Mois : mai 2020

Where does the sensation come from ? Such a question is a typical
error, the produce of the feudal and the bourgeois approaches, which separate the brain and the body.

The feudal conception separates them totally, whereas the bourgeois way links them in a tormented way.

Both consider that the question of the sensation is connected to the body, to the interpretation of the body by the brain. A feeling, a sensation, can not exist in itself; it has an existence only in the case of an interpretation by an individual.

The reason for this anthropocentrism resides in Metaphysics. For the feudal
conception, the mind must leave the body and join the origin of the world, God, which is immaterial.

For the bourgeois conception, we can not explain the origin of the world, so we should restrain us in elaborating theory about the relationships we make with reality.

Life is seen through individuals, through their relationships. There is no world, no nature, only a world, a nature existing insofar we have a relationship to them.

This conception was necessary to the bourgeois to justify the existence of the capitalist, which is an individual acting through his own understanding of its surrounding reality.

Protestantism is here the main ideological construction of this approach.

Nowadays, existentialism and all the post-modernist variants that exist support a terrorist version of this self-centeredness, this vision of the world based merely on the individuals.

Therefore, in the history of science dominated by the bourgeoisie, it was always considered that animals know no pain. They are considered as mere mechanisms, by Descartes and Malebranche notably, without a “conscience”.

Of course, this wrong conception proved more and more wrong, through the affirmation of democratic and socialist thought.

One major historical event here is when, on 10 December 1907, in a turmoil following an dissection of a living brown dog in London, 1,000 medical students marched through central London waving effigies of a brown dog on sticks, justifying and promoting vivisection, attacking for this reason suffragettes and trade unionists fighting against vivisection.

Two conceptions of the world struggled. Nowadays, the sensation of pets are recognized, but they are still mistreated; the sensation of vertebrates is also recognized but they are considered as of minor interest.

Moreover, the sensation of fishes and invertebrates are openly negated, in the name of the nervous system and the brain, in an anthropocentric conception.

On the contrary, dialectical materialism connects living matter to sensation.
In Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin deals with this question among others, and remembers us this important question :

“There still remains to be investigated and reinvestigated how matter, apparently entirely devoid of sensation, is related to matter which, though composed of the same atoms (or electrons), is yet endowed with a well-defined faculty of sensation.

Materialism clearly formulates the as yet unsolved problem and thereby
stimulates the attempt to solve it, to undertake further experimental investigation.”

Lenin says also that we have certainly to go in the direction of considering that, in the foundation of the structure of matter, we can surmise the existence of a faculty akin to sensation, like Denis Diderot did it.

And indeed, compassion and empathy are a proof of it. What is the dialectical materialist conception of reflect? That thebrain reflects reality; what we think is an echo.

But, if René Descartes and Emmanuel Kant are right, if each individual is like surrounded by a Chinese wall, how is it possible to feel what somebody else feels? How are compassion and empathy possible ?

This is only possible because living matter knows sensations; sensations are linked to the principle of echo, of movement of matter.

That is why a revolution can occur: the masses have synthesized, at different levels, the same vision of the world, corresponding to reality.

Revolution occurs at the general level, compassion and empathy at the individual levels, but their foundation is the fact that matter and sensation can not be separated.

Living matter is therefore at the heart of dialectical materialism, as it is a developed form of matter, a direction which corresponds to the auto-movement of matter itself to more complexity.

This is the reason why we have to recognize, cherish and defend the dignity of reality of nature, of the animals, of each living being, which correspond to the auto-development of matter, and participate in the global system of life on our planet as a Biosphere.

The universe consists of the infinite and eternal process of the reflection of matter by the matter and for the matter.

Matter is indeed sensitive and knows in itself an impression shaping it to different degrees.

This difference in the marking of the reflection has as its source in the fact that the universe is in motion and that it is through it that the reflections and impressions are carried.

This movement and the many aspects of reality make that reflections and
impressions know different rhythms, different magnitudes.

We can say that the universe is the reflection of itself in an uninterrupted
process of transformations.

Its nature is the equivalent of an infinite ocean where everything is reflected in an uninterrupted movement of waves at all levels, at all scales.

This process of reflections and impressions within a moving universe, with all its different aspects of matter, is thus characterized by unequal development.

The inequality of the markings of the reflection, of the impression, causes
situations of imbalances.

There is movement because unequal development, and uneven development because movement.

The main aspect depends on the stage of the process.

On the one hand, the impression of reflection in matter results in making it
more complex on the internal plane.

On the other hand, the uneven nature of this impression provokes breaks. The break is precisely what characterizes a process leading to a transformation as a qualitative leap.

There is concretely neither cause nor consequence, but only an internal transformation resulting in a greater complexity of matter, an enlargement of its impressions, an increase in the power of its reflections, one or more moments of rupture, a qualitative leap.

It is this movement of internal transformation reflected from matter in matter which itself inscribes impressions and produces changes. And what takes place internally is the contradiction brought to its conclusion.

The law of contradiction, with two poles opposed in a relative manner or not, expressing uninterrupted antagonistic relations, belongs to the general and universal movement of matter.

There is neither beginning nor end, because no process is isolated.

The reflection and the impression are generalized and uninterrupted; every phenomenon is related, in different ways and to different degrees, to all the other phenomena.

In the universe, everything is constantly transformed, with transformations whose reflection causes impressions, which themselves produce reflections, which provoke impressions, and this to infinity.

There is consequently neither cause nor consequence.

The process of transformation is dialectical, it unites the particular and the
universal, the relative and the absolute, all being bound together and at the same time unbound in an infinite and eternal process.

Any transformation is added to other transformations and is reflected in them, producing interaction, liaison, mediation.

Nothing is so isolated and independent.

Everything is mutually connected and interdependent, constantly transformed and transforming, by the reflection, by the impression.

Absolutely everything is reflection and reflection of reflection, and this to infinity.

Matter is inexhaustible and ever more complex, ever richer.

No turning back is possible, never, because the movement produces a series
of qualitative leaps that has resulted in a more developed form, more intertwined with the rest of the material.

What is called time is the description of transformation and what is called space is the description of matter, because the universe is only matter, always richer, ever more complex, ever more intertwined to an infinity of aspects of itself.

Any process obeys this mirror system. The most developed phenomena of nature and life correspond to major qualitative leaps in the complexification of matter on a large scale.

The two poles of electricity, molecular asymmetry in the domain of life in relation to the domain of non-living matter, action and reaction in mechanics, mirror neurons in brains, union and dissociation of atoms in chemistry, childhood and parenthood, the masculine and feminine, the class struggle in the modes of production… are examples of complex expression of the movement of matter and of a very high degree of
interplay with itself.

This process has no beginning or ending.

There is no starting point to the universe, nor any point of arrival.

There is no « God », no Big Bang, no source, no beginning.

There is only a ever deeper movement of reflections and impressions, in a spiral movement, proceeding by jumps, characterized by unequal development at all levels, affirming the dynamic nature of the internal relations taking a contradictory dimension until the break.

In fact, not only are the developments unequal between them, but each development is itself unequal in itself, because of the different density of
impressions.

The law of contradiction applies to the expression of the contradiction itself.
Nothing is therefore indivisible, nor eternal. One becomes two and that forever and everywhere.

As it is formulated in the article « The universe is the unity of the finite and the infinite », published in the Journal of the Dialectic of Nature in People’s China in the first half of the 1970s:

« The end of all concrete things, the sun, the Earth and humanity is not the end of the universe.

The end of the Earth will bring a new and more sophisticated cosmic body.

At that time, people will hold meetings and celebrate the victory of the dialectic and welcome the birth of new planets.

The end of humanity will also result in new species that will inherit all our achievements. In this sense… the death of the old is the condition of the birth of the new. »

Communism is the product of the movement of the synthesis of matter through leaps, that is to say that matter ceases to use itself in a partially
unproductive way to find a way to form an active whole.

By partially unproductive, we must understand that matter can only use
matter to develop itself, which implies that one aspect develops at the expense of another, within the framework of an uneven development.

The imbalance caused is resolved by a dialectical leap.

Mao Zedong tells us here that:

“Imbalance is a general and objective law. The cycle, which is endless, goes from imbalance to equilibrium and, again, from this one to the other.

Each cycle, however, corresponds to a higher level of development. The
imbalance is absolute, while the balance is temporary and relative.
The rupture of the balance is a leap forward.”

The capitalist mode of production thus permits the development of the productive forces, but this at the expense of the proletarians; socialism is the negation of it and the communism which prolongs it is then humanity
applying the principle of each according to his means, to each according to his needs.

There is however no negation of negation and socialism organized by humanity does not mean that it is alone to march to communism.

In reality, for dialectical materialism, the whole universe goes to Communism. Dialectically, this means that the entire universe has also gone to communism.

Matter is eternal and infinite; it is inexhaustible.

Consequently, it has already undergone a dialectical evolution, by means of transformations, since this is its very nature. It therefore implies that it has already known and that in every great step, every leap forward, it knows
a communist leap.

This communism consists in the universalization of the means of production of a material form, its synthetic combination. Any rise in the complexity of matter on a certain level corresponds to a communist assertion.

Mountains, galaxies, plants and animals are examples of synthetic leaps corresponding to a communist stage. We have an affirmation of a complex and organized system, a pooling of multiple contradictory aspects of the matter.

These complex systems themselves have a past made up of steps that established the elements that were going to synthesize.

The separate elements combine; they form a harmonious whole and at the same time obey an internal contradiction involving them in a development.

This development is itself uneven and this explains the different galaxies, the different mountains, the different plants, the different animals. The systematization of the production of a complex system is itself uneven.

These are not nature tests or nature errors; it is a reality of any development to be unequal.

Any process takes advantage of a process which has by definition been
unequal in itself to produce a more complex form, through an equally
unequal development.

This past is infinite, as much as the future. The process is endless, its
aspects infinite.

Matter, based on the inequalities of development of its different aspects, knows an infinite development by the affirmation of contradictions leading to a communist leap, producing new forms which themselves bring more
complexity in the general development.

Any jump does not correspond to a communist stage.

But each leap contains, in germ, the tendency to the leap forward towards
the communist nature of the system.

The communist stage is distinguished from the others by a unification where the contradiction ceases to be antagonistic between different aspects to allow a harmonious development – which corresponds to the development of new contradictions, which are different from the previous ones, which have shifted.

This displacement is done by placing the new form in new relationships with the rest of the material.

Each mountain, each galaxy … is the fruit of an internal contradiction, and its realization as a complex form produces a new contradiction with other aspects of matter, for example the galaxy with another galaxy, the
mountain with a river, etc.

The initial internal contradiction, allowing the advent of a new one, of a more complex form, then moves towards the dialectical relationship between the new thing and another thing, forming a new internal contradiction.

The article « The Universe is the unity of the finite and the infinite », published in the Journal of the dialectic of Nature at the time of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, presents the new relationship which established itself as follows:

« The end of all concrete things, the sun, the Earth and humanity is not the end of the Universe. The end of the Earth will bring a new and more sophisticated cosmic body.

At that time, people will hold meetings and celebrate the victory of the dialectic and welcome the birth of new planets.

The end of humanity will also signify that species will inherit all of our achievements. In this sense… the death of the old is the condition for the birth of the new. « 

Communism therefore generalizes on ever more complex levels, because matter transforms itself and its interaction at a complex level deepens, becomes systematized. In this sense, there is no negation of negation, no end of history, nor indeed beginning. There is communism for communism, matter for matter.

The universe is an infinite system where complexity develops in leaps and
bounds. The Japanese physicist Shoichi Sakata, in Theoretical Physics and
Dialectics of Nature, in June 1947, defines his conception of the Universe
as an onion, greeted by Mao Zedong:

“Current science has found that in nature there exist qualitatively different “levels »-the form of motion — , for example, a series of the levels such as elementary particles — nuclei — atoms — molecules — masses — heavenly bodies — nebulae.

These levels form various nodal points which restrict the various qualitative modes of existence of matter in general. And thus they are not merely related in a straightforward manner as described above.

The “levels” are also connected in a direction such as molecules — colloids — cells — organs — individuals — societies. Even in the same masses, there exist “levels” of states corresponding to solids-liquids-gases.

Metaphorically speaking, these circumstances may he described as having a sort of multi-dimensional structure of the fish net type, or it may be better to say that they have the onion-like structure of successive phases.

These levels are by no means mutually isolated and independent, but they are mutually connected, dependent and constantly “transformed” into each other. For example, an atom is constructed from elementary particles and a molecule is constructed from atoms, and conversely the decompositions of a molecule into atoms, an atom into elementary particles can be made.

These kinds of transformations occur constantly, with the creation of new quality and the destruction of others in ceaseless changes.”

The universe is an infinite ocean of contradictions raising matter to a more complex level, bringing richer contradictions, allowing an ever richer combination of matter, more sensitive, more complex, and this in all
directions.

It’s the meaning of communism.

The MLPD, Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany, is the only Marxist-Leninist structure to have maintained itself since the 1960s and 1970s in West Germany. It was one of the main initiators of the International Coordination of Revolutionary Parties and Organizations (ICOR), regrouping since 2010 some fifty structures claiming to be Marxist-Leninist and, most of the time, in one way or another, uphelding Mao Zedong.

The line of the MLPD and of the ICOR is classically neo-revisionist: revisionism is denounced, but in reality it is revisionism itself which is assumed. We can see this very simply with the thesis of “state monopoly capitalism”. This thesis is revisionist. State monopoly capitalism would be a new stage of imperialism.

The state would have acquired a great level of independence from the classes, it would be “rational” and by relying on it, capitalism would reach an “organized” stage. The state, through the socialization of losses, would prevent monopoly capitalism from sinking.

Developed by Eugen Varga, this thesis was strictly rejected in the immediate post-war period in the USSR, as part of a great ideological battle. Then, Nikita Khrushchev made it an official device of the revisionist ideology. And, unfortunately, most Marxist-Leninist organizations defining themselves as anti-revisionists in Western Europe have maintained this thesis of “state monopoly capitalism”.

This is the case with the MLPD.

The MLPD does not say that the state is neutral and that it could be wrested from monopoly capital. This distinguishes it from those practicing open revisionism. However, it maintains the thesis of “state monopoly capitalism” theorized by Eugen Varga as a new stage of imperialism. Willi Dickhut, the main theorist of the MLPD since its founding in 1982 and until his death in 1992, fully assumed it in 1973 and this position is documented
by the MLPD itself in 2019.

The MLPD says exactly the same thing as Eugen Varga and this thesis was strictly rejected by the USSR at the time of Stalin, in a vast controversy. Here is how the MLPD presents it:

“In connection with the Second World War, there was a qualitative leap: in all imperialist countries the transition from monopoly capitalist imperialism to monopoly state imperialism has matured.”

This thesis is totally revisionist, historically indefensible from the communist point of view, since it was proposed by Eugen Varga, denounced by Stalin’s USSR, assumed by revisionism in the USSR and systematized in all revisionist parties in the world. The idea of a “qualitative leap” in the history of imperialism was rejected by Stalin. There has never been any talk of a new stage of imperialism.
The consequences must be understood.

Indeed, Eugen Varga’s thesis of “state monopoly capitalism” implies that the state systematically comes to the rescue of monopolies, being even only an appendage to them. The activity is therefore the same as that of the Western European revisionists of the 1960s: the regime should be “unmasked”.

The MLPD says in 2017:

“Bourgeois democracy masks that we live in Germany in a state monopoly capitalism, a dictatorship of monopolies.”

And since we are already living in a dictatorship of monopolies according to the MLPD, then the communist analysis of fascism disappears. There can no longer be any attempt by the monopolies to take control of the state by means of fascism, since the monopolies already have the power. The monopolies therefore wrest the necessary profit thanks to the “organizing” State making society pay. No more need for fascism, no more need for
imperialist war.

The thesis defended by Stalin in 1952 on the inevitability of wars for capitalism, specifically targeting Eugen Varga, is rejected.

Instead, we have the 1920s socialist thesis of so-called organized capitalism.
The MLPD fully accepts this conception and, to satisfy its formulation, has put in place several concepts: the “surmonopoly”, the “sole domination of international financial capital”, the formation of new imperialist countries, the “proletarian way of thinking”.

The MLPD says:

“The international financial capital alone dominant is a small disappearing layer of the bourgeoisie, which is formed by groupings of the international surmonopolies with different national-state bases and links.”

By “surmonopolies”, the MLPD means the 500 most powerful companies in the world. They would form an “international financial capitalism” dominating capitalism on a world scale and supported by states subject to them. Not only non-monopoly capital, but even monopoly capitalist is subject to these “surmonopolies”. And these surmonopolies have not
only merged their own organs with those of the state apparatus, they have pushed for the dismantling of the states themselves.

This is the thesis of organized capitalism theorized by social democracy in the 1920s, with ultra-imperialism forming alongside the possibility of world socialism, and modernized in the 1940s with the thesis of “State monopoly capitalism”.

To unmask this organized capitalism, it would be necessary, according to the MLPD, to have a “proletarian way of thinking”, which would make it possible to discover the real situation. But, quite logically, the only possible revolution is against these “surmonopolies” and we then arrive at the Trotskyist thesis of the unitary world revolution. The program of the MLPD is explicit:

“Under the conditions of internationalized production, the socialist revolution will take an international character. The international collaboration of the imperialists in the organization of the counter-revolution and the interaction with the international class struggle make that today it is practically impossible that an isolated revolutionary process in a country can be carried out victoriously (…).

In this world revolutionary process, there will be in indissoluble interaction mass strikes, mass demonstrations, anti-imperialist, democratic and revolutionary struggles and uprisings.

This is why the proletarian strategy and tactics in each country must essentially be understood and carried out as preparation for the international socialist revolution.”

This is Trotskyism.

And then remains a fundamental problem to explain for the MLPD: why is there still a very clear tendency to war which emerges?

An explanation was to be found. The MLPD then says the following thing: yes, war is inevitable in capitalism, because the states compete for their interests. This is not Lenin’s teaching at all.

Leninism explains that imperialism is the superstructure of national capitalism. The imperialist war is therefore carried by capitalism itself, because once developed, the monopoly fraction prevails.

It was therefore necessary for the MLPD to break this definition and broaden the concept of an imperialist country. Stefan Engel, leader of the MLPD, publicly expressed this “broader” concept in 2011.

Would be henceforth imperialist countries Saudi Arabia, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, India, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Argentina, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Iran. Added to this must be China and Russia, as well as Israel, which the MLPD already considered as imperialist.

We immediately see the paradox, since the MLPD itself explains that these 14 countries bring together 3.7 billion people, more than half of the world’s
population. If we therefore add the population of the remaining imperialist countries (United States, Western European countries, Japan), then not living in an imperialist country would only affect 35% of the world population!

Here is completely reversed the principle of uneven development and the parasitic nature of imperialism. Besides that, the MLPD does not recognize the concept of a semi-feudal semi-colonial country, speaking of “neo-colonialism”. The MLPD needs all this fiction to pretend that it has not left communist teachings. The MLPD thus denounces the war, saying that it is the result of competition between imperialists.

What the MLPD does not directly confess, however, is that according to this conception, this competition takes place in what is called the “world imperialist system”. For the MLPD, this is a kind of by-product of the world domination of the “surmonopolies”.

It is therefore the fruit of state militarism in search of territories to be controlled – we come back here to Rosa Luxembourg’s erroneous thesis that an imperialist war is based only on the principle of conquering territories to widen the accumulation of capital.

For the MLPD, there is a global, unified imperialism, and within it competition between states. This is why countries without industrial production apart from oil and gas, such as Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, can be defined as “imperialist”. As they take a part of
the global « piece of the cake », they compete with others.

All this has nothing to do with the teachings of communism and the just understanding of the uneven development of semi-feudal semi-colonial countries, recognizing that there are indeed differences between Gabon and South Korea, Chile and India. Nevertheless, a semifeudal semi-colonial country can only be transformed into expansionism and not into
imperialism, because it is itself linked to one or more imperialist countries.

Iran practices expansionism, as does Israel, but neither the one nor the other is an imperialism. This responds to the specific needs of bureaucratic capitalism in crisis, which needs to get out of it by war. But their semi-feudal and semi-colonial dimension is obvious.

The weight of religions in institutions alone shows the undemocratic dimension present, the maintenance of backward social structures, incompatible with liberated capitalism and going as far as imperialism. There is indeed a tendency towards war, but it is not imperialism in substance or else one distorts the notion of imperialism by reducing it to a bourgeois definition of « geopolitics ».

This is why, beyond a few rhetorical remarks, the MLPD does not make imperialist war one of its favorite themes. The imperialist wars is for it only a secondary aspect, specific to the internal competition of states for in a “world imperialist system”. This is an entirely revisionist analysis.

Movement has by definition a non-linear nature. If this were not the case, it would necessarily tend inversely to linearity and therefore to the abolition of movement as such. As movement does not imply the abolition of movement as a universal principle specific to matter, but the abolition of the matter which carries movement, that is to say its transformation since its abolition is impossible.

There is always movement, because there is always matter. But so that the movement does not stop, without which there would be no more matter expressing it, it must be the matter itself which stops, and as it cannot stop, it is transformed. Matter carries movement, is abolished by movement, is constituted by movement.

But nothing can constitute matter. Therefore is matter movement and movement matter.

What is at stake here is the question of quality. A line, even an ascending one, does not evolve, it carries a uniform direction. And who says uniform direction says absence of rupture. Even a movement uniformly experiencing breaks would, by definition, have no breaks due to its continuous dimension. It can therefore not exist.

Therefore, the break is not sufficient in itself to go beyond the principle of a linear movement.

If we take a uniform line, we have no breaks.

∕

If you accept the breaking principle and integrate it into the movement, then you have a leap, but only in terms of form. This jump only adjusts the direction, corrects it, it is a qualitative correction of the quantitative. The break applies to development, to its expression – but it is not development itself.

A break, a qualitative leap, is not enough to formulate quality.

A qualitative leap knows quality, it is not quality. A jump is not quality in itself.

__ ∕

Concretely, we can see in the development of the phenomena that there is advance, retreat, revolution, restoration, counter-restoration. The final transition to a higher stage is never unilateral. It is never linear.

It is never linear either with a single « jump », since there are backslides, a push forward, a counter-push, etc.

So there is not simply a « break » in the course of development. There is not a trend, then suddenly a qualitative acceleration breaking with this trend while continuing it. This can only be a summary description, losing the substance of quality.

What is at stake here is the contradiction between the new and the old. If we stop at it, we have the principle of rupture, in a way however formal.

This contradiction in fact also implies the contradiction of the phenomenon with itself. There is no abstract struggle between the new and the old, only a concrete struggle.

This contradiction in fact also implies the contradiction of the phenomenon with itself. There is no abstract struggle between the new and the old, only a concrete struggle.

The development being internal, the crisis does not occur from the outside, bringing about a transformation, but inside and it is carried by the inside itself; in fact it is the interior itself.

Any development of a phenomenon is a crisis carried by an internal tear. It is not the « form » of the phenomenon that is affected by the crisis, but the contradictory substance of the phenomenon that carries it.

There is therefore no linear movement, because the movement itself undergoes a change in nature by the change in the substance of what carries it.

The changing movement is the changing matter, the changing matter is the changing movement. Movement is transformation of matter and transformation of matter is transformation of movement.

Thus, there is a contradiction between the change in the nature of the movement and the change in the substance that carries it. The old wears the old movement, the new the new movement. But the old and the new are one and the same phenomenon, thus carrying so contradictory both the old and the new movements.

There are thus:

– contradiction within the phenomenon (or more adequately contradiction of the phenomenon), producing the movement;

– contradiction within the phenomenon, between the old and the new;

– contradiction between the new movement and the old, within the phenomenon;

– contradiction between the old movement and the new, within the phenomenon;

– contradiction between the movement and the phenomenon.

There is no negation of negation, because each stage constitutes a qualitatively new terrain. There is no linear movement, nothing is linear, everything comes under the non-linear character – including the non-linear character.

This is because the contradiction is always concrete – there is no movement in itself – it is the dignity of the real that prevails.

Viruses, the most common organisms on Earth, can only be understood in their relationship to living things; they are in fact not able to carry out metabolic processes, because they do not have any of the physiological mechanisms necessary for the implementation of these processes. They cannot reproduce or feed on their own.

A virus simply consists of a protein capsule protecting a DNA or RNA. It can only reproduce by means of a host, from which it diverts part of the operation for its own benefit. In doing so, it can also cause its own genetic code to intrude into that of its host.

Viruses, by their massive spread on the planet, are a key in biochemical exchanges; at least 8% of homo sapiens DNA is viral from its origin. The placenta owes its function to viral DNA.

This fact alone completely ruins bourgeois conceptions of heredity as « fixed », frozen, separated from reality, etc.

Viruses form, concretely, a pivot in the more complex development of matter.

This material always comes from the universal unity of the processes as well as from the qualitative character of the movement, while being carried out in a particular way and through quantity.

It must be understood that there is nothing existing in a separated way and that nothing is regressing in its development. What is called “disease” is therefore improperly defined, because the negative effects are completely secondary to the main aspect of the general process of complexification of matter which involves dialectical relationship.

Only a small minority of viruses are thus pathogenic to humans, even though they form a material aspect of the utmost importance. It is an expression of uneven development.

The types of viral populations in the ocean are at least 200,000 and it is predicted that they would be a billion. In the ocean, the number of viruses per milliliter of water is estimated to be between 10 exponent 6 and 10 exponent 8 (between one and one hundred million).

These viruses play an essential role in the ocean in their relationship to bacteria and living things; their role is still unknown, but it appears that they regulate the bacterial population, that of micro-algae and even living beings.

In other words, the decomposition resulting from the activity of viruses has a biogeochemical activity, playing on food in the oceans, the equilibria of the beings therein, neutralizing the development of bacteria, having an essential function in the presence of CO2 on Earth through activity in the carbon cycle (by capturing carbon to transform it as sediment in the seabed).

Many chemical elements are still involved here in the activity of viruses in the ocean (phosphorus, sulfur …) and research is new, dating from the very end of the 20th century and the very beginning of the 21st century.

It wasn’t until the 1930s that we were able to see viruses, using electron microscopes; it was not until the beginning of the 21st century that viruses, like the bacteria, appeared as an essential scientific field.

If this statement is true on the level of practical studies, dialectical materialism had already noted the nature of viruses in the early 1950s, within the framework of the socialist USSR led by Stalin, and had asked the question of their role in biogeochemical processes.

In a summary on dialectical materialism of 1953, Peter Belov, in his article On the primacy of matter and the secondary character of consciousness, says that:

“The data of advanced modern science as to the essence and origin of life can be briefly summarized as follows.

Living is not something random on earth. The totality of all living things on earth – the biosphere – is a natural product of the geochemical development of the planet’s surface.

The biosphere continues to play an essential and extremely important role in all the other geochemical processes of the earth’s crust, determining the nature of the rock formation, the formation of the soil, the composition of the atmosphere and in general the distribution of the chemical elements in the upper layers of the earth’s crust, hydrosphere, atmosphere.

“Living organisms, from a geochemical point of view, are not an accidental fact in the chemical mechanism of the earth’s crust; they constitute its most essential and inseparable part. They are inextricably linked to the inert matter of the earth’s crust, minerals and rocks … The great biologists have long been aware of the inextricable link that connects the body to its surrounding nature.” (V.I. Vernadsky, Essays on geochemistry, State Publishing House, 1927)

Living things are made up of the same chemical elements that make up the rest, the mineral part of nature.

The composition of a living body includes almost all of the chemical elements (including radioactive) in the periodic table, some largely, some in smaller proportions. But whatever the quantitative proportion of certain chemical elements in the composition of the protoplasm (their presence in organisms is only detected by spectral analysis), they however also play an important role in the life of the protein, their absence leads to death of the body.

Modern advanced natural sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology) have fully exposed the idealist theories of “eternity of life”, “panspermia”, etc. Life on earth is of terrestrial origin, the result of an extremely long natural synthesis of increasingly complex organic substances (…). The Living is inseparable from the conditions of its existence and can only be conceived as a product of the development of these conditions themselves.”

The question that inevitably arises here is that of placing the virus: is it an organism falling under living matter or is it inert matter?

Virologist Konstantin Sukhov rightly noted in 1950 in the journal Questions of philosophy that:

“The self-reproduction of viral particles marks their capacity to assimilate and is a quality that fundamentally distinguishes them from bodies of inanimate nature.

At the same time, due to the simplicity of their organization, viruses retain a number of properties which make them extremely close to molecular substances.

This includes their ability to crystallize and their chemical reactivity.

At this stage of the development of living matter, life turns out to be reversible, it can completely stop and resume depending on environmental conditions.”

This point of view is essential, because it poses the viruses “in the middle” of inert matter and living matter.

There are two opposing points of view here, indeed, in the socialist USSR at the time of Stalin, implying themselves a whole conception which, if it is wrong, shakes up the scientific perspective itself.

If we say that viruses come from inert matter or living matter, there is indeed a compulsory validation from a parallel point of view.

The question arises in the following way: either it is said that viruses are not alive, but by-products of life, that they are basic living forms but having degenerated and having lost everything except their DNA. This places them in a subordinate role, consequent to the development of living matter and bringing them back to inert matter.

Or, on the contrary, it is said that viruses are part of the process of life itself, that they are there from the start in this process.

The Soviet biochemist Alexandre Oparin (1894-1980) considered for example that this second conception was wrong, because it would bring to consider that viruses would be a “brick” of life, which would lead to a metaphysical conception of a “creator” at the origin of such a brick.

Oparin was head on against Vernadsky here. Oparin reasoned in terms of “primordial soup” where living matter is inert matter experiencing a leap, while conversely Vernadsky considered that the universe had always known an opposition between living matter and inert.

However, Vernadsky had still not resolved the question of viruses in 1938; he then formulated the problem as follows in Inert matter, living bodies and biosphere:

“We have never observed a spontaneous generation of a living organism from inert bodies: the principle of F. Redi (all life comes from life) is never violated.

The concept of inert (dead) and living natural bodies as distinct natural objects is an ancient concept, taught over the millennia – a concept of common sense. It cannot be doubted and is clearly intelligible to all.

After centuries of scientific work, there have been very few doubtful cases where one wonders whether a specific natural body should be considered as a living or inert body, or whether a given natural phenomenon is a manifestation of living or non-living processes.

The issue of viruses is one of those rare cases, and it is probably the most profound illustration of this.”

Here is the problem. Oparin is right to say that there cannot be an absolute border between living matter and inert matter: this would be an absolutist idealism. However, it follows from his reasoning that viruses would be a regression, but a regressive process is not possible, since it is opposed to the principle of the dialectical movement.

Vernadsky is thus right to see in viruses a theoretical problem, but he sees himself blocked by his positioning opposing unilaterally inert matter and living matter.

In fact, the answer is in the question and Mao Zedong’s teachings on dialectical materialism, his insights into movement and its nature, make it clear.

There are two aspects, which has been well seen. First, it is clear that living matter requires an internal process and that viruses do not have it.

Friedrich Engels tells us about living matter, in the Anti-Dühring, in 1878, that:

“Life is the mode of existence of albuminous bodies, and this mode of existence essentially consists in the constant self-renewal of the chemical constituents of these bodies.

The term albuminous body is used here in the sense in which it is employed in modern chemistry, which includes under this name all bodies constituted similarly to ordinary white of egg, otherwise also known as protein substances (…).

Wherever we find life we find it associated with an albuminous body, and wherever we find an albuminous body not in process of dissolution, there also without exception we find phenomena of life.”

There are no vital phenomena relating to viruses. So it seems that viruses do not come from life, from living matter.

However, at the same time, viruses have DNA or RNA, which inert matter does not have. Viruses are capable of having a direct relationship with living matter, while inert matter has an indirect relationship.

This is where the key lies. Vernadsky is wrong to oppose living matter to inert matter, but Oparin is wrong to assimilate them by saying that one comes from the other. Indeed, by doing so, he himself opposes one to the other and returns to Vernadsky’s unilateral idealism.

The latter is moreover more materialist despite his idealism, because he recognizes the dignity of the real: in opposing in the past living matter to inert matter, he is wrong, but in opposing them today he is right because it allows us to understand their combination, their dialectical relationship in a whole which is the Biosphere.

By opposing one to the other, Oparin is materialist because he says that matter comes from matter, but he loses the dialectic because he separates living matter and inert manner unilaterally and therefore misses the leap made by matter.

His point of view is thus regressive compared to that of Vernadsky, because it breaks the unity of matter and arrives at an abstract schematism where inert matter would have remained after all “behind”.

Viruses are, in such a framework, the proof of the leap in matter and at the heart of the contradiction that this leap implies.

Viruses are not either inert matter or living matter, they represent the expression of uneven development in the leap of matter bringing about the existence of living matter.

Viruses are the nexus of the inert and the living, of the spread of the complexification of life (by the transmission of DNA) and of death (by diseases and bacteriophage activities, massive in the ocean).

Viruses are fixed, they do not change in size, and yet they can transform, recombine. They have genetic material but cannot reproduce on their own.

They have a form depending of mineralogy but are turned towards the living.

Viruses are the nexus of the relationship between life and death, and as such a key to understanding the development of living matter as we know it.

The “primordial soup” of which Oparin speaks cannot exist in the past only, such a reading is anti-dialectic.

In reality, there is no negation of the negation, a break rejecting the legacy of the past, and the soup still exists, having experienced qualitative leaps. Viruses are at the heart of the contradiction of this soup where living matter and “inert” matter both attract and repel each other, as opposites.

The emergence of a particular strain of coronavirus, never identified in humans, is no coincidence. It is a product – entirely new, a qualitative leap from the virus – of the collision between cities and countryside caused by the capitalist mode of production (CMP).

These cities and countryside are, moreover, themselves largely shaped by the CMP, which is true of the way of life of humanity in general. And all of this is happening on a planetary scale.

We should not therefore think that the health crisis comes from outside of humanity, from outside the CMP, on the contrary. It was born from within the CMP and from the world it formed in its image.

A world which is by no means finished, firm, stable, permanent … and which is collapsing under the blows of what is new, exponential, in rupture.

Capitalism is a mode of production now planetary

Capitalism is not only an economy, i.e. a particular distribution of property and a particular distribution of wealth. It is, more concretely, the way in which humanity socially finds the material means to exist and to develop.

It is a mode of production.

And having reached an immense development of the productive forces at the beginning of the 21st century, and being by nature universal, the CMP subjugates all planetary activities. Its consequences concern all aspects of life on Earth, all the time.

It was this historic situation that brought about the emergence of a new strain of coronavirus and gave it a global dimension.

It is this same historical situation that has brought global warming and the same goes for deforestation, the massive annihilation of wild animals, the massive use of animals in industry, the uncontrolled development of areas constantly expanding urban areas, etc.

The concrete origin of coronavirus disease 2019

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a direct result of the development of the CMP in China, a monopolist and bureaucratic development, with metropolises established in a short time and engulfing everything around them.

The city of Wuhan, where the virus originated, illustrates this. It had just under 1.5 million inhabitants in 1953, 2.2 million in the early 1970s. Then the restoration of capitalism in China brought about a complete change, transforming it into the megalopolis of central China.

The agglomeration had more than 4 million inhabitants in 1982, more than 8 million in 2000, practically 11 million in 2015. Wuhan integrates eight cities of significant importance in this agglomeration (Huangshi, Erzhou, Huanggang, Xiaogan, Xianning, Xiantao, Tianmen, Qianjiang).

This former French Factory is now even the Chinese model for urban development and is undergoing a massive operation to build road infrastructure (one metro line per year, 400 km high-speed commuter train, etc.).

This urban dimension is, however, only one aspect of the question. A third of the population still lives in the countryside, in an agglomeration where we find Carrefour, Auchan, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, KFC, etc.

Here we have an intermingling of cities, countryside, within the framework of an unbridled capitalist expansion.

The origin of the virus in the strict sense, it’s thus the massive urbanization of the area of Wuhan, with a use, for food, of animals both wild and from breeding, in a kind of general confusion where we no longer know what is cities, what is countryside.

This was the terrain, unnatural, favorable to the mutation of the virus, which passed from one species to another, then finally to the human species.

It is not an encounter with a disease not discovered so far – it is the confrontation of humanity with a disease resulting from a mutation, caused by the action of humanity itself.

The metropolis as the basis of the CMP

There is a Franco-Chinese « sustainable city » of 39 km² in Wuhan, a project set up during the presidency of François Hollande. 2018 was even « the Franco-Chinese year of the environment » and going to China on this occasion, Emmanuel Macron said the following:

« Urbanization is already a challenge for China and will be even more so tomorrow. France wishes to strengthen its partnerships in this area by developing the integrated offer that we have built for the sustainable city. »

This shows the convergence, on a world scale, of all the capitalist forces towards the strengthening of the metropolis. Today, the majority of humanity indeed lives in cities.

We should however more being talking of urban areas, as since the passage of the bourgeoisie in the reaction following its victory over feudalism, it is no longer able to create cities in the historical sense of the term, hence the great cultural interest for real cities in the strict sense (Paris, London, New York, Venice, Bruges, Amsterdam, Prague…), themselves also deeply disfigured by the CMP.

The metropolis with innumerable ramifications, despotic in its anonymity and entirely denatured, becomes the norm. It is the form most suited to the satisfaction of capitalist production and consumption, to the 24 hours a day of capitalism.

For our country, France, we can say that its symbol is the roundabout that dots the roads. We are there in the dynamics of the just-in-time, zero stock massively involving industrial zones in the countryside, in order to have an accelerated circulation and a better rotation of capital.

This leads to the destruction of nature and to the moral, cultural and psychological crushing of the workers. Karl Marx rightly speaks of :

“an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”

The historical city, that of the bourgeoisie, involved culture, exchanges, meetings. This is incompatible with the CMP, which is tyrannical and requires everything to be an ever deeper, broader, more perfected, faster trading relationship.

The modern city is now a place to live in isolation, seeking to make the most of its accommodation, if possible by buying a home. Everything is far, farther and farther away, whether it’s leisure, the possibilities of playing sports, shopping, people you can meet.

Everything is subject to a commercial relationship, everything must go through the CMP.

The limited nature of CMP in the face of coronavirus disease 2019

The CMP has only one logic: its own development. It does not proceed by choice, but by necessity, since its very existence depends on an uninterrupted and enlarged development of capital. Its only horizon is himself.

The CMP is the first to “regret” the 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19), but at the same time if the same thing had to be done again, it would do it again. The CMP does not allow itself any retreat, any background analysis; it lives in the immediacy of its self-realization. It has no regard for itelf, being a system which is its own end in itself.

We can clearly see its limited character throughout the health crisis due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is new in its scale, and above all which is shocking because of its qualitative dimension. Researchers are overwhelmed, because the natural relationships between living things are upset and this causes health crises expressing a qualitative leap that exceeds them.

There has already been the emergence of the SARS-CoV virus through the masked palm civet and MERS-CoV through the dromedary. These jumps between species of virus, which are not found in a natural situation, become recurrent due to the situation imposed by the CMP.

For this reason, everyone has heard of HIV, Ebola, avian flu, swine flu. The so-called Spanish flu, which killed between 20 and 100 million people in 1918, is also of this type; cominh from an animal farm in the United States, it reflects the beginning of the generalization of the distorted relationship to life.

The CMP produces, by its action (and its inaction), destructive phenomena, born from the contradiction between it and life on Earth.

None of this, however, can be grasped by the CMP, which only identifies reality by means of statistics, « big data », quantitative data evaluation. The principle of qualitative development is foreign to the CMP.

Capitalism being not simply an « economy », but an unilateral mode of production, it responds to its own logic of accumulation and nothing else. It can only notice things, passively, remaining himself.

The CMP thus has an interest in having what it sees as potential natural resources, and therefore in preserving them – but on the other hand, it is obliged to integrate them, to quickly valorize them, to meet the needs of capital-based production and consumption.

The CMP also has every interest in ensuring that global warming does not cause massive unrest. However, at the same time, the CMP has its own priorities and considers that its own development takes precedence over any other consideration.

This is the reason why supporters of the CMP can indifferently say either that global warming does not count, or that capitalism must develop new markets to adapt. These are two pieces of the same coin consisting of the narrow character of the CMP.

The CMP collides with reality

The CMP has upset the whole natural relationship between life and its surroundings. Human labor had already caused upheavals, from agriculture and animal husbandry. With the development of the productive forces, however, the planet has changed entirely with the CMP.

Life concerned by the CMP was initially restricted, since there were only a handful of capitalist countries originally, along with the Netherlands and England, with underdeveloped productive forces.

Then followed a whole series of countries, like Belgium, France, Germany … and mainly the United States, with a material accumulation starting to be significant, while colonization upset the primitive economies all over the world.

There are economies which are not yet perfectly capitalist in the strict sense, but the CMP has fundamentally modified them in order to subordinate them. The situations of modern feudalism that exist in most countries of the world themselves fall within the framework of the CMP.

It is this modern feudalism that achieves deforestation in the Amazon, the massive use of fossil fuels in the Middle East, the cocoa monoculture in West Africa, that of palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia, etc.

The human way of life within the CMP has not changed qualitatively over the decades. It is quantitatively that it has deepened and generalized.

And the quantitative is transformed, at a moment, into qualitative.

The 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19) reflects that the CMP is starting to reach its limit: it is starting to undermine the whole reality, at all levels. It is no longer a realizing force, but a force of destabilization, of disturbances, of destruction.

The CMP is reaching its limit

The more the CMP develops itself, the more it confronts its limit, its inability to bring about the enlarged reproduction of life without entering into an antagonistic contradiction with life itself.

As long as capital is in the hands of particular people, it will irrationally seek its enlarged reproduction and produce a forced systematization of the valuation of capital – that is to say, the use of what exists, as much as possible, to bring about capitalist production, capitalist consumption.

The destruction of all that is natural is inevitable for a mode of production whose function is the dispersed, disorderly, systematic accumulation and by ever more powerful cycles, by an ever more unified and violent capital.

The 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19) shows that the transformation of reality by the CMP has reached a global dimension and that the threshold of rupture has been reached.

There were already many telltale signs. The CMP seeks to force the course of things, to ensure that everything fits perfectly into it, even if it means being violently distorted, crushed, reshaped.

The CMP already literally dynamites the natural functioning of things. It distorts everything that exists to insert it into the capitalist market. This is true for animals used in industry, which are genetically modified for food and the pet industry.

This is true for vegetation and wild life in general, whose richness, multiplicity, abundance… are considered hostile by the CMP, because they are carriers of quality, irreducible to a simple quantitative reading.

This is true for the human way of life; there is just the need to think of the consumption of meat, the massive use of sugar and stimulating products (caffeine, theine), the generalization of processed products, the proliferation of specific markets (halal, kosher, gluten-free, meat-like products, etc.).

And even if working conditions have improved, they involve a far greater human tension, as well as a profound deformation of the personality. Night work alone has expanded considerably, affecting more than 15% of workers in France, with dire consequences for health.

The CMP concretely tries to modify its own material base, in order to avoid reaching its own historical limit, and by doing so it reaches it.

Because the CMP thus comes into contradiction with its own material base to force its own development – reality becomes antagonistic to the CMP.

World health crisis and communist affirmation

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global crisis that does not come from outside of the CMP, but from it, and at the same time it expresses itself in it. Capitalist accumulation takes place in a concrete way and it is this process of accumulation which itself brings the crisis, produces the crisis, is the crisis itself.

The CMP sees reality here lurching under its feet. It is forced to back off.

And the CMP backing off is humanity backing off – placing itself at the heart of historical contradiction, as source and resolution.

It is indeed humanity that carries the CMP. What the CMP is going through, humanity is going through, just like what humanity is going through, the CMP is going through.

Humanity, prisoner of the CMP, of its mechanisms, of the ideology which ensues from it, is confronted with a brutal awareness: reality rebels against it.

The onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a crisis shaking the very foundations of human participation in the activities of the CMP.

Humanity, which is a part from nature, is forced to drop out of the CMP which becomes an obstacle to life itself.

It’s the end of a whole movement. Humanity has come out of nature to assert itself as a species, but it must return to it by bringing the achievements of its own journey. This corresponds to the principle of uneven development.

What is called History is human history in its separate course from the Biosphere, that is, from all of life on Earth as a unified system.

The end of History, the passage to Communism, is his return to the History of the Biosphere, bringing to it what was acquired during its uneven development.

Communist transformation affects the human being at its very bottom. It brings it back to nature, as a complex social being.

It is both a tearing, but also a reintegration into the general process of the Biosphere.

Communist objectives

Produced by the CMP, the health crisis will have repercussions in it, causing disorganization, slowdowns, inevitable bankruptcies. This reveals all this fragility of the CMP construction, which comes to its term.

The CMP will obviously desperately seek to get out of there, at the expense of the masses, who will be further exploited and alienated. It will also mean stepping up the march to war for the distribution of the world, with at its heart the confrontation between the hegemonic American imperialist superpower and China wishing to divide the world in its favor.

However, this will not be enough, the limit being reached, the tilting threshold being reached.

What matters substantially is that the limit of the CMP is capital itself, always more incapable of valuing itself in reality, all the more if it rebels openly.

The CMP finds itself in the impossible situation to perpetually seek to circumvent the downward trend of the rate of profit. It tries to escape an overproduction of goods by the lack of continuity in the consumption cycle, to avoid the overproduction of capital, in the absence of field to develop itself.

The health crisis precipitates it all the more in the failure of its self-enlargement.

The CMP is effectively disappearing in front of the historic qualitative leap: the transition to world unification of humanity under the aegis of the working class, the adoption of the communist position in relation to nature.

It clearly follows from this revolutionary reading of the 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19) that the following tasks are on the agenda, falling under the general communist program for our entire era:

1. Replacement of state apparatus by the democratic power of the people;

2. Dismantling of metropolises;

3. Cessation as far as possible of any destructive relationship with life on Earth;

4. Socialization without compensation of all monopolies;

5. Establishment of a world socialist republic;

6. Conquest of space in order to spread there life, from the Biosphere.

We are entering the decisive era, that of the second wave of the world revolution. We will be on the front line to make our country the example to follow to meet the challenges of our time!

This task is inevitable historically, the communist victory is assured by definition.

Long live Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong!

Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

People’s War for Communism!

Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)

March 2020

Since some years, Ajith is put forward as an intellectual by the Indian Maoists and the Maoist Communist Party of Italy. It is therefore very interesting to see what he has to say about the Covid-19 crisis, as its postmodern conception of the world can only appear in a more frankly manner. What we can see in its article Covid-19, its social roots are as important as the virus itself is indeed the expression of the negation of Dialectical Materialism.

Ajith doesn’t understand nothing about the principle of mode of production. So, he criticizes Capitalism under only one aspect, the one of health. Understanding that it’s not enough to appear as a Communist, he then salutes the article COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital published by Monthly Review.

This review is edited by a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and was co-founded b Paul M. Sweezy by Paul M. Sweezy, a professor of economics at Harvard acquiring a certain fame for Monopoly Capital (1966) written with Paul A. Baran. We are in the intellectual bourgeois environement of the universities.

Ajith belongs exactly to this approach and this is why he hails the article of Monthly review, which would “ scientifically” analyze the imperialist relations giving birth to the Corona pandemic. Ajith shows that he’s a total failure.

The article of Monthly review is typically petty bourgeois. We would need rules and regulations in the world, good rules and regulations, which capitalism is not able to obey. Ajith agrees. Both Monthly Review and Ajith are, because of this approach, unable to understand both the mutation of the virus and the animal question.

Monthly Review says the following, which is completely wrong:

“We need to retain the shock we received when we learned another SARS virus emerged out of its wildlife refugia and in a matter of eight weeks splattered itself across humanity (…).

Ecosystems in which such “wild” viruses were in part controlled by the complexities of the tropical forest are being drastically streamlined by capital-led deforestation and, at the other end of periurban development, by deficits in public health and environmental sanitation (…).

What were once local spillovers are now epidemics trawling their way through global webs of travel and trade. By this parallax effect—by a change in the environmental background alone—old standards such as Ebola, Zika, malaria, and yellow fever, evolving comparatively little, have all made sharp turns into regional threats. They have suddenly moved from spilling over into remote villagers now and again to infecting thousands in capital cities.”

Ajith agrees totally and says:

“The crux of this essay may be summarised thus: Viruses that had been largely contained through the complexities of the tropical forests have entered the mainstream through the deforestation caused by capital, and deficits in public health and environmental sanitation.

In short, the changes in livelihood conditions and environmental conditions of the vast majority, caused by globalisation and neo-liberal policies, lie at the root of the present tragedy. Its primary solution is the destruction of the imperialist system and the success of the Communist project.”

Let’s put aside the fact that for Ajith Communism is a “project” and that evil consists in “globalisation and neo-liberal policies”. This is even too petty-bourgeois to be mentioned and it shows a clear problem about the level of political economy in some part of the world.

Let’s see here a new thing, very important: the fact that the Covid-19 virus is not seen as a mutation. There would be a reservoir of pathogen viruses and the deforestation would bring them in contact to us. The industrial farms are the intermediary for the spread.

This is totally wrong. The virus didn’t come from the wildlife. It knew a mutation. It was in the wildlife but then it changed. And it changed through the animal farms. This is why Dialectical Materialism can only have the conclusion that we need a leap in agriculture and this means the dismissal of the animal farms.

Monthly Review has a “logical” conclusion and not a “dialectical”: we must go back in the past. It doesn’t see the leap of the virus, sop it can not see the leap necessary in agriculture. We read in the article of Monthly Review a typical peasant-populist argumentation:

“If by its global expansion alone, commodity agriculture serves as both propulsion for and nexus through which pathogens of diverse origins migrate from the most remote reservoirs to the most international of population center (…).

We reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities, and reintegrate animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up in virulence and geographic extent. We allow our food animals to reproduce onsite, restarting the natural selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real time.”

This means only going backward in capitalism: as capitalism, when developed, comes to interference with nature, then we should go in the past, when production didn’t not have this level of development at a planetary scale. This is totally reactionary.

What we see here is typically petty-bourgeois. Neither Monthly Review nor Ajith understand that it is the animal question which has been raised. Living at the expense of living beings is not only morally wrong, but practically a suicide. In the past, using meat has a sense as a local source of protein. But with an agriculture at the planetary scale, it is nonsense.

So,we don’t need to look at the past and try to make again a “local” production, an autonomous consumption, which is a reactionary dream, an anti-capitalist Romanticism. We need to look at the future and accept the leap which consists in the planetary agriculture, abolishing animal farms.

I The particular situation of North America in its relation to England

a) North America posed an historical problem to England, who had at first under-estimated the importance of the modernisations required to maintain its colonial and imperial domination on qualitatively more advanced economies than, for example, India’s. England’s failure led to the thirteen colonies’ independence and the formation of the United States. 61 years later, democratic-patriot rebellions almost costed England a second independence, on its Canadian territory this time.

b) England could relatively maintain its historical domination on Canada with an historical compromise due to the particular configuration of the property right, literally cutting the country in half. Canada didn’t exist in a unified way during the colonization process and the historical conditions of the part colonized by France were backward in comparison to England’s part. Thus, it is an unequal development that will shape Canada.

II The particular situation of French Canada

a) The french part of Canada, colonised under the aegis of the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France (also named Compagnie des Cent-Associés) has known the establishment of a feudal type regime. The lords had immediately put in place their parasite type domination, sitting down their monopolistic-bureaucratic position, with the help of the profits extracted from fur trade which the king of France gave them the monopoly of.

b) Serfdom and the seigniorial system were abolished in 1854, in words only because peasants had to buy back their liberty at a high price, which the majority couldn’t afford to, instead they started paying a regular rent. This situation lasted until 1935 and the Syndicat National du Rachat des Rentes Seigneuriales (National Syndicat for the Buying Back of Seignorial Rents).

III The dual development of English Canada

a) The English part of Canada has seen a large settlement colonization, on the basis of a qualified immigrated peasantry establishing farms. English capitalism, already strongly running, made Upper Canada its trade hub. What will become Ontario formed the starting point for the general development of the capitalist mode of production in Canada, formed by the reunion of Upper and Lower Canada with the other British colonies in North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

b) Capitalism which developed itself in the English part under English imperialism contained an essential contradiction: a contradiction between a free peasantry by definition producing a free capitalism and a bureaucratically formed bourgeoisie with the role of intermediate for English imperialism exporting its capital.

IV The establishment of Canada under the aegis of English Canada itself integrated in the device of English imperialism

a) Upper Canada’s preponderance rests uppon the fact that it forms the English stronghold, as opposed to a french Lower Canada, France having lost this zone after the seven years war (1756-1763). After that, there’s the fact that it forms the fallback base of the British loyalists fleeing the United-States who conquered its independence. Finally, its the material base of the victory over the American invasion of 1812.

b) The Canadian regime developed itself in multiple constitutions. The Act of Union (1840) served as a basis for the development of the Canadian ideology, because it seeks to “unite” “both” Canada in a Province of Canada, both having to equally share an unequal debt and a parliamentarian representation. It’s in 1867 that the Dominion of Canada came into existence as a confederation, with the British North America Act, which will little by little result in today’s Canada, with its actual sharing of provincial-federal powers, new provinces coming into existence overtime. It’s only in 1982, with the repatriation of the constitution, that the judicial sovereignty of Canada is fully recognized in its relation to the England and that its English-Canada national bourgeoisie has sort of “acquired” its political independence to the United Kingdom, however accompanying an ever increasing capital influx from the United-States.

V French Canada’s dialectical relation to English Canada

a) The national English Canadian bourgeoisie didn’t revolt against England’s comprador bourgeoisie. There has been a double development, principal aspect being the domination of the comprador bourgeoisie, in alliance with the national bourgeoisie placed in a subordinated role.

b) Canada isn’t born out of a bourgeois democratic regime. It is born out of the domination of an oligarchy itslef born out of the top-bottom capitalist contributions from English imperialism. However, this aspect is somewhat balanced by a strong bottom-up capitalism produced by the historically free English peasantry. This historical compromise was only possible due to the looting of Québec.

VI French Canada’s own contradictions

a) The feudal class in Lower Canada (Québec) was integrated, not toppled. Therefore there was no immediate democratic outcome in its countryside, only a gradual transfer of land monopoly from feudal lords to the big bureaucratic-capitalist land owners.

b) Lower Canada’s feudal class became totally useless because capitalism was impulse by the Anglo-Saxons and could detach from it. Therefore, the feudal class diluted itself inside Québec’s bourgeois factions, mainly real estate developers, a new monopolistic layer.

VII The origins of French Canada’s own contradictions

a) English Canada’s capitalism didn’t systematize itself because it came by the top for a large part, hence some monopolistic aspects. Has it not happened, if capitalism really developed itself freely in Canada, then Québec, having backward productive forces and being held back by its feudal forms, would have been completely integrated, loosing all its characteristics.

b) The preservation of a feudal French Canadian infrastructure finds itself in the monopolistic character of English-Canadian capitalism. The consequence is the incapacity to get to a republican form and the preservation of the dominant classes by the means of four provincial framing, allowing an alliance between the English elite directly linked to English capitalism as well as the local capitalists and the French elite forming an aristocracy edifying top-bottom capitalism.

VIII Québec as a nation in formation

a) Québec’s existence despite English Canadian capitalism’s development only reflects its weaknesses. It inevitably leads, because of capitalist penetration into the feudal countryside, to the emergence of the national sentiment. Forming Québec national identity, there is its language, an established market, a particular economic life and a psychic situation born out of the French origins and Catholicism.

b) Because of the external capitalist penetration, Québec’s national affirmation only could emerge as deformed by religion and the peasantry, producing an idealistic romanticism. The feudal class was able to make profit out of it by using demagoguery, thus maintaining its position while accompanying capitalist development.

IX Positions in front of Québec as a nation in formation

a) English Canada tried to solve the French Canadian question from above, with the help of measures such as the interdiction for French people to buy land in the west of the country, the massive immigration used to recolonize Québec as an English-speaking territory, the integration of French-speaking « house negroes », an extreme provincialization, etc.

b) Because of the historically stuck up situation of French Canada, an uncommunist view of things could only lead to two things:

– a romantic dreaming of the past, wanting to go back or;

– a liberal dream of a cosmopolitan-stateless escape in the Canadian ideology and even American.

X The modernist crisis of Canada at the beginning second half of the 20th

a) The elevation of the productive forces broke the feudal domination. Quebec’s society was cut in half during the administrative period of Prime Minister Maurice Duplessis (1944-1959), an epoch known as “The Great Darkness”. The liberal-democratic faction rose to power and lead Québec to a “Quiet Revolution” (1960-1966). National sentiment rose, although romantic it nonetheless abandoned its feudal clothing. As a consequence there was massive excitation in the years 1960-1970, primarily worn by the petite-

b)  The total reconsideration of the balance of power between the United States and England since 1918 brought the generalisation of American imperialism in Canada. The pro-American faction of the Canadian oligarchy defeated the one aligned on England, as the nation bourgeoisie was weakened.

XI Québec in front of the historical challenge

a) French Canada is probably the most developed example of a bureaucratic capitalism, allowing exceptionally good standards of living and a powerful petite-bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy. Because of the high level of its productive forces, Québec also knows the same typical problems of advanced capitalist countries (24/7 capitalist corruption, strong petite-bourgeoisie in the cultural realm, labour aristocracy linked to trade-unions, etc.). It also suffers from a situation that puts it on a secondary and provincial level in the Canadian system.

b) The historical problem of Québec is that it’s always been lagging behind Canada’s modifications because of its historically backward situation. This situation is now however only there as a background to an advanced capitalism. Québec appears as the weak link not only in the Canadian device but also practically for the United States.

XII Québec’s national-democratic tasks: a historical significance

a) The only basis allowing equality between peoples of North America is socialism, itself coming from the popular-democratic effort. Because it is marginalised from Canada, itself being an annex of American imperialism, Québec represents the detonator for a Canadian and even American Popular Republican Union.

b) In Québec’s specific framework, the historical contradiction arises from the national-democratic affirmation, then generalises itself to the rest of Canada (even possibly the rest of North America and its other specific frameworks). Thus, the first task of democrats and revolutionaries from Québec is to display and pass on the national-democratic legacy, to keep it alive, study and defend its historical, social and cultural actors and to begging a historical-materialist study of the North-American situation, as to give birth to the popular and democratic movement able to strike a blow to North American imperialism. This leads either to a Democratic Union or to Québec’s independence.