 Mae'r cwrs o'i gwybodaeth yma mae Max yn ddiogelio'r gwybodaeth i'r pethau cysylltau hynny. Ond dyna'r gwybodaeth gael amser oedd ymuno o'r pethau'r gwybodaeth... ...eg i'r ddweud o'r hystryd. Mae'r ddweud o'r methu sy'n llystiadau ym yng ngyfydig... ...y'r methu o diolegysg, i hystryd, i'r ddweud o'r cyffredinodau hynod. ac yn mynd i gael bod y dywedig yn bwysig i'w prifodol, yw eich gwneud yn hyrraedd y ddysgu i chi'n mynd i'ch gwybod yw'r cyntaf o'r cystafell yma yn ymgyrch gyrfa i'r clywoddau ac, oherwydd, yna'n chysylltu, y ddych chi'n ddysgu'r cyfrifodau. Fy ffyrdd mae'r cyrhaith eich cyfrifodau i'r cyfrifodau was effectively the approach of the various declarations or tales of the kings and queens of old. Perhaps you'd have people like Herodotus who was essentially just somebody who kept a travel diary, very fascinating history, but nothing scientific about it. There was something lacking and that was precisely a scientific method. And that's doubly interesting when you consider the fact that Marx didn't invent materialism. Materialism, as a philosophical standpoint, existed long before Marx, actually. But as Plakhanov, who's considered the father of Russian Marxism, himself pointed out, he said, the materialist conception of nature is still not the materialist conception of history. The materialist of the last century, referring to the 18th century, saw history with the eyes of idealists and very naive idealists at that. Insofar as they dealt with the history of human societies, they tried to explain it by the history of thought. And this is something that didn't die away after Marx put forward his ideas and after Marx's death. In fact, actually, today, as we speak in universities and in history books and on historical programmes on TV, there are really two main trends of what I would call bourgeois history. The first is that in reality history, one way or another, has always been this way. There's always been some form of oppression, for example, some form of rulership, some form of inequality and exploitation. Or that history is, in reality, just the kind of cultural development towards what we have now. I'm sure many, if not all of you, are familiar with Francis Fukoyama's idea of the end of history, which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. That idea, philosophically speaking, in terms of the development of history, is that liberal Western democratic values are the end state of human society. And that really the course of history is this process of enlightenment towards this final state. There's that idea, which is similar to Wigg history of the past, but then there's also, I would say, even more reactionary, a more pernicious idea, which is linked to the philosophy of postmodernism, which is essentially that, as Alan was discussing this morning, there is no progress. I would say the postmodernist approach to history is not summed up best by a postmodernist philosopher or historian, but rather by Henry Ford, the industrial tycoon in America in the 1920s, who described history as one damn thing after another. The idea that you could have any connection between these events, that you could offer any kind of systematic or scientific approach to explaining, not just the hows, wares and whats, but also the fundamental question of why things have happened as they do is considering itself just a ridiculous endeavour. Now, this is something that also gripped the minds of the materialists of the 18th century. They thought Alan this morning was talking about this separation between the body, that the materialists such as Descartes, for example, considered to be just a machine, but then you had a strange contradiction that you had this body as a machine, but how do you explain the ghost in the machine, as they thought of it? How do you explain the soul? And so we had this dualism between the material and the spiritual. The approach, the bourgeois approach to history, is effectively a continuation of that, but it kind of expanded onto the scale of human society as a whole. Yes, the natural world can be explained by scientific material laws, and there is objectivity to nature. However, because we as human beings are conscious, and human society is therefore, by definition, a collection of conscious beings, it can't follow those laws. The human psyche, if you like, has placed us outside of nature, and the human society therefore either has no relation to the material world whatsoever, or it has no possible explanation itself. And this idea, as I already mentioned, is very, very common. One very popular book about history, it marks itself as a popular science book, and many of my friends have read it. It's a book called Sapiens by a fellow called Yuval Harari. And I've taken this just as a short example of what I mean by the fact that modern bourgeois history today is still burdened by this dualism. He says, since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths, by telling different stories. So history is basically the course of development of different ideas. And if people start having different ideas, then society changes accordingly. Now, we would say that's idealism. That the materialism of these kind of original 18th-century materialists and their kind of, I don't know, modern descendants is an incomplete idealism. And what Marx contributed, which no one up until that point had done, was he was the first person to place the evolution of human society on a scientific material basis. And I'd like to talk a bit about how he did it. He was a big fan of Charles Darwin. Marx himself, he lived through religious, a scientific revolution in his lifetime. And I don't think it's any coincidence that Marx's very famous preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy actually came out in exactly the same year as Darwin's Origin of the Species in 1859. And I think Engel sums this up best, Marx's relationship to Darwin in his speech that he gave at Marx's graveside after Marx's death, obviously. He said, Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human society, the simple fact hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, the mankind must have, first of all, eat, drink, have shelter and clothing before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc. And Marx himself explains in Capital, he talks about labour. It's all very well saying, oh well, okay, we're going to take a scientific approach to history, we're going to try and root it in material conditions, which, how are we going to do that? And what Marx did is rather than rooting the development of history in the brains of men and women, he rooted it in their labour, if you like, rooted it in the hand rather than the head. In Capital Volume 1 he says, Labour then as the creator of use values as useful labour is a condition of human existence, which is independent of all forms of society, by which he means it's just a permanent state of our existence, is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature and therefore human life itself. So just as Darwin traced the evolution and development of the species of this planet based on their relationship with the natural world and their surroundings, Marx did something similar, mediated by this labour. And what's interesting is this, if you like, the transference of history from the head to the hand is something that's actually been confirmed by more recent scientific studies. It's kind of an interesting tangent to briefly go into that Engels Marx's lifelong collaborator predicted and he hypothesised that actually it was the development, the evolution, the physical evolution of the hand, the precision grip which led and allowed for the development of the human brain and the very high level of consciousness of human beings. At that time that wasn't the accepted point of view. Further research, more recent scientific studies have confirmed precisely that. So this idea of labour being the primary kind of the basis of the development of human society is something also confirmed in the natural world. There's some very important conclusions flow from this because simply saying it is the production of the necessities of life and labour which is the base of human society. That is our starting point for a materialist, a consistently materialist approach to history. But we have to go a little further than that and I think one of the most important quotations that I can offer in terms of Marx's approach to history comes from his preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy. And I will quote in full, it's slightly long, quite dense, but we can unpack these ideas over the course of this session. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitute the economic structure of society. The real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. And this famous line, it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness. Now there's a lot of ideas in this paragraph. The first one to start with which is extremely important that when we talk about labour we're necessarily in every case talking about a social process. The interaction, and we were discussing dialectics earlier, the dialectical relationship between humanity and the natural world is one that takes place in a social way. All forms of human society are based on some level of cooperation, interaction and interdependency between different individuals. And so necessarily at any given stage of the development of productive forces which means the instruments, technology, techniques, the means by which we extract our necessities of life from the natural world that necessarily brings people together in some form of productive relations which then the totality of these relations act upon the individuals in society themselves almost like a natural force. When we're born into a society, when we're born into capitalism for example we can't simply think well this doesn't seem like a very good idea let's live a different way. It forces it, it imposes itself on us as if it were the natural world. And this is something that's confused people in the past and still continues to confuse people. I mentioned that quote from Harari. Marx actually in chapter two of Capital responds to these ideas 150 years before they're put out. He says it's also declared that these characteristics by which he's referring to the different features of society are the arbitrary product of human reflection. This was the kind of explanation favoured by the 18th century. In this way the Enlightenment endeavoured at least temporarily to remove the appearance of strangeness from the mysterious shapes assumed by human relations whose origins they were unable to decipher. So one important thing to understand at all points when we're talking about the Marx's approach to history is it's one rooted in the relations between people and we consider relations to be a real thing. The real and the material is not simply the kind of physical objects, the tangible reality that we can see, hear, feel, whatever. It's also the relations between those things. Gravity is real but it is ultimately a relation between things rather than a physical entity itself. And you can see this in the kind of economic and social relations that form our society. And there's another aspect to this which I've already mentioned which is the dialectical aspect. I've concentrated on the kind of materialist basis of the Marxist approach to history but it is also a dialectical theory which is very important. This isn't a secondary feature of the theory because how do things develop dialectically? They develop as Alan was explaining through a process of constant and inevitable change. But not only change, we're not talking about a gradual easy transition from one from the lower to the higher but one that is contradictory, one that is rooted in contradiction and one which proceeds in leaps and bounds in revolutions essentially and we can see its reflection in human society itself. Let's take one very common explanation of human history which is this idea of human nature. I'm sure you've all encountered it. Many of you, if you find yourselves arguing for the ideas of socialism, for example, someone will say, well, no, that can't work because it's against human nature. And this idea of human nature as being a fixed and eternal state is something that we reject as dialectical materialists. That's something abstract and ultimately unreal just as Alan was talking about Heraclitus. Just as he said, everything is and is not. Humanity and human nature is something that's in a constant process of change and something actually that reflects our environment and our conditions. To take possibly the most fundamental example of this is in the way we live. Today it's considered perfectly normal. It's considered effectively human nature that we live a certain way, that we live in houses, in settled communities, for example, and that we have to work for someone else. This is something a state of existence has admittedly existed for thousands of years, but it has not existed for the sum total of humanity's existence, whether we take it in the form of homo sapiens or whether we take it in all of the different human species. In reality, actually, that the earliest human societies, based on what anthropological, archaeological studies we have, would have had no notion whatsoever of living in a permanent, settled place, living in the same place your entire life, or even of private property, or of working for someone else in order to, say, earn a wage. These would have been utterly alien notions to the people living at this time, and by this time, I mean, not relatively speaking very long ago, over 10,000 years ago. In fact, for the vast majority of humanity's existence, these ideas would have been considered complete nonsense, utterly alien ideas. However, as we know, that's not the case anymore. The approach of many scholars, I suppose, has been to struggle with this. If you take an abstract approach to human nature, if human nature must be fixed, and I don't simply mean humanity's biological nature, which itself actually isn't completely fixed, but in terms of our social nature, if it has to be one thing or another, for example, if the monogamous family is something coded into our DNA, it becomes very, very difficult to explain how in the past there is plenty of evidence for that not being the case. Usually what we get is a romanticisation of one or the other. Either humanity's prehistory, as it's often referred to, is a state of the most black ignorance and barbarism, and what was necessary was for people to finally start having proper ideas about settling down, marrying, forcing women into the marriage contract, things like that, and that's when we become civilised and raise ourselves out of this barbarism. But then you've got the other kind of caricature, which is that life prior to class society and prior to urban settlement was this kind of Garden of Eden situation. I was talking about the Garden of Eden where everything was basically provided and we lived in complete harmony and equality and everything was perfect, but then almost this cataclysm came from the sky, almost this act of original sin, and men were forced to work the land and women were forced to go through the agony of childbirth. Both of these have more religious than scientific merit, in my opinion. In reality, human nature has changed fundamentally over the years and what has driven that change in the last analysis, we're not talking about a purely mechanical relationship that every single innovation in the means of production automatically produces some new idea and new form of society far from it, but that underlying this process was a fundamental change in the means of production, and to just pursue this, Gordon Child, a very famous archaeologist, and himself a Marxist coined a term that you may well be familiar with, the Neolithic Revolution. Neolithic means new stone, new stone age, and of course revolution is referring to this revolutionary process in which nomadic hunter-gatherer communities that did not rely on agriculture and working the land or the domestication of animals suddenly, and by suddenly I mean not in one moment, but over a relatively short period, settled and started living in a way that would have been considered absolutely absurd. In the same way that today when we talk about the possibility of living without private property or without class oppression, people say, but it's always been like this. What are you talking about? I can imagine that thousands and thousands of years ago, the 10,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, that when somebody suggested, obviously I can't claim that this conversation actually took place, something like it must have taken place at some point surely, when someone said, well why don't we harvest these crops and stay in the same place on a permanent or semi-permanent basis? I'm sure there will have been people in this society that say, what are you talking about? We've never done that. We've always moved around. Why on earth would we want to stay in the same place? But these revolutionary ideas, if you like, were reflecting a change in the material basis, and that change came with the domestication of plants and animals, with the coming of agriculture. Prior to this innovation, if you like, the ownership of land, for example, would have been a complete nonsense. Why would you have private ownership of a piece of land that you can't cultivate? If you can't produce a surplus, then the whole notion of ownership of land in particular doesn't make sense. It's only once you have the beginnings of agriculture that notions of ownership, and even then private ownership, as in one single individual owning a plot of land, doesn't come in for much, much later. But here we see very important social relations coming into being as a result of the changes in the means of production. And from this, there then comes even more dramatic results. For the first time in history, this production of a regular, reliable surplus, which didn't take place overnight, but did eventually take place, it gives rise to this surplus from which other processes start to come about. Aristotle, actually, the ancients had some kind of notion of this. Aristotle said that man begins to philosophise when his needs of life are catered for, provided. What that means is the first kind of, you know, settled civilisations, and incidentally, I forgot to mention, the beginning of these urban civilisations, like the Mesopotamian city-states, are themselves another revolution. Gordon Child also coined the term the urban revolution, that again, this development of the surplus, this development of the means of production, for example, the cultivation of the former swamps, really, of southern Mesopotamia, now Iraq, gave basis to a surplus that was great enough to sustain an entire class of people who do not work the land. At no point do they have to work the land. Instead, they devoted their time to other things. They devoted their time, yes, to religion, to administration, to astrology, and the ancient Greeks, actually, again, they identified this process. They saw the first civilisation on earth, the original civilisation as ancient Egypt, and Aristotle explained that mathematics and astrology were discovered in Egypt as opposed to elsewhere, so they had to work. This raises a very profound conclusion for Marxists and for history itself, I would say, that you see the origins of the class struggle. First of all, not as something eternal and everlasting and a product of human nature itself, which on its own means nothing, but actually as a product of the development of the means of production and the splitting of society into classes to put it simply of a class of those who produce or those who appropriate that surplus product. That gives root to all kinds of things. It gives root, yes, to the development of the state. Engels explained, based on also Marx's work in relation to the anthropology of the time, he explained that the state is not something that's everlasting and eternal, that kingship is not some inbuilt part of human nature. He explains, and this I'm quoting from his book on the origin of the family, private property and the state, society at a certain stage of development is the admission that this society has become entangled in insoluble contradiction with itself, that it's split into irreconcilable antagonisms which is powerless to dispel, but in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests might not consume themselves in society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of order. This power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state. We can see this in the fact that city states, kings are themselves socially evolved things. There is very little, if any, evidence for any kings whatsoever prior to about 3000 BC give or take. All of a sudden, you have a period, speaking specifically of Mesopotamia, but this process can be seen elsewhere, you're a process where all of a sudden you have a period of crisis for a couple of hundred years and following that, all of a sudden you've got kings all over the shop. You've got kings popping up like mushrooms in the night, claiming themselves to be the first and everlasting kings. You have states, armed bodies of men that prior to that hadn't existed. Prior to that, yes, you had armed people but it was usually the community itself, the village commune, for example. This is a dramatic change. It's a revolution, essentially, in the way that society was organised. Ultimately Lenin explained that the class struggle, the way that we define the class struggle is over the struggle, over the surplus that is being produced. That is ultimately, in the broad sense, what the class struggle is about. But after this class struggle evolves, as Marx explains, it becomes the motor force of history. It becomes, as he puts in the Communist Manifesto, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Those of you who've read the manifesto will notice after that line where Engels, after the event, has come back in and said, actually what he meant is written history because prior to that you did not have class society, you did not have a state. Writing, history itself, the way we understand and approach history is itself a product of the class struggle. The origin of writing comes through the development of this surplus of trade and exchange. The first ever form of writing, if you can call it that really, is symbols to denote things like cattle, sheep. Just little tokens that would imprint on a piece of clay the picture of a sheep, for example. Eventually these pictures became what you'd call a pictographic script that they started to denote basically the people were drawing the things that they wanted to communicate. Eventually that became increasingly abstract and this process was being underpinned by development of trade, commerce and the development of production. Eventually these abstract symbols became, in Mesopotamia, the cuneiform script that gave birth to things like the epic of Gilgamesh. Alan mentioned that Genesis comes from a Babylonian story. That was written in that script. The code of laws of Hammurabi that arguably the first constitution on earth. That is again a product of that script. It came from essentially the accounting practices of a bunch of temple bureaucrats in what is now Iraq. It's not nearly as romantic as people would have you to understand. In reality the accountant and the poet historically have the same mother and that mother is the development of production and the development of a surplus. That's a struggle in its ancient state. Religion. We discussed religion in the morning session. I won't go into detail on that. But not only does Marxism kind of, if you like it puts religion in its place in terms of material basis but it can actually offer insight into why is it that we have these different religious revolutions, these different religious sects that split off from each other. Why is it that the Protestant heresy developed where and when it did as opposed to 500 years before? These questions can only be asked well they can be asked on many bases but they can only be answered satisfactorily on the basis of material understanding of society. It is not a coincidence that the first forms of Protestantism for example, arose in the towns. In the towns where the town dwellers also known in French as bourgeois lived. It was a class question. It was the emergence of the very first bourgeois that was linked to this religious, religious understanding that was really not just a reaction against the kind of dogma of the Catholic Church but against the social feudal relations that existed in that society at that time. Once we unlock this we can actually start to understand history as a process and not as Henry Ford said as one damn thing after another. But there's a very important aspect to this. I've so far talked about the evolution of society being underpinned by the evolution of the productive forces or the development of the productive forces but it's important for us to dwell on how exactly does that take place. Does it take place in a slow gradual fashion and as I was talking about earlier does the invention of some new technique or form of technology automatically in a mechanical way change society. That's absolutely not the case. If that were the case then history would probably be a lot more of a straightforward and peaceful process than it actually has been. In fact actually history is riven with contradictions. Contradictions which themselves have given birth to not only step forward but steps back. Progress is itself and we as Marxists do not deny progress at all but we do accept that progress is contradictory and it's possible to have steps back as well as steps forward. How do we explain that? If society is rooted in the material conditions in this process of labour how can we explain this? And that's because as I mentioned earlier labour is a social process that this process of labour itself gives birth to social relations different ways of doing things and social orders. Once that kind of social framework, this economic base of society is crystallised and on top of it various institutions like the states like the family structure which has evolved and changed over time. These things become a rigid block if you like. Marx uses the word a fetta eventually on the self-sane development of these productive forces. In other words this is another dialectical idea that that which is progressive at one point later becomes reactionary, later becomes a fetta, a drag on development. This is a very common idea in life. The idea that all that is born is eventually destined to die and over the course of our lives you have a growing up, you have a vigorous period of youth and eventually you have a decline. It's just a natural part of life and eventually death. You see these in societies. And Marx says in the Communist Manifesto that eventually these relations when these societies are no longer able in the last analysis to develop the productive forces to push society forward they enter into a period of crises and revolutions. And this is a very important conclusion for us to ponder because I would say we are living in just a period such as that. We are living in a period of a society of social relations which actually become a fetta on the development of future society and as a result of that entering into crises and periods of revolution. One example, so Marx drew these conclusions by looking at the evolution of capitalism itself. He looked at how capitalism was born within the womb, if you like, of feudal society and then eventually had to break out and came into conflict with the feudal relations which had themselves become fetas. You may remember if you've read the Communist Manifesto he says the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces. They became so many fetas they had to be burst asunder they were burst asunder and we can see this I would say today. We have today a society in which the total potential productive forces that exist today not on the base of future society or technology but right now is enough I'm told to feed as many as 10 billion people but Prince William on the birth of his third child as a coincidence said that the world is overpopulated. We have a situation one of the comrades early on today spoke about the Oxfam study and other studies that are pointed to the fact that what was it 45 individuals own as much as 3.5 billion. You have a concentration of wealth on an enormous scale you have the development of huge monopolies the development of enormous banks who effectively control the entire economy. This is coming into conflict with the fact that okay you have what Marx would call social production. None of us produce on a purely individual basis all of us are dependent on the labor of everyone else particularly in the society and yet at the same time the wealth the surplus of this social labor is appropriated on an individual basis and so you have the absurdity of for example climate change something that requires a global response you have a global economy something that requires a planned global response and yet the individual nation states themselves things that are historically evolved as a result of the development of capitalism are holding it back you have for example the phenomenon of scientists being climate change denies because various companies such as oil companies are paying them off or politicians like Donald Trump this is a sign I would say of a society in really desperate decline and yet it's not all doom and gloom I don't want you to think that it's we're all doomed because history as I already mentioned develops in a contradictory way it's a two-sided process because just as within the womb of feudalism a new form of society of capitalist society developed and came into conflict with that so too the history of the last 200 years of capitalism is one of a new class coming into being and coming into conflict with these relations with these fetters of capitalist society that's the working class this is actually why Marxist puts so much importance and emphasis on the role of the working class in society it's not as a result of romanticism we don't look at the working class as the progressive class in society because it's oppressed which it is or because it's exploited which it is but because in their hands the workers this class which really has not existed before in history in some cases literally hold in their hands the levers of production they already have the capability on society they already produce the wealth of society and purely through their own kind of experience of the capitalist system they come together they organise for example on a trade union basis they organise on a political basis and they raise ideas coming from their movement not coming simply from Marx or any other great intellectual but actually from the logic of their own struggle they put forward the same demands that we put forward they put forward socialist demands a great example of that is the Paris Commune the Paris Commune was not suddenly sprung on society by Marxist it wasn't even led by Marxist it was an uprising of the working class which brought into being the first ever worker's state in history and Marx actually took an example from that not the other way around it's an interesting thing to ponder and I think it's important to remember that that is the way that Marxist theory works this is also why we need to we Marxist study in detail the science of revolution if you like and we study the history of the working class in detail again not out of some kind of fetish or because we think it's romantic but because in that is the collective experience of the workers as they fight to overthrow this old decrepit society and if we as Marxist comes to the conclusion that it must it has become these relations need to be burst asunder to quote from the manifesto again then we need to analyse scientifically the process by which that'll come into being there's one more point about how this can come into being which I should mention there is an idea very common idea that history the movement of history is spurred by great individuals great men or women usually men are the way the story is told come onto the scene and then by some great acts for example if they're a king they'll make some great acts of legislation or if they're a great warrior or some great religious figure in their train well we as Marxist don't believe that that's how it works we actually think that great men are produced by history rather than the other way round again a great example of this you can go back to the very very ancient times you know who the first great man in history ever was at least based on written records he was a guy called Alulim he's the first king listed on the Sumerian king list this is something from 5000 years ago and he apparently when he became king he apparently ruled for 28,800 years so a great advert there for the Mesopotamian diet now we don't have any evidence that he ever existed but we do have evidence that one of these the first ever king that we know or a confidant that did exist is a guy called N. Mebaragesi and he's dated to about 2600 years he wasn't quite as long lived as Alulim he apparently just ruled for 900 years there are two conclusions that we can draw from this the first one is that ever since these institutions of kingship and of great men have emerged which have not existed for all time there has been a vested interest in your life of saying it's always been like this it's been like this for 30,000 years how can you get rid of kings it's been like this for longer than agriculture existed another conclusion from that is that these great men are themselves the product of history I mentioned that prior to the evolution of states about 5000 years ago there was no record you can't even find statues of identifiable individuals there were no individuals in history let alone great individuals the reason is with the development of class society with an oppressor class and with armed bodies of men which require a leader that all of a sudden these all powerful great individuals come into play very very relatively speaking late on in human history that should give us an indication of the real role of individuals one other example and there are many perhaps we can discuss them in the discussion itself Napoleon there are more books written about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other figure in world history I'm not sure why to be honest Napoleon Bonaparte about two days before the coup which brought him to power fell off his horse and he was knocked out cold he was in a comatose state for a couple of days and they weren't sure he was going to make it now I ask you what do you think would have happened if he'd never come out of that coma if he'd fallen off his horse and that would have been the end of Napoleon Bonaparte do we think that the revolution French revolution would have continued in exactly the way it was going or do you not think that history and the process that was going on in French society at that time would have found another Napoleon maybe that other Napoleon wouldn't have been as good we don't know, every individual has their own individual characteristics we're not saying that you can't have talented people who play enormous roles in the process but do we really think that the phenomenon that we call Bonapartism would not have emerged simply because one man fell off his horse that seems to me to be quite an arbitrary view of the human historical process let's take one other great figure we as Marxists or I certainly as a Marxist think a great deal of Lenin I think he's a great man do I think that the history of Russia was determined by the force of his character no I don't I think he played an extremely important role I don't think the seizure of power in October would have taken place without Lenin and Trotsky but these same great individuals that in this period of history at this pinnacle of the class struggle if you like when all the forces in history are laid bare for that relatively brief window those same people that were able to tip the balance if you like to play that all important role later on when the same process has gone into reverse when you enter into a process of an ebb of the masses which is the masses which give the great individuals power is the class struggle that give these great individuals power when the masses start to recede and you enter into a period of counter evolution in Russia those same individuals someone as great as Lenin finds himself saying he literally said it feels like being in a car which is effectively driving itself that the driver does not have full control over the steering wheel he was referring to the growing and increasingly confident bureaucracy of the Soviet Union so this great man on one hand was able to make history and the other was incapable of doing it how do we explain this? it's because of the historical process itself it's because of the role of the working class and of the masses does that therefore mean and there's a conclusion that I want to dispel that apparently flows from this that therefore because we reject the idea of great individuals making history for us that therefore we don't say that the individual has no role whatsoever to play in history that basically there is no human agency and we take almost a nihilistic or fatalistic perspective that well society is going to develop as it develops either it will be good or bad there's nothing we can do about it that clearly isn't what Marx thought later on we're going to have a session about what kind of activity Marx dedicated himself to I don't think if that was his philosophy if that was the attitude to history he would have bothered to be honest I don't think he would have gone to the effort and spending years rowing with Bakarnin for example or Bakunin even sorry I think he would have written his great works buried in the garden with a note saying I told you so and left it at that and led a cushty life as a professor why not if it's going to happen anyway instead he devoted his life to revolutionary struggle that suggests to me that he did believe in a certain element of individual agency and he also gave a huge role to consciousness why is that why would a materialist give a huge role to consciousness and it's based on a dialectical understanding of what consciousness is yes our consciousness reflects the real material world around us but it is in that sense it's secondary the material world must always be primary but it can act back on the material world Marx actually said that ideas themselves have or can have a material force but only when they grip the minds of the masses and for him that was the importance of working class consciousness class consciousness again it wasn't simply a romantic or poetic idea it is becoming becoming aware not only of the working class is placed in society the fact it's exploited but then also coming to terms with the fact that it is capable of taking society and the economy into its hands and planning it and transforming society from a capitalist to a working class socialist basis that consciousness for Marx it didn't come down it didn't simply happen by us like prophets coming down and telling people you're oppressed you need to rise up there have been plenty of people who have said that in history it's a process of struggle and it's through that process of struggle but also crystallising all of this collective experience the history of working class struggle that we can actually make this a reality and for that you also require organisation how do ideas attain material force it's all well and good for us to agree on something but to agree on an idea and then just disperse and go about our lives will not give it any material force whatsoever we have to organise in that sense the party it's like the crystallised form of the consciousness we're talking about you see here the relationship between the material and the idea and just to kind of conclude a great Marxist Ted Grant once said that the brain is matter made aware of itself that human consciousness is matter it can't be made of anything else it has become self aware well I would say that the Marxist view of history is class made aware of itself and that gives us a certain but also it also has a certain it gives a certain sense of duty I would say revolution lies at the heart of the Marxist view of history but I must say when I've talked a lot about revolutions I've talked about the Neolithic Revolution I've talked about the French Revolution but actually the revolution that we're fighting for is a little bit different from these it's not completely divorced it plays the same role in history but these revolutions even the French Revolution took place and if you like at best on a semi-conscious level I think the people who are fighting for these ideas like liberty, fraternity equality they were espousing kind of idealized versions of the same capitalist relations or bourgeois relations that would eventually come into being but they didn't literally see it as we are a class overthrowing a defunct social system that idea didn't exist anymore likewise during the time of the Neolithic Revolution I very much doubt people were thinking about it in those terms however this the socialist revolution the overthrow of capitalism as a global system by a global class it requires the conscious seizure of power by the workers and the conscious transformation of human society that relates back to what Alan was saying about Engels quote that it would be a transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom for Engels consciousness came through experience it came through learning about the laws which determine our existence and through that being able to move and change our own fate another quote that I'd like to bring forward to give him a lever and a place to stand then he'll move the earth I would say that the Marxist view of history is our lever it's the lever of the working class to understand its place in the world to understand how the world works and accordingly to move it to move it to its will and to change society in its own image and finally I would just like to end on the words of the great man himself Carl Marx that the philosophers of hitherto only interpreted the world the point however is to change it thank you