 Yeah, so Marxism, we are told, is fatalistic. It has, as they say, a teleological view of human history, which means to say, Marxism is, allegedly, a sort of new form of Christianity which sees all of history as preordained from the beginning, as having a goal, an end goal, to which we are ineluctably moving. Nothing we can do about it. It's inevitable. Communism is the end goal, just as for Christianity, you know, the kingdom of God on earth is the end. And it's been decided in advance, basically. That is the accusation. Karl Popper famously argued along these lines, and he said that Marxism is pseudo-scientific because of this prediction, this prediction of communism, which cannot be proven or disproven, and therefore there's no scientific value. It's just meaningless, essentially, according to him. More recently, as we've been learning a bit about in the previous session, postmodernism has attacked Marxism in a similar way for having, or being, a meta-narrative. That is, having an overarching theory which says that human society develops and it develops towards, of course, communism. Now, there's a political significance to these attacks. It's not just that they are attacks on Marxism, right? It's very significant that they pick this point out because, of course, this means eliminating the belief that you can have a new kind of society, that you can change society in a fundamental way. And this is very much what, in different ways, Popper and the postmodernists subscribe to. In other words, it's unscientific, it's meaningless to fight against the status quo. You can't ever fight for something that hasn't existed because you don't know what that thing is like, and it's basically meaningless to talk about it. That is essentially the position that is being put across, which is, of course, a very convenient outlook to suggest that the most scientific thing is to just to accept the status quo, essentially. It's very convenient for the powers that be. Now, this point is also dismissed for its alleged fatalism, which means to say Marxism is accused of eliminating human agency. Marxism is painted as a sort of cold mechanical ideology that has no role for human consciousness. In this view, Marxism has, you know, history has already been decided, and we have no free will to change history, right? We cannot do anything to change the course of history. We have no choice, essentially. We are basically prisoners of the iron laws of history in this criticism. So what these criticisms reveal is a typical one-sidedness, an inability to think dialectically in terms of contradictions and the interpenetration of opposites. What we are given is this notion that history is either absolutely one kind of thing or absolutely another. It is either absolutely rigidly determined, and that's, of course, Marxism is put into that category, and there's no possibility of changing anything. Or it is a completely unwritten book in each generation, and each individual has freedom to change it however they please, basically. Those are the two views of history that you can have, apparently. These two poles are both wrong in their one-sided extremes. You know, we can call them fatalism and volunteerism, if you like, or determinism and sheer randomness, if you like, as views on human history. Now, let's look at this volunteeristic conception, which is obviously that is the point of view that these attacks are coming from. This view that we can make history as we please, and we have free will to do so just as much as we want to. Postmodernism, of course, is a form of this, because it denies lawfulness in history, and it denies development, it denies progress. There's no particular direction to history, and there's no overarching law that we can understand, such as, you know, explained in historical materialism. There's no meta-narrative, and any claim of a meta-narrative is false or is meaningless, according to these people. But there's plenty of other examples of this volunteerism. In a way, all of the sort of the views of history in terms of great men are an example of this, you know, this trend in historical writing that takes up a period of history, and just describes the actions and the ideologies of the main people who carried out these actions, basically. And in the 18th century, this was quite a, I think, was the main kind of conception of history, an idealist conception of history, that since history was carried out by conscious beings, by humans, it was defined and driven by the ideas that these people had, and of course, by the main proponents of these ideas, by the great men, essentially. But we still have this today. I mean, a lot of mainstream histories of anything, say, if you were to take up a book about the history of Thatcherism, you would often find it has this form. It just basically would talk about the character of Thatcher, her iron determination, you know, all of these things would be kind of, essentially, that would be the reason that Thatcherism happened, because of these, her character and her upbringing. There's lots of kind of pop histories of, you know, of fascism that try to examine the upbringing of Hitler and maybe speculate as to if he got accepted into that art school, would he have not had that complex and would he, therefore, not have carried out the Holocaust. You know, this is a very common approach to history, right? It's not usually made explicit, but it is very common. We see it very recently in the celebrated films of Adam Curtis, who just had a massive film series on the BBC. He's quite celebrated by a lot of people on the left as well. That series begins and ends on a quotation from the anarchist David Graber. And the quotation is the following, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is just something we make and could just as easily make something different. And throughout his work, Adam Curtis, that is, which is very historical in its nature, it describes recent history, basically. This is, it's all about the great individual. So the recent one has various great individuals like Zhang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong. These people are set up and their history and their psychology is explained. And the implication is that things like the age of individualism as he sees it happen just because of these prominent individuals and the ideas that they had. And hence, of course, it would follow, as he says, as he approvingly quotes David Graber, we can just as easily make history in some other way. Because, of course, if it was made in this way just because some people happen to have some ideas, we can happen to have some other ideas and make it in a different way. And therefore, of course, improve society. Now, this worldview sets itself up as having a very lofty view of human nature. The way it describes itself is that they venerate free will. Whereas the Marxists have a look down upon humans and see humans as just sort of economic automatons with no independence, with no agency. And so it very much opposes itself to fatalism and it paints itself in these vivid colors. However, ironically, actually, the one-sided errors of this worldview put it back into the camp unconsciously anyway of fatalism. Because, of course, if history is made by individuals and if anything is possible, if it's an unwritten book and we can change it, however we please, if we only realize that we had that freedom. The obvious question to ask is, if we can make a better society simply by having these ideas, why don't we? Why don't we? And, of course, it's not the first time people have had ideas about having a better society. Many people in history have suggested that we should do this. But it hasn't happened. We still live in a class society with untold injustices everywhere. So why on earth don't we all just live better, basically, and have nicer ideas? In a sense, one concrete example of this, by the way, would be the idea put forward by left reformists, that austerity is an ideological choice, that it hasn't happened out of any necessity. It's simply because of the bad ideas. And we simply have to have better ideas, essentially, that's their position. If, in fact, there's no cause and effect that we're not strictly determined as individuals and as a society to behave in one way or another, and we can just choose to be different, then what actually appears to be this lofty philosophy of human history actually reduces everything to caprice, just to arbitrariness. We haven't done something because we were caused to do so, or because economic conditions made that the best or the overwhelmingly most likely cause of events. No, we do things simply because, well, who knows why, we just happen to have those ideas. In this worldview, history appears arbitrary and baffling, inexplicable. And in turn, there's no way of understanding how we can make sure that our better ideas, which we're propagating now, can be taken up and be the main ideas. They might say something like this David Graver quote, we don't realize it, but we can just make a better society because it's only a human endeavor in the end anyway. So why don't we just make a better society? But in the end, we don't make a better society. People have been saying this for a long time, as I've said, and they end up being baffled as to why that is the case. They cannot understand why their ideas haven't been taken up. Or if they are taken up, they cannot guarantee that they will remain being taken up and that worse ideas won't come and overtake them and lead back to oppression. So the only strategy they really have is to just hope that other people take up these nice ideas, these more lofty ideals of, I don't know, equality or whatever they happen to be. So in the end, this outlook ends up being baffled as to why history is the way that it is. And so history once again appears to these people as just, as in the words, famous words of Henry Ford, just one damn thing after another. Or as Gibbon said, the famous history and history is just little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. And so the regular, for example, crises of capitalism that afflict capitalism appear as natural disasters, basically as something totally out of our control. As perhaps just if we put history down to the ideas that people have, the bad ideas that people have, then the crises of capitalism that periodically happen appear to happen just because there's a wave of greed and short-sightedness that washes over society from time to time. There's no explanation as to the necessity or the logic of these events and why they take place. And therefore they appear as inexplicable afflictions imposed on to society. And therefore this just reproduces the alienation of capitalism that they claim to overcome, this sense of having no control over our fate, that we just watch the world burn and we don't really understand why so many awful things happen. And therefore in this worldview, we actually remain prisoners of history. There's nothing we can do about it other than to hope for something better. So it might claim to reject fatalism and to have this wonderful idea that we can change everything, but it turns out to really have nothing to say about that. We Marxists, of course, subscribe to science and to materialism. For us, there's no spiritual realm separate from the material world and humans with their ideas are physical things, obviously. And our ideas express the interests and the experiences that we have. They don't create those experiences. They don't create the world at all. It's the other way around. And we insist that history is neither random and inexplicable, nor is it designed in advance by a God and meant to happen in a certain way. It follows that we can understand history because we ourselves are natural beings. We are subject to the laws of nature, obviously, in the way we have to survive. And therefore, ultimately, human society is a natural thing. Of course, it's different from other natural things, but it is a part of nature. And like anything else in nature, it can be studied. It has regularity. It has patterns. It isn't arbitrary. And not only this, but human society does feature progress. Now many object to this as, again, as discussed quite a bit in the previous session, they find it vaguely odious. The idea of it sounds a bit imperialistic, a bit racist, it sounds like we're claiming that the most advanced people in the world are better, which is not at all what it means, by the way. But just in terms of that rejection, do we really think that there's no progress in human history, that there's no regularity? So might it be that if we somehow repeated history, that the first humans to appear, the first humans to evolve, might immediately set up capitalism and urban societies, and all of zero-hour contracts and all the things that we have with that today? Might that just suddenly happen? Or would we have to start with hunting and gathering and build our way up? Or might we have a capitalist society, and might that society have a revolution? But it turns out that the aim of that revolution was just to re-institute feudalism, and for us all to return to serfdom and living in the countryside. Would that happen? Is that very likely? I think we can all see it clearly isn't. So there is lawfulness, regularity, and progress in society. It's not a value judgment, it's simply an understanding of the way that things are and must be. Society, of course, doesn't progress in a simple way, or in a straight line. It's not just a perfect march to liberation, of course not. That's far more complex than that, and far more full of deviations and mistakes, if you like. But it does have causes, it does obey laws, and we can understand those things. And therefore, freedom, genuine freedom, isn't this freedom from causation, which just means that we are senseless in our behavior, that we just do things for no particular reason. It means freedom freedom means understanding the necessity, understanding lawfulness, as Hegel put it, the recognition of necessity. We cannot escape lawfulness, we cannot just dream away reality, but we can understand it and therefore change it to suit our interests. And so in terms of society, that means we can understand why capitalism goes into crisis, and we can understand what the solution to that is and organize to do it. And therefore, we have the freedom to build a better society, but only if we have that understanding. Now, from what I've said, it may sound as if, well, actually, yes, Marxism is fatalistic, because I'm laying a lot of stress on the lawfulness and the progress of society. So doesn't that just confirm that argument, or that attack? And therefore, why bother fighting for socialism, right? Because I seem to be saying it's inevitable, it will just come about because of the laws of history. Well, let's discuss what fatalism is and what I think the areas of it are. So fatalism, of course, could have many different forms. Basically, it just means that there is a fate that it's guaranteed that history or events will end in a certain way. In terms of materialist fatalism, because of course, religion is usually a form of that. But the materialist fatalism developed in the 18th century, and it was actually stepped forward because it was an attempt to understand the lawfulness of history and to treat it scientifically. But it was limited, shall we say. The most famous example of it is Laplace, who said that if we could only know the position and the velocity of every single particle in the universe and the laws that they obey, we could predict everything for all eternity, not just in society, but in nature. And this we call absolute determinism. Everything can be foreseen in advance, and it is guaranteed to end in a certain way. Now the Marxist caricature of this, in other words, people would set up Marxism as a form of this. What it would be is something along the lines that the economic laws are the only laws that determine society, and we've understood them fully, and we've foreseen exactly how they will play out. And they guarantee, of course, socialism is no room for accident in this. Socialism is definitely, it is inevitable it's coming, because the iron laws of economics guarantee it, and it's just a matter of time basically. Now this worldview is excessively simplistic and has a mechanical and I think a kind of fetishistic understanding of lawfulness, which I will explain what I mean by that. It leaves no role for consciousness at all. The way that the trouble with it is the way that it sees consciousness is just as an effect and not a cause. It's like the froth thrown up by the currents of the ocean. It doesn't influence anything. It doesn't change anything by its presence. It's simply an effect, a sort of passive effect, a bit like human waste when we go to the toilet. It's just something that happens to appear, but it doesn't play any real role, doesn't change anything. Trotsky in his philosophical notebooks, which weren't intended for publication, but they were later unpublished, interestingly criticizes this view, not in terms of history, but in terms of consciousness, says that he says that obviously he is a materialist, but he says that our consciousness isn't determined by our physiology, but by society. And he said if it was determined by our physiology, in other words, if it was, you know, just purely an effect, what he means is just an effect and doesn't cause our physiology to do anything. Then it would just be a very expensive, in terms of energy, it would be a very, very expensive thing, you know, because the brain consumes a lot of energy and why do that if it doesn't change anything by its presence, if it's just an effect. And actually there are many scientists, this is a very common error in scientific thinking, this kind of, this reductionism to the sort of base laws of everything, and this sort of rigid determinism. For example, Paul Churchland, who is a prominent sort of philosopher of mind, and I think he's also a neuroscientist, he says he is a subscriber to eliminative materialism, and his actual position is that human beliefs do not exist. They're all that they, what we call beliefs, like believing, you know, love or happiness or whatever, or, you know, ideals basically, all that there actually is is just neurons firing in your brain. And it's an illusion that we have a belief that sort of guides anything. All you need to do to understand human thoughts and behavior is to understand the laws of neurons. And therefore consciousness has no role, it's just an effect. And a lot of scientists say this kind of thing, I've seen other articles saying consciousness is just a fluky byproduct of our constitution. It's just a meaningless thing, it's just a sort of weird freak of nature that doesn't do anything. Now, and I think this sort of mechanical determinism in history has the same attitude towards consciousness, it sees it as just not really adding anything, it's just, we just have the economic laws of history. And they just play out. And basically, the ideas that we have about them are just unnecessary kind of, you know, froth on the surface. But the question therefore would be, well, why bother having these ideas? Why is so much effort put into creating ideologies and preaching them? And why do all classes form in history, parties or political leaders to fight for their interests? And why do they pay such attention to the ideological battle that they wage? The thing is, this is a very one sided view and Marxism, which is not Marxist, and doesn't actually explain these things. For example, if history is determined exclusively by these economic laws, then it would be somewhat of a mystery why they actually work the way that they do. Who is making all of this happen and why? To give a sense of what I mean by this, I'm going to quote Bismarck, who is, I'm taking the quote from Plekhanov in his famous book or pamphlet, The Role of the Individual in History, which is very relevant to this discussion. And he quotes Bismarck saying the following, gentlemen, we can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future. I would like to warn you against the mistake that causes, sorry, that causes people to advance the hands of their clocks, thinking that thereby they are hastening the passage of time. And this is the important bit. We cannot make history. We must wait while it is being made. And that's what I mean about the sort of the one sidedness of this, these economic laws playing out sort of behind our backs with no actual human participation or consciousness. Where does their power derive from then? Who is making history and why? And I think there's actually a kind of, there is a kind of quasi religious element to this, to this, to this philosophy. And it has nothing in common with Marxism. Marx always combated this view. He famous, there's a quite a famous quote of his from the, the Holy Family Way, which is an early work by him. He says the following in it, history does nothing. It possesses no immense wealth. It wages no battles. It is man, sorry, it is man, real living man who does all that, who possesses and fights. History is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims. History is nothing, but the activity of man pursuing his aims. So we are not puppets for economic laws somewhere else that make us do things against our will or with no conscious participation. But of course these individuals, and Marx does mean when he says man, he means individual men and women. He doesn't mean some abstract man. He means actual real concrete individuals, but of course concrete individuals are unpredictable, you know, and they are unlike. So even, you know, capitalists, of course, aren't all like perfect capitalists. They deviate from the norm in various ways. And the same for workers. People are unique, and they are unpredictable in their details. So then does this mean that what Marx is saying is really, Marx is a volunteerist. He's saying, well history is made by concrete individuals, and of course these individuals do their own thing. And therefore, is he saying that, you know, history is just simply what we make of it. There's no laws of history. There's no necessity after all. It's just what we as individuals actually decide to do. And therefore it's all about our ideas and what we decide. Well, I think to understand this more, we have to delve into the question of accident and what is accident in the philosophical sense of the term. Now it's often pointed out by people that there's an enormous amount of accident in history. And it's quite a funny game that you can play where you sort of pick an enormous turning point in history. And then you sort of find how actually that just this one little random thing could have made that not happen. Famous example of it is Franz Ferdinand being shot. And if his, you know, if his, if the car he was in was just a little bit later, then he wouldn't have been shot. And therefore allegedly World War One would never have happened, which of course did change human history in a very significant way. Or I don't know, like you could just pick anything really. I mean, a more recent example would be maybe Trump. And, you know, people say that alleged that his softness is, you know, pushing American foreign policy into a soft position on Russia was because there happened to be an incriminating videotape that Putin had of Trump in Russia, of him doing shall we say obscene acts. Now, I don't know if that's true, it probably isn't true, but it could have been true. And that it really could have been something that determined the what American foreign policy was. We're all familiar, I think with this idea that huge turning points in history really do seem to have been changed by the chance characteristics of individuals, or by just even more accidental things like whether or not they were late for an event or something. And that is true. That is the case, right? We are not guaranteed, you know, history doesn't select people, and make sure that they're in the right place at the right time for something to happen. As Mark says, there is no such thing as history in that sense. It is not a guiding principle, it's not a kind of godly figure moving us around. So how then can we speak of necessity if this is the case in history? Where is necessity? What we have to ask ourselves is what then is the relationship between necessity and chance or necessity and accidents? And this takes us to Hegel, who brilliantly demonstrated the dialectical interdependence of necessity and accidents. As he said it, necessity expresses itself in accidents. Most people tend to see the two as absolute opposites that have nothing to do with each other, and history is either necessary, and it has to happen in this way, or it is accident, and it's just one damn thing after another, as Ford said. But actually the two go together, they are two sides of the same coin, they're inseparable from one another, and they express themselves through one another, which may sound difficult to understand, but I will explain that. But it's interesting to know that it was Hegel who said this, because those who accuse Marxism of being teleological or fatalistic would often say that that comes from Hegel, because Hegel was this kind of guy, very teleological, you know, for Hegel all of history is the unfolding of the absolute idea and this kind of mystical religious view that he had, and it's true that he did think that. But Hegel is a contradictory philosopher, because he also brilliantly describes the nature of necessity and that necessity does not work in that kind of God-like way. So what does that mean? Well, Hegel said that the law, or the universal, the lawfulness of something, the necessity of something basically is what he means, is always a result. In other words, it doesn't produce reality, it is the result of reality playing out, or it is the way that reality has to play out. It's way that the parts, it's the way that the accidents add up in a sense, it's the overall necessity that emerges from this chaos, order emerging from chaos basically is the idea. It doesn't pre-exist anything. And this is, again, this is a fallacy in science you often find that still exists, I think, to this idea that the laws somehow have a perfect, separate objective existence outside of things, and guide things. Marx is alluding to that when he says that history doesn't exist, history is not a person apart, like a powerful person, making things happen in a certain way. Another example of it you would often get in science is in evolution, we often say, and I've heard scientists say this all the time, and they don't really mean it, but what they say is, let's talk about the organ of an animal, and they say it's designed to do something, it's designed to work in that way. Well, it's not designed, evolution isn't a force that designs things in advance of them existing, you know, that says, well, let's have an animal that has this organ to do, no, evolution is a process, and it is a necessary process, of course, it's not something that can somehow be opted out of, or not apply, but it is a process, it doesn't exist before and outside of the different living beings that it is the expression of, of their struggle to survive. Hegel put it like this, I'm going to, it's a relative, don't worry, it's a relatively straightforward quotation from Hegel, he said, the universal, or if you like the law of something, does not exist externally to the outward eye as a universal. The law of the celestial motions are not written in the sky, even common sense is, in everyday matters, is above the absurdity of setting a universal beside the particulars, with anyone who wished for fruit reject cherries, pears and grapes on the ground that they were cherries, pears or grapes and not fruits. In other words, what he's saying is there's no such thing as fruit as an object, which is obvious, right, there's only concrete fruits of different kinds, but of course, those people who talk about history in that way or in all kinds of other forces, they do often talk about them as if they are, there is a perfect form of them that sort of intervenes in events to make sure that they happen in a certain way. A way of thinking about a good example is to use, because it's very straightforward, is water, and a body of water is wet, it has the properties of liquidity, which are universal laws, we can describe those laws and understand how they work in a predictable way. But where is that wetness, where does it, does it exist somehow outside of the water and is it breathed into the water to make it behave in that way? Obviously not, it has no separate existence from the water itself and the parts that make it up. But of course, none of those parts of the water are wet, a water molecule is not in itself in any way wet, and very much just does its own thing, it's not trying to be wet, it's not being guided by some mystical force of wetness. It is just going with its own course of events, if you like, interacting with its surroundings. And it's unpredictable, you can't predict the exact movement of any molecule, it's far too complex, subject to far too many accidental forces that you just simply can't predict. So does that mean there's no such thing as wetness that we can't predict the body, the behavior of a body of water, that it doesn't have certain properties that we can identify? Of course that's not the case. So what we have is a dialectical interplay between necessity and chance at different levels basically. And Engels took this idea of Hegel up very well, and he describes in dialectics of nature an unpublished book of his, what obviously is now published and I would strongly recommend it. He talks about, in a really brilliant passage, about this kind of absolute determinism, this fatalism. And what he says about it is that it tries to force everything in existence under the category of necessity in a perfect sort of way. But in doing so, it doesn't make everything necessary, it makes everything accidental. And he gives the example of like a pee pod, he says a pee pod basically can have six peas in it, it can have five. And why does it have one and not the other in one particular case? If you wanted to, you could obviously try to find it out. And of course it is caused, right? It's not absolutely random that it's happened. There will be particular reasons for it. And he takes up therefore the question of cause and effect, which is a closely related question to what we're talking about. And we tend to think in philosophy about cause and effect as if it's a line of one cause and effect, and that causes something else. And it's just a simple line that you can understand. But of course that's not how cause and effect works at all. Everything is affected by everything else. So in actual fact, Engels points out, if you wanted to work out why, what caused this pee pod to have six peas and not five, there wouldn't be one cause to it. There'd actually be an infinity of causes. In fact, even the most bizarre unrelated things might in some way have actually given rise to that. Perhaps, you know, some war in another part of the world might have slightly warmed the temperature in that place that was just enough to cause it, you know, etc. In fact, to really trace it, you could never do it. There is infinite cause and effect behind everything. So what we actually have is universal causation at play with really any given thing. Nothing exists in isolation or just has one line behind it giving rise to it. Everything is interacting with everything else in the universe. And out of this, therefore, certain patterns do emerge, certain regular features that we can identify. But what Engels points out is that, of course, there's no question of actually tracing the chain of cause and effect in any of these cases, as he says. So he says, we end up just as wise in one as the other. And so-called necessity remains an empty phrase. And with it, chance remains what it was before. In other words, because we can't actually find, we can never get to the bottom of this chain of cause and effect. We might say that it was caused and like this is the same for everything. And like Laplace said, we can, if we understand all of these causes, we can find out everything that will ever happen exactly correctly. Of course, we never can for any, even something as incidental as the number of Ps in a pod. And therefore, we don't understand anything from this approach. No, it's just an assertion that things are caused, which of course is true, doesn't tell us anything about why things have to happen in a particular way and not another. It's just a bare assertion that things must be caused. So in other words, there are levels of causation, right? And the cause that what we really mean by necessity is not just something having a cause, but the more universal causes that operate on a broad level, the things that are generalizable, if you like. So, you know, the fact that objects fall to the ground on the planet Earth, that is obviously generalizable. It is necessary. And we can understand the reasons for it, why it applies generally. You know, the fact that earthquakes take place, there are clear laws behind that. And we can understand where they tend to take place. The fact that capitalism goes into crisis, of course, is like that as well. We can understand why that happens, Marx explained it. And, you know, we can understand roughly how often it tends to happen, for example. So, this is what we really mean by necessity, not just the most incidental level of causation imaginable. And this understanding has become increasingly important to science. So, for example, with things like chaos theory or complexity theory, which study complex systems and find, you know, the sort of predictability and patterns that emerge in these complex systems without making the parts of them determined or rather predictable. A classic example is the weather. We cannot predict what the weather will be like on this day a year from now in Britain. We simply cannot predict it. I mean, it's not even like, we have a good idea. But no, it literally could be raining or sunny, which are the, you know, extreme opposite in a sense. It could be relatively warm or relatively cold. We cannot know at all what it will be like in a year's time. It really could be any of those. It's simply too complex to be able to predict. But the point about that kind of scientific understanding, which very much closely correlates Marxist philosophy, is that even though we cannot predict these particulars, at the same time, predictability does emerge at the overall level. So, we can understand how the weather behaves and we can know that the weather in Britain has certain sort of predictable features. In other words, we know that it's not going to be like the Sahara. We might not know if it's going to be, you know, 14 degrees or 21 degrees, but it's not going to be 50 degrees Celsius and, you know, blazing sunshine. You know what I mean? So there's overall, over a period of time, actually the system obeys very predictable properties. Human society is very much like that. You cannot know if somebody will die or not. Even the healthiest person could die the following day for a completely accidental reason. But over time, a society has a very predictable level of deaths. That is something that has actually been used this year with the coronavirus pandemic to show how many people have died as a very reliable indicator. Because the excess deaths is a, you know, as a reliable, the death rate is so predictable that that tells us how many people have died as a result of the pandemic. So in other words, there is, there is a sort of constant dialectical interaction between necessity and chance. And I have, I would like to make a criticism of some Marxists, I think sometimes put this in a wrong way. So discussing the role of chance in things is possible to overemphasize that. I think that sometimes people talk about the chance that, you know, whether or not this person was involved in a political event or whether or not, you know, the weather was a certain way. It's possible to overemphasize that and make it out to be absolutely random. I think there's no such thing as absolute randomness. And if that was the case, I know I've said that things are unpredictable, completely unpredictable, whether the weather will be this way or that. But that's not quite true because it is predictable, actually. It's not going to be, like I said, it's not going to be like the Sahara. It's not going to be like the Antarctic. There's a limit, basically, to how much things deviate from the norm, to if you like how random things are, even the most incidental thing. And that applies to human society as well. And if that wasn't the case, then how would the necessity even emerge? How could we say that there was a very reliable pattern or regularity to these things? Because if all of the parts that make these things up happened in the most random way imaginable, totally unpredictable, without any sense to it at all, then of course, there would be no pattern. The point is that there's a relative degree of randomness. And the reason for that is that there is no, you know, guiding force of history, if you like, outside of us, that sort of makes a perfect revolutionary leader because history needs a revolution. History can only work through the real individuals, as Mark says. And those real individuals, of course, are going to have all kinds of features. They're going to be affected by all kinds of things. They don't have anything to do with politics, you know, could be to do with their health, it could be to do with their upbringing, all kinds of very specific details, which of course, you can't predict. And that will have an effect on history. If they come to play an important role, their individual personality, of course, will play an important role that we can't predict in advance. But the important point is these people are only so random. In other words, people do are types, if you like. Most people belonging to a certain class actually do think along the lines of that class, you know, that people do vote in certain ways, for example. And of course, they have to do so in order to survive within that class. If you were to take a political leader that played a counter revolutionary or a revolutionary role, somebody who leads a revolution or leads a counter revolution, yes, they're going to have unpredictable features. But if you look closer, first of all, a lot of those features turn out not to be as unpredictable or as meaningless as you thought. Take the case of Trump, the example I gave earlier on, and his, you know, alleged obscene acts in Moscow that allowed the Putin to have to basically blackmail him allegedly. Well, actually, if that were true, it's not even that surprising, really, for a member of the American ruling class to get up to that sort of stuff. You know, it does actually tell us something about it. In other words, people do subscribe to types, basically. People are not totally unpredictable. Of course, there are more unpredictable things than that. But still, people, you know, there is a, in other words, there's a limit to how much people deviate from the norm in most cases. Moreover, if you're going to play a role in history, if you're going to become a political leader of a revolution or a counter revolution, of course, society and the laws of society are going to demand certain things from you. And that is going to mean that you're going to have, even if you do have a very particular personality, it's going to require you to behave in a certain way because you don't exist in isolation, you exist in society. So what is this determinism then? And how does it emerge from all of these unpredictable events? We aren't economic determinists in the sense of economics is the only force in history and it's somehow outside of society or separate from the other things. All aspects of society influence everything else. And culture can influence things, you know, but it's very particular culture of a country might retard the revolution or speed one up, for example. There's, there's, you know, anything can influence anything else. However, in this kind of maelstrom of noise and chaos in society, if you like, one factor does stand out as particularly important. And that is the economic factor. It is true that economics plays a decisive role in the long run, although not the only role. How do we understand this? Well, I'd like to give a couple of relatively lengthy quotations from Engels in letters that he writes. I apologize for the length, but I think that they're important. The first one is as follows. He said, men make their history themselves, a little bit like Marx's earlier point about history doesn't exist as such as any real individuals. Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will or according to a collective plan or even in a definitely defined given society. Their efforts clash. And for that very reason, all such societies are governed by necessity, which is supplemented by and appears under the forms of accidents. The necessity which here asserts itself amid all accident is again ultimately economic necessity. The second one I'd like to give is as follows. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everybody else. And what emerges is something that no one will. But from the fact that the wills of individuals, each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external in the last resort, economic circumstances, do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, that it must not be concluded from that, that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each person contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it. So here Engels has both sides. And I'd like in particular to stress one thing, this point he makes about what they are, they are impelled to will a certain thing by their physical constitution and in economic circumstances. So yes, we are all individuals and no historical force sort of somehow forces us to behave in a certain way to make it to be a perfect revolutionary or counter revolutionary or whatever. Of course, we are individuals with our own particular desires. But actually, we are all physical beings of the same broad type, we are all human beings, in other words, we all occupy the same planet, and we have to basically survive in more or less the same way, we have to produce ourselves and reproduce ourselves, we have to, you know, exist economically, we have to consume things obviously to survive. And that forces us in the same kind of ways each other into definite economic relations with each other, as Marx explained, we cannot simply will away society, we can't just, you know, do whatever we want, we can't, oh, I fancy being a serf, or a feudal lord, so I'll just do that. Or even in this society, I fancy being a capitalist, I'll just become a capitalist. Obviously, you can't simply do that, nor can you just decide not to eat, and just somehow kind of float away into some ethereal existence. You'll just die, obviously, right? So that obliges us to enter into relations with each other, economic relations fundamentally. And of course, the given development of society, the historical development of primarily development of the means of production, that is, all of the prior acts of people throughout history to invent new things, new ways of producing things basically, that prehistory of that taking place before our existence means that the kind of society we enter into the kind of economic relations we must enter into to survive already has a definite form. And today, of course, that's capitalism, right? And we cannot escape that. So whilst, yes, we do pursue our own aims, and in the detail that is unpredictable, it's only so unpredictable, right? We are all basically forced into this system, and to sort of behave in a certain predictable way into it. And a very obvious example of the fact is that a capitalist, no matter what they think, no matter what their values are, is obliged to exploit workers. The characters cannot survive without doing that, because they will go out of business. They have to do that, even if they don't want to, even if they have the nicest, most progressive values you can imagine. So at the end of the day, this necessity is there. It appears, if you're like amidst all of these accidents, and it's important to stress, the accidents are relative accidents, right? The sort of individual personalities involved are only relatively different. Now, in terms of how this plays out in history, it's important we don't have a mechanical view that there are economic events, which are the most important ones. And then because we admit that other things can affect history, like culture, or religion, or something, that you also have these events as well, where these change history, but they're less, they're always less important than the economic events. I think that's a bit mechanical, and that's not exactly right. Although I would say that economic events, the main economic events, are the most important ones. In other words, things like economic crises under capitalism, the crises of the 70s and of 2008 completely changed the political and economic thinking of the bourgeoisie, in a way that I think had a force that it wouldn't have had if it wasn't an economic one, if you see what I mean. And that really, the major shifts in recent history I do see as being driven by economic forces, definitely. But I think it's more than that. Even the, in my opinion, even the allegedly sort of non-economic events, actually obviously still are determined economically in a certain sense. So take an example of the two, the referendums we've had in Ireland recently over abortion and same-sex marriage. These are obviously not economic things, although perhaps the crisis that Ireland endured after the 2008 crisis, the banking crisis, may have obviously in some way influenced that mood. I think it's probably very likely. But obviously in the main, those did change Irish history. They asked very significant events, but they allowed you to do with religion and the family and the ideology that surrounds that. So it's not economic. However, is it possible to imagine you would have had these referenda in Ireland 500 years ago? Would medieval Ireland have had a referendum on same-sex marriage or on the right to abortion? I mean, it's enough to ask the question to realise the absurdity of it, clearly not. The fact that people live in urban societies, they have the internet. The fact that you have emigration and immigration, people living in other societies and picking up the culture and the values of other societies. The fact that women have become more economically independent in modern Irish society thanks to economic development. All of these things obviously play a huge role as well as the fact you simply didn't have referendums in medieval Europe for obvious reasons. So even something that appears at first glance to have not really anything to do with economics, even an economic crisis in some way creating a certain mood, even ignoring that, it's still shaped by the economic foundations of society in a very profound way. So that is the kind of the determinism. That's how we understand the determinism of society, but not in a direct and a mechanical way like there's an economic God guiding with a pre-worked-out plan of history sort of making us all do things in some way. So yes, each individual has a role to play and can change history, and we cannot predict or know how that will happen. The understanding the laws of society and there are laws of society does not mean you can just fold your hands and wait for them to play out because you're part of society. Society isn't this other thing outside of all the concrete humans that make it up. It's made up of nothing but people like you, although the ability for you to influence it is obviously greatly restricted by the form of society that you live in. So when we say that socialism is necessary, and we do believe that socialism is necessary or even inevitable, how do we mean that? We mean it in this dialectical sense. It's not just a good idea that you can or cannot have at any point in history. It's a product of economic development that does tend in a certain direction and has to. The laws of history do exist indeed, and as Mark said, communism is like the riddle of history solved. In other words, what he means is that the class struggle and economic development tend to increasingly develop forms and have to do so over time and build up to a certain point that socialism is the only direction that things can go in. So the solutions to facing us, yes, we have choice, we do have political choice, but that choice is very restricted. So in facing the crisis of capitalism, the choice is essentially socialism or barbarism. Socialism is the alternative, right? We can't look at the crisis of capitalism and say, oh, let's go back and live in primitive communism. Let's live in a very small scale production, and let's just choose to do that and just somehow make it happen. No, that isn't possible. That literally is not possible. The only alternative to socialism of capitalism is not to be changed into socialism is ultimately barbarism. In other words, it's things like nuclear war, and these things are possible, ultimately, so environmental catastrophe and of course, brutal and vicious counter revolutions like we saw with the Nazis. That is definitely possible. We don't think that it's 100% guaranteed that socialism will come about. What we mean is that it isn't the necessary next step in social development. Social development is not arbitrary. That is what we mean. Socialism is not inevitable in the Laplacian sense, i.e. we've foreseen every single cause, and we've understood perfectly the economic laws with such fine detail. We've understood how every factory is going to operate, what exactly when every crisis of overproduction will take place, and exactly how this will affect the consciousness of every single individual, such that we know that socialism is coming about and at this time. It does not mean that. What it means is that socialism is not just a nice idea. It is the next step that capitalist society has laid the basis for, but nobody will do it for us. There isn't a god of history that will make this come about. It's real concrete individuals that have to consciously fight for it, that have to take that decision to fight for socialism, and have the freedom to do so. But that freedom is dependent upon the material conditions and understanding those conditions that capitalism has laid for us. And I'll finish that.