As is our custom and way of working, we give an extensive summary of the report which, on the theme of knowledge as a prerequisite for the party’s historical battle, was delivered at our inter-sectional meeting on 1 January 1977.

‘As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished (...) The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man. Germany can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realise itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realisation [Verwirklichung] of philosophy. When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the cock of Gaul’. (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction).

If this was true in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is evident that today no form of servitude can be broken without breaking every form of material servitude. If the Germany of the time is the keystone to the emancipation of the proletariat, not just the German proletariat, today Germany embraces far wider times and spaces, from North Africa to Palestine, wherever emancipation from colonialism is only possible insofar as it is at the same time emancipation from the presumed or real partial overcoming of imperialist capitalism. The basic condition, indispensable for this historical goal, is, however, the defence of revolutionary theory; otherwise, there will be no cock, neither French nor Russian, nor simply any cock at all, to announce the resurrection.

This is a permanent task of the class party, especially in the present difficult phase of the struggle, when there is a profusion of false modesty and of updating the cornerstones of Marxism by ‘democratic’ and ‘pluralist’ means. These attitudes have always infested the workers’ movement, and they come from afar, since already Lenin, in the Preface to the first edition of his Materialism and Empirio-criticism, sarcastically comments on a statement by Lunacharsky ‘perhaps we have gone astray, but we are seeking’, taken from the Essays on the Philosophy of Marxism, September 1908, with these words:

‘That the first half of this phrase contains an absolute and the second a relative truth, I shall endeavour to demonstrate circumstantially in the present book. At the moment I would only remark that if our philosophers had spoken not in the name of Marxism but in the name of a few “seeking” Marxists, they would have shown more respect for themselves and for Marxism. As for myself, I too am a “seeker” in philosophy. Namely, the task I have set myself in these comments is to find out what was the stumbling block to these people who under the guise of Marxism are offering something incredibly muddled, confused and reactionary’. The experience of the first victorious proletarian revolution and the founding of the International marked for communists all over the world the end of isolated or independent Marxist ‘researchers’, whom Lenin already mocks, and the defence of its doctrine becomes the collective task of the party, and the task seems immense because today we are not dealing with comrades who had ‘stumbled’ like the Otzovists à la Bogdanov or Menshevik liquidators (we are in the Russia of 1908) but with conscious falsifiers, who, cloaking themselves behind the ‘pluralistic’ and ‘democratic’ ‘perhaps we have gone astray, but we are seeking’, in fact destroy every possible reference to the indispensable cornerstones of revolutionary Marxist theory.

At every stage and historical juncture of the modern class struggle, the party has found itself having to fulfil this primary task, having to wield the weapon of criticism not in the abstract, outside of time and space, but in relation to the false conceptions of reality propagated by the class enemy. This is how it has been possible to refer to Marxism as a debatable, relative, freely interpretable point of view, because it has been claimed that its worldview should be interpreted as one ‘philosophy’ among many, as a way of contemplating reality, when Marx himself decreed the end of this metaphysics in the name of the revolutionary transformation of history and nature.

Thus Lenin was forced to place more emphasis again on materialism rather than on history, whereas Marx and Engels, who were trained in the school of Feuerbach ‘...naturally paid most attention to crowning the structure of philosophical materialism, that is, not to the materialist epistemology but to the materialist conception of history. That is why Marx and Engels laid the emphasis in their works rather on dialectical materialism than on dialectical materialism, why they insisted rather on historical materialism than on historical materialism’.

The communist party finds itself today confronted with a tide of schools and counter-schools for which even pre-Kantian idealism is the rule, and with scientific and philosophical currents that deny even nature (more on this later). Imagine then how necessary the defence of theory is in a reality where one is forced to sail entirely against the tide, and where perhaps only the heart of the proletariat, by its necessity, will be unable not to recognise us. We witness today the extrapolation of scientific data in order to reintroduce through the window what has been driven out through the door, the justification of religion as a response to impotence, and the theorisation of the unknowability of the physical world, in an explicit anti-proletarian function of the dogmatic or democratic (which is worse) weaponry of the Churches.

In our action, as convinced proponents of the knowability of the world and its revolutionary transformation, we must reckon with a concrete and historical conjuncture of the class struggle, which we do not delude ourselves into thinking we can simply reverse with doctrinaire sermons, but which nonetheless requires us not to renounce the weapon of the sharpest possible criticism.

Today, the very demystification of Hegel’s theology carried out by Feuerbach, an acknowledged master of Marxism, is ridiculed as an expression of mystical love for man: bourgeois natural sciences based on biologism and ethology tend to distort the nonetheless uplifting formula ‘homo homini deus’ into the feral ‘homo homini lupus’ and to give it legitimacy by demonstrating it with the data of the most advanced research, in reality bad philosophy and a projection of poisoned class relations.

It is certainly not easy to reaffirm that Marxism, demystifying in its turn Feuerbach’s ‘homo homini deus’, has definitively ruled out the abstract and definitive image of a human essence to be worshipped, because the fetishism of this attitude is through Marxism replaced with the striving for the realisation of a natural human-social order that is socialism, for us the beginning of history against the slave, feudal, capitalist prehistory.

This is the absolute – relative to a given historical phase – to which we strive, in spite of all pre-Hegelian metaphysicians and the biologists of our day.

Marxism denies love for man considered in his existing social relations. Marxism does not love the exploited man as exploited, but as potentially free from exploitation, not the proletariat as proletariat, but the proletariat as self-negator and heart of the species-society.

It is petty-bourgeois intellectualism, which, out of its guilt, tends to see true humanity in suffering humanity, in the working class, in its sacrifices. Nothing could be more hollow and more harmful. Hence the appeals to live the suffering of the masses, to make oneself humble among the humble, to go to school with the class, and other falsehoods of this kind.

Conversely, either the party is able to bring its highest vision to the class, or it puts itself at its tail, and then it contributes only to its brutalisation and to its worship of the status quo. Insofar as the human being is not an abstraction standing above the individual person, but is in its reality, the ensemble of social relations, the respect for man as such is false, static, and reactionary.

On the other hand, this had already been intuited in the past, even if explained in an idealist or religious form; one need only think of the mystical body of Saint Paul or of the revolutionary morality of the bourgeois themselves in their phase of ascent and struggle against feudalism.

The phrase ‘in its reality’ clearly refers not to an absolute concept, but to ‘a certain degree’ of reality, i.e., to a relative concept. To clarify the matter; medieval scholastic philosophy ascribed to God the highest degree of reality – an absolute reality – since only the divinity was endowed with the ‘fullness of being’, all other beings being excluded from this ‘totality of existence’.

In the 14th century, in the dispute recorded in the history of philosophy as the ‘ontological status of universals’ that took place between ‘realists’ and ‘nominalists’, the concept of reality was still at the centre of the discussion. The realists, who derived their conceptions from the idealism of Plato, summarised their doctrine in the statement ‘universalia sunt realia’, which meant that a prior existence is inherent to the universal – in a logical sense – and independently of the individual, so that the universal was recognised as an independent being; as if to say that before horses (individuals), there stood horseness (essence, general) which had an autonomous existence with respect to individuals.

The nominalists, on the contrary, held that in the real world nothing existed that was distinct from particular concrete things, which nevertheless had certain determinate common general properties (which is why Marx called nominalism the first expression of materialism). Materialism, in short, denies the existence of realities above individuals who move within a ‘social field’, and the ‘generalities’, which seem to subsist beyond this field, have no autonomous existence. And this also applies, whatever all the modernisers and improvers may say, even for the specific ‘reality’ that is the class party; when reference is made, in our doctrine and tradition, to the integration between individual militants and the ‘organic’ whole, i.e. a totality endowed with particular functions but unified as essence, one is not alluding to an abstract and fideistic moralistic type of mysticism, but to a collective unity, of intent, of will which manifests itself in action and in a common goal that must be measured in social reality.

When this organic reality has been ridiculed in the name of the necessity of a martinet discipline, in the name of the emergency of the situation, of the chasm of distance separating objective reality from the party, it has been forgotten that the practically most precious conquest of revolutionary communism, made its own by the Communist Left, is precisely this way of being of the party in its internal organisation and its tactical way of moving. Nor does the establishment of internal relations seem to us a petty or formal Christian humanism which, by overcoming outward formalism, or at least attempting to reduce it to a purely necessary technique for acting in conformity with common ends, entails the prefiguration of the party as communism already living in the very midst of the poisoned relations of bourgeois life.

In our conception, the contradiction that would oppose the individual to the party, the individual to the class, the individual to the species, does not envisage the insuperability between present and empirical reality, and the so-called realm of ends, the much-ridiculed communist Eden.

Only the venomous polemic of its enemies attributes to historical materialism a social and natural spacetime without contradictions and without dialectics: it has instead simply referred to socialist society as the beginning of the true history of the human species, an absolute-relative that has nothing to do with messianic eschatology, a dialectically higher level of social life.

The bourgeois, who fears the end of the contradictions of his social field, projects his obstinate and violent determination to bar the way to the proletariat, in motion and in struggle for the real transformation of society, and to preserve this world which, despite everything, continues to be for him the best of all possible worlds. Classical metaphysics, and modern bourgeois metaphysics however disguised, all fall into dogmatism: either by having already defined, even in its formalism, future reality up to the point of having envisaged a cloying classificatory casuistry typical of the scholastic way of thinking (one need only refer to the meticulous descriptions of the Afterlife, of which Dante’s Divine Comedy is a sublime example), or by denying any possibility of reference to the future, which they can only imagine as a terrifying and empty Nothingness. Communist society is not the mere projection, perhaps revised and corrected in its excessive aspects, of bourgeois society, but its negation, nor does it claim to be the realm of the absolute, in which Thought and Being will fully coincide.

‘The identity of thought and being, to express myself in Hegelian fashion, everywhere coincides with your example of the circle and the polygon. Or the two of them, the concept of a thing and its reality, run side by side like two asymptotes, always approaching each other yet never meeting. This difference between the two is the very difference which prevents the concept from being directly and immediately reality and reality from being immediately its own concept. But although a concept has the essential nature of a concept and cannot therefore prima facie directly coincide with reality, from which it must first be abstracted, it is still something more than a fiction, unless you are going to declare all the results of thought fictions because reality has to go a long way round before it corresponds to them, and even then only corresponds to them with asymptotic approximation’ (Engels to Schmidt on 12 March 1895).

Theoretical philosophical conceptions in general, which end up considering the results of thought as fictions, have attacked and attempted to destroy the sense of causality, objectivity, and truth, proposing as a meagre and painful compensation the consolation of faith in an abstract and dogmatic Absolute not clearly identified and which reintroduces the most inhuman and insane ghosts of the past.

‘The wise person is imbued with a sense of causality for everything that happens’ (Einstein; from Religion and Science). This is the basis for knowing reality, not only natural reality but also social reality.

‘Materialism, in full agreement with natural science, takes matter as primary and regards consciousness, thought, sensation as secondary, because in its well-defined form sensation is associated only with the higher forms of matter (...) only with definite processes in matter organised in a definite way (...) there still remains to be investigated and reinvestigated how matter, apparently entirely devoid of sensation, is related to matter which, though composed of the same atoms (or electrons), is yet endowed with a well-defined faculty of sensation. Materialism clearly formulates the as yet unsolved problem and thereby stimulates the attempt to solve it, to undertake further experimental investigation’ (Lenin).

This is our response, as can be seen much less ‘dogmatic’ than one might think, in the face of the rekindled controversy raging among the so-called bourgeois and opportunist ‘epistemologists’ on the question of the value of science, i.e. whether it is neutral, valid for all, or itself a historical product and as such the dialectical reflection, on the cognitive level, of partial and class interests.

The problem, both practical and theoretical, has always kept revolutionary communist theory keenly engaged, while the bourgeoisie and opportunism, in alternating and contradictory phases, have at times extolled experimental scientific achievements, at other times preferred to have them preceded by idealist, subjectivist, and instrumentalist smokescreens.

At its rise, the bourgeoisie has decapitated Gods and Kings, reactionary philosophical systems, and superstitions. When its historical fortunes have been darkened under the pressure of the proletariat, an increasingly powerful candidate to free itself from its liberators from the feudal yoke, the bourgeoisie has had no difficulty in re-embarking onto its multicoloured chariot the old mysticism, fideism, the most sophisticated rear guards and the most convoluted avant-gardes.

Scientific and philosophical production is, naturally, not a generic conditioned reflection of the relations of production and reproduction; as Engels recalls, in certain historical phases it can be noted, according to a very general assessment, that profound ‘philosophical’ intuitions have even anticipated, thought ‘pre-emptively’, a wealth of discoveries that experimental science would later verify, just as it also appears evident that in other historical phases, the progressive and revolutionary social forces have had to reckon with the impediments imposed by religious, philosophical, and scientific tradition. When, therefore, in the present phase of the unfolding of the class struggle, one has the impression that old ghosts are being exhumed against the correct understanding of reality, which revolutionary theory cannot do without in order to correctly set up the transformative struggle of society and nature, it is not enough to repeat that the class enemy resorts to old tools to block the path to communism; it is necessary to determine with sufficient precision what relations are established between the socio-economic conditions of the proletariat’s subjection to capital, and the ‘forms’ that tend not only to justify, but to reinforce and possibly ‘eternalise’ this domination.

It is true that the very name of some of the more ‘current’ currents of class ideological domination betrays its own origin, which was thought to be abundantly beaten and falsified. We need only think of neo-positivism, neo-idealism, and we will realise that, just as they claimed to change the features of the capitalist mode of production by preceding its noun with a more or less black and innocent mole [a pun in Italian: neo also means ‘mole’, tr. ed.], so too, in the philosophical and scientific field the class enemy, in the absence of appropriate and reliable arguments, has prefixed the name of the old elaborations with the usual neo.

But revolutionary communists are not willing to be beguiled by innocent re-evaluations or revivals, as they say, without first having fought and pointed out the pejorative and vulgar nature of both opportunist bourgeois practice and theory. Just as in their time Marx and Engels were not afraid to recognise the ‘scientific’, i.e. objectively cognitive, value of the economics of the classical authors Smith, Ricardo, Rodbertus, in order to highlight the depth of falsity and lack of objective value of the vulgar economists, all the more reason why revolutionary communists today must not have the slightest feeling of inferiority and awe before the ultra-vulgar philosophies and epistemologies of the ultra-vulgarised epigones.

But we want to move on to some probative examples to show that we know, it is our method, how to go beyond anathemas, though necessary. We start, in any case, from a historical basis, not from divine illumination. Bourgeois science takes on the characteristics of subjectivism and metaphysics, more or less evident, when the need to ‘conserve’ class privileges takes precedence over the natural need to wrest from nature its secrets for the enhancement of the productive forces and the very accumulation of surplus value. The appearance of the proletariat on the stage of history and its historical diagram embodied by its party entails, for the bourgeoisie as the ruling class, a double order of problems: to obey the law of the expansion of its own class domination, favouring the ‘objective knowledge of nature and society’, and at the same time to prevent such knowledge from calling into question such domination on both a theoretical and practical level.

It is for this reason that the clash between these two conflicting exigencies does not follow a straight line, or a continuous curve, but rather takes on a course marked by sudden ruptures, falls, and recoveries more easily representable as broken lines.

The bourgeoisie has sought to realise its own class brain capable of aggregating its contradictions in advance even on the theoretical level: the State, which in the unsurpassed Hegelian definition is the Idea itself. But when it believed it had foreseen everything, it had to resort to the arsenal, carefully accumulated and prearranged for the ‘total solution’ of class violence: yesterday the Kaiser’s warships, today the neutron bomb, the latest fashion of ecological atomic warfare!

What has settled the question of the superiority of Thought and Science over brute force, over violence, has never been ideal disputes, but historical trials of iron and fire: the European 1848, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution.

This is why, when faced with the abstract question of whether or not science is indifferent regarding the so-called ‘other aspects of reality’, as bourgeois and opportunist ideologues clumsily express it, we begin by answering that bourgeois society and the societies preceding it have not been and are not capable of setting up the matter-knowledge relation in a general form, being able only to express partial aspects of this relation. The revolutionary bourgeoisie has longed, we cannot deny it, for a solution, at the level of the human species, to the man-nature relation, but its concrete historical experience has belied its capacity to develop it satisfactorily. On the other hand, what would be the value of our claim, of revolutionary Marxism, that we live in prehistory and that only communism will be the beginning of the real possibility of preparing general plans for relations and knowledge of reality?

There is no doubt, however, that the most skilful attempt, however dated, to reduce the objectivity of matter to opinion or hypothesis for its own sake – in the current scenario of class relations at the global level, the glories of classical and less classical idealism up to the pseudo-concepts of Don Benedetto Croce are now burned away – is the ‘instrumentalist’ conception of science. Already, Cardinal Bellarmine suggested to Galileo that he accept a merely instrumental interpretation of the Copernican theory. Osiander had written: ‘There is no need for such hypotheses to be true. It is enough that they give rise to calculations in agreement with observations’. And Bellarmine: ‘Galilei will act with prudence if, without pretensions to truth, he limits himself to saying that, supposing the Earth moves and the Sun stands still, we account better for phenomena’. A Mach ante litteram! Here are the forerunners of empiriocriticism. The church – Popper notes – recognised that the new System was a ‘more useful tool than the old one for astronomical calculations’ and ‘the Gregorian calendar reform made full practical use of it’.

There are not a few today who haughtily claim that the science founded by Osiander, Bellarmine, and Bishop Berkeley has prevailed. But, and we think we are in good company, Einstein and others reject it.

Galileo and classical physics presuppose, in the words of the modern ‘instrumentalists’, an ‘essentialist’ metaphysics, according to which the description in geometrical-mathematical terms captures the true reality beyond a sensible experience that is merely appearance. ‘But this metaphysics’, admits the critical ‘rationalist’ Popper himself, ‘was not obscurantist like instrumentalism: it pushed the scientist to seek deeper truths and unknown realities beyond immediate experience. The “realist” need (Popper refuses to say ‘materialist’ like all timid materialists afraid of compromising themselves with Marxism, of which they are indeed determined deniers) to discover reality beyond the sensible datum must be preserved by abandoning essentialist metaphysics without falling into instrumentalism. Although one cannot say definitively that a theoretical description is true, many effective theories (or believed to be such) have been refuted through comparisons with “reality”’.

It is clear from these arguments how concerned the modern ‘epistemologist’ is about the efficacy of scientific theories, in line, moreover, with the urgency of capitalist productive forces to obtain results as quickly as possible, not giving a damn about the objective cognitive dimension, which, on the contrary, Marxism does not scorn and with which it is chiefly concerned, denying to bourgeois science the capacity and power to establish a valid equation between action and science.

There is no doubt for us that in the beginning is the act and that therefore science is the result of action and movement; hence the interested polemic according to which Marxism would fall, in its claim to the objectivity of matter and knowledge, into a sort of Galilean-style ‘essentialism’. One forgets, of course, that when dialectical materialism claims that matter is movement, it does not intend to fall into a tautology of the ‘everything flows’ type in the manner of Heraclitus or Cratylus, so dear to the many contemporary Lassalles, in order to construct the revisionist Bernstein’s brilliant aphorism ‘movement is everything, the end nothing’, but rather intends, without denying the objectivity and truth of relations, to determine and measure natural-social movement in its unfolding, within concrete historical and material conditions.

When Marxism recognises that astrology is ‘the science’ of certain societies of the past, or that the knowledge of the moon phases of the peasant is ‘its science’, it does not intend to equate scientific interpretations of different historical phases; that is to say, it is not prepared to lump everything together, because it is not afraid – precisely because it is not closed in an ‘essentialist’ conception, nor in an instrumentalist one, claiming the capacity and the need to foresee beyond sensible data and beyond ready-made theories – to imagine, starting from the very results elaborated by the bourgeoisie in its creative and revolutionary phase, a conception of reality in which the eternal movement of matter will not be a flat relation of the initial ‘first impulse’, which all ‘creationists’ and more or less camouflaged idealists need, with the inert thing-in-itself, but that determined material-ideal-historical movement of which the species-humanity of communism intends to be neither a generic accessory nor a haughty and subjectivistic centre, according to the waffling illusions of idealists of all stripes.

When we fire our batteries, unfortunately at this contingent stage only verbal, against bourgeois science, we mean to argue that the epoch of capital’s putrescent imperialism is only capable of producing science for capital, i.e. for the accumulation of commodities and knowledge whose only value is functionality for one part of humanity, the bourgeoisie, and not for humanity in general. On the other hand, the same humanitarian and self-interested sirens of the bourgeoisie are admitting it when they recognise that so-called Science with a capital S is producing the annihilation or violation of reality, ecological disaster, the destruction of the species. Only, pandering and false as they are, they pretend to attribute the blame for all this not to the dominant social relation, the capitalist one, but to machines as such, according to the classic inversion of subject-predicate already unmasked by Marx that is typical of every fetishistic process, and particularly of the capitalist claim to attribute to things powers and intentions that are on the contrary largely those of a putrid social class incapable of seeing and pursuing the interests of humanity.

Science and knowledge of reality in its internal relations are the work of social forces for their possibility of accommodation or happy transformation, knowledge of objective processes without which there is no economy, nor philosophy, to which the bourgeoisie itself must submit against all pretence of ideological mystification. We therefore maintain that science and knowledge are a result that is not definitive, but approximate and historical, and as such relative to different historical phases and processes. We deny that knowledge of these objective relations and processes can be neutral in the sense of being indifferent to the internal processes and relations in which class-divided society is articulated; we therefore deny the bourgeoisie – which has never shown itself more clearly to be a selfish and blind part, bloodthirsty and incapable of setting itself human-general goals – the right to present itself as the author and dispenser of true science. That is why we fight for its violent end and the establishment of communism.