[RG-9] Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory Pt. 1

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

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.

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

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 realmin 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).

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.

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.

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.