 We were talking about postmodernism and Marxism versus postmodernism. So the first question we should probably ask is why should we talk about postmodernism? And commonly postmodernism refers to some philosophers and set of ideas that were written or these philosophers wrote their main books in the 1960s and to 80s roughly. So is this even relevant today anymore? And we would say it is very relevant today actually because many elements and features of these ideas have actually seeped into all kinds of areas and have come to influence not only social sciences and philosophy majors at universities but also political organizations, movements and even mass media. And examples are ideas, these ideas of intersectionality, identity politics, postcolonialism, queer theories, some ideas of a present in the climate movement and so on. So when we look at the roots and the basic concepts if you could call it like that of postmodernism, we are talking about quite prominent trends that we need to be able to answer and to defend Marxism and put forward Marxism against them. And as I said, so-called postmodernism emerged or the main text, the famous text, emerged mainly in the 1970s, right after the 1968 movement and some in the 1980s. And the most famous books associated with this are written by names like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and Baudrillard and others. Now, as Marxists, we know that ideas don't simply fall from the sky. There is a reason why any set of ideas emerges and gains influence in a certain time. So in order to understand where the postmodernism trend comes from, we first want to look at the historical context in which it arose. And I'm sorry if I try not to be too long winded but I think it will be helpful to understand this. So at the beginning of the 20th century, the contradiction of the capitalist system were carried to the extreme and showed for all to see that the system had outlived really its progressive role in history. Imperialism had thrown the world into the great slaughter of the First World War, directly followed by a revolutionary wave that swept across the globe. And the bourgeoisie and its ideas were in an impasse and incapable of explaining the developments that capitalism had given rise to. So there, the bourgeois philosophy's view of reason, rationality and mechanical imperialism couldn't really grapple with this new phenomena in science and in society, like quantum mechanics, cosmology, the imperialist crisis. And these things contradicted their old schemata and through philosophy and through crisis as well, bourgeois philosophy. And so bourgeois philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century was reduced to extreme, narrow-minded, logical positivism on the one hand where they tried to find very abstract mathematical formula to explain the world and only accepted directly observable, superficial, measurable facts. And then on the other hand all kinds of mysticism that emerged. And actually the post-modern trend was a direct expression and continuation of this trend of intellectual skepticism and pessimism of this time as I will try to show in a moment. So in the meantime, of course, the working class had found their own philosophy and worldview that could explain the contradictory nature of capitalist society and also of nature itself and bring the ruling system's contradictions to its own revolutionary conclusions. And these were the ideas of Marxism, of course, which were fiercely opposed by the bourgeoisie that tried to discredit and destroy the influence of Marxism as much as possible. So in this crisis of capitalism, the working class, capitalism's own grave digger, entered the stage of history, directly threatening the power of the capitalists with the Russian Revolution and a number of other major revolutionary events that really shaped the whole period between the world wars. But the leadership of the large workers' parties, the social democracy and then later on Stalinism, they were not willing to see the struggle against capitalism to its end and on the contrary they betrayed these countless revolutions that happened at that time. And on the basis of this betrayal of the working class and the massive destruction of the world wars, capitalism was given a new lease of life with the post-war boom, with new technologies and so on. And so this is the setting and the background in which the post-modernists wrote their texts. It was in a time when the massive process of colonial revolutions in Latin America, Africa and Asia were taking place in the post-war period, but they did not lead to democratic worker states and international socialism. And then there was the May 1968 movement in France. France was shaken by the huge revolutionary general strike that openly posed the question of who should have the power in society, the workers or the capitalists. And again, this movement was betrayed by the Stalinists who went to compromise with the ruling class and led this revolutionary movement into safe channels of capitalism. So the people, the post-modernists that we're talking about, they were all academic intellectuals at universities in the student milieu and most of them in France. I read the names, most of them were from France. And there was a mood of demoralization and pessimism and distrust towards the system. But these intellectuals, they didn't understand and until today they don't understand the reason why revolutionary movements had failed and are failing and what the role of leadership in movements is really. They themselves, they weren't involved in the workers' movement and they didn't have any class analysis of what fascism, they were also still in the minds of people like the horrors of fascism were not that long ago. They couldn't explain how it had come to power and why the movement of 68 had failed. The Frankfurt School, critical theory is a good example of this. Like names such as Adorno, Hoakheimer and Makuza that you may have heard of, these are part of the Frankfurt School, the early Frankfurt School. They were in many ways close to the post-modernists and influenced their theoreticians, if you want to call it that. And in the book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, this was written in 1947 and then republished in a new edition again in 1969 in a second edition, so one year after May 68. They write, and I'm sorry, I have to translate this from the German myself because I didn't have the English version of all the texts at hand, but they write in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, what we had set out to do was to show why humanity, instead of entering a true human state of being, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. And they say that they have lost any trust in the sciences and the education system to the point, and I quote, that in the current collapse of bourgeois civilization, not only academia, but the meaning of science itself has come into question. So this feeling that science and technology are actually only means to oppress and to fool us all is very present in post-modernism. For example, Foucault, Michel Foucault, who was very influential on queer theory and queer theory itself also, they say that for them science plays a prominent role to explain or try to explain the oppression of sexuality and identity. They say that the discourse of science has made us believe that there are men and women and that heterosexuality is normal, and that's the reason why minorities are oppressed. But actually, to say that there is such a thing as biological sex is not oppressive per se, it's just a fact. And only if we understand how oppression of sexuality and identities and capitalism are connected can we find a true explanation for oppression and how to fight it. But here, instead, science is seen as a fiction that defines norms that have no factual base whatsoever and that are processes. So in short, objective reality and truth are being denied, or doubted at least. And post-modernists see the fault for all that went wrong in these ideas of enlightenment. And this is a common theme in post-modernism as well. What they understand as modernity starts roughly from the Renaissance and the emergence of capitalism and includes the ideas of liberalism, of enlightenment, but also of Marxism. So to them, these are all modern ideas and as the name post-modernism indicates, they see them as outdated and even dangerous. So the ideas of reason, of rationality, and so on, that had shaped enlightenment, industrialization, and modernity, and their eyes were already carrying the seed of fascism and degeneration of society and civilization. So what did they do instead? On the other hand, they blame fascism, the horrors of fascism, but also the horrors of capitalism, not on the failed revolutions and the bad leadership that led to the defeat of revolution, but on the psychology of individuals and the masses. And this is not only done by the Frankfurt School, but by post-modernism in general. They have this obsession with psychoanalysis and psychology, which they use as a sort of individualization of problems in society. For example, they frequently make claims such as the Oripus complex, or the nuclear family, or consumerism of workers are responsible for the evils of capitalism. And that's the failures of historical revolutions. They analyze as the mistake of individuals, of the masses, of all of us really who are complicit in this. And we're complicit by default because we're part of this society. For example, the book Anti-Oripus by Deleuze and Guattari was written under the impression of the movement of 1968. I think it was published in 1972 or so. And they were both quite enthusiastic about the movement, actually, but they didn't understand its failure. And as the name already shows, they interpreted this event in a psychoanalytic, psychological way. So in it, they argued that the Freudian concept known as Oripus complex, I won't go into this detail now, it's not that relevant, and the nuclear family, they make us all accept repression and submission and actually like that we are oppressed. So that's the real problem here. So what we need to free ourselves is to accept our wild desires and becomes schizophrenic. And they write, what counts is not the authoritarian unification, but rather a sort of infinite spreading, desire in the schools, the factories, the neighborhoods, the nursery schools, the prison, et cetera. And they say, as long as one alternates between the important spontaneity of anarchy and the bureaucratic and heretic coding of a party organization, there is no liberation of desire. So it's quite absurd, actually. So they sense, clearly, that something with the bureaucracy of the workers organization and with this party organization, like the Communist Party of France, that something is not right there and may have to do something with the failure of 68. But all they put forward is an alternative, is to unleash desire and glorifying schizophrenia, really. And this shows how completely reactionary these ideas are and that their non-explanations cannot help any revolutionary movement to actually win and overthrow capitalism. So as I said, the main proponents of post-modernism, they were all from France. And in the intellectual milieu at that time, it was kind of trendy to be radical and against the system. But none of them were actually involved in the workers organization. So Foucault, he was an inactive member of the French Communist Party for a few years and then later stated in an interview that he had joined without having read any Marxist literature himself. Instead, he'd read Nietzsche and Heidegger and other pessimistic and idealistic philosophers. And it's also interesting, like this post-modernist, they also all knew each other. Like Foucault was a pupil of Al-Chisels, whom you might have heard of. He's called an enhancer of Marxism, a new Marxism. But actually, he paved the way for a very reformist torsion of Marxism. And Derrida was a pupil of Foucault. Deleuze was a friend of Foucault's. Derrida was friends with Paul de Man, who was from Belgium, but taught in the USA and actually popularized these ideas in the US and so on. So it's really a clique of intellectuals, if you want to. And even today, they all know each other. It's like, yeah, they're all buddies. So they don't know Marxism really. And they haven't read much about it either way. Al-Chisels, you could argue, has read Marx. He wrote a book about capital. And in it, he says, the worst thing about capital is that it's dialectic. That was the mistake Marx made. But what they say, what they saw of Marxism really was only the Stalinist caricature of Marxism that they experienced in the Stalinist French Communist Party of what they saw. And I think the Communist Party of France at the time, there must have been probably a suffocating place, not only but also intellectually, because the CPS and Stalinism popularized a very mechanical view of society. So when so-called left intellectuals criticize Marxism, what they really attack is the Stalinist caricature of Marxism most of the time. Often when the way postmodernists talk about Marxism is, like they say, it's only about economics and reductionists and so on. But often, the way they talk about Marxism and when they mention Marx, it's so ridiculous and so obviously not in any even remote way what Marx has said ever that it can't be seen as anything but pure slander. Like, for example, Deloitte and Gueteri write, and I'm sorry, I have to translate from the German again and I'm not always 100% certain what exact terms are used in English for this because they also tend to invent terms as they go along and see fit. But if any one of you has any question about the sources and where to find what you can ask me later. So they write, Marx constructs a concept of capitalism by defining the two main components, naked labor and pure wealth with their zone of indissernability when wealth buys labor. And I don't know if many of you have already read the Communist Manifesto or any other work by Marxist and Engels, but I assure you that they do not, most certainly do not talk of naked labor and pure wealth. They talk about wage labor and capital and they even decidedly differentiate between capital and wealth. And moreover, there is no zone of indissernability there but a very clear relationship of exploitation of labor by capital. So why destroy a nice piece of prose with such thing as facts, right? But this is really just slanderous. But this distortion of Marxism and attacking it while pretending to stand on the same side or pretending to attack it from the left, so to say, was and still is actually very useful to the bourgeoisie. For radical students who were repelled by Stalinism and this sort of subtle and intellectual and academic critique of Marxism, so serious doubts and skepticism towards the ideas of Marxism. And this is important today as well. And one reason why we must decisively combat these ideas of modernism, identity politics, and so on. For example, I mean, it's almost compulsory in feminist circles to start any mentioning of Marx with the claim that, or did this claim that Marxism doesn't understand the root of women's oppression plus Marxism with the white men and also sexist and Marxism only cares about factories and economy and stuff and can't explain household work and so on. And this is completely wrong but it has to for the ruling class a very useful effect of discrediting Marxism from the left, so to say, for those who actually want to fight capitalism, it confuses. And there's a CIA report from 1985, which is called France, the Faction of the Left Intellectuals. And in fact, it directly proves how happy the ruling class is and was about the so-called left intellectuals. And the report says, even more effective in undermining Marxism however were those intellectuals who set out as true believers to apply Marxist theory and the social sciences but ended up by rethinking and rejecting the entire tradition and then about a certain historical school, right? They do this primarily by challenging and later rejecting the hitherto dominant Marxist theory of theories of historical progress. And it continues, for the most part, they have concluded that Marxist's notions are simplistic and invalid. In the field of anthropology, the influential structuralist school associated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Foucault and others performed virtually the same mission. So Foucault would call himself post-structuralist, they call him a structuralist in a way, it's details. And they say, we believe their critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences is likely to endure as a profound contribution to modern scholarship both in France and elsewhere in Western Europe. And actually this is exactly what many post-modernists and queer theoreticians such as Judith Butler and so on and Foucault say like Marxism is simplistic, it only cares about economics, it's class reductionists as to say and we should reject an emotion of historical progress. Yeah, so I have already talked about some common themes of post-modernism that are prevalent in all areas that have been influenced by it. This feeling of pessimism, a sense of doom, the technology and science only serves to oppress us. A rejection of historical progress, an individualization and psychologization of problems in society instead of explaining how the root of problems is capitalism. A rejection of reason and rationality since these are ideas of modernity. But I want to go a bit more systematically into the philosophical questions they try to answer and explain where they're coming from. Because it was already said, one main and the very fundamental, one of the main and very fundamental opinions of post-modernism is that there is no objective truth and no objective reality. So to post-modernists the whole world is actually made up of language, of narrative and of discourse. And they have all their soul focus on the role of language. So to them, the way we speak about the world constitutes what the world is. There is no real world beyond language to them. And this they also call anti-essentialists. So there's no hidden essence, as they would say behind words. Jacques Derrida, for example, has famously said there is nothing outside of texts. And Lyotard, who coined the term post-modernism, refers to the whole world as a language game. And Chris Whedon, a post-structuralist feminist, writes, again translated, sorry, she writes the following, language far from reflecting a given societal reality, constitutes social reality. Language is not expression and naming of the real world. There is no meaning beyond language. And Baudrillard, he's probably the craziest of the post-modernists, he says, it is no longer possible to manufacture the unreal from the real, to create the imaginary from the data of reality. The process will rather be the reverse, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because the real has disappeared from our lives. Yeah, from this proposition that everything is actually made up of narratives and discourse, they argue that the old big narratives have become outdated and failed. And so we need new trendier narratives, apparently. And with big or meta narratives, what they really mean is any systematic world view that can explain what is happening and why. And here they lump together all modern thoughts such as Marxism or liberalism, the ideas of enlightenment and so on. And again, Lyotard, I quoted earlier, the one who majorly coined the term post-modernism, he defines post-modernism as, quote, incredulity toward meta narratives. And he says, our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as did Marx. And with inconsistencies in this case, he means the contradictions of capitalism in this context. So he doesn't believe that any positive outcome, such as a revolution and socialism can come from the contradictions of capitalism. So if the so-called big narratives are no longer valid, how do they explain what is happening in the world and why? And the answer is they don't. To them, the world is an obscure network with many small individual points of reference, but no causal or definable relationship between them. It's a chaos. So Deleuze and Guattari actually call it chaos. There are no laws, no clear laws, except these imaginary laws of narratives. And even though they reject what they call big narratives, they do not at all reject their own narrative, which is that the whole world is made up of narratives. So while they always claim that they're very critical and want to question the very foundation of all we believe, they themselves base their philosophy on a quite big assumption that the whole world is made up of stories. However, not just any stories, not big narratives, but only small individual and partial and disconnected ones. So Foucault, for example, says in the order of things, one of his major works, if there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that which gives absolute priority to the observing subject. And then it seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice. So it's open to all kinds of speculation about the world, but he wants to reject, what he wants to reject is a worldview that assumes that we, the subject, can know the world and that we can explain it. So this is scored out, anything else? Yeah, sure, let's talk about it. And I mean, if I tell you that the whole world is only made out of words and nothing except language exists, you would most likely, and rightfully so call me crazy, and yes, these ideas are quite delusional. But in fact, I mean, they're not really believing it, right? I mean, the way these authors write makes it very clear that their texts are not any serious attempt to actually understand the world. I mean, they're just right for the sake of writing, really, which incidentally is in full line with their sole focus of the theory, which is language, and has the nice and very real-worldly side effect of selling books and getting professorships at universities and so on. Yeah, so but back to these philosophical questions. Because yeah, it sounds absurd, but I mean, it's not out of nothing that they discuss what the world is and whether we can know it in the way they do, because actually the question, whether there is such a thing as objective reality and whether or how we can know and understand it, has always been a major central question in philosophy. And I want to take a short detour and delve a little deeper into this question because I think it will help us to understand not only postmodernism, but also why it's so reactionary and also what the Marxist's answer to it is. So the answer, the question that is being posed by them really is what is the relationship between the things and objects around us and our ideas and thoughts about them? So this is the question of the relationship between matter and idea. And this question of the relationship between matter and idea rose to new relevance when science advanced and we were actually able to deepen our knowledge of things in the 19th century and so on. And generally, the two big philosophical camps as Engels explained it, the idealist and the materialist camp. And maybe some of you have attended the philosophy talk yesterday evening and there have been a few other very excellent leaders on this so I won't go too deeply into this but I think it's still important to mention it a bit. So idealists assume that ideas and worlds and concepts are the starting point and the origin of the world. So in the last instance, the primacy of the idea, actually in an idealist world view can only mean like a god-like spiritual existence because where else would these ideas come from really if not from nature and the world? And according to the idealist view, matter and objects are only derived from ideas or even identical to ideas. Materialists on the other hand recognize that matter is primary and that ideas are derived from matter and that ideas are actually the highest expression of matter. And as Marxists, we're materialists, we're dialectical materialists and we recognize that there is an objective material reality and outside world. And as humans, we are part of this reality. We are part of nature. And the material world around us is constantly changing and evolving and this movement of matter follows certain laws and patterns. And there is such a thing as cause and effect and laws of motion according to which matter moves and develops. And since humans are part of nature, our bodies and our brains themselves are obviously also governed by these laws. And therefore we can also recognize the world we are part of and understand its laws. So our brain is a material organ and it consists of matter organized in a certain way. And as Marx wrote in the German Ideology, he said it the following way. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also necessarily supplements of their material life process which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. So this is Marx. So through our senses and through our interaction with nature, we can observe its patterns and generalize laws from it. Laws that actually really do exist. We can recognize the laws. And this, however, doesn't mean that ideas are simply a direct and static reflection of nature. On the contrary, ideas can have a very profound impact on reality because these ideas can be used to manipulate nature and thus change it. For example, if we observe an apple tree and learn that from seeds and tree grows which then bears fruits, we can use this knowledge and then plant seeds strategically and build an apple orchard and then harvest the fruit systematically and get apple juice and whatnot. So in other words, through labor, we test out our ideas in practice and transform the world through it. And this is how humanity has actually progressed from primitive societies with almost no technology and means to consciously influence our surroundings so that now we have big cities, technology, a huge productive capacities today. And here also lies the answer to the question of what truth is. So there is an objective reality and yes, we can also recognize it and find truth. The world is infinitely complex and changing all the time. It's impossible for us to know absolute truth like everything. However, we can gain relative knowledge and truth by testing out our ideas and approximate truth, find part truth. So our ideas are an accurate reflection of the world that gives us a deeper understanding of how it works. We can test this out and angle set through practice and labor. We can turn the thing in itself like objective world into the thing for us. And it is no accident at all that these philosophical insights of Marxism were made at a time where science was progressing fast and giving us a real ever deeper understanding of nature, really. So through experimentation and labor, we can test out our ideas and develop and deepen them. And this is how we consciously change the world. In other words, only if we truly understand how capitalism works, can we consciously work to overthrow it. And this was what Marx meant when he famously said the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point however is to change it. So now with this in mind, I think it will now become much clearer to understand what postmodernists are saying. They, of course, completely ignore or distort what Marxism has to say about the relation between matter and idea. And they are actually moving backwards in the history of philosophy and take as their starting point the ideas of Emmanuel Kant, a German idealist philosopher who lived in the 18th century. And Friedrich Engels in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, he describes Kant's philosophical position in regard to idealism and materialism as agnosticism. So ultimately, no one can evade the choice between idealism and materialism, but Kant was trying to do just that. And these postmodernists, they take Kant as starting point. Kant recognized that material reality does exist. He called it the thing in itself. But he thought that this reality cannot be truly known because by default, we would impose our preconceived categories onto the world and thus interpret it without being able to determine whether our interpretation of the world that we see is actually accurate. But then, if it says this, then the next question arises, where do these categories actually come from? And then Kant went on to argue that these categories that form our ideas are given to us by reason, which is an inherent a priori ability and gift of humans. And then in the end, he's a bit in a pickle and he ends by saying like in, this reason is somehow given to us by God. So he proposed a sort of dualism, matter and idea separates fears and tried to evade the question of whether matter or ideas are primary. But in the end, he had to decide and he chose idealism. So what the postmodernists are doing is they pick up the question Kant posts and then completely fail to answer them. Really, they try to. So actually, most of them argue against this Kantian dualism where matter and idea are completely separate fears. And in fact, they want to get rid of this dualism. And this is partly their justification of why they are attacking reason and rationality all the time, because they say this is this dualism and so on. But they don't always manage to do so. And most of all, they don't do so in any sensible way. So Derrida really spends hundreds of pages in his book, Criminatology, of trying to argue against reason and logocentrism, as he calls it. And these postmodernists, they want to resolve the relationship between matter and idea, but without resorting to this reason that Kant evokes. But their attempt to do so actually leads to them to either stopping at the incomplete and nonsensical agnosticism that Angus described, which is nothing but a hidden idealism, or it leads to them actually cancelling out the material part of the dualism completely, like leading them to pure subjective idealism, really. So sometimes they would say that the thing in itself, the objective reality is something we cannot talk about, assuming in fact agnostic position, a Kantian position where the thing in itself may, may not exist, we cannot know. And at other times, they openly deny that the thing in itself, objective reality exists at all. But in any case, they are quite certain that we cannot truth and in fact, to ask for truth is an impermissible question that shouldn't even be asked. So Deleuze and Guattari, you can see I like them a lot, they say, we thus have no concept of truth. And they say, philosophy is not about knowing, it is not truth that is its driving force, but rather categories such as the interesting, the notable, or the important. So this is how they arrive at the fantastic point of view that there is nothing outside of language, i.e. out of our concepts and ideas. Our ideas are just a permanent self-reflective network that reproduces itself. And it leads to quite fantastic so-called analysis of reality, and I'll give you a few examples. For example, a certain professor called Wolfgang Müller-Funk wrote a piece in a newspaper paper two years ago in which he explained how narratives create reality. And he wrote, a glance at the narrative clearly shows that so-called facts are not a simple matter. What we call factual events are actually mediated by narratives which connect different events in a cunning way through time and casualty and turn them into a bigger union. For example, they connect the overthrow of the Tsar with the October Revolution. So note here that time and causality are for him just cunning inventions of this ominous narrative, not actual relations between matter. But also, what is this professor telling us about the greatest event in human history, the October Revolution? He says, there was no real relationship between the February Revolution that overthrew the Tsar and the October Revolution. So how did the October Revolution happen, what was it? And he doesn't tell us, but countless bourgeois ideologists have filled the gaps that he proposed fully leaves open here with slanderous lies with their narratives like it was an evil coup by Lenin who was a German imperialist agent. So Mr. Müller-Funk's non-explanation leads to either useless or openly reactionary conclusions, really. Another example is Baudrillard who wrote a book, a collection of essays which is called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. An entity argues that the Gulf War was not actually a war. It was only a television propaganda spectacle, really. And only what we were told through the narrative, only the most superficial and simplistic expression of the war, the images on TV, is what made this war a war. It was not a real war. But understanding imperialist interests or finding a way to end the suffering and the deaths of hundreds of thousands that were killed has clearly no place in his worldview, right? It's only about the narratives and images on TV. And the very same Baudrillard also explained, okay, I read it, it's really funny, by representing things to ourselves, by naming them and conceptualizing them, human beings call them into existence and at the same time hasten their doom, subtly detach them from their brute reality. For example, the class struggle exists from the moment Marx names it, but in no doubt exists in its greatest intensity only before being named. Afterward, it merely declines. So, supposedly class struggle was at its greatest before it was named by Marx, but it was only created once Marx named it. But ever since it was named, it hasn't existed anymore. And this is complete and utter nonsense, and it's not only historically and factually wrong since there are class struggles happening right now and they were happening before Marx named them, which he didn't even do, I mean, yeah. But even the sentences themselves are contradictory and nonsensical, right? So I think this is sufficient to show how unserious and frankly, completely reactionary these kind of ideas are when it comes to understanding the world in order to change it. And in fact, these postmodernist ideas, these postmodernists are not radical at all. They're actually, again and again, argue that there's no alternative to the present system. So yes, they say sometimes the ruling system is oppressive and they say this is because all the narratives and discourses in society are oppressing us and telling us to live in a certain way, but at the same time, they repeatedly state that you can never escape this oppressive discursive reality. The power of discourse and narrative is in their view omnipresent. It shapes a way of thinking and of living so deeply that the best we can do is to show through their amazing philosophical writings how oppressive it is. So they say if we do this, if we show this, then slowly, gradually, maybe we can shift the narrative in society toward a better discourse. And Michel Foucault famously said, said resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. And David Halperin, a defender and big fan of Foucault, sums up these ideas in the following way. Resistance cannot stand in pure opposition to the powers that be, but struggle and change always take place through co-optation, that that, in fact, change is made possible by co-optation because in the process of co-optation, in assimilation, the resistance, the terms of power change. So this is a completely reformist approach, really. It basically says, or not even reformist, but anyway, it says the ruling class will always adapt and co-opt resistance. And this is here portrayed as a very good thing because once we are absorbed by the ruling order, we can maybe change the system from within. And here it becomes apparent what kind of role these ideas can play in movements and class struggle in reformist workers organizations and so on because with this set of ideas, it's extremely easy to argue that there's nothing to do but to talk differently about problems, to identify and address oppression, and that's all there is to this. It's a philosophy that is the perfect excuse for politicians, leaders, and bureaucrats who want to talk a lot, generate votes, but do nothing substantial to improve the living situation for the masses, but instead just want to profit from the perks of working within the system to change it. And this has, in fact, already been proven in action. The idea of a left narrative and left populism gave quite a lot of popularity in recent years when new left parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain witnessed a sudden surge and important proponents of these parties referred to these ideas. So the leader of Syriza, Alexis Tsipras, he was able to form a left-wing government in the wake of the financial crisis in Greece and he had the idea that he would change the hegemonic discourse of austerity in Europe. So he went to meet the Pope so that the church could spread anti-austerity ideas probably. He refused to wear a tie in public to give a symbol of radical change. He appealed to bourgeois politicians in Europe to change the idea that austerity is rational. And he demanded that the Troika of austerity, the European Central Bank, the IMF, and the European Commission, they should no longer be called the Troika because it's a negative word. And of course, Merkel and the others, they laughed and gladly stopped to use the word Troika at least in the open, but they crushed the will of the Greek workers nevertheless and forced through brutal cuts, really. Of course, there was no resistance to austerity by the ruling class of the EU. And those who could have really resisted and who started to do at the time were the workers and youth of Europe. And instead of changing the narrative and going to the Pope at Tsipras, he should have appealed to the working class of Europe. So the Greek comrades of the IMT of our organization at that time wrote actually, right after the elections, no illusions in negotiating with European capital and its institutions. Our opponents are the capitalist interests, local and foreign, that are hiding behind the Troika. Our only true ally is the European working class. But yeah, this was not the idea of left narratives and so on. So in fact, the working class is such, is seen as completely irrelevant to postmodernists. To them, they're just one of many identities created by narratives. Marxists, on the other hand, argued that the working class is the only force in society that can overthrow capitalism exactly because it's objective and real role in the capitalist mode of production. But Chantal Mouff, another quite famous defender of the idea of a left narrative and a left populism, she was recently asked in an interview whether her strategy of a left narrative and left populism maybe must be considered a failure since Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Bernie Sanders in the USA. They all have suffered defeats recently, right? And her answer is, I am not at all of the opinion that the time of the left populism is over or that now is the right time to return to a traditional left politics that is to class politics. And she also says, I have never been convinced that the pandemic would open up a window of opportunity for progressive politics. And today, I'm rather pessimistic. So these lefts, they really, they cannot imagine a world without exploitation and oppression and they're infested with pessimism. That there is subjective idealism that at first glance seems radical. In the end, it's just the twin of just normal bourgeois ideas. In practice, both stand on the same side of the barricade or land on the same side of the barricade. These so-called left liberal, these left liberal demands when detached from a class struggle, even if they happen to be good demands in some cases, if they're detached from class struggle, they can't stop the profit-mongering of the capitalists. Instead, these demands are being taken up as tokenist concessions by the capitalists sometimes when it suits them and are being implemented in the interest of the capitalists. Like we have seen how the CO2 taxation demand of the climate movement is being implemented by the EU as a protectionist border tax against China, basically. We have seen the bourgeoisie adopt a gender-neutral language, like in Austria, now even the police force does that on Twitter use these asterisks to gender. But the systematic oppression of LGBT people and women isn't touched at all by this, right? And in practice, there was exactly these narrative-based, postmodern and reformist ideas that have confused and damaged numerous mass movements in the last years. Like leading figures who adopted these ideas did not pose the question of power in crucial moments and did not challenge the capitalists, but instead gave into the pressure of the bourgeoisie. In Chile, for example, the demand of overthrowing the billionaire president, Pinera out, it was channels into your dialogue about the constituent assembly, the Black Lives Matter movement, where police stations were set on fire and applauded by the majority of the S population and the demands such as abolish the police were raised. But this movement was then channeled into a lesser evil presidential election campaign for Joe Biden and so on. So the task of Marxist is to clear the way from all the clutter of bourgeois ideas to really make room for those ideas that can really show a way forward for the working class and youth. And this important task of the ideological struggle helps to shorten as much as possible the painful experiences of the masses when they have to test out useless, reformist and bourgeois ideas and leaderships. So if we were to give into the pressure of such reformist and post-modernist ideas, we would be forced to go down the road of decay and decline of these outdated ideas. And this at a time when the crisis of capitalism has made revolutionary ideas as appealing as never before really. We cannot let the decay of the capitalist system and its ideas drag us down this road of pessimism and defeats. Marxist theory enables us to understand the underlying processes that are taking place and the instability of capitalism and the direction of historical development is very clear. Capitalism is in its deepest crisis no matter which way the ruling class moves. It only digs itself deeper into contradictions. The working class is stronger in numbers than it was ever in history. And in the last years, the workers, the youth and the oppressed masses have started to move and clearly say no to the barbarism of the system and countless movements and revolutions we've seen. But to say no, it's a very good starting point but it's not enough in order to realize the dormant potential that is there. So we need a positive answer of how to overcome capitalism and Marxism has these answers. Marxist theory is the generalized experience of history and the revolution and with these ideas we can lead the coming revolutions to victory. So that's what you're going to do. Thank you.