 Yn ymgyrch yw'r hyn sy'n meddwl yw'r marxist mefyd yw'r hynny. Yn ymgyrch yw'r hynny, dyna'r ddod ymlaen nhw'n ddod y byddai'r hynny, mae'r hynny yw'r hynny? Mae'r hynny'n ddod ymlaen nhw'n ddod ymlaen nhw'n ddod. Mae'r hynny'n ddod yn y bwysig yw'r hynny, ond mae'r hynny'n ddod yn ei wneud yn ymddangos, yn ymgyrch yw'r hynny'n ddod, a ddod y byddai'n ymgyrch yn ymlaen nhw. Mae ymwygar ктоedd ymwyr o'r hynny, mae tynnu'n fawr i'n dddangos wedi bod hefyd. Mae hi wnaeth ymwysig yn gwybod yn gwirionedd. Mae'r hynny'n ddod y fwygar can oedd dysgu… ym anders hynny'n fwygar sy'n gwasanaeth maffiaeth a gael. Yn ymgyrch gyda'r hyn sy'n sadddiologi, mae'r hynny ni ddod y byddai'n ddod ymlaen nhw'n fwygar is the first historical act, and that act of initially producing leads to the extension of more needs. This is the second historical act, the production of new needs. What that means is, as humans can labour and create and develop things to satisfy our needs, that forms the basis for all of society, and therefore history is the development of society and the development of that process. So, rather than rooting it in the minds of human beings, this kind of telling of events and stories, which is definitely how I was taught about history in school, Marx rooted history in labour, in the labour of humans, and this was one of the key tasks of Marx, of making history scientific, and I think that is where we fundamentally differ from modern bourgeois historians' take on history, because before Marx, history was understood through morals and stories and myths. But Marx recognised that the development of labour, of human labour, and the subsequent tools that came with that process, and what that produced, has changed over time, and has progressed over time as well. In the same way that there are laws that govern nature and the natural world, so too are there laws that govern history. Marx famously said that conditions determine our consciousness, and it is our consciousness as human beings that separates us from animals and the animal kingdom, and allows us to progress and push society forward. But crucially, that consciousness is not separate from the material world at all, it's not alien to it, but actually human beings and their relationship with nature and the natural world has developed over time. So I think that most bourgeois historians and economists, sorry, would deny the idea that history could be scientific at all. The most dominant view I would say is that history and human society as well is random, because it's determined by all the ideas of every different individual in that process. Every individual has wanted certain things in history, and that is how we've arrived where we are today. They've had different needs and different desires, and that process, that need to survive, is how we've gotten here self-preservation essentially. But I think that these kind of basic vague ideas such as self-preservation can't really explain the changes that have taken place in history, and we have to explain these by reference to something else. Because hasn't our social nature fundamentally changed many, many times? Is our social nature today the exact same as it was a thousand years ago? And Mark's answer to that is that no, it's not. And I'm going to try and flesh this out a little. So Darwin, and Mark's was a big fan of Darwin and what Darwin did in science, Darwin showed how species developed over time through their relationship to nature. And that scientific method is what we apply to history, to explain its development not through the individual wills and desires and wants of human beings, but rather through the development of the productive forces. Because essentially that what makes us human is labour and the subsequent tools that has brought into society. And that is our history, I would say, as a species, as human beings. Engels actually points out that the upright posture marks the transition from ape to man in a very materialist explanation. And this is something that has been confirmed by many modern anthropologists even in recent times. Because the upright posture liberated the hands for gripping with an opposable thumb. And this enabled tools to be used and then to be developed even further beyond that. The upright posture also allowed early humans to rely more on their eyes rather than other senses in order to sense the world around them and see what was going on. And this use of the hands developed the powers of the brain through the medium of the eyes as well. And this is really why Marx was such a fan of Darwin who kind of went up against the might of science and philosophy at the time with that materialist approach. And I think we could say that just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history. I'm just going to give an example of this. So when farming began in the Middle East around 10,000 years ago, this represented a revolution really in human society and culture. Because new conditions of production by way of this farming gave men and women more time. It gave them more time simply for complex analytical thought. And this was actually reflected in new art that came out at the time, new art consisting of geometrical patterns. And this is the first example of abstract art in history. And so these new conditions simply produced a new outlook on life, a new social relations and relations to nature and the natural world that existed around them at the time. And because of this change, the way they understood nature advanced rapidly due to the demands of agriculture, the demands that farming brought to them. And this allowed them greater power over the natural world at the same time as well. And that was the exact result of the collective labour that farming had produced, that collective labour on a grand scale. And so that difference in farming that led to various other social manifestation was marked by that change in production, that change in the way they organised. And this really sums up Marx's whole approach to history and his kind of seminal work in doing so. And we quote that he discovered that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing before it can pursue politic science, religion and art. So why do we pay attention to this and why is this so important for Marxist and our view of history? And it's because historical materialism explains these different processes, these different stages in history, scientifically in terms of their ability or inability to develop the means of production and develop the productive forces. And that is because without that development, human society simply can't progress. And the productive forces really are the material foundations upon which society, culture and civilisation are built. When the productive forces develop beyond the limits of the social structure that exists, it becomes fettered. But this also means that there is a basis for a new form of social arrangement, which will allow for further development. And each different social system throughout history and the different stages that I'll go into a bit more later, from slavery to feudalism and decapitalism, which is what we live under today, has served to take humanity and human society forward through that development of the productive forces and that form of organising. And I think that when we look at the whole of history and the different stages that it's been through, we can see that each different form of production, each different mode of production, manifested itself in a different social outlook. It manifested itself in a different form of psychology, a different morality, different laws, different religions to a certain extent. And also each of those different systems believed itself to be the last and ultimate one, believed itself to be the best form of society that there could be. And those ideas that came out of those societies, that morality, that law and all of that religion, were rooted in the class relations that existed at the time, that come out of the economic basis of society. And just to give one example, if we take the cultural ideas around adultery, for example, I don't know if anyone was in the session yesterday in defensive angles explaining a lot of the origins, the origins, sorry, of women's oppression and where that came from. But today adultery and our cultural ideas around that. I think some people would believe that it's an innate biological thing that exists in humans to be anti adultery and anti a woman being able to have extramarital sex, for example. But a lot of what that session explained is why this is nonsense. Because yesterday we discussed the beginnings of monogamy in a certain sense. But more importantly, why monogamy was a necessity and why it became essential for that society when it developed. And the necessity of monogamy and the consequence shunning and condemning of women who didn't conform to that came from the beginnings of class society and the beginnings of a surplus. And so the relationship between the economic base of society and the ideas that come out of it is a complicated one, but still fundamentally rooted in that. And it's not a strict mechanical thing and we have to look at all the different factors at one time. And it can even be contradictory at times. But ultimately what Marx did was root the social relations of human beings in the economic base of society. And I think the history and the changing ideas around morality and that has come out of that proves this as well. So all of these systems have ultimately played a role in progressing society and taking it forward. And I want to talk a little bit about this idea of progress and what that means for Marxist when we use the word, because I think it's slightly different from how we would use it in a normal modern sense. Because I think the most mainstream ideas of progress at the moment are that it's a liberal one or one that makes it completely random and completely detached from anything material. And the liberal idea of progress would be that exploitation has always existed, but we've had this cultural development, a process of enlightenment that's taken us to where we are today. Essentially Western capitalist democracy is where the whole of society has been pushing itself towards. I think the other idea of progress, the postmodernist idea, is more that there's kind of no real connection in society. There's no scientific analysis to draw any of these events together or why we are where we are today. And that every individual has simply wanted something and it's a very kind of pessimistic, random approach to why we are in the world we are today. And I think that what's important to draw out of both of those ideas is that both of them justify capitalism ultimately. Either you think that we've reached the end point of history and all other societies now need to just model themselves off us and model themselves off Western capitalist democracy in that sense. Or you believe that it's completely random and there's no link between them and therefore there's nothing we can do about it. There's nothing we can do to end exploitation or change the world because this is just the way society is and human beings have no control over that ultimately. But as Marxists we have a dialectical approach to history and we recognise that it is one of constant contradiction and change and that is true of progress and the way we use it. And we maintain that the development of human society over millions of years represents progress, of course it does, in the sense that it increases humankind's power over nature and thus creates the material conditions for achieving genuine freedom for men and women. And when I talk about power over nature I want to clarify, I don't mean deforestation and mankind just ripping through the earth and using it for what they want. Freedom from nature means the freedom for humans to actually have agency and control over their lives for the first time in a serious and genuine way. And our ability today to live and overcome climate change proves that necessity, that necessity to have power over nature and power over our conditions in this world. And this is something that Engels understood very well actually and understood the need to look at and study the objective laws of the world around us to know what we can but also what we cannot do and understand those limits. Because the technology and the resources to live a plentiful life exist today but we're still bound by this capitalist system. And so history and progress is not a linear thing and that history has a descending line as well as an ascending one. I think that liberals identify one thing as progressive which is basically what we have today and then apply that fixed sense of progress to the whole of human history and compare it and measure it to where we are right now. But we take a revolutionary approach and we don't approach history with a fixed morality at all through which we measure things because we also know that that which is progressive isn't necessarily good. It's not necessarily a good thing in a moral sense that we might think of today. Slavery had a role in developing the means of productions and so slavery was progressive which seems like an abhorrent thing to say by our standards now but in a Marxist sense it's not and I'm going to explain a bit of what I mean by that. Another argument to go against this idea of human nature which people often use to attack Marxists and the fact that socialism can never exist is that in ancient Greece, slavery was seen as a completely normal and acceptable thing even amongst the most enlightened people at the time. And so when I say that slavery was progressive Engels makes this point in anti-during I think that you need a certain level of the productive forces in order to have a slave in the first place and that represents a certain amount of progress. The slave needs something to work on and you also need enough surplus to then feed that slave and so it's not just a matter of brute force and forcing someone to do something. And that is the Marxist definition in a way I suppose of progress and what we talk about in terms of its application to history because we say that all new systems have brought society forward including capitalism but that can still be a contradictory process. I mean Marx says that capital came onto the stage of history dripping blood from every poor but nevertheless it was a colossal leap forward for human beings and its development and our power over nature. And just one more kind of point on this liberal fixation of progress and enlightenment to where we are today. Today's morality, if they believe it really is the end point lets people die on the streets due to hunger and homelessness. Is that really the end point of humanity? I'd like to think that it isn't. And actually our earliest ancestors that lived in a very different way that we do today would be disgusted by that and wouldn't really understand it. And who is right? Which morality is the more progressive one? And I don't think that's something that can just be explained on the basis of ideas alone. It has to be rooted in something more fundamental. And I just want to go on to explain this, the fact that classes haven't always existed in society. The majority of history was communal and organised within different groups and that society divided into classes has actually only existed for about 10,000 years which is 100th of the time that mankind has been on this planet and for the rest of that time humans there was no class society which means certain things. It means there was no state, there was no enforced inequality and there was also no family in the modern sense but that's something that was dealt with in a session yesterday so I'm not going to explain that any further. And actually these kind of primitive communist groups the way that we organised in that sense did so and were able to survive based on a powerful sense of cooperation a communal child rearing as well and respect of mothers and respect of elders in the group. And what's interesting then is if you compare that on a base level to the way we live today and you compare it to the modern family if we want to be crude in the way that liberals do in their approach to history and progress and compare communal child rearing where everyone has everything they need to the modern family today where you might have domestic abuse, rape, violence, orphans it doesn't really, you know you could look at that and think oh well actually that was a much better way of living maybe we need to go back towards that but that's not what Marx is saying and that's not what Marx meant when he studied history and it wasn't that our earlier ancestors were just more noble than us and had better ideas than us but the production relations that existed at that time produced a different society and a different morality or human nature whatever you want to call it had an idealised view of that time and talk about oh we just need to return to this because there were obviously difficulties at that time as well they didn't have control or power over nature in a way, in a better way in a greater way I would say sorry that we do now and what we argue for now is not a return to that time a return to those primitive communist tribes because we have progressed in these days but we're arguing for a higher society and returning to that but on a much higher level so I've explained slightly how the development of the productive forces brings into existence different relations and therefore different forms of class society and this is important because under this primitive communism that I described there was no basis for an ideal class there was no basis for a group of people that didn't have to work and so there was no point of enslaving someone else because they could only provide for their own needs but at a certain point in history and in this process it became possible for an ideal class to exist because it became possible for there to be a harvest to live off and even produce a surplus and this was a marked difference with the way that they had led their lives and organised before and this was the first time the question was posed who gets the surplus after we die and what do we do with the surplus that we have and so now that this possibility of idleness arose for some extent that everyone could be idle and everyone could live this kind of simple life mankind definitely could not provide enough for that and it's on this basis that we saw class societies arise societies becoming divided between a possessing and a labouring class the idle group and the group that has to work I don't have time to go into this now but we've briefly kind of talked about the connection with women's oppression on that and it's because we take this dialectical approach to history it's how we can explain that how did we go from a completely classless society to one where we had private property and one where we had classes and it comes from a question and it comes from a change in the production and the means of production and so I just want to explain more concretely what we mean as well by class when we talk about different classes in society and via class we mean a group of people essentially who just have the same relationship to the means of production and the class which owns and controls the means of production rules society in their interests and this allows them and this at the same time enables them to force the oppressed the labouring class to toil in their interest and the labouring class is forced to produce a surplus which the ruling class then lives off and this separating of society into different groups playing different roles and division of labour eventually enters into conflict and struggle but this takes different forms in different locations that we can see throughout history but ultimately based on this contradiction of hostile classes society develops and it takes steps forward and steps backwards and it's not a linear thing but the overwhelming direction of history shows that and I think that this direction of history has been shaped by these struggles between these two classes who are attempting not too sorry but these classes who are attempting to mould society fundamentally into their interests and obviously I'm sure everyone knows the first words of the communist manifesto which is the history of all the two existing societies is the history of class struggle and what historical materialism explains and displays for us is that the motor force then of social development is rooted in that class struggle and I just want to read out a quote that summarises this quite well which is in the 1885 preface to the 18th brimer of Louis Bonaparte it says and so this class struggle has always existed and formed as the and its formation has been the main engine of progress and I want to try and give a concretise this a bit more by giving an example and by talking about in a very small and crude if you will way the transition I suppose between feudalism and capitalism because that's the way feudalism and capitalism because that is something that deserves its own discussion and it definitely won't flesh out all of the points but I just want to highlight a few things which is that under feudalism we had this structure that was based on a kind of pyramid in which God and the King stood at the top of this kind of hierarchy and each segment was linked to everyone else based on duties and the duties that they had to each other and in theory you had feudal lords who existed to protect the peasants in the peasantry and in return for that the peasants would put food on their table and clothes on their backs and this kind of enabled them to live a life of luxury of idleness like I described earlier but you also had priests and the role of the priests would have been to pray for their souls and the knights who had defended them and so on and so on so you had this complex and very different if we take today way of living but even in that process class struggle existed and the transition when we start to see the beginnings of capitalism in a certain sense started with the serfs who were struggling against their lords and in doing so we started to see the beginnings of towns and the beginnings of the bourgeoisie the kind of first escaped serfs if you will and the development of commodity exchange and various other things and at a certain point basically we see this rise of this new group of people this new class the bourgeoisie who had fundamentally different interests to that of the dominant class of the time the feudal aristocracy but it wasn't as simple as okay we've got these new people now and therefore I think we need to change the way society has run not how history manifests itself that's not how change happens and capitalism couldn't just move on to the stage of history without any struggle without any hindrance at all and you had these newly awakened productive forces that were now in revolt they were in conflict with the old way of organising the old relations of production and this had to be overcome and new relations needed to be installed and this new way of organising that had developed and though feudalism in a certain sense was maybe starting to decline the landed interest in society remained this fetter on commodity production and so this battle of living forces this battle takes place over a number of years and we can't point to a certain year and say right that's it that's when capitalism developed but we can look at certain things and see how that accelerated the class struggle to a certain extent and one example of this that is so in history I'm sure we're all taught about Henry VIII for example which might seem a bit random but I'm going to hopefully link this and Henry VIII's role in history and his division of religion in that sense was all because of his divorce or that his want for a divorce and we're all taught that divorce per head had died, divorce per head had survived and this fat greedy man just wanted this woman and the Pope said no and so he had to force his nomen and that for some reason is the entirety of the basis of why our whole country was split in two in terms of in terms of religions and he was significant in a certain sense his desires and wants represented something but ultimately what was he doing and what did that process do in terms of the development of the class struggle at that time and the development of the new growing bourgeoisie which was in his process in his kind of wrecking of the Catholic Church and taking, he took the monasteries at a cut down price and he sold them to upcoming landlords at the time and this accelerated this process this emergence of a new class of a new group in society and that is the class struggle and that is what the historical materialist method allows us to do, it allows us to look at these things and actually explain them on a much deeper basis than the superficial wants and needs of individual humans and so this emerging kind of bourgeois class this new class which takes form in many different ways in different countries which I can't go into all of them this class struggle was the task then of the bourgeois revolutions the English revolution obviously of the 1640s, the American Revolution in 1776 and the subsequent Civil War and just kind of on that a brief kind of a side to specifically in America just as I explained earlier that slavery was once progressive in a certain sense in terms of its ability to push society forward if you take America the abolition of slavery then was even more progressive in the sense that it set free the introduction of capitalism fully the American Civil War was a contest between the north and the south the southern land owning classes that wanted to maintain slavery because of their form of production and the northern states that wanted to set free capitalism across the country and it was the abolition of slavery that allowed that to happen and Marx paid attention to that very closely precisely because the abolition of slavery was a great step forward for the development of the working class in America which I'm going to end on when talking about the role of the working class and Marx was very concerned about this and followed it closely and Marx says that labour in the white skin can never be free while labour in the black skin is branded and he's talking about slavery and talking about the fact that slavery had to end for the working class to grow and then organise and develop and that is why in that sense the abolition of slavery was progressive and that's just an example of this kind of contradiction that progress is not a linear thing that we can point A to B at but that's just one example of that the French Revolution of course I'm not going to explain or go into any of these in any specific detail but these were all decisive struggles that laid the foundations for the domination of capitalism on a well scale and when any socio-economic system is entering into crisis is entering into decline and is expected not only in stagnation of the productive forces but at every level as well the decline of feudalism was an epoch when intellectual life was dead or dying you had the role of the church in particular which had a really big stronghold and was paralyzing or cultural and scientific initiatives and so these revolutions and the way they take place is not through one specific event on a specific avenue at all but the bourgeoisie had to go up against this in all its various different forms and through law and morality and the changes in our laws in particular I would say in this country really kind of show that the development of land law and the rights of people to own land and the way that developed in England definitely demonstrates this and the point is that class struggle ultimately was at the heart of that entire process and the historical materials method allows us to uncover so I spoke a bit about briefly the development of the working class in particular and why that was so important for Marx in America but also in general and I want to explain why that capitalism in its progressive role developed the productive forces but also one of the most important tasks that it did was develop the working class and create the working class and that is important for us because of what it gave society in terms of the tools of society to actually overcome these class divisions the working class came what came out of the working class then was trade unions political parties talking about the Labour party a lot at this conference as well and ultimately the working class is the progressive revolutionary class in society and that is important because the proletariat has no weapon other than organisation that is the only thing they have to go up against capitalism because without organisation the proletariat is simply just the raw material for exploitation and that is its significance and that is why we talk about the value and the importance of the working class it's not a moral thing that we think that they're just the best people in society but it's a practical question as to who controls and who creates in society and therefore has the ability to run it and that is the working class the labouring class so I want to talk a little bit briefly now about the role of the individual then in society because I kind of mentioned a few people like Henry VIII but rooted ultimately their decisions and their wants in the economic basis of what was happening at that time and in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx actually explains that men make their own history but they do not make it as they please they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under circumstances existing already given and transmitted from the past and so Marx and Engels explained that participants in history may not always be aware of what motives are driving them and may try and rationalise them in one way or another and certainly those motives have a basis and exist in the real world, in the material world around them and Marxists are often kind of accused of being economic determinists of being reductionists in lots of different ways but I don't think we deny the importance all the active roles of individuals in society the difference with the Marxist approach to history is we place individuals in their historical context and we understand the role of individuals far better actually than modern the kind of modern conception of history liberal idealist ideas of history because of that because we can explain it in a much better sense than someone somehow was just born with something really really special and that is why the whole of society changed that is why war started because Franz Ferdinand was shot that is why millions of people subsequently died I think we explained it on a much more materialist basis by saying okay where does the individual come from and that we say that they are a product of the objective conditions at that time that has given rise to a certain crisis and it's only at a certain point that the role of the individual becomes important and I'll just kind of give one example of this I once heard someone basically asked we were talking about Bolshevism and the role of the Bolsheviks and they said well isn't Bolshevism just Leninism because Lenin had to change the line of the Bolsheviks on so many occasions Lenin had to fight and correct what the Bolsheviks were doing so many times so doesn't that essentially mean that the Bolshevism is just Leninism but the Marxist approach to history and our understanding of the individual is that Lenin couldn't have been Lenin without the Bolsheviks Lenin rose to the challenges of that time precisely because of the objective conditions and the crisis that was developing and so there's a dialectical relationship that exists there between Lenin and the Bolsheviks and ultimately between the individual and the conditions of that time and you see this in particular I would say in moments of revolution in terms of leaders and their relationship to the masses and how one can influence the other in terms of pushing society forward and so that is how we understand the role of the individual in particular because we root it in the historical conditions that exist to create them in the first place and so you know you'd be forgiven for being a bit confused if I'm saying that individuals by themselves can't really do much what are we all doing here I guess we are still actually individuals and is it actually possible then to consciously change society do we actually have power over that and I would say yes to society but only if you understand the objective processes that are taking place within it and that is why historical materialism is so important to us because if we understand the laws of history we understand just how much an individual can do and how and when is appropriate to intervene in a certain sense so just to give another example if you looked at the world around us today and maybe misunderstood or didn't have the theory of the class struggle with you you might call for barricades right now we just need to build a barricade outside Parliament because the working class must be fed up with Boris Johnson and they must be fed up with the Tories and I'm right because there's a crisis of capitalism right now and the working class are immediately going to follow you but if we try to build a barricade outside Parliament right now we'd just be arrested and then we'd have absolutely no role at all in doing anything to consciously change society but if you study history and you study the class struggle you begin to understand the processes through which we have to understand the objective conditions and how the working class moves which is ultimately that we as Marxists can't tell the working class now is the time for revolution now is the time to move and to storm Parliament and they will do that by themselves and that is not our role our role as Marxists and our relationship to the working class is not a kind of one where we're telling them what to do but one where we have to be a part of the process but understand the laws that are taking place in order to get them to get them through that and that is why we study history and the theory of the class struggle so what does that mean for us today in the fight for socialism should we just keep waiting then for all the conditions to keep worsening until the working class will finally realise I suppose what's happening and move to take power but that's because if you take there's been process in society does this mean socialism is just inevitable and our fuchs we don't have to worry too much about it but that's not what historical materialism teaches us and that Marx actually explains that there is no final crisis of capitalism that will be the tipping point to change everything that is becoming a fetter does not automatically bring about the change in society that we might want and ultimately a revolution still needs to be made by human beings because men make their own history humanity does make its own history and a revolution is a conscious historical act and that is what we have to remember when looking at all these processes and everything that's going on in the world today and so we've emerged from all these different forms of society, slavery, feudalism and now we're in capitalism and like I said earlier I think each one of those social systems ultimately believed that it represented the only possible form of existence for human systems and that all of its institutions and religions and laws were the last form but I think hopefully what I've described today and what we've understood is that that idea goes against the entirety of human history the entirety of what has actually happened and that every stage in the development of society has been rooted in its last one and emerged out of it and I think history can only be understood if you look at it in that kind of way where at a certain point a contradiction has emerged and the further development of society which was necessary needed to take place to allow a new form of living and I think that what I just want to end on is that ultimately what historical materialism gives us I think is optimism and real optimism for the future and what we can do as individuals and as everyone sat in this room here today because if you look at the world around you I don't think it's hard to see all of the symptoms of this systems decline and the ruling class know it themselves I think they're terrified of it and they're doing everything they can to try and prevent it through various different means but none of this will be enough at every single level and what history gives us as well as confidence it gives us confidence I think in the working class in the theory of the class struggle and confidence of the general direction and tendency of human history which has been one towards the greater development of the productive forces and cultural potential that human beings really have and I think that gives us not a kind of passive approach to the amazing revolutions that have taken place even this year around the world but ultimately shows us that we can change the world and therefore we must change the world