How do Marxists view history?

[APPLAUSE] So yeah, I'm excited to give this talk, because I've always felt that historical materialism is like the beating heart of Marxism, because it is the most clear application of the dialectical philosophy. And I would say in turn that it also provides the theoretical groundwork for understanding Marxist economics as well. But I really do think that the name historical materialism doesn't really quite do it justice, because it isn't just about history really. You know, not only in the sense that history shapes the world around us, or that those who fail to learn from history will be doomed to repeat it. These are all quite, you know, fairly commonplace cliches, although they are true. But I think what's important to remember is that the same method is required of us to make sense of the present as it is of the past. I'd like to ask you a question. What is the difference between what we might call perspectives or, you know, analysis and historical materialism? What is the difference between our perspectives documents to be, for example, that we discuss in debate at Congress? And classic works of Marxism, like the class rules in France, the 18th Brumaire, or something like, you know, Trotsky's Revolution betrayed. They're the same thing. You know, Marx wasn't sat down thinking, OK, I'm going to write a history book right now, because he was analyzing the present conditions of his time. So yeah, perspectives are essentially just historical materialism applied to the present. Now, I've never seen this term used, but I think you could, with equal justification, call it something like sociological materialism. Although the word sociology gives me, like, war flashbacks to being at university, studying like Hawkeimer and Adorno and people like that. Speaking of academia, actually, there are many myths and distortions about historical materialism. Many of them are just simply accepted as truisms, basically. They aren't even questioned whatsoever. Things like, you know, Marxism is economically determinist. It leaves no room for individuals. It's rigid and teleological. It's Eurocentric and even Messianic as well, right? It kind of draws upon like a Christian kind of millenarianism or something like that. And I want to, you know, mainly focus on rebooting these critiques. Not going to give a potted history of the entirety of human civilization, because that would be impossible. Maybe it would last about three hours or something like that. And if you want to have that, you can read What is Marxism, which was one of the recommended readings for this talk. Chapter 2 has an excellent overview of the sort of main processes of human history. So yeah, hopefully I can get my well-read commission now. (laughs) But yeah, first of all, I think it's important to kind of put Marxism into its context to see the historical development of ideas about history and where Marxism kind of fits into that. So I'm gonna give a bit of like a history of history essentially. So, you know, in the history of philosophy, you do see this kind of like centuries old millennium old, actually, battle between two main trends of idealism and materialism. And I think in historical thought, you also see a similar kind of battle between two distinct trends. I think you can group them into one side, which is very deterministic, we call it determinism, and the other side which emphasizes free will and the kind of free action of individuals. And I think this fundamental question really kind of drives the history of ideas about history. If this fundamental question that keeps expressing itself in different ways in different historical periods. But me, first of all, to have a sense of history is a given for us, right? But in reality, having a sense of history itself is a historically cultivated thing. I mean, think about it. What uses something like a calendar to a hunter-gatherer who, you know, does the same thing pretty much within a given time span? What meaning does the word epoch have to a tribe's man whose way of life has been the same for centuries? So yeah, the first historical theories are like an event basically, right? They emerge with the rise of class societies themselves around about 10 to 12,000 years ago. And I think what's remarkable when you step back and look at the big picture of human history, the scope of human history is how slowly it develops actually, generally speaking. And the flip side for that is how exponentially it develops once you actually get to the modern kind of capitalistic era and modern societies. But yes, the early civilizations, I think, can be described as having what Marxists often call an asiatic mode of production or asiatic despotism or something like that. This applies to civilizations like Mesopotamia, like India, China, Egypt, and so on, also various societies in the Americas as well, which, I'm pointing it down a lot here, but it essentially revolves around communal village units with a large kind of central state bureaucracy doing things like extracting taxes, overseeing infrastructure projects like irrigation, for example, and sometimes enforcing labor as well. And the point is that these societies developed extremely slowly, there was an incredible amount of social stability, despite the fact that there was, for example, wars, invasions, dynastic struggles. The point is that economic and social life was typically the same from one generation to the next. And therefore, within these societies, their ideas about the general laws that govern them really emphasize the unchanging nature of things. And despite how much change you might see on the surface, deep down things remain the same. So you have Eastern philosophies, for example, like Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism as well, really emphasize this concept of, I think it's called samsara or like karmic cycles, right? This idea of the eternal recurrence of birth, death, and rebirth. It's often depicted in art as like this wheel, this wheel of history. It's very fatalistic. This idea that you can't really change anything. I think it's also actually, on the flip side, an example of quite primitive dialectics, this idea of constant rebirth. But anyway, you also see this in the Old Testament as well, in the book of Ecclesiastes, there's a quote, which I'm sure people have heard. What has been will be again, what has been done, will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun. That comes from the Bible. And actually in complete isolation from the Old World, in the Americas, you also have the Mayan civilization as well, which has exactly pretty much the same theory of like cyclical development, essentially. And ancient Greece starts out much the same. The idea of the three fates or destiny, they become, you know, major themes in Greek kind of philosophy and also in Greek tragedy as well. But I think ancient Greece is where you see the birth of a struggle really for a science history. And why is that? I think you've got to look at the productive forces, right? You've got to look at the fact that there was the discovery of, you know, iron implements, which raised the productivity of agriculture, which freed up a section of society, yeah, to pursue, you know, to become the governing kind of political elite and pursue things like science in the arts and so on. And yeah, you have the possibility really for a new type of society. And one that was based upon that on slave production. And with that, you see the rise of trade and money and the dissolution of the old kind of tribal communal life. And alongside that, therefore, it's a period of rapid political transitions. You see in Athens and other places, the democratic revolutions, aristocratic counter revolutions, demagogues, all of this sort of stuff. And I would say that in general, actually, periods of social appeal and political turmoil, they do stimulate and enrich the study of history. And in fact, all of the sciences, I would say, for that matter. So yeah, you see an explosion of theories, really. You see the first classifications of the different stages of history. Very interesting, actually, Hesseyard, who was writing, like, way a long time ago, he actually looks at the development of the productive forces, right? He looks at that. He separates the Iron Age from the copper ages, he understood it, of previous societies. Then you know, other people as well, like Anaxagoras, who says that reason governs the world and that therefore reasoned individuals can change it. So you know, you're already seeing this kind of determinism in this free will kind of beginning to split us under. And you have a very interesting idea from Aristotle as well. He says that, yeah, there are cycles, there are patterns in other words, there is lawfulness, but history isn't eternal, eternally repetitious. And therefore it's not fatalistic. It can't be absolutely foreseen and therefore we need to study it concretely. And I would say as well, this was the view that prevailed in Roman society as well. You had the the analytic tradition, people who just basically collected facts, recorded events year by year. And you also saw history being used for kind of subjective moral lessons as well. And also for propaganda purposes, you know, Caesar, a right thing about the Gallic Wars. And this is where you also see the great man theory of history first beginning to emerge as well. And interestingly, Hegel kind of encapsulates the Roman society by saying that subjectivity and individualism was the essence of Rome. I think this was based actually upon the most complete development of private property at the time. By moving on, the collapse of Roman civilization really plunged Europe into the dark ages. There's this centuries of like barbarism and warlordism which tore society apart. And out of this you sort of had a slow emergence of feudal relations as we heard about in one of the previous sessions. And I'll get onto this a bit more later as well. But the point is that alongside this retrogression of society, you also see a retrogression towards fatalism once again, that kind of primitiveistic kind of view of the world. Even the wheel of fortune actually reappears in feudal artwork spun by a blindfolded lady fortune upon which the fate of society rests. It was actually the artwork on the website for this talk. I think it's really interesting. But I think it also corresponds to the very rigid stasis of feudal society. Again, you know, nothing really much changes. There's no great revolutions in production like that will happen in the capitalism. And therefore, yeah, this idea of the submission of the blind fate, I think really is a sign of kind of, yeah, social backwardness basically. Now, of course, there was some progress in the Middle Ages, but very little. In reality, I would say intellectual advancement passed to the Islamic world, which unfortunately I can't really spend a lot of time on. But you know, a lot of like the Arab scholars, people like Ibn Kaldun, they preserved a lot of the, and developed a lot of the ideas of the ancient Greeks. And Ibn Kaldun in particular came to some very advanced and materialistic conclusions around ideas of like the lair of theory of value and stuff like that. But having got time to talk about that, unfortunately, everyone who got 45 minutes to play with. With the birth of bourgeois society then, you see, and the period of the bourgeois revolutions in particular, you see a similar explosion of social theories like you saw in Ancient Greece. Because you have this rising class who want to understand the world, they want to understand society and fight for their own interests. I think the development of bourgeois ideas around history is outlined very well by the Russian Marxist, Gogi Plecanov, in his book The Development of the Monastery of History, which I highly recommend. Unfortunately, I think it's out of print, but it is available online. So yeah, the height of this really was the French Enlightenment. These thinkers were basing themselves upon the empiricism and the scientific method of English thinkers like John Locke, for example. You had some great materialist thinkers like the Holbach, Helvetius, Russo, Diderot, all of these types of people. In this period, the struggle between free will and determinism, I would say deepened it, sharpened it, clarified, they posed the question, are men in their opinions produced by their social environment, or is the social environment produced by men in their ideas? In Marxist terms, you could pose the question as, you know, does being determined social consciousness or does consciousness determine being? So the French materialists, they started with a very materialistic foundation. They have this idea that man is, in fact, shaped by his environment, geography, economics, political institutions, all this sort of thing, it was quite loose in a lot of ways, but they immediately got caught in a chicken and egg scenario, right? Because then they got to ask the question, well, what shapes the environment? What shapes have social environment? Now, they understood that men and ideas on one side and the environment, they do, of course, interact with each other, but one of them has to be the kind of the prime mover, right? It has to be the primary one, I can't just be caught in this kind of eternal chicken and egg scenario. So yeah, they understood that they're too interact with each other, but they couldn't really uncover what actually drove those two interacting forces, basically. Being men of enlightenment, however, they eventually kind of settled in general on the idea of the spread of enlightenment, being the kind of main force of history, the main lever of historical development. And therefore, they thought that reason, in the form of enlightened individuals, like themselves, could produce rational government and justice and liberty and so on. So ironically, starting out from, you know, very materialistic assumptions, they actually ended up with a very idealistic conclusion in favor of this kind of unrestrained free will of rational individuals. Nonetheless, these new ideas were a big step forward, I would say. They were a weapon of battering ram against the stale kind of fatalistic dogma of the Catholic church and the kind of reactionary classes. This was a very rationalistic philosophy. It was imbued with the spirit of optimism, and it also formed the ideological basis, by the way, of the French Revolution and of the revolutionary Jacobins within that. And the French Revolution itself was a massive impetus for the study of history. It plunged Europe into a struggle of classes and factions. You had the red terror, the white terror, and the revolutionary wars. But by 1804, Napoleon was crowned emperor, and once again, in 1815, you have the old monarchy restored. And it seems like things are basically back to the start, like the revolution was just a waste of time almost. And this was a bit of a blow, actually, to the French materialist view that men and reason could shape history. So the pendulum kind of swings back towards determinism. You have utopian socialists beginning to emerge as well, people like Sansimon, who I think very aptly describes politics as being the science of production, which I think is quite a profound insight. But then you also have the historians of the French Restoration, who really begin renewing their study of how the social environment shapes men and their actions. And they come to some extremely advanced conclusions, I would say. There's that guy Gizo, who's mentioned in the Communist Manifesto. I think he's like a French statesman, but he was also an historian as well. And he actually posits that political institutions are rooted in social relations, which are themselves rooted in actually property relations. He's actually one of the first historians to truly uncover that the English Civil War wasn't just a struggle between different religious factions, but it was actually a deeper cluster of struggle between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. I think Marx writes quite an interesting kind of article in reply to Gizo's essay. And but again, these historians, they find a stumbling block. They can't really answer what shaped property relations. They're completely unable to answer it. And in fact, Gizo just misively pins it on this idea of an eternal, unchanging human nature. Now, skipping over to Germany, Gizo's contemporary, a Hegel, he scoffs at this idea of human nature. He ridicules it. Because he understands he's beginning to observe that human nature has constantly changed with each stage of social development. He says that human nature is itself a product of historical development, driven by something else outside of it, and this is a big step forward, I would say. Unfortunately, however, as we might know, Hegel's reply was just pure mysticism, right? This idea of the absolute spirit, the absolute idea. Engels wants to remark that it's absolutely a set in the sense that it means absolutely nothing, right? It's just a kind of a personification of thought or God, whoever you want to ask. It's this very kind of mystical notion. And in reality, because of that, actually, Hegel often lapses into some more materialistic kind of interpretations of things, talking about things like the state of political economy, civil society, but in a bit of a confused kind of half-hearted way. So now, finally, after about a few thousand years of human history, we get to Marx. Marx belonged to the young Hegelians who tried to rebel against the weak sides of Hegel's system, and they really focused their attacks on this idea of the absolute spirit. Now, Marx's contemporaries, they all try and fail to do this, right? They have this guy called Bauer, who tries to replace the absolute idea with the independent conscious activity of man. He says that history is driven by reason, which is eternally changing, but he can't really answer the question of why reason eternally changes. He says that essentially reason is just self-moving. So he's basically lapsing back into that idealism, but worse, I think it represents actually a step backwards for the subjectivism of the enlightenment, because the masses are otherwise just less passive, while these critical thinkers at the top can shape society above their heads. Now, for a back, meanwhile, he understands that we need to root the development of ideas in human relations, in real relations between people, but he ends up once again attributing this unchanging nature to human nature, right? He just says humans are driven towards things like love and willpower and reason and so on. So the point is that up until Marx, everyone had been banging their heads against the wall, historians and philosophers were just chasing their own tail. They were asking, do people shape society, do society shape people, and so on? And Hegel, and Gizo, and the Utopian socialists, they reached some extremely advanced conclusions. They basically boil it down to the fact that economics, property, and civil society shape man's relations, but in the end, they always laps back into idealistic notions of reason or human nature driving those things. So Marx's discovery, then, is nothing short of a Copernican revolution, essentially. Copernicus being the guy who worked out that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of vice versa. And Marx essentially put an end to this centuries of back-and-forth discussion. So what is Marx's main discovery, then? Some will say things like, you know, the history of all the two existing societies is a history of class struggle. And that's partly true, I would say, but Gizo had already kind of said that, and even actually some Greek and Roman historians, like Aristotle and Lucretius also kind of understood that as well. No, Marx's Copernican revolution, I think, lay in something deeper, uncovering what shapes the social classes, what produces property relations upon which they rest, and what gives right to the economic laws which govern the relation of the classes. Now, the answer, I think, is surprisingly simple. You can simmer up in it in a single word, because they want to take a guess, I like a bit of audience participation. I don't want to guess. Dialectics. Party about everything's dialectics. Everything's also materialistic as well. Last guess? Labor. Exactly. Labor. That is the precise answer. Labor is the engine of history. I think perhaps the reason why this was so elusive to the other people is because of their social position. Many of them were aristocrats, they were bourgeois, and they saw labor as dirty as beneath them, essentially. Whereas Marx, he was becoming in the 1840s, a partisan of this new class that had been born, this modern industrial proletariat. So yeah, what do we mean when we say that labor is the engine of history? Well, I would say the evolution of the human species, just like any other species for that matter, is based upon the struggle for survival, you know, as Darwin said, to produce the necessities of life, to survive, and to reproduce. And while Marx wasn't influenced by Darwin until a bit later on in the late 1850s, you can really see how his method overlaps with Darwin's theory of evolution. Because they're both based upon the scientific methods, there's no coincidence. And yes, labor is the decisive thing which separates man from the animal kingdom and raises the evolution of our species from a biological level to a cultural level to a question of production. Because yes, our development is intimately tied up with our ability to interact with our external environment and to change it to meet our own needs. I think Benjamin Franklin, I think, once kind of summed it up by saying that man is a tool-making animal. And on my question about tools, Engels is not a tool, but Engels wrote a very interesting pamphlet. He's part of a tool. You wrote a very interesting pamphlet called "The Part Plays". by labor in the transition from ape to man. It's very small and it's very interesting. And it actually predates a lot of more recent anthropological discoveries and so on. And here I hypothesize is how it was actually tool-making, right? Our ability to stand upright, freeing up the hands, being able to grasp things and manipulate them. It was our tool-making and also our collaborative labor, which actually stimulated our ability to make abstractions and to communicate complex ideas. In other words, before we can think and talk, we need to have something worth thinking and talking about. So yeah, if it's labor, that separates us from the animal kingdom in the first place. It's our species being as I think Marx describes it as. And what's more, our labor as humans is inherently social. And despite what people like John Hobbes, for example, might say, primitive man was not this solitary creature just kind of like battling against the nature, just like in a forest somewhere by himself or something like that, right? We labor collectively, early humans formed cooperative societies, communal societies, essentially, of hunter-gatherers and eventually started to form groups based around the types of labor that they were doing, you know, kind of divisions of labor which evolved eventually into classes. And so it naturally follows that the way that things are produced and how much is produced has a direct bearing on our social relations. And this applies all the way down to hunter-gatherer societies all the way up to capitalism and even beyond to socialism and communism. Now, I'm trying not to quote too much in this lead off, but I'm always surprised by how aptly and how concisely Marx is able to describe this entire, you know, thesis basically in his, I think it's for the contribution to a critique of political economy. No, the preface to a contribution to a critique of political economy, that title would never make it onto communist.reds. He says that in the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production, appropriate to a given stage in their development of their productive forces of production. That's right, in the material forces of production. This is why I never re-quote it. It always gets me tongue twisted. The totality of these relations of production constitute the economic structure of society, the real foundation upon which a right is a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence, which determines their consciousness. Now, I think that last part, by the way, is so profound, because it applies not just to, you know, social classes in general, but I think also even to other aspects of social life as well. For example, like which profession you have, if you ever noticed town like lawyers, right, like say like Kia Stammer, for example, kind of have this kind of faith in the ability of the state, you know, has this magic powers to kind of resolve conflict. Well, that's because they're sort of part in the social life of humanity relates to the state, right? That's the main kind of contact with the social life of humanity. And similarly, right, academics, right, they often think that ideas have the ability to kind of shape society and so on. Anyway, Marx's discovery, I would say, resolves or rather synthesizes that age, old debate of ideas versus conditions of free will versus determinism. And for that matter, in passing, it also actually resolves the debate between idealism and materialism as well. He's saying that yes, we shape our social environment, but crucially, by transforming the world around us, we also transform ourselves and our ideas. That is the crux of Marxist materialism, which you can read more about in Marx's very short feces on FOIA back. And on that question of free will and determinism, let's look at that for a second. People act freely in their day-to-day lives. In the production of their material existence, they make their choices freely, they freely interact, they have their own aims, their own aspirations, their own thoughts. Every day life is made of countless free decisions and interactions, many of them often clash with each other. But from this chaos of individuals and accidental choices, their arises a certain order, right? An objective logic, laws of history, laws of economics, whether that's market relations, feudal basil age or slavery, it doesn't really matter. These relations of production exist independently of our will, kind of acting behind our backs. We even often attribute to them like an independent existence, right? We give things names like inflation and recession and unemployment and so on, supply and demand, as if that isn't just an abstraction of real social behavior essentially. And what you see is that the will of one class in society will clash with the will of another. And therefore you have new contradictions that emerge, right? A state is required to regulate that class struggle and prevent society from imploding. But the state then often clashes itself with the interests of society, producing further struggles within the state over its structure and its composition and its constitution and so on. And each attempt to resolve one of these contradictions gets a new one. In our social evolution, there's therefore this tendency towards greater and greater complexity, just like how there is in biological evolution, in fact. And as technology and methods of production develop, the social weight of particular classes will shift. The old institutions and ideas will fall out of step with an ever changing reality and they must be reformed or overthrown. Now that might all sound quite fatalistic the way that I've just said that. But freedom isn't destroyed, Mark says. It re-emerges on a higher level because through deeper insight into the logic of history, through studying the laws of history essentially, people can intervene in the process of history as conscious participants, as part of the progressive class that can take society into its new phase of development. And he draws upon this idea that, I think it haggily initially said, that freedom lies not in sort of dreamt of freedom from the laws of history, not in running away from the laws of history. Nor does it existently in the enlightened visions of critical thinkers, but it lies in understanding the laws of history and making them work towards our own ends. Now people reproach Mark's for sort of reducing everything down to economics. But I would say that he does nothing of the sort. Mark simply kind of cut the Gordian knot, which had been tying up philosophers and historians for centuries. And I would say that those who ignore Mark's epoch making discoveries are like those who ignore Copernicus or ignore Darwin. They'll find themselves in the same company as creationists and people who think the Sun revolves around the Earth and so on. And to this day, the same debate, which Mark has already resolved, rages between these components of free will and determinism. On the one hand, you have these books like Guns, Germs and Steel or Prisoners of Geography, right? This kind of WH Smith's slop that you find in airports, right? They argue that history is mechanically determined by biology or geography or technological factors and so on. On the other hand, however, you have people who emphasize free will and randomness and accident. You have this guy Yuval Noah Harari who writes in Sapiens that we can't really make any predictions about the future because human behavior is simply too complex to be truly lawful. Ironically, he is actually known to advise politicians and business leaders, to which I would say how can you give advice when you can't predict anything? And then you have people like David Graber who argues in the dawn of everything that experimentation and play are at the center of human development. This is a real person that thinks that plays at the center of human development. He says that societies are basically free to develop however they like and if one tribe develops differently from another, one society different from another, that's just because that's how they chose to do it basically. They thought it was a good idea. And then you have people like Jason Hickl for example who thinks that capitalism developed because one day basically in the 1600s or something, we just decided to develop a growthist philosophy which plays humans above nature is very postmodern kind of ideas. And both Graber and Hickl I would say are powerless to explain why certain ideas take root when they do and not other points in history. By fighting against economic determinism you could say, they actually end up with pure ideological determinism. And this is really the swamp of social theory that exists outside of Marxism. It really can teach us nothing whatsoever. So I want to go on with some of those myths quite quickly now before we wrap up. Who has heard this following kind of myth of Marxism? Marxism reduces everything down to economics and it leaves no room for ideas and individuals. Everyone's heard that, yeah of course we've all heard that. Again it's asserted almost as a truism in university politics and sociology courses. Now it is true that Marx uses this analogy of the base determining the superstructure. Right? It's a very loose analogy and some very mechanical Marxists, you know the likes of you know Stalinists and the mention of X back then as well maybe have seized upon this simple analogy and ran with it. And yeah in their hands, historical materialism does become a bit of a rigid dogma. And in fact even in Marx and Engels's day people misunderstood historical materialism. Engels wrote a very interesting letter to a guy called Joseph Block later on in his life. And he said that everything could be reduced down to economics. Human history would be as simple as solving an equation. Marx and I however had to emphasize the economic element at first and this led to a certain over exaggeration amongst that followers. And I believe it was Hegel who said that any philosophy really can be reduced down to an empty formalism if you just confine yourself to a simple repetition of its fundamental principles. And that's exactly what we have here. Now there is a temptingly simple way to resolve this right you can say yeah economics determines the superstructure but also the superstructure determines economics as well. And of course that is It's true, but it's true and embarrassing. simplistic sense. If it's a simple, just two-way interaction, you kind of just open back up that whole debate that was had between the, you know, all the different bourgeois historians about, you know, opinion versus social environment and so on and so on. And you leave yourself open to all sorts of kind of petty bourgeois reclecticism, right? The idea that, oh, you know, economics is really important, class is important, but, you know, X, Y and Z are also important as well. And we have to say very openly, I think, in response to this, that we are economic determinists, right? We do think that the way that we produce things and the classes that form upon various modes of production, this all has a fundamental bearing on the development of politics and ideas and culture and so on. Now, I always like to think of the word "determine" in terms of etymology. Sometimes etymology can actually reveal the meaning behind certain words, and I'm pretty sure that "determine" kind of literally means like to set a limit upon something, right? And what I mean by that is like, you know, what we're saying is that a society of hunter gatherers is never going to produce the works of Shakespeare, nor will a slave society produce an iPhone, although I'm sure that Apple employee many slaves to produce the iPhone, or to put it another way, right? You know, Marx uses the base in superstructure analogy, right? That's drawn from architecture, right? The foundation of a building and then the structure of a building, and so on. Let's run with that. Think about it. On a bed of reads and clay, you can build many different types of structure, right? You can build a, you know, many different types of hut, for example. On a foundation of earth and stone, you can build everything from a path and on to a pagoda, or even a modern semi-detached house or something like that. But to build a skyscraper, right, a modern high-rise building, you need concrete and steel. The base doesn't determine exactly every aspect of the structure, but it strictly delimits what can and cannot be. And besides, actually, beyond the foundation, there are many other aspects of architecture and engineering, which play a quite a vital role, things like, you know, materials, archwaves, reinforcements, prefabrication, which you could say are analogous in this very extended metaphor to things like politics and law and culture and religion. The point is that Marxism isn't the science of tracing everything back to economics. Marxism is the science of uncovering the inner laws of every aspect of society and how they connect together to form a totality, a social totality. Economic relations just happen to be the most predominant amongst those, because they are foundational to our entire existence, the way we produce things, the way we eat, shelter ourselves, and so on. Ideas do, of course, have their own logic of development, right? Things like art and culture and law and political ideology, they all have their own content, right? They all have their own inner laws and their material that needs to be developed, right? And therefore, they have their own relatively independent development as well. For example, like the development of new genres of music doesn't, uh, isn't determined by like stock market fluctuations or something like that. But development does take place in the heads of real people with real material relations and therefore there is always going to be an interconnection between ideas and material relations, no matter how remote and indirect and contradictory they are. For example, taking that music analogy, right? You can't just mechanically say that certain musical movements, you know, come from the economy, but you can definitely say that the rise of rock music can definitely be traced back to the general social milieu of the post-war upswing, right? You had, you know, a massive explosion of, you know, population, you know, the baby boomers, for example, a lot of young people getting college education for the first time in a widespread way, have a lot of disposable income because of the share of wealth going towards the working class and the middle class and so on. And he also had the availability of mass produced instruments as a result of the spread of industry and so on. That's just one example. But yeah, a class overseeing a system in decline on the other hand will see a corresponding, I think, reflection in its ideas. The capitalist class today are overcome with pessimism and stupidity and moral degeneracy. A class based upon a dying mode of production will do everything wrong in other words. It will be powerless to prevent the sort of slow collapse of its system. And conversely, a class that's advancing forward, which is able to develop the productive forces and lead society further, it will, in the long run, produce great intellect and be imbued with a sense of optimism for the future and a sense of vitality. It will swim with the tide of history. But the progressive class can't just sit around and wait for history to kind of push it forward. This is another point. If social relations and political institutions just passively and mechanically reflected changes in the economy or changes in the productive forces, think about it. There'd be no need for revolutions whatsoever. In fact, there'd be no need for any sort of political action whatsoever. History would just be automatic. We could all just go home, basically. This is another key point. History isn't just some mysterious kind of impersonal force, just like standing above society and kind of pushing these pieces wherever it will. History is people, right? History is real people with their thoughts and aspirations and their material interests. And the struggle to become conscious of those material interests, to generalize them into a theory and to win over the rest of society to a certain political program, that is a crucial part of the historical process. And Mark understands this quite early on, I think, in his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right. I'm going to paraphrase here. He says that no class can play a revolutionary role unless it calls forth infusiasm within its own ranks and those of the masses without fraternising and mingling with society without becoming recognised as its universal representatives, its social head and its social heart. And for Marxists, right, every political struggle is that root of class struggle, but at the same time every class struggle must rise to the level of a political struggle, a generalized struggle for state power. Because the group profiting from the old order, in our case the capitalists, will defend it with every means at their disposal, they'll use their institutions to spread propaganda, they'll use their armed forces to crush revolt. Whereas the progressive class, I think the oppressed class, the exploited class, realises its interests very slowly and empirically. Some people will prefer one set of reforms, some people will prefer another set of reforms. And then through a series of defeats and setbacks, a farcised minority will realise the need for a thorough going revolution. And different wings of a class will therefore form different parties and those parties will have different programmes and those programmes will be represented by individual leaders in some cases. I think that also explains the regular appearance of great figures in history, right? The likes of your cromwells and your robes peers or your lenons and your trotskies. It may appear on the surface that these eminent figures, these great men of history, shape things. But no matter how great a stamp that they leave, and in some cases that stamp is decisive, they are merely embodiments of a drawn out social underlying social process. There are periods of history, those decades where nothing happens, when even the most strong-willed individuals and the best organised parties aren't going to change a single thing. But in periods of intense social struggle, when the contending classes are at log-aheads, those factors of history, which usually account for very little, can actually become decisive for things like parties and programmes and people, and even like mass psychology, for example. In the long run, of course, material and economic relations, they are decisive, but revolutions, by definition, happen in the short run. And this is something that Engels, I think, understood as well. He said in his introduction to Marx's class rules in France, and again, I'm paraphrasing here, it will never be possible to go back to the ultimate economic causes. For this reason, it's necessary, when analysing revolutions, to treat economics, the most decisive factor, as constant for the whole period. And Trotsky returns to this idea, this very profound idea, in his introduction to the history of the Russian Revolution, which I would say is one of the best books ever written, by the way. I'd recommend it to anyone, regardless of where you are in your Marxist education. He says that changes in the economic base and class relations are not sufficient to explain the course of the revolution itself. The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by the swift, intense, passionate changes in the psychology of classes, which have already formed themselves before the revolution. And what an interesting paradox that is, what an interesting dialectical contradiction that is, that the doctrine which places the highest emphasis on the economic element recognises as well the paramount importance of ideas which play a decisive role. Is that a surprise? I mean, unlike anyone else, we Marxist actually understand how one of them concretely linked to the other, whereas everyone else is blind to that fact. Just how in history we reject any division between body and soul, or mind and matter, we also reject the idea of a rigid separation between the economic and the ideological, they're made of the same substance of man's real social practical activity, and it's only when economic development is united with a clear political and ideological struggle can real progress be unleashed. And for us today, that means building a vanguard party to advance the interests of the working class in a most resolute and thorough going way. Now another one, who has heard Marxism is teleological. It believes in an inevitable linear progression from one stage to another, primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and so on and so on. Who's heard that? Everyone's heard that, of course we have. And again, it's accepted as a truism. And once again, it's repeated actually by the formalists who masquerade as Marxists, the Mensheviks and the Stalinists and so on. In reality, this is a lifeless caricature of Marxism. This is a very general outline, I would say, of historical progression which is based upon the experience of Western Europe, and it is broadly correct and useful, I would say. And that's where there are stages of history, phases where certain modes of production predominate over others. And these phases stand at varying levels of development, meaning that there is progress actually. And I want to return to the idea of progress in my summer if I unfortunately had to cut it out for the lead off. But yeah, we do say that some societies are therefore more advanced and some are actually backward. That's not a moral thing. It's just an objective statement, an observation of the level of the productive forces. The best progress for Marxist is quite a simple thing. It means to develop the productive forces, to expand the capacities of our species, to increase our mastery of nature, and to stretch our intellectual horizons. Progress really is the sum total of all of these things. And without this very objective measure, you do become lost, I think, in a swamp of just subjective moralism. But to think that all of history follows the same pattern as Western Europe would be woefully simplistic, of course. If we like believing that all species are just kind of like evolving towards humans, simply because humans are the most advanced species. But biology shows us that there are plenty of species that do get stuck at a low level of development, hence the prevalence of germs and invertebrates and so on. And many go extinct altogether, of course. It's the same in human history, right? There are many societies that barely made it past the stage of hunting and gathering. Others reached a certain level of civilization, but went no further and collapsed under the weight of more developed civilizations. For example, the Greeks and the Romans, they considered Egypt to be the birthplace of civilization, but that didn't stop them from utilising the sort of decline of Egyptian society, and just swooping in and invading and colonising it eventually. And another thing as well, some modes of production are simply dead ends, they don't progress any further. I'll give two examples if I have time. Maybe I'll give one example since I'm running out of time, actually. I was going to talk about nomadic pastoralism and the Mongol Empire, but you'll have to talk to me about that afterwards. So yeah, the asiatic mode of production then was a dead end, right? Marx didn't really talk about it that much because it really had no future. It lasted for millennia in places like India and China and the Americas, and it had great technological discoveries. They had astronomy, art, science, all of these types of things, mathematics. But ultimately, they did dissolve and disintegrate upon the first contact with the European capital as powers. Nor is progress really a progress to a higher form of society, always inevitable. Look at the collapse of Rome, for example, right? It plunged Europe into the dark ages, centuries of barbarism. The written word died out in Britain for a century, via ducs, collapsed, and so on. Rome stood at the pinnacle of civilisation at the time, but no class could save it from the pent up contradictions of the slave economy. The slaves and the Spartacists, they tried in this field, and you did also have elements of feudal relations, like tenant farming, you even had a sort of capitalistic elements within Roman society as well, things like money and trade and large-scale manufacture. But the point was that history couldn't find a real flesh and blood social group to carry society forward, and therefore Rome collapsed. And this is a warning, actually, because it shows that history knows retrogression as well as progress. This is what Rosa Luxembourg was talking about when she said that our choice is one of socialism or barbarism. Except the barbarism today would be one of chemical weapons and nuclear warheads. Another difference, actually, is that the impasse of Rome in many respects was an objective thing, whereas our impasse today is a subjective one. It's the lack of a working class leadership. Now, I'm getting to the end of my talk now. One more thing on this question of teleology, though. The progress from one historical stage to the next doesn't take place in isolation either, no one like this kind of simplistic linear way. One of the richest concepts I would say within historical materialism, one that was developed most of all by Leon Trotsky, I would say, is this idea of uneven and combined development. That nations and states don't evolve in isolation, they face each other on a world stage. And they are forced to adapt to one another or perish. And in some cases, you actually see states consciously adopting new modes of production and implementing the latest advancements of rival societies. That's what the feudal regime, essentially, places like Germany and Japan did in the 19th century. They essentially leapfrogged over the US and Britain in the process. And the same thing can happen in reverse as well, right? The most advanced modes of production can actually integrate and revive more primitive modes of production as well. Resulting in some quite anachronistic scenarios, like, for example, Britain, the most advanced capitalist power, reviving chattelslavery in North America, something which died out, really, with the collapse of Roman Greece. And similarly, in the colonial world as well, the various capitalist powers often rested upon any feudal relations, locking in that backwardness that they themselves had only fought against, back at home, only generations prior. History knows all sorts of hybrids and peculiarities. Trotsky once observed that, in Tsarist Russia, for example, you have four different modes of production, existing side by side with one another, producing a very contradictory classical situation and a very contradictory class struggle as well. Now, this might seem like a very scholastic kind of discussion, but I would say that it has a real direct bearing on questions of perspectives and program and tactics, because if we think, if we base ourselves on the perspective that every society must strictly follow the template of Western Europe, then you might draw the conclusion that these countries therefore require a period of gradual capitalist development led by the bourgeoisie as what happened in Western Europe. And then you would draw from that conclusion that the workers and the oppressed masses should therefore submit themselves to the bourgeoisie and its political parties. And that is exactly what the Mensheviks and the Stalinists thought in regard to Russia on one hand, but also to the colonial world as well. And the national liberation struggles that took place in the 20th century, and it had disastrous consequences. If you want to learn more about that, there will be a session tomorrow on Lenin and Trotsky what they really stood for. The point that I want to make is that Marxism is alien to all worship of historical formulas and schemas. History will always rebel against any attempt at lazy categorizations and lazy kind of like, yeah, reducing things down to forms. For us, as Lenin said, the truth is always concrete. And as Goethe said as well, all theory is gray, but the tree of life is ever green. So yeah, to conclude, I want to talk about one last thing, which is that some people reproach us with the notion that communism is the end of history. They say that Marxism is Messianic, that it's no different from the millenarian Christian sects who believe in a final bay of judgment or something like that. And we scoff at this idea, I would say. We say that communism is really the beginning of history. It is merely the end of man's slay-bish and shameful prehistory, the end of 99% of humanity being barred from the gates of culture and science and politics. Now earlier on, I said that labor is the engine of history, that a struggle to gain mastery over nature is the driving force of social development. And the communism, I would say, this struggle will only accelerate and reach new levels. I mean, firstly, we need to deal with the content with the existential question of the climate breakdown, right, things like droughts and famines and pandemics. But alongside that, new questions will arise as well. Things like gene editing, even weather manipulation, even far-reaching things like space travel or something like that, artificial intelligence, even the struggle against mortality as well. And this will open up vast new avenues for scientific and philosophical investigation and debate. And in transforming the world around us, we'll also revolutionize our relations with one another as well. And this will produce brand new questions of law and morality and even personal manners. And our struggle with our own human condition, our psyche, our emotions, and the unspoken mysteries of the human experience will continue to generate great works of art, essays, music and cinema and so on. Now Trotsky remarks somewhere in his problems of everyday life that under communism, political parties will form over questions of architecture and science, and not on base questions like arm-spending or the budget deficit. But communism, I would say, does resolve one very fundamental contradiction, which is driven human society for millennia, beginning with the very first private appropriation of the surplus product. Communism will at long last recognize the social nature of all of our endeavors, of both production and knowledge, and it will replace the primitive animalistic struggle for survival with true collective enjoyment and human relations finally worthy of the label civilization. Thanks. (audience applauds)