While triumphantly the dominant bourgeois ideology declares communism and, inevitably, its theoretical framework that goes by the name of historical and dialectical materialism dead, never before has the class-divided society been shattered by a congeries of tensions that one likes to think are stirred by racial, ethnic, and religious hatred.

We revolutionary communists remain, against all, steadfast in our defence of the scientific nature of the communist Utopia, and re-propose it in a precise, detailed refinement, all the more necessary the more one is deluded into confronting, especially by opportunist currents, reality by riding on the most disparate sociological or, at best, political-science type interpretations.

In this work, we intend to emphasise the scientific nature of the communist social vision, clarifying our way of understanding social science, which we do not borrow from any bourgeois body, since it is the practical fruit of the class struggles of the human species culminating in the final clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as they have taken shape, as classes, in the last two centuries of history.

Scientific socialism still claims, through our revolutionary militia, its nature against the more or less recent, more or less sensational alleged refutations.

We feel it appropriate to emphasise, in particular, the demonstrative framework of our science, without which it becomes impossible to refer to the so-called facts, which alone, in our view of things, are unable to explain anything. We adhere to an approach that we dare to call strong based on the demonstrative framework, even if this term no longer means adherence to the Aristotelian-rationalist version of the problem. Let us now see what this entails.

We invoke Aristotle’s ‘Posterior Analytics’, where the Author regards demonstration as the necessary and sufficient expression of science (epistème). The only exception to this condition are those indemonstrable principles on which the demonstration is based, and which, although indemonstrable, are nevertheless part of the scientific system. All other propositions, in order to be considered scientific, must be demonstrated and demonstrable; what is not a principle of demonstration and is not demonstrable remains mere opinion or doxa.

In our view of history and reality in general, approached according to the scientific method, the indemonstrable principle that underlies the materialist conception is first and foremost the communist feeling that binds the history of human events, from the club-wielding man to the modern proletarian. It could be objected that this principle, which nevertheless is part of the scientific system, is alien to the scientific criterion precisely because it is a feeling, a sentiment; but the indemonstrable principles of other political and social currents also start from strong sentiments. Think of Cartesian rationalism, which entails a clear Faith in Reason, or the empiricist faith in human experience, characteristic of liberal currents. Since sentiments are difficult to dispute, it is appropriate to say that for communists, the idea of Humanity, even before an individual feeling of the Self, is the collective egoism of the clan or tribe: a Strong Idea, which communism of all times, including class-based communism, has affirmed.

Supporting this entails the acknowledgment that the indemonstrable Principles underlying every scientific paradigm are Faiths, Beliefs, Emotions.

As can be seen, this is entirely the opposite of what the pompous rhetoric of science claims to lay at their foundation. This not only does not disturb the materialist conception of history and nature, but constitutes the powerful lever that pushes in the direction of the communist social system. This makes it possible for us to affirm that, Communism being at its origin a feeling, Science comes after; without at all contradicting the claim of socialism as a scientifically predictable social regime.

In our vision, not only does Science come after, but the very Consciousness that human beings make of their social life.

The problem, suggestive and fascinating, can be summed up in the formula: In the beginning is the Deed. Man, even before being moved by a scientific plan, is driven by the need to accommodate the external world, adapting it to his needs, exploring it and elaborating his own vision of things. This is how human society, through Labour, produces and reproduces its material and spiritual life.

Our current, in its historical and theoretical work of the systematisation of principles and the class doctrine, has been able to codify rules of conduct and interpretative schemes, adhering to a demonstrative paradigm of its way of understanding science, which, if in certain respects adopts logical-dialectical forms from previous human thought, nevertheless claims its uniqueness and its birth as a single block; and is therefore not to be confused with other theories, not so much for its cognitive nature, as for the close intertwining that occurs within it between theory and praxis, between feeling and reason.

In this, our interpretative schema of the nexus ‘economic action – class theory’ differs first of all from what we have called the transcendentalist (authoritarian) Schema, which is in fact typical of revealed religions, feudalism, and theocratic absolutism. This conception appeals to a divinity which, in the very act of creation, has infused in men a spirit, which, finding itself in each individual, ensures equality before God, and thus at least in the afterlife, and guarantees behaviour inspired by common principles of divine origin. The state, in turn, by controlling the consciousness and activity of individuals, allows spiritual and physical life to unfold within its hierarchical order, which reflects the divine plan revealed in the holy scriptures.

What is striking about the authoritarian model of society is that it still manages to be usable by modern capitalist society, especially of the European type, where the long wave of feudal ideology still manages to make itself felt due to a series of superstructures that have been brought back into play by the bourgeois tendency to compromise with the authoritarian conception of power, once the threat of subversion from the modern proletariat has proven to be global and irreversible.

The analysis of this first Schema, which our Text ‘The Reversal of Praxis in Marxist Doctrine’ illustrates in Table III, shows how important it is for us to have a clear interpretation of the paradigms of demonstration, on pain of devaluing every scientific criterion of analysis and synthesis of social reality.

Historical and dialectical materialism has no illusions about tackling the mighty contradictions of the capitalist mode of production without its own specific method, such as to allow for a real description of the world, and not a mere vision marred by subjectivism and characterised by an emotional approach, typical of the conceptions proper to utopian socialism and the sociological versions fashionable today.

It is not for nothing that it opposes the socialism of yesterday’s and today’s utopians with a scientific conception, and it claims it today in particular, when from so many quarters there is a tendency to cast suspicion on this way of tackling problems in the name of generic relativism, of unfounded opinion, of the freedom of interpretations divorced from any objective reference to data. And yet we are well aware that scientific is a term subject to a series of limits and cautions. The attention to the method of the natural sciences, to the progress of logic and mathematics, is constant in Marx, Engels, and Lenin, not to mention the Left, accused for this very reason of determinism, so rigorous did its attitude towards science appear to be and its passionate defence of its Enlightenment foundations, without stopping abstractly at them.

Let us therefore say that historical materialism recognises that the scientific paradigm consists of two fundamental moments: 1) indemonstrable principles (not in an absolute sense, but in a dialectical sense); 2) demonstration as a necessary and sufficient condition for science. Even in seventeenth-eighteenth century thought, science is thus defined by Wolff: ‘by science I mean the habit of proving assertions, that is, of inferring by legitimate consequence from certain and innate principles’.

Overall, classical empiricism remains anchored to the scientific paradigm outlined; it is the rationalist currents that transform the paradigm into the programme of extending science and demonstration to all knowledge, and consequently, of identifying the philosophical method with the mathematical method.

The rationalist desire to constitute and legitimise the empirical sciences is the knot that must be untied in the modern confrontation between the scientific paradigm of the classical framework and the scientific paradigm of the statistical-probabilistic framework.

In the Aristotelian conception, the premises of demonstration must be necessary, such that all other inferences that do not satisfy this material condition are excluded from the domain of scientific knowledge.

It is a matter of clarifying whether Aristotle means to refer to logical or ontological necessity. A problem of no small importance. Let us not forget that the materialist method, when confronted with these crucial problems, is not afraid to stretch the bow by pulling the string back as far as it is useful. This is proven by Lenin’s underlinings on the dialectic in Aristotle (‘Notebooks’). This constitutes proof that what interests us is not only, as our adversaries prefer to think, the structure, but also the superstructure of class society, especially when we have the opportunity to show that it is often defector philosophers and scientists, whether they know it or not, who demolish the theoretical edifice of their own class with pickaxes.

In any case, according to the predeterminist requirement of the seventeenth-eighteenth century, a proposition is necessary if and only if its negation is impossible. This impossibility can be known either directly through intuition or indirectly through demonstration. This kind of conception of demonstration produces a strong interpretation of the scientific paradigm.

Descartes adheres to the concept of demonstration elaborated by the Greek mathematical tradition rather than the Aristotelian tradition, but in the eighteenth century, Leibniz and Wolff, following a typically logistic programme, consider logic, including Aristotelian syllogistics, as the basis of mathematics.

We are in the epoch, let us even say in the century, in which the theoretical premises of the French Revolution are being prepared, which dismantle the authoritarian-transcendentalist scheme of society and legitimisation of power, to give room and justification to what we call the Demo-Liberal Schema, which we illustrate in Table IV.

The work that matures in the minds of Leibniz, Wolff, and later, with exceptionally far-reaching effects, in Kant, produces a revolution in the superstructures of thought never before witnessed. It has been said jokingly that Kant guillotined more heads than Robespierre. Of course, we do not believe this, because in reality it was the advent of capitalist production that cut the grass under the feet of the weary society of the aristocrats and clergy.

The upheavals in the field of ideology and scientific thought are very illuminating for understanding the new times, marked by radical changes in the field of productive and social life.

The problem, then, is, and in any case remains, to reconcile the necessity of demonstration with the contingency of Nature. It is the problem of Kant and, subsequently, of all contemporary Epistemology, naturally with differing outcomes.

In Scholasticism, the Contingent is defined as the opposite of Necessary, as that whose negation is always possible, by definition. Thus, the idea of a science of the contingent was repugnant, in the sense of a true logical contradiction, to the scientific paradigm. Mathematics represents a certain model of science, but the applicability of this model seemed destined to remain confined only to sciences considered as a priori. With regard to experience, to a posteriori, only opinion was possible.

Thus, as Bacon argues, Aristotelian theory is not a method for acquiring new knowledge, but a formal model of how knowledge should be presented and imparted. It can be argued, however, that a discipline cannot be scientific if its propositions cannot be set forth according to the criteria required by the theory of demonstration.

When, with the advent of modern science, it becomes an imperative necessity to prove the validity of the principles and the method required to discover them, then the discussion on the theory of demonstration becomes particularly acute.

Locke too, despite his scepticism, upholds the necessity of adhering to the strong paradigm, regarding the possibility of a physical science: ‘I am tempted to doubt whether, however much human industry may push useful and experimental philosophy into physical things, a scientific philosophy can fall within the range of our possibilities, for we lack perfect and adequate ideas even of those bodies that are close to us and most subject to our command. Certainty and demonstration are two concepts which, in these matters, we must not expect’.

If it was problematic to recognise scientific status to empirical sciences such as Physics, much more difficult and problematic was the recognition of scientific status to the social sciences and, as far as we are concerned, to the possibility of founding a materialist conception of history.

The difficulty lies, above all, in developing a method that recognises how the study of human behaviour is not reducible to a mere description of it (and that is no small thing!); in a word, in making Morality (literally: Custom) a Science, without limiting itself to taking note of a present Human Nature always identical to itself for metaphysical reasons, and instead recognising a changing, dialectical nature, up to the definition according to which man, while he is the product of social relations, is at the same time their producer.

In this way, the indemonstrable principles are approached and attempted to be demonstrated. Human nature, a classic empty vessel, is approached in its history, in its process; human feelings, hatred, love, selfishness, altruism, can be analysed as expressions of various social forms, up to the discovery not of an abstract and absolute definition, but a concrete one, in flesh and blood. Smith’s invisible hand, the immanentisation of theological Providence, becomes the revealed fabric of social relations as they are shaped by material and describable relations of production and exchange, rather than being determined by occult forces to which everything is allowed above or below man (against the dogma of overdetermination...).

In Galileo we find very strongly expressed, the need to consider both experience and the extension of the use of the mathematical method. But Descartes also very harshly criticises ‘those philosophers who, neglecting experience, think they can bring forth truth from their own brain, as Minerva from that of Jupiter’.

Even Rohault, author of a ‘Traité de Phisyque’ (1671), argues that ‘experiences are necessary for the foundation of physics’ and that one must base ‘reasoning on the truths of mathematics and certain experiences’. In the ‘Essai de Logique’ (1678), Edme Mariotte, influenced by Cartesianism, states: ‘an experience of one hour often instructs us more than reasoning over many years... because there are no demonstrations in physics other than those founded on certain experiences due to the infallible consequences that can be drawn from them, whether one uses intellectual propositions or not, and because, furthermore, if one can have experiences, it is not necessary to seek other ways of proving the truth of facts. Mariotte thus blames the attachment to ‘too much reasoning and too little experience and the claim to prove a natural effect by intellectual principles alone’.

It can thus be deduced that even those who, like the Cartesians, emphasise the urgency of extending the use of the mathematical method to philosophy as well, had no intention of proceeding a priori from rational principles in order to then deduce empirical propositions. All, therefore, at least in principle, agree in ‘joining together reasoning with experience’ (Rohault).

There are two types of experience according to Spinoza: 1) simple sensible perception, ‘vague experience’, i.e. made casually, and therefore difficult to evaluate critically; 2) experience determined by the intellect, i.e. deliberated on the basis of a precise idea, conceived beforehand, corresponding more or less to Galileo’s ‘sensible experiences’.

Joachim Jungius clearly distinguishes between: 1) vulgar experience and 2) experience arising from observation, which also includes experiment, whereby observation is to be understood as an ‘ordered series of sensations established on the basis of a given consideration’.

Rohault, in his ‘Traité de Phisyque’, speaks of three kinds of experience: 1) experience made through the simple use of the senses, by chance and without design; 2) experience made intentionally, ‘but without knowing or foreseeing what may happen, i.e. scientific experimentation not guided by any conjecture’; 3) experience preceded by a ‘reasoning’ in order to be able to verify whether it is false or correct. Naturally, it is to the latter that Rohault attributes primary importance.

As can be seen, the science we take into consideration is the fruit of the reflection of long centuries: historical materialism is not at all indifferent to the honest considerations of human thought in general, not so much or simply when they coincide with our view of things, as our enemies maliciously insinuate, but when they are the fruit of thoughtful and objective inquiry.

If it is true that we claim that the theory was born in a single block, as Lenin aptly put it, it is also true, and it does not contradict this claim at all, that the birth pangs have been centuries and, we should say, millennia-long.

Regarding the experience-reason relationship, the question is whether experience is a world accessible to rational enquiry or not.

It is clear that currents of thought that view the world as negative (the crude nature of the senses) are inclined to regard this reciprocal exchange between senses and reason as precarious and problematic. Not only that, but it is a question of whether the world of experience is chaotic, or organised according to forms and relations that reason can or cannot discover.

It is with Locke that the idea of a constitutive activity of reason with respect to experience matures, but for rationalism, experience already has its own determined structure which reason must only attempt to explicate in clear and distinct concepts. In the seventeenth century, it is thought that experience intervenes in the formation of rationalist conceptuality.

It is well known that our current has always preferred the more orthodox and impersonal doctrine to the individualistic consciousness.

The reason for this lies in the fact that we claim only to the Party, as form and as historical substance, the possibility of overturning praxis, that is, of guiding and directing the historical forces, evoked by the class struggle, in the direction of Revolution and Communism, as a social regime conscious and capable of a happy and peaceful human organisation.

Our idiosyncrasy towards consciousness has a matrix and a historical reason: it has advised us to be suspicious of Reason based on the cogito; the surrogate, in the Demo-Liberal Schema (see Table IV) of the function and role of God, proper to the Authoritarian Schema (Table III).

For Tschinrhaus, the cogito is first of all a self-evident experience, the internal experience that Wolff understands as fundamentum principii contradictionis, according to which we perceive that a state of affairs is thus and precisely thus, because we perceive that it cannot be otherwise than thus.

Rationalism, as one can see, attributes to internal experience a fundamental function for establishing the relationship between external and internal experience, and the possibility of giving this material a satisfactory conceptual formalisation.

The limit of the cogito, understood as indubitable self-perception, also constitutes the limit of bourgeois science. It was Descartes who saw in the Subject, in Consciousness, the foundation of certainty. Hence the conviction that to know was not only to bring the unknown to the known, but the other to oneself, the shadowed areas to the transparency of the I.

Once it is established that the I IS, everything else becomes subordinate to it.

How to trust a truth that is the expression of the dominion of the I over what opposes and resists it? In the materialist and dialectical notion, first comes social and natural Being, then Consciousness. Historical materialism prides itself on having discovered the social subsoil, and of ascribing to it, as Economy, the viscous, vital, despised region of social vitality, the basis of all superstructures.

Without retreating before it, Marx, entering with the dignity and coherence of Science, without civility (all cowardice must here be dead, it is written on the gate of Hell), into its circles, discovers that it is possible to identify its forms and dynamics.

Does it perhaps follow that Marx goes so far as to say that the Consciousness of that Economy can become clear and transparent, like the I of Cartesian illusion? In the Party, an organic consciousness, with all the limitations we attach to such a definition, the methodical arrangement of external and internal experience (class struggles, social upheavals, wars between states; in short, the innumerable manifestations of social events) is possible, even if not absolute: this is because we recognise only in it a heritage of doctrine and knowledge which, under certain favourable historical conditions, is capable of overturning praxis.

The Party has always wondered how much it can influence class relations through its conscious intervention. For historical materialism, it is a great source of concern and study how much the class organ can do, in relation to the differentiated realities that economic forms assume; and what organs of class defence to rely on in different historical situations.

Can it delude itself into acting consciously on them to influence and direct them arbitrarily?

The Party has never given up intervening in these forms, knowing, however, that it cannot do so at will. It is, and always has been, a matter of evaluating their potential in the shifting vicissitudes of the class struggle, knowing how to make distinctions in the different areas of Capital’s development, but always aiming to grasp the unifying links at the general and international scale.

The historical Party of the proletariat cannot afford the luxury of adhering to a simply rational form of social reality. The rationalist attitude recognises that there is a rational foundation to experience, as well as an empirical foundation of reason, but then argues that the former level can exist independently of the latter. In this way, it cannot refrain from privileging Reason as an internal experience.

In our eyes, this is an ideological position and a historical product which we evaluate for what it is, namely, as a superfetation typical of bourgeois ideology, which shows itself capable of overturning the authoritarian Schema, but is not yet able to read history according to our unmistakable dialectical version.

Rationalism in the theoretical field could be posited as the premise of the historical Enlightenment, which, carrying its attack on feudal-type authoritarianism, promoted the bourgeois revolution.

Along with it, our current has recognised the revolutionary value of the Ideologues, who dealt heavy blows to the absolutist edifice. At the same time, however, it is unwilling to recognise the absolute value of the Idea, of Consciousness as preceding natural and social Reality, and therefore capable of moving everything, independently of the formless matter of social relations, of the inextricable tangle of the economy, which only with the English, such as Adam Smith, becomes a subsoil readable through the scientific method.

Under the push of the bourgeois class, the nexuses of the molecular experience of society become endowed with meaning and even decisive for its control and valorisation.

The scientific paradigm of the Aristotelian mould prevented the empirical disciplines from being considered scientific. This is the crucial point that had to be addressed by the emerging bourgeois science; in reality already partly dissolved in the practical experience of the new organisation of labour. It was a question, in the ideological sphere, of drawing conclusions in the preparation of a social science that our current makes follow, as a model, the transcendentalist (authoritarian) one, which we call demo-liberal.

Reflection on the value of the doctrine and on the preference with regard to the use of the term consciousness leads us, not just today, to dismantle and critically examine the neurotic myth of the I, not only as a means of attacking the enemy ideology, but also as a permanent internal clarification on the nature and function of the class Party.

Dismantling the neurotic myth of the Party consists in recognising that the delusion of omnipotence imported into it by the class enemy and conveyed by the Stalinist experience, is the product of the degeneration and betrayal of sound revolutionary theory.

In our tradition, the Left has always adhered to a dialectical version of the Party as form and as history, especially when it was attempted, during the degeneration of Moscow, to resolve external and internal problems by means of ukases and false discipline.

When the Left has had to explain the value of its golden isolation (never absolute silence...), it has done so in order that within the truth of the Party, the dogma would not be absolutised. We have never forgotten the Virtues of the Party, when silence and isolation required the reorganisation and definition-crystallisation of our theses, according to the rules of internal life based on organic centralism.

The Party has learned not to fall into useless revolutionary phraseology, which only hides impotence; not to fall into the dangerous forms of both primary and secondary exaltation.

In this way, the Party has never ceased to be attentive, and to struggle with its few adherents, in the most imperceptible forms of conscious class struggle, despite the counter-revolution, demonstrating adherence to the simplest and most immediate forms of class membership.

In order to explore the depths of the economy and understand the messages of its ‘demons’, it is necessary for the relationship between party and class to be healthy and correct: neither the Party’s rhetoric, nor its opposite, i.e. its negation, is the correct formula. Neither the exaltation of Consciousness, nor its reduction to the formless aspect of matter, productive forces, and relations of production, are the straight path for the overturning of praxis, for the Revolution.

For this series of considerations, not of today, but permanent and invariant in the life of the Party in its relations with the class, we cannot renounce the definition and claim of a strong-scientific paradigm.

Just as the bourgeoisie already found itself in need of overturning the Aristotelian model of considering the empirical disciplines, so the proletariat has found in historical and dialectical materialism the necessary interpretation for its historical affirmation.

It has drawn the extreme and necessary consequences that bourgeois ideology could not draw precisely because of its class limitations, which, if it could reject the Aristotelian model, it could not radically recognise that the true problem of Philosophy is not to contemplate the world, but to transform it.

R. Goclenius, one of the first who addressed this question in ‘Problemata Logica’ (1597), argues: ‘there can be demonstration of the certain contingent... science and demonstration concern the absolutely necessary entities and those contingent ones that are mostly subject to becoming. But there is science and demonstration of these (i.e. of the contingent entities) not insofar as they are contingent, but insofar as they are close to the absolutely necessary entities’. Hence the revolutionary theory appears, and is invariant!

Jungius, more cautiously, argues that in addition to necessary entities, only those apparently contingent, taken in their kind, can fall under the domain of science. However, he adds that even of the truly contingent entities, less suited to constitute science, a science according to analogy, or in its kind, is possible.

We are at the first steps, in the modern age, towards the recognition that science is possible as a thematisation and analysis of movement.

Society is in motion, or rather, it is Movement, and this is recognised. It is a question of preparing a scientific schema that is capable of representing such a complex reality.

The need to formalise the new type of paradigm is expressed by G.B. Baliani, who in a letter to Galileo dated 10 July 1639 writes: ‘I have indeed judged that experience must be placed as principles of the sciences, when they are certain... I plan to fully update this in a little treatise which I intend to publish in due course on secular matters, and to show how science does nothing else in us, and that the search for causes belongs to another habit, called Wisdom... and this because the principles of the sciences tend to be definitions, axioms, and petitions, which, in natural things, are mostly experiences, and upon these are founded astronomy, music, mechanics, perspective, and all the others’.

Thus, within the natural sciences, experience becomes part of the Principles. No longer the jumbled and confused reality of the crude senses, but the principal way through which one begins to recognise that science does not consist in the application of absolute principles to experience, but on the contrary the search for reliable experiences, capable of becoming themselves starting points for a wise reading of the entire book of the Universe.

In the sphere of social science we are mostly in line at the end of the transcendentalist Schema, at the admission that experience is the sphere of reality to be investigated; no longer the social groups understood as pre-established roles upon which order rests; but the recognition that their active and troubled historical dynamics, which with dialectical materialism will become the study of the laws of class struggle, is the real object of knowledge and action.

The new so-called weak scientific paradigm therefore also admits empirical premises. In science in general, the two paradigms begin to operate and confront each other, intersecting, exchanging functions, and often contradicting each other.

The great Cristian Huygens himself maintains that ‘the demonstrations concerning optics, as occurs in all sciences where the geometry of matter is studied, are based on truths derived from experience’.

But in order to arrive at a single paradigm it is necessary to arrive at Thomasius, who, attacking the Aristotelian paradigm, says: ‘I hear it said that Aristotle prescribed that science concerns necessary entities, but not contingent ones, which are also artefacts, that is, laboratory tests; however, this prescription does not bind us, so we reverse it. Only of contingent entities is there science. Contingent entities are accidents, thus there is science only of accidents... but not of substances’.

And so, gradually, paving the way, we arrive at the considerations of the rationalist Leibniz who, in contrast to Locke, defends the reliability and cognitive function of opinion: ‘Opinion, founded on the probable, perhaps deserves the name of knowledge; otherwise, historical knowledge and many others would lose all value’ (‘New Essays on Human Understanding’). We are not yet at the classical Enlightenment-style opinion rules the world; but the ice is broken, and Metaphysics is relegated to the margins of science by the modern bourgeoisie. The decisive step forward towards the unification of the scientific paradigm of demonstration is the work of the great Leibniz. Aware of the obvious difference between necessary propositions proper to reason and empirical evidence, he proposes a distinction between what is certain and what is necessary. A proposition can be certain even if it is not necessary, i.e. even if its negation does not imply contradiction. Not only that, but the concept of Truth is distinguished from that of Necessity: All existential propositions are certainly true, but not necessary.

Contingent truths cannot be resolved into identical analyses through a finite analysis, but they can approach them, even if only automatically, through a progressive resolutio.

To finally consider a proposition as an axiom, it is not indispensable that it be necessary; it is sufficient that it be an immediate and indemonstrable truth.

We have thus clearly entered the modernity of the way in which demonstration is conceived in Science; the Aristotelian system, its claim that science is the Science of the necessary and not the contingent, has been superseded.

Increasingly, the contingent, in mathematical models, will be formalised according to the criterion of progressive resolutio.

That is, the mathematician makes use of formalism, without claiming to flatten empiricism into the truth of Reason. This is ultimately our Method: between the existential certain and the rational necessary, there is a complex range of propositions that should be interconnected and refined until they form a single intermediate proposition, capable of serving as a buffer-layer, preventing the flattening of immediate experience and rational demonstration based on universal premises.

If it were possible to do without this substratum, life would be entirely a revelation, in the sense that all stages of Consciousness would be immediate and present.

Historical materialism, in Lenin’s masterful remarks on Aristotle’s dialectic, rightly argued that life is neither a continuous miracle, as certain faux naive expressions of hermeneutics believe, nor a flat and dull reality incapable of revolution and qualitative leaps, as democratic-relativist currents claim. In reality, the capacity to regenerate itself within the dialectic of movement is intrinsic to contingent being.

The need to assimilate certain, therefore unprovable, experience and convert it into Universal Truth is a projection of the so-called metaphysical demand, of the human need to consider eternal what is movement, to render immortal what is governed by its natural physiology, according to which what is born is worthy of perishing. This attitude of the spirit is well resolved in Wittgenstein’s proposition: ‘Not how the World is the Mystic, but the fact that the World is’; somewhat equivalent to G.B. Vico’s verum ipsum factum. From this attitude descends the reduction of the transcendent to the immanent, the discovery of the value in itself of experience, whose relativisation and emptying has always been the typical operation of the well-fed sacerdotal hierarchies, an ideological expression of the ruling classes, concerned with emptying the struggle of the subjected classes of content.

This operation, which we ascribe to the Superstructure, nevertheless has a value not be overlooked, because its power influences the class struggle in a constant and subtle form, even if we deny it, in the long run, to have won over the necessities of the Revolution.

The new scientific paradigm thus consists of mixed propositions, whose premises are partly necessary, and partly derived from facts and observations. However, these mixed conclusions remain empirical, because their certainty cannot be higher than that of the weak premises, i.e. the empirical premise. Ultimately, it is now recognised that experiments become part of the scientific paradigm. This is the crucial point.

Naturally, unpopular to the old schema, now blurred and inadequate to the new needs, the new demo-liberal form looms. The new general conditions of the social order are characterised by: 1) Bourgeoisie becoming the leading class and capable of replacing clergy and nobility. 2) Parliament putting itself forward as the central organ of power capable of exercising the legislative function. 3) Freedom for science, rather than its authoritarian control, being invoked as the basis for the development of culture. 4) Practical life becoming the place where religious commitment is manifested: growing esteem for honestly achieved and enjoyed prosperity instead of the exaltation of poverty and penance. 5) Education of all the people and general use of the vernacular language (instead of the no longer understood Latin). 6) Greater importance given to substance and practice over the valorisation of form and theory. 7) Greater acceptance of the principle of freedom of Conscience, worship, speech (instead of the strict control of the Inquisition). 8) Clear separation of spheres of influence between State and Church and high esteem for the political authorities (instead of the struggle by the Catholic authorities against the civil authorities).

Leibniz’s admission of a kind of weaker demonstration, which admits non-necessary empirical propositions as premises, and of which, demonstration in the strict sense is to be understood as a special case, is the real novelty often overlooked by critics. Yet Leibniz himself delves into, but does not clarify, the epistemological status of the empirical propositions admitted among the premises, and how these might be attenuated; a sign that the times are still immature; but that, amid the uncertainty of his contemporaries, an old world is about to fall under the blows of the new productive forces, whose vitality lies not so much in the Consciousness that is laboriously forming, but in its youthful and disruptive impetus.

Even for the Bourgeoisie, as for all social forces, first comes Being, then Consciousness.

What could our opportunist enemies possibly have objected to us when they accused us, in words difficult for ordinary proletarians to hear, of being determinists? As is well-known, they accused us of being stagnant, resignedly stuck on doctrinaire positions incapable of following the movement, the continuous transformation of historical circumstances. What do they have to say now, precisely those who, in running after changed circumstances, have decreed not only the end of communism, but the very credibility of the idea of communism?

Our revolutionary nihilism has allowed us to witness the fatal fall of the traitors, confirming our predictions; with some delay, yes, but unequivocally and definitively. Now we are certain, documents and facts in hand, that no one except diehards like us upholds not only the possibility, but the historical necessity of communism.

On the subject of determinism, naturally dialectical, we oppose the sophisticated and feeble theorists of statistical and aleatory causality with the truth of action at a distance. This means that there remain few of us who uphold the validity of the classical concepts of causality, not only in the sphere of physical phenomena, but also in the certainly more complex sphere of social phenomena. To many, let us say to the vast majority of the infidels, the existence of action at a distance seems problematic. But we will not fully understand the causal structure until we understand this mechanism.

In the experimental scientific paradigm that claims the requirement of verification, can one accept action at a distance, indemonstrable? The scientific statute requires controllability and repeatability as criteria for testing its validity, lest we fall into magic, esotericism, or vision. Or else it is necessary to shift the discourse to so-called second causes, to the point of risking falling into the mechanistic model.

In science worthy of that name, it is necessary to know the laws of processes and interactions, as well as the more generic statistical regularities. Instead, falling back on statistical causality as a generic reference for any kind of indeterministic causality brings out the constant conjunctions and relations of statistical regularity.

In statistical causality, the mechanisms of causality are not mentioned.

In action at a distance, it becomes increasingly difficult to detect conjunctive Forks and so the need for the so-called screening off increases indefinitely. In simpler words, many causal links are screened out by other processes.

The world as a whole thus ends up assuming an opaque image, behind which the deus absconditus of the true Truth hides. This happens when by science one means not the real process of bare things, but an intimate reality that only the theology of impostor priests would be able to intuit and administer.

This is precisely what historical materialism has refuted with its critique of bourgeois ideology, as always.

In determinism, it is believed that every event is connected to the whole. Freedom coincides with necessity (determinatio est negatio); that is, it is thought that the chain of connections is coherent and rational.

In indeterminism, it is argued that the event is not always the product of a causal link, but an expression that cannot be explained in relation to a cause. For example: a person can suffer a heart attack without an external cause. A neutron can spontaneously disintegrate, releasing an electron or proton. In short, in the indeterminism model, the event is free.

In the determinist conception, every event is produced by an interaction with the whole, even when we are unable to know it in analytical form. The answer to this difficulty is: We do not know, but we will know.

There are two types of causal axioms: 1) the production of the event, 2) its propagation. Causal interactions are the agents of production that determine changes in intersecting processes.

Causal processes are the patterns of propagation. They transmit causal influences through the universe.

A strong and visible causal link sometimes remains screened off in relation to the world, but becomes visible through one of its manifestations. A classic case, in theology, of the triad God Father – Son – Spirit, or of its immanentisation carried out by Hegel in the triad Idea – Nature – Spirit, which dialectical materialism recognised as valid from the point of view of dialectical logic, but to be purified of residual theological disguises, to be overturned, as we say. Being screened off in relation to the world leaves to God or to the Idea that halo of mystery, of transcendent uncaused cause that cannot be resolved in some conjunctive Forks. The different ways of understanding causal links, either in dialectical form or according to other conjunctions, is part of formal logic, which historical materialism does not underestimate, without ever falling into the idolatry of forms and losing sight of the power of concrete-sensorial experience. If we attend to it with much interest, it is because we have not abandoned the possibility of transforming reality in a revolutionary sense, in the historical enterprise of emancipating the subaltern classes. In relation to this endeavour, not every or any logical model is reducible to another. This is why we did not deny at the time our preference for dialectical logic. Nor does it seem appropriate to regret it, given its instrumental value, and its usefulness as a guide to action.

While the supposedly powerful ones of the earth have no qualms about admitting that they sail by sight and do not rule out that the ship might crash on the rocks, we communists are of the opinion that without a general vision of the future, it is not possible not only to live in the present, but also to understand history and the past.

The human species has written in its genes not only a biological, but also a cultural programme, according to an interaction that in our time postulates in no uncertain terms the necessity of the Proletarian Revolution.

It is thus that the question on the meaning of life on which bourgeois thinkers hypocritically question themselves, cannot have a particularistic and short-sighted answer, that is, proper to and consonant with the class reasons of the bourgeoisie, but a general and species-specific one, which only the revolutionary class is capable of conceiving through its political organ, the Party. Only the Party of the working class, which interprets its needs and necessities, and consequently the entire interests and reasons for life of the human species, is capable of designing a plan that does not stop at biological and economic impulses; but, starting from them, without underestimating them, indeed realistically leveraging them, is capable of a general historical vision.

The Party of the working class is aware of the system of relations that binds the human being to nature, according to a bond that religions have called God, to the point of personalising it, precisely because man refuses to live without projecting around himself and beyond himself his likeness and his desire to shape the world according to his needs.

The Party’s function is essentially that of keeping intact the Programme, which no one has invented with their head, neither leader nor prophet, but is written in letters of fire in the history of the liberation of the class of the exploited of today and of all times. The Party, in its essential function today, is called upon to restore the revolutionary organ: it is therefore not simply a matter of foreseeing and keeping alive the sense of the future, but of acting, within the scope of concrete historical possibilities, so that no struggle in the direction of communism, however limited, is dispersed.

Against all facile voluntarist exasperation, it is aware that the transit towards the social regime of human freedom is not marked solely by the great stages and the great moments, but also by the obscure movements that prepare them. This is a task from which it cannot shirk, on pain of compromising the outcome. This commitment can be fulfilled not so much through the repetition of tired rituals, but through practical adherence to the needs that arise, without yielding, without compromising on principles, without shortcuts of convenience. The morality of the militant lies in this: in the acceptance of the historical task that reality delivers to him; be it exhilarating and studded with victories, or obscure and strewn with poor results, such as the contingent moment.

After the setbacks and betrayals, is it sufficient that there are those remaining faithful to the programme for the future to still have meaning? We have always maintained that this is the minimum condition, without which the struggles that will inevitably resume will be fruitless, due to the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production.

If one were to delude oneself that the forces of history act by their own motion and are able to automatically pursue the goal, we would fall into the most feeble economism. We maintain that History cannot unfold without a conscious plan, that it remains valid and continues to act by virtue of those who remain faithful to the programme, despite the highs and lows of historical developments. The Party, even when reduced to its historical minimum, is the only leaven that continues to act within the masses, against all disbelief and idolatry raging in the class.

It is well known that the Party does not originate from the statistical struggles of the class, and that it is instead parallel and external to them. The militants are those who remain anchored to the programme, and measure the historical task not on the short life of each, but on the impersonality of the project.