The present note is a reminder of the well-known concepts on the dialectical method followed by Marx in his economic and historical expositions. It is intended as a transition to broader research, which should be undertaken, on a topic that it is not appropriate to call: Marxist Philosophy; Philosophical part of Marxism. Such a title would contradict Engels’ clear statement:

«[M]odern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences. That which still survives, independently, of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws – formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history».

At a decisive turning point, it was affirmed that, just as the phenomena of physical nature were treated by means of experimental research and no longer with the data of revelation and speculation, replacing ‘natural philosophy’ with the sciences, so, in turn, the facts of the human world: economics, sociology, history, should be treated with the scientific method, eliminating all arbitrary assumptions of transcendental and speculative dictates.

Since positive scientific and experimental research would be meaningless if it merely found results without transmitting and communicating them, the problems of exposition are just as important as those of investigation. Philosophy could be an individual product, at least in form; science is fact and collective activity.

The method of coordination and presentation of data, with the use of language as well as other more modern symbolic mechanisms, thus constitutes a general discipline for Marxists as well.

This method, however, differs substantially from that of the modern bourgeois philosophical schools, which, in their critical struggle against religious and scholastic culture, arrived at the discovery of the dialectic. In them, as especially in Hegel, the dialectic lives, is found and discovered in the human spirit, with acts of pure thought, and its laws, with all their construction, pre-exist to the approach of the external world, be it natural or historical.

For the bourgeois materialists, the material natural world exists, yes, prior to the thought that investigates and discovers it; but they lacked the strength to reach the same height in the sciences of human society and history; to understand, in the material world itself, the importance of perennial change.

As we have already mentioned in notes to Elements of Marxist Economics, the study we referred to, and which should not be titled as the philosophy of Marxism, could be called: Marxism and the Theory of Knowledge.

Such a study would, on the one hand, unfold the fundamental themes given by Engels in Anti-Dühring and Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, in connection with the results of science subsequent to the epoch of the two classics; on the other hand, it would oppose the dominant tendency in contemporary ‘thought’ which led, for class reasons, to the battle against deterministic dialectics in the social sciences, claims to base its rejection of determinism in general on the recent achievements of the science of physical nature.

It is therefore first and foremost necessary for Marxist militants to orient themselves on the value of the dialectic. This asserts that the same laws and connections apply to the presentation of the natural process and of the historical one. It denies any idealistic presupposition, as a claim to find irrevocable rules in the head of man (or the author of ‘systems’), to be premised on research in any field. It sees, in the causal order, the physical and material conditions of man’s life and of society as ceaselessly determining and modifying the way of feeling and thinking. But it also sees, in the action of groups of men in analogous material conditions, forces that influence the social situation and come to change it. Here lies the true meaning of Marx’s determinism. Not an apostle or an enlightened one, but a ‘class party’ can, in given historical situations, have ‘found’, not in the head, but in social reality, the laws of a future historical formation that will destroy the present one. In all the famous statements – «theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses» – «The (…) working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy» – «Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it» – the realistic and positive content of the method is intact, and the ruthless rejection of this thesis is consistent: with purely mental operations it is possible to establish laws to which both nature and history are ‘forced’ to submit.

There is therefore nothing mysterious or eschatological in the shift from necessity to revolutionary will, from the cold analysis of what has happened and is happening to the call for ‘violent combat’.

The old desired equivocation must be eliminated in the light of the same texts and references on the historical course of Marx and Engels’ research and studies; the clear coherence of their construction must be vindicated; and this must be defended, in the light of the most recent data, in the natural and social field, today more than ever escaping metaphysical pedantry and idealistic romanticisms, both explosive – and revolutionary.

Let us therefore make a few notes on all this, of an elementary nature.

They refer to the well-known passage in Capital, penultimate paragraph of the penultimate chapter, where the ‘negation of the negation’ is cited to explain the passage: petty industry – capitalism – socialism, a passage that was the subject of Engels’ lively polemic against Dühring.

Dialectics means connection, that is, relation. Just as there is relation between thing and thing, between event and event in the real world, so there is relation between the (more or less imperfect) reflections of this real world in our thought, and between the formulations we use to describe it and to store and practically exploit the knowledge of it that we have acquired. Our way of expounding, reasoning, deducing, of drawing conclusions, can therefore be guided and ordered by certain rules, corresponding to the successful interpretation of reality. Such rules form logic insofar as they guide the forms of reasoning; and in a broader sense they form dialectics insofar as they serve as a method for linking together acquired scientific truths. Logic and dialectics help us to tread a non-fallible path when, starting from our way of formulating certain results from observation of the real world, we want to arrive at enunciating other properties from those deduced. If these properties turn out to be valid in the experimental field, it will mean that our formulae and our way of transforming them were sufficiently exact.

The dialectical method is opposed to the metaphysical one. This, a tenacious inheritance of the flawed way of formulating thought, derived from religious conceptions based on dogmatic revelation, presents the concepts of things as immutable, absolute, eternal and reducible to certain first principles, unrelated to one another and having a kind of autonomous life. With the dialectical method, all things are in motion, not only that, but in their motion they influence each other, so that even their concepts, i.e. the reflections of the things themselves in our mind, are connected and related to each other. Metaphysics proceeds by antinomies, i.e. by absolute terms that are opposed to each other. These opposite terms can never mix or reach each other, nor can anything new arise from their connection, which does not reduce to the simple affirmation of the presence of one and the absence of the other, and vice versa.

To give some examples, in the natural sciences one metaphysically contrasts stasis with movement: there is no reconciliation between the two; by virtue of the formal principle of contradiction, that which stands does not move, that which moves does not stand. But already the Eleatic school showed with Zeno the fallacy of a distinction that seems so certain: the arrow in motion, as it passes through a point in its trajectory, stands at that point, therefore it does not move. The ship moves with respect to the shore, the passenger walks on deck in the opposite direction: he stands still with respect to the shore; therefore he does not move. The alleged sophisms were demonstrations of the possibility of reconciling opposites: rest and motion; only by breaking motion down into many point-like elements of time and space will it be possible for infinitesimal mathematics and modern physics not blinded by the metaphysical method to solve the problems of non-rectilinear and non-uniform motion. Today it is considered that motion and stillness are relative terms, as neither motion nor stillness is absolute.

Another example: for the astronomy of the metaphysicians, all the bodies placed in the sky beyond the sphere of fire are immutable and incorruptible, their dimensions, form, and motion will remain eternally equal to themselves. Terrestrial bodies, instead, are transformable and corruptible in a thousand ways. There is no reconciliation between the two opposing parts of the universe. We know today, however, that the same evolutionary laws are valid for the stars and for the Earth, which is a ‘piece of heaven’, without thereby assuming mysterious titles of nobility. For Dante, the influence of the incorruptible planets on the vicissitudes of corruptible humanity was a big deal, while for modern science, the reciprocal influences between the Earth and the other parts of the universe are a matter of daily observation, even though it is not believed that the stars move in order to mark our fate.

Finally, in the human and social field, metaphysics introduces two supreme absolute principles: Good and Evil, acquired in a more or less mysterious manner into the consciousness of all, or personified in otherworldly beings. We have alluded to the relativism of moral concepts, to their mutability and to their with exchanging one another according to places, epochs, and class situations.

The metaphysical method with its absolute identities and contradictions causes gross errors, being traditionally ingrained in our way of thinking, even if we are not conscious of it. The concept of the antipodes seemed absurd for a long time, one laughed in the face of Columbus who sought the East by way of the West, always in the name of the formal contradiction of terms. Thus it is a metaphysical error to resolve human problems, such as those of violence and the State, in only two ways: that is, to declare oneself for the State or for violence; against the State or against violence. Dialectically, on the other hand, those problems are placed in their historical moment and are resolved simultaneously with opposite formulas, such as advocating the use of violence for the abolition of violence, the use of the State for the abolition of the State. The error of authoritarians or libertarians in principle is equally metaphysical.

However, the introduction of dialectics can be understood in two very different ways. First enunciated by the most brilliant cosmological schools of Greek philosophy as a method for natural knowledge unconstrained by aprioristic prejudices, it succumbed in later times to the acceptance by authority of Aristotelian texts, not because Aristotle did not feel the value of dialectics as an interpretation of reality, but because the scientific decadence and the dominant mysticism of later epochs fossilised, by immobilising them, Aristotelian results.

In modern critical philosophy, it is said, dialectics reappears and triumphs in Hegel, from whom Marx would have taken it. But the dialectic of these philosophical schools, while realising the unbinding in the handling of reasoning from the formal and verbal fetters of scholasticism, is based on the assumption that the laws of the construction of thought are the basis for the actual construction of the world. Human science would first seek in man’s own mind the rules by which the truths enunciated must relate to one another; it would then go on to frame all the notions of the external world on this scheme. Logic and dialectics could thus be established and formulated by a purely mental work: every science would depend on a methodology to be discovered inside the skull of man, or rather inside the head of the individual author of the system. This claim is justified with the usual argument that, in science, the factor of the external elements to be studied inevitably intertwines with the factor of human personality, by which every science is thus conditioned. In conclusion, the dialectical method with an idealistic presupposition also has a metaphysical character, even if it pretends to call its purely mental constructions by the name of science instead of revelation, of critique instead of absolute apriorisms, of immanence of the possibilities of human thought instead of transcendence in relation to it, as with the data of religions and spiritualist systems.

Dialectics is valid for us insofar as the application of its rules is not contradicted by experimental control. Its use is certainly necessary, since we must also treat the results of every science with the instrument of our language and of our reasoning (aided by mathematical calculation: even the mathematical sciences for us, however, are not based on pure properties of thought, but on real properties of things). Dialectics, that is to say, is an instrument of exposition and elaboration, as well as of polemic and didactics; it serves as a defence against the errors engendered by traditionalistic methods of reasoning and to achieve the quite difficult result of not unconsciously introducing arbitrary data based on preconceptions into the study of questions.

But the dialectic is itself a reflection of reality and cannot claim for itself to oblige or generate it. Pure dialectics will never reveal anything to us of itself, yet it has an enormous advantage over the metaphysical method because it is dynamic, whereas the latter is static, cinematographing reality instead of photographing it. I know little about a car, when I know that its instantaneous speed is 60 km per hour, if I do not know whether it increases or decreases. I would know even less if I only knew where it is in a snapshot. But even knowing that it is travelling at 60 km/h, if it is accelerating from 0 to 120 in a few seconds it will be enormously distant, if it is braking it will be stationary a few metres further on. The metaphysician who gave me the where and when of the phenomenon knew nothing, compared to the dialectician who gave me the dependence between the where (space) and the when (time), which is called velocity; or rather, more, the dependence between velocity and time (acceleration). This logical process corresponds, in the mathematical theory of functions, to successive derivatives.

If I know dialectics, I avoid saying two absurdities: the car is speeding, therefore it will soon be far away; the car drives slowly, therefore it will soon still be nearby. However, I would be just as naive as the metaphysician if, for the sake of being dialectical, I concluded: the car runs, therefore it will soon be near, and vice versa. Dialectics is not the sport of paradoxes, it states that a contradiction can contain a truth, not that every contradiction contains a truth. In the case of the car, dialectics warns me that I cannot conclude from pure reasoning, lacking other data: dialectics does not replace them a priori, but obliges us, when they are lacking, to deduce them from new experimental observations; in our case, a second measurement of speed made a few instants later. In the historical field, he who said: the Terror, given the means it employed, was a reactionary movement, would reason like a metaphysician; but he would be a very poor dialectician to judge Thiers’ government, for example, as revolutionary because of its violent repression of the Communards.

Let us return to the negation of negation. In the metaphysical method, since there are two opposing but fixed principles, negating the one yields the other, if you then negate the second you fall back into the first: two negations equal one affirmation. E.g.: Spirits are good or evil. Tizio denies that Lucifer is an evil spirit. I deny what Tizio says: consequently, I affirm that Lucifer is an evil spirit. Thus remains obscure the story of the myth of Yahweh, ‘vile demiurge’, who casts Satan down into hell and usurps the throne of the heavens, a primitive reflection in human thought of an overturning of powers and values.

From the dialectical point of view, during negations and affirmations, the terms have changed in characteristics and position, such that, having negated the original negation, one does not fall back into the original affirmation pure and simple, but arrives at a new result. E.g., in Aristotelian physics, every body tends to its place, and so heavy things descend downward; air that goes upward, or smoke, are not heavy. Having got this false schema into their heads, the Peripatetics uttered infinite stupidities to explain the movement of the pendulum, which rises and falls in every oscillation. Instead, the question, thought dialectically, is expounded much better. (But to get there, it was not enough to think, one had to experiment, as Galileo did).

Heavy things move downwards. Bodies that do not move downwards are not heavy: then is the weight of the pendulum, a heavy thing or not? Behold the difficulty for the Aristotelians, behold violated the sacred ‘principle of identity and contradiction’. If, on the other hand, heavy things are said to accelerate downwards, they can also proceed upwards, provided they slow down. The pendulum has a pre-impressed velocity, which increases as long as it descends, decreases as long as it ascends. We have first negated the direction of motion, and then negated the direction of acceleration. However, we have taken a step forward not only acquiring the right to affirm that the pendulum is always a heavy thing, but above all by discovering that gravity is not the cause of motion, but of acceleration, a discovery that founds modern science by the work of Galileo. He, however, did not make it by handling dialectics, but by measuring the motion of pendulums: dialectics only served him to break the formal and verbal constraint of the old statements.

In encountering a negation of a negation, we must not believe that we have returned to the point of departure, but must expect, thanks to the dialectic, to have arrived at a new point: where it is and what it is, the dialectic does not know, but only positive and experimental investigation can establish.

Before illustrating the negation of the negation in the example of social character that we have encountered in Marx’s text, it is good to say a few more things about the common arbitrary character of metaphysics and dialectics with an idealistic presupposition.

Starting from the observation that we only know the external world by way of psychic processes, whether we refer to sensism, i.e. the doctrine that bases knowledge on the senses, or pure idealism, which bases it on thought (to the point of conceiving, in certain systems, the external world as a projection of subjective thought), the traditional philosophies all maintain that to the cognitive system, to concrete science, must be premised certain norms of thinking, found purely in our I. These first principles, which were made to appear unquestionable precisely because they were unprovable, were called categories. In the Aristotelian system, the categories (there is a clear difference between this meaning of the term and the current meaning of class, or grouping) are the following ten: substance, quantity, quality, relation, space, time, position, property, action and passion; corresponding to the questions: what is it made of? How big is it? Of what quality is it? In what relationship is it with other subjects? Where is it? When? In what position is it? Of what attributes is it endowed? What does it do? What affects it? (i.e. what action does it receive?). For example: a man is a living and heavy substance; 1.80 m tall; of the white race; heavier than another; is in Athens; lives in the year 516; sits; wears the cuirass; speaks; is watched by onlookers.

The Aristotelian categories were modified and reduced in number. Kant gave a slightly different picture of them, still calling them ‘a priori forms’ of thought, with which human intelligence can and must elaborate any datum of experience. According to Kant himself, experience is impossible if it does not refer to two ‘a priori intuitions’, namely the notion of space and the notion of time, which pre-exist in our minds every datum of experience. But the later achievements of modern science have subsequently broken up these various ‘a priori’ systems, and have broken them up irremediably, even if they remain far from having exhaustively answered all the questions, whose void was filled by fabricating ‘a priori forms’. Hegel could already say that quality reduces itself to quantity. (The man is white and not black because in the analysis of his pigment there is a certain figure rather than another). Kant would be quite astonished to see that physicists (Einstein’s relativity) treat space and time as a single quantity, or that, by common consensus, the decision on the fusion or divorce of the two irreducible categories is postponed to certain positive experiences in physics and astronomy, except for Madame Intelligence to accustom itself to the victorious result.

Marx rejects the cold empiricism of those thinkers who claim that only the collection of data from the external world is possible, like so many detached and isolated findings, without arriving at their systematisation, and without knowing how to ask themselves whether we are collecting sure results on objective reality, or only dubious imprints on our sensitive tissues. Such a method, to which the thought of the bourgeoisie falls back after the first bold systematisation, as in the field of economics, is suited to the conservatism of those who have come to power and guard their privileges against excessively corrosive analyses. Marx, while attributing great social importance to it, is not fully happy with the materialism of the French encyclopaedists, who, despite their revolutionary vigour and the unmitigated overthrow of religious prejudices, did not free themselves from metaphysics and could not generate any other socialism than that of the utopians, defective in the historical sense. Marx, thirdly, although he drew heavily on the results of the systems of German critical philosophy, broke, as he and Engels repeatedly recounted, with its idealistic content as soon as he grappled with social problems, that is, as early as 1842.

Pure German criticism had in common with the materialism of beyond the Rhine, the dispersion of religious phantasms and the liquidation of every dogmatic element, and of every element transcending, by definition, the rational possibilities of man; it had, in addition to that, the overcoming of metaphysics and the general vision of the movement of things and facts; but it had less the strength to historically generate a revolution against the old German feudal world, corresponding to the formidable one carried out by the political students of the Voltaires, the Rousseaus, and the d’Alemberts. East of the Rhine, the bourgeois class had not been able to make the transition from the theoretical field to that of action; Hegel’s system was used for even pre-bourgeois and reactionary purposes; and Marxism broke this thread, foreshadowing the substitution of a new class for the bourgeoisie, which had exhausted its doctrinal possibilities and completely missed the revolutionary ones.

Having thus re-established the authentic position of Marxism in relation to the previous schools, it is here of interest to reclaim that reservations about concretist empiricism (especially English) and metaphysical materialism (especially French) never meant recognition of the abstract criticism of the Germans, and its abstruse search for a priori forms. One need only recall Marx’s critique of Proudhon, in the Poverty of Philosophy, of 1847, on the latter’s hybrid Hegelianism-Kantianism. The categories of thought and spirit are therein amiably mocked, along with Proudhon’s claim to be a… German philosopher. In joking form, what we have said about empiricism and criticism becomes this joke: «If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms hats into ideas»!

There follows, in the ‘First Observation’, a splendid exposition and at the same time a radical critique of the dialectical method in Hegel, reduced to a useless ‘applied metaphysics’. The empiricist leaves the individual and the isolated fact in their sterility. The critic, by dint of abstractions, lets all the elements and limits of the individual datum fall away, and in the end reduces himself to the ‘pure logical category’.

«If all that exists, all that lives on land, and under water, can be reduced by abstraction to a logical category – if the whole real world can be drowned thus in a world of abstractions, in the world of logical categories – who need be astonished at it?»

It is not possible to reproduce and annotate the whole page. It remains established that, in dialectical materialism, the ‘logical categories’ and ‘a priori forms’ take the same path that the thinkers of the revolutionary bourgeoisie made the entities of the supernatural world, the saints and souls of the dead, take.

In the passage, which we quoted at the end of the study on Marxist Economics, Dühring wanted to catch the author in contradiction, since the new form that will replace capitalist property is first called ‘individual property’ and then ‘social property’.

Engels duly restores the scope of the expressions by distinguishing between the ownership of products, or consumer goods, and the ownership of the instruments of production.

The application of the dialectical schema of the negation of the negation proceeds clearly in Marx. Before repeating it, we would like to add some better indication of the scope of the terms employed. Terminology is of great importance for us Marxists, both because we work constantly switching from one language to another, and because for the sake of polemics and propaganda we often have to apply the language of different theories.

Let us therefore stop at three terminological distinctions: instrumental and consumer goods – ownership and use of the former and the latter – private, individual, social property.

The first distinction is now also current in common economics. The products of human activity either serve for direct consumption, like a food or a garment; or they are used in other working operations, like a hoe, a machine. The distinction is not always easy, and there are mixed cases; however, everyone understands when we distinguish products between consumer goods and instrumental goods.

Ownership over consumer goods at the moment of their use, it would be good not to call it by the term property, even if followed by the adjectives: personal, individual. It consists in the relationship whereby he who is about to feed himself holds the food in his hand and no one forbids that he take it to his mouth. Even in the legal sciences, this relationship is not well defined as ownership, but as possession. Possession can be de facto and material, or even rightful and legal, but it always implies ‘holding in hand’, the physical disposition of the thing. Ownership is the relationship whereby one disposes of a thing, without having to hold it in one’s hands, by titular effect of a piece of paper and a social norm.

Property stands to possession as in physics Newton’s actio in distans stands to contact action, to direct pressure. Since term possession also has a juridical value, we could try, for this practical concept of being able to eat a piece of bread or put on shoes, to use the term ‘disposal’ (given that the term ‘disposition’ gives the idea of deployment, ordering, which belongs to another field).

We shall reserve the term property for instrumental goods: tools, machines, workshops, house, land, etc.

Calling property also the disposal, for example, of one’s own suit or pencil as property, The Manifesto of the Communist Party says that the communists want to abolish bourgeois property, not personal property.

Third distinction: private, individual, social. Right, private power over a thing, over a good, consumable or instrumental (and, before that, over the persons and activities of other men) means right not extended to all, but reserved to some only. In the term private, even literally, the negative value prevails; not the faculty of the enjoying of the thing, but rather that of depriving others – with the protection of the law – of the enjoyment of it. A regime of private property is one in which a few are owners, and a great many others are not. In the language of Dante’s time, the ‘private human beings’ are the latrines, a place where it is the norm for only one occupant to reign, a good symbol of the stinking ideologies of the bourgeois.

Individual property does not have the same meaning as private property. The person, the individual, are thought of by the… well-thinking people as bourgeois person, bourgeois individual (Manifesto). But we would only have a regime of individual property when every individual could achieve ownership over something, which in bourgeois times is in fact not the case, despite legal hypocrisies, neither for instrumental nor for consumer goods.

Social property, socialism, is the system in which there is no longer a fixed relationship between the good in question and a particular person or individual. In this case it would be good to stop saying property, since the adjective proper refers to a single subject and not to universality. Anyhow, one speaks every day of national and state property, and we Marxists speak, to make ourselves understood, of social, collective, common property.

Let us now follow the three social and historical phases presented in synthesis by Marx in the first volume of Capital.

Let us leave aside preceding epochs of slavery and full landed feudalism, in which the property relation between man and thing prevailed over the personal relation between man and man.

First phase. Society of small production, artisanal for manufactures, peasant for agriculture. Each worker, of the workshop and the land, in what relationship is he to the instrumental goods he uses? The peasant is the master of his small plot, the artisan of his simple tools. Hence, the worker has disposal and ownership of his means of production. What relationship is each worker in with his products, whether of the field or the workshop? He disposes of them freely, if they are consumer goods he uses them as he pleases. Then we shall say with exactness: individual ownership of instrumental goods, personal disposal of products.

Second phase. Capitalism. Both these forms are negated. The worker no longer owns land, workshop or tools. The instruments of production have become the private property of a few industrialists, of the bourgeoisie. The worker no longer has any right over the products, even consumer goods, which have themselves become the property of the master of the land or factory.

Third phase. Negation of the negation. ‘The expropriators are expropriated’ not in the sense that the capitalists are expropriated of their workshops and land in order to restore general individual ownership of instrumental goods. This is not socialism, it is the ‘all proprietors’ formula of the petty bourgeois, today of the CPI-ists. Instrumental goods become social property, since the ‘acquisitions of the capitalist era’ that made production a ‘social’ fact must be ‘preserved’. They cease to be private property. But what about consumer goods? These are placed by society at the general disposal of all consumers, i.e. to any individual.

In the first phase, therefore, every individual was an owner of small quantities of productive instruments, and every individual had disposal over products and consumer goods. In the third phase each individual is forbidden private ownership of instrumental goods, which are of a social nature, but he is assured the possibility – which capitalism had taken away from him – of always having disposal over consumer goods. This means that, with the social ownership of machines, factories, etc., the ‘individual property’ of each worker is reborn – but how different! – the ‘individual property’ of each worker over a share of consumable products which existed in the artisanal-peasant, pre-capitalist society, no longer a private, social relation.

[If there subsisted the slightest doubt as to our interpretation of Marx’s words on the ‘re-establishment of individual property’, and also on the strict rigour of continuity in Marxist terminology, a quotation from a text of a different date and on a different theme, The Civil War in France, will suffice to dispel it: «…no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, then uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wage-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilisation! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism!»].

The two negations in the inverse sense have not led us back to the starting point of the economy, of scattered, molecular production, but much further and higher, to the communist management of all goods, in which, in the end, the terms of property, of good, of personal share will no longer have any reason for use.

For our methodological assumption, the confutation of Engels contra Dühring is important, after this schema of the historical transition has been clarified.

«It is only at this point, after Marx has completed his proof on the basis of historical and economic facts (…) Thus, by characterising the process as the negation of the negation (…) only after he has proved from history that in fact the process has partially already occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he in addition characterises it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law (…) It is therefore once again a pure distortion of the facts (…) that Marx [on faith in the negation of negation] wants anyone to be convinced of the necessity of the common ownership of land and capital».

In conclusion, the dialectic serves us, both (as Marx says in the afterword to Capital) to expose what analytical research has established, and to destroy the obstacle of traditional theoretical forms. Marx’s dialectic is the most powerful force of destruction. Philosophers toiled to construct systems. Dialectical revolutionaries forcibly destroy consolidated forms, which want to bar the way to the future. The dialectic is the weapon to break the barriers that, once broken, break the spell of the eternal immutability of the forms of thought, which unveil themselves as incessantly mutable, moulded by the revolutionary change of social forms.

Our cognitive methodology must lead us to the opposite pole of a statement, which we will take from a decisive source such as Benedetto Croce, in one of his concise notes against the Stalinist dissemination of dialectical materialism.

«The dialectic takes place solely in the relationship between the categories of the spirit and is intended to resolve the ancient and bitter, and seemingly almost desperate, dualism of value and disvalue, of true and false, of good and evil, of positive and negative, of being and non-being».

For us – on the contrary – the dialectic takes place in those representations in continuous change, with which human thought reflects the processes of nature and recounts their history. These representations are a group of relations, or transformations, that one tends to deal with without positing any absolute datum required of the ‘spirit’ and its solitary exercises, and with a method that has nothing different from that which holds for the influences between two fields of the material world.

When ‘modern’ conservative thought attempted to marry the forces of empiricism and criticism, in a common negation of the possibility of knowledge of the laws of both nature and human society, it was Lenin who in turn perceived the counter-revolutionary pitfall, and quickly provided the remedy.

The current order of Russian power, tied to the conformism of established positions, lacks any possibility of continuing this struggle, even in the scientific sector: the orderly defence and offence of the Marxist school in the field of theory threatens to break down under the desperate counterattack of the world capitalist intelligentsia, and its immense means of propaganda, unless new bases emerge for radical party work, free to carry the flame of the dialectic over all the welds that hold together artificial structures of privilege, and metaphysical faiths in brand new infallibilities.

No priest is needed, no Mecca is needed, for the doctrine of the Communist Revolution.