Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming for this presentation. The idea I have here is to express some of the achievements and concerns that I have with the subject of documentation and to try to foresee in the future what kind of developments that we can do in terms of documentation for LibreOffice. What I think it's important, and it is my personal view, is that we are good at developing software, but we should also be able to transmit the beauty of the software to our customers and to our users. And that includes documentation of the software. From the very beginning, it was clear that we were developing software, and we were not documenting the features. And this is not good because, of course, users don't get the information about the features. So that's important for us. And what we have at the moment in terms of documentation, it's a very broad subject, and it includes the help. It includes the user guides. It includes the technical documentation of the technical aspects of the software and many other aspects, as well as, for example, new medias and new forms of media. So what we have in terms of documentation, the help, which is connected to the product, is something that we deliver when we download it. The guides, which is written by the community and it's available to increase the user awareness of the features. The API, which is this focus for development and also for some advanced users. The Wiki, which is community-driven and it's free for addition and including whatever kind of topic is relevant. Tutorials and others. Well, the help for help. This is a situation that we have. The help is an application that is written in XML. XML is complicated. It's not very readable. It's something that we use. It has some advantage, but also it's not an easy way to edit information. The help is online and offline. And also it's a steep entry barrier. If you have to explain the XML that we use to someone that is just coming, that takes a lot of work and a lot of time to get familiar with the help. And also, in order to see what are the results of the help, you also need to likely have a build of LibreOffice. And also the help also has to address the translations. So everything is already in place in terms of XML. But again, for the editor of the help, it's not so easy. So what's XML? You are using whoever already read the help in source code. We have that kind of verbals editing. You absolutely need to be familiar with the XMLs. We need to build the software. It's very easy to make mistakes. It's very easy to break the DTD. So again, this is knowledge that people need to be sort of a developer to really address that. And steep entry barrier. Very often I get in the chats, in telegram, shall we keep the XML? Is there anything else that we can use to improve the access of the help? Some requirements of these new tools, support for the translation in the build, provide ways to support translation tools, such as weblates, be easy to learn for new volunteers, produce online and offline help pages. So I got a lot of suggestions. People always come with bright ideas. Let's do that. And then of course, when we start to look at the requirements, that's not so easy. So for example, first thing is markdown. Let's change the XML for markdown. It's very easy. It's pure text, many standards editors. Pure text editor is enough. Syntax is easy to learn, build tools exist. However, we have several standards. There is not one markdown syntax. There are several. It depends on the tools that you use. And it has to address or raise the translation. For example, one of the interesting things is why don't we use Hugo, which also is a markdown-based text editor.  It's very fast. And we get all the pages that we want in HTML, for example. The other one is why not use pure XML. Here again, we have many editors. It's non-syntax. It's much more flexible, but it's much more popular. We have support for translation. And it's very quite close to the XML that we have, except for some specific features. And also, this advantage, it can be quite verbose. So that's not so. The other things that I thought, people also already said, use LibreOffice Writer and then export to HTML. The point is that the export for HTML is very old. It has not been updated since ages. There is a sanity check for script necessary, so that you don't do the mistakes. The translation framework is not very easy to implement. And export to XHTML is a little bit better, but it needs some manual tweak. So what is your choice? You have to tell me. You have to draft a project on what is the best tool that we need to have for the help. And one thing that is very, very common is that I have an idea. Why don't you do that? That's not going to work. OK? If you have an idea and you want people to join, then you have to start explaining and developing your idea, and then you get people to join. That's the way, for example, Linus Torvald started. He made a small idea, and he publicized his idea, and then he got support. Here's the same. Don't ask me to implement your idea. That's not going to work. Well, the second big challenge that we have in documentation are the guides. The guides, what's the problem that we have at the moment? We have a small team of skilled people, usually people like myself, Peter Schofield, Gene Webber, and a couple of others' names that really understand what is not only the content that we have to write, but also the formatting and the production of a book. Very often I have people that comes to the documentation, I want to help. I want to be a technical writer. Help me. And then we have to put all the efforts to make the people understand that's not so easy, and it's not just writing a couple of paragraphs, but also to understand what is styles, what you have to do, and what you can't do, and things like that. At the moment, we are quite close to the release. So mostly what we do in the guides is the updates and revision. So new features go to the guides. And then this is a thing that I already asked in the steering committee for engineering, is that please developers, if you implement the new features, please let us know the new feature. Please put an image of what you are doing. I discovered later that we have a lot of very visual features that were just aligned in the release notes. So I didn't imagine that we had so many new features in 7.6 that deserves a good documentation. So be verbose when you explain what you are doing. It's important for us. You know? I have tons of examples. And the first one is that I discovered by myself that we have the spotlight for styles. This is a wonderful feature. And I discovered by chance, you know? And I said, oh my god, if you write a book and you use styles, the spotlight of styles is an amazing feature. OK, the guides you produce, PDFs and ODT. I am a bit, at the moment, a bit skeptic on the effectiveness of publishing PDFs, 500 pages PDF for user guides. I think that it is important that we make the content more accessible for the people in the sense that it make it more popular. And we are very good in producing PDFs and ODT. But the people that are used now, the Z generation or the Y generation that use only cell phones, do they want to download the PDF and read on the phone? That's not going to work, OK? So I invested quite a lot in terms of online reading. And I evaluated several tools to make my life easier. At the moment, I use this extension, write it to HTML extension. And I create this small web server, well called the bookshelf. OK, sorry, this is in Portuguese, but it's the bookshelf. And I have all the guides available for download, not only on PDF, on ODF, but also on HTML. But the point is that to transform 500 pages book into a readable HTML, it requires a lot of sanity checking on the books, OK? So I had to run scripts to check the anchoring of the images, the anchoring of the frames, existence of direct formatting, several issues with lists, and fake, I call that fake list, which is a body text with a bullet, not a specific style. So that makes quite a lot of work to transform it. But at the end, it works, OK? So this is the layout of one of the guides. I was able to put the table of contents of the chapter here, some auxiliary information here, and the contents there, OK? And also all the books, all the chapters, are accessible on the left, sorry, on the right. OK, so this is the layout I have, OK? That's not so easy, why it's not so easy? Because when I export into XTML, then I have to manually introduce JavaScript and CSS to get the layout of the page like that, OK? So it's not so easy. I will explain some of the details here. This is the way we see a chapter. We have the logo. We have the guide name, the title, the subtitle, the copyright, the table of contents, and the contents of the chapter. This is the way that you leave a book. It's a sequence of contents. Then you have to shuffle. These are sections, and you have to shuffle that to get the other layouts. So I have to introduce sections, these sections then, so that I can get the sections here, OK? So you may recognize that we have the table of contents on the left, chapter and subtitle, guide name, et cetera. And for the sake of usability, I also introduced a couple of more sections, OK, so that I can have the layouts that I show in there. So what is all this effort? This is, at the moment, very manual. And I'm just wondering if we can evolve and have what I call the web output, which is I have a document. And can I export this document into a true web system, a web page, because this is the book page and this is the web page. So it's different, but the contents is the same, OK? So question, do we have a page grid that is something that could remind me, could remind us about the grid used in HTML5, the CSS grid, so that we can reposition elements of my content into different real estate positions, associate or locate the sections in the grid so that I can shuffle everything, OK? So my question is, can I get an attribute of page grid ID into my section? This, of course, are extensions of the ODF. This is OK. And the idea is to have that, OK? This is a page type, and I could have grids to divide my page types into several others' ways. And then I can attribute the sections. How about translation? OK, translation is done by communities. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. Everybody knows that. Leo knows that. I know that. It takes a lot of time to translate. Now, I would like to have translation assistance. Fortunately, we started to use web leads for guides to make an evaluation of how it's effective or not. But machine translation is something that I would like very much to consider, either using external service or an internal service with another force project, namely Libre Translate. Well, the API documentation is something I try to touch. It's created by developers. It's an automatic export of the code, the IDL thing. But for the end user and for whoever wants to make a script, this is very, very hard to read. It's not designed for the end user. If I am an accountant and I want to make a spreadsheet with a specific operation, it's extremely hard to get into the information with the current API. So we don't have a good idea for completion. I know that there is an experimental code, but it's not complete. It's very hard to navigate in the right API page. Let me adjust the challenge you to get a specific paragraph into a text document. This is just crazy. You need to traverse a lot of collections of things. The notation is not user-friendly. Critical lack of code snippets, et cetera. This is an example of what is created by Ranch. You really, really need to be developers to read that and apply it in your scripts. So that's my presentation ends here. I'm open to questions, to suggestions, but suggestions will have to be followed by a bit of work from you. So thank you for your time. And, well, I'm open for questions. Yes, the ebook, EPUB, I saw the contents is there, but it's very, very badly shaped. And most of the EPUB, you need to have a specific tool for that. You need to have an extension on a browser for EPUB. So I prefer to get it directly in the navigator, in the browser, and get to the page immediately. But I found that the export for HTML, it's good, but it has some glitches, some small things that need to be fixed. Yes? Perhaps we can work together with Michael and Simone today. We use an export to generate web pages from the EPUB document. It's a special large as our documentation, and they are the one who made it as smooth. So when you see problems with the export of HTML, you should speak with Michael and Simone. Yeah. When do you export? Can you repeat the question? Regina is suggesting me to work with Michael Stahl and Svante for exports of HTML. Is that correct? Yeah. I have made some tests with exporting of HTML. And the layout is very faithful. I mean, it renders correctly, but it's a very, very, very long page, and the table of contents is exactly where it was in the book. It's not shuffled in another position. And that's my specific demand. I have this demand, too. When I export to HTML, it would be nice that I could have a dialogue where I can add some specific parameters so that it will help me to produce automatically the web page, including a link for a JavaScript and a link for a CSS. The CSS is to get the grid, and the JavaScript is to add some other features that I don't have in ODF. So that's it. Question? No question? You have a question? Yeah. A challenge. Deepak has been mentioned. I have been working with the Ministry of Defense for an innovation department there who invested in the initial export. And you are perfectly right that there are some open issues that are not as correct in even as exports, not yet in government. On the other hand, Deepak has some advantages that it's flexible. It shows on various devices, small and large, manipulating your screen, and it allows scrolling. There is already an extra dialogue. It has some advantages connected with library and meter data, et cetera. But still, you may be right that the export in improving deeper exports to the level that is needed for this work is huge compared to the effort that is needed to get the HHML export work nicely and the manual tweets, et cetera. So could you be challenged by making some comparison of the effort for route one and route two? And it's not something the HHML do that. I think it might be very convincing to see something like that. Deepak's question, sorry.  I used the extension that was available. Unfortunately, this extension is not very well maintained by his author. So I may consider to come back to HHML and do the scripts that I use for the extension. I can eventually try to make it work with the export to HHML. So I'm not close to any specific. As long as I get the results I was showing here, what is the tool I don't care very much in the sense that, well, I am focusing on the results. But when I export, for example, here, let's put the draw guide and read online. So this is what I have. And you see it's quite fast. It's just static HTML. So no servers, no database, no snorting. But as long as I get this kind of layout or even something that is even more better, but at the moment, this is enough. And it can be the export for HHML or it can be the extension. The point is that the current export to HTML, which is 4.0, it's broken. It's really need to be completely updated. Yes, I love the idea to get a lightweight output of the great content, because that is obviously a drain. Yes? It's a map. Formulas exploded. Mathematics? You can run. You can run, but then you need to get much. There is a JavaScript library specific for that. Firefox has it internally. It renders all the equations nicely, but Chrome and Edge, I don't think they have. So you need the JavaScript. And well, I consider the results quite good, at least on Firefox. The formula part from there to HHML, including the formula, which is JavaScript division, and it renders corrective. Yeah, it's very good. Any question? OK, thank you very much.


Okay, thanks for the applause now. We'll see if you still feel the same way at the end. So I think, you know, for a very long time, people have had questions about how and why we live the way we do. And there's a deep curiosity and fascination, especially right now, with history in general, and particularly the question of how class societies came to be and how they collapsed. You know, there are loads of pop science books about it. People might have seen Sapiens by Harari, Guns, Germs and Steel. And of course, this fascination really is because our society, I think, is obviously living through its own very deep crisis. And people want to know how we got here. For a very long time, philosophers and historians have justified the domination of one section of society over another by claiming it somehow natural and that it's always been this way. And even today, with all of the research and evidence the country, we're told it's human nature to be greedy and exploitative, to live in a class society. This isn't new, of course, even in ancient times. The first kings of Mesopotamia and Egypt trace their lineage back to the gods and claim that their ancestors, the earliest kings, had lived and reigned for thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. And this is for precisely the same reason, to claim that society as it was then was eternal and unchanging. But of course, this is not actually the case. Human society has changed many, many times over the centuries and over the millennia and will continue to do so. And in fact, what I would say really is that one of the few things that every human society does have in common is that they aren't static and they aren't permanent. In fact, only in the final 5% of the time that homo sapiens, anatomically modern humans have existed on this planet, have we lived in a class society. And that includes ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome and modern capitalism today. So we see that nothing is eternal, just very old and everything that exists has to have a beginning. A class society is no different. And this is important, I think, because for Marxists, the study of history is no academic curiosity, but it's a tool for understanding how to change society. And the way to study things in general is not through taking a single moment, a single static kind of screenshot, but is to study it in its movement, in its development and change. And I think, therefore, through understanding the emergence of class society, we can actually start to see elements of its development that we wouldn't otherwise be obvious to us. So class society then hasn't been around forever. Then what existed before it? Well, for the first 95% of our history, anthropology and archaeology shows us that we lived in what are effectively egalitarian groups without classes, kings, priests or capitalists. Prior to the origins of agriculture, these societies basically subsisted through hunting and gathering. And social relations were also entirely different to what we see today. Engels described these groups as primitive communists because their social structures were deeply egalitarian. And we do have evidence for this. On an archaeological level throughout the whole of the Paleolithic, the old Stone Age, we see very few wealthy burials or signs of permanent wealth or status. And incidentally, in this time, we also see very little evidence of the oppression of women, which I'm afraid that I don't have time to talk about at all today. But hopefully we can discuss it in the discussion. Unfortunately, these societies didn't have writing. So we can only really guess at their social structures. And the best way to do so is by studying modern hunter-gatherers that exist today, which do provide a little bit of a window into how these ancient groups might have lived. So for example, there's a culture around the Kalahari desert called the Sand People. And there's a group called the Kung, which have been studied by a lot of archaeologists and anthropologists. And the anthropologist, Leakey, explains of these people, they have no chiefs and no leaders. And he goes on to say that sharing deeply pervades the values of these foragers just as the principles of profit and rationality are central to the capitalist ethic. And these people, Leakey, describes that they also have safeguards basically against anyone getting a bit too big for their boots.  You're obviously not a very good hunter. And Leakey actually talks about how when he was leaving he bought this group a cow as like a gift to say thank you for letting him stay there and study them. And rather than saying thank you, they gathered around and they mocked the cow and said, you know, this is a very small cow. Couldn't you possibly have brought a better gift than this? And, you know, why is this? I think this practice seems very strange to us who are accustomed to thanking people when we get given things. At least, I mean, with Christmas coming up, I really hope that's what everyone's going to do. And I think really this is moral pressure that's being applied by the community as a whole in order to ensure that nobody can use their position as a skilled hunter or use access to like a certain resource that no one else in the society has to basically flout the egalitarianism of the community. And incidentally as well, I think this is a really fantastic rebuttal this evidence of these kind of egalitarian moral and political basically structures. To those who argue that capitalism and greed is basically human nature which is obviously a very common argument that you'll hear all the time. Because in actual fact, what we perceive to be human nature is simply a reflection of the conditions that we live in. So, if you speak to someone who doesn't live in a class society they'll have a very different idea of what it means to be human. Just to give another example, something that always stands out to me comes from a book called The Book of the Eskimo. It's by an anthropologist called Peter Froechin who was actually working quite a long time ago. And he lived with an Inuit in the Arctic Circle and he tells this story about how he came home after an unsuccessful walrus hunt, basically feeling very hungry worrying that he wasn't going to have enough to eat. And when on his way home he bumped into someone who was dropping off walrus meat at his dwelling like another hunter and when he turned around to this other hunter and tried to thank him the hunter like vehemently refused their thanks. And he said, well, up here we're human. Because we're human we help each other. What I may have today, you might have tomorrow. And then he proceeds to go on to explain to this confused explorer that they believed that by gifts you make slaves and by whips you make dogs. Now this is a very different view of society and the relations between people that you get from living in a class society. And I think it really exposes something that Marx actually pointed out in the poverty of philosophy when he explained that the whole of history really is nothing but the continuous transformation of human nature which is in no way fixed and static. Of course, modern hunter-gatherer societies are really diverse. You can see different groups from like the gatherer groups in the Amazon to the Namibia in Canada and in the Arctic Circle to obviously the Sam people. And there's a fantastic diversity there and you can see that archaeological groups back in the past must have been very different and diverse too. But even though we understand there was no single monolithic primitive communist culture which is a slander that's basically been put against Engels and Marxists what is really remarkable and really striking is that in studying all of these groups this same kind of egalitarian social structure and egalitarian morality stands out in almost every single case. And they share this in common. And I think fundamentally then how do you explain this? This can't be because of some set of like moral commandments that was handed down at the beginning of the Paleolithic to every hunter-gatherer society. They aren't following some sort of rules that come from above but it's because of the reality of what it means to be a gatherer. There was and there couldn't be any surplus in any private property beyond sort of tools perhaps and small personal items. Mobile hunter-gatherer groups basically had what they could carry with them and even sedentary hunter-gatherers, people who stayed in one place they could only really own things like personal items. There was no question of owning like the vast swathes of land that was a source of wealth and resources. They went where they needed to. And there was enough for everyone. And to bring indebtedness or personal benefit into these kinds of societies would basically be a disaster precisely for the reason actually that this inuit hunter explained to Freudian when he said, well I have today, you might have tomorrow because of the unreliability and the kind of question mark over where your resources would come from from day to day. The community had to work together to pull their resources. What would hunter-gatherer society look like if your fishermen were indebted to your hunters in the winter and then your skilled hunters were indebted to your fishermen in the spring during breeding season? That would be an absolute disaster or one hunting party was indebted to the other because of a shortage of a certain kind of game that year. And I think what this really reveals basically a law of historical materialism which is that ideas, morality, politics, all of this is exceptionally powerful. You can see this moral pressure that these groups are applying to defend their communities, but only when it corresponds to the real needs of society if you like the material basis. We'll go on to see this throughout the development of class society. So how did this change then? If you had these basically strong and stable hunter-gatherer groups, how did that then transform into its opposite? Well, as I said earlier, primitive communist societies weren't in any way static. No society is. These themselves were also undergoing their own processes of development and change. And the continuous transformation of human nature that Mark's talked about doesn't come out of nowhere. It's really predicated on the continuous transformation and development of the way that we work to extract the resources from our environment, which is, of course, the basis of survival for everyone. By the way, I think the fact that human beings need to eat and find shelter and therefore that process of doing so basically of working to find resources defines a massive part of our social existence. That fact is a massive source of embarrassment for most archaeologists and universities. And despite the fact that they shy away from it, it's no less true for it. So the better the tools and the techniques that we have, the more control over our lives we have, the better we can guarantee food and shelter for ourselves. And so throughout history, we've constantly sought to improve this. And this process really is the driving force of human history. This is what we refer to as the development of the productive forces. And, of course, it doesn't start with agriculture any more than the development of the productive forces started with the Industrial Revolution. It dates back millions of years. Even before anatomically modern humans actually, the first stone tools were created by our harmonium ancestors millions of years ago in places like the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania where they made like very crude stone tools to help them extract resources from the things that they hunted and gathered. And Engels actually explained in his fantastic work, the part played by Labour in the transition from it to man, that I'd recommend everyone read, that evolutionary biology is later returned to this. The idea that the way that we labour and the manufacture and use of stone tools actually aided the development of our brains. And therefore in a certain sense, that labour is what made us human. It's what created us. However, around 10,000 years ago, we skipped forward a bit, skipped forward a couple of million years. It's how these lead us tend to go. About 10,000 years ago, massive earth shattering, basically, revolution took place in the productive forces, which has shaped the whole of human society ever since. And this is known as the Neolithic Revolution. It was named this by the great Marxist archaeologist Gordon Child. And what it really was is the fact that previous, under Hunter-Gatherer society, none of the plants and animals that we today rely on existed. We, barley, maize, pigs, cattle, all of these basically has evolved as a result of direct human intervention in the environment, selective pressure, if you like. They were domesticated by humans. I don't have time sadly to go into the details. I've already had like 15 minutes. But the fascinating thing is that this was basically completely unintentional and in the process effectively of attempting to gain a little bit of more control over their futures through picking and re-sewing crops so that they could return to them the next year when they came around. Early hunter-gatherers effectively turned their relationship with nature of being completely reliant and subject to it on its head and exacted a change back on the natural environment. They made these crops they were re-sewing more edible and easier to cultivate. And I think the most important part of this is that these frankly explosive changes which occurred across the world independently in places like the Near East, South Asia, East Asia, South America, they opened up the possibility of a whole new way of working agriculture. And this was to have very far-reaching consequences. Now, of course, just because this new possibility was open, doesn't mean that agriculture or indeed class society basically emerged at the flip of a coin, as soon as the first kind of grains of modern wheat emerged from the soil. Instead, the adoption of agriculture was really only the beginning of a process of development and change. What agriculture had done was open the door effectively to this process and we describe it as a turning point because it is the revolution in the productive forces that made all future development possible. With the emergence of domesticate, some people began to settle down and started farming, living in small villages. There's a whole debate about why they did this that I do not have time to go into right now. Perhaps we can discuss at a future date. But in some ways, the point is these villages were actually very similar to what had existed under primitive communism. So, social relations were still communistic in nature. When people started farming, they didn't decide to abandon the hundreds of thousands of years worth of egalitarian tradition and morality that they had accumulated. There was little to no evidence of private property, class exploitation, or inherited wealth. In these earliest Neolithic sites, we very often see sheds like grain storage areas or food storage areas because people were sharing out what they produced. At one site, which is very famous, it's called Çatalhöyük, it's a modern-day Turkey. Which is, by the way, an incredibly remarkable site because it was home to 10,000 people. It's a massive settlement compared to these small groups that existed prior to it. Houses showed almost no difference in size, but also notably analysing the skeletons of the people that lived in these houses show very little difference in diet either, which is always a very good indicator of a lack of social inequality. Now, some people here also might have heard of Skara Bray in Orkney, which is my favourite archaeological site. It was excavated by this Marxist archaeologist, Gordon Child. And at this settlement, we can really start to see how people lived during the Neolithic because they didn't have any wood on Orkney, so they built the furnishings for their houses in stone. And we can see that not only were the houses of a very similar size at Skara Bray, but also the furniture was very similar. And again, very little evidence of any form of inequality or difference in social status. No one home or one person was elevated above any other. There also seemed to have been a shared workshop where tools were kept and used by the whole group. So at the same time, however, in these Neolithic villages, life was completely different. They were sedentary. They'd settled down. And they were staying in one place rather than roaming around. This, of course, gave them that reliability and control over their lives that they sought. But it also made them vulnerable to sudden shocks like floods or famines, so communities had to start planning for the future. They had to start setting aside some of their surplus. They didn't immediately consume it like hunter-gatherers did when they found a little bit extra. And perhaps most importantly, for the first time, a phenomenon which has previously been exclusive to only a few very wealthy hunter-gatherer groups began to emerge, the emergence of a consistent, reliable surplus product on the basis of agriculture. And this opened up a whole host of new questions and possibilities. And it was the solving of these questions. Really, it is in that that we can trace the real origins of class society. Now, to show this process, I'm going to talk mainly about the Near East, but what I think is really remarkable is that, actually, this process doesn't just stop at the Near East, but it's repeated in one form or another elsewhere. So, in these Neolithic villages, the question of what to do with this surplus, of course, emerged. And it had to have an answer. They weren't just going to throw it out because they didn't know what to do about it. And first, I think the question could be answered quite simply. The surplus effectively belonged to the whole of society. It was shared between everyone. It was an assurance against future instability. If someone's harvest was poor, it could be shared with them. And the surplus could also be used to support non-productive members of society, the ill, the old, people like medicine men and shamans. And this was not new. It was an extrapolation, if you like, of things that previously existed in hunter-gatherer society to a lesser extent. And over time, people in the Near East start giving over their surplus to a new institution, the temple, the priesthood. And why is this? This seems like a bit of a mystery, but the giving over of the spare surplus to the temple was really a reflection of the need to plan what to do with this excess, not just the excess food that could be stockpiled for the future, but also the excess labour, which is another very important part of the surplus. With agriculture, you start to have seasonal labour. People have more free time on their hands that could be put to use in social projects, such as the building of shrines, walls, and perhaps most importantly in the Near East, the building of irrigation canals. Outside of planting season, and these priest planners, this emergent, it signified a huge step forward in the division of labour. A division between mental and physical labour, between the hand and the head, and the emergence of leadership. At first, of course, this was only with the consent of the whole community. And these people were seen as providing a vital service. But this emergence was historically incredibly important. So if you think about it, the freeing up of a layer of people in society, not just a plan and direct, but also to think, to philosophise, to come up with ideas about religion and mathematics, and art is the basis of all civilisation. And Aristotle actually points this out when he talks about how mathematics was first developed in ancient Egypt, basically because the priests had three times to think about such things and dedicate themselves to such things. So for a practical example, we're not quite at ancient Egypt yet. In the Near East, there's a site called Eridu, which now lies in Monday, Iraq. And this is a small Neolithic village, but two things about it are really remarkable. First, we see the first real evidence of buildings dedicated only to worship, to cultic activities, to ritual. And secondly, we also see very early examples of irrigation being used to drain areas to make them suitable for agriculture. And what does this show? Well, I think this shows that the new kind of leadership was required to build these irrigation canals, a leadership that was capable of organising labour in the community. And this, of course, in a way was self-sustaining because irrigation allowed a greater surplus to be produced, which then contributed to the growing importance of the directors and the managers of the surplus. And as Eridu, as the village grows, we not only see the elaboration of the temple, which actually came to be known as the House of the Aquifer, which is very interesting because then it connects back to irrigation. But we also see the increasing importance of the temple and society in the sense that there was increased resources and planning. The emergence of specialised craftsmen, as well as priests. So a division of labour developing a society that wasn't just vertical, but was also horizontal in a way, potters and other kinds of craftsmen. And towards the end of this period of Neolithic villages called the Abade Period, in many places we start to see workshops that are directly attached to these new temple complexes, which also implies, I think, the increasing specialisation and division of labour was connecting back to these priest planners who become a directing organ in society. Now, I'm running a bit short on time, but the emergence of this kind of priest caste, which subsisted in what was produced by society, while seemingly serving the interests of society, was not exclusive in any way to the Near East. In fact, another really fascinating example was in the Maya. So the early pre-classic Maya, when they were shifting to a system of agriculture that was based on May's cultivation, basically, in the lowlands. We start to see the emergence of ritual sites, which indicate the growing role of religious leaders as the organisers of society. We see these basically massive platforms being built, some of them up to 50 foot high and 4,600 feet wide. So this would have required a huge amount of labour. Unfortunately enough, these early examples of these platforms, they don't have any of the massive statues of elites or the huge stone thrones, which characterise later Mayan architecture. In fact, they're completely devoid of that. And later on, also after the development of a class, would continue to be responsible for organising public works and particularly organising agriculture. And unfortunately for them, they would also be held responsible if they started to fail, which they would try to solve by building more temples. It didn't work, unfortunately. Now, of course, not in every early state was the emergence of this governing organ tied to the priesthood. That's not an iron law. In ancient Egypt, for example, I think you can see the emergence of this governing organ as possibly being tied to war leaders. But again, this still emerged out of a role present and necessary within the commune. But it took on a completely different character when it was faced with more resources to direct and organise. And the fact that there's diversity here only really reflects the fact that all the creativity of individuals and individual human societies must still come up with solutions to the same problems that are thrown up by the adoption of a new mode of production. And this means that while no human society can ever be a carbon copy of each other, and we wouldn't expect that to be the case, there's still a certain lawfulness to it. Similar needs require similar solutions. And this lawfulness, again, it doesn't come from rules applied from above or a set of commandments, but it naturally emerges because of the material necessities of developing a new mode of production and really the realities of human social life. So, these organised villages in the Neolithic, there are no way a class society, and yet these organising layers now divided between mental and physical labour were to develop into the first ruling classes. At the end of the Abide period in the Near East, we're back there now after a bit of a detour to the Maya, we see the rise of the first cities, and it's this revolutionary tipping point that Gordon Child referred to as the Urban Revolution. The process of growth within these Neolithic villages based on this new organisation of labour and based on agriculture started to create bigger settlements. The most notable one in Mesopotamia, two villages dedicated actually to two different gods grew so large that they fused together and became one city, the city of Uruk. This was the first city in the world and it shows now the development of a new social division of labour. No longer just between groups in one community, but between different settlements, the city needed to get resources from the villages in order to continue to survive. So the temple in Uruk tithed the surrounding villages for a percentage of their agricultural produce. And this massive expansion of the division of labour would very quickly transform from quantity into quality because a certain level of organisation really is required to organise a city of 30,000 plus people, see this couldn't just be done on the basis of everyone's consent and agreement anymore. I think a very evocative example of what the city of Uruk looked like and what these new relations were come from these things called beveled rim balls which you might have heard of basically in archaeological layers in Uruk. The first time we start to see the emergence of really ugly pottery. In hundreds of thousands these awful like thrown mass produced bowls that just start to appear. And the question really is how in the emergence of all of this specialisation the starting of building of temples this emergence of culture really, do you see these ugly artifacts that were frankly worse than what were being produced before? And the prevailing theory is that these mass produced bowls were made to hand out rations to labourers, to conscript labourers who were levied from the surrounding towns in order to be put to work by the temple of Uruk on public projects. So in other words they were basically ancient societies equivalent of wages and these labourers could have been drafted from loads of different communities. They would never have, unlike before, they wouldn't have known the people that were drafting them and they might not even have benefitted from the public works that they were putting to work on because if they were drafted from the villages then what use would a wall around the city of Uruk actually be to them? So we can see really that new class relations are starting to take form outside of these old communal structures. So we start to see clearly now the citizens of Uruk are not all equally benefiting either from the surplus that's being extracted from the villages. The temple actually held exclusive control over the surplus product and it started to take a greater and greater share for itself. What wasn't consumed by the temple bureaucracy was stored and distributed and traded under its own control and this actually began all of these growing taxes and tithes that actually began to push the villages and the poorest in society down into debt and those who failed to pay their debt could be enslaved by their creditors along with their families and so we can see again the temple was growing and was beginning to transform into a distinct class standing above and usurping the commune. Now, just a quick disclaimer here I think there's a bit of an absurdity to the idea that you can pinpoint the exact moment in which this governing organ became class societies. Because what it really amounts to is the dialectical transformation of quantity into quality which is sometimes very obvious but sometimes isn't at all. I think an analogy that's very often given is the analogy of the bald man. Basically if a man's hairs fall out one by one can you actually pinpoint the moment that he becomes bald?  So by about 3100 BC I think it's fair to say that the man is bald. We have ample evidence that out of this whole process has arisen a class of priests and scribes who held exclusive control over the production in society and the distribution of what was produced and they were beginning to secure for themselves actually wealth. You see all of these developments come along with it. These priests invented writing in order to control and administrate the surplus that they had basically gained ownership of and these institutions that had emerged out of communal relations with individuals ceding their own surplus to the god rather than hoard it because they didn't want to hoard it because they were basically bowing to the morality of primitive communist society. You see that this actually completely transforms into its opposite and these institutions become the thing that will break down those communal relations. Now ultimately of course this new ruling class justified all of this power and privilege by a rapid development of the productive forces between 5000 and 2000 BC the world's population increased from 5 million to 25 million by our best estimates and of course they also developed things like writing. But that was really only positive because this process was also the expropriation of the vast majority of society in favour of the few and this is basically what we see in the whole history of class society at root it's just the expropriation and the subjugation of the many in the name of progress and in order to increase the wealth of the few. But what's remarkable and I'll return to this at the end what's remarkable about capitalism now is that it can no longer even justify itself on the basis of the development of the productive forces. So there's one more piece of the puzzle missing I said earlier that this group, this temple had transformed it into a sort of class standing above society and in fact we do see figures who are called priest kings who are basically the representatives of this temple. But these priest kings I don't think could really be considered a state because they didn't have an ability to be honest to enforce their tithes beyond ideological domination and in a sense their authority actually was a bit of a hold over from the commune as far as we can tell from that authority that they were given when the god represented the good of the whole of society. In primitive communist society and in Neolithic society there was authority and there was leadership but it was fairly communal going to war would have required the consent of the whole tribe not just one leader and this persisted into early agricultural societies in which forms of leadership did emerge, forms that we talked about but they still required the chiefs or the priests or whoever it was to win the respect and allegiance of the group that they were leading usually by giving out gifts or putting on big parties for them anthropologists and archaeologists write a lot about feasting which is basically what this process is an example that some of you might be familiar with is obviously the Viking lords who would give out to their kind of vassals and their servants gold and silver basically in order to secure their continued consent and support however once classes, real classes emerge in society this form of leadership begins to run into conflict because how can the leader serve and gain allegiance from everyone in society when there are two or more separate classes with separate interests which fundamentally contradict each other ultimately they have to come down on one side and the other and this is the issue that was really being faced in Uruk and Uruk actually goes into an unexplained crisis during the third millennium which people have suggested many causes for people talk about drought and over farming affecting the productivity of the land they talk about the rise of other cities acting as competition but really like the land getting a bit worse and other cities that doesn't bring down a whole civilization on its own potentially a possibility emerging where in order to compete with these other cities the priests would have had to raise taxes and at the same time the lack of agricultural productivity might have caused the villages not to want to give up their product to the priests anymore so you could potentially see the emergence of a class struggle starting to take root in society in Uruk and all of these pressures which could not have existed prior to the developments brought about by the Uruk temple bureaucracy really presented a fatal threat to this careful compromise that they had going on and so we see that the result of this actually is the Uruk culture disappears for a period during the crisis in the third millennium and what emerges afterwards well it's cities which have palaces and those palaces in those palaces live kings who are called Lugals which literally means men and these kings the first real kings have learned the lesson from the crisis of the past and they now have the power to enforce their laws, they have men at arms and they have independent political authority and what this shows really is the previous rule of the priest kings wasn't enough to control society just through ideological power and so a state had to emerge this is clearly not just any form of leadership or authority created because of a recognition of the need for the first time in history to enforce the rule of one section of society over another using force if necessary and Engels explains in his fantastic book origin of the family private property of the state which I would recommend people read the state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without it is a product of society at a particular age and development the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction that it is powerless to exercise now Engels describes this process in origin of the family with relation to the Athenian state and the Roman state and we know a lot more about these because it's more recent and better recorded he describes how money and private property entered Athenian society from without like a corrosive substance and wore away all of the previous interconnections and rules of what he describes as the previous gentile society and really the unchecked power of the nobility that arose out of the previous communal tribes opened up a period of social tumult so great that it proved the necessity for a state in practice you know people would be being sold into slavery because they were unable to pay their debts and this state had to defend the interests of the property classes and if necessary curb its worst excesses and this was the real necessity in Athens behind a set of reforms which broke up the old hereditary nobility which was kind of a remnant of the commune in a certain sense and put in place a new system where private property was codified into law and you were classified based on how much you owned and whilst every group in society could theoretically elect offices the highest offices could only be elected by the wealthiest property owning classes in society and he also and he basically explains that as a result of the fact that the state in all cases is emerging out of this class struggle it can really only be done away with when the whole point of its existence the antagonism between classes in society has also been done away with you know this is a very different view I think to the one that the anarchists put forward the idea that the state itself is effectively the root of all evils and all these other things money, class society, inequality and exploitation they all arise out of this cruel imposition of authority because they don't really have any way to explain why it is in societies like Athens Arook, Rome and many others the state only arises after class divisions have already emerged and not only have emerged have developed the point that a class struggle is breaking out and putting society in danger of collapsing under its own weight and how actually once it has developed we see in the first societies in the earlier states that often its real task is actually to curb the worst excesses of the ruling class in order to prevent class society from coming apart at its seams and its coming apart at the seams precisely because of the pressures of class society you don't see policemen in primitive communism I can tell you there's no archaeological evidence for that kind of phenomenon in primitive communism and nor in modern day hunter gatherer societies except when a capitalist state sends their policemen in to basically break up what already existed so I'm going to sum up now because I've spoken for 40 minutes but I just wanted to talk a little bit really about this final question which is if the state and class society has a purely material basis what then is the role of ideas what about individuals do they play any role at all in this process I think the point that we have to make time and time again is that people didn't just sleepwalk into the origin of class society like zombies any more than they sleptwalk through any other revolution in human history this doesn't mean that a state and classes were bound to develop automatically in every specific society in which agriculture was able to develop this process can actually be interrupted it can be scattered, it can be slowed down even reversed or abandoned half way through over the course of the real historical events that are taking place in these societies some villages chose to reject this process developing inequality perhaps recognising in these early developments the future violation of all of the moral norms of primitive communism history has peppered with examples of this but those societies that continue to develop on the basis of class society and the state rather than retreating they represented a concrete leap forward in the productive forces and as a result of that it was these early civilisations that grew and spread and actually grew to dominate all of these other groups so these individual societies acceptance or refusal to allow inequality to take hold was very meaningful to them and should be appreciated but at the moment they lived it was meaningful but in the grand scheme of things it wasn't really meaningful at all and what do we see today you know we see the natural conclusion of this process where not only class society but capitalism has come to dominate the entire world because in its time it was a historically progressive development of the productive forces that was able to dominate all of these other societies and this is even more important this question of individualism and the role of ideas and we get to the question of the state because what was really required in the formation of the earliest states was for individuals and groups actually to take action and the formation of the state is it didn't happen automatically Marx explains this in Holy Family when he says history does nothing it fights no battles it possesses no wealth it's man that does that for someone an individual or a group to actually look at the society they lived in at the commune and to break it up and to install themselves as the master or master of society was to break with hundreds of thousands of years of tradition it was a pretty big deal and history is peppered with examples of all of these people these great individuals who did just that one example that comes to mind is Nama he was the first pharaoh and you see depictions of him but well the first pharaoh that we know about you see depictions of him everywhere basically with his mace in hand bashing the heads of all his opponents in and taking their crowns for himself and installing himself basically as the master of society in Egypt and he wasn't able to do this because of his own talent undoubtedly these people were very talented and very self interested individuals but there are a lot of those I personally know a lot of talented and self interested individuals but I know very few have made themselves pharaoh and the actions of these individuals really what they were was either consciously or unconsciously a recognition of the fact that at the time that they were living the formation of a state and only the formation of the state was able to develop society and I think the relationship here between individual agency and historical necessity is very obvious when we look at these massive transformations in society the idea that these two things are mutually exclusive is completely thrown out of the window when you look at these individuals who played a decisive even a revolutionary role precisely because there was a need to break with the old society and create a new one you know what is a revolution really it's an idea but it's an idea whose time has come so just to sum up just to finish on this and not stretch the patience of the chair any further we can see that far from being a natural development the overturn of the egalitarianism of primitive communist society was an overthrow it was far from natural it was far from human nature it was a violation of all of the morality of old primitive communist society there was a tragedy for hundreds of thousands of people millions who were relegated to the position of slaves and servants when they had previously been free but there was a reason for it these early communist societies had ceased to serve their purpose they had developed the productive forces as far as they were able to there was no longer any room for development and only with the origins of agriculture only with the growth of the first class societies could society actually move forward further develop the productive forces and with it the whole potential of human civilization and this is really all that we can speak of when we talk about progress a deep contradiction really within history which is what is historically progressive what develops the productive forces in the whole of humanity is not always what is good for every individual in fact it can be quite the opposite but just because class society was historically progressive then that doesn't mean it is now the situation has changed today it's capitalism and class society that is just as outdated as the hand acts of primitive communist society today you know if we look around us all we see is crisis actually Boris Johnson earlier this week compared society today to the Roman Empire just prior to its fall and he said if we don't do something about climate change what we he means because he doesn't have any plans to do so then society will collapse into barbarism what is that is a recognition that capitalism has reached its limits if as a result of the adoption of agriculture the world's population quintupled now the birth rate is actually going down you know look at that if you want some proof so what is progressive now really is actually to overthrow class society and replace it with a socialist society one that's based on collective ownership and if kingship religion and slavery were the ideas and the forms needed to develop the productive forces thousands of years ago now the idea that time has come is actually socialism and it's a socialist revolution and this won't be anything like the scarcity of primitive communism these forms that existed in the past they don't return in the same way but they come back on a higher level the unlimited potential for the development of society and a society that can be built by billions of working people on the basis of all of the development to the past and actually finally I think just in the same way as the fathers of the first class societies had to break with hundreds of thousands of years of communist tradition basically in order to develop society today it's revolutionary socialists who have the job of breaking through the built up baggage of oppression of religion of exploitation exploitation inequality that was created over thousands of years of class society and it's an immense privilege that unlike any other revolutionary class revolutionaries today don't seek to install themselves as any new oppressive class but are able to fight for a society which is not only historically progressive but is also better for everyone that's where I'm going to end