 I think really the importance of this session is to remind us that we stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to our movement and in particular theoretical giants people like Marx and Lenin and Trotsky of course and today we're going to of course be adding to that the name of Frederick Engels whose 200th birthday it is next month on the 28th of November and Engels really it's unfortunate that his contribution often gets overlooked actually because he lived both in life and well and in death after as well really in the shadow of his lifelong friend and collaborator Karl Marx who was undeniably a genius and in this respect Engels is often considered as playing kind of second fiddle to Marx and in fact Engels himself was a very modest humble man and he actually often kind of promoted this idea himself he said for example I'll just read what this is a speech Engels gave after Marx's death he said what I contributed at any rate with the exception of my work in a few special fields Marx could very well have done without me what Marx accomplished I would not have achieved Marx was a genius we others were at best men of talent without him the theory would be far from where it is today it therefore rightly bears his name but I think despite Engels's apparent modesty what you'll find is in fact he himself was also a theoretical giant and not just in a few special fields as he says in fact Engels himself was actually a genuine polymath really he was a man with an encyclopedic mind and you can see this from his writings you see it on his writings in economy on philosophy on history but also wide-ranging topics from science to literature and even military writings and most importantly we see that it was really thanks to Engels that together with Marx they were able to lay the theoretical foundations for the movement that we are involved in today the revolutionary workers movement the movement for socialism internationally they helped to lay the scientific socialist ideas that were so key to the development of this movement but also they always try to link these to the real movements of the working class that were going on around them and they threw themselves into trying to build a revolutionary organization worthy of of this name they started with the communist league but later on tried to form the first international and then later on helped to establish the german social democracy and after Marx's death Engels was also involved in the founding of the second international now it's very fashionable these days to try and slander Marx Engels Lenin Trotsky Engels himself is often painted as just some sort of philanthropic benefactor to Marx now it's true that his financial contributions to to Marx and his family were pivotal actually in helping to support Marx enable him to actually dedicate his time to writing but I think if you look at Engels's own writings you'll see that his role was primarily a political and a theoretical one not a financial one that was really a secondary role others have tried to exaggerate differences between Marx and Engels often you'll hear things like Marx is just a kind of liberal academic and it was Engels who kind of was the revolutionary firebrand others try to say that Marx was the the economist and Engels kind of was this kind of fruity philosopher who invented terms like dialectical materialism but this is completely false Marx you can see uses the method of dialectical materialism throughout all of his works and in fact the Engels's philosophical writings things like anti-during were checked over by Marx and vice versa Engels also helped introduce Marx to economic ideas so there was really no separation between the two they were both dedicated revolutionaries what you will see is that both get slandered obviously for giving birth to the ideas supposedly that led to Stalin and Mao and all this is one of nonsense this is what you find in biographies like the one by Tristram Hunt the the um uh the frock coated communist he calls his biography trying to you know trying to implicate Engels as just being this kind of man of leisure going about drinking and hunting which of course Engels did like the the finer things in life but the important thing was he dedicated himself to the struggle of the working class and really it's kind of quite rich for these criticisms to come from someone like Tristram Hunt who was parachuted into his seat as a labor MP in Stoke and later went and now abandoned that position to become head of the Victorian Albert Museum 200 000 a year salary and he's actually firing the lowest pay workers there as we speak anyway that aside it's our job now to really scrape away all of this mud that's been slugging at Engels and uncover his real revolutionary role that he played in developing the movement now I want to focus in this respect on Engels's ideas that's the title of the talk revolutionary ideas of Engels but just a little bit on his life he was born as I said almost 200 years ago on the 28th of November 1820 into a bourgeois family a very conservative family in Germany in the Rhineland province in a town called Barman and he was quite a rebellious youth from a young age and his father who wanted him to kind of go and work in the in the family business sent him off to do an apprenticeship in a town called Bremen and later on he went to do military service in the Prussian army in 1841 that's where he ended up in Berlin and it was in Berlin that he became more involved in political activity in particular he attended the lectures at University of Berlin of philosophy lectures and it was here in University of Berlin that you had a movement very prominent movement called the Young Hegelians now these were kind of group of radical liberals who were kind of looking for ideas that could challenge the kind of autocracy of the Prussian regime and they started to grasp towards the dialectical ideas of Hegel the German the great German dialectical philosopher who'd actually been a lecturer at the University of Berlin just before and the Young Hegelians with this kind of radical liberal movement as I say it was also here that Engels started writing for a paper called the Rheinischer Zeitung which was actually edited by Marx and that's how the two of them first became acquainted on his way to Manchester to work in his family business in 1842 he popped in to see Marx along the way and actually the two didn't get along initially because Marx thought that Hegel was still attached to the Young Hegelians Marx was moving away from this kind of philosophical idealist group of intellectuals and academic critics and was looking for a more revolutionary philosophy Engels was too but Marx didn't realize it thankfully later on in 1845 on the way back from Manchester Engels popped in to see Marx again this time in Paris and the two of them collaborated to produce a polemic against the Young Hegelians particularly the leading figures around the Bauer brothers and this is what became known as the Holy Family also known as a critique of critical criticism because what they were critiquing was this very academic criticism that came from the Young Hegelians similar to kind of what we were discussing earlier this morning in terms of academic Marxism very divorced from the struggles of the working class very idealistic and Engels and Marx were moving away from this and started to develop a philosophy more based on materialism and based on the working class now it's important at this point I think to underline what do we mean by idealism and materialism idealism sorry materialism first of all we should say is the philosophy that asserts that the material world is primary the material world of matter of nature of society that we see around us is real and foot and primary and it is governed by objective laws and processes and these objective laws and processes can be known to us can be discovered and understood by interacting with the world around us by interacting with the world through investigation experimentation science we uncover the laws of nature and uncover the objective reality of the material world we live in the world of ideas is not a separate world of ideas ideas are in a materialist sense are a reflection our approximation our generalization of the material world the ideas that we see around us and similarly with ideologies and so forth idealism on the other hand says the the opposite he says that says that there is a separate world of ideas that is primary you know got plateaus idea of the cave with the the ideas the forms that exist in a kind of separate realm and everything that we see on earth is apparently just some sort of imperfect kind of version of a perfect form existing somewhere else and this kind of idealism is what is then the basis for religion for spirituality and even I would say today the the kind of post modernism that we see infecting a lot of the the left in the universities with where everything is determined by narratives and stories and discourses and that's similar really to the idealism of the past which puts ideas and ideology primarily above all else rather than material conditions and idealism in this sense it's it's it's looking for to recourse to to gods and spirits to explain the world rather than investigating the world itself and the Enlightenment thinkers and and the Enlightenment thinkers before Marx and Engels were attempting to break with this religious idealism and we're trying to develop philosophies based on rationalism and empiricism on science now on the other hand as I said you had Hegel who was this dialectical philosopher trying to resurrect the ideas of dialectics that originally come about actually in ancient Greece around a man called Heraclitus he was a kind of mysterious figure who talked in aphorisms and he he had all these kind of phrases like everything is and is not because everything is in flux and you cannot step into the same river twice these are the kind of kind of dialectical ideas that Heraclitus introduced and what you was grasping at really is the idea that the world around us is not something rigid and static things do not exist in isolation but they are interconnected and they're part of processes of motion of change of flux as you say and that fundamentally things are are driven forwards by tension and contradiction rather than the world of formal logic which seeks to try and absolve contradiction from the world rather in dialectics we see contradiction as something inherent within all processes driving motion forwards in fact as as Hegel and later Engels point out change and motion themselves are a contradiction in the sense that things both are something and are something else they are both here and there at the same time that in itself is a contradiction if you like and Engels was trying to develop these dialectical ideas with his logic but the problem with Hegel's philosophy of dialectics was that for him it was a very idealistic philosophy he based his dialectics on idealism in the sense that he saw the laws of dialectics as existing separate from the world he's as governed by some sort of absolute spirit he saw rather than seeing dialectics as something within the world that something kind of arising out of the real material world the real interactions and this is where Marx and Engels come in because they try to again resurrect these ideas of dialectics but on a materialist basis in their words they had to take Hegel and turn him on his head in other words take dialectics and put it on a materialist basis by explaining that the laws of change are generalizations of real processes taking place in the world around us they are they are laws that arise out of the complex dynamic interactions of matter in motion not laws that are imposed upon it now they took this philosophy of dialectical materialism and then applied it to history particularly with their other collaborative work the German ideology which is not published in their lifetime but it's a great exposition of historical materialism because the point for them was that there was no sharp dividing line between the natural world and the historical world or the world of society and the economy and human thought just as processes could be examined in nature scientifically so too history and the economy could be scientifically understood as well as obviously the development of ideas themselves now it's therefore on this basis of dialectical materialism historical materialism and of course Marxist economics the application of these ideas to the current economic system we live under that we get the fundamental basis then of Marxism or scientific socialism as Marx and Engels named it and this is what really helped them to develop a kind of a fully rounded framework breaking away from the young Hegelians breaking away also from people like Feuerbach who had kind of tried to move away from the idealism of Hegel but not quite leapt to that revolutionary materialism that Marx and Engels had arrived at and this is really what Marx meant with his thesis on Feuerbach when he said the philosophers have only interpreted the world the point however is to change it wasn't enough just to have a philosophy looking and examining the world is necessary to understand the world in order to actively try and change it and that really was the big break that Marx and Engels made with the predecessors and importantly in this respect Marx and Engels tried to connect the ideas to the real movements and and and and events taking place around them and Engels's experience in Manchester were very key in this respect because he observed at close quarters the living conditions the working conditions of the working class and from his observations which he wrote up into a pamphlet called the conditions of the working class in England he drew very revolutionary conclusions and what he what he realized was that it was the social conditions of the working class that gave them the potential for revolutionary class consciousness in other words the the conditions of exploitation by the bosses that forced workers to come together to form trade unions and their ability to withdraw their labor to go on strike to form political parties as well ultimately all of this kind of collective consciousness that the working class has because of the their objective material conditions in relation to production it was this that gave the working class the potential to be a revolutionary agent of change Engels noted and in this respect this is where he notified Marx really the importance this is where Marx was alerted to the importance really of the working class as the potential grave diggers of capitalism the proletariat this is really the the key lesson to be drawn from Engels's experience in Manchester however in Manchester he also came across political economy the ideas of Adam Smith of David Ricardo these English British Enlightenment thinkers they were bourgeois liberals but they were trying to at least understand capitalism scientifically and in this respect again Engels alerted Marx to the importance of these thinkers the these people trying to analyze capitalism and and and treat economics as a science and Marx subsequently tried to do the same himself but again from the perspective of the working class and the struggle for socialism so again we can see it's a complete myth to portray Marx as the economist and Engels as the philosopher because actually at this point it was the other way around Marx was writing his philosophical manuscripts and it was Engels who was writing more on economics and the two were really inseparable sharing these ideas to come up with the framework of scientific socialism it was also in Manchester that Engels came in touch with the Chartist movement which we heard about last night this revolutionary movement of the nascent working class in Britain and he actually put the Chartist leaders in touch with the leaders of a group called the League of the Just who were a group of German revolutionary emigres with a with the headquarters in London and Engels had met these people in 1843 described them as the first revolutionary proletarians he'd met in Britain and Marx and Engels from this point threw themselves into the League of the Just seeing the potential here for a new movement a socialist movement a workers movement and for this reason in the summer of 1847 the at the first congress of the League of the Just they actually convinced the League to change their name from this kind of superhero sounding organization you know the Justice League the League of the Just were changed to the Communist League got much more fitting name and later at the second congress in November December of 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a programmatic document for this uh continue communist league to outline its program its demands and Engels initially drafted this it was called the principles of communism and it's basically a kind of FAQ of uh of uh of of scientific socialism going through all the common accusations against communism uh replying in in very deep you know very uh concise answers about the myths of Marxism effectively similar to what you can find on socialist.net and marxist.com today uh these very concise answers you know saying what is the working class what would socialism look like why does capitalism go into crisis what was the historic role of capitalism what's its redundancy its obsolescence now all of these things were answered in this and eventually written up into what became really the most famous collaboration between Marx and Engels which is of course the communist manifesto and this obviously ended with the famous call to arms workers of all countries unite now the manifesto would prove to be extremely prophetic actually because it was in 1848 just months after the the manifesto was written and published that you had uh revolutions breaking out across the whole of europe and uh and you and it was these kind of events you see that these events shaped Marx and Engels and their ideas and in fact Marx and Engels in many respects were a product of their time they were alive to see the chartist movement rising up the revolutions across europe in 1848 to 51 and of course the paris commune which was this marvellous inspiring event that they drew many lessons from and this is the important thing for marx and engels that their ideas were always based on these real experiences their lessons the theory they developed someone asked the question earlier this morning what is theory and it was pointed out theory is the is the concentrated experience of the class struggle that's what they were doing writing down the generalized lessons of these events that could be applied by the revolutionary movement to to try and help it and be successful in its aims and the real conclusion they drew was the need for an international socialist movement based on a clear revolutionary scientific socialist program and this is what they dedicated their life to trying to achieve to try to bring political clarity to the movement and in this respect you see that for decades they were involved in constant correspondence with the leading political figures socialist groups various thinkers and so forth from across the world trying to kind of debate with them discuss with them and clarify these ideas educate the movement in the importance of scientific socialism at the same time they weren't sectarian they weren't they didn't just hold their noses up to to to these groups they said actually marx pointed out in his critique of the gothra program he said every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs in this respect they saw the launch of the international working men's association otherwise known as the first international which was launched in 1864 they saw this as a massive step forward despite it was very political heterogeneous character it was a mixture of prudinists and utopians and all sorts of trade unionists and figures it was very confused politically but marx and engels became its leading theoretical figures tried to clarify the program of the international and engaged in debates and discussions in order to try to do so always in a patient way as marx said you wanted to be mild in manner but bold in content nevertheless their efforts were really scuppered by the intrigues of bakunin and the anarchist so accused engels and marx of authoritarianism in other words really they didn't like the fact that the the anarchists were in a minority and couldn't convince the majority so they went around saying everything was authoritarian engels answered these arguments actually in an excellent essay called on authority fortunately i don't have time to really go into that but unfortunately because of the defeat of the paris commune the the turn in the class struggle and the intrigues of the anarchists the international was wrapped up soon after 1871 but in this sense marx and engels as they say they tried to develop the real movement and develop theory this was really for them the key goal develop theory for marx that primarily meant his magnum opus capital which again engels played a pivotal role in actually although engels was based up in manchester at the time he read and reviewed every page that marx wrote on capital and sent it back with his comments so again heavily evolved in the economics side of things and in fact after marx's death because engels was the the one most acquainted with the ideas and also most acquainted with marx's indecipherable handwriting it was actually engels who had to dedicate sacrifice himself to writing down all you know getting together all of marx's assorted notes and handbooks and manuscripts in order to publish volumes two and three of capital which again is an enormous kind of achievement that without engels his efforts would not have been possible only engels could have done that and engels during this whole time as i said he made enormous sacrifices he was living up in manchester working in this factory in his family business he hated it but he did it in order to be able to provide marx and his family with the funds so that they could dedicate themselves to writing while they were living in poverty and squalor and so ho marx trekking back and forth to the british library reading reports trying to get this this book together and all of this correspondence all of this building of the first international all this writing of capital it meant that engels's time was incredibly busy and his main writings therefore come later in life and at the same time once he finally did start publishing some some big works that you can see how important these works were the key classic marx's texts that any aspiring revolutionary should read and possibly of greatest importance is anti-during now during was a arrogant academic philosopher who had written his own grand theory which he considered to be a rebuttal of marxism and his kind of academic idealistic reformist scribblings that gained a certain echo amongst a layer of the german social democracy particularly the youth again similar to the kind of postmodernists and the academics that we discussed earlier today but in this respect marx felt it was necessary to respond to during he was busy with capital and so he passed the buck onto engels who i don't think was particularly keen to do it but he did it and he used the opportunity to outline brilliantly the ideas the fundamental principles of marxism of scientific socialism in fact anti-during i'd say is one of the the best kind of writings you can find that summarizes marxism in one place and above all it's a great exposition of the laws of dialectics which engels summarizes in this book as such he says the laws of dialectics are nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature a human society and thought that's pretty uh pretty bold claim but he pointed out that these are not idealistic laws as i said earlier this isn't like the hegelian view where dialectical laws exist separate from the rest of the world no angles goes on to say there can be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it so what are these laws of dialectics well uh the most fundamental of these laws uh is uh the transformation of quantity and quality uh a description a general description really of how change occurs because it's not enough to just say everything changes because when we look around the world we can see everything isn't changing all the time there's relative stasis uh interspersed with periods of rapid change and this is what engels meant by the transformation of quantity into quality the idea that you get a gradual accumulation of small changes quantitative changes beneath the surface within processes that go unnoticed and then burst to the surface at a certain point a tipping point when suddenly you have a transformation of quality a phase change if you like and in fact engels uses the example of water in anti-juring to explain this he says look water doesn't just change gradually in its composition rather it starts as ice at sub-zero temperatures at zero degrees it suddenly all becomes water and melts and then you have a gradual increase in temperature until another turning point has reached the boiling point 100 degrees when suddenly you have this phase change from liquid into gas but again for marks and angles there was no iron wall separating nature from the rest of the world from society and therefore this idea of quantity and quality can equally be seen and applied to history and to the economy you see it in history and consciousness in revolutions what are revolutions if not a tipping point where the the gradual accumulation of discontent and anger breaks out into the surface in these massive societal transformations similarly with economic crises the contradictions build up within capitalism and then some sort of trigger like the pandemic for example suddenly burst these things to the surface again engels highlights that the same happens in science and thought itself actually in the sense that you have in science build up an accumulation of errors that contradict theories and at a certain point leads to the need for a paradigm shift or a scientific revolution as thomas kuhn called it and this highlights another law of dialectics the negation of the negation and what do we mean by that well let's look at this example of theory you can see that when a scientific a new scientific theory comes about it doesn't simply cancel what came before it doesn't simply abolish the old theory rather it absorbs all that is correct within that theory and takes it to a higher level often by having to transform it into its opposite but not in a in a pure cancellation way and through this process of paradigm shifts you you see a spiral and upward spiral of human knowledge and development of science constantly being taken to a higher and higher level you can see this with the example of light in science for example how newton had to first come up with a particle theory of light the corpuscular theory of light saying that light was composed of these little corpuscules or particles and this was dominant for about a hundred years until huygens came along with the wave theory of light in order to explain certain phenomena like diffraction then you fast forward to the early 20th century and einstein comes along and says actually i've discovered the photon which shows both properties of particles and waves so light is actually both and you can see how these theories build upon each other coming to a higher level incorporating everything of the old but uh radically transforming and advancing human knowledge now engels really applied this idea also to human society itself and that was the the case in one of his most famous works called the origins of the family private property and the state and in this book engels used the most recent anthropological evidence of his time to show how class society had developed out of what you call primitive communism and that was because of changes in the material conditions of production what you had was a process known as the neolithic revolution a revolution in agriculture and the the the rearing of of animals and this led to the first time in society of a production of a surplus and on the basis of a surplus you get the development of class society because now with the production of a surplus a certain layer and elite are freed from manual labor and can dedicate themselves to the advancement of science and technology and uh and mathematics philosophy and so forth and actually Aristotle pointed this out himself in uh as as someone who benefited from this process in uh slave society ancient Greece he said man can only philosophize and think once he can eat and this is the case it's it's the material conditions that changes in production that give rise to the ability to actually take society forwards through science and philosophy and this way actually Hegel pointed out that it's not so much from slavery that mankind is originally liberated but through it it's actually only on the basis of this brutal exploitation you actually see the development of science and technology the progress of mathematics and art and culture of the ancient period and at the same time Engels shows in this writings of his there is only it is actually because of class society and in particular private property that you end up with the you see the beginnings of the oppression of women there was no oppression of women in early primitive communism they were considered equals to men in every respect and it's only with the emergence of private property and inheritance and the the attempt for men to to know who their inheritors are to pass on their surplus pass on their property that you see the beginnings of nuclear families of monogamy and of the oppression of women don't have time to go more into that but hopefully someone in the discussion can can can develop this point earlier the point is for Engels that he said that we want to return to a communistic society one free of classes of private property and of oppression but obviously at a higher level not on a primitive communism but if you like a fully luxury automated communism based on superabundance not scarcity and in this respect capitalism has paved the way for this it's created the conditions the material conditions for this this is why Marx and Engels called themselves scientific socialism socialists they were materialists who understood that socialism required this superabundance in order to come about and Engels explains this brilliantly in anti-juring and in the the redacted version of the reduced version sorry the editor's cut known as socialism utopia utopian and scientific where he shows how capitalism has developed an immense level of planning within these firms and at the same time there's this huge antagonism between that socialized production that planning that goes on within companies within these giant monopolies that have negated free competition competition has turned into concentration monopoly but it's created this planning the task now is to is to get rid of this antagonism between that and the private ownership that means that the fruits of all of this go to the elites to the ruling class to the capitalists we want obviously all this production and technology to be used for the needs of society not the profits of the few now all of this explains also a third law of dialectics that highlights a third law of dialectics the Engels noted which is to which is that of the unity and interaction of opposites now what he means by that is the idea that phenomena processes they're never purely one-sided all opposites always exist alongside each other in in in opposition to each other in in in relation to one another and that things when pushed to their extremes can actually transform into their opposites and Engels highlights this again in anti-during in relation to this idea of science and theories pointing out that general truths general scientific knowledge if you push it beyond its applicability they can always become an absurdity and and and become fallacious and in that respect you know you can see that with again the development of science you know theories always reach their limits and become errors at a certain point and you need again as I said this negation of the negation to take theories and science to a higher level but the other side of the coin is that even even very elementary ideas can have a practical application within certain limits formal logic is clearly not true in all times in all places but on a day-to-day basis it gets us by right things generally are the same from one day to the next and that's really the material basis in the world around us that relative calm that we occasionally experience is the basis for formal logic and for a lot of idealism and but in the relation to this idea of the unity of opposites Engels highlights that all these concepts that we think of as pure kind of divorced opposites are in fact interrelated and part of a unity of an inter interaction and in particular he really he describes this in relation to things like the general and the particular or the abstract and the concrete or the part and the whole these are all similar concepts which try and explain the fact that for us dialectics is about yes drawing out the general laws the general processes but then trying to obviously apply these to the concrete situation the truth ultimately is concrete so we have to take our theories including dialectics which are these generalized expressions of the things we see around us the processes we see around us but then apply them to the real world you see that in the development of philosophy itself Engels points out you have initially the very general philosophy of the ancients but then it required the enlightenment and the scientific method to delve deeper into these specific fields and cover more and now what's needed is to bring these things back together again under one general framework and it's very important to have this framework this generalized theory because at the end of the day this is what gives us kind of as I said the foresight over astonishment it can what's what can help us guide our investigations it's very important to have a philosophy if you don't have a general philosophy a framework an analytical set of tools then you just absorb the prejudices and the the the ideas of the ruling class which are obviously the dominant ideas in any society and what you see in is actually Engels applies this idea of the need for a scientific philosophical dialectical method he applies this in a remarkable way in his other great work the dialectics of nature which is actually a collection of unfinished essays he never finished this work of his but by applying a dialectical and materialist analysis he was able to explain many of the unresolved kind of scientific questions of his day and delve deeper into these scientific mysteries and in fact he brilliantly anticipates many of the problems that modern science faces for example in modern physics cosmology you've got ideas like dark matter and dark energy these completely nonsensical ideas bound by you know bouncing around because as as our scientists stumble to try and find the the solution to the mysteries of the universe and in doing so all sorts of weird and wonderful theories developed along the way like string theory completely unprovable theories Engels actually anticipate a lot of these discussions with his writings on matter and motion and time and space showing how all these things were interconnected and in particularly talks about infinity the concept of infinity how the universe is infinite in time and space and it's ridiculous to talk about a beginning of time i.e a big bang which again is one of these mysteries that still remains unresolved today but which Engels gave an enormous insight into with his writing so again we could learn a lot from going back in and reading Engels from over a hundred uh well 140 or 30 years ago now what's most notable actually is his essay within this collection of essays called a partplay by labor the partplay by labor from ape to man uh and the transition sorry in the transition from ape to man i should say because what Engels did here was apply this materialist analysis this dialectical analysis to the evolution of mankind itself they're pointing out that the thing that really separated out us from our early ancestors you know what our early ancestors had in uniquely different from the rest of the animal kingdom was not a miraculously large brain and super intelligence that separated them out rather Engels points out the big brain was the product of labor actually and it was the ultimately the bipedal stance the the upright stance of our early ancestors coming down from the trees that freed up the hands enabled tools to be developed enable our early ancestors to interact with the world around us and it was this interaction this labor that ultimately led to the development of of abstract thinking of complex thought of of higher levels of consciousness and internal so social production the need to produce together collectively it was what gave an impetus to the development of language which further gave a development uh an impetus to the development of abstract thinking and complex thought of memory of planning all of these sorts of things of societal knowledge passed down from one generation to the next Engels says in this respect it was it was labor and language that were the real stimuluses to the development of the brain and this was actually proven subsequently after long after Engels's death by the discovery of the fossil records showing that our early ancestors begin yes with an upright stance and with the development of tools and it's only much later on that you see a much larger brain size developing in other words the brain is the product of labor not some idealistic just superhuman brain that developed out of nowhere and then again this shows the advantage of foresight over astonishment of theory Steven J. Gould when a more modern evolutionary biologist passed away many years ago he pointed out actually that Engels was right in all of this and that some modern science could have learned a lot if they'd read Engels a bit sooner now for us also it's very important how to have this theoretical framework as I say not just to analyse science but to understand how history moves why crises occur how revolutions take place and how consciousness changes and this brings me to another key aspect of dialectics that Engels explained which is the relationship between necessity accident and cause because Engels points out that there's not a kind of a mechanical determinism in in in the world we're materialists we understand that material conditions create ideas create the superstructure in society but not in this mechanical way not in there's no fatalism in history but what you can see Engels points out is that accident is a reflection of necessity this is a Hegelian idea that Engels took put on a materialist basis in other words yes there's there's certain random historic events around us and triggers that produce crises but the point is these are accidental events reflect underlying contradictions and processes in the objective material world laws underlying laws and dynamics that we need to uncover that is the role of Marxism is to undercover uncover and understand these laws because it's only in doing so Engels highlights that we can obtain true freedom Engels remarks that you know if we we cannot be independent of the natural and social laws that objectively exist around us you know we can but we can know these laws we can discover these laws for ourselves and make them work in our interest and manipulate the world around us to suit our ends a good example like I cannot imagine myself to fly and to be a bird that can jump out the window and fly away but what I can do is by understanding physics gravity the laws of motion aerodynamics I can discover and create machines like aeroplanes drones helicopters that can fly and can seemingly defy these laws but in fact are utilizing laws and manipulating them to our advantage and in the same way it's up to us to uncover the mysteries and the mysterious laws of capitalism which operate behind the backs of humans and individuals including the capitalists themselves the we need to uncover the laws of capitalism so that we can fundamentally replace them with a new set of economic laws based on socialist planning nationalization and workers control only in this way Engels points out in his writings can we leap from the kingdom of necessity necessity to the kingdom of freedom that is to the true liberation of humanity so I think to sum up really it's thanks to Engels that we have the weapons the ideological tools the weapons we need to wage this struggle for genuine human emancipation for genuine liberty and freedom and that is why we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Engels and so I just like to finish by uh raising a toast really if I had a glass I'd raise it to Engels and wish him a happy birthday and I hope everyone at home will do the same wish you happy 200th birthday Engels thank you very much