The text published here is the continuation of the contribution begun in the previous issue on Communism and Community. It will be followed by a third part of this study in the next Revolution or War. We submit this contribution to the critical reflection of all. Any comment or even contribution, critical or not, will be welcome. And as far as possible, we will not hesitate to publish them.

To reflect on the function and the nature of the communist party necessarily implies to reflect on the status of human knowledge. Obviously, the knowledge of modern society is the fruit of the scientific method which took off in parallel with the rise of capitalism itself. But science was certainly not the only way to establish knowledge throughout history. The members of classless pre-capitalist societies all learned what they needed to learn about the way of life, for example the basics of hunting and gathering, through an education not separated from general socialization. In the same way, the medieval peasant possessed some knowledge of agronomy by the simple daily experience of agriculture. From the historical point of, science does not have the monopoly on knowledge, but appears more as a dominant and specific mode of acquiring knowledge that is dominant and specific to capitalism.

We will therefore try to clarify the nature and status of human knowledge in general from a Marxist point of view. The political stake behind this contribution is to put back on the agenda the Marxist imperative to transform society. Indeed, it is a question of better understanding the link between social transformation and knowledge, a link that has been formulated in an abstract way in the bourgeois philosophical tradition in the following dualistic way: being and consciousness or matter and Spirit.

Method : continuity of Marxism

Before trying to put on paper the main lines of a Marxist theory of knowledge, it is important to make explicit a notion which will be constantly in the background of our development. It is the notion of the continuity and the theoretical unity of Marxism. This may seem at first sight as an attempt to freeze Marxism in the form of an immutable dogma, but we will try to show that it is on the contrary an important conception for a good understanding of what knowledge is from both a materialist and a historical point of view.

In the background of all the great polemics and debates in the ranks of what is conventionally called Marxism, there always appears a doubt about the validity of the Marxist analysis in front of the appearance of new facts. Most of the time, this doubt appeared within the most right-wing currents of the workers’ movement: it is what we call revisionism, an acute form of opportunism. Many militants tried to dispel this doubt by showing that the validity of Marxism is not restricted to 19th century England, but that the theory is valid for the whole of the capitalist historical course. At the end of the 19th century, did Engels [1] not defend Marxist theory in its entirety against Dühring, who sought to purge socialist thought of all traces of dialectic? At the beginning of the 20th century, did Luxemburg [2] not defend the entirety of the Marxist theory of catastrophic economic crises against Bernstein, who claimed that the new evolution of capitalism allowed it to solve its economic contradictions? Did Lenin [3] not defend the revolutionary political program in its entirety against Kautsky, who advocated a peaceful passage to socialism made possible by new facts such as the constant democratization of European political regimes? What emerges from these examples of historical polemics concerning Marxism is that Engels, Luxemburg and Lenin did not defend Marxism as a series of divine writings to which one must subscribe with faith. On the contrary, the principle they implicitly put forward is quite simple: Marxism, as a theory of the revolutionary transformation of societies and a critical theory of capitalism, remains valid as long as capitalist social relations persist. This is already an implicit form of the notion of theoretical continuity of Marxism. This being said, the principle of invariance - even if valid in itself - should not be used as a pretext to defend positions made obsolete by the very experience of the communist movement. Indeed, we can see some groups of the proletarian camp using this principle as a fig leaf to hide opportunist positions such as the red unions, the national liberation struggles, etc.

This notion, although always defended implicitly by the left fractions of the communist movement against the revisionist right, will be especially systematized by the current of the so-called Italian Communist Left. For it, the notion of continuity - or invariance - is in some way a methodological posture of Marxism in relation to itself. In fact, "we use the expression ‘Marxism’ not in the sense of a doctrine discovered or introduced by the person Karl Marx, but in reference to the doctrine which arose with the modern industrial proletariat and which ‘accompanies’ it throughout the course of a social revolution"
 [4]." Marxism is therefore a historical product, and not the thought of an isolated individual, however brilliant he may be. It is a theory that is born at the same time as the class in which the negativity against capitalism is affirmed, that is to say, the proletariat. Being a theory that, like any theory, emerges from the materiality of social relations, Marxism cannot be modified according to individual wills and passing fashions, otherwise it will betray its premises and, above all, its objectives: "It is precisely because Marxism denies any sense to the search of the ‘absolute truth’ and sees in the doctrine not a given of the eternal spirit or of the abstract Reason, but an ‘instrument’ of work and a ‘weapon’ of fight, that it postulates that one doesn’t abandon his weapon or his instrument in the middle of the effort or at the height of the battle to ‘repair’ it : it is by wielding good tools and weapons from the start that one emerges victorious, in peace as in war." [5]

This is an implacable critique of the dominant ideology that makes Reason a continuous progress towards infinite knowledge, but also of the corollary theory according to which human beings invent ideas that are then constantly improved by successive generations until perfect knowledge of the world is achieved. In short, it is an arrow shot at the ideology of the constant progress of Reason associated with the Enlightenment. On the contrary, from the Marxist point of view, ideas are historically specific and are ultimately determined by the different modes of production.

We could be reproached for not seeing the eminently dynamic character of capitalism. Indeed, it is constantly changing and transforming itself. After all, we have gone from the artisanal workshop to the Taylorist scientific factory, from the individual entrepreneur to the joint-stock company, and from the primacy of the industrial sector to the explosion of the tertiary sector. So many changes that Marx and other theorists could not perceive in their time, would argue the past and present Dühring, Bernstein and Kautsky. If we consider the problem from the point of view of Marxist methodology, capitalism only develops further by remaining absolutely faithful to its intrinsic functioning. All the changes that have taken place in its history are determined by its very nature, by what makes capital capital. Thus, Marx and Engels "showed that this evolution of capitalism, far from modifying it, tended on the contrary to bring it ever closer to pure capitalism; they answered in advance to the discoverers of new facts too eager to declare obsolete what they do not know: the Marxist analysis of capitalism with all its political implications cannot be surpassed, it can only become truer and truer!" [6]

Basic principles of Marxism

In order to tackle specifically the Marxist theory of knowledge, it is necessary to make a brief exposition of the principles which form the foundation of the Marxist edifice. It is these same principles that will then allow us to clearly define what knowledge is.

Materialism can be conceived as a philosophy that affirms that all phenomena have their source in matter. Thus, Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species can be qualified as naturalistic materialism. Indeed, this theory locates the motor of the evolution of species in their ability to adapt to their natural environment. The existence of the diversity of living species derives from the organic functioning of nature itself, not from an original intelligent design of God. The philosophical postulate of materialism is therefore to get rid of a dualistic view of the world where matter and Spirit are two separate and autonomous elements.

Marx, for his part, brings the social field into materialism. Indeed, according to him, class social relations linked to the way in which human beings produce and reproduce their lives constitute the material basis of social life. It is precisely this material basis that determines the consciousness and the ideas that human beings have of their own practices. Thus, Spirit, consciousness, ideas, knowledge and even Reason are not what determines the way of living in society, but they are instead determined by the way human beings organize their social relations. According to Marx, "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life." [7] or, in other words, it is not thought acting autonomously that determines the modalities of social relations, but it is the modalities of social relations that determine the thought of human beings.

It is thus precisely the material social relations that determine the consciousness that human beings have of their own existence. Marx adds that "consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process." [8] to further set aside the dualistic conception between matter and Spirit, between being and thought. This methodological posture necessarily implies a certain form of determinism. Indeed, "this method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists." [9]

This conception leaves little room for the contingent. Such relations of production will imply such social relations of classes which will necessarily produce such consciousnesses, ideas and knowledge. Said in an even simpler way, "the ‘rationality of the world’, it is the fact that the phenomena and the events of the world are not independent and incoherent but linked between them, that it is possible to discover these relations and the laws which govern them, to understand the world. It is quite simply the notion of determinism." [10]

From the Marxist point of view, "It is absurd to ask whether the laws of the universe agree with the ‘laws of reason’: there are no a priori and immutable ‘laws of reason’, our reason and its laws are a product of the world and of our activity in the world; they reflect our effort to understand, represent and master the phenomena of the world. It follows that there is nothing stable about reason; like the whole of man, it changes as the conditions of existence, the needs, the activities and the knowledge of the human species change. Things that were ‘rational’ yesterday are no longer so today, and vice versa; likewise, in a society divided into antagonistic classes, each of them has its own ‘rationality’."  [11]

History is not, therefore, an infinite deployment of Reason, of the Idea or of human consciousness. In fact, the meaning of these notions is constantly changing precisely because the changes of social relations determine the transformation of their meaning. To imagine the unfolding of history as the progress of Reason is therefore historically incorrect and has more to do with ideological mystification. On the contrary, "the knowledge that the human species possesses has developed through contact with matter and nature, never through the autonomous work of thought." [12]

The other equally important aspect of Marxism is the dialectical method. To bridge the gap between materialism and the dialectical method, Engels asserted that "motion is the mode of existence of matter." [13] As we have just seen, the Marxist tradition is very critical of bourgeois philosophical traditions that make certain categories such as Reason stable, unchanging, even eternal. On the contrary, in the Marxist conception, every category is historically specific. Beyond the traditional triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis which expresses in itself the movement, it is the foundation of the Marxist dialectic, that is to say that in the social field, nothing is stable. Everything is movement whose engine is the antagonism of classes.

This movement of the history or this social dynamic results from the fact that each mode of production in history until now was neither stable nor immutable. Each mode of production contains within itself its negation. Just as feudalism saw the birth of a class that tended to affirm its negation - the bourgeoisie - the rise of capitalism also creates a class that tends to negate it - the proletariat. The dialectical conception is methodologically led to analyze contradictions, conflicts, tendencies to negation, in short social transformation. This emphasis on movement is completely at odds with other strictly empirical methodologies typical of the social sciences promoting capitalist society, which try to demonstrate that each society includes social institutions that aim at the proper functioning, the durability and the stability of the social totality.

Marx’s dialectic implies a certain position in relation to knowledge. Indeed, he posits the appearance of new knowledge as the result of material changes in society, of a revolutionary transformation of social relations. This posture requires a differentiation of dialectic with regard to the traditional science: "to make work of descriptive science means that one records the facts considered in a static, eternal and immutable table; to make work of dialectic, of revolutionary program, means that one draws from the facts the science of their inexhaustible dynamics." [14] Do we not find here under another formulation the famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach of Marx, thesis that affirms that "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" [15]?

From the point of view of the method, the Marxist dialectic imposes the transformation of the society as a task of knowledge. But it is necessary to be careful here not to fall again in the dead-ends of idealism, that is to say to make depend the transformation of the society on a global and preliminary rise of knowledge. As we have seen, being precedes consciousness. So, in a way, the social transformation precedes the new knowledge. Let us now try to disentangle these complex links between social transformation and knowledge, which may at first sight appear to be paradoxical.

Marxist theory of knowledge

In order to resolve conclusively this apparent paradox between knowledge and the imperative of social transformation, let us take a moment to try to understand the nature of Marxism in relation to human knowledge in general.

It is quite true that Marx and Engels were quick to claim the scientific method in the elaboration of their militant writings. However, it was not a question for them of taking up in an uncritical way all the usual canons of science such as objectivity, neutrality or truth. The scientific character of the Marxist method is elaborated first of all in opposition to the previous socialist currents - the Utopian Socialism - that Marx and Engels, while recognizing its important legacy, try to surpass. It is important to emphasize what distinguishes the two socialist traditions to better understand the scientific character of Marxism: "Utopianism consists in ‘proposing’, from a construction elaborated in the author’s head and dictated by a supposed rationality, a new form of society that should be implemented through the adherence of other thinking men to the dissemination of these wise proposals, or, in its most degraded version, through a decision of existing powers and governments." [16]

To simplify, utopian socialists generally proposed to first change the consciousness of individuals. These new individuals, now transformed by rational socialist education, would then in turn be able to transform society in the image of their ideas. Therefore, consciousness would precede being. In contrast, "Scientific socialism consists in foreseeing, not according to rational plans, nor sentimental or moral preferences, the unfolding of the phenomena of the bourgeois social form as well as the historical processes that it will accomplish, as well as the new dynamics of the economic forces, all different, that will not only succeed them but will oppose them, in the dialectic of doctrinal research and revolutionary combat." [17]

In other words, socialism becomes scientific with Marx and Engels in that it derives the necessity of social transformation, not from brilliant ideas, but from the material characteristics of the class struggle itself. The possibility of communism does not exist as an idea in the heads of a few enlightened militants, but in the material reality of capitalist society. Therefore, being precedes consciousness.

Marxism is thus scientific compared to Utopian Socialism. But, what about its scientific character in relation to science in general? "Indeed, if Marxism is not a science in the usual sense of the term, it is nevertheless scientific, i.e. founded on the real knowledge of the real laws of the real world. While bourgeois sociology, which claims to be a science, does not dare, and for good reason, to venture beyond the flattest empiricism. The scientific as well as revolutionary rigor of its analysis has allowed Marxism to foresee, a hundred years ago already, all the subsequent development of capitalist society and the general aspects of the society that will succeed it." [18]

In fact, the currents of the social sciences conceive the social realities as static and transhistorical facts according to a method that limits itself to want to "interpret[...] the world in various ways [19], showing themselves incapable to conceive the social transformation. In doing so, the claim to scientific character of many currents of thought in the social sciences is in fact "the apology of the eternity of bourgeois society." [20] They do the work of social conservation. And this is precisely the distinction that Marx makes between valid knowledge and ideology, a distinction that goes beyond the framework of what science would be and what it would not be. Valid knowledge aims at the social transformation whereas ideology aims at the perpetuation of the current social relations and political order.

In capitalist society, the social sciences produce more ideologies than valid knowledge. This is explained by the fact that, "In a society where productive activity is determined not by human needs but by the laws of the extended reproduction of capital, the same is true of science, which sees the objects it deals with and the goals it pursues determined by the capitalist relations of production and the social relations that flow from them. Moreover, even the scientific method does not escape social determination, insofar as the ideology of the dominant class intervenes in the work of theorization, or else imposes on science to consider as natural, irreducible objects, products of social activity." [21]

Despite its objectivity and neutrality, science as a social phenomenon cannot credibly claim to be above the social determinations that are at its very basis. To deny and ignore the reality of class interests and antagonisms is for science to admit the acceptance of the world as it is and its will to protect such a social order. In opposition, to recognize the existence of the social conflict and to put itself in the service of the exploited ones poses for science the necessity to transform the current social order. This is again what separates ideology from knowledge. For example, bourgeois economists demonstrate, with the help of a scientific and objective method which from their point of view is absolutely rigorous, that the price of a commodity on a market varies according to the law of supply and demand. It cannot be disputed that this is a true fact. But economists ignore the fact that behind the relationship between things (commodities) on a market there are social relationships between human beings [22]. This true fact - the law of supply and demand - therefore hides equally true social relations of class oppression. To deny the reality of these social relations of exploitation, under the pretext of making an objective analysis, is then to pass from the domain of knowledge to that of ideology.

We have tried to sketch a differentiation between what belongs to knowledge and what belongs rather to ideology. We should now determine who is the subject of knowledge. Indeed, it is frequent to represent human knowledge as a kind of flash of genius which was produced by an isolated individual brain and which is thereafter transmitted to the other individuals through education in its broad acceptance. But such a conception, which is more of an ideological nature, legitimizes a panoply of highly capitalist practices and ideologies: the ’entrepreneurial spirit’, intellectual property, the myth of the self-made man, meritocracy, etc.

These kind of conceptions are very far from the social reality. In fact, all knowledge is absolutely the result of social processes. It is the social contradictions that push society towards new knowledge. The brilliant individuals that bourgeois society always puts on stage are, to use a funny expression, only "on a hide into nothing." [23] This implies that in a society where not only the individual is socially produced, but also where his or her practice serves as a social bond, the individual considered brilliant will receive all the credit for a work that is the result not only of the current set of social relations, but also of the knowledge accumulated previously in human history.

This conception of the social nature of knowledge may be difficult to grasp at first sight, so much so that the individualistic conception that ideas arise from particularly bright isolated cranial cavities is taken for granted at present. But Marx had already tried to conceptualize the social aspect of knowledge, in particular in the Grundrisse: "On this point, Marx has a magnificent expression: the ‘social brain’. Technology first, then science, are transmitted from generation to generation as an endowment of the Social Man, of the Species that has worked and collaborated in the person of the individuals that compose it. Following our construction, the Prophet, the Priest, the Discoverer, the Inventor walk towards their common liquidation. In these pages, the Social Man is also called Social Individual, not in the sense of ‘human person’, cell of the Society, but on the contrary in the sense of human society treated as a unique organism, living of a single life. (...) This organism whose Life is History has its brain, an organ which is the product of its millenary function and not the heritage of a Head or a Skull. Even more than Gold, the Knowledge of the Species, Science, could not be for us private inheritances; in Potential, they belong entirely to the Social Man." [24]

Knowledge is thus an attribute of human society as a whole. Like any result of human activity - production, reproduction, art, etc. - it cannot be appropriated by an isolated individual. It is capitalist social relations that individualize human practices, thus alienating humanity from its own fruits for the benefit of a class of supposedly brilliant and meritorious individuals: the capitalists.

Praxis : the revolutionary practice

We have seen that Marxism obtains its scientific character among other things from its dialectical method, that is to say, from the conception according to which every social fact is conceived in its movement and as a moment of a radical transformation past or to come. Moreover, all knowledge is the result of the whole of the social relations and thus belongs in reality to the whole of humanity. However, we have not yet resolved the apparent paradox between knowledge and social transformation. Indeed, would it not be to fall back into this idealism so much criticized by Marx to make all social transformations depend on a new knowledge of which the majority or even the totality of the individuals should learn beforehand in order to prepare the ’great evening’?

Marx is often criticized for having a teleological conception of history, i.e. for conceiving that history moves by itself according to an already known finality. However, Marx repeated several times that history as such does not do anything. On the contrary, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" [25] History is not, therefore, a kind of machine that functions autonomously; rather, it is the result of all human practices, or more precisely of the material confrontation between social classes. These confrontations are determined precisely by past and present social conditions. In other words, and to take up the thread of our exploration of human knowledge, the individual will never acts as the motor of history. What pushes history to transform itself is precisely the struggle between these collective social facts that we call social classes.

Thinking of human knowledge in this way, i.e. from the materialist point of view, implies an implacable critique of the various conceptions of social change based on education and the prior conscientization of the individual. Indeed, most of the supposedly reformist conceptions have in common that they want to change first the individuals as a means to change the society. They forget, however, that the alternative education given to individuals is always conditioned and branded by the present society [26]. In doing so, such approaches can only result in superficial changes that never challenge the root of the problem, the capitalist social relations. From the Marxist point of view, the relation between individuals and society is reversed: if the individual is determined by their society, society must first be changed in order for a transformation of individual consciousness to take place afterwards. Obviously, as we have already indicated, the impulse of change cannot come from the individual themselves, since they are constantly subjected to the weight of the "ideas of the ruling class [which] are in every epoch the ruling ideas." [27] Where then does the impulse for social transformation come from?

The emergence of new knowledge thus always depends on radical social transformations linked to changes in the mode of production. The revolutions that occurred in history and that allowed the emergence of new knowledge were rather the result of the material clash between classes where ideas were never the triggering element. That being said, revolutionary episodes do see the emergence of knowledge critical of the established order which, because of the power of the ideology of the ruling class, is always in the minority: "Only after long and painful clashes of interests and needs, after long physical struggles provoked by class conflicts, does the subject class forge a new opinion and doctrine of its own capable of opposing the reasons given in defence of the constituted order and proposing its violent demolition." [28] But this new critical knowledge does not form in the head of each individual, one by one, until it smoothly replaces the dominant ideology and gradually becomes the majority way of thinking.

On the contrary, Marx locates the new critical knowledge of the present society in a unitary and collective body representing the interests and defending the needs of the whole exploited class under capitalism and expressing a certain knowledge of the future society. This is obviously the Communist Party. "Hitherto even the ruling classes and their agents have only expressed their historical task in a confused way. The first class to express it clearly is the modern proletariat; but not the entire proletariat, not some particular person who guides and leads them, but rather a minority collective: the class party." [29] The apparent paradox between the imperative of social transformation and human knowledge - between being and consciousness, between matter and Spirit - is thus resolved by this political and militant organism that is the Communist Party. Its task is to produce on the historical level a revolutionary practice: "Thus, whilst determinism denies the individual the possibility of achieving will and consciousness prior to action, the reversal of praxis does allow it within the party, and only within the party, as a result of a general historical elaboration. However, although will and consciousness can be attributed to the party, it is not the case that the party is formed by a concurrence of the consciousness and will of individual members of a group; and nor can such a group be in any way considered as free of the determining physical, economic and social factors weighing on the class as a whole." [30]

The notion of revolutionary practice is important in that it grants a degree of will and consciousness prior to the social transformation that can arise in great social crises of historical magnitude, but only within the framework of a collective organism that exceeds individual consciousnesses. "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." [31]

On the other hand, it would be wrong to imagine the history of revolutions as a material clash between classes in which ideas are absolutely absent from the scene. The new critical knowledge itself has a certain effect on the course of history. Indeed, according to Marx, "the weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses." [32] The theory is fatally and unfortunately, always because of the pugnacity of the capitalist ideology, shared only by a minority militant community constituted as a political party. It is only afterwards, that is to say after the political confrontation between the classes, that the new critical knowledge will be absorbed by the whole of the society then rid of the social classes. As Marx masterfully stated, "this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew..." [33]

Social transformation thus starts from the radical needs of the exploited class. The whole class does not necessarily have an absolutely clear critical consciousness of the political acts it undertakes. But during this process, a minority of the exploited class emerges with a clear consciousness of the need to transform society and organizes itself into a political party. This minority will then have the task of pushing for the most radical transformations possible, assuming the political leadership of the proletariat; that is to say, it aims at dragging in its wake a large mass of proletarians. It is precisely this critical communist consciousness that becomes, after the revolution, the patrimony of humanity, much like the philosophy of the Enlightenment was integrated into the patrimony of humanity as the dominant ideology of the bourgeois class after the French and American revolutions, to name only these examples, thus relegating the old knowledge often based on religion to the dusty shelves of human history. However, unlike the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which after having carried out its historical task of destroying the feudal mode of production became in its turn the dominant ideology of a new exploitation and a new class society, the current communist movement representing the historical interests of the proletariat does not intend to establish a new form of exploitation after its revolution. It aims at the establishment of the human community free from the state, from social classes, from money, from nations, in short from any form of exploitation of the human being by the human being.