 Hi, so last week we discussed a dialectical contradiction or the interpenetration of two dialectical opposites, which is part and whole. This week we're going to discuss something which is actually quite very closely related, but it might not seem so at first, which is the question of freedom and determinism and the way in which necessity, as we say, expresses itself through chance. Now, as we discussed last week, the part and the whole are two opposites that cannot be separated, right? You cannot understand the one without the other, and in fact the one expresses itself through the other, and so it is the same with freedom and necessity or necessity and chance. Now Marxists, of course, are materialists, as we discussed extensively, and that means, of course, that we think that nothing can come from nothing, and therefore anything that happens happens for a reason, in other words, it's caused, it's conditioned by something else. And for that reason we are known as determinists, and some people say that this means that we are actually fatalists, Marxists have a kind of teleological belief that everything is sort of predestined, it has to happen, so capitalism has to give way to socialism. Socialism is absolutely inevitable, it's sort of written into the laws of the universe, and therefore all we have to do is kind of wait for this inevitability to come about. Now, we are determinists, so that much is true, but the reason that this accusation of being fatalists is wrong is because it misunderstands dialectical determinism, and it confuses it for crude kind of mechanical determinism. So to understand this, let's start with the question of causation. How do we define causation? Well, with its first glance it seems very simple, right? Something happens because something caused it to happen, and because there are laws of nature it had to happen, there was no way it could have been otherwise. One thing begets another basically, and it is necessary. Now in a sense that is true, and this however the sort of limitations of this world for you, which I'll come on to in a moment, give rise to concepts such as Laplace's demon. So Laplace was a philosopher, and he said, writing I think in the 18th century that if only we were to know the exact position of every single part of the universe from the beginning, and its exact velocity, then it would be possible to determine the future course of everything for all time, because of course causation should mean that it's absolutely necessary for everything to happen in a set way, and therefore everything is rigidly determined. And this is a kind of pseudo-scientific idea, which you get a lot in certain kinds of what we would call crude materialism. Now Engels pointed out in a quite brilliant passage, the problems with this idea is kind of simplistic thinking, which thinks that everything can be reduced down to these very simple sort of equations basically, which really grossly underestimates the complexity of the universe basically. And Engels points out that the problem with this is, or one of the problems with this, is that whilst it seems to eliminate accidents or sort of arbitrariness and make everything understood and predictable, actually it does the opposite. It ends up reducing everything to the level of chance and losing necessity entirely. And I'll just give this quotation, because it's a very good quotation, it is rather long, so apologies for that. But Engels says the following, he says, According to this conception, only simple direct necessity prevails in nature. That particular pea pod contains five peas, and not four or six. That particular dog's tail is five inches long and not a width longer or shorter. And that this year a particular clover flower was fertilized by a bee and not another. And indeed by precisely one particular bee at a particular time, that particular windblown dandelion seed had sprouted an another knot. That last night I was bitten by a flea at four o'clock in the morning and not at three or five o'clock and on the right shoulder and not on the left calf. These are all facts which have been produced by an irrevocable concatenation of cause and effect by an unshatterable necessity of such a nature indeed that the gaseous sphere from which the solar system was derived was already so constituted that these events had to happen thus and not otherwise. With this kind of necessity, likewise, we do not get away from the theological conception of nature. Whether with Augustine and Calvin, we call it the eternal decree of God or Kismet as the Turks do, or whether we call it necessity, is all pretty much the same for science. There is no question of tracing the chain of causation in any of these cases, so we adjust as wise in one as in the other. The so-called necessity remains an empty phrase and with it chance also remains what it was before. This shows, I think, that if you eliminate one of the dialectical poles, so you only take necessity or you only take accident, you end up really having no ability to comprehend the question. You have to have both of these poles in this particular case, necessity and chance. Now, of course, it's true that even the most incidental thing you can imagine does have a cause, and if you were to study, it would seem that it had to happen, and that is true. But is that cause generalisable? Is it essential to the nature of the thing? So, for example, if I get bit bitten by a flea, as Engel says on my shoulder at 4am, does that have the same necessity as, for example, the fact that over time I grow old? Is that sort of a general feature of my existence that I will get bitten by a flea? I think it's clear that it's not. So, causation has to be understood more deeply than as an endless chain of isolated cause and effects that just go on forever and, you know, just a sort of single thread. In reality, it's more like a vast web of, in which everything affects everything else and nothing exists in isolation. So, whilst we often rethink that we can say something like, somebody died because they were knocked over by a car, and of course, that might be the interesting and important fact that we want to highlight. In reality, of course, there is an infinite web of causes that enabled that to happen, if that person had simply left their house a bit later or earlier, walked a bit faster, had or hadn't bumped into somebody on the way, etc. etc. You can multiply these conditions at will. So, actually, everything that happens is really not caused by one thing, but the whole web of reality that influences everything. So, this is a kind of what we could call a universal causation and all-sided causation. And with this, patterns emerge. General features, you know, that are patterns which are repeatable and predictable. And these are the more essential features of the matter, essentially. Because we can, not only can we predict these things, but we can understand the reason why they take place. And that is really what we're after, basically. So, however, having said that, the accidental elements, the sort of incidental events that take place remain absolutely vital for this. Because these general patterns, the necessity, basically, the laws or whatever, can only exist because, or through, shall we say, this maelstrom of individual relatively accidental things that take place. There is no sort of necessity that exists outside of these particular events. As Marx himself says at one point, that if that were the case, in other words, if necessity did not express itself through chance, the necessity itself would be mystical. Like, how it comes to be that this particular pattern must exist, would be absolutely incomprehensible. So, we still need to have these sort of accidental elements in the equation. We can't only talk about the sort of general patterns in this abstract way. So, we have both accidents and necessity, each of which is equally vital to understand what is going on. And this is an outlook which has also been happened upon by modern science, particularly things like chaos theory or complexity theory. And this is because a lot of scientists started to realise that a lot of systems, particularly complex systems, such as the weather, and of course, human societies, another example, very, very complex systems, on the one hand, have these kind of predictable patterns. But on the other hand, they are completely unpredictable and seemingly random at the same time. And this is a kind of a huge kind of philosophical conundrum that people wrestle with. How can it be both predictable and random? Does that really make any sense? And the tendency for people is always to pick one sign to say, well, no, it's not at all random. It's completely predictable. Or to go to the other extreme and say, no, it's totally random. We can't understand anything. Of course, our position is that it's both at the same time. And we will explain this further. But there's countless examples of this. Gases in which the past, the exact movements of the molecules is completely unpredictable, but the behaviour of the volume of all of these particles as a whole is completely predictable. The weather, of course, is one that I've mentioned as well. The death rates in a society as well. And these are actually, this principle is probably something we're more familiar with than we realise. We're familiar with the fact that even the healthiest person who is young could just die tomorrow for no particular reason, just at a random event. On the other hand, we also think that it is to be expected that the average amount of people that die a year stays fairly constant most of the time and is very predictable, which instead of seems paradoxical because you would think, well, if one person is unpredictable, then surely like 50 million people is 50 million times more unpredictable. But actually, it's not back that way at all. So why is this? And how do we explain this? Well, as we discussed in previous weeks, the law or the necessity, or if you like the pattern, whatever you want to call it, does not exist externally to the thing themselves. As I said earlier, it expresses itself through these accidents. And this was understood by Marx when he says the following, and this is very famous quotation from him. 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 men pursuing his aims or man pursuing his aims. So here it almost seems as if Marx might be stressing the randomness or the accidental character of society that it's just men doing whatever they want and almost as if there is no law to society. But of course, Marx does not think that. So how do we explain that? Well, the randomness that scientists might talk about with the weather system or that we could talk about with society. This should be understood as only a relative thing. It's not absolutely random or without causation, right? So take society, each given person in society, of course, it is unique and it is unpredictable in the detail exactly what they will do with their lives on any given day. That can't be, but you can't say that because we know this person's class background, we know that tomorrow they're going to do this. That's ridiculous. And yet at the same time, people do exist, individuals do exist in a social context and they are molded by that context. People are, unfortunately, they might protest, but they are types by and large. People do largely conform to the types of, for example, the class background that they have and many other things that condition them as well besides class. So people aren't actually so unique. So uniqueness, if you like, turns out to be a relative term. People are types that people also are unique and in the detail, basically. People are influenced by other things. And moreover, they have certain interests, you know, if you come from a certain class, then you have certain interests, which no matter what your personality is, those interests will probably exert themselves over time. There are exceptions, of course, people who break from their class background and do very exceptional things. But by and large, people are molded by their social environments in that way. So although we say they're random, yes, they are random in the detail, most people, of course, don't stray from the path too much. And therefore, and there are good reasons for that that we can explain, which I've just mentioned, you know, that the social environment, the interests that they have. So over time, or if you like, across society, you know, one exception is balanced out by another exception in the opposite direction. And these averages, therefore, yeah, they compensate one another. And we get a pattern emerging, we get a predictability to society. And therefore, we have, if you like, necessity emerging through this sort of maelstrom of random individuals. But of course, as I've said, only so random. And so this shows how the individual contains the whole within themselves, that you know, the one side of the opposite contains the other side, or is expressed through it. In other words, the individual is also partly a type as part of their classes, and is probably conforms to it to a large extent. On the other hand, the necessity or, you know, the sort of the lawfulness of society can only exist through these relatively unique, relatively random individuals. And this is why we say after Hegel that necessity expresses itself through chance. So if we take, for example, social revolution, if a social revolution is necessary, right, if they're really society needs to have a revolution, because of its the state that it's in, this can't happen, sort of because outside of society, this law exists, and then sort of orders society to have a revolution and to have it exactly on time, and in exactly the right way. As I said earlier, such a law would be mystical and incomprehensible. I mean, where would it exist? How would it gain its power over society? It's just, it's nonsense. So although the revolution is necessary, it can only express itself, if you like, through the more or less unique individuals that make up society. And of course, those people are unpredictable. And even the leaders of revolutions are relatively unpredictable in the detail, if you like. So on the one hand, revolutions have general features for the, because of the structure of society. On the other hand, that each revolution is also unique. And it happens, if you like in it, you could say in an imperfect way. Take a concrete example from recent history in 2010, at the end of 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia. So that was a relatively accidental event in the sense that, you know, this was to do with the detail of his own personal life. But that, once that accident had happened, that sparked off a social revolution in Tunisia. And it sparked off, in fact, the whole of the Arab Spring. And the fact that it spread not just to Tunisia, but the rest of the Arab world, shows that there was a general need for that. In other words, capitalism in these countries had become so unbearable, and the regimes they lived on there had become so unbearable, that seeing this man killing himself in this way was enough to make people rise up and to sort of organize a revolution, essentially. And in fact, this randomness of the event is actually, once again, only so random, because of course, the very same unbearableness of capitalism in Tunisia is also to a certain extent the reason that he set himself on fire. Although we can't obviously generalize this and say that all revolutions in Tunisia will always be caused by someone setting themselves on fire, that of course, there is still this uniqueness to the events. But the point is that the conditions being ripe for revolution, that was all that was needed. And it wasn't really just him setting himself on fire that caused the revolution, but the whole, the whole, the build up of all of the contradictions in Tunisian society, of course. So we are determinists, of course, but we do not imagine because of that that we are able to understand and to predict everything that will ever happen and to know exactly when a revolution will take place or something like that and just fold our hands and wait for it to happen. So this brings me on to the final thing I want to discuss, which is the question of freedom. This is a very tired debate in philosophy. Are we free or are we determined? And it's usually put as if it turns out that we are determined, in other words, we're caused and those causes are predictable. There's no such thing as morality because somebody kills someone just because of the composition of their body or what they ate for breakfast that day. And therefore, people say, well, we have to accept freedom if we're to accept moral responsibility. This is not a debate that Marxists are hugely interested in. But the question of freedom itself is very important. So, of course, for us, the idea of freedom without causation, you know, that somebody isn't caused in any way by or determined by their composition and things like that and is therefore unpredictable and has absolute freedom, this is nonsense. It's unscientific. And if you think about it, it's not desirable or a good thing. If somebody were to do something purely just for random, not because of their composition or anything in their life experience, but just randomly, that wouldn't really be a good thing. On the other hand, we don't deny freedom, but we give it a real material content. We give it a proper explanation for the first time, rather than having it as this fictitious abstraction. For us, freedom, for Marxists, freedom means, again after Hegel, the recognition of necessity. In other words, you cannot escape causation. But if you understand its principles in the given case, then you can act with freedom. So to give a classic example, if we want to fly, we can't simply fantasize about flying and then fly. We have to understand the laws of aerodynamics and things like that. And then we can build planes and things which enable us to fly. And therefore, in a sense, we have the freedom to fly, which would otherwise not be possible. So consciousness is absolutely essential for freedom because consciousness is what enables us to understand these laws that we live in and are determined by, rather than just being kind of blindly affected by them. And then we can manipulate these laws to meet our needs, really, and to live better, essentially. And that, therefore, is freedom. So consciousness is absolutely vital. And that shows why we need to build a revolutionary party. Yes, there are laws to capitalism. And yes, I would say it's inevitable that capitalism goes into crisis and provokes revolutions. That is true. But on the other hand, we need to consciously recognize those laws in order to realize them. And in this sense, social laws, the laws of human society, are somewhat different to the laws in the rest of the natural world because consciousness plays a role. So whilst the bourgeoisie cannot prevent a revolution from happening, because the laws of capitalism cannot be escaped from and revolutions will happen, they can't prevent them from happening. But they can sort of sabotage them, if you like. And certainly they do that. They bribe our leaders, for example. They corrupt workers' organizations. They use every means at their disposal to confuse our movement, basically. And they've done so many, many times in history. They've shown that no matter how much there is an objective need for revolution and for socialism, it doesn't necessarily come to full completion because of the conscious intervention of the bourgeoisie. And so therefore it follows that we need to recognize necessity as well. We need to recognize that revolutions can and must take place. And therefore build an adequate organization to realize that necessity, which is of course a revolution. That doesn't mean that creating, sorry, a revolutionary party. That doesn't mean that a revolutionary party can create a revolution at will and that necessity is no longer important. But it means that we can, we can, these laws can be consciously used rather than sort of sabotaged by the other side, if you like. And that is, history has shown that that is absolutely vital. And so what this kind of philosophical understanding tells us is that is that far from not having to fight for socialism, this understanding should give us every confidence of the need for socialism. And therefore the fact that we can and we must build a party that can help us to carry out a socialist revolution. Lenin stated that without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement. Without a revolutionary theory, we are bound to take in the ideas that surround us. Under capitalism, these are ideas that ultimately defend the status quo. In well read upcoming book on the history of philosophy, Alan Woods looks at the development of philosophical thinking from the ancient Greeks all the way through to Marx and Engels, who brought together the best of previous thinking to produce the Marxist philosophical outlook, which looks at the real material world, not as a static immovable reality, but one that is constantly changing and moving according to laws that can be discovered. Through this, we can learn how philosophy becomes an indispensable tool in the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society. Pre-order your copy now at www.marxist.com.hop