 Yes, they're all of the individual in history. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously stated that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle and quite often quotes like that are taken out of context by the enemies of Marxism or by academics and they're used to paint a caricature of Marxism according to which Marx and Engels are said to have believed that essentially history was nothing more than the product of blind economic forces and that this class struggle was nothing more than the clash of impersonal economic classes that essentially are driven by these economic forces almost like automata. Now if this were the case, if this were genuine Marxism, clearly there would be no there would be no room for the role of an individual within history. It also be a very trivial thing to basically disprove this Marxism if you like and you could do it by just pointing to examples around the world which show that a specific person in the right place and at the right time can have a decisive impact on history. Just to use one example in the United States this summer, we have seen one of the biggest social explosions in that country in living memory and it would be unfair to blame that entirely on Donald Trump. You can blame Donald Trump for many things but to explain something of such profound depth in terms of the level of anger, you have to look at the profound causes which go back decades. You have had a decade of foreclosures on the properties of poor people. You have had years of austerity, years of police violence which goes back not decades, it goes back centuries, the oppression of black people and then of course this year you have seen hundreds of thousands of deaths from COVID-19, disproportionately black and Latino people, disproportionately working class and then on top of that millions of job losses which have piled upon millions and millions of injustices creating finally a condition which is completely unbearable. But whilst Trump didn't alone cause that explosion of anger, nevertheless what a catalyst he has played basically, what a role he has played from his position as the president of the United States and in playing that role. It would be ridiculous to suggest that Trump is thinking about his broad place in history or that he is thinking about the interest of his class, the general interest of his class. That would actually be to give him too much credit as an individual because Trump is far more narrow-minded than that. Trump's thoughts don't actually extend beyond November this year when he's obviously looking to get re-elected as the president of the United States and for that reason and that reason alone he, trying to present himself as the law and order candidate, he unleashed Homeland Security troops on protesters in Portland. He headed over to Kenosha days after a right when gunmen had committed murder on the streets of that town and in a whole series of other actions he's basically acted like petrol on the flames of this anger and in that sense he has acted like a catalyst tremendously accelerating those processes already going on in society. I use Trump but I could use plenty of other examples simply to prove to confirm to ourselves that individuals can have a massive impact on history but of course we as Marxists have never denied that. We have never actually said that individuals can't have an impact in history and this economic determinist caricature of Marxism is not Marxism at all, it's a strawman argument. So I want to basically, first of all, before we kick off, I want to quote from one of the early writings of Marx and Engels called The Holy Family written I believe in 1845 and let Marx and Engels speak for themselves. Where do they place the role of the individual in history? This is what they say. History does nothing. It possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles, it is man, real living man who does all that, who possesses and fights. History is not as it were a person apart using man as a means to achieve its own aims. History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims. So I think that, I think quite clearly that history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims. The individual, all of us as individuals are a part of history in this conception. I don't think though if we look at that, this idea that it is men and women pursuing their aims that creates history and we of course as individuals we can all be extremely capricious, we have a certain amount of freedom I can decide to get up in the morning, come to the revolution festival I can decide to stay in bed. On a day-to-day basis there are all sorts of free choices we can make but that is not the same on the one hand as saying that we make history therefore without constraints willy-nilly almost as the great men view of history, the advocates of the great men view of history would suggest. Now come on to what makes great men great but I just want to give you a bit of an example of how this idea that history is lawful and this idea that history is also nothing but the activity of human beings which can be entirely unpredictable are not in contradiction to each other. Well first of all I use the example of myself whether I decide to get up in the morning, well I can make many free choices but however free I am to make those choices I'm always pinched from various directions. I always will have to feed myself, clothe myself and house myself no matter how free I may be or how capricious I may be and to do that born as a proletarian man into the you know in the 20th 21st century I have to sell myself a piece of meal to a capitalist as a proletarian. I enter into these economic relationships against my will but if I was born 1,600 years ago the probability would be that I would be born a surf and that I would get my daily bread by working on a piece of land I'd grow it myself and another part of the week I'd be duty bound to work on the land of my lord and that's how they would get their daily bread. Now if I were to go and try to get a piece of land now in the 21st century and to employ surfs on that land to feed myself people would think I had gone insane because clearly I cannot create history willy-nilly those economic relationships I enter into they are already predetermined by a whole process of historical development so whatever I do I'm obviously pinched in my freedom already but within limits nonetheless of course under capitalism even you have everyone has a certain freedom if you have no other freedoms under capitalism you can certainly do one thing which is you can buy and sell whatever little you may have and so I can choose for example to buy my dinners at Tesco this week or I can go to Nando's every day of the week and be a bit more profligate or another example a young couple who have saved for a number of years as hard as that might be to believe for many young couples to buy a house they might decide to buy this year or they might decide to wait until the property market crashes and buy in a year's time or on a slightly less trivial scale an investor might decide to invest tens of millions of pounds in the stock market or they might look at the prices on the stock market think that's a speculative bubble and they might instead decide to invest in something like art as we discussed in the last session in other words within limits of course each of these individuals has a certain amount of freedom and yet out of all of these economic transactions and trillions of other economic transactions you you see the emergence of laws over roughly ten years you see the boom bus cycle appearing over the course of a number of boom and bus cycles you see inevitably the the bankruptcies the mergers leading to concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands eventually you see the emergence of giant monopolies that dominate entire national economies and again inevitably as a result of this process of all of these transactions you see that the gangs of national monopoly capitalists entering into conflict with each other wars trade wars alliances being created and broken all of these basically laws of capitalist development happening against the will of any of the individuals involved no one has willed this but it emerges as a as a product of all of this all of these transactions which are taking place and every social system from feudalism slave society capitalism it has its laws of development and I quite like I believe this was in a letter to to block by Engels where he he summed up this idea of each of us adding a small portion of our you know of a bit of a push to history giving rise to something that no one willed and I quite like the image the mental image that this of this idea and he says this in a letter to block he says history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life thus there are innumerable intersecting forces an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant the historical event now I like this this image of lots of small forces adding to one resultant but just I just like to add on to that what Engels has said clearly in human history we don't all add the same force or if we do some people the little the little nudge that they give to history has a much bigger effect than than other individuals and in fact I would even say that in key historical term this is always the case this is always the case but this is particularly the case in the in the periods of the most acute crises in history where single individuals and the wills of individuals can be absolutely decisive I would I would even go so far as to say that the wills and actions of single individuals at key turning points in history can express the will and the interests of entire social classes for example uh lufa inhaling his theological feces to the door of a church in Wittenberg was basically expressing the and summarizing the rebellion of the german burgers against the the catholic church Rob Speer in his uh extreme revolutionary uh attitude and his incorruptible character was expressing and was giving giving expression to the the moods within the the french petit bourgeoisie and the lower layers particularly in the sans culottes of paris um but doesn't this then if this is the case if individuals then are clearly key to making history doesn't this seem like a bit of a contradiction are we now saying as we did at the start that history is made by classes or is history made by individuals now this this this contradiction disappears or rather disappearing is made to make sense when we understand it as a dialectical contradiction when we understand the dialectical relationship between individuals and leaders and parties and masses and classes on the other hand and to explain what I mean by this dialectical relationship we have to make a brief diversion into philosophy because what we're discussing with this this idea of the relationship between the leaders and masses um or or the individual and the broad process of history as we are discussing one example of the relationship between example of accident and necessity now when viewed from the point of view of the laws governing history as a whole the fact that such and such a man or woman is born in such and such a time and is thrust to the fore by events is always when viewed from the point of view of these laws is always an accident it is not there is nothing inherent within the laws that say that individual must be born at that time and place and play that role and I can use an example that I think everyone will be familiar with to sort of try to illustrate that point for for instance that a particular embittered petty bourgeois born in in in lince in austria in the early part of the 20th century try to become a watercolor painter but failed because quite frankly he was a bad painter I mean he couldn't even get perspective I mean he was really a bad painter and for that and a host of other reasons he got swept up in the maelstrom of the first world war he became radicalized far to the right becoming a rabid anti-semite and eventually built the Nazi party and became the Fuhrer of Germany from the point of view of history that is an accident in a sense that that a a rooftop could have fallen off his house when he was a young a young man and he could have been knocked dead there and then and there was nothing in the court in the lawfulness of history that says that couldn't have happened in his in his youth but if you were to cut hit the point is if you were to cut Hitler out of history and it's of course Hitler I'm referring to and nevertheless another Fuhrer would have risen to power or to take his place or would have would have expressed the social forces that he expressed and in fact Weimar Germany in the 20s and 30s was absolutely teaming with far right clubs you had all sorts of veterans groups and ex-officer clubs and beer hall conspiracies and and out of this whole environment you would have had no shortage of of would be Fuhrers basically of Germany and what brought Hitler to power was the fact that he expressed a deep and was able to give expression because of various of his characteristics a deep social needs that existed in German society and specifically that came from the interest of the German bourgeoisie and I have to be extremely telegraphic about the processes in Germany but you'd had since 1918 a revolutionary a series of revolutionary upheavals in which the the the German working class had reached out to seize power and had been stymied and and frustrated by its own leadership by betrayals and inexperience in in in various measures and and and this led to exhaustion demoralization and it terrified of course the German bourgeoisie and convinced them of the necessity of annihilating the workers organizations and using the most extreme measures even at great risk to themselves and their interests and then of course in 1929 you have the Wall Street crash and an acute crisis of German capitalism which ruined swathes of the petty bourgeoisie who because of their prior experience were were disenchanted with the working class and didn't believe that the working class was capable of changing the situation fundamentally and so they were looking in other directions in a in a frenzy looking for a messiah basically to come along and save them and all that was left under these circumstances was for a big enough section of the German bourgeoisie to throw money and resources behind a Hitler character their future savior to create the basis for a mass fascist movement and that's what happens and the fact that this is not a historical accident is is proven by the fact that roughly contemporaneously with the rise of fascism in Germany you have similar rise of fascist movements in in with Mussolini in Italy with Franco in Spain and and elsewhere so from two points of view depending on which end you pick the stick up from the rise of Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany was both an accident and also a necessity and to express it in a in a more all-round way in the words of of Hegel necessity expressed itself through accident and Hitler that the individual was the accident in this case now to use another example from from nature because I enjoy using analogies from nature imagine snow falling on the peak of a mountain now at the at the start of of the season at the start of winter you have only a very thin layer of snow but towards the end of the season towards the end of winter that builds up into a thick layer of snow that eventually reaches a critical mass where one further snowflake can fall on the side of that mountain where it falls might have a big impact from the point of view of the people living in the shadow of the mountain because it can it can push it over the edge it can go super critical and you can have an avalanche fly down the mountain and it can have an extraordinary effect now if if you could pick out those individual snowflakes that that caused those avalanches and wrote their biographies you might come up with a theory of avalanches that you'd call the great snowflake theory of avalanches and of course people would think you're ridiculous to come up with that because and it wouldn't be hard to point out what you were ignoring you were ignoring the huge build-up of snow which had allowed that that snowflake to be the great snowflake that it became and the same thing can be said it is equally ridiculous to to suggest that history is made by great men that it ignores what it ignores is the the social forces the great waves of history that rose them up on their peaks that's what's missing from the great men view of history it looks at these things in their isolation rather than looking at the their interaction with the great social forces in history now of course despite my my analogy with a snowflake has a certain usefulness but it's of course human history is far more complicated than that and for one thing unlike snowflakes we make history consciously um whether we understand the outcome of our conscious actions is another thing in the same way actually we we we manipulate nature consciously far earlier than we begin to understand and formulate the lawfulness of nature um but we can understand the lawfulness of nature just as we can understand the lawfulness of history but in understanding the lawfulness of these processes we don't abolish their lawfulness um but we do allow ourselves to bend those laws to our aims so for example again in nature we can we can understand the lawfulness of the seasons that doesn't allow us to abolish the seasons but it does allow us to plant fields at the most opportune time to reap a good harvest we can understand that we can gain a knowledge of genetics but that doesn't mean our cells cease to be be based upon genetics basically and and and what have you but it does allow us to find cures for previously debilitating diseases and in the same way we can know the laws of history and that can allow us that doesn't allow us however to abolish the laws of history but it does allow us to to bend the historical process to our will or more more specifically to the to the will and to the interests of the working class now um it has to be said for the majority of human history right up to Marx and Engels we are if we believe that Marx and Engels for the first time um summarise the laws of history what we're saying is that up until that point the laws of history remained a mystery for for the whole of humanity and that that is true and as a matter of fact it was necessarily true um because the human history um from 10 000 years ago right down to uh capital modern capitalism has has existed under the domination of a minority exploiting class in society and the domination of any minority exploiting class always requires that they at least partially cloak the the genuine nature of that of that rule either through religious or ideological mysticism of one form or another and even since from the very moment the capitalist class came to power actually they have always had to um at least partially disguise um their rule um and the great bourgeois revolutions which brought them to power like the english revolution and the french revolution were not fought under under slogans such as uh you know free trade the right to enjoy your property and make profits and and money but they were fought under far more noble slogans slogans um through which it was possible for the minority capitalist class to unite behind the mass of the nation slogans such as the fight for religious liberty in the 17th century and later in the 18th century the rights of man and other noble pursuits um but of course what what it installed was not uh the um uh uh you know a great utopia it was far from a utopia is actually simply the rule of another minority exploiting class the capitalist this time a socialist revolution and this is where i think we come onto the most important part of the talk is the role of the individual in in the socialist revolution is fundamentally different to any revolution which has gone before in so far as it is a revolution of the exploited majority against an exploiting minority and for the working class therefore as a majority to seize power in its own interest it's necessary that it doesn't become simply a political tool of another exploiting class in other words it has to consciously formulate its own interests and it has to come to a conscious understanding of its relationship to itself as a class its relationship to the other classes in society and its historical function and role um it has to the working class to be successful in a socialist revolution has to consciously fight for its own interests and to overthrow capitalism um and uh that uh in fact any struggle of the working class requires this this conscious understanding of its role within either the the workplace or society um and to fight the bosses even to improve pay never mind to to gain reforms or to seize political power and to expropriate the bosses and reorganize the economy on a democratic plan demands conscious organized activity from millions of people or on the or maybe on the on the scale of a workplace dozens or hundreds of people and it requires that that those wills those hundreds or up to the biggest scale millions and on in the current world there are hundreds of millions billions of proletarians that all of these wills are unified into a single will they must be fused into a single will and that means therefore centralization of the organization of the working class despite and with apologies to the anarchists for the working class to enter into a serious struggle against the bosses they require centralization and even for a partial strike that's necessary um even for a strike over economic demands but whilst a strike over economic demands um in a workplace or an industry um only requires a union because the the demands which which emerge in that struggle come quite naturally from the economic conditions of the workers and the need for organization on a workplace wide scale uh arises almost automatically and clearly so that the workers almost uh instinctively a revolution is something is something different entirely because for a revolution to be successful it's necessary to fuse the working class in its overwhelming majority into a single will to achieve a goal that requires not just an understanding of the conditions in one workplace but an an understanding of the class dynamics of the whole of society and this therefore requires us to to raise the consciousness and raise the sights of the working class it requires theoreticians of how the whole of the capitalist system works it requires teachers it requires strategists and therefore it requires great individuals of course and it requires a revolutionary party which does more than simply unify workers on a workplace wide basis but it fuses together the whole activity of the working class in all of its heterogeneity heterogeneity towards a single end and um so the point i'm trying to make in in in a very roundabout kind of way is essentially that despite the fact that the socialist revolution is the revolution of a majority against an exploiting minority that doesn't diminish the role of of of leadership it doesn't diminish the role of individuals it doesn't diminish the role of of a party actually if anything it amplifies the importance of of leadership because of the conscious that consciousness isn't and conscious organization is a necessary factor and as a side note i'd also say this need for conscious organized leadership is um on a side note that's precisely why acts of individual terror are reactionary from the point of view of the interest of the working class i mean we've already seen before that you get rid of a hitler or any other despot or tyrant and you don't actually budge the ruling class even an inch from power nor do you negate the social conditions which led to that tyrant being brought to to power in the first place but there's another reason that individual terror is is reactionary it's not just that it doesn't work it actually lowers the level of consciousness of the working class because it says to workers um that you don't need parties you don't need unions you don't need political programs and it replaces the conscious organized activity of the class with the the deeds of a few heroic individuals essentially now i think uh we as marxists we don't discuss these questions however simply in the abstract i think to really see the role of of leadership concretely i think we have to look at probably the the the greatest laboratory for the the working class and its struggle on earth up until this point we have to look i think at the great revolutions and specifically the russian revolution of 1917 where the question of of revolutionary leadership and the solution of that problem was was shown for us for us all through the the role of the bolsheviks in leading the working class to seize power for the first time actually the working class seized power on a national scale for a prolonged period of time we find all of these lessons contained in the october revolution and what we what we find when we read i think manon was mentioning the the history of the russian revolution as an excellent case study in the role of the individual in history and it is it's a fantastic book by liantrotsky and what emerges from it even just a you know a very quick scan through that book is the decisive impact actually of leadership um without the presence of two men in fact without the presence of lenin and trotsky it's fair to say that it's it's likely that there would have been no october revolution in 1917 whatsoever and in fact at each decisive stage in the revolution the presence or absence of one man in particular had a decisive impact and this wasn't accidental that it was this individual that had this impact i'm of course speaking about lenin his his his absence or or presence was decisive at many of the key turning points of the revolution now when the revolution first broke out in february 1917 lenin found himself desperately trying to return to russia from his swiss exile at that time negotiating to pass through german occupied territory and of course the leadership of the bolshevik party fell to the second ranked leaders who managed to return to petrograd quick more quickly from their Siberian exile kamenev and starling but under the leadership of these two individuals and not without grumbling in the rank and file of the party uh they they they executed a sharp shift to the right in the party's uh political program not only did these second ranked leaders support the provisional government um which was the bourgeoisie in power basically uh they backs the continuation of the first world war this this this imperialist war being one of the main springs of the anger of the of of the revolutionary mood in society in particularly of the soldiers but they even more than this they were inclined towards unity with the mensheviks which would have meant if they'd have had their way at that point this solution of the bolshevik party it would have meant the impossibility of a socialist revolution because the working class would have been left without a party essentially now um of course lenin returned to russia in april 1917 and this allowed and within weeks of he he opened up a struggle against the leadership of the bolshevik party against starling and kamenev these second ranked leaders um and the other the other leaders as well and one man against the rest of the leadership he conducted this struggle uh first publishing the april theses in pravda under his own name because no one else on the central committee would put their name to these theses and yet despite just being one individual such was his authority which was not an accident as i'll come on to that he managed to politically rearm the party within a matter of weeks and overcome that confusion um a remarkable feat and again his his it was necessary for him to again apply a pressure on the eve of the october revolution against the resistance of this second rank layer of leadership within the party to ensure that preparations for an insurrection were made and finally executed uh and that the october revolution actually took place so he played a decisive role lenin as one man even within the bolshevik party an anarchist not not just anarchist sorry i'd say that the enemies of marxism in general specifically anarchist but also liberal social democrats and they all think that in identifying this importance that it's not as if marxist invented this but clearly the importance that that marxist hold for the uh the role of leadership in a socialist revolution is the achilles heel of marxism um because it dooms the revolution uh in advance and their objection can roughly be resolved into two points that relate to the the russian revolution um the first objection is um well if the if if leadership is essential for a successful revolution wasn't wasn't russia just lucky to have a lenin present in 1917 um and the second uh if you like objection to marxism is uh basically the just the reverse side of that um wasn't it then um when the look of of the russia ran out because lenin died wasn't it inevitable that a less scrupulous individual would have come to power and that therefore i.e starlin starlinism that was equally inevitable and the unwinding and degeneration of the revolution was inevitable as well because of the the corrupting influence of power i suppose well let's look at these objections um one at a time now first of all with respect to lenin um was the presence or absence of lenin an accidental factor well first of all lenin was not born lenin um he he was created by uh the russian revolutionary movement and the conditions which existed that made possible a lenin type character 30 minutes thank you madam um as we know uh russia was the most in towards the end of the 19th century and early 20th century it was the most backward country in europe and yet in spite of that backwardness the generation after generation of russian intellectual youth going back before lenin was even born through themselves heroically at the autocracy at the uh this monolith of czarism and they even achieved blinding results you had thousands of petty and and mid-ranking officials in the czarist regime were assassinated and four years before lenin was even born in 1866 czar alexander the second was actually successfully assassinated by one of the terrorists of the narod naya volya party which was the people's will um but despite this spectacular success um individual terrorism failed to even make a dent in the in the edifice of absolutism this was a tremendous lesson actually for a lot of revolutionaries um that came from that tradition that narodnik movement um and at the same time as you had this heroic struggle taking place you had a rich and passionate debates about how to overcome russian backwardness how to bury czarism how to take society forward and this produced towering intellectual figures like the uh uh the the the um author churneshevsky and this was a this was a rich theoretical inheritance which was also enriched by the most advanced elements within the narodniks led by people like plekhanov who broke with narodnism and uh fused the the revolutionary tradition of russia with marxism imported from the west which condensed the lessons of the labor movement of the west um these were the the rich these were the rich theoretical traditions and inheritance that of course came down to lenin in his youth and of course also in his youth we see the awakening of the russian working class in the 1890s when lenin was a young man in his 20s we see um a vast um wave of strike action sweeping across russia under these illegal conditions inevitably even smallest economic strike and these were not small strikes but even the smallest strike immediately raised political questions uh the the role of the police the the right to organize the role of the censorship and the the legitimacy of the autocracy itself and this this vast swipe uh this vast strike wave and a whole number of other experiences of course they serve to educate lenin as well as educating a whole layer of of other revolutionaries um write the way down through the the the first world war the split in the international uh the and of course the the revolution of 1917 itself um and the experience of bolshevism the intellectual debate that took place within the workers movement and within its most revolutionary wing within the bolshevik party and i would say in the course of this debate and in the course of these events what you had i would liken to the process of natural selection that takes place within nature itself you had a natural selection within the uh the bolshevik party of leaders and of theories and of ideas and the authority of of lenin was based upon the fact that nine times out of ten throughout these political experiences lenin proved to be correct he proved to be the most clear-sighted leader and he proved to be one of the most flexible individuals those that didn't actually cut the grades those who went tested by the great events like the 1905 revolution and later the outbreak of the first world war completely disoriented individuals like plekinov who nevertheless had played a tremendous a fantastic role in in uh and we we should still read the writings of of plekinov today but because they couldn't keep up with the pace of events they couldn't orient themselves correctly they they were not on the level to play this role there was a process of selection and the authority of people like plekinov was squandered and the people that the authority of individuals like lenin was reinforced so the most revolutionary party inevitably selected for itself the most revolutionary far-sighted individuals as as part of its leadership um and within the workers movements as well there was a process of selection and above all revolutions accelerate this process like a like a hot house atmosphere you uh the 1905 revolution for instance it put to the test all of the ideas of the different trends within the workers movement and it this the the menshevik party decisively failed that test in 1905 they had said because the russian revolution is a bourgeois democratic revolution we must provide we must hand over leadership to the liberals and subs the the workers movement must be subservient to the liberal part the liberal wing of the capitalist class but when those liberals proved entirely reactionary it clearly discredited the menshevik party in the eyes of um at the most advanced layer of workers and so when you had a new upturn in the workers movement after 1905 between 1912 and 1914 hundreds of thousands of the most advanced workers marched behind the bolshevik party the bolshevik party won authority by fighting alongside the workers explaining their ideas and those ideas being tested in practice they managed to yes through the the heroic act activity of the individuals involved in the bolshevik party by the far-sightedness of its leaders but also by being tested in practice by the workers themselves the most advanced layers drew themselves in behind the bolshevik party now in 1917 of course the bolsheviks are once again reduced to a minority but that was more because of the scale of the the revolutionary events which swept into the the movement the most backward layers of the masses as well and so inevitably the menshevik and sr party were once more pushed to the fore but again we see how quickly the masses learn in the course of a revolution now i would say as an as an uh whilst that is true whilst the masses do learn incredibly quickly so the the bolsheviks could have gone from a party of a few thousands to 250 000 by the by october 1917 it is impossible to build that uh revolutionary party if it has not been built already in the midst of a revolution and it's the the the furious attempts to to to try and do that by the the trotskis in the spanish civil war uh by by even even rosa luxembourg charlie mix and the others to quickly put together a communist party in the midst of the outbreak of the the the german revolution show that that is is not possible it has to be built in advance that's a decisive thing um but yes in summary i suppose a process of natural selection brought the most revolutionary party in russia to the leadership of the working class um and so um there was a necessity about it but does this then diminish the role of a genius or an individual like lenin i don't think it does um now i've spoken about uh the natural selection in biology and of course that was discovered by the great um scientist charles darwin in the 19th century now darwin was a genius and no one would um no one would uh say any any other way but could darwin have achieved a fraction of what he achieved without thousands of biologists and naturalists and paleontologists who'd gone before him of geologists who had sifted and sorted through a massive of biological and paleontological data in order so that the a genius might step back and see the whole picture see the whole threads running through this collection of of information um of course he would have been nothing without that that scientific investigation going on over decades the same can be said of a of a person like lenin um he was uh of course dependent upon that rich revolutionary tradition and he was created by bolshevism itself that doesn't negate the importance of and the role that that uh ingenious theoreticians uh can make nothing automatic would have created the theory of evolution it required a genius to step back and see the bigger picture nothing automatic would have founded the bolshevik party it required conscious intervention in the historical process yes by lenin but also by hundreds and thousands of other um revolutionary cadres it was a it was consciously constructed and and building a revolution party again will require conscious intervention in the historical process now i briefly uh want to to mention the uh the other objection which is thrown against us as marxists for the when we raise this question of leadership which is well then wasn't the the reverse process and the rise of Stalin equally inevitable well i've talked about this process of natural selection taking place um throughout the period of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 now when the revolution was rushing forward it inevitably raised the most brilliant individuals to the leadership of the masses and that's not accidental because when the masses are moving forward when they're breaking from tradition and when the situation becomes extremely fluid history is going to push to the fore those individuals who are capable of quickly grasping the situation because they have a deeper theoretical insight or who can skillfully give eloquent expression to the fleeting mood of the masses um and who can act audaciously and so not just individuals like lenin but uh great organizers like sferdlov were pushed to the front uh you had great agitators like zinoviev all of these second rank lay uh individuals within the bolshevik party not just lenin and trotsky but a whole layer of brilliant cadres were pushed to the fore and of course as a result of that the less media the more mediocre individuals were also elbowed aside and left um nursing bruised egos and starlin was amongst those mediocrities nursing a bruised ego in 1917 in fact his biography is almost a blank in 1917 um there is very little to be said about it so much so embarrassing was this the bureaucracy post uh reaction after his rise to power had to basically fabricate a new biography for this man he was a mediocrity in in in all of his characteristics and he uh he was sulking and looking for revenge basically and unbeknownst to him he would have that opportunity and that opportunity would be given to him by the the process of the ebb and the counter-revolution in which a a reverse process of selection almost took place in which the mediocrities now were pushed to the fore um and uh starlin didn't predict this because starlin was no theoretician uh he didn't understand the dynamics of the revolution he didn't understand the dynamics of the counter-revolution if he had a done he might have actually um he might have stepped back from what he was about to do he was determined to personally advance himself and finally with the ebb of the revolution he unexpectedly found this opportunity and the reason for the ebb of the revolution was nothing to do with starlin as an individual but it was because the russian revolution had set itself tasks that could not be achieved on russian soil they could only be achieved on a world scale and isolated the russian revolution was ultimately defeated by its the russian backwardness by the low cultural level by the level of under development of the productive forces in the country which led in in those conditions of hunger and cold the advanced workers retreated becoming demoralized um and as in in inverse proportion as the as the workers retreated the bureaucracy began to rise up began to accrue privileges to itself began to elbow the revolutionary workers aside and began to become conscious of its interests and seek out points of support in the bolshevik leadership now these circumstances of of of brutality of russian conditions the low cultural level and the centuries long tradition of slavery and subjugation they produced narrow minded scheming uh and and and rude individuals in spades they produced just the kind of individuals that could come to represent a bureaucratic thermidorian counter-revolution um and there was nothing in that respect particularly special about starlin he only really raised himself above the average bureaucrat and mediocrity in the bolshevik party on account of one his willpower and number two the fact that he had an important qualification which was he had been an old bolshevik for for many decades and this meant that this usurping bureaucracy which needed a bolshevik figurehead it needed that authority precisely because of its its action in usurping the the authority of the russian revolution it needed a person like starlin and it recognized in starlin a kindred spirit and his theoretical weakness actually prepared him well for playing the role of leader of rising to power actually it helped to elevate him to power because he he found he he worked his way through empirically basically he didn't expect the tremendous success uh that he would uh he would gain basically on on by uh using the machine of the party and of the bureaucracy first of all very cautiously he hid behind kamenev and zhinoviev in the struggle against trotsky and later behind bukharin against zhinoviev and kamenev and eventually rose to power uh himself becoming of course the hangman of the revolution trotsky on the contrary trotsky in starting out the struggle against starlinism understood in advance that uh that he would have he and the advanced layers of the workers notwithstanding some victory for the working class in some other part of the world were inevitably going to go down to defeat at the hands of the bureaucracy um and uh this was the uh under these circumstances what did theoretical insight offer someone like trotsky it couldn't have helped to prevent this process of bureaucratic degeneration but what it did allow trotsky to do was to to consciously build the forces for a new upturn basically to regroup the cadres to preserve the unsullied banner of marxism for a new period of revolution um and in everything on all major questions trotsky was right against starlin on the theory of the permanent revolution on the um the uh the question of the united front versus the popular front on the the experience of the chinese revolution and yet it was trotsky who went down to defeat not starlin and so this shows that despite what the many of the biographers try to try to say this the struggle between starlin and trotsky was like a struggle of mere individuals it wasn't a struggle of mere individuals like a wrestling match or something like that where you can just like you know top trumps come up with a different stats and starlin was more pernicious or something or more more uh uh you know had some characteristic that helped him to come to power it was a struggle of living forces of the bureaucracy against the traditions of of genuine bolshevism and the advanced workers of russia um and yet of course trotsky was proven correct um he he he he conducted this struggle in the most difficult conditions imaginable in of course a period of counter-revolution of both the fascist and starlinist variety and yet he was correct against the starlinist and over a long historical period has been proven decisively correct but that has taken 70 years of course for the the collapse of the soviet union to show that trotsky's analysis of those events was decisively correct it's taken another 30 years for the working class to overcome those massive defeats that uh uh the the starlinist counter-revolution and and eventually the restoration of capitalism that flowed from that have have created and so we can see that history is not a straight line it's got a lot of roundabout ways but now finally these ideas are are again on the march we again have the the the the the the wind of the wind is in our sails as as marxist and the slate has been wiped clean the the sort of the uh the stain of starlinism has been wiped from the earth and now it is of course the starlinist themselves it is the the social democrats who are in crisis and whose ideas have become irrational they do not correspond to the situation um and it isn't going to be an automatic process to rebuild the forces of marxism but all we can say is like it was an automatic process that built the bolshevik party nevertheless what other conditions we are looking at we are looking at a whole historical period of crisis of the capitalist system of of revolutions counter-revolutions wars of a rich political experience which is going to shake away the prejudices and shake away the cobwebs of the working class and of its advanced layer and vanguard and it's not going to be an easy period but it is going to be a period in which um many uh uh thousands and tens of thousands of bolshevik cadres and even potentially future Lenin's and Trotsky's can be forged in that in that process in that in that white heat of political events which is which is going to take place and which is unfolding already and so I think that the the the prospects are tremendous um but it isn't an automatic process building the revolutionary leadership to make the socialist revolution successful depends upon every one of us uh putting in um our our bit basically uh the small forces which add up to the the overall resultant we are that conscious factor in history we consciously add that small push throw our small weight onto the scales of history so that we can finally tip the balance of history and carry out a successful socialist revolution