While the subject matter deserves such development here that it takes up all the space, readers unfamiliar with our work should not, however, believe that the scope of our research and party activity is limited to these studies alone: they will find the chronicles and procedures of our meetings and the complete course of presentations on the topics in the columns of the monthly Il Partito Comunista and in past and forthcoming issues of this journal.

The opportunist currents fornicate with bourgeois philosophy of various stripes, from the irrationalism of faiths to the most ‘rigorous’ logical empiricism, and so everything that to true communists appears a merit in the theoretical and practical work of the party, from the Communist Manifesto to our small group in 1985, appears to them aberrant and anti-scientific, a source of logical and material monstrosities. There exists no dialogue between bourgeois science and science as revolutionary Marxism understands it: as yesterday in the time of Galileo, ‘the dialogue with Simplicius does not express the logos, but the clash of two stages of human history and knowledge; it will no longer be revoked by the future’.

And yet, it is objected, the work of Marx and Engels is punctuated by a continuous flirtation with Hegel, a continual referring back, a search for confirmation in the natural sciences of the time. Certainly, on the condition that we understand, that is, that we distinguish between what is transient in the standpoint of bourgeois science, by definition incapable of an organic and systematic knowledge of man and nature, and what has been valid, as intuition and as a driving force in the course of human history.

In his letter to Conrad Schmidt of 4 February 1892, Engels writes, among other things: ‘It’s certainly a very good thing that some of the student gentlemen of yours who have looked askance at the transactions of the party should now be resuming their studies. The more they learn, the more tolerant they will be towards people who hold really responsible positions and try to fill them conscientiously, and in time they will also probably realise that, if an important goal is to be attained and the immense army necessary to its attainment kept together, they must keep concentrate on the main issue and not allow themselves to be led astray by irrelevant squabbles. They may also discover that the “education”, by which they set so much store vis-à-vis the working man, still leaves a great deal to be desired and that the working man already possess instinctively, “immediately”, à la Hegel, what they could only din into themselves at the cost of much toil (...) If you become “bogged down” in Hegel, do not be discouraged; six months later you will discover firm stepping-stones in that self-same bog and be able to get across it without trouble. In Hegel the coherent sequence of stages in the development of a notion is part of the system, of what is transient, and I consider that this is where he is at his weakest – if also at his wittiest for every difficult point he has recourse to a witticism: positive and negative fall to the ground and hence lead on to the category “ground”’.

In the revolutionary communist vision, it is the forces of the classes in collision that determine consciousness and social and natural science, and not the other way around, which is why the workers, the proletariat, possess in an immediate, instinctive way, that for which the intellectuals must first toil. This does not mean that the party constitutes itself spontaneously from the immediate, instinctive force of the proletariat: hence the labour of the defectors of the bourgeois class who, outside the class, also flirting with bourgeois science and philosophy, have given substance to revolutionary theory. However, once incubated, it is born in a single block, in its essential core, and does not change throughout a historical arc, until the realisation of the political programme of the proletariat constituted as a class.

The need for social science therefore does not conflict with the assertion that, at its origin, the need for communism is a faith and a feeling, not a demonstration or a syllogism. When, in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx addresses the so-called critical-utopian communist and socialist thinkers (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, etc. he says that for them, ‘Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat to an organisation of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans’.) he objects that they do not proceed from a scientific analysis of modern society and its tendency towards development, but superimpose on it fantastic projects of social and political transformation, plans for the integral and total regeneration of the world, which have the defect precisely of being fantastic, of taking no account whatsoever of the movement of modern society.

But what does historical materialism mean by science? Does it perhaps claim the notion of science in its foundations and methods proper to bourgeois thought, according to the notion of a universal science, above the parties, elaborated over millennia of metaphysics and philosophical idealism, from Plato to our times? This is what bourgeois and opportunist intellectuals and idealists rely on to reaffirm a conception of science that Marxism rejects, when it maintains, on the contrary, that science is not a superstructure superior and indifferent to the clash of material forces, but is if anything an ideological expression of them, with all that this nature, false and true at the same time, entails.

Even before the priest of bourgeois critical rationalism, Max Weber, Engels went so far as to say that facts are one thing and values another, socio-economic reality is one thing and the political programme aimed at its transformation is another. To confuse these two dimensions would mean renouncing, from the outset, scientific analysis.

Marx, Engels wrote in a letter to Lafargue in 1884, would protest against the ‘political and social ideal’ that you attribute to him. When one is a man of science, one does not have ideals, one elaborates scientific results, and when one is also a party man, one fights to put them into practice. But when you have an ideal, you cannot be a man of science because you have preconceived ideas. Here is the contradiction that is still held against revolutionary communism, and which on the contrary we, like Engels, reject: ‘[communists] cannot be [men] of science [because they have] preconceived ideas’.

How to reconcile political passion with scientific analysis? How to reconcile the claim that communism is, first and foremost, a feeling, a belief in the emancipation of the exploited, with the need to adhere to the value-free nature of science? Bourgeois science, from Weber to Kelsen, has not tired of pointing out this fundamental ‘confusion’ in Marxism. If Marx claims to derive the ‘end’ of communism from the scientific analysis of historical development as an objective causal course, this discovery would be possible only because the value that is claimed to have been discovered was previously projected into reality, the aim of scientific socialism is not only to conceive and describe social reality as it actually is without evaluating it, but rather to judge it according to a value presupposed by this science, deceptively projected into social reality in order to conform it to the presupposed value. Marxism, in short, would have ignored the fundamental distinction between ethical-political and scientific-natural causal science, incongruously confusing facts and values, causes and ends.

This is undoubtedly a matter of no small importance, if Lenin claimed that Marx had for the first time brought sociology onto a scientific plane, establishing the concept of an economic-social formation as a complex of certain relations of production and establishing that the evolution of such formations is a natural historical process, and polemicising the insistence of many Marxists on the Hegelian dialectic, on examples proving that the Hegelian triads are correct, etc., that ‘[they are] nothing but a relic of the Hegelianism out of which scientific socialism has grown, a relic of its manner of expression’ and nothing more.

Those who, like positivism throughout its evolution, have attempted to debunk the anti-scientific mystique of historical materialism, once they have entered into the ‘rigorous’ and illusion-free merits of science and its foundations, having abandoned the swampy terrain of dialectics and the Hegelian system, have lost sight of even the firmest stones on which to set their feet on and move forward, recognising the intrinsic impossibility of constructing a solid foundation for science, ending up in the Babel of languages or in the recognition that, ultimately, the sensations of others will be for us an eternally closed world, and that experimental observation is essentially private, like the ownership and appropriation of social goods.

We are far from the Kantian appeal against the dreams of visionaries for humans to hold hands on the ground of faith in the verifiability of observations and the possibility of universal science based on phenomena as objects of experience! Here is the historical arc of bourgeois evolution, from its triumphs, even philosophical ones, albeit steeped in philistine narrowness, to its current hopeless nefariousness, laden with irrationalist and destructive strains. Thus, at the very moment when the currents of critical realism claim to attack historical materialism as anti-scientific, they admit that the claim of inductivist theories (those that do not want to confuse values with facts) to base conjectures and hypotheses on observations and facts is unsustainable.

They admit that one does not move from facts to the construction of theories, but from theories to their verification through facts, and it is also admitted that the fact that materialism and every force of realism is neither provable nor verifiable, does not at all imply that it is ‘unreasonable’, and that valid, though inconclusive, arguments can be advanced in its favour. Indeed: Marxism as a theory does not claim to be rationally believed by its adversaries, but holds that only, as the Manifesto says, those who have their chains to lose and a world to conquer can adhere to it instinctively, immediately, à la Hegel, and immediately also with a kind of reason, by those who have the time and passion to recognise its historical reasonableness.

Marxism does not cultivate the idea of a universal scientificity in the abstract, above class reasons, because it proclaims itself to be, first and foremost, the reason of a class, the exploited class, and consequently also that of the human species, but afterward, only afterward! Moreover, even the framework of verification or falsification protocols for a scientific theory or hypothesis devised by bourgeois science not only does not disprove the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, but indirectly recognises its ‘reasonableness’ precisely because it does not claim to be the absolute reason of all classes.

The scientific nature of the communist conception, before being based on the data of experience, is a faith that starts from feeling.

Today, even the bourgeois currents that have claimed experience as the basis of their veracity declare bankruptcy, since in reality the principle of induction has never been adequately proven neither through deductive argumentation nor through experience. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was formulated in this form: if phenomena of type A have been observed to occur in a wide range of circumstances, and if all observed phenomena A had characteristic X, then it can be concluded that all phenomena A (observed or unobserved) have characteristic X. The argument based on experience is presented as follows: the induction principle worked in case a, it worked in case b, etc. So the principle of induction works in all cases. But the logical procedure according to which, starting from a finite number of singular observations, one can infer a general (or universal) proposition with a certain conclusion is erroneous, both from a logical examination and from experience. From a logical point of view, it is hard to see why, if phenomena A have n times exhibited characteristic X, this makes it necessary that the nth plus one A also exhibits X. Experience has often shown that after A with X, an A without X appeared.

The materialist conception of nature and history does not adhere to the principle of induction or to bourgeois-style empiricism, just as it does not adhere to the deductive, tautological, and abstract conceptions proper to rationalism and metaphysics. All this for the reason that the abstract processes of the mind (even when they do not underestimate formal logic and its procedures), as well as the empiricist claim to derive the rules of knowledge from immediate experience, are two poles that in bourgeois thought cannot be integrated. One and the other fall into petitio principii that the logical method is incapable of resolving.

The ‘scientificity’ of communism, even before a formal description of its codes, starts from the negative critique of the science of the enemy, changing the presuppositions of the problems it addresses, its way of solving practical problems in relation to bourgeois science. The claim of adherence to reality proclaimed by bourgeois empiricism in its variants does not explain or prove its coherence, it is a faith in itself.

The necessity of the overturning of praxis in the communist conception starts from the presupposition that it is not a question of opposing bourgeois science and ideology with its negation, but a social action capable of destroying the material basis from which its ideal representation arises. The weapons of criticism can simply be borrowed and taken from the opposing class, but they are forged in a crucible that unifies feeling and the capacity to understand the ends of the revolutionary class in its leading organ.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the probabilistic conception of induction, and thus of scientific knowledge, became widespread. Then, the induction principle was given the following formulation: if phenomena of type A have been observed to occur in a wide range of circumstances, and if all observed phenomena A have characteristic X, then it can be concluded that probably all phenomena A (observed and unobserved) have characteristic X.

In this probabilistic formulation, the principle of induction is apparently more adherent to reality, but even in this formulation, a rationally valid justification could not be given. Moreover, in seeking the probability of a universal law, a conclusion was reached that seemed paradoxical and contrary to induction: a universal law had a probability of being true lower than any defined positive value. This was equivalent to saying that any universal law was, with extreme probability, wrong.

This contradiction, a source of scandal for formal logic, becomes self-evident in the communist conception. Having demolished the absolute ‘absolutes’, it is normal that the universal law (the result of formalisation according to the inductive criterion described) may have a probability of being true lower than any defined positive value. The failure of bourgeois science, the science of thought and experience, is nothing but the reflection of the historical class failure, of the social and human project of the bourgeoisie. This is why the dogma of the probabilistic and approximate nature of experimental scientific knowledge, which for us is natural and obvious, without being at odds with our faith in the integral science of nature and society that we prefigure, of communist society, determines a feeling of unease and frustration in the bourgeois vision, to the point of philosophical or religious extrapolations that justify resignation, decadence, indeterminism, and casualism as a general conception of life and existence in general.

The myth, first religious then metaphysical-secular, of the non-relative absolute, has led to the total misunderstanding of general relativity, considered by the advanced vanguards of bourgeois class reason as the product of the Jewish mind and inherently perverse communism, from Marx to Einstein. The old absolutes cannot but be limited and, rather than erroneous, inadequate responses to the conception of reality.

On the other hand, the very claim to arrive at the logical consideration of this error (every universal law is, with extreme probability, wrong) is an example of a logical-formal speciousness. To instructively illustrate how this conclusion is reached, the argument runs as follows: Suppose we have observed 100 A’s and that all these A’s have characteristic X. Obviously, the hypothesis that 50% of the A’s do not have X does not fit well with the observation made (although this hypothesis cannot be excluded as impossible). Instead, the hypothesis that 0% of the A’s do not have X agrees well with the observations; but also the hypothesis that 0.3% of the A’s do not have X agrees well with the observations; and also all hypotheses that attribute to the A’s without X an intermediate percentage between 0% and 0.3% also agree well with the observations. Since these hypotheses are infinite, the probability of each is an infinitesimal. The claim to propose such considerations as a neutral scientific procedure is typically ideological.

Faith in communist society is not based on the consideration of a series of hypotheses on the reliability and testability, in percentage terms, of such hypotheses, but on an organic and integral necessity of the class that does not possess the means of production of life. The concept of logical cogency is a superstructure of the organic constraints and necessities of the social classes. The techniques of probability calculation are not an integral science, but a formal expression of the theory of risk from the bourgeois perspective, which is not of the same type as the revolutionary audacity of the proletariat, which does not take into account the same factors, does not start from the same presuppositions, does not contemplate the same elements at play, does not attribute to them the same weight, the same measure, the same value.

It is no coincidence that the probability calculation, as a science and as part of mathematical methods, developed with the advent of the capitalist mode of production, thanks to Pascal and Bernoulli. The reasons for the necessity of communism do not lie in the revisionist, gradualist, and renunciatory mechanism, nor are they founded in the messianic expectation of the objective maturation of events, which alone would produce the new social conditions, but on a historical and social praxis that relies on the necessary class struggle that transcends into a political struggle for power.

All the issues regarding the resilience of theories, in all fields, their mutual compatibility, their verification or falsification, must come to terms with this fundamental assumption. We do not pit science against science in the abstract, but iron against science in the concrete. The ideological clash in our version does not consist in the Enlightenment-style battle of ideas, but in the recognition that the ideological clash is only epiphenomenal in relation to the deeper struggle of classes, incompatible and antagonistic in their historical ends.

The empiricist premises of scientific theory were developed and consistently carried to their extreme consequences by the ‘logical neo-positivists’, according to whom only verifiable prepositions have meaning, and specifically only those prepositions verifiable directly and sensorially. If this principle of verifiability were accepted, one would have to admit that all scientific laws are also meaningless, because such laws are of the type: All A’s have characteristic X, and it is impossible to verify all infinite A’s. They come to regard experimental observation as essentially ‘private’ and therefore incommunicable. ‘The sensations of others will certainly be a closed world for us. Is the sensation I call “red” the same as what my neighbour calls “red”? We have no way of verifying this’.

How can one fail to see that in this radical and, in its own way, coherent scientific approach, reflects the entire crisis of bourgeois ideology, which, despite its promises of objective transformation of the world for universal human purposes, even in the field of science, has had to fall back on the original proclamation: ‘opinion rules the world’?

In its Enlightenment phase, when the myth of progress and happiness fascinated and enthralled, this statement was understood as an attitude of tolerance and inquiry aimed at a rational and objective truth capable of imposing itself on all men. The historical arc of bourgeois ideology can only recognise the insuperable privacy of opinion: observation as the basis of the experimental method that has torn traditional metaphysics to shreds, and reduced it to an individual illusion whose meaning cannot be imposed by its own evidence, because if the passage from observation to expression is arduous, even more arduous, insofar as it is subjective and unverifiable, is the meaning of the proposition.

Nothing new under the sun: communism is only confirmed by this declared failure of theoretical science, and affirms that only the Party, as the organ of the class, is the locus of the community of humans united, not only by the common intelligence of historical, social, and natural reality, but by the original feeling of faith in the unity of the species and in the integration of man into nature, according to the formula of the naturalisation of man and the humanisation of nature.

The tactical rules of struggle against the class enemies, the analysis of the complex reality of contradictions comes later, like organisation as a technical fact, as means to be adapted to the end.

We have not hesitated, we communists, to claim the mystical, to affirm that only voluntary and personal adherence to this vision of reality as reserveless militia is the condition for realising that community of humans who struggle solely outside their organisational form, wage political struggle only against the class enemy, refrain from oppressing their comrades in the struggle, so as not to lose a single one, using the method of accepting the common programme in the name of the common feeling of reality.

Everything else, the study of the conditions of struggle, the analysis of history and nature, takes place in the conviction that differences in evaluations, in the final instance, what the bourgeoisie call observational propositions, are not private and insuperable, but reconcilable and integrable, and in any case always reducible to a common evaluation.

The hatred of bourgeois science and philosophy towards the materialist conception of reality is the product of its historical decadence: ‘in the decadence of feudalism, art experienced the Baroque period; the science of capitalist decadence is a Baroque science, heavy but impotent’.

On the contrary, ‘the power of philosophical determinism lies in establishing that our will cannot go beyond given limits, and social science consists in a deeper and clearer knowledge of the nature of the mechanism of these limits’.

The irreconcilable contrast between the different interpretations of reality typical of the most consistent bourgeois scientific currents does not lie in the purely mental impossibility of giving shape to a new form of ‘scientific community’, to a new ‘holding of hands’ against the mists of metaphysics, but rather in the objective limit of the mercantile division of labour. Only by breaking its historical limits will it be possible to recompose science, to have a common vision of the world.

In the communist tradition, according to the daily chewing of the syllabary of sound materialism, either human science is able to predict, to grasp regularities, laws in the succession of human and natural events, or it is nothing, and life impossible. This was possible once the metaphysical boundary between the terrestrial and celestial worlds was erased, ‘the heavens were discovered to be mutable and Newton identified the same principle to explain the weight and motions of bodies on Earth and the turning of the stars in the sky’. It is not the abolition of a priori data that prevents science, but their artificial maintenance that prevents the development of social life and the understanding of the natural environment that allows for its conditions.

When we take note that ‘motion is the state condition of all bodies’ and extend this acquisition to the social field, rather than retreating, as makeshift sociology does, and falling into indeterminism or whiny existentialism, we proceed in the direction of the Marxist construction of science.

By the explicit admission of the enemies of revolutionary communism, the Manifesto already contains the fundamental concepts of historical materialism: the progressive role, for example, of the productive forces; the social relations that are determined between classes, based on the way in which production takes place and in which the product is appropriated; the fundamental importance of the economy, which is called upon to provide, so to speak, the skeleton or structure of society; finally, the idea that historical upheavals (those marking the transition from one type of society to another) arise from the conflict between developing productive forces and social relations that tend, instead, to constrain and stifle them. In short, the Manifesto recognises that Marx identifies regularities within the various social formations, without, however, erasing their differences.

But the contradiction between this scientific programme and the desire to found a science emancipating humanity would, for our critics, be jarring, because communism does not limit itself to analysing and considering the regularities that no one denies, but to overturning them. Here’s the point: for the bourgeois conception, the function of science must be purely cognitive and analytical, it must not claim to transform, on pain of intrusion of anthropomorphic and animistic motivations. In short, communism, in the language of our enemies, would like to erase ‘evil’ from the world, and this is metaphysics, and therefore impossible.

Historical materialism, having dropped the ancient apriorisms, does not believe that all natural and social regularities must be erased, being aware that new, higher, and more harmonious regularities will be produced by the new social regime of communism. Nor does it retreat from the millennia-old tension between being and non-being that has become the battle slogan of all those who play with dilemmas.

It is not true for historical materialism that the study of the particular and distinct functions of thought would be an offence to the absoluteness of Being, which would admit no specification and modification except for Non-Being: the logical and linguistic instrument through which thought is expressed is perfectible and relative; not with this do we throw into the rubbish bin the syntactic and logical ‘regularities’ that are useful for proceeding, even though we know that ‘it will be possible to better regulate, even in the mechanism of language and syntactic logic, the scope of the generalisation of all the forms of being common to mineral bodies, organisms, man, etc., when more complete data is available concerning the phenomena of the transition between the mineral, organic, and human etc., realms (...) Even if the mechanism of language is constantly changing and lacks any definitive character, this does not detract from the fact that there is no science outside of its use, and that there never can be. Now, if science is built on the mechanism of language, as well as on experimental data, and if one expects from science the perfection of that mechanism, then we are caught in a vicious circle, because science will never acquire a value independent of the mechanism itself: either the mechanism has its own internal perfection upon which science rests, and we are back to the aprioristic thesis, or the instrument of language-thought is imperfect by nature, and at least in part, scientific operations and their reforms of speech and thought will always be imperfect. But even this vicious circle is nothing but a legacy of the traditional way of thinking. We cannot stop at the empty expression of vicious circle: what seems so today may not seem so tomorrow. Indeed, this objection to the cognitive process can be raised against all practical processes of everyday life, which, however, are not judged as vicious circles’. (Philosophical Notes, 1928).

On the contrary, the baroqueism of bourgeois science, in addition to exhuming the ancient dilemmas and aporias, revels in a kind of aestheticism: the new prophets in the various fields of ‘knowledge’ are the repeaters of captivating and sibylline formulas, from physics to economics.

Let us begin with the latter as an example. There is not a day that goes by without celebrating the authority and genius of the reinterpreter of classical economics, Sraffa, because in his ‘Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities’, against Marx’s revolutionary materialist dialectic, and to the glory of the prince of the classics, Ricardo, it is stated that ‘the net national product is a surplus (obtained in addition to and above what is required by the substitution of the means of production), while production is presented as a circular process, in which the commodities themselves appear both as means of production and as final products’. In other words: glory to the vicious circle, the society of commodity production is insuperable: it is circular. Long live the eternal return. Communism as the abolition of commodity production is a utopia.

In the field of physics, the indeterminist currents, extrapolating from experimental data, with its uncertainties, the general theory, in the name of the fact that it is impossible to determine both a particle’s momentum and its position, conclude that the interaction between the observer and the observed object excludes any possible and certifiable regularity of objective nature.

The father of realism, Popper, for his part, after the hangovers of nineteenth-century positivism, refutes inductivism, i.e. the thesis according to which conjectures and hypotheses within scientific knowledge would be based on observations and facts. One does not move from facts to the construction of theories, but from theories to their verification by facts. A fundamental characteristic of the scientific enterprise is to construct theories that are falsifiable, i.e. capable of being disproved.

In the mishmash of regurgitations, between Enlightenment, neo-positivism, and irrationalism, the science of the ruling class stands poorly: its only real support is the traitorous collaboration of opportunism, the acquiescence of the dominated class that suffers its domination in exchange for the lentil plate of a relative well-being, ever more precarious and uncertain.

Historical and dialectical materialism, precisely because it accepts with a healthy sense of reality the impossibility of a scholastic philosophy, has no illusions about handing over the problems of knowledge to professors: human science is too serious a matter to be entrusted to philosophers: therefore, by not stopping at the vicious circles of armchair reasoning, we are well aware that the encounter between the laws of thought and experimental data is a historical product that is never exhausted, but rather, in some places, in need of a radical restructuring. Revolutionary epochs correspond to these needs, capable of sweeping away all the academic and cerebral junk with the unscrupulous lucidity typical of new young social forces capable of powerfully pushing the machine of history forward.

In the production of material and spiritual life, ‘it is always the tool that is imperfect, and despite this it produces results that allow it to diminish its own imperfection (...) For the language-instrument, the same happens: we must be content to set out using it, even if we know it is imperfect but do not know precisely in what way and by how much. This will not prevent us from obtaining good, if not certain, results that will lead to improving the instrument, and so on with endless repetitions of the cycle. The analogy of the examples we have invoked is obviously contested by the traditionalists. In an effort to explain the cognitive process without the use of a priori data, we have given examples taken from active processes, between material things, but in which man and his judgment participate as a diligent element. One could attribute the breaking of the vicious circles in which practical life and man’s struggle against the environment is woven, to the power of choice and discrimination of human reasoning. Although it is more difficult, it can nevertheless be shown that the fact of successive corrections is actually determined directly by material conditions and occurs in processes in which man has only a minimal role, or none at all, nor do living organisms (...) In any case, it is evident that those refinements are not made in an arbitrary sense. Just as the great scientific breakthroughs, so the technical devices have been achieved through multiple independent paths. It is trivial that the millstone has taken the circular form everywhere, but far more impressive examples are very frequent in the history of science and technology and are resolved in the systematic dispute over the priority of discoveries’.

It is, in any case, certain that the epochs of decadence, characterised by the decline of entire modes of production of material and spiritual life, are marked by the Byzantine disputes of the revivers of minds now only capable of dissecting lifeless bodies and cataloguing, according to sophisticated formulas, entities without necessity.

To get closer to our problem however, what distinguishes living matter from non-living matter is the possession of an internal programme. This programme (which in the organic field resides in the DNA sequences of chromosomes) regulates the functions of organisms and gives rise, through the modifications it undergoes throughout history, to evolution. The possession of an internal programme unites the most diverse organisms and can become the guiding thread for different aspects, from the study of molecules, to that of ecosystems, or the ensembles made up of living beings and the environment.

In the historical field, precisely because our conception rejects the typically neo-idealist claim to separate the field of nature from that of history, without denying the different and differently complex nature of the object, all the more has it sought within historical organisms those regularities that allow knowledge and prediction, the possibility of reading in history, of anticipating in tactical and strategic rules the evolution of results that are relative and valid in given circumstances, to the proposition of ends to be achieved, not in contrast with results, and that are not therefore mere repetitions of premises, according to a simplistic and impossible return to origins.

The communist anchoring to its own revolutionary theory is never a concession to the psychological and individualist need for certainty on which to rely on in order to live in personal security or in the gratification of conscience: ‘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’ (Meeting No. 6 – Milan, 6 and 7 September 1952. Part I, 13).

The question, then, of whether our conception of reality is an objective truth, proven or provable, or rather accepted through faith, cannot be evaded with the classic either-or in the form of the sloppy theism-or-atheism dilemma typical of past revealed and secular religions, but in the dialectical and organic sense of the party version of truth itself.

Faced with the betrayals of opportunism, perpetrated on both the practical and doctrinal terrain, ‘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. On condition, that is, that the party doesn’t belong to particular men, doesn’t succumb to the cult of the leader; that it goes back to defending, with blind faith if necessary, its invariable theory and rigid organisation; and the method which doesn’t set out from sectarian preconceptions, but knows that in a society which has developed into its typical form (like Israel at year zero, and Europe at year 1900) one has to strictly apply the battle-cry: those who aren’t with us are against us’.

Not only does Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism correctly interpret the much-discussed 2^nd thesis on Feuerbach, in order to refute a different philosophical position of Marx from Engels, addressing, in theoretical precision, the question ‘whether objective truth belongs to human thought’, to say with Marx that it is not a theoretical question, but a practical one. The Communist Left, in its reconstituted party structure of 1952, argued: ‘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 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’ (Meeting No. 6 – Milan, 6 and 7 September 1952. Part I, 26).

In this way, any dispute over the priority of faith in relation to an alleged communist reason does not prevent us from being beyond any aping of the medieval polemics between Anselmians and Thomists, between dialecticians and anti-dialecticians.

The appeal to blind faith, if need be, is not at odds with the assertion that ‘[a]lthough small in number and having but few links with the proletarian masses, the party is nevertheless jealously attached to its theoretical tasks which are of prime importance, and because of this true appreciation of its revolutionary duties in the present period, it absolutely refuses to be considered either as a circle of thinkers in search of new truths, or as “renovators” who consider past truths insufficient (...) Consequently, party members are not granted personal freedom to elaborate and conjure up new schemes or explanations of the contemporary social world. They are not free as individuals to analyse, criticise and make forecasts, whatever their level of intellectual competence may be. The Party defends the integrity of a theory which is not the product of blind faith, but one whose content is the science of the proletarian class; developed from centuries of historical material, not by thinkers, but under the impulse of material events, and reflected in the historical consciousness of one revolutionary class and crystallised in its party’ (Meeting No. 3 – Florence, 8 and 9 December 1951. Part IV, 7).

Adherence to this indispensable organ for the struggle against the enemy of the proletariat and communism precedes any demonstration or certainty of the provability of the objective truth of the Marxist conception. Naturally, it does not exclude the analysis and study of social and natural reality, but never independently of this act of submission, at the same time free and necessary. Adherence to this type of truth does not require academic entrance examinations, but an unreserved, material and unintentional integration into the party organ, which in the tradition of the Left, against all pharisaical and Stalinist hypocrisy, we have defined as practical discipline, applications of the tactical norms known to all, which no one can innovate at will, the fruit of an experience tested by the history of the class struggle, paid for with blood and sacrifice, lessons not to be forgotten.

The appeal to practice, already contained in Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach and reaffirmed by Lenin and the Left, does not refer to a generic social practice that any pragmatist might share, but to the practice of struggle and organisation expressed in the Manifesto’s appeal for the union of all workers of the world, which is anything but a scholastic disquisition on the philosophical superiority of reason over faith, or vice versa.

It is not by chance that Lenin, who is not one to shy away from philosophical disputes, when faced with the main problem of the political unity of the Bolsheviks, which had to be achieved by beating the Otzovist position, when Kautsky’s journal expressed concern that philosophical discussion may become a new cause for division among the Russian Social-Democrats, the Bolsheviks’ newspaper Proletary in February 1908 replies: ‘[T]his philosophical controversy is not a factional one and (...) should not be so; any attempt to represent these differences of opinion as factional is radically erroneous’. And in a letter to Gorky on 25 November 1908 Lenin reiterated: ‘To hinder the application of the tactics of revolutionary Social-Democracy in the workers’ party for the sake of disputes on the question of materialism or Machism, would be (...) unpardonable folly’.

Lenin’s cynicism, lack of position for objective truth, or superior revolutionary dialectics? We believe there is no shadow of doubt. Primacy of political struggle, of revolutionary practice against all purism that would waste time, sense of dialectics against all spirit of zeal and sect, in a word, dedication to the struggle and to the party as the superior good to be safeguarded, the basic condition of all revolutionary discussion, the rest is the stuff of priests, albeit red, but of priests; who as the poet says ‘are equal in every part’.

The fact is that difficult problems cannot be solved with the usual idealist ‘supplement of spirit’, but with discipline and tenacity. The carving of theory into the minds and behaviour of the new revolutionary generations is a matter of pure and simple repetition.

In the biological processes themselves (and we have observed a thousand times how examples from this field are always insufficient, our organic conception being not a simple matter of materialistic biology, but of history and higher dialectics), it is expected that in the mechanisms of biological inheritance (and we are the heirs of the Party of the Revolution, from Marx to Lenin) the DNA contained in the nucleus of cells can reproduce a complementary sequence of nucleotides, known as messenger RNA, or mRNA, which is equivalent to a sheet of instructions concerning the assembly of a linear series of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins). The two processes (DNA —> mRNA, mRNA —> protein) are called by different terms: the first is known as transcription, because it operates in an intralinguistic sense (within the language of nucleotides), and not copying due to some lexical differences. The second is known as translation, because it goes from one language (that of nucleotides) to another (that of amino acids and proteins). Without proceeding further in this example, we could say that the conceptual work is the work of the Party, a kind of ribosome, which is not only capable of presiding over the translation in language between theory and practice, but is the very subject that guarantees the active tradition of the entire revolutionary experience. It is not a kind of third person, an Artificer or Demiurge, being conditioned by and a condition of the struggle, it is not a grey eminence of the social dialectic: in short, Marxism has never said ‘in the beginning there was the Party’, part egg, part chicken; but it maintains that the necessary birth of it, not directly from the class struggle, but parallel and external to it, once enunciated, becomes the beginning of a new epoch, in a certain sense, the beginning of communism, albeit on the infinitesimal scale of its internal and organic structure.

Given this reality, while we are not afraid to venture into the borderlands between the various specialised and mercantile ‘sciences’ of the class enemy, without getting lost in their sophistry and secret diplomacy, we rule out that within our internal life and organisational structure, a useless dispute between fideists and rationalists, between priests and laity, should or could ever arise. There are no a priori or formalistic criteria of demonstration capable of resolving the problem of the validity of our doctrine.

Nor does the revolutionary militia consist in a scholastic presumption of being able to say in due course ‘we were right’. If this were the case, the proletarian and communist struggle would lapse into a squalid idealist moralism: in our sacrosanct affirmation of the existence of the objective truth of historical materialism, one philosophy (the one we profess) is not opposed to another (the idealist one or any sub-species) but rather a consistent practice, a tactic that is a battle order capable of routing the class enemy and burying capitalist anarchy.

If the new bourgeois critical rationality finds itself grappling with the return of religious irrationalism or with the banalities of stale positivism, we can only feel vindicated and rejoice in the paucity of the enemy’s speculation.

On the other hand, the unresolved tension between the bourgeoisie’s realist and, let’s say, materialist demands and its idealist ones is a fact that Marxism has never pretended not to see, capable of giving these disagreements the weight they have deserved and deserve: with the bourgeois faith in Progress and the Liberation of Humanity fallen, it is normal for fideist currents in the deteriorated, religious, and aestheticising sense to come to the fore. This is also true in the sphere of science: on the one hand, the demands of productivity and profit require the bourgeoisie to have an objective and not purely ideological understanding of reality, on the other hand, the preponderant demands of ideological domination compel it to draw heavily on the paraphernalia of old traditional superstitions.

In the crucial field of social forecasting, the dominant sociological thought constantly oscillates between the moralistic preaching, of which the most blatant opportunists are capable, and the cult of efficiency based on the criterion of the cold objectivity of science and its constructive capacity, which requires positive knowledge without adjectives. It is true: the bourgeoisie has failed in its prediction of origins: it has not swept away secret diplomacy, it has not realised the self-determination of peoples, it is not capable of a discourse of solidarity among men.

Historical materialism, in the version of opportunism, would have fallen into the same trap, would have failed in its forecasts, because the realm of predictions and predictability is no stranger to the basic premises, to the underlying assumptions from which any programmatic approach is initiated. The communist prediction starts from the premise of the necessary clash between classes until the end of the class system, the bourgeois and opportunist prediction claims ‘solidarity discourse’ among men despite the clash of classes and the subjugation of the subordinate classes.

The essential difference between the classical conception (which we accept) and the frequentist conception (which is purely empiricist) of probability lies in the fact that, according to the former, the probability of an event derives from the physical and ontological structure of the causal system, and is knowable based on the knowledge of that structure; the frequentist conception, on the other hand, denies such derivation and such knowability and identifies probability with frequency! For the frequentists, we can only know the frequency of a type of causal event; it is impossible (indeed meaningless) to trace the causes. For the frequentist interpretation, the degree of probability is a matter of experience, not reason.

For us, the relationship between classes and their historical destiny is not a question of observing their conditions in order to draw auguries from them, but a clash between material forces whose outcome does not lie in a comparison of the ideal and spiritual superiority of their own reasons, of their own consciousness, but in the necessity of the reasons and causes that impose themselves and in the consciousness that derives from them. The interest of historical materialism in living, vital experience does not mean lapsing into the vulgar pluralism of viewpoints. Communism postulates the recomposition of the different aspects of experience: it is the human species that demands it, it is nature itself that demands integration with the man-species.

With this work we wish to highlight, in a necessarily concise and far from conclusive manner, the aspects and positions that principally characterise revolutionary Marxism, and therefore our Party, with regard to the question of knowledge, that is, to try to answer the question: how do revolutionary communists position themselves in relation to the knowledge hitherto acquired by mankind through all social epochs and different modes of production?

How is it that the Party knows reality and intends to face it in its battle for the world proletarian revolution?

A first natural orientation towards the solution of these questions, which encapsulates the essence of the whole question, is that the answer must be deduced from the very nature of the Party, as the fighting organ of the proletarian class, and of revolutionary Marxism, of transformation and not mere interpretation of the world, according to Marx’s famous expression. First and foremost, therefore, it is revolutionary action aimed at forging, even in this field, a weapon of sharp criticism, demolishing the class adversary and the thousand ideological and philosophical shades with which the bourgeoisie mystifies its economic and political power. A response that cannot propose a philosophical conception competing for ‘truth’ on par with the others in circulation, but a weapon of struggle that, expressing the aspiration of the total emancipation of humanity from the shackles of the social exploitation of labour, through the revolutionary action of political emancipation of the working class, rises to a class social science, prefiguring the future social science of the species.

As we have often recalled, Marxism is not only a programmatic weapon of action for the struggle of the proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie and for the destruction of capitalism, but precisely as such it is also a historical science embracing the entire conception of the human species and its relations with the world, with nature; indeed, it is the first science to make no category distinction between the human species and the ‘external’ world, to affirm that the history of nature and the history of humanity are both described in historically determined laws.

‘Marxism’, we wrote in Il Programma Comunista, No. 13, 1968, ‘has “inferred” the dialectical method from classical German philosophy (...) This does not mean that Marxism is a philosophy, just as it does not mean that we discuss certain problems under the designation of the “philosophical part” of Marxism (...) More accurate, instead, is the denomination of “doctrine” and “weapon”, in that Marxism stands, at the same time, as a conception which indeed derives from the entire historical development of the human species, and especially from the emergence of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, but is at the same time the only weapon capable of explaining the past, present and future development of history, and therefore of acting within it. Doctrine, therefore, and weapon, because it is the set of truths that together give a clear vision of history and a clear directive for action to those who militate for it’.

Theoretical weapon of revolutionary action, and, at the same time, scientific conception of social relations embracing the entire historical journey from the happy epoch of primitive communism of the ‘anti-prehistory’ to the future history worthy of the name, that of communism fully realised by the species finally conscious of itself.

In this second aspect, it is therefore also a ‘philosophy’, but completely different from all those that preceded it.

The question is well clarified in the following passage from ‘Communism and Human Knowledge’, our 1952 text: ‘Marxism poses the question of philosophy in an original way and, in this sense, refuses to be lumped in with the various philosophies that can be listed historically, or worse still, systematically. We will therefore not say that there is a Marxist philosophy, but neither will we say that Marxism is not a philosophy or that Marxism does not have a philosophy: this would give rise to a misunderstanding and a very serious danger: that of believing that Marxism sets itself on “foreign” ground to that which philosophers have been mortgaging for millennia. And one could, with serious deviation, deduce that the Marxist militant remains free, having accepted certain directives of political and social action, and “confessed” certain economic and historical theories, to declare himself for one of the many philosophies: realism or idealism, materialism or spiritualism, humanism or dualism, or whatever you like. Now, Marxism excludes all historically known philosophies in a way that is different from the way each philosophy condemns the others, and thus, at least destructively, has a characteristic position in the matter of philosophy. A not-forgotten example of such a position many of us remember from Gramsci’s statement at the Lyon Congress in 1926: although it was a party tactic, in the vast debate he was led to say: I give credit to the Left for having finally acquired and shared its thesis that adhering to Marxist communism does not only entail adhering to an economic and historical doctrine and a political action, but entails a well-defined vision, distinct from all others, of the entire system of the universe, including the material one’.

These considerations suffice to show that the question of knowledge cannot be at all secondary to the others dealt with by the Party. In the forty years since the war, our organisation has devoted quite a few reports to it at the general meetings in the immediate post-war years and more recently, particularly in the period between 1952 and 1960, from which we will draw extensively for this exposition, as is now our established method.

The preceding works are to be considered a guiding framework that very effectively summarises the entire general structure of the question and condenses the positions of revolutionary Marxism on the subject into fixed points. We limit ourselves here to ordering and restating the salient concepts, faithfully following concepts and passages, forbidding any modifications or additions, and with the sole intention of better defining our positions.

In the meantime, it is necessary to immediately clear the field of preconceived attitudes towards the so-called ‘difficult subjects’, which would only be comprehensible to those who ‘have studied’, who possess the ‘piece of paper’ that would enable them to understand the great theoretical questions, while the poor uneducated would only be left with the handling of the most practical and accessible tools. We would thus fall back into the mystifying framework of the class adversary, which tends to present science and knowledge as the privilege of those who drink from the wells of its dominant class culture, in the Academies, in the Universities, in School. On the contrary: those who are free from bourgeois pseudo-scientific indoctrination and ‘high-level’ philosophical speculation are better predisposed to deal with these topics, because their minds are free of the mendacious trickery propagated in the classrooms of capitalism and today poured out by the ton over onto a ‘public opinion’ increasingly malleable and stupefied by the ‘progress’ of a society in full recoil on all fronts, including that of knowledge, and above all increasingly distant from the possibility of directing it towards the aims of the species. As we shall see, our positions on these issues are, fundamentally, very simple and understandable by any individual who cares not about enriching their own personal ‘cultural baggage’, an idiotic and meaningless expression, but the impersonal and militant dedication to the cause of the proletarian revolution.

After all, ‘today’s bourgeois philosophy is a mountain of doctrinaire froth that serves only to mask very simple answers to very simple questions’ (Il Programma Comunista, No. 1, 1967).

The Party has only to demolish this mountain with equal simplicity. We wrote in this newspaper, No. 4, 1960, as a preface to an exposition on the space question:
‘Interest in these topics does not stem from abilities based on the course of studies that each person has done, and even less from notions that they have grasped through their professional activity and economic work, but stems precisely from class motives and the revolutionary politics of the Party, so that similar topics, as well as many analogous ones, such as Einstein’s relativity and nuclear physics, have reason to access all militants of the movement, and this must assure them the means to do so, whatever the extent of their scientific training.
‘We have the certainty that the least insidious way to reach the vital social and historical conclusions proper to the Party is precisely not to build on the data of the scholastic and academic bureaucracy dominant in mercantile society, and that while it is true that in it culture is also a privilege of those who usurp the economic one, nevertheless the road to truth – precisely for such class reasons – opens up more easily to the ignorant than to the stamped with coursework.
‘No one, therefore, has reason to desist from tackling these topics, and must find the strength to do so with radical critical efficiency without drinking in all the insidious toxic positions of modern dissemination.
‘Some remember that in the islands of fascist confinement, after 1926, schools were formed in which the argument that one was not doing politics but culture valid for all did serve, yes, but only as a function of a bourgeois police mentality.
‘Among those little courses there were some on physics and astronomy, with mention also of the difficult discussions on the theory of relativity. That all this was a useless pastime for political purposes may be an idea that remained in the heads of ardent anti-fascist Stalinists, unknowingly educated in a passive fascist style. Suffice it to say that in those courses, the idea of the technical possibility of setting an artificial satellite in motion around the Earth was enunciated. It must be said that the first attempt was still thirty years away, accessible only to a state economy, but also that at that time no military, let alone political, objectives were being set, that is, to “épater le proletaire”, but rather that of verifying one of the experimental proofs of Einstein’s theory, i.e. the shift in the period of a planet very close to the attractive body, as observed for Mercury, without traditional celestial mechanics being able to explain it’.

It is therefore the duty of the Party to stimulate anyone who approaches Marxism not to shy away from the radical critique of the mystifications of bourgeois science and theory, under the pretext that this is the prerogative of specialists in the field, but rather to wield the weapon of demolition of the class adversary, with greater vigour precisely against its learned lies, without conceding anything to its vaunted objective and progressive achievements of knowledge, even when one does not have at hand technical and specialist arguments to refute them.

It is our central thesis of the whole question of knowledge that we recognise no supra-class validity in science. We reject every attitude and form of reverence toward contemporary purported ‘scientific achievements’ and ‘technical progress’ waved ad nauseam as sources of social progress, because we identify in them not the greatest achievements of human knowledge, but the highest degree achieved by the subjugation of science to the aims of preserving capitalist society.

The subjugation of so-called scientific research to the insatiable greed for capitalist production and the realisation of profit is such that today it is impossible even to distinguish between what truly may be useful and what certainly is harmful to the human species: any scientific discovery, any technical update, any ‘revolutionary’ technological transformation comes from research laboratories behind which it is certainly not necessary to be a Marxist to see banks, state institutions, large industries ready to invest mountains of capital as soon as the possibility of some discovery being introduced into capitalist production looms, not to mention research for war purposes which practically now dominates all branches of science: from chemistry, to physics, to astronomy, to biology.

What is interesting to note here is that our thesis on the subjugation of science to capital and its consequent complete decadence today, is intrinsically contained in Marxism from its inception. In Book III of Capital, Marx develops this thesis by dialectically combining, at one at the same time, the Enlightenment exaltation of the progressive association of science with labour, proper to capitalism, and the subordination of this historical product to the demands of capitalist production, intrinsic premise of the degeneration of science and technology. In Chapter XV, Section 4, he formulates the first aspect with this definition of capitalism: ‘[One of the] cardinal facts of capitalist production [is the] (...) the organisation of labour itself into social labour: through co-operation, division of labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences’.

In Chapter V, Section 5, Marx, on the other hand, formulates a precise definition of the subordination of science to capitalism: ‘Incidentally, a distinction should be made between universal labour and co-operative labour. Both kinds play their role in the process of production, both flow one into the other, but both are also differentiated. Universal labour is all scientific labour, all discovery and all invention. This labour depends partly on the co-operation of the living, and partly on the utilisation of the labours of those who have gone before. Co-operative labour, on the other hand, is the direct co-operation of individuals (...) It is, therefore, generally the most worthless and miserable sort of money-capitalists who draw the greatest profit out of all new developments of the universal labour of the human spirit and their social application through combined labour’.

Universal labour, and thus any scientific result, is the fruit of socially combined labour, of the co-operation of the living with the labour of the dead, and can therefore only be immediately subordinated to capitalist production, not only that, but determined by it: capital transforms universal labour into mercantile science and the products of universal labour into products of capital, into commodity capital. This process is not only applicable to the manufactured products of industry, containing directly extorted labour-power, but also to those more abstractly identifiable in human knowledge, in the more strictly spiritual (Marx also uses this term) human production, which becomes alienable, acquires a value, even if not directly determinable by the amount of labour contained, and even if not easily reproducible. Again in Book III of Capital, in Chapter XXXVII, Marx develops precisely this passage: ‘Finally, it should be borne in mind in considering the various forms of manifestation of ground-rent, that is, the lease money paid under the heading of ground-rent to the landlord for the use of the land for purposes of production or consumption, that the price of things which have in themselves no value, i.e., are not the product of labour, such as land, or which at least cannot be reproduced by labour, such as antiques and works of art by certain masters, etc., may be determined by many fortuitous combinations. In order to sell a thing, nothing more is required than its capacity to be monopolised and alienated’. Science and in general all cognitive works of human thought present precisely this characteristic: they are alienable as objects of class monopoly, even though in themselves they have no value, as they are not reproducible by human labour.

Commenting on these passages we concluded in ‘The Destruction of the Temple’ (Il Programma Comunista, No. 19, 1962): ‘Who are the monopolists today who put a price on science, who fraudulently alienate the universal labour of the human spirit? They are the scientists definitively subordinated to capital. The metamorphosis of the scientist into a technician is the metamorphosis of the scientist into a monopolist of science. Just as capital has found a limit in land, so it has found a limit in science, in the exploitation of universal labour. Capital overcame this limit, first by making science alienable, just as it had “made land an article of commerce”, then by transforming scientists into monopolists, into landowners, and bargaining with them for a rent. This process has led to the impoverishment of the land, and the decadence of science. Today’s “experts” and “technicians” are, like landowners, parasites of society – they monopolise the universal labour of the human spirit in order to cede it to capital in exchange for a rent, they alienate the labour of the dead in order to exploit the labour of the living’.

For this reason, we can place no trust in today’s scientists and have the utmost mistrust in all the scientific and technical discoveries churned out by laboratories and universities, now saturated with capitalist commodification, down to the very depths of the logical-scientific mechanisms from which they draw on. This crowd of ‘experts’ represent nothing but the quintessence of capitalist production: technical and scientific evolution degraded to the rank of an ideological falsehood of bourgeois conservation, the exact opposite of the much-vaunted progress, which we have the revolutionary task of exposing in all its manifestations, and especially those that cloak themselves in the supra-class objectivity of science.

We wrote in another article from that period, in ‘The Gaiety and Nefariousness of Bourgeois Mercantile Science’ (Il Programma Comunista, No. 17, 1962): ‘Science and culture do not stand above the classes, they are on the contrary in a dialectical relationship with their struggles and with the function, sometimes revolutionary, sometimes reformist, sometimes reactionary, that they fulfil in history (...) We, instead, resolutely deny any validity to the bourgeois theory of progress, even technical and scientific (...), we maintain that only by freeing itself from this subjection to the false theory of progress will the proletariat be able to rediscover its revolutionary path tomorrow (...) All their clownish technology useless to the real needs of the human species, all their superfluous, charlatan, and harmful production, all their venal and mercantile culture and science, are erected upon the ruthless exploitation, sweat, and blood of the proletariat of the entire world. The science of communist society will be a species science precisely because it will not be mercantile. The so-called science of today, of a bourgeois society now in decay, is not only false and corrupt, but inferior in cynicism and vulgarity to the witchcraft of primitive peoples and the alchemy of the late Middle Ages. The proletariat has nothing to learn from the so-called science of this society: it must only destroy it’.

The main objection to this position is that according to it, the contents of science, being objective, i.e. independent of social phenomena and of the subjects discovering this objectivity, would confirm to scientific knowledge in general a supra-class character, and therefore unrelated to questions of human conflicts of interest. Plainly, the reasoning seems unassailable: 2 + 2 equals 4 for bourgeois, proletarians, communists, reformists, or reactionaries, just as a weight falls to earth with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s², regardless of the class in power and the social system of production in force; therefore the proletariat, not only would not have to destroy science, but should pay it homage and bow respectfully to its ‘eternal and indisputable truths’. One of the war horses of opportunism, ever since the days of Gramscian ordinovism and up to the present day, when ‘participation’, ‘cultural growth’, ‘technical-scientific qualification’ etc. etc., are being peddled to the proletarian masses from morning to night, was the position according to which the proletariat should ‘appropriate’ the dictates of science and technology without classist adjectives, before and independently of the conquest of political power.

This equation of the objectivity of science = its extraneousness to social conflicts, is one of the most insidious theoretical weapons for dazzling and bewildering the proletariat, against which the Party must fight, unmasking the mystifications of what are propagated as indisputable truths because they have the stamp of scientific objectivity.

The bourgeoisie has presented the lie of the unquestionable superiority of science in a thousand different sauces: it has often relied on the truly objective content of acquired knowledge of the physical and mechanical laws of nature to cloak its culture and ideology in objectivity. But these are two different things: the objectivity of a natural law deduced from experimentation and from the application of theoretical principles themselves deduced in turn from the natural world is one thing, the theories that are built upon it are quite another, and the social and class purposes underlying these results are yet another.

Science is at the same time objective and class-based. It is objective insofar as it translates the properties of the real world, of material objects, into theoretical abstraction, discovers and describes with mathematical formulations the laws of nature, applying a scientific method, which is also our dialectical and deterministic method, based on the systematic observation of phenomena, the identification of the causal links that connect them, making abstraction from disturbing phenomena that often tend to mask and distort reality, in order to arrive at general, theoretical laws that not only represent observed and past physical phenomena, but also make it possible to predict and measure future ones or explain others that are already indecipherable.

The objectivity of science ends in its object, nature, in the determinist method of research and in the laws discovered by it; but the objective, the aims of investigation, the most general abstract conclusions of scientific research are determined by the mode of production in which the scientific work is carried out. The orientation of cognitive enquiry in a class-divided society is a function of the conditions of existence and the needs of the social class that produces it. It follows that when the class that possesses the levers of cognitive enquiry socially expresses a revolutionary and progressive function, the results achieved by the individuals expressing these social functions approach, in great leaps, the objectivity of knowledge, that is, the function of science at that moment temporarily coincides with the course of ‘true science’, that of the human species, which will only unfold freely and with the greatest social potential in a society in which it is no longer an expression of class, in communism. These are, however, brief historical moments, because as soon as the class holding scientific investigation settles into power and tends to conserve it against the exploited class, and its class oppression thus becomes an obstacle to social revolution, science progressively decays into a purely conservationist, reactionary, anti-historical, false function, and its direction of enquiry conflicts with the real interests and needs of the human species.

Thus, not only do we not deny the objective character of the physical world and its laws, but we make our own the materialist-dialectical and determinist method of investigation that the scientists of the age of the revolutionary bourgeoisie had to wield in order to discover those real laws governing the intimate processes and mechanisms of nature, which the bourgeoisie itself needed in order to develop the capitalist exploitation of proletarian labour power. Indeed, the great revolutionary step of Marxism consisted in having transferred, to the horror and aversion of the bourgeois theorists, materialist determinism to social facts whereby, if in the physical field it had become possible to calculate and predict the course of natural phenomena and to discover organic and inorganic bodies, elements and substances even before the human eye and senses perceived their existence or without ever being able to perceive it, it was likewise possible, having discovered the social mechanisms regulating the relations of men between and among themselves and the production of the means necessary for the reproduction of their existence as a species, to derive and predict the necessity of historical developments and, on this basis, to draw up a programme of revolutionary action in which the deterministic necessity of the historical transition from capitalism to socialism and communism was reflected.

In order to discover the real nature of the mechanisms that regulate relations between men, one had to start not from the reflection of these mechanisms in the thought of the protagonists, as had been the case with all the philosophical systems expressed by previous societies, not therefore from how these relations appeared to the men operating within them, but from what they really were, from their real essence, overturning the ideological or mystical readings in the anticipations of the great thinkers of past eras, and in particular at war with the ideologues of the bourgeoisie.

This is the method Marx applies in Capital, where he unveils the intimate social essence of the commodity and of money, and from there goes on to ascend to the complete and complex definition of the entire economic, political, and social apparatus of the capitalist mode of production, to then descend again to define and clarify all the ensuing phenomena, above all revealing their character, not eternal and definitive, as the bourgeoisie and its theorists claimed and still claim today, but transitory towards a social transition by the revolutionary proletariat directed by its class political party, a transition that imposes itself deterministically and in the interest of the entire human species.

It is the method that we have defined from the particular to the general, as opposed to the metaphysical-idealist method that starts from the general, i.e. from a general philosophical conception that claims to embrace the entire essence of life and nature, based on a series of a priori principles deduced from pure rationalist thought (bourgeois philosophy and ideology) or from divine revelation (theology and mystical-religious doctrines of pre-capitalist eras) and thereby claims to explain every particular phenomenon.

What we categorically deny, therefore, is not the objectivity proper to the physical laws discovered by science, but the position of bourgeois ideology to infer from this objectivity the supposedly supra-class, neutral character of scientific theories, and hence the even more mendacious consequence that to the swarm of scientists, technicians, and ‘experts’ in natural phenomena, should be accorded the halo of a social class that places itself above the economic and political disputes of society, revered custodians of superior and supra-historical human thought, priests of the religion of constant and unstoppable Progress. We deny that science operating in capitalist society can set itself aims and directions that are in line with the real social well-being of the human species and above all that it can be devoted to the disinterested pursuit of pure knowledge. We deny that science today can be oriented along tracks other than those on which it is directed, and we therefore fight as demagogic and mendacious any claim in this sense by the numerous opportunist currents of thought today which, while maintaining the mercantile nature of social relations and thus the capitalist mode of production, preach that it is possible, through political goodwill alone, to impart to scientific research a direction aimed at defending the natural balance of human life. We reject any recognition of the cognitive achievements of modern science, completely subservient to capitalist profit, and we do not hesitate to reject wholesale all the structural scaffolding on which it rests, all its absurd fragmentations into ever more specialised branches, the ‘mania of today’s technicism, which creates closed and bigoted circles of sold-out hirelings, impotent to any vision of the real natural and social world’.

This is a position that does not stem from an abstractly sectarian attitude that leads Marxists to shut themselves up in the immaculate ‘ivory tower’ of today’s small revolutionary party, spitting venomous destructive sentences against every aspect of the contaminated outside world, but characterises the communist revolutionary programme of action that aims to lay the foundations of clarity in social relations, an indispensable prerequisite for any truly human cognitive science, and as such cannot but reject wholesale any claim to the truth of a class-based knowledge that has, as the pivot of all its research, in the final analysis, the preservation of a mode of production that has long since outlived its need for historical development.

As early as 1913, in L’Avanguardia of 13 April, the Italian Left summarily liquidated the question: ‘To true science, as the sum total of human achievements, research and activity, we can believe, but we do not consider its existence possible in the present society undermined by the principle of economic competition and by the hunt for individual profit. We thus strike at another common prejudice, that of the superiority of the scientific world. The decisions of the Academies are believed to be unquestionable today, as in the Middle Ages those of the sacristies were. Yet it would take a book and not an article to reveal even a little of the miserable and mercantile background of science! The most unconscionable dilettantism, the most audacious scoundrels, the vilest abuses of the dominant minorities, easily find the guarantee of the scientific label (...) Bourgeois science is also, like philosophy, a heap of nonsense. Scientific socialism cannot breathe in this atmosphere of lies’.

There is a passage by Trotsky, in ‘Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art’, which well expresses this relationship between the objectivity of science and its class subordination: ‘All science, in greater or lesser degree, unquestionably reflects the tendencies of the ruling class. The more closely science attaches itself to the practical tasks of conquering nature, the greater is its non-class and human contribution. The more deeply science is connected with the social mechanism of exploitation, or the more abstractly it generalises the entire experience of mankind, the more does it obey the class egotism of the bourgeoisie and the less significant is its contribution to the general sum of human knowledge’.

Between the objectivity of science and the social subjectivity of investigation, we do not always have the tools to distinguish what, or how many, of the physical laws we know today are real, and what are instead deduced from pseudo-scientific concepts and notions behind which the interests of mercantile capitalism are concealed; there are now too many formulas, even in everyday language, that have as their base of departure economic profit and the lowest cost as their end: mountains of even serious projects of scientific investigation in all fields have been abandoned not because they are unfeasible, but because they are capitalistically unproductive. The subjugation of the human heritage of knowledge to the short-sighted, corporate, anarchic, and ruthless productive frenzy of capitalism has reached such proportions that it is less and less possible to recognise the real objectivity of scientific knowledge beneath the subjective ideological superstructures and imposed economic aims.

The trends in scientific analysis over the last half-century, practically since Bohr and the Copenhagen School onwards, have finally disavowed determinism even from the methods of investigating the physical world. This aspect of the matter should be examined in depth in subsequent party studies on this subject, because it leads directly to the conclusion that now, the entire scientific orientation of bourgeois knowledge of matter is irreversibly imbued with pure idealism: in all the fundamental fields of science, in physics, in biology, in chemistry, up to evolutionary genetics, up to the much fashionable ‘philosophy of science’, deterministic causalism is now repudiated in favour of a subjective indeterminism that tends to place at the basis of the transformation of matter ‘the random event’ and, as such, impossible to determine and predict. This aspect, coupled with indeterministic theories, which are based on the presumed impossibility of knowing the reality of natural phenomena since it is impossible to separate the human analyst subject from the analysed object, goes so far as to theorise the absolute impossibility of knowledge of the physical world. What is known would not be, in essence, the real, objective world as it is, but what can be known of it through the subjective mechanisms of human thought; knowledge ends up being debatable by each individual observer, their own subjective and personal interpretation, comparable with equal dignity to the opinion, to the ‘scientific hypothesis’ of anyone else.

The recoil in the face of the great leaps in knowledge of determinism of the great revolutionary scientists of thought, from Galileo, to Newton, to Descartes, to Leibniz, and on to Einstein, is total. The idealist subjectivism before which science has today capitulated well expresses the economic utilitarianism that dominates it: every law of nature, every discovery, is ‘real’ if it is ‘useful’, if it can, in the final analysis, be translated into money, exploited capitalistically, even if it is the most blatant nonsense. No recognition of pure objectivity can be attributed to the conclusions emanating from the scientific laboratories and scholastic academies of capitalism, the scientists, the ‘experts’, the ‘specialists’, are now technical means of capitalist production, chronically incapable of arriving at an overall vision that can be of real use to the development of human knowledge of the real world, increasingly directed towards specialised sectors that end up constituting many small worlds unto themselves, fragments of knowledge from which it is impossible to ascend toward an organic ordering of the part in relation to the whole. Today, this ruthless technical and specialised parcelisation of research ends up constituting a brake even on the continual technological revolutionising of the means of production that characterises the capitalist mode of production: the most strident contradictions of bourgeois science turn against itself. Specialist parcelisation and ruthless competition among branches of research, among laboratories, and among individual researchers is the cause of enormous waste, and it is becoming too costly for capital itself to finance an enormous host of experts and technicians employed in the myriad of sub-branches into which scientific research today is divided, and in which a mass of information, of results, of specific experiences is duplicated and dispersed, overlapping and ending up constituting an unproductive investment overall, or at any rate one too burdensome in relation to the final economic results.

This is reflected in the growing insistence with which certain research sectors and numerous scientists call for ‘interdisciplinarity’, that is, today a utopian reunification of the various disciplines. The most serious researchers realise the absurdity of the situation, they realise that parcelisation now is such that each particular discipline encroaches on the others, and the very results of research require a unified approach; but, in the productivist logic of capitalism, every attempt in this direction can only generate more disciplines, more specialists, more divisions, more competition and waste. The productivist frenzy of capital cannot allow for a meaningful reversal of the trend in scientific research, which is destined to grapple with insoluble contradictions. As in all other areas of social, economic, and political life, in scientific research too the capitalist mode of production expresses the historical necessity for its destruction, a revolutionary action indispensable to liberate the social productive and cognitive energies from the fetters of mercantilism.

Along with super-specialisation, another aspect that highlights the involutionary process of bourgeois science is the subordination of the method of systematic observation of phenomena to the directly experimental one. Systematic observation and experience, and especially the insights derived from it, greatly facilitate the verification and discovery of the relationships or laws they obey. By rationally combining observation and experimentation, an attempt is made to construct a theoretical scheme that represents in the most coherent manner the greatest possible number of phenomena: this synthesis thus makes it possible to return to the analysis of individual phenomena, to pay attention to those that seem to escape the synthesis, to refine or modify the method of observation, to predict new relationships to be discovered, to intuit other general laws and proceed further in the research. But the eagerness for rapid technical application of scientific discoveries and technological innovations in all fields, especially in those most directly related to the production of commodities: chemistry, electronics, biology, medicine, the frenzy of capitalist production, in which it is increasingly crucial for companies to manufacture commodities before their competitors and with more productive techniques (mechanics, chemistry, electronics) or of new products capable of being introduced quickly, and in large quantities, on the market (medicine, pharmacology) determine the tendency to move away from systematic observation, which requires time and above all scientific disinterest, and to throw oneself into experimentation that tends to artificially reproduce, ‘torturing nature’, phenomena in the laboratory in such a way as to rapidly obtain results that are useful for the immediate purpose at hand, to the complete detriment of true social knowledge. It is not by chance that the most significant steps in general knowledge, bourgeois science has taken in astrophysics and in special and general relativity, where the observation of phenomena and the classification of the data deduced from it are indispensable to the acquisition and formulation of general laws.

Significant, too, is that systematic observation of phenomena and the historical experience derived therefrom are the only tools applicable to social phenomena, where laboratory experimentation is obviously meaningless.

Bourgeois science is thus entangled, with no possibility of escape, within specialist fragmentation and, reduced to a technical instrument of the greed for capitalist accumulation, has definitively lost every characteristic of social science, and therefore as revolutionaries we must question each one of its general postulates and, increasingly often, its particular ones too.

The very bourgeois ideological approach of presenting science as inherently objective and supra-class appears increasingly difficult, so much so that the most recent philosophical currents feel the need to present the issue by attempting to arbitrarily split science into two supposed categories: there would be ‘applied science’, dominated by productive and mercantile exigencies, and ‘pure science’, research conducted to satisfy the simple urge for knowledge, a ‘philosophical’ alibi for laying a demure little cloth over the senile character of bourgeois science, both pure and applied.

Once again, the learned apologists of capital do nothing more than mask the harsh reality of the general prostitution of the entire world of scientific and technical research with abstract euphemisms: ‘pure science’ is a deceptive sophism: science, as the totality of knowledge acquired by man, can only have one purpose: it is class-based in class-divided societies, it will only be species-based in communism, where there will be no pure science, which means nothing, but finally true human science where the impulse to knowledge will find its purpose, means, and recognition. We quote in this regard from ‘Queue to the Trivial Satellite’ (Il Programma Comunista, No. 21, 1957): ‘In the Marxist construction, science will become the science of society as a whole (...) The closed circles of experts and specialists will die, behind which does not lurk the impulse to human knowledge and human action, but only the fornication between mercantilist business and brains for hire (...) The secret of State and Nation is worth that of class (...) It is not the dawning of scientific labour in a new world, but a step from the threadbare Enlightenment towards obscurantist forms and monopolised science, which is on a level, in the history of thought, with the hermeticism of ancient theocracies; it is worthy of a stale esoteric theosophy, in which the masses do not reach the conquest of science, which is precluded to them, but the enslaving suggestion of an external rite that arouses terror; or brutalised admiration’.

This passage is particularly relevant today, when capital has succeeded in economically exploiting science as a spectacle disguised as ‘mass scientific information’: so-called scientific journals sprout up like mushrooms, while radio, newspapers, and television offer round tables, reports, and broadcasts in which ‘experts’, ‘specialists’, and the full cream of ‘intelligence’, indulge in the poses of knowledge gurus, display all kinds of learned drivel that do not even have the appearance of being scientific, not to mention the famous philosophers, who go on international tours like singers and movie stars, well-funded by banks, industries, and state institutions. The result of all this is that the hyperbolic decadence of human knowledge acquisition in capitalist society translates into yet another source of capital valorisation and produces on the social scale, and especially on the proletariat, an intellectual drug effect that translates into a mixture of the stupefied habituation to all kinds of propagated progress and the passive and destructive admiration of class combativeness, towards a host of supposed scientists and intellectuals presented as the exclusive bearers of all human knowledge.

We wrote about the space question in ‘Squalid World of International Quackery’ from Il Programma Comunista, No. 23, 1963: ‘The mass of falsifications peddled to so-called “public opinion” thus grows to a gigantic scale: it represents a real material force and is part of the potential violence that capital exerts on the oppressed class (...) Cosmic psychosis is a fetish in which the power of capital is crystallised. Whoever unveils this fetish unveils a horror that cries out only for its own destruction’. This applies not only to ‘cosmic psychosis’ in particular, but to technological and scientific psychosis in general.

Having established the principle of the demolition of the fetish of bourgeois science as the Party’s main task in the field of knowledge, of revolutionary action, therefore, and not of mere ‘philosophical criticism’, a task that tends towards our final goal, which is not the demolition of bourgeois thought but of the political domination of the bourgeoisie, let us go on to see through which fundamental Marxist theses this demolition passes.

The entire theoretical framework of Marxism in the field of the critique of bourgeois rationalism and the claim of the revolutionary bourgeoisie to express a total and definitive conception of the world, liquidating the ideological, philosophical, and theoretical constructions expressed by past modes of production, is based on the original solution it provides to the great social questions: what is the relationship between man and nature, individual and society, to put it in the more philosophical terms that Marx himself uses in his critique of Hegel and the Hegelian left, between essence and existence? Our reports on the subject, heard at past meetings, hammer home the point that the great scientific discovery of Marxism consists simply in this: material conditions, productive forces, and the resulting social relations between men have reached such a historic turning point that the definitive solution to the historical individual-society enigma is in sight; but this solution is not to be found in human thought, where in vain it had been sought and repeatedly believed to have been found by the philosophers and ideologues of the great revolutionary periods of past societies, who however, as we shall see, unlike the bourgeois, we do not despise, but in social praxis, in the revolutionary overthrow of society by the proletariat, with the implementation of its class dictatorship, directed by the Communist Party, and in the determined outcome toward communist society. A historical solution, therefore, that contains the negation of the human being as an autonomous social entity, and therefore the negation of the false bourgeois principle of the freedom of the individual. The solution is to be found at the scale of the human species, in which, for the first time in history, the individual molecule disappears to make way for what, with a truly masterful term, Marx defines as the social man.

The recognition of the individual in the species is the meaning of communism, the historical solution discovered by dialectical materialism applied to the dynamics of the cyclopean social conflicts that have determined past historical epochs. Marxism opposes this thesis not only to bourgeois and pre-bourgeois philosophical idealism, but to philosophy in general, taking a leap forward from the classical materialism of the French encyclopaedists, who had also arrived, on the wave of the disruptive social dynamics of the nascent revolutionary bourgeoisie, at the powerful conception of the destruction of all fideism and spiritualism in both nature and human society. The revolutionary bourgeoisie, in economics and in the field of knowledge, at the apex of its historical and political battle against the ancient feudal regime and its ethical and theological superstructures, a progressive moment for the whole of humanity, comes close to the truth for a moment, but its political triumph as the new ruling class prevents the consequent development of those grandiose cognitive intuitions, and in both economics and philosophy, bourgeois thought recoils towards conceptions that are in keeping with the need to preserve its dominance. Thus the classical materialism of Diderot and d’Alembert, having arrived at the monist conception of the unity of spirit and matter (‘sensibility, thought, are a general property of matter, products of its organisation’, as far as Diderot went), decays into vulgar materialism and then into positivism, which, yes, accept the materialist thesis of the material determination of human existence, but reduce it to the scale of the utterly bourgeois single individual, thinker and sovereign, free citizen who, with his cerebral reasoning, would interpret the external world, and from the sum of thinking brains would originate the legitimacy of the state institutions governing society.

Here, matter and spirit once again split into two, thought once again becomes the sole repository of reason, a new a priori entity that estranges itself from physical nature.

All the philosophical currents following the French materialism of the Encyclopaedia, and up to the ultra-idealist drivel of our sad days, drown in a mountain of speculation around the dualism between objective reality and subjective consciousness, where man is continually considered as a single thinking individual and where objective knowledge of the world is constantly filtered through the imponderable mechanism of thought. Naturally, this artificial separation between man and nature leaves the field open to the imperious return of spiritualist and transcendental conceptions, which now return to dominate unchallenged the fields from which the most consistent revolutionary bourgeois avant-gardes had claimed to have definitively driven them out. Marxism, on the contrary, and since its inception, takes the leap that the material development of social reality now makes possible: the unity of spirit and matter, of subjective thought and objective reality, is to be sought not between Man and Nature, but between Individual and Species, and it will be found not through the critical evolution of pure thought, but through the social praxis of the revolutionary action of the proletariat, it will be found in revolution, in communism. Thus, as early as 1844, Marx in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts outlines this solution: ‘This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution’.

‘The riddle of history solved’: this is the point: the answer to the millennia-old questions that man has posed about himself and about the reality of the entire physical world will be original and definitive, expressed by a humanity finally capable of living a human history, in which this term will no longer mean the history of human individuals, as in all bourgeois philosophical constructions, even those that seem to accept the postulates of materialism, but the history of the species.

Marx again: ‘Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore (at the end of the total transition) as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development’.

If we wanted to encapsulate Marxism’s position on cognitive matters in a single thesis, it would be entirely enclosed in these two magnificent quotations. An original solution that overcomes and shatters the very terms of the question: the eternal question: ‘what relationship exists between man and nature?’ finds its answer by changing the terms of the question; the solution is found in the relationship between individual and human being, between individual and species, determined as a real and material process that takes place ‘embracing the entire wealth of previous development’.

The question of the individual and the Species is developed by Marx to the point where he even replaces the subjective sense with a collective sense. There does not exist the eye, the ear of the individual, but the eye, the ear of the species. Finally, he unfolds the wonderful concept of the appropriation by man of the true human being, in the widest social and natural sense of the term. In communism, Marx states, ‘Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality. For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities, it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man’.

This of acting and suffering is also an ancient opposition, which only communism will dissolve. Positivist philosophies, born of the bourgeoisie’s continuing need to subject the natural world to the capitalist production process, tend to give prominence to acting: it is man who acts on the external world and shapes it to his will, while ancient theosophies tend to highlight the suffering of man crushed by adverse natural conditions: earthly life is suffering and he finds solace in supernatural deities and otherworldly realms. The dilemma is: is it I who completely deforms nature around me and subjugates it to my will by my action, my strength, and thus life is joyful action and happiness, or is it nature that constrains me in a bottleneck, suffocates me, and every attempt I make to free myself or move in a certain direction turns into suffering and life becomes suffering and pain?

Many naive thinkers have interpreted historical and social revolutionary transitions, falling prey to this umpteenth false dualism, whereby all the revolutionary spirit of the oppressed and suffering would lie in wanting to move into the category of the enjoyers. This antithesis between suffering and enjoyment, and between acting and suffering, is completely overcome by Marxism: man suffers because he lives, suffering and pleasure are dialectically connected, he would not enjoy if he did not suffer, as is recognisable in so many human actions, individual and collective. In communism, the joy that man will experience in succeeding as a species in integrating himself into nature, in transmitting the imprints of his will, not of his human brain but of the collective organisation, into the malleable reality of the external world, will always imply that he suffers because every activity is the effect of effort, and effort entails suffering, torment of limbs and feelings.

Revolutionary action is therefore neither the path to joy nor the path to avoid pain, but to arrive at a natural, rational, human combination of joy and pain. This passage by Marx, that suffering posited in the human sense is man’s self-enjoyment is truly magnificent and goes beyond all that philosophers before or after him could have thought or written.

This allows us to expound another key position of ours, which not only outlines the characteristics of the future communist society and social science, but also judges those of bourgeois science and, in general, the evolution of human knowledge in past epochs: all the great acquisitions in the field of knowledge that appeared in the few great revolutionary periods of history have always provided an original solution to ancient questions that the philosophy of previous epochs struggled with. But they have never given a solution by siding with one camp or the other among those contending for the correct solution, they have given it by breaking, by destroying the question, that is, by demonstrating that the question was wrong.

All the great leaps forward in knowledge in the natural sciences have taken place in this way; for example, the ancient antithesis between motion and matter at rest was not resolved in favour of either term, but by eliminating the antithesis itself and discovering that motion belongs to matter, just as the famous dilemma as to whether the motion of the pendulum, according to the ancient Aristotelian dichotomy, should be considered ascending or descending, was resolved by merging the two movements in the discovery of gravitational force. Each time the question is posed in different terms or is nullified and the previous disputes no longer make sense. Thus Einstein’s great insight into the special relativity of motion dissolves the age-old enigma of the search for a privileged reference system to which to refer all universal physical laws, and shifts the question: the speed of light is fixed, independent of the reference system; it is space that contracts as a function of the velocity of the point of observation; time is not an absolute, but elapses relative to motion.

If we move from the physical field, according to our deterministic thesis, to the social one, we find the cognitive and historical mechanism of human relations responding to the same dynamics. In this regard, let us take up a significant passage from Meeting No. 25 in Milan on 17 and 18 October 1959: ‘For a centuries-long collapse, Man unfolds towards the Freedom of his Person (they also say Dignity). It begs the question: is political freedom to be won for man, or economic freedom? Millennia of philosophical systems grapple with this question and confuse the problem of man’s freedom from the necessity that bends him to the influences of the natural environment with that of the freedom of the individual from slavery to other men or groups of men. But the revolutionary discovery of communism does not already find a new solution to the problem, rather it shatters its approach, overturning the empty question: freedom or necessity? The animal man, meanwhile, is endowed with knowledge insofar as he is a social animal, a social man. His wisdom, following his action, will lead him to free his species from the most severe shackles that determine natural necessity. Our programme is not the freedom of the human person, political or economic, it is something else entirely: to free man from the stupid illusion of the Person; to elevate him to social man.

‘Geocentrism, uniqueness of the categories of space and time, philosophical systems built on the individual I; are phantoms of Man that fall in its course.

‘But this does not mean that they should not be considered and examined as stages in the long, immense construction that was the history of the human species. They are not nullified as is done with an incorrect formula written on the blackboard by wiping it with a rag. Thus, one childishly erases the “incorrect answer”.

‘The conquest of truth is not achieved by erasing answers, but by erasing questions, which occurs in great, glorious, and isolated turning points of life, which is struggle, before it is wisdom. Truth is reached by changing the questions, and this is achieved not by the servile theories of correct answers, but by the series of incorrect answers that drag every traditional question to its overturning.

‘It is error, the weapon of the search for truth. It is error that becomes doubt, critique, and revolution, as it did for the nascent bourgeoisie centuries ago.

‘For us communists, it is even more so: the violence of revolution precedes and makes possible the only science, proper to Man who is no longer an empty Person’ (‘Elements of the Space Question’, Il Programma Comunista, No. 4, 1960).

This classic position of Marxism, that social history and human knowledge proceed in revolutionary stages in which ancient questions are shattered into original solutions, just as previous economic and social structures and relations are overthrown and transformed into new social structures that negate the old schemes, allows us to draw from it a theoretical consequence that is no less fundamental: faced with the proponents of ancient opposing solutions to the great historical and cognitive questions, we do not side with either of the opposing camps. Our solution surpasses both proposed solutions, it does not annul them, it understands and utilises both, and above all it does not deny the historical validity of the previous ones, rather considering them fundamental stages of the past, without which it would not have been possible to arrive at the subsequent steps.

This applies in particular to the age-old dispute debated by all ancient and modern philosophy, that between materialists and spiritualists: did thought ‘come first’ or matter?; does spirit dominate over matter or vice versa? If we answered: it is matter that dominates over spirit and thus sided with one of the materialist strands against spiritualist ones, we would have given a wrong answer. Our solution, instead, overcomes this contrast in a new conception that renders it useless, academic, false: a new conception has become possible and theorisable not because human thought and spirit have developed, but because human action in relations between man and man and between man and nature has reached a new stage and course that could only be given at this level of evolution. Our solution is Marxist: and it consists in the simple elimination of thought-matter dualism and its derivatives man-nature, subject-object, a dualism on which the philosophical dissertations of all bourgeois and opportunist currents of thought rest. It consists in the very simple statement: thought is matter, whereby the eternal dilemma of the relationship between subjective knowing thought and objective known matter is resolved by saying that it is not matter that is known by thought, but matter that knows itself. We are not materialists in that we maintain, like bourgeois positivism, that the material world influences subjective thought in a play of cause and effect desperately and futilely searched for in the skull of the single sacred person, but because we hold that thought is nothing more than a phenomenon, a mode of being of matter. That there is not yet a scientific explanation of the neuro-molecular-psychic process that underpins this thesis does not faze us at all, because we deduce it from the most general theorems of dialectical-deterministic science.

The first science that has been able to go as far as social phenomena is Marxist revolutionary science; for its theory, thought is a material phenomenon; science in communist society will transfer with demonstrative rigour this certainty even into the science of the single individual, a leap that bourgeois science will never be able to make.

This does not detract from the fact that the same cognitive achievements in the field of atomic physics, of particle physics – perhaps the only specialist branch to have developed appreciable discoveries, not by chance resting on what we have defined as the highest point of arrival of bourgeois science, Einsteinian general relativity – have come closer and, by the intuition and admission of the bourgeois scientists themselves, are moving towards the identification of a single link among all the fundamental forces of nature, towards the discovery of a single basic element, the so-called ‘building blocks of matter’, from which it will not be possible to oust the phenomenon of thought, except by arbitrary and idealist... thought.

We wrote in On the Thread of Time ‘Relativity and Determinism’ (Il Programma Comunista, No. 9, 1955) on the occasion of Einstein’s death: ‘The knowledge that the human species possesses has developed through contact with matter and nature, never through the autonomous work of thought (...) If the mechanical, electrical, magnetic, optical forms of energy, of matter-energy (among the latter are those which hold together the arduous atomic constructions and are released from them when the nuclei are split by corpuscular projectiles) respond to a single law from which the orbit of Sirius millions of light years away and the trajectory of the proton in the core of the nucleus at millionths of a millimetre can be deduced, then Albert Einstein came very close to the unitary assimilation of even that still little-known form of vital energy that we call thought’.

This is a major milestone on the path of Marxism, of our conception of the world. ‘Making not only matter and energy one substance, but erasing, with the ingenious construction of space deformed by gravitation, the barrier between every substance and every form, he has at last written the monist and materialist identity between matter and thought, removed from the world and from man a soul that may have a law and theory originally independent from those of Total Physics’.

A variant of spirit-matter dualism is, as we have said, subject-object dualism, knowing subject-known object. The question, also as old as philosophy, is: is the reality that man knows through thought an objective reality or only a subjective reality, that is, determined through man’s own mechanisms, precisely those that preside over thought? Even if an objective reality outside human knowledge is admitted, can man arrive at it, or will what man can know be only and always a reality relative to the representation that his own senses allow him to have?

And the eternal question of the reality or non-reality of Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ and the human possibility or impossibility of knowing the ‘external world’. Our answer is that we come out of this enigma the moment we cease to find an answer in thought, in the small human brain, as the philosophers have always sought it, and we instead descend onto the terrain of human and social praxis; we will then discover that this millenary way of posing the question is nothing more than an abstract sophism; once again, it is a false enigma from which one emerges as soon as one ceases to think of the knowing subject as the single individual and one widens their view to the collective brain of the human species, itself a product of nature, of the so-called ‘external world’ to be known, and that there is therefore a direct connection between thinking subject and thought object and there is no need to set one before the other, to give one precedence at all costs, a procedure typical of hierarchical societies, where philosophers, accustomed to the idea that there must always be a leader, a master and a servant, the superior and the inferior, always seek a priority in the categories, feel the irresistible need to find a pre-eminence, a presupposition, must at all costs assume one thing to explain another.

Marx, in the second of the Theses on Feuerbach, writes: ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question’.

Lenin comments in Materialism and Empirio-criticism: ‘The really important epistemological question that divides the philosophical trends is not the degree of precision attained by our descriptions of causal connections, or whether these descriptions can be expressed in exact mathematical formulas, but whether the source of our knowledge of these connections is objective natural law or properties of our mind, its innate faculty of apprehending certain a priori truths’.

And it is precisely in adhering to the first part of the question that the fundamental difference between materialism and idealism lies. Bourgeois rationalism, which claims, or has claimed in the past, to have expelled the ‘a priori’ by refuting the theological principle that known truth is of transcendent and divine origin, rests its axioms on principles equally aprioristic, when it believes it finds the basis of knowledge in the so-called faculty intrinsic to human thought, immanent to it. In reality, the logical mechanisms of human thought are themselves derived from the objective reality of the world. The resolution of this historical enigma by Marxist dialectical materialism consists precisely in considering subjective cognitive thought as nothing more than a natural technical instrument belonging to the world one wishes to know and, therefore, like all instruments, susceptible to perfection, and adjustments derived from its use.

In our ‘Philosophical Notes’, 1928, Notebook No. 1, the question is treated with extreme Marxist rigour; we quote the most significant passages: ‘Undoubtedly, we express, record, communicate our knowledge by means of thought, and, in a more concrete sense, by means of spoken and written language. On the data thus accumulated we then perform operations or reasonings from which we draw out new results in the form of suppositions or predictions, which in turn are generally confirmed by events in the real world. The argument appears very strong that this whole system: notion, reasoning, prediction, cannot subsist without the subject man, and moreover thinking man, and that its relations and connections are not properties of an external extra-human world, but of a world that is such insofar as it is known and thought of by us. Indeed, the serious difficulty of this problem consists above all in the imperfections of the language into which we try to translate it. If we claim to resolve it by thinking, we have already placed ourselves on the terrain of those who want to convince us that every result is conditioned by intrinsic laws of thought. Instead, the correct procedure is the opposite: the mechanism inherent in the instrument of thought, i.e. language, needs to be perfected and corrected in order for the question to be eliminated (...) The value of linguistic terms and relations is in continuous evolution and transformation: it is precisely the experience of the external world that decides, in the last instance, on the validity of the modifications. It is only that the slowness of these makes one believe that they are of little importance and thus limited by an absolute content of thought’.

It is in this slowness of the evolution of linguistic relations and thought that the speculations of philosophers and transcendental constructions of past epochs have been embedded, it is on the organic class inability to recognise this evolution to its extreme social consequences that the impossibility of bourgeois science to accept such a position is based, because this recognition in the social field implies the denial of the eternity of the capitalist mode of production, and thus the denial of its own class domination.

‘In reality’, the ‘Philosophical Notes’ continue, ‘the susceptibility of thought to adaptation is absolutely limitless: what was unthinkable for an epoch and was considered so because of absolute properties of thought, may today be entirely thinkable; and likewise if we compare, instead of different times, different races or individuals of different social classes, different brain development, etc. (...) These impossibilities of thought, so often employed as demonstrations of the absurdity of certain theses, have then had to give way to the eventual success of those very theses’.

Thought and language are therefore nothing more than tools that man uses to know and modify objective reality and, like all tools, they are imperfect and susceptible to perfection in the course of their use and of the consequent results.

In this sense, as explained later in the cited text, the cognitive process through the use of the thought instrument is comparable to the process of the development of productive technique in which, for example, tools of a lower hardness than that of the materials being processed are used, which makes it possible to construct tools of increasing hardness, just as, with another example, the laws of the thermal expansion of gases were discovered using pressure gauges based precisely on the properties explained by the laws discovered. The use of the imperfect instrument renders possible its continuous improvement, and this is precisely what happens with the use of thought: ‘we must be content to set out using it, even if we know it is imperfect but do not know precisely in what way and by how much. This will not prevent us from obtaining good, if not certain, results that will lead to improving the instrument, and so on with endless repetitions of the cycle’.

All this responds to the bourgeois idealist thesis that defines cognitive and scientific progress as explicable only through the use of an instrument that would enjoy its own intrinsic perfection, or at any rate its own logical mechanisms, immanent to its natural repository: the cranial box of man-individual-thinker.

In support of this thesis, the philosophising theorists like to point out as an irrefutable example of these allegedly perfect mechanisms the logical concepts of mathematics and geometry, ‘an indispensable language for reading the marvellous world of nature’ (Galileo), and this symbolic language is would be the exclusive and a priori work of human thought to the point of meriting the appellation of exact science by definition. We answered, with Engels in Anti-Dühring, that these axiomatic symbols: point, straight line, plane surface, up to the abstract concept of number itself, are in turn derived from the material world and that therefore all the objectivity of the geometric and mathematical relationships based on these concepts is real, ‘true’, only because applied to the real world. But we do not need to bother with the classics of Marxism to combat these enemy positions, we need only quote Einstein, the great physicist whose powerful materialist determinism in the natural sciences, the last that bourgeois science has expressed and also the last that it could express, we have said is ours: ‘The concept of “true” does not suit the assertions of pure geometry, because with the word “true” we are ultimately in the habit of always designating correspondence with a real object; geometry, on the other hand, is not concerned with the relation between the concepts it examines and the objects of experience, but only with the logical connection of these concepts with one another. It is not difficult to understand why, despite this, we feel compelled to call the propositions of geometry “true”. Geometric concepts correspond more or less exactly to objects in nature, and the latter undoubtedly constitute the exclusive cause of the genesis of those concepts’.

We fully endorse and consider such positions to be perfectly aligned with the Marxist series that places the products of thought in last place in the ranking of sensible reality, images reflected in the human brain of material objects and phenomena. The ability to ‘think’, i.e. to abstract from reality in order to deduce logical relations from it and then return to verify their exactness in reality, is a millenary result of human activity and, more generally, of the transformation and organisation of natural matter, and it arrives at the end, rather than at the beginning as in all bourgeois ideological theses, of a process in which, in a certain sense, men have acted without thinking, just as matter has been transformed without being conscious of it. In the words of Engels, ‘before there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die Tat [In the beginning was the deed]. And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it’.

From a general point of view, the present use in bourgeois science of the thought instrument for speculative and mercantile purposes entails its deformation rather than refinement, and this translates into a historical regression on the road to progressive rapprochement to the knowledge of the true, a regression that is reflected in the idealist theorisations, imbued with subjectivism and deteriorated relativism, of modern currents of philosophical and cognitive thought. Assuming awkward poses as learned wielders of the dialectic, they disguise the emptiness of their academic sophistry behind the ‘relativity’ of knowledge, which would translate into the denial of an absolute truth to be known, into the theorisation that any hypothesis, any scientific law is open to every possible and unpredictable development, indeed it is scientific if it contains within itself the possibility of being denied and refuted.

The impossibility of taking a single step that is truly useful for cognitive purposes translates into miserable contortions around the alleged irreconcilability of an objective truth that, being in itself unknowable to man in its complete objectivity, would justify as relatively valid every possible subjective truth, that is, every ‘philosophical’ piss-take as long as it comes from the sanctuaries of the intelligence recognised and praised by so-called mass media. Learned nonsense, which would have horrified the bourgeois idealists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is dished out in the name of the relativity of knowledge understood as the subjective freedom of interpretation of the material laws of the universe. Incapable of freeing itself from subject-object, thought-matter dualism, ultramodern scientism squirms within another dualism: relative truth and absolute truth.

Modern philosophical trends, and especially. those in the philosophy of science, are derived from the conviction that there is no single precise method of scientific enquiry, which, wielded to the fullest, can lead, through an inevitable succession of errors, approximations, refinements of formulae and laws, to the increasingly precise definition of the real contours of the objective world. The rejection of determinism has led to the triumph of pure relativism, that is, of conceptions which, even when they do not explicitly say so, deny the existence of a single absolute reality towards which scientific investigation and experimentation progressively approach, and advocate the principle of the independence of scientific and cognitive discoveries from the method followed to reach them: each ‘reality’ is that investigated by the individual scientist using ‘their’ method and each person is free to interpret experimental and observational data as they see fit. Ultimately, every scientific conclusion would have relative value, and every refutation, presupposing the cognitive investigation of another subject, which in turn is free to construct hypotheses and methodologies, would itself also be relative and every conclusion free to develop in every possible direction, because every direction taken will be randomly determined by the subjective relativity of the new method of investigation undertaken. Every current of thought, indeed every individual researcher or scientist, considers themselves free to disregard historical theories preceding the current period of investigation. Feyerabend, for example, who describes himself as an anarchist of the theory of knowledge, maintains that the best ‘methodology’ for the advancement of science is ‘any method will do’, while in general, modern philosophical currents, not coincidentally termed neo-empiricist and neo-positivist, arrive at the rejection of deductive logic, and introduce the so-called inductive or analogical logic in which the objective reality of the physical world is mediated by the subjective state of mind of the scientist, by their ‘free interpretative essence’, a translation into the philosophical field of the democratic and utterly bourgeois free citizen, the basis of the rule-of-law state.

Popper, who is all the rage, even goes so far as to invent a ‘third world of ideas’ in this wake, one that he defines as the objective contents of thought that would relate to the physical world on the one hand and the subjective states of consciousness of the scientist on the other. The putrescent character of the capitalist mode of production, which conditions all scientific research and philosophical speculation, is reflected in the field of knowledge in the unchallenged triumph of metaphysics, in the return at full sail of the allegory of imp spirits, of theories that see nature at the mercy of unattainable and capricious superhuman entities vainly pursued by human knowledge.

Max Black, one of the big shots in the ‘philosophy of science’, recently come up with a little story that well expresses the prevailing tendencies in the contemporary scientific-academic world: he imagines the existence of a demon that changes the laws of nature every time man manages to discover them. At this point, he says, there are two cases: either the infernal demonic creature can change the laws of nature by following a rule, and in this case man will always manage to discover them, or it does so arbitrarily and then it will not be possible to arrive at the ‘truth’. The vast majority of ‘theorists’ and philosophers grope around this hypothesis today, and all scientific research in many fields (biology, biophysics, etc.) is imbued with it, introducing casualism into natural phenomena.

At the bottom of all this, even when rivers of learned speculation try to muddle the issue, there is still, in the final analysis, the denial of the objective reality of the sensible world and therefore of an absolute truth to be approached through a successive series of relative truths. The question is turned upside down: there are many subjective realities, linked to the free will of whoever wants to discover them, and each discovery is relative in itself insofar as it relates to a freely adopted method of investigation which, in order to assume progressive and ‘advanced’ positions, many call dialectics.

Any hint of the existence of a single truth, attainable through a single method, is fiercely branded as ideologism, dogmatism, scholastic pedantry; it is considered a serious obstacle to scientific evolution. Significantly, pragmatism, eclecticism, and empiricism dominate everywhere, that is, all the political ingredients of political opportunism and social conservatism.

For us Marxists, however, once again the terms of the question are not antithetical, but merge into a single conception.

It is Lenin who explains this with marvellous clarity in Materialism and Empirio-criticism in response to Mach, Bogdanov, Avenarius and the various representatives of the empiricist currents of that period, who were certainly more serious than present-day scribblers, but who even then were already misusing the words ‘dialectics’ and ‘relativism’, sowing great confusion: ‘From the standpoint of modern materialism i.e., Marxism, the limits of approximation of our knowledge to objective, absolute truth are historically conditional, but the existence of such truth is unconditional, and the fact that we are approaching nearer to it is also unconditional (even without ever being able to reach it, as Engels states in Anti-Dühring).

‘The contours of the picture are historically conditional, but the fact that this picture depicts an objectively existing model is unconditional. When and under what circumstances we reached, in our knowledge of the essential nature of things (...) but that every such discovery is an advance of “absolutely objective knowledge” is unconditional. In a word, every ideology is historically conditional, but it is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology, there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature. You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: yes, it is sufficiently “indefinite” to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but it is at the same time sufficiently “definite” to enable us to dissociate ourselves in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner from fideism and agnosticism, from philosophical idealism...’

The march of scientific knowledge of absolute objective reality is therefore a journey in which progressive achievements are stages that contain truths relative to the knowledge and developments of human activity in the epoch in which they occur; they generally contain imperfections and errors or, more often, false dilemmas resolved by subsequent stages, but, at the basis of the Marxist theory of knowledge lies the continuous approximation, interrupted today and which will resume only under communism, towards an absolute truth, unique because it coincides with the material reality of the objective world to which the human species and its knowledge, its collective thought, belong.

Instead, ‘to make relativism’, Lenin continues, ‘the basis of the theory of knowledge is inevitably to condemn oneself either to absolute scepticism, agnosticism and sophistry, or to subjectivism. Relativism as a basis of the theory of knowledge is not only the recognition of the relativity of our knowledge, but also a denial of any objective measure or model existing independently of humanity to which our relative knowledge approximates (...) Dialectics – as Hegel in his time explained – contains the element of relativism, of negation, of scepticism, but is not reducible to relativism. The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels certainly does contain relativism, but is not reducible to relativism, that is, it recognises the relativity of all our knowledge, not in the sense of denying objective truth, but in the sense that the limits of approximation of our knowledge to this truth are historically conditional’.

The history of these successive approximations is not linear, there are great leaps forward, which are usually followed by long periods of stagnation and regression; at times, ancient theories once abandoned because they were apparently erroneous reappear as viable, other conceptions that appear to be definitive prove incapable of explaining previously unobserved phenomena, but the path rests on a single track, solidly planted in the objective reality of the material world, and does not follow the painful twists and turns of individual thinking brains, but the social furrow whose final stretch the revolutionary proletariat has the historical task of tracing, which will lead the whole of humanity finally living as one, to approach the consciousness of worldly reality in immense leaps.

Our great strength, that of today’s small party, lies in knowing how to proclaim our will to continue marching along this path, today deserted by the protagonist class, conscious that only the revolutionary Communist Party can possess the relative and absolute truth of the historical transition that will destroy capitalism.

To give in to the endless seductions of the adversary, to take sides, or even to allow oneself to be swayed by any aspect of so-called contemporary or future bourgeois cognitive progress, would mean suddenly falling into the social quagmire in the midst of which we have the misfortune to operate.

We proclaim it again with Lenin: ‘The sole conclusion to be drawn from the opinion of the Marxists that Marx’s theory is an objective truth is that by following the path of Marxist theory we shall draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies’.

The process of approaching objective truth in stages actually coincides with the history of man, not of his thought but of his social praxis. In this sense, our method of historical enquiry is clearly opposed to the bourgeois one. Bourgeois historicism, whether it deals with social history or philosophy, is entangled in two fundamental defects: on one hand, it regards cognitive steps as eliminating and demolishing previous ones; on the other, it proceeds as if the development of knowledge were a slow and continuous supra-historical evolution of thought. The first defect tends to deny the historical value of the epochs in which previous acquisitions were expressed, the second to decouple the cognitive process from social movements or, at best, to consider the latter as the historical background to the progress of thought and in any case determined by it. Both reflect the bourgeoisie’s need to preserve its political dominance and tend to consider the current social order and capitalist mode of production as definitive, eternal, and natural, the ‘best possible world’. According to this approach, for instance, there would have appeared Aristotle who, although justified by the limited information of the time, would proclaim a lot of nonsense, then would come Galileo and Newton to prove the truth, only to be followed by Einstein to show that even those contained a good amount of errors, and immediately afterwards it would be the turn of Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Born to do justice to the determinist method whereby the last road to follow is that one and the preceding ones useless old scrap. The bourgeoisie’s way of proceeding was to demand the erasure the past, to judge the systems of thought of past eras as useless and counterproductive to the pursuit of knowledge. According to this method, true knowledge would have progressed since the emergence of Renaissance scientific rationalism, which would have cleared away all the junk of the past and finally opened the doors to the progress of thought.

Similarly, the thesis of the gradual progression of the acquisitions of thought leads to denying the necessity of social upheavals. Both approaches merge into one: for the bourgeoisie, to deny the function of the past is to deny the necessity of the future, it is to proclaim its own class preservation, it is to claim to have said the last word in the social field, it is to bar the way to the communist revolution.

On the contrary, the connection between the multifaceted expressions of human thought and social history leads to the observation that positive stages of human knowledge appear in rare instances in history when revolutionary human forces tend to overthrow ancient dominant social and institutional arrangements and shatter the stagnation of the existing mode of production.

These liberating impulses from the fetters of static and conservative productive and social forms express themselves intellectually in a leap forward, towards cognitive truth; they are sudden flashes of thought that manage to catch the first glimpses of previously unknown truths, because the mists of the cultural and ideological conceptions on which the status quo rests are clearing in society. In these rare historical turning points, another arch in the bridge connecting the first cognitive intuitions of the ancient prehistoric peoples to the knowledgeable life of communist society is detached.

In this sense, Marxism has always viewed these leaps forward with enthusiasm, even when they have taken the form of religious, mystical, and extra-human expressions. Unlike the bourgeoisie, which has claimed to assert its own class doctrines as a substitute for the fideist conceptions of past centuries and has branded as obscurantism the periods when these have enjoyed their greatest triumph, we know how to perceive the immense value of past religious conceptions and place them on the path of social progress or regression depending on the revolutionary or reactionary historical function that each of them has played in its course, and we grasp their progressive signs towards human knowledge of the world whenever an ideological expression of a social upheaval has marked, regardless of the transcendent and mystical nature of its contents, a step in this direction and has made possible the emergence of systems of thought that have marked leaps forward in the direction of objective knowledge of the material world. In this sense, we have not hesitated to reject the bourgeois religion-science antithesis and consider religion a form and phase of knowledge, and the history of the cognitive stages of human thought written by Marxists, or rather that which will be written in communism, will certainly give the greatest importance to the materialist analysis of the religious myths of primitive peoples and of the revolutionary transitions of ancient peoples.

An example of what we mean was the rebellion of the Jews against the subjugation to which they were forced by ancient Egypt. This revolt is and can be considered the first popular-national revolution in history and builds a bridge, of the utmost importance in social development, with subsequent historical periods. The rebellion transfigured itself into mythical form in the flight of the Jews who crossed the waters of the Red Sea under the leadership of Moses, God’s chosen custodian of the Twelve Tablets; the waters miraculously parted as the Jewish people pass through and then close again, overwhelming the army of Egyptian pursuers. The Jews continue their journey towards the promised land: in all revolutions, the rebels go towards a new world, and dream of a different and better society. Those Twelve Tablets have been able to leap over the millennia because they were the programme of those revolutionaries.

In this sense, we can say that we are closer to the programme of those Twelve Tablets than to the rationalist atheism of the bourgeoisie, a false demolisher of past stages of knowledge; not because we want to return to believing in the supernatural, but because it was the superstructural ideological expression of a social upheaval which has cast one of those arches reaching towards the rise of our revolutionary programme, the communist society.

Another great arch towards scientific knowledge of the real world was the emergence of theology, whose powerful innovators of thought unrecognised by the theorists of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and which almost always is considered by official culture as an obstacle to the development of science.

Here too, as Marxists, we place the question outside the bourgeois faith-reason contrast. We do not, as endless hosts of ‘progressives’ have done, opt for reason over faith, but place faith in its rightful place in the historical process of human thought’s advance towards knowledge of the world. Those who have claimed to pay definitive homage and unconditional reverence to human reason have all historically ended up re-embracing the other pole of the binomial, not disdaining to return to bowing at the altars and flirting with the pious.

Theology became an obstacle to science historically when the economic and commercial innovatory ferment of the 15th and 16th centuries forced the overcoming of the metaphysical axioms on which it rested, but it was precisely its appearance that made the transition to the rationalist sciences possible. The rediscovery of Greek rationalism through the work of the scientists of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of the Renaissance occurs through the grandiose encounter between revealed and transmitted dogma, proper to the Christian faith, and the research work of human rationalism: and this encounter belongs to theology.

Among the Greeks, nature, and in particular physics, were subject to laws, and Aristotle, with his preparatory analyses for science, furnished the weapons of a rational thought, with the rigorous development of all forms into syllogisms and his deductive method of reasoning. The subsequent social organisation of almost the entire then-known world laid the foundations for the temporal dominion of the Roman Church, and the ideological reflection of this social structure was Christianity, whose dogmatic framework developed upon the axioms of faith and divine creation, in opposition to Greek rationalism.

In this system of thought, culminating historically in the works of St. Augustine (354-450), reason and faith were irreconcilable; the former being subordinate to the latter. But even here, if one wanted to delve a little further into the subject, one could show it to be a mistake to regard a superstructural phenomenon of thought as always and in every case negative for the purposes of the human development of knowledge. St. Augustine’s philosophical speculations on the essence of God and his relationship with the created world lead him, for example, to express a truly remarkable relativistic conception of time, superior to the very considerations of the Greeks: past, present, future, are imprecise ways of expressing oneself, both can only be ‘thought of as present’: the past must be understood as ‘memory’, the future as ‘expectation’; but memory and expectation are present facts. This assertion contemplates in intuitive form the principle rejected for centuries by idealists and also by bourgeois rationalists, that time is not an abstract entity, a convention adopted by man to distinguish the passing of events, but belongs to the real physical world (‘there can be no time without a created being’, says Augustine) and its passing is not an a priori absolute unrelated to the material facts in succession but, as Einstein will demonstrate, is relative to the speed of this succession.

We do not express a concept very different from this when we state that we condense the historical memory of the working class (the past) into our revolutionary programme, projecting it into future revolutionary action, which in a certain sense we expect, but toward which, at the same time, the present, daily activity of the Party is directed. In all our militant action we transmit into the present, toward the future, the past of the communist programme, and as such we consider it the heritage of the ‘dead’ and of the ‘unborn’.

In general, however, the irreconcilability of faith and human reason appears clear in St. Augustine: anyone who had attempted to probe faith with thought would have been considered a heretic; this obviously constituted an impediment to the development of knowledge of the laws of the real world, which was not to be understood, but accepted through faith for what it had been created as.

It was Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) who, in an impressive and monumental systematisation that we Marxists must consider another arch of the bridge of human knowledge, who realised a synthesis of these two points of view, arguing that since the spirit of man is part of the spirit of god, and nature a divine creation, therefore the latter had to be rational and knowable to human thought enlightened by faith. To assume nature to be non-rational and unknowable to man would mean, for Thomas, to admit the imperfection of god.

Thomas, who can be considered the father of what was later called Scholasticism, is precisely the founder of theology: everything could be explained rationally.

On the basis of theological principles, the very existence of god could be proved and this gave rise to very long and tormented diatribes around another classic dualism: that between existence and essence. In short: should the search for truth be directed towards explaining the existence of this higher being or towards his essence, that is, towards the very characteristics of this intangible divine element, towards what he is? The philosophers and theologians of the time resorted to various sophistries to extricate themselves from this question until they generally agreed on a clever speculative device: the famous ontological proof of the existence of god; being himself perfection, he encloses within himself all the properties of essence, of substance, and among these there must also be that of existing; since he is everything, he must necessarily also exist. Today, of course, these diatribes are no longer of interest, but we do not deride them because they arose from the principle that the use of human reasoning was no longer at odds with the dogmas of faith, and this subsequently allowed the observation of nature and its laws and favoured the rediscovery of the writings of the ancients, of the Greeks precisely, for the formulation of scientific premises.

In fact, the two fundamental pillars of Scholasticism became the geocentrism of Ptolemy and the physics of Aristotle. The Ptolemaic conception of the world, which places the Earth at the centre of the universe, was in tune with Christianity, which fixes man at the highest rung of the ladder of creation. Moreover, the cosmic conception of the Greeks was dualistic: in opposition to the earth, considered corruptible, the heavens represent purity, perfection. The planets and the Sun revolving around the Earth describe perfect circles. Associated with each planet was a god or goddess: Pluto, Venus, etc.; farther away, behind the planets, stood the firmament. Theologians perceived this conception by populating the heavens with angels and fixing therein the kingdom of god, while in the bowels of the Earth stood the kingdom of Satan, of evil. On the Earth’s surface, evil and good mingle in the living creation and only after death will good ascend upwards and evil descend downwards. This view found justification in Aristotelian physics in which everything tends towards its natural place. Heavy bodies fall towards the ground because that is their place of destination while airy and gaseous bodies, such as smoke and vapours, tend to rise towards the sky; movement is alien to matter: a body, in order to move, needs a force to be applied to it, otherwise it remains at rest.

The fusion between Greek rationalism and Christian theism served as a transitional bridge to the intuitive rationalism of the early bourgeois scientists. The great economic movement of the 15th and 16th centuries, the development of trade, the strengthening of industry forced an overturning of these conceptions, which had now become an obstacle to scientific development. In this brief but extremely intense period, millennia-old dilemmas were solved not by the ‘progress of thought’ but by social praxis, and the transition from Scholasticism to rational scientism was anything but gradual and painless. The clash between the modern Copernican astronomical conception, later enthusiastically espoused by Galileo, and the Ptolemaic one was only the most important cognitive reflection of the profound social turmoil of that historical moment. The powerful political and economic movement that saw the bourgeoisie assert itself as a revolutionary class, expressed such a social and cognitive impulse that its best theorists and scientists came, for a moment, close to the truth, overturning dogmas and systems of thought that had for millennia been considered the summa of human knowledge. On the most strictly ideological superstructural level, this expressed itself as a rejection of theism and fideist conceptions. In its battle, which it conducted with the support of the proletariat, to liberate society from the shackles of the feudal mode of production, the revolutionary bourgeoisie politically asserted the ‘freedom of the person’ and, in its most advanced and consistent Enlightenment fraction, proclaimed itself atheist, removed god and the divine kingdom from earthly affairs and placed there man and his sacred and individual reason. The material reality of the world was made to rest on the head of the thinking man; but it was an inverted reality, resting on the material class interests of the bourgeoisie and, on the level of knowledge, merely substituting for the fideistic abstraction of the creator god responsible for earthly affairs, another abstraction, that of the Human Person and his Idea placed outside and above the world. The resulting philosophical systems, if they had the merit of going as far as the discovery of the dialectic, as in Hegel, ended up substituting new social falsehoods for old ones and, subsequently, reopening the doors to the religious fideistic ghosts of the past.

On the philosophical level, bourgeois atheism did nothing more than transfer the Scholastic disquisitions on the existence and essence of god to the level of the individual and claimed, with the use of reason, to deny the existence of god and to erase as useless junk all the theological assertions of the past. Even in this dispute, Marxism did not take sides on either front.

The historical and dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels places the real world back on its material foundations, places the individual and their thought within the human species and in nature and thus inside, and not outside, this world, and thereby also considers the faith-reason antithesis to be overcome. There is no longer any need for either a religion that affirms the existence of god or an atheism that denies it. This theological-philosophical dispute cannot be resolved by abstract thought, but by revolutionary social praxis. Both sides of the dispute, the reasoning fideism of theology, as well as atheistic rationalism, have assumed considerable historical importance in the development of knowledge, but are no longer of interest to us today.

In this sense, the statement of not believing in god has, for us, a very different meaning from that of the bourgeoisie, as we simply mean that communist society will no longer need churches. We do not claim to provide answers about life and the origin of the world, nor are we interested in devising a rational refutation of the existence of god. It is enough for us to have identified the terms of society whereby at a certain point in social historical development, a complex of human and natural relations became possible in which there is no longer any need for churches that exhibit a revealed word, a divine gospel.

The expression that the communists want to abolish religion is only a propaganda phrase, referring to the church. We do not want to ‘abolish’ God, the Virgin Mary, or the Saints; this the bourgeoisie has claimed to do, only to reconcile itself with the church as soon as its class rule had settled itself and subjugate and massacre entire peoples in the name of god. We want to abolish precisely the churches as social organisations that have certain aims, and as such we will fight them whenever they stand in the way of the proletarian revolution.

The human need for extraterrestrial beliefs, being superstructures of class-divided societies, will tend to disappear in communism in proportion to the self-consciousness of the species, especially of its own capacity to understand and shape the real world.

One final aspect to highlight, which serves to refute yet again the supra-historical validity of bourgeois science and at the same time to define the party’s function in this battle for knowledge, is the generally pre-scientific character that the great subversions in knowledge take on as they appear in the rare historical and revolutionary turning points. The social tension underlying these leaps in knowledge expresses revolutionary minorities in which all cultural, artistic, and cognitive expressions take on an original character that comes close to objective truth, but through intuition: they do not have the rigorous logical or complete experimental proof of what they claim, they do not have the time or the means. As a rule, it even happens that the existing scientific and cognitive apparatus at the moment of the appearance of these intuitive innovations suddenly becomes an obstacle to their affirmation. Only later do these positions manage to formalise themselves in the canons of scientific rigour, and this generally coincides with the progressively conservative structure of the productive and social relations of which those intuitions were the anticipation.

An example of this procedure is given to us again by ancient Greece: the great social mobility of the first centuries of its civilisation led to the great insights of the pre-Socratic philosophers and physicists, in particular of the atomists Leucippus and Democritus, who laid the foundations of future science, having intuited the essence of motion and matter.

The rapid evolution of Greek society in that period pushed the most sensitive intellects towards the acquisition of dialectics and towards the great relativistic insights of the ever-changing real world. The subsequent period, which saw in Greece the triumph and stabilisation of slave society, imposed a profound regression in knowledge with Plato’s idealism, while Aristotle’s own logical-formal-scientific systematisation of all knowledge then known, which nevertheless represents a fundamental pillar of the overall edifice of human knowledge, constitutes a regression compared to the astonishing intuitive predictions that preceded it.

Numerous other examples could be drawn from the scientific events of more recent periods, showing, among other things, that the evolution of knowledge cannot be expressed as a constantly and harmoniously rising line, but rather with very high peaks and sudden falls into muddy depths. The former coincide with epochs of great political-economic upheaval, the latter with those of social immobility. In revolutionary periods, moreover, the high ferment of human tensions produces impetuous surges in the realm of art, from which usually originate works whose extremely high value remains intact in all subsequent epochs.

From this indisputable reality, modern currents of thought attempt to derive a spiritualistic and almost mystical solution. According to these prevailing interpretations, there would be a difference between artistic knowledge and scientific knowledge, deducible from the difference between the transience of scientific discoveries, destined to be replaced by new discoveries, new theories and thus to be forgotten by future generations, and the immortality of artistic works, whose validity survives intact through the passing of centuries and historical epochs.

The reason for this would be that the scientist seeks their affirmation in the real sensible world and would therefore base their theories and discoveries on an ever-changing reality, impossible to define with precise contours and therefore would endlessly chase after transient and mutable truths; on the other hand, the artist would achieve immortality because they would ‘create’ with the force of the spirit, which would be an immanent and eternal presupposition, specific to their person, given outside all nature and all humanity. This is why the writings of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe have remained eternal and will never lose their value as the history of humanity unfolds. The scientist, in short, would proceed by intelligence, proper to the material world they attempt to define, the artist by inspiration, which would belong to the depths of the unintelligible ‘human spirit’ and therefore art would reach heights that science could never reach.

We cannot accept such an explanation, as it once again poses a false dilemma: the separation, indeed the opposition, between art and science. We deny that there exist products that are part of a particular type of cognitive activity, namely artistic, which would have acquired an eternity denied to scientific achievements. There are scientific works that will certainly remain eternal like the verses of Homer, Dante, or Goethe, like those of Galileo Galilei, or Newton’s ‘Philosophiae Naturalis Principia’, or Euclid’s Elements, still the basis of the most widely used geometry. The elegance of these works is complete: they are works that are both artistic and scientific because they achieve at the same time the patient analytical laboriousness of the scientist and the powerful synthesis of the artist.

Art and science are not antithetical, at certain historical moments they converge, and in general, even when they seem to follow different paths, they are two analogous aspects of human knowledge, not by chance merged into a single operative human expression in ancient times.

Our explanation lies instead in the connection of these works to the social epochs in which they took place, we then recognise that artistic works are the expression of new feelings and needs of enlightened epochs, revolutionary epochs, they are works that break old patterns, that clash with dominant conceptions. On the other hand, scientific systems reflect the transmission of past achievements in epochs of stagnation. Homer arose in a revolutionary epoch of antiquity, Dante stands at the dawn of modern times and represents in poetry the transition between the ancient feudal structure and the modern bourgeois conception, and likewise the same can be said of Shakespeare.

The immortality of their works stems from being the product of one of those rare moments when humanity sprints towards new achievements and anticipates, in the most revealing minds, the features intuited of the future social order. Conversely, science is more bound to material technology, and this to the relations and forms of production and ownership, as well as to the existing social and state organisation. This is why it is generally art that hints at the first revolutionary signs of change in an epoch.

Culture and art appear as the work of individuals often unrecognised only because revolutions always present themselves to minorities, to vanguard groups, to minority parties. When the inspiring principles of these works become the general domain of academies, state institutions, churches – all equivalent forms of ideology transmission – then they become conservative and counter-revolutionary.

The difference should not therefore be sought between science and art, between intuition and intelligence, because in the transitions between the great class societies and in the leaps of knowledge that correspond to them, it is always intuition that is revolutionary, while intelligence is conservative. Intelligence, analytical knowledge, always follows synthetic intuition, knowledge advances along the path of intuition.

Taken together the results of all these great historical stages add up and form that baggage of humanity, that historical endowment transmitted from the past on which we Marxists work and upon which we construct the terms of the future knowledge of the species, in the final advancing and decisive part of its dynamics.

We have therefore returned to the question from which we started: the function of the party and the nature of its revolutionary action, the only one for which all that has been said so far can have a conclusive meaning.

‘Communism is the riddle of history solved’, we have affirmed with Marx; this means that the exhaustive and definitive solution to all the riddles that have tormented mankind throughout history can only be attained in communism, in the realised communist society.

However, we have repeated over and over again that for us this society already exists in a certain sense now, anticipated in the communist party, which possesses the doctrine, definitively, never complete and always approximate, but possesses it and it is the only subject that can possess it.

Not only do we know that humanity will emerge from the millenary enigmas of history when it will have a communist economy, but we have the courage to affirm, in opposition to the sad squalor of the current decadence, that it has already emerged from it in the total theoretical victory of Marxism, living in the party. We can affirm this not because we possess the science that humanity will conquer in communism, nor the social organisation that will be able to produce it, but we have fully emerged from it through an intuitive anticipation. Ours therefore, in a revolutionary sense, is an intuition, so it still contains reflections of the schools that appear condemned by the course of historical development; of the school of thought and spirit, of the school of subjective consciousness and the school of the theological interpretation of humanity itself, of all the systems of thought that have stratified themselves in history and that have formed the layers of that geology of knowledge that is adherent to the eras of terrestrial geology.

We wrote in ‘Church and Faith – Individual and Reason – Class and Theory’: ‘Such a study, as with cosmic or terrestrial nature, examines the past and, based on the data available, upon the present, and tends, within the limits of possibility, to find laws of development that are also applicable to the future. It is naturally understandable to everyone that Marxist materialism, newly-born, did not suddenly find and record all the social scientific laws, nor did it codify them, not even in monumental works such as Capital, in texts that for the followers and militants of the movement stand as definitive. Research and elaboration continued and continues, and could not fail to give rise to divergences and contrasts that, if they were not called Councils, Schisms, Heresies, were called Congresses, revisions, political splits. But this does not detract from the fact that the movement as a whole cannot live and win without a dorsal thread of doctrine, crude, if you like, in some parts, which through struggle must be carried intact in its vital core until victory’. (Battaglia Comunista, No. 17, 1950).

Our knowledge cannot have the value of a perfect thing, it has no pretensions of a scholastic, academic character, which have then always been characteristic of conservative and counter-revolutionary ideologies, but has an essentially party character, the party being the subject of this position that liquidates the ancient ideological disputes and superimposes upon them a new theory and a pre-consciousness of the future society.

We proceed by intuition therefore, but we are not an artistic movement according to the individual and alienated bourgeois interpretation, nor do we seek the endorsement of scientific officialdom.

For the very adherence to the revolutionary militia of the party a rational understanding of Marxist theory has never been, nor will ever be, required, but rather faith and enthusiasm in the struggle for communism, just as the social upheveal that will lead the proletariat to the conquest of political power will be the result of the fusion between the irrational and confused spontaneity of proletarian hatred towards capitalism and the active pre-consciousness of the party, which together will generate a marching movement towards a dreamed-of, intuited communist society. We cannot proceed exclusively with the instruments of intelligence because only the society freed from bourgeois class domination and the inheritance of all the preceding ones will be able to intelligently live and construct the future science of the human species.

Today, the truths for which we exist and fight require not only evidence, but faith, not only critical doubt, but struggle, not only reason, but force; its content is neither art nor science, although the work of the party is also art and science, it is called revolution. In this sense, the communist party can be the sole depository of the science of tomorrow, the sole environment in which what can be called science today is condensed, beyond the possible ignorance of individual militants.

We wrote in Il Programma Comunista, No. 23, 1959: ‘The fate of science, its unlimited development in the service of humanity is inseparably linked to revolutionary communism, to Marxism. In the present putrescent phase of capitalism, which heralds its death, the genuine communist party is the greenhouse that allows science, as far as it still has the right to be considered such, to stay alive and survive’.

All this helps us understand why our critique of the postulates of bourgeois science will never be corrosive enough and that our attitude towards it can only be one of total demolition: we deny that its technology and its improvements, its engineering, the discoveries of its universities, its science as a whole, are progressive; we are not impressed by the hyperbolic frenzy of its progress because we read in them nothing but regression.

The bourgeoisie has claimed to construct the edifice of knowledge in the shape of a pyramid, at the base of which it places the so-called exact sciences: mathematics, physics, chemistry, the questionable biological sciences, and ascending upwards it places in the upper strata the ‘imperfect’ and subjective sciences, psychology, sociology, and at the summit the most aleatory of all, philosophy. This pyramid, a reflection of the social uncertainty of bourgeois society and its intrinsic impossibility to respond to the needs of the species, will be overthrown and overturned by the communist revolution, which will introduce at the summit of knowledge, before all, clarity in relations within the human species and in its social way of life, the clarity that we precisely intuitively anticipate in the party.

From this certainty, the true and only exact science of humanity, it will start to descend again along the pyramid and reconstruct the entire edifice in reverse: psychology, physiology, biology, chemistry, and finally physics and mathematics.

Good scientific certainty of the truth will only be achieved by humanity long after the communist revolution, and our historical position, according to which the decisive and final step in this direction lies with the uneducated class, to those without science: to the class of the dispossessed, belongs to the highest dialectic of Marxist determinism.