 Ac rwy'n creadio bod ymlaen yn ein cyfnod o'r hyffordd yna fawr a'r byd i'r llyfr wedi'i lleol ar y syniad. Ac rydyn ni'n meddwl iawn i'r rwyng hwn, mae'n rhaid i'r lleol yn dda i'r lleol ar gyfer gyfer GSC o'r ysbryd. A dyna'r lleol yn ddengylcheddol i'r lleol, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r lleol yn dda i'r lleol, You have to take an interest in science You have to take an interest in philosophy A lot of people would probably want to walk out And never have to think about those horrors of their school days again But no, I think that the significance Why we say that you should have an interest in philosophy Why you should have an interest in science Is because Marxism at its root is really a philosophy of change It's a philosophy of development Of a society of nature and of human thinking And yeah, this finds itself confirmed best in my opinion Throughout the natural world and in the developments of the natural sciences as well And indeed, you might not think you have a philosophy But you do have a philosophy It is your worldview and you can bet your bottom dollar That the ruling class have their philosophy They have their philosophy of change For the ruling class, if you think about it Change for them is whatever maintains the status quo You know, we have to sort of understand that this system is the most natural system And you know, the law of the jungle of the market Is merely the translation into human affairs Of the law of the jungle of nature And this is the most natural system And any attempt to change it Any attempt to shoehorn us into some more altruistic Or socialistic form of society always is unnatural Leads the totalitarianism and everything else And as far as possible, I mean these people sound ridiculous But pre-2008 you have people like Gordon Brown Saying that he, Chancellor of the Exchequer Elected in 1997 had done what no one had done In 300 years of capitalist history He had put an end to boom and bust Obviously these people look ridiculous now Francis Fukuyama who in a similar period Was talking about the end of history That in other words the system tends towards equilibrium It expels its contradictions Nowadays we look at these people And we think they're utterly ridiculous But of course it reflects the mentality of the ruling class Who want to argue basically that the status quo Is the only possible mode of existence And therefore give up That's their philosophy of change Can be summed up in two words Give up in any notion of changing the world This is the most natural system And if change does take place It takes place in a slow evolutionary Gradualistic way basically And therefore don't think about revolution Marks and Engels had a whole industry Dedicated to disproving their ideas But Lenin and Trotsky were the devil You know these people, these revolutionaries These were tried to impose upon us An unnatural system And therefore we need our own philosophy The working class needs its own philosophy Because fundamentally I think that if the working class Cannot conquer its own world view Cannot understand its own relationship to the world Independently of the world view of the ruling class How is it going to conquer power How is it going to transform society So for us and for the most advanced layers Of the working class it's necessary If we want to transform society That we first of all conquer our own understanding Of society, our own understanding Of our relationship to society and nature Our own philosophy of change And Marks and Engels took a lot of interest In the natural sciences and they took a lot of interest In philosophy as well of course Marks himself was a student of philosophy Before he was a communist And they took a lot of interest In philosophy I apologise to any students of philosophy In the audience today because philosophy As it is today is basically It is a complete swamp It's a complete desert compared to philosophy As it existed in Marks' youth in Germany And it reflects the fact that the ruling class Nowadays is completely and utterly They've lost confidence in themselves They've lost confidence in their system And therefore the dominant philosophy Is the reflection of this in the minds of academics Is that basically we cannot understand history History is irrational This is the post modern philosophy That we all have our own narrative But understanding objective laws which govern The development of society is a complete impossibility And therefore the idea of progress in particular Is completely out of the question And this is really a reflection Of the pessimism of the ruling class In academia Now in Marks' youth philosophy Was very different And this was a reflection of the fact That capitalism as a system was very different It was still a revolutionary system It was revolutionising not just industry, science and technique But you had great events like the French Revolution Which gave a huge impetus to human thinking And the capitalist class were fighting A struggle against all of the rubbish That had basically come down from the Middle Ages Against feudalism, against absolutism Against mysticism and the Catholic Church Philosophy and science were themselves Battlegrounds in the class struggle And therefore you had giants of philosophy In this period quite unlike today And one of the greatest philosophers Of the modern age really A product of this period was a guy called George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Of whom Marks in his youth Was an avid follower of his ideas And he made a, I hesitate to say a discovery He rescued really a very ancient idea An idea which owes its origins to the, there are elements of it In ancient Eastern religions and philosophies And it finds a very developed form In ancient Greek philosophy So it was not a new idea And this idea we refer to as dialectics basically Now what is dialectics? Dialectics, Engels explains Represents the general law of development of nature, society and thought That's a pretty, that's a pretty bold claim The idea that there is some general law of development Of all of the, of basically the whole of matter And the whole of this material world So like all sciences philosophy has its specialist language But I think like all genuinely profound ideas Dialectics is not really a very complicated idea It can be very simply expressed And I think it can best be expressed Through examples, through looking at how We need to discover it in nature, in society Rather than, it's not something we can simply impose upon the world around us It is a product of the world around us And therefore it needs to be discovered and explained Through the phenomena of nature and of social development So let's have a bit of a look What is this dialectics thing So if I were to sum it up I would probably use the aphorism of an ancient Greek philosopher A guy called Heraclitus To later philosophers was known as Heraclitus the Dark Because he wrote in riddles and aphorisms And this sort of thing And he said the following which I think sums up dialectics very nicely He says that everything both is and is not For everything is in flux Everything is in a constant process of change I both do and do not step in the same river twice Now this is an interesting idea That completely contradicts our notion of common sense How can everything both be and not be I am me, my name is Ben Nice to meet you I'm not Ben as far as I know This is a phone, it's not not a phone It contradicts common sense I'll come back to this question of common sense in a minute But let's look at this question in a little more detail Am I really me Well if I go down to the level of my cells in my body We'll see that they're constantly excreting matter into my bloodstream Which has been removed from my kidneys and other organs And I'm constantly ingesting food Which is being reabsorbed into my cells From the bloodstream, these new nutrients So that over the course of months or maybe years I don't know exactly the time frame Every single molecule in my body Will have been replaced by new molecules And then if I ask you in a few months or years Am I still the same person There is no simple answer The answer is both yes and no I'm both am and I'm not the same person at the same time Excuse me It is a contradiction And it is a contradiction The logic you are taught in schools Formal logic basically So-called common sense logic cannot deal with Everything in formal logic either is Or it is not And there is this law of the excluded middle Dialectics on the contrary Is a philosophy of change It is a philosophy of things in their motion And in their motion things have contradictions Contradictions are not absurdities Contradictions are very real Motion itself is an expression Of contradiction that something can be And not be in the same place at the same time And so Our common sense ideas Break down when we take into consideration Motion That's not to say formal logic doesn't have Its area of applicability But certainly Things start to break down These fixed categories cease to be fixed They become blurry and things turn into their opposites And we see this in biology in particular I took myself as an organism We see that within biology Common sense has told people for thousands Of years that things fall into Fixed static categories Something is either a dog or a cat Or a lizard or a plant or an animal But of course the Greeks Who had a very profound grasp of dialectics Did understand that actually Within biology species can change The idea of anaximanda had His had a theory of evolution But it was only in the past 100 years That you really had this put on a scientific basis With the theory of evolution Through natural selection That things are not so fixed Let's look at some examples I mean the most fundamental division Within the sphere of organic life Is probably that between plants and animals And yet if you go into the ocean The majority of biomass in the ocean Is composed of tiny microscopic organisms Called plankton And many of these plankton move around And interact with their surroundings like animals Yet they have chloroplasts And photosynthesised like plants They don't fit into any of these static categories Right? You can discover these examples Of this throughout nature, viruses Have none of the processes of metabolism Like the rest of living life as we know it And yet they are able to reproduce Much like life, they defy the categorisation Even into the categories of organic And inorganic life And The history of our own species And how we conceive of the development Of our species, likewise Has defied this simple categorisation It used to be that there was a very simple Linear notion of how human life evolved That we had these ape-like creatures That developed into upright apes The Australopithecines And that these Then led to the emergence of hominids Our more human-like ancestors And finally homosapiens Sort of the crowning glory upon that But in actual fact more discoveries have shown That there is no clear distinction That the discovery of new fossils The advance of paleontology has shown There's all sorts of Specimens that fit into neither the Australopithecines Nor the hominids And in fact far from being this linear progress What we have is all sorts of offshoots Evolutionary dead ends, re-mergers We have the interbreeding in Europe Of neanderthals with homosapiens To a certain extent So this simple linear image Of progressive development has broken down Under examination And in fact if we look at the difference Evolutionarily speaking between us And our nearest living relatives Like the higher apes We see that amongst the higher apes There is only a very small genetic difference Actually the difference is as little as 1.2% Difference in our genes And those of Bonobo apes for example Which is a tiny difference To give you a sense of proportion The difference between me and any of you In this room Genetically speaking could be as great as 0.1% Which means that the leap from Between us is only 1.12% Of the difference of the leap between me and an ape So it's a very small difference Actually genetically speaking And yet within this tiny quantitative Difference represents such a tremendous Leap that we are separated By an enormous gulf from the rest Of the animal kingdom We really in many respects are not animals Like the rest of the animals Unconscious beings that only are able to project themselves A very limited amount into the future We have wrought changes upon the natural world Which the only point of comparison Can be like the evolution Of multi cellular life 550 million years ago Such is the scale of this revolution Contained within this tiny amount Of genetic difference And this is precisely how dialectics explains That change takes place Not through gradualistic slow Progressive development Quantitative changes Reach a tipping point And then you have huge qualitative transformations Revolutions, catastrophes, upheavals As we are discussing today Could I have some more water? And indeed Darwin's discovery That the process of evolution through natural selection Is really the discovery of dialectics This law of quantity transforming Into quality As applied to the biological world After all the differences between organisms Within a species Can be measured quantitatively In their genetics In the lengths of their clods Or fins or limbs and so forth And yet these small quantitative differences accumulate To make complete qualitative transformations The emergence of new species It is dialectics confirmed within nature And yet Darwin's conception of this Reflected the prejudices around him The gradualist reformist prejudices Basically He saw evolution as taking place Not through these qualitative leaps But in a slow gradualistic manner Much in the same way that for example The branches slowly emerge smoothly From the root of a tree The trunk of a tree And This is not what the This is not actually what the fossil record shows us We actually see that there are periods When species look completely the same You go millions of years Ammonites look exactly the same And then suddenly an adaptation Or a speciation they change Of one species But you have mass extinctions Huge upheavals Undoubtedly there was change taking place Small changes within their ecosystem Within their genetics Within their variation Within their genes of that species The gene pool of that species And yet this slow gradual Progressive development Of gradual change Quasi-equilibrium basically exists This is then punctuated by tremendous revolutions Which owes itself to two scientists in particular Stephen J. Gould and Niles Elridge And in fact There was one piece of evidence That Darwin put forward Such was his sort of attachment To this slow gradualistic evolutionary theory of change That he thought it was a legitimate Counterargument to his entire theory basically And that was If you go back 600 million years There was only really one type of fossil That we see in abundance And it's called a stromatolite A big blob Which is formed when single-celled algae Basically formed mats essentially That's all that existed These single-celled organisms forming these big blobs Basically all over the planet And then 550 million years ago You see a sudden explosion A huge variety of complex multi-cellular life forms And some of them have names like hallucinogenia Because they're so unlike anything you've ever seen They are like from another world A fantastic array Of new species evolving In what is a blink of an eye geologically speaking And Darwin could not explain this Now we see that there are There are breakthroughs Stephen Jay Gould puts forward the theory That what actually happened Is that you had one of these tiny little algae Sat in one of these Stromatolites basically Underwent a very small genetic change It wouldn't have looked very different From the algae around it And yet it started doing something remarkable To bring up all of the algae around it And this was like a whip basically At the back of these prey algae That were trying to escape from it That forced them to evolve mechanisms To get away from this Out-of-control grazing algae basically And it in turn Underwent an evolution to try and overcome these It was basically a giant arms race Began 550 million years ago And it hasn't stopped accelerating since A huge variety of species emerged From that difference And he would not have been able to tell the difference Between these two microscopic organisms So you see that evolution Really takes place in this manner Of a punctuated equilibrium Equilibria punctuated by these tremendous revolutions And this theory can be applied actually Punctuated equilibria Is a phenomena of the whole of nature around us In many respects It isn't just something that can be looked at in biology And yet when Darwin was writing I talked about him discovering dialectics In evolutionary biology Which was a far more advanced science in many respects It achieved a far greater level Of completion It had even ossified into a complete world view Completely rejected what we would understand As dialectics The world view which had developed In the mid-19th century Was fundamentally the same as that developed by Newton In 1687 in his Principia And according to this view of the world The universe was governed essentially By simple, time-reversible Mechanistic laws Which can be calculated to a high degree of precision And everything could be understood in these laws We also could be understood Our hearts are nearly pumps Our arms are like levers These are simple mechanistic Newtonian laws And this was developed to such a high degree It became so ossified That a guy called Laplace Put forward the idea that imagine If we had this hyperintelligence People derogatory Derogatory Refer Refer to this as Laplace's demon Subsequently Imagine if you had an intelligence Which knew the positions and momentum of every single particle And part of the universe around us We could basically Predict how the entire universe Would evolve for all of eternity And furthermore we could even reverse the clock To say what the starting conditions of the universe were In other words This view of the universe Completely expelled the notion of accident From physics Everything was a matter of iron necessity And if we see things that we don't understand It's simply because there are gaps in our knowledge Of the precise positions of everything in the universe So it completely expelled the notion of accident Everything became a matter of necessity If you like within nature Now some, particularly within the idealist school of philosophy Rejected this view Because they said actually Whilst we have these laws of nature Nothing actually conforms to it Galileo talks about how two things drop At the same time they don't Because of air resistance and everything else And therefore he said actually everything in nature Is subject to contingency to accident And so forth If there are laws within nature They are unknowable because we cannot know the thing in itself The laws we have are the products of Our a priori Products of a priori understanding And we use reason and so forth to basically Bring order to chaos So the world is governed by accident So the idealist took the opposite position Expelling necessity from the real world Hegel His great revolutionary breakthrough I think in many respects Was he saw that accidents and necessity Although contradicting each other Exist and depend upon each other They condition each other He said that he made the following very profound statement That necessity expresses itself through accident Now this is a very interesting idea In my opinion And we've just looked at an example of that idea Darwinian evolution is precisely an example Because once One individual within a species It can be the fittest it likes It can be very well adapted to its surroundings And yet A forest fire can kill it off anyway It can entirely accidentally fall into The jaws of a predator And despite this fact that You have this All of these accidents within nature Over the course Of only a few dozen generations Only a few hundred individuals within a species This resolves itself Into the well-describable law Of evolution basically That the species as a whole Will adapt in the direction of its greatest fitness Within that ecosystem So you see that necessity expresses itself Through a multitude of accidents And in fact Trotsky even went on to say The following which I really like Because I think it shows how Accidents expresses itself through necessity Also in human history He said the following in my life He said that broadly speaking The entire historical process Is a refraction of the historical law Through the accidental In the language of biology one might say That the historical law is realised Through the natural selection of accidents Excuse me On this foundation there develops that Conscious human activity which subjects Accidents to a process of artificial selection So he saw that this unity Of accident and necessity Actually amplifies and gives rise To the possibility of artificial selection Of the subjective factor intervening In the objective processes Of social development That the two are interdependent if you like Now just coming back to this question Of the Newtonian view of the world Of course we know that it was In many respects brought down A revolution overthrew it And put it in its rightful place That was in quantum mechanics and relativity But in fact the first attacks upon The universe didn't come from that Direction they actually came From the theory of heat in the 19th century Started to be used polemically Actually against Laplace's demon Attacking this notion that everything is governed By this iron necessity And you had a great breakthrough By a guy called Ludwig Boltzmann In 1870 who basically Gave a new interpretation to an idea Which had been empirically discovered What we discovered is that if you have an engine You burn coal And you turn it into heat And that is transmitted into motion Some of that energy When it goes through its transformations This energy is neither created nor destroyed But a lot of it is lost as heat Which is just disordered chaotic motion It's just molecular motion That is uncontrollable And it dissipates into the universe And Boltzmann said that actually this reflects The fact that systems as a whole Tend towards the most probables outcome An example When you had a field of sheep And you had a field of cows That's a very orderly system All the sheep and the cows are separated by a fence If I open the gate to that fence The sheep and the cows will start wandering around And eventually there will be half the sheep in one And half the sheep in the other And likewise with the cows Until motion has ceased You've reached an equilibrium basically This was an interesting interpretation Of this notion That heat tends to increase You have a dissipation of energy within the universe This second law of thermodynamics And what this seems to say It was a revolution really Because what it said is you can calculate How heat dissipates and so forth But it takes place in a probabilistic manner Through a lot of tiny accidents Statistically you get the objective necessity Of the laws of the transformation Of energy The second law of thermodynamics Emerged from this So for the first time There was an attempt to unify accident and necessity Within physics And yet So this was a big step forward It introduced history into physics You can boil an egg but you can't un-boil an egg If you leave a cup of coffee down on the table It will go down to room temperature It won't spontaneously start rising in temperature So suddenly the universe had a history It was not this time reversible piece of clockwork Mechanism that the Newtonian view had And yet it itself is extremely one-sided Because if you consider it What it says is that there is dissipation It says that things tend to chaos And to disorder if you like And there is undoubtedly there are phenomena Like the cooling cup of tea or these animals That are allowed to roam on this chaotic farm That we've set up in my imagination It undoubtedly has a certain field of applicability And yet what it says Is things tend towards equilibrium Motion actually tends to cease In these cases And this was taken to an extreme To say that actually if you think of the universe as a whole Motion is running down So we have a clockwork universe Where the spring is not being wound down Until eventually we'll have a heat death Everything will be the same temperature Everything will reach an equilibrium And motion will cease So this whilst it was a step forward We had the clockwork universe And then we have a clockwork universe Which is winding down to an eventual death And stasis Again an extremely undialectical view Of the universe and one which actually does not correspond To the world around us in many respects If you look at the world around you You'll see that things are winding up You have not greater dispersion Of not just dissipation That is one feature of the universe But you also have growing organisation Growing complexity within the universe Within biology You had originally the primordial soup Which was complete disorder Which eventually organised itself into single-celled organisms And then more and more and more complex organisms And human history follows the same development Not in a linear fashion But you have this process of development From the less complex forms of organisation To the more highly organised And more complex forms of human society And culture and so forth So clearly it is a one-sided tendency But it came about Fundamentally in my opinion Partly as a result of a natural process Within science Because science itself has to break things down Into their constituent parts It has to look at things in their isolation You have to understand Before you can understand for example How air resistance works You have to imagine we get all of the air out of the room And then we drop these two objects And see how they fall It isolates things, it forms closed systems Because it is necessary to do so In order to understand these more simple things But therefore it's all the more necessary To have a philosophy To be able to put the universe back together Because actually things don't exist in closed isolated systems In a closed system you can have A pendulum which very nicely goes Back and forwards for all eternity You can have a cup of tea reaching an equilibrium With its surroundings and you can have cows and sheep Ffrolicking on a farm Or whatever you want But the universe is not a closed system It is an open system As Richard Lewontin said The great Marxist biologist Or a pancreas or a stomach or an intestine They only exist under the knife of the anatomist In nature you only have the whole organism And we have to understand things In their interactions In their complexity and development As a whole The problem is actually That is very complicated because By isolating these closed systems You create a class of very easily Solvable problems within physics But for example if I don't look at a farm But I consider an open ecosystem It is actually far more complex Every part interacts with every other part You have not simple Random motion of cows and sheep You have great migrations And herds And these herds break up into smaller herds Because they need to go and look for resources Because they are at threat of overeating the vegetation You have predation You have over-predation So that predators themselves Enter into a decline in their populations Because they have eaten too many of the prey animal So you have feedback loops within the world And you have extreme complexity basically And that's very difficult to actually model Whereas it's very much easier to model these simpler Abstract ideas These models that we create That science often creates And therefore In order to be able to look at these open systems More complex systems such as the weather for example Which itself is not simply It doesn't reach an equilibrium of stasis Like the cup of tea reaching room temperature But it does not reach an equilibrium of stasis Like the cup of tea reaching room temperature It is constantly out of equilibrium In fact we see that Non-equilibrium Open systems Dynamic systems are the norm Equilibrium is not the norm It is actually the It is a very special case basically Within nature Most things are far from in equilibrium And the weather is exactly one of those You see That however a big That forward really I think a tremendous revolution Took place in the middle of the 20th century Which allowed us to begin exploring these things For the first time in mathematical detail And that was of course the invention of the computer Now for the first time we're able to actually model Extremely complex systems Or at least create Models that approximate To these systems And indeed there was a guy called Edward Lorenz Who in the middle of the 20th century Began sitting down to a computer trying to predict the weather And he used a very simple model It only had 12 parameters It clearly wasn't like the weather that we understand it But you know he modeled things like Humidity, wind speed, pressure Temperature and so forth And he expected to be able To predict how this system would unfold For an unlimited Amount of time basically And what he found is he ran this model And then he ran it again And he found that it started off doing the same thing And then it started to diverge Until eventually after a period of time It was completely unrecognisable The system was completely different And what he found is he put The figures that he put back into the system Had a rounding error of 0.001 Difference with the original parameters It was a tiny difference basically And yet this had profound implications For science, what it actually said Is that The Weather we may have these deterministic laws Even though we may be able to understand All that there is to understand About the weather Yet you have this extreme sensitivity To starting conditions That out of these predictable laws can arise chaos Can arise unpredictability And this was led to the interpretation As you may have heard of the butterfly effect The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings In Britain Can have such a tiny difference here But it could have the overall effect of causing a hurricane In the Caribbean for example Of course that's a slight misinterpretation In many respects so it's one sided Because it's not the butterfly that causes it It's the interaction of all of the parts of the system That cause the development of these patterns So we actually lose a certain amount of predictability Within these chaotic systems And you can see that human society In many respects is more like the weather Than it is like a swinging pendulum Or a fields of cattle and sheep Or whatever silly example I gave earlier It is an extremely chaotic system With all sorts of interacting factors Going on And yet whilst we lose a lot of the ability To predict the weather long term We can say that there are well defined features Within the weather that are very well understood Under what circumstances they arise We have only a very limited number Of pressure systems, storms, hurricanes Cloud patterns and so forth So on another level We see that there are patterns That constantly repeat but never exactly repeat That the weather never repeats But it rhymes really And likewise in human history We can see that there are developments That we understand how these developments take place But they never take place in exactly the same way And in fact I don't really have time to go into The idea of strange attractors Within chaos theory And I don't really want to explain what they are But if you plot These Parameters That Edward Lorenz was talking about Is that the system forms these patterns Spiral patterns actually Never exactly repeating itself But forming very similar patterns And I'll compare that to the theory Of dialectics of the negation of the negation Which this is how Alan describes it in Reason and Revolt He says that dialectics envisages The fundamental processes At work in the universe and society And in the history of ideas Not as a closed circle Where the same processes merely repeat themselves In an endless mechanical cycle There's an open-ended spiral of development In which nothing is ever repeated Exactly in the same way before Now I don't have a huge amount of time left So I'm going to bring things to a close In a minute But first of all I want to look at another Feature of these Non-linear dynamic Systems which is very well explained In a book that I highly recommend There's a few books that I recommend really That come ready to read dialectics of nature And anti-during in particular And on top of that Reason and Revolt Which I've just quoted from It looks at how dialectics Finds itself confirmed in nature But when you've read those I highly recommend a fourth book Which is a book called Ubiquity By a guy called Mark Buchanan And what he showed Is that what he explains in this book Is that other scientists have showed That these complex systems Tend towards actually self-organisation And in particular They tend to organise to a very special state Which is very rare in equilibrium physics And that is called the critical state The boundary, the turning point Between one state and another One phase and another In equilibrium physics You have to actually fine tune things To get them to this precise boundary You have to get to a very specific temperature Or pressure or what have you If you want to go from That find the state between magnetised And non-magnetised iron, for example It's at about 700-something degrees centigrade You have to fine tune things To get them on that barrier In equilibrium physics Much like balancing a pencil on its lead It's very unstable However, what he found is in Non-equilibrium physics In dynamic systems Things actually tend towards this critical state They tend towards this fine tuning This fine balancing basically And under those circumstances In this critical state You can see that tiny effects can have Massive qualitative effects basically Outcomes Tiny inputs can have massive outcomes You can have, for an example that he gives Is a pile of sand Where you drop grains upon that sand Until it becomes steeper and steeper And what you find is it organises into a critical state Where the next grain of sand Might have the effect of causing an avalanche of one or two sand grains Or it might be a few hundred Or it might be a few million And in fact where it falls could collapse the east Or the west side of the sand pile And it's entirely down to accident How that takes place So this organisation of things Into their critical state Where tiny effects can have massive changes On a system Qualitative changes on a system Were discovered and examples were given In this book by Buchanan Of earthquakes Of stock market crashes Fluctuations in fashion War, mass extinctions So in other words there is this lawfulness To how change takes place In these non-equilibrium systems Which I don't have that much time To go into unfortunately But finally to bring it back I want to give an example from our own experience Which is a society Why is this interesting? Why is this of interest to us As revolutionary Marxists who want to transform society And why is it of interest to us As Marxists What does this actually tell us About society? Well likewise As in nature within society You find this critical state Constantly re-emerging and in fact We had a debate within Britain Amongst Marxists the supporters of socialist appeal In 2015-2016 After the election of Jeremy Corbyn Now what we had said for many years Is we had said That as the class struggle develops in Britain The Labour Party will be transformed And yet in our articles In 2015-2016 We described Jeremy Corbyn As an accident basically It was something that might or might not have happened Basically And some comrades said How can a revolution And we just called it the Corbyn Revolution In many of our In much of our literature How can a revolution be caused by an accident It seems absurd And yet Precisely it was an accident After all Corbyn could have been hit by a bus The day before God forbid Margaret Beckett Might have had a sudden Sense might have suddenly come to her And she decided not actually to nominate Corbyn Or any of these sort of things might have happened Corbyn might have decided Not to have breakfast in the morning And that made him a bit grumpy To stand for an election of the leader of the Labour Party History is made up of all of these tiny accidents Many of them ridiculous And yet they can have profound and far reaching effects And what I would say is actually If you look at every single revolution in history Has been started apparently Been started by an accident in fact Just in 2010 You had the death of a young man called Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia Now this young man's life in many respects Was nothing special There was nothing special about this particular young man But he was so humiliated And by the regime His life was such a daily struggle Simply to survive That he killed himself He immolated himself And that particular suicide Which is definitely not the first And certainly won't be the last suicide In Tunisia by a young man Who's reached the end of desperation Had a massive effect It's based on It's basically resonated With millions of people Who saw in that young man their own conditions And went out onto the streets And brought down a dictator And eventually of course it didn't just have that effect in Tunisia It had an effect in Egypt And the wider Middle Eastern North Africa And yet what this man did Was in many respects an accident He might have or he might not have done so And likewise in the Lebanon Who can say that the insurrectionary movement That we've seen in the Lebanon Is anything to do with WhatsApp Or charging for WhatsApp calls It has nothing to do with that It has everything to do with the build up Of anger within society Until the point where it reached That tipping point basically Where an accident can have a massive effect And another example which I think Illustrates this much better in many ways Because it shows what an imprint An accident can have on history Is the example of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela Because after all He was an officer in the Venezuelan army Had died fighting guerrillas In the jungles of Venezuela Of course he would not have been able to play the role That he did in the Venezuelan revolution In 1998 onwards So in many respects he was himself An accident of history Yet who can doubt the huge impact That this accident had A decisive impact Venezuela will never be the same again It has laid down a tradition amongst the workers and the poor The Bolivarian tradition Which was a creation of Hugo Chávez And so it had a huge impact A decisive impact And yet of course If he had not come along Or if Mohammed Bouzizi had not killed himself In that way Or if Jeremy Corbyn had decided not to stand for the Labour Party There would have still been these revolutionary movements But they would have expressed themselves Very differently, decisively differently Possibly In Britain for example If Corbyn had not stood for election Back in 2015 as I think was entirely possible That he might have decided not to Many of the lefts also had a completely pessimistic view They didn't think they were going to win this He stood because it was his turn John McDonald stood twice And he stood because it was It was his turn basically There were lefts who thought that they shouldn't stand They would get humiliated, they would get thrashed I don't know and I'm not saying that that was the position of Jeremy Corbyn But if he hadn't have stood What would have been the outcome From the point of view of the development of the Labour Party I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility To say That you could have seen the near destruction of that party Under a right wing leadership A Blairite or whoever else An Andy Burnham or a Liz Kendall of this world Had been at the leadership The Labour Party in England and Wales could have gone the same way That it went in Scotland So you see that things were in many respects On a knife edge And an accident falling one of two sides Of different transformative effects And indeed of course That anger would have still been there Had Corbyn not been elected If the Labour Party had even been more or less destroyed But it would have found another expression A very different expression So you see that one small accident Can have a decisive effect And in many respects I think like Trotsky's analogy is a very beautiful one The idea that history is the natural selection Of a whole host of accidents Because in many respects That simply That Revolutions are caused by accidents I would go so far as to say That the whole of history is in many ways Nothing but a whole host of accidents Some of which have a bigger and a smaller effect Think of economics for example What is economics What is the market economy If it's not whether I decide to buy a cheese sandwich At lunch at Tesco Or if I decide to go and get a pastry At the wonderful stall over there Or whether I decide to take out a mortgage Which I obviously can't afford There is a strong necessity of pushing me against that Or I decide until The housing market crashes And decide to get a mortgage a few years later Whether an investor buys Or an investor sells There's a whole host of accidents And yet out of that myriad of accidents Emerges the law Of capitalist development Which has very well definable features The law of the boom and bust Of the cycle of capitalist economics The longer term trends The secular stagnation that we're seeing setting in And we can see that in many respects History is composed of a whole infinite host of accidents Like those sand grains falling upon That sand pile that I talked about a minute ago Whether I decide Whether I sleep in in the morning Or whether Jeremy Corbyn stands for election Or whether a young man kills himself in Tunisia There is this whole host of accidents That eventually form if you like Much like the falling sand grains form a dune They form a landscape Which determines where the future accidents may fall But not necessarily where they will fall So I think by understanding these processes By studying them in nature And also studying them in society Looking at the history of revolutions And seeing that a small effect Can have a huge qualitative transformation Upon a system We can understand how we can best use our forces We are going through a process Of artificial selection ourselves We are artificially selecting The most advanced workers and youth And bringing them together in a revolutionary organisation To overthrow capitalism So that when the moment comes We can decisively throw our small forces Onto the scales of history And tip it in a way that will transform The whole of human history decisively With the socialist transformation of society