 Hi, welcome back. This is week five of our course on philosophy, on Marxist philosophy, I should say. And this week we'll be discussing the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, which is extremely important for Marxist philosophy. Now we've discussed up to now that everything changes and that Marxist philosophy is all about understanding the fact that everything changes. However that by itself doesn't really tell us very much. It's necessary to understand how and why things change. And actually it's a bit one-sided just to assert that everything changes because in fact that's not really true. And after all, dialectics is all about understanding opposites and the necessity of opposites. And therefore just clinging to one side of opposites such as change is always going to end up being one-sided and ultimately false. And this problem was understood by a pupil of Heraclitus. Now Heraclitus is an ancient Greek philosopher and he is really the father of dialectics and he built his whole philosophy around the idea of change, that everything changes and that is the essence of all things. In fact he's so important that Hegel actually said and I quote, there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic. Now Heraclitus famously stated that you can never step into the same stream twice, meaning that the stream will always have changed the next time you come to step into it and thus it isn't really the same stream. According to Aristotle one of his pupils took this further and kind of absurdly said what actually can never even step into a stream once because in fact it's already changed. There is no such thing as a stream or anything for that matter because everything that you can think of has always already changed, become something completely different. Now this seems like an obviously absurd thing to say and why would he say this and what's the meaning of it and how do we answer it? Well the truth is that this reveals the fact that just asserting that things change is actually a bit more on the side because actually things don't just change, they do also stay the same. Everything stays the same because if they didn't stay the same of course as this example shows it would be everything would have already fallen apart. For anything to exist it means it must sustain certain qualities, right? It must sustain a quality of being, for example in the case of a stream coming from a certain source, flowing to a certain mouth and obviously having water. And for anything to exist they must sustain certain qualities such as that over a period of time. And therefore things can actually say that everything stays the same. For anything to exist it must stay the same, must have a certain conservatism to it if you like. And yet we also know of course that everything does change, that is absolutely fundamental. So we need a bridge essentially, a category of dialectical logic which serves as a bridge between status and change and explains how the one becomes the other rather than for us just to be stuck in the assertion of one and not the other. And this problem of how we explain something going from being one thing to then suddenly being a different thing is a very important one for philosophy and it is expressed in a couple of famous examples such as the heap of grain and the bald man in which for example the bald man you are in this hypothetical scenario you are plucking hairs off someone's head who obviously is not bald but eventually if you keep on doing that they will obviously become bald. Now how do we just determine at what point they've become bald and why is that the case? And the same for a heap of grain, if you start out with just one grain then obviously that's not a heap. If you add another one it's still not a heap but at a certain point it becomes what you would call a heap. And why is that and how does that change take place? This is a deep philosophical problem which has bamboozled philosophers for literally thousands of years. And I think that the law of the transformation of quantity and quality is really the answer to this problem and it provides this bridge between stasis and change and is therefore extremely useful and important. I would go too fast to say that all change ultimately takes place in some way through this law. You cannot understand change ultimately without understanding this law. And it's such a widespread phenomena, in fact like I said it applies everywhere, that it is expressed in several famous idioms such as the straw that broke the camel's back or something being more than the sum of its parts. The basis for this is the fact that all things are organised. Any phenomena be it a state of affairs or a particular object, they are composed of parts which are self-organised, which stand in definite relations to one another. So the parts of something are not indifferent to one another, right? They're not just sort of like blocks of wood in a bag jumbling about, but they have definite relations towards one another. Now take the classic example of a body of water and alternatively ice. Now these are made up of the exact same parts clearly and yet they're totally different. In fact ice really has in many respects far more in common than it does with other solids, such as I don't know a rock, than it does with itself when it is in liquid form. Solid ice and liquid water completely different in terms of the way they behave and yet they're made of the exact same stuff. So this shows that the character of the inner relations of something is absolutely essential to understanding the overall quality that it has, the way in which it behaves and hence the phrase more than the sum of its parts. So organisation is absolutely vital to understanding any given phenomena. This is also understood and well expressed by a famous quote from Napoleon discussing his army. And he says the following. Two Mamaluks were undoubtedly more than a match for three Frenchmen. 100 Mamaluks were equal to 100 Frenchmen. 300 Frenchmen could generally beat 300 Mamaluks and 1,000 Frenchmen invariably defeated 1,500 Mamaluks. And essentially what he's saying is that even if the individual parts of one army, otherwise the soldiers, are more skillful than another, if the other one is better organised, then once you have enough of them, in other words, it's not just one V1, but once you have hundreds or thousands, then that organisation will ultimately count and it will be what causes victory. So yes, organisation is absolutely fundamental to understanding and the self-relation of the parts of something, if you like, is absolutely fundamental. And I'd like to point out how this differs from two mistakes, if you like, of thought, which you find particularly in science, but also in philosophy. One would be gradualism, which is basically the sort of assumption. It's usually an assumption that you're not usually actually stated. But the assumption that all change takes place is constantly in a linear way, in other words, just a sort of step by step drip, drip, drip of change, rather than going through leaps and then periods of stasis. That's one idea and that often crops up in science or in people who study society. And I'll give an example of that in a moment. One example of science is Darwin, who of course was a genius, but his original idea of evolution was that it was just constant change rather than animals being settled on species for a long period of time before much more rapid periods of evolution. But another related mistake that is very common, I think, in science, especially in the bourgeois mindset of science that you have, is reductionism. Reductionism essentially treats the parts of something as indifferent to one another. It reduces things down just to their parts. Now, again, it's not usually explicitly stated that that's what they're saying, but it is implied in how they understand things. And the problem with this is really expressed with Heraclitus' people's point, which is that if all things change constantly, then how do you explain the different definite qualities that things have and if all things are just made up of their parts that aren't in definite relations to one another, that form definite qualities, then how do you explain the phenomena of these qualities in society, in nature? So with reductionism, a famous example with reductionism is biological determinism, which is still quite common, I think. And what it basically attempts to do is to explain human nature, to reduce human behaviour to just the genes that make us up. So it appears on the surface to be very scientific, very materialist, because it's saying that we're caused by our genes. And you'll sometimes hear this. You'll see maybe you'll see like an article in the news or in a newspaper that says, oh, scientists think they've discovered the gene for theft, you know. And once we've found that maybe then we can sort that problem out by eliminating that gene or something. Now, this is absurd and completely unscientific, in fact, precisely because it reduces us to our parts without understanding the relations in which they stand. Genes, of course, do not code for specific behaviours generally. Like you don't have one gene for a very specific behaviour that just sort of stands in isolation from all other genes. In reality, genes obviously code not for behaviour, but for how to build our body. And then our behaviour is an expression once a whole body is built of the mutual interaction of all of the parts of our body and not only that, but ultimately the interaction of our bodies as a whole with society and the general environment in which we live. And that's the only way to explain behaviour. It's not, of course, the fundamental basis for this is our genes. Without that, we wouldn't even exist. But nevertheless, you can reduce these things and understand them by doing that. This mistake is unfortunately extremely common. Marxists are sometimes accused of being it through our economic determinism as people see it, but I don't have time to go into that. But that is a caricature of Marxism. In fact, dialectical philosophy, dialectical materialism really explains why reductionism is false and what the real alternative to it is. This also helps us to understand that the problem once again of the heap of grain, the idea that things are internally related. Well, if that's the case, then the reason a heap emerges as a quality of so many grains is because they stand in relations to one another. And when there is enough of them, those relations produce that overall quality. Similarly with liquidity or wetness, you know, a body of water or any other liquid is you would call it wet. But you can't find that quality in any one of its molecules, even though it is made up of nothing but those molecules. So that does that mean it sort of somehow comes from outside of the body of water, some sort of spiritual force, which of course some philosophers in the past would have argued. No, it is thoroughly based on those parts, but on in the relations of those parts. So anyway, we have to come back to this idea of quantity and quality because I haven't fully finished describing that. This, as I said, explains how change takes place. Now it is true that change is happening all the time. However, most of the change that takes place is not sufficient to alter the overall qualities, which, as I said, are a product of the relations of the parts. Again, to go back to our example of a body of water. It works because it's very simple and we understand water quite well. So the quality of, let's say, liquidity of liquid water is more or less identical between the temperatures of 0.1 degrees Celsius and 99.9 degrees Celsius. Of course, the water will feel more hot or cold, but ultimately it is a liquid and it behaves as a liquid within that spectrum. So no matter how much you add or subtract temperature, it remains qualitatively fundamentally the same. But at certain points, in other words, at 0 and at 100 degrees Celsius, the quantity of heat energy is sufficient or insufficient to hold it in that set of relations, if you like. And that specific set of relations is burst asunder. New relations are now created and that gives rise to a very different quality overall. And that's what we call quantity transforming into quality. There's sufficient of a quality to change the overall quality. And until that point is reached, the quality stays more or less the same. And this, I would say, as I said, it is across nature, this law holds and society. And I'll come on to that in a moment. But the last thing I want to say about this is that this also helps us to grasp that change can be very sudden, that qualitative changes can appear as if they come out of nowhere. To give an example of a strike or a revolution, it can be understood by most people that everything is normal, everything is staying the same, nothing is, there's not going to be a revolution or anything weird like that. And then suddenly a strike or a revolution can take place quite often as a result of a fairly incidental thing. To give a relatively recent example, the Tunisian revolution was sparked by a man setting himself on fire in protest at basically being unable to sell fruits and being punished by the police for doing so. But people were doing that all the time in Tunisia and many other similar countries for a long time. Why exactly at that point that enraged people so much that they created a revolution? Of course, we can't know the details. But what we can know is that that obviously was not just a completely random or bizarre thing that happened, but it somehow, in the eyes of Tunisians, it expressed the enormous discontent and the injustice of society and it was enough for them to feel that they had to do something. And then, of course, that takes on the logic of its own and it changes history. And this brings me on to the political value of this kind of discussion. We don't have these discussions just because they're interesting or because it allows us to understand certain scientific questions, but also because it makes us better revolutionaries. We have to have the long view of history. Marxists are not fighting for this or that reform or just to make this or that country a bit better for a while. We are fighting to change human history, to really liberate humanity from capitalism and from class society in general. So that's a rather large undertaking clearly. And if we allow ourselves prejudices, if we allow ourselves to be distracted or to be seduced by apparent shortcuts to victory that in reality are actually going to be disastrous, if we do that then we will fail ultimately and revolutions have failed many, many times of course. So we need to understand in a very clear and sober headed way the real processes at work and have the long view of histories so that we don't get demoralised by this or that setback or overrode by some temporary change. And the law of quantity and quality helps with that. Before 2008, if you were a Marxist, you would often be considered quite bizarre and your ideas were completely discredited. And you can understand why people thought that. And everything seemed in capitalist society to be very predictable and basically all the problems had been solved more or less. And yet if you looked underneath the surface, in other words if you didn't just look at the overall quality that was on the surface, but you looked at the inner relations of society by for example studying the rate of inequality which was increasing for year after year after year or the level of indebtedness for example. Personal, private and corporate and also state deficits. If you looked at those things you would begin to see a different picture. You would begin to see that in other words, contradictions, inner contradictions were developing and quantitative tensions you could say were developing. Of course this all exploded in the 2008 financial crisis which people did not foresee but that event was if you like a qualitative rupture which really has changed human history, has changed consciousness and has made Marxism much more obviously relevant to people although it was always relevant but it has made it far easier to explain. And so that's why it's important for this to understand this law and other dialectical laws but I would particularly emphasise this law for grasping the process of change in society and for not getting demoralised because at the moment perhaps not very much seems to be happening. Anyway that concludes our discussion on quantity and quality. Next week we will be discussing another going into more detail in another law of dialectical change which is contradiction and the unity of opposites which is equally essential to understanding how and why things change. So I'll see you then. Lenin stated that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. Without a revolutionary theory we are bound to take in the ideas that surround us. Under capitalism these are ideas that ultimately defend the status quo. In Wellread's upcoming book on the history of philosophy Alan Woods looks at the development of philosophical thinking from the ancient Greeks all the way through to Marx and Engels who brought together the best of previous thinking to produce the Marxist philosophical outlook which looks at the real material world not as a static immovable reality but one that is constantly changing and moving according to laws that can be discovered. Through this we can learn how philosophy becomes an indispensable tool in the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society. Pre-order your copy now at www.marxist.com.hop