At the Paris Meeting, where very important economic and social theses were stated, arguments were also made concerning those such problems that current culture is accustomed to collect under the name of philosophical positions.

In the meetings in Turin, Parma, Milan, Florence, and also in the reports, we have dealt with these questions extensively. It only happened, as usual for the needs of our work, that the report of the last meeting in Florence went as far as the treatment of Marxist economics, but did not go as far as the treatment of the philosophical question that we carried out there. And so its report will overlap, superimpose, integrate with the report of the current meeting.

This always leads to some minor inconvenience: for example, there were comrades waiting to get those texts. Perhaps one will be able to pose that famous question we discussed regarding the hypothesis that in the biblical description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, one could imagine that this was the transmission of an ancient memory of a descent of ‘space beings’ onto Earth. Some comrades would have loved to have those texts: when the time comes, we will produce them. In any case, naturally, we will not include the whole little biblical booklet we used in Florence in the report, but we will do so at the end of the report of this meeting. The summer months are also useful for us and we can do this work calmly.

At that third session in Florence, in addition to Marxist economics, about which we have said enough, we talked about the study of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. We reconnected with the concluding part of the Milan report, which had been given at length in the newspaper report, and we spoke of the famous question of the dissolution of millenary enigmas that have wearied mankind; whose contrast, whose irreconcilability is brilliantly resolved by the new position given by the dialectical materialism of Marx on the famous contradictions man-nature, sense-thought, motion-rest, enjoying and suffering, object and subject, idea and fact, etc. We talked about the value of science, of scientific socialism. We touched on that subject, to which we shall now return, of modern technology and saw our point of view. We expounded or tried to expound the viewpoint of the Marxist school on the general problem of human knowledge.

If we believe that knowledge, ideology in all its manifestations, literature, religion, philosophy, are the superstructures superimposed on the fundamental structure of the forms of production, then just as we have made a historical schema of the forms and modes of production, so we must also be able to make a historical schema of the superstructures. Just as our schema already contains, in its broad outlines, a history of technology, it can also contain a schema of the history of science and what is considered the history of philosophy; hence a schema of human knowledge. Just as human activity and tradition has evolved, so this derivative of it, which is knowledge, has also developed in the course of the millennia, in the alternating of historical epochs and in the concatenation of all these great archs we have repeatedly spoken of. And the key to our position, contrary to everyone else’s, is this: that action came first and then thought. Knowledge did not come first and then action. Knowledge came later. Systems of written ideas, of disseminated ideas, of propagated ideas were organised afterwards; they were determined after certain concomitants in the systems of human acts and facts had been determined.

This is the fundamental key. We have therefore dealt with this problem. Then we have dealt with the origin of thought. And it was precisely the question of whether thought somehow pre-existed nature. Since we have abolished the contradiction of man and nature; since we cannot maintain that nature thinks without man, one such dilemma arises, as famous as the dilemma of whether the chicken or the egg was born first: whether thought was born before matter or vice versa. And so this dilemma was met with the question of extraterrestrial and space thoughts. And this made us recount, more by way of amusement and light relief than anything else, the famous story of the space travellers who, in setting out, by discharging their fuel, would bring about the celestial flame described in The Bible that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, as would result from the new biblical lesson drawn from the famous manuscripts discovered near the Dead Sea.

From all this we arrived at the concluding part about the function not only of science, but also of religion. Because here our solution is quite different from the bourgeois one; and that is that religion represents ignorance and that, by the appearance of science, religion disappears. Religion for us is nothing but an anticipation of science. But we also came to the question of the difference between art and science, responding to the question which some bourgeois thinkers had posed to themselves: why scientific discoveries were so frequently changeable and renewable and scientific theories were in general ephemeral and provisional; whereas the great products, the great masterpieces of artistic thought have remained unchanged and have transferred themselves across the millennia, preserving intact their fascination, their power.

We put forward the theory that the explanation was not that ‘intuition was quicker than intelligence’. Our theory is that these great artistic works are the translations of words that were emanated in the enlightening epochs, which are the epochs of revolution; whereas the scientific transmissions are instead the transmissions of the epochs of humanity’s slumber. It would be the famous: quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.

Homer would have arisen, according to our explanation, in a revolutionary age; and so would the great poets. Dante arose at the birth of modern times; and in a way, so did Shakespeare. Therefore these works have remained immortal because they were truly born in one of the developing epochs of humanity (those epochs which we have called progressive moments), in those rare moments when humanity sprints towards new achievements; whereas science depends too much on material technology. Technology depends on the relations of forms of production. And on technology, as on its development and renewal, the preservation of the forms of property and forms of production, as well as the ways of organising society and the State, has a negative influence. Thus an anti-developmental, anti-progressive pressure is exerted; and this same pressure is exerted on so-called positive science.

That is why art is generally revolutionary and science is counter-revolutionary. That is why culture is generally conformist and counter-revolutionary. In current opinion, culture ‘appears’ in the artist as an isolated phenomenon; because the revolution always presents itself to minorities, vanguard groups and minority parties. When it has become the general domain of schooling, scholasticism, academia, and the church (these are nothing but equivalent forms of transmitting ideologies), then it becomes obscurantist and counter-revolutionary.

Therefore we arrived at this point.

In these various reports, we have thus extensively discussed the question of the ingenious definition of enigmas contained in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. And we have insisted, and we insist again, that this part of our critique, of how superstructures have evolved, meets perfectly, connects perfectly with the other reports and the other accounts that concern historical research, such as that on the forms of production preceding capitalism; or economic research, such as that on the current American structure and the current Russian structure, or on the general theory of capitalism contained in the fundamental work of Marx.

Parallel to this, we carry out the critique of philosophical thought, and return to this famous question of the opposition of matter and thought. We have given in the course of these reports the explanation of the content of our dialectical materialism; and here there is another demonstration that in a certain sense (as the aforementioned bourgeois thinkers used to say) intuition comes before intelligence and the first science to arise is what would seem, according to the system of academics, to be the last, i.e. social science; whereas the science of nature is by its nature destined to proceed slowly. This in another view opposed, as we shall soon see, to that of the bourgeois.

On the famous opposition therefore of matter and thought, we have resolved the issue by saying that it is matter that explains, it is the phenomena of matter that explain those of thought. Science, however, has not yet been able to show us how this happens in the individual; it has not yet been able to show us how it happens that the portion of boiled meat or the portion of roast meat enters into the individual and the theses that we are going to state come out; science has not yet been able to show us what process takes place in those mechanisms, in those organs of our body that serve for nutrition and digestion, between the absorption in general of external energies and the production of our thought.

This demonstration of our materialism has been proven in social science. It will be transferred later into the science of the individual, into the physiology of the individual. It will be transferred later into the natural sciences.

And it is also possible (I am now stating another paradox: take it for what it is worth and forgive me if it may be nonsense) that the same science of nature, the so-called exact science, which today is said may be going through a crisis, i.e. physics, chemistry, and those sciences that make most use of the mathematical algorithm to develop, will come in line. How do we explain that the science of the human individual will unfold after the science of society?

The first science that has arrived at the complete truth is the science of society, and it has given us the certainty of this dependence of thought on matter. This certainty will only be reached later in the science of the human organism. It will probably still come later to the exact science of purely physical dynamics: the science of atomic and intra-atomic structures with all its doubts. All these doubts, we believe, will not be resolved until after the communist revolution.

The first certainty that humanity conquers is in the most complex science, it is in the science of man himself as a society. Then he will learn, he will build the science of man as an individual. And then he will build the science of the atom as a system, the complication of which the latest discoveries tend to prove ever greater. For now, the capitalist system explains for purely classist and technological reasons; it seeks in an indeterminate and contradictory manner, because so far it has been able to discover only one thing, that is, the death, curse, and destruction of humanity.

This science will therefore resume its useful cycle with respect to its current negative cycle. And here it is necessary to continue our struggle against the suggestion that the alleged development of capitalist technology and science has always exerted on the proletariat. It is false that they are developing, it is completely false, it is a complete illusion, which only stems from a social fact, namely that in order to force humanity to satisfy its needs, consuming a completely useless and nine-tenths harmful production, the expedients through which this production has been prepared are boasted. The discoveries of this science are articulated and complicated in an absurd manner which, in its complication, has come to completely lose that unitary path that alone can lead to the path of truth.

At this point, on this piece of paper, at this part of the presentation, we have placed this title: the fetish of technology and science. In each of these great arcs, these great cycles, all the great religions and the great mystics were born as mystics in a noble form; they ended in an ignoble form, in the form of the fetish. They were useful and developing in the ascending curve, degenerating in the descending curve; they took on the appearance of a fetish. The god of the Sermon on the Mount is still a noble figuration of the destinies of humanity. The god of the priests, in the last phase of feudalism and surviving magnificently in that of capitalism, the god of the current pope, an unproductive worker by definition, according to Marx is reduced to a pure fetish.

Marx wrote a chapter to demonstrate the fetish character of the commodity. The commodity in the beginning was truly an achievement. Because when it became possible for a small tool (a penknife, a pair of scissors) to be quickly made in thousands of copies and for every family to be equipped with it; when this complicated affair, which everyone had to make for themselves, became an article of commerce, at that moment it was a step forward. Today the commodity has become a fetish and Marx demonstrates this in the most brilliant of his chapters.

Its exchange-value content has suffocated its use-value utility, its initial human function. Just as in Marx’s time the commodity was a fetish, and it was possible to demonstrate this in the realm of economic and social science, today we can assert that even the vaunted modern productive technology and modern exact science have become a fetish, they are a mere caricature, a Freudian complex, an obscurantist milieu and gang, a complete racket. Their end is the economic racket, the production of surplus value in the most ignoble form of that in which it was produced by the first factories, to which we have alluded in connection with their initial heroic phase.

Thus, in order to resolve this enigma, which we have dealt with by citing the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, i.e. of thought that cannot have existed prior to matter (because the ancients had thought this, and to think this they had to imagine that there were entities, or gods, that had created the cosmos before man, then man himself, and therefore thought would have existed prior to material bodies and prior to organic bodies), the modern worshippers of quack science or science fiction have returned to the charge, not on the subject of ancient descents to earth of ultra-spatial peoples who, having undergone a geological evolution on their planet earlier than ours, would already thousands of years ago have brought us the results of a science that we have not yet achieved today. Instead of this explanation, it has been thought that this thought could transmit itself and create a peaceful ‘coexistence’ through space by means of radio-type telecommunications from one planet to another.

Science fiction novelists must now admit, have long since had to admit, that life on the other planets of the solar system is inconceivable (to which, until recently, our most direct knowledge was limited, although even this expression, as we shall soon see, is an inadequate expression and suffers a little from the scientism of the bourgeois popular university because in reality the views of the ancients were different). In any case, it seems to be established by now that the existence, not only of a human race, but also of an organic animal species, and perhaps even a plant species, on the other planets of the solar system is scientifically not supposable; because all the physical conditions of temperature, magnetism, electricity, and chemistry of the atmospheres are such as to be irreconcilable with life.

Other populations, if they exist, must exist on other planets belonging to other suns. Therefore, attempts have been made to direct modern radio telescopes, which are capable of picking up not only light radiation but also Hertzian waves and electromagnetic waves that can transmit signals, towards those stars that are less distant from the Earth and which probably have a system of planets. The nearest of these stars would be Mira of the Whale and Alpha of the Eridanus, which are among the stars nearest to the Earth; assuming that there may be a system of planets in the surroundings of those stars, thus at a minimal distance, compared to the visual angle of the Earth’s meridian, that some of these planets may be in comparable conditions and in the degree of evolution to that of the Earth. Since the stars are now counted in the billions, and each of these stars may have tens or dozens of planets, the degree of probability, even if there were one in every hundred thousand, would be such that every now and then a planet could be found on which thinking beings live. And then it would have to be proved that from this system, from this planet, there are teletransmitted signals that can be picked up by large modern detectors, by radio telescopes, so that these signals can be recorded.

Scientists say that they carry out this investigation and that this investigation could have a result. Because it is not said that, at distances that by now should no longer even be measured in hundreds of millions of kilometres, but even in light years, for the nearest of these stars, it may be possible to receive a radio signal. If it is true that the Sputniks launched by the Russians, the Luniks and the Pioneers launched by the Americans, would have sent signals already more than a million kilometres from Earth, it is very unlikely that it would be possible to reach thousands of millions of kilometres; because the intensity of a signal, whatever it may be, transmitted spatially in all directions, diminishes with the square of the distance. Therefore it is quite implausible that an artificial radio signal from a star in the planetary system of Mira Ceti or Alpha Eridani or another star not very distant from the Earth would be receivable; because the distance is such that, in our opinion, this signal would not be received. If signals are received, they are signals due to cosmic radiation that rely on sources of interstellar energy about which we have very vague knowledge; and they are probably of such power that they are able to register on our receivers.

However the scientists who have made this hypothesis have said: as long as we are able to pick up this signal and we are able to understand that this signal is not a signal that has random oscillations and variations, due to a natural and material phenomenon, but that it is a deliberate signal because it has intermittences (to give a banal idea, like the dots and dashes of our Morse apparatus), the fact that we cannot decipher it, is only a technical-physical problem, not an intellectual one; because if we manage to get this signal picked up by our apparatus, when it comes to deciphering it, we will always manage to decipher it.

This is a bit like the famous issue of the police boasting that they could decipher any cryptographic writing. In fact, in the Rome trial of 1923 they deciphered some of our cryptograms. Then we defended ourselves by saying that it was true that any cryptographic writing could be deciphered, but it was equally true that it could be deciphered in any way they wanted to decipher it. So even if they had deciphered them, that was not judicial evidence able to convict us: it was they who had managed to put all those letters in a certain order. And we cited the famous Gulliver novel in which the fellow is condemned because he had written a sentence that said ‘Our brother Tom hath just got the piles’. Anagramming this sentence into English resulted in ‘Resist –, a plot is brought home – The tour’ and it became evidence to hang the guy because he had written on that piece of paper that he wanted to hang the king. Therefore cryptograms can be deciphered with a little good will, but you get out of them whatever you want; not what you read in that cryptogram with our key, which only we have. This was a clever defensive manoeuvre on the part of defendants who were not foolish before the judicial and bourgeois mechanism in order to demonstrate to them that their deciphering led nothing.

In any case, these scientists claim that it will always be possible to decipher it. In reality, this is an old idea that we too have always had. It was talked about in the early enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution, that if it had been possible to send or transmit a signal, it would have returned. It is the old idea that said that Schiapparelli one night, while observing Mars, saw the famous splitting of the channels into parallel lines and in his telescope appeared geometric figures representing the principal regular polygons, Pythagoras’ theorem, etc. This therefore proved that the inhabitants of Mars think as we do. But this would be a demonstration by other means that all thinking humanities born on the different planets construct for themselves the same mathematics, the same geometry, and thus have the same norm of counting numbers, of musical intervals, and thus by capturing one of their coded languages one could succeed in deciphering it. Which is true up to a point, because we could instead argue that if thought arises from matter and if knowledge is a function of the development of the species, we can more or less say that all exchanges of thought, all the languages of all the peoples of the earth, have a common origin and can be reduced to one another. And even this has not yet been arrived at because, for example, the Etruscan language has not yet been able to be read. Therefore even this system too would remain completely indecipherable or its explanation would be a relapse into the idealist presupposition that whoever thinks, whoever writes, whoever creates a text to determine communication from one thought to another, applies a standard, a system of fundamental musical notes. If it were music, for example, it would have to be the same one born from the seven notes of Guido of Arezzo. One could return to it. Now this is by no means proven. It is evidently an arbitrary supposition made with an idealist spirit, with a purely fanciful spirit, serving as usual to stuff the skulls of the current masses. One would return to the fundamental idealist assumption that in the beginning was thought.

One could argue another thing: this could also be true in the materialist sense. After all, if our materialism says: although we do not yet know how it happens, that to our knowledge, to the thought, to the words that pass through our heads and come out of our mouths at this moment, precedes a processing that takes place in our organism, in its animal life, in its vegetative life; that this vegetative life derives in turn from a unique constitution of matter that chemically is divided into certain types; types that distinguish themselves according to the composition of the atom, according to its pattern, which is becoming more and more complicated (its very numerous particles: sigma, anti-sigma, protons, neutrons, electrons), that the elementary particle in the last instance is the electron, that the whole world is made up of electrons equal to themselves, that starting from these electrons and combining them all 92 atoms came about, later become 100, that is, as many chemical atoms, from these all molecules came about, from molecules all cells, from these all men, from men all societies with the same geological stratification as Roger’s Tableau and with the same system of knowledge; and therefore if matter is the same throughout the universe, knowledge in the last instance will also be the same throughout the universe. This we could say if they were able to take, to pick up the signals of this planet, millions of millions of kilometres away from us, and decipher them. That would only have been proved. It would still not have been proved that there was a god before all systems and all planets, who has created all planets, has created all Suns, has created all mankinds or the few mankinds he believed to be located somewhere.

When we developed the criterion, the concept of art and science, we were alluding to the concept of mysticism and science. In this regard, I would like to quote an article that was published in L’Unità, which gives a perfect idea of the petty-bourgeois and myopic way of looking at this problem of the journey and achievements of mankind on earth. We say that art millennia and millennia ago anticipated science and manifested itself truer than the first scientific attempts. For the first attempts at scientific systematisaion by the Greek Eleatics, then by the Atomists, fell. They were then replaced, at the beginning of bourgeois society, by the quite different systems of Galileo, Lavoisier, Milton. Today, all this is still being revolutionised with new findings boasted by these ultra-modernists, while instead those ancient achievements (of art) have remained stable.

We believe that art is evidently not as exact and powerful as an analytical means as science; but that as a means of synthesis it anticipated science, was an early appearance of science. The same can be said of mysticism, because mysticism merges with art. Religion is art, it is song, it is dance. The first manifestations of the recognition of God, that is, of this primordial and intuitive form of judging the complexity of the phenomena that the cosmos makes unfold around us, take place in forms that have sound, music, song, dance. The earliest poems are sung, not merely written. And it is said that the same poet (the poet or the rhapsodes who would represent him: there were twelve or thirteen of them), the blind poet Homer, went around the cities singing his compositions; also because, since they could not yet be written down or since writing was not known, and since a mnemonic form existed, by singing, the poem is better remembered and repeated as it is. It is a manner of transmission. In this, too, art is much earlier than science, because science has to wait centuries, millennia, to discover writing, centuries to discover printing, to discover the printed alphabet, typewriters, the many copies, the cyclostyle in which we very humbly draft our Abacus. Whereas back then this was done with a simplistic system, singing and thus composing in poetry. Therefore even song was born before the spoken word, poetry was born before prose, art was born before science, religion was born before science.

None of this has been in vain. On the contrary, the great advances have been due to these few vital and fertile epochs that have periodically entered into the long path travelled by humanity. Art, therefore, is revolution. Conformism is a fetish, it is deformation, it is a little lesson recited from memory, said as the student may stammer it, who when he recites, when he says from memory, does not know how to recite, does not know how to pronounce, does not know how to use a human language. Something which happens in almost all schools, in almost all sacristies, in almost all modern academies and universities.

So the modern one of technology and science is nothing but a fetish. The mentality according to which proletarians should make use of bourgeois technology and science is a completely bourgeois and counter-revolutionary mentality. It is true that there is that certain aspect of Marx and that certain aspect of Lenin that we could reiterate with numerous quotations, which states that these achievements of modern industrial technology have been useful, have served to make one of these leaps forward. The question, posed with respect to 200 years ago, we resolve it this way. Because the first proletarians also posed the question in the sense that they wanted to destroy the machines, and that was, at the time, the preferable attitude. Clearly, that first position is a truly revolutionary position compared to the point of inversion, degeneration, and weakening at which we, the proletarian party, have arrived in this era. We have taken many steps back from that situation where we had the courage to despise these innovations. At that time, however, Marxist and communist theory had to convince the proletariat that it had to accept that organisation in a new form, because it was susceptible to being used by communist society, provided, however, that it was used in a very different way from the way bourgeois society uses it, in a completely antithetical way and in a completely revolutionary way and much more in keeping with the needs of humanity.

We try to show, in the footsteps of what Marx was able to write and what Lenin was able to write, that everything was used, even in these primordial forms of mysticisms and religions, of artistic monuments and artistic traditions, in the construction of the enormous monument of human knowledge.

Instead, this journalist from L’Unità and these so-called communists of today say that science has a very recent origin, it was born 360 years ago. They substitute 360 years for 360 centuries, and perhaps millennia, that humanity must have lived and in which it built piece by piece, not by putting pebble upon pebble, but by building the first monuments and then blowing them up, then building others and synthesising these results in a truly gigantic and immense history. These people are so bourgeois intus et in cute that for them it all started 360 years ago with Galileo, with Descartes, and with Newton. No one more than us is an admirer of Galileo and the revolutionary effort that his thought made; and many times we have also used examples drawn from Galileo’s thought here. But Galileo himself demonstrates that his scientific maturity was possible precisely because he had thoroughly understood the efforts made by his predecessors, even up to and long before Aristotle.

This riffraff says: by now we must feel we are inhabitants of the cosmos because modern man knows this question in a very different way than ancient man. This is not true. The opposite is true; that we do not know how to go into the cosmos even with our thoughts, except by saying enormous nonsense. But it was precisely the ancients who had believed that there was no limit to thought. They had split man into soul and body, the thinking man into an imponderable unity, and this they had left free to roam the cosmos. It was there in the heavens, on planets and stars, that the gods who directed our actions were installed, it was the stars that disciplined us.

And now, by contrast, we no longer know how to lift ourselves off the ground, even assuming that Sputniks and Pioneers do lift off.

In any case, this whole statement is explained by saying that today we have acquired it because Einstein has explained, has changed the conception of the infinite. Before, we believed that our thought could proceed limitlessly. Starting from the Earth along a straight line, I can sink into space. The first hour, the first day, the first year will pass, this journey never ends, the extreme limit of space is unreachable. Einstein has proved, however, but not only Einstein, other scientists have also proved that space has its own curvature. Therefore in space it is not possible to draw an orthogonal system of straight lines, but it is only possible to draw lines that close on themselves. Thus even the trajectory of an electron charge or a light photon that started from the Earth will curve back on itself: it will eventually return to its starting point. This is not even what these scientists have claimed, they have claimed that in order to decipher certain phenomena and to construct the mathematical algorithm capable of registering certain effects established by modern experimental physics, it is necessary to imagine a system of spatial geometry that no longer has straight axes, as according to Euclid, but that it has curved axes, as according to Riemann, and to study it according to various dimensions.

In any case, all this has served these gentlemen well in saying that now, for man, science goes back only to these 360 years. They do not even say since the day the Russian Revolution was made or since the day Khrushchev held the 20th Congress: they would perhaps be more consistent.

Marx himself says in the Grundrisse that labour becomes joy, becomes satisfaction. He holds Fourier in high esteem for having foreseen as the supreme aim not only the suppression of capitalist distribution, but the suppression of the capitalist mode of production, and their transformation into a more evolved form.

Free time, which is both that devoted to enjoying oneself and that devoted to higher activities, will evidently transform the one who enjoys it into a new subject and it is as such that he will also present himself in the process of immediate production. This process will belong to the man of the future and will be at the same time discipline, applied exercise, experimental science, creative science that materially objectifies itself for our man who has in his head the science accumulated in society.

Man’s process is to the extent that labour demands manual practice. Freedom of movement, as in agriculture, will also be an exercise. Therefore, he who must think well must also have a healthy body, and we will have him drag a few sacks over his shoulders, at least while he is young, to keep him in good efficiency; and to the one who drags the sacks we will say: now go and rest so that you can read philosophers, scientists, etc.

There is a writer, cited by Marx, from the 17th century, John Bellers, who is a truly intelligent, bohemian economist for his time. He said of education that it must also contain productive labour. ‘An idle learning being little better than the learning of idleness’. Labour, the science of idleness. ‘Bodily labour, it’s a primitive institution of God’. Bellers uses the expression ‘of God’ at that time, but it is an equally correct expression.

‘Labour being as proper for the bodies’ health as eating is for its living; for what pains a man saves by ease, he will find in disease’. It will be the diseases that will mock him when he is old, etc. ‘Labour adds (listen to how beautiful this phrase is), labour adds oil to the lamp of life, when thinking inflames it’. It follows: ‘A childish silly employ (...) leaves the children’s minds silly’. It is a very beautiful phrase that labour puts oil in the lamp of life and thought kindles the flame in it. Therefore, labour first and then thought, first action and then science and philosophy. This historically for humanity and socially for man (see Capital, Book I, Chapter XV/228).

Listen to this famous passage. I will read it to you: ‘For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being (it has been since the division of labour) each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow’ (see The German Ideology, Vol. 1, I/Feuerbach). It is the usual concept that returns.

Here there is a bit of polemic with Stirner, whom Marx in this edition calls Sancho because he was the proponent of individualism, of the unique ego, of the man who towers over everything. ‘Here, as always, Sancho (i.e. Stirner) is again unlucky with his practical examples. He thinks that “no one can compose your (Mozart’s) music for you, complete the sketches for your (Raphael’s) paintings. No one can do Raphael’s works for him”. Sancho could surely have known, however, that it was not Mozart himself, but someone else who composed the greater part of Mozart’s Requiem and finished it, and that Raphael himself “completed” only an insignificant part of his own frescoes. He imagines that the so-called organisers of labour wanted to organise the entire activity of each individual, and yet it is precisely they who distinguish between directly productive labour, which has to be organised, and labour which is not directly productive. In regard to the latter, however, it was not their view, as Sancho imagines, that each should do the work of Raphael, but that anyone in whom there is a potential Raphael should be able to develop without hindrance’.

Who knows how many Mozarts and how many Raphaels were not able to develop because they were foolishly locked in a workshop, in an atelier, to do another job. ‘Sancho imagines that Raphael produced his pictures independently of the division of labour that existed in Rome at the time. If he were to compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he would see how greatly Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice. Raphael as much as any other artist was determined by the technical advances in art made before him, by the organisation of society and the division of labour in his locality, and, finally, by the division of labour in all the countries with which his locality had intercourse. Whether an individual like Raphael succeeds in developing his talent depends wholly on demand, which in turn depends on the division of labour and the conditions of human culture resulting from it. In proclaiming the uniqueness of labour in science and art, Stirner adopts a position far inferior to that of the bourgeoisie. At the present time it has already been found necessary to organise this unique activity. Horace Vernet would not have had time to paint even a tenth of his pictures if he regarded them as works which only this unique person is capable of producing. In Paris, the great demand for vaudevilles and novels brought about the organisation of labour for their production; this organisation at any rate yields something better than its unique competitors in Germany. In astronomy, people like Arago, Herschel, Encke and Bessel considered it necessary to organise joint observations and only after that obtained some moderately good results’ (see The German Ideology, III – Union, 2 – Organisation of Labour. The italics are taken from Stirner).

Even now there is the brain trust, as you know. We can let art, literature go. Then in the report we will develop this concept of art a bit. This last passage was what we had come up with for some years. I don’t remember if we had used it. A few more words on the unproductive class and then a final little bit of a conclusion.

In a passage from his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith gives free rein to his hatred of the unproductive class. ‘The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value (...) The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers (...) In the same class must be ranked, some both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions: churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc.’.

Here, however, Smith in his time had not included engineers. We have decreed that engineers must go and keep all these other gentlemen company.

This, of Smith, is a language of the bourgeoisie when it is still revolutionary and has not yet subjugated the whole of Society, the State, etc. The State, the Church justify themselves only as organs of administration and management of common interests.

I have not read to you the piece on unproductive workers. Two examples are taken to show who the unproductive worker is in the capitalist sense. These two examples are: the pope and, excuse me, the whore. Since these unproductive workers fall under the false expenses of production, they must be reduced to the bare minimum. This idea presents a historical interest in that: it developed in a manner diametrically opposed to the conceptions of antiquity and to those of the absolute or aristocratic monarchy emerging from the revolution of the Middle Ages. This is so long as the bourgeoisie is revolutionary. Then it declares that all these are unproductive workers and therefore takes away the salaries of all priests. But from the moment the bourgeoisie has conquered the land, seized the State, made a compromise with its former holders, since it has recognised the ideologues as the flesh of its flesh, it has made them everywhere its own organs, its own image. Since it is educated enough to not simply want to produce, but to also want to consume with an evolved taste; since intellectual labour is increasingly being done at the service of the bourgeoisie, it strives to economically justify those whom it had fought until that moment. To which is added the zeal of economists, who themselves are priests, the zeal of professors, etc., to prove their productive utility and justify their very rounded salaries from an economic point of view.

Then there is Marx’s critique of Ricardo, which responds well as we said yesterday in Giuliano’s report. What Ricardo forgets to point out (we already read it yesterday, but let’s continue reading it) is the continuous increase of the middle classes who are placed between the workers on one side and the capitalists and landowners on the other side and live mainly off the rents of capital. These middle classes weigh heavily on the working class, reinforce the social security and power of the ruling class.

And we are done. Then some of these quotes we will include in the report.