The phenomena of technical evolution, unfolding before our eyes, can only be mastered and understood in the wake of the proletarian revolution.

Instead, the bourgeois attitude to technology today takes on ambiguous or extreme connotations: there are currents that oppose it, others that consider it capable of solving every problem. Finally, there are us communists, critically aware that there is no technology in itself, but there is a level of productive capacity and modes or relations of production, according to which technologies of various kinds are organised by classes, in a determined order of social subordination. It is this that characterises us, and which poses a great difficulty for our opponents, since we are not prepared to reason in generic or abstract terms, with preconceived favour or hatred towards machines.

Unlike everyone else, we are of the conviction that the productive forces, at a certain stage of their development, cannot be contained within the old and narrow relations of production. When society is pregnant, inevitably, at some point, the labour pains are felt, and a new society, founded on new relations, is about to be born.

It may be said that the birth has been and will be, historically, troubled, but mastering modern technology will only be possible by a new class, not by a new bourgeois or petty-bourgeois thought that does not allow itself to be overwhelmed by machines, the great fear typical of those who cannot see a way out of the pressure of dead Capital that devours and lives off living labour.

To represent Technology as the great invincible Golem is nothing more than the construction of an idol to be sacrificed in order to appease it. Nor is this the dynamic and dialectic capable of giving perspective to the proletariat and, through it, to the entire human species. Technology is not a totalising structure now victorious and insurmountable, as people try to make it out to be. Those who pretend not to see the connection between productive forces and relations of production are condemned to invent the Idol, in the same way that past modes of production, unable to see the end of ancient slavery, had to explain everything with the advent of a messianic Saviour, expected and welcomed by some, executed by others.

While the Party, in relation to the processes of science, shares its material object and acts upon it to transform it, it cannot, however, make its own the form it takes within the capitalist mode of production. Dialectical materialism does not deny science this objectivity and stance, recognising its autonomy, distinct from bourgeois ideology in general, but we deny from the outset, and in a stark manner, that there can be a science of nature and society of a neutral type, above classes.

Once one accepts and enters into the Marxist reading of technology, any opposing interpretation or description proves shallow and unable to account for the internal dynamics of the material production of life. The preoccupation with not being able to cope with and control technological innovations, as they are defined today, is the product of the objective and historical weakness of the bourgeois class, before its thought.

The modern myth, from Faust to the more or less evocative remakes of our less brilliant culture, has as its object the looming threat over every technical invention: the alembic that could explode, the discovery that could change and disrupt life in its already known forms, up to the catastrophe that can accompany the destructive possibilities of energy. Are they not, perhaps, all variants of the myth of Prometheus, so familiar and dear to us?

It is not given to the ruling class to dominate, even on a conceptual level, technology because the productive forces are the dynamic fact and only relatively controllable compared to the relations of production, which constitute the form that ‘artificial’ material reality assumes in the social relation. The scope of the productive forces constitutes the explosive element, which, while breaking the shell of the constituted social forms of production, only through revolutionary processes settles and crystallises into relations of production, within which the voluntary element alone is able to exercise its influence and control. Technology, as a product of the social hand, can escape its control: this is indeed what continuously happens in the capitalist mode of life.

What makes us believe that socialism will be capable of giving form and security so that the remedies of technology are no worse than the evil for which they were invented and implemented? We might deduce this in the negative, from the critical description of the prevailing and overflowing capitalism.

There is no such thing as a technology or technique above classes, the result of general human ingenuity. And yet the most widespread of impostures seems, today more than ever, to rage: technology will free man from his miseries and difficulties. The operation stems from the representation of reality, both natural and social, that the bourgeoisie has historically tended to give: hiding its basic contradictions through the myth of science and technology, avoiding highlighting social relations and ownership of the means of production, giving the impression that the social complex acts and produces without internal divisions.

Where this has occurred, as in primitive organic society, this raises no objections on our part; but the fact that modern society is divided into classes is not a discovery of Marx, who honestly acknowledges it, nor do the supporters of Capital themselves today deny it; they simply reject its logical consequences and deny that it can invalidate the entire productive and distributive apparatus. Technology and science would, according to them, have the power to ignore these fractures, indeed to heal them as if they were a natural remedy.

The core of historical materialism, however, is this: the socially dominant class subjugates, shapes, and organises the technical productive forces for the purpose of preserving its privilege; there is no discovery or technical invention that can escape this necessity. Even, indeed particularly, research centres, portrayed as places protected from the whirlwind of egoism and interests, where one would not care about anything other than finding the truth of things, and then applying it to the preparation of instruments useful to humanity, are not only conditioned, but determined by the sources of funding that come from the broader productive apparatus, from Capital as the overall system of social life. This is so obvious that it needs no explanation. The analysis of Capital carried out by Marx constitutes the organic scientific representation of the processes through which wage labour, variable capital, is subjugated to constant capital in all its forms, from factory labour to the benches of the most sophisticated research.

Capital, greedy only for corporate and immediate profit, easily subjugates technology and science since, holding the means of production and all wealth, it can always bribe the managers of research centres and force its wage-earning technicians to poorly design and mismanage. This phenomenon is odious and evident to everyone, even to many of the, shall we say, honest technicians and scientists in this society, so much so as to become vox populi and the object of repeated and insistent rhetorical denunciations, as hypocritical as they are impotent. Indeed, the company that behaved otherwise would succumb. But, on the other hand, the obtuse and self-interested violence of Capital on human doing and knowing takes place in a deeper, subtler way, unknown and involuntary to the bourgeois themselves, through the defects of their class intelligence that manifest themselves in superstitions, prejudices, insensitivity and in a mass of real systematic errors. A certain class astigmatism strikes its scholars and designers. This, from within the isolated system, from within the society of capital, is difficult to detect just as it would be difficult to explain in an institute for the blind that blue is not green. Only the revolutionary bourgeoisie, in its time, was able to see, and denounce, the glaring errors of medieval scholasticism in astronomy, medicine, etc., while the learned cardinals were truly convinced, and with proofs, their badly interpreted proofs, that the Earth stood still in the Universe.

If there were any need for another confirmation of the absurdity of the democratic principle: the opposing classes will neither understand nor convince each other.

We deduce from this the prediction that, just as communism is the exit from human prehistory, so will Science and a true critique of present-day superstitions, worse, we are certain, than those of the ancient priests, only be made in a post-wage and post-mercantile society, and that only in that recovered non-lacerated way of living will technology be truly aimed at the reduction of effort and the duration of labour.

Despite fashionable indeterminism, the hard law of labour has not yet managed to escape, under the capitalist regime, from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Every technical innovation, stripped of its phenomenal aspects and glittering packaging, carries with it the stigma and damnation of reacting to that law. There is no discovery that can boast of having escaped this law of gravity, the heavy tribute to the iron laws of the market. This is what Marx intended to uphold throughout his entire work, insistently attentive to science, to discoveries on the dialectic of nature, from that of Darwin to those of Morgan. No indifferentism on our part towards the revolutions to which the production and reproduction of Capital is relentlessly subjected; but without wavering from reiterating that only the proletarian one, which is social, i.e. political and not merely technical, will be able to rescue labour from the condemnation to which the factory regime subjects it.

The very succession of technical revolutions, from the basic one of the steam engine, which enabled the take off of modern capitalism, up to the most recent ones, such as computing and telematics, indicate that the very sectors of activity and research in which Capital has entangled itself have never been free or the result of randomness: every apparent randomness of discoveries has been pressed and accompanied by a force more powerful than any serendipity, the new illusion that seems to animate the hopes of unprincipled scientists, namely, the idea of relying on chance, on luck, which would have the power to bring about what one would never have expected.

When they present Columbus’s discovery of the New World to us as the fruit of chance, while it may seem plausible given that he expected to reach the Indies, it is forgotten that, despite the inadequacy of their physical notions and outright errors in geographical calculation, the powers of the time were in search of gold, as the development of the market of the time in Europe dictated. Whatever land might have been discovered, the imperative was to find gold! And gold was found. Thus, at our school, it is a matter of going a little deeper with respect to the common and taken-for-granted ideological, religious, political, surface-level, or other reasons.

The very caravels themselves, poetically presented as fragile vessels, are clearly understandable, on a technical level, in the light of the development of the productive forces of the time. A truism, of course, but much more serious than the serendipity that astonishes epistemologists, scholars of the history of science, who are short on ideas and investigative seriousness. If it is true that penicillin was discovered by chance by Fleming, it is also true that the scientist found himself, not by chance, among the moulds that had attracted his curiosity and attention. So, while today telematics is praised as the quintessence of marvels, it is not admitted that mathematical and logical research has for almost a century been actuated, not so much or simply in the name of pure knowledge, but by material pressures that demand it to shorten times, roll up its sleeves, and find a way to make mathematics applicable to the world of machines, so as to create tools that slow down the fall in the rate of profit, that make machines more manageable, easier for calculation, to the point of equipping with them and through them not only some big electronic brain as big as a room in some ministry, but every company, if possible every white-collar worker in the service of His Majesty Capital.

Does all this perhaps mean that we intend to say that there is no need for ingenuity? We only want to argue that ingenuity does not live on hot air, and that it is possible for it to develop in the midst of productive life, even when it must be admitted that a certain kind of isolation and distance from praxis in the strict sense is needed for it to bear fruit. A dialectical circuit is conceivable between – the initial enhancement of human labour capacities – the freeing from the permanent and looming pressure to procure the essentials of life, from food to shelter against the elements – the emergence of theoretical thought, of reflection on human labour and nature, as a distinct activity. In this sense, the transition from the condition of nomadic hunter-gatherer to that of a sedentary herder-farmer was decisive for our species.

The formation of the brain, and the functioning of the social network of brains, which allowed for faster cognitive development, are still to be investigated and explained. Only when this has been accomplished will it really make sense to pose the unsolved question of whether universals are real or merely nominal, in other words, whether the logisticians or the psychologists are right. That the discovery of remedies for living has accelerated the formation of a brain-mind capable of producing within itself powerful superstructures (perhaps so powerful, or too powerful, as to delude itself into thinking it lives independently of the other organs of the body, as well as of manual labour) is a question of striking relevance, if we think of the stupid promises of the bourgeoisie that continues to offer more technology as the basis of Progress and Freedom.

Since we have the declared ambition to link within a single arc the men with clubs and the communist man produced by modern society, we would like to identify the motives and reasons for the communist project and for its necessity.

The way of being in the world is the product of different modes of social life and production: but while many conceptions either fail or refuse to find the shared humanity in the epochs most distant from one another, we, who theorise the translatability of languages and experiences, even when they seem incommensurable, have the need to see clearly what binds and what divides, in such a way as to find the objective, material, tendential laws that unite and drive towards communist society.

That the club or the skilfully chipped amygdala are already rudimentary yet effective extensions of the hand is unquestionable. But to recognise in the machines produced by social labour, today alienated and vilified by the capitalist mode of production, still, and ever more so, the powerful hand that will be the hand of communist society tomorrow, appears to most to be unfeasible, especially after the tragic events of the century just ended.

We, of course, do not relent and remain of the conviction that the development of the productive forces pushes in the direction of the complete liberation of labour and the proletarian class, an elementary conviction that is the product of science but first and foremost of feeling and intuition.

The feeling of man and nature that characterises archaic humanity is distinct from that which animates the so-called modern technological man, who is nothing other than the alienated man of bourgeois society. While only the class party is the bearer of the scientific doctrine of the communist future and glimpses its vast horizons, the latter is instead dulled by divided and specialised labour, which it exalts and supports.

In the Bible, at the beginning, Genesis, it is said that ‘God created the heavens and the earth’, and that this was ‘desolate and uniform’. How can one fail to see that in the God who creates and draws out of the formless the form of all things lies the human metaphor and the sublimation of his labour?

Tekne is synonymous with art-artus-hand. Engels goes so far as to say the ‘discovery of the hand by the ape’! The hand is the organ that allows man to install himself in nature, producer of his own living conditions. From that fateful moment, the hand no longer confines itself to producing immediate, general remedies for life, because it has produced, exponentially, those tools, which in the modern age are identified with machines, capable of replacing the hand, up to the possibility of modern industry to mass produce. While idealist currents have always sought the motor of history and human development in the so-called power of thought, in ideas, we have always asserted the primacy of labour, distinguishing the productive forces – in the different modes of production, from the ancient slave system to the serf system of the Middle Ages to modern capitalism – from the relations of production which, while being their product, at the same time tend to dominate and shape them, up to the point of attempts to contain them in the descending phase of their development.

This does not mean, contrary to the claims of our political and ideological opponents, that we do not concern ourselves with superstructures, including those that are exquisitely formal and theoretical. As long as one does not pretend to speak either of pure philosophy, or pure mathematics, or pure ethics or aesthetics, which generally arise when the vital relationship and implication between material forces and their psychic/formal elaboration is lost, by virtue of the tendency of the decadent classes to completely detach themselves from labour and from living, organic experience, in order to better delude and deceive themselves into believing that they can preserve their primacy.

In our outlook, in organic societies (and future communism, like crude and primitive communism, will be such but at the level of species!) praxis and thought are not in opposition, even when we know that at a certain level of development theory, as a general view of matters, assumes its own relative autonomy. So much so that we are of the conviction that without revolutionary theory there can be no reversal of praxis. We were alone in asserting this ‘vision’ of the world when social-democratic theorists made a mockery of this archaic behaviour. Now, at the risk of appearing naive, since historically we have even earned the epithet of iguanodons from the ‘frigid’ Palmiro, we believe in ‘visions’! Which is not to say that we do not lay claim to dialectical materialism as our necessary scientific method!

The development of specialisations, the division of increasingly complex functions have ended up splitting society into classes and provoking in individuals the accentuation of faculties functional to these differences. But the communist conception has always envisaged the recovery of the polyvalence of capacities, the openness to the performance of different tasks and aptitudes, that genius that the modern bourgeois views with suspicion or as a waste of time, of productivity and increased costs, and that instead in the best, as in the European Renaissance, have expressed the multilateral man, open to the most diverse arts, worker-theorists, inventors, builders, and users of tools and languages all at once, from Leonardo’s machines to Galileo’s convex lenses, which well represent the human spirit close to us.

That is why we have no less admiration and respect for archaic man than for the man produced, and crushed, by modern productive forces. In other words: the age-old tension between ‘fides et ratio’ is overcome in the dialectical materialist theory of the Party, which encompasses both. In opposition to the detractors of manual, inferior labour, we triadically claim the possibility of co-operation and agreement not only between mind and heart, but between hand, heart, and mind, which we consider to be at the origin of the development of all the faculties considered higher such as art, science, philosophy, theological and mathematical speculation. They are, however, not the mind, heart, and hand of an individual, but of a class whose destinies are anticipated in its party.

Keeping to the history of the evolution of human societies and faculties, if it is true that the cerebral cortex is the formation closest to the man of today, with its 1500 cubic centimetres of capacity in relation to the 450 of the Pithecanthropus, it also seems natural to us and by no means abnormal that the primitive does not think ideas, but that these appear before his eyes: ‘the idea appears before him as a sensory perception projected outwards, almost like a hallucination or at least like an extremely vivid dream. For this reason in a primitive, thought can superimpose itself on sensory reality to such an extent that if a European were to behave in the same way he would be taken for a fool’ (Jung, The Unconscious). For the Amazonian aborigines, who do not go to the analyst, the dream is more real than waking life.

The setting up of the dispirited universe of science and technology is a relatively recent acquisition, even if the foundations can be traced to the logical/rational education of Greek origin. The transition from the attitude of vision to an objectifying evaluation of the world matures in the society marked by the class division typical of the polis: on one side slave owners, on the other slaves and metics. Those who ascribe this result to thought as such, and specifically Greek thought, idealise Athenian democracy, forgetting the conditions that made it possible.

Since we hold that in the most diverse cultures, at a certain degree of development of the productive forces what is decisive is the economic and social base, we do not have an exclusive preference for the culture of one area over another. Whose side should we take, if we followed the thread of thought and culture? And why should we, especially today, disregard Chinese, Japanese, Indian philosophy and thought?

Marxist historical materialism, a conscious expression, a scientific doctrine of the proletarian class, finds its foundation in communist sentiment, siding with the subaltern classes wherever they may be. Does this conflict with the material needs of knowledge and its methods? Certainly not, even though we are able to distinguish and identify the historical and theoretical conditions that, in different areas, have accompanied the development of technology.

We are not indifferent to the concern proper to modern science, to expunge from the notion of matter spirits and little spirits, according to the magical and superstitious version typical of other modes of life of the past. But in our conception, ‘communist vision’ and ‘science’ (with its inevitable theoretical apparatus, of a conceptual kind, according to a certain theory of ideas as handed down to us in the modern age) cannot be at odds. This clarifies a fundamental difference, according to which while in the Party it is the ‘vision’ and ‘science’, in the class that struggles, fights anonymously in time and space, it is not the ‘theory’. Proletarians struggle according to need, animated by need and levels of consciousness that cannot be confused with the notion that the class organ has of it, historically and formally. The party is not indifferent to the emotions and instinctive intuitions of the class, but it cannot do without the rational theoretical knowledge of the economic processes that condemn bourgeois society and drive towards communism.

Once again, ‘fides et ratio’ united and not in conflict, as if faith were primitive and reason modern, sic et simpliciter, but a recognition that nature is governed by laws and that the indisputable principle of the objective value of scientific knowledge and technical activities cannot be considered, in our battle, detached from the ‘vision of communism’, or from the meaning that opposing social forces attribute to reality.

The attitude proper to science consists in considering as real not what manifests itself, but only what it, after corroboration checks, can state as objective. Science always comes after experience. It proves (or disproves) intuitions, formulates laws and theories in which both the ‘worldview’ and the rational consideration of things and events converge. The bourgeois ‘worldview’ necessarily produces bourgeois science and bourgeois technology!

Once again, in this way, we can say that, in our conception, immediate struggles, organised resistance to the pressure of the ruling class that the proletarian class is able to face with its own forces, are not underestimated, but at the same time it is argued that the ability to make assessments and verifications belongs only to the party as the organ that synthesises both attitudes, that is, both the ‘revelatory’ and the ‘objectifying’ posture in relation to material reality.

It follows that techniques, understood both as productive methods and as remedial capacities in relation to limitations and shortcomings, as well as the obstacles that reality opposes, are not for us to abstract as results in themselves, but always as the product and interaction of concauses, a convergence of forces within the social and natural parallelogram.

It follows that while we do not idolise any technology (not even those internal to the class or the party, such as organisational modules, recruitment or combat tricks, inducing enthusiasm through buzzwords) we are at the same time willing and able to recognise its effectiveness or weakness. In principle, we have no reason to abhor any technology (Luddism was an instinctive class reaction against machines that took work away from the proletariat), but we do not expect anything decisive from any new technology that has any bearing on the struggle for communism.

In a world and in a mode of production where there is a tendency to recover the ‘revelatory posture’ in relation to the real, to the point that the alienated man expects from technology those miracles that reduce his sufferings and deprivations of humanity, while in reality the effect is the opposite, the hard experience of the difficult struggles of the subordinate classes stands as testimony that without a fighting organ that does not let itself be overwhelmed by the easy surrogates that last a day, it is not possible for them to free themselves from their historical chains.

From this point of view, the accusation levelled at our historical movement of having deprived the dispossessed, through the coldness of materialism, of the consolation of the apparition, which in the so-called ‘revelatory posture’ of consciousness would allow the real to give itself flesh and blood, rich in meaning and reality for each subject, is accompanied by the opposite accusation, namely that of propagating myths and illusions that would overlap with the ‘truths’ of religious faiths or magical promises, typical of pre-scientific eras. It is really time to decide: either the revolution is simply a mechanistic model that lets things mature automatically by purely natural means, or it is an illusion that replaces other illusions.

For this reason, the two postures before reality, both the ‘revelatory’ and the ‘objectifying’ one, both assume, under the scrutiny of Marxist critique, the meaning and function of proposing an attitude that is not concerned with transforming, with revolutionising social and natural reality, but with receiving it in a miraculous form, or its opposite, with accepting technology as an objective and unchangeable given and that never questions the fundamental order of social relations. In both cases, the result is a static, descriptive vision, rather than a prescriptive one in relation to reality.

In the dialectical materialist notion, which appears aberrant to current thought, eclectic or sceptical even in the ‘rigorous’ sphere of science, in the beginning was the Act.

Is this perhaps such a shocking discovery? Recent exegesis has recognised that even the Gospel of John, when it states ‘In the beginning was the Word’, does not refer to the Greek Logos. In the Middle Eastern area, where Judeo-Christianity took root, the term Davar means Speaking, Acting, Being, while Logos means Speaking, Counting, Thinking. The Logos, which literally alludes to the philosophical nature of discourse, gathers and binds words together, brings order to concepts, but often remains prisoner to them.

Questions of orthodoxy, correct doctrine, are not opposable to those of orthopraxy, which have always plagued political and philosophical movements, as well as associations and churches. Not by chance. Of ‘Father Zapatas’ who preach well but behave badly, sooner or later everyone ends up fed up with them. One might object that it is not easy to find a way around this inconvenience. There are those who appeal to constitutions, laws, rules, regulations, congresses, at which to take stock of whether intentions, programmes, have been executed, whether the given word has been kept, in short, whether practice has corresponded to pacts. All this indicates that any theory does not limit itself to knowing reality, or worse, as is fashionable today, to interpreting it, but acts upon social and individual reality, transforms it! This has always been the case.

‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Thesis 11 on Feuerbach). Marx, emphasising this need, in the sense of the necessity of revolutionary transformation, merely said that an abstract theory, which limits itself to interpretation, is simply an illusion, a deception that tends to conceal the praxis of the ruling classes, yesterday, today concerned with passing off as true a static conception of knowledge and reality. The attempt to attribute to thought an objective truth, Marx continues, ‘is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question’.

But the Praxis of Homo Faber, and its progeny, is precisely Technique. The hand of man, the discovery of his possibilities to shape reality, to adapt it to his needs, means that in the course of history the human being (not individually, but as organised in social forms) has succeeded in bending nature to its needs, although never in a definitive way. Labour applied to nature entails the discovery of its relative regularities, of its laws. Only in this way is it possible to speak of technique, which indeed is still today associated with the concept of an instrumentation capable of drawing and extracting from the objective world remedies suitable for life.

There is truth in the conviction that every acquired level of tool instrumentation appears in every epoch and historical moment as the non plus ultra, a vanguard of effects, the ultimate breakthrough that gives the impression of having solved the problem in relation to which it was developed.

That the courage and pride with which bourgeois science demolished millennia-old beliefs and errors is in decline, indeed in an almost marasmus phase, is there for all to see. This class, which had overcome ideological and state boundaries, is retreating, leaving behind it rubble and... commodities that cannot pass through the narrow bottleneck of relative overproduction. If the effort to understand social processes as well as natural ones was powerful and sincere, naturally because it was necessary, all the more stomach-turning are the current attitudes of an almost complete rejection of the scientific method, not only in nature but particularly in the so-called ‘social sciences’, abandoned to sociologism, pragmatism, and aimless probabilism. Imagine the tedium that our lessons based on historical and dialectical materialism must cause!

The nature of technique should be to obey a purpose. But it is inevitable that, as in the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, the demons conjured cannot be exorcised. What is it that in the domain of technology ends up escaping the control of the forces that set it in motion?

The purpose of technique is conceivable as external to technique itself, which, being a mere means, having its own rationality, should easily be neutralised and set aside if one so desires. But in the social sphere, the means of production are things that live a life of their own. No mode of production can be evoked or stopped by political power no matter how strong. Even in the case of proletarian power, it is not through a decree that the system of production of Capital can be abolished, just because it would be desirable. With proletarian power begins an era of great social reforms that will lead to the overcoming of the old regime.

The rationality proper to technology tends instead to be conceived as an insuperable Moloch, precisely because its intrinsic lack of purpose makes it a dull power. Faced with it there would be nothing but the impotent Luddite-like reaction of the violent destruction of the object that tends to enslave the will and living force of man. The fetishisation of technology, the latest theoretical cry, would realise the very nature of Western rationality, now dominant, indeed totalitarianly insuperable. In short, the Tekne would be the new God who admits no other God besides Himself: worship or remain victims.

The means-end circuit, or ends, needs to be mastered even at the theoretical level, otherwise the guide for action becomes an end in itself. The Left has very clearly de-sanctified Theory, so as not to fall victim to it: what has happened to opportunism, which, after having delegated to high priests the custody of so-called Marxism-Leninism as a link, has surrendered to the evidence... of the primacy and victory of technology! The impracticability-uselessness of socialism has thus become a new doctrine: whoever lingers thinking otherwise is no longer even heretical (for lack of a church), but simply worthy of the ship of Medusa.

But the harsh retorts of History will not be long in coming, if it is true that the structural crisis, the ungovernability of the global market are admitted, the fractal geometry within the management of political power, divided between nationalist-localist temptations and the UN World Government. In short, an evident clogging both from a theoretical and practical point of view.

For our party the end remains communism, and the means, all those series of necessary steps from the class struggle to the proletarian State. Those who complain that the proletarian State has historically ended up assuming the dignity and shame of an end in itself are confusing things. And they know it perfectly well. It is no coincidence that, in the climate of catastrophic assessments at the end of the century, the historical legislators have not mentioned those political currents that denounced and fought opportunist degeneration at the cost of their lives, first from within and then from outside. Not a single mention (fortunately!). The history of the Left has insistently revealed not only theoretical collusions, but practical forms of collaboration, not tactical, as the various Stalins deluded themselves, but strategic. Once again, means have been transformed into ends and vice versa.

No neo-Luddism therefore to be invoked as a revolutionary tool, but the workers’ struggle that knows how to combine the uncompromising defence of labour with the political goal.

The most burning question, often vulgarised into the most cloying sauces of clichés, is that of the technology-ethics link, i.e. to what extent man (Man with a capital M, i.e. ethical man) is able to master the productive forces without, as happens to the sorcerer’s apprentice, being overwhelmed by them.

The new demon, exorcised by so many, would be the will to power that would take advantage of the development of technology. The myth of progress is replaced by the terror of too much wisdom, because progress, which should have brought everyone, democratically, improvement, definitive liberation from misery, continues instead to provoke insuperable contradictions, the hunger of almost two billion of the world’s population, the economic-ecological ruin of entire continental areas. Here then is the beast, the technology that dominates everything, and that no one will ever be able to dominate! It will be objected that bourgeois thought is pluralistic, and allows itself to perpetually oscillate between the exaltation of science and its demonisation! Too convenient. In reality, the bourgeoisie is constitutionally incapable of a general Species Plan, prisoner of the contradictions between increasingly complex and sophisticated social labour, and private appropriation. The old, unsurpassed contradictions of its auroral times.

If in the not too distant past the subaltern classes could be threatened with religion and the State by divine will, today the aim is to dominate them through the deployment of technology, which must give the impression of the Babelic, sprawling, and uncontrollable quagmire, which offers no possibility of being governed. But for us, it is nothing but the mass of dead Capital that predominates over the living one, crushes it, not allowing it to organise itself according to true necessities and real needs.

In the Marxist conception, technology, far from assuming a categorical-abstract meaning and value, is tackled head-on when it is recognised that the economic structure, the production and reproduction by human societies of material life, is the fundamental base upon which the so-called superstructures, from those of command to the more sophisticated and general ones, including religious and philosophical ones in the broadest sense, are erected.

So, our bread and butter. But what characterises our position is that it is scholastic and improper to pretend to give abstract answers such as: will our hero (always Man!) manage not to be overwhelmed by the products of his labour? The question must be treated in a dialectical form: Man, as Marx recalls, is both a social product and an actor, capable of actively intervening in ‘making his own history’, but not at his own pleasure and whenever he wants, with his own hands! Seemingly a Solomonic solution: as much to the productive forces as to the relations of production...

A certain level of productive forces, that is to say, a certain type of development of technology, determines a certain type of social relations. But there is, in our view, no technology in the abstract, that are not held within given relations of production, capable of directing them toward certain ends. As long as they do not explode in their hands, giving rise to a phase of profound crisis, of a transition towards new relations of production.

So why is it that, despite ultra-rotten capitalism, it is communism that appears to have been definitively beaten by history? Because only an ultra-imperialistic and economistic version, proper to social-democracy as always, can delude us into thinking that we are moving mechanically and gradually towards socialism. Productive forces, techniques, are not neutral, and no one can delude himself into thinking he can dominate them at will, neither in the belief in a natural equilibrium constituted by the market, nor of a false bourgeois statist dirigisme, nor of a cunning combination of the two forms.

These theoretical elaborations, not lacking in suggestion, are not foreign to historical materialism, which has given its own assessment and response: the productive forces determine particular relations of production, which come into conflict with them, giving rise to a tension and a dialectic that pushes toward new social arrangements. In this sense, the womb of History is pregnant with new realities.

This historical determinism that culminates in socialism was overturned by Stalinism, heretically, into a socialism that develops the productive forces, kept compatible with the market and with Capital. The market, it theorised, is unsurpassable. As if to say: socialism is nothing but better (?) organised capitalism, capable of distributing more equitably... (and we have seen how!). In this theoretical (naturally... practical!) gridlock, technology, its intrinsic rationality has become the invincible God, the end of history, the means without an end, and other such pleasantries.

How then is control to be re-established over the remedy gone mad? Can the remedy be remedied? Theoretical short-circuits, notoriously, like the famous Hegelian ‘headaches’, need the sword of Alexander, who, when faced with the Gordian knot, gave the blunt demonstration of how it could be untied.

Violence, then? complain the official thinkers. We have already said that no decree can remedy things, nor recourse to blind Luddism, but a series of despotic social measures are necessary so that the means may return to being a means.

Capitalism boasts of its techniques as the only possible ones, in some way natural, and instead they are nothing but its means, productive forces functional to the valorisation of Capital. It is Capital that, from a means, has transformed itself into an end, becoming the Moloch that in the eyes of its worshippers appears insurmountable, both as an end and as a means.

The harsh and bitter controversy unleashed against technology, therefore, strikes the pack saddle, but alludes to the beast. Unable to tame the demons it itself evoked, the society of Capital has realised, with its thoughtful ideologues, that resentment towards technical progress is a good instrument to put an entire social expectation of emancipation on trial, thus masking the true objective of the controversy. It is forbidden to deal with the real dialectic, not a word about the relations between classes, which, according to many, have now been overcome by the spread of services, of the tertiary sector that is in danger of becoming ‘quaternary’.

Technology is the remedy put in place by man to confront, due to his finiteness, the primary scarcity in which he found himself living. But the remedy proposed by social reformers risks becoming worse than the evil to which they would like to provide a solution. And we are already in the midst of existentialism-catastrophism. Then spreads the utopia of a society tailored to man, understood as the possibility of controlling technology by returning to the good old days with the romanticism of handmade things, a fairy tale for reactionary petty bourgeois, at least on the social scale.

For today’s thinkers who have tried harder than others to grasp the heart of the matter, from Heidegger to some of his followers and critics, once, according to them, the so-called ‘death of God’ was attested to, it was inevitable that something would take its place, a new deity, harrowing and unbeatable, as well as, naturally, eternal and insuperable: the non plus ultra, technology. What would this power of consist of, which would subject everything to itself and in particular every human, or humanistic, will? The fact that it is ‘based on exact measurements, and rational criteria’! The petty bourgeois fears this power of technology. Because – apart from the cliché of the standardisation it would produce, with the levelling of the individual, with the seriality that replicates, dissolving every trace of the hand (think of the much lamented society tailored to man, which we have not failed to be ironic about) – they fear, out of an insuperable sense of guilt, the brutality of their capitalist relations of production, which are the true producers of extortion, alienation, and violate not only proletarian labour, but their very own culture and routine of life.

The bourgeoisie is incapable of grasping the positive aspect, in a dialectical sense, of its work of destruction. On the contrary, we are historically able to grasp this positive, and not just the nihilistic, aspect that seems to prevail: ‘debase, alienate, erase the individual, to the terror and scandal of the reactionaries: it works for the Revolution. It will make it possible for Man, after the revolution, and the cancellation of every patent and monopoly, to resume his studies, without the nightmare that the malignant subterranean forces of the market will rob him of the magical creatures of his labour and thought’ (Il Partito Comunista, May-June 2000).

Technology reflects the potential of the productive force of labour subjected to a given mode of production. And inevitably, in the capitalist mode, every product, even the most fascinating, technological, and sophisticated, bears the mark of the private appropriation of profit, the glaring contradiction that within every tool sees, on one side, social labour capable of so much, and, on the other, the stigma of specialisation, of the limits determined by the haste needed to produce it, with the intrinsic defects of an assembly carried out under the drive of private interest, with the original sin of a class necessity that makes it pay its price.

Consider the recent air collision over Lake Constance: the technical apparatus on the ground for detecting conflicting routes was present but, due to the lack of a backup parallel processor, it was not monitoring during maintenance operations; despite this, due to the sacred dogma of cost reduction, only one wage-earner was on duty to monitor the movements of five behemoths waiting to land. Given the congestion at airports, technical regulations have recently halved the altitude difference that must be maintained between the stack of planes in circular flight until a runway becomes free, relying on new, more precise technical altitude measuring equipment that should be installed on board. It is clear that the new, truly astounding, distance measuring capabilities do not serve the safety of flights today, or anything else, on the contrary, they make them more unsafe, everything being geared towards their immediate economic and corporate returns.

Technology, the latest Golem, is, in short, the most fragile of creatures: in the hands of Capital, its dangerous explosive power grows with every passing moment. Technology is not at the service of man, but of his idol, money and accumulation. Every time technology betrays, the capitalist organisation promises more controls, sets up inquiry commissions. But it is incapable of unravelling its enigma. Only the mole of the revolution is able to grind down the foundations on which the capitalist edifice stands.

Our invariance is matched, disguised as movement at all costs, by the opposing invariance, of the bourgeoisie, and the trick remains the same: swapping the subject with the predicate. For us, technology becomes neither idol nor sacrificial victim, because neither science nor technology is above classes. Science and technology stand in a peculiar relationship with each other, which reflects the level of the class struggle. When the wind blows in favour of progress, the bourgeoisie succeeds in making people believe that everything will be solved through devices, tools, miraculous products. When, however, the damages of the capitalist mode of production emerge, the wind changes and the immense mise-en-scène is tragically unmasked, with world wars or historic ruptures in the supposed social peace.

The computer is command, which grows the more its algorithms are reproduced and evolve, no longer fully containable within the previous schemes of true-false, before-after logic, and somewhat dialectical. This confirms how technology, the more it goes beyond human measure, that is, beyond the hands of man, becoming machine, ends up adequately fulfilling the tasks for which it was invented.

Materialised in the computer, the form taken by Fixed Capital, is science and memory. The machine knows and decides while, in an increasingly evident way, the worker, the human operator, cannot allow himself any freedom, he must scrupulously abide by the rules (and the vagaries, obstinacies, rigidities, inability to self-correct) of the machine. Naturally, the short-brained attribute the ‘fault’ to the machine as such, we, on the contrary, to the use made of it in the present social system.

That computational science, with its laws, but also with the new possibilities that are identified in flexibility and in the power of memory and computation, thanks to languages (software) in slow but continuous and potentially indefinite enrichment, is a science of command makes no difference to us, as it confirms our judgement on so-called technology, be it first or fifth generation. It is not the machines in themselves that are authoritarian, it is the relations of production that dictate.

Yet not a day goes by in which the new economy, founded on communication, with its more or less critical supporters, does not strive to convince itself and to convince others that a new era with no return and no political spectres, such as 1848-style communism, has opened up for every corner of the earth. One notes, in these interventions, more episodic than systematic, the attempt to dominate on a theoretical level an extremely fluid and uncontrollable matter, an attempt to impose order within one’s own field aimed at freeing the social environment, which for us remains bourgeois capitalist, from the fear of new catastrophes or sudden turns that could turn the entire structure upside down. Nor is there any need to fear that from one moment to the next a new Adam Smith might arise who would be able to grasp the core elements of the matter.

Our focus on the technical processes that subject the economy to continual upheavals is not only long-standing, but constitutes the core of the critique of political economy. We thus reject, to begin with, the accusation of having been overwhelmed by the volcano of economic change, by the fourth, fifth, and by now we no longer know which ordinal to use to label, technological revolution. We, who, moreover, are said always to have sinned with economistic and deterministic materialism, would truly have been outplayed as naïfs on our home ground! In reality, the entire framework of our adversaries is of such intrinsic weakness that it escapes polemical grasp.

The first argument is the increasingly debated theme of the tendency of the economy to dematerialise, under the impetus of the information revolution: ‘the speed with which communicative factors are taking over from the material factors of production, would nullify not so much certain elements of economic theory (which ones...?) but the unquestioned principle that justifies any mode of production, ancient or modern, and that is that of scarcity’. This principle, it should be recalled, found lapidary formulation in the famous slogan that no meal is free and symbolises the whole of human history, as determined by the end of the reign of gold and by the advent, as Plato says in The Republic, of the State and the scarcity of goods. From that moment on, humans would be forced to find ever more efficient remedies to cope with the necessities of life, driven by the imperatives of productivity and that cost containment that is invoked every day by states, governments, enterprises, anywhere, anytime!

Proof of this would be that even within the very regime of real communism, now finally collapsed, it was not possible to escape the pressure of a law so peremptory and natural! Let us not return to the polemic over the false socialism of Russian origin, against which we have fought for almost a century now and which characterises us unequivocally.

With each technical revolution, there is the pretence of discovering new astonishing social revolutions; whereas we maintain that as long as the capitalist structure of production and distribution remains standing, the basic principles of economics will remain those that historical materialism has identified, from the principle of scarcity, to that of the labour/value equivalence, to the law of the fall in the rate of profit.

The phenomenon of Capital’s tendency to become anonymous and dematerialise is not unknown to historical and dialectical materialism; Capital’s damnation is that of having to pass, in its metamorphoses, from material production (which today some call hard, as opposed to the soft production of the tertiary sector and of services) to distribution, which enables the realisation of monetary profit, up to the development of finance capital, which has reached, in the imperialist phase of our times, super-sophisticated forms, which however do not in any way depart from the analysis of political economy outlined by Marx.

Technology has not prevented the crashes of the new economy, the bursting of increasingly looming and threatening stock market bubbles, which are presented as ‘teething troubles’ destined to stabilise: it takes a lot of courage to call the sclerotic senescence of capitalism teething troubles; if anything, we are at the strangest injections and drips that economic history has ever presented.

The same clamour around the virtual economy should not come as a surprise: it too is an expression of Capital’s claim to dematerialise itself. If it is possible to admit that a large part of the economic superstructure is largely virtual, this does not prevent us from emphasising that the compulsoriness of the material nature of the capitalist economy (as indeed of any type of economy) is by no means disproved. The material basis of capitalism is and remains industrial production, beyond the poetry about virtual reality, easy commerce via the internet, about coupons that can be cut before they have matured. All soft sectors, after all, telecommunications and so on, which today plunge into recession and bankruptcy more and earlier than the hard ones.

The consolations about the lightness of the current new economy should not deceive: reality remains hard and tiring, with the need for all its steps. The matter is not so easily disproved! On the contrary, with the information revolution, there are those who argue that ‘production based on communication (and in particular on new media, such as the much-hyped and global internet) represents a case unto itself in economic history’. The development of network communication would change the rules of the social and economic game, because it would transform the behaviour of technological systems to the point of making it similar to that of biological systems: ‘The amount of data put into circulation makes the subjects in the network collectively brilliant... in the same way that a termite mound made up of millions of insects, in itself stupid, acts as an intelligent system when it has to solve certain problems’.

No more dangers of speculative bubbles and sudden crashes in the stock market and financial sector. The network, in fact, against every rule imposed by scarcity, would continuously create unprecedented opportunities for profit in the form of demand for new products and services, and it is the same network that creates cognitive and organisational human resources to satisfy demand, feeding an infinite circuit, because it is free of all constraints of scarcity. The very law of supply and demand would be reversed: since the network is the more efficient the greater the number of its nodes, the law that a product is worth less the more it is widespread would no longer make sense. On the contrary, the more widespread a product is, the higher its value, measured in connection potential, would be. Finally: ‘from an economic system that functions like a biological system, it is then legitimate to expect it to replace productivity and efficiency with “dissipative” dynamics. In the same way that nature wastes millions of sperm to fertilise one ovum, or selects a favourable mutation from among thousands of mutations incompatible with the environment, so the network economy will only reward those who are willing to try a myriad wrong ideas to fish out the right one’.

Thus, amid full capitalist turbulence, we would finally have, with the network economy, a grafting of elements of socialism, according to the always opportunist thesis, to be inoculated into the capitalist system, permeating it from within with organic economy. We have already shown that the islands of socialism, or of communal life, are nothing but utopias that serve to mask the comprehensive, centralised, and tyrannical domination of Capital.

At the same time, however, we must once again claim that the dream of a free post-mercantile community, which breaks every closed circle of production-consumption, ordered according to a non-rigid but certainly unitary and complex plan, and using evolved tools, in which it is recognised that an economy worthy of the name demands high production costs, a waste necessary to realise the most satisfactory human conditions, is none other than Communism.

But the overly optimistic neophytes of the network economy do not dare deny the market; on the contrary, they idealise a market that is not even new but, little aware of the actual historical conditions, more fluid, the one that the liberals have always invoked. For our school, it has never been free, on the contrary, it has been conditioned by previous modes of production, by the political apparatuses functional to them, swept away only by the fury of social revolutions, which have, if anything, served as powerful accelerators of the new forces at play. There is no free market without monopolies, just as there are no pure monopolies competing over free market areas, in a competition/contradiction that would lead to ‘new economic and social possibilities’, socialism included.

The network economy would like to open up possibilities to trade in a capillary, virtual way, capable, yes, of producing services, but functional to a market clogged with the most prosaic and vulgar heavy commodities, produced by the imperialist market. The light economy of the network, which hopes to supplant the serious real economy, only hints at the distinction already clearly outlined by Marx between the production of goods in department A, destined for the production of other goods, and department B, destined for consumption. In capitalist society, the process is not towards the decommodification of goods, but rather the opposite, towards the transformation into commodities of any good necessary for life, from drinking water to the most immaterial products of thought, if you will, internetted.

With the word communism disappearing from the newspapers’ vocabulary, everything is being done to make the word class disappear as well. But if it is true that words are things, it is also true that it is not by naming them that problems are solved. That is why the most alert, but no less bogus, of intellectuals outline the possible social changes in light of the large-scale concentrations and mergers of enterprises at the global level, which, indeed, cannot be avoided. Thus, all the enthusiastic reasoning about information democracy seems to be thwarted by the hard (far from light!) needs of enterprises, even when they are multimedia enterprises (see the cases of AOL/Time Warner/Worldcom).

New theories about equally new class realities are thus wasted. Believing they are discovering new facts, they go on to write: ‘Social reality, dominated by information technology and new forms of production and consumption of highly sophisticated services, is complicated by a new phenomenon: the distribution of cultural capital is no longer identical to that of economic capital... everyone knows the ignorant businessman or the taxi driver with a degree... the new regime operates a catalogue of virtues that renders obsolete all previous ethical codes... it rewards qualities and modes of behaviour that were previously suspect. The cardinal virtue required is flexibility, the ability to assert oneself, mobility, and readiness to learn throughout one’s entire life’. So far, nothing too extraordinary: it is a perfect description of the now pluri-secular capitalist figure. But the ‘poetic’ gimmick consists in having proposed new names to describe the current class composition, which, moreover, is not denied, assigning to the various couches nice animal names, a bit like in the field of parties, botanical species have become established, at least in our surroundings (oaks, clovers, bushes, notoriously favoured by dogs to lift their legs and do their business on them).

The new ‘producers’, according to the writer, would be: chameleons, hedgehogs, and beavers, while behind them, as an underclass, or rather, without class, would be the dispossessed, the gens sans feu et sans aveu as we know them. The typification of the new producers thus follows a curious distinction of their strange activities: ‘the chameleons are intermediaries, consultant lawyers, media or entertainment people, managers of science, money, and information; the condition of their success is to have nothing to do with material production’.

Below them would be the hedgehogs, united by their ‘lack of flexibility’, and protected by their spiny armour. ‘International, national, and local institutions are their den. Bureaucrats at every level, administrators, party, league, union, chamber, and mutual society officials’.

Doomed instead to disappear are other types of animals, namely the beavers, employed in the classic productive sectors, which automation, rationalisation and internationalisation relegate to lower income levels. The author refers to the agricultural sectors ‘where the process has gone so far that it can only survive thanks to massive subsidies’.

Finally comes the fourth class, for which he has been unable or unwilling to find a name, that of the losers and outcasts, the last ones, as certain religious currents call them: people incompatible with the catalogue of virtues of digital capitalism and, in these perspectives, superfluous, who, needless to say, make up the overwhelming majority worldwide. An underclass of it is in turn formed by the unemployed, refugees, the underpaid, who end up in the web of illegal work, prostitution, crime.

At the conclusion of this strange and colourful catalogue, the writer appends his warning: ‘digital capitalism (sic) can only strengthen these tendencies... the political consequences of this development are incalculable’. As we can see, no new Capital is coming; a lot of aggressive sociology, a pinch of fantasy and a few lone truths. The only one we feel we can see recognised: classes, albeit with animal names (the animal spirits... of capitalism?), are still there and no digital exorcism has been able to dematerialise them.

Needless to say, we are sticking with the old nomenclature, which is more than enough for a much better orchestrated analysis and synthesis: that which envisions a bourgeoisie with all its facets, master of the instruments of production, including those based on silicon, and a proletariat increasingly impoverished, in a relative sense, which, in areas of differing development, finds itself in a historical trench from which it will not be able to recover except by reorganising itself as a political class and not only as an economic and statistical one. This does not detract from the fact that new technologies, permanently revolutionising the productive forces, force the proletarian front to react, not always successfully or with the best organisation.

Aptly named, however, is the chameleon class. It is the couche that, according to our criteria of recognition, fully belongs to those middle classes who, without being the actual holders of the means of production, find their place as luxury agents of capital, in a position to change their attitude according to the prevailing wind. They also exploit the wage workers, often underpaid, of the expanding service societies.

These chameleonic middle classes, ‘whom we heartily despise’, believe themselves to be the salt of the earth, the substratum that allows all mediations and transitions. In our view, on the contrary, they are the breeding ground for every expedient that prevents direct confrontation between the bourgeois class, which holds the instruments of production, and that which is instead not only deprived of them, but every day more and more stripped of them, except for labour power, which is its exclusive, scarce, and limited resource.

These middle classes, in their new position within the information technology revolution, are defined as the anxious class, prisoners of the great network. For anonymous Capital, they function as a glue for political and ideological experiments ranging from classic fascism, to opportunism, and to the explicit betrayal of the proletarian class.

It is worth quoting from the book ‘Le capitalisme zinzin’, by Erik Izraelewicz: ‘The bawdy capitalism that is before our eyes, characterised by a multitude of hysterical faces, with symptoms of psychosis... The Internet gives us so much freedom as to make us slaves... We live in a universe divided into networks and sub-networks, everything is interdependent, so that, as in chaos theory, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in the West is enough to cause an earthquake in the East... the intensity of financial relations... makes a small error cause a cataclysm on the whole planet. One is freer and more enslaved at the same time. A situation similar to schizophrenia, the schizophrenia of freedom: we were under the illusion that economic and technological progress would lead us into an era of greater stability and security, instead we are often on the edge of an abyss. Think of the brutality of economic movements, the stock exchanges and financial institutions do not fall, they plummet. Think of the dangers of a war unleashed by a small ethnic group equipped with a network of information technology resources worthy of a great power. One was safer in the Middle Ages, one depended much less on the “networks” of the time and on socialisation. The great network behaves like the Wolf in the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. The Internet multiplies freedom and prosperity on the one hand, insecurity and anxiety on the other... The increase in prosperity is accompanied by the emergence of an anxious class, increasingly torn apart by this contradiction’.

In short, the reseaupolis, the net-city, which in the opinion of many seemed the key to all evils, the New World complete with islands and islets for all the Robinsonades, turns out to be a mirage that, if in certain circumstances quenches thirst, in others, most of them, makes it come with no hope of prompt intervention.

Once again, then, it is pointless to consider the new productive forces without taking into account the relations of production that underlie them. Is the information network in itself capable of revolutionising traditional, capitalist, class relations? Evidently not. One can hold iron or silicon, Fordist factories or scattered production circuits connected only by telephone wires, but the result does not change. You can wear a grease-stained blue jumpsuit or an immaculate lab coat, but the instruments of production remain, autocratic as ever, firmly in the hands of the holders of Capital. Not only that: in our notion, the more Capital draws on new technologies, the more the mass of proletarians and the reserveless expands, who are such not because they belong to services or to the traditional factory, but because they have only the strength of their hands at their disposal, from the calloused ones of labourers to the slender fingers of engineers!

It is now a stale thesis that technical development would reduce the ranks of the working class, no longer central, supplanted by the categories of the so-called services, of varying degrees. As far as we are concerned, we have never idolised the centrality of the working class; if anything, this was done, ante litteram, with the society of producers, conceived by nascent fascism, then becoming the workhorse of post-fascist workerism and opportunism. We know, precisely by virtue of Marxist economic theory, that the constant revolutionising of the capitalist mode of production entails a corresponding revolutionising of the technical composition of the proletariat. We are not only unimpressed, for example, by the fact that the production of commodities in the agrarian sector is increasingly being undermined by that of the mining and industrial sectors. On the contrary, we are objectively favoured by it, because the increase in the organic composition of capital constitutes the premise for the maturation, then the inevitable crisis of capitalism.

We remain of the opinion that a disruptive force, in the front ranks of the troops called upon by history to react to the crushing and then to overthrow class relations, will also tomorrow be that of the labourers, the mass of the industrial and agricultural proletariat, those of the so-called real economy. But the working class, the last in history, the class that negates itself, we do not define it in statistical or technical terms. The working class is a perspective, a need, a historical direction and tendency. It is vain to look for that perspective in the purity of given trade-union categories in which this dying society imprisons for life, deforms and brutalises the proletarians, but it is accessible only from the privileged and external vantage point of the class party.

In short, all the hullabaloo about the service society is nothing but a masquerade of bourgeois ideology, which, however, fails to hide its crisis, the inescapable Marxist tendential fall in the rate of profit, which not by chance is the current black beast of globalised capital.

There have been times when chemistry seemed to be the key to penetrating the intimate processes of matter: today we venture into the more complex field of biochemistry, the molecular biology of living beings and man. But the direction that today seems to propose itself as a harbinger of great applications, that of biotechnology, can only be explained if approached with our method.

We have always shown how and why productive processes are not separate from reproductive ones, and how reproduction cannot continue to be simply natural or biological, while the organic composition increases in the productive field. If the cycle is open, and involves a continuous exchange, it is inevitable that Capital will increasingly encroach on natural reproduction, intervening with machines, at the very heart of life. Dialectical materialism is not only not a priori hostile to man’s intervention in nature, but has historically always noted this and recognised it as a necessary exchange for the development and realisation of higher levels of human organisation. At the same time, we can neither denounce nor demonise the systematic study of the origins of life, including the mapping of the genome, which could in the meantime allow the defeat of diseases and malformations.

The problem, once again, is neither abstractly moral nor moralistic. The objective knowledge of these processes, which cannot disregard the mode of production and reproduction of life, implies for us the evaluation of the use that is and will be made of them, an evaluation that must be referred to the good of the communist man of tomorrow, which is only in small part anticipated in the proletarian of today.

By now, not even the most ardent advocates of Capital deny that science, research, is dependent on financial sources, and thus they acknowledge that it is not independent of big business interests. The capitalist mode of production envelops and twists itself into a series of contradictions born from this basis: social production – private appropriation. In the course of its development, from primitive accumulation to its seemingly endless imperialist phase, it is undeniable that production and reproduction are inseparable moments of life and history, but if we get to the core of their internal tensions, it becomes apparent that nations and regions arriving at capitalist modernisation punctually leverage, at first, the overabundance of labour, of labour power, which they throw into the fire of accumulation without regard to savings (see today’s mines in China). Their most important resource at this stage is not technology, to which they are indebted to the regions and countries further ahead in a similar process. They think first of all about producing, without worrying too much about the serious imbalances occurring in the life of the workforce. Until the moment when it is realised that the imbalances caused by a mode of production that is incapable of planning and sacrificing except in the name and on the altar of profit, corrode productive life, which contracts, to the point of making reproduction itself precarious.

When we hear that biotechnology will be able to solve the hunger of the most impoverished areas, one is saying nothing more than what has been promised for centuries: progress will save everyone indiscriminately. When the countries furthest ahead in reproductive desertification, the metropolitan countries, find themselves in the heart of technical-technological saturation, then we witness the birth of drives and movements that appeal to nature, re-proposing the ancient myth that should save against the damnation of the mechanised world.

We will never be among those who turn up their nose at technology. We simply do not accept talking about it, as the production of life and the conditions for life, in a generic and undifferentiated manner as bourgeois ideology, broadly speaking, has always done and continues to do today with impunity. No bourgeois would venture to think that technology, including biotechnology, on which Capital is currently projected to patent new forms of intervention in production and reproduction, finds its internal limit in Capital!

Should we, a small party, a cloned embryo, be able to patch up a historical deficit! (We allow ourselves this brief biological digression). If cloning means, as is well known, cultivating cells to produce new tissue, we rule it out. There were those who tried, in 1921, in the name of bolshevisation, precisely in open polemic with our territorial type organisational vision: those who deluded themselves into thinking they were voluntarily creating factory, building, or office cells, did not realise that it is not by creating cells that are all the same, just to multiply, that the Party is strengthened. Once again, we raised the organic conception, which envisages a living complex, structured on a programmatic, dare we say genetic, very precise basis, the one which history hands down and orders.

Today, biotechnology research claims to be able to cultivate cells in order to correct errors and cure certain diseases, but the hype about this does not bode well. The evolution of the cell, even biologically speaking, is not gradual, but responds to dialectical laws and processes... So much so that bioethics committees, which are multiplying unnecessarily, try to give themselves a democratic form, so that the various political and ideological currents are represented, in order to camouflage or conceal everyone’s thirst for profit and not admit that what is holding back research and discoveries is nothing but the contradiction that binds Science and Capital, in an unprecedented short circuit.

The fear of creating monsters, of giving form to a humanity of slaves, as demanded by the eugenic ravings of the Nazis, has democratically seeped into all circles of civil society: this fear has no other basis than that which rests on the already existing society of monsters, daily produced and reproduced by the factory barracks and wherever the capitalist mode of social organisation is in force and is perpetuated.

They are right to fear worsening the situation: Capital can only develop the conditions of a way of understanding life that runs counter to Species Humanity, the only one that will have nothing to fear from science and technology!

In truth, bourgeois ideology, however variegated and reflecting a range of viewpoints that have never coagulated into a compact and unitary vision, such as the one we claim for our way of understanding and for our political organ, has moved, from its origins, between two poles: the first, of Rousseauian origin, revolves around the myth of good Nature and bad Society, which corrupts it; the other, opposite, but not so much, of voracious and aggressive Nature, which forces man to defend himself, to be violent if he wants to survive and cope with all dangers.

Certainly the first version has always fascinated more, as it has provided the opportunity to theorise man’s reaction to the corruption caused by social living and the commitment to restore the reign of ‘Virtue’. The other, of a libertine and sensualist stamp, gives substance to the current of vulgar and mechanistic materialism, which ends up representing Nature as the great violent Mother who is, by definition, action and movement and who inevitably involves all creatures in her vortex, from animals and plants up to the human being, justified, in this way, in his aggressive, greedy, violent way of reacting. A kind of nihilistic vitalism which has been prolonged up to its extreme consequences in the twentieth century, in the reactionary movements of a nationalist type, of racist origin, in the name of the affirmation of the strongest, who dictates his law precisely in the name of Nature, which only he adequately interprets. The very phenomenon of Nazism, which is blamed on German culture, in reality has broader origins, in social Darwinism, which has little to do with the discoveries of the genius Darwin!

Alongside ‘revolutionary’ intuitions, the bourgeoisie soon ideologically bends its conceptions to its own exclusive interests, leading to aberrant and odious conclusions, which dialectical materialism rejects not in the name of a generic humanism, but of the reason of the proletariat, beating metaphysical materialism into the breach, a new God and a new form of idolatry which to a good extent has also filtered through socialist currents, fallen into opportunism.

The deification of Nature certainly makes sense for the new class: the operation is found not only in French culture, but also in English culture, homeland of the Industrial Revolution. If the laws of nature are deified, it is enough to proclaim oneself a devotee to them to put oneself in an iron grip. The laws of the market entail obedience, and not a voluntaristic claim to bend them to one’s own advantage and needs. From Mandeville’s fable of the Bees, in which vices become virtues, to the consideration of the father of classical economics A. Smith, what does one do but assert that the presumed egoism (not just individual, but class) ends up revealing itself as altruism, once it is exercised with professionalism and commitment. Why is it believed that the butcher or the brewer gives us meat and fresh mugs, because we are capable of inducing compassion? No, because we are buyers to be taken into due account and respect. All this in the name of the law of nature that animates the market. The laws of ethics and morality, hitherto considered to be imposed by Gods, Churches, or States, are claimed to be the pleasure that nature induces each one to freely pursue, on pain of not indulging and obeying it properly.

And we, what do we have to oppose? A more uplifting morality? One might believe that as materialists we should align ourselves with the hairless truth of the fiery libertines... It would be too easy and too odious! Dialectical materialism, once it affirms the truth of praxis, certainly does not exalt action for action’s sake. The specificity of historical and dialectical materialism, if anything, is precisely that it identifies the rhythms of action and movement; what Hegel’s idealism had done, in an idealist sense, and thus to be overthrown, or rather, to be put back on its feet.

On the contrary, action for action’s sake is affirmed as early as the eighteenth century, in a furious attempt to theorise the primacy of nature, of its inner turmoil, from all points of view up to the exaltation, not so much metaphorical or paradoxical, of ‘crime’. ‘Is it sensible and admissible that the weaker have the strength to offend the stronger? What are we relative to matter? (the question concerns us closely, ed.). Can it, in creating us, have placed in us that which would have the capacity to harm it? Does such a stupid supposition accord with the sublimity and certainty with which we see it arrive at its own ends? Ah! If murder were not one of man’s actions that best carry out his intentions, would he allow it to be carried out? Would not man remain impassive to man’s blows? Can imitating nature therefore be harmful to nature? For it is demonstrated that it cannot reproduce itself except by destroying, is it not acting in accordance with its purpose to multiply destruction without respite? Is it not perhaps a pleasing thing to cooperate in its designs?’ (De Sade, La nouvelle Justine).

Tell us how this step differs from so-called positivist social Darwinism. Try to argue that bourgeois ideology would only degenerate with the advent of fascism and Nazism! We are far from claiming that the bourgeoisie and its thought, its mental superstructures are the same in the 18th and 20th centuries, but certainly, as they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree! Bourgeois thought could only unfold from its premises.

The Communist Left, without ever lapsing into the bleating sentimentalism that seems to be the norm today, claims that its struggle for communism is founded on a basic and original sentiment, which while it is not at odds with the science of society, at the same time is not separated from it. We are about to say without a shadow of rhetoric that for us truly faith and reason go hand in hand. We have gone so far as to claim that we will defend our class, if necessary, with blind faith, making people cry fanaticism. In reality, blind faith is adherence to the historical class programme even when analysis and study of concrete reality seem incapable of warming the heart and seem to place the advent of communism in a distant and almost impalpable future.

Against bourgeois materialism, we will never, ever be willing to endorse a version and vision of reality made up of individuals in eternal struggle, in an indiscriminate tangle of tensions and conflicts that should only be known to nature as mother or stepmother. We argue that such a simplification is incapable of grasping the historical becoming of class forces, their clashing, but also their meeting, their recognising and drawing together of individuals within the lower classes, their uniting, at certain historical turning points, showing empathy, of a fascination full of feelings and selfless solidarity struggle which paves the way for the new, for higher affections and social relations, beyond the intraspecific struggle among living beings, to the prehistoric competition that selects, eliminates, destroys.

Our notion of matter and nature is far more articulated and moved, rich in internal and external distinctions than that metaphysical one of the bourgeoisie; and this precisely by virtue of the fact that the human being is not simply an integral part or ultimate appendage of it, but an active factor, capable of transforming it. Of course more or less a truism, but one that deserves to be emphasised in all its magnitude. If nature had an enveloping and exclusive power, then yes, we would be at its mercy, for better or for worse.

The nature of labour and production has not had a definitive explanation and justification before Marx. From the negative conception, for which labour is the product of guilt, to the positive one, for which labour is prayer, positive intervention on the environment, even collaboration in the permanent creative activity of nature or of God, it was only with the advent of classical political economy that a radically scientific and critical evaluation of the nature and function of labour and technique began. Marx has not failed to recognise the scientificity of the contribution of figures like Smith and Ricardo, but has claimed dialectical materialism as the complete discovery of the fundamental reasons and behaviour of the human species in its historical unfolding. To speak, for us, of labour and productive instruments in general means nothing if we forget the internal and specific facets of the production phenomenon. In the 1857 Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx emphasises that production is also destruction, that labour is also consumption, that consumption is in turn also production, in a circle that must be explained dialectically. Not a vicious circle, as the metaphysical materialists think, but a contradictory progression whose lines of force must be identified.

A study by the Italian Socialist Party at the end of the nineteenth century showed that the worker could work, with the new means of those days, 4 hours a day, maintaining the same standard of living, so that he could devote the other time to his education and to solidarise with his fellow man. If we were to stay with the technological revolutions just passed, who knows how far we could go. Instead, by official admission, the average working time has still lengthened, in defiance of the historical achievement of the 8 hour day. Not only that: it is admitted that illegal labour, child labour and other shames are now the order of the day, not only in poorly developed countries but within the most advanced metropolitan countries, starting with the United States! All this despite the enormous productive capacity of modern labour.

Nor do the falsely workers’ and socialistic movements, from the ex one of Stalin and his successors to Fidel Castro and to the lowest super-exes around the world, promise any more reduction of effort and duration of labour. Having reached the point where we are now, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Castro’s about-turns (but we could talk at length about capitalist-communist China...), it is the case to reiterate without a shadow of a doubt our way of understanding the technology-socialism nexus.

In socialism, even before the rationality of the plan, comes the political and economic liberation of the proletariat from its subjection to Capital; once this priority is forgotten and sacrificed, one falls, as has happened, into the nefariousness of real-socialist type emulativism, into the new idol that the Stalinist version of counter-revolution has ended up identifying with planning.

The function of the communist dictatorship’s Immediate Revolutionary Measures in the field of technology and labour will not be the development of the productive forces, already far overstretched by capitalism. Exactly to the contrary, they will immediately tend to downsize production, 90% of which are of useless products, with the radical elimination of entire branches of industry or reduction to a few per cent of the current (oil extraction, for example). Unlike the quantitative and measureless planning of capitalism, which is all about violating and destroying, the Species Plan of socialism will have the task of harmonising life cycles, proportioning production and reproduction at slow rates, which are those biologically proper to man and woman, of the seasons, of the day, and the complex and at times very long rates of nature. Only once the insane lust for surplus value has been destroyed will it be possible to plan, based on the enormous growth of the productive forces inherited from capitalism, for the first time in human history free from cost constraints. What this conscious control might entail on a species level and in the temporal perspective of a few generations, our prehistoric minds can only glimpse.

Everything related to rationality is not in itself hostile to our conception of life and society, on the contrary; but on the condition that first of all the negation of wage labour is affirmed and that it is abolished. We know well how passionate and tragic the debates were on how to implement the policy of dictatorship in Russia, politically communist but economically backward and socially founded on the workers-peasants alliance, and what aberrant heresies could be affirmed under the push of historical pressures and demands that appeared without alternative. Only the sound theory of Lenin and the Left did not lose sight of the totality of the issues, and no necessity, neither that of the development of industry nor that of agriculture, which competed for precedence, could prevail over the fundamental historical evaluation: the victory of socialism is not a question of more productive techniques, but a question first and foremost of politics, that is, of which class is in power in the State. Once it is reduced to an administrative fact, then anything is possible, including stakhanovism and new subjection to the old idol, Capital, interpreted in a national-popular key. That is why the Left has never renounced posing the Party question outside administrative or organisational fetters, because these too are expressions of the primacy of techniques, of manoeuvrism, of forms, rather than substance.

Those who insisted on seeking the reasons for the differences between the Western capitalist world, and the Eastern and Asiatic realities, did not realise that superstructures, while not indifferent, certainly do not constitute the cause of the technical-technological supremacy of the West. In the historical contrast between the so-called Slavophiles (such as Stalin) and the Westernisers (Lenin and Trotsky) there is a grain of truth, but one tends to forget that Marxists were primarily interested in the different degree of development and social maturation of capitalism between Europe and the United States and Russia and Asia. Marx calls Asiatic a mode of production, that of the great Russia, which is not exactly to be assimilated to the Middle Ages. The technical question was not solvable by planning internally, within a single country, the construction of machines or electrification, because it required profound transformations, both technical and social, such as to presuppose the solidarity of a much stronger and more mature proletariat, educated by modern industry and disposing of it, like that of Germany and the West. The dramatic problem remained not technical development, but the maintenance of power in Russia while waiting for the revolution in the West.

Now that the presumed Russian Asiatic communism has imploded, it is even more difficult to approach the big questions that prevented the Western proletariat from seizing power in the 1920s. What is certain is that, 1989, Russian imperialism did not fall because of cultural, technological weakness, but because, in the economic crisis, it was overwhelmed by competitors on the world market.

Technology, as an expression of the capacity for labour and organisation, is not merely a remedy, which inevitably alludes to a basic deficiency of the human being, but the faculty that, by uniting the mind with the hand, allows the realisation of that reciprocal integration between man and nature, which was well defined by Marx in the Manuscripts ‘humanisation of nature and at the same time naturalisation of man’. This balanced and rational exchange has not been possible, betrayed by the bourgeoisie, despite having promised it at the time, because the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production prevent it from moving according to a Species Plan.

Contrary to expectations, it is recognised that the differences between the haves and have-nots are exacerbated every day by the current way of life: where is the secret, the terrible mystery of this trend of things? Inevitably in a form of development that is not simply the one determined by the distortions of technology, but by the technologies dominated and governed by world imperialism. What is the point, then, of complaining about the so-called excesses of globalisation if the thrusts in the direction of imperialism were amply analysed and denounced a century and a half ago by Marx’s Capital? And when Marx argues that class societies are condemned to a clash that leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, he does not merely express a wish, but identifies a historical process and its internal laws.

Only Communism as a social regime unfolded on the social scale is able to overcome any kind of fetishism. Communism constitutes the abolition of Capital, and with it the commodity as its fundamental molecule.

The tendency of bourgeois ideology to attribute to technology certain distortions produced by the capitalist mode of production is false and deceitful. By attacking, as some humanist currents do, the modernising aspect of capitalism, one has the pretence of saving the overall system. We, on the contrary, are not only not hostile to technology, but are convinced that only communism will be able to develop them harmoniously, once classes will no longer exist. We do not make this an intellectual question, but a practical question, when commodity fetishism not only produces alienation, but actual starvation of a good part of humanity as a whole. Those who wish to return to the Species the land and resources so that they may be used for all, must recognise that without the political struggle against the apparatuses that protect Capital at the general level, it is not possible to move towards the much touted rebalancing between man and nature.

No ostracism then against technology as such, but to Capital that subjects them to its basic fetish, Profit. In socialism, it will be possible to effectively initiate the fundamental social reform: to produce at the species level in order to achieve a social distribution, against the current irreconcilable contradiction that a now globalised production corresponds to a distribution tied to the misery of the private appropriation of products. Any other path is either impracticable, or is once again functional to the capitalist regime.

Only the overthrow of bourgeois political power will liberate the capacity to develop and exchange our human relations with nature. To the triad, presented as eternal by liberal ideology, Land-Capital-Labour, we will oppose the dyad Land-Labour, proper to the communist mode of production and social life. Does this mean that we are hostile to the development of technology? We have said countless times no. We do not want to, nor can we, share anything with reactionary forms of socialism, from the closed commercial State à la Fichte to all the reactionary vulgata ranging from Sismondi, Fourier, to the more or less latent federal-populist or anti-globalist nostalgias that claim to oppose the laws of imperialism on a global scale through ecologism, fair trade, regionalism, sub-national alliances, localisms, and so on.

But we are not advocates of technology as such, for the reasons we have outlined so far. What, then, will be the link between general knowledge of nature and life and the forms of production that will prevail in socialism? Once the law of profit is abolished, no contradictions can remain between labour, the development of the most adequate and useful techniques, and the general Species Plan. The communist social regime has nothing to fear from technology, because it will be rational labour, supported by ever more extensive and conscious knowledge of nature and society. Labour only needs to be handed back to the proletariat and governed by it, to the last class that has no private interests to defend.

Socialism, then, is not born out of a need to close off human creativity, in the name of a myopic security, of protecting civil liberties, as is claimed among the heretics of every school. Marx formulates the necessity of communism not out of an unhealthy impulse grown in his head, but on the basis of a historical recognition of the objective trend of the productive forces, and of the inability of capitalist relations of production to maintain and control them. Certainly in this decisive consideration lies the recognition that the productive forces constitute the dynamic and disruptive element in relation to the forms of production. Put another way, it means that the power of labour cannot be contained by the private claim to appropriate it cheaply. Labour achieves, in the capitalist system, a complex network of relations, which today is called globalisation. In reality, competition, the fight to the death among the myriad private (or even state-owned... it hardly matters) enterprises pushes towards monopoly, with the inevitable destruction of productive forces. Originary liberalism, in its various formulations, would like to prevent Capital from being driven by this internal dynamic, and relies on antitrust laws to restore the never-existing good old days, in which freedom of enterprise would have taken place without the mastodons engulfing small economic operators... So much for the future! Bourgeois ideology is not at all directed towards the future, which it can neither see nor outline; it is directed towards the past, as its sick memory depicts it.

In our case, instead, by way of dialectic, while there is the recognition of the power of Capital that has broken down old and narrow shells, there is the identification of the impossibility for the new to withstand the pressure of the power of social labour, which only needs to be liberated to give substance to socialist-type production, in which there is no longer any contradiction between highly organised labour in the social sense and private appropriation, no longer able to plan the future.

It will certainly not be the engineers, the technicians, let alone the philosophers, superordinate to them, according to every imbecile idealism, who will overthrow the society founded on profit, but the revolt of the working class, of the classic labourers, when the time comes. Socialism, as we have been repeating for centuries now, will not be the product of the beautiful and finally enlightened thought of philosophers, but the necessity-freedom that will be imposed by social processes that will no longer endure internal contradictions.

Workers are able to sketch out the revolt against the inhuman working conditions in which they find themselves. But liberation from class subjugation involves struggles and experimental adjustments that are not possible by simply switching from manual to intellectual labour, in a gradual and painless sense. If this were so, the transition from one technology to another would have been nothing more than a slow refinement of the old productive forces, an addition of new gears and wheels in the great contraption of the organisation of labour. This kind of tale has been taught by the mannerist optimism of the bourgeois world, and which we have historically demystified, and which even today, more than ever, must be refuted.

The party must not lose sight of the critical and programmatic lines of its tradition. Technology does not move as a semi-divine nature among men. Technology is human labour organised according to forms and modes that are not the result of chance, but of determined needs, to whose response society assumes one physiognomy or another. When even technology has become a deity to be sacrificed to, then it means that the revolutionary and progressive phase is over, and another, repressive and hostile to the subaltern classes, has taken its place. The rationality of measurability, of standardisation, becomes the only god to whom the consideration and defence of wage labour is preferred.

No preconceived idiosyncrasy, therefore, towards technology, including media, informatics, telematics, which, on the contrary, we must use as instruments to be bent to our cause. Besides, if we know how to communicate, transmit, speak better, it is by no means by chance. We must, if possible, know how to do it better than the bourgeois, and we do not lack experience. In the nineteenth century, a work like Capital had the power to fascinate by its truth and power the flower of intellectuals from the opposite barricade; and even today we hear that in American universities, for the sake of knowledge, ‘Marxian’ theories are back in fashion. This is not what interests us, and indeed we must fight it, but it is proof that we must not fall into reactionary and antiquated traps.

When we say that man is shaped by social relations, we have already said it all, whether we live in the age of the telegraph, the radio, or computer networks. What the bourgeoisie, however, will never be able to acquire due to its intrinsic class limitations, is to conceive of a Species Plan, to put an end to individualism and private appropriation, with the tendency to conceive techniques as expedients for the extortion of surplus value, or as trinkets for their own dotard tastes and pleasures.

Our general conception, instead, feels that the organisation of labour, even the capitalist one, presses inexorably in the direction of socialism. On the contrary, bourgeois pessimism, which cohabits with the apparent cheerfulness of those who daily theorise lightness and virtuality, is tinged, or rather is now covered by the nihilist veil, precisely because of the unconscious phobia towards the technical apparatus that threatens, devours with its complexity increasingly inextricable in their eyes. Hence the nostalgia for a playful thought that concludes nothing and serves no purpose, a miserable surrogate for our social foresight, and practical implementation in the party, of time for selfless and non-paid labour and study time, necessary for science and for all true progress.

There are no particular secrets why the tools that man uses acquire, or regain, a soul. The re-appropriation of the meaning of labour and life will not be individual, but general; something that petty-bourgeois mentality cannot accept, because it does not want to give up the proprietary feeling, the exclusive use of one’s own things. The relationship established between the individual and the objects of use is today marked by the stigma of class: there is the illusion that the title of ownership can bend the tools and expressions of labour to the most insipid manias of the individual, in the incapacity to see the fruit of collective labour, there, within reach for the enjoyment and realisation of all.

The life-cycle of the technologies necessary to realise capitalist interaction is inexorably shorter and shorter, they soon fall into obsolescence at the same frantic pace as living labour accumulates into dead fixed capital. We called it the murder of the dead. Primitive man learned to believe in the soul, as his double or that he imagined could survive him. Today, the consciousness of the masses is deprived even of this illusion and despairs of producing objects, or thinking principles, let us not say eternal, as was the case with poetry, art, religion, but only lasting, prevented by the need to serve profit, which soon devalues and destroys everything. In communist production, this split, which has been the product of social and temporal mismatch between production and distribution, between the working moment and the enjoyment of the fruit of sacrifice, will not occur, the mutual exchange between culture and nature will allow living, producing, and consuming, according to a plan, of a non-immediate horizon, that will embrace both man and the things produced by him. A resurrection-reappropriation of the labour of the dead and the living.

‘If mass could not transform into energy, a candle could not shine with light. Light therefore has its roots in this extraordinary process in which mass transforms into energy’ (Zichichi). Try, with a bit of imagination (and not even that much!), but dictated by passion and enthusiasm, to imagine in what way the mass of proletarian human labour transforms into revolutionary energy. One might object that ‘it is not seen’, thus confirming that there is none so blind as those who do not want to see...

One thinks, moreover, of the accelerations that the mass of proletarian labour has undergone, over two centuries of extortion of labour power, with the classic ‘shocks’ of ‘48, ‘71, and 1917, and one will realise how true, and how confirmed, the theory is, according to which mass is a physical quantity whose modulus is represented by the ratio between the force applied to bodies and their acceleration, which, while in classical physics is understood to be constant, in relativity, on the other hand, depends on velocity.

The proletarian class, and not individual proletarians, is interested in the application of the accelerating force brought about by the ever-new production technologies, causing jolts and upheavals within the relations of production that have led to revolutionary outbreaks three times in two centuries.

Relativity is confirmed by the fact that the three main upheavals do not repeat themselves according to a constant plan, but increase in power and proportion, resulting in a worldwide fire, believed to be definitively quelled but which instead still casts sinister flashes today, not only in memory, but in historical and social reality. Certainly, the Light, the Spark (Iskra), is not always visible... as is the case with the explosion of atomic bombs.

The very disasters and debris of defeats are not of the same nature.

Even at the social level, albeit not mechanically, processes affecting matter occur: in our eyes, energy, mass, acceleration!