For some years now, the final part of our inter-federal meetings, when the pressure of the preceding topics has allowed it, has been devoted to the questions that we sometimes designate as ‘critique of traditional philosophies’, but which arise directly from our task of restoring the programme of the revolutionary Marxist party as it has been for over a century, fighting against the disruptive forces that in continuous waves attempt to sweep it away into corruption. For many meetings now, it has been conducted orally, but time constraints and the amount of work our small party has to deal with have meant that the corresponding report has no longer been given. It is clear that all this fundamental material must be reordered and collected into a party text that many comrades, of various nationalities, have been earnestly working on for years. There is a mention of what took place in Milan at the session of Sunday 9 June in the final part of our general summary report given in issue 12 of this year. However, it is appropriate to go back in order to rejoin the links in the chain in the subject we are dealing with.

There have been four meetings, reports of which have regularly appeared in these pages, and whose importance the comrades know.

The first is Meeting No. 21 in Turin in June 1958. The number given to each meeting facilitates the search in our bibliographical-chronological dossier, mimeographed and circulated throughout the movement.

In the said meeting, it dealt with the ideological disagreements simulating conflicts of tendencies within the ‘communist bloc’ with reference to revisionist aberrations, all of which, for us, must be reproved, and with Russians and Chinese, Albanians and Yugoslavs. For us, all of them are outside the platform of the revolutionary Marxist programme of the historical communist party born with The Manifesto of the (World) Communist Party of 1848.

This decisive critique led us to clarify, with the usual strict fidelity to the classical texts of the movement, the falsity of the well-known formulae: property of the whole people, of the nation, of the State, or even of local communes, or even, as with many anti-Stalinist immediatists no less to be opposed than all the others, of categories of workers or of workers in enterprises. This theme was developed thoroughly to the point of condemning as false in doctrine even the formulas of property of society, extending the condemnation to the objects of ownership, whether they be the land, the instruments of production, or even the very objects of consumption. The programme of communism is not the overthrow of capitalist property or private property alone, but to reach a stage in the future society where there will be no capital and there will be no property, even personal property.

At Meeting No. 22 in Parma in September 1959, which insisted on the struggle against all revisionism, the final programmatic part (widely reported) moved from condemnation of the false theorem of personal property to that of the person, not only as an economic entity but also as a historical factor. In this part, the difference between bourgeois materialism and Marxist dialectical materialism was expounded. The former ‘revolves’ entirely around the individual and wants, after having freed him from creation and direction by the god of the fideists, to draw from his biochemical functions the psychological and ideal ones, in search of keys to which bourgeois science has now shown itself impotent, wanting to deduce what I think from what I eat, or perhaps from my illnesses; the second, our determinist materialism, applies to societies and social classes, and for these units, which it does not consider aggregates of human molecules, but basic organisms, links the sub-structure of material conditions of production to political, legal, cultural, religious superstructures.

One of these organic units is the communist party, which anticipates the unitary positions of the proletarian class that will be victorious in the bloody historical struggle, and the positions of the future communist humanity. The party too, does not consider itself an aggregate of human molecules, neither at the base nor at the summit, but a revolutionary force of synthesis, and this holds for only one party, the one that possesses this now-defined doctrine. This treatment culminates in the condemnation of today’s rampant superstition of the ‘bigs’ according to which it would be the Kennedys, Khrushchevs, and similar ‘Battilocchi’ who would decide history.

In Meeting No. 23 in La Spezia in April 1959, the critical final part, dwelling on the ravings of the I, attacked the idealist bourgeois philosophies spawned by Hegel and showed their pulverisation by the Marxist party, relying on the text of the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts. In this development, the antitheses are hammered out: between communism and wages – between communism and money – between communism and the family, unfolding the superb Marxist vision of the much obfuscated sexual question. The report is explicit. All of this was moreover introduced at that meeting by an extremely decisive critique of economic, social, and political Russia.

An extensive report was given at Meeting No. 24 in Milan in October 1959, at which the precious text of the now-mentioned Manuscripts was used even more extensively at the end to show how with them a tombstone is placed over all historical ideologies, deist or atheist, and philosophy as the key to the human future is supplanted by historical economics. The new construction courageously and proudly dissolves the ‘eternal enigmas’ of human thought, and this irrevocable dissolution is in the very letter of the very young Marx’s communism, revolutionary action, and doctrine.

We endeavoured to draw from the glorious but not always faithfully transmitted material of our origins, the fundamental thesis that all these luminous bridges that leapt over abysses believed to be unbridgeable reach their apex in the characterisation of the eternal lies about the freedom of the individual and the alleged ‘human personality’, with which today’s atmosphere, from East and West, infects us for purely anti-revolutionary purposes.

It is at this 1959 meeting that our reports stop, save for a few very brief mentions that were given from time to time in the brief and generic reports published immediately after the holding of each meeting.

At Meeting No. 25 in Florence in March 1960, the topic was again dealt with extensively, also prompted by the discussion of pre-capitalist modes of production, which used the suggestive text from Marx’s Grundrisse.

Going back to the riddles ‘magically’ solved in 1844 is the relationship, about which there is so often misunderstanding, between science and socialism. So far we deny that there is a human Science, a common reservoir from which the capitalist form drew and from which we still draw on. Scientific socialism is the opposite of utopian socialism, in the sense that it is not a moral or mystical wish to found a better society through the will of men, but a development determined by real data. Woe betide if we posited these as the science of the bourgeois gentlemen does: no socialism would emerge, but the apology for the eternity of bourgeois property.

Let us therefore raise the cry that leaves many perplexed, blinded by the force of the most trite clichés of: down with science! The fundamental problem of the relationship between matter and thought, science today neither dares to pose it, nor can it resolve it, without the new revolution. The problem was addressed: thought without matter cannot exist, even for the first bourgeois philosophical science, later degenerated into positions preserving the bourgeois class form. But the long and complicated generation of ‘thought’ from the evolution of matter, is it a fact limited to our planet Earth, or can it occur elsewhere and at other times? A way out of these straits is provided by the original position of the Marxists: ‘knowledge’ is a relationship not between mutually antithetical substances, between non-communicating parts of nature. In knowledge, material nature is both subject and object, the fact of knowledge is one of many ‘transformations’ that do not need God, the person, the soul, and all this ancient baggage.

The intuition that victoriously precedes knowledge and science (claimed to be exact, as in the ultra-fashionable term) was addressed. The inexact grasps the true real before and better than the exact. To this, a note was applied on the relationship between Art and Science. Why does the product of Art not decay as quickly as that of ‘science’? Because Art marks a stage in the human dynamic that is Revolution, while Science settles into conservation, all the more publicised are its discoveries and those of its hag sister, Technique, understood in the modern sense.

This is why, in our conception, Instinct has many victories over Reason (another fetish of bourgeois thought) and there are cognitive positions that religions have boldly anticipated for a science that was at the time still impossible. Even today, under the capitalist mode, human science is impossible, and an illiterate proletarian possesses, in certain cases, certainties inaccessible to her: and we are not shaken by the derision that calls them mystical.

At Meeting No. 26 in Casale Monferrato, which again addressed the critique of the Russian course and the history of modes of production, the critique of the fetish of technology and science was treated at length, but there is no widely distributed report. The false admiration for three centuries of bourgeois science, on which the pro-Russian ‘communists’ feed on in their publicity of ‘space’ achievements, was stigmatised. Critique was made of specialisation, mania of today’s technicism, which creates closed and bigoted circles of sold-out professionals, impotent to any vision of the real natural and social world. The bourgeois myth of progress was criticised, evoking high civilisations that disappeared in history and were superior to the Christian and bourgeois one. We affirmed that the only sure and ‘exact’ science must be begun by man not from physics but from historical politics. Today’s experts and academics depend on entrepreneurial economics and its speculations and plundering; these people of today are worth the bigotry of yesterday’s priests, who, moreover, still actively support them today. Today’s academic and mercantile Pharisaism is more despicable than all past obscurantisms, mocked in the name of a false progress.

At Meeting No. 27 in Bologna in November 1960, which dwelt extensively on the movement of coloured peoples and on the history of the International Communist Left, the final part of the meeting dwelt again on the problem of extraterrestrial thought, starting from the sensational hypothesis, allegedly supported by the famous biblical Manuscripts discovered near the Dead Sea in Jordan, of an extremely ancient descent onto Earth of spaceships from another planet, which first spread truths of a more developed civilisation, and then upon departing caused, with their ‘launch rockets’, the cataclysm, of which the biblical version was reread as divine punishment on the corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. In a review of the history of the theory of knowledge, formed on our planet, a comparison was made between ancient and new philosophies and the Aristotelian and present-day ‘reversal of the pyramid’ of the sciences was announced, stating that for us Marxists, cognitive clarification is first attained in the science of social relations and the series of modes of production, and from this base it moves towards the other sciences, today called natural considered certain and definitive, making a foray into the serious uncertainties currently arising concerning the intimate structure of material particles, and alluding to theories on ‘Antimatter’ which some claim is a revenge of Aristotelian positions on modern scientific philosophy, as proof that the human path is tortuous and contradictory, and its fashionable apologia, vain and conventional.

Meeting No. 28 in Rome in March 1961, widely circulated on other issues, did not address but postponed that of knowledge in Marxism. In it, the ‘anti-pig’ manifesto was prepared as a response to that disgraceful one of the 81 parties gathered in Moscow.

Meeting No. 29 in Milan in July 1961, after important topics on the anti-colonial movements and the agrarian question classic and present, is a remarkable contribution to the History of the Left, grafting to the discussion of the well-known chrono-historical publication of the Annali Feltrinelli, a critique of the crucial problem of man and party, for our thesis of the non-necessity of the Leader.

Meeting No. 30 in Genoa centred on the demolishing critique of the 22nd Russian party congress, with its further galloping runs towards the repudiation of all revolutionary doctrine, and the concluding part followed the specifically economic and political ones, framing the irreconcilable programmatic antithesis with the basic tablets of Marxist doctrine, and linking to these the general theoretical theme. The report made ample mention of this.

Meeting No. 31 in Florence in March 1962, which, among other things, fully addressed the very important theme of the ‘military question in Marxism’, had to postpone the topic of ‘philosophical’ critique after having devoted an ample amount of time especially to the question of China and its alleged extremism.

Meeting No. 32 in Milan in June 1962 (the last one held), after extensive discussions on the Algeria-France issue, and on the union question related to that of the History of the Left, dealt in the end with the topic of critique we have here outlined meeting by meeting, dealing mainly with the question: Determinism and Causality.

This question can be posed in a twofold sense. Is there, on other planets than our Earth, life in the organic sense, plant or animal? Is there life of animal species that have reached the level of development that we consider ourselves to have reached, that is, of reasoning, thinking animals?

The latest astronomical knowledge leads us to extremely large numbers of stars or Suns that may have, in our and countless other ‘galaxies’ and star systems, swarms of planets. Not all of them, due to physical constraints and as far as can be known, have stable planets comparable to those of the Sun, but even if the probability is low, the number of such planets will always be gigantic.

Those who have attempted to analyse the conditions that make life possible, even in its primordial forms, have come to the conclusion that a truly tiny fraction of such celestial bodies can present them: consider temperature, pressure, gravity, humidity, and the chemistry of the atmosphere and hydrosphere, if they exist, etc. However, out of perhaps billions of bodies under consideration, there will certainly be a good number hosting organic life, and the question is too uncertain whether germs of this life can, via meteorites, traverse space from one world to another, or whether life arises spontaneously from the inorganic world.

If, however, we turn to the second problem of thought, it becomes even more complicated. To the question of counting the innumerable bodies is added that of counting the ages, and the billions of years appear. The Earth has certainly reached them, apart from the Sun, but in which span of them has life existed, and in which still narrower span the life of humanity, known to us for only a few millennia?

The strange question; are we alone in the cosmos? If it cannot deserve a negative answer; it is, nevertheless, not a very ‘frequent’ solution, this seems certain.

How then these thinking cosmic species could get to know each other is another point of science fiction. We have always said that we do not believe in exploration with cosmic vehicles, but we can admit, in cases of extreme rarity, an exchange of signals...

All-powerful science even today helps us very little more than the speculative metaphysics repudiated by us, and it is not clear whether it is accepted or rejected by the bourgeois, on the famous dualism (one of the many enigmas from which Marxism emerges) between matter and thought.

As long as class interests monopolise research and falsify it on this wretched earth, little can we hope to know of anything well-founded.

The other aspect of this same enigma was treated, if you like: determinism and causality, or indeterminism?

Modern schools of physics have abandoned the strict causalism of the days of Galileo, Newton, the so-called: mechanicism. The one who asserted this thesis in a lapidary manner was Laplace, founder of celestial mechanics, and for this reason always vilified. If a powerful mind, he said – and he was not thinking of robots – could write down all the positions and velocities affecting the parts of matter that form the Universe, it would be possible for it to calculate the position of all of them at any future time. Then bourgeois thought was horrified by such a challenge. It was that same Laplace who explained to Napoleon the Great his and Kant’s theory of the origin of the solar system from the primitive incandescent nebula. The emperor, sternly, said: in the whole speech I have not heard the name of God! Your Majesty, replied the scientist, I have done without such a hypothesis.

Today everyone is too afraid to do without it. You never know, what if he exists and takes offence? Modern petty-bourgeois science is not above such an old joke.

The little people on the bourgeois side reason like this: revolutionary Marxism rests everything on a social ‘causalism’ whereby the economic fact determines the political struggle. If causalist determinism falls, we free ourselves from this spectre that terrorises us. And if official science casts aside determinism in biology, and better still in the very physics of non-living nature, here is a hope of eradicating the revolutionary monster in the social war.

Poor people! We certainly do not accept subordinating our social agitation to your academic science. You do not know how to move from cause to effect, and from past to present, in physics, in astronomy, and in biology and anthropology. We are not dismayed: we don’t need your library and university paraphernalia: seeing it flounder, we enjoy it, and we don’t take it upon ourselves today to put it back in order: wait, then, for the world communist dictatorship for that; and we will serve you.

For now, we affirm the determinist theory in history and sociology as a sure and certain science; your class death we entrust not to a timid probabilism but to an armed certainty. Let your splendid physics of three centuries ago and your philosophy falter: we need nothing more from them. Yet we follow the course of your class thought as crucial proof of your decay and of our prediction of capitalist collapse. Napoleon the First returned the crown to the pope and to god; Laplace’s disciples found it risky to swear by his audacious ‘mechanical’ determinism. When Einstein came, he did not declare the experimentalism and causalism of classical mechanics fallen. He carried it intact to a higher level.

Not all nuclear physicists of the latest schools have thrown this away. It was Planck, who ‘atomised energy as well as matter’, who gave the foundations to the new indeterminism, developed by Heisenberg with his theory of the unpredictability of the outcome of every experiment, and thus of every law (in essence) that can be discovered in nature. But this does not mean that we will renounce the laws found in that part of it, which is history, and the supreme one that capitalism will succumb, and communism will win. Heisenberg is but one of many converts, and he showed it by philosophising in a sense not only idealist, but spiritualist and fideist.

The great Italian mathematician Severi and his school, in the historical polemic of the centuries, have re-evaluated Aristotle, contra Galileo, who held that a mechanical force acts even in the uniform motion of bodies. Their language is symptomatic: ‘principle of exchange’ ‘balance of physical motion’. It seems to confirm that economics (class science par excellence) invades the territory of physics. Severi’s outcome is ingenious, of course, regarding the eternal problem of causality. On the basis of the discovery of the famous antiparticles, and having established the ‘stage world’ in which there is matter as always understood, and the behind-the-scenes world, i.e. of Antimatter; he reserves this for indeterminacy, and concedes that classical determinism holds for the Matter of the sensible world, treated by everyone until now.

We accept. In the world of Aristotelian-Galilean matter, which is not to be confused with the abstruse mysticism of form, power, and spirit, that old metaphysical bogey, a certain and secure determinism operates, and it is that of the class struggle, of the war between parties. In this palpable world of the front stage we await the REVOLUTION. This, together with the wave of generations not distorted by your cretinising society, will revise your texts, your formulas, and will teach new ones. It will deign to explain to you your history and your Anti-History. Therefore it will not make use of the lectern, but of force, and, if necessary, of Terror.