On Saturday afternoon, we moved on to the presentation of the reports, beginning with an unusual topic, but one that was neither non-central nor external to the science of revolution: to state our position regarding the ongoing debate between bourgeois circles and churches on human reproduction and its necessities. Obviously our aim is not to preach to individuals, nor, still less, to point out a correct path to classes and regimes in dissolution, but rather we want to investigate the historically determined Human Life-Capital relation, which today is nothing other than the relation between Variable Capital and Constant Capital, to which we counterpose Communism as a possible future for the species.

First of all, biotechnologies are recognised as a branch of capitalist production with a particularly high organic composition, i.e. temporarily high rates of profit, and with an expanding market; like armaments. The multiplication of life is conceived only as the multiplication of profits. All the debate among moralists of all hues is basically justified only by the intricate questions of heredity, the same ones that led the first bourgeois jurists to write that ‘the child born in wedlock has the husband for a father’, and there we still are.

Bourgeois ‘scientific’ imagination, enslaved to profit and immiserated and sterilised by modern specialisation, can only imagine the bestial, the inhuman, from Frankenstein to Dr. Faust, while returning to the churches the monopoly over the human in general, over the ‘defence of life’. But Life is synonymous with Labour, and it is only we communists who defend it, in theory and in practice: only we fight for the drastic reduction of the working day and compulsory labour for all. Only those who have these credentials can one day really talk about life and its problems; the others either defend, or are themselves, breeders and slave traders. In class-divided societies, the defence of life is a matter for revolutionary parties.

Coming to the quarrels between Technology and Theology, which fascinate so much but leave us equally disgusted, we discover behind them only the anguish of the petty-bourgeois small proprietor and head of the family, in the quintessential American example, who already calls his son by his own name and would like to have him tailor-made in his own image. The bourgeoisie as a class remains tendentially sterile, despite its technological aids.

Obviously, Science is for us an insufficient goal because the real instigator is Capital, which today deludes itself into thinking it can reproduce the variable part. But class societies are historically incapable of planning life like any particular activity. And life is revolution.

* * *

Bourgeois mentality is incapable of recognising revolutions except within the narrow scope of ‘Technological’ matters, nor does it care to deeply understand the causes of the very jolts that force it to constantly revolutionise itself under the pressure of the productive forces; not only that, but in order to mask and mystify these processes for ideological reasons, it tends to elaborate justifications that no longer verge on the ‘sublime’ as was the case in other historical phases, but simply on the grotesque and monstrous. This is demonstrated by the great diatribe ignited around the possible in-vitro production of beings of various kinds, assembled for reasons of scientific research, driven by the curiosities that the sick bourgeois mind has concocted within coveted modernity.

Against certain terrifying possibilities, the role of hysterical critical reaction has been left in the hands of traditional religious Ethics; bourgeois thought has regressed on this field across the board, in a resigned and passive manner that speaks volumes about its historical illusions, from Kant onwards, of founding a human behaviour autonomously capable of justifying and designing itself. The key to interpreting such an apparently inextricable tangle can only be possessed by an organism that does not pursue exclusive class interests, but which dialectically sees the historical perspective and sets as its fundamental purpose that of pursuing the good of the human species: in our historical perspective, the Class Party is to be identified as this necessary instrument capable of such a lofty vision. Without resorting to abstractly logical or metaphysical categories that claim to explain man outside of his real and social dimension, according to the Marxist theory of anthropology and life, every drive of knowledge towards a better self-understanding is not determined by a pure and simple speculation on the ideal or transcendental structure of human nature, but by the interaction of man in flesh and blood with the environment that determines him and which he contributes to shaping for the satisfaction of his needs. The identification of diabolical faculties in this need by the hierarchies of class society is not a twentieth-century phenomenon: suffice it to say that the passion for truth has been branded as transgression from the very beginning by religions, or in the myth of Prometheus in Greek thought. Class societies have never been able to give a rational explanation of human development, of its struggle and integration into the natural and social environment: it is easier for the consolidated classes in power to demonise change, to see in the tension towards the breaking of the old social shells a dangerous temptation for the human species, with a view to consecrating the past on the basis of sacred or divine sanctions.

It is in a sense natural that class societies have no knowledge of the species, let alone, therefore, their origin; yet it is precisely these forms of society that have claimed to provide a total explanation of life. Our position is not intended to condemn this claim, but ever since the advent of the proletariat as a class onto the stage of modern history has given birth to revolutionary theory, any concession to bourgeois and reactionary ideology to explain life according to its narrow requirements becomes a grave fault with respect to the species: only a classless society can overcome the classical dichotomies between this world and other supposed ones, between internal and external, between objective and subjective. A social organisation that justifies class divisions and works for their eternalisation not only unconsciously and through its own internal and inevitable dynamic, but knowingly and violently, is unable to know and accept a version of life that privileges its reasons, its integral defence, and makes this the true thinkable and possible religion.

The classic example that is now before everyone’s eyes, from the biologist scientist to the simple common man, is precisely the controversy that has been dramatised with the development of biomolecular engineering over the possibility of constructing life in the laboratory, undermining or skipping those steps that have been defined as ‘natural’ until now.

Generally, the approach to this complex issue sees, on one side, the advocates of all-round scientific research; and therefore also in the experimentation of methodologies capable of providing a complete view of biological mechanisms and dynamics, including experimentation of life forms to be reared in the laboratory, up to the possible manipulation of genetic data; on the other, in the name of divine right or ‘natural’ right, that of the ineffable priests of life as a gift, inscrutable and unrecognisable, and therefore absolutely not open to speculation. The lion’s share of the properly speculative milieu on this issue is taken up by moral theology, the prerogative of the Churches, which even today act in a regime of quasi-monopoly, by explicit admission (with impotent regret) of the ‘scientists’ of various ideological provenance.

The truth, the debate goes back a long way and has historically been very heated: it is a matter of outlining certain characteristics and results in order to understand the reason for the present torpor that accompanies the fierce research on the practical-technological terrain.

It is well known that, at least in the old European world from which the modern capitalist organisation of labour was formed, to radiate outward and conquer the whole world to its reasons, realising the world market and its relations, the clash dates back to the so-called ‘Copernican era’ when the confrontation between the old frameworks and relations between Science and Religion, sees the affirmation of the scientific method founded by Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes, and others no less great in the path of the human revolution.

The metaphysical spirit and dogmatic defence of every aspect of traditional culture was shaken from its foundations; the general theoretical anticipations and ideological reasons of the tensions that have a class matrix will see their political and general affirmation with the great events of the English Revolution in the mid 17th century and the French Revolution in the late 18th century. The feudal world, of which the church is the supporting structure on the ideological terrain, sees its dominion and interference shrink, and therefore closes itself off in a bitter and intransigent defence of its organised form and instruments of control, especially in the second half of the 16th century, with the Counter-Reformation. In that phase of great social tension and great passion in the field of theoretical and moral research, the scientists’ gaze seems to be mainly turned toward the heavens, but at a more complete view it is directed towards an arrangement of knowledge functional to the new requirements of social life, from those directly productive to those mediated and superstructural in its various instances, including the inevitable relationship with theology. The erosion of power and of the conditions of social life persists for three crucial centuries marked not simply, as modern gradualists pretend to believe, et pour cause, by an ideal confrontation, but by hard blows inflicted by the young and fresh capitalist productive forces on the feudal apparatus. A very clear reckoning of this process can be read in the document known as the Syllabus of the Catholic Church which, having irreparably lost its centrality not only in Italy but in Europe, in order to stem the pressure in all fields closes itself up according to the Tridentine schemes, at least on the doctrinal and disciplinary level, and denounces all the ‘modern errors’, from scientism to rationalism, positivism, liberalism, socialism, and finally communism.

But, here is the point that we are keen to emphasise, it defines with precision, often denigrated and undervalued by so-called ‘free thought’, the nature of its infallibility, delimited, after the lessons of the Galileo case and others, to questions of morals and customs. The Chair of Peter is defined as infallible only in this matter. The last bulwark not to be left in the hands of the profane, scientific, productive, philosophical world and others is that of moral principles applied to life, its nature, its origins, its perspective.

Nineteenth-century positivism, all caught up in its mania for development (the magnificent and progressive destinies), entirely pervaded by faith in science, believes it can leave the abstract terrain of morality in the hands of the Church, or rather it is rationally convinced that science will necessarily sweep away every residue, even ideological, of the past.

It is not possible here not to vindicate the value of ideological and theoretical battle, which communists have never considered a luxury, which Marxism fought against all revisionist schools confident in the short-sightedness of the so-called ‘conquests of technology and science’. Marxist theory, born as a single block of steel, as Lenin accurately claimed, has no illusions in leaving behind the frontal polemic against reactionary conceptions, and in denouncing the inevitable collusions bound up with this attitude, between liberal thought, already enfeebled and inclined toward capitulation, and the old forces, in an anti-proletarian direction. It is not for nothing that the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 begins with the classic ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism’. Thus modern thought was precisely intuited by the astute Jesuits and feudal-ecclesiastical hierarchies: the natural collapse of liberalism can only open the way to communism. It is thus that all currents of thought that threaten to unhinge every metaphysical foundation of nature and life, even when they were born revolutionary and full of promise (let it not be forgotten that Marx proposed to Darwin that Capital be dedicated to him, and that the latter declined such an honour, claiming that he did not concern himself with philosophy and theology; today we would say with... politics), could in the short term be easily circumvented, adapted, even overturned in their basic and fundamental meaning, to the point that today they are the declared theoretical foundation of the most boorish opportunist currents that have made evolutionism of the origins a justification for gradualism in every field, a theoretical foundation of the famous motto of the prince of revisionists ‘the movement is everything, the goal nothing’. We reserve the right to return to this question later: for now, we are proud to anticipate and show how ‘everything is inexorably connected’.

Thus the reactionary currents, displaced and beaten on the ground of practice, presented themselves as depositaries of tradition, protecting the secrets of life, in a sacred vision that alluded to the will to constitute the Moral Reserve, which sooner or later would have to be resorted to or returned to by the advocates of the profane, returning from the conquests of economics and technology: not coincidentally, after the violent storms stirred by Darwin among the English reactionaries, when it seemed that once again a Galileo case was being evoked, the evolutionism-fixism problematic continued to animate positivist culture. So-called great thought is systematically sidelined by a diatribe that, on the contrary, remains unheard among experts; one need only think of the vicissitudes of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin who, in attempting to integrate Christianity and evolutionary theories, found himself barred by the Catholic hierarchies. In this climate, only experts and enthusiasts of the question are aware of the Vatican document that takes a position on the nature of life and risks reopening ancient fences. As can be seen, faced with the threat of the new sciences, from anthropology to palaeontology, to the most current molecular biology and sociobiology, the response of the idealist-religious currents accepts no conclusive argument, but refers to dogma, under penalty of unhinging not simply a delicate matter, but of an edifice that has managed to be saved by the inevitable alliance between feudal residue and capitalism.

As soon as the bourgeois world had to think about stemming the pressure of the revolutionary proletariat, it began to draw again from the repository of tradition: the flare-ups of various forms of fundamentalism are known to all, not only in the Catholic and Protestant fields, but at the heart of the old monotheistic religions, especially in Judaism and Islam, which is one of the hottest and most talked-about topics of the current political-ideological moment. In this situation, there is an obvious disconnect between the technical-engineering skills, capable of probing the secrets of life and its historical origins, and the theoretical paucity of bioengineers who, locked in their specialism, are easily blackmailed whenever they have to respond on the moral ground. It is precisely in these circumstances that we communists touch firsthand the misery of capitalist specialism, its conceit when it confines itself to the field of the neutrality of science, in its condition of continuous blackmail from the ‘demand’ for new technologies and applications on the one side, and of threat and intimidation from the side of the watchdogs of the sanctity of life. Meanwhile, the reasons of capital have no respite, and, far from vaguely Mephistophelean curiosities, especially in the naive but temperamental America of capitalism at all costs, the problems of property transmission, which seemed by now exclusive to the agrarian feudal world, reclaim a topicality in the name of the individualistic right to profit.

The fronts on which capital’s war incessantly unfolds are two: on one side putting pressure on variable capital, reducing its claims and demands as much as possible in order to increase profit rates; on the other, ensuring through social and familial mechanisms, the transmission of wealth in order to guarantee the survival of the ruling class and eternalise its domination. On the front of the reduction of labour power to reason, there is no need to insist much: only we revolutionary Marxists have never yielded on the theoretical ground in upholding the labour-value thesis, and in never conceding anything to the adversaries who have always attempted, and indeed today boast of having definitively unmasked this dogma.

It is no coincidence that the accident that befell Professor Chiarelli of Florence touched precisely on this point: the news of the practical development of grafts that would allow the in-vitro production of sub-humans of the will (or rather ‘free will’) and therefore only capable of performing and relieving the ‘real men’ of routine, executive, and exhausting labour, has in recent months been doing the rounds of the world, with painful distinctions, retractions, condemnations and other staged events. But the professor has spoken, and consciously or not, has touched on the sore point of the issue that has sent the well-wishers into a frenzy. Oh! How horrible to think of docile and imbecilic monsters, all work, home and... family, one would be tempted to say. Were it not for the fact that capital already has such old-fashioned tools at its disposal, we would really have to start believing it. The reality is that in all fields, from the vile everyday economy to research laboratories, the obsession of the bourgeoisie is always the same: to take even the remote possibility of rebellion out of the heads of the labour force, to economise on the instruments of domination, to obtain the slickest formula which is the obsession of opportunism, namely to guarantee guns and butter, and not to face every day the dilemma that generated the monsters à la Hess, the author of the classic either/or, ‘either guns or butter’. In this light, the temptation that has always urged class society seems to take shape. While the Greeks and Romans boasted of their system founded on slavery, which allowed owners to call the slave a ‘vocal instrument’ and be served, the modern system of capital could achieve the result once and for all, finally creating an infinitely renewable, artificially reproducible instrument. Oh! Let’s be clear, it doesn’t even cross our minds to take such a reality for granted, i.e., feasible on the social scale: and not for abstract moral reasons, but because capital will first have to reckon with the old (no longer even existing, according to some) working class, determined to launch itself in assault on bourgeois domination when necessary, and determined to oppose any bestiality precisely in the name of its existence as a class first, and as a species, as an inevitable consequence.

On the other hand, on the front of the transmission of proprietary relations founded on capitalist profit and guaranteed by the monogamous family (by now polygamous in disguise and legitimised by divorce and the mending of bourgeois law), in vitro production seems to open up unexpected prospects for the bourgeoisie, rendered increasingly less fertile by the stress, drugs, and selfishness of official culture, which are disguised by the need to combat genetic deficiencies (which will truly be implemented by customs and science in communism) but which on the contrary respond to the truest concern, that of obtaining heirs, intelligent and efficient, possibly of the same nature as the Father, according to the method of cloning, which in America is already a repugnant claim. Once again, a denial of the bourgeois, and above all opportunist, mystification which seems to want to relegate the proletariat’s abstention from ownership structures to one side, supporting the thesis that today everything is a matter of capital ‘management’, and not of personal legal ownership, of living and reproducing classes.

Things get even worse when the science of life of this type of society ventures in search of its origins. Without prejudice to the curiosity and passion for one’s own history, which has a not insignificant dimension in the theoretical structure of our own worldview, it is also always useful to discourage any bourgeois attempt to give us a vision of biological life and its origins. A product of Renaissance culture that discovers the Copernican man and the historical perspective as an antidote to any possible flattening into the fixist and creationist conception, the bourgeoisie, even when, in its most prominent ideologues, has defended, even established, a Reason of History, in the face of its biological origins has almost always genuflected to romanticised and metaphysical versions. In spite of the fact that European ethnocentrism today makes amends for its exaggerations and respects in its own way and for its own interests the fables of primitive peoples and savages who believe in myths, unseemly for an evolved Western civilisation, its version of the origin of life is certainly no more organised, more aware and capable of orienting it in the environment. Without retracing classical notions, which at least have the ethical merit of insisting on the value of the ‘gift’ of life itself, when at the dawn of the modern scientific conception in the biological field the attempt to unblock fixism in the name of development appears, of the dialectic between life and the environment, the overall cultural climate has progressively fallen back, to the point that after about a century or so of diatribes we have the honour of seeing the current turn to interpretations that seek an experimental foundation for neo-fixism of various fundamentalisms, including secular ones.

Our point of view on the matter is inspired by the most crystalline form of science, namely trust in research without metaphysical apriorisms, and at the same time by the assertion that the key to understanding the objective laws of nature does not lie outside nature and man, but within nature and man: in a word, we do not abandon the Promethean position whereby the laws of the universe cannot be alien and hostile to man by definition, but they can be hostile to man-individual once he closes himself up in his subjectivism, does not mature an integration within the species and does not accept to live and transform this reality of his for the better.

So, in the field of the origin of life, which would have the pretension of presenting itself as the open sesame of all enigmas, either we stoically and somewhat cynically repeat that origins are always uncertain, or, without the pretence of pinpointing the X hour, we are no strangers to a general conception that finally seems to find devotees, albeit isolated and determined even in the current scientific universe. After all, Giordano Bruno’s intuition (it was not for nothing that the audacious man was burned alive in 1600) is that we live in an infinity of possible worlds, where everything is centre and everything is periphery.

Historical materialism has always denied bourgeois science the ability to validly deal with the heavens without being able to address its earthly problems, but it is no stranger to looking far ahead, indeed it claims a stringently anti-subjectivist, and therefore non-anthropocentric, non-geocentric passion. The Galilean attempt to cleanse science of all anthropocentrism is a classic that we claim. And so, to return to our point, it seems rather obvious to us not to exclude that what we call life is precisely a ‘cosmic’ phenomenon, whose speculation is only intuited and only in its infancy. But let us try to hear some experts on the subject (Hojle). On this basis, all myths about the chosen people and ethnocentrisms of various origins could fall; but above all, what we like and confirm would be disproved, any claim to natural law based on a metaphysical and abstract reading. Indeed, it is no coincidence that after opposing the conceptions of the past with its own method founded on practice and experimental reality, the bourgeois spirit has in the course of time recovered the old tools, polished them anew, and wields them in substantial alliance with its old enemies precisely in the name of the absoluteness of life and history, of a notion of law, politics, economics, not to mention the most sophisticated and sublime superstructure that admits no development, evolution, or change, that instead postulates its truth, its iron law, which is cherished as always by all conservative classes. The search for the sources of life and its rules in an aprioristic and absolute version has generated aberrant conceptions that, as always, aimed to prevent the dominated classes from their emancipation.

The old and now hypocritical tension between idealist or rationalist schools that accuse each other of objectivism or subjectivism thus finds an experimental refutation: Marx’s famous thesis to Feuerbach, for whom the solution to the enigma is not a scholastic problem, but a practical one, finds confirmation in the recognition that conscious life is the development of unconscious nature and vice versa, in a process of integration which in man tends to become increasingly aware, capable of a project, of a national plan, on the condition that it does not come up against class boundaries, that is, that it is not a pious recitation of universal norms contradicted by philistine practice, but a necessity imposed on the species in its unity for its very possibility of developing and realising optimal integration and life in its totality. And besides, the ideological-religious results that have always accompanied class struggle ever since history became the history of class struggle, have had no other imagination and no other alternative than that of claiming their own exclusive validity, against others, in the name of a predilection and election by a superior Being. Even when rationalised by the revolutionary bourgeoisie, this operation only succeeded in creating a new abstract Being that had to and could mask the unresolved class tensions, and it immediately began to cut down the unruly heads who intuited communism as the only possible, radical, and consequential solution to the enigma.

The demand for equal rights has been recognised by us as revolutionary, but only as a historical referent that could drive the proletariat to fight against feudalism, without deluding itself that it would ally itself forever with the most prepared and fierce representatives of the bourgeoisie. The confirmation of the historical failure of equal rights is, in fact, found in our reading of the history of rights themselves, in the statement of forms which, as the capitalist system unfolds and complexifies, that is, reaches its natural maturity, both formal and substantial, manifest themselves ever more clearly as an empty shell incapable of being filled. It is no coincidence that after the lapidary demand for equal justice for all, the source of every legal case, which should guarantee every living being its possibility of development without impeding the same conditions for others, has shattered into a myriad of shards and fragments in conflict with each other; what the academic professor now calls the legal jungle, the one that produces the ‘cries’ as always.

And so, like the shrimp, from one backward step to the next, today the ‘right to life’ has finally been discovered, as if this elementary reality, which we cannot define except by being within it, is assimilated to one of many claims, such as the right to work, fair pay, and other such Proudhonian-like demands of this kind. Life, of which the bourgeoisie has not even the faintest idea, would finally be guaranteed by all its most brutal and devious institutions, which proclaim it sacred and inviolable, declaring to protect it in all its forms and without discrimination. In reality, since law is born old, the legal arrangements and declarations are merely the sanction of a fact that the bourgeoisie and its culture absolutely cannot deny: to the capitalist mode of production, human life can only be of interest as a commodity, as variable capital whose quintessence consists in the property discovered by Marx in his works, that of valorising capital, of increasing it indefinitely, being precisely praxis, that is, labour, the capacity to transform reality, and thus the only real wealth, the wealth that dialectically accompanies and marries itself to poverty, to scarcity, and makes it human reality, crystallises it, realises it. Given certain economic and social conditions, human labour, while capable of subverting and profoundly transforming these conditions, can yet do so within certain limits, as Marx’s famous introduction to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy correctly recalls!

In this way, since human life is the variable capital that transforms everything and turns everything into gold for capital just as everything King Midas touched turned to gold, it can only be the object of perpetual torture for dead or Constant Capital, that enormous heap of commodities whose interest and damnation is to increase, to grow out of all proportion, precisely to reify life. In this sense then, all bourgeois good intentions (and the road to hell is paved with good intentions) to respect man, to valorise life, clash with its own internal and irreparable contradictions. Politics, law, the superstructure, let us say, closest to the economic base, can only come afterwards to justify the already determined with the velleity to operate above and against the very facts, manipulating or subjugating them: the exact opposite of the Marxist thesis, according to which it can only be supported by submitting to it, deeply understanding its fabric, recognising its needs, satisfying them without selfishness, affirming its reasons. One cannot save man’s soul if one has not first helped to satisfy his needs of life, except by giving him food when he is hungry, drink when he is thirsty, shelter if he has none. Whoever pretends not to see this man in flesh and blood, this quite special commodity, and use him as they please for the satisfaction of a purpose that is not the man himself, with this attitude subjects him to an inhuman law, alien to the nature of vital reality.

It is pointless for opportunism and the bourgeoisie, especially if progressive, to rend their garments in indignation at the memory of exterminations, if they do not recognise that they themselves are the defenders, now not even indirectly, of modern slavery. The limits on the use of the variable commodity cannot be the product of legal sanction or the ethics of politics, but must be the respect for the real nature of labour, which is alienated whenever it does not valorise itself, but capital, the mountain of commodities that it is able to raise above itself like the classic stone of Sisyphus.

The bourgeois world’s interest in life therefore oozes hypocrisy from every pore, and must be rejected and fought against. These are the theoretical cornerstones on which our view of life rests, a reality that is real life itself, whose essence as such we have not so much renounced defining, as is claimed by the spiritualist-idealist schools, but which is precisely in itself undefinable independently from being lived at the social level, beyond any narrow subjectivist and existentialist viewpoint, which, by exasperating in a paradoxically opposite sense the definition given to it by the metaphysical tradition, has ended up destroying its communist and social meaning.

This is why the current diatribes on Bioethics come to nothing, since they claim to define the nature of life in the abstract, outside its practical and social context, forgetting that it is the very dynamic of science that continually sets different dimensions to the definition. Think of the lawfulness of suppressing life itself at its birth or at its demise, and think of relating this to the historical speculation that has never ceased to gush over it. For the Islamic Solons of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the human being is not such until after the third month of conception, whereas for Western schools it is such from the very moment of conception, albeit with the distinction between its being-in-itself and its psychological and social being. The more the conditions of real life dominated by capital and its logic impede the unfolding of life itself, the more speculation stubbornly insists on its abstract determination. In the field of the in vitro ‘construction’ of life, the debate is particularly concerned not so much with the possibility of experimentation, which is already underway as we have mentioned, but with the legitimacy of conception outside the act of sex and love; thus the constructivists are confronted with the reactionaries’ claim of the creation of life as possible solely from an elementary social relation, in a certain sense. In the total deficiency of bourgeois speculation, in the recognition that life is at its origin a social fact, those currents rear their heads again which, in their sovereign respect for life, have never recoiled in the face of torture and extermination, of ‘holy war’ and class depression as a normal way of perpetuating domination.

Only our firm, albeit faint, voice is capable of asserting the social nature of life from its emergence to its development, with the difference that sacral sanction is not enough – in fact we deny it – which taboos and does not explain, nor defends or develops, because only the material biological-spiritual dialectic is not separable, but is affirmed precisely in the pursuit of the fullness of social life which only communism is capable of defining and practically pursuing.

Naturally, we are not deaf to the objection that is commonly raised: yes, but while communism is yet to come, what is to be done regarding the technological practice that threatens to make human life an assembly of parts and one production among many, albeit of a particular nature? The defence of human life, even from a contingent standpoint, is not possible through the observance of precepts, but in the struggle against capital, both in terms of its perspectives and aims, and in terms of its daily practice, which is not different from the former. Let us say bluntly that proletarians, by definition, have no inheritance or property to pass on, except that of their historical and class heritage, which coincides with that of the species, and that therefore the aforementioned experiments (it is statistically and socially proven) do not affect them except to a minimal extent: that the proletariat’s desire for life coincides with that of the dispossessed of all latitudes, regardless of gender, skin colour, philosophical or religious beliefs and so on, and that therefore it does not arise at the individual level.

What frightens the bourgeoisie most in this still rather obscure and confusing adventure is the loss of its own identity and sense of belonging: we, as communists, have always peremptorily affirmed that one of the most evident limits of the bourgeoisie as a class is the lack of a real identity, ‘self-consciousness’, even if the term is a little repugnant to us. Even while dialectically admitting that the historical scope of this social structure was that it violently demolished the old feudal trappings and the narrow shell of the closed economy of the manor, we have never, however, admitted that the bourgeoisie was able to provide a valid theoretical and organisational framework, precisely because it is unrealistic in the tension between its being bourgeois and its aspiration to assert itself as citoyen. In the clash, or sharp dilemma, despite flashes of iron and fire, the bourgeois ended up winning with its philistinism, its real lack of a future and of a species sense, its original being ‘latro’, as medieval moralists used to say. In fact, the doggedness and hypocrisy in the use of the proletarian since the dawn of the capitalist mode of production is pre-eminent in relation to the glories and merits of the bourgeoisie: that is why its condemnation lies somewhat in its origins.

Only a few solitary spirits have been able to think on a grand scale, of a great economy, of a great politics, capable of imposing a real rationality on the forces of nature and on social forces: for the rest, the mercantile and shopkeeper spirit has largely won out, the much exalted, especially in these meagre times, pragmatism, living day to day and seeing as Louis XV and après moi le déluge. If this is the overall theoretical horizon of the bourgeoisie, and let’s even say the average bourgeoisie, it is understandable how, even in relation to life and its basic theory, the bourgeoisie cannot decide between building its own future on a grand scale, against the anxieties of proprietary and patrimonial reason, and taking refuge in the mysticism of mother nature, untouchable and sacred, now alma mater, now treacherous and ungrateful stepmother. There has been recent news of a grand plan conceived by Nobel laureate Dulbecco, which would have the ambition of determining not the knowledge of some chromosome or genius, but a complex map of life, which would make it possible to intervene in the fine-tuning of a healthy humanity, correctable according to a rational plan, and not at random, as happens today by his own admission. Here is a further example of wishful thinking that we dare to call impossible within the current class contradictions. We were more than right in judging the missile intoxication and the claim to colonise the cosmos; we take the liberty of predicting the same collapse, not because intelligence is lacking as such, but because conflicting interests will undermine such ways of thinking.

Humanity, contrary to the assumptions of bourgeois thought, was not anticipated in laboratories and abstract science, as is believed, but by practical and social forces that have pushed forward and determined laboratories and research, science and philosophy. This is the theoretical overturning carried out by Marxism, which we affirm. It will not be the laboratories of bourgeois monsters that revolutionise life, but the social revolution that will lay the foundations for the kind of social order that will be able to correct riverbeds, make peaceful beasts tigers and lions, as Trotsky so beautifully put it, turn swords into ploughs, and so on, with these that are not fables, mocked or told with condescension by the cynics of the bourgeoisie, but practical possibilities known to communism.

When Marxism, in the analysis of Capital, identifies in the commodity labour, in variable capital the cornerstone upon which the edifice of profit rises, it is true to its basic premises and to its value choices: that is to say, while from the standpoint of its struggle it commits itself with feeling and heart (in the highest and most classical sense of this term... the reasons of the heart already spoken of by Pascal) and therefore makes the proletariat’s reason, which is precisely and exclusively life, the only reason for which it makes sense to fight, it does not let itself be overwhelmed by edifying or effectual phraseology, and realises that this yardstick, this absolute-relative, in the capitalist mode of production is subject to the continuous pressure of market conditions, its being a commodity that varies in relation to a complex series of factors. This realisation is not an acceptance nor a fatalistic resignation, but a starting point that allows us to know the structure of capital, its being a vampire thirsty for proletarian blood; and it is also the theoretical premise that allows Marxism to prefigure a social order in which the reasons for life, for labour, are no longer subject to this kind of pressure, but solely to exchange with nature, in turn adapted and improved, ‘integrated’ into human activity.

Here, faced with this dialectical operation which sees possible the union of the absolute, at least as a position, with the relative, that is, being with becoming, any version of bourgeois and reactionary thought will balk, react, become threatening and rigid, and brandish the weapons of criticism along with the far more powerful ones of class reaction. Marxism is then said to be inhuman, incapable of adopting values in the abstract, in their categorical and disembodied validity, as categorical imperatives before which everything should be sacrificed, life itself, precisely, and preferably that of the proletariat which possesses this ‘property’. Our ‘relativism’ is thus accused of dogmatism, and all efforts are directed towards the search for a philosophy to serve as a hat, as an introduction and a justification. In short, one cannot digest the fact that Marxist relativism has nothing to do with the pure and simple logical theory of relations, since it rests on the assumption that what for capital is variable and relative and thus malleable and compressible to the point of class crushing, for communism is instead to be defended as an absolute, in the sense that it is not fodder to be thrown into the fray for tactics more or less recommendable at the scholastic level; because for communism, the defence of variable capital, or life, in the contingent moment coincides with its aims, which are also and above all the aims of the species in its totality. It is on this terrain that true communists are able to refute the counter-revolution operating within their own camp, and which has seen actors, until yesterday comrades, from Stalin to his epigones; precisely because opportunism, first revisionist of various kinds, and then of Stalinist origin, has deluded itself into using proletarian life, to use it and tamper with it, separating tactics from strategy, means from ends. The communism of Marx and Lenin has never conceived the possibility of bargaining over the conditions of the proletariat according to the specifically bourgeois norm, either on the immediate economic or political level: it never thought of sacrificing the proletariat for purposes other than its own life, even through its own life; that is, it did not conceive of alliances with enemy classes by abandoning its own organisational autonomy, accepting, i.e., to become an instrument of other interests, losing sight of its historical interest, its end.

Here then, is unveiled the mystery of the absolute-relative, of life, which is the sole value of the working class reduced to variable capital by profit, here then, is unveiled the mystery of how proletarian life can sacrifice itself, but for itself and for the species, outside Kantian universals of the law of duty, a source of bourgeois misunderstandings of all times, up to the Bernsteinian profession of faith in the eternal values that have entailed betrayal for the cause of socialism, yesterday and today.