. Mae'n deserio arall a'r amlwg yn hynny'n pieroeddio. Dyn nhw'n mynd o hyrdech chi sy'n bebydd hwnnw, mae'r Sarfauo'r Sefydlieis yn y hirthfawr ar gyfer ymgyrch.eddwn ni'n glwwlaeth. Mae'n golygu'n cael y byddwyr o'r lle mae'r bysiau yn gyfweithio ar yr hyn yn hyn. Ac mae'n cefnodwg參 âw, mae'n cael ei amlwg yn hynny. Ond we all going out how you form, we are a product of long process literally of billions of years. They deny the idea that such thing is a progress. This is the psychology of a ruling class in decline. It's the psychology as a ruling class whose system survived well beyond is sell by date. Mae gennym ni ddweud o'r corecterau'r cyffredin iawn. Mae gair mewn ffordd yw'n teimlo iddyn nhw. Mae'r gynhymhwyl i'r gweld hwrs ac yn myhfyrwydder, ond y cysylltu hanes wedi'u hyfforddi'r cyfriddwyd drwy amryl, a hwn yn ymuno o'r cyfriddwyd ac yn ystod o'r grifthau, ac mae'n gweithio gwahanol yn gweithio. Mae'n gweithio ychydig yn ysgrifennu, ac mae'n ymddorol yng nghymru. Yn ymlaen i'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, Darwin yn ymddangos gweld yn ei ddweud i'r ideaeth, ac mae'n ddweud o'r ffordd. Mae'n ddweud i'n ddweud ymddangos ymddangos i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ffyrddol sydd yn gweithio. Lythau yn cael ei ddweud fel Homo sapion. Efo'r ddweud fel cofnod y dyfodol dyw'r cyffredig iawn, ac o'r gwrddol yn y dyfodol, o'r gwahol, o'r ddweud ychydig, o'r ddiweddol, oedd ydych i'r lleol yn ei ddweud oherwydd. Yn ei ddweud, mae yna'n golygu gwybod, mae'n ddweud, mae'n golygu gyd, Mae ein cyfaint mewn awr, y gwybod, yr urnod'r iawn ddwylo'r awr neu bwydodr, spouse yna hwn eich gwneud o'r awr, o gyfan eu hwn o, o'r awr o, o'r awrdd o'r awr o'r awr o, o'r awr. Mae'r самodau gweithio'r arbennig a'r ysgaf trwy'n eich gwneudio'r awr o. Felly os yw'r amgylcheddou, mae eon eich dynhyrch o'r proses? O ar gyfan pe llawer o'r amgylcheddou. mae'r peth yn siarad hynny'r hynny yn ystod yn ymwneud yn ei dweud. Ac mae'r ddefnyddio'r cyhoedd, ac mae'n dweud i'w ddiwedd, mae'n edrych y cyhoedd, mae'r ddechrau a'r ddechrau a'r ddechrau a'r ddefnyddio'r cyhoedd, mae'r ddechrau a'r ddechrau a'r ddechrau yn ei ddefnyddio'r ddechrau. The Roman Empire, based on slavery, had a progressive element to it. It was a terrible thing, slavery, but they developed the society through it, eventually went into crisis and collapsed. In the latter period, the mood was, the world is ending, where is it going? That's actually where Christianity originated and got such a huge grip on the minds of millions of people because it offered a kind of solution to that crisis. In feudalism towards the latter period, people felt the end of the world is nigh, the end of the world is coming. What was coming was not the end of the world, but the end of the system they lived in. Today we have them. How many times have you had a Jehovah's Witness knock on your door? How many times? The number of times I've been involved in discussions with them. Sometimes I feel so sorry for them, they're gripped by these ideas. But they start off by asking questions which try and see whether you think everything is so bad and desperate and we need something new, something that can offer a new kind of life. What it means is in reality that when a system is in decline and towards its end, while there's a kind of doom and gloom, there's also within it the seeds of a new society. The Enlightenment and the Advanced Ideas of the Bourgeoisie, as feudalism was collapsing, represented the new society that was being born. Today, under capitalism, we have the same thing. We are part of the seeds of the new society which is already present within the old. We just need to break the shell of the old society to come forward. But as I said, progress is near that today. You talk about progress, as I said from lower to higher, you're near that by the postmodernists. How dare you talk like this? But as I said, it's because of the impasse of the system. They can snare. I bet if I ask most of you young guys and girls, what's your housing situation like? Have you got a stable flat that you know you can live in for the next 10 or 20 years at a reasonable rent? Or have you actually considered when you might get a mortgage and buy a house and get a stable life? I bet there's very few. The only way you can achieve that today if his mum and dad has got plenty of money to help you on the road, climate change, every day it's on the news. The other day there was news about Tuscany being hit by massive flooding and people being killed. And then there's the wars, two wars at the same time, two main wars because there's lots of others, the Ukraine and Gaza and the deepening economic crisis. So you can understand why some people say, where's the progress? Well, it's true. Systems also have regression. When they're in crisis, they start to unravel backwards. That can lead to the conclusion that progress is a load of bunkum and bonobunk and it doesn't make sense. But we know that it's actually part of the crisis of the system. Now, the way we look at this question of randomness does depend on your philosophical outlook because randomness is like chance. Anything can happen in any direction and anybody can play their individual role in doing that. It means you have an idealist philosophical outlook. For us idealism is not the ideal of having an equal society. The idealism is that it's the mind, it's the spirit that dominates matter. We reject that. We have a materialist approach, which again doesn't mean that we want the big cars and lots of money, which is what a lot of people think materialism means. It's one meaning they give. From a philosophical point of view, it means we have a collective approach. We understand the lawfulness of history and we believe that it can be understood. And the ability to understand society means the ability to act upon it. I'll go back to this. The question is, are we completely free to do whatever we want? Can we just tomorrow morning announce the mass revolutionary party and the storming of the Winter Palace? I think all of you know that that freedom we don't have. We don't have that freedom. We can do it. It will have no impact tomorrow morning. But the point of understanding is we know that the conditions are maturing when that precise same call will have an impact and it will lead to a mass following of revolutionary ideas. Now, another aspect of this thinking is the question of human nature. Part of the thinking is that human nature is always the same, unchanging. Now, at the same time, idealism says it's humans. Human thinking, it's the mind that changes society. But if human nature never changes because it's always the same, you know, every time you propose a change, they say, oh, human nature wouldn't allow for that. Where does the change come from then? If human nature doesn't change, but it's the mind that, you know, the human mind that changes things, where does the change come from? Placanov actually took this up and explained that human nature changes. It changes not because you consciously work on it, but it changes because of the changes in the relations in society, the relations of production and the type of society that you live in. So how does this human nature influence the social development of mankind? Where do the changes come from? Are there just chance occurrences? Where, for instance, does the accumulation of knowledge come from and what effect does it have at a certain point? Can we accumulate knowledge or is it just a random picking of the facts here and there? What drives society forward? Now, if you think that individuals drive history, then you have to analyse the individual. You have to analyse the psychology of the individual. We as Marxists don't refuse the role of individuals and Placanov wrote some very interesting texts on that. We start from society, i.e. a collective of many individuals acting together. Therefore, we study systems and how they develop and we look at how a system can give a progressive stimulus and push society forward and the same system at a certain point becomes a break and the system which was so progressive in its earlier days needs to be destroyed and for that you require new ideas. Those ideas appear when society needs them. Engels made this point, Placanov made this point. Placanov in, it's called the indefensive materialism, it's called the monusware thinking, a text he wrote in defensive materialism. He writes this about Marx. The great scientific merit of Marx lies in this, that he approached the question from the diametrically opposite side and that he regarded man's nature itself as the eternally changing result of historical process, the cause of which lies outside man. He says the action of man on that external nature, but acting on external nature, man changes his own nature. He says this contains the essence of the whole historical theory of Marx. Human beings, by working generation after generation and gradually accumulating greater knowledge, conquering tools and methods of production, changing the way they procure their food, clothing and housing, eventually change the conditions in which they themselves live and unconsciously change themselves and change so-called human nature and human nature appears as something very different in each society that you look at. Placanov makes the point. He says the founder of civil society, by civil society you mean obviously class society with a civilisation. Consequently, the great digger of primitive equality was the man who first ffenced off a piece of land and said it belongs to me. In other words, the foundation of civil society is property, which arouses so many disputes. I won't go into the whole quote. But basically, once the early humans had reached the stage where the development of the means of production and technique allowed for such things as herding animals, breeding animals, rather than going to hunt them, planting a seed, growing your food rather than going to forage for it, was a huge step forward for humanity, but it changed the way people related to each other. In this reference to property by Placanov, it's one of the key elements in the history of humanity which changes the way people thought, the way people related to each other, it changed the structure of society, and it changed human nature. People before that didn't have the concept of property. How could they think of property when it didn't exist? Once you've created property and you've done it unconsciously, then humans adapt and change accordingly. To quote Placanov again, he talks about that order that has outlived its day and is preparing to yield a place to a new order. The true character of which will again become clear to mankind after it has played its historical part. Once it's appeared and has been around for a period, humans start to realise the nature of the system they've created. Now, has there been progress? I don't see any hunter-gatherers sitting in this room. Are there any? I don't know. Anybody here goes hunting? Maybe some of you go fishing. I doubt you go fishing because you have to do it as a hobby. Is there any hunter-gatherers? Anybody goes out gathering wild plants? Obviously not. I'm in a building with lights, electricity. I'm using a microphone. We have books on the stalls. We have the internet to spread our ideas. It's obvious there's been a huge development and it's been in a certain direction. At the same time, going back to what I said previously, a system which can be immensely progressive up to a point where that's to become regressive and you can see it, the problems of climate change, the problems of housing, the wars, etc. People are starting to see, are starting to question where is the progress? That's where the postmodernists come in and try and give an answer that, well, progress doesn't exist as a concept. The question is this. Can we look at the history of humanity? Can we look at different societies? Can we see patterns of development? Or is it just haphazard random, just a mass of accidents taking place? We, as Marxists, argue that we can. It starts fundamentally with the way humans procure their means of existence, starting with food, hunter-gathering, for example. The latest studies show that homo sapiens have been around probably for about 300,000 years. This seems to be the latest archaeological evidence from that and fossil evidence. The agriculture came in between 10 and 12,000 years ago in different parts of the world. So we're talking about a very long period of time of extremely slow development, but there was development. Humans were learning to use tools, improving their weapons, etc. Then agriculture came into being, and primitive society, which was based on primitive communism, is destroyed by the development of the means of production and technique. As I said, from stones to cutting, wood, weapons, arrows, spears, gradual accumulation of more and more efficient weapons and tools, and man starts to rise above the primitive condition. Alan referred to the right to be lazy, and I think, you know, human beings, you can look at them as animals who are fundamentally lazy in what sense. Well, we want to produce as much as possible and more with the least amount of work possible. So that's why when somebody discovered that if you breed animals, you get a much bigger abundance of meat and milk and all the rest of it, then if you have to go hunting them, well, you're producing more in theory, less work. Now, subjective idealism, which is an important part of postmodernism, denies the existence of any laws governing human society. They end up looking at history from a subjective and a moralistic point of view. They deny that you can actually understand, and they reject what Marx and Engels established, which was that the motor force of historical events is not individuals as such, but the development of productive forces by society as a whole. There is an example. There's a podcast. There's an article by Joel Bergman from the Canadian section on this book, The Dawn of Everything, which I haven't got time to go into. He deals with it a lot more than I can hear. But it's a book which presents itself as a kind of radical left book written by anarchists, authors and stuff. But they end up denying that there's an awfulness to history. For example, they talk about, there's a title that talks about cities beginning the mind. People wandering the jungle as primitive hunter-gatherers, they didn't have cities, not because they hadn't developed the ability to create them, it's they thought about it, but they didn't want to have cities. That is literally the level of the thinking of these people. To farm or not to farm. A lot of them were going around hunting animals and thinking, it'd be a good idea to have herds. Nah, we won't do that. I'm not interested in that. It's literally individuals and minds saying, we're not going to do it, we are going to do it, etc. It leads to a completely unscientific approach to our understanding. It was Marx and Engels who actually finally, finally brought together all the thinking of previous thinkers and developed the understanding that it's the development of the productive forces which drive society forward. Now, I just wanted to use one example from history. The picture at the back is the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. At school they tell you the war started because this guy was killed. That's how it started. It was an accident and it was a random event. If it hadn't happened, we wouldn't have a war. Well, I looked up some of the figures of the economies of both Germany and Britain in the period 1870 to 1913. I'll just give you some figures. In the period 1871 to 1913, GDP per person was growing in Germany by 1.48% a year. In Britain, it was growing by 0.8%. There's lots of other figures. For instance, the faster German growth came in the context of an initially much lower level of real income and tail catching up with the UK, such that the GDP per person rose from 56% of that of the UK in Germany in 1871 to 74% by 1913. But when you look at other figures, industrial production actually surpassed British production. There's lots of figures I could give. I can't go into all the details. But if you look at them, there's a 30-40 year period in which what was a formerly much less developed economy, the German economy, was moving forward rapidly to the point where it started to dominate the market of Europe. The figures I found dominated most of Europe economically in terms of exports. But it arrived on the scene of history with a much more embedded power, which was Britain, which had its empire, the French had their empire, and other countries. There was a growing conflict of interest between the German economy and the British. With it went the investment, for instance, in a navy. The Germans started to develop a navy, which started to be seen as a threat by the British because they weren't ships just to go up the rivers. They were ships that could challenge the British on the open seas. And everything you read, ignoring that event, you read it and you think this is leading to a conflict. And there's a material reason why it's leading to that conflict. And if we take the actual events of the event that's supposed to have sparked it, in 1914 you could present that event as an accident. In a sense, it was. But the question is why were there people prepared to risk everything to kill the Archduke? Well, there was the oppression of the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We could have had a situation where they tried to kill him and failed. And let's put it this way, imagine if he had failed to kill, the assassination had failed, would the world war have been avoided? Because if your explanation is accidental events, is what explains it, you'd have to say there would have been no world war. But would that have cancelled all the figures? I've got a lot more here, I haven't got time to go into them. You read all of them and you think this paints a picture of an inevitability that's being prepared. Now, what difference would it have made if it hadn't killed him? Well, maybe the war wouldn't have started in 1914, maybe in 1915, I can't say. That's an element of chance. But it was a trigger that started a process which was being prepared. And if you read the actual intentions of the German ruling class, they actually told the Austrians, go ahead, act, and if this leads to a war, all the better. They were looking for the excuse to go to war because they needed it in order to settle accounts with their main competitor, which was Britain. None of that has chance in it. It's part of a process which can be analysed. It is true that in world events you have such things as triggers. For instance, the oil crisis of 1973 is always presented as the cause of the crisis of 1974-75. It was due to, again, same place, by the way, Middle East, Israel, Palestine. But if you look at the figures, nobody who's serious takes a look at and analyzes the economy in the 60s and 70s. For instance, the very sharp declining rate of profit in the 60s through to the 70s, the slowing down of the economy, which was already beginning, you can see the crisis was coming. Then what happens? Something happens that triggers it and that then is presented as the explanation, which explains nothing. Today we have a famous writer for the Financial Times, Wolf. He's written articles on whether the Gaza situation today could trigger a slump. So he's looking at, could this be the trigger? Now, what he says fundamentally is, if we can limit it to the present state, it won't be the trigger that could unleash it. But if it goes beyond Gaza, if it starts to involve Lebanon, the West Bank, and widens out, and then sucks in the Arab countries who then have to act and the price of oil is affected, they're looking at that, it could be the trigger of a slump. But why would it trigger a slump? It's not the accident. That random event you could call it is not the cause. It's the accumulation of the contradictions already taking place. We discussed the question of China earlier on. The death of Mao, now everybody dies sooner or later, obviously. You can say the death of Mao is what caused the beginning of the transition to capitalism in China. But where did it come from? How is it that the death of Mao starts this process? Surely are we saying that one guy dies and then the whole objective situation changes? The truth is, the overwhelming majority of the Chinese bureaucracy already were thinking in terms of opening up to the market. The dang wing was there. It existed prior to that moment. Now, if Mao had lived another two years, you might have delayed that process by a couple of years. But the process was embedded in the objective situation. Now, I haven't got time here to go into the details of it, but I've got an article here on the question of, you know, the laboratory experiments with sand piles where they sit and they just drop grains of sand, one on top of the other, waiting to see when the avalanche takes place. Now, the avalanche will always invariably take place when one grain is added. Now, is the grain of sand the accident that causes the avalanche? In a certain sense, yes. But if you hadn't had the huge accumulation of sand beforehand, that grain of sand would not provoke an avalanche. It's the conditions which have been prepared beforehand. And they call it a self-organised criticality. And it says, which appears in a plethora of real-life situations from coordinated firing of brain cells, the spread of forest fires, the distribution of earthquakes, and I've seen it applied also to the stock market and even to recessions. They do try and understand this phenomenon of the so-called accident, that little random event which triggers something. Now, as I said before, there are long periods in which very little seems to be happening. For instance, the long process of development of the human species in which it seemed that hardly anything was happening. But if you look at it, it was very, very slow, obviously, that the more primitive and less developed the means of production are, the longer it's going to take for society to develop. But what you see is once it reaches a certain level, it accelerates very quickly. And you could say, oh, there was an accident that provoked that. It's not. It's the accumulation from the previous period. And then we get agriculture appearing in different parts of the world. Now, I have got a lot more than I can deal with the time I've got. But there was a debate, for instance, in anthropology, starting at the end of the 19th century, more importantly, the early 20th, in which there was a systematic campaign in the universities to deny evolutionism in the development of society, not so much the physical, biological evolution, but the application of the idea of evolution to society. And it was an attempt to negate the idea that there are stages, to negate Morgan, for example, who came up with an idea that Marx had already discovered on the question of the development of society, on the basis of the development of technique and the mode of production. And you have an individual like Boas, who is the last guy at the end there. He was a German professor in America and set up a whole school of anthropology, who denied. He systematically set about denying the idea of stages and development and laws of development. I actually have a quote where he says that we cannot. He says, it seems impossible to reduce the fundamental beliefs of mankind to an economic source. Or he says, it has been claimed that human culture is something super organic, that it follows laws, et cetera, et cetera, denying the lawfulness of the development of human society and the very idea of stages. And he comes up with this idea and I think, I often wonder, they spend years in the universities discussing this. He says, no, it's not evolution, it's diffusion. What does he mean by that? Somebody somewhere discovers something. It can be agriculture, for example, or planting something. And then other people copy it. Therefore, there's no evolution, there's just diffusion. And I'm reading this, I'm thinking you really are desperate to find a way of negating the ideas of evolution. And this debate amongst anthropologists, there's an American and that's Leslie White is the one with the glasses here. He read capital and he was an active socialist. I wouldn't say he was a fully worked out Marxist, but he had a materialist approach. And he explained, evolutionists do not say that every society must go through all the same stages of development. And it's incredible, it's a similar debate, which I found in Placanov when he's talking about the idealists in Russia were saying, we have to stop the development of capitalism in Russia, look at what terrible things it's done in Britain. And they accused the Marxists of being so deterministic that the Marxists were saying, Russia is condemned to going through stages of capitalist development. Placanov points out that that was not Marx's position at all. He says Marx did not recognise the inevitability of this stage. And then quotes Engels, who actually points out that Russia, Marx pointed out that Russia, if it continues on this road will become capitalist, Engels said, if there's a socialist revolution, a proletarian revolution in the west, Russia need not go through the stages of development towards capitalism. And in the debate in anthropology, which I found between Boas and Lewis, the same kind of idea is there. Once an idea has developed in one part, of course other people are going to copy them. Can you imagine the first agriculture has started to produce a surplus? Other people are going to absorb that knowledge. It will move sideways, let's say, from the original source of discovery. But the idea was humans do not, they don't evolve. There are no laws of development. Societies don't have to go through all these laws and stages that you're talking about as Marx's. And it was always a false debate involved in presenting Marxism as a kind of, you know, Russia must go through these stages. Every society must discover agriculture independently. And if they don't, then there's no evolution. This is complete nonsense that is present in the academic world. And it's because they're desperate to negate the very idea that, yes, society has evolved, society develops, and there are laws to the development of society. The other side of this debate is the role of individuals and, you know, the individual mind, the genius. And it's all down to the genius who appears, and then suddenly society flourishes and develops. I found an interesting article again by this Leslie White, where he points out, he says, if say the percentage of people who are geniuses in society is a permanent percentage, then we should have geniuses appearing every day, at every moment in history. But if you look at history, they seem to appear at certain moments. And curiously, they concentrate at certain moments and he lists the number of inventions which were independently invented the same year by three people, four people, five people at the same time. And what he says is, how do you explain that if it's just a random thing? Well, he says first of all, the genius himself is a product of the society to the knowledge that the genius can take and put together to develop the new idea has already been previously developed by others. The accumulation of knowledge is also a process throughout history. And for example, Darwin. Darwin comes up with evolution. He spent decades doubting whether to publish, when to publish or the rest of it. One of the problems he had with his theory was how could this have happened over the time that the world is supposed to have existed? Because you know until not long before him, people literally believed the world was created like 4,000 BC. So in 6,000 years, how can you have the differentiation of species? It was in another sector in geology for example and in cosmology that human thinking started to reach the conclusion, the understanding that the world was actually much, much older. They actually thought in millions. They hadn't got to the point of billions. Darwin read that, a book by Lyle on geology. When he realised that it's much older, that the material world we live in is much, much older, it then clicked in his mind and he thought that provides the time for the process which I've been thinking of and it allowed him to make a huge leap in understanding. Now that shows you that Darwin, you can call him a genius. Leslie White actually makes the point that a lot of so-called geniuses were not particularly intelligent. They weren't super intelligent but they were at the right place, at the right time, with enough knowledge accumulated by a number of other people previous to them and they obviously had sufficient education and obviously you need a certain level of culture and understanding. And then you have a kind of synthesis of an accumulation over time of different steps in our knowledge and understanding and at a certain point it comes together and it appears in the form of the genius of history and a leap, a sudden event takes place in our knowledge. If you don't have a materialist understanding like we have, you would say that was the great mind of that individual, independent of the world you lived in and it was an accidental event. That's how you would think which would mean you wouldn't be able to understand anything and why this happened. Now, that doesn't mean we deny that individuals do play a role. As I said, they're part of a process. They are the peak, the fulcrum of a process which then produces this leap in our understanding. We don't deny the role of individuals. After all, we are trying to build a subjective factor, not an objective factor. We are trying to build the revolutionary party which doesn't evolve out of nothing. It has to be consciously created. But why are we trying to build that subjective factor? In a sense, it's the individual in history that the subjective factor. Why? Because we understand the laws of development. That's the point. If you understand the laws of development you can understand where society is going. You can make a prediction such as a war is coming. Or why was Trotsky able to write before 1939 the world is tobogganing towards war? Did he have a crystal ball? No, he had a Marxist understanding and he looked at the facts and the figures and the balance of forces and the different powers and the state of the economy and all the rest of it and he drew the correct conclusion. It's moving towards that event. If you can understand that then you become truly free because we're not free in a sense we cannot do whatever we like. I can't fly to the top of this building. I don't have that freedom. There's lots of things I can't do and I'm also limited by the knowledge I have, the skills I have and the society that I live in. But if I understand a process that's taking place around me and I can prepare the forces to intervene in that objective process which is maturing objectively there are laws of development. We understand the laws of development of capitalism and the crisis that it produces. We also understand a law which says a crisis changes the consciousness of millions of people. It doesn't happen by chance. It happens for real objective reasons and again it accumulates which is a point where it can make a leap. Again you could call it an accident but it's not an accident. How often do we say the accident waiting to happen? Or in Marxist terms necessity expressing itself through accident. So we don't deny the role of the individual in shaping history. In fact in certain moments we understand individuals play a key role. Imagine if Lenin had not been in Russia in 1917. There would have been a revolution which we could have explained with all the factors, the same factors which led to the revolution of 1917. But today we would be discussing the fact that it failed because there are also laws of revolution if at a particular moment in time when the factors have accumulated and come together and there isn't a vehicle through which the new consciousness can express itself that moment can be lost and then you have the laws of counter revolution the ruling class steps in and destroys. By understanding these laws of development and rejecting all this randomness of history accidental events the genius that creates everything we can understand how an objective situation develops and the role that the individuals can play Lenin himself was a great individual but could he have carried out a revolution in 1910 or in 1908? He could not, it was not within his powers. What he could do was use his Marxist understanding to analyse the society he was in and work out where it's going get a rough idea at least of where it's going and what we need to do now is to prepare for that. Now I haven't got time my lead off would have been a lot longer the guy with the moustache there's a lot of them here, sorry the guy with the hat and the moustache I was going to highlight him he's called Labriola Trotsky read him when he was young wasn't yet formed as a Marxist he read his texts on historical materialism and what stuck in his mind was something that he keeps repeating in his text ideas don't fall from the sky and he keeps saying that ideas come from a process from a history, from a development and he's an interesting guy you can have a discussion just about how he developed he started off as a Hegelian a bourgeois philosopher a bourgeois professor and it was a priest that suggested he read Hegel as an interesting philosopher but he actually evolved through that from Hegel to an understanding of Marxism he started reading Marx and Engels and drew conclusions about historical materialism and he said this is what Trotsky said about him he had made short work and in marvellous style of the theory of multiple factors which were supposed to dwell on the Olympus of history and rule our fates from there i.e. this idea that there are so many different factors that you have to take into account and there's no real structure to them and he says it was Labriola that helped him when he was in prison reading that text I could give a lot more quotes but I don't have the time but I'm going to have to fast forward here now as I said before randomness is presented as the way history takes place the reason for that is because you have these leaps you have these sudden what seem to be unpredictable events unexplicable events such as revolutions such as stock market crisis such as an outbreak of war et cetera but as I said before they are leaps and they are leaps which express a necessity which has matured below the surface to come to today making a comparison say with the first world war look at China the rise of the economy of China the massive growth in the productive forces of China the massive exports of China China is spreading its influence and its power globally we have the United States which is still a big power obviously but in decline we see the tensions between these two powers the tensions in the Pacific both of them are vying for influence and control of the various little statelets in the Pacific Taiwan you can see the possibility of Taiwan becoming the Ukraine of the future it's there in the contradictions which are developing should a war erupt around that I don't think anybody in this room would go around saying oh where did that come from that was an accident, that was a random event of history you can see it maturing in Europe you have the war in the Ukraine if you look back just a little bit America is desperately trying to regain spheres of influence and the power that it's lost it's been pushing NATO evermore eastwards to pull the whole of Europe under its influence Russia recovered from the collapse of the 90s and has started spreading its wings we saw that in Syria we see it in Africa we see it in its relationship with Iran and so on China is present in Africa so you see the inevitable conflict which is erupting or take another example Brexit was Brexit just an accident or were there factors at play now obviously it was so much in the balance it was a 50-50 thing but you can explain it we were discussing before Brexit the crisis of the European Union the conflicts within the European Union the different interests within the European Union and Brexit is in effect it's like an accidental event but it's an expression of a process there are different sides to that accident one is the conflicts between the ruling powers within Europe the other was the conflict the class conflict in Britain itself the austerity that's been imposed on the people of Britain and you give them a chance to express their opinions and they basically stick two fingers up at the British establishment that's what happened I'm going to actually explain it it's not just this random event it's part of a process there's other things I'm going to have to skip forward again what I wanted to raise here was I won't develop it when a religion splits such as Catholicism from which Protestantism emerges and why it emerges at a certain point and why certain figures and Luther play the role they play in a certain moment whereas if you'd taken them back in time 300 or 400 years that same individual who is regarded as the father of Protestantism would have been burnt at the stake by the Catholics and would have gone nowhere and many of those individuals did end up like that it was because an idea expressed in 800 or 900 or 1200 AD its time hadn't come but once the productive forces had started to emerge and the bourgeoisie started to emerge the ideas to back up the rising power of that class were needed and those same ideas which previously would have gone nowhere would have made progress for instance Fradol Cino who was 1250 to 1300 he was burnt at the stake why because he practiced poverty liberty and opposition to the feudal system well he lived at the wrong time in the wrong place had he lived a little bit later he would have been remembered probably as one of the great thinkers of the bourgeois revolution let me move on again because of time and space yeah there's a lot of stuff on the family which I will move out because I don't have time to develop it if we want to look at present day event yes I've done all that I was going to talk about Cromwell the role he played but there's a lot of excellent writing by Alan on that the I'll conclude on this we're living through the barbaric bombing and destruction of Gaza October the 7th and in a certain sense you could call it an accident because obviously it had been prepared it didn't happen by accident it didn't fall over the fence but I've been reading text even the guys who organized it weren't fully aware of how successful they might be I think they shot themselves in that event now I can imagine the history books in 20, 30 years time writing those history books but if we're not they'll explain it as imagine this scenario the West Bank was taken back by Israel and the Palestinians were expelled in a second Nakbar and why because of the events of October the 7th that's one way in which you can look back at the period we're going through as Marxists we would say just a minute look at what's been happening for the last 30 years look at what the Zionist project has been doing to the Palestinians systematically for 30 years all we have at the moment is an acceleration of an already existing situation if we want to use the example of the First World War to understand today let me see and I'll just finish on this I've got so much more I could say on this but there are moments in history such as May 68 again you can present it as an accident and some people I've seen people go and look for the accident oh it was this student meeting at this university or the police who repressed this group of students that was the accident that provoked May 68 or the hot autumn in Italy or the strike wave in Britain in 1972 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 they will all look for that event which triggered it and not look at the actual underlying causes which can be understood earlier on we were discussing about the collapse of the Soviet Union I can remember the texts of our tendency analysing the immense growth of the 30s 20% plus and then at a certain point after the war it's down to 10% in the 70s it goes down to 3% it's the same as capitalism in the west and by the 80s is at 0% therefore that collapse could be predicted by analysing those details and you can make a fairly reasonable scientific prediction of how it would go now to conclude we look at processes we understand the mechanisms in the processes and on that basis we can see where society has come from and why it's come from there to where we are but also make a reasonable hypothesis of where it's going what direction it's going in and what events can unfold at the end of the day the discussion about whether history is random whether it's accidental whether it's just a mass of incomprehensible events that this could happen or that could happen but we can't say which of those would have been the most likely that is bunkum that is nonsense because we can see by the study of history there's a pattern, there's a development there's an evolution, there are laws of development and it's precisely to understand those that we exist as a tendency as an organisation what is Marxism? it's the full consciousness of the fact that we can study society we can study its laws we can make predictions about where it's going and that's where the true freedom lies the freedom that we have is to organise a party that can become the tool which the working class can use when those moments come in the future which we can confidently predict that's why an understanding of this way of thinking is key to actually building a powerful revolutionary communist organisation and the guy next to Engels is Placanov which I didn't have time to refer to too much