 Welcome to another episode of Marxist Voice, podcast of the Communists in Britain. This episode will be listening to another talk from 2023's Revolution Festival, this time with Ben Curry discussing and defending the Enlightenment. In the age of the Enlightenment, the young, ascendant, capitalist class began to stretch its wings against the spiritual dictatorship of the Church and the feudal monarchies that they propped up. Breaking the chains of obscurantist medieval dogma, bold thinkers and pioneers like Locke, Newton, Diderot and Rousseau fought for rationality and science, and in so doing, theoretically cleared the ground for the great bourgeois revolutions. Today, however, capitalism is decrepit and dying, and the ruling class has turned away from the reason of its youth. In fact, the irrational capitalist system threatens to drag human society back to a new dark age. Therefore, as Ben will explain, despite its limits, we as Marxists lay claim to the bold materialism and clarity of thought which characterised the Enlightenment as theoretical armaments in our own struggle against our rotten ruling class. Without further ado, this episode of Marxist Voice, brought to you by the revolutionary communists in Britain. Well, Alan on Friday explains that we as communists, we're not just fighting for a world in which everyone has what they materially need. We are fighting for a world in which people can really begin to spiritually develop themselves, in which the doors of culture are flung open to the masses so that they have access to art, science, philosophy, all of these things that are excluded to them under capitalism. But today, capitalism threatens humanity with a huge throwback of culture. It's threatening to drag art, science and literature into the abyss with them. And really, there's an excellent symptoms of the complete dead ends, the impasse of capitalism in the halls of universities because it has become now all the rage in academia to denigrate, to slander and to reject what they call the Enlightenment project. That is the capitalist class and its thinkers in the ivory towers of universities increasingly tend towards rejecting the great heritage and achievements of the capitalist class itself and its thinkers in its youth, basically. This has become, as I'll come onto, I'll name a few of the examples of these academics of the modern day. But let us start by looking at the context in which the Enlightenment arose. Now, as Marx and Engels explain in the Communist Manifesto, capitalism played the most revolutionary role in history and its youth. It completely revolutionised industry and commerce and trade. It broke up feudal relations on the land and it dragged huge populations out of rural isolation. And it also revolutionised human thinking. Science received an unprecedented impetus from the developments of industry and trade and philosophy in all areas of human culture also developed alongside that. And these revolutionary changes that capitalism brought about completely through the feudal system that had dominated Europe from millennium completely out of balance and did the feudal lords and the old monarchies of Europe have the good sense to go into the dust-benefit history quietly? Of course not, just like the capitalist class of today. They fought against every threat to their rule and privilege. The old feudal ruling class, they instigated reigns of terror, they instigated inquisitions, religious wars, drowned Europe in blood. Parts of Germany were nearly depopulated, 50% collapsing population in some parts of central Europe. And the church didn't just silence religious heresies, but they silenced every form of opposition. 80,000 witches were burned at the stake and scientists were also persecuted by the church. Galileo, of course, was forced to recant his views. Giordano Bruno, the most modern thinker, would be incredible just to give a lead off on just what he stood for. He refused to recant his views and he was burned at the stake by the Catholic church. And alongside this, the church also put together a long list of banned books, the Papal Index. And the more irrational their system became basically, the more rationality, reason and science themselves became the enemy from the point of view of this old ruling class. And their system wasn't just becoming irrational, it was becoming downright surreal. The closer, the more feudalism had exhausted itself, the more deserving it was of being overthrown, the more the old monarchies that dominated Europe for centuries concentrated power in their hands. Just like the capitalist state is concentrating power in its hands, the more it is in conflict with the needs of society. You had the rise of autocracies. Louis XIV in France demanded that his subjects refer to him as the sun king, the literal centre of the universe. So that's how irrational and surreal this system was becoming. And so it was a time in all respects like our own, in the sense that the old order, the ancien régime, was choking the paws of society and it was threatening to bring civilization down into the abyss with it. And it was a time of course in which earth-shattering revolutionary events were being prepared and the crowning of all of that was of course the Great French Revolution of 1789 to 1793. But revolutions don't spring from the grounds ready made, the ground is prepared for them and the minds of men are prepared for those revolutions. And you had that in this period, revolutionary thinkers emerged who subjected the old society to merciless criticism. They developed programs of action. You had pamphleteers that were agitating amongst the masses for these revolutionary ideas. Just as we're meeting here today, you had across ancien régime France, you had salons and clubs meeting and discussing these bold revolutionary ideas. And to begin with, these ideas were the property of an advanced guard. They were isolated from the masses. Their ideas, they seemed shocking and extreme to the people of those days. But at the decisive moment, because these ideas answered the needs of the historical moment, it was these ideas that gripped the masses. It was under the banner of reason, liberty, equality, the rights of man that the French Revolution of course was fought. And these thinkers provided that thinking conscious element which is vital to all revolutionary movements. And of course, I'm referring to the boldest, most revolutionary thinkers that formed the vanguard of that great intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment in opposition to faith, to superstition and to the irrational remnants of feudalism, they raised on their banner reason. That was their rallying cry, reason effectively. And they believed that there were many thinkers, they were more moderate and they were more radical thinkers and they had a diversity of views. But fundamentally what linked them was the belief that human beings are naturally endowed with reason. That reason can be used to understand nature and society. And that placed at the feet of humanity, this understanding can liberate human beings. We can develop a rational morality, a rational law and social system. At a time when the existing social system depended upon the justification of the divine rights of monarchies to rule. This was a revolutionary challenge to say that we need a rational system based upon reason. And of course we know that in actual fact they were blazing a trail for the rule of capital. They were blazing a trail for the rise of capitalism. But they didn't necessarily understand that their fight in those terms, they were fighting sincerely for human liberation. They were not actuated, they were not inspired by the desire for money and acquisition and petty things that we associate with capitalist motivation. They were inspired by the most noble, high spirited motivations that any revolutionary thinkers have ever been inspired by. And I will give the word over now to a great thinker from the Enlightenment. Emmanuel Kant, who was writing at the high point of this period, who in 1784 wrote a short article titled What is Enlightenment? And I think he sums up the spirit of the Enlightenment brilliantly. He says, on all sides I hear, do not argue. The officer says, do not argue, drill. The taxman says, do not argue, pay. The pastor says, do not argue, believe. So the ruling class were demanding ignorance and passive obedience from the masses. And in opposition to this Kant raises what he calls the slogan of the Enlightenment, Sapare Aude, which is Latin for dare to know. That was the spirit of this period, dare to know. It was a daring, scientific, defiant revolutionary spirit that had the most fertilizing effect on a galaxy of the most brilliant thinkers imaginable. From the 17th through to the end of the 18th century, I'll just list some of the speakers that belong to this short period. There's no period in human history that has produced such a galaxy of thinkers. Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Isaac Newton, Dallembert, Levocier, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Holback, Helvetius, Diderot. And this is just some of the more brilliant amongst them. And there were others just as brilliant whose names completely slipped my mind. So this was the spirit of the Enlightenment, right? And these were the brilliant thinkers that it produced. And it was a spirit that was appropriate to a period in which the capitalist class felt that it represented the future of civilization. It was an optimistic spirit when great revolutionary tasks were posed before that class. But of course, things moved on. The French Revolution came and went. It was followed by the Thermidorian reaction, the Napoleonic Wars, the Bourbon Restoration, the hell of the suffering of the working class and the industrial revolutions. And by the middle of the 19th century, the mood had changed amongst the capitalist class. By the time you have the 1848 Revolution sweeping Europe, the capitalist class was more scared of the rising working class than they were interested, shall we say, in burying the remnants of feudalism that still scattered about Europe. And in fact, they proved in that revolutionary wave that they were capable of coming to an understanding with the counter-revolution. They played a counter-revolutionary role against the working class. And in the same way that they did that on the political plane, they increasingly were showing that they were capable of coming to a philosophical pact with the remnants of medievalism, with clericalism and reaction. And it's from this period, the middle of the 19th century, that you start to see the emergence in bourgeois philosophy of a strong anti-enlightenment trend. You have thinkers like Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, who reject the idea that there is a world out there to be known by reason. People like Schopenhauer reviving the idea that all we have is appearances, representation, as he referred to it. We cannot know the world outside of our representation. We have our five senses, but we can't know the world itself. Its subjective idealism is being revived in philosophy. Kierkegaard is saying that reason cannot let us know the world. All we can really resort to is faith. This idea is once more revived. These reactionary, inward-looking philosophies are being revived. A fun fact about Schopenhauer. In 1848, he was living in Frankfurt, which was one of the centres of the German Revolution in that year. He actually allowed Prussian troops to use his balcony to shoot revolutionaries. I raised this point just to point out that he was a man rooted in his times. His ideas were reflected of the mood of his class, of the bourgeoisie basically. It's a pessimistic mood. It's an inward-looking mood. It's a subjectivist outlook in which you're surrounded by this hostile world that is out there. It bases itself on extreme individualism, which of course, by the end of the 19th century, now capitalism is really sputtering out its last progressive mission. You have the rise of monopolies, the rise of colonialism and imperialism. You have the militarism across Europe preparing the ground for what would become the First World War. In that context, you have the extreme pessimistic individualistic philosophy of Nietzsche expressing really the mood of the age, shall we say. For Nietzsche, he was an atheist. He rejected God, but he also rejected science. He rejected both as forms of faith and extreme individualistic philosophy and questioning even of the benefits of pursuing scientific investigation by Nietzsche. I'll bring some quotes in by him in a second. In the 20th century, of course, now the real disaster is upon capitalism. We have school after school that rejects enlightenment, that rejects reason. The Frankfurt School, for the first time, so-called left-wingers, so-called Marxists, rejecting the Enlightenment. They reflected the mood of the ruling class by this time, seeped in pessimism and that pessimism seeping down into the petty bourgeois intelligentsia. And the Frankfurt School thinkers like Adorno and Hawkeimer, they wrote a famous book called The Dialectic of Enlightenment and fundamentally they were saying, look around you. What has enlightenment and scientific thought brought you? It's brought you the Holocaust, it's brought you the Attenbaum and at least in the case of Adorno, it's brought you jazz music, which he placed for some reason on a similar sort of pedestal. But yeah, I mean the fundamental idea that they were saying is that science was supposed to be about liberating men, but actually it was about controlling nature, yes, but also controlling men and controlling the minds of men. And therefore the end result of enlightenment is totalitarianism. It's the Gulag of Stalin, the death camp of Hitler and American consumerism which is controlling the minds of the masses through things like jazz music. And then of course by the second half of the 20th century you have the rise of post-modernism, which down to the present day and its offshoots, post-modernism and its offshoots, are dominant still on university campuses and particularly philosophy departments and they were inspired by people like Nietzsche and the Frankfurt School. And the rejection of the Enlightenment has become the mainstream philosophical position of bourgeois academia. Now, it would not be educational to you nor pleasurable for me to go into all of the differences of these different schools, these thinkers and so forth that all have their own diverse theories and little nuances, but in one way or another they all have the same fundamental thing about them which is they all revive idealism and specifically subjective idealism, this inward retreat, and in all cases it opens the door for mysticism. In place of the Enlightenment view which is that there is an objective world out there, it exists independently of our minds and it can be understood by reason and the senses and science. You have this inward retreat. There's only me, I have my senses, I can see things, hear things and so forth but do I know that they tell me anything about the world? Do I even know that they tell me there is a world out there? That is a question mark that is placed above science by these thinkers, these subjective idealists. Instead of that I only have my own subjective truth. I know what I think, I know what I feel but I cannot know if there is an objective truth out there. This is how Nietzsche put it. Now Nietzsche has the advantage, the virtue should we say over most modern academic thinkers that he at least tried to put a bit of poetry into his pessimistic nonsense and he says the following, even the Sphinx has eyes and as a result there are various truths and as a result there is no truth. So that's it, there is no truth. There are only many subjective viewpoints. Now if you're familiar with postmodernism this will sound very familiar to you and that's not a coincidence because people like Foucault and Deleuze and these people that are the touchstone of postmodern thinking directly attribute and credit Nietzsche as an important inspiration. They only change fundamentally the wording which is rather than many eyes and all of this sort of stuff they talk about we all have our own narrative I have my narrative in my head you have your narrative in your head stories basically and we cannot privilege one narrative above another because to do so is anti-democratic it's totalitarian and authoritarian and we can't say that one story is better than another which is precisely what enlightenment thinking and science says is the rational explanation and other explanations based upon superstition are false and incorrect that's a meta-narrative and that is something that they reject they reject therefore the idea of objective truth independent of the individual Now we can understand the reasons for this we can understand the reasons that these theories have gripped academia and university campuses in particular it's a reflection of the fact that the capitalist system has become irrational just like the feudal system was irrational it has become irrational and their mood therefore has turned to pessimism the deepest despair and pessimism and it has seeped down into the petty bourgeois layers who turn their back on rationality and reason and they develop all of these irrationalist philosophies but all of these different philosophical schools they don't just come out and say that they want to justify their point of view and they do so by pointing to what they claim are the failures of the so called enlightenment project and of science now Foucault in particular takes up this pointing out should we say the failures of science and makes an entire career out of it and in particular pointing out where science has been wrong before hasn't science been false in the past haven't we had dead ends we ended up at downright reactionary positions which were the scientific consensus in the past particularly he puts psychiatry and the history of sexuality and these sort of things where downright reactionary views have been regarded as the scientific consensus in the past and he puts them and there's an implication which Foucault is a very slippery fish he never quite spells out his views entirely categorically as I will come onto but there's an implication there that all scientific categories that we impose are more or less imposed by our ideas on nature and they're all more or less arbitrary and can be disposed of and another set of views inserted in their place and that really what they reflect is power relations and he has this abstract notion of power relations not the notion of state power or of class power but power as an abstract thing coming from the minds coming from our discourse and so on again Nietzsche put it much clearer than Foucault or any of the rest of them ever did when he said the following things are subject to interpretation and whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth that's the view now yes of course science has been abused by the capitalist class we can just point to the fact that in the 19th century it was scientific consensus that there's a hierarchy of races which was used to justify slavery, colonialism and all the rest of it but instead of blaming the ruling class instead of blaming capitalism for straight jacketing science what you end up with is the very notion stemming from the enlightenment that science can attain truth that is regarded as false and rejected and they point to the fact yes there were things that were regarded as scientific fact yesterday that have today been proven to be totally false can we not thereby say that there will be scientific theories today which are regarded as true that in the future will be regarded as false and of course we will have to say we will have to admit yes that is true so how can we trust anything that's the fundamental line of argument basically it's a line of argument that rests on the basis of an undialectical view of scientific progress in the sense that it looks at each individual snapshot of science each theory is necessarily only an approximation to the description of the world it can only ever achieve that right we never arrive at a complete state of science science is an infinite progression of closer and closer approximation and therefore it also always necessarily contains a partial falsehood it also has a relative element to it as well now does this mean that there is no such thing as absolute truth and we as dialectical materialists would deny that we would say that actually that is not in the snapshot of science that we see the whole truth but it's in the progress of science by an infinite number of generations or should I say an indefinite number of generations of scientists arriving at a closer and closer approximation that we have the absolute truth which has its basis in the material objectivity of the world that's what gives its absolute character is our materialist position and there's another sense in which I think that the postmodernists become confused and these anti-enlightenment thinkers become confused and that is that they don't understand the way that science progresses science doesn't actually progress in a straight line I think this is central to the whole point here or the way that science progresses is it progresses through a process of negation in the sense that you have an old theory right it stands the test of time for a period and then a new theory comes about a revolutionary theory that overthrows the old theory and takes its place and they take this to mean that you have one set of categories which are imposed upon nature and then they are basically overthrown completely and a new set of categories take their place they see it as a complete negation of the old in a very formalistic sense but that's not it's a dialectical negation is the way that science progresses and I'll try to explain what I mean by that and this is where the difference between a formalistic and a dialectical understanding of negation is very important and I want to use the example of modern chemistry which was born really in the century of the Enlightenment in the 18th century now at the start of that century alchemy was the dominant view within chemistry you know the philosopher's stone turning lead into gold and all of that sort of thing it was very infused with mystical ideas by the end of the 18th century you had what is recognizably very much like modern chemistry had emerged but bridging the gap of the 18th century you had a theory which rose early in the century and collapsed towards the end of the century known as the theory of Phlegisthen and this is based upon a very simple observation right when something burns it seems to emit something it emits a flame you know red or yellow or whatever coloured flame and this theory was that that is a substance called Phlegisthen everything possesses it and when it burns it is emitted it loses this Phlegisthen right now this was a theory that was eventually overturned but was the theory of Phlegisthen therefore completely and utterly worthless well no actually on the contrary it was an enormous step forward first of all in the sense that even on the basis of a wrong theory you can do a lot of good science at the start of the 18th century thousands of years of scientific investigation had discovered 15 chemical elements by the end of that century we had 41 chemical elements had been discovered so that in itself proved something I think but more than that in a more profound sense the theory of Phlegisthen actually lives on in modern chemistry in the sense that if you take Phlegisthen and turn it upside down so here you have a substance that is emitted and was calculated to have a negative mass if you think of a substance that is absorbed and has a positive mass with all of the same attributes you have oxygen which was precisely what was discovered by Levolsier at the end of the 18th century and in that sense even a false idea can have a rational kernel and the process of negation in science is not simply one of disposing of all old ideas in favour of a completely arbitrary new set of categories it is a process of negation but at the same time of preservation of what is rational and separation of that rational kernel from the accidental and irrational husk that it is contained with him that contains it and it's precisely this inability to see the progress of science as a process and a contradictory process through the negation of the negation that leads to the idea of a lack of progress and the idea that one set of it's just an arbitrary set of categories replaced with any other arbitrary set of categories and actually this dialectical concept of negation of the negation is precisely vital to understanding the essence of what I'm trying to get across in this whole talk because that dialectical negation is precisely vital to understanding our whole approach to the enlightenment and to all of bourgeois culture basically because the socialist revolution is not just about throwing out everything that capitalism has created after all under capitalism isn't it the case that machinery and industry are used to enslave the worker that's very much of course true but we don't thereby reject the whole of industry we fight for the expropriation of the capitalist class by the working class which will allow industry and technology to become a force for human liberation for freeing us from jodgery and everything else and so in that sense capitalism has created the basis for communism by creating the basis for super abundance and in the same way all bourgeois culture and above all enlightenment thinking must be conquered preserved and at the same time freed of its class character by the proletariat as the preparation for a socialist culture, a higher culture which which will base itself not just on the rational kernel of enlightenment and scientific thinking but the enormous cultural and scientific inheritance that has to be separated from that irrational kernel and that's the difference between us and those who blindly reject the enlightenment and think that they can negate it in a purely formalistic sense by rejecting it by rejecting it in that way because they point to all of the bad things that capitalist culture has about it they embrace barbarism which incidentally is precisely the direction that the capitalist class are taking us in anyway fundamentally now Foucault I'll give him this much he was intelligent enough to understand that by rejecting the idea of scientific progress that leads you into a patently reactionary and absurd idea that medieval superstition is just as good at telling us about the world there's modern astrophysics and theoretical physics and biochemistry and everything else and he was too cowardly should we say to actually openly embrace that point of view and instead he actually explained his point of view in an essay called titled what is enlightenment in direct response to cancer what is enlightenment where he says he refuses to say whether he accepts the enlightenment or not he says the problem with the enlightenment is it says that you're either on the side of reason and rationality or you're irrational and superstitious and he says he rejects what he calls the blackmail of the enlightenment which is the most cowardly, mealy mouthed way of saying that he embraces superstition basically now other of his followers are a little less cowardly and are prepared to precisely openly reject the enlightenment and scientific progress whatsoever and I'll just take one example an academic who says she is a follower of Foucault and disgracefully calls herself a Marxist feminist and that is Sylvia Federici in her book which I had the pleasure of reading Caliban and the Witch she says the following well she directly questions what she calls the belief in the socially progressive character of the scientific revolution and she rejects enlightenment thinking because she blames it for the subjugation of the workers the subjugation of women and colonial peoples under capitalism but what does she end up doing by rejecting this enlightenment thinking in particular she disgracefully treats Descartes and Hobbes in particular in this kind of way in fact they're the only enlightenment thinkers she cares the cherry pick from well she ends up first of all glorifying the position of women and peasants under feudalism first of all embracing feudalism over capitalism in the first instance and in place of science she embraces magic and witchcraft and this is what she says about magic and particularly whether we can say that magic is real she calls herself a Marxist by the way so listen to this it would not be fruitful to investigate whether these powers were real or imaginary it can be said that all pre-capitalist societies have believed in them and in recent times we've witnessed a revaluation of practices that at the time we refer to would have been condemned as witchcraft let us mention the growing interests in parapsychology and biofeedback that are increasingly applied even by mainstream medicine so she's arguing in favor of alternative medicine against science and she won't say whether she believes that witchcraft is actually real whether magic is real that's the logical conclusion of Foucault's ideas to be honest it's incredible and what she accuses enlightenment thinkers of doing particularly Descartes is of imposing a new vision of the body on society they invent this new vision of the body and they do this precisely in order to prepare the body for capitalist exploitation because before you can exploit the body you have to start thinking about it the mechanical extension of the machine as the factory worker or as a baby making machine as women become under capitalism and this vision she then says was first of all developed by these thinkers and then enforced by state violence and where does Federici identify the state violence which is backing up enlightenment thought in the witch trials in the burning of 80,000 witches in Europe was supposedly the imposition it was all about basically driving out the idea that the body has anything spiritual or magical about it in order to to create raw material for exploitation so you have this situation where she says that those fighting for reason and science and rationality and the religious fanatics burning witches were one reactionary block which is the biggest slander and the most absurd slander that you can throw at these enlightenment thinkers and what is more it is a completely idealist notion of how capitalism arose it presents the struggle of ideas as the locomotive of history and bad ideas were responsible for the rise of capitalism which is completely and utterly turning things on its head now Foucault doesn't in fact draw things quite to this logical conclusion in fact again this slippery fish says that he actually stands in the enlightenment in the tradition of the enlightenment in what sense in this same article that I referred to he says that he maintains the same skeptical approach enlightenment thought was all about skepticism didn't they after all adopt a skeptical approach to the received wisdom of their days and he just does the same well let's look at a particular enlightenment thinker who is well known one of the fathers of the enlightenment Descartes who is treated so disgracefully by Federici he's well known for his skeptical approach to the thinking of the day he regarded it as his duty to doubt everything and he declared that nine-tenths of the received wisdom that had come down from the medieval ages was trash based upon dogma, faith and superstition and he declared that he was going to sweep all of this away and rebuild human knowledge on the basis of reason starting from what he described as a few simple self-evident truths that he would be left with and of course we know what those simple self-evident truths they included the famous dictum I think therefore I am doesn't that sound a bit like the post monist I think therefore I am it's very inward looking it's very subjectivist notion well maybe superficially but here's the difference fundamentally Foucault says that he is also a skeptic he also takes a skeptical attitude towards and cast doubt on the received wisdom of his day but he is casting doubt on the possibility of science and of knowing the world whereas Descartes cast doubt on faith and superstition from the optimistic point of view that he could on the basis of reason come to understand the world now of course it's very easy to point to the limits of Descartes and his philosophy but it's completely and utterly they are the inverse they are the completely opposite of each other and I will also say this in answer to Federici Foucault was able to espouse his skeptical views towards science and reason from the comfy position of a university chair Descartes had to do so from self-imposed exile in France because his views were regarded as too dangerous in his day far from the state being the ones that carried out his views into practice his views were fundamental he earns the undying hatred of the church and of the established powers by elevating faith sorry reason over faith they completely despise these views and the church attempted to stamp them out for 60 years after his death it was forbidden to teach Descartes views not just in France but also in the Netherlands where he had a relatively free atmosphere relatively in those days and others amongst Descartes followers were even more were even bolder in their point of view these are the real continuators of the Enlightenment people like Spinoza now Descartes he famously believed of course that the world is separated in two he had a dualistic view he saw the material world as being very mechanical following the mechanical laws of motion but there's also another realm of spirit of thoughts basically and there was a separation between the two but his followers Spinoza completely abolished that separation and he believed there was only one substance in this world and yes it has the qualities that are describable by mechanical motion of speed, penetrability, extension and so on but it also has infinite other qualities including the possibility, the potential for thought and sensation and he called this one substance God or nature it was a kind of pantheism but it was a pantheism in form only because if you say that God is everything you're basically saying that God is nothing and this was dangerous stuff in those days if you just change in fact the word God or nature to matter you have a fully consistent worked out materialist point of view a materialist doctrine that was a consciously revolutionary in Spinoza's case a consciously revolutionary challenge to the religious authorities of his day particularly because as I say religion provided the justification of all of the regimes that dominated Europe and so it was a challenge to the state to hold an idea like this and let's listen to how Spinoza, these real brave revolutionary thinkers put things forward as it may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government and utterly essential to it to keep man deceived and to disguise the fear that sways them with the specious name of religion so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance and will not think it's humiliating but supremely glorious to spill their blood and sacrifice their lives for the glorification of a single man now consider the context this was extremely revolutionary stuff and he was persecuted like all of these thinkers they were not the ones doing the persecuting they were not the totalitarian authoritarian thinkers these were fighters for human liberty prepared to pay the ultimate sacrifice and long after his death if you were denounced as a Spinozist in the 18th century that was tantamount to being called an atheist a materialist a republican democrat and a revolutionary a subversive an enemy of the state basically that was what it was to be a follower of Spinoza and the materialist spirit of men like Spinoza that was the spirit of the age it was a spirit that drew upon the great scientific advances of people like Galileo Kepler Newton and so forth it produced other materialist schools this age of enlightenment you had the English philosophers like Bacon Hobbes and Locke they were far from radicals Bacon in particular was he developed the philosophical basis for the scientific method but when these ideas were transferred to France where the Ancien regime had become so rotten the existing material conditions were demanding a criticism under enlightenment thought under the basis of reason and a materialist method it provided the source of tremendous revolutionary inspiration this materialist doctrine from Spinoza and from the English empiricists had an electrifying effect on the boldest thinkers in pre-revolutionary France and these thinkers you had among them men like Diderot they explained that there was no need for God to give us morality it's our material needs and our senses that explain our morality and it's the social well-being of society that creates the moral sense of what is right and wrong and Diderot used the example if you are blind the idea of indecent nudity is meaningless to you so clearly the senses have a lot to do with our morality there's nothing God given that makes it immoral to go around with no clothes on it's our material conditions our material reality and what conclusions did they come to people like Diderot on the basis of a materialist approach he didn't conclude that we need to turn workers into mechanisms for exploitation and so forth he concluded that slavery is immoral homosexuality is not immoral this in the middle of the 18th century incredible views for which he was sent to prison in 1749 and even after his release from prison he continued his work as did many of these revolutionary thinkers all working on this project called the Encyclopedia the aim of which was to gather all of the scientific knowledge across Europe and to use it like a giant torch to clear the fog of superstition they brought these ideas together there's incredible wits as well about these people how far they stand from these academics who are completely and utterly impenetrable they don't want to be read and they don't want to be understood Nietzsche in particular said I don't want to be understood they wrote it in black and white the modern academics don't want to be understood because they want to keep these ideas from the masses it's their academic preserve the plastics against whom the Enlightenment thinkers were fighting these people that were defenders of faith and superstition in the middle ages on the contrary these works are full of wit and verve there's so much life in these works of these great revolutionary thinkers of the French Enlightenment in fact in 1920 Lenin said we should republish the French materialist writings and redistribute them amongst the Russian workers and peasants because they are better atheists propaganda than nine-tenths of what we're capable of producing incredible stuff if you read two books at the end of this you should read the history of philosophy here and you should read Dallenbert's Dream by Diderot which is one of the most beautiful and astonishing expositions of materialism and very close to dialectics Diderot in particular came very close to a dialectical outlook far from being a totalitarian philosophy it was about human beings liberating themselves it was about dispelling superstition through works like the Encyclopedia they fervently hated aristocracy they hated inequality and injustice even when the capitalist class were guilty of it people like Holbach the great German materialist who lived in France he was of the same group he hated England okay not because he had any bitterness towards English people but because the rise of trade and industry had brought about tremendous inequality so they were bourgeois thinkers yes but they did not have bourgeois limitations these were extremely humanistic thinkers and revolutionaries and in fact it is directly towards French materialism that we can trace modern communism so it's in the enlightenment that we find the roots of our own tradition and after all the materialists were arguing it's not nature that makes men evil it's evil institutions and evil conditions that mould us that condition us and therefore if you want to create a heaven on earth you need to overthrow evil conditions and evil institutions it was a revolutionary philosophy is fundamentally what I'm saying and you even had some amongst them who believing they were applying pure reason to the material conditions arrived at the conclusion that there was no in the middle of the 18th century I'm not talking about the utopian socialist I'm talking about people like Abbey de Marbley okay who argued that there is nothing reason cannot erect an argument against redistributing property and introducing communism this was in the 18th century this is far advanced they were looking beyond the bourgeois revolution they were groping beyond that now it is of course it is of course of course we do have our criticisms of enlightenment thought the main limitation of enlightenment thinking was that it was metaphysical rather than dialectical by and large people like Diderot and certain writings why people like Rousseau they did contain elements of dialectics but the main limitation was precisely that as I said previously what was the main unifying theme of the enlightenment human beings are naturally endowed with reason but reason is not something that maybe we are all naturally endowed with the potential for reason but reason is something that has developed mankind gaining greater and greater control over nature and understanding over nature so it is a historically arrived that place it is not as if and this is the conclusion you could draw if you believe that human beings are endowed with reason all that would have been necessary would have been for some great thinkers to come along 300 years before and we could have had the enlightenment in the 14th century instead of the 18th century no they didn't understand things as a process of development they didn't see history historical development in particular was something that was a bit beyond their horizon because after all such was the development of science that even the earth itself was not regarded as having a history that people like Newton advocated that the earth had been spinning around the sun for all eternity and geology was in its infancy the idea that the earth has a history biology was even more in its infancy they were still collecting all of the data all of specifying the different species and genera and so forth in fact read that book by Diderot I highly recommend it he anticipates evolution they're groping beyond even the limits of their day he talks about the idea that species perhaps did have a history but they were limited by their day and in particular they were limited by the fact that the tasks posed before humanity were those of the bourgeois revolution and they could not go beyond the limits of their day they were materialistically analyzing man in the abstract right they were talking about man in the abstract the rights of man and so forth but in actual fact we were talking about specific men in a specific epoch in the bourgeois epoch and their ideas could only find realization of course in the bourgeois republic and in a new form of exploitation they couldn't have gone beyond that because there was no other force in society upon which they could base themselves so it had a certain abstract anti-dilectical character and in that sense the anti-enlightenment thinkers have all of the vices and none of the virtues of the Enlightenment because they lack dialectics even more so there aren't the brilliant elements of dialectics that you see in Diderot or Rousseau in these thinkers they are as I mentioned previously they don't understand the Enlightenment precisely because they don't have dialectics and they start from a subjective idealist point of view and it was precisely in the in the Enlightenment thinking that we find the roots of our own tradition of Marxism it's from French materialism that you have the birth of communism the great utopian socialists were directly inspired and based themselves on the philosophy of French materialism instead of feudalism being irrational they regarded capitalism as irrational and they critiqued it from that point of view that was a key source and inspiration of Marxism the great political economists Smith and Ricardo were men of the Enlightenment who for the first time subjected capitalism to a scientific analysis Marx just took that to its conclusion and of course the rediscovery of dialectics in the modern era can trace its roots through Kant into the German idealist tradition which is also fruit of the Enlightenment of the greatest thinkers that the bourgeois class has produced so we owe a direct debt of gratitude to Enlightenment philosophy and we defend it against those people that say forward to barbarism or they would do if they had any ounce of sincerity and honesty about them and yes I'll leave the last words now to Trotsky because I've gone to 45 minutes but I didn't go to 50 minutes and this is from his 1924 pamphlet literature and revolution and in it he's arguing against those communists in Russia who precisely wanted to discard all bourgeois culture in the name of a some sort of supposed proletarian culture that would start from zero which as I mentioned is precisely it's not how culture develops it's through negation of the negation and he explained the following and I think it's a very striking summary of what I'm trying to get across much better than I could express it he says if there had been no working class with its strikes, struggles, sufferings and revolts there would of course have been no scientific communism because there would have been no historical necessity for it but its theory was formed entirely on the basis of bourgeois culture both scientific and political though it declared a fight to the finish upon that culture under the pressure of capitalistic contradictions the universalizing thought of the bourgeois democracy of its boldest, most honest and most farsighted representatives rises to the height of a marvellous renunciation armed with all the critical weapons of bourgeois science such is the origin of Marxism that's all for this week's Marxist voice but before we go a few announcements if this talk piqued your interest then you should get a copy of Reason in Revolt from Wellread Books which shows how the advances in modern science like chaos theory, the human 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