 Dydw i'n wneud o hyn o'r gweithio cydwyngau iawn i'r cymdeithasol ac iddo, gyda'r ddweud cydwyngau cydwyngau rhai. Mae'r cydwngorau i'r gweithio cydwyngau iawn i'r ffordd y llunio sy'n ddigonio, mae'r cydwyngau ar y cydwyngau. I will start by explaining what they are not. Idealism and materialism are not what they are in the popular consciousness. Materialism is associated with the grubby preoccupation with wealth and material things, whereas idealism is associated with the pursuit of the lofty of things in equality and justice and self-sacrifice associated with idealism. Materialism and idealism in philosophy have a very different meaning to that. I will just start by outlining what materialism and idealism mean to philosophers, because they touch upon questions of the relationship between mind and matter. The idea of what is reality, what is true and false, how can we distinguish truth and falsehood? And for the materialists, which we as Marxists define ourselves as materialists, describe ourselves as materialists, and in fact materialism lies at the root, either unconsciously or consciously, of all natural science, really. It is an instinctive materialism lies at the basis of all natural science. And materialism simply explains that all that exists is matter in motion, that there is a world, an objective world of matter that exists independently of the human mind, and that the relationship between mind and matter is a similar relationship between the part and the whole, that mind is one of the products of matter in motion, that it is the product of the human brain, which itself is the product of a long period of evolution, of revolutions in the organisation of matter, from the most simple up to the most complex forms of matter, and it is one of the products of this, it emerges from matter organised in the human brain. And ideas are not something which are planted in our heads from either God or the devil, but ideas themselves are a reflection in the material brain within the human mind of the world external to us, and an interpretation and a reflection upon that world. And as I say, the human brain is itself the long period, the product of a long period of hundreds of millions of years of evolution of matter from lower, less complex to higher, more complex forms of organisation, starting with the transition billions of years ago from inorganic to organic matter, the same substances organised in a certain way were led to the emergence of life, and over hundreds of millions of years of course we have the domination of simple unicellial organisms, and then about 550 million years ago we have a huge explosion, a revolution within the animal kingdom, within the sphere of biology, and the emergence of complex organisms during the Cambrian explosion, and one of those organisms led to what we call the chordates, a particular branch of organisms which led to vertebrates, where you had the emergence of a primitive spinal column, the centralisation of the nervous system, and increasingly at the head of the central nervous system, the brain, which emerged instead of simply transmitting from the sense organs to the motor organs, increasingly formed connections with itself, the neurons increasingly formed connections with themselves, reflected upon the world, interpreted the information of the world around us, formed memories which obviously helped in the evolution of the survival of these species, and eventually over hundreds of millions of years we've seen the growth of the brain, and then a quantum leap that separates human beings from the entire animal kingdom, and the emergence of human consciousness as you had this transformation of quantity into quality, but in the story of the emergence of human consciousness and the emergence of human beings from the animal kingdom, you actually have an interesting little diversion about 100 years ago, you had the discovery of a fossil, it was actually a giant hoax called the Pilthvow Man, which completely had the scientific community enthralled to it, it suckered in a lot of scientists, and basically it was a human skull with an orangutan's jaw attached to it, and that reflects quite a deep set prejudice about how humanity emerged from the animal kingdom, that what we were looking for in the missing link was basically an ape-like creature with a human-like brain, that essentially that consciousness occupies a certain pedestal if you like, it is raised above the rest of the material world. In actual fact, decades before the discovery of the Pilthvow Man, Engels actually wrote a book called The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, a very excellent article called The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, and he describes in this article how actually the key turning point in the transition from ape to man was not so much the emergence of an ape with a giant head if you like, but it was actually when human beings, or our ancestors, how many two to three million years ago, started to stand upright, and by doing so they freed the hand, which allowed all sorts of millions of an infinite number of complex operations that we can change the world around us, and this is what actually separates us as human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom, is an ability to not take nature simply as it is, but to alter nature according to our will, if you like that the animal kingdom, all of the most intelligent animals are very much slaves to the concrete, to their immediate experience and immediate environment, but we see that human beings are very much distinguished by being able to project ourselves into the future, to think abstractly, to plan and develop how we're going to actually change the world. If you look at the most primitive human stone axe and compare that with the tools that are used by the higher forms of the animal kingdom apart from human beings, you see that the most primitive stone axe shows a level of planning that this was constructed in that primitive human mind before it was actually constructed materially, whereas the animals take what is concrete in front of them, they take the stick or the stone and so forth, and manipulate the world in that way, use the rock to break up a piece of fruit or a knot and so on, whereas we construct things within our minds, we're able to form very high levels of abstraction, we're able to pass those on through the means of language, and so actually by transforming the world through the means of labour created by the hands, human beings transforming their own environment actually transform themselves, they give an impulse to the evolution of the brain, which happens after actually the emergence of the upright stance, posture and the hands, but it is interesting what this hoax of the Piltdown Man says, it shows that there is actually a prejudice and tendency to raise consciousness above the material world, and there is actually an entire camp of philosophy, the camp of idealism, which opposes itself to materialism, which inverts the relationship between mind and matter, it doesn't say that matter is primary and consciousness forms out of that, it's a product of matter emotion, but on the contrary, it is our thought, our minds, it is consciousness which is something primary, which gives rise to the material world, either it's the mind of man or the mind of gods which is primary, and the material world is secondary, it's either a reflection of this mind, everything is a product of our mind and so on, it's an interesting philosophical inversion, and Engels describes, and this is where I want to actually begin really, is that Engels describes how in the human eye on the retina, the external world is reflected in an upside down way, the image is upside down on the human retina, and we explain that through the physics of optics, and in the same way, of course, in idealist philosophy you have this inversion of the relationship between mind and matter, and that too must be explained, but it must be explained through the laws of history, of historical materialism, explaining how our ideas are a reflection of the material world around us, and as we continue to change the material world, it didn't obviously stop two to three million years ago with the emergence of human beings, if you like, when evolution stopped, we continue to change our consciousness, we continue to change our ideas when we change the material world around us, as we change our conditions, we lay the basis for new thoughts, new ideas, new levels of culture and so on. So obviously the emergence of this split within idealism and materialism has to first of all be explained. But secondly, I think this is something that a lot of Marxists are guilty of on occasion, not all Marxist, but sometimes I think we can very much simplify idealism, not give it the credit that is actually due to it, because of course we associate idealism, the idea that mind is primary with mysticism, with religion and with organised religion, the church and so forth, which of course the church is the last bastion of idealist philosophy. However, there are of course attempts to wrap up idealism in a much more scientific sounding language, even in materialistic sounding language. There are much more subtle arguments which idealists use and I think it's worth us learning to recognise where idealism, how it sort of emerges, how it presents itself and the arguments which are used and the counterarguments which we as Marxists, as dialectical materialists, lay down in opposition to idealism. And finally of course, what is the relevance of this for us as revolutionaries? This is what it all has to come back to, you know, we as revolutionary Marxists describe ourselves as materialists, dialectical materialists, there are other brands of materialism, what distinguishes our ideas, if you like. And so first of all I want to talk about, as I say, the emergence of idealism. It seems like a very strange thing, this idea that consciousness is somehow independent of the material world, it was very much, what's the word? A common sense and easy to understand how this sort of thing emerged actually amongst primitive human beings. If you go back hundreds of thousands of years I described how we as human beings tend to actually bring the forces of nature under our control through the means of labour. But of course the earliest human beings had barely emerged from the animal kingdom. They had begun to transform their world around them. They had begun to sort of bring the forces of nature under their control. But it was only a beginning and in many respects of course primitive human beings were barely distinguished from the animal kingdom, had barely emerged from the animal kingdom. And the forces of nature far from actually being under the control of human beings were barely even understood whatsoever. We've seen that the earliest minds would have been grasping in the dark trying to understand the world around it. And coming up with all sorts of explanations, magical and mystical explanations. And we see independently in all sorts of parts of the world the emergence of very similar animistic religions. The attribution to nature, of consciousness, of spirits, all sorts of things inhabiting nature. And therefore also the possibility of actually controlling nature. Of bringing nature under our control if everything is subject to these sort of spirits which inhabit it in these animistic religions. Of course those spirits could be appealed to. You can beg them to sort of change their ways to be less capricious or what have you. Or on the other hand you can threaten those spirits or threaten these gods if you like. These primitive gods. So you see that actually superstition and idealist modes of thought were very much sort of connected with attempts to control the natural. The supernatural and the natural sort of merged in together. And of course that was easy to understand how people saw that there were spirits in nature. After all, when we sleep does our consciousness not seem to rise out of our body? Do we not seem to carry on walking around in our dreams? Interacting with people who are perhaps dead or passed away, our ancestors and so on? So it was quite natural primitive peoples to come to these ideas, these animistic conclusions and try to bring nature under their control through means of exerting control over the supernatural. But of course to raise above that, to explain nature purely in terms of nature it was necessary to have a development of the productive forces to bring nature more and more under our control. And it's particularly amongst the Greeks that we see of course a high level of development of philosophy and one of the first attempts within Europe to really explain nature through the processes of nature. A lot of comrades may have been actually at the discussion on dialectics so if you were there I won't necessarily bore you with that because a lot of that has already been covered. And it's remarkable the fact that the majority actually of the Greek philosophers were materialists particularly the earlier Ionian philosophers that Scott was talking about earlier on were materialists, they didn't have any recourse to the supernatural that was all expelled from nature, there were attempts to explain nature in terms of nature. However of course there were very definite limits to the materialism of the ancient Greeks First of all of course it was not a revolutionary materialism for the liberation of a press class it was the materialism of a slave owning aristocracy within ancient Greece and actually the Lucretius, one of the great Roman materialists described his materialism as a little bit like being a man with his feet firmly on the shore looking over a stormy bay and you can see the ships are getting battered and so forth and you have a feeling of calm washes over yourself so by understanding the laws of nature it gives you a certain sense of internal calm and peace whereas you see all of the other peoples around you full of superstition and so on and completely unable to explain the laws of nature around them so it was a thing of personal consumption for the ruling class and it had a very qualitative nature to it if you actually read the writings of people like Lucretius and so on you can see that they have much more of a sense of poetry these are not like scientific papers and what have you with long mathematical details and so on obviously there were limits to the degree to which science could be developed amongst the ancient Greeks and within ancient society in general but at the same time as you had the emergence of materialist philosophy you also had strong impulses in the direction of idealist philosophy at the same time which also emerged with the emergence of class society you have of course the division between manual and mental labour which was a result of the fact that a certain layer of the population were freed from the burden of labour by the labour of the slaves who could obviously fed the plateaus and the pythagorases of the ancient world and therefore a tendency to actually elevate mental labour above manual labour and at the same time you see in particular in more abstract thoughts such as in mathematics and so on a tendency to forget the relationship that our abstractions about the world have to the concrete material world around us so we see in Plato he had this idea that you had a world of perfect forms that existed on another plane separate to the material world and that if we see for example roundness within nature if we see a plate is round, the moon is round and the sun is round that these all reflect a perfect round circular form that exists on another plane separate and independent from the material world and the material world is simply an imperfect reflection of this realm of ideas and so on in other words our abstractions had a sort of separate existence to the concrete world around us the essence of things was separated from the appearance of things and you can see that there was particularly the times that Plato was actually thinking in were extremely tumultuous times you had the defeat at the end of the Peloponnesian war the 30 tyrants that dominated in that period particularly of Plato's youth and this had a formative effect on his consciousness a tendency in periods of decline and crisis for a polarisation within philosophy of some people turning away actually from the material world which seems to be run by irrational people that seems to bear no resemblance to any rationality or reason that reason has abandoned the world in periods of decline and therefore turned to a perfect world of which the material world is merely an imperfect reflection and expression and particularly that period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was one such period of where everything seemed to be completely unreasonable the world seemed to be in a period of decline there was despair that infected not just the lower classes within society but sections of the aristocracy, sections of the old ruling class and a tendency for mysticism to creep in and pessimism to creep in and a tendency to see the possibility of a better life in the hereafter because there was no possibility of improving one's life in the present and all of these mystical ideas injected into the declining Roman Empire with the growth of different cults the growth of the spread of the Jewish and the Christian religions throughout the empire we see that in periods of decline and crisis a tendency amongst certain sections of the population to turn in a mystical direction to turn away from the material world so we see all of these elements which gave rise to the potential for the domination of idealism throughout a whole period of human history particularly in the feudal period idealist conceptions of the world when the Christian religion merged with the Roman ruling class to form the Roman Catholic Church the feudal church which was based upon many of the ideas of Plato and some of the ideas of Aristotle injected into Christian theology idealism became the official state philosophy and it became the divine justification for the material order that existed for the interests of the particular ruling class and the Catholic Church of course was in many respects the subjective factor in the transition from the old declining slave society towards the new feudal order now I don't have much time to go into all of those developments but it's interesting at the same time that this was of course a massive step back relative to the cultural achievements of antiquity what stands out in the period of the middle ages despite some attempts to revise this assessment the period of darkness in fact much of philosophy was only really retained amongst the Arab populations the Muslim Al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula but you did have the re-emergence of civilization a growth after this sort of throwback within Europe and the emergence of course particularly in the areas between the great landed estates you had the emergence of a bourgeoisie of a class of traders, of artisans and merchants in the nooks and crannies of feudal society and increasingly this class emerged which increasingly depended for its wealth upon money rather than landed property and the bourgeoisie is a class in its revolutionary phase of course came into conflict with the old ruling class with the old feudal elite and it is a testament to the correctness actually of the materialist method its first opposition of course it took the intellectual material which existed in the world around it the first opposition of the bourgeoisie to the old feudal regime into the Catholic Church took the expression of a religious opposition of purifying the old Catholic Church of all of the trappings of feudalism and so forth and a return of purification and a return to the original Christian religion of course this was not a return to the religion of the twelve apostles this was actually the purification of all of the feudal rubbish and the creation actually of a bourgeois God the Protestant religion in many respects represents the interests of the bourgeoisie as opposed to the old feudal God and in the English Civil War the ideology under which Oliver Cromwell's army fought was of a purified religion and the same in Germany as well it was under Luther the Reformation and the peasant war was fought under the banner of a purified religion and its interesting actually that within decaying feudal society the extreme left wing for example in the Reformation within Germany amongst the anabaptists you had a movement in the direction of complete philosophical opposition to God and the Catholic Church under the guise of pantheism a sort of pantheistic atheism was beginning to emerge on the extreme left wing representing the most radical elements of the petty bourgeoisie and semi-prolitarian layers within Germany but as the bourgeois revolutions developed on a higher level particularly in the period prior to the French Revolution you have the emergence of the bourgeoisie using a militant materialism in opposition to the old feudal ideas of the Catholic Church and in particular in France in the period of the 18th century in the period of the preparation before the French Revolution you have the spread of all sorts of revolutionary ideas which in many of the philosophers within this period were themselves materialists man was to become the measure of everything they saw themselves as bringing in a new epoch of reason of the rights of man of justice and equality and so on and in many of respects they were actually influenced by earlier bourgeois philosophers such as the British materialists Francis Bacon and John Locke who were amongst the Locke in particular was a massive influence to the French materialists of the period of the 18th century now I think it's worth as pausing for a second to look at what is the relationship between the bourgeoisie as a class and the two great camps within philosophy between materialism and idealism and we can see in a certain sense of course a reason why the bourgeoisie particularly in its revolutionary phase and even to this day to a certain extent will promote a certain brand of materialism on the one hand the bourgeoisie has an interest in the development of science and science itself was one of the fields of battle between the Catholic Church and the rising bourgeoisie in the period of the late Middle Ages and at the same time of course the bourgeoisie comes into opposition against the old Catholic Church and amongst its most radical and revolutionary representatives you get the rise of this militant materialism who Engels describes the materialists in France as heralding the bourgeois revolution in France but they were by no means had the same bourgeois limitations of the class which they were representing in their revolutionary ideological struggle in the 18th century and so I think it's worth particularly pausing on the ideas of the sort of materialism which was developing at this time and looking at it in a bit more depth and the arguments that the idealists used encounter to this sort of materialism so Locke in particular took us his starting point the idea that knowledge has only one source really that the source of knowledge is the external world around us it is our sensations provides the source of knowledge and they provide a window to a material world which exists independently and outside of ourselves and then we take this information from our sensations we process it in our mind and through deductive logic we're able to tease out the laws of nature and of the material world which very much saw it as existing independently now it's interesting that some of his opponents who came from an idealist or an agnostic camp that is to say they didn't exert the primacy of a material world outside of ourselves people like David Hume they were sort of they denied the knowability even of a material world is there a world out there they didn't know so there are camps between materialism and idealism but people like Bishop Berkeley who was an idealist philosopher and David Hume who was opposed to materialism from an agnostic point of view actually took us their starting point the very same starting point as Locke and drew the exact opposite conclusion they said okay we agree that the only source of they in turn agreed that the only source of knowledge is sensations all that we know to be real are our sensations I see this, I hear that, I smell that and taste such and such this is all that we know to be real but what we conceive of as matter or what we conceive of as things if you like is the correlations of sensations that's all I can say for example if I have an apple before me I see red, I taste sweet and crunchy it has a round form I associate those, correlate those things and give them a name I call it an apple and therefore all that this is is really an idea it exists purely as an idea now Hume said it's impossible to know actually if there is a material world beyond these sensations that is causing these sensations to be created Bishop Berkeley took a quite categorical opinion that they didn't exist except in the mind if you like and there was no evidence for the material world and the lawfulness of the world was simply the fact that God was planting in our minds these ideas these sensations were directly implanted in our minds from God so it was a very clear idealist position that Bishop Berkeley took so as you see for the materialists our sensations act almost as a window to the external world for the agnostic and for the idealist our sensations are like a fence which are insurpassable if you like and Diderot the French materialist described this philosophy as a little bit like if you imagine a sentient piano and you play the keys of the piano in the same way that our senses are played upon by nature and he described this philosophy as a bit like a piano that imagines that there was no such thing as a pianist playing its keys that all of the world's harmonies existed purely within its head we would surely describe that as a completely insane piano and in the same way he described idealism as the most insane philosophy it is the most absurd philosophy yet he described it as the most devilishly difficult to actually disprove how do you know how can you actually disprove that there is a material world out there now Diderot to his credit came very close to a dialectical materialist point of view although he didn't quite overcome the limits that most of the French materialists all of the French materialists were subject to what was it worth us then having a look at what were the limits that we as Marxists would describe of this sort of materialism that existed in the revolutionary period of the bourgeois years of class well Engels actually described three fundamental limits to this sort of what he described as metaphysical materialism and Lenin also picked up on those in his book materialism and imperial criticism which I recommend all comrades read and I also recommend everyone read another short book by Engels called Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy it's not very long, it's reasonably accessible a lot of the names though you can obviously look on Wikipedia but it's very good and Engels and Lenin described three real limitations to this materialism on the one hand they described it very much as being a materialism of a mechanical character and I think I mentioned previously actually in Scott's discussion on dialectics what they meant by that was of course in the period that we're talking about even by the time you get to the late 18th century in which the French materialists were writing science was still yet to be put on a scientific basis in many fields particularly chemistry and biology lagged behind physics and astronomy which had far superseded them had marched far ahead and according to simple mechanics and according to astronomy the world operates according to these unchanging laws of simple cause and effect and you know you have the eternal rotations of the motions of the heavens and so on which very much appear like a piece of clockwork and these mechanical laws of motion were applied to try and explain by these philosophers the world of chemistry and biology and so on and you see attempts to explain organisms also as merely pieces of clockwork and Descartes for example was a very mechanical philosopher he imagined that animals were purely nothing but complex machines they were very complex machines that operated according to very deterministic laws and actually he described us as human beings as being merely machines that were on the other hand inhabited by consciousness that connected somewhere in our brain you imagine there was some sort of like God organ in the brain and you see this develops in different periods within neuroscience as well actually this idea that there is some sort of controlling centre within the brain because when you have a mechanical materialist conception you imagine that the brain operates in the same way that billiard balls operate when they interact with each other or a piece of clockwork operates where do you find the consciousness in that the brain is nothing more than the individual sum of its parts operating by very strict deterministic laws of mechanics if you like so it's very difficult to solve this question of where does consciousness fit into a mechanical universe on the other hand the angles criticize this materialism as being very much anti-dialectical and now if we go back to Locke for example he described the one source of our knowledge as being our sensations that give us a window onto the outside world that is true to a certain extent but of course do we simply speculate about the world around us do we just simply allow our sensations to bombard us from all directions and then draw conclusions about the world no and natural scientists don't operate in that manner in actual fact we also act upon the world and actually we act upon the world before we even begin to think about the world previously in the beginning human beings began transforming the world and in so doing laid the basis for human mind human consciousness, human culture that's the meaning of what Marx talks about when he said in his thesis on Feuerbach that the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways the point however is to change it and practice plays a very important role in the question of the truthfulness of our knowledge is there a material world which corresponds to these laws that I have described and hypothesised from observation what the scientist does is they go into the laboratory and they test those things they put those things into practice and practice is for Marxist a key category in the theory of knowledge it is something which was disdained by many philosophers prior to Marx and of course for us as revolutionaries as revolutionary communists we see that actually there are a lot of people who put forward the idea that the level of consciousness of the working class is too low that first of all we have to educate everyone one by one and eventually when consciousness reaches a certain level it will be possible for the working class to transform society but it's actually through the class struggle it's actually through revolutions that the working class achieves its class consciousness and achieves its level of organisation it can be through no other means than through changing the world and entering into struggle that the working class achieves a certain level of class consciousness and is able to finally transform society so for us as Marxist we are not simply speculative materialists we are dialectical materialists we see that action forms a key part of our philosophy and finally Engels describes how these materialists were limited to a certain idealism sort of materialism below but idealism above as he described it in other words on the one hand whilst they described nature in terms of nature they didn't imagine that a supernatural existed and the French materialists in particular were completely implacably opposed to the idea of God and mysticism and all that sort of stuff and as I said made man the measure of things nevertheless this was not man historically given as the representative of a particular class or division or group within society a given historical stage in society this was man in the abstract that had certain abstract human rights and a human nature the rights of man would have been completely laughable because the ancient Romans the idea that everyone has inherent rights because actually a certain section of humanity were slaves and the whole basis of their civilisation was one of slavery the kind of ideals that the French materialists were fighting for were really the ideals of the bourgeois republic of the freedom to trade equality before the law they represented the interests of a certain class but of course they didn't express it as this they expressed it in terms of transcendental ideas of rights, justice and so on in other words there was no connection between these ideas if you like in the material world to go beyond that materialism of the great revolutionary materialists in France and others would necessarily mean seeing the bourgeois epoch as one stage in human society and one stage of human development of seeing that materialism as simply being the materialism of a revolutionary bourgeois class in other words it would have meant taking the class point of view of a proletariat of a new revolutionary class that is in opposition to the bourgeoisie and of developing such a position which of course was impossible for these thinkers at the time when the proletariat was basically barely emerging as a class there were very much limits to which they could develop this materialism and so it's fairly understandable why they came to these conclusions now I've gone into a lot of depth as to of course the materialism of the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary phase and the differences between bourgeois materialism sorry I won't call it bourgeois materialism mechanical metaphysical materialism and dialectical materialism which is the philosophy of Marxism however I think it's also quite clear that today the bourgeoisie whilst there are bourgeois materialists the bourgeoisie as a class is also the greatest funder and backer of all forms of organised religion all forms of mysticism and attempts to sort of if you like cloak the reality of the world around us in mysticism the bourgeoisie as a class particularly once it has become a ruling class we can see has an interest in propelling certain forms of idealism forwards in different guises some more subtle some less so and in fact I quite like there's a little dialogue in Les Miserables between the good bishop who of course is an idealist as one might expect from a bishop and the bourgeois senator who describes his materialism because he says I'm a materialist you know what I'm born I live and I die and whilst I'm fortunate to be a wealthy man I can enjoy good wine good food and so on this materialism is very much the materialism of a bourgeois he's not going to deny himself material things in life if he knows he's not going to live in the next life it was not very different the materialism of Lucretius and the materialism of the slave-owning class except far more hypocritical because the guy then goes on to say yes but there is room for idealism there is room for your philosophy he says to the bishop it's the butter that the sorry God is what the poor man butters his dry bread with in other words it's a means of solace for the working classes it's a means of solace for the poor and the oppressed classes within society and he goes on a raging rant about Diderot he's a very conservative sort of thing and he sees the room for religion, for mysticism and of course we can quite clearly see why that is the case but I think this points in the direction of why our for us as Marxists we are obviously materialists and we are scientific socialists and we are atheists therefore but our atheism has nothing to do with that certain strand of atheism like the new atheists that strand of bourgeois atheism that you see from people like Richard Dawkins and other essentially bourgeois atheists who see their own atheism as being you know gives them a certain superiority they feel a bit superior if there is atheism if there are peoples in other parts of the world that are killing each other supposedly because of religion if there are death cults and some gods in the Middle East or there are Buddhists in Myanmar or what have you chopping off the limbs of people this is because of their backwardness and actually it tends to lead to all sorts of racist and extremely backward conclusions on the part of these so called new atheists actually ignoring the fact of something that we looked at in another session on terrorism is that where do all of these movements spawn actually it's the same imperialists in the secular developed advanced countries that are at the same time backing the most backward mystical sort of sets and these death cults and terrorist groups in other parts of the world it's the same French ruling class that bans the burqa in the name of secularism and having an advanced sort of it's complete hypocrisy obviously and that has nothing to do with the atheism of us as marxists for us as marxists our atheism is our critique of religion is a critique of the material circumstances that seek people to try and find solace in a hereafter in a better world when you're dead basically we say let's build heaven on earth let's not wait until the afterlife to actually build to go to heaven and but of course between the most if you like what's the word blatant and undisguised and naked idealism and materialism there are much more subtle attempts to introduce idealism into the working class movement introduce this sort of philosophy in the interest of the bourgeoisie for example I might describe how I might say you as a worker if you're working 40-50 hours a week for a crack pay if you're lucky working that many hours a week or if you're living in a damp rat infested house or whatever else if your healthcare system is falling apart and all of these sort of things it's because of the objective laws of capitalism as a scientific socialist I explain that it is the exploitation of the working class which leads to this situation that you're living in the bourgeois idealist on the other hand will turn around and say what do you mean there are objective laws of capitalism there is no objective laws of capitalism in fact you might not like eating soup with dried reds but some people love that sort of thing some people love to just live off of crap food you call that a hovel but for someone else that is like a palace in other words the only truth that exists in the world is that subjective truth that exists in your head and therefore stop complaining some people like working hard a very subjectivist outlook you can see how that leads to the idea that you should give up in any attempt to try and change the world and we see this given a philosophical justification in university campuses and so on I know there was a session on postmodernism I didn't go to that but postmodernism it's very difficult to actually describe postmodernism as like a coherent theory but all it really is a rejection of any sort of meta narrative the idea that there is some sort of like overarching objective laws to society is completely dispensed with in other words there is only your own subjective view and how you subjectively see things and therefore if you want to fight for environmentalism or struggle for equality of LGBT people or women's rights and all of these sort of things that's fair enough but the idea that there are objective laws to society and you have to smash capitalism to solve these things no it's purely subjective in other words it serves to ideologically justify all of this identity politics and dividing the working class basically by gender, religion, race and all of these sort of categories so we see how it works its way into the left through the universities through the media not simply through the means of the conveyor belt of religion idealist for us if he finds its way in all sorts of ways also into the working class movement and here's the point the point is if you don't have your own philosophy you're going to absorb the philosophy of the world around you and how can we conceive of the working class transforming society without first of all adopting its own independent class point in other words until the working class has a clear view of the world which is independent of the view of the world that the bourgeoisie holds there is no question on earth of the working class being able to liberate itself until it has a party which is led by a certain philosophy dialectical materialism there is no possibility of the working class achieving its own liberation and we see that within the working class movement actually idealist concepts not consciously expressed as idealism but they find themselves left right and centre and Britain for example there is the idea that there is amongst the leaders of the trade unions and the labour party there is this idea that actually austerity and cuts and attacks on the working class are merely ideological in character of course they are ideological in character as in fact the Tory party does have a certain ideology and they are carrying out this austerity which is in line with their ideology but for us as Marxists of course ideology is not grounded it doesn't live in the air separate from the material world actually that ideology corresponds to a certain class interest it corresponds to the interest of bourgeoisie the capitalist class as a class and in the period of crisis they are determined to pass on basically that the working class will pay for this crisis through all of this austerity and attacks but the conclusions you are led to draw if you simply think this is an ideological attack and it's because of the anti working class ideology which for some reason unexplained enters the heads of these Tory politicians you are left with a conclusion that simply changing the politicians or even convincing and converting the politicians away from this insane ideology towards a more compassionate and rational ideology would lead to the end of austerity and would lead to an end of the attacks upon the working class in fact that's a very old idea that is not something that has been invented by the trade union leaders or the Labour party leaders that is the the ideology actually of the utopian socialist the pre-Marxist socialist had this point of view that it was only necessary to convince the ruling class of the superiority of socialism people like Robert Owen actually tried to appeal to the better nature of the capitalist class and they completely failed of course but we can understand why the utopian socialist drew that conclusion because the material conditions were not right for the development of an actual materialist scientific socialist view of the world were not right for Marxism because the working class as a class was still too small, still too underdeveloped, not sufficiently independent as a class and organised as a class for trade union leaders at the head of trade unions with six million members plus to continue to hold those views of these idealist views of the pre-Marxist utopian socialist is something unforgivable in my opinion however we understand they do not have their own philosophy therefore they absorb the bits of philosophy from the society around them we understand how that comes about and of course Marx and Engels started their life as philosophers, as students of philosophy and for them communism if you like Marxism, those ideas the revolutionary transformation of society started out with working out their own philosophical point of view and for Lenin and Trotsky as well I haven't had time to go into really Lenin's book materialism and imperial criticism although a lot of the arguments that I've laid down are found in that book he too saw it as in the period after the 1905 revolution when you had a wave of mysticism as a result of the defeat of the revolutionary movement and idealism finding its expression within the Bolshevik party he saw it as necessary to publish a book explaining why we are materialists and laying down all of the arguments against idealism in its various different forms and therefore the defence of the materialist method the defence of dialectical materialism is the defence of the building of the revolutionary party the starting point of the building of a party is the defence of this theory because after all the party is simply the mechanism by which to actually bring this philosophy and this outlook of the world into the working class movement