 So Leon Trotsky was visited the comrades of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States. And they comrades over there were wondering what is this great revolutionary figure going to want to discuss with us? Could it be that he would want to discuss the revolutionary development taking a place across the world in the United States? Could it be the nature of the Soviet Union under Stalin? well no, what Trotsky insisted on discussing first and foremost was Marxist philosophy and was dialectical materialism. He helped this up as a vital question that the comrades needed to have a clear understanding of. But why is this, you know it might seem strange today to think of that as being the case. philosophy these days has quite a bad name and I would include Marxist philosophy in with that. To most people I would say philosophy does seem quite an abstract thing that has no relevance to their lives and as well as Marxist philosophy too because I would say most you know so called academic Marxists what do they write it tends to be they tend to kind of produce material that seems to be almost purposely almost intentionally hard to understand really and solely intended for interesting points in university seminar rooms or most importantly to ensure a fat wallet for the author of the produced work but that is not true Marxism. Marx for example said that philosophers have merely interpreted the world the point however is to change it so Marxism is a philosophy of action and of change and since the agent of change according to Marxism is the working class we must not kind of you know present the ideas of Marxism or the distorted ideas of Marxism shouldn't produce them present them anyway but we shouldn't produce present the ideas of Marxism in a way that is unintelligible but more than being a philosophy of change Marxism provides a guide to action and this is vital because just because most people aren't interested in philosophy at the moment that doesn't mean that they don't have a philosophy and actually if you don't work hard to have your own consciously worked out philosophy what I would say is that what will happen is that you will unconsciously merely repeat the ideas and methods of the ruling class because they are the ideas that surround us every day they are the ideas that are kind of fed out through the television through the newspapers and that is ultimately what Marx meant when he said that the ruling ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class so working class people need our own philosophy our own method in order to change the world in order to combat the ideas as well of the ruling class but before we start I just want to say that Marxism is a science and like all sciences it comes with its own terminology and can be quite difficult when you first begin to study these ideas however after some work I would say that the philosophy of Marxism better than anything else is able to explain society and humanity human thoughts and nature so this talk is meant as an introduction to the philosophy of Marxism but I do hope that it encourages comrades to either continue or start a proper study of Marxist philosophy anyway as I kind of indicated earlier the philosophy of Marxism is called dialectical materialism but both dialectics and materialism have their own history that predates Marxism so what is materialism well philosophically it has a completely different meaning to what it means colloquially if someone calls you a materialist for example you might be quite offended and you might think well I mean what does that mean that means you know you're obsessed with shopping with consuming things like that if someone calls you an idealist on the other hand equally is quite patronising but what it probably means is that you are very keen on you know fighting for a just world for you know make to make things better basically that philosophically materialism means something completely different a philosophical materialist use the material physical world as primary for a materialist matter is the driving force of all reality and that means that ideas including the idea of god are secondary and ideas are understood as being a product of the material world not the other way around but to add to this as well a materialist would conceive of this material world and as having an objective existence that separates and apart from our own interpretation of it the world exists whether we personally are there to view it or not so in answer to the question you know if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it it's a materialist would answer yes it certainly makes a sound the the sound that it makes is not dependent on an observer being there to hear it making a sound and now one of the big influence influences for marks and angles and marxism was a man named Ludwig Voibach and this man was a a materialist and and he kind of approached the question of materialism in this way he said in the conflict between materialism and spiritualism the human head is under discussion once we have learnt what kind of matter the brain is made up of we shall soon arrive at a great view upon all other matter on matter in general and Engels deals with this in Ludwig Voibach and the end of German classical philosophy which is available on the stall has a terrible name but anyway he deals with this he says what this means is that so since thought and consciousness are products of the human brain and since humanity is a product of nature which has developed in and along with the environment products of the human brain ideas in the last analysis are also products of nature they don't contradict nature but are in correspondence with it and so for marxists consciousness um really is a result of matter having become conscious of itself um but you can use a materialist approach to gain a real understanding of all ideas we root we say all ideas have a material base and that includes idealism itself um you can find the origins of idealism really um in the lack of understanding of our ancestors um because the early humans um for example were unable um to understand how kind of nature worked so therefore they were unable to make the environment make the environment generally work for them and so in order to attain what they wanted rather than being able to use science or technology because of this lack of understanding instead they had to resort with a kind of magical interaction with nature so the anthropologist Sir James Fraser for example said um the early human hardly conceived the distinction between the natural and the supernatural to them the world is to a great extent worked by supernatural agents liable to be moved by appeals to their pity so for the human for the early humans they were forced to rely on prayers in order to um get what they wanted basically um but also you have these early religions a lot of them were known as animist religions which um essentially is um the kind of attributing natural processes to the actions of the gods so you have things like for example uh you know thunder being attributed to gods playing the drums in the sky or something like that um however idealism itself also received a powerful impulse with the emergence of class society because class society essentially means the division of labour between those who do all the manual work and those who do mental work and if you like but it's important to remember from a marxist point of view this division of labour initially at least was actually a progressive thing because what did it mean well it meant that a certain section of society was free from having to carry out manual labour and therefore had the time to develop science and technology so for example example Aristotle said mathematics originated in Egypt where a priestly caste enjoyed all the necessary leisure but whilst there were obviously progressive elements what this phenomenon meant was that there was a certain section of society obviously that were free from having to carry out manual labour but also their conditions of existence depended on ideas and if your position in society depends on ideas it can be very easy to come to view ideas as being the driving force in the world and this battle between materialism and idealism really I would say colours a lot of the history of philosophy and you can read about this I would recommend Cymru to read Alan Woods he's sitting at the back history of philosophy and you can get it online if you would like to I don't have time to go through the whole history of philosophy so I'm going to skip ahead a little bit and go to you know materialism it's kind of one of its big breakthroughs if you like and this came really in France in the 18th century here you had a new class that was rising fighting to change society against the decrepit old ruling class this was the emergence at this period of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and this class had their own revolutionary and materialist philosophy which itself was the kind of ideological expression of the struggle against the old ruling class this basically was the creed of the french revolution and these people recognised no external authority and the measure of everything for them instead was reason however both Marx and Engels criticised this materialism they uh they said that actually this materialism was too mechanical and and then they also explained why it was too mechanical and they rooted it again in for material reasons in the fact that at this point in time the most developed form of science was mechanics and this fact then coloured the whole of thinking of that time which also meant that this materialism was unable basically to grasp the fact that the universe is in a state of constant change instead this materialism had quite a static view of things including human nature and one of the materialists that they criticised was this man Ludwig Feuerbach this man was very important to both Marx and Engels because he was someone who broke from Hegel Hegel is another influence of Marx and Engels I will come back to um later but he broke from Hegel um on a materialist basis so for example Feuerbach said before thinking of an object man experiences its actions upon himself um now that that is a materialist approach um I would say um matter is Brian Reef of Feuerbach however Marx criticised this he criticised it in theses on Feuerbach he said um the chief defect of all previous materialism Feuerbach has included is that things reality sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation but not a sensuous human activity practice not subjectively but what does this mean well according to Feuerbach we become aware of an object by coming under its action Marx objects he says yes we do become aware of an object by coming under its action but wilds also at the same time um acting upon it so for Marx there's a two-way process between the object and the subject rather than a pure uh you know one-way relationship from the object so for Marxists people are induced to think chiefly by the sensations they experience in the process of acting upon the external world um and you can see this method in the works of Marx in capital for example Marx says by thus acting on the external world and changing it he at the same time changes his own nature and this is a fundamental point um and it affects um at Marxist approach to all number of questions but i'll just give one example which is the Marxist approach to oppression um and sexism in particular now Marxist would say that all ideas including sexism have um its roots in material reality um class society and there was a talk on that yesterday so i'm going to much into detail about it but we say that the sexism of workers and the sexism of the ruling class are of a different character women are oppressed um both as workers and as women both by other workers and by the capitalist system however the ruling class relies on sexism in all forms of oppression in order to divide the working class whilst the working class in order to struggle to change society need unity the point is though that when working class people are passive and not fighting to change society um they are unaware of the need for this unity and so that is why these ideas can um you know have some existence amongst working class people however when the working class begin to move in order to change society they also at the same time begin to change themselves in various ways and one of these ways is that they learn the importance of unity whilst struggling and so that's why in big movements of the working class you do tend to see ideas like this begin to lose their hold for example in Egypt um Egypt is obviously a place where the position of women is a lot lower than in Britain um but during the Arab Spring um there were no sexual assaults reported whatsoever and women also reported that they've never felt safer um than during this period equally in the minor strike in Britain um women uh you can see there are like lots of interviews of this women at the start of the minor strike you know might have been too shy too nervous to speak in meetings but during the struggle the um workers learnt the importance of unity and women began to take a leading role in the minor strike with speaking meetings visiting picket lines and things like this I'd also say there is no coincidence whatsoever that following the Russian revolution there were hugely progressive reforms that were carried out that benefited women so um I mean I can't go into it now but you had for example the legalisation of abortion and the right to divorce being granted and countless other examples but I'd argue that what these examples show is that Marx's approach to materialism was correct rather than there being a one-way relationship between the object influencing the subject or people mechanically and being product solely of their environment and he has I would say what is a dialectical approach and where subject and object simultaneously influence each other so materialism needed dialectics but what is um dialectics well the first dialectician came a little bit before Marx um his name was Heraclitus and he's a philosopher from ancient Greece he was born in 535 BC and he was famous for saying a number of very profound things um I'll give two examples the first of which is we both step and do not step in the same river twice we are and are not and also everything changes and nothing remains still his thinking was that we can't step in the same river twice because both the river is constantly changing and we also are constantly changing and if you think about it it is true the river is constantly changing if you try and step into it twice the water will be different also the banks of the river are constantly moving because due to erosion the river itself might be becoming more shallow or more deep but also we are constantly changing and you know it files to show you a picture of myself as a baby you probably wouldn't recognise me and but more than that um I am constantly changing cells in my body are constantly dying and being replaced by new ones so you know everything is constantly changing basically and that is one of the key points of dialectics everything is the constant state of flux but this idea ultimately well this idea means that dialectics comes into conflict with um the traditional form of logic with formal logic um the laws of formal logic were kind of formulated um by Aristotle um in kind of three points first of all a is always equal to a um a is a can never be equal to not a and a is either a or not a there can be no middle way um on the face of it this does seem to make total sense right a cup is a cup um if you started calling a cup a spade um people would think you're slightly strange um however trotski pointed out that actually um a is never equal to a if you take two one kilogram bags of sugar for example um on the face of it they seem completely equal however if you use a fine if a more accurate weighing scales you will find that there are slight differences between the weight of the two bags but even if you say a bag of sugar is equal to itself that also doesn't help because as i've said all bodies are in a constant state of uh flux um because if you look more closely at this bag of sugar you can see that the particles themselves are constantly moving constantly reacting with the atmosphere equally even more than this you can't say that a bag of sugar is equal to itself at a given moment because even in the smallest interval of time uh all things are constantly changing um you also says can you say that a bag of sugar is equal to itself when time is zero well he says um all things all things exist in time so once that's true in abstract thinking it can't be true in real life um it would if by saying that all it would mean really is that a is equal to a if it does not exist in time um if it does not change um which basically if it does not exist now whilst dialectics does oppose formal logic that doesn't mean that you know we throw the baby out with the bath water so to speak we still would say that formal logic has its uses um you know you'd have a hard time shopping for a recipe in the supermarket wouldn't you if you didn't disagree with formal logic in its entirety um essentially formal logic is true but it's true within certain limits um you can go to um a supermarket and buy a kilo of sugar don't worry um um and you you know you will know that it's not exactly equal to one kilo of sugar but that doesn't matter provided the discrepancy isn't too big um so that means for everyday operations when you know change it's not very big um um formal logic can suffice however there are moments when small quantitative changes um can cause a radical rupture in the very nature of the thin um or process whatever we're considering and it's here where the full the laws of formal logic actually begin to break down and you can see this with um when you try and boil uh a quantity of water you can gradually heat this water from zero to 100 degrees and it seems yes gradually the heat of the water increases um however once you hit the 100 degree mark there is a radical sudden change in the very nature of the water and it ceases to be water altogether so that means that the change from 99 to 100 degrees of the water is completely different from the change from 90 uh to 99 and to understand this we do need a new form um of logic but it's not one that completely disregards the old it's one that enriches it um Trotsky actually compared the relationship between formal and dialectical logic so that between a still photo and a video um you know we have video um but it doesn't completely negate the kind of all need for photos all that video does is provide a a greater appreciation of reality um than the photo um so this phenomenon of small quantitative changes um leading to a qualitative change is also one of the main laws of dialectics and it has lots of applications it's reflected in uh you know popular sayings like the straw that broke the camel's back but it's also um incredibly important to keep this in our minds in our political activism um if you take a strike for example now every single day most workers are treated like rubbish by their bosses um and every day workers tend to put up with it and this can lead some people to say well look the working class are backward and they're uneducated they're bourgeoisified um we need a different actor in order to bring about change but then suddenly one uh innocuous thing one wage cut one uh you know alteration to terms and conditions one insult from management can provide the spark um but you know changes things in its entirety and that is because every wage cut every insult by management is causing a steady build-up um of anger and resentment onto the surface and all that's needed is one spark um eventually um to produce a change in consciousness so we need to look beyond the surface of of calm um although that seems a bit redundant these days given if you turn on the news anyway um yes i'd say this is very important to have a dialectical approach in our in our kind of political activism um and a good example of this was told to me of a story involving Jim Brookshore I really hope that I've got this this right because Hazel Brookshore is here um but don't tell him if I've got this um anecdote slightly wrong anyway um so Jim is a supporter at Socialist Appeal he's here um at this event um and he was a print worker who was open about his communist views um but the other workers didn't come over to his views initially right um but because of this he didn't change his views in order to appeal to how the workers were at that moment in time he put forward his case in a friendly reasonable way in a language that his colleagues could understand and then when a strike was called and the old leadership was shown to be ineffective he was suddenly put into the leadership of this strike that's quite a radical leap in consciousness right um but there are no bigger leaps I would say um than in human history I would say than revolutions um and as I said I mean as I indicated earlier you're quite spoiled for choice when you want to give a concrete example of a recent revolution but I'll pick um Algeria so Algeria was a place where you know not much was happening for quite some time um even the Arab Spring in 2011 left the country uh relatively untouched however that didn't mean that there wasn't anger bubbling away under the surface and eventually um you had the ruler Bouteflika um who was he talked about the decrepit ruling class I mean this guy um was so I mean he couldn't even speak so he announced that he was going to stand for a fourth term or his handlers announced that he was going to stand for a fourth term and this set off a spark essentially it well it was the spark that set off um the Algerian revolution um this was quantity turning into quality a sudden small incident that provoked um a revolution and clearly these facts can't be accounted for by formal logic if a equals a if the working class equal passive or equal backward or apathetic whatever terminology you want to use um and how do you ever appreciate that you know things can change um essentially um you can't understand that these kind of uh small quantitative changes can lead to a sudden uh qualitative change if you solely use um formal logic equally formal logic I would say is incapable of understanding movement um this is demonstrated in quite a funny way um by this philosopher Zeno um of Elia and this philosopher set out to prove that movement was impossible um and he had a number of paradoxes to prove that movement was impossible um I'll give two here if I can um so first of all um Achilles is in a race with a tortoise Achilles obviously runs a little bit quicker than the tortoise so he gives the tortoise a 100 meter head start and they both run at constant speeds but in the time once Achilles has covered that first 100 meters the tortoise has covered 10 meters so the lead is 10 meters then Achilles covers that extra 10 meters the tortoise is one meter ahead and Zeno points out that this will carry on forever with the lead getting smaller and smaller and smaller but Achilles never being able to take over the tortoise he also gave another example um of this um which was a uh an archer firing um an arrow towards a target um he says that at every instant of the arrow's journey from the archer towards the target at every instance the arrow is neither moving to where it is nor moving to where it is not actually at every instant the arrow is still and since time is entirely composed of instance that must mean that motion is completely impossible um he was proved wrong actually which is quite funny by someone just getting up and walking around um funny and for time anyway what I'm going to say that this demonstrates is not obviously that movement is impossible but it demonstrates that formal logic is incapable of appreciating movement um and Hegel actually answered as he knows paradoxes um by saying he said actually it's contradiction that is the source of all movement and life and only in so far as it contains a contradiction can anything have movement power and effect so to solve this problem of the arrow um Hegel says movement means to be in this place and not be in it this is the continuity of space and time and it's this which makes movement possible so essentially what Hegel is saying is that when the arrow is moving through the air it is both where it is and where it is not something moving this is Hegel again something moves not because it is here at one point of time and there it's another but because at one and the same time it is here and not here and I'd say this demonstrates another one of the main laws of dialectics which is whilst formal logic as I said earlier and says that a is either a or not a and dialectics says that a is a and not a at the same time sounds a bit weird I know but it posits that the heart of all things is contradiction and contradiction drives development and change and you can see Marx use this in his method if people caught Nelson's talk on Marxist economics yesterday you'll have heard this already but Marx begins capital by investigating the fundamental building block of capitalism she calls the commodity and what is the commodity is a contradiction between use value and exchange value he also uses this method in his approach to society and he says the history and he says that the history of all the two existing societies and excluding pre-class society is the history of class struggle and it's this struggle between the exploiters and the exploited over the surplus which drives the development of society you can see this phenomenon in nature as well if you take you know within cells for example you have both electrons and neutrons which are positively and negatively charged but more importantly for us I would say you can use this approach to gain a better understanding in our kind of day-to-day political life if we take the UK Labour Party for example this party is both a party with workers in it and also a part of the bourgeois of bourgeois politics basically and and it's this contradiction between on the one hand the influence of working class people who enter the party in order to try and change it into something that can improve their lives on the one hand and on the other hand the representatives of the ruling class want to do all that they can to avoid that happening that contradiction drives the development of the party and it can drive it in both progressive and reactionary directions so when the working class are not active in their party the ruling class through their representatives can take a greater hold of the party and you did see that with Blair for example um where because there was a lack of um you know people holding the kind of structures of the Labour Party to account Blair and his cronies were able to drive the Labour Party to the right um and he was able to get quite far in trying to change the nature of the party from uh into a liberal party essentially however when the working class are active and involved in the party um they can enter the party and replace the old leaders um and drive it significantly to the left and that's I would say what's happened what we've seen basically in front of our eyes um you've had hundreds of thousands of people join the Labour Party in order to elect Jeremy Corbyn um as the leader and obviously this process is still taking place but they have driven the party very far to the left um but this isn't the whole story for dialectics because when things change how do they change um and that is something obviously that's answered by dialectics as well um because dialectics posits that uh when things change we see the re-emergence of old characteristics but on a higher level um and there are plenty of examples of this phenomenon but I'd give a couple we see this in history um and Marks explains this um so as I mentioned there was a time before classes in pre-class society um and in pre-class society you had a common ownership of the means of production if you can call it that because obviously it was a very low level um of development however with the development of agriculture um um kind of racing through this but there was a talk on historical materialism earlier this morning but with the development of agriculture um and the ability to produce a surplus this enabled essentially the negation of common ownership and you had the emergence of private ownership of the means of production um now Marxists viewed this as actually progressive because it led to the development of the productive forces but then a socialist revolution would then be the negation of private ownership of the means of production and the return of the old you know common ownership of the means of production but it wouldn't be a return exactly to how things were uh in pre-class society because you'd have the return of common ownership but enriched by the development of the productive forces um you can also see this phenomenon at play in the development of Marxism itself um so as I pointed out the materialism of the 18th century was very mechanical mechanical um and because of this uh a lot of the kind of big developments in philosophy at that time actually happened within the idealistic idealist school um and one of these people who developed philosophy hugely was Hegel who was himself um an idealist and so Hegel was limited by the fact that he was an idealist but he's still kind of hugely developed philosophy with his development of the dialectical method basically um and Marx points this out he says to Hegel the life processes of the human brain the process of thinking which under the name of the idea he even transforms into an independent subject is the creator of the real world and the real world for Hegel is only the external phenomenal form of the idea with me and Marx and the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought so what Marx essentially does is then again negate um idealism by returning to materialism but he didn't return to the old materialism he returned to materialism that had been enriched by the developments um of uh of all the acquisitions of idealism um now Marxism explains that there are certain laws operate in society um and these can be studied and understood this is quite controversial for some people and some people for some reason um say there can be no laws within human society because we all have free will there are um you know there are certain laws that operate in nature but for some reason humanity is completely separate from nature and therefore there are no laws and we can't study how human society works but Engels answers this in in in Ludwig Feuerbach again and who says yes every individual is endowed with consciousness and acts towards definite goals um but regardless of every individual's consciously desired aim um on the surface accident appears to rain and paraphrasing Engels here um because what an individual person wills for themselves actually that rarely happens um what this means is that this what Engels calls a conflict of innumerable wills in the domain of history produces a state of affairs which actually is analogous to that which obtains in nature that means there are certain laws that operate in society they can be under studied and they can be understood um and if you can understand the laws operating society you can make certain predictions as to how society will develop um a good kind of example which is not particularly controversial is um if i'd introduce that right but car accidents um so we can't really know um whether we as individuals will be involved in a car accident tomorrow however you can make predictions or as to how many car accidents that will occur in London over the next year because there are patterns that exist there are laws that exist um in society i would argue marxists argue that actually all of our actions are determined um but because they are determined by countless influences um it is probably impossible to make predictions for like on an individual basis but this changes as with the example of car accidents this changes when you consider society as a whole um and that is why by studying the history of the working class by studying the history of the class struggle um you're able to get an idea as to what might happen um in the future um but as i said to come back to this question of free will um now i would say what marxists say is that um if you think um by free will um if you define it as being um completely free from all external forces that determine your decision um then unfortunately you've never had free will um and you never will have free will um instead marxists go with hagel's definition of freedom which means that freedom is the appreciation of necessity what this means um is that to be truly free a good understanding of the objective laws that act within history and nature is necessary because once you understand these laws you can make them work for you um so a good example of this is the law of gravity now we can't wish away the law of gravity i can't just hope that gravity doesn't exist jump out the window and fly to france right however we as humanity have studied the laws of gravity we've studied the laws of aerodynamics and all the rest of it and so actually we've been able to make these laws work for us and so we can fly uh to france um and this i would say is and there is a certain analogy or kind of it's similar to our task in politics basically um because in order to change the world um we need to understand the laws operate within society um and the best way to understand these laws is by using the method of marxism is by using dialectical materialism dialectical materialism i would say underpins the whole of marxism um marxist economics really is the application of this method to the field of economics um the historical materialism is the application of this method to the field of history um and ultimately that i would say is why Leon Trotsky was so keen to ensure that the socialist workers party had a good understanding of dialectics and that is because why i think we should all strive consciously to have a good understanding um of dialectical materialism um you know it's not for nothing that Lenin said that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement um so i hope that we all am going to kind of take from this talk that we need to build a revolutionary movement that's built on the solid foundations of marxism um and marxist philosophy because without this or with this um it would be the only way that we can ensure that we'll lead the working class to victory in Britain in Europe um and the world