The report intends to constitute a premise for the planned study on the history of religions, in the ambition of arriving at an initial historical collocation of the worldviews that have developed, affirmed themselves and confronted one another in the countries and continents of the East.

The great talk that has been made for over a century about the crisis of the West concerns us, not so much because we claim the culture of the West, but for the fact that communism cannot disregard reality and deny that in the West has matured the school of thought that today postulates the end of the forms of life and of social production that culminated in imperialist capitalism.

Discussing the decline or end of the West only to end up on the theme of catastrophe, as if the end of the world were imminent, and not instead that of a historical form of social life, takes on a flavour in our view that is classically to the advantage of the ruling classes, who somehow, even if not always consciously, seem to recite Louis XV’s formula: après moi le déluge!

Then does the question of fundamental ontology, in which we hold the proper credentials, have meaning: indeed, Marx says in the German Ideology: ‘Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process’.

Eating god is a constant in all religions, Kronos eats his children, Niobe tears them apart, meaning to transform, to destroy, to believe that life consists of an unceasing process of exchange and mutual incorporation between creatures. Tradition says that before Creation there was a showdown between God and the most beautiful of angels, Lucifer, the clash centres on a rebellion, an act that challenges the Principle.

Marx was able to analyse Capital, starting from the commodity-monad, to project into the future a scenario in which the commodity no longer has any reason to exist, where the atomised man of class society can have no place. The base-conceptual language, which comes largely from Jewish culture, is able to do this, but language alone cannot do everything, just as theory estranged from action cannot do everything.

If in Judaism, labour is the guilt to be expiated for an original rebellion and transgression, for Greek thought it is the choice of the will to power that, interpreting the unceasing becoming of reality, seeks to impose its mark on it. Historical materialism knows how to distinguish between Greek metaphysics, the thought of slaveowners in the name of freedom, and the Jewish belief in the common root of all men, according to a teleological process that should lead to the Promised Land. But it is not enough to argue that, Judaism being a doctrine of action… we are all in the same boat: we know what differences there are between the theory of action (perhaps the good deed!) à la Bernstein, à la Dühring, or as our theory conceives it.

In this phase, in which the thesis of the clash of civilisations seems to be reasserting itself, there is a desire to bury beneath the weight of Ideas the concrete reality of real and material forms and conditions.

Faced with philosophies of history arranged in this way, our position is known: it is not that philosophy makes history but the exact opposite, even if at a certain level of exchange between theory and action there is not mutual indifference but interpenetration and continuous rebound.

The True as Whole comes in the memory of the species not only from the culture of the so-called West, but more from that of the East. A proof lies in the ongoing difficulty even today of establishing whether the land of the Fertile Crescent, upon which the three great monotheistic traditions, in tension since time immemorial, are concentrated, is to be considered West or East, Middle East or Middle West?

The term True from Indo-European means ‘that which possesses the attributes of its nature in its entirety’. This means that the species has preserved the memory, albeit unconscious, of its original wholeness, of primitive communism. In this conception, there do not exist individuals without an organic bond to the species, or to the community of belonging. Our version starts from the presupposition that the overcoming does not consist in opposing a humanistic anthropology to bourgeois idealism, but rather in the possibility-necessity of the reversal of praxis, so that the individual man may reunite with all his potentialities as a worker, open to different functions and not condemned to any imposed specialisation.