1. Over a hundred years
2. The victory of science is in Marxism

On 24 November 1859, a book appeared in the bookshops of London that was to revolutionise the natural sciences: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. It marked a milestone in the development of modern materialist thought, which had a thriving beginning through the work of the French Encyclopaedists of the late eighteenth century and was later to reach its highest point through the work of Marx and the doctrine of dialectical materialism.

The importance of Darwin’s evolutionary doctrines in the field of scientific knowledge of organised living matter undoubtedly equals their importance in the field of knowledge of the physical world and the stellar universe to the works of the founders of modern celestial mechanics: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. The discoveries of these geniuses of astronomical investigation were consequently to lead to hypotheses on the formation of celestial bodies, and in particular of the solar system. From the time when Kant and later Laplace formulated the well-known hypothesis of the formation of the planetary system through the emission of solar matter, cosmogonic hypotheses have followed one another. At times, they differ profoundly from one another, but they all have in common the guiding principle of cosmic evolutionism. The discoveries of modern astrophysics allow no doubt about the fact that constellations, stars, planets, and the Earth itself, have a ‘history’ measured perhaps in millions of years. Astral bodies are neither fixed nor eternal: they are in perpetual motion, arising, enduring, and transforming themselves in the immensity of space. Matter evolves continuously. The physical world and the stellar universe itself that fall under our observation are merely the current stage of an evolutionary process that is undeniable, even if we do not know, at the present state of our knowledge, all of its laws of development.

Before Darwin, cosmic evolutionism was a great achievement of materialist thought, but there was still lacking a doctrine that explained materialistically the laws that govern the realm of life. The universe appeared to be populated with bodies in perpetual evolution. The nebular hypothesis formulated by Kant in 1755 and perfected later by Laplace had driven out the creationist myth at least from the confines of the solar system. But it remained unassailable in the field of biology and ultimately continued to appear as the only explanation for the origins of man, presented by religion in his supposedly contradictory nature of matter and spirit, of body and soul. Darwin’s undying glory is to have unveiled the mystery surrounding the origin of life on Earth. The origin of species came to win for evolutionism the great realm of organised living matter; it introduced the dialectical principle of transformation into the biological realm. Since then, we know that not only the nebulae, the stars, and the planets bear witness to the perpetual movement of matter, but the very forms in which life manifests itself on Earth. Thus collapsed the myth of the separate creation of animal and plant species which were considered fixed and immutable, just as before Copernicus the fixed stars of the eighth heaven had been. In the great Darwinist conception, which immediately found full consensus in Marx and Engels, the biological world as it surrounds us today has not existed forever, but has undergone a long and complex transformation, so that the animal and plant species now living, and among them the human species, are heirs of extinct species.

But the real victory of materialist thought lies not so much in the principle of the transformation of species, as in the fact that biological transformation is explained by entirely natural factors. In the struggle against the hostile environment (as brought about, for example, by a change in climate), living species are forced to develop certain organic functions, to acquire new somatic characteristics that, transmitted hereditarily, end up constituting the fundamental traits of new species, endowed with better organic defences and thus capable of surviving. This inseparably linked the evolution of the inorganic, mineral world to that of the multiform world of life. That is, the metaphysical antithesis between matter and spirit was overcome, showing that physical life and psychic life walk hand in hand along the immense scale of evolution. As Engels put it, the mind appeared as the highest level reached in the organisation of matter. In this sense, Darwinism represents an extremely important stage and a battle won by modern materialist thought.

Darwinism filled a great gap that materialist thought had left behind. The Encyclopaedists had already achieved such satisfactory results that Engels, a century later, could recommend to the German social democrats that they translate and publish their works, and Lenin, following Engels’ example, suggested it to the Russian communists in 1922. But their era lacked the precious documentary materials accumulated from geographical, geological, and palaeontological research that Darwin had to ingeniously interpret, reading the secret history of life on Earth.

The materialists, for whom Darwinism provided another formidable weapon in the struggle against idealism and religious superstition, failed, however, to realise the seemingly paradoxical fact that science had had to work harder to wrest God from the Earth than to wrest him from Heaven.

If, in spite of the great scientific progress achieved in the investigation of the universe and of life, religious superstition continued to dominate consciences, this was to be explained first of all by interpreting the origins of religion materialistically. It was necessary to demonstrate that religious superstition does not originate from the ‘ignorance of the masses’, that is, from a cultural condition, but from the oppression of the masses themselves, crushed by the mechanism of class domination. Materialism had to tell the supreme truth, namely that the religious superstition that subjugates and lulls the masses is not the result of a duel of ideas within the confines of consciences, but the only non-revolutionary way of reacting to injustice, oppression, unpunished crimes, and the rule of terror, inseparably linked to the economic class division of society, and that the victory of science over religion cannot be the effect of Enlightenment preaching, but the necessary consequence of a social transformation that erases the fearful material condition of the masses. Such a task could not fall to the atheist thinkers of the bourgeoisie, but only to the vanguard of the class that historically opposes it; to revolutionary communism, to Marxism.

Openly materialist doctrines have accompanied advances in scientific research throughout the ages. Indeed, materialism was born in the age of the republics of classical Greece and Rome. But neither the discoveries of the great scientists of antiquity nor those that laid the foundations of modern science have been able to undermine the dominance of religion. This has happened because religion is inseparably linked to class society. The bourgeois intellectual can, without changing his social status, reject religious superstition and embrace atheist doctrines. But for the broad masses, it is impossible to continue living in the atrocious conditions imposed by class division and free themselves from religious beliefs. Religion is the ‘opium of the people’, the ‘spiritual brandy’ that the masses need to forget their condition and quench their thirst for justice. Only the advanced worker who has broken the chains of resignation and devoted himself to the struggle against capitalism by embracing the Marxist programme and theory can do away with religion. No other explanation for the survival of religion, in spite of scientific progress, is possible.

Let us look at the facts. In the hundred years since the publication of The Origin of Species, evolutionary doctrine has accumulated an enormous amount of evidence. The achievements of chemistry and biochemistry, which succeeded in producing organic substances in living organisms in the laboratory, have completely dismantled the fictitious barrier between the inorganic and organic worlds, between the mineral kingdom and the two kingdoms of life. Indeed, even before the publication of Darwin’s book, in 1828 Wöhler succeeded in producing urea in the laboratory, proving that there was no need for the ‘vis vitalis’ of creationists to obtain organic substances. Far more important are the syntheses obtained by biochemists in recent years.

Starting from elements such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, etc., biochemists today are able to artificially produce the organic substances that form the basis of living matter, from hydrocarbons to amino acids. This means that science, starting from mineral substances, can produce, without divine breath, the substances that constitute living beings. Biochemical synthesis unfortunately stops at amino acids, the substances that Oparin defines as the ‘building blocks’ that make up the structure of the protein molecule, and which, in a gaseous mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapour, are rapidly formed. Science is not yet able, however, to artificially produce proteins of more complex structure. When this is accomplished, then we will approach the artificial production of protoplasm, the ‘material basis from which the vital phenomenon develops’. Protoplasm, the basis of the bodies of the various bacteria, fungi, diatoms, and of the different plants and animals, appears as a greyish, semi-liquid, mucilaginous mass, in the composition of which, in addition to water, proteins and other organic substances and inorganic salts enter above all.

‘But it is not simply a mixture of substances; the protoplasm is intricately organised. The chief characteristics of this organisation are, first, that it possesses a definite structure and special arrangement of the particles of the substances which form it, and, secondly, that physical and chemical processes take place in it in a harmonious manner, in a consecutive order, in conformity with definite laws (...) Thus, the chemical composition characteristic of protoplasm and its structure are an expression of a definite order of the chemical transformations which incessantly take place in living matter’.

The difficulty inherent in switching, in the laboratory, from amino acids to proteins consists precisely in arranging hundreds of amino acids of different kinds according to the natural order. In fact, each protein differs from another not only in the number of amino acids, but also in the order in which they are arranged within the molecular structure. Consider that the permutations, i.e. changes of position, of just 10 objects amount to more than 3.6 million. Now, the amino acids present in the protein molecule number several hundred and belong to 20 or more different kinds.

‘Unfortunately’, Oparin observes, ‘the arrangement of amino acids has been established at present only in the case of the most elementary albuminious substances (...) But this will be certainly done, and no one doubts any longer the possibility of producing proteins in this manner’.

What truly matters to the materialist is that one can imagine transferred to the great laboratory of nature the conditions that the biochemist reproduces artificially. It is possible to ideally reconstruct, without succumbing to fantastic invention, the synthesis processes that gave rise, in the high temperatures reigning on the Earth that had recently broken away from the sun, to carbides and hydrocarbons, fundamental substances of living matter. Chemical science further demonstrates that hydrocarbons can be obtained by treating carbides with superheated water vapour. Well then, on the Earth recently formed, some three and a half billion years ago, carbides were in a molten state and the atmosphere consisted of a dense blanket of boiling water vapour, sufficient conditions for the formation of hydrocarbons, substances composed of carbon and hydrogen, to which are added, in more complex substances, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulphur. When the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere, as a consequence of the planet cooling as it dissipated its heat into interplanetary space, approached 100 degrees, the boiling mixtures of water vapour condensed and the great primordial ocean was formed. With the water vapour, the hydrocarbons mixed with it also condensed, so that the warm waters of the ocean became an immense laboratory within which hydrocarbons went from the simplest to the most complex forms. What does this prove? The fact that in chemical laboratories it is possible to obtain, without the intervention of forces other than natural ones, hydrocarbons of a higher order: fats, sugars, and finally amino acids.

Oparin writes: ‘Thus, during the process of our planet’s development, numerous albuminoid compounds and other complex organic substances, similar to those which make up modern living creatures, were bound to appear in the Earth’s primitive ocean. They were, of course, but building material – bricks and cement with which a house could be, but was not yet, built. Organic substances were present in the waters of the ocean in a dissolved state; their molecules were scattered. The structure and organization which are typical of every living creature were so far absent’.

At this point, the fideist might object that, in giving a structure and an organisation to the particles of organic substances scattered throughout the primordial ocean, divine design intervened. Instead, science, although not yet able to manufacture proteins, has proven how associations (which in technical language are called ‘coacervates’), of protein substances can be obtained. The ‘coacervate droplets’, obtained by Russian scientists, have demonstrated that they possess the ability to perform certain functions proper to protoplasm, such as immiscibility and substance exchange with the solvent, and to be able already to give rise to processes of creation (synthesis) of new substances. Of course, the coacervate is not yet life, it possesses a structure far less complex than that observed in protoplasm. But they do show the way along which raw matter began to organise itself, in order to transform itself, in an evolution lasting millions of years, into living matter.

It would be useful to continue following the fascinating history of life, but that is not the subject of this note. What needs to be made clear, speaking of the centenary of The Origin of Species, is the inadequacy of non-Marxist materialism, its inability to combat religion victoriously. Here is an enormous mass of scientific discoveries which breach the principle of the creation of the world out of nothing; here is reconstructed, albeit in broad strokes, the history of the Earth and the living beings that inhabit it, without the intervention of a supernatural power having to be introduced into this marvellous narrative! It would seem that religion ought to have long since disappeared. And yet what happens? Except for a few people, the great mass of mankind is still subject to it. Here is a phenomenon that non-Marxist materialism is powerless to explain.

Celebrating the centenary of The Origin of Species, the English biologist Julian Huxley declared at the University of Chicago, in the presence of some two thousand scientists, that religion is destined to disappear: ‘All religions are destined to disappear’, he exclaimed, ‘and to make way for a new order of ideas, a new logical mentality. In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer any need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body. So did religion. (...) In their evolution, some (...) have given birth to the concept of gods as supernatural beings endowed with mental and spiritual properties and capable of intervening in the affairs of nature, including man. Such supernaturally centred religions are early organisations of human thought in its interaction with the puzzling, complex world with which it has to contend – the outer world of nature and the inner world of man’s own nature’.

Huxley clearly shows the nature of his materialism when he predicted that ‘[religions] are destined to disappear in competition with other, truer, and more embracing thought organisations’.

Evidently, the fact that a century of confirmation of evolutionism has not succeeded in uprooting the roots of religion has taught our scientist nothing. He does not know how to apply materialism to the field of history, to the field of the social sciences, any more than the bourgeois materialists to whom Lenin addressed himself in his article, The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion, published in 1909 but as relevant today as it was fifty years ago.

‘Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly SOCIAL’.

Here is an example of the application of materialism to the ‘field of social science’! Here is the difference between bourgeois materialism and dialectical materialism! Here, above all, is why we have defined the Darwinian revolution only as a stage in materialist thought, even though Darwinism is able to explain the evolution of the biological world materialistically in light of the latest achievements in biochemistry! The impotence of bourgeois materialism to explain social phenomena is apparent in Lenin’s writing.

The materialist scientist contemplates the mass of documents that confirm the great defeat suffered, on the doctrinal and critical level, by religion, and is astonished to note that, in the social sphere, it is science that constantly comes out the loser, as usual, given that the minds of the masses remain under the influence of religion. He is incapable of seeing the ‘roots’ of religion, because while he observes nature with a materialist method, he persists in considering social facts idealistically, in seeing in them the implementation of certain Ideas. It is necessary to reverse this method and see ‘what men think’ as a consequence of ‘what they are socially’.

‘The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extra-ordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc. “Fear made the gods”. Fear of the blind force of capital – blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people – a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden”, “unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation – such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist. No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way’.

The great victories achieved by materialist thought, at the time of the Copernican revolution and the foundation of modern celestial mechanics, as, a hundred years ago, by the Darwinist revolution, are to be considered partial victories. The centuries-long struggle had to reach, on the doctrinal and critical terrain, the final battle only when revolutionary communism, embodied by Marx and Engels, carried out the greatest of intellectual revolutions, applying materialism to the study of social forms and the laws governing their succession. It was not enough to tear God from heaven, nor was it enough to drive him out from the earth, he had to be driven out of society. Thus Engels, in his speech delivered before Marx’s open grave, expressed himself thus: ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case’.

It is therefore in Marxism that the long and tremendous struggle of materialism against idealism and religion is brought to a victorious conclusion, and materialism becomes dialectical materialism. But if the struggle is won on the critical terrain, it is still open on the social terrain. If the basis of religion in capitalist countries is the capitalist mode of production of the immediate material means, the abolition of religion in the consciousness of the masses is closely linked to the social revolution. This does not mean that Marxist communists renounce atheist propaganda. To avoid attacking religion, or to reduce atheist propaganda to the level of sleazy anti-clericalism because one fears losing a few parliamentary seats, is to renege on the communist movement. But Marxist communists subordinate the religious struggle to their fundamental task, namely the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters.

Under capitalism, in the horrendous conditions in which almost the entire human species is now forced to live, crushed by the tyrannical power of Capital, and perpetually terrorised by the spectre of war, the struggle between religion and science is destined to end in the defeat of the latter, in spite of its progress, in spite of discoveries that expel God from every corner of the world. It is the oppression of wage labour that generates religion, it is despair, the fear of poverty and civil death, above all the false belief that nothing can be done against the power of Capital. It is social hell that irresistibly generates the aspiration for a heavenly paradise. If such feelings of desperate pessimism were not stirring in the masses, the blandishments and grotesque threats of the priests would be of no use. Only the politically educated worker who has learned to struggle against capitalism and has understood that it is not indestructible, feels that he no longer needs God, thereby acquiring a scientific mentality.

The struggle for the triumph of science over religious superstition, begun four centuries ago, will be concluded by the communist revolution; only those who are not dialectical materialists are unable to understand that it is up to the class producing the material means of existence, the uneducated class, to lead science to victory.