

Preface

The text we are publishing here is the written report of a meeting on the same subject that took place on August 29-30, 1953, in Trieste, and which appeared in issues 16-20 of our organ at the time, Il programma comunista.

At that time the destiny of the “Free Territory” was still uncertain, one of the many political and economical monstrosities of the post-war “settlement” in Europe and the world. The Trieste drama was a small event in the world picture, but nevertheless enormous for those who had to endure it. During the war, Istrian Italians had suffered genocide at the hands of Tito’s partisans, but this was kept out of main information channels by the Italian Stalinists, who did not want “communism” to be associated with the persecution of ethnic Italians. In 1953, the Trieste area was militarily occupied by the Allied Forces, and disputed by Italy and Yugoslavia, although inhabited by a majority of Italians. Most of Istria had already gone over to Tito: the remaining territory, with independent administration, would eventually be partitioned in 1954 with the city of Trieste going to Italy and the rest to present-day Slovenia. For many it was a tragedy, since without a hinterland there was no longer work for the port, and most of Trieste’s youth had to migrate; yet thousands of Italians were expelled from what was then Yugoslavia, making the situation in the city even worse.

These sordid contemporary events gave the International Communist Party the opportunity to present fundamental and classical Marxist theses, in a trenchant way, directly antithetical to the deformation operated on them by opportunism; deformations coming either from the Stalinist counter-revolution or from false left groups; all of them unable to appreciate factors such as those of race and nation which, although not belonging to the totality of direct objectives of the communist revolution, are historically present on the path that dialectically leads to it. In this quality, such factors make the revolution closer and at the same time compete against it in an interplay that Marxism has never ignored; in given times and in definite historical areas they have their say within the frame of the proletarian strategy of double revolutions.

This translation makes a powerful Marxist text available for the first time in English. At present the national issue is at the forefront of bourgeois political discussion in the English-speaking world, notably in the United Kingdom, with the rise of an invigorated “anti-European” British chauvinism and strong nationalist movements in Scotland and Wales. Meanwhile the competing nationalisms in Northern Ireland (Unionist and Republican) remain unresolved. “Factors of race and nation in Marxist theory” outlines the proletarian party’s critique of such currents in the broadest possible historical context and therefore stands in the starkest possible contrast to the pseudo-Marxism of various leftist factions in the British Isles, all of which serve only to disorientate and divide the working class.

This powerful party text is within the great Marxist tradition of “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” and of “Anti-Dühring”, and possesses the same dialectical vigour and sharp sarcasm.

We dedicate it to the young militants of the working class and of the communist movement, for them to use it to sharpen the “weapons of criticism”, and hoping that the moment when these can be turned into “criticism by weapons” won’t be long to come.



















INTRODUCTION

The impotence of the tritely “negativist” attitude





1. Race, nation or class ?

1. The approach of the Italian and international communist left has never had anything in common with the false, dogmatic, sectarian extremism which claims to go beyond the forces at work in real historic processes using a lot of verbal negations and hollow literary formulas.

With a recent “On the Thread of Time” (“Racial influence in the peasantry, class influence among coloured people” (Pressione razziale del contadiname, pressione classista dei popoli colorati) which appeared in Il programma comunista, n. 14, 1953) we have undertaken a series of presentations on the national and colonial question, and on the agrarian question, that’s to say on the principal contemporary social questions bringing into play the most important forces other than industrial capital and the waged proletariat. We have demonstrated, with the help of classic citations, that perfectly orthodox and radical revolutionary Marxism recognises the importance of these factors in the current epoch, and therefore the necessity of taking an appropriate class and party approach in their regard. To this end, we have relied not just on citations from Marx, Engels and Lenin, but also on the fundamental texts of the Left Opposition in the International from the years 1920 to 1926 as well as the Communist Party of Italy, which was at the time an integrative part of it.

If you are to believe the groundless insinuations of its adversaries, already committed at the time to the path of opportunism, which had led them to renounce the class basis of Marxism and to sink into counter-revolutionary politics, the Italian Left would have shared the anti-dialectical and metaphysical error, according to which the communist party should never concern itself with anything other than the duel between the pure forces of modern capital and factory workers, the duel that would lead to proletarian revolution; in other words, it should deny and ignore the influence of every other class and every other factor on the social struggle. In our recent work of restoring the fundamental economic points and the revolutionary Marxist programme, we have, on the contrary, largely demonstrated that even today this “pure phase” does not exist anywhere, not even in the most industrialised countries where the political domination of the bourgeoisie is longest established, such as England, France and the United States. Moreover, we have shown that this pure phase will never exist, not in a single country, and that it is not a necessary condition for the revolutionary victory of the proletariat.

It is therefore pure stupidity to say that because Marxism is the theory of the modern class struggle between capitalists and workers, and communism is the movement that directs the struggle of the proletariat, we deny that both the social forces of other classes (the peasantry, for example), and racial and national orientations and pressures have any historical impact whatsoever, and therefore we don’t consider any of these factors when defining our action.

2. In presenting the course of prehistory in a new and original fashion, historical materialism is not blinded to considering, studying or evaluating the processes by which families, groups, tribes, races and peoples are formed up to the formation of nations and political States. It also explains these, showing that they are tied to productive forces and conditioned by their development, and that they therefore illustrate and confirm the theory of economic determinism.

It is true that the family and the horde are forms that one also meets in animal species. But even among the most evolved, those which begin to exhibit examples of collective organisation with a view to self-preservation and common defence, and even the harvesting and storage of foodstuffs, one does not yet encounter the productive activity which distinguishes mankind (even the most primitive) from the animal. That’s why it would be better to say that what distinguishes the human species is not knowledge, or thought, or a particle of divine light, but its capacity to produce not only objects of consumption, but also objects designed for later production, such as the first rudimentary tools for hunting, fishing, harvesting of fruits and, later on, agricultural and artisanal production. This primary need to organise the production of tools imposed itself – and this is what characterises humankind –on the need to discipline and regulate the process of reproduction, substituting the occasional character of sexual relations with more complex forms than those of the animal kingdom. Above all it is in Engels’ classic text on the origin of the family, to which we will largely refer, that light is shed at least on the close connection between the evolution of familial institutions and the evolution of forms of production, if not on their common identity.

Embracing the period preceding the appearance of social classes (the goal of our entire theoretical battle is to show that classes are not eternal, that they have a beginning and they will have an end), the Marxist vision of the course of history thus offers the only possible explanation, resting on material, scientific foundations, of the function of clans, tribes and races, together with their gathering into ever more complex formations in consequence of the prevailing physical conditions, the expansion of productive forces and the technology at their collective disposal.

3. Appearing in various guises throughout history, nations, and their great armed struggles by and for themselves, are the decisive factor in the appearance of the bourgeois and capitalist social form and its extension across the entire globe. In his time Marx devoted as much attention to the struggles and wars that led to the formation of nations as he did to socio-economic processes. Given that the doctrine and the party of the proletariat were both in existence from 1848, Marx did not simply provide a theoretical explanation of these struggles in accordance with economic determinism; rather, he was anxious to establish the limits and the conditions of time and place for supporting uprisings and wars for national independence.

As soon as organised unities of people and of nations have broadly developed, and once the hierarchical forms of the State have come to overlay these unities and their social dynamism, differentiated into castes and classes, the racial and national factor follows through the historical epochs: slavery, lordship, feudalism, capitalism. In fact, as we will see in the second part of this work, and as we have often explained, the importance of this factor is not the same in these different epochs. In the modern epoch, which has seen the start and the continuation of the process whereby the feudal form, characterised by personal dependence and limited, localised exchange, has given way to the bourgeois form, characterised by economic servitude and the formation of great unitary national markets, extending to a global market, the systematisation of nationalities according to race, language, traditions and culture constitutes a fundamental force in the dynamic of history. This is the demand that Lenin summarised in the formula, one nation, one State, explaining that it was necessary to struggle for this while underlining that it is not a proletarian or socialist formula, but a bourgeois one. What Lenin advocated for Eastern Europe before 1917 is what Marx advocated, as everyone knows, for all of Western Europe (apart from England) from 1848 to 1871. This remains true today outside of Europe for immense inhabited parts of the world, even if this process is stimulated and accelerated by the power of economic and other exchanges at the global level. The problem of the position to take vis-à-vis the irresistible orientation of “backward” people in struggling for national independence is therefore a contemporary one.







2. Opportunism in the national question

4. The dialectic nub of the question is as follows: an alliance of the working class and its party with bourgeois strata in the armed struggle for anti-feudal revolutionary goals should not be considered as a renunciation of the doctrine and the politics of class struggle; however, even in historical situations and geographical areas where such an alliance is both necessary and unavoidable, it is essential to uphold totally, and even raise to the highest degree, the theoretical, political and programmatic critique of the objectives and the ideologies for which bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements are struggling.

In the third and final part of this text we will show that while fully supporting (for example) the independence of Poland or Ireland, Marx never ceased not only to condemn, but to demolish totally, with devastating sarcasm, the idealist baggage of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois partisans of democratic justice and popular liberty.

Although for us the national market and the centralised capitalist State are no more than an inevitable passage towards an international economy without the State and without markets, for these great priests of democracy, whom Marx ridiculed in the persons of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth, Sobieski etc, the formation of democratic nations constituted a point of arrival that would put an end to all social struggle. What they wanted was a homogenous national State where the bosses would no longer appear as a foreign body among the exploited workers. In reality, at this historic moment, the front bursts asunder and the working class throws itself into the civil war against the State and its “fatherland”. It is during the revolutionary processes and the bourgeois national wars for the formation of States in Europe (and today in Asia and Africa) that this moment comes closer and that these conditions mature: such is the ceaselessly changing problem that we have to make sense of, in the context of extremely variable developments.

5. Opportunism, treason, renunciation and the counter-revolutionary and pro-capitalist actions of today’s Stalinist pseudo-communists have in this domain, as well as in the more strictly economic and social sphere of “internal” politics, a dual significance. Not only do they put democratic demands and values back in fashion – through open and solid political alliances – even within the advanced capitalist West, where such alliances ceased to have any justification from 1871 onwards; more than this, they also encourage the masses’ religious respect for a popular national-patriotic ideology which is identical in all respects to that of their bourgeois allies, flattering the champions of politics which Marx and Lenin had thrashed without pity, thereby dutifully performing the hard task of destroying any class consciousness among workers who have the misfortune of following them.

Recognising that Marxist methodology has agreed to – in a specific historical and geographical context totally different from 20 th Century Europe – the participation of workers in national revolutionary alliances, does not in any way diminish the infamy of parties which, under the usurped name of communist and socialist parties, today lay claim to representing workers. In the [Second World] war that set the developed western countries of France, England, America, Italy, Germany and Austria against one another, when we saw the Russian State and all the parties of the former Third Communist International successively ally themselves with all the bourgeois States in the struggle, the Napoleon IIIs and Nicolas IIs had long since disappeared from the scene. Making such alliances meant renouncing Marxist principles, pure and simple. Principles such as were expressed on the one hand in the “Address” by the First International to the Paris Commune in 1871, on the other hand in Lenin’s theses on the war of 1914 and for the foundation of the Third International. In the first case, Marx declared a period of history closed and condemned for ever and a day every alliance with national armies, “Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national Governments are as one against the proletariat!”. In the second, Lenin established that once the phase of general imperialist wars had started, the politics of national States no longer had anything to do with democratic demands and national independence, and he roundly condemned all social-traitors on both sides of the Rhine and the Vistula.

Every revision that would seek to extend the cut-off dates of 1871 and 1917 to the years 1939 and 1953 – not to mention a prolongation ad infinitum – would be a concession to capitalism, which would come back to deny, purely and simply, the Marxist method for understanding history in its entirety, wiping away the watershed moments in history that it had brought to light: 1848 for Europe, 1905 for Russia. What’s more, this revisionism collides with Marxist social and economic analysis in its entirety, because it attempts to assimilate the recent fascist totalitarianisms (and not just fascist, at the time of the division of Poland!) within the relics of feudalism in the current epoch.

But, above all, the treason is complete with the second aspect of the renunciations, the total abandonment of the critique of the “values” particular to bourgeois thought, which exalt a world without classes and composed of popular autonomous entities, free nations, independent and pacific countries, as the final stage of the anguished path of humanity. Indeed, at the very moment when they were once again being coerced into forming alliances with the defenders of this corrupt programme, Marx and Lenin struggled doggedly to liberate the working class from the cult of the fatherland, the nation, democracy, these fetishes celebrated by the high priests of bourgeois radicalism; at the decisive moment, they knew how to break with them on the facts, and when the balance of forces permitted it they blocked their progress without mercy. Today’s renegades are the new priests of this cult and these myths: it’s not a historic pact that they would simply like to break later than originally intended; rather it is total enslavement to the demands of the capitalist bourgeoisie, for the greater good of the regime which confers it privilege and power.

This confirms what we have already demonstrated in the economic sphere, for example in our “Dialogue with Stalin”: Russia today is a State based on an accomplished capitalist revolution, whose patriotic flag flutters over its social merchandise and represents the most extreme militarism.

6. It would be a very grave error to fail to see or to deny that ethnic and national factors still have a very important impact on today’s world. Among the tasks currently at hand is the study of the historical and geographic limits within which rebellions for national independence tied to a social revolution against pre-capitalist forms (Asiatic, slave States, feudal) as well as the foundation of modern types of national State still represent a necessary condition for the progression to socialism (for example in India, China, Egypt, Iran etc.)

The precise evaluation of different situations is rendered difficult, on the one hand by the xenophobia engendered in these countries by the brutal nature of capitalist colonialism, on the other hand by the large diffusion around the world of productive resources and products which reach the most remote markets; but at the global level the burning question of 1920 (which was even posed in the former Russian empire), the question of political and armed support for the independence movements of oriental peoples, remains.

He who says, for example, that the relationship between industrial capital and the working class is the same in Belgium as it is in Siam [Thailand] and that in the one case as in the other one can lead the struggle without taking account of factors of race and nation, is not demonstrating his revolutionary extremism. He is simply proving that he has understood nothing that Marxism has to teach.

Cutting Marxism off from the breadth, depth and complexity of its analysis is not the way to win the right to denounce and one day defeat the miserable scum who have renounced it.



PART ONE

Reproduction of the species and the productive economy,

two aspects of the material basis of the historical process





3. Work and sex



1. Historical materialism loses all sense if you regard sexual appetite as entirely unrelated to the social economy, on the basis that it is individual in character and that it takes on forms of expression arising outside of economic relations, ultimately spiritual and evanescent in nature.

If we wanted to direct our polemic on this subject against the open and direct opponents of Marxism we would need to appeal to a much vaster scientific body of work, while regarding today’s venal and decadent official science with the customary suspicion. But as is usually the case, we are more concerned about those currents of thought – counter-revolutionary currents – which proclaim their adherence to certain aspects of Marxism but which, as soon as they are confronted with fundamental questions for the human community, claim that these are outside the scope of Marxism.

It is obvious that by setting up a hierarchy of values in their explanation of nature, the believers and idealists would like to put issues of sex and love on a pedestal and in a sphere far above that of the economy, which must be understood in the vulgar sense of the satisfaction of alimentary needs and suchlike. If the element that raises homo sapiens above, and distinguishes it from, other animal species is not the physical effect of a long evolution in a complex environment of material factors, but rather the result of an immaterial particle of cosmic spirit, then clearly the reproduction of one being from another, the reproduction of a thinking brain to another, must surely occur on a nobler plane than filling your stomach. Without going so far as to present this spirit-person as immaterial, if we however concede that a virtue or a power is present in the dynamic of human thought which pre-dates matter or exists outside of matter, the mechanism for the generation of individuals is thus transferred to some mysterious realm in which everyone has, like their procreators, immutable faculties, presumed to exist long before any contact with physical nature and any cognition.

But dialectical materialism itself has no excuse if it believes that the economic infrastructure, in whose forces and laws we look for an explanation of the political history of humanity, only covers production and consumption of the more or less vast range of goods necessary for individual subsistence; if it believes that the domain of the economic infrastructure is limited to material relations between individuals, the standards, rules and laws of social life being determined by the interplay of forces between these innumerable isolated molecules, while a complete set of life’s satisfactions are excluded. For many dilettantes, these include satisfactions arising from sex appeal or aesthetic and intellectual pleasures. Such a view of Marxism is radically wrong and represents, in fact, the very worst anti-Marxist notions currently circulating. It implicitly and inexorably falls back not just into bourgeois idealism but even, in the crassest way, into individualism, a no less essential facet of reactionary thought, and in so doing it advances the biological or rather the psychic individual as the basic unit.

Material factors do not “create” the legal, political or philosophical superstructure via a process taking place at the level of each individual, nor even across generations of individuals, remaining then to create “norms” for the economic substructure and for its cultural crowning (the superstructure). The material base is a system of tangible physical factors which embraces everybody, and influences them right down to their individual behaviour, a system which only exists to the extent that these individuals constitute a social species; the superstructure is the product of these basic conditions, a product that can be determined and evaluated through the analysis of these conditions, independently of the thousand and one particular developments and minor differences that can exist between one person and another.

This error, to limit Marxism’s field of application, is thus a fundamental error of principle. If, in order to examine the causes of historic processes, you resort on the one hand to ideal factors that are alien to physical nature, and on the other hand to the pre-eminence of the derisory individual citizen, you exclude dialectical materialism from every domain, and you make it impossible to draw any conclusions, even at the level of the butcher’s or baker’s book-keeping.

2. Those who renounce the authority of Marxism in the domains of sexuality and reproduction, with all their multiple consequences, ignore the fundamental opposition between bourgeois and communist views of the economy, and thereby abandon in the same breath the mighty theoretical edifice that Marx built on the ruins of capitalist schools of thought. For the latter, the economy is a set of relationships based on the exchange of goods between two individuals for their mutual benefit, including labour power; they conclude from this that there has never been and never could be an economy without exchange, without commodities and without property. For us, on the contrary, the economy comprises all the vast complex of human activities, with all its influence on the natural environment; economic determinism does not pertain only to the era of private property, but rather to the entire history of the species.

All Marxists consider the following theses to be given: private property is not eternal; it was unknown to the era of primitive communism and we are moving towards the era of social communism; the family and above all the monogamous family is not eternal, it appeared late in human history, and it will have to disappear at a higher level of development; the State is not eternal, but rather appeared at a very advanced stage of “civilisation” and it will disappear along with class-divided society, that is to say, with classes themselves.

Every vision of historical praxis based on the dynamic of individuals and which makes concessions, even if limited, to their autonomy, their initiative, liberty, conscience, free will or other such hokum, is obviously incompatible with these truths. But these truths can only be proved by accepting that the determining factor is the laborious process whereby human communities organise themselves to adapt to the difficult obstacles imposed upon on them in the time and space in which they live, something that does not resolve itself through the billions of cases of individual adaptation, but rather through the resolution of a problem which more and more appears in a singular fashion, that of the continued adaptation of the species, in its entirety, to prevailing external conditions. All of this inexorably leads to the numerical growth of the species and the dissolution of the barriers that separate its members, the astounding expansion of the technical means at its disposal, the impossibility of employing these means without the organisation of innumerable individuals into communities, etc.

For a primitive people, you can view sociology as simply the challenges of food supply, since even this minimum requirement is no longer within reach of individual effort, as is the case for animals. But then sociology embraces public health, reproduction, eugenics (and tomorrow, the annual planning of births).

4. Individual and species

3. The maintenance of the individual, this individual who is presumed to be the primary mover behind events, is nothing but a derived and secondary manifestation of the maintenance and development of the species; contrary to traditional opinions, it owes nothing to a natural or supernatural providence or to the effect of instinct or reason. This is all the more so when we consider a social species and an advanced, complex society.

It may seem like stating the obvious to say that if the individual was immortal, everything would revert to the maintenance of the individual, as the fundament and cause of every phenomenon. But being immortal means being immutable, never ageing. A living organism, on the other hand – and an animal organism in the first instance – is host to a substantial sequence of movements, circulations and metabolic reactions which bring about inexorable change. It mutates down to the minutest cell. In actual fact it is absurd to imagine a living entirety that continually replaces the elements that it loses yet stays the same; as if this could be a crystal you plunged into a solution of its own chemically pure solid substance, which would grow or diminish under the effect of a cyclical variation of temperature or exterior pressures. But if some have spoken about the life of crystals (and today, the atom), it is precisely because they can be born, grow, diminish, disappear and even double and multiply.

This may seem banal but it is useful to demonstrate that the fetishistic belief of many (also alleged Marxists) in the primacy of individual biology is but a throw-back to the first coarse beliefs in the immortality of the soul. This bourgeois egoism has flagrantly grafted itself on religions, becoming even more fiercely contemptuous of the life of the species and charity for the species, putting the subjective person in this fantastic form at the centre of things, at the expense of others, by asserting the immortality of the soul.

It certainly brings no pleasure to think that our poor carcases won’t be around for long on this earth; those who don’t believe in life beyond the grave thus seek an alternative solace in intellectualist illusions – today existentialist illusions – that each individual has (or believes he has) a unique and indelible brand-identity, even if expressing this only means attaching yourself passively to the latest fad in a sheep-like fashion, ever happy to ape all the other dupes and schlemiels. And so it is that the ineffable heights of emotion, sensual delight, artistic exaltation and cerebral ecstasy gush forth, all sensations that you can only hope to experience in the privacy of your individual cell – when in fact, the truth is the exact opposite.

Returning to the actual material facts as they appear before our noses, it is clear that every adult individual who is of sound mind and body can produce, when he is in full possession of his faculties, what he needs for daily subsistence (let us return to the situation in a completely primitive economy). But the very insecurity of “every man for himself” would very soon bring about the end of the individual (and of the species, if it consisted of a series of individuals crushed up against one another in close proximity) if it were not for the ebb and flow of reproduction. In an organic totality, individuals who subsist on their own are few and far between: the old cannot produce much and the young must be fed so that they can produce in the future. Every economic cycle is unimaginable, and every economic equation impossible, if you don’t introduce these essential facts into the calculus: age, effectiveness, health.

If we wanted to be completely pedestrian, we could write the economic formula for a parthenogenetic, unisex humanity. But we are not in a position to confirm its existence. Therefore, we have no choice but to introduce the sex factor, because reproduction is assured only by two distinct sexes, and also to consider the pauses between gestation and lactation …

It is only after we have integrated these factors that we can claim to have taken into account all of the conditions which form the economic “base”, the economic “substructure” of society. Abandoning forever the individual, this cipher who has never worked out how to make himself immortal, nor even to reproduce on his own, and who will become less and less capable as humanity continues its mighty progress, we shall grasp the infinite range of expressions made possible by the species, including the most elevated expressions of thought.

A very recent article (by Yourgrau, of Johannesburg) expounded the theory of the General Theory of Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who sought to bring the two opposing principles of vitalism and mechanism into synthesis. Recognising through gritted teeth that materialism is gaining ground in biology, he remembers this paradox that is not so easy to rebut: one rabbit is not a rabbit; only two rabbits can be a rabbit. Blessed individual, you have now been expelled from your last line of defence, that of Onan! It is thus absurd to understand the economy without taking account of the reproduction of the species. We know this already from our classic texts. From the very first lines of the preface to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels expresses one of the cornerstones of Marxism in these terms:

“According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organisation under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other ”.

Ever since the theory was first put forward, the materialist interpretation of history has embraced, not only the degrees of development of technology and productive labour, but also the “production of the producers”, in other words, sexuality, and has accorded both the same level of importance. Marx says that the working class is the primary productive force. It is therefore every bit as important to understand how the working class reproduces itself as it is to understand the production and reproduction of commodities, wealth and capital. In Rome, the wage labourer of antiquity, he who owned nothing, was officially defined not as a worker but as a proletarian, one who has no wealth other than his children (proles). His distinguishing function was not to give to society and the ruling classes the product of his manual labour, but rather to produce tomorrow’s labourers, without controls or limits, in his shabby alcove.

Today’s petty-bourgeois – in his empty-headedness – imagines that this second function must be as sweet as the first is bitter. The petty-bourgeois is as much a philistine pig as the grand bourgeois; but he has no means to oppose the power of the latter except by variously giving vent to his own impotence.

4. In the same way that the first communities organised themselves for productive labour with a rudimentary technology, so too they organised themselves with a view to mating and procreating, as well as raising and protecting children. The family is therefore, in its various guises, a relationship of production, adapting according to different environments and the available productive forces.

We cannot recount in this presentation each and every stage of savagery and barbarism that humanity has travelled, each characterised by familial resources and aggregates; on this point we refer back to Engels’ brilliant study on the matter.

Having lived in the trees and fed on fruit, man first discovered fishing and fire and learned to walk the coasts and rivers, so well that the different branches of the species started to meet. Then came hunting with the deployment of the first weapons and during the age of barbarism there first appeared the domestication of animals, then agriculture, which marked the passage from a nomadic to a settled life. The corresponding sexual forms were not yet monogamy nor even polygamy; these were preceded by matriarchy, in which the mother had moral and social prominence, and in which the males and females of the same kinsfolk (gens) coupled with each other for reproductive purposes in various ways – as Lewis H. Morgan confirmed was the case for the Indians of America (even though, when they were discovered by the whites, they had become monogamous; while distinguishing between the mother and aunts they continued to refer to fathers as their paternal uncles). These groups of siblings, where there was no constituted authority, did not divide property and land.

It is possible to say that one of the characteristics of higher species of animals is to have an embryonic organisation for the purpose of raising and defending the newly born, a characteristic that is born of instinct. But the rational animal, man organised himself around economic technology, with instinct continuing to rule in the sphere of sexual and familial affection. If this were true intelligence, which one usually regards as replacing instinct and making it redundant, would have an equal share alongside instinct. But in fact this is pure metaphysics. You can find a nice definition of instinct in a book by Maurice Thomas written in 1952 (if we refer to recent specialised studies, it is only to demonstrate that the impressions provided by Engels or Morgan, revolutionaries who were much maligned by bourgeois pedantry, have not been “invalidated” or rendered “out of date” by recent scientific literature): instinct is the hereditary knowledge of a plan of life of the species. In the course of evolution and natural selection, which we can acknowledge in the animal world results from a collision of individuals as individuals against the environment, it is only the physical and physiological that determines a common behaviour for all members of a species, in particular in the reproductive domain. All agree that such behaviour is automatic, “non-conscious” and “non-rational”. It is understandable that this behaviour is transmitted via hereditary means, like all of the morphological and structural characteristics of the organism, and that the transmission mechanism is fixed (this point is still somewhat unclear in science) at the level of genes (and not geniuses, gentlemen individualists!) and other reproductive and germinative cells and liquids.

This mechanism, which is present in each individual, only provides the minimum of elementary norms for a rudimentary life plan to deal with the difficulties presented by the environment.

In the social species, collaborative work, even primitive, goes much further. It passes on many other habits and disciplines which serve as social norms. For the bourgeois and the idealist, what distinguishes the human from animal species is reason and conscience, which are the foundation for freedom of action. From this arises the free will of the believer, the personal liberty of the rationalist and lots more besides. For us, by contrast, it is not a question of lending the individual a supplementary power, thought and spirit, which overturns all of the facts, such as the purported principle of life as opposed to mechanical physics. On the other hand we do add a supplementary power, born exclusively from the necessity for social production which imposes the most complex norms and disciplines; this necessity, which drives the instinct for guiding individuals out of the technical sphere, likewise drives it out of the sexual sphere. It is not the individual who has developed and ennobled the species, it is the life of the species that has developed the individual and pushed him towards new dynamics and towards more elevated spheres.

That which is primal and bestial is to be found in the individual. That which is developed, complex and orderly derives not from an automatic plan of life, but rather from one that is organised and organisable, from collective life, and it is first born outside of the brains of individuals before arriving there, via complex routes, it is something that must be earned. When we talk – outside of all idealism – of thought, of knowledge, of science, we understand by this the products of social life: individuals, without exception, are not the donors but the beneficiaries, and in our contemporary society, they remain parasites.

At the outset, and from the outset, economic organisation and sexual organisation were closely tied together in the life lived by humans in association, though you read about this under the veil of all the religious myths which, for Marxism, are not gratuitous fantasies and empty nonsense that should be rejected (as by the bourgeois freethinker) but rather the first elaborations of collective knowledge to be passed down the generations, which we need to interpret.

In Genesis (Book II, Verses 19 and 20) even before the creation of Eve and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden (where Adam and Eve could live alone, eternal even in their physical condition, to gather effortlessly the fruits of nourishment, but not those of science), God creates all species of animals from the soil and presents them to Adam, who learns to call them by their names. The text explains this procedure: Adoe vero non inveniebatur adjutor similis ejus. This means, Adam has no helper (adjutor) of the same species at this point. Eve is given to him, but not to work or to procreate. Apparently they could make the animals their servants. But after they make their serious error, starting with the cunning serpent, God changes the destiny of humanity. It is only outside of Eden that Eve “knows” her companion. She bears him sons whom she brings forth under sufferance and he earns his living by the sweat of his brow. Thus, even in these age-old mythical teachings, production and reproduction are born together. Adam domesticates the animals but only with hard work; however he gets adjutores, workers of the same species as he, similes ejus.

Voilà the immutable, timeless individual immediately fallen into nothingness; deprived of the bitter and sublime bread of knowledge he is a brute and a runt devoted to idleness, damned to a life without work, love and science, yet this is the man whom today’s idiotic pseudo-materialists would like to celebrate once again.

In his place is born a species of being who thinks because he works, alongside his adjutores, his neighbours, his brothers.

5. Biological heredity and social tradition

5. From the earliest human societies the behaviour of group members became uniform across the collective practices and functions necessary to both production and sexual reproduction; they took the form of ceremonies, festivals and rites of a religious nature. This first mechanism of collective life followed unwritten rules that were neither imposed nor transgressed; what made this possible was not innate or instilled ideas about sociability or a morality particular to the animal-human, but rather the deterministic effect of the evolution of techniques for work.

The history of the first customs and traditions, before written constitutions and prescriptive law, which has been confirmed by the life of savage tribes at the time of their first contacts with the white man, can only be understood based on similar criteria. The seasonality of their festivals is clearly tied to the seasonality of their labour, such as ploughing, sowing and harvest. In the beginning, the time for love and conception was, for the human species, also seasonal. Later evolution would make it, contrary to what happens in the animal kingdom, an ongoing requirement. Novelists who adopted the white culture have described festivals of a sexual character among the people of Africa. Each year, pubescent adolescents are released from the bondage applied to their genitals shortly after birth, and a sexual orgy follows this cruel operation conducted by the priests, in the heady atmosphere of noise and drink. But it is evident that these rites were designed to preserve the race’s fecundity in difficult conditions which, in the absence of any control, would lead to degeneration and impotence; and perhaps there are more disgusting things in the Kinsey Report into the behaviour of the two sexes in the age of capital.

Marxism has long-since affirmed that procreation and production go together, as is demonstrated, for example, by the lovely passage in which Engels recalls that Charlemagne wanted to improve agriculture, which was then in a completely decadent state, founding not kolkhozes but imperial farms. Managed by the monasteries, these farms, like all other initiatives of this sort in the Middle Ages, were to fail: a unisexual and non-procreating estate cannot meet the needs of active production. Thus, for example, the Rule of Saint Benedict reads like a communist statute: work is severely imposed and personal appropriation of any kind of good or product is forbidden, even any consumption way from the communal table. But such an organisation, incapable of reproducing its constituent membership because of its chastity and sterility, remained outside of life and of history. A comparative study of the early regulations of monks and nuns orders might shed light on the problem of the feeble level of production compared to consumption in the Middle Ages; it would explain certain daring and admirable ideas of Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi, who did not seek mortification to save the soul, but a social reform to better nourish the scrawny bodies of the disinherited classes.

6. The transfer of the norms of productive technology from generation to generation, becoming richer and more complex over time, in the various domains of fishing, hunting, livestock and arable farming, norms which are adapted to the behaviour of healthy adults, the young, the old, expectant and child-rearing mothers and couples joined for procreation, proceeds via a dual path, on the one hand organic and on the other social. On the first path hereditary aptitudes and physical adjustments are transferred from the procreator to the procreated, overcoming personal variations of secondary importance. On the second path, whose importance continues to grow, the group’s resources are transferred down the generations; this extra-physiological route is no less material than the first; it is the same for everyone and consists of all types of “equipment” and “tools” that the community has managed to provide for itself.

We have demonstrated in some of our “Thread of Time” texts that before the discovery of more convenient media such as writing, monuments, then print etc. it was necessary to exploit individual memory as much as possible, memories formed by the common exercises of the entire community. Starting with the first maternal rebukes and continuing through to collective recitations, members of the group took part in conversations on the obligatory topics of the moment, the old folk repeating them to the point of boredom. Singing and music aid the memory; at first, knowledge is transferred in verse, not in prose. If we carried on in the same manner today, a good part of modern capitalist civilisation’s “science” could only circulate as a horrible cacophony!

The continuation of this impersonal and collective legacy passed on by groups of humans from age to age would require a more systematic form of presentation. But it was already becoming clear that the more this mechanism was enhanced, the less it reposed in the head of an individual; all members of the group tended towards a common level. The great man, who is nearly always a figure of legend, became increasingly worthless, because he became more and more incapable of wielding a larger weapon or performing a faster multiplication (and therefore a robot will soon be the most intelligent citizen of this stupid bourgeois world and, according to some, will become the ruling dictator of immense countries).

Anyway, social power gains more and more on organic power, which is in every instance the basis for the power of the individual spirit. In this context, we can cite a recent and interesting summary by H. Wallon, Collège de France, 1953: L’organique et le social chez l’homme. Criticising mechanical materialism (of the bourgeois age, that’s to say through the agency of the individual) the author describes the systems of communication between humans in society and cites Marx, as we will see later in this section with regard to language. In his study he registers, in judicial terms, the failure of idealism, in particular in its current form, existentialism: “Idealism has not been content to confine reality [or “the real”] within the limits of representation (in our minds). It has also circumscribed the image of what it considers reality [or “the real”]”. Then, having reviewed various modern concepts, he goes on to draw this wise conclusion:

“Solidarity and opposition co-exist simultaneously in the conscience between organic impressions and intellectual reflections. Between the two, mutual actions and reactions never cease to pursue one another, which demonstrates the uselessness of the kind of distinctions made by different philosophical systems between matter and thought, existence and intelligence, body and spirit”.

Studies like this show very well that the Marxist method has so far provided the opportunity to donate a good 100 years of work to unlabelled science, with neither a price tag nor a contraband label.

6. Natural factors and historical development

7. The living conditions of the first human gentes, the communist communities, evolved very slowly, and because of the diversity of natural conditions (the type of soil and geological phenomena, the geographical situation, altitude, water flows, proximity or not to the sea, climatic conditions, flora, fauna etc.) the rhythm of development was not the same everywhere. Depending on variable cycles, they progressed from the nomadic life of wandering hordes to settlement, reducing the number of unoccupied lands, meeting and contacting tribes from other parts (sometimes even engaging in conflict), leading to invasions and finally the enslavement of one group by another, which was one of the original reasons for the division of ancient egalitarian societies into different social classes.

Engels recalls that the first gentes allowed neither enslavement nor exogamy; the victory of one gens against another brought with it the pitiless and complete destruction of the conquered group. It was necessary to avoid admitting too many workers within a restricted area and disrupting sexual and reproductive discipline, two aspects that were constantly bound together in social development. Later, the relationships between groups became more complex, cross-breeding and fusions more frequent, especially in the fertile and temperate countries where the first great settlements established themselves. But in this first part of the presentation, we’ll stick to the prehistoric period. Engels underlines the progress in the development of production that takes place with the use of animals not just as food for humans, but also as labour power, emphasising the importance of the natural environment in the largest sense of the term. Although every type of animal capable of domestication was available in Eurasia, in America there was practically just one, a large type of ovine, the lama (all the other species have been introduced and acclimatised there at various historical epochs). As a result, the people of this continent experienced an arrest in their social development compared to those in the ancient continent. The faithful explain this by saying, shortly after Christopher Columbus’s discovery, that redemption had not been extended to this part of the planet and that the breath of eternal spirit had not descended upon the heads of the inhabitants. Evidently, the explanation is a little different if one interprets things not by the absence of the Supreme Being, but rather by the absence of a few species of very humble beasts.

However, the explanation suited the pious Christian colonists who exterminated the aboriginal Indians as wild animals and replaced them with black Africans, whom they had reduced to slavery, thereby achieving an ethnic revolution whose implications would first be understood much later.

7. Prehistory and language

8. One can say, in a very general respect, that the transition from the racial to the national factor corresponds with the transition from prehistory to history. By nation we mean a complex in which ethnicity is only one aspect, and an aspect that is moreover rarely dominant. Before analysing the historical significance of the national factor, we therefore have to examine the other aspects that complement the racial factor, and first and foremost, language. You cannot explain the origin of languages and speech unless you start with the material characteristics pertaining to the environment and the organisation of production. The language of a human group is itself one of the means of production.

We have seen on the one hand that there is a close relationship between the ties of blood-brotherhood in the first tribes and the start of a social production using a certain set of tools, and on the other hand that the relationship between the human grouping and the natural environment predominates over individual initiatives and tendencies. This is the very basis of historical materialism, as is proved by two texts written at an interval of a half century. Marx indeed wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845): “But the human essence is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations”. By social relations, we Marxists understand race, the physical environment, tools and the organisation of the given group.

In a letter of 1894 to W. Borgius, which we have often already referred to in order to combat those prejudiced with regard to the role of individual “great men” in history, Engels replied to the following question: what part does the race factor (see Point 3), and what part does that of historic individuals play in Marx and Engels’ materialist view of history ? Engels, having dealt with his correspondent’s first point (Borgius was clearly thinking above all of Napoleon) by knocking the individual from his pedestal without the slightest hesitation, needed just a single blow of the chisel to deal with the point on race: “race is itself an economic factor”.

The pipsqueaks of bourgeois pseudo-culture snigger when you retrace the immense arc that proceeds from first principles to final result, as when, for example the powerful and tenacious Catholic school explains the prestigious course proceeding from primordial chaos to the eternal beatitude of nature’s creatures.

The first groups were strictly blood-brothers and simultaneously formed family groups and work groups. Their “economy” is a reaction by all against the natural environments, and all the relations are identical: there is no personal property, there are no social classes, no political power, and no State.

Being neither metaphysicians nor mystics, we accept, without sackcloth and ashes and without believing that humanity must wash away the stains on its character, that the mixing of blood, the division of labour, the division of society into classes, the State and civil war all arise in a thousand ways. But what lies at the end of the cycle, with a mix of races that has become general and inextricable, with a productive technology capable of acting in a powerful and complex way on the environment to the point of regulating affairs on a planetary level, is the end of all racial and social discrimination: it is a renewed communist economy; it is the end, on a global level, of individual property that has engendered transitory cults with its monstrous fetishes: the individual person, the family, the fatherland.

But at the start, what characterises a people is its economy and the degree of development of its productive technology, alongside its ethnicity.

The most recent research regarding prehistory has led the science of human origins to acknowledge several points of departure in the appearance of human beings on earth and the evolution of other species. One can no longer speak about a “genealogical tree” of all humanity, nor even of different branches on this “tree”. A study by Etienne Patte (Faculty of Science, Poitiers, 1953) has very effectively underlined the inadequacy of this traditional image. In a tree, the separation between two branches, large or small, is definitive, so to speak, since in general they never join together again into a single branch. By contrast, the human species is an inextricable network whose different branches are constantly intertwining. In three generations, that’s to say a century, each of us has had, if not interbreeding by our parents, eight great-grand parents; but over a thousand years that would make a billion ancestors, and for a duration of 600,000 years, corresponding to the likely age of the species, the number would attain astronomical figures with thousands of zeroes. This is, therefore, a network and not a tree. And indeed, in the population statistics of modern people, the representatives of pure ethnic types are very few in number. From which the neat definition of humanity as sungameion, Greek for an ensemble in which cross-fertilisation takes place in every sense, the word gameo embracing both the sexual act and the nuptial rite. We therefore return to a somewhat simplistic formula: the cross-fertilisation of species is sterile, that of races fecund.

The Pope’s position on this point is understandable. Rejecting every idea of racial minorities – which is a progressive position from a historical point of view – he affirms that you can speak about races of animals but not of men. Despite his wish to take recent scientific findings on board, findings which otherwise often converge rather nicely with Catholic dogma, he cannot abandon the genealogical tree of the Bible starting with Adam (even if this is, in the philosophical scheme of things, more Hebrew than Catholic).

Nevertheless other authors with a distinctly anti-materialist viewpoint can only reject the old distinction between the anthropological and historiographical approaches, according to which the first would have to establish the facts whereas the second finds them ready to hand and above all ordered chronologically. Nobody can doubt that Caesar lived before Napoleon, but it is a little more difficult to establish the evidence as to which appeared first, Neanderthal man or the anthropomorphic ape, proconsul.

By contrast, the power of the materialist method applied to facts proven through research easily establishes the synthesis between these two approaches, even if race was effectively a more decisive economic factor among the prehistoric gentes, and the nation, a much more sophisticated entity, in the contemporary world.

It is only by following this method that you can accord language its true place and function. In the beginning, only small groups of blood-brothers shared the same language, for collaboration among themselves and without any connection to other groups, except in the case of armed conflicts: today, entire populations occupying immense territories speak the same language.

In the beginning, groups that had the same phonetic expression also had common rules for reproduction, technology, and the capacity to produce the necessities for material life.

Safe to say that the use of sounds for communication between individuals can already be observed among animal species. But there is a huge difference between the modulations such as are emitted by the vocal organs of animals of the same species (organs whose structure and functioning transmit in a purely physiological manner) and the formation of a language embracing a complete complex ensemble of words. The word did not appear to indicate the person speaking or spoken to, an individual of the opposite sex or a part of the body, or the light, darkness, the earth, water, food or danger. Language articulated in words was born alongside work with tools, the production of objects for consumption, which required men to work collaboratively.

8. Socialised work and speech

9. Every collective human activity towards productive ends, in the broadest meaning of the term, calls for a system of communication between the workers for successful collaboration. Starting from the simple effort required to catch prey or to defend oneself, which needs instinctive incitements, a strongly motivated animal scream will suffice; when the choice of moment, of place and means of action (primitive tool, weapon etc.) becomes indispensable, speech is born, over a very long series of failed attempts and corrections. The process is exactly the opposite of what the idealists imagine: for them, an innovator would research in his brain a new technology, without ever having seen it, would then explain it verbally and would then direct its fulfilment. For them, the order is thus: thought, speech, action. For us it is the exact opposite.

A real testament to the natural process of the intervention of language can be found in the biblical myth, the famous tower of Babel. In this, we are already in the presence of a real state of immense power with formidable armies and large numbers of prisoners and forced labourers. It undertakes colossal works, particularly in its capital (the technological power of the Babylonians, not just in construction, but in that of river hydraulics and other domains, is attested by history). According to the story, this great power wants to build a tower of such height that it could touch the sky (this is the typical classical myth about human presumption knocked down by divinity, as in the myths of Prometheus stealing fire or the flight of Daedalus, etc.) The countless workers, foremen and architects, being of very different and distant origins, do not speak the same language and cannot understand one another. The implementation of projects and provisions is chaotic and contradictory, and the construction, having attained a certain height, collapses as a result of errors due to the confusion of languages, so the builders are either crushed or dispersed, victims of punishment by the Gods.

The hidden meaning of this story is that you cannot build without a common language; the stones, arms, hammers and picks are not enough if you don’t have another tool of production: a common language, a lexicon, an ensemble of common formulas known to everyone. The same legend can be found among the savages of central Africa: in this case the tower was made of wood and was intended to reach the moon. Now that we all speak “American” it is child’s play to raise skyscrapers, though they seem rather ridiculous when compared to the ingenious towers of the barbarians and savages.

Tithe Marxist definition of language is therefore that it is one of the means of production. There is no doubt about this. In his above-cited recent study on principal doctrines, Wallon cannot help but refer to the one that we follow: “According to Marx, language is tied to man’s production of tools and objects with defined properties”. The author chooses two authoritative quotes from Marx; the first comes from The German Ideology: “[men] begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence”. The second is from Engels, in The Dialectics of Nature: “First labour, then with it speech – these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man”. When Engels was writing, he was unaware of the findings that even entirely idealist authors refer to, despite themselves. (Cf. Karl Saller, Leitfaden der Anthropologie, University of Munich, 1930).

Today the human brain has a volume of 1,400 cm³ (both for geniuses and for simpletons like us). A long time ago, in the age of Peking Man (Sinanthropus pekinensis) and Java Man (Pithecanthropus erectus) the brain was 1,000 cm³ and it appears that our ancestor already had elementary notions about magic, had his way of burying the dead (even though he was quite frequently cannibalistic), used fire considerably earlier and made use of various utensils: cups for drinking, made from the skulls of animals, stone weapons etc. But discoveries made in southern Africa in particular go much further: 600,000 years ago (this figure is cited by Wallon) another of our ancestors, who had a brain of just 500 cm³, but had already used fire, hunted and ate the cooked flesh of animals, walked upright like us and, as a single correction to the facts cited by Engels (in 1884), it appears that he was no longer living in trees like his close relation Australopithecus but rather fought courageously against ferocious animals on the ground.

It is interesting that the author of the study that we have just cited, confounded by facts that batter his stronghold with the fundamental points of materialist theory, searches in psychology for a remedy to anthropology, finally weeping over the remains of the individual, elevated by a mysterious extra-organic inspiration and who, in our modern epoch of excess population and mechanisation, has lost himself in the mass, ceasing to be a man. But who is the more human of the two ? The sympathetic Pithecanthropus with his brain of 500 cm³ (not to be confused with the small utilitarian Italian car of the same capacity, a mass-produced vehicle!) or the scientist with 1.400 cm³ who chases butterflies under the Arch of Titus to establish the pitiful equation, official science + idealism = despair ?



9. Economic substructure and superstructure

10. The concept of the “economic substructure” in a given human society thus extends significantly beyond the limits that the superficial interpretation assigns to it, according to which this base exclusively comprises the remuneration of work and the exchange of commodities. It embraces the entire range of forms of reproduction of the species – that’s to say familial institutions, but also technological resources, equipment, tools of every kind, without forgetting, if you don’t want to limit the component technology to a simple inventory of tangible materials, all the mechanisms that society uses to transfer its “technical know-how” from generation to generation. In this sense, it comprises the following general networks of communications: spoken language, writing, singing, music, graphical arts, printing. All of them have been created as ways to transfer knowledge about productive technology. For Marxism, literature, poetry and science are themselves superior and differentiated forms of the instruments of production and they arise in order to respond to the same exigencies, immediate and mediated, of social life.

In this respect, some questions of interpretation of historic materialism present themselves to the proletarian movement: which, in particular, are the social phenomena that specifically constitute the “productive base”, or to put it another way, the economic conditions that call for an explanation of the ideological and political superstructures characteristic of a given historic society ?

It is well known that for Marxism, society does not evolve in a slow and gradual fashion but passes suddenly from one period to the next, each characterised by different forms of production and social relations. These mutations modify both the productive base and the superstructure. To explain this idea, we frequently return to classic texts, both to put different formulas and concepts in their proper context, and to specify what changes so brusquely when a revolutionary crisis occurs.

In the aforementioned letters clarifying things for young scholars of Marxism, Engels insists on the reciprocal relationships between the base and the superstructure: for example, the political State of a given class is a superstructure par excellence, but it in turn makes interventions on the economic substructure such as protective duties, taxes, etc.

Later, at the time of Lenin, it was particularly important to clarify the process of class revolution. The State, political power, is the superstructure which exquisitely collapses in the most exquisitely quasi-instantaneous manner to give way to an analogue but opposed structure. But the relationships that govern the productive economy are not transformed with the same rapidity, even though it is precisely the contradiction between productive relations and the development of new productive forces that drive the revolution in the first place. Wage labour, mercantilism, etc. do not disappear overnight. As for the other aspects of the superstructure, some are more robust and will survive the economic substructure (for example, capitalism) which gave birth to them: these are the traditional ideologies that are left behind, even at the heart of the victorious revolutionary class, following the long period of subjugation that went before. For example the law will be rapidly transformed both in its written form and in its application, whereas a superstructure such as religious beliefs will disappear much more slowly.

Reference has often been made to the pithy preface to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, 1859. It will not hurt stop here before continuing on the issue of language.

The material productive forces of society are, at different stages of development, the physical labour power of man, the tools and instruments he makes use of in order to apply it, the fertility of cultivated land, the machines that add mechanical and physical energy to the physical power of man, in brief, all the methods at a society’s disposition that allow it to apply manual and mechanical forces to land and materials.

The relations of production are, in any given society, those necessary to men “in the social production of their existence” whereby “men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will”. What distinguishes these relations of production is, in a general sense, the freedom to, or prohibition from, occupying land to cultivate it, using tools, machines or manufactured goods, or to have the products of labour for consumption, transportation or distribution. We can cite here particular forms of the relations of production: slavery, serfdom, wage labour, commerce, landlordism, industrial enterprise. If we put the accent on the legal aspect rather than the economic, we can equally say that the relations of production are property relations or again, according to some texts, the forms of property as they apply to land, slavery, the product of the serf’s labour, commodities, factories and machines etc. This collection of relationships constitutes the economic substructure or structure of society.

The essential dynamic idea here is the contrast between the forces of production, which have attained a certain level of evolution and development, and the relations of production or property, in brief social relations (all these formulae are equivalent).

The superstructure i.e. what follows, that which superimposes itself on the underlying economic structure, is for Marx fundamentally the legal or political system specific to a given society, that’s to say the constitutional texts, laws, the magistracy, the armed forces, the centre of power. This superstructure always has a material, concrete aspect. But Marx makes a careful distinction between the material transformation in the relations of production, in the juridical and proprietary relations and in the end power, and the transition in the “conscience” of the time and of the victorious class. This, up to now, is a derivative of the derivative, a superstructure of the superstructure, which constitutes the changing domain of popular opinion, ideology, philosophy, art and to a certain degree (insofar as it is not a normative practice) religion.

Modes of production (it is better to reserve the term forms of production for the more restricted concept of forms of property) – Produktionsweisen – are the “consecutive epochs marking progress in the economic development of society”, which Marx refers to with a broad brush such as Asiatic, antique, feudal, bourgeois.

We will take an example, that of the bourgeois revolution in France. Productive forces: agriculture with the serfs, the artisans and their workshops in the cities, the expanding manufactories and factories and their workforces. Traditional relations of production (or forms of property): serfdom of the peasants attached to the glebe, feudal lord of the manor and those who cultivate the land; corporate bondage for the artisan trades. Legal and political superstructure: the power of the nobility and the Church, absolute monarchy. Ideological superstructure: authority by divine right, Catholicism, etc. Mode of production: feudalism.

The revolutionary transformation presents itself immediately, as the transition of power from the nobles and the priests to the bourgeoisie. Elective parliamentary democracy is the new legal and political superstructure. Relations of production that are abolished: serfdom and the artisanal corporations; the new relations that take over are industrial wage labour (alongside the autonomous artisan tradesmen and the smallholding peasants, who subsist) and freedom of commerce within the national market, including land.

The productive force of the factory workers grows enormously through absorption of the former serfs and artisans. The power of the machine-tools and engines grows in the same proportion. The ideological superstructure undergoes a slow evolution which started before the revolution and carries on afterwards: religious faith and legitimism give way to freedom of thought, “Enlightenment”, rationalism.

The new mode of production extending within France and beyond in place of feudalism is capitalism, in which, contrary to the “conscience that this revolution has of itself”, political power belongs not to “the people” but to the industrial capitalist class and the bourgeois landlords.

To distinguish between the two “layers” of the superstructure, we could adopt the terms superstructure of force (positive law, State) and the superstructure of conscience (ideology, philosophy, religion etc.).

Marx says that material force, violence, is in its turn an economic instrument. In the texts that we have cited and in his Feuerbach Engels says the same thing: the State (which is force) acts upon and influences the economic substructure.

The State pertaining to a new class thus provides a powerful impetus for modifying the relations of production. In France after 1789, the feudal relations of production were swept away quickly because of the very advanced developments of modern productive forces, which were exerting their pressure for a long time previously. Although it gave power back to the landed aristocracy and re-established the legitimist monarchy, the restoration of 1815 did not succeed in overturning the new relations of production and the new forms of property. It did not bring about a regression in manufacturing industry and did not revive the great seigniorial estates. Historically, changes in power and the transformation of the forms of production can very well go in different directions to one another, albeit for a limited period.

What of Russia in October 1917 ? Political power, that’s to say the superstructure of force, which in February passed from the feudal to the bourgeois class, passed in its turn to the workers supported in struggle by poor peasants. The statutory and legal State took proletarian forms (dictatorship and break-up of the democratic assembly). The ideological superstructures received a powerful impulse across broad strata in the direction of the proletariat’s own ideological superstructure, amid desperate resistance from those of the old society, the bourgeoisie and semi-bourgeois. The anti-feudal productive forces gained momentum for industry and free agriculture. Can we say that in the years that followed October, the relations of production became socialist ? Certainly not, because in all cases, this would require a period measured in more than months. Can we therefore say that they simply became capitalist ? It would not be exact to say that they became completely and utterly capitalist, because as we know, pre-capitalist forms have survived there for a long time. However, it would be insufficient to say that the relations simply received an impulse for their transformation into capitalist relations.

In fact, since power is an economic agent of primary importance, the transformation of relations of production in a democratic bourgeois State is one thing, and the transformation of the relations of production under the dictatorship of the proletariat quite another (we are not referring here to the first measures of communism, of civil war and war on profiteering: shelter, bread, transport).

The mode of production is defined as the entire complex of relations of production and forms, political and legal. If the entire Russian cycle that has unwound until today has resulted in a fully capitalist mode of production, and there are no socialist relations of production, this is because after the revolution of October 1917 in Russia, the proletarian revolution in the West did not take place; such a revolution would not only have shored up the power of the Russian proletariat, more importantly it would also have made productive forces that the West had in abundance available to the Russian economy, which would have driven forward the relations of production in the direction of socialism.

New relations of production do not occur instantly after political revolution takes place.

In order to achieve such a development, political power in Russia was the other condition of equal importance (Lenin); the formulation which says that the only historic task of the Bolshevik party in Russia after the October revolution was to ensure the transition from feudal social relations to bourgeois is inexact. Until the revolutionary wave following the war of 1914 had exhausted itself, that’s to say until roughly 1923, the task of the October power was to work for the transition from the feudal mode of production and social relations to the proletarian. This journey was taken on the only historical path available, i.e. the high road. It is only later that we can say that Russia is neither actually, nor potentially, socialist. The relations of production subsequent to October are thus partly pre-capitalist, partly capitalist, and, to a quantitatively negligible degree, post-capitalist; but the historic form, or rather the historic mode of production cannot be said to be capitalist, rather, it is potentially proletarian and socialist. This is what matters!

It’s in this way that we address the dead-end formulation, “bourgeois economic substructure, proletarian and socialist superstructure” – and not by denying the second half of the formulation, which remained true for at least six years after the conquest of the dictatorship.

10. Stalin and linguistics

[The digression that follows was not out of place in this arrangement of the material used for the report, since we had to confront Stalin’s doctrine on linguistics, which was entirely based on inappropriate distinctions between base and superstructure]

11. Stalin’s thesis, according to which language is not a superstructure in relation to the economic substructure, is a false position for resolving the issue, since Stalin wants a different outcome. Every transition from one historic mode of production to the next implies a change, as much in the superstructure as in the economic base, a change in the power of the different classes and their respective positions at the heart of society. But Stalin claims that the national language neither follows the rise of the substructure, nor of the superstructure, because it does not belong to one class but rather to the entire people of a given country. Thus, to rescue language and linguistics from the effects of the social revolution (and, softly-softly, to rescue national culture and the cult of the country), it is pulled to the banks of the churning river of history, beyond the battlefield of the productive substructure and safely out of the reach of politics and ideology.

According to Stalin (Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, 1950) in the course of the past few years in Russia, “the old capitalist base has been liquidated and a new base has been built, a socialist base. In parallel, the superstructure of the capitalist base has been liquidated, and a new superstructure has been created (…) Despite this the Russian language has remained fundamentally what it was before the October Revolution”.

These gentlemen’s only merit (we don’t know if the text was written by Stalin himself, or in his name by secretary X or bureau Y) is that they have mastered the art of dressing up their lies in clear, accessible language, the way you would write after a century’s immersion in bourgeois culture, and above all in a “casually concrete” manner. Everything seems easy to grasp, and yet it is all just a scam, relapsing entirely into the most rancid bourgeois mode of thought.

The entire transition took place “in parallel”. It’s that easy! To which we mustn’t simply reply that such a nice transition has not taken place, but also that if it had (or if it will) things would have happened quite differently. Stalin’s formula is that of a country snake-oil merchant. Nothing is left of dialectical materialism. Doesn’t the base influence the superstructure, doesn’t it act on the latter ? And in what sense does this derived superstructure, which is not simply malleable and passive, react in its turn ? According to which cycles, in what order, at what speed does this historic transformation take place ? Oh, all that is byzantine distinctions. Just roll up your shirtsleeves, first the right then the left! Destruction! Creation! For God’s sake! Out with the creator, out with the destroyer. Such materialism cannot function without a demiurge, an autonomous creative force: then everything becomes conscious and voluntary, nothing is necessary or determined.

Whatever. We can confront Stalin’s reasoning with reality. The economic base and the superstructure, which were feudal under the Tsar, have become, through the course of complex events, fully capitalist by the end of Stalin’s life. Since the Russian language has remained fundamentally the same, language is not part of the superstructure, nor of the base.

It appears that this whole controversy has been directed against a school of linguistics that has been suddenly disavowed in high places, and whose leader is the university professor, Nicolai Yakolevitch Marr, whose texts are unknown to us. Marr apparently said that the language is part of the superstructure. Given who is condemning him, we could consider Professor Marr to be a good Marxist. In fact, Stalin wrote, “Once N.Y. Marr noted that his formula ‘language is a superstructure with respect to the base’ encountered objections, he decided to ‘readjust’ his theory and announced that ‘language is an instrument of production. Was N.Y. Marr right to classify language as one of the instruments of production ? No, he was certainly wrong”.

Why ? According to Stalin, there is a certain analogy between language and the means of production, which can also, to some extent, be independent of class relations. What Stalin means is that, for example, the plough or the hoe can be equally used in a feudal society as in a bourgeois or socialist society. But the reason why Marr is wrong (and Marx and Engels too, because for them, work and the production of the means of production occurs in combination with language) is that these means of production produce material goods, whereas language doesn’t. To which we reply: but the means of production also do not produce material goods! It is man who produces them, using these instruments! Tools are the means which humans use to produce. When a child first picks up the hoe by the blade, his father shouts at him: no, pick it up by the handle! This cry – which becomes a regular instruction – is, like the hoe, used for production.

Stalin’s smart-aleck conclusion proves that he’s the one who’s got it wrong. If language, he says, produced material goods, then windbags would be the richest men in the world! Well, isn’t that so ? The labourer works with his hands, the engineer with his language. Which of them is the better paid ? The landed gentleman smokes his pipe sitting in the shade and shouts ceaselessly at the day-labourer (who is working his fingers to the bone in silence): “Get on with it, dig!” fearing that the slightest pause will diminish his profit.

We are familiar neither with Marr nor with his books, but dialectics allow us to suppose that despite being menaced with thunderbolts from on high, he has not really “readjusted” anything. We have ourselves said, for example, that since the beginning of mnemonic choral singing during the age of magical-mystical technology, poetry has been the premier mode of social knowledge transfer, and is therefore a means of production. Then, we placed poetry within the superstructures of an epoch. It is the same for language. Language in general, and versification in general, are means of production. But a given poetry, a given school of poetry, within a particular country and within a particular epoch, distinct from those that went before and those that will follow, form part of the ideological and artistic superstructure of a given economic form and mode of production. Thus Engels writes that the upper stage of barbarism “begins with the smelting of iron ore, and passes into civilization with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use for literary records (…) We find the upper stage of barbarism at its highest in the Homeric poems, particularly in the Iliad”. We could also cite other passages and characterise Dante’s Divine Comedy as a funeral lament for feudalism, or Shakespeare’s tragedies as a prologue to capitalism.

For Marxism’s last Supreme Pontiff, iron ore would be a means of production characteristic of an epoch, but not alphabetic writing – because the latter does not produce material goods! But hasn’t the use of alphabetic writing been indispensable, among other things, to arrive at the specialty steels of the modern ferrous metallurgical industry ?

It’s the same for language. Language is always a means of production, but taken individually, languages ​​are part of the superstructure. For example, Dante does not write his poem in the classical Latin of the Church but rather in the Italian vernacular; likewise the Reformation marks the final abandonment of the ancient Saxon in favour of modern German.

Besides, it’s the same for the plough and the hoe. While it is true that a given tool can straddle two great social epochs separated by a class revolution, it is also true that the complete totality of tools of a given society “classifies” and “defines” it, and that the well-known collision of the forces of production against the relations of production compels them to assume the new form that is appropriate to them. We find the wood-turning lathe in the era of barbarism and the precision motor lathe in the era of capitalism. And every now and then an old tool will disappear and become a museum-piece, for example the spinning-wheel mentioned by Engels.

It’s the same for the plough and the hoe. Industrial capitalist society does not have the means to eliminate gruelling small-scale agricultural cultivation, work that twists the spine so proudly straightened by Pithecanthropus erectus. But a communist organisation with a comprehensive industrial base would not use anything other than the mechanized plough. And this society will have overturned the language of the capitalists: we will no longer hear the banal formulae which the Stalinists love to use when affecting to oppose them: moral, liberty, justice, legality, popular, progressive, democratic, constitutional, constructive, productive, humanitarian etc., i.e. all the words that form precisely the toolset thanks to which the largest share of society’s wealth ends up in the pockets of the braggarts, and which fulfils the same role as material instruments such as foreman’s whistle or the gaoler’s handcuffs.

11. The idealist thesis of national language

12. To deny that human language in general arises and functions as a means of production, and that particular written and spoken languages form part of the superstructure of a class society (even if the transformation of these superstructures cannot be immediate, but only gradual) is to fall back entirely to idealist doctrines and politically embrace the bourgeois postulate that the advent of capitalism brings with it a linguistic revolution, which marks the transfer of a common language to illiterates speaking different dialects, producing cultivated people in a politically united country.

Since, according to Stalin, language is neither a superstructure of the economic base, nor is it a means of production, we should perhaps ask what it is. So, here is Stalin’s definition: “Language is a medium, an instrument with the help of which people communicate with one another, exchange thoughts and understand each other. Being directly connected with thinking, language registers and fixes in words, and in words combined into sentences, the results of the process of thinking and achievements of man’s cognitive activity, and thus makes possible the exchange of thoughts in human society”. This should be the Marxist solution to the problem! It is hard to see what orthodox and traditional ideology would refuse to subscribe to such a definition, which clearly states that humanity progresses thanks to a research effort led by thought and formulated in ideas, and passes from the individual phase to collective application through the mediation of language, which allows the inventor transmit his achievement to other men. This conception turns material development completely on its head, such as we have previously illustrated with reference to our standard texts: from action to speech, from speech to idea; and since this process is not individual but concerns the whole of society, it would be better to say: from collective work to language, from language to science, from science to collective thought. The function of thought is only derived and passive in the individual. The definition offered by Stalin is therefore pure idealism. The alleged exchange of ideas is nothing but the projection of bourgeois commodity exchange onto the imagination.

Accusing the disgraced Marr of idealism is strange, as Stalin says he has arrived here by supporting the thesis of mutation of languages, envisaging a decadence in the function of language, which will one day be replaced by other forms. Marr is reproached for having fallen into the quagmire of idealism by imagining that thought can transmit itself without language. But the people who presume that they know how to stay afloat on this quagmire are the most pitiful. Indeed, according to them, Marr’s thesis contradicts Marx’s phrase: “Language is the immediate reality of thought… Ideas do not exist independently of language”.

But isn’t this clear materialist thesis completely contradicted by the definition reproduced above, which reduces language to a means of exchanging ideas and thoughts ?

Let us reconstruct Marr’s audacious theory in our own way (which would have to allow us to have a party theory crossing generations and frontiers). Language is – so far Stalin is in agreement – a means which allows men to communicate with one another. But would communication between men have nothing to do with production ? This affirms bourgeois economic theory, according to which each individual produces alone and only comes into contact with another individual in the marketplace, in order to swindle him. The correct Marxist formulation would not be, men communicate with one another in order to understand one another, but rather, they communicate with one another in order to produce. Thus the definition of language as a means of production is correct. As for the metaphysical “understand one another”: humanity is already 600,000 years old and the disciples of the same teacher still apparently do not understand one another!

So, language is a technological means of communication. It is the first of these. But is it the only one ? Certainly not. Social evolution brings into being a complete raft of increasingly diversified means of communication and Marr’s research on what could in large measure replace spoken language is absolutely not irrelevant. Marr does not claim in this respect that thought, as the immaterial elaboration of an individual subject, will be transmitted to others without the natural form of language. With his formula on “the operation of thought” he indicates that not only individual metaphysical cogitations, but also the full range of technical knowledge relevant to a developed society will develop in forms that go beyond language. Nothing magical or eschatological here.

Let’s take a very simple example. The skipper of a rowing boat commands “On the stroke”. Same thing for a sail ship and the first steam ships: “Heave ho”, “Full ahead”, “Avast”. But when boats become too large, the captain yells his commands down a mouthpiece which communicates with the engine room. But soon that is insufficient, and before loudspeakers arrive – a really retrograde invention – they use a mechanical device called an engine order telegraph, later electrical, which consists of a round dial with an indicator, and which puts the commands right in front of the chief engineer’s eyes. As for the control panel of a modern aircraft, it is covered with instruments that transmit indications to all the sensory organs. Thus, speech gives way to forms of communication which, though less natural are no less material, just as modern tools are no less material than a branch ripped off a tree and used as a weapon.

There is no need to discuss the full range of means of communication embracing spoken language, written language, print, algorithms, internationally agreed mathematical notation etc. In all domains, technical or otherwise, there are universally accepted standards and conventions for transmitting precise indications (meteorological, electrical, astronomical etc.). All of the electronic applications (such as radar) and all the procedures for receiving and recording symbols are new connections between men, made necessary by the complexity of production and day-to-day life. In more than a hundred domains communication ignores words, grammar and syntax, in defence of whose immanence and timelessness Stalin breaks the back of N.Y. Marr.

How could the capitalist system admit that the conjugation of the verbs to have and to cost, or the way in which the possessive adjective is declined, is anything but eternal ? How could it ever renounce the use of the possessive pronoun as the cornerstone of every utterance ? Yet one day we’ll laugh at all that along with “your lordship”, “your humble and obedient servant” and salesmen’s expressions such as “it’s been a pleasure doing business with you”.

12. References and distortions

13. One of the fundamental theses of all Marxist texts on this question is that the demand for a national language is a historical characteristic of all anti-feudal revolutions. A national language is indispensable to the establishment of communication and business between all the newly established commercial locations within the national market, as is the free movement of proletarians torn away from feudal bondage across the national territory, the reduction of traditional religious, scholastic and cultural forms which rely on Latin as the intellectual language, and the shredding of local dialects as the popular form of language.

To support this theory of a language that sits above classes, one that is completely new to Marxism, Stalin attempts to overcome the obvious objections from all sides, based on texts by Lafargue, Marx, Engels and even … Stalin. The good Lafargue is thrown overboard, to be sure. In his pamphlet La langue française avant et après la revolution, he spoke about the sudden linguistic revolution in France between 1789 and 1794. Too short a period, retorts Stalin, and in any case it was only a small number of words that disappeared from the language and were replaced by new ones. Yes, but it turns out that these words are precisely the ones most closely tied to relations in social life. Some of these words were banned by decrees of the Convention. Let’s refer to the satirical counter-revolutionary anecdote:

“What’s your name, citizen ?”

“Marquis de Saint Roiné”.

“There are no more marquises!”

“De Saint Roiné”.

“There are no more ‘de’s’” (‘de’ was an aristocratic designation).

“Saint Roiné”.

“There are no more Saints!”

“Roiné”.

“There are no more kings!” (‘roi’ is French for king).

“I am born!” (“Je suis né” – ‘né’ is French for born), the unhappy man yelled.

Stalin was right: the participle né hadn’t changed!

In the article “Saint Max” [a chapter in The German Ideology, which would only be translated into Italian in 1958] which we admit is unfamiliar to us, Marx writes that the bourgeois has “its own” language, which is “a product of the bourgeoisie” and this language is imbued with the style of mercantilism, of buying and selling. In fact, in the Middle Ages the merchants of Antwerp communicated with those of Florence and this is one of the glories of the Italian language, the mother-language of capital. While in music we still say andante, allegro, pianissimo etc., many Italian words were known in European city-squares: firma, sconto, tratta, riporto (firm, discount, draft, report). As to the smelly jargon of commercial correspondence (“with respect to your esteemed correspondence of the 25 th inst.” etc.) it became the same everywhere. How does Stalin manage to counter the incontrovertible citation ? By inviting us to read another passage from the same text, where Marx speaks of “the concentration of dialects into a single national language resulting from economic and political concentration”. What of it ? The linguistic superstructure follows the same process as the State superstructure and the economic substructure. The concentration of capital, the unification of the national market, political concentration in the capitalist State, are not inherent and definitive facts but historical outcomes linked to bourgeois domination and cycles of accumulation. It goes the same for the process that ensues, the transition of local dialects to a unitary language. The market, the State and power are only national because they are bourgeois. Language becomes the national language because it is the language of the bourgeoisie.

Stalin then cites Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England: “the working class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie […] the workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie”.

Here again, he is grasping at straws: Engels is not saying that there are class languages, Stalin claims, since he is speaking about dialect, and dialect is a derivative of the national language! But haven’t we demonstrated that, on the contrary, the national language is a synthesis of dialects (or the result of a struggle between different dialects) a