Socialism as a real movement and as a set of opinions or theoretical views.
This second aspect interests us for the moment.
As such, it is not a system of opinions in purely political or even socio-economic matters, but an integral conception of the world in all its aspects and parts.
Relations and differences between the socialist conception and the fundamental philosophical schools of the past:
– ancient Greek cosmological philosophy
– Greek idealism (Christian scholasticism)
– the period of the scientific Renaissance
– English empiricism
– German idealist philosophy
– French Enlightenment (19th century positivism)
– recent neo-idealism and neo-spiritualism.
Dialectical method and metaphysical method.
Socialism treats the facts of history and economics with a scientific method. What philosophy is reduced to, for it.
Main line of the Marxist school in the theoretical aspect.
Deviations and revisionisms.
Theoretical incompatibilities.

The characteristic theses of Marxism.
Economic determinism.
The theory of surplus value.
The theory of the class party and the state.
Philosophy.

World and thought.
Mathematics and logic are not internal constructions of the intellect, but results of experience.

Monism and dualism.
Spiritualism; existence of God.

Time and Space.
Question of the Infinity of Space and Time.
Claim to consider as contradictory and false that which is not thinkable.
Infinite series of numbers and its double meaning; application to instants of time and points in space.
How dialectics aids in this question.

Mention the most recent cosmogonic hypotheses which take into account not only gravitation and heat, but intra-atomic energies and the electrical theory of matter.
Relativity of motion, rest, and equilibrium.
Energy of motion and position.
Why relativity is dialectical.
Einstein’s theory.
Theory of thermodynamics.
Modern data on the conservation of matter and energy and on chemical elements.

Character of the transition from one group of phenomena to another.
Teleology of the organic world (vitalism and mechanicism).
Darwin and the transformation of species.
Adaptation, struggle for existence, natural selection, heredity.
Origin of species.
Boundaries between the animal and plant world, organic and inorganic: origin of life.

The cell as an element of organised bodies.
Question of the definition of life.
Albuminoid bodies, their chemical composition and life.
Transition from plant to animal.
Sensation and nervous system.
Metabolism, growth, movement, etc.

Whether there are eternal truths in knowledge within the field of the three groups of knowledge. There are none, nor is there sense in speaking of the sovereignty of human thought. The opposition of truth and error is not absolute. Neither is that of good and evil. There is no absolute human morality; nor do the various possible and known moralities have a common foundation. Each morality corresponds to a historical situation and to the rule of a class.

Absurdity of the doctrine of innate equality.
Origin of social inequalities.
Historical value of the claims of equality: ancient world, Christianity, feudalism, capitalism.
Even equality as a proletarian claim is a contingent formula and not an absolute principle.

Question of free will and determination. Freedom can only be conceived as knowledge of natural necessities. The achievements of human technology are liberating. In what sense the greatest liberation of humanity will be realised.

Is contradiction nonsense?
Example of differential geometry of curves.
Dialectical method and contradiction.
Movement.
Life.
Contradictions in the field of thought and in elementary mathematics.
Marx and the transformation of quantity into quality with regard to minimum capital.
Example of fusion and vaporisation.
Example of the paraffin series.

Dühring’s misrepresentation of Marx’s application of the formula.
Marx and the expropriation of the expropriators.
Examples of the negation of the negation in Marx.
Demonstration sought not from the virtue of the formula but from historical-economic data.
Dialectics and logic as instruments of proof.
Various examples of the dialectical process: germination of grain, insect cycles.
Examples drawn from elementary and higher mathematics.
Historical examples drawn from the history of philosophy and from Rousseau (origin of inequality).
Character of the negation of the negation.

In the Preface to the Second Edition of the popularly named Anti-Dühring, dated 23 September 1885, Friedrich Engels thus summarises the origin of the doctrines he expounds.

The communist conception of the world is due to Marx and first appeared from him in the Poverty of Philosophy and in The Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1847. It then went through an incubation stage of twenty years until the appearance of Capital, spreading from then on more and more widely in all countries ‘where on the one hand there were proletarians, on the other scholars free from prejudice’.

The Poverty of Philosophy and Capital dealt mainly with economic subjects; the Manifesto constituted the programme of a political party, such that it could be believed that it was only a matter of a new economic school and a new party.

The doctrine instead encompassed a general vision of all problems of human action in which all problems of knowledge are included; and that at the same time it announced itself not as the birth of a new school of thinkers, but as the theoretical baggage of a section of men clearly defined by its material relations with others: the wage-earning class.

What was lacking was a text summarising the general communist conception of the world, meaning the world as the whole complex of facts presented to us by nature, including of course those concerning man and his functions; a text that alone could clarify the theoretical content of the communist movement and the necessary stance to be taken not only before the opposing classes and parties, but also before the religious, philosophical, and ideological statements and positions in general.

One of the theses of the new doctrine being that no author or school will ever be able to give the complete and definitive ‘system’ of ‘truth’, it proved particularly difficult to fulfil that task in a positive and ex-professo manner. Engels seized a polemical opportunity in the publications of the German professor Dühring who had adhered to socialism, bringing with him serious ideological confusion; publications that have lost all relevance today.

Of great importance, however, is the fact that Engels was able, in 1878 and with Marx’s direct collaboration, to coordinate the enunciation of his doctrine in the most diverse fields by taking advantage of the possibility of removing pretension and heaviness from his own work and that of the reader; so that the writing retains great value and marks a milestone as much as the other fundamental works mentioned earlier.

Engels was able to follow the order of Dühring’s work instead of the order of the new doctrine, which would in reality be very laborious, because it would have to consist of a recapitulation of the main data of all the sciences of the physical, organic, and human world, culminating in the study of the problems of human thought and action. In the traditional order, the series is partly inverted, and this remains inevitable even today because we too work with the traditional apparatus, at least in terms of language.

Fifty years after Anti-Dühring, the data of knowledge acquired in the various fields has multiplied and even changed, even if, conversely, the vicissitudes of the history of social conditions and of its reflected history in thought have not freed us much more from the difficulties we were already struggling against at the time.

For a study of the general conception of the world proper to communists, Engels’ book remains fundamental, but it would be difficult to work on it without taking into account later achievements in the field of science, even without making a secret of the fact that we largely overlook those contemporary ones in so-called philosophy.

And although Dühring is of little interest today and one can even dispense with quoting him, one can follow the order of Engels’ work despite the inevitable anticipations, which it renders necessary, of results set forth in the subsequent course of the treatment.

It is necessary to coordinate, with a stance taken before the various problems that arise and re-emerge from the field of science or pseudo-science and of all the traditional or latest fashionable ideological elaborations, the best known postulates of the doctrine that are for the most part its distinguishing features; not least because these themselves are for the most part poorly understood and poorly stated due to the lack of the general connection with which we are concerned here.

Socialism in the proper sense is something more than a programme of social order based on economic equality; at the same time, it is something more than a social and political movement for the defence of workers’ interests. The acceptance of socialism in the Marxist sense (which is identified with the original historical name of communism) consists in the acceptance, as fundamental points of doctrine and collective action, of the following cornerstones:
1. economic determinism or materialist conception of history, a positive explanation of the determination and development of the action and thought of human collectivities;
2. the doctrine of value and surplus value and the corresponding scientific explanation of capitalist production with its laws of development;
3. the programmatic doctrine of classes, parties, and the State, which defines the movement and the struggle of the working class, the party as its political organ for the conquest of power, the workers’ state or dictatorship of the proletariat.

These three doctrines are developed in the second and third parts of Anti-Dühring (Political Economy – Socialism).

Of the first of these, the fundamental elements are also found in the study of the first part of the work itself (Philosophy), the second, however, finds a more suitable place in a study along the lines of Capital; while the third can especially be developed on the basis of the programmatic part of the Manifesto and on that, particularly important since it has the value of restoration after the well-known deviations and revisions, of Lenin’s State and Revolution, which moreover draws on further vast historical experience of the proletarian struggle.

A general study such as that outlined by Engels serves not only to coordinate the best-known historical, economic, and political theses, but also to establish how one who accepts these, and does not want to be the unconscious object of extraneous influences is not ‘free’ to adhere traditionally or extemporaneously to even circumscribed currents of opinion, cannot remain or become, for example, Protestant or Jew, theosophist or spiritualist, Platonist or Spencerian, protectionist or Paretoite, and so on, while claiming to disconnect such attitudes from those determined by his or her alignment within the current of thought or action that corresponds to the advance of the proletarian class.

According to the traditional conception, philosophy is the unfolding of the highest forms of consciousness of the world and of life; and, in a broader sense, it embraces the principles of all knowing and all willing. The principles of every group of forms of existence and of knowledge are the object of philosophy.

These principles would be the simplest constitutive parts into which one can decompose, or from which one can recompose, the complexity of knowing and willing. Once acquired, these principles would have value not only for the field of known and accessible data, but also for spheres still inaccessible and unknown.

With this, the principles of philosophy would represent the final completion of which the individual sciences, all differently incomplete, have need in order to become a unified system of explanation of nature and human life.

Philosophy would therefore have as its proper object first of all the fundamental forms of all existence and subsequently the doctrine of the principles of nature and that of the human world.

Hence a division into three groups which more or less all philosophical systems present us. In the first group it is a matter of the principles of being, that is, of fundamental theses drawn from pure thought. And in the other two groups, these theses are applied to the world of nature and to the human world.

The conclusions of the first group are, for the various schools, more or less extensive, but in one sense or another they are always put forward as preconditions.

Philosophies of transcendence, assuming that those first principles are unreachable by the limited powers of human thought, enunciate them either as positive revelations from a higher consciousness, the divinity, or as data imposed upon human consciousness by a force it feels but cannot analyse or comprehend.

Philosophies of immanence construct such principles through operations of pure thought which they claim to implement before the data and sensations of the external world have influenced thought itself.

Finally, even philosophies of experience scarcely escape the thesis that in experience one of the factors is the human I; and even more so in the cognitive arrangement of the results of experience itself.

Since thought is the fabric upon which the results of observation of the external world are arranged, there would always have to be recognised as preconditions, if not to the reality of this world, then at least to our interpretation and exposition of it, certain properties and laws of thought that can be reduced to a more or less restricted set of relations (logic, mathematical logic, etc.).

These are the various answers given to the problem of the ‘theory of knowledge’ (gnoseology); but, aside from the differing importance attributed to such a precondition, it would seem unquestionable that one cannot escape the necessity of explicitly and implicitly resolving this problem in some way before dealing with the external world in its various distinctions, psychic and material, organic and inorganic, etc., insofar as every element of such treatment involves a human cognitive act.

And as long as this precondition is recognised, philosophy survives as a separate doctrine and its claim to ‘complete’ the gaps of positive and experimental knowledge, for a part that, from the minimum of certain formal schemata, claims to arrive at the schools we first mentioned, at the maximum of world-construction by projecting it outward from within the thinking I, even in spite of its ‘false appearances’.

Be that as it may, it is always a matter of principles, that is, of fundamental theses drawn not from the external world but from thought. These principles should hold for every being insofar as they are intended to apply to the real world, thus they condition not only the first group but also the other two.

For example, in Hegel’s system, the first group constitutes the Logic, which is not only the technique of the employment of thought and reasoning, but is at the same time the fundamental doctrine of being (ontology).

The second group in Hegel is the Philosophy of Nature, the third the Philosophy of Spirit. The data of the subsequent two groups are drawn from the constructions of the first, which are purely ideal.

To these traditional conceptions must be opposed their complete overturning. Man’s thinking is a process caused and conditioned by a very long series of other natural processes.

Its laws and principles cannot be considered as starting points of inquiry, but are instead its points of arrival.

They are drawn from the external world, that is, from nature and from the realm of man, which are not governed according to principles: on the contrary, principles are correct insofar as they accord with the facts of nature and history.

Consciousness and thought are not some given thing that pre-exists and at the same time stands in opposition to being and nature, they are products of the human brain just as man is a product of nature, and thus it is easiest to understand that thought and its principles, being ultimately products of nature, are in agreement with it as a whole rather than in contradiction with it.

If we seek to derive the schema of being, that is, of the world, not from our head but by means of our head from the real world, then we no longer have need of philosophy but positive knowledge of the world and what happens in it, i.e. positive science.

Since philosophy as such is no longer necessary, the need for any system likewise falls away. The notion that the totality of natural processes has a systematic connection compels science to search for it everywhere, in the particular and in the general. But a decisive and complete representation of this overall connection, that is, the construction of an exact mental image of the world system, remains for us and for all time an impossibility. Such a result would entail the consequence that any subsequent event, and the very complication and differentiation of cerebral functions (without here claiming that this is an eternal process with a constantly positive meaning) could no longer modify anything in the system of knowledge.

In fact, every attempt to systematise knowledge is provisional and transitory, as it is limited objectively by the historical situation and subjectively by the physical and mental characteristics of its author.

Just as the process of the formation of human knowledge presents itself as indefinite, so it appears necessary to reject all the a priori to which we have alluded, whether they be taught by God or excavated from the depths of thought; put forward as intuitions or patiently fabricated as absolute requirements of reasoning.

We have already alluded to the traditional objection that all our relations with reality are obtained through knowledge, and therefore the conclusions we reach concerning reality contain an element that is proper to our thought.

And so even those who attach great value to the results of experience, as we said, recognise that certain criteria of knowledge, such as pure mathematics and logic, are produced outside of it.

These theses are, on the basis of recent results, increasingly to be rejected, since, as we shall see, experience also conditions the conclusions of geometry, of mathematical analysis, and of logic itself.

We do not deny the existence of logic as a science and instrumental technique of the forms of thought; indeed, it is well known that in the Marxist conception its use is accompanied by that of dialectics, or the science of the relations between things and thus between their mental images, of which we shall have to discuss.

But what must be clarified is that logic is constructed and justified by its application to and correspondence with reality and not codified a priori in our head and only then applied to things.

It is no longer the science of the principles of thought, which becomes the science of the principles of being, but is merely the science of the forms of thought, not absolute and fixed, but always ready to be modified by results and data of the external world.

Whatever part is then attributed to experience in the formation of knowledge, one is faced with a very old objection: the experience of our senses tells us many times what is false; we do not believe it, but rectify its indications by means of our reasoning; therefore the function of this must precede all experience.

Let us next deal with these four arguments that claim to demonstrate the necessity of placing more or less extensive a priori data of the intellect at the basis of the study of the world.
1. The act of knowing as a relation between the I and the external is conditioned by the properties of the I, i.e., of thought.
2. The results of mathematics are products of pure thought.
3. The laws of logic, at least in the narrow formal sense, are products of pure thought.
4. The use of experience is impossible if certain preliminary critical conditions posited in our thought are lacking.

1 – Undoubtedly, we express, record, communicate our knowledge by means of thought, and, in a more concrete sense, by means of spoken and written language. On the data thus accumulated we then perform operations or reasonings from which we draw out new results in the form of suppositions or predictions, which in turn are generally confirmed by events in the real world. The argument appears very strong that this whole system: notion, reasoning, prediction, cannot subsist without the subject man, and moreover thinking man, and that its relations and connections are not properties of an external extra-human world, but of a world that is such insofar as it is known and thought of by us.

Indeed, the serious difficulty of this problem consists above all in the imperfections of the language into which we try to translate it.

If we claim to resolve it by thinking, we have already placed ourselves on the terrain of those who want to convince us that every result is conditioned by intrinsic laws of thought. Instead, the correct procedure is the opposite: the mechanism inherent in the instrument of thought, i.e. language, needs to be perfected and corrected in order for the question to be eliminated.

Correcting and rectifying the mechanism of language means appropriately modifying the value of the terms that represent real things and facts, and of the logical-syntactic relations that are susceptible to ever greater adaptation to their purpose.

It is a fact that the mechanism of language changes not only from epoch to epoch and from people to people (although the fundamental laws can and should be considered common to the various idioms) but also from school to school, from author to author, from researcher to researcher.

The value of terms and of linguistic relations is in continuous evolution and transformation: it is precisely the experience of the external world that decides, in the last instance, on the validity of the modifications. It is only that the slowness of these makes one believe that they are of little importance and thus limited by an absolute content of thought.

All this will be made clearer by the discussion of the alleged a priori validity of logical schemata and mathematical principles. In reality, the susceptibility of thought to adaptation is absolutely limitless; what was unthinkable for an epoch and was considered so because of absolute properties of thought, may today be entirely thinkable; and likewise if we compare, instead of different times, different races or individuals of different social classes, different brain development, etc., we can see that the same thing is possible today.

Especially the faculty of abstracting and generalising is acquired through a long exercise of the faculty of thinking, both collective and personal, and the exercise consists in the repetition of infinite particular applications, all satisfying experimental conditions.

The purported absolutes of thought are nothing but successive generalisations, most often destined to give way to others, thus lacking definitive value: in any case, they are the opposite of primitive, unmodifiable principles functioning as starting points.

The particular historical, ethnographic, etc., facts that confirm all this are innumerable. The savage cannot think of a number greater than three or five, the ordinary man must already make an effort to see clearly in his thought a demonstration of elementary mathematics, and he refuses to admit that it makes any sense to calculate with the infinitesimal parts of finite magnitudes.

The modern mathematician, on the other hand, performs such calculations as a matter of course, but may feel a sense of unease when confronted with the proposal of further abstractions such as those of differential forms with more than three dimensions, of Cantorian numbers (two infinite numbers, better known as transfinites, can be greater than each other) etc., etc.

These impossibilities of thought, so often employed as demonstrations of the absurdity of certain theses, have then had to give way to the eventual success of those very theses.

In the more proper field of language, the same observations can be made about both the value of words and their relations. For example, the verb ‘to be’, which represents the abstraction of abstractions and is the pillar upon which the proponents of the a priori wish to base the absolute laws of thought, goes back to an Indo-European root meaning to breathe, that is, a very concrete way of being that is peculiar only to living organisms. Having slowly reached generalisation, Scholasticism attempted to derive from it the properties of all material, spiritual, and divine essences, just as classical idealist philosophy sought to ground the origin of all superimposed logical schemas on it.

In the field of syntactic relations between words, it is noteworthy how, for example, the first steps of Hegel’s immense logical construction are conditioned, as has been observed, by the confusion of two instrumental functions of the verb ‘is’. If I say: Socrates is mortal, the verb ‘is’ has the function of a copula between subject and predicate; whereas if I say: Socrates is the husband of Xanthippe, the same verb expresses identity, i.e. it is equivalent to the expression ‘is the same man who was husband etc.’.

In the mechanism of thought, the two functions are different and it is worth studying them by recounting all the particular ‘cases’. But that would be an affront to the absoluteness of being, which admits of no specification or modification except non-being…!

Hegel therefore preferred to conclude that, since Socrates is particular, mortal is universal, the universal and the particular identify with each other, that is, they reconcile in the inner stage of the schema: the individual or concrete universal, etc., etc.

Regarding being, it should be considered that speculation, even by the most powerful minds (let alone the innumerable amateurs of philosophy), will never be able to discover anything. Rather, it will be possible to better regulate, even in the mechanism of language and syntactic logic, the scope of the generalisation of all the forms of being common to mineral bodies, organisms, man, etc., when more complete data is available concerning the phenomena of the transition between the mineral, organic, and human etc., realms.

It would seem that a certain weight of the objection under discussion has not been eliminated, or at least that it reduces to the impossibility of science and its development. Even if the mechanism of language is constantly changing and lacks any definitive character, this does not detract from the fact that there is no science outside of its use, and that there never can be. Now, if science is built on the mechanism of language, as well as on experimental data, and if one expects from science the perfection of that mechanism, then we are caught in a vicious circle, because science will never acquire a value independent of the mechanism itself: either the mechanism has its own internal perfection upon which science rests, and we are back to the aprioristic thesis, or the instrument of language-thought is imperfect by nature, and at least in part, scientific operations and their reforms of speech and thought will always be imperfect.

But even this vicious circle is nothing but a legacy of the traditional way of thinking. We cannot stop at the empty expression of vicious circle: what seems so today may not seem so tomorrow.

Indeed, this objection to the cognitive process can be raised against all practical processes of everyday life, which, however, are not judged as vicious circles.

Let us give a few examples, although any of these processes may present the characteristics we are alluding to.

Scales are nowadays built with graduations to the hundredth of a millimetre. High-precision machines are used to make them, the construction of which requires the mechanic to achieve an approximation in the dimensions of the parts that, a priori, would seem to have to be no less accurate than a hundredth of a millimetre. Let us pose the problem to the most skilled of mechanics, locked in a room; he will not solve it, yet this does not prevent technique from solving it routinely.

The vicious circle that would discourage any attempt by a pure logician has in reality been overcome through successive approximations. Let us summarise them as follows: with the tool accurate to the millimetre and with appropriate ‘demultiplying’ arrangements, a graduation to the tenth of a millimetre was achieved, and the tool that cuts to a tenth was built. With the parts made to the tenth, a tool was then built that cuts with the precision of a twentieth etc. etc. The actual process unfolded somewhat differently and was more complicated but that does not matter.

A similar example could be given by referring to advances in the hardness of steels, not in the sense of new chemical-metallurgical resources, but in that of the actual cutting ability of tool tips. Logically, it would seem that if a tool tip of hardness 20 exists, there must have previously existed one of hardness 40 to cut it. In practice, the opposite has happened, and continues to happen. That is, it is always the tool that is imperfect, and despite this it produces results that allow it to diminish its own imperfection.

Similarly, in order to study the laws of thermal expansion of gases, high-precision thermometers have been required: but precision thermometers are based on knowledge of the law of expansion of gases.

The vicious circle was there, but only in words; in reality, today the law of the phenomenon is known even in very advanced decimal deviations, and there are gas thermometers that give tiny fractions of a degree centigrade.

For the language-instrument, the same happens: we must be content to set out using it, even if we know it is imperfect but do not know precisely in what way and by how much. This will not prevent us from obtaining good, if not certain, results that will lead to improving the instrument, and so on with endless repetitions of the cycle.

The analogy of the examples we have invoked is obviously contested by the traditionalists. In an effort to explain the cognitive process without the use of a priori data, we have given examples taken from active processes, between material things, but in which man and his judgment participate as a diligent element. One could attribute the breaking of the vicious circles in which practical life and man’s struggle against the environment is woven, to the power of choice and discrimination of human reasoning.

Although it is more difficult, it can nevertheless be shown that the fact of successive corrections is actually determined directly by material conditions and occurs in processes in which man has only a minimal role, or none at all, nor do living organisms. This we could do in the special chapters on the organic and inorganic world.

In any case, it is evident that those refinements are not made in an arbitrary sense. Just as the great scientific breakthroughs, so the technical devices have been achieved through multiple independent paths.

It is trivial that the millstone has taken the circular form everywhere, but far more impressive examples are very frequent in the history of science and technology and are resolved in the systematic dispute over the priority of discoveries.

Finally, the practice of bypassing human intervention in certain stages of the technical process is becoming increasingly common through countless automatic devices, with the sole intention of proving that the intervention of an act of knowledge and will by a human being does not necessarily imprint a process with a character that cannot otherwise be reproduced.

The separation of the technique of language from the characteristics imprinted on it by the human subject may lend itself to irony, such as references to various past attempts at reasoning machines and the like.

That the instrumental evolution of human language, in which thought finds expression is in a sense substantially determined by the relations of the external world is also proven (even if the need for a single world language seems highly immature today) by the demonstration given by the glottologist Trombetti on the fundamental unity of type of all languages, patiently discovered through countless phonetic differences and degrees of conceptual development, and independently of the thesis of a single origin of human races.

We repeat that the least uncertain conclusion regarding the cognitive problem is to accept the instrumental ensemble of the laws of language and forms of thought as they are, to apply it to the unfolding of positive knowledge, expecting that those laws can still change in such a way as to better frame the totality of knowledge in accordance with the necessities of their critical comparison, denying that pure thought can in any case reveal its intrinsic laws and principles.

At the higher stages of positive research lies the answer to the problem of the relations between mechanism, physiology, and products of the organ of thought, our brain, which may perhaps provide a general solution to the relations between the external world and human thought, or rather to the way these relations arise.

This does not exclude that one may work on this research by provisionally accepting as valid methods and positions that will have to be superseded.

This procedure has a history of fruitful results in all fields: speculation has only created illusory difficulties and often unnecessary renunciations; when it has appeared to produce useful results, it was only a matter of results extracted from the unconscious application of the approximate and concrete method that we have derived.