Auteur/autrice : IoULeeM0n

1. Le matérialisme dialectique est l’affirmation du caractère inépuisable de la matière éternelle qui obéit à la loi de la contradiction.

2. « La philosophie marxiste considère que la loi de l’unité des contraires est la loi fondamentale de l’univers. Cette loi agit universellement aussi bien dans la nature que dans la société humaine et dans la pensée des hommes. Entre les aspects opposés de la contradiction, il y a à la fois unité et lutte, c’est cela même qui pousse les choses et les phénomènes à se mouvoir et à changer. » (Mao Zedong, De la contradiction)

3. Le PMD a comme raison d’être la systématisation du matérialisme dialectique dans tous les domaines, au niveau personnel et à l’échelle de toute la société, dans une humanité unifiée vivant en harmonie avec la planète Terre reconnue comme Biosphère.

4. Le matérialisme dialectique est porté par le prolétariat, classe transformatrice de la réalité et unificatrice de l’humanité, génératrice du mode de production socialiste abolissant toute exploitation et toute oppression.

5. Le PMD représente l’avant-garde du prolétariat et son activité a comme aspect principal de générer et diriger les luttes de classe pour le renversement de la bourgeoisie et l’instauration de la classe ouvrière comme classe dirigeante, systématisant la vision matérialiste dialectique du monde.

6. Les principales références théoriques du PMD sont les ouvrages Matérialisme dialectique et matérialisme historique de Staline et De la contradiction de Mao Zedong.

7. Les principales références historiques du PMD sont l’existence historique de l’URSS depuis la révolution d’Octobre 1917 jusqu’à 1952, celle de la République populaire de Chine depuis sa fondation en 1949 à 1976 (avec principalement la Grande révolution culturelle prolétarienne),

celle du Parti Communiste du Pérou de 1980 à 1992 (avec l’affirmation du marxisme-léninisme-maoïsme).

8. Le PMD souligne que les débuts de l’humanité, avec l’agriculture et l’élevage, ont instauré un rapport inégal avec la Nature ainsi que placé les femmes dans une situation d’infériorité : cela implique des révolutions culturelles pour libérer la psyché féminine et corriger les rapports à la Nature, notamment ceux avec les animaux.

9. Le PMD a comme démarche la lutte des deux lignes, dans tous les domaines : la constatation de la contradiction, l’affirmation de la ligne rouge face à la ligne noire, le renforcement de la ligne rouge jusqu’à la victoire de celle-ci.

10. Le PMD souligne l’importance de l’optimisme collectif, de l’enthousiasme historique, de l’abnégation personnelle, du romantisme révolutionnaire ; il combat le pessimisme, l’isolement anti-social, la vanité égoïste, l’indifférence insensible.

11. Le PMD est une organisation révolutionnaire ; on l’intègre par cooptation d’au moins trois de ses membres. La compartimentation de ses structures est la règle, le secret de l’organisation le principe. Être membre de l’organisation signifie être actif dans une organisation du PMD, appliquer les résolutions prises, observer la discipline qui lui est propre.

12. Le PMD fonctionne selon la dialectique de la centralisation et de la démocratie. Ce centralisme démocratique implique que les organes de direction à tous les échelons sont élus par voie de consultation démocratique lors des congrès et qu’entre les congrès, le membre du PMD doit se soumettre à l’organisation, la minorité à la majorité, l’échelon inférieur à l’échelon supérieur et l’ensemble du Parti au Comité central.

13. Si un membre commet une infraction à la discipline du Parti, l’organisation du Parti de l’échelon intéressé, dans les limites de ses attributions et selon le cas considéré, lui appliquera l’une des sanctions suivantes : avertissement, blâme, destitution des fonctions au sein du Parti, mise en observation, exclusion du Parti.

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France is a country with its own historical trajectory, and the revolution will necessarily be the fruit of this specific trajectory. This is why it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the French national trajectory, the evolution of society and of modes of production, all of which provide a framework in which contradictions are expressed and the future is seen as the fruit of the past.

France was born in the 16th century, when the unification achieved by the monarchy, principally with François I, made it possible to establish a framework of sufficient scope for the French language, a territory benefiting from relative homogeneity in terms of unification, an economy that was at least significantly common, and a culture that was active enough to establish a psychic formation. However, nascent France was facing the wars of religion that were to traumatize it, and its continued existence depended on the existence of a centralized state apparatus put in place by the ‘Politicians’. Their watchword was ‘scepticism’ in order to maintain a certain rationalism.

Their philosopher was Montaigne, who was at the forefront of supporting Henri IV. Henri IV changed religion six times in his life, the last time to become King of France. Even in the 17th century, when rationalism as such triumphed with the classical spirit, thinkers and writers were busy taking a sceptical look at human nature and morals, in the hope of correcting them (Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, etc.).

Subsequently, the Enlightenment came to be seen above all as a generalized scepticism of the dominant ideology, absolute monarchy and Catholicism; the approach remained mainly at the level of a critical eye, of biting criticism, of which Voltaire is the greatest exponent. Although there was indeed a French materialism (Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, La Mettrie), of which the Encyclopédie is the sum, it never achieved a synthesis and never became a general system of thought. For this reason, once the French Revolution was over, it quickly withered away.

In France, then, Protestantism failed in the 16th century, 17th-century classicism never composed a theoretical monument, and the Enlightenment vision of the 18th century never established itself as a complete system either. The same is true of the 19th century. None of the movements that left their deepest mark on it established a doctrine: neither Freemasonry, nor the royalism of the Action Française, nor Republican radicalism, nor the labour movement (whether socialist or trade unionist).

Scepticism remains the underlying substance of the French spirit, and if we look closely, we can see that its counterpart is legitimism. Since the French mind claims to be rationalist, it considers that as long as things are, there will be a way of extending them in one way or another. For there to be a new craze, a new legitimacy must first have been established.

For this reason, the Enlightenment was not a mass movement in France; it was a movement to gain legitimacy for new ideas, opening the door to a transformation of French scepticism, from scepticism about the new to scepticism about the old. Similarly, the Front Populaire and the Résistance were not mass movements: it was only after they had been established, and because of a ‘blocked’ historical situation, that the masses, recognizing their legitimacy, rushed to follow them.

This question of legitimacy explains the complete defeat of May-1968, whose sudden eruption failed to take hold in French society, except through François Mitterrand and the long work of legitimacy carried out since 1945 by the ‘second left’; it also helps us to understand the complete triumph of General de Gaulle’s coup d’état in 1958, carried by the legitimacy of his action in response to the defeat of 1940.

While the question of new legitimacy always plays a fundamental role in the establishment of a new regime, it is important to understand how it works in relation to the sceptical, rationalist French mindset. This is a stumbling block that cannot be avoided and that must be faced as the great test for achieving revolution in France.

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In the revolutionary process, we know that there are phases, whose dynamics were clearly illustrated by Mao Zedong through the schema of strategic defense, strategic balance and then strategic offensive. In this scheme, there is a dialectical dynamic through the offensive, then counter-defence, counter-offensive, etc., in a spiral path that continues uninterrupted until Communism.

When we look back at the experience of the First General Crisis, which began in 1917 and ended in 1989, we need to highlight an important ideological element for our times.

At each historical interval that presented itself as ‘strategic defense’, specific theoretical work was carried out, not for the immediate tasks of the revolution, but for its universal consolidation. This formed the proletarian counter-offensive to the bourgeois counter-offensive, a kind of counter-counter-offensive.

When Friedrich Engels published his analysis of the ‘Dialectics of Nature’ in 1883, it took place in a rather unfavorable historical context. We were in the ashes of the failure of the Paris Commune, the First International had collapsed and the Second had not yet been founded, and the political conditions of the struggle in Germany had been particularly hardened by Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws of 1878.

With such an emphasis on ideology, the retreat of the Revolution became relative, as it continued its momentum by consolidating its foundations, in a movement of reflection with practice. Indeed, the ‘Dialectics of Nature’ corresponds to a context of repression, but at the same time to the stabilization of a social-democratic centre whose political core is consolidated.

Similarly, when Lenin published ‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism’ in 1908, the Revolution in Russia was confronted with the ‘Stolypinian reaction’, but also with the solidification of the majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Here too, the retreat of the revolution became relative, because this work shattered the idealistic wanderings and other ideological opportunisms present even in the social-democratic camp.

So it is no coincidence that ‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism’ is historically placed in continuity with Engels’ “Dialectics of Nature”, which was unknown to Lenin. It had in fact been recuperated by the revisionists of German social democracy, who had been careful to put it aside. It was not until 1925 that it was republished by the Russian Communists.

In reality, there is a process of enrichment, like a staircase with steps that are compiled to reach ever greater heights of vision. This is why we read in the famous ‘History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) – short course’, published in 1938, that:

“In order to appreciate the tremendous part played by Lenin’s book in the history of our Party and to realize what theoretical treasure Lenin safeguarded from the motley crowd of revisionists and renegades of the period of the Stolypin reaction, we must acquaint ourselves, if only briefly, with the fundamentals of dialectical and historical materialism.

This is all the more necessary because dialectical and historical materialism constitute the theoretical basis of Communism, the theoretical foundations of the Marxist party, and it is the duty of every active member of our Party to know these principles and hence to study them.

What, then, is

1) Dialectical materialism?

2) Historical materialism?”

This was followed in the short course by the great classic ‘Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism’, written by Stalin especially for the occasion. It was at the same time, in 1937, that Mao wrote ‘On Contradiction’, a classic which, in addition to protecting and defending the gains made, would also become a new beacon illuminating and deepening the dialectical materialist understanding of the world.

During this period, the World Revolution also had to contend with the strengthening of the counter-revolution in the fascist regimes, and its objective ally in the revolutionary camp – Trotskyism – but also with the stabilization of the first socialist state, the USSR.

When the Revolution knows moments on the defensive, then idealistic, mechanical and regressive conceptions are inevitably reflected at the very heart of the revolutionary camp. This led to apathy and demoralization, as the 1938 short course noted:

“The defeat of the Revolution of 1905 started a process of disintegration and degeneration in the ranks of the fellow-travelers of the revolution. Degenerate and decadent tendencies grew particularly marked among the intelligentsia.

The fellow-travelers who came from the bourgeois camp to join the movement during the upsurge of the revolution deserted the Party in the days of reaction (…).

The offensive of the counter-revolution was waged on the ideological front as well.

There appeared a whole horde of fashionable writers who « criticized » Marxism, and « demolished » it, mocked and scoffed at the revolution, extolled treachery, and lauded sexual depravity under the guise of the « cult of individuality. »

In the realm of philosophy increasing attempts were made to « criticize » and revise Marxism; there also appeared all sorts of religious trends camouflaged by pseudo-scientific theories.”

This is why the four classics cited above form, albeit at different times, one and the same truth: that of the reaffirmation of the ideological foundations of the Revolution in a context marked by the subjective depletion of its forces.

This makes it possible to temporize the strategic defense in the sense that the universal, scientific principle underlying the Revolution is affirmed, and consequently to safeguard revolutionary subjectivity.

And we know to what extent revolutionary subjectivity is the driving force behind the Revolution itself.

There is an extension and enrichment of ‘Dialectics of Nature’ (1883) to ‘Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism’ (1938), via ‘Materialism and Empirio-critism’ (1908) and ‘On Contradiction’ (1937). The last ‘inverted’ word in the revolutionary counter-counter-offensive is naturally to be found in the writings of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.

Between 1883 and 1938 (but also up to 1966), we are at the heart of the first spiral movements of the revolution (offensive, defensive, counter-offensive, etc.) in the context of the first general crisis of capitalism: the texts cited here affirm and stabilize theoretical elements taken for granted by previous practice.

What we have here is a work of synthesis. If we understand precisely this, we can see that the emphasis on the Dialectical Materialist Party (DMP) corresponds to an obvious historical situation: that of the nexus between the first general crisis and the second general crisis.

To put it another way: the Revolution is in strategic defense in relation to past dynamics, but tends to be on the offensive in relation to the future.

It is a question of corresponding to this situation on a general level, in the ideological affirmation itself, in order to counter despondency and demoralization, and to affirm the general offensive and optimism.

There is a need to re-impulse revolutionary subjectivity in a context of the crushing of the Revolution, not merely conjunctural like the Bismarckian, Stolypinian, Hitlerian repressions, etc., but in a general way.

We are talking here about a situation marked by the general crushing of the first wave of the World Revolution and the creation of the conditions for the deployment of the second wave.

The DMP signifies precisely this reading of things, and stands at the heart of the nexus as guardian of the temple (that of the achievements of the previous century) and vanguard of the future revolutionary movement.

This is the meaning of the DMP’s affirmation, because it appears in such a historical context that there is a need to affirm the world view not just as a ‘theoretical basis’ for practical revolutionary commitment, but as revolutionary commitment itself, its very subjective substance. The times now make this possible.

We are not simply affirming the continuity of the classical texts mentioned above, in the idea of a cumulative heritage, but rather their universal synthesis, or rather their universalization in a synthetic way.

This is not a new step in the staircase, as the previous theoretical elements were, but the arrival on a landing before the ascent of a new staircase.

This is materialized by a new cerebral, synaptic connection with a subjectivity developing a total vision of the world, that of dialectical materialism.

The DMP is the revolutionary expression in the nexus itself, and by this very fact it must protect and systematize the dialectical materialist worldview while at the same time extending it, because the revolution can only take a relative step backwards.

Anyone who does not understand this is immediately on the outside of the world revolution that is about to take place.

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The question of transition is extremely difficult in dialectical materialism. Indeed, since movement and stasis are dialectically opposed, how can we consider that they establish a ‘constructive’, ‘productive’ relationship, to enable us to cross a threshold?

The difficulty is such that it has served revisionism well, claiming to have solved the problem by asserting that, in ‘creative’ moments, it is not one that becomes two, but two that become one. There would be a ‘unification’ of opposites in order to move things and phenomena forward.

When things move forward, it is because they have ‘united’ their forces. Differences would be cancelled out so that there would be enough energy, enough support, to move forward. This is, of course, an anti-dialectical trap, which, behind the slogan ‘union is strength’, serves to erase nuances and differences, and to neutralize contradictions, all in the name of a hypothetical intermediate period which is ‘productive’, useful, necessary, etc.

In contrast to revisionism, which falsifies the communist vision of the world, dialectical materialism does not conceive of a ‘transition’ as a ‘reconciliation’ of two contradictory poles. It sees transition as the expression of a contradiction, and therefore as a separation.

Strictly speaking, transition is only one aspect of the confrontation between the new and the old. It occurs at a particular level, which is of essential importance, which establishes the main aspect for the whole thing, the whole phenomenon. It is in this sense that we can speak of ‘transition’. But there is no such thing as transition as an airlock, an isolated and separate moment. In this sense, the famous words of the Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci, a major figure in Italian communism, are totally erroneous and anti-dialectical: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

This is the hypothesis of a ‘transition’ as a moment of annulment of contradictions, as we find among all those who reject dialectical materialism and therefore don’t know how to ‘read’ contradictions. This is the same conception that proposes ‘transitions’ from capitalism to socialism based on ‘magic’ means such as education, elections, trade unionism, strikes, etc.

How should we see things? What is this contradiction that expresses what a transition really is? Let’s put things in perspective. A movement is by definition both continuous and non-continuous, in other words there is no precise, static, unilateral ‘moment’ when we know that we are moving from one thing to another, from one stage to another.

But there is transformation: the transformation of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman into an unborn child, the transformation of capitalism into socialism, the transformation of food into the chemical elements that make our bodies function, and so on.

We can arbitrarily define a key moment to announce a passage from one stage to another, but this would only be descriptive. There’s a very important point to be made here: such an arbitrary approach is the basis of what we call perversion.

Someone who eats, but immediately makes himself vomit so as not to gain weight, has in his imagination the fetish that, since the food is eaten, it has been assimilated in order to live, and that it is therefore possible to get rid of it by ‘cheating’.

Men who are fascinated by teenagers have a fetish for the transformation into an adult, seen as a ‘potential’, a realization achieved but not yet realized. In this sense, a society where children and teenagers dress like adults contributes to confusion and tends to leave the door open to fetishes.

Any failure to adopt a dialectical materialist understanding of things and phenomena inevitably leads to fetishes, to ‘static’ readings, to a narrow-minded conception. To avoid such an error, we must turn to spiral movement.

It is well known that dialectical materialism emphasizes spiral movement, but what exactly is meant by this? Here, the concept is mainly descriptive, to indicate that things do not move in a straight line.

Lenin uses the concept of the spiral in the following way, in 1915, in his notes on the question of dialectics. He says that if we look at things with an ‘immediate’ vision, we imagine that things progress in a straight line. But in reality, progress comes in leaps and bounds, with breaks and setbacks. So it’s better to talk about a spiral.

It is those who have a vested interest in a narrow vision of things who insist on the concept of the ‘straight line’, in order to give rise to fetishes to which we must cling, so that nothing changes, so that everything remains the same.

“Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral.

Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).

Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness—voila the epistemological roots of idealism.

And clerical obscurantism (=philosophical idealism), of course, has epistemological roots, it is not groundless; it is a sterile flower undoubtedly, but a sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge. »

Let’s take a look at the concept of the spiral and see how it can be used to great effect. A spiral is a curve that wraps around an axis. However, a spiral can also be a curve that wraps around an axis… moving away from or towards that axis, ad infinitum.

In the latter case, a spiral is a curved movement that moves ever closer to or further away from a fixed point, an axis, to infinity.

Here is a representation drawn by the engraver Jost Amman and designed by the German humanist goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer, for the 1568 work Perspectiva corporum regularium (Perspective of regular bodies).

The representation here has just one problem: the three-dimensional spiral reaches one end. This end has to be removed, otherwise there would be an end, and we would need a beginning, which would run counter to the principle of infinity and lead us back to the ‘bounded’.

Why is this spiral movement correct, in principle, to represent movement?

There are a series of very complex points.

1. The spiral movement shows a difference in degrees between the different levels of curves.

The further you go, the ‘smaller’ and more compressed the curves become. This is consistent with quantitative evolution. It becomes heavier, faster, deeper and so on.

The opposite is true: curves that become wider and larger represent dilation, spreading out, development, etc.

This is the contradiction between quality and quality.

2. The spiral movement is evidence of an ongoing process.

When we move towards or away from the axis, we do it gradually.

This “gradually” is was what we call time ; time is produced by space, by infinite matter, which is everywhere, which is everything, and which transforms itself.

The notation of this transformation, by contrast of one transformation with respect to another, is what we call time.

3. Spiral movement tends around a fixed point, without ever reaching it.

On the one hand, it conforms to the movement of each phenomenon, which is on one side fixed (like the point), on the other in movement (like the spiral). Opposites always interpenetrate; there is never “reconciliation”.

Nothing is ever static, united, unified, unique, there is never any possible assimilation of the curve and the static point. Movement always takes precedence over the static dimension – and the static dimension is the skeleton of reality, without which nothing would exist, dispersing into movement. It is matter that is dialectical, not dialectic that is material.

How do these points covered help with the question of transition?

Well, if we reason without the spiral movement, we will clearly grasp the two poles of a contradiction. However, there is a major risk: that of falling into duality and not dialectics.

This is precisely where lies the mistake not to be made. This is ultimately the opposite error of revisionism. Revisionism says that two become one, that there is reconciliation of opposites. Duality is the error that fetishizes the two opposites in their pure opposition.

Duality results, all in all, in conceiving that opposites cannot be converted into one another. The reproach that Mao Zedong ultimately made of Stalin was precisely that he sometimes replaced dialectics with duality, and arrived at mechanistic or administrative solutions. This is where it will help to better understand what a transition is.

If we start from the principle that opposites can be converted into each other, then, due to unequal development, there will necessarily be one aspect which will become principal, in relation to the other aspects which are secondary.

Let us recall here that uneven development does not at all designate the opposite of linear movement; to make such an error would demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of dialectical materialism. Uneven development always concerns several things, several aspects, several phenomena.

We cannot therefore say of something that it is experiencing “uneven development”. What it knows is non-linear movement.

It is within it that uneven development takes place, with its different aspects. It is also in the relationship to other things that there is a situation of unequal development.

This is very important here, because otherwise we would deny the principle of difference. Uneven development is the expression of nuance, of difference. It is a relationship between things – and that is not what we are looking for here, since we want to know the transition, which is posed as a “non-relation” between things, an intermediate period.

In other words, what we are looking for here is how to determine a transition within movement, a movement that dialectical materialism analyses as uninterrupted and infinite.

How then can we find the finite in the infinite, the static in movement? And it must be a finite that goes to infinity, the static that goes to movement, because the transition leads to the next thing by coming from the previous thing.

We must put it as follows. In contradiction, opposites are at times converted into each other.

What we can then call a ‘nexus’ is the place where this conversion is expressed in the most marked way, where it plays the most advanced role.

It is the nexus which, in a transformation, is the expression of the transition.

And this nexus is the ‘static’ point of spiral movement, which spiral movement never reaches.

Or, to put it another way: the nexus is the aspect of a contradiction where, at one and the same time, we move further away from and closer to both the old and the new.

Let’s look at a few examples to clarify things.

a) A man and a woman meet and develop feelings for each other. They become a couple. The transition from being single with feelings to being a couple is their first kiss.

The tension of this transition in the first kiss is a perfect illustration of the nexus, where there is a contradictory movement away from and towards both the past and the future.

Going towards the other person is a negation of the self, because you have to change, and at the same time an affirmation, because you are going towards the person you are going to be from now on.

But the movement of love is also based on self-affirmation, since it is the old self that is experiencing a lack, which leads to negation, since we are going to deny the lack by making it disappear by being with the loved one.

b) Hunger is the expression of a nutritional need, which is expressed by bodily discomfort. We eat to respond to this contradiction, which is need versus lack.

When we eat, we fill the gap. The spiral movement tends to satisfy the need. But it can never fill it, because even when the need is satisfied, it returns to being lack. Once we have eaten, we will be obliged to eat again later. Opposites are converted into each other.

We eat to keep hunger at bay, but by eating we keep the body functioning and at the same time we get closer to hunger.

And this contradiction is the nexus of the entire human biological system.

Without food, all the rest of the functioning cannot take place. The transition between the different moments of the human being is marked by the meal. This explains the historical importance of this particular moment.

It’s also worth noting that this is where we discover the concept of cycles. Each feeding cycle repeats itself, but there are nuances and differences; we do not eat in the same way as a baby, a child, an adolescent, an adult or as an elder.

c) A human being moves from adolescence to adulthood. If we take the spiral movement, we can’t really see a boundary, a mark of separation.

Through the contradictions, however, we can see the fundamental contours: we reach a certain maturity, bodily growth has ceased and all the biological factors (particularly hormonal) have stabilised.

In this bundle of contradictions, there is a point that will become the nexus, because it is at this point that the conversion of opposites into each other is most marked.

What are these two opposites? Well, on the one hand it’s the completed look at oneself and on the other the recognition of the rest of the society that one is integrating. It is through the integration of the whole person into adult society that the transition is completed: that is the nexus.

A citizenship ceremony seems inevitable as recognition of the process; in France, it was traditionally the baccalaureate that played this role in the second half of the 20th century.

d) There are usually four seasons, with spring followed by summer and autumn followed by winter. Of course, there is no such mechanical succession, but rather a contradiction between the colder and warmer seasons.

And how do you see the transition from one to the other? By the length of the days.

They are short in winter and long in summer. This is how vegetation generally knows how to behave, because it interprets the length of the sunshine.

However, the change is not linear, but in a spiral way of expression. If the sun formally ‘sets’ later on a certain day than on the previous day, it may well be that on that day the clouds are blocking out the light, whereas on the previous day the weather was fine, so the day was genuinely longer.

However, there is a general movement from more daylight to less daylight, and then vice versa from less daylight to more daylight. Obviously, the nexus, the transition, occurs around the 21th of June for summer and the 21th of December for winter.

This is the moment when the transition is concentrated, going from one movement to another, transforming itself into its opposite. The nexus is very easy to see in the calendar, with a real sense of ‘static’ fixation and reversal.

This explains the major place given by humanity, in different parts of the world, over and above different paths, to the summer and winter solstices.

e) A sprained ankle is an injury. At the heart of the contradiction between the ankle and the accident causing the injury, the nexus is the inflammatory process: it is the moment of transition between the injured ankle and its healing, the expression of the repair phase.

Inflammation is the way in which the human body brings to a specific area the nutrients it needs to repair itself. It is the recognition of the injury, in order to move away from it; we move towards and away from the injury at the same time.

Here we can see that prescribing anti-inflammatories does not correspond to an understanding of the dialectical process of injury, since they aim to combat a phenomenon internal to the contradiction at the very root of repair.

It is far more appropriate to use ice to help the blood circulation, initially accompanying the supply of nutrients taken up by the inflammation.

f) The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution represents a grasp of the question of transition, because it is based on the understanding that the general articulation of the elements making up tradition is based on one main aspect.

All the phases of the GPCR have to do with battles over this nexus, which varies from moment to moment and which must be found in order to act wisely. The GPCR began with a theatrical critique, then moved on to universities, the division of labour, cosmology, mathematics, the alleged cult of genius, and so on.

Its successes lay in identifying the nexus and calibrating its work at that level.

g) When the capitalist mode of production took off in Western Europe, the feudal worldview was shaken to its foundations. The bourgeoisie began a struggle to the death with feudalism and the aristocracy that supported it, and therefore with the feudal worldview, of which the Roman Catholic religion was the most successful expression.

But in France, because of the failure of Calvinism, the transformation took a diversion, through absolute monarchy, the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the adaptation of Catholicism (Augustinian dissidence, also known as Jansenism, social Catholicism, etc.).

The historical paradox is that neither the aristocracy nor the Catholic Church were really eliminated, with their survival beyond the historical period when their role was central. This has played a significant role, through the perversion of certain elements in the direction of bourgeois progress.

Hence the impression sometimes given of a confused era in which we don’t know where the decadent elements are and where the progressive ones are. A Catholic cleric may have appeared very avant-garde for his time, while an Enlightenment thinker may have appeared totally decadent on certain points in particular.

In other words, because historically, the trend was towards the crushing of feudalism and therefore of the forces behind it, but at the same time, each of the elements of French society at the time was each moment in the nexus more or less aligned with this trend, which inevitably led to the Revolution.

The tension between the implacability of the historical movement on a material level and the extreme diversity of the elements making up human society and the instability of their trajectory, due to differences in the development of consciousness, makes it possible to understand the process as both tendentially clear-cut, but circumstantially bushy and almost unreadable in appearance.

All these examples clearly show that it is the question of worldview that is central here. It follows fundamentally from the assimilation of this notion of nexus, in the sense that the worldview is produced by the nexus and makes it possible to grasp the next.

Dialectical materialism achieves an absolutely fundamental transition, a step towards aligning one’s consciousness with the Cosmos as eternal matter in motion.

Paradoxically, this understanding clashes precisely with human consciousness in its very movement within matter. Human consciousness is finite, as opposed to the universe, which is infinite.

It is what we call History that is here turned upside down in a fascinating and even vertiginous way: it opens up nothing less than the question of the relative relationship of human consciousness to time, in terms of sensitive perception.

The bourgeois understanding of history, now outmoded, focuses on the abundance of circumstantial events, in an attempt to put forward a pseudo unpredictable aspect of history, in which the human will would have a space, expressed by actors more or less aware of their role. Bourgeois understanding of history is thus logically reduced to a series of explanations of well-circumstantiated problems.

On the contrary, the proletarian understanding of history sets understanding to face explanation itself, by affirming the centrality of transformation. Dialectical materialism focuses on the general tendency, before tackling the particular declension.

At the same time, it affirms that in the particular declension there is an affirmation of the general tendency – but it does not make a fetish of it, being aware of the uneven development of things, of phenomena within a general process.

The nexuses in the historical development of Humanity may in fact be more or less long, more or less dense, more or less localized or circumscribed, and thus form part of a more or less striking sequence, echoing the relationship to the nexus itself and determining the capacity to perceive it. This is where the avant-garde is formed.

In the same way, in all the sciences in general, understanding the nexus is fundamental to grasping the confrontation between the old and the new, their junction and their confrontation, their combination and their separation.

In this sense, we can say that the Revolution is the updating, or rather the education in the strict sense of elevation, that Humanity undertakes to realign itself with material reality and its movement.

To understand the nexus is to grasp the transition as the closest and furthest point between the old and the new; this is where the contradiction expresses its greatest tension.

This explains the traumatic situation of humanity today, deeply engaged in the nexus that must realign the History of Humanity with the movement of the Cosmos, and yet still without an understanding of historical necessities, whereas what we are experiencing is the end of the History of Humanity and the beginning of the Understanding of the Cosmos, as an active component of it.

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In the course of our analysis of the crisis of capitalism in our time, we have discovered and formalized the concept of the nexus, as a key element in understanding the spiral development of matter.

This concept is a highly valuable standard that we use to oppose head-on and significantly the enemies of dialectical materialism, who mask their idealism or dualism behind an erroneous understanding of materialism (at best). It is a decisive criterion of differentiation that makes it possible to identify our organisation.

You could say that it separates us from all those people or organizations who unthinkingly endorse the famous words of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a famous figure of Italian communism who has been quoted over and over again: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Many people see this as a summary of their way of seeing things, which is true. But it is precisely their whole way of looking at things that is incorrect.

In fact, this erroneous assertion confuses the concept of ‘transition’, understood in the sense given here as the moment of a supposedly revolutionary unification, amalgamating on the one hand the old world into a waste tending towards monstrosity, while in the same movement there would symmetrically take place the unification of elements formally opposed to the old world, hitherto separate, even contrary, whose unification would make it possible to give impetus, a dynamic.

We summarize this inaccurate approach by saying that it says that two become one, to which we oppose the correct principle: one becomes two, making it possible to grasp the transition in the revolutionary sense as being a nexus.

This correct understanding is a total attack on the cultural level of the bourgeois conception of the world, and in particular an overcoming of the very conception of History in the bourgeois sense.

For us, this is the red line we are drawing in order to affirm as precisely and completely as possible the revolutionary break with the old world.

The struggle we intend to wage is in fact a total struggle, opposing the bourgeoisie and its vision of the world to the dialectical materialism of the proletariat as a revolutionary class.

The concept of nexus allows us to take the effective measure of the scale of our revolutionary break, to understand that this break, in the context of the process of class struggle in our country, is a complete overthrow of the bourgeois order, from top to bottom, heralding a wave of universal transformation.

The concept of nexus allows us to take the effective measure of the scale of our revolutionary break, to understand that this break, in the context of the process of class struggle in our country, is a complete overthrow of the bourgeois order, from top to bottom, heralding a wave of universal transformation.

Our break with the past is the affirmation of a new stage in the development of humanity as thinking matter within the biosphere, an elevation of culture that is both part of the long march of humanity in its understanding of the cosmos and new in its blossoming.

As an avant-garde organization, it’s our entire itinerary that has enabled us to grasp all these aspects as clearly as possible, first and so completely. As an extension of the gigantic historical legacy that has enabled humanity to formalize historical materialism, we have the best possible understanding of what the period we are entering means.

Humanity is now in a position to understand not only the historic need to move beyond Capitalism as a world view, but also, since the concept of the Anthropocene has been expressed with humanity’s modification of the planet, the need to establish in a conscious and scientific way the symbiosis between the cultural development that Humanity has achieved and its harmonious existence as a species, as thinking matter, within our biosphere.

Reaching a full understanding of this dizzying and decisive stage took years and years of productive organization. At the turn of the twenty-first century, we knew that we were right to take the strategic step back necessary to gather and formalize the foundations of a new thought-guide, to put our energy into a vast work of compilation and ideological elaboration, adjusting our practice within our environment, to our theory, with exacting standards and by imposing a strict and prolonged discipline.

Our organization has thus existed on this basis, generating and gathering the energy of people adjusting to our vision of the world, which is becoming ever more refined and complex.

This ideological work has been unique and unparalleled in the revolutionary organizations, or those claiming to be revolutionary, in France, to the point where we can say very openly today: we are the real base of dialectical materialism in France.

We are sitting on top of a production of hundreds and hundreds of articles, covering a wide range of fields, reflecting the depth of our understanding of French society, within our epoch, as an element of the collective History of Humanity and as a component of the evolution of our biosphere, within the gigantic movements of an eternal Cosmos.

At this stage, we have all managed to grasp the totality and complexity of these layers and their dynamics, which has given us, in the context of the reviews we have produced to analyze the second general crisis of the capitalist mode of production in which we are engaged, and in particular our organ Crise, prospective analyses validated by the facts in a relentlessly verified way.

This work has enabled us to collectively stimulate our consciousness, to unite internationally, and particularly in Belgium, with comrades who have undertaken the same productive work, and to project ourselves enthusiastically into the future, certain that we are the biological material of a vast transformation of our species, of which we are the prototypes in our time.

We are heartbeats and we must align ourselves with the rhythm of History!

On the strength of this collective energy and our alignment with both the historical movement of the development of our species and its place in the Cosmos within our Biosphere, we are developing an ever more symbiotic commitment to the Party we are generating, from which each of our members can draw in return unfailing moral support, expressed by an enthusiasm that gives way to neither gloom nor nihilism and a spirit of ever greater rupture with bourgeois society in its decadence, its institutions and above all its vision of the world. For

“The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man’s will. However much the reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, sooner or later revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph” (Mao Zedong).

Certain that we are the vanguard of the new Humanity, heralding the establishment of a new order in keeping with the evolution of our species, we proudly display the heritage of our History and turn our eyes towards the infinite and eternal Cosmos, towards which the gold star illuminating the red flag that our hearts are waving in the sky is pointing.

Let this be a signal to all the consciences for whom our call will resound to come and work in the service of Culture and Humanity, through the prolonged struggle without capitulation against the bourgeoisie, to install the proletariat in power, in the service of the masses, through the ever-deepening triumph of its ideology: dialectical materialism.

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Every contrast is a difference, every difference a contradiction. If things do not develop simultaneously, then there is already difference.

This is also true if things already exist in different ways: different things developing in different ways go hand in hand with the existence of contradictions between these things, by virtue of their difference.

One mistake that has been made in the past is this:

– since there is difference, there is independence of the contradiction of a thing, because it is different ;

– if there is independence of contradiction, then its development is its own;

– if it has its own development, then it is particular;

– if it is particular, then there is negation of negation within that particular;

– if there is a negation of the negation within this particular, then we can force the existence of this negation of the negation because it is itself particular.

This is the mistake that was made in the USSR in the early 1950s, and which allowed the revisionists to gain the upper hand.

A well-known error was that of Trofim Lyssenko, who believed that he could modify the development of agriculture by ‘forcing’ changes in the reaction of plants, for example by planting several seeds in the same hole.

This was an idealistic reading in terms of isolated things, based on the ‘negation of negation’ applied to one thing in particular; the exact counterpart of this approach is the reading of the genetic whole which, similarly, takes things in isolation by fixing them unilaterally on the basis of DNA. In agriculture and for living organisms in general, this is particularly true of Genetically Modified Organisms.

What we have here is a misunderstanding of the relationship between the particular and the general, a reduction of the process of movement to an isolated thing, based on a ‘negation of negation’.

Another well-known example is the campaign against the ‘four pests’ in People’s China, targeting rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. This campaign, which began in 1958, was stopped in 1960, because it was clear that the ecological imbalances caused by the campaign were leading us into a corner.

It is easy to understand why the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution produced intense research into cosmology, into the links between the different layers of the universe, while Mao Zedong rejected the concept of negation of negation.

Mao Zedong praised the efforts of Japanese physicist Shoichi Sakata, who sought to formulate the links between the different ‘layers’ of matter, which can be summed up in the image of an onion-shaped universe.

Shoichi Sakata wrote in Theoretical Physics and the Dialectics of Nature, in June 1947:

“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 be 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.”

There are, of course, two aspects here.

The first is the uneven development that characterizes all movement and implies differences within this onion-shaped universe.

The second is difference, because each layer is different, which is already a contradiction. So we have a contradiction both within the movement and between the layers of the movement.

The Covid-19 crisis is thus the product of a contradiction between two layers, humanity and the Biosphere; to give an example of the uneven development of the movement, we can take the emergence of sexuality in adolescents, which appears as a qualitative break/jump in the movement of personal development.

Ultimately, all this appears to be a contradiction between the general and the particular.

This contradiction is universal, it requires us to grasp the differences between the layers of the universe, and it appears as the contradiction of unequal development and difference.

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Why do religions still exist at the beginning of the 21st century? Because, as well as reflecting class interests, they are a civilizational response to the crisis of human nature. Humanity has been in crisis ever since its historical emergence ‘out of Nature’, as an animal or former animal capable of advanced thought and able of transforming Nature.

An animal that is no longer one, that is what the human being is now. The human race’s emergence from animality is thus contradictory: it has been achieved in practice, but at the same time it is illusory because human beings remain animals. Religions try to provide a general framework for humanity so that we can look at ourselves in the mirror.

This is why Jesus was able to say that ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’. Indeed, people with a major intellectual problem, being ‘simpletons’ or ‘retarded’, do not have to juggle between good and evil like human beings in general, or more precisely with situations that are experienced as really ‘positive’ and others that are experienced as particularly ‘negative’.

So they don’t have the anxiety and worry that plague humanity in general, the positive and negative to-ing and fro-ing that turns our lives upside down.

In pre-colonial America, people with intellectual or mental disabilities were celebrated, for the same reason as Jesus did, as beings in contact with the divine, with goodness, with heaven.

Religions are an attempt to preserve appearances, to neutralize the oscillation between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Religions are an obsession with maintaining a framework for humanity, to escape from the barbarism of the period when humanity lived ‘on the hoof’, with summary institutions established on a small scale.

This is the dialectical paradox: on the one hand, religions say that humanity is bad, but on the other, it is through this non-animal capacity to be bad that humanity can be good. It’s a contradictory message that runs through the whole of religion, as we read in the Koran: “Indeed, We offered the Trust1 to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, and they declined to bear it and feared it; but man [undertook to] bear it. Indeed, he was unjust and ignorant.” Religions are a fiction, because they say that mankind oscillates all the time between good and evil, and yet it is towards them that God would turn. In reality, God is a way of ‘holding on’, of establishing a certain calm.

It is in this sense that it is interesting to look at the dual aspects of what is happening at the beginning of the 21st century. On the one hand, religions are in constant retreat, giving way to everyday capitalist life, which leaves no room for such a spiritual approach. On the other, religions are constantly on the move, multiplying their forms and their attempts to influence the direction of society as much as possible. Hinduism wants hegemony over India, Islam over a whole series of countries, Judaism wants to control Israel, Buddhism wants to shape the countries where it is in the majority, Evangelicalism wants to take the moral lead in the United States, Roman Catholicism wants to be a profound cultural and moral lever, while the Orthodox Church works in tandem with the Russian state.

Religions are dying and, at the same time, aiming to expand in order to anchor themselves in modernity. This is significant, because what is at stake is a complete change in humanity’s vision of the world. The productive forces have developed to such an extent that religions are an anomaly, whose existence corresponds to a humanity of the past. We know too much for religions to have even the slightest credibility. We know too much about the planet’s past in the cosmic context, about the past of animals with the dinosaurs, about the evolution of humanity as a species…

And yet religions still exist. This paradox implies that they must disappear. As we enter the final quarter of the 21st century, a break is about to take place within humanity, with religions being replaced not simply by a ‘social’ reading of things, but by a materialist vision of reality, on a par with the universe. It is Spinoza’s dream that the 21st century will realize, with humanity recognizing Nature as a system and abandoning the vain hypothesis of ‘Man in Nature like an empire within an empire’.

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Dialectical materialism affirms the inexhaustible nature of matter. The universe is only material, and it is infinite. This means that there is no space or time without matter, that matter is everywhere and always present. Whether we look to the infinitely small or the infinitely large, whether we look to the past, the present or the future, we will always have matter and only matter.

This aspect of matter is dialectically opposed to another aspect: that of its continuity. Dialectical materialism asserts that matter forms a whole, a whole in which everything is interrelated. At no point can we find a thing or phenomenon that is indivisible, isolated, irreducibly independent of the rest.

The dialectical paradox of the universe

There’s a dialectical paradox here. On the one hand, the universe is made up of an infinite number of different, and therefore distinguishable, things. On the other, the universe is absolutely continuous, undivided, all part of a single, infinitely rich, yet unified reality.

On the one hand, there is only one determination, that of the universe forming a whole where everything is interrelated, where nothing exists without being related to everything else.

On the other hand, there is an infinity of determinate things, each thing, each phenomenon possessing its own unity and consequently its own identity arising from its own difference from the rest.

However, dialectically, an infinity of determinate things posits an indeterminate infinity, since the identities of its elements are infinite.

On the one hand, then, we have a universe that is determined, because it is unified, uni-total… and, at the same time, a universe whose infinite nature is lost, in terms of definitions, in the infinity of what exists. The resolution of this question is complex.

The attempt at a religious answer
through the one and the many

What dialectical materialism understands as the opposition between the finite and the infinite has in the past been understood as the opposition between the one and the many. This is at the heart of the thinking of what is called philosophy.

The traditional starting point for this is philosophical questioning in Greece before Plato and Aristotle, with two philosophers highlighted here. There’s Parmenides, who says that the universe is one, always the same, and that consequently once we’ve talked about it, we can not speak more, since everything has already been said.

Then there’s Heraclitus, for whom everything is always changing: you can’t bathe in the same river twice. Consequently, we need to speak uninterruptedly, in order to always define things that are in essence always changing.

In one case, the universe is unity, in the other it is multiplicity. The notion of God was formulated intellectually precisely to be able to interpret this relationship between the one and the many.

For Plato, the material world is nothing but an illusion, a pale reflection of the only true reality, which is spiritual and is God. This is the message of the allegory of the cave. For Aristotle, on the other hand, the material world has all its dignity, with God serving merely as a “motionless motor” to set material things in motion in a continuous interplay of cause and effect.

Naturally, religions, which by definition necessarily follow Plato, have had great difficulty in justifying how the divine “one” can give rise to the material “many” (in some cases, the finite “emanates” from the infinite by degrees, other explanations invent an intermediary God playing the role of demiurge, others multiply the intermediate stages between the two or, on the contrary, make God “recede”, etc.).

In all cases, however, a relationship is established between the one and the many, making it possible to grasp the many by means of the concept of “one” (divine), and to establish definitions and determinations.

Religions are precisely those ethical, social, psychological, political, economic and other determinations. It is necessary to submit to the definitions laid down by the “one” (divine), which is the origin of the “many”. In any case, at the end of time, the multiple must give way to the “one”.

The bourgeois attempt at an empirio-critical response

In reality, God has only a conceptual reality, allowing us to posit the relationship between the finite and the infinite in one way or another. Moreover, according to its historical needs, humanity has modulated the relationship between God and the world, the one and the many. Protestantism, by affirming the unity of personal consciousness, thus reformulates the relationship to God in its entirety.

Religious formalism was, and still is, less tenable in the face of the observation of movement, whether in the past with the history of the planet, the history of species, or in the present, with expanding human activities.

As the productive forces grew, religions saw their concept weaken, allowing science to assert itself in human activities.

However, under the weight of bourgeois domination, science has been increasingly reduced to utilitarian pragmatism.

Its vision of the world is summed up in a more or less critical empiricism, combined with a wholly idealistic positivism, a genuine belief in “progress” consisting in the simple accumulation of data.

There would be a linear development of the sciences, as techniques and functional capacities would become more widespread.

In reality, it’s not so much a question of science as of a technical upsurge driven by the development of productive forces.

Under the bourgeoisie, scientists have even become so freewheeling that they can no longer even fight the idea of God, getting bogged down in a blissful cult of experimentation and a relativism presented as materialism.

The dialectical materialist response through cosmology

Dialectical materialism rejects both the religious interpretation of a relationship between the one and the many, and the more or less critical empiricism of a science reduced to techniques and experimentation.

Dialectical materialism posits the universe – i.e., matter – as the basis of any authentically scientific perspective. In so doing, it resolves the problem of the relationship between the elements of the universe and the universe itself.

It is because there is, dialectically, the infinite in the finite and the finite in the infinite, that it is possible to grasp how the universe is a single entity which, at the same time, possesses an infinite nature.

There is no such thing as a definite quantity of matter, which is static and simply “formed” from the outside. Only matter exists, and matter is self-moving. There is no external impulse to matter.

Nor is there any pause in the incessant movement of matter: there is never a halt in the process of matter’s transformation.

The universe is composed solely of matter, and this matter is in uninterrupted transformation, experiencing dialectical leaps based on the internal contradictions inherent in each thing, each phenomenon.

Since matter knows no external impulse or origin, and yet exists, then it has always existed, and always will. Since matter knows dialectical jumps, then it has always existed by knowing these dialectical jumps, and it exists by knowing these dialectical jumps, everywhere and all the time.

Since dialectical leaps take place everywhere and all the time, there is no limit to matter or its development.

The question of the relationship between whole and parts

How do incessant dialectical leaps relate to the unified, uni-total character of the universe? The basic problem is that what is infinite is logically incapable of having parts.

If infinity had parts, they would be finite or infinite. If these parts are infinite, then there would be several infinities, which is not coherent. If the parts are finite, then the infinite would be made up of finite elements, and could not be infinite.

One solution would be to conceive of an infinity of finite parts, which was Spinoza’s solution for expressing the inexhaustible character of the “modes” of existence of the entirely material universe. Here, the universe would be infinite in the sense that it would consist of an infinity of modes that themselves exist infinitely. All modes would be related in their very existence, as they would be of the “nature naturated” by the whole, which is “naturating nature”.

To define a thing or a phenomenon, we must therefore not have a positive reading, starting from “nothing” to get to the thing, but extract the thing from the whole: for Spinoza, “all definition is negation” (in the sense that a thing is not everything else).

However, this is not to posit a qualitative infinity, but to affirm that there is a dimension measurable to infinity, even if this measurement never ceases, quantitatively, going precisely to infinity.

Spinoza’s quantitatively infinite universe, with its concept of negation as the definition of everything, nevertheless paved the way for dialectics.

Negation as determination

It was Hegel who posited infinity as a qualitative leap from the finite. Unfortunately, he saw the movement of the world as passing through the human mind’s grasp of dialectics, rather than through the dialectical transformation of the world itself.

Hegel’s extension of Spinoza (who in turn extended Aristotle, Avicenna and Averroës) nevertheless posited transformation as the key to understanding phenomena.

Dialectical materialism does not consider the finite and the infinite to be separate. There is no irreducible “one” and “many” facing each other. In reality, God has only been the mask for the concept of infinity, and the term multiple has only designated the finite.

And yet, according to the law of contradiction, the finite is infinite and the infinite finite. Hegel understood this based on Spinoza’s definition of negation.

He understood that if a thing defines itself negatively (in the sense that a thing is not something else), then it must also be defined negatively in relation to itself.

Difference then becomes a thing’s identity. Every thing is both itself (because it is not something else) and other than itself, because it carries its own finitude.

Hegel, in The Science of Logic, notes that: “Difference as such is already contradiction in itself; it is in fact the unity of things that are only insofar as they are not one – and the separation of things that are only insofar as they are separated in the same relation.

The positive and the negative, on the other hand, are the contradiction posited, because as negative units they pose themselves, and hence the overcoming of the latter and the positing of its opposite.”

The direct consequence of considering that a thing, a phenomenon, poses itself as difference, is that there is a dialectical identity. This means that in its very existence, every thing posits itself as finite in the infinite, because it differs from the infinity of things. It posits itself as different, and therefore allows itself to be determined by this difference, by this negation of the rest.

Lenin, in his notes on this work by Hegel, makes the following remark on this question:

“[Hegel:] “They” (things) “are, but the truth of this being is their end.”

Shrewd and clever! Hegel analyses concepts that usually appear to be dead and shows that there is movement in them.

Finite? That means moving to an end!

Something?—means not that which is Other.

Being in general?— means such indeterminateness that Being = not-Being. All-sided, universal flexibility of concepts, a flexibility reaching to the identity of opposites,—that is the essence of the matter.

This flexibility, applied subjectively = eclecticism and sophistry.

Flexibility, applied objectively, i.e. reflecting the all-sidedness of the material process and its unity, is dialectics, is the correct reflection of the eternal development of the world.”

The dialectic of finite and infinite

It is from this contradictory relationship between the finite and the infinite that we must understand the inexhaustible nature of matter. Each thing is inherently different, and thus already the basis of a dialectical opposition. What’s more, in its very nature of being finite, it will cease to exist. It therefore carries an internal contradiction: it is, but it also contains its own death.

And this is universal. This means that finitude is infinite. And since, what’s more, everything transforms itself, this means that everything carries the infinite, since what is finite yields to transformation, in a qualitative leap, opening the way to something new, a non-finite within the finite, and thus the infinite.

In his notes, Lenin transcribes the following lines from Hegel:

“The unity of finite and infinite is not an external juxtaposition of these terms, nor an improper connection contrary to their determination, and binding together entities separate and opposed and mutually independent and hence incompatible.

On the contrary, each in itself is this unity, and is so only in transcending itself, neither excelling the other in Being-in-Self and affirmative Existent Being.

It has been demonstrated above that finitude exists only as a passing beyond itself; it thus contains infinity, which is its Other.…”

Lenin writes the following remark next to this quote:

« To be applied to atoms versus electrons. In general the infiniteness of matter deep within…”

Lenin prefigures here, as Mao Zedong did, the non-indivisible character of matter as regards atoms and their components. However, this is true not only in depth, but in all directions.

Infinity, non-infinity, continuity, discontinuity

We need to distinguish between infinity and non-infinity. A thing experiencing a qualitative leap is a finite thing carrying non-finiteness within it, as the new emerges from the old. We could say that, in the qualitative leap, a thing demolishes the limits apparently assigned to it.

Hegel, in The Science of Logic, sums this up by saying that: “It is the nature of the finite itself to surpass itself, to negate its negation, and to become infinite.”

The non-finite extracts itself from the finite. However, the question of the infinite still arises. Hegel has failed to define it here, because he has turned it into an abstract principle that overhangs reality. For him, infinity is the meaning of development, and therefore of the world, and the world no longer counts for him.

Dialectical materialism considers that it is the world which carries movement, development and therefore infinity. This means that infinity is by definition present in matter, as Lenin observed with “the infinity of matter in depth”.

In fact, one of the essential aspects of the process and the most disturbing for a human observer is that the infinite nature of matter combines with its opposite, its finite nature.

However, it is here in relation to the contradiction between continuity and discontinuity. Every phenomenon carries contradiction within itself, and therefore difference, because every contradiction affirms a phenomenon and consequently separates itself from the rest of matter to take on a finite, different character.

This poses a discontinuity in the infinite character of matter, but at the same time this discontinuity implies continuity, nothing being isolated.

An object made by a human being is, for example, inseparable from the productive forces carried by humanity, just as a cloud is inseparable from the general terrestrial system, the Biosphere.

However, if the productive forces of humanity cannot be explained without the terrestrial Biosphere, it cannot be explained without the galaxy, which itself depends on a super-cluster of galaxies, etc.

All this is true for the infinitely large and the infinitely small, to infinity.

There is no “final” level, whether towards the infinitely large or the infinitely small – otherwise, this “final” level would be isolated, independent, even a framework.

The infinitely large and the infinitely small themselves form a contradiction. There is thus both continuity and discontinuity in existence. A thing is both in continuity with the rest of the universe… And, through its internal contradiction, has its own leap.

The universe and its constitution in waves

The universe is a sort of infinite ocean made up of infinite waves responding to each other, transforming each other, to infinity.

Matter transforms matter, deepens it, develops it, and this does the same, to infinity.

The existence in the sense of elements relatively separated from the general movement of the universe is based on the waves of qualitative leaps occurring in matter itself. This in no way means that the contradiction of each thing is not internal, but that its framework relates to matter as a whole. To take an example, the Earth is the product of a qualitative leap in the organization of matter at the galaxy level, and one of the waves produced by the existence of the Earth is the formation of humanity, which itself forms a wave having an impact on its direct spatial environment, etc.

Every echo is infinite

Every qualitative leap has an infinite echo, because however small this echo may be, it is part of the general movement of matter.

Every finite thus carries within itself not only the non-finite of its own leap, of its own transformation, but also the infinite itself due to the fact that it relates to a general movement of matter.

It is not at all a question here of the existence of a simple “limit” pushed back from an expanding finite, but of infinity in the strict sense, that is to say non-measurable and non-divisible.

The slightest material element taken arbitrarily possesses in itself infinity, the infinite extension of matter, since it is part of it. Matter is infinite in its reality and the partial possesses the totality, the finite the infinite, and vice versa. In no case is it possible to speak of “parts” of matter.

If they were parts, then they would have to be given a special status. Their identity would each be opposed to the other parts, and therefore relatively isolated. However, no isolation is possible in the infinite nature of matter, because infinity cannot be finite.

Consequently, the separations that exist within material infinity, i.e. the existence of finite elements within infinity, must be defined as a moment, a stage, a relative situation, proper to the expansion, growth and thickening of matter. They are an aspect of infinity as the eternal movement of matter.

It is this aspect that mathematics observes, fixing and separating arbitrarily, for a momentary photograph of what in reality is in uninterrupted and infinite transformation.

Eternity and the inexhaustible nature of matter

What is finite has as its foundation the qualitative leap proper to the dialectic of the finite and the infinite, for the finite is the product of an infinite expressed in the finite.

The finite thus carries within it its own limit, which produces a leap to infinity; this leap leads to a finite situation which itself carries its limit, which itself produces a leap to infinity, and this to infinity, and therefore eternally.

What exists materially as a relatively autonomous entity – a human being, a tree, a table – has as its foundation the qualitative leap to infinity, and thus the contradiction between finite and infinite.

In this way, eternity is based on the uninterrupted and, so to say, the expanding presence of matter. This is not a mere spatial expansion. It is an extension in the sense of a qualitative movement progressing in an infinity of aspects.

In concrete terms, the contradictory movement of matter results in the production of an infinite number of contradictions, which themselves have an echo in matter. The law of contradiction is universal and it extends eternally through infinity, producing waves with an ever-greater impact in the universe.

The inexhaustible nature of matter

In a certain sense, we can say that matter is not only infinite, but that it goes on to infinity. Its movement of complexification is based on the infinite (as an internal leap resulting from the rupture within the finite) and goes towards infinity.

Matter is both infinite and in the process of becoming infinite – it’s a contradiction.

Dialectical materialism thus affirms the infinite character of matter, both in its finite existence and in its infinite nature. However, this infinite character relates to the infinity carried by the movement of matter in its universality, as its principal aspect. The infinite character of an ‘isolated’ material reality is solely an abstraction freezing the general movement of matter and its qualitative leaps producing cosmic waves consisting of transformations.

The waves in the universe, of the universe, are produced by different contradictions. This means that they are both finite, because they consist of a phenomenon that responds to an internal contradiction, and at the same time infinite, because their number is infinite, because they are part of the general movement of the universe, because their qualitative impact is itself infinite in the future, their source itself being infinite in the past.

The movement of matter, producing a qualitative leap in one phenomenon, which itself acts on other phenomena, other leaps, is therefore characterized by an uneven development, underlining both the identity and the difference of the leaps and the phenomena.

Any isolation of a thing is therefore necessarily arbitrary, at whatever level. And there is no such thing as a fixed matrix in the movement of matter. This is an essential aspect of movement, of the nature of matter, of the inexhaustible nature of matter. There is no fixed determination, because there are no separate, fixed ‘parts’ of matter.

Any focus on a particular aspect is simply a mathematical photograph of a given moment that has its dignity, but lets the internally-carried limit escape, and therefore the break that leads to the leap to infinity.

Matter is therefore inexhaustible, because its dialectical richness is infinite and carries infinity. To have a ‘stock’ of matter, we would need a ‘beginning’ – but this is impossible, because matter by definition carries infinity.

The realization of the law of contradiction

The contradiction between the finite nature of a thing, in the sense of its internal determination, and its finite expression in the world, produces in itself an internal tear, causing the infinite to re-express itself, to reassert itself. This is the law of contradiction: each thing, in existing, uninterruptedly affirms its difference, and thus posits negation.

This is true everywhere and all the time, ad infinitum. It is a consequence of the inexhaustible nature of matter.

The point here is not to confuse what is absolute with what is relative. It is not the finite form that is relative, but the infinite. In fact, the finite form itself carries the contradiction, and it is the contradiction that is universal. The development of the infinite is relative because it expresses contradiction.

Dialectical materialism is the science of the unity of opposites, not the religion of an abstract infinity.

However, the relative and the absolute also form a contradiction. The development of the infinite always prevails, because it is inherent in matter. For this reason, what is finite is only relative and is bound to disappear.

This is why every material entity is obliged to transform itself and can never be eternal. Nothing is eternal, everything is transformed, because only the whole exists, as a whole, but consequently also as an infinite whole, and therefore infinity in extension, expansion and deepening.

The eternity of a finite thing would be the cessation of movement, and therefore of infinity. Consequently, there would be no more movement, and there would never even have been any. Movement does not exist if there is no infinity.

The question is therefore whether the main aspect is infinity, motion or matter. Primitive materialism considers that it is matter, while materialism that recognizes the dynamics of matter chooses movement. Dialectical materialism considers that it is infinity, because matter implies movement, and therefore infinity.

However, dialectically, it is matter that carries infinity. The affirmation of dialectics thus establishes materialism. Dialectical materialism rests on the contradiction between matter and its own finitude, hence infinity, hence dialectic. This is the main aspect.

The infinity of matter

Dialectical materialism does not, therefore, make a fetish of matter in finite form, but celebrates the infinite as the most authentic reality of matter – and at the same time recognizes the full dignity of matter as the only reality, the bearer of the infinite. The universe is not composed of matter: it is matter. What we call the universe is matter in its infinite reality, whose waves propagate its general and particular transformations, in an infinite movement that produces the finite, itself both the carrier and the vector of the infinite.

This is why only dialectical materialism recognizes the dignity of reality. Only dialectical materialism can see the infinite in the finite, and therefore accord fundamental value to the finite. Far from losing itself in the infinite by affirming it, it is enthusiastic about reality and its movement, its transformation.

It is in transforming reality that inexhaustible matter is affirmed, forming the true meaning of life. Dialectical materialism sees movement as transformation (and not as dynamics), and assumes matter as a cosmic, infinite and therefore eternal reality.

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To transform a country through revolution, you need a strategic analysis. Without a strategy, there’s nothing; you can take as many tactical initiatives as you like, they’ll still come to nothing, because quantity is not quality.

Likewise, it’s futile to hope that through a lot of initiatives, quantity will be transformed into quality, because scattered initiatives, with no common thread, are not just a matter of quantity, but of individual quality, with very poor quality.

Only a long-term vision shall enable us to see what this or that thing wants, what impact this or that initiative can have. To get a clearer picture, we need to look at things in terms of periods, historical development, and the requirements specific to those periods and that development.

So, when we do something, we calibrate it according to objectives, historical expectations; if we observe a phenomenon, we assess whether or not it’s in line with historical expectations.

You always have to evaluate what you do, what you observe, by means of a two-lines analysis: what’s the red line, what’s the black line, where does the thing, the phenomenon, stand in relation to these lines.

It’s opportunism to rush into the slightest demand, the slightest strike, the slightest protest. In any case, modern France, from 1945 to 2023, has been full of protests, strikes and protests, without ever leading to a mass protest against capitalism. Civil servant strikist ideology and students spirit of revolt have never led to anything concrete.

French decadence

Let’s take a concrete example. France is a country in decadence. The level of science, culture and ideas among its people has collapsed. There’s a general laissez-faire, idle attitude that reflects France’s parasitic position in relation to the Third World. The French want to keep what they’ve got, and that’s as far as it goes.

If we turn our attention to the modalities and state of mind of the movement against pension reform in 2023, or the Gilets Jaunes before that, then we see very clearly that we’re dealing with reactionary initiatives aimed simply at keeping French capitalism as it is. Nothing good could come of it.

So how should we view the red line? It has to be said that France is a country that is losing positions on the world market; the standard of living cannot be maintained. There is already a real fracture between a bourgeoisie living in a pronounced bubble of conspicuous consumption and the broad masses living on the go, with home ownership as a central consideration. This divide is set to widen, mechanically producing bitterness and resentment.

This last aspect represents the major moral difficulty, since we are in the retrograde attitude of the proletarian of rich countries. Nevertheless, the positive aspect is that it is now possible to affirm civilization as socialist.

In the 1960s, 1980s, 2000s… the bourgeoisie was still educated, well-bred and capable of framing things. It had the prestige of tradition, of moral and civilizational continuity. Who was going to trust leftists or trade unionists to go off on their own adventures? Nobody, of course.

The proletariat no longer faces such a strong enemy. But it still has to transform itself, massively and profoundly, to assume its role as the ruling class.

Do the syndicalists of 2023 or the Gilets Jaunes converge with this need for proletarian self-criticism, with the idea of a socialist civilization? Not at all. The syndicalists and the Gilets Jaunes aligned themselves with the illusion of capitalism as infinitely redistributive, as long as you can “scrape away” gains.

Instability and war

How should the PMD see things? It must start from the premise that French capitalism is not static, but evolving. It’s evolving because of its internal contradictions, and it’s also evolving in relation to the global competition between powers, large and small. The internal evolution is decadence; the relationship with global competition is war. France goes to war because it has to in order to maintain its position in the global balance of power, and also to try and strengthen its own positions.

The internal shrivelling thus combines with a tendency towards war, which will bound to provoke upheavals in society. We tend to a revolutionary situation, which Lenin describes as follows:

“The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way.

It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters).

It follows that, for a revolution to take place, it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority of the class-conscious, thinking, and politically active workers) should fully realise that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die for it; second, that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics (symptomatic of any genuine revolution is a rapid, tenfold and even hundredfold increase in the size of the working and oppressed masses—hitherto apathetic—who are capable of waging the political struggle), weakens the government, and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to rapidly overthrow it.”

Analytical grid and criteria

For each thing or phenomenon, the PMD must ask not simply for a “class position”, but how it relates to the New or the Old. In what way does the thing or phenomenon contribute to decadence, or, on the contrary, hinder it? In what way does the thing, the phenomenon, contribute to the tendency towards war, or, on the contrary, hinder it?

Then comes the question of placing ourselves historically: in what way does the thing, the phenomenon, converge with and reflect proletarian consciousness, the dialectical materialist worldview? For without dialectical materialism, there is no sufficient solidity.

It’s an analysis of the two lines first, then of alignment with the historical demand for socialist civilization. This is the driving force of the Party, which is why Mao Zedong says that holding a class position is not enough in itself. You have to align yourself entirely with the Party, which expresses the new in its historic, complete character.

“We stand on the positions of the proletariat and the masses of the people. For Communist Party members, this implies the need to stand on the Party’s position, to conform to the Party spirit and Party policy.”

The new drives out the old, the Party carries the future.

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Dialectical materialism is the study of contradiction, the identity of opposites. Lenin sums it up in his « Notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic »:

« Dialectics is the theory that shows how opposites can be and usually are (and become) identical – under what conditions they are identical by converting into each other -, why the human understanding must not take these opposites to be dead, petrified, but to be alive, conditioned, mobile, converting into each other. »

Idealism doesn’t grasp contradiction; indeed, it doesn’t even know the principle of contradiction. It looks for relationships, particularly of the cause-consequence type. In the end, what idealism talks about is abstractly constituted.

What Mao Zedong says about myths and children’s stories applies to the chimeras of idealism:

« In myths or children’s stories, the aspects constituting a contradiction do not have a real identity, but an imaginary one. Marxist dialectics, on the other hand, scientifically reflects identity in real transformations. »

Idealism does the same thing as myths or children’s stories, it looks for different aspects, but without grasping the real identity, the driving force, without delimiting the phenomenon. Idealism picks and chooses from different things, it invents realities, all in an attempt to explain or justify things.

Dialectical materialism does the opposite: it starts from the very substance of general reality, of the universe.

The first thing to note when studying dialectical materialism is that it is a total thesis: everything that exists is called nature, and nature obeys dialectics.

This is why Lenin remarked:

« Marx’s dialectic of bourgeois society is only a special case of dialectics. »

Dialectics, in fact, is the principle of absolutely all movement. There is no matter without contradiction, without unity of opposites, without movement. Consequently, to be scientific is to seek out the dialectical process in a phenomenon, in a thing.

As Lenin puts it:

« Thus, in any proposition we can (and must), as in a « cell », bring out the embryos of all the elements of dialectics, showing that dialectics is inherent in all human knowledge in general [that it is possible to acquire].

And the science of nature shows us (and, again, this is what must be shown on every simplest example) objective nature with the same qualities, the change from particular to general, from contingent to necessary, the leaps, the modulations in leaps, the mutual binding of opposites.

Dialectics is precisely the theory of knowledge (of Hegel and) of Marxism: this is what « aspect » of the story (and it’s not an « aspect », but the substance of the story) Plekhanov, to say nothing of other Marxists, didn’t pay attention to. »

Every process is dialectical, but we need to find its core, its driving force.

It’s wrong to think you can pick and choose, or to be satisfied with different examples.

To do so is to attempt to describe a phenomenon with movement, without seeing that the very material existence of the phenomenon and the movement are part of the very substance of the world, as eternal matter in dialectical motion.

As Mao Zedong puts it in On Contradiction:

« In all things and phenomena, the interdependence and struggle of the contradictory aspects inherent in them determine their life and animate their development.

There is nothing that does not contain contradictions. Without contradictions, there is no universe.

Contradiction is the basis of simple forms of motion (e.g. mechanical motion), and a fortiori of complex forms of motion. »

This universality doesn’t just apply to today’s phenomena, it is eternally valid: there is no matter without contradiction, and so all matter is necessarily in motion, and must transform itself, its contradiction giving way to a new contradiction, within the framework of a new phenomenon.

Mao Zedong notes therefore:

« Contradiction is universal, absolute; it exists in every process of the development of things and phenomena, and permeates every process from beginning to end.

What does the appearance of a new process mean? It means that the old unity and its opposites give way to a new unity and its new opposites, which succeeds the old one. The old process comes to an end, the new arises. And as the new process contains new contradictions, it begins the history of the development of its own contradictions. »

Dialectical materialism does not take phenomena at random: it circumscribes them and studies their inner core: the unity of opposites.

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When the bourgeoisie set out to conquer power, it came up against the ideology of the former ruling class, materialized in the Church and the Catholic religion. The Enlightenment was the culmination of the ideological conflict with the superstructure of the ancien régime, bringing to the fore the figure of the individual endowed with reason and free will.

The bourgeoisie’s dual historical task

The establishment of the capitalist mode of production, or rather the consolidation of the bourgeoisie’s power over the whole of society throughout the 19th century, led to a transformation of values and lifestyles. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had already noted this in their 1847 Manifesto, saying of the bourgeoisie that

« The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ―natural superiors, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ―cash payment.

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.

It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

This transformation of the way of life was well described in the works of Honoré de Balzac, with a critical focus on a romantic idealization of the past. Marx and Engels called this ideology « feudal socialism », which justified a return to the ancien régime, and which would recombine in the 20th century in fascism and its corporatist ideology.

In any case, the historical role of the bourgeoisie was that of the most complete dissolution of all the moral standards of the ancien régime.

In France, the bourgeoisie’s historical mission spans two centuries, between 1789 and 1989.

Between 1789 and 1917, the bourgeoisie fully asserted its claim to control society in the face of the social strata of the ancien régime. Naturally, this involved a predominantly political struggle, particularly over institutional, educational and clerical issues.

It was a time of trial and error for the bourgeoisie as it sought to form the political regime best suited to asserting its domination and leadership.

Thus, in 1875, the republican form of the regime was established, followed by school as central institution, the influence of the Church being historically set aside in 1905 in the « inventory quarrel », until 1913, when the obligation of secret voting in the polling booth and by envelope was enshrined in law, putting an end to the hegemony of the parish priest-worthy people tandem in the countryside.

The First World War was the culmination of the process: there was no crack in the political edifice, the mobilization for war was full and complete, at all levels of society. The bourgeoisie appears as the ruling force, having completely triumphed over the former ruling class.

But this does not mean that the bourgeoisie has completed its historical tasks, for it still has to train and consolidate a proletariat that is still far too immature, not what it is concerned itself, but in relation to the necessities of capital accumulation.

It’s important to understand that, up until the 1920s, France’s population was still massively rural, with a sea of self-sufficient domestic producers and an industry still fragmented and run by professional workers with skills inherited from the guild. Similarly, until the 1970s, the figure of the « worker-peasant » persisted in many industrial regions of France, just as some working-class homes in the most isolated rural areas had no toilets or running water.

And so, at the very heart of capitalism’s first general crisis, the bourgeoisie’s second mission began: to transform the peasantry, itself shaped by the ancien régime, into a proletariat that did not exist within capitalism, but through the accumulation of capital.

With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can safely say that France saw the formation of a proletariat in the period 1920-1970, at the very moment when the capitalist mode of production experienced its first qualitative break.

The proletariat as a historical force, born in the first general crisis

From this point of view, the following must be affirmed: the first general crisis of capitalism is not the space of confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but rather the space of affirmation of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

The proletariats of each country were still too immature to pose as positive protagonistsagainst a bourgeoisie that had only relatively decomposed, since it had been victorious on one side, that of its confrontation with the old feudal regime, still so pervasive across the globe.

Nor should we forget the emergence of the United States, a vast country with unhindered capitalism, spreading a way of life perfectly adapted to capitalist needs, without having to confront the historical situation as it exists in Europe.

The socialist experiments of the 20th century appear to be an attempt by a nascent proletariat to take charge of the universal, historical movement to raise the productive forces. This is a major contradiction: a historical social force still in its chrysalis was called upon to lead the major scientific process of industrialization.

This process was all the more difficult to manage through planning, as the proletariat itself was maturing within the process. This contradiction materialized in the debates on the modalities of the new socialist state apparatus and the trial-and-error implementation of planning.

It was only after this period of economic establishment that the proletariat of these countries – 1930-1940 for the USSR, 1950-1960 for People’s China – came to a full understanding of its own ruling vision, dialectical materialism.

But it was also at this turning point that the proletariat failed against revisionism, for the bourgeoisie was still on the move, not having fully achieved its second task, having entered into decadence only relatively.

While the proletariat « completed » the bourgeoisie’s two missions in backward countries, thus revealing its historical superiority, it remained on the threshold of realizing its own mission. The affirmation of socialist-communist ideology was thus confined to the proletariat as the pole opposed to the bourgeoisie, illustrated by its emblem of the hammer and sickle.

Dialectical materialism, the affirmation of proletarian maturity

When the proletariat aims for (and achieves) the conquest of power in the twentieth century, it does so first and foremost to direct the productive forces towards the full satisfaction of society’s needs.

The aim is quantitative production based on harmonious planning.

Socialism is about putting an end to pauperism, but also to the individual-king exemplified by the triumph of the private entrepreneur who decides on the lives of workers as well as of the consumers.

From this point of view, the proletariat is not confronted with the consequences of capitalist industrialization in terms of consumer society. Consumer society is the historical culmination of the capitalist mode of production, opening the way for the proletariat to grasp itself, for itself and with its own historical mission.

The reason is simple: the grip of the commodity had to be generalized to all aspects of human life, and the subsumption of the worker had to be superimposed by the subsumption of the consumer as the culmination of the capitalist mode of production.

It’s not for nothing that Marx begins Capital with an analysis of the commodity, and his well-known assertion that « the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production reigns is announced as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities' ».

Let’s take an image. If we make a worker in the 1920s read « The fetish character of the commodity and its secret », he will perceive its dimension, but not with the same depth as the proletarian of 2023. The worker of the 1920s is marginalized in terms of consumption, and lives a restricted life in this respect; he is not as familiar with commodities as the proletarian of 2023, whose consumption is everywhere.

If you make a proletarian of 2023 read « The Working Day », he’ll grasp its substance, but not with the same intensity as the worker of 1936. Not that the proletarian of 2023 works less, but the psychic and psychological implications of work prevent him from having the same distance from work as the worker in 1936.

We are witnessing the completion of the bourgeoisie’s second historical mission, with the existence of a proletariat that participates fully in capitalism, both as producer and consumer.

Dialectically, it’s also the consecration of the proletariat’s maturity. You can’t have a consumer proletariat, i.e. one that is alienated, without having a proletariat that is subjectively active in making consumer choices.

Consumer society corresponds to a stage of advanced development of the productive forces which, in its capitalist framework, gives rise to multitudes of markets valorizing heaps of subjective identities. This requires a certain cognitive disposition as a consumer, but also a degree of intellectual enrichment as a producer.

In this sense, the working class can grasp science, no longer simply as a modality for analyzing each sector of life (biology, chemistry, neurology, etc., etc.), but as a universal principle that takes the name of dialectical materialism. This understanding is made all the easier by the legacy of the 20th century’s long and vast experience.

Consumer society enshrines multi-dimensional connections

Until the development of consumer society, the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie posed a framework that could still be said to be formal. There were bourgeois on one side, proletarians on the other.

The understanding of dialectical materialism was still marked by residues of « one-sided » conceptions: if it wasn’t bourgeois, it was proletarian, and vice versa. The real content of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as classes faded into the background, leading to the triumph of economist, syndicalist and reformist tendencies.

Even when refusing to abandon the cause, it was reductive to consider that dialectics had to be « applied » in such and such a field, each field being seen separately, as if they had a life of their own with no logical connections between them in the general whole.

This is why, even with the best will in the world, the social democracy of pre-1914, the Communist movement of the first half of the 20th century, and even the People’s Republic of China in the second half of the 20th century, always had to blindly chase after problems to try and solve them. The ability to take a global view was lacking.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was precisely the understanding of this lack of global vision. Before the GPCR, the Party was seen as a center that had to support and steer in the right direction. With the GRCP, the Party was seen as the hard core radiating its approach throughout the country.

The People’s Republic of China called this « Mao Zedong Thought », believing it to be an ideology, an ideology applied to concrete Chinese conditions, a state of mind, a mentality.

This is absolutely right, and every country does indeed need a guiding thought, a historical synthesis of national reality that exposes its contradictions.

Nevertheless, the GPCR is not only the expression of the need for a guiding thought, it is also the consideration of ideology as irradiating the whole country from its hard core, the Party.

It’s obviously easier to understand this vision in the 21st century than in 1966. In an underdeveloped country, and even in the second half of the 20th century in general, there was a tendency to separate things, to consider that each thing existed separately, forming a separate domain.

With the development of productive forces, on the contrary, it is immediately apparent that everything is linked: it is no longer possible to do economics without mathematics, physics without philosophy, geography without physics, archaeology without astronomy, law without history, architecture without aesthetics, mechanics without computer science, sport without biology, etc.

In the past, there were few goods and a hint of craftsmanship was still present, or we imagined a few large factories for the most massive goods, such as cars. Nowadays, we know that there are a variety of industries in different countries, designers in other countries, sellers, carriers, deliverers and so on.

The very existence of the Internet as a global network implies multiple connections. Naturally, this network is fragmented, separated by countries and their possible blockages, monopolies monopolizing its use, the lack of technical access in certain countries of the world, etc. Nevertheless, a human consciousness that has experienced the Internet is fundamentally different from one that has not.

In short, we can now see how everything is connected. Unfortunately, this rise in the level of knowledge is taking place within the framework of capitalism, in parallel with widespread consumerism. All intelligence serves capitalist competition and the systematization of commodification at every level.

Dialectical materialism is the way to understand this contradiction between developed productive forces and a reading of things demolished by consumer society. Dialectical materialism brings together where capitalism divides, and separates where capitalism artificially brings together.

End of prehistory, beginning of history

In concrete terms, what is at stake is not simply a new material distribution within humanity, but the re-establishment of the human being as a social animal, after a detour begun with agriculture and animal husbandry. Human civilization ceases to live « beside » reality, in the illusion of omnipotence.

The Dialectical Materialist Party takes it upon itself to put forward this essential thesis for the 21st century: the proletarian class struggle is not simply situated in human space-time, but takes place within the framework of cosmological development itself.

Put another way, the proletarian revolution is not simply the reconciliation of humanity with itself, but the harmonious unification of humanity with all living matter, with the planet as Biosphere.

As the opposite pole to the bourgeoisie, the proletariat not only brings about a social revolution, but also a qualitative leap forward for humanity as a whole.

This concept of the proletarian revolution as a vector for the extension and enrichment of civilization was well understood by the founders of dialectical materialism. The well-known thesis of communism as the « end of prehistory » is to be found in Marx’s 1859 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, made famous by Stalin himself, who strove to present this text as the general classic of dialectical and historical materialism.

Here’s what Marx writes:

“The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism.

The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.”

Historically, this thesis has been understood as the end of the exploitation of man by man, and more generally of all oppression. This is absolutely true, but to put it this way is to limit it to a single dimension.

We must insist on the fact that we’re talking about « prehistory » and not simply « history »: there’s a reading of mankind’s development not just by and for itself, but in the context of Matter as a whole, of which mankind is only a part. To understand this, we need to read the passage from Capital analyzing « the fetish character of the commodity and its secret »:

“The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.

This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.”

The socialist mode of production is humanity which grasps itself, and, grasping itself, can only grasp its own nature as a living being acting within the great whole of matter in motion.

Dialectically, it was necessary to arrive at this epoch of commodity generalization for the proletarian revolution to be a point of culmination for Humanity, that of the passage to a new Civilization enabled by the dialectical materialist worldview.

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Dialectical materialism considers that every phenomenon forms a unity of opposites, the latter being in struggle, in opposition. This is the law of contradiction, the universal law of eternal and inexhaustible matter on the road to Communism. In this context, the term « contrary » is often equated with « opposite ». In his philosophical notes, Lenin said:

« Strictly speaking, dialectics is the search for contradictions in the essence of things themselves. »

« Development is the ‘struggle’ of opposites. »

The terms contrary and opposite are easily interchangeable, and in fact it is easy to switch from one term to the other, with the idea that they are equivalent.

In the French language, there is a great deal of ambiguity in the definition of the two terms; we tend to define something contrary as opposed, and something opposed as a contrary, even if there are nuances, depending on the context.

The basis of these nuances is as follows. “Oppose” is a term from Latin, meaning to place towards, in front of, i.e. to place opposite, against. There is an idea of face to face. Contradiction is what contradicts; the term also comes from Latin. There is an idea of cancellation.

The Latin languages and Russian follow the same pattern; in German, the term contradiction is widerspruch (wider meaning against, spruch meaning to say); the term gegensatz, opposition, in the strict sense means counter-sentence or anti-sentence. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels use the term widerspruch, but in the sense of gegensatz; the distinction is not operative.

Mathematical language, on the other hand, makes an apparently clear distinction, but we can see that it comes to the same thing.

The opposite of 1 is -1, -2 for 2, -3 for 3, and so on. The opposite is set against, and we find the idea of face to face: facing1 is -1, facing 2 is -2, and so on.

The contradiction is called the « inverse ». The inverse refers to a number that can be multiplied by itself to arrive at 1: 0.2 is the inverse of 5, because 5 x 0.2 = 1; 0.01 is the inverse of 100, because 0.01 x 100 = 1, and so on.

This inverse actually contradicts a number, because it prevents it from reaching 1, i.e. it prevents it from forming a unit, from being itself. The inverse annuls the number, annihilates its identity, contradicts it. Here we find the idea of a counter-affirmation to an affirmation.

However, if we think in terms of tension and conflict, it’s hard to see at first sight any difference between contrary and opposite, even in the mathematical language. There are always two aspects facing each other, and one cannot exist without the other.

The terms of opposite and contrary are thus closely related, even interchangeable, because they have in common the fact that they signify negation. The existing nuances have to do with the modalities of this negation, but their substance is common: their dialectical relationship, both linked (and therefore positive) and negative.

These negative nuances are found again and again in any language that seeks to describe material processes. For example, we speak of a headwind [in French a “contrary wind”] to say that the wind intervenes and opposes the initial movement, forming a cancellation.

The word “opposed” implies the idea of resistance, of an obstacle: we say that we have faced opposition. There is a strong idea of tension. However, we can interchangeably say “on the contrary” or “in the opposite direction”.

It is useful here to turn to the Chinese language. The term of contradiction originally chosen in Chinese by Mao Zedong, Mao-dun, is made up of 矛, meaning spear, and 盾, meaning shield. It is based on an old story told by Han Fei Zi (280 – 233 BC):

« A person, eager to sell his spear and shield, praised the excellence of the latter in these terms: ‘Its resistance is such that nothing can dent it. This shield is absolutely impenetrable ».

Turning to the spear, he continued: « Its point is so sharp that there is nothing it cannot pierce. It is omnipenetrating.

– How can your spear penetrate your shield?

The man didn’t know what to say. He had contradicted himself. Logically, an absolutely impenetrable shield and an omnipenetrable spear cannot go together.”

Here we have a contradiction, something contradicts something else, there is a cancellation, even though the idea of spear and shield also implies tension, and therefore opposition.

There are other Chinese expressions worth noting, such as 一分為二, yifenweier, meaning one becomes two, each thing has two sides, etc. 对 立 统 , duili tongyi, meaning the unity of opposites; 相 反 相 承, xiangfan xiangcheng, meaning to oppose and promote each other; 两點論, liangdian lun, which can be translated as the theory of two points.

All these expressions were used in People’s China during the time of Mao Zedong, particularly at the time of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. They are useful for showing that the term contradiction does not in itself adequately capture complementarity and tension; conversely, the notion of opposite does not capture the unity of the two poles, which is much more apparent with the term contradiction.

In concrete terms, contradiction and opposite form two aspects of the same contradiction/opposition, the two terms coming together and repelling each other.

If we want to avoid such back-and-forth, the expression « two-point theory » seems more abstract at first sight, but it allows us to set out the dialectical operational framework. The expression was used in an article for the fiftieth anniversary of the Communist Party of China, published simultaneously in the Renmin Ribao (the People’s Daily), the Hongqi (the Red Flag, the theoretical organ) and the Jiefangjun Bao (the Daily of the People’s Liberation Army).

This 1971 document retraces the history of the Party, with the struggles of two lines, between the red line and the black line at each stage, from the revolutionary war to the construction of socialism and the struggle against the forces of capitalist restoration, including the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution launched in 1966, while stressing that several such revolutions were needed.

The long conclusion deals with learning well and mentions the importance of the two-point theory:

« We have to follow the two-point theory, not the one-point theory. While focusing our attention on the main trend, we need to take note of the other trend that may be masked.

We must take full account of and firmly grasp the main aspect and at the same time resolve one by one the problems raised by the non-main aspect.

We need to see the negative aspects of things as well as their positive aspects. We have to see the problems that have already arisen and also anticipate the problems that we haven’t yet perceived, but which could arise. »

Hsueh Li clarified this in a 1972 article, The Two-point Theory, where he explained from the outset that:

« What is the theory of the two points? It is what we usually call dialectical materialism; it is the Marxist-Leninist theory of the fundamental law of the universe.

Chairman Mao gave us a comprehensible and penetrating explanation in his On Contradiction ».

After recalling the fundamentals of dialectical materialism, he concludes as follows:

« Managing to carry the two-point theory and go beyond the one-point theory is not simply a question of method, but of worldview. The two-point theory belongs to the proletarian world-view and the one-point theory belongs to the world-view of the bourgeoisie and all the exploiting classes.

Without exception, the thinking of people living in a class society is marked by class and is invariably influenced by the political orientation of the class to which they belong.

Even if people do not belong to the exploiting classes, they are inevitably affected by the idealism and metaphysics universally existing in class society.

This is why every person in the revolutionary ranks must see to it that every idealistic and metaphysical point of view is eliminated from his mind, and must make constant efforts to reshape his subjective world while changing the objective world.

Only in this way can the two-point theory be sustained and the one-point theory overcome. »

The expression « two-point theory » allows us to avoid focusing on the idea of annulment that the term « contradiction » may abstractly imply. – and it’s worth noting that the Chinese revisionists went so far as to say that it was necessary to accept the existence of contradiction, to accept negative things, and so on.

The expression « two-point theory » also avoids the use of the term « opposition », which loses sight of unity and runs the risk of refuting even the unity of opposites, in a leftist mode.

What’s more, the expression « theory of two points » immediately underlines the existence of two aspects, which is important at a time when the bourgeoisie seeks to deny dialectics, as evidenced by the nihilistic refutation of the existence of man and woman.

It allows you to change its own state of mind while at the same time transforming reality: have I followed the two-point theory correctly, have I seen the two aspects correctly, using the main trend to see which way to go?

In this way, the expression puts the emphasis on practice: it’s a good equivalent to the terms contradiction and opposition, which are themselves « two points ».

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Marxism was born with the workers’ movement; it consists of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but also of their political action, with the First International and the birth of German social democracy. What we are talking about here are particular people, in a particular country, with particular ideas. And because of the dimension of these ideas of these people in this country, it is the universal that has prevailed and throughout the world, Marxism has been recognised as right by the workers’ movement. As right, not just for Germany, but for all countries.

Other ideas appeared and were added to Marxism, placing themselves within it, developing it through obstacles, difficulties and conflicts. Similarly, ideas developed in Russia and China have been recognized as having value not just for those countries, but for all countries. Lenin and Mao were references throughout the world.

Is it so then that we have to consider that the process could go on like this ad infinitum, that others could be added, that Marxism would continue to develop in this way? Of course, but then we have to recognize that this is no longer Marxism. Marxism would still be the basis, but there would be so many additions, so many deepenings, that Marxism would be unrecognisable.

It would be Marxism, but transformed. Already at the time of Lenin, Marxism had been profoundly transformed compared to the time of Marx, and it’s the same with Mao.

There was an interesting discussion on this subject in the 1990s between French Maoists and representatives in France of the Communist Party of Peru. The latter explained that to understand Marxism, you first had to understand Maoism, because Maoism was the most advanced form of Marxism. For the French communists, it seemed to be the other way round: it was by understanding Marxism well that one arrived, quite naturally, at Maoism. In a sense, both are naturally right, because it is a contradiction. However, if it is a contradiction, then it is a productive one.

It is precisely by turning towards this productive nature that we can overcome the separations between Marxism, Leninism and Maoism and grasp the unity of substance, which allows us to see that they are one and the same thing, and not three things with which we have to « come to terms ».

Mao Zedong had already foreseen what we must call the death of Marxism, not in the sense that it would be outdated, useless and had had its day, but in the sense that it was now material that had become part of something more developed.

Mao Zedong said with profound accuracy and a far-reaching historical perspective that:

« The world is infinite.

Both in time and space, the world is infinite and inexhaustible. Beyond our solar system, there are many stars that together form the Milky Way. Beyond this galaxy, there are many other galaxies.

Viewed globally, the universe is infinite, and viewed narrowly, the universe is also infinite.

Not only is the atom divisible, but so is the atomic nucleus, and it can be divided ad infinitum (…).

All individuals and all specific things have their births, their developments and their deaths.

Every person dies because he is born. Human beings must die, and Chang San (editor’s note: equivalent to Smith) being a man, he must die.

No one can see Confucius, who lived 2,000 years ago, because he had to die.

Humanity was born, and therefore humanity must also die. The Earth was born, and so it too must die.

However, when we say that humanity will die and the Earth will die, that’s different from what Christians say about the end of the world.

When we talk about the death of humanity and the death of the Earth, we mean that something more advanced than humanity will replace it, and this is a higher stage in the development of things.

I said that Marxism also had its birth, its development and its death. That may sound absurd.

But since Marx said that all things that develop have their death, how could that not be applicable to Marxism itself?

To say that it will not die is metaphysics.

Naturally, the death of Marxism means that something higher than Marxism will come to replace it. »

The death of Marxism that Mao Zedong is talking about here is the birth of dialectical materialism. Does this mean that dialectical materialism itself will die, disappear? Of course it does; dialectical materialism will suffer the same fate as Marxism: it will fade away to make way for a deeper understanding of the world. It will be dialectical materialism that has undergone a qualitative leap.

When will this happen? Most certainly in the decades following the unification of humanity and the systematisation of dialectical materialism at world level. There will be then such a deepening, such a development of nuances, that differences will appear and the law of contradiction will apply to dialectical materialism itself.

But we are not there yet, of course. What we need, for the time being, is for humanity to assimilate the fundamentals of dialectical materialism and to know how to apply them in practice, or rather: for dialectical materialism to be taken up as a world view by more and more people, until it is generalized throughout society.

Socialism will triumph when the proletariat understands the contradiction which both binds and opposes it to the bourgeoisie, and when the law of contradiction is grasped in everyday life, in scientific experimentation and the sciences, in industrial production and its conception, in the arts and letters.

This is a new era in which, the more connections are understood, the more connections are developed, the qualitative leap reaches maturity and is realized.

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1. Dialectical materialism is the affirmation of the inexhaustible nature of eternal matter, which obeys the law of contradiction.

2. « Marxist philosophy considers that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. This law operates universally in nature, in human society and in human thought. Between the opposing aspects of contradiction, there is both unity and struggle, and this is what drives things and phenomena to move and change ». (Mao Zedong, On Contradiction)

3. The PMD’s raison d’être is the systematization of dialectical materialism in all fields, at the personal level and throughout society, in a unified humanity living in harmony with planet Earth recognized as a Biosphere.

4. Dialectical materialism is carried forward by the proletariat, the class that transforms reality and unifies humanity, generating the socialist mode of production that abolishes all exploitation and oppression.

5. The PMD represents the vanguard of the proletariat, and its main activity is to generate and direct class struggles for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the working class as the ruling class, systematizing the dialectical materialist vision of the world.

6. The PMD’s main theoretical references are Stalin’s Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism and Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction.

7. The PMD’s main historical references are the historical existence of the USSR from the October Revolution of 1917 to 1952, that of the People’s Republic of China from its foundation in 1949 to 1976 (mainly with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution), that of the Communist Party of Peru from 1980 to 1992 (with the affirmation of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism).

8. The PMD stresses that the beginnings of humanity, with agriculture and animal husbandry, established an unequal relationship with Nature and placed women in a situation of inferiority: this implies cultural revolutions to liberate the female psyche and correct the relationship with Nature, particularly with animals.

9. The PMD’s approach is the two lines struggle, in all areas: recognising the contradiction, asserting the red line against the black line, and strengthening the red line until it wins.

10. The PMD stresses the importance of collective optimism, historical enthusiasm, personal self-sacrifice and revolutionary romanticism; it combats pessimism, anti-social isolation, selfish vanity and insensitive indifference.

11. The PMD is a revolutionary organisation; membership is by co-option of at least three of its members. The compartmentalisation of its structures is the rule, the secrecy of the organisation the principle. To be a member of the organisation means to be active in a PMD organisation, to apply the resolutions adopted and to observe its own discipline.

12. The PMD operates according to the dialectic of centralisation and democracy. This democratic centralism implies that the leading bodies at all levels are elected by democratic consultation at congresses and that between congresses, the member of the PMD must submit to the organisation, the minority to the majority, the lower level to the higher level and the whole Party to the Central Committee.

13. If a member commits an offence against Party discipline, the Party organisation of the echelon concerned, within the limits of its powers and according to the case in question, will apply one of the following sanctions: warning, reprimand, removal from Party duties, observation, exclusion from the Party.

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On the occasion of this new first of May, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Center of Belgium and the Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) express their confidence and enthusiasm for the growing affirmation of the second wave of the world revolution.

The first wave had given birth, a hundred years ago, in March, 1919, to the Communist International; the second will realize the objective of this one: the world unification and the realization of socialism on all the planet.

The formation of a World Socialist Republic is unavoidable in the 21st century. The realization of the complete unification of Humanity, on the basis of socialist relations in the economy and throughout society, is certain. There can be absolutely no doubt about it.

The resolution of the environmental problems, by establishing dialectical relations of humanity with the planet considered as a biosphere, is inevitable. The understanding of the nature of living matter and its respect goes hand in hand with the dialectical materialistic understanding of the general evolution of the eternal and infinite universe.

We affirm that the mastery of dialectical materialism and its fundamental theses on the universe are the very basis for understanding reality and transforming it.

It is undeniable that this still requires formidable initiatives. Mao Zedong had spoken in the 1960s of the next fifty to one hundred years, when humanity would experience upheavals like never before. We are precisely in this period and it is about being on the front line. We are as the vanguard of the working class in Belgium and France.

We say: there will be no capitulation, no turning back, no modification of the ideological fundamentals, nor revision of the main principles. We are fully aware of the complexity of the tasks incumbent upon us, but we will be able to assume them, with vigor and the greatest sense of responsibility. We are full of optimism about the future: the triumph of Communism corresponds to the movement of the universe itself. The proletariat is the most revolutionary class in history.

It is true that in the imperialist metropolis, the recomposition of the proletarian fabric is still an ongoing process, which does not follow a linear path and still requires an extremely important substantive work. There is still a titanic job to do in this area. We believe, however, that we have grasped the necessary general guidelines. In this sense, our two organizations are fully engaged in this struggle to ensure that the proletariat recovers itself and goes back to the reconquest of its identity, which has undergone profound changes due to the increase of the productive forces, beyond deep deformations, significant errors.

This process of recomposition of the proletarian fabric corresponds to the emergence of the second wave of the World Revolution. And the capitalist mode of production, both in Belgium and in France, experiences such internal problems, because of its historical limits, that it is less and less able to freeze social relations by means of the apparatus of State and corruption of a large part of the proletariat. This had led, since the 1950s, to the displacement of the main contradiction in the zone of storms: Africa, Latin America, Asia. We are now in a new period.

There is also the reaffirmation of the communist ideology that arises historically, through the maturation of class conflicts and especially the driving role of diffusion played by our organizations. Here we affirm very clearly that the explanations we provide of dialectical materialism are the decisive weapons to have the necessary tools, in the theoretical and practical, intellectual and material fields, to make advance the Cause. It is not a question of a side aspect or a philosophy accompanied by simple demands, but of the hard core of the communist affirmation.

It goes without saying, however, that it would be wrong to consider unilaterally that the proletarian-bourgeois contradiction has already resumed its natural course. It is very far from being the case. The ideological, cultural, social and political remains of the 1950-1980s are still widely present. The years 1990-2010 were also marked by a strengthening of many aspects of the capitalist mode of production, due to technological progress, the collapse of the bloc dominated by Soviet social-imperialism and integration into the capitalist world economy of China which became social-fascist.

In this sense, it is incorrect to consider a movement like the « yellow vests » in France other than as an expression of the capitalist crisis in general and the petty bourgeoisie in particular. There is a scissors phenomenon where everything between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is crushed. This phenomenon is also parallel to many others who, similarly, express the fear of seeing capitalism not being longer able to ensure social peace, to give free rein to small capitalists, to neutralize the working class.

Petty-bourgeois interpretations of the massive ecological crisis and the terrifying ecocide it causes, the catastrophic aggravation of global warming, the dramatic animal condition, are also the terrorized expression of the middle layers of capitalism taken between the hammer of proletarian demands and the anvil of capitalism. They are actually phenomena corresponding to the historical limit of capitalism. The time of its world overtaking has arrived.

Discourses on a « finite world », on the need to move to « sustainable » economic development, to adopt a more « sober » way of life, are nothing more than an attempt to curb the wheel of History. Fascism also reappears more strongly as a requirement for a step back in time. Calls to be more « reasonable » are always more numerous within the parasitic intellectual layers. All this catastrophism is fundamentally foreign to who has understood the magnitude of the changes underway, their scale.

In reality, matter is inexhaustible and we know a time of general transformation, both of social life and of humanity’s relationship with the rest of matter. In order to live up to this process, we must liberate the productive forces by adopting the principles of socialism in all fields. This is what will establish productive dynamics for the whole of life in the Biosphere that is the planet, announcing in the medium term the process of spatial colonization and the ever greater diffusion of life.

This requires a great capacity for self-criticism, in relationship to the old way of life. Only collectivism is able to break the individualism and selfishness that characterize the initiatives and dominant values in the capitalist mode of production. Only a perspective based on the notion of totality, of the whole, of universalism, can allow society not to fall under the blows of ultra-individualism, of its capricious consumption, of its contempt for all morality and all social requirement.

The capitalist mode of production, in perdition, also produces only cultural horrors and ideological poisons. Contemporary art, moral relativism, the most outrageous cynicism, the cult of excessive egos and futile appearance, subjectivist literature, dissonant music as a value in itself or repetitive and simplistic music with simple harmonies… Capitalism takes advantage of the overproduction of capital to overrun ever more aspects of everyday life.

This is vain, however. The masses feel fundamentally alien to all this decadence, even if some sectors being more or less important may be fascinated or momentarily disoriented. The masses are on the side of transformation and culture, openness and development. Fixations on identity, material fetishism, superficiality, are essentially foreign to them. Here, the future opposes itself to the celebration of an idealized past, Socialism to the decadence of « culture » in capitalism, to that anticapitalist romanticism that is fascism.

In Belgium and France, the battle is therefore the one to free the initiatives of the masses, to raise their consciousness and their organizational capacities. The avant-garde opens here spaces and, starting from workers’ centrality, forms the movement bringing the emergence of the People’s Democracy as a strategic proposition. It is a question of making falter the dominant system, of shaking it, go to its assault for the establishment of a new State. We must be certain of victory here.

Long live the working class, the most revolutionary class in history!

Long live its ideology: dialectical materialism, today Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

People’s war up to Communism!

Long live the second wave of the world revolution!

Marxist Leninist Maoist Center of Belgium

Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) 

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