 Okay welcome to this new series that we're doing on Marxist Philosophy. The way this is going to work is it's going to be a series of talks about 15, 20 minutes long throughout the weeks which will go through all of the key aspects of Marxist Philosophy. The different key concepts, the different logical ideas and the arguments to back up Marxist Philosophy. And if you watch all of these videos you should come away with quite a good understanding of Marxist Philosophy as a whole and how we use it to explain the world around us. Now why do we discuss philosophy as Marxists? Some people find this to be a bit of a luxury and shouldn't we instead be going out onto the streets and campaigning for higher wages or you know fighting with fascists or something like that. But obviously we do those things as well that the two are not mutually exclusive. But it is essential to be absolutely clear about our philosophical ideas because we're fighting to change the world fundamentally, not just to improve things a bit, to end this or that problem, but to liberate humanity ultimately from inequality, injustice, oppression etc. And that requires that our worldview is as thorough, as deep, as thorough, as realistic if you like and as long-term as possible. So not a view which is sort of seduced by short-term you know solutions by prejudices or anything else like any kind of illusion basically. And our goals are far more ambitious than you know any other political movement in history really. So therefore of course we need to have, and everyone has a philosophy, not least any political movement obviously has a philosophy and we have to be absolutely clear about what ours is. So today's session is going to be an introduction and especially going to be focusing on materialism which we'll also go into in more detail next week. But yeah so Marxism is a materialist philosophy, thoroughly materialist, unambiguously materialist. And that means that we think that matter exists independently of the mind. Okay so there's there is only one reality and that is the material reality, which of course many people accept in one form or another and most people's daily life obviously that's the assumption. But for us this means that there is no other reality, there is no world, no spiritual realm, you know there is no God or anything like that. And it also means that for us not only is the mind dependent on the material world if you like, but also that the material world is not dependent on the mind and that's important to state. In other words the material world existed prior to the existence of thinking beings, in other words humans, which again seems obvious to state. And yet in philosophy this is not necessarily the most predominant view. In fact I would say that in the history of philosophy the most prevailing outlook is idealism which is the opposite of materialism. And that is the outlook essentially that in one way or another, because there's many kinds of idealism, but that is the outlook that ideas or thoughts are somehow independent of material reality or at the very least that material reality cannot be independent of thoughts. So perception almost makes the world essentially. Without perception, without something to perceive the world, the world could not exist. And one so cliched and very famous example of this is the question of whether or not if a tree falls over in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it really make a sound? Well Marxist and materialist would answer unequivocally, yes of course it makes a sound. It just means that nobody happens to experience that sound. It still of course happens. If that sound didn't happen then how on earth could somebody experience it if they were there? And so yeah idealism is actually really the dominant philosophy in the history of philosophy as I said there's many kinds of it. And that might seem weird like it's you know it seems obvious that the material world exists independently of us so why is idealism in its various forms so predominant? I would say there's really two main reasons for this. The first I think is the abstract character of thought itself. What is it to think? Well to think is really to generalise and to make abstractions. So if you have an idea of something then that means that you have generalised it. So if you have the idea of a chair that means of course that you're not beholden to this particular chair in front of you. But the idea of it kind of embraces all chairs and that's what it is to have an idea of it being a chair otherwise it's just a purely individual object that happens to be in front of you. That's what thinking is it's generalisation and it's an abstraction if you like. Which is an enormously powerful thing of course but there is a kind of a danger of this which is that through abstracting and generalising the abstraction can come to seem almost independent of or even greater than the thing that it is abstracting from. In other words you know our ideas such as our idea of a circle seems almost more perfect and for some philosophers more true than the imperfect circles that we actually find in the material world. And I would say the other reason for the predominance of idealism is the existence of class society and exploitation inequality. Once you have class society that is a layer of society, a privileged layer that doesn't have to work physically. In fact it doesn't necessarily have to work at all. It lives off the work of others. You know this layer of the if you like the leisure class, the ruling class that is of course deals more in ideas and is more highly educated throughout history and therefore it's natural if you like that such a class would justify its existence by elevating ideas in the world of ideas above that of you know the grubby world, the dirty and imperfect world of manual labour, you know generally the struggle for survival. And so the outlook of professional philosophers throughout history has tended to have this kind of elitism if you like it and I think that is expressed in idealism. Now materialism was not discovered for the first time by Marx and Engels. There were many materialists before them. The first philosophers in fact were materialists the first ancient Greek philosophers that is people who specifically dedicated themselves to philosophy such as Thales or Anaximander or Heraclitus. These people were essentially materialists. They attempted to explain the world only through the world itself, through natural forces alone. They didn't resort to spiritual forces or gods in any way. Of course their ideas today in some respects are very outdated, although in many respects they are extraordinarily ahead of their time with some brilliant insights. And this reflected, this layer of philosophers I think reflected the development of ancient Greek society at the time and the development of commerce basically and he had a class that was a very worldly class dealing in mathematics and you know developing the world and with a sort of highly educated essentially and I think that such people tended towards materialism and I'd like to draw your attention to this quotation from Engels that I think sums up this this outlook really this early materialist outlook where he says that when we consider and reflect upon nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. This primitive naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus. Everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, coming into being and passing away. Now that this conception was essentially this outlook this sort of essentially correct but perhaps rather sort of abstract outlook or was really the outlook of the first ancient Greek philosophy and as I said it was a materialist outlook and it's one that I think Marxist philosophers still draw inspiration from today. However following that philosophy moved in a strongly idealist direction. He had the most famous philosophers such as Plato that were very much idealists reacted against this this early materialism and there are various reasons for this and I don't want to denigrate Plato's ideas because he was a brilliant philosopher but one I think reason for this kind of idealism and I think this explains a lot of as I said the trend of idealism in history is a kind of a prejudice really against against work and against against ordinary people. For example Plato was just referring to the world of work and people who laboured he said it's meaning work accustoms a man's mind to low ideas and absorbs him in the pursuit of the mere means of life and his outlook was essentially that basically the mind is to the body or the material world as the master is to the slave you know the educated person to the uneducated person and you can see how these people again going back to what I said before that's how they looked at the world as the kind of the material world rather than the world of work as beneath them essentially whereas those who understood ideas and theories were of course higher people and therefore naturally the world of ideas was a higher world that's really essentially was their outlook and throughout the history philosophy there has also been a prejudice I think in which matter is seen as sort of inert without any animating force and essentially meaningless and nearly there for mind to order it if you like. So for example Kant who's skipping much further ahead and much later philosopher also a different kind of idealist but essentially an idealist or at least somebody who straddled idealism and materialism but I would I would say was essentially an idealist in the critique of judgment he says the following the possibility of living matter cannot even be thought its concept involves a contradiction because lifelessness inertia constitutes the essential character of matter and so for most philosophers it is thought consciousness that is the driving force that molds the world that gives it purpose shape form etc. and shorn of consciousness the material world is just chaos meaningless chaos essentially that's that's really the outlook of most philosophers throughout history in one in one form or another. However materialism did come back into fashion before Marx and Engels came into being in the with really with the bourgeois revolution and the Enlightenment the scientific revolution and these the philosophers of this era had kind of resuscitated materialism and that wasn't an accident they reflected the the the revolutionary development of bourgeois society and a new class that was confident and believed in science and the ability to explain the world around them and wanted to get rid of the prejudices and dogmas of religion which obviously had previously dominated what was feudal society and this was a huge step forward and really laid the basis for the ideas of Marx and Engels and they made many brilliant discoveries. However there was a limitation to this materialism and it's what we refer to as mechanical materialism. It was how would we put it a kind of passive materialism in which it's almost like they went to the opposite extreme in a one sided manner. Whereas the idealist emphasised that mind shapes matter and matter is completely inert. These materialists tended to go a little bit far in the other direction. They in their keenness and fundamentally get a correct idea this is their keenness to describe that the fact that humans are moulded by the matter of the world around them they're conditioned by society and material forces which of course we agree with but in their keenness they perhaps overstressed that and tended to describe consciousness as completely inert essentially and it's just just a sort of passive reflection of the material world. And Marx criticised this in his famous Theses on Feuerbach where he explains that well yes of course humans are taught or conditioned by the material world and by other people but then who teaches the people that teach them and what Marx is getting at is that is that the trouble with this kind of mechanical materialism in which the world was described as in a rather simplistic way in which you know one force just sort of smashes into another and the inner impulse of the of the material world is not really described. For example the ideas of Newton you know describing very well and in a revolutionary way the laws of you know the movement of planets for example in the solar system this was of course a revolutionary development. However the whole thing was rather simplistic in a sense a very linear kind of system which ultimately required an external mover to make it to you know to give movement to the system as a whole. So once the system once the solar system is moving then of course it all works perfectly the laws that he that he discovered perfectly describe how the planets move. But why they started moving is inexplicable from this point of view there's no inner impulse if you see what I mean. And therefore it required God essentially this philosophy required God's or some initial mover to set the whole thing in motion. And this really I think was the general problem of this kind of philosophy this this this mechanical materialism that it went so far in describing the world but the science was still at a very limited level of course it was a new discipline really. And it was only so much that it could describe and as a result it tended to fall back into idealist explanations for things. Similarly if you think about this this stressing that human thoughts is conditioned by the material world but doesn't necessarily condition the world back in other words is very very passive. The trouble with that is it assumes that the human mind actually is not part of the material world and is only pushed and pulled by it but doesn't exert any force back. Of course a revolutionary Marxist position would explain that well actually humans are part of nature as well we are only natural beings as well and we inhabit the natural world so whilst the natural world exerts an enormously powerful influence over our lives obviously we have to as natural beings we have to feed ourselves we have to eat we have to to house ourselves you know we have to struggle just to survive. This is absolutely this is the way to look at humanity. But what flows from that is that we are also part of that material world and in turn can and must change it therefore it's a little one-sided just to say that we are influenced by the world as if we don't change the world ourselves and indeed this is the revolution of Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism because it explains that we change the world and that it's in changing the world that we change ourselves and that is really the secret to human development. So to kind of to sum up this introduction to materialism Marx and Engels took materialism further took it forward by by showing that really that the material world is an active force and that humanity is also an active force and is not outside of the material world or some sort of spiritual thing but is part of the material world and the way in which we we labor and you know put our ideas into practice if you like or put our desires into practice and change the world defines who we are and develops developed society and with it history and so for the first time in philosophy a realistic picture of humanity and of human society was developed by Marx and Engels. Marx describes how again in the thesis from in on Foybach that humanity or that human nature doesn't exist sort of in an ahistorical character you know outside of the natural world in each person like in their soul or something human nature is merely the ensemble as he says of social relations it is the product it doesn't reside in any one person fully but it's the product of all of humanity interacting with nature and with the rest of humanity in order to survive and and in doing so changing human nature in history and this this revolutionary outlook really I think it is is the is the best possible explanation of and the most accurate explanation of of of thoughts really and the role of thought in the natural world which is how we should see it however idealism still exists religion exists of course but I not only that but in the realm of philosophy idealism not only still exists but is probably still dominant 20th century philosophy is largely dominated by variants of subjective idealism which we will discuss in later weeks and for example post modernism tends to assert that we that the individual or that humans kind of create truth by the way that they think or talk about things rather than truth existing independently of us and that is an idealist position but why does this still exist why does this in my opinion fundamentally unscientific outlook still exists and even dominates well as far as I'm concerned it's ultimately because of the persistence of class society it's because we still live in a society characterized by inequality injustice and in which humanity doesn't control its own fate or doesn't consciously control its own fate and therefore we are subject to to the forces of society and as a result of that everything seems out of our control moreover there are people who are very interested in maintaining the domination of the ruling class and therefore want to obscure the real processes of history the realities of class society the real mechanics of class society and they would rather us look to our souls or to our values and and rather than instead of changing the actual social relations of class society so ultimately the struggle for materialism is part of the class struggle and it is a revolutionary struggle without which we will never we will never defeat idealism and never establish materialism as the as the correct outlook for humanity which I think it is