Following the ‘Elements of Marxist Economics’, an illustration and commentary on the first Book of Capital, we published a note – ‘On the Dialectical Method’ – which was intended to be the transition to a new series, expository of what could be called ‘the philosophical side of Marxism’.

Marxism poses the question of philosophy in an original way and in this sense refuses to let itself be lumped in with the various philosophies historically listable, or even worse, systematically. We will therefore not say that there is a Marxist philosophy, but neither will we say that Marxism is not a philosophy or that Marxism has no philosophy. This would give rise to an equivocation and to a very serious danger: that of believing that Marxism stands on ‘foreign’ ground to that which philosophers have for millennia hypothesised. And from this one could with serious deviation deduce that the Marxist militant remains free, having accepted certain directives of political and social action, and ‘confessed’ certain economic and historical theories, to declare himself for one of the many philosophies: realism or idealism, materialism or spiritualism, monism or dualism, or whatever.

Now Marxism excludes all historically known philosophies in a way different from that in which every philosophy condemns the others, and thus at least destructively has a characteristic position on the matter of philosophy.

A not-forgotten example of such a position many of us remember from Gramsci’s statement at the 1926 Lyon Congress. Although it was a party tactic, in the wide-ranging debate he was led to say: I give credit to the Left for having finally acquired and shared its thesis that adhering to Marxist communism does not only mean adhering to an economic and historical doctrine and to a political action, but entails a well-defined vision, and distinct from all others, of the entire system of the universe, including the material.

While Gramsci therefore understood that whoever passes under the Marxist banner must bind the terms of their scientific and philosophical thought and decisively cast off whatever traces back, albeit through serious scholarly effort, to non-classist and non-Marxist sources, his posthumous epigones are more and more (since then) slipping towards the most eclectic tolerance of infinite ideological, sceptical and confessional, incredulous and mystical, individualist and statolatrous positions, reflecting in their inconsistency, and in their ostentatious disregard for principles, today’s manifestations of ideological and theoretical laxity of the bourgeois world, to which they counterpose nothing but a wandering reprimand for having violated its own wise traditions and institutional tables, now here now there, now from here now from there.

In that first note, faithful to the method of not re-proposing these vast questions with the pretence of new plots and original systematics, as we were referring, it is understood, to crucial passages from the works of Marx and Engels, we wanted to choose for our own and others’ clarity an opposing point of reference, if you like, a directing line of fire – to emphasise our dissent and disgust against the conniving stone throwers in the pigeon house and, if you like, cage keepers of doves in the arsenal of munitions – and we found the point of reference in Croce, as an orderly expositor, and continuous in hammering his nails, point against point with ours, always, it is understood, with the corresponding merit of not having deviated.

Croce’s passage was this: ‘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’. We argued instead that for Marxists, the dialectic takes place in the representations by which the processes of nature are reflected in the human brain, and that this manner of imprinting itself, reflecting itself, representing itself, being described or ‘narrated’, is treated by us like any other set of relations among material processes: let us say between the chemistry of the fertiliser and the physiology of the plant cell.

Engels, taking the Iroquois as an example, describes how our ancient forefathers lived in a classless society, in which private property and, consequently, commodities and money were unknown.

The gulf lies between the two conceptions. For Croce, not only is every description and explanation that thought gives of nature and the world purely occasional and secondary, and science and truth are in a certain way the results of thought’s collision with itself, of a ‘parthenogenesis of the spirit’, within which the seeker, the search, and the finding are all contained – for Marxists (leaving aside the usual slippery formulation of the existence in and for itself of the world and things as objects of knowledge, and the equivocation of a matter-fetish against a spirit-fetish) thought and spirit are the latest arrivals, the weakest, the most vacillating, precisely because they are more elaborate and complex, more corruptible and evanescent. In the difficult process of the life of the species, of history, of science, of the struggles to organise oneself against the natural environment, men arrive at arranging, by very long routes, structures, and mechanisms with sufficiently good transmissions of ‘physical reality’, which count as science. We believe that the assertion ‘science is possible’ is safe, and is not conditioned by falling into ecstasy before the inscrutable light that would ignite under some mysterious conditions in the thinking I. Or in the Is? It is never quite understood.

Since in these things it is easy to make a salad of the language and vocabulary used, and to put in front algorithms forged by different and therefore incomparable conventions, they must and will be taken up again calmly, we will refer back to some of Croce’s passages to see, starting with, three points. How he sees the general possibility of science in the present time. How he explains his criterion. How he explains the Marxist one, and to what extent we accept the formulation he gives of our theses which he rejects.

Since we are not of those who think that Marxism will be saved, in the harsh barrage that an entire hostile world unleashes upon it, with circulars from an organised centre that wants to monopolise theoretical orthodoxy and which succeeds (less and less) in being echoed by a vast organisation (this too is needed for a class science, inconceivable to Croce, but this alone is worth nothing) we must recognise that the greatest danger lies in the modern denial of the validity of the scientific results that the theory of nature claims to have arrived at, after audacious advances, with the latest discoveries. This conquest naturally fills the bourgeois world with joy, and the historical and class reasons are entirely evident, to us.

It makes Croce laugh that there can be proletarian science. But it is indisputable that throughout the liberal revolutionary battle, to which he never ceases to refer back, the struggle between two armed parties was accompanied by the struggle between two philosophies, the authoritarian one and the critical one, in multiple literary and national aspects, but with a single European and worldwide dualism.

It pleased the industrial bourgeoisie to declare that the science of natural forces was certainly possible outside of social or religious norms, and it broke down the barriers without regard. It did not like it then that with the same weapons: doubt, contestation of authority, critique, induction, one would arrive to pretend to see clearly, not only in the ‘skeleton’ of material nature, but also in that of human society and history.

Today, even to postpone this second fearful philosophical revolution, dominant capitalism is recoiling from its proud claim to know the frameworks and dynamisms of the physical world.

Benedetto Croce (who in his earnestness at every turn reminds us that he is not a specific scholar of the natural sciences, which in itself does not invalidate his ‘headstrong’ construction) naturally exerts powerful leverage on this so widely admitted fact of ‘modern thought’ over the period of almost half a century. It is best to have it said by him.

‘If you ask me what is the great philosophical acquisition that our age, albeit without too much awareness of it, has made, I would say that it is the overturning of positivist beliefs, a reconsideration of them so radical that it seems miraculous.

‘The natural sciences and mathematical disciplines, have willingly yielded to philosophy the privilege of truth, and they resignedly, or even smilingly, confess that their concepts are concepts of convenience, and of practical utility, which have nothing to do with the meditation of the true. A German has even written that the sciences are nothing more than a Kochbuch, a cookbook, offered to men so that they can make use of it to produce the many objects useful to them in life.

‘I will not repeat the names of the scientists, no less than the philosophers, who have accomplished this necessary conversion, from Bergson and Poincaré in France to Avenarius and Mach in Germany. It can be said that the work accomplished has had a collective character’.

Naturally, in this premise we keep to the statements and do not go on to critique and refutation. For Croce, it is established that the sciences have ‘surrendered their cognitive character to philosophy’, today, as of 1952, and as a result of a struggle lasting several decades. In this the man in the street can remain perplexed. Croce therefore sees two distinct fields: that of philosophy and that of science.

The bourgeois, who preceded Croce by a century (in due course we will see Croce’s argument that even Marxism’s theorists are bourgeois; this does not worry us too much, if the theorists of bourgeois criticism were nobles and even priests), the bourgeois, as we said, of the classical period of the anti-feudal liberal revolutions saw, in his own way, positive science progressively conquering a field that it took away with glorious discoveries from religion first, and from theoretical philosophy itself later. This victory, at least for common opinion, was due to the strength of the experimental method in comparison to both research on texts vested with traditional authority and to the pure speculation of the thinker. Priests and philosophers had hitherto wandered in the world of phantoms and dreams, modern scientists, in their laboratories more or less connected to the great capitalist factories, worked on the solid and finally arrived to lead us the undisputed notion of the true.

We are not at all averse to condemning all the class rhetoric and philistinism that was built on this deification of positive science, for social ends, and to prevent the mighty instrument of investigation from acting not on the orders of the master but on those of his wage-earners.

Here it is a matter of seeing how Croce uses terms in regaining that ground. The field of experimental science is humiliated, and distanced from that of the notion of the ‘true’. That man in the street would have said that priests and philosophers feasted on the abstract, manufacturers and scientists on the concrete. Practically, by the word abstract we mean something drawn out of the palpable and assessable only with the eyes of the mind; by concrete something that solidifies under our fingers like frozen water or clay that comes out hardened from the oven or plaster that sets. The English, these ruthless empiricists, call concrete our cement conglomerate, the béton of the French.

Croce keeps the concrete to himself (which we could truly say... is the cross and delight of all false Marxists who carry hidden philosophical contraband) and leaves the abstract to mechanics, physicists, chemists and so on. On biological problems, his precise thought deserves some further investigation.

Empirical, meaning experimental, is for Croce associated with the abstract. For him, the position is this: a series of verifications and findings on material nature that results in the establishment of a scientific law, is nothing but a gratuitous construction with which the researcher describes, in his own way, nature in his abstract model. Now there is no need to go further about the alleged asserted transience and emptiness of the ‘laws’ that science declares to have found and expressed. One understands that every time a heap of isolated data is ‘sifted’ and ordered into laws or formulae, one goes to those universals, those generalisations that at every step Croce derides, and so whoever wishes to grasp what all concrete cases have in common, takes himself out of all concrete cases not considered one by one, and thus ‘abstracts’ from them. And it is natural that, by not wanting to abstract, we could not even read and write, and Benedetto Croce would remain unknown to us poor people.

Now is not the time to look into this: let us limit ourselves to an example from nefarious ‘mechanics’. The law of uniformly accelerated motion dates back to Galileo and is taught to schoolchildren in the form that distances are proportional to the squares of the times taken to traverse them. Such a motion with its formula is defined if we make three measurements of the positions of the moving body. Then with its abstraction the calculator can predict a fourth position. Now let us freely admit that, since the world began, whether we take a star a hundred times heavier than the Sun, or a speck of dust, never have four concrete measurements matched with the law. Therefore Galileo’s uniformly accelerated motion, in the concrete, if you like, does not exist. But that his notion has not been solidly walked upon, and made not only industry and technology, but science (and philosophy! which would leave Aristotle dumbfounded), without offending Croce, is a thesis that would be repudiated by Poincaré, and by Einstein.

Would all this then be a useless game? And does the cookbook turn out to be a useless game; or does it somehow condense notions without which one cannot live and a fortiori cannot philosophise? This will have to be better studied. We are, like any announcer, presenting Croce, nothing more.

For him, therefore, science is a set of abstractions and empiricisms that does not lead to knowledge of the true. However, this knowledge is possible, but it does not take the form of a system of natural laws. It is achieved by the spirit and within the spirit, and presents itself as the possibility of making value, ethical, and aesthetic judgements. Better to quote a few passages.

Croce excludes the concept of cause from historical questions. ‘The concept of cause is certainly the backbone of the natural sciences, which move within abstractions, and is therefore the opposite of what is required for history, which lies in the concrete. With abstractions it is possible to play and trace the fact back to one cause or another; but with the concrete one has to deal with consciousness, whose voice does not deceive and unmasks every deception when it comes to persuading others or persuading oneself’.

Therefore the network of causal laws is not inherent in nature, but is made and unmade almost at will in the reasoning head of the physical scientist; everything is therefore insecure; the secure datum is found in consciousness. Let us expound, in an attempt to properly align what is furthest from us.

With these guiding lights of consciousness, which are all the more orientative than those of reason (let us forbid ourselves from polemicising!), the only valid system is built, it is clear: ‘A philosophy of the spirit that makes us capable of understanding the world in motion, history’. And then the rush of invasion from the enemy camp ignites again: ‘in the new sense, history comprehends much more than before was usual, because it embraces entirely the so-called history of nature’.

Indeed, for Croce, historiography is possible, but it is reduced to an incessant and indefinite recording of concretes, and must abhor causal laws. Croce’s historiography is therefore a meteorology of human events, to which every forecast, every weather prediction bulletin is forbidden. Hence the antithesis with Marxism, the horror at the claim to outline the historical developments of tomorrow.

‘In such historical reconstruction (hence reconstruction, something more than mere recording) I look not at men in their life that is called personal and private, but at their works, that is, their labour’. Let us not delude ourselves into thinking that we are moving towards a meeting point. Croce’s is not the social labour of the average man; on the contrary, it is the exceptional creation, the masterpiece. With an undoubtedly remarkable concept, the author wants to elevate himself above the limit of personality. ‘It is also understood that these are works in which the whole world in all its parts concurs, hence it would be simplistic as well as arbitrary to attribute them to a given individual’. They are, however, quite exceptional works, the greatest, to which ‘the epithet divine is usually given’.

In these very rare works, Croce recognises the ‘objective value and directed towards the universal’ which he resolutely denies to experimental research and to the description of the world with scientific laws. These works, which leave a mark and make a stop in the human path, have through them an author, Artist or Poet, or as Croce seems to concede also legislator or ruler of States; but, in a certain way, if the individual person is little, the collectivity is too much; in a certain way, the World, as Nature and as Humanity (and also as Divinity? it does not seem so) is arcanely translated therein. ‘Works are certainly also performed by the muscles and nerves of men, but they do not mingle with these, and a kind of repugnance is felt when this is done. Private passions surround the works of men on every side; but these remain distinct and superior to them’.

Let us proceed with moderation. In this constellation of maximal works, we see the only region in which general values such as those of Art and also of Ethics are in force; moreover, of Logic; and these are the concrete certainties that are given to us (to all of us, or only to the most noble theory, albeit not strictly crystallised in names, of high spirits?). Not only does the part left to all other men in the course of days have contingent and private accidental value, so that even any judgement of moral value is excluded from historical facts, insofar as masses or classes of men or social and political organisations are the protagonists. Not only that, but we confess that we remain doubtful whether or not the application of the values of Good and Evil erected in that stratosphere of the spirit should apply to the conduct of the individual even in his ‘private affairs’.

In other words, the Dialectic, finally discovering those supreme values, provides us with a compass by which we can judge the actions of Orestes or Macbeth, and pass judgment; it certainly does not give it to us for the work of Brutus or Walter Audisio; we are wondering whether it provides it for Caterina Fort.

If we have poorly rendered another’s construction, we apologise. We are not sorry if, having contested almost the entire field to science, large regions of it have been subtracted from morality, leaving only Aesthetics standing with universal scope. We do not care to raise what has fallen, nor to distrust the structural solidity of the rest.

On this point, yet another quote confirming our weak reading: ‘Firstly, I posit a philosophical theory of art, from which descend all the truths proper to it... Secondly, a power which is called Genius, and which alone gives life to art...’.

It is clear that such a construction, even if it entails an ordering of the greatest Works that cannot be content with being arbitrary and accidental, and even if it spreads a connective tissue, which is difficult to understand how it is interwoven in time and space, between work and work, and if we want between genius and genius (no longer the Word, but the Beautiful that became Flesh?), it leaves out and aside the labour of all men, none excluded, the types and forms in which this labour leads to production and its different forms in places and times. This action of the masses lacks history, or constitutes a neutral background in half-light, incapable of expressing potentials, which are all inherent to the spirit and unleashed by the advent of geniuses.

And yet a poem, which we do not know if it is among the Primates, and if the old Hesiod is among the Aces of poetry (would a philosophical theory... of sport, with its Champions and exploits, perhaps be proposable? we are inclined to ask pedestrianly), the first Greek poem, spoke of Works and Days. The word ergai itself means the works of the supreme, and the labour of all, and today, after all, we call opera the workday of the labourer and the Walkyrie. Tekné means technique, and means art. Why would technique, the productive gesture common to all at a given social stage, lead only to the vulgar empirical and abstract ‘specification’, from which technology and experimental and mathematical physics were laboriously constructed; and would greatness, nobility, only be in the Art of the very few invested with high-powered genius, whose knowledge alone enables the construction of a Doctrine?

Labour and Art are the same for us, and since Dante and the Scholastics, violence in them was the same sin.

From the doctrine of the relations between species-man and nature, friend and foe, we do not expel Art and its pinnacles with a kick in the derriere. We say that a history of labour, technique, and production, on whose solid foundations they stand, and a history of applied and theoretical science, and a history of Art, the products of which are inexplicable if one does not understand that hard path, at the opening of which all living beings – and all days – contributed, is buildable. ‘Ergai kai emèrai!’ (Works and Days).

The art of men expressed not what the power of Genius was, but what degree had been reached by that which Marx called the power of species.

That even the former goes beyond the narrow confines of the person, idolised by spiritualists and pure legalists, is a valuable, but insufficient, observation.

The second aspect that interests us, after having attempted to give a perhaps meagre statement of Crocean thought, is the author’s assessment of Marxism. Which in some cases rises above current banalities, but in others must be rejected by us.

Where Croce states the cognitive retreat of science, and shows that he takes note that all current schools willingly associate themselves with it, whatever their own surrogate may be, transcendent or immanent, mystical or critical, he says that ‘one philosophy has kept itself out of this modern movement; it is the historical materialism of Karl Marx, proud, it seems, of having been born before 1848’.

About such pride, of which we gladly confess ourselves participants, it should astonish all but those who believe that Theory arises without empirical contributions. We are empirical, but we proceed in centuries and not weeks, of which more in due course.

Lenin is then quoted, acknowledging him as having notions of natural science equal to those of Engels (perhaps not... weeks apart); and Lenin’s work ‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism’ is recalled, a book that Croce has seen quoted but has not read: a statement only allowed to true monsters of erudition, and admirable.

Well, the reading would be a great disappointment. Lenin subjects the doctrines of Mach and Avenarius above all to a complete and powerful critique, but he considers them knocked down after scoring points that for Croce would not be decisive at all. Lenin reduces the entire demonstration to the thesis that the ‘new’ criterion of natural philosophy is contained in, now overthrown, ancient criteria. These criteria are fideism, or the system of religious and supernatural beliefs, solipsism, or the extreme endpoint of idealism in the forms of, for example, Berkeley, the denial of the objectivity of the world. Now Lenin considers all these tendencies to be unanimously repudiated by the whole camp of the participants in the discussion, and therefore nothing more is needed to demolish empirio-criticism than to prove that it denies the physical reality of the world, or admits its creation, or sees in human sensation and feeling a phenomenon which can be torn away from the relationship with external stimuli, the environment, etc.

This can be explained by the fact that Lenin was writing first of all against elements in the party who had welcomed that philosophy, claiming it to be compatible with Marxism, and then also by the fact that nearly half a century ago it seemed that due to convergence in the same negative positions of schools as diverse as German critical philosophy, French classical materialism, the more recent experimentalist positivism, the theoretical debate was forever judged against the existence of God, creation, any study of manifestations of thought that disregarded biological life...

Given this, while the value of Lenin’s work remains, and it is enough to read it with a suitable translation tool to refute later ‘neo-antiscientism’, and all philosophies founded on the spirit, we think that for Croce, Engels’ ‘Anti-Dühring’, well known to him, is more probative to define our clinging to our old philosophy. In what follows, we will attempt some connection between the two historical stages of the Marxist school’s struggle against its contradictors. Thus the statement that outside and against that great movement of the cooks, the Marxists left, is correct.

Even the definition of reactionary philosopher was a landmark in Lenin’s time, when the bourgeois opponent admitted to needing, or to having just had, anti-medieval and revolutionary theories. Today, when the only possible reaction is to preserve capitalism, it makes no impression, indeed it does credit to Croce himself. So be it. Point clarified.

Another point is the violent attack on historiography as understood and conducted by Marxists: ‘monotonous, empty, and desolately boring’. Spare us certain histories taught in Russia and elsewhere, in which, unfortunately, Allah is Marx, and Stalin his prophet. How can one bring oneself to judge the history of, say, ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ and ‘Class Struggles in France’ as monotonous, empty, and desolately boring? Call it drama and poetry if you wish, dream and proclamation, if the demonstration does not reach you – or leaves you far behind in its scientific force; but then, hats off!

Let us look at the definition, let us set aside the aesthetic judgement, which really makes a poor showing here of its unquestionable priority! ‘The historiography of Karl Marx, with a power that one might call historico-radioscopic, made transparent in the great body of history the skeleton that holds it all up, the economic structure’. Let this, albeit ironic, first statement pass: old schools wanted to even forbid looking inside into the physical body of man, and the objection that the anatomical knife rummaged there after death (while it is not easy to rummage among the cadavers of histories) was precisely buried, not only in a memorable ‘philosophical’ battle, but then by the discovery of radioscopy, which applies to the living organism, and reveals it.

From this point on we denounce the record. ‘Marx, thanks to this concept, confidently interpreted not only the whole of European history of the last two centuries, but universal history, because the substance of all of them is always the same: the unworthy exploitation that the ruling minorities have always carried out upon the peoples’. The factual thesis is badly put, because at given stages ruling minorities have emancipated given classes from exploitation; the ‘right’ thesis is worse, because unworthiness is an ethical judgement, foreign to Marx. But let us proceed slowly and quote further. ‘History is the history of struggles, and communism does not want to know about struggles, except to put an end to them all at once by violent action... Its ideal (sic!) is peace among men, and since struggle arises, according to what it believes, from the work of evil against good, the means of removing it from the world is to remove evil from the world, and since... the reasons for evil would lie in private property... to remove private property, considering it the evil of evils’. And here the final argument: ‘having thereby obtained the effect of removing evil, the question should arise whether history, which is a history of struggles, can continue’.

Thus accused of wanting to ‘arrest history’, we Marxists would not have stopped at the serious difficulty of being unable to define this which would not be ‘even a differentiated epoch of history’ because it is reduced to eternity, immobile and always identical to itself. We are brought down to the level of the Christian who seriously admits that after the valley of Jehoshaphat sin ends, and at the same time redemption ends, life ends as death ends, and one is fixed within oneself outside of time in a useless, static bliss or damnation.

Come on! If there were a referee, we would raise our arms here like the runner boxed in during the sprint, or the footballer illegally shoved by an opponent. But there is no referee, and the disputes and fights, may the illustrious adversary be rest assured, are not about to end.

If we want to stick to the ‘letter’ of Marxism, a certain ‘Manifesto’ begins by saying: the history of humanity is a history of class struggles. A certain Engels later wrote that with the communist revolution ‘human prehistory comes to an end’. Therefore we by no means claim that history cannot then continue: on the contrary, it is prehistory that ends, and history only then begins! We claim, yes, that class struggles will come to an end. Does this mean an immobile series of days all alike? One moment, please, for this is answered a little further on. A note to that first passage of the ‘Manifesto’ says: written history is a history of class struggles because the earliest life of the human species, according to discoveries made mostly after 1848, reveals epochs when class struggles had not yet erupted, and the earliest agglomerations of the human species lived communistically.

You therefore lend us a false schema: a long history of class struggles between oppressors and oppressed – a future communist Eden succeeding the last supreme revolutionary struggle and implementing an immobile, immutable Peace.

Our ‘official’ schema is instead quite different: anti-prehistory (for you, barbarism) of primitive communism – prehistory of humanity recounted in your war epics and constituted by bitter class struggles (which you call a succession of civilisations or the realisation of the values of the spirit) – history that begins with the abolition of classes, whose inexhaustible fecundity is denied to you, to us granted only in small part, to foresee!

Simple ‘ignoratio elenchi’ would be no great harm, and it is better to get to the heart of the matter.

Perhaps only the earliest of utopians reduced the question to the battle against an evil principle that is to be found in every human organisation and that, finally ‘isolated’ like any virus, will one day be able to be expelled, founding the era of happy humanity. They could be accused of seeing in history the clash of the two principles of Good and Evil, which must end with the victory of the former. But it is precisely Marx who has forever put such banalities out of the way.

The struggle does not arise from the clash of evil against good, but is a necessary transition and a condition of a whole successive series of struggles, and then of the last one for which so much irony is given. Each transition was equally necessary to the subsequent ones, and each struggle equally ‘good’, i.e. useful to the overall process. When the first communism collapses and the first proletarian class arises we do not shout: stop Evil, and leave the Good alone! We (assuming that at the box office of history one buys tickets for the whole show) burst into applause and shout: at last! The forces of production cannot be developed unless ownership over land, things, men even, arises, since men are many, land few, and distances between groups smaller.

Since then, a true radioscopy, which Roentgen did not invent, is needed for Croce and his followers to see the same spirit inherent in all men: or the same values playing at explaining the extent of domination and freedom, slavery and emancipation. We work on the abstract, on the empirical number of inhabitants of the fertile land, on the amount of wheat or rice they can extract from it, and on other little things, and we say: at this raising of the curtain, communism is bad, partition of the soil is good.

These continual overturnings are for us the key to history, and in each of them not only do the ‘values’ of good and evil, as projected into the common thinking of men, ceaselessly invert each other, but the very same class makes itself the bearer, within the same ideologising rind, of the opposite effects.

In the presence, to be concrete (if we were allowed), of the struggle of the bourgeoisie, we see in it a revolutionary factor so long as it is a matter of overthrowing medieval and feudal institutions. We therefore do not condemn such a struggle to the cry that incredibly lends itself to it: long live Peace! First of all, such a struggle cannot lead to social peace (nor to peace between States), and we know this well. But we hasten that the bourgeoisie should win in it precisely because this moves us towards another struggle; that of the modern proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie therefore is Evil and is Good in history, the struggles of the bourgeoisie are Evil and are Good, peace, so long as there is capitalism, is neither Evil nor Good, because it is not viable, and so on. All this may be debatable and questionable for others, for us it is enough, without further examples, to establish that we never dreamed of introducing Evil and Good in history; and it was Marx who expelled them, by expelling the illusion that history had the mandate to realise them.

Only that, having removed them from history, we do not know what else to do with them.

However, the adversary catches us at the ‘mystical’ step, because we declare that we have firmly established that this modern struggle of proletarians and bourgeois is the last struggle, that it will not bring about the emergence of a new ruling class but the end of the class division of society.

This would be the arbitrary and gratuitous result, given that the rule of the struggle that generates struggle would be followed by the opposite conclusion of a struggle that generates Peace. First of all, spare us this unfortunate word. If two States that could wage war against each other stand with arms at rest, that is peace: each retaining power over its territory. If two classes do not clash within a State, but the relations of forces and forms of production remain (and it cannot be otherwise) unchanged, this is class peace, that is, it is class collaboration, and not only is this not our ‘ideal’, it is what we furiously abhor.

Therefore the proletarian revolution will not mark a ‘peace contract’ between classes, just as it will not mark a ‘labour contract’ between capitalists and wage-earners. It will be the end, first of the class power of the bourgeoisie, then of the capital and wage economy.

If this transition has a new and original character, it is not because a Marx or a Marxist party came to say: we have discovered that Evil is private property, that the supreme Good is social peace! It is because, for the first time, a set of conditions that only capitalism could establish has come into being: social and global production and consumption, the breaking of all circles of closed islands of life, the exaltation of mechanical forces, and physical forces in general, used in production.

However, will every struggle among men come to an end? First of all: the world is vast, and the foundation of capitalist production does not yet extend to its greater part, it presents oases of shifting sands and muds at every turn. And even an entire world industrialised and innervated by the ultra-modern networks characteristic of developed capitalism, after the fall of bourgeois power, will require a long effort to dismantle not only the material ties but also the ideological and psychological imprints of the current era; it will take generations, while the ‘geographical’ events of the transition across continents still appear largely unpredictable.

But when we say that the military, ideological, political struggle is only a result of the economic drive, we are saying that ‘in the beginning was the struggle’ and that it will never cease. Economic drive is a drive for physiological need, the struggle of every being and every day for its food. If the brute contests the meal against another brute, and man, a social animal, began his species life in groups that struggled together for food and for everything else against the whole of nature, and only the differences between means of satisfaction and ways of accumulating drove men to struggle, in groups and in classes, when the accumulative power of resources attained by the species increases, the reasons for the contest over distribution give way.

That is why after the victory of communism, there will be no cessation of struggle, but more and more in a united struggle of men against the difficulties that must be overcome for the common benefit. Argue, if you want, that it will always be the case that resources will be gained by certain groups, and others will dedicate themselves to wresting those already gained by the former; and let us discuss it according to the real data of historical progress.

But do not ignore that even labour is struggle, collective production is struggle, the harnessing of natural energies is struggle, and this will never cease. And if you like to define struggle with trauma and with blood, make the statistics of those who died by car in the 20th century after Christ, and those who died by spear or dagger in the 20th century before Christ.

No, gentlemen philosophers, rest assured: communism will not stop history, but will mark the starting point of its richest stages. The proof is so vast that we do not need to resort, in order to enrich the course of the coming generations with drama, to off-planet explorations... or to war with the Martians, which would evidently allow the Spirit to be reassured about the gruesome prospect of us sending it into retirement.

We must leave this point of Good and Evil that we have unexpectedly been saddled with, to touch on some others, in which Croce does us more honour, or rather does to his knowledge of the matter.

‘Highly significant of the nature of communism... is the aversion and repugnance that it has always shown for a fundamental concept of the life of the spirit and of history, that of “freedom”, which not only had no place in the old utopias of the “City of the Sun” type, but is also fought against by modern communist parties...’.

We take a breath, although we see, looking around, the world infested with parties with a communist name, serving freedom at every meal.

But it is the motivation that is most important. In fact, Croce attacks Babeuf, who in the first glorious communist formulation of the League of Equals, in a certain way accepted bourgeois ‘formal freedom’, but claimed ‘real freedom’ in addition to that. Today, not a few anarchists still say that, having accepted civil liberty, social liberty must be won. Fools, says Croce, and here he is right: ‘the concept of freedom is always formal, that is, moral, and never conditioned by the possession of particular economic goods’. In common language: the free can be poor and the poor can be free.

Here lies the real turning point. Marx ‘advised supporting the efforts of the liberals against absolute regimes in order to then dispose of their occasional allies’. Very well. Between bourgeois and proletarians there was an historical encounter (now long since closed), there never was, we are about to say, a ‘philosophical’ encounter. We have no ‘certain ideals’ in common, we do not spring from a common ‘stock of civilisation’. You have made it clear that you cannot leverage your liberal claim and push it to the social, economic claim. It is not that liberalism stops halfway, and we have to go on alone: it gets in the way, against our social goal, and from the very first moment.

Away, then, with formal and moral freedom, and freedom without adjectives! It is an empty word, and the Marxist who uses it even for agitational purposes is a mystifier of the worst kind: because he mystifies those for whom he claims to fight.

Yes, sir: for Marx, ‘the gateway to communism was dictatorship’. Passed off as temporary? One would be tempted to answer like Michel Ardan, a character by Verne, to those who asked him: how will you return from the Moon? – let’s start going there now, then we’ll see up there.

For Marx, the transition ‘would have meant the abolition of the State’. Exactly right, in fact. No less clarifying is the authoritative addition: of the State ‘that is, of the first institution guaranteeing freedom, which is the legal form’.

Libertarians who, without offending grand old Babeuf, want to put their careless foot on the liberal step, think again. We Marxists have our theoretical cards on the table here: to hell with Freedom! To hell with the State!

A passage from our formula came to Croce’s mind here, who was wrong to have forgotten those on struggle and history. Marx called the Communist Revolution: ‘leap from the realm of Necessity into that of Freedom’.

No contradiction. You want to liberate, not the Spirit, which is freedom itself unceasingly breathing and actualising, but the individual. We prove it to you: the common individual, and even the exceptional one, is subject to deterministic law and bound by Necessity: not only does he not do what he wants, but he does not know what he does. As long as classes of men struggle against other classes, society, the species, is also subject to this looming necessity. But with history’s emergence from the drama of classes, society as a whole, not in its personal elements, frees itself from millennia-old impotence; it directs technology and labour and the immense activity of all, and in this lies the only, the true liberation, the first: like the first consciousness and knowledge, which you claimed from the dawn to have fixed in the light of the spirit.

Babeuf, he again, would have been the first to lay the foundation for the Marxist devaluation, for the irreverence ‘for all forms of spiritual life, religion, philosophy, science, poetry’ in that he dared to say (and we did not know the splendid quotation): ‘the value of intelligence is a matter of opinion, and we must examine whether the value of force, which is entirely natural and physical, is not worth it’.

Well then, the same pessimism that transpires from every page of the author that we have wanted to follow, authorises making a negative balance sheet of the work of intelligence and consciousness: if these are the absolute ‘values’, i.e. the only quantities whose input and output can be written with certainty, the balance sheet is the natural outcome. At the height of this vaunted civilisation that finds us irreverent and iconoclastic, the balance sheet could not be more disastrous.

If Babeuf, who uttered the first revolutionary cry, poorly expressed an illusion of freedom and believed in unfolding the proletarian from the deceptive shell of the citizen, he nevertheless gave the signal of the new class path.

Natural and physical force is necessary, which reaches bodies and not spirits, which is precisely called struggle, revolution, and dictatorship, so that by truly breaking through the ruthless barriers of necessity, humans rise towards vast fields of manifold and grandiose activities, and the deformed and distorted results that the use and abuse of intelligence and the hypocrisy of a control of consciousness has hitherto produced can be overcome to the point where they are rightly ascribed to prehistory, in whose darkness and in whose shame we are still immersed.