In The Class Struggle in France (13 June 1849 to 10 March 1850) Marx clearly states that the Blanquists had already claimed the dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of classes: what characterises Marx’s conception, therefore, is that he determines the conditions of both the one and the other; this is what constitutes scientific communism. Blanqui’s communism is a revolutionary communism, but not a scientific one (cf. 18th Brumaire, Blanqui and his followers, the revolutionary communists, i.e. the true leaders of the proletarian party, Engels).

The problem of choosing the times and means for the realisation of communism is not subjective but is inscribed in the tradition of struggle that the party embodies in its long history, not simply littered with defeats or victories, but with lessons.

We are accused of being insensitive to changing conditions, of remaining entrenched in a kind of paleo-Marxism valid for a certain historical period now dead and buried. All this because we do not indulge in the flat sociologism in fashion. But the historical method is one thing, the sociological-metaphysical method is quite another. Capital, says Lenin ironically against the sociologist Mikhailovsky, is not a work corresponding to the purpose for the metaphysical sociologist, who has not realised the sterility of a priori reasonings about the nature of society and has not realised that, instead of studying and explaining, such methods merely insinuate, as a conception of society, the bourgeois ideas of an English merchant or the ideals of petty-bourgeois socialism of a Russian democrat, and nothing more. At best, they were merely a symptom of the ideas and social relations of their time, but they did not advance by one jot mankind’s understanding of social relations, even individual ones, but real ones (and not those ‘corresponding to human nature’). And again:

‘The gigantic step forward taken by Marx in this respect consisted precisely in that he discarded all these arguments about society and progress in general and produced a scientific analysis of one society and of one progress – capitalist’ (Lenin, What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are).

Here’s the problem: a given society and a given progress are analysed in their internal dynamics, in their characteristic forms, which are valid for the entire epoch of their existence, and do not change because consciousness wills it or because of the convenience of shortcuts!

We wrote (Milan meeting 1952) about the historical invariance of Marxism:

‘The materialist rejection of the idea that a theoretical “system” which arose at such-and-such a moment (or worse still, arose in the mind, and was systemised within the work of, a given man, thinker, or historical leader, or any of those things combined) can encompass the entire course of future history, its laws and principles, in an irrevocable way, shouldn’t be understood as a rejection of the notion that systems of principles can be stable over extremely long periods of time. In fact their stability and resistance to attack, and to being improved as well, means they constitute a major weapon in the armoury of the social class to which they belong, and whose historical task and interests they reflect. The succession of such systems and bodies of doctrine and praxis, is tied not to the advent of outstanding man, but rather to the succession of modes of production, that is, to the types of material organization of the living human collectivity’.

And again:

‘According to Marxism, historical progress in the realm (above all) of the organization of productive resources is not continuous and gradual, but is rather a series of consecutive, widely spaced leaps forward which cause profound disruption in the entire social-economic apparatus, shaking it to its very foundations. These are genuine cataclysms, disasters, rapid crises, in which everything changes very quickly after having stayed the same for a very long period of time, as with the physical world, with the stars in the cosmos, with geology and with the phylogenesis of living organisms themselves’.

For Marxism, contradictory reality is not resolved once and for all in the unity of the concept and its duration, so that on every occasion it becomes easy to go fishing in the illusory top hat for the answer, and any answer at all, to the problems that historically arise. We said that for Marxism there is no continuous and gradual progress in history, but ‘a series of distant, successive leaps forward that upset the whole social economic apparatus deeply and from the bottom up’. The political struggles, the great battles in the long war that is the class struggle, are the living concentrate of these abrupt upheavals, and they clearly sanction, almost consecrate or curse forever the instruments and weapons for the conquest of victory. There is no turning back.

‘Since class ideology is a superstructure of the modes of production, it is not shaped by the daily flow of particles of knowledge either, but appears within the chasm produced by a violent clash, and it guides the class whose expression it is – in a substantially monolithic and stable form – through a long series of struggles and convulsions until the next critical phase is reached; until the next historical revolution (...) Marxism itself isn’t a doctrine which can be moulded and remoulded each day by adding and changing “bits” of it (patching it up more like) because it is still counted amongst those doctrines (even if the final one) which function as a weapon of a dominated and exploited class which needs to overturn social relations; in the process of which it is subjected, in a thousand and one ways, to the conservative influences of the traditional forms and ideologies of the enemy classes’.

For Marxism, dialectics is not movement in general, or that which consciousness commands, otherwise ‘we would assume what is in question’ or ‘what we doubt’, as Simplicio does in the Dialogue of the Chief Systems.

Against the appearance of movement, which not only does not keep the programme fixed, but compromises it definitively, we respond:

‘Even if we can now, or rather since the proletariat appeared on the great historical scene, glimpse the history of the future society without classes and therefore without revolutions, it must be affirmed that for the very long period that will lead to this, the revolutionary class will in the meantime fulfil its task insofar as it will move using a doctrine and a method that remain stable and are stabilised in a monolithic programme, throughout the tremendous struggle, the number of followers remaining variable, the success of the phases and social clashes’.

All this because real and objective power relations are determined in the movement, not removable by strokes of will, with appeals to the need to transform the world independently of the transformations determined by the clashes of collective forces. This, too, has earned our position the accusation of dogmatism, a term that in the classical German philosophical tradition is equivalent to materialism: an accusation that we have never been ashamed, if anything we have been justifiably proud of. The clash of collective forces in the modern class struggle rests on the terrain of opposing interests, discernible with the precision of the natural sciences, as Marx reminds us in the Introduction to his Critique of Political Economy; Capital is a monument erected as vivid proof of these possibilities of analysis and synthesis, and thus of prediction.

‘History itself’, writes Marx in this sense in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, III, 2, ‘is a “real” part of natural history – of nature developing into man. Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science (in the sense that it will adopt its experimental method and in this historical-dialectical sense): there will be one science’.

Let the opponents see in such statements a pure utopia or crude materialism: the experience of the class struggle, especially in the current inauspicious years of counter-revolution, serves to demonstrate that he who has deluded himself into updating in the name of the creativity of consciousness, or worse, of the so-called ‘masses’, find themselves grazing in the same meadow, now no longer so green, as the hated bourgeoisie.

‘Although, therefore, the ideological endowment of the revolutionary working class is no longer revelation, myth and idealism as it was for previous classes, but positive “science” instead, it nevertheless still needs a stable formulation of its principles and rules of action, which fulfil the purpose and have the same decisive efficacy as the dogmas, catechisms, tables, constitutions; and the “books of guidance” such as the Vedas, the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran, and the Bills of Rights had in the past. The profound errors of form and substance contained in those books did not detract from, indeed in many cases they contributed to, their enormous organisational and social force, which was first revolutionary, then counterrevolutionary, in dialectical succession’.

This is why, just as we have always rejected the gradualist and Menshevik thesis of revolution by stages, so we reject the equally opportunist and counter-revolutionary conception of the party and its formation by stages.

Only in appearance can the stages give the illusion of a correct and concrete conception of revolutionary space-time: in reality they are the idealist pretence of dividing the time-unit into arbitrary parts, into phases dominated by consciousness: they are once again a mystified movement that has, not coincidentally, rediscovered ‘the eternal values’ above history and class struggle. We know what name these eternal values have assumed: they are democracy, liberty, justice, law, a whole paraphernalia with which we have long ago and once and for all come to terms.

The party itself cannot pretend to adjust the stages as it sees fit, another being its task, namely, to foresee in advance the unfolding of events and the unleashing of forces in order to direct them towards revolutionary ends.

‘A new doctrine cannot appear at just any historical moment. There are given, very characteristic – and also very rare – periods in history when, like a dazzling beam of light, one can appear; and if the crucial moment is not recognised and the terrible light not faced, it is no good resorting to little candles instead; by which the way is lit for academic pedants and fighters of little faith’.

Just as in these very rare epochs the clash of forces in the field determines adjustments or upheavals equal to true natural catastrophes, so they mark for both camps a series of lessons not to be forgotten, in victory and defeat.

This was the case for the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary ascent, this has been imposed on the rising proletariat. Those who have claimed to dictate law to the forces of history with academic pedantry or with feeble, defeatist intellectualism have contributed to clipping the wings of the revolutionary movement when it was being driven to the trenches by the force of social determinations, or have horrendously sent it to the slaughter when it was necessary to execute an orderly retreat and defence in anticipation of new favourable conditions.

History cannot be sliced into pieces, it cannot be measured in stages: the clock, even the atomic one, is after all still a rudimentary instrument incapable of imposing its prefabricated rhythms on the social entrails stirred by an infinite series of material determinations.

When it is then pointed out that times change and it is not permissible to transpose past situations with current conditions, it is necessary to forcefully reiterate that this is true, but not in the sense that the situations of the moment are unpredictable realities, before which it is futile to align texts and theses. In this case, the truly ‘scientific’ dialectic precisely makes us the figure of the incorruptible motion of the heavens, which, under the guise of unvaried circular motion, hides the unity of the concept and its immutability.

Marx summarises, in his well-known letter to Schweitzer of 24 January 1865, the lesson of The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), which fits perfectly for our discourse, saying that he had shown there how little Proudhon may have penetrated the mystery of the scientific dialectic and how often, on the other hand, he may have shared the illusions of ‘speculative’ philosophy that

‘instead of regarding economic categories as the theoretical expression of historical relations of production, corresponding to a particular stage of development in material production, he garbles them into pre-existing eternal ideas, and how in this roundabout way he arrives once more at the standpoint of bourgeois economy’.

We underline that ‘particular stage of development in material production’ in order to highlight how ideas, and thus conscious positions, decisions, orders, new theses, cannot be justified except by objective determinations, which must be detected, justified and proposed in line, thus, as we say, ‘aligned on the thread of time’. Before claiming to ‘decide’, therefore, it is necessary to first lay out the alleged ‘new facts’ on the anatomical table, and draw practical conclusions, so to speak, in our case, organisational conclusions, as a necessary result of this preventive operation.

Organisational rules would have changed if the ends, the revolutionary tasks, had changed:

‘The principle of the historical invariance of doctrines which reflect the tasks of protagonist classes, and also all the potent referring back to founding principles, stands opposed to the gossipy assumption that every generation and every season of intellectual fashion is more powerful than the previous one. It rejects the whole silly film show which portrays the relentless advance of civil progress, and other such bourgeois prejudices from which very few of those who lay claim to the adjective “Marxist” are really free. It is a principle which applies to every great historical period’.

But the misunderstanding for the sophisticated bourgeois and opportunist ideology of our days lies precisely in the exchange, inadmissible for Marxism, between the discovery that there are no ‘absolute truths’ and the worship of the ‘fact’, a typical distortion of ‘shitty’ positivism.

All the greater then the confusion becomes when one claims to be faced with alleged ‘new facts’ that would justify adjustments or adaptations of the entire doctrine, or which, and this is a variant of the same attitude, would recommend the reaffirmation (in words) of the doctrine, but its correction in practice (action, tactics, organisation).

Yet already the new science of Galileo, according to a critic of our times, Banfi, had established that

‘Science is a continuous interfering of experience and reason’, and that ‘all scientific knowledge is resolution of an empirical discontinuity, the datum (the fact) in a rational continuum of relations that are not “concretely” thinkable except on a basis of discontinuity’.

For us, the rational continuum of relations can only be historical and resulting from the dialectical alignment along the thread of time of the class struggle, with its repercussions on all fields, not only on that of the pure economic forces, which do not exist separately, but also on that of the superstructures, including the much-adored science, or ideology, or law, or ‘politics’.

Today, we must bitterly note, that even those whom you would have least suspected, discover the shortcut of ‘politics’, that is, of being in some way ‘present’ according to the moralist maxim ‘and it can’t be said that I wasn’t there’, the quintessence of anarchic, petty-bourgeois individualism.

So too C. Bernard, an unconscious Marxist, as Lenin would say, on the subject of the much trumpeted ‘functionality of the fact’, after having rightly pointed out that ‘experience is the privilege of reason’ (see his introduction to the study of experimental medicine), observes:

‘Yes, the experimenter undoubtedly forces nature to explain itself by attacking it and asking it questions in all directions: but he must never answer for it, nor listen incompletely to its answers, taking from experience the part of the results that favour or confirm the hypothesis (...) Our ideas are but intellectual instruments that serve us to penetrate into phenomena, and it is necessary to change them when they have fulfilled their role’.

In other words, the abandonment of instruments is necessary when they have fulfilled their role. In our language:

‘In the same way that Marxism excludes any kind of search for “absolute truth”, by seeing doctrine not as evidence of a timeless spirit or abstract reason, but as an “instrument” of work and as a “weapon” of combat, it postulates that, when exerting yourself to the utmost and in a pitched battle, you don’t send your tools or your weapons “off for repair”, but rather, in order to win in both peace and war, you need from the beginning the right equipment and weapons to brandish at the enemy’.

Much less, however, in our case, can the experimenter arrogate to himself the power to adapt the means independently of the rational continuum of relations that are the never refuted lessons of more than a century and a half of class struggle, whereby

‘Either this position remains valid, or the doctrine will have shown itself to be false, and the announced appearance of a new class with its own character, program, and revolutionary function in history will have all been in vain. Whoever therefore sets out to change parts of the Marxist corpus, its theses and essential articles which have been in our possession for around a century now, saps its strength far more than he who renounces it in full and declares it aborted’.

Since the doctrine is a corpus, i.e. an organic unity, it cannot be recognised as valid with regard to the ends and to be readjusted with regard to the means, since the means have been codified in relation to the ends, and have imposed themselves in the fire of the struggle, not in the mind of the ideologue, even if he is called Karl Marx. Lenin says in his A Talk with Defenders of Economism:

‘They are muddled over the question of the relations between the “material” (spontaneous) elements of the movement and the ideological (conscious, operating “according to plan”). They fail to understand that the “ideologist” is worthy of the name only when he precedes the spontaneous movement, points out the road, and is able ahead of all others to solve all the theoretical, political, tactical, and organisational questions which the “material elements” of the movement spontaneously encounter. In order truly to give “consideration to the material elements of the movement”, one must view them critically, one must be able to point out the dangers and defects of spontaneity and to elevate it to the level of consciousness, To say, however, that ideologists (i.e., politically conscious leaders) cannot divert the movement from the path determined by the interaction of environment and elements is to ignore the simple truth that the conscious element participates in this interaction and in the determination of the path. Catholic and monarchist labour unions in Europe are also an inevitable result of the interaction of environment and elements, but it was the consciousness of priests and Zubatovs [founder in 1901-1903 of the workers’ unions under the auspices of the police] and not that of socialists that participated in this interaction’.

And so what sense does it make to claim that, ‘the programme remaining fixed’, proletarians should go and defend a crumb of the right that the bourgeoisie grants fallen from its lavish banquet?

Faced with the increasingly clear confirmation of Marxist predictions, bourgeois ideological reaction infiltrates into the workers’ movement and among its leaders. Instead of contesting it en bloc, it mutilates it either in its revolutionary conclusions or in its strategic-tactical-organisational consequences. In other words, it seeks precisely to make Marxism a mere ideology or to reduce it to a more or less amorphous compilation of facts.

Lenin continues (in Marxism and Revisionism, March-April 1908):

‘But after Marxism had ousted all the more or less integral doctrines hostile to it, the tendencies expressed in those doctrines began to seek other channels. The forms and causes of the struggle changed, but the struggle continued. Pre-Marxist socialism has been defeated. It is continuing the struggle, no longer on its own independent ground, but on the general ground of Marxism, as revisionism (...) And it patently follows from the very nature of this [revisionist] policy that it may assume an infinite variety of forms, and that every more or less “new” question, every more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of events, even though it change the basic line of development only to an insignificant degree and only for the briefest period, will always inevitably give rise to one variety of revisionism or another. The inevitability of revisionism is determined by its class roots in modern society. Revisionism is an international phenomenon (...) [So is] “revisionism from the left”’.

Faced with certain phenomena it has always been necessary for us to hammer the nails back again, to restore. On the other hand, this is not simply a modern problem:

‘There is no lack of examples of restorers in the face of revisionist degenerations, as Francis was with respect to Christ when Christianity arisen to redeem the meek made itself comfortable in the courts of the medieval signori, so were the Gracchi with respect to Lucius Junius Brutus; and as so many times the standard-bearers of an up and coming class had to be with respect to the revolutionary renegades from the heroic phase of previous classes: struggles in France, 1831, 1848, 1849 and innumerable other phases throughout Europe’.

Our task therefore is to continue in the work of restoration; organisational readjustments are not justified in the light of the corpus of doctrine, principles, tactical strategy, in their organic nexus; and moreover, not even today in the name of some ‘new’ fact.

Will the resumption of the great struggles perhaps be the new fact? It has not been said. On the contrary, we have always maintained that the resumption of the revolutionary movement does not mechanically arise from the worsening of the crisis of the capitalist mode of production, even though it may contribute to the awakening of the class struggle. Other conditions must occur, which are also objective, namely the resumption of the political struggle, the refutation of opportunist lies regarding ‘socialist’ camps to defend or extend, etc. All these conditions do not arise because it would be pleasant. Therefore, if Marxist communism is scientific, as we said at the outset, in that it identifies ‘the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of classes’ against any other form of revolutionary ‘communism’, we wrote:

‘At present we are at the lowest point of the curve of revolutionary potential, and therefore centuries away from the next of those moments which will be conducive to the appearance of a new historical theory. In the present situation, with no imminent prospect of a great social upheaval, it is not just the political disintegration of the global proletarian class which is the logical result; just as logical is the existence of small groups which know how to maintain the guiding historical thread of the great revolutionary course, stretched like a great arc between two social revolutions, on condition that these groups show no desire to spread original ideas but remain strictly attached to the traditional formulations of Marxism’.

This certainly does not mean, as was once said to us by our opponents, to ‘sit back’ on the class struggle and, as is now reproached to us, to ‘contemplate’ the monolithic and homogeneous programme, since the transformation of the world is not a matter of subjective initiatives, but a clash of collective forces.

‘When in the famous Theses on Feuerbach Marx said that the philosophers had done enough interpreting of the world, and the time had come to change it, he did not mean to say that willing change conditions the change itself, but that change, determined by the clash of collective forces, comes first and only then critical consciousness of it by individual subjects. Indeed, the latter don’t act on the basis of decisions which each has developed separately, but on the basis of influences which precede science and precede consciousness’, and again: ‘And in passing from the weapon of criticism, to the criticism of weapons, one actually transfers everything from the thinking subject to the militant mass, in such a way that not only rifles and cannons serve as weapons but, above all, that real instrument which is the common, uniform, monolithic and steadfast doctrine of the party, to which we are all subordinated and bound, bringing gossipy and know-it-all discussion to an end’.

This is what constitutes the sound determinist-dialectical conception, as it was perfectly set forth by Engels when in the Dialectics of Nature he deals with the relationships between causality, necessity, and chance, and their dialectic, and with absolute determinism, passed from metaphysical French materialism in science, i.e. from fatalism equivalent to the eternal divine counsel of St. Augustine and Calvin, to the ‘Kismet’ of the Turks, i.e. from the theological conception of nature.

Let’s look at Bernard’s brilliant definition (always better the unconscious Marxists than the damned ‘conscious’ Marxists):

‘Fatalism supposes the necessary manifestation of a phenomenon independently of its conditions, whereas determinism is the necessary condition of a phenomenon, the manifestation of which is not forced’. And again: ‘Thanks to experience, we can grasp relationships between phenomena that, although partial and relative, will allow us to extend our power over nature more and more (...) Experimental reasoning aims at the same end in all sciences. The experimenter wants to arrive at determinism, that is, he seeks to connect natural phenomena to their condition of existence, or otherwise to their proximate causes, by means of reasoning and experience. He arrives by this route at the law that enables him to make himself master of the phenomenon. All natural science boils down to this: to know the law of phenomena. Every experimental problem boils down to this: to predict and direct phenomena’.

In essence, we are faced what Marx and Engels say: ‘We cannot master phenomena except by submitting ourselves to the laws that govern them’ (freedom as recognised necessity). The Marxist theory of the class struggle does not content itself with knowing of its existence, but recognises its objective conditions, its laws, and on the basis of this knowledge draws a plan of practical intervention (programme) (umwalzende praxis) that is, of revolutionary activity. Far from the discovery of new facts at every step. Here we speak of laws, and laws are norms, that is, observed and classified realities, therefore actual determinations, in our case social ones, hence not due to any subjective arbitrariness.

In The False Resource of Activism (1952) we consistently stated:

‘The Marxist thesis states: it isn’t possible, first of all, for consciousness of the historical road to appear, in advance, within a single human brain. This is for two reasons: firstly, consciousness follows, rather than precedes, being, that is, the material conditions which surround the subject of consciousness itself; secondly, all forms of social consciousness – with a given delay allowing them time to get generally established – emerge out of circumstances which are analogous and parallel to the economic relations in which masses of individuals find themselves, thereby forming a social class. Historically the latter are then led to “act together” long before they can “think together”. The theory of this relationship between class conditions, and class action and its future point of arrival, isn’t required of persons, in the sense it isn’t required of a particular author or leader; nor is it asked of “the class as whole”, in the sense of a fleeting lump sum of individuals in existence at a certain time or place; and much less can it be deduced from an extremely bourgeois “consultation” of the class (...) all that remains is the party as the existing organ which defines the class, struggles for the class, and when the time comes governs for the class and prepares for a time when there will be no governments, and no classes’.

From these premises follows the organic relationship of the historical life of the party, whose physical presence is organisation only in the sense of being the consequent historical result of a series of conditions that neither depend nor can depend on the divine illumination of anyone, but which precede the consciousness of both leaders and rank-and-file, united only by the common subordination to the programme in all its articulations, known in advance and binding for all.

Still from these premises follows the sound and materialist way of understanding the political organisation in a class party, according to the ever-relevant words of Lenin (The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion):

‘[A] political organisation cannot put its members through an examination to see if there is no contradiction between their views and the Party programme’.

He means that in the Marxist communist party all those stupid disciplinary measures, of a Catholic-anarchist-rationalist-individualist-bourgeois flavour, which purport to govern the party through examinations of conscience, of wisdom, of ideological purity, with self-criticism and repentance, are banned as odious and counterproductive. The terrain on which the efficiency and strength of the party is measured is in social warfare, in discipline in battle, and not in intentions; in a word, in executive discipline, under orders, voluntarily and spontaneously of a military type.

Ideological terrorism, on the other hand, paralyses revolutionary passion, hinders militia, free insofar as it is recognised as necessary, not by compulsion of Tom or Dick, or worse, because of the particular charm of Tom or Dick, but insofar as powerful social determinations push the forces onto the terrain of class struggle, thus making them both instruments and actors at the same time, in a dialectical unity in which it becomes an empty exercise to cut with a knife, at a desk, what pertains to the ‘free’ will of the subject, or to the blind necessity of nature.