Leftist Feminist political prisoners

I'm a Marxist-Feminist revolutionary activist woman and philosopher working on constructing a dialectical materialist Feminist theory. I'm a researcher and activist on how capitalist patriarchal Junta dictatorships abused Leftist women political prisoners, and I have dedicated myself to exposing and learning from these crimes of capitalist misogyny. I work to raised awareness for the victims of patriarchal violence both past and present and to help bring the perpetrators to justice and punishment. Trigger warning for discussions involving sexual violence, abuse, torture. DM me to discuss these issues.

[leftistfeminista]

Women's Protests against Pinochet 1986

English Dubbed Documentary

In the third episode of "Chile, The Forbidden Images", broadcast on August 28, 2013, what was not seen of Pope John Paul II's visit to Chile is shown. You will also learn about the testimonies of the women who organized to protest against human rights violations during the Dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

"Women have always been told we are the weak ones. But in reality we are stronger than all the men. We are capable of defending our men, our children."

[leftistfeminista]

Chilean women activists extinguish Pinochet's "eternal flame of liberty"

[leftistfeminista]

Interpretive dance on the sufferings of leftist women political prisoners

Using Carlos Alonso's Anonymous Hands series as a gestural and movement score, the victim/perpetrator duo is presented in an endless narrative. Capture, abduction, humiliation, torture are presented as different sections of a complete action that is continuously repeated.

Performers: Physical Theatre Staging Laboratory Noelia Cavalin, Paula Fernández Dossi, Adrián Cozzi, and Leo Di Napoli. Director: Yamil Ostrovsky

Interpretive dance as a bodily artform is best able to capture the emotional turmoil of women political prisoners under the physical control of the patriarchal fascist dictatorship. The masculinist state literally bends the bodies of revolutionary women to their will.

[leftistfeminista]

The Anonymous Hands series comprises works created since 1981 using various materials, primarily oil pastels. They speak to us of the brutal human rights violations committed during the dictatorship; they are the visual representations of state terrorism. This collection could well illustrate the accounts gathered by the CONADEP in the Nunca Más report . 

In the series, the representation of the violated human body transforms the work into a critique of the exercise of power, challenging the way of representing a traditional genre such as nudity.

Carlos Alonso worked on the theme of violence throughout his life; his work proposes another context for interpreting it, a non-time anchored in the human condition.

Throughout his extensive career, Alonso experimented with a wide range of materials and techniques: oils, acrylics, collages, drypoint, woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, and aquatints. His work falls within the expressionist movement, representing reality in an incisive, dramatic, and stark manner, sometimes with a touch of irony or sarcasm.

He was openly interested in political and social themes, directly impacting the viewer through his portrayals. These creations constitute a Brechtian, embodied style. It is not a uniform or static style. Regarding this, he would say: “For me, embodied style means that it appears when the actor is mobilized carnally, in their entirety. It is not just intellectual; the flesh, the viscera, the whole person are involved. It is not handled as a merely manual art; it goes much further. A series of coincidences are needed, gears that come together, and then the embodied style begins to function. It appears when several qualities combine, not only color, form, and composition, but also other substances” (La Marea Magazine No. 22: 2004) .

Manos Anónimas

Visita la entrada para saber más.

The disappeared women suffered specific forms of torture because of their status as activists (belonging to a political, neighborhood, community, or workers' organization). This systematic torture involved various forms of sexual abuse, mistreatment and torture of pregnant women, clandestine maternity wards, and the theft of babies born in captivity.

Argentine Dawn II,  1984. Pastel on paper.

In the cultural model the dictatorship attempted to impose, women were confined to the domestic sphere—they could not be active in their political positions—and were expected to remain subservient and obedient to their husbands and, through them, to social power. The torturers, embodying patriarchal and religious values, materialized the mandate to "inflict pain," carrying out merciless torture. This was the punishment for the collective desire and will for "another paradise" without such inequality.

Argentine Dawn III , 1989. Pastel on paper

Carlos Alonso - Wikipedia

Carlos Alonso, las artes como testimonio de nuestra historia | La tinta

Manos anónimas es la serie de obras de Carlos Alonso que relatan y retratan de manera estremecedora los secuestros, torturas y desaparicione

[leftistfeminista]

MUJERES COMUNISTAS CHILE 2026

Women Communists of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) gathered together for a congress. Under the banners of Salvador Allender and General Secretary Gladys Marin who lead the party underground during the brutal Pinochet years. We are proud to be a Party that put our commitment to radical equality into praxis not just in class and sex but in gender. A woman-lead Marxist-Leninist party is what capitalist patriarchy feared most, leading to the Junta's extreme measures of placing all party women under enslavement. We recall the strength learned from that ordeal as we prepare for new battles against today's fascistic Kast regime.

[marxbook]

SOVIET LES MISERABLES DUBBED INTO ENGLISH

"Gavroche"  is a heroic revolutionary film based on Victor Hugo's novel " Les Miserables ", directed by Tatyana Lukashevich at the Mosfilm studio in 1937 .

Restored at the Gorky Film Studio in 1976 .

Plot

The film's plot differs significantly from the novel's. New characters are added, and their motivations are adapted to better suit the revolutionary romance of the film's young audience.

Paris, 1832. Touchet, who had escaped from penal servitude, was arrested in his former apartment just as the police came to evict the residents of the Gorbeau building for non-payment.

After their mother's death, the Touchet children were taken in by a little vagabond named Gavroche , who slept inside a wooden elephant statue in the Place de la Bastille. He later helped their father escape from prison and met him at the Montmartre barricade , built by revolutionary-minded Parisians .

The defending commander, Enjolras, conveyed to Gavroche the sad news of his father's death in the royal prison. The boy fought alongside other revolutionaries and was killed by a guardsman's bullet while making a daring raid for ammunition.

[marxbook]

B.M. Kedrov's "Conversations on Dialectics" (1983)

This book is a popular introduction to dialectical materialism (the Marxist philosophical method) framed as six days of philosophical dialogues between a Father (an experienced Marxist thinker) and his Son (a curious adolescent) during a multi-day hiking journey. Written in accessible, narrative style for Soviet youth (school students and P.T.U. pupils), it uses everyday examples from nature, science, history, daily life, and personal experience to illustrate core concepts. It contrasts dialectics (dynamic, developmental, contradictory view of reality) with metaphysics (static, one-sided, dogmatic thinking).

Kedrov (a prominent Soviet philosopher, historian of science, and chemist) draws heavily on Marx, Engels, and especially Lenin, while grounding explanations in natural and social sciences. The structure mirrors a journey: silent walking (reflection) alternates with conversations at stops (learning). Repetitions are intentional for pedagogical reinforcement from multiple angles.

Conversation 4 (Morning): Motion and Contradiction (pp. 46–54)

Father. Here we are. We can make a halt, light a fire, and have breakfast. Aren’t you tired?

Son. To tell the truth, a little tired, and you probably are too. After all, we walked all day yesterday.

Father. You say — we walked! Or, to put it another way, we were in motion. So tell me then: what is this — motion?

Son. Well, it’s when you move from one place to another, as we moved here from yesterday’s stopping place.

Father. So, in your opinion, motion is a change of place, that is, the displacement of a body in space?

Son. Yes, father. You expressed my thought more precisely.

Father. Wait, wait. I didn’t say at all that I agree with you. You are right, but only in part. Every displacement is, of course, motion, but not every motion is simple displacement.

Son. How so? I don’t understand…

Father. All right. I’ll try to explain… But first I’ll remind you of one witty, playful poem by Pushkin. It’s called “Motion”:

“There is no motion,” said the bearded sage. The other remained silent and began to walk before him. He could not have refuted it more strongly; Everyone praised the ingenious answer. But, gentlemen, this amusing incident Brings another example to my mind: Every day the sun walks before us, Yet the stubborn Galileo is right.

Father. Oh, you know Pushkin not only from the textbook! Well done! Read the classics as much as possible. Pushkin and other great poets were distinguished by imagery and dialectical thinking, the ability to see and evaluate phenomena from different sides. Pushkin here brilliantly reveals the contradictoriness of the obvious. And we with you will examine the relationship between motion and displacement. What do you think, are you moving now?

Son. Of course not. After all, I am sitting here in one and the same place all the time.

Father. Sitting! But when you were just speaking, weren’t your hands moving, pointing to the place where you are sitting? Wasn’t your head turning toward me when you were talking to me? And wasn’t your chest rising with every breath, and your heart contracting and expanding with every beat, making the blood move through your whole body? And your tongue — wasn’t it moving together with your lips when you pronounced the words? So it turns out that although you are sitting in one place, you are nevertheless moving all the time, because all your organs are moving. And now remember that the Earth on which we are standing is itself constantly moving — both around its axis and around the Sun, and the Sun together with all its planets and their satellites is rushing through world space inside our Galaxy, that is, in that cluster of stars to which the Milky Way belongs. And you participate in all these motions together with the Earth.

Son. You are right. I myself now see how I hastened to assert what I had not thought through. But after all, everything you just mentioned — hands, head, and celestial bodies — moves because they change their places. So motion is still displacement?

Father. You are capable of reasoning. Indeed, every motion is accompanied by displacement — of some bodies, large or small — in space, but it is not reduced to it. Here we have lit a fire with you and put water to heat. And what is heating? Water consists of tiny particles invisible to our eye — molecules. The molecules move, but we do not see it. The fire imparts energy to the water in the form of heat, and this energy makes the water molecules move faster. When the motion becomes faster, our hands by touch feel that the water has heated up and become warmer. The heating of water is also its motion, and it is caused by the motion of water molecules. The same with the cooling of water: the molecules move more slowly, heat leaves, the water becomes colder. So here the motion of water has a special internal character, unlike how water flows in a river or falls from the sky in the form of raindrops. Scientists called the invisible motion of molecules, which we sense as heat, thermal, or more broadly — physical motion, and the simple displacement of bodies in space — their mechanical motion.

Son. I understand that. What I called motion is only one part or side of it — mechanical motion. And besides that, there is thermal motion.

Father. There are still many other kinds of motion. Light, which you see, is also motion that occurs as rapid oscillations in a special physical — electromagnetic — field. Light from many stars reaches us not immediately, but after several years or even more. This means that we see stars as they were earlier, many years before this day. And what they are like now, people will see much later, perhaps when not only I, but you too will no longer be alive. (Consequently, light is a special kind of physical motion, and although this motion is connected with the displacement of electromagnetic waves in space, it is by no means exhausted by this displacement, as scientists say, it is not reduced to it, but has its own special nature.)

Son. And combustion too?

Father. And combustion, and all chemical processes in general too. But this is no longer physical, but chemical motion. It occurs when atoms, of which molecules consist, move — combine and separate. And life itself is also motion and also of a special kind — biological motion. And society, all humanity also moves, and various motions occur in it. They speak of the workers’ movement, the national liberation movement, the movement of the popular masses. And great revolutions, such as the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, which opened the way for people to socialism, are also a special kind of motion.

Son. I am beginning to guess what motion in general is, but I cannot express it in words. Help me.

Father. Motion in general, motion independent of where and what is moving, is change. When something changes — whether the position of a body in space, or the physical state of any body, or its chemical composition, or changes occur in a living body or in human society — they say that the corresponding objects are moving.

Son. And thoughts too?

Father. Yes, and thoughts too, because in your head thoughts are never at rest but are always changing, and therefore moving. But one must distinguish when things themselves move or change, and when our thoughts about things, our ideas, teachings, our images of things and phenomena move. We will talk about this with you later, but first let’s see if we can understand more deeply what motion or change is.

Son. I would be glad to do that, but I don’t know how. For me, what you said about motion — that it is change in general — has made me look at the world in a completely new way. Now I remembered that everything flows, everything moves, everything changes. How strange that sometimes you pronounce words, but their meaning is revealed only later: everything moves — means everything changes.

Father. You, my friend, have now very correctly noticed this. But you probably noticed even earlier, when we were talking about motion, that in different bodies it occurs differently and that there exist various kinds, or, as they say, various forms of motion: mechanical, physical, chemical, biological, social. And every motion, every one of its kinds, is always connected with matter, with its bodies. After all, bodies change and move, and therefore motion itself, change itself, is inseparable from them. And if there is no motion without moving bodies, then there are also no such bodies anywhere in the world that would not move or change. You remembered well the words of the ancient thinker: everything changes, everything moves. Everything — means all bodies and every body individually. So we have come to the point of understanding more deeply what motion is, in which all bodies, the whole world, all matter find themselves.

Son. And again I am in difficulty how to express this thought in words. Is it like this: motion is that in which all bodies find themselves?

Father. Yes, approximately so. Motion is the way in which everything in the world exists, or more precisely: it is the mode of existence of matter.

Son. How good that long reasonings can be expressed so concisely and clearly. Not a single word can be thrown out and not a single word needs to be added. But can we understand motion even more deeply?

Father. Even more deeply — means to penetrate into the very essence of what we are talking about, as if to find the kernel hidden inside the shell. It is similar to when you crack a nut. But in a nut the kernel is separated from the shell, but here it is different: what is inside and what is outside are only two different sides of one and the same thing; one (the kernel) manifests itself, appears in the other and through the other.

Son. Let it be so, but I don’t understand what relation this has to what we are talking about now — to motion?

Father. Wait a little and you will understand. And about these two sides — which is always on the outside and which is hidden inside — we will talk more. But now let’s look into the depths of motion, into its essence hidden inside it. Here is a stone for you, hold it in your hands for now. Here I will draw a thin line on the ground. Put your stone on this line. Good. Now tell me, where is the stone?

Son. It’s obvious — it is lying on the line.

Father. Very good. Remember that if the stone is located — I emphasize: is located — in this place, it means it is lying here, at rest. And now I will make the stone roll along this line. Look, watch it carefully. Now it has ended up exactly in the same place on the line where you just put it. It crossed it and rolled further. Tell me: when the stone was rolling along the line, was it in that place where you first put it?

Son. Of course, I was watching it all the time and saw how it was in that place.

Father. Wait, don’t rush. I am asking: was the stone in that place now in the same way as when you put it there before, that is, was it there now, when I made it move and roll?

Son. Let me think, you made me pay attention to something new that I had not noticed before. After all, then the stone was lying in that place, but now it reached the same place, but did not stay there, but immediately rolled further.

Father. I see that you understood this difference, because not everyone notices and understands it. And the whole point is that this is a case when one cannot answer only yes or no: it is located or not located. When the stone was rolling or moving through that place where you had previously put it, then it both was and was not in that place at one and the same time: it was because it entered there, and it was not because it immediately began to leave that place. So the stone had only just entered that place when it already began to leave it, because it possessed motion. And motion means that a body does not rest, does not lie, does not remain in some definite place, but passes through that place. So the essence of mechanical motion, and it is the most understandable, consists in the fact that moving bodies at one and the same moment both are in a given place and are not in it. So, to the question: is this body in a given place? — one has to answer both yes and no at once. That is how dialectics proceeds.

Son. I think I understood this, but at the same time it is very strange that one has to answer like that: both yes and no. After all, this looks like a contradiction and like a desire to give an evasive answer. Here you ask me: are there stars in the sky? And I answer: both yes and no — and add that such a strange answer of mine is dialectics.

Father. Yes, you are right: this is indeed a contradiction. But there is nothing terrible or strange in this. One must only single out contradictions hidden in things themselves, in phenomena themselves, independently of us, independently of whether we know anything about them or not. Such contradictions are called objective or real and dialectical, and sometimes vital. But there are other contradictions that we ourselves generate because we do not know how to reason correctly. That would be the case you cited as an example: first a person said that there are stars in the sky, and then began to deny it and said that there are none in the sky. This means that the person contradicted himself, and that is all. Such contradictions must be avoided, and there is no dialectics in them: they are invented and are called logical or formal-logical. They are called that because they arise as a result of violating the rules of formal logic…

[sespursongles-deactivated201906]

I find it so depressing to know that as soon as men invent or gain access to a new communication technology, they immediately use it to increase tenfold their production and consumption of porn. In the book I’m reading about feminism and technology, the author spends a while explaining how revolutionary the telephone has been for women, allowing them to escape the isolation & confinement of their nuclear households and increasing their access to the outside world and to other women (friends, relatives) in a way that was harder for men to supervise (which is of course why the industry men who developed it spent decades loudly condemning women’s use of the telephone for “trivial gossip”.)

But then she has to concede that this new technology, like most others, also affected women negatively because men immediately started using it for porn (& to harm women, since that is the main purpose of porn). “The diffusion of the telephone facilitated the intrusion of pornography into the home, not only through intrusive and abusive telephone calls made by men to women, but also through the development of sexual services over the phone.” The same thing happened with the internet of course, but before the internet there was also the French Minitel service, which was a kind of small TV screen linked to your telephone that allowed for proto-emailing and instant messaging—and a study by the French government found that the Minitel “vastly contributed to the propagation of hardcore pornography”, notably the sale and purchase of paedophilic content.

I saw a post once where a feminist said she almost wished the Internet had never been invented, because of the explosion in porn it facilitated, and I understand the sentiment, but it’s not limited to the internet, it’s a recurring and pretty much inevitable phenomenon, since porn seems to be men’s primordial interest. It happened with the printing press, with the daguerreotype, the invention of movies of course, now virtual reality… Dworkin called pornography the propaganda tool of woman-hatred, so of course it makes sense that every new information & communication technology men develop always translates to them as better access to ever-increasing amounts of porn.

[hereticelle]

Here’s the pdf of the book, Judy Wajcman’s Feminism Confronts Technology (1991). 

[fidnru]

this is the updated link, the one above is a 404.

[leftistfeminista]

Militarized Masculinity from Pinochet's Chile to Trump's America

A guest essay by Lisa DiGiovanni

Militarized Masculinity in Spain and Chile: A Video Project - The Volunteer

Three years ago, when I was on sabbatical in Barcelona, I was introduced to the genre through the feminist film scholar Barbara Zecchi, Prof

Pinochet’s campaign to restore Chile to an idealized earlier state could very well be instructive for what’s happening in the United States today. The Pinochet regime (1973–1990) was defined by brutal institutionalized violence that repressed all opposition to a conservative economic and social agenda. Pinochet dissolved Congress, declared a state of emergency, crippled the judiciary, shut down opposition news outlets, ousted academic leaders, sacked local bureaucrats and filled his government with loyalists.

Pinochet also projected the image of the unyielding, decisive military leader—the epitome of militarized masculinity—to enforce control and instill fear, contrasting sharply with the ideas that Schneider and Allende championed.Augusto Pinochet, September 1973. Chas Gerretsen/Nederlands Fotomuseum.

In my book Militarized Masculinity in Spain and Chile, I examine the beliefs and social constructs that underlay the dictatorships of Franco in Spain and Pinochet in Chile. These same ideas, centered around a soldier ethos and a deep-rooted faith in the effectiveness of military force, are at the heart of right-wing political movements now in the United States.

While Pinochet’s path as a General was the direct use of military force, Trump’s appeal lies in the rhetorical and performative use of similar aggressive, uncompromising ideals. Both styles reject the notion of the military (or the executive) as a guarantor of democratic political order. Instead, they position the strong leader as the active, combative agent necessary to save the nation from weakness, corruption, or internal enemies. These are key characteristics of militarized masculinity.

As trailblazing feminist and political scientist Cynthia Enloe powerfully stated decades ago, militarized masculinity is not a naturally occurring trait; it is a learned gender identity that emphasizes physical toughness, emotional stoicism, unwavering discipline, and, most crucially, a reflexive willingness to use violence in the name of patriotism and national security. It is built by hierarchical, ultra-nationalistic, patriarchal societies and reinforced, often invisibly, through our most fundamental institutions —educational systems, media, government, and religious bodies. Understanding this societal architecture is vital, because it reveals that the continuum of violence is not an unstoppable force of nature, but a political choice that can be unmade.

From childhood, boys are bathed in subtle or overt gendered propaganda. Toys, narratives, and social expectations align with the militarized ideal: men are protectors, women are those to be protected. As they grow, these messages become harder to ignore. Cruel hazing practices aim to eliminate empathy and vulnerability (framed as feminine) and turn recruits into weapons of war. The logic of militarization fuels the dehumanization of the “other” and serves to justify armed domination.

Women, too, play a functional role in making militarized masculinity, though typically a supportive one. They are often pushed toward reproductive and domestic roles, reinforcing the gender hierarchy where men are positioned as the primary agents of action and protection. Both reinforce the overall, power-controlling structure.

The political utility of this construction cannot be overstated. Militarized masculinity serves political goals, from justifying cultural colonization and economic imperialism abroad to maintaining anti-liberal, homophobic, and misogynistic national identities at home. It is a powerful tool for maintaining social control and consolidating power, both domestically and internationally.

Some readers may dismiss Pinochet as a relic of a distant past. But now an open Pinochet supporter, José Antonio Kast, is President of Chile. His father, Michael Kast Schindele (1924–2014), was a German Nazi lieutenant who fled to Chile after the Second World War. Kast pledged to “restore” order after the 2019 protests (labelled by him as terrorism) and to use a strong hand to tackle tensions with Indigenous Mapuche in the south. His 2025 presidential campaign focused heavily on security and strict immigration controls.

There are some unsettling similarities between those past military regimes and what’s happening in Washington in the second Trump Administration. Power becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of a single man who undermines the democratic belief in dialogue over force. The military, both in its actual strength and as a mythology, is central to these regimes, which frame the opposition as internal enemies that must be eliminated for the restoration of order and tradition.

It is no surprise that Trump selected Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense, renamed the Secretary of War under the Trump administration. The “warrior ethos” that he gained from his war experience has taken a new form. To “fix” a broken immigration system, send in squadrons of masked armed ICE agents who then use force against anyone who opposes their presence even with peaceful protest.

[leftistfeminista]

Misogynist Incel attacks the Venda Sexy Memorial site in Chile.

Acto Vandálico Contra Nuestro Sitio de Memoria -

Durante la mañana del lunes 22, alrededor de las 09:30 horas, un individuo que transitaba por el frontis de nuestro sitio se detuvo para arr

With the victory of José Antonio Kast, misogynist fascists feel more comfortable coming out of the woodworks. Instead of denying the crimes against leftist women, actively celebrating it as what feminist women need. They see Communist Party women as the most radical, militant form of feminism. Imposing total equality not just over gender but over economics, race, culture, society and every aspect of life in a totalitarian dictatorship.

Misogynists celebrate that at Venda Sexy even women of that type could be tamed into sexual submission. They call the guards of Iran 3037, heroes who saved Chile from Communism. The creation of a Venda Sexy museum has enraged them and they have attempted to get Kast to stop it. Here we see misogynist incel taking direction action into his own hands with violent vandalism. He is so incel that he feels violent rage at honoring the suffering of leftist women who endured sexualized torture. We need to identify him and bring him to justice.

[leftistfeminista]

From a 2012 JJCC ceremony

Estatutos Juventudes Comunistas de Chile

TITLE II. OF THE SYMBOLS OF THE JJ.CC.

ARTICLE 4. On the Color Amaranth is the color that identifies the Communist Youth.

ARTICLE 5. On the Organ of Communication The Central Committee shall ensure the periodic publication of an official organ of communication aimed at disseminating its policy among the youth.

ARTICLE 6. On the Anthem The Communist Youth has an anthem: “The Anthem of the Communist Youth of Chile”, written by Sergio Ortega. In addition, it officially adopts the anthem “The Internationale”.

ARTICLE 7. On the Uniform The uniform of the Communist Youth consists of an amaranth-colored shirt with two upper pockets and shoulder loops (epaulettes).

[marxbook]

Marta Harnecker, Chilean Marxist theorist, authored the original Los Conceptos Elementales del Materialismo Histórico in 1969

⚔️ Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism: The Framework That Actually Explains Everything Bourgeois Economists Are Too Cowardly to Admit

🏛️ AUTHORSHIP, TRANSLATION & THEORETICAL LINEAGE

Marta Harnecker, Chilean Marxist theorist, authored the original Los Conceptos Elementales del Materialismo Histórico in 1969

Translated and serialized 1978–1981 by the Tucson Marxist-Leninist Collective in their journal Theoretical Review

Preserved by marxists.org; reformatted via libre OCR software and LaTeX in 2024

This edition is an early translation — missing later additions and refinements from subsequent editions

Prefaced by the towering Louis Althusser, whose 1974 preface alone is worth more than the entire canon of bourgeois sociology

📜 ALTHUSSER'S PREFACE: THE CLASS STRUGGLE IS THE HEART OF EVERYTHING — YES, EVERYTHING

🎯 The Central Thesis Nobody Wants to Accept

One simple idea with enormous theoretical and political consequences:

All of Marx's theory — both historical materialism (the science) and dialectical materialism (the philosophy) — has the class struggle at its absolute center

The class struggle is the "decisive link" not only in political practice but in Marxist science and philosophy themselves

Since Lenin, it has been understood that philosophy represents the class struggle in theory

Every philosophy represents a class viewpoint against opposing class viewpoints

Marxist-Leninist philosophy (dialectical materialism) = the proletarian class viewpoint in theory

📖 Reading Capital Correctly vs. Reading It Like a Bourgeois Economist

Yes, you can read Capital in a completely bourgeois manner — and apparently many people do

The wrong reading: treat Capital as merely a theory of Political Economy of the capitalist mode of production

Begin with the economic base

Study the labor process

Distinguish forces of production from relations of production

Analyze commodity, money, surplus value, wages, reproduction of capital, rent, profit, interest, falling rate of profit

Then tack on social classes and class struggle at the very end, as if they were an afterthought

The excuse for this wrong reading: the unfinished chapter on social classes appears at the very end of Capital

The bourgeois interpretation therefore claims: social classes = final product of the capitalist economic structure; class struggle = simple effect of the existence of classes

🚨 Why That Reading Is a Grave Deformation

Social classes are NOT at the end of Capital — they are present from beginning to end

The class struggle is NOT an effect of class existence — class struggle and class existence are one and the same thing

When Marx subtitled Capital: "A Critique of Political Economy" — he was critiquing the bourgeois illusion that separates:

Production and exchange (the "economy") on one side

Social classes, political struggles, etc. on the other

Marx's goal: show that all conditions of capitalist production, circulation, and distribution are dominated and permeated by class relations and the class struggle

🏭 There Is No "Pure" Economy — A Point Bourgeois Economists Simply Refuse to Acknowledge

There is no "pure" economic production

There is no "pure" circulation (exchange)

There is no "pure" distribution

All these economic phenomena are processes occurring within social relations which are, in the last instance, class relations — antagonistic class relations — relations of class struggle

Material production presupposes "productive forces" — labor power (workers) + instruments of production (tools, machines) transforming raw material

A bourgeois economist sees: a simple technical labor process

A Marxist sees: productive forces put to work under the domination of relations of production which are relations of exploitation

If there are workers → they are wage laborers → exploited

If there are wage laborers who only possess their labor power and are constrained (by hunger — Lenin's word) to sell it → there are capitalists who own the means of production and buy labor power to draw surplus value from it

The existence of antagonistic classes is inscribed in production itself — in the relations of production

🔗 Relations of Production Pervade Productive Forces — They Are NOT Simply Added On

Relations of production are not something merely added to productive forces as their "form"

Relations of production pervade the productive forces because:

Labor power — which sets productive forces in motion — itself forms part of those productive forces

The capitalist production process ceaselessly tends toward the maximum exploitation of labor power

This tendency dominates everything else in the capitalist production process

Therefore: technical mechanisms of production are subordinate to the (class) mechanisms of capitalist exploitation

Marx demonstrated in Capital, Volume I, Section 4, Chapters 14 and 15: successive bases and forms of organization of productive forces (from manufacture to large-scale industry) were nothing more than successive bases and forms of the material and historical existence of capitalist relations of production

Economist and technocratic error: separating productive forces from relations of production

What actually exists: the unity of productive forces and relations of production under the domination of the relations of production

⚔️ The Class Struggle Is Two-Directional — And the Capitalists Start It First

Class struggle = the struggle of the capitalist class to exploit the working class + the struggle of the working class to resist that exploitation

Crucially: it is not a one-way affair

The capitalist class wages its struggle with "extraordinary ferocity" well before the working class begins to organize, mobilize, or reply

The class struggle of capitalists never ceases — it is part of the very system of the capitalist mode of production

The bourgeoisie cannot maintain exploitation without conducting a permanent class struggle against the working class

Conducted in production: reduction of wages, repression, sanctions, anti-union activities

Conducted outside production: via the state, repressive state apparatuses, ideological state apparatuses (political system, schools, churches, news media)

🌍 The "Humanist" Illusion Must Be Abandoned

The "humanist" illusion — a product of petty bourgeois ideology — imagines that:

Capitalist society existed somehow before class struggle

The class struggle began when the proletariat revolted against injustice

Reality: the class struggle is consubstantial with capitalist society — it began with it

It was the bourgeoisie who conducted the class struggle first, with "unequalled ferocity", against the then-unarmed proletariat

The proletariat initially only resisted bourgeois attacks before organizing, developing class consciousness, and passing to the counter-offensive

Mao Zedong's dictum, cited by Althusser: "Never forget the class struggle"

🤝 Why the Workers' Movement Recognized Itself in Capital

The "fusion" of Marxist theory and the workers' movement is no historical accident

Both share a common point of origin: the class struggle

The class struggle was the heart of the daily practice of the workers' movement

The class struggle is at the heart of Capital and Marxist theory

Marx returned to the workers' movement, in the form of scientific theory, what he received from them in political experience

Paris, January 1971 — Althusser's preface written

📚 INTRODUCTION: THEORY IS NOT THE ENEMY OF REVOLUTION — IT IS ITS PRECONDITION

🔥 Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach — What It Actually Means

"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point, however, is to change it." — Marx, 11th Thesis on Feuerbach

Many young Latin Americans of the era, exhausted by revolutionary rhetoric that produced no actual transformation of the conditions of misery and exploitation of the great masses of Latin American workers, interpreted this as:

Theory → Action: abandon the library, commit exclusively to revolutionary political action

But Marx himself spent the vast majority of his life in intellectual work — to the very end — while not abandoning immediate political work

Conclusion: the 11th Thesis does not announce the death of theory

It announces a break with all philosophical theories of man, society, and history that were limited to contemplating and interpreting the world — incapable of transforming it because they did not understand the functioning mechanisms of societies

🔬 What Existed Before Marx: The Bleak Pre-Scientific Landscape

Before Marx, regarding society and history, there were only:

Philosophical theories about history (philosophies of history) — useless for transformation

Historical narrations and sociological analyses — limited to describing events

What did not exist: scientific knowledge of societies and their history

The 11th Thesis announces the beginning of a new scientific theory: historical materialism

Founded a new scientific field: the science of history

In the same way that Galileo's scientific theory founded the science of physics

🌐 The Great Continents of Scientific Knowledge — Marx Opens a New One

Using Louis Althusser's metaphor of scientific "continents":

Continent of Mathematics: opened by the Greeks (Thales, or whoever the myth designates)

Continent of Physics: opened by Galileo and his successors

Chemistry (Lavoisier) = regional science of the Physics continent

Biology (via molecular chemistry) = also inscribed in the Physics continent

Modern logic = inscribed in the Mathematics continent

Sigmund Freud very possibly discovered a new scientific continent

Marx: opened the Continent of History to scientific knowledge

This new science is "materialist" — like all sciences — hence: historical materialism

The word "materialism" establishes a line of demarcation between previous idealist conceptions and the new materialist (scientific) conception of history

⚗️ Historical Materialism AND Dialectical Materialism — Not Reducible to One

Marxist theory is composed of:

A scientific theory: historical materialism

A philosophy: dialectical materialism

Althusser demonstrates: great scientific revolutions always follow great philosophical revolutions

From Greek mathematics → Plato's philosophy

From Galilean physics → Cartesian philosophy

From Newtonian physics → Kantian philosophy

From mathematical logic → Husserl's philosophy

From Marx's science → dialectical materialism (a new philosophy)

The "thirty-year desert" between the Theses on Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring demonstrates the necessary lag of philosophy with respect to science

Lenin correctly argued: look for dialectical materialism within Capital itself

📊 The Current State of Historical Materialism's Development — Uneven but Indispensable

The body of concepts was never developed systematically by Marx and Engels — but was employed with great success in analyzing capitalist production

Infrastructure concepts: better elaborated (most frequently used by Marx in Capital)

Superstructure concepts: largely remain as "practical concepts" indicating general lines of investigation

🗂️ What Actually Exists in the Theory

✅ A scientific theory of the economic aspect of the pre-monopoly stage of the capitalist mode of production

✅ Some elements to understand monopoly capitalism

❌ Absent: a developed scientific theory of the ideological and juridico-political structures of capitalism

❌ Absent: a scientific study of other modes of production (slave, feudal, etc.)

⚠️ Some elements of a general theory of transition from one mode of production to another (especially capitalist → socialist)

⚠️ First elements of a scientific theory of social classes, especially under capitalism

⚠️ Some elements for political conjuncture analysis (Lenin's theory of the weakest link; Mao's system of contradictions)

🎓 The Three Aspects of Revolutionary Formation — Because Reading Marx Alone Is Not Enough

🧠 First Aspect: Study of Marxist Theory

History proves: the union of Marxist theory and the workers' movement gives people the possibility of transforming the world

But Marxist theory alone is not sufficient — it's like, as Mao said, "contemplating an arrow without ever launching it"

🗺️ Second Aspect: Creative Application to Concrete National Reality

Revolutions in general do not exist — only particular revolutions adapted to each country's situation

Must study: economic structure, form of combination of relations of production, dominant relation, ideological structure, structure of power

Combat dogmatic study — study not to accumulate knowledge but to serve the practical necessities of revolution

⏱️ Third Aspect: Study of the Political Conjuncture

Not enough to know a country's history and present development

Must pass to the "present moment" of the class struggle — nationally and globally

Must determine: who are the friends and enemies of the revolution at each stage

Must assess: economic, political, military, and cultural power of each confronting group

✉️ Marx's Letter to Lachatre, March 18, 1872 — The Road to Science Has No Shortcuts

Marx's own warning: "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits"

This book's objective: present the principal concepts of the general theory of historical materialism in a pedagogical yet rigorous form

Method drawn primarily from the works of Louis Althusser and collaborators, especially Reading Capital (Pantheon, 1970)

Warning: Lenin condemned politicians who limit themselves to "quoting from books" and become confused when new situations arise — "he grabs the wrong quotation from the box" (Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 364)

⚙️ CHAPTER 1: PRODUCTION — WHERE Everything Begins

🧱 Why Production Is the Foundation

Not an arbitrary starting point — production is the base on which the theoretical edifice of historical materialism is built

Engels, Anti-Dühring: the production of the means to support human life, and the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure

Distribution of wealth and division of society into classes depends on: what is produced, how it is produced, how products are exchanged

Final causes of all social changes and political revolutions: NOT in men's brains, NOT in better insights into eternal truth and justice — but in changes in the modes of production and exchange

🔄 The Labour Process — The Core Definition

The Labour Process: any process of transformation of a definite object (natural or already worked upon) into a definite product, effected by a definite human activity, using definite instruments of labour

Structure: Object → Transformation → Product via Human Activity + Instrument

The moment of transformation is the determinant, most important moment

Studied by Marx in Volume I of Capital

🔩 The Three Elements of the Labour Process

🌲 a) The Object of Labour

Raw Material: substance coming directly from nature, untouched by labour

Examples: trees in forest, minerals in mines

Primary Material: substance that has undergone some modification as a result of labour

Examples: cut wood, refined ores

Auxiliary Primary Materials — can be:

Absorbed by instruments of labour themselves (coal/electricity for machinery, oil for wheels)

Incorporated in the principal primary material to produce material transformation (dye in leather/wool, chlorine to bleach fabrics)

Used simply in execution of labour (materials to illuminate or heat workspaces)

In true chemical industries: distinction between principal and auxiliary primary materials blurs — in the final product, none of the primary materials employed appears

🔨 b) The Means of Labour

Means of Labour in the Strict Sense: things which the labourer interposes directly between himself and the object of labour

Examples: hammer and saw in furniture factory, sewing machine for tailor, mechanized shovel in mining

Means of Labour in the Broad Sense: all material conditions which, without intervening directly, are indispensable for the process

Examples: land, factories, roads, canals, irrigation projects

Means of Production = objects of labour + means of labour in the broadest sense

⚠️ Warning: many Marxist texts misuse "means of production" to designate only what Marx defined as "means of labour" — this creates misunderstandings

💪 c) Human Activity — Labour Power

The human activity developed in material goods production is called labour

Labour Power: the human energy expended in the process of labour

Fatigue after a day's work = physical expression of this energy expenditure

Good food and rest permit this energy to be renewed

Critical distinction: labour ≠ labour power

Labour = the realised expenditure of energy (the actual work done)

Labour power = the capacity for labour (the energy itself)

Classical economists confused these two — which is precisely why they could not discover the origin of capitalist exploitation

They said wages were the price of labour realised

But when calculating wages, they calculated the price of objects needed to restore labour power — food, shelter, cultural objects (radio, movies, sports)

📦 d) The Product

Product: the final object created in the labour process

The product has use value: any object corresponding to a definite human necessity (physiological or social)

⚠️ Not everything with use value is a product — air has use value but is not a product (no previous transformation)

When a product is made for exchange rather than direct consumption → it is a commodity

🏗️ The Role of Means of Labour in the Labour Process

The most significant elements in the labour process: means of labour in the strict sense

They determine the type of activity individuals must carry on → determine the type of relationship between labourer and means of production

Example: Introduction of the tractor in agriculture → replaces 20 labourers with shovels/hoes → single person drives tractor → labour ceases being fundamentally manual

Marx: "It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs" — Capital, Vol. I, p. 180

In countries with low technological level: labour power occupies the dominant place (primitive and slave societies, "underdeveloped" societies)

In advanced capitalism: highly developed machinery dominates the entire process, converting the labourer into an automaton of production

🏭 Labour Process vs. Production Process — A Crucial Distinction

The labour process studied in isolation ignores concrete historical conditions

Marxism holds: human beings establish definite relationships among themselves in the labour process — mutual aid and collaboration, exploitation, or transitions between both

Marx's term: relations of production — every labour process goes on under definite relations of production

A great difference exists between labour conducted under the whip of the overseer of slaves and labour under the watchful eyes of the capitalist

Production Process = the labour process which goes on under definite relations of production

Therefore: "production in general" does not exist — production is always historically determined

Marx: "When we speak of production, we always have in mind production at a definite stage of social development" — "Introduction," A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

🔀 Division of Labour — Three Distinct Types

🏢 Division of Social Production

Division of social production into different wings, spheres, or sectors

Examples: agricultural vs. industrial labour; divisions within industry (metallurgy, chemical, textile); industrial vs. commercial labour

⚙️ Technical Division of Labour

Division of labour within a process of production itself

Especially developed in modern industry

Each worker or group does a specific job corresponding to one part of the process (automobile industry: different sections until finished car is produced)

What each specialized worker produces = only a part of the final product → finished product = common product of all

✅ Positive effect: increased efficiency → more products produced with same effort in same time

Chemical activity example: began as technical division within textile production → later became autonomous industry (division of social production) when its products went to market

🏛️ Social Division of Labour

Distribution of different tasks individuals perform in society (economic, political, ideological) as a function of the place they occupy in the social structure

Began historically with division between manual and intellectual labour — only individuals from dominant classes had access to the latter

In capitalist production: distribution of individuals into different tasks depends not on purely technical criteria (aptitude, preparation) but on social criteria

Certain social classes have access to certain tasks; others do not

Social relations of production determine the social division of labour

⚖️ CHAPTER 2: PRODUCTION RELATIONS — HOW Exploitation Actually Works

👥 Agents of Production — Defined

Agents of Production: all individuals who participate in any way in the process of production of material goods

Can be classified from two points of view:

Technical point of view: direct labourers and indirect labourers

Social point of view: workers (non-owners of means of production) and owners of means of production

Each agent of production is doubly determined — by technical function AND social function

The social (class) function has the dominant role

🔧 Technical Relations of Production

🤝 Individual vs. Cooperative Labour

Individual Labour Process: single labourer working in isolation (artisan, small peasant producer)

Fundamental characteristic: unity of labourer and means of labour — the artisan controls the entire labour process

Cooperative Labour Process: multiple labourers

Simple cooperation: all labourers realise the same or similar tasks (primitive hunting, technically undeveloped agriculture)

Complex cooperation: established on the basis of a technical division of labour (furrow-making, seed-planting, etc.)

🎻 The Directing Function — Born from Cooperative Labour

All cooperative labour on a sufficiently wide scale requires a directing force to harmonise different individual activities

Marx: "In all forms of labour in which many individuals cooperate, the cohesion and unity of the process is personified necessarily in a volition to command" — like an orchestra director

Direct Labourers: agents in direct contact with primary materials

Indirect Labourers: those with functions of organisation, vigilance, control at distinct levels of the labour process

Any process based on large-scale cooperation → individual labourers lose control of the labour process → separation between individual labourer and the totality of the labour process

🤖 From Manufacturing to Large-Scale Industry: The Labourer Becomes a Slave

In large-scale industry: labourer loses control not only over the labour process but also over the means of labour

New unity constituted: means of labour + object of labour (machine transforms primary materials)

The labourer becomes the slave of the machine — "a material skeleton independent of the workers"

Total separation produced between individual labourer and means of production

Collective labourer becomes a socialised labourer

Technical Relations of Production: the forms of control or domination which agents of production exercise over the means of labour in particular and the labour process in general

Note: This relation was not made explicit by Marx, Engels, Lenin — but attentive study of Capital and Precapitalist Economic Formations reveals Marx's preoccupation with it

Étienne Balibar (in Reading Capital) named these "relations of real appropriation," opposing them to relations of ownership

💰 Social Relations of Production — Where Exploitation Lives

📜 Ownership and Its Varieties

Right of Ownership: the right to use, enjoy, and dispose of goods

Right to use = make use of goods in accord with their natural characteristics (cultivate land, drive vehicle)

Right to enjoy = enjoyment of fruits these goods produce

Right to use and enjoy = usufruct in law

Right to dispose = assign goods to definite ends or delegate this right

Content of ownership rights varies across historical epochs — feudal private property ≠ capitalist private property

Feudal system: distinct grades — eminent but not effective ownership by most powerful lords over immense terrain; direct but not absolute ownership by small/middle lords

Real Ownership of means of production: when the right of ownership is transformed into real power to use, enjoy, and dispose of the means of production AND the products thereof

Effective Possession: the capacity of owners of means of production to put them into motion

Real ownership exists when: effective possession + power of disposition are united in the same hands

Joint stock companies: many owners in the juridical sense, but only a very small group have real ownership

🔑 The Central Definition of Social Relations of Production

Social Relations of Production: relationships established between owners of the means of production and direct producers in a definite production process, depending on the type of ownership relation, possession, dispossession, or usufruct they establish with the means of production

⚡ Two Fundamental Types

a) Exploiter-Exploited Relations — when owners of means of production live off labour of direct producers

Slavery: master owns means of production AND owns labour power (the slave)

Servitude: master owns land; servant depends on master and must work gratuitously for a certain number of days per year

Capitalist relations: capitalist owns means of production; worker must sell labour power in order to live

b) Relations of Reciprocal Collaboration — when social ownership of means of production exists; no sector lives off exploitation of another

Examples: primitive community relations; communist mode of production as conceived by Marx

🏭 Manufacturing vs. Large-Scale Industry — Technical AND Social Relations in Unity

🧵 Manufacturing

Born when a capitalist (owner of means of production) brought together a relatively large number of workers to labour simultaneously in the same place under the same command

Required two conditions:

A certain accumulated quantity of money (capital) in the hands of a sector of the population

A free labourer dispossessed of all means of production, compelled to sell labour power to survive

Began as simple cooperation → evolved (driven by desire to augment profits) into complex cooperation → technical division of labour within manufacturing

Technical character of manufacturing labour:

Primarily manual labour — depends greatly on force, ability, safety, speed of the worker managing tools

Detail labour — each worker specialised in a very specific task; only the sum of all labours constitutes the total object

Negative effect: labourer reduced to one set of motions; body deformed to better respond to highly specialised manual activity

The directing/supervisory function, born as a technical task, is overdetermined by social function: the capitalist's need to extract maximum surplus value

Marx on capitalist despotism in Capital, Vol. I, pp. 331-32: "he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an attribute of capital, just as in feudal times the functions of general and judge were attributes of landed property"

In manufacturing: capitalist has full social control but not yet full real ownership — worker still controls the management of the means of labour; capitalist sometimes must yield to skilled workers' pressure

🤖 Large-Scale Industry

Introduced: machine-tools — integrated apparatuses and tools with which the manual worker laboured in manufacturing into a technical unity

Marx: machine-tool = "a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations that were formerly done by the workman" — Capital, Vol. I, p. 373

Machine-tool overcame the organic barrier between labourer and means of labour in manufacturing

Complete separation established between labourer and means of labour

New unity: means of labour + object of labour

Production process no longer definable as a coming-together of workers but as a conjunction of machines ready to receive whatever worker comes along

Formal subjugation of labour (manufacturing stage) → Real subjugation (machine-tool introduction)

Collective labour becomes a technical necessity → converted into "socialised labour"

Increasingly difficult to distinguish the role of each individual labourer in the final product

The socialised character of the labour process structure contradicts the private character of real ownership of means of production

Taylor system etc.: increased intensity → replaced manual labour with machine labour → technical relations of large-scale industry originated in and were overdetermined by capitalist social relations of production

Therefore: independent technical relations do not exist — only a definite form of their subordination to social relations of production

🔁 Reproduction of Production Relations

Any production process produces not only material products but also reproduces its social conditions of production

Capitalist production simultaneously produces commodities AND reproduces capitalist relations: capital and wage labour

Reproduction requires superstructural factors: juridical forms of private ownership, labour contract, presence of armed forces ready to defend the capitalist system

Superstructural factors even more necessary where there is non-correspondence between juridical ownership and effective possession

🚫 Social Relations of Production Are NOT Simply "Human Relations"

They cannot be considered solely relations between human beings

They are relations between agents of production — human beings who have a definite function in production, depending on their relation to the means of production

This destroys all utopian ideas about "collaboration between workers and bosses"

These relations are established independently of human will

The capitalist will exploit the worker even if he does not consciously propose to do so — the objective laws of the capitalist system are inflexible: either exploitation of workers or death of the industrialist

When Marxism says "destroy capitalist relations of production," it means: destroy the FUNCTION of the capitalist — the function of exploitation — not physically destroy capitalists

⚡ CHAPTER 3: PRODUCTIVE FORCES — The Material Engine of History

💡 Defining Productive Forces

Marx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production"

Productive forces = elements of the labour process considered from the point of view of their productive potential — especially labor power and means of labour

BUT: cannot examine these elements in isolation — productive forces only make sense as a historically determined combination

The decisive factor: labour power of man — the only one who can put means of production into action

Without human labour, means of production have only a potentially productive character

🔢 Two Types

Potential Productive Forces: elements of the labour process seen as isolated from one another, from the point of view of their productive potential

Productive Forces as Such: forces that result from the combination of elements of the labour process under specific relations of production — measurable by level of productivity of labour (number of products producible in a determined time)

📈 The Socialisation of Productive Forces

Productive forces are (with rare exceptions) constantly developing

This process transforms individual production into increasingly social production

Artisan production (individual) → surpassed by industrial production (social character)

Means of production can only be set in motion by a group of workers

The socialisation of productive forces overflows the boundary of the factory

🔗 Two Dimensions of Socialisation (based on Charles Bettelheim, Études de Planification Socialiste)

a) Ever More Social Origin of Means of Production

Means of production come from an ever greater number of branches of economic production

Primitive agriculture was self-sufficient → progressively requires means of production of increasingly diverse origins (complex tools, disinfectants, electrical energy, equipment)

This process = counterpart of greater division of labour and growing specialisation

b) Ever More Social Destination of the Product

Products increasingly destined (directly or indirectly) for a growing number of users

Each branch of production works directly or indirectly for a growing number of other branches

Chemical industry example: when first appearing, worked for a small number of industries → now applications are almost infinite (agriculture, extractive industries, metallurgy)

Scale of systems served passes successively: local → micro-regional → regional → national → international

💥 Socialisation vs. Private Appropriation — The Core Contradiction

The ever more social character of productive forces comes into increasingly acute contradiction with the private nature of capitalist appropriation of means of production

This contradiction did not give rise to capitalism — a contradictory unity existed from the beginning of capitalism between private character of ownership and social character of labour power

As productive forces develop → the machine continues to socialise the collective worker within the factory AND continues to intertwine different sectors of production

The contradiction transforms from the motor force of development into the brake

This contradiction takes on antagonistic character → prepares material conditions for the destruction of capitalist relations of production

⚖️ Correspondence and Non-Correspondence of Productive Forces and Relations of Production

Productive forces and relations of production develop unevenly

General tendency: development of productive forces is constant (with periods of stagnation)

Relations of production do not change every day → tend to be left behind → non-correspondence emerges

When relations of production begin to block development of productive forces: Law of Non-Correspondence

Example: monopoly-capitalist system — productive forces reach high level of socialisation contradicting private character of property relations

When social relations of production correspond to the level of development of productive forces → development is stimulated → Law of Correspondence

Marx, Preface to the Critique: "relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production"

⚠️ Two Important Errors to Avoid

Mechanistic determinism: belief that socialisation of productive forces will inevitably and spontaneously bring socialist relations of production — nothing more to do but wait

Underestimation of minimal limits: cannot impose socialist relations by sheer political decision — obliging peasants tied to their land and individual cultivation to work collectively without the necessary material base = idealistic measure

Counter-example: China and Vietnam — learned to conduct changes in the countryside all the way to socialist relations of production without forcing peasants to accept governmental decisions

🔬 Science and the Development of Productive Forces

Kautsky (Second International): sought the final determinant cause of productive force development in the progress of knowledge/science — wrong

Scientific knowledge plays an important role but is not the fundamental determinant

Engels to Starkenburg, January 25, 1884: "science depends far more still on the state and requirements of technique... If society has a technical need, that helps science forward more than ten universities"

Examples:

Hydrostatics (Torricelli etc.) called forth by necessity to regulate mountain streams in 16th-17th century Italy

Electricity: known only reasonably once its technical applicability was discovered

Steam energy: property as energy source discovered in ancient Greece — but slavery made its use unnecessary (abundant manual labour available)

Atomic energy: capitalist monopolies put up great resistance to its peaceful development — monopolized patents, prevented competitors from access

Conclusion: scientific discoveries only create the possibility for productive force development — but depend on social relations of production for their realisation and application

🏗️ CHAPTER 4: THE ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY

📊 Critiquing the Bourgeois Definition of Political Economy

Lalande dictionary: political economy = a science whose object is the phenomena of distribution of wealth as well as those of production and consumption

This definition gives preponderance to distribution over other aspects of the economic cycle

Marx demolishes this hierarchy

💵 Relations of Production Determine Relations of Distribution

Distribution = how the total social product is divided among different members of society

Example: capitalist society produces total social product equivalent to $100 million/year

Capitalists: $30 million

Landlords: $20 million

Workers and Employees: $50 million

Capitalists and landlords (a small group) receive half the total social product

Why? Not because capitalists/landlords are more intelligent or harder working

Marx's great merit: demonstrated that unequal distribution depends not on human capability endowment but on ownership or lack of ownership of means of production

Workers' struggle for better wages = struggle for better distribution — but while means of production remain in private hands, the owning group will only make small concessions to calm protests

Marx, Capital Vol. III, p. 882: "The specific distribution relations are thus merely the expression of the specific historical production relations"

🛍️ Relations of Production Determine Relations of Consumption

Two types of consumption:

Individual Consumption: direct consumption of use value by individuals (food, clothing, automobiles)

Productive Consumption: use values consumed not directly but as means of production in new production processes (tractors consumed in agricultural production)

Production determines consumption by:

Supplying the object of consumption (cannot consume a car not yet produced)

Determining the form of consumption (consuming a car implies knowing how to drive it)

Continuously creating new consumption needs (advertising, fashion changes — the most notorious example)

But relationship is NOT unilateral: consumption also has a role — if objects produced are not consumed, production paralysis results

🔄 Relations of Production Determine Relations of Exchange

Necessity for exchange arises from division of labour

Exchange of products = intermediate between production and distribution

Intensity, extent, and form of exchange determined through relations of production

Limited exchange → limited production

Private exchange → private production

🎯 The Relations of Production as the Determinant Element

Marx, Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy: "A distinct mode of production thus determines the specific mode of consumption, distribution, exchange and the specific relations of these different phases to one another"

Capital Vol. III: "the aggregate of these relations, in which the agents of this production stand with respect to nature and to one another ... it is precisely society, considered from the standpoint of its economic structure"

Total of these relations of production = economic structure of society

🏛️ The Marxist Concept of Structure — Not Just Any "Whole"

📦 Totality vs. Structure

Totality: a "whole" formed by juxtaposed elements with no specific form — like a bag of sugar (crystals have no specific organisation)

Structure: a "whole" in which elements are distributed according to the organisation of the entirety — it is this organisation that determines the function each element fulfils

Marx: "whether a use-value is to be regarded as raw material, as instrument of labour, or as product, this is determined entirely by its function in the labour process" — Capital Vol. I, p. 178

🔑 What Is Fundamental in the Marxist Concept of Structure

The kind of relation established among the different elements of the whole

Not the relation of one isolated element to the whole — but the different relations among elements that determine the type of organisation

These relations have a relatively stable character — elements may change; if relations are maintained, one speaks of the same structure

Example: manufacture's structure characterised by capitalist social relations + technical relations in which collective worker was formed through detail workers — while these relations existed, it was manufacture regardless of changes in tools or number of specialised workers

Structure only changes when relations among elements change (introduction of machine-tool → breaks unity of worker and means of labour → new unity of means of labour and object of labour)

These relations are NOT visible at first sight — only brought to light through serious scientific labour

Marx studied manufacture as process — not just structural analysis but dynamic analysis of internal contradictions and conditions for its disappearance

📐 Final Definitions

Structure: an articulated totality composed of a conjunction of internal and stable relations which determine the function elements perform within the totality

Economic Structure = the conjunction of relations of production

Economic System = the complete economic process (production, distribution, exchange, and consumption)

🏗️🏛️ CHAPTER 5: BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE — The Building Metaphor That Actually Works

🏚️ Infrastructure and Superstructure — The Basic Architecture

Infrastructure/Base = the economic structure of society

Superstructure = juridico-political institutions (State, law) + "forms of social consciousness"

Engels, Anti-Dühring: "the economic structure of society always forms the real basis from which, in the last analysis, is to be explained the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions, as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other conceptions of each historical period"

Marx, Capital Vol. III: the direct relationship of owners of conditions of production to direct producers "reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure"

One of Marx and Engels' great contributions: to understand society, do NOT start with what human beings say, imagine, or think — start with how they produce the material goods they need

Superstructure designates two levels:

Juridico-political structure: the state and the law

Ideological structure: the "forms of social consciousness"

❓ Superstructure: A Problematical Notion — Marxism's Honest Admission

Used the term "notion" rather than "concept" deliberately — it has NOT been studied in a finished form

Stalin (in "Concerning Marxism in Linguistics"): language belongs neither to superstructure nor to base — nor to any "intermediate" phenomena between them (which do not exist)

Althusser (criticising Gramsci): science cannot be ranked under the category of superstructure

Problem: if superstructure does not account for all extra-economic phenomena, what concept does? — Marxism must still resolve this

🔗 Relations Between Infrastructure and Superstructure — Reject Vulgar Determinism

Must look to infrastructure for the "guideline" to explain superstructural social phenomena

BUT: this does NOT imply everything is a reduction to or simple reflection of economics

Why did Marx and Engels use excessive emphasis on the economic?

Writing against a powerful idealist current attributing all social phenomena to will and thought of man

French and English materialists of the 17th-18th centuries + Ludwig Feuerbach — maintained idealist principles when explaining social history

Idealist theologians, philosophers, bourgeois sociologists, historians — all saw in consciousness, reason, political/moral/religious ideas the fundamental motor force of social development

Marx to Annenkov, December 28, 1846: criticising Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty — "Nothing is easier than to invent mystical causes, that is to say, phrases which lack common sense"

🚫 The Vulgar Marxist Error

"Vulgar Marxists" (Lenin's term): strain to deduce directly from economy ALL phenomena at the juridico-political and ideological level

Example of absurdity: trying to deduce concepts of matter and spirit from relations of production — concept of matter = proletariat (material labour); concept of spirit = capitalists (organisational work)

Lenin rejected such oversimplification: these concepts were produced more than 2,000 years ago by philosophers of entirely different classes

Menshevik error (pre-October Revolution): learned that democratic revolution has a bourgeois base → concluded it was necessary to reduce democratic tasks of the proletariat to bourgeois moderation

Couldn't grasp the fundamental role of the political aspect in the transition stage

Reduced society to its economic structure → lost sight of other levels → lost sight of necessity to organise a vanguard party

✅ The Correct Position

Engels to Starkenburg: there is no "automatic effect" of the economic situation

Marx and Engels accentuated the economic side because of the nature of their adversaries — had to "emphasise the main principle" denied by opponents

Economic conditions are "finally determinant" conditions — but other instances of society also play a role

Engels: "Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis ... which ultimately always asserts itself"

Elements of superstructure linked (directly or indirectly) to infrastructure changes, but have relative autonomy and are guided by specific laws

Engels: philosophy in an economically backward country can still play first fiddle — the poverty or wealth of philosophical tradition depends on inherited philosophical material

If economic level mechanically determined everything → Marx and Engels would fall into absurd contradiction: calling for class struggle and revolution when everything would be predetermined by the economy

Engels to Franz Mehring: "The basis of this is the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction... once an historical element has been brought into the work by other, ultimately economic causes, it reacts, can react on its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it"

🧠 CHAPTER 6: THE IDEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE — The Invisible Cement That Holds Everything Together

📍 The Place of Ideology in the Social Structure

In all societies: three levels — economic, juridico-political, ideological — articulated in complex relationships, with economic level determinant in the last instance

Ideology belongs to the superstructure — BUT is not limited to it

Ideology = "the cement that holds the building together"

Ideology penetrates into ALL human activities — economic practice, political practice, attitudes toward production, political judgements, cynicism/honesty/resignation/rebellion, family behaviour, relations with other persons and with nature

Ideology is present to such a degree in all acts and gestures that it becomes indiscernible from the way we experience life

When we think we have a "clear and unobstructed perception of reality" — what we actually have is a perception "impure," influenced by the invisible structures of ideology

📋 The Content of the Ideological Level

Formed by two kinds of systems:

💭 System of Ideas and Social Representations (Ideology in the Strict Sense)

Political, juridical, moral, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas in a given society

Given in the form of different views of the world and of man's role in it

NOT objective, scientific representations — but representations filled with imaginary elements

Rather than describing reality, they express desires, hopes, nostalgia

Can contain elements of knowledge — but what predominates are elements that function to adapt to reality

Example: religious ideology treating suffering and death gives exploited people ideas that permit them to better endure their conditions of existence

🎭 System of Attitudes and Social Behaviours (Customs)

All habits, customs, tendencies necessary to act in a certain way

Harder to change than ideology in the strict sense — easier to change one's view of the world than customary ways of living

Therefore ideology in the strict sense and the system of attitudes/behaviours are not always identical — relations range from correlation to contradiction

Example: bureaucratic or technocratic behaviour of some Marxist leaders reveals penetration of bourgeois ideology into the ranks of the working class

⚔️ Ideology and Social Classes

In class society: ideology's function of reinforcing human relations is dominated by the division into classes

Ideology is supposed to assure that people remain in the general structure of class exploitation

Supposed to assure domination of one class over the rest — making exploited accept their condition as based on "will of God," "nature," or "moral duty"

But ideology is NOT simply a "pious lie" invented by exploiters to trick the exploited

Ideology also serves as a bond of social cohesion for the exploiting class itself — permits them to practice exploitation "in a natural way"

The "pious lie" has a double purpose:

Exercised over consciousness of exploited → make them accept their exploitation as natural

Exercised over members of dominant class → permit them to practice exploitation and domination naturally

🧩 Ideology and Structure

Ideology is only intelligible through its structure

Ideological elements (representations, images, signs) mean nothing in isolation — it is the system of ideology, its mode of combining elements that gives them meaning

Ideology is greater than the sum of all the ways in which it is lived by individuals → therefore can be the object of objective study

🗺️ Ideological Regions

Despite being diffused throughout the entire social body, ideology can be divided into particular regions centred around different themes

Relatively autonomous regions: moral, religious, juridical, political, aesthetic, philosophical ideology

Not all these regions have always existed historically; some may disappear or merge in the course of socialism and communism

Different classes correspond to different dominant regions:

Peasant rebellions from 14th to 18th centuries: religious ideology dominates

Oppressed races (e.g., African Americans in the US): religious ideology seems to dominate

🎓 Practical vs. Theoretical Ideologies

Practical Ideology: more or less diffuse, unreflective form — customs, tendencies, preferences

Theoretical Ideology: more or less conscious, systematised, reflective form — moral "theory," political "theory"

Theology = highest level of theoretical systematisation of religious ideology

Philosophy (in the traditional sense) = the highest theoretical form of ideology

⚠️ "Theoretical ideologies" can contain scientific elements — but since these are contained within an ideological structure, they can provide only partial, distorted, or limited knowledge

🎯 Ideological Tendencies — The Dominant Ideology Is the Ideology of the Dominant Class

Marx: "the dominant ideas are the ideas of the dominant class"

In capitalist societies: petty bourgeois and proletarian ideologies are subordinated to ruling class ideology

Bourgeois ideology dominates: worker protest against exploitation is expressed within the very structure of the system and largely within the representations and frames of reference of dominant bourgeois ideology

Example: workers' struggle for greater purchasing power for consumer goods — remains within bourgeois ideological framework

The proletariat cannot by itself free itself from bourgeois ideology

To become liberated: spontaneous worker ideology must receive aid from outside — from science — and be transformed under this new element

Lenin's fundamental thesis: the necessary "fusion" of Marxist theory with the workers' movement is not arbitrary — it is based on the very nature of ideology and the absolute limits of the natural development of spontaneous working-class ideology

🔍 The Origin of the Deformed and Falsified Character of Ideology

Ideologies contain elements of knowledge of reality — but always integrated into a deformed and falsified system

Does this falsification originate in the ruling class's desire to deceive? — NO

📉 Marx's Analysis — Capital Vol. III, Chapter IX (General Rate of Profit)

Originally: rates of profit in each branch of production differ greatly

Through effect of competition: these rates tend to equalise in an average rate of profit

Prices of production = cost of production + percentage of profit based on average rate

Individual capitalist does not receive exactly the surplus value he produces — receives only a quantity proportional to capital invested

Marx, Capital Vol. III, p. 158-59: capitalists are "so many stockholders in a stock company in which the shares of profit are uniformly divided per 100"

This completely conceals from the consciousness of agents of production (capitalists AND workers) the true nature and origin of profit

Marx: "the utter incapacity of the practical capitalist, blinded by competition as he is, and incapable of penetrating its phenomena, to recognise the inner essence and inner structure" — Capital Vol. III, p. 168

🔬 The Conclusion: Falsification is Objective, Not Conspiratorial

The perception that agents of production have of the production process — even those in the ruling class — is a deformed and falsified perception

This deformation does NOT come from the will of the ruling class to deceive

It comes from the objective character of the economic system (the difference between surplus value and profit)

The distortion of reality in ideological knowledge is owed fundamentally to the necessary opaqueness of social realities — which are complex structures that can only be known through scientific analysis

Real life presents: people determined by objective structures (relations of production, political class relations) → their practical life makes them perceive some objective effects of these structures but conceals their essence

Arriving at true knowledge of these structures requires scientific activity — not simple perception from everyday life

Even in classless societies, ideology will continue to exist — its particular forms vary tremendously (from myths of primitive societies to modern ideological forms) but in every society ideology survives as necessarily deformed and falsified knowledge

In class societies: this first deformation is combined with a supplementary deformation dominated by class division — and this supplementary deformation dominates the former

📡 Ideological Structure and Economic Determination — No Mechanical Reduction

The economy determines human ideas — but this does NOT imply reducing ideology to a simple reflection of economics

Ideological level has its own content and own laws of operation and development

The dominant ideological region (religious, moral, philosophical) is not directly determined by economy but by characteristics belonging to the ideological structure itself

The ruling class always knows to utilise the language that permits the greatest communication with the dominated class

Engels to Conrad Schmidt, October 27, 1890: each new historical period finds itself faced with ideological material inherited from the previous period — economics acts on THIS inherited material

Not only inherited ideological material but also "instrumentation" (libraries, archives, research projects, educational structure) — the poverty or richness of a country's philosophy depends on the poverty or richness of philosophical material and instrumentation inherited from the earlier period

Economic determinism acts on the ideological structure in its entirety — produces a result of two kinds of determinations: one internal to the ideological structure; one external (juridico-political and economic)

Therefore: no direct, mechanical determination by the economy — a complex, structural determination

🛑 Responding to Critics of Marxism

Critics: "the working class — instead of growing and maturing in class consciousness — becomes more bourgeois, adapting to the system"

If Marxism maintained class consciousness = simple reflection of economic conditions → one could assert Marx was wrong

But Marxism maintains something quite different:

Economic conditions create the objective material conditions (concentrations of workers in urban centres; technical division of labour creating habits of cooperation and discipline; mobility of labour between areas etc.)

These serve as a base for reaching proletarian class consciousness

But these conditions do NOT directly provoke or create class consciousness

Requires intervention of extra-economic factors: Marxist-Leninist theory in the hands of the proletariat

⚖️ CHAPTER 7: THE JURIDICO-POLITICAL STRUCTURE — The State Is Not Your Friend

🏛️ The Juridico-Political Structure Defined

Every society possesses institutional apparatuses and norms to regulate the operation of society as a whole

These constitute the juridico-political structure — part of the superstructure

Forms, importance, and normative principles vary with the economic structure on which they are based

In class societies: the juridico-political level is secured by an autonomous apparatus — the State

Monopolizes "legitimate violence"

Major function: maintain under the domination of the ruling class all other dependent classes

Fundamental thesis of Marxism: the State is an instrument of oppression of ruling classes over oppressed classes

🎭 The Double Function of the State

🔧 Technical-Administrative Function

As the social division of labour increases, need grows for a body of individuals capable of organising and administering society as a whole

Characteristic of every society with a minimal division of labour

⚔️ Function of Political Domination

Appears only when division of society into opposing classes arises — when productivity of social labour produces a surplus monopolized by a group

Lenin, "State and Revolution," Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 387: "The state arises where, when, and insofar as class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled"

Engels: the state — originally serving common interests (irrigation in the East, protection against external enemies) — acquires the function of maintaining by force the economic and political position of the ruling class against the subject class

Overdetermination: the political domination function overdetermines the technical-administrative function, orienting it, putting it at the service of domination

Therefore: there are no neutral technical-administrative state tasks

Engels: "the exercise of a social function was everywhere the basis of political supremacy; and further, that political supremacy has existed for any length of time only when it fulfilled its social functions" — Anti-Dühring, pp. 198-99

⚠️ Why Insisting on Both Functions Matters

Marx, Engels, Lenin fundamentally emphasised the function of political domination — rarely referring to the technical-administrative function

This was due to requirements of ideological struggle against the bourgeois thesis of a state above classes (state reduced entirely to its technical function)

Ignoring the technical function has led to "voluntarist" errors: conceiving the state as a product linked exclusively to the will of ruling classes to dominate

Reality: ruling classes do NOT create the state to serve their class interests — they utilise an already existing juridico-political apparatus, modifying it to reach their class objectives

💀 The Withering Away of the State — Not the Anarchist Fantasy

When the proletariat seizes state power → the state cannot disappear the following day

Must destroy the old apparatus and construct a new one with proletarian character (class struggle continues; a repressive apparatus against classes opposed to socialism is needed)

Anarchist thesis: immediately dissolve the whole "bureaucratic" apparatus — wrong

Marxist thesis: the proletarian state will tend to wither away as it advances toward communism

As class differences are suppressed → the function of political domination tends to disappear → only technical-administrative functions survive

Engels: "The government of individuals is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not 'abolished', it withers away" — Anti-Dühring, pp. 306-7

Lenin: "only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed 'nobody' in the sense of a class... with the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to 'wither away'. With their withering away the state will also wither away" — "State and Revolution," Collected Works, p. 464

🔑 State Apparatus vs. Political Power — A Critical Distinction

State Apparatus: organism carrying out technical-administrative tasks and the job of political domination

Within it: fundamentally technical-administrative corps (civil servants) + fundamentally repressive (standing army, police bureaucracy)

Political Power: the capacity to utilise the state apparatus to carry out the political objectives of the ruling class

The fundamental object of the class struggle concerns political power of the State

The class obtaining power puts the state apparatus at its service

BUT: Marx (based on experience of the Paris Commune): "the working class cannot simply take possession of the existing state machinery and put it to work for its own ends"

Working class must "smash," "destroy" the military-bureaucratic apparatus of the bourgeois state and replace it with a proletarian apparatus

🏛️ Lessons of the Paris Commune

Substitution of bourgeois centralist form (state above the nation) with a centralist form of a new type with real and conscious democratic participation — based on the whole commune

Substitution of the standing army by the armed people

Transformation of the police into an instrument at the service of the commune

Representatives elected by universal suffrage and re-callable at any time

Suppression of privileges linked to public office (a salary equal to that of a worker)

Destruction of bourgeois parliamentarianism → transforming representative institutions into "labour, legislative and executive corporations all at the same time"

⚠️ Lenin's 1917 Position vs. 1921 Reality

1917: Lenin believed material conditions existed to destroy the bureaucratic apparatus and realise the ideals of the Paris Commune

1921: Had to recognize they must resort to old bureaucrats — had to set aside ideas of equal salary and recall

Lenin, 1921: "We took over the old machinery of state, and that was our misfortune. Very often this machinery operates against us" — hundreds of thousands of old officials from the tsar and bourgeois society working against Soviet measures; only a few thousand party people at the top to exercise real control

🌐 Types of States and Forms of Government

Type of State: determined by the economic structure (class nature of the State)

Slave states, feudal states, capitalist states, etc.

Forms of Government: depend on concrete, historical conditions

Within the capitalist/bourgeois type of state: forms range from republican "democracy" to military dictatorship

Critical point: those operating within the narrow margins of dominant ideology in capitalist society will tend to displace the problem of the nature of the state onto that of the forms of government — thus obscuring the class nature of the state

💸 Economic Power vs. Political Power — They Don't Always Match

Classic case: France under Louis Bonaparte's dictatorship

Bourgeoisie dominated in the economic structure → had to yield its place in the political structure to conserve its dominant social position

Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon": "in order to save its purse it must forfeit the crown"

Another case: Germany in the modern epoch

Bourgeoisie so frightened by proletariat's political importance → preferred to leave Junkers (feudal landlords) in position of power to maintain economic domination

Result: feudal-absolutist political power carrying out an economic policy that serves bourgeois interests

💼 The Capitalist State — Serving Capital While Pretending to Be Neutral

In appearance: the State does not intervene in capitalist exploitation — lets it develop according to its own laws

The "peaceful" exploitation is accomplished through the peaceful act of buying and selling: the labour contract

The idea of the state being above classes finds encouragement in this structure where the state does not intervene directly in exploitation

Reality: the "invisible threads" tying the working class to capitalist private property would not hold if the state did not guarantee ownership and the freedom of capital

🎭 When the Mask Slips

In places where capitalism is little developed: the state places itself directly at the service of capital (example: Congo, British capitalism in India)

When the free act of purchase and sale is threatened by strikes, factory/land occupations → the repressive judicial apparatus and army intervene

State monopoly capitalism: nationalised sectors give the illusion of socialist embryo — actually serve to permit capital to take advantage of the social character of productive forces while remaining within the limits of the capitalist mode of production

State capitalism in its narrow sense (nationalised sector): when abstracted from its relations with the rest of capitalism, appears as socialist embryo — but actually represents the subordination of the State to the interests of capital

Unequal development is the absolute law of capitalist development — capitalism reabsorbs one inequality only to create another

Example: unused production capacity in the United States surpasses 50% — the result of monopoly strategy of over-equipping to flood markets and achieve dominance

☭ The Dictatorship of the Proletariat — The Only Honest Answer

📋 Two Weaknesses of the Proletariat in the Transition

1) Weakness at the level of the economic infrastructure: non-correspondence between new socialist relations of production and still-backward technical relations; social ownership not accompanied by real collective appropriation; former-regime technicians and administrators still directing production

2) Weakness at the level of the ideological superstructure: classes dispossessed of economic power seek refuge in the ideological front; the weight of old habits and customs of many generations cannot be changed overnight

An ideological revolution must be realised with the participation of the masses — not enough to revolutionise the ideology of some intellectuals

✊ Lenin on the Essence of Proletarian Dictatorship

"But the essence of proletarian dictatorship is not in force alone, or even mainly in force. Its chief feature is the organisation and discipline of the advanced contingent of the working people ... the proletariat ... whose object is to build socialism, abolish the division of society into classes, make all members of society working people" — "Greetings to the Hungarian Workers"

🔥 Why the Dictatorship Is Necessary

Lenin: "The dictatorship of the proletariat is the most determined and most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy ... small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale" — "'Left-wing' Communism, an Infantile Disorder"

This dictatorship against a privileged minority is a democracy for the majority of people

Bourgeois democracy: democracy for a minority, dictatorship for the majority

Proletarian democracy: democracy for the majority, dictatorship for the small group refusing to give up privileges

🎯 Lenin's Definitive Statement on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

"A Marxist is solely someone who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested." — "State and Revolution"

🌐 CHAPTER 8: MODE OF PRODUCTION, SOCIAL FORMATION, AND POLITICAL CONJUNCTURE

🔬 The Concept of Mode of Production — Not a Simple Descriptor

"Mode of production of material goods" (a descriptive notion referring only to the economic structure) ≠ "mode of production" as a theoretical concept (referring to the entire social totality)

Marx and Engels used it frequently but never defined it — most Marxist writers either use it without defining it or limit it to the economic level alone

Harnecker and Althusser: this limitation misses the implicit sense Marx gave it in Capital

🏛️ Four Constitutive Elements of Every Mode of Production

1) A global structure formed by three regional structures:

Economic structure

Juridico-political structure (laws, state)

Ideological structure (ideas, customs)

2) In this global structure, one regional structure dominates the others

⚠️ It is NOT always the economic level that plays the dominant role — despite what vulgar Marxism claims

Marx (footnote, Capital Vol. I): in the Middle Ages, Catholicism dominated (ideological structure); in Athens and Rome, politics dominated (juridico-political structure); but "it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains" why here politics and there Catholicism played the chief part

3) The economic structure is always determinant in the last instance — determines which of the regional structures will have the dominant role

Dominant role ≠ determinant role in the last instance — a fundamental distinction; difficult to find explicit formulations in Marx and Engels since their object of study (capitalism) has both coinciding in the economic

4) What characterises every mode of production: its dynamism — the continuous reproduction of its conditions of existence

🎯 Dominant Structure Defined

The regional structure dominant at the level of the mode of production = the one that plays the fundamental role in the reproduction of that mode of production

Capitalist mode: reproduction assured by laws internal to the economic structure (accumulation, extended reproduction) → economic structure occupies the dominant place

Feudal mode: reproduction requires active and fundamental intervention of superstructural elements (without ideological/juridico-political dependency, serfs would not work lords' land) → ideological or juridico-political superstructure is dominant

📐 Final Definition

Mode of Production: the theoretical concept which permits us to think the social totality as a "structure in dominance" (Althusser's term from For Marx), in which the economic level is determinant in the last instance

The structural nucleus or matrix of the mode of production = the relations of production

🗺️ The Concept of Social Formation — The Messy Reality of History

Mode of production = abstract social totality — a "pure," "ideal" object

In the great majority of historically determined societies: production is not carried on homogeneously — different kinds of relations of production coexist

Lenin's analysis of Russia (corresponding to approximately 1917-1929): five coexisting economic systems:

Patriarchal, peasant economy (largely natural economy)

Small commodity production (majority of peasants selling wheat)

Private capitalism

State capitalism

Socialism

Marx's analysis of France (18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon): combination of feudal, patriarchal, small commodity, and capitalist modes

These diverse relations of production coexist in a concrete society NOT anarchically — one occupies a dominant place, imposing its laws on the rest

Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy: "In every form of society it is a determinant production and the relations engendered by it which assigns to all other productions and the relations engendered by them their place and importance"

Latin America: diverse relations of production ranging from highly developed capitalist to near-autarchy — capitalist relations dominating in the majority → subject other relations to their laws

⚠️ André Gunder Frank's error (in early books on Latin America): believing that asserting the domination of the world capitalist system requires denying the existence of pre-capitalist relations — confuses domination in exchange relations with domination at the level of relations of production

📝 Formal Definition

Social Formation: a concrete, historically determined, social reality

Can correspond to a given country or series of countries with similar characteristics and common history (Chilean social formation, Mexican social formation, Latin American social formation)

Composed of: (1) complex economic structure (diverse coexisting relations of production, one dominant); (2) complex ideological structure (different ideological tendencies, dominant one generally corresponding to exploiting pole of dominant relation of production); (3) complex juridico-political structure fulfilling domination function

The study of a social formation is fundamentally an empirical study — requires concrete data, statistics — the other structures of the society can never be deduced from the economic infrastructure — economics serves only as a "guideline"

📚 What Is the Object of Capital? — Setting the Record Straight

Lenin: "The only object of Capital is the precise study of capitalist society. This study implies a materialist analysis of that society and of its superstructures" — "What the 'Friends of the People' Are"

Marx studied an abstract object: the capitalist mode of production — England in the second half of the 19th century figures only as an example illustrating theoretical statements, since it was where capitalism was most advanced

Marx: "Our mission is to explain simply the internal organization of the capitalist system of production in its ideal form, in a manner of speaking"

Lenin, "What the 'Friends of the People' Are," pp. 141-42: Marx did not confine himself to "economic theory" in the ordinary sense — "while explaining the structure and development of the given formation of society exclusively through production relations, he nevertheless everywhere and incessantly scrutinized the superstructure"

Capital is an unfinished work — scientific study of the "economic level" of the capitalist mode of production; Marx tried to also analyse the laws, state, and ideology but time ran out

Capital is further limited to the competitive phase of capitalism — Marx discovered the tendency of capital concentration and monopoly formation but could not carry on a scientific analysis of this stage

⏰ The Concept of Political Conjuncture

Political Conjuncture: the "current moment" of the class struggle in a social formation or a system of social formations

Characterized by a synthesis of the contradictions of a formation in a given moment — expressed fundamentally as an opposition between different social forces

Mao Tse-tung's great contribution: providing a scientific method for analysing the conjuncture by asserting that every political conjuncture is a system of contradictions

In this system: one contradiction occupies the principal place; others occupy secondary places

🔄 Principal vs. Secondary Contradictions (Mao)

Mao, On Contradiction: "There are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principle contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions"

Example: in capitalist society — principal contradiction = proletariat vs. bourgeoisie; other contradictions (remnant feudal class/bourgeoisie, peasant petty bourgeoisie/bourgeoisie, proletariat/peasant petty bourgeoisie, non-monopoly/monopoly capitalists, democratic/fascist bourgeoisie, among capitalist countries, imperialism/colonies) are determined or influenced by this principal contradiction

Each contradiction has two aspects: principal aspect (the dominant one, determining the nature of the thing) and secondary aspect

The principal and non-principal aspects can transform themselves into each other — the nature of the thing changes accordingly

📍 The Conjuncture and Political Slogans

Only a correct analysis of the political conjuncture lets us put forward adequate slogans of struggle

Russia example: fundamental difference between the contradiction resolved by the February Revolution and the one resolved by the October Revolution — and between the methods used to resolve them

Dogmatists do not observe this principle — they adopt what they imagine to be an unalterable formula and apply it everywhere

🔄 The Concept of Transition — From One Mode of Production to Another

Material base of transition: a non-correspondence between old dominant relations of production (entering into contradiction with productive forces' development) and new ones that need to replace them

Development of productive forces and embryonic rise of new relations of production have a spontaneous and unpredictable character initially

BUT: spontaneous development only up to a certain limit

When new productive forces and corresponding relations of production conflict with old dominant ones → spontaneous development replaced by conscious activity — by the struggle of the most advanced classes

The conscious and violent process of destruction of old relations of production = revolution — the general law characterising change of domination in a social formation

🔥 What Is Specific to Capitalism → Socialism Transition

In previous transitions (e.g., feudalism → capitalism in France): spontaneous development at the economic level preceded the political revolution

The Revolution of 1789 = juridico-political consolidation of already-existing capitalist relations of production — came after (not before) the economic revolution

Capitalism → socialism is fundamentally different:

In the heart of a capitalist social formation, socialist relations of production CANNOT arise spontaneously

The "seeds of socialism" (kibbutz in Israel example) cannot constitute a socialist economy because socialist relations refer to the entire economy of a country — not just individual factories

Socialist relations cannot be born within capitalist society whose law of development implies anarchy of social production

Therefore: in the transition from capitalism to socialism, the juridico-political relations are the first to be established

The seizure of political power by the working class creates the conditions for establishing socialist relations of production

Engels, Anti-Dühring: "with the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with... Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organization... This is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom"

Spontaneicist deviation of Marxism: applies the same model to all transitions → waits for the capitalist social formation to spontaneously evolve toward socialism — catastrophically wrong

👥 CHAPTER 9: SOCIAL CLASSES — The Bearers of Structures They Did Not Write

🎯 The Marxist Definition — Rigorously Derived

Marx died before completing the chapter of Capital dedicated to social classes

Dahrendorf (Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society): tried to reconstruct it via a compendium of quotations from different periods and levels of abstraction — absolutely worthless as a contribution to understanding the Marxist problematic

Correct approach: construct missing concepts through understanding the problematic on which they are based, found fundamentally in Capital

✉️ Marx to Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852 — What Was Actually New

"No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them"

Predecessors: bourgeois historians (Thierry, Guizot, Niebuhr), economists (Smith, Ricardo) had already described class struggle

Marx's three innovations:

The existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production

The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat

This dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and a classless society

📋 Lenin's Definition (Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 421)

"Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation ... to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labour, and consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy"

📐 Harnecker's Definition

Social Classes: antagonistic social groups in which one appropriates the labour of the other owing to the different places they occupy in the economic structure of a given mode of production, places fundamentally determined by the specific form in which they are related to the means of production

⚖️ Two Fundamental Types of Class Relations

Class AClass BEffectType I (Capitalism) Ownership AND effective possession of all means of production Non-ownership NOR effective possession Class B must work for Class A to produce means of subsistence Type II (Feudalism) Ownership of most important means (land) Possession of land, ownership of instruments, control of production process Class B does NOT need to work for Class A without extra-economic pressure

Type II requires extra-economic factors (political, ideological) to maintain exploitation — serfs need to be coerced by religion, tradition, force

Capitalism: the coincidence of legal ownership and real ownership + worker's total separation from means of production → worker "voluntarily" offers labour power → theoretically unnecessary for extra-economic intervention

BUT: capitalist relations still rest on juridical conception of ownership + labour contract + army ready to act when class struggle intensifies (history of bloody defeats of workers' movement proves this)

🔢 Capitalist Mode of Production: Two or Three Classes?

Marx sometimes speaks of three classes in capitalism: capitalists, landlords, workers

How to resolve: at what level of abstraction was Marx speaking?

Careful study of texts: when Marx speaks of "three classes" he always refers to "modern society" — not to the pure capitalist mode of production

Lenin: "logically we can quite easily imagine a purely capitalist organization of agriculture in which private property in land is entirely absent"

Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part II, pp. 44-45: the landowner "is quite superfluous in this mode of production" — if land became state property, the purpose would be completely fulfilled

Conclusion: in the capitalist mode of production (as in every mode), there are only two fundamentally antagonistic classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat

🔄 Social Classes and Reproduction of the Mode of Production

Production must continually reproduce itself — and tends to reproduce the social relations of production within which it functions

Marx, Capital Vol. I, pp. 541-2: "Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labour-power and the means of labour ... it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage labourer"

Reproduction of the capitalist mode implies not just reproduction of the two classes but their reproduction according to a determined tendency:

Numerical strengthening of the working class (through proletarianization of capitalists unable to withstand competition)

Numerical diminution of the capitalist class

Dynamic aspect of the functioning of classes = essential to Marxist theory — but many followers have forgotten this, transforming class study into a formal, static exercise

🏗️ Class Fractions — The Internal Differentiation

Not all individuals in a society belong to a definite class

Only groups that directly participate in the production process as antagonistic poles (exploiters/exploited) constitute social classes

Other groups: intermediaries between the two (technicians, administrators) or not directly linked to production (professors, lawyers, state functionaries) — NOT social classes as such

Class fraction: subgroups into which a class can be broken down

Bourgeoisie breaks down into: industrial bourgeoisie (industrial profit), commercial bourgeoisie (commercial profit), financial bourgeoisie (interest)

These correspond to developed forms of surplus value appearing at a more concrete level of analysis of capital

Similarly: "non-productive" (commercial, financial) bourgeoisie has corresponding "non-producing" proletariat — commercial wage workers, bank employees etc.

Marx, Capital Vol. III, pp. 292-3 on commercial wage workers: "his labour power is bought with the variable capital of the merchant" — exploited by the merchant, not in direct surplus value production but in its realisation

Marx, Capital Vol. III, pp. 300-01: the commercial worker belongs to "the better-paid class of wage workers" — but wages tend to fall with advance of capitalist production due to division of labour in offices and universality of public education enabling recruitment from formerly excluded classes

🎯 Class Interest — Strategic vs. Immediate

⚡ Immediate, Spontaneous Interests

Aspirations motivated by current problems of existence

Objective: securing greater immediate well-being, larger share in social wealth distribution

Always influenced by ruling ideology — therefore never call into question the system itself

Lenin: "The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness" — What is to be Done?

Lenin: "all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement ... means ... a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers" — ibid.

🔥 Long-Range, Strategic Interests = True Class Interests

Marx, The Holy Family: "Its objective and its historical action are manifest and irrevocably fixed by its very life situation"

Strategic interest of the dominant class: perpetuate domination

Strategic interest of the dominated class: destroy the system of domination

Strategic interest of the proletariat: destroy the capitalist system and its foundation — private ownership of the means of production

Consciousness of these strategic interests cannot arise spontaneously — requires penetration of Marxist-Leninist theory

Lenin: "Social-Democracy is the combination of the working class movement and socialism ... to represent the interests of the movement as a whole, to point out to this movement its ultimate aim ... Isolated from Social-Democracy, the working class movement becomes petty and inevitably becomes bourgeois" — Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 368

⚠️ Two Errors to Combat

Error 1: considering immediate, spontaneous aspirations of a class as its true class interests

Error 2: forgetting that it is necessary to begin with immediate interests to lead the class toward its true class interests

Lenin: link the struggle with "the definite interests of daily life" — but if these interests are buried under solely abstract political demands understandable only by intellectuals, this represents a retreat

🧠 Class Consciousness vs. Class Instinct

💡 Class Consciousness

NOT the psychological consciousness of individuals comprising a class

NOT the sum or average of what individuals of a class think or feel

Directly linked to the concept of class interest

An individual or social group has class consciousness when it is conscious of its true (long-range, strategic) class interests

An objective datum related to an objective situation — distinguishes it absolutely from empirical, psychologically recognizable notions

🔮 Class Instinct

Every social class, owing to its objective situation, tends to react in a typical manner

Class Instinct: the unconscious sets of reactions, products of class situation, at the base of all spontaneous expressions of class

Class instinct = subjective and spontaneous; class consciousness = objective and rational

Lenin frequently employs "class instinct": "The peasantry has proletarian 'instinct'... The workers instinctively aspire to socialism..."

No direct step from instinct to consciousness — dominant ideology interposes itself, perverting instinct and limiting it to manifestations that do not call the system into question

Therefore: proletarian class consciousness is never the mere expression of its situation in the economic structure

Task of the workers' party: "introduce" class consciousness into the proletariat

🏗️ Social Classes and the Social Formation

Class Structure: the relationship of different classes and class fractions at different levels (economic, political, ideological) of a social formation

In this articulation: always a ruling class or class fraction and ruled classes or class fractions

At the level of the social formation: new transitional classes arise from disintegration of old relations of production

🌾 Transitional Classes — The Petty Bourgeoisie

Transitional Classes: classes that appear only at the level of the social formation as the effect of disintegration of old relations of production and that tend to decompose as new relations develop

Peasantry (agrarian petty bourgeoisie):

Arose from abolition of serfdom bonds — liberating old serfs as more or less independent petty producers

Capitalist penetration of the countryside produces a disintegrating effect: peasantry → rural proletariat OR rural bourgeoisie (a few)

This decomposition is irreversible as long as capitalist laws of production dominate

Urban petty bourgeoisie (artisans, small independent producers):

Cannot compete with capitalist enterprises → progressively reduced to proletarian conditions

The petty bourgeoisie does not exist as a class at the level of a pure mode of production — appears as a transitional class at the level of the social formation

Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, MIT, 1971, pp. 59-60: "This class lives at least in part in the capitalist big city... as a 'transitional class in which the interests of two other classes become simultaneously blunted...' it will imagine itself 'to be above all class antagonisms'... In all decisions crucial for society its actions will be irrelevant and it will be forced to fight for both sides in turn but always without consciousness"

🎯 Class Position — Not the Same as Class Situation

Class Situation: the situation individuals occupy in the social structure, determined in the last instance by the role they play in the process of social production (an objective, structural position)

Class Origin: refers to the class situation in which an individual was formed (e.g., the class situation of parents) — NOT the current situation

Class Position: the "taking of sides" by a class (or individual/group) in a given political conjuncture

Implies defending and struggling for class interests, adopting "its point of view," "joining its ranks"

NOT automatically determined by class situation — isolated elements or groups from other classes can join and struggle for a class that is not their own

Labour aristocracy example: the privileged sector of the working class of capitalist-imperialist countries, in numerous conjunctures, has defended bourgeois interests rather than working-class interests

Class situation creates class instinct → members tend to take the side of their class

For a proletarian to reach proletarian class position: class instinct needs only to be educated

For a petty bourgeois intellectual to reach proletarian class position: class instinct must be revolutionized — a long process, often leading to deviations in difficult conjunctures

⚔️ Social Forces — Classes in Action

Social Force: a class or social group that actively participates in the political struggle, producing "pertinent effects" at the conjunctural level (Poulantzas' terminology)

A social group can constitute a class but not a social force — e.g., petty peasant producers in certain countries who have no organization or ideology yet still produce conjunctural effects

Revolutionary intellectuals can constitute a social force without being a class

🔥 Three Types of Forces in a Revolutionary Process

Motor Forces: social groups actively participating in the revolutionary process

Chinese Revolution: peasantry, proletariat, urban bourgeoisie, occasionally certain sectors of the national bourgeoisie

Principal Force: the most numerous motor force

Chinese Revolution: the peasantry

Directing Force: the social group that directs the revolutionary process

Does NOT need to be the most numerous

What makes a directing force: its political role — capacity to take initiative, formulate adequate goals at each stage, find correct forms of leadership → gains confidence of revolutionary masses

Chinese Revolution: the proletariat — small in numbers, but made itself the directing force through its political role

🏛️ Social Classes as Bearers of Determined Structures

Social classes are NOT the creative subjects of social structures

They are — as Marx says — the "bearers" (Träger) of determined structures; "actors in a drama they have not written"

Two meanings of "Träger":

"Support" (Stütze): indicating sustaining, being the base of something — Marx uses this when stating "the material conditions are the supports (Träger) of the social relations"

"Bearer": meaning to take on oneself, bring with you — Marx uses this when stating "the capitalist is nothing more than capital personified", that "he only acts in the process of production as the bearer (Träger) of capital"

Rejecting voluntaristic conceptions about social classes — a class cannot simply propose to change a social structure and do so — the proletariat cannot immediately implant communism after destroying capitalism (requires very advanced productive forces development)

BUT: saying classes don't create structures does NOT mean they cannot act on structures — within certain limits determined by material conditions

Without active participation of classes: social structures tend to reproduce themselves, surmounting crises through internal contradictions

Radical structural changes only come when revolutionary classes take advantage of system crises to produce profound structural changes

Therefore: the class struggle is the motor of history in class societies

⚔️ CHAPTER 10: THE CLASS STRUGGLE — The Motor of History

📜 The Concept of Class Struggle

At the level of the political conjuncture: social classes can only be conceived through their "class practices" — and since classes have opposing interests, these practices have the character of class struggle

The class struggle — going on within the limits fixed by the social structure — is in class societies the motor of history

Marx's great contribution: pass from description of class existence to knowledge of the origin of classes → was able to give us the law ruling the class struggle

⚡ Engels on the Law of Class Struggle

"It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes" — Engels, Preface to the Third German Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

"This law has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science"

🎯 Lenin on When Class Struggle Becomes Class Struggle

A strike at one factory is NOT class struggle — only "a weak embryo of it"

"The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class" — Our Immediate Task (1899)

📐 Formal Definition

Class Struggle: the confrontation produced between two antagonistic classes when they are struggling for their class interests

🔀 The Three Levels of Class Struggle

💰 a) Economic Struggle

Confrontation between antagonistic classes at the level of the economic structure

Lenin, What is to be Done?: "The economic struggle is the collective struggle of the workers against their employers for better terms in the sale of their labour power, for better living and working conditions" — necessarily a trade-union struggle since working conditions differ greatly in different trades

The economic struggle is necessary but insufficient — limited to the sphere of what is "tolerable" to the liberal bourgeoisie

🧠 b) Ideological Struggle

Class struggle at the ideological level — between ideology of the exploited class and ideology of the exploiting class

In capitalist society: between bourgeois ideology (in all its forms) and proletarian ideology (based on Marxist theory)

To be successful: must attack the enemy where he is strongest — not by oversimplifying ruling-class ideology or choosing its weakest supporters (this allows the enemy to advance rather than retreat)

Gramsci, Historical Materialism and the Philosophy of Benedetto Croce: "A science obtains proof of its effectiveness and vitality when it demonstrates that it knows how to confront the great champions of opposing tendencies, when it resolves, by its own means, the vital problems which they have posed"

⚡ c) Political Struggle

Confrontation between classes in the struggle for political power — to make state power their own

Lenin on Economists (Liberal and Marxist Conceptions of the Class Struggle, 1913): Economists recognised as "class struggle" any clash between classes — even a struggle for a "wage increase of five kopeks on the ruble" — but refused to recognise the higher, more developed, nation-wide class struggle for political aims → became "liberal workers' politicians"

Lenin: "Marxism recognises a class struggle as fully developed, 'nation-wide,' only if it does not merely embrace politics but takes in the most significant thing in politics — the organization of state power"

🔗 The Unity of the Three Kinds

The different kinds of struggle do NOT exist separated from one another — they are fused into a single unity that constitutes the class struggle as such

In every conjuncture: a given form of fusion in which one plays the dominant role

Marx's statement that "all class struggle is a political struggle" means: the definitive confrontation of antagonistic classes is only produced when the oppressed class comes to question the system of power

Until political struggle is reached: only partial confrontations that do not question the system's reproduction

This does NOT deny the importance of economic struggle — Marx and Engels criticised utopian socialists for deprecating it; warned at the 1866 Congress of the International Working Men's Association against both underestimating and overestimating its importance

🎭 Forms of Class Struggle — Not Dogmatically Fixed

Economic front: strikes, hunger marches, slowdowns, factory takeovers

Ideological front: publications, radio/television broadcasts of revolutionary orientation, revolutionary utilisation of political concentrations and electoral campaigns

Political front: electoral struggle, armed insurrection, popular war (guerrilla war, wars of position, war of movement)

🧭 Lenin's Two Fundamental Requirements for Examining Forms of Struggle (Guerrilla Warfare, 1906)

First: Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by NOT binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle — recognises the most varied forms; does not "concoct" them but "generalises, organises, gives conscious expression" to forms that arise in the course of movement; recognises that new forms of struggle arise as the social situation changes

Second: Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of forms of struggle — different stages of economic evolution, different conditions → different forms come to the fore; "to attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making detailed examination of the concrete situation ... means completely to abandon the Marxist position"

🗺️ Strategy and Tactics in the Class Struggle

A Marxist-Leninist party cannot limit itself to following spontaneously arising forms of struggle — must raise them to the most adequate means to meet class interests

Class interests cannot always be realised immediately — may require a first stage of preparation

Example: first stage → unite proletariat with peasantry and popular sectors to complete bourgeois-democratic tasks → then, having demonstrated leading capacity, carry out tasks of definitive suppression of social exploitation — as in Chinese and Cuban revolutions

📋 Minimum and Maximum Programs

Minimum Program: goals of the first stage of the class struggle — the only truly revolutionary program for that stage since it is the only one that lets the process advance

Analogy: a patriotic army liberating its country from a powerful enemy must first liberate strategic zones to rapidly weaken the enemy — trying to liberate all zones simultaneously with scarce forces leads to defeat

Maximum Program: aimed at finally bringing about the suppression of all exploitation

🎯 Tactics and Political Slogans

Concrete proposals for action corresponding to the political conjuncture of each moment

Political slogans: short phrases synthesising concrete proposals — must correspond to both strategic objectives AND immediate interests of the masses

Parties lacking contact with the masses put forth abstract slogans — correct strategically but meaningless for the masses

"It is in struggle and not in declarations where the true revolutionary vanguard is recognised"

🌋 The Social Revolution — The Highest Form of Class Struggle

As contradictions develop → class struggle acquires sharper character → oppressed classes eventually seize political power and begin destroying old relations of production

Social Revolution: the conscious and violent process of destruction of old relations of production — and therefore of the social classes that are their bearers

⚠️ Has nothing in common with simple achievement of political independence (Latin American independence movements) or simple changes in government through military takeovers

🌡️ The Revolutionary Situation — Objective Conditions

Lenin, "The Collapse of the Second International," 1915 — three major symptoms of a revolutionary situation:

When it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without change — a crisis in the ruling class, leading to a "fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth"

When the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual

When, as consequence of the above, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses — in turbulent times, drawn by both circumstances of the crisis and by the actions of the upper classes into independent historical action

Althusser (in For Marx, p. 95) defines the revolutionary situation as "an accumulation and exacerbation of historical conditions" which fuse into a ruptural unity

History has known numerous cases of revolutionary situations NOT turned into victorious revolutions: Germany in the 1860s, Russia in 1905, first year of WWI in various European countries

🔥 Subjective Conditions — Also Required

Lenin: "revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, 'falls', if it is not toppled over" — ibid.

⚠️ These objective and subjective conditions as necessary for general insurrection cannot be mechanically used as the criterion for when a prolonged popular war ought to begin — which has as one of its objectives precisely the creation of conditions for social revolution

📖 This outline is based entirely on Marta Harnecker's Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism (1969), as translated by the Tucson Marxist-Leninist Collective (1978-81), with the preface by Louis Althusser (1971/1974). All specific quotes, references, and citations are drawn directly from the text.

[marxbook]

Spanish & Portuguese pdf books from USSR, East Germany and the Socialist Bloc

Dialectical Materialism and Marxist Philosophy

Ivan Andreev - Fundamental Laws and Categories of Materialist Dialectics

Ovshiy Yakhot - What is Dialectical Materialism

Alexander Spirkin - Dialectical Materialism and Dialectical Logic

Materialismo Dialéctico (Dialectical Materialism)

Fundamental Problems of Dialectical Materialism

S. Stolyarov - The Science of Development (Introduction to Dialectics)

Mitrofan Alekseev - Dialectics of the Forms of Thought

Current Problems of Marxist Dialectics

Mark Rosenthal - The Problems of Dialectics in Marx's "Capital"

M. Rosenthal - Lenin and Dialectics

Alexander Spirkin - Lenin and Philosophy

P. Fedoseev - Communism and Philosophy

G. Kursanov - Veritas: Foundations of the Leninist Theory of Truth

Alfred Kosing & Erich Hahn - Marxist-Leninist Philosophy

Problems of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (various authors)

Pavel Kopnin - Hypothesis and Truth

E. V. Shorokhova - The Problem of Consciousness

S. L. Rubinstein - The Process of Thought and the Laws of Analysis, Synthesis, and Generalization

Marx, Engels, and Capital Studies

Engels: Life and Activity

P. V. Kopnin, M. Klein et al. - Engels and Hegel's Philosophy

G. Bagaturia & G. Ardaiev - Marx's "Capital" and Capitalism

Lev Leontiev - Karl Marx's "Capital" and Equality

Jorge Gaspar García Galló - Glosses on Lenin's Book "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism"

VI Maltsev - Essays on Dialectical Logic

History of Philosophy and Critiques of Other Philosophies

Mikhail Dynnik - History of Philosophy

Bernard Bykhovsky - Erosion of Eternal Philosophy

Georg Lukacs - The Crisis of Bourgeois Philosophy

Igor Kon - Neopositivism and Historical Materialism

Igor Kon - Philosophical Idealism and the Crisis of Historical Thought

Thomas J. Blakeley - Soviet Scholasticism

M. T. Iovchuk - The Falsifiers of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy

Critique of the Theoretical Conceptions of Mao Tse-Tung

Abram Deborin - Philosophy and Politics

Gottfried Stiehler - Hegel and the Origins of Dialectics

Science, Philosophy of Science, and Natural Sciences

USSR Academy of Sciences - Lenin and Contemporary Natural Sciences

Serafim Melukhin - Philosophical Problems of Contemporary Physics

Philosophy and Conceptual Problems of Contemporary Sciences

Sciences and Scientific Foresight (various authors)

Sciences and Marxism-Leninism (various authors)

History of Science: Soviet Research, Volume I

History of Science: Soviet Research, Volume II

I. V. Savelyev - Course in General Physics

A. Bialko - Our Planet Earth (Physics Within Everyone's Reach)

Nikolai Dubinin - General Genetics, Volumes 1 and 2

D. N. Trifonov - The Price of Truth (Scientists to Schoolchildren)

Society, Culture, Sociology, and Humanism

Vadim Mezhuev - Culture and History

Vladislav Kelle & Matvey Kovalzon - Marxist Sociology

V. Kelle & M. Kovalzon - Forms of Social Consciousness

Teodor Oizerman, Viktor Malinin et al. - Humanism and Marxism

Varlaam Keshelava - Real Humanism and Fictitious Humanism

USSR Academy of Sciences - Man in the System of Scientific Knowledge

L. F. Ilyichev - Social Sciences and Communism

Bernard Bykhovsky - Science, Society and Future

Mikhail Lifshitz et al. - Literature and Marxism: A Controversy

Essays on Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics

Boris Kuznetsov - Philosophy of Optimism

Economics and Political Economy

Podkolzin - Essay on the History of the USSR Economy

Nikolai Bukharin - Critique of Marginalist Theory

The World Economy and Imperialism

Elements of Marxist Economics

On the Economic Theory of Socialism

History and Politics

A. V. Krasnov - Critique of the Christian Conception of the Historical Process

Eduard Nitoburg (ed.) - Africans in the New World

Carlos Tuya - The Historical Function of the State and Democracy

Zhores Medvedev & Roy Medvedev - The Unknown Stalin

Yuri Modin - My Cambridge Comrades

Fundamental Aspects of the Spanish Revolution

Miscellaneous

E. Batalov - Philosophy of Rebellion

Marcuse and His Critics

Nikolai Bukharin - Philosophical Arabesques

[marxbook]

East German Marxist Philosophy Textbook in Portuguese

Alfred Kosing; Erich Hahn - A Filosofia Marxista Leninista : Alfred Kosing, Erich Hahn : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Arc

A filosofía marxista leninista. Curso básico.Edições Avante!, Lisboa, 1983, 264 páginasTítulo original: Marxistisch-leninistische Philosophi

[leftistfeminista]

Lacan's further point is that this covert Sadean dimension of an "ethical (sexual) passion" is not read into Kant by our eccentric interpretation, but is inherent to the Kantian theoretical edifice. If we put aside the body of "circumstantial evidence" for it (isn't Kant's infamous definition of marriage-"the contract between two adults of the opposite sex about the mutual use of each other's sexual organs"-thoroughly Sadean, since it reduces the Other, the subject's sexual partner, to a partial object, to his/her bodily organ which provides pleasure, ignoring him/her as the Whole of a human Person?), the crucial clue that allows us to discern the contours of "Sade in Kant" is the way Kant conceptualizes the relationship between sentiments (feelings) and the moral Law. Although Kant insists on the absolute gap between pathological sentiments and the pure form of moral Law, there is one a priori sentiment that the subject necessarily experiences when confronted with the injunction of the moral Law, the pain of humiliation (because of man's hurt pride, due to the "radical Evil" of human nature); for Lacan, this Kantian privileging of pain as the only a priori sentiment is strictly correlative to Sade's notion of pain (torturing and humiliating the other, being tortured and humiliated by him) as the privileged way of access to sexual jouissance (Sade's argument, of course, is that pain is to be given priority over pleasure on account of its greater longevity-pleasures are passing, while pain can last almost indefinitely). This link can be further substantiated by what Lacan calls the Sadean fundamental fantasy: the fantasy of another, ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitely and nonetheless magically retains its beauty (see the standard Sadean figure of a young girl sustaining endless humiliations and mutilations from her deprived torturer and somehow mysteriously surviving it all intact, in the same way Tom and Jerry and other cartoon heroes survive all their ridiculous ordeals intact). Doesn't this fantasy provide the libidinal foundation of the Kantian postulate of the immortality of the soul endlessly striving to achieve ethical perfection, i.e., is not the phantasmic "truth" of the immortality of the soul its exact opposite, the immortality of the body, its ability to sustain endless pain and humiliation? Judith Butler pointed out that the Foucaultian "body" as the site of resistance is none other than the Freudian "psyche": paradoxically, "body" is Foucault's name for the psychic apparatus insofar as it resists the soul's domination. That is to say, when, in his well-known definition of the soul as the "prison of the body," Foucault turns around the standard Platonic-Christian definition of the body as the "prison of the soul," what he calls "body" is not simply the biological body, but is effectively already caught into some kind of pre-subjective psychic apparatus.  Consequently, don't we encounter in Kant a secret homologous inversion, only in the opposite direction, of the relationship between body and soul: what Kant calls "immortality of the soul" is effectively the immortality of the other, ethereal, "undead" body?

Kant and Sade: the Ideal Couple Zizek 1998

[marxbook]

📚 OBRAS BY ZAIRA RODRÍGUEZ UGIDOS: THE DEFINITIVE MARXIST-LENINIST PHILOSOPHICAL ARSENAL OF REVOLUTIONARY CUBA

🌟 I. ZAIRA RODRÍGUEZ UGIDOS: WHO SHE WAS AND WHY IT MATTERS

Born 1941, died September 11, 1985 — a loss described as "irreparable" for Marxist-Leninist philosophy in Cuba and Latin America, and the description is not hyperbole

Graduated 1965, Doctor in Philosophy and Letters, Universidad de La Habana — trained at the most prestigious Cuban institution of higher learning

1970: defended her Candidacy thesis at the Lomonosov State University of Moscow — topic: "The Problem of Man in Hegel and the Formation of Marxist Philosophy"

Not just any institution — Lomonosov was the intellectual fortress of Soviet philosophical science

Her thesis topic alone signals her entire intellectual program: the human question, Hegel, Marx — the holy trinity of dialectical materialism

Was preparing to defend her Doctorate in Philosophical Sciences at Lomonosov at the time of her sudden death — the academic world lost a fully mature thinker at the height of her powers

Professor of: 🎓

History of philosophy

Contemporary bourgeois philosophy

Dialectical materialism

Dialectical logic

Institutional roles held simultaneously:

Professor at Universidad de La Habana

Researcher and instructor at the Academy of Sciences of Cuba

Sub-Director of Teaching, Department for the Teaching of Marxism-Leninism

Head of the Department of Dialectical Materialism, Faculty of Philosophy and History, Universidad de La Habana

Vice-Director of the Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of Cuba

Published extensively in national and international journals on:

Dialectical logic

Marxist-Leninist philosophy

History of philosophy

Latin American Marxist philosophy

Major monographs (because one book is never enough when you have something to say): 📖

Problems of Dialectical Logic (1986)

Lectures on Dialectical Logic: Notes for a Textbook (1983)

The Problem of the Specific Nature of Philosophical Knowledge (1984)

Philosophy: Science and Value (1985)

Represented Cuba at multiple international events — including the UNESCO-sponsored Encounter of Latin American Philosophers in Lima, 1985, the very year of her death

Characterized by Professor and historian Sergio Aguirre at her memorial in the Aula Magna of Universidad de La Habana, September 11, 1986:

"A character, a true character, capable of combining the most incredibly sincere modesty and temperamental sweetness with the most impregnable firmness before principles"

"I do not believe there has been any Cuban professor of Philosophy, from the era of the Revolution, capable of surpassing her"

"The stamp of irreducible dignity"

Her death was not merely a personal tragedy — it was a structural wound to the development of revolutionary thought in Cuba and the broader Latin American left

🏙️ II. "EXACT NOTION OF COLOR": HAVANA AS REVOLUTIONARY ANCHOR

Published in: Universidad de La Habana, No. 222, January–September 1984

The premise: Rodríguez Ugidos discovers what Havana means to her from the bridge of the ship Rossia as it pulls her away from the harbor

Not a sentimental exercise — a philosophical act of recognition

The city is not nostalgia; it is epistemological ground zero

Havana as a "mere point on the map" — and yet:

An avalanche of ideas, emotions, plastic images, and feelings

The city as the decisive turning point that opened itself to the Revolution

The place where her notion of the beautiful, the grand, the dignified was forged

Key philosophical claim embedded in lyrical form:

Havana is the "obligatory reference to everything else"

It is responsible for her exact notion of color of the sea, the sky, the texture of air and earth

Responsible for her sense of rhythm, music, language, belonging

The political subtext is unmistakable: 🔴

This is not tourism — this is the argument that revolutionary consciousness is rooted in concrete material and cultural place

The individual is not an abstract subject floating in philosophical ether — she is a Habanera, shaped by specific geography, specific history, specific Revolution

The Marxist concept of the social determination of consciousness appears here in its most intimate personal form

The "nosotros" (we/us) — Havana converts her day by day into a collective subject

The individual dissolves not into Hegelian Absolute Spirit but into revolutionary community

This is not alienation — this is concretely realized freedom

🏛️ III. PROLOGUE TO THE CUBAN EDITION OF EL PENSAMIENTO ANTIGUO BY RODOLFO MONDOLFO

Published in: El pensamiento antiguo de Rodolfo Mondolfo, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1971

🧑‍🎓 A. Rodolfo Mondolfo: The Man and His Project

Born 1877 in Senigallia, Italy — studied at the University of Florence under positivist Ardigó

Professor at:

University of Turin (1910–1914)

University of Bologna (1914–1938)

Forced to flee Italy in 1938 when the pro-fascist dictatorial government banned intellectuals of Hebrew origin from their professions

Not a footnote — this is the material condition shaping his intellectual production

Emigrated to Argentina, where he continued his prolific intellectual work

Combat record against fascism: Published anti-fascist articles in the Italian journal Critica Sociale — philosophy as political weapon, not ivory tower decoration

Dedicated over six decades to critical investigation across three major periods:

Classical antiquity

Modern thought (17th–19th centuries): Hobbes, Helvétius, Montesquieu, Condillac, Rousseau, Lassalle, Beccaria

Marxism

Works on Marxism include: El materialismo histórico en F. Engels, Feuerbach y Marx, Marx y el marxismo, Sulle orme di Marx, El humanismo de Marx

Major works on ancient philosophy: El genio helénico, El infinito en el pensamiento de la antigüedad clásica, Problemas del pensamiento antiguo, La comprensión del sujeto humano en la cultura antigua

Published over 50 titles on ancient philosophy alone — including a critical text on Heraclitus, Heráclito: textos y problemas de su interpretación (Siglo XXI, México, 1966)

The Cuban edition of El pensamiento antiguo is taken from the second edition published by Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1945 — originally written in Italian in 1929

📜 B. Mondolfo's Core Argument: Against the Schematic Mutilation of Greek Thought

The target: The "romantic vision" of the classical world defended by critics including Zeller, Gomperz, Burnet, Tannery

These thinkers attribute to ancient culture: freedom and clarity of spirit, harmonic unity of form and content, plastic serenity, pure objectivism

Result: the classical world is rigidly counterposed to the Oriental, the Christian, and the modern

This is intellectual laziness dressed up as erudition — and Mondolfo calls it out

Mondolfo's counter-thesis: The Greek world has a "polyhedral nature" — multifaceted, not unidimensional

It contains pessimistic elements, a "gloomy universal vision of life"

Dionysian elements alongside the Apollonian — not one tonic but a mixture

Elements of subjectivism, dynamism, disharmony — all suppressed by the schematic historians

Three specific corrections Mondolfo makes to received dogma: 🎭 First Correction: The Myth of Pure Greek Optimism

Greek culture also contains meditation on death, consciousness of sin, pessimstic world-vision

The dominant spirit is not purely "Apollonian" — it is always already mixed with the Dionysian

♾️ Second Correction: The Myth That Greeks Had No Concept of Infinity

The exclusive attribution of the concept of infinity as perfection to Christian and modern thought is "absolutely erroneous"

Greeks did conceive of the infinite — temporally, spatially, numerically, dynamically

The idea that infinity meant imperfection or monstrosity to the Greeks is a fabrication

🧠 Third Correction: The Myth of Pure Greek Objectivism

The charge that ancient philosophy had no concept of human subjectivity is unfounded

Mondolfo demonstrates through textual evidence: subjectivity is present in ancient philosophy

Key evidence chain:

Democritus precedes Locke in distinguishing primary and secondary qualities (later taken up by Galileo, Descartes, Locke)

The Cyrenaics precede Berkeley in claiming we know only sensations, not objective causes

Protagoras' relativism of knowledge

The methodical doubt traced back through Socrates to Aristotle

Zeller's claim that modern philosophy begins with doubt (Bacon's critique, Descartes' methodical doubt) must be tempered by acknowledging that Aristotle already recognized doubt as the origin of all philosophy

🔗 C. Mondolfo's Methodology: The Problem of Historical Continuity

Central thesis of his method: There is no absolute novelty in the history of philosophy — only deeper realizations of ancient tendencies

"The possibility that ancient thought offered so many orientations to modern thought cannot be understood except by taking into account the multiplicity of directions in which it moves"

This directly attacks the schematic periodization of philosophy into hermetically sealed epochs

The philosophy of "problematicity" (problematicidad):

For Mondolfo, philosophy is essentially the eternal problematic activity of the human spirit

Philosophy as Socratic ignorance — awareness of problems deepening through critique of systems

The systems fall, but the problems remain — as "imperishable conquests of philosophical consciousness"

Philosophy exists in a double aspect: as system (historically relative, linked to its epoch) and as problem (eternally recurring, pointing to progressive deepening of consciousness)

The historian Mondolfo vs. the Marxist standard:

His continuity thesis is valuable — it demolishes false ruptures and honors genuine intellectual inheritance

But his "essentialist" framework — appealing to the "eternal human condition" — fails to account for the material historical analysis that Marxism requires

He cannot explain why philosophy emerges in specific historical forms — only that it recurs eternally

The materialist and historical analysis of philosophy as a form of social consciousness is absent from his framework

Critics like W. Jaeger, E. Cassirer and Mondolfo himself broaden the scope of philosophical history beyond mere internal development — introducing "sociology of knowledge" (Jaeger's term) — but still remain within the sphere of superstructure, never descending to concrete socioeconomic structure

⚖️ D. Mondolfo's Marxism: A Diagnosis of Profound Misreading

The verdict: "Marx passes through Mondolfo, but Mondolfo does not pass through Marx" 🎯

Mondolfo engages Marx, but from a framework that ultimately cannot absorb him

The specific errors:

Interprets historical materialism through the abstract lens of Feuerbachian humanism

Ignores the radically new theoretical character of Marxist ideology relative to all previous philosophy

Does not use the Marxist analysis of superstructures, their dynamics, and their articulation with economic base

Conceives of historical materialism as the "culmination of German classical philosophy" — the realization of the Spirit's progress toward freedom

Falsely opposes "genuine Marxism" (animated by historical consciousness and freedom) to "Leninism or totalitarian communism" as its adulterator

This is not a scholarly error — this is ideological class interest dressed as philosophical critique

The consequence:

The explanation Mondolfo offers for the advancement of theoretical thought — in terms of "necessity" and "contingency", the interplay of historical preparation and individual genius — remains "vague and abstract"

A complete Marxist critique of philosophical history requires the study of:

The articulation of a philosophy with existing ideological practices (religion, politics, art)

With scientific practices

With the economic-social structure of a specific epoch and place

Only then does the analysis become concrete, multilateral, and genuinely historical

The value of Mondolfo's work despite its limitations:

His erudition on Greek thought is unquestionable

His broadening of the horizon of philosophical history is a genuine contribution

The Cuban edition of El pensamiento antiguo is a living anthology — not a dry history, but fragments organized as successive responses to abiding questions that kept alive the spirit of the ancients

🧩 IV. PROLOGUE TO THE CUBAN EDITION OF HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT

Published in: Fenomenología del espíritu de J. G. F. Hegel, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1972

👑 A. Hegel as the Apex and End of Speculative Philosophy

The claim: Hegelian thought represents "the most accomplished expression that speculative and systematic philosophy of the modern and contemporary eras has achieved"

With Hegel, philosophical activity acquires disproportionate value relative to all other human praxis — material, ideological, artistic, religious, scientific

All social productions, including the process of natural reality, fall under the domain of philosophical consciousness

Result: "spiritualization of the world" — its complete and essential realization as the "rationalization of the real"

The paradox: 🎪 With Hegel, this universalist and totalizing construction assigned to philosophy reaches its end

The very success of Hegelian philosophy announces its own termination — but for reasons entirely different from those Hegel supposed

Hegel believed his epoch had found its "eternal present" — the dialectical cycle of social and cultural development was closed, crowned by Hegelian philosophy itself

He was catastrophically wrong about the permanence of what he declared permanent — but magnificently right about the structure of the dialectical process

🇩🇪 B. The Historical-Social Roots of Hegelian Rationalism

What produced Hegelian philosophy? Not the internal logic of philosophical discourse — but concrete historical-social conditions:

The social and historical situation of Germany in the early 19th century

Ideological and theoretical presuppositions implicit in his work — operative but not conscious to Hegel himself

The complex and contradictory repercussions of the French Revolutionary process on backward, fragmented Germany

🧮 Pre-Hegelian Rationalism: Descartes and Kant as Foils

Cartesian rationalism (dominant in 18th-century bourgeois thought):

Reason as instrument common to all men — granting privilege over mechanical nature and a certain independence from God

Reason as critical and methodological instrument for science and metaphysics

The individualist subject as foundation of abstract equality and freedom

But: carefully bounded — Descartes took care that his liberal innovations not be read as subversion of established moral, religious, or political values

Faithful exponent of bourgeois ideology in formation: asserting individual value against feudal hierarchy of castes

Inaugurates reflexive, gnoseological-methodological philosophy — the tradition Hegel will combat

The Enlightenment (Iluminismo): 💡

Extends Cartesian ideas with stricter criticism and broader scope

Reason must analyze its own possibilities and limits — renouncing sterile dogmatic metaphysics

But extends its terrain: reason as tool for transforming all spheres of human practice — religion, morality, politics, society

Goal: a more just and human morality inspired by rational norms; a natural religion (deism) subordinated to the demands of thinking humans; a State guaranteeing natural rights

Expressed the most radical theses of the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary period of the European bourgeoisie

In gnoseology: critical character; in political-social thought: normative philosophy ("what ought to be")

Hegel's dialectical philosophy also reacts against this — condemning the abstract ideality of this "ought to be" as unworthy of rationality

🔄 The Hegelian Revolution in Rationalism

The new questions Hegelianism formulates are conditioned by the history European nations were living:

Hegelian reflection as an attempt at coherent response to the profound transformations produced by the French Revolutionary process and its contradictory repercussions for Germany

Displacement of philosophical object:

Pre-Hegelian modern philosophy centered on philosophy of sciences, gnoseology, methodology of knowledge — inspired by geometry and Newtonian physics

Hegel redirects attention to historical and social problems

The bulk of Hegelian work concerns Philosophy of Spirit:

Objective Spirit: civil society, property relations, family, law, juridical institutions, the State

Absolute Spirit: spiritual social productions — art, religion, philosophy

The "phenomenological" perspective:

Human consciousness (individual and social) has its history — not external to social and historical-cultural processes

The historical sequence of forms of consciousness expresses the entire material and spiritual social development of humanity

Ideological motivations behind Hegelian solutions:

Reconciliation with his epoch — justification of bourgeois society in general, its economic-social structures, its culture

Attempt to conciliate the contradictory situation of Germany (backward, fragmented) with the model offered by England and France

Hegel sanctions and sublimes the German political-juridical order

His theory of the State attempts to resolve all social conflicts through political institutions (constitutional monarchy)

Result at the theoretical level: the necessity of a "closed system", the finalism of his historical-dialectical conception, the contemplative, positive, and uncritical character of his philosophy of being

📐 C. Hegelian Rationalism in Detail: The Core Concepts

🌐 The Universalization of Reason

Hegel breaks with the concept of rationality as exclusive property of the individual thinking subject

Combats Kantian criticism's view that reason must renounce the superhuman task of grasping Infinite and Absolute Reality

Hegel's famous critique of Kant: "To want to know before knowing is as absurd as the wise proposal of that certain Scholastic, to begin swimming before risking the water"

The panlogist alternative: Rationality is the essential and ultimate principle of infinite reality — man is merely a part, an aspect of this totality

"Everything real is rational; everything rational is real" — Hegel's universalization of reason affects the very foundations of reflexive philosophy

Consequence: Philosophy cannot be conceived as ideality, as abstraction, as "ought to be" — as a "system of cerebral phantoms" prescribing rational norms to non-rational Reality

Philosophy as the "Owl of Minerva" — taking flight at dusk, reading the past rather than predicting the future

Against Kantian resignation: If Kant makes the human subject (as reflective, thinking subject) renounce the problem of the Absolute, Hegel insists philosophy must begin by posing this problem

🔁 The False Infinite and the True Infinite

The key problem: The relationship between "the Infinite" and "the finite"

The Infinite = reason or rational principle of being = the only and total reality

Philosophical reflection must start from the Infinite, not arrive at it from finite subjects

The "false infinite" (falso infinito, infinito malo):

Result of starting from the finite as opposed to the Infinite

Kant's philosophy: tears man apart by opposing philosophical consciousness to the world — his solution is a renunciation of any possible solution

Fichte's Doctrine of Science: starts from the I or subjective consciousness enclosed in itself — the Infinite thus obtained can only be "negative" and "false"

In Fichte: the Infinite is given as perpetual re-creation (ad infinitum) of the I — never reaching its end

Hegel's solution: The finite is "superseded", dissolved, integrated into the Infinite — it is a particularized expression of the Infinite, not a separate term beyond it

The political and philosophical durability of this Hegelian lesson:

Against 20th-century irrationalist currents that sever the individual from the social environment to exalt human personality and freedom

These tendencies offer a false and abstract image of the human being

Marx's Thesis on Feuerbach: "The human essence is not something abstract and immanent to each individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of social relations" — this is the materialist elaboration of Hegel's social rootedness of the individual

⚙️ D. The System and the Dialectic: Hegel's Method

"The truth is the whole" — Hegel's governing maxim 🎯

Hegel's ambition: systematic integration and unitary explanation of all branches of knowledge:

Logic, philosophy of nature, anthropology, "psychology," philosophy of history, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, history of philosophy

Caution required: One should not seek perfectly achieved systematic deductions where Hegel is in fact engaged in constant evolution and searching

The triadic construction is not a fatal permanent model — imposing it where it doesn't exist is a falsification of Hegelian thought

🏗️ The Absolute Idealism Behind the System

Hegel's idealism is the idealism of Absolute Reason — unrelated to subjective idealism or Kantian transcendental idealism

The Absolute = Reason itself — accessible to finite human reason because it is of the same nature

Philosophy = "explosion of finite reason" provoked ultimately by Absolute Reason, allowing elevation toward it

Panlogism: A unique ideal principle as ultimate cause of all reality — a "dynamic panlogism" as essential to Hegelian idealism as the "ascending dialectic"

Consequence for scientific procedure:

Where Descartes and Spinoza modeled philosophical discourse on mathematics or geometry, Hegel highlights the specificity of speculative philosophical reflection

Only to philosophy belongs the supreme task of grasping the concrete totality in a unitary, organically integrated construction: the "closed system"

"A philosophizing without system cannot be anything scientific"

💠 The Circle of Circles

History of philosophy as process of totalizations and re-totalizations:

Each system assimilates, supersedes, and integrates previous contents

The totality as "circle of circles" — each singular circle constitutes a necessary moment of the whole

The part, to be truly something, cannot be considered in isolation — only within the totality does it have meaning

Hegel: "The Spirit proceeds by detours and the line of scientific progress is circular"

The Spirit is a circle that returns to itself — presupposes its beginning and only reaches it at the end

Philosophical knowledge as the richest and most concrete knowledge — precisely because it is mediated and enriched by other forms of knowing

Forms of consciousness (feelings, institutions, appetites, volitions) are valid but limited

Philosophy subsumes the contents expressed in other forms of consciousness, elevating them to conceptual thought — seeking the "universal-concrete" in the sea of individualities

⚡ The Dialectic: Its Genius and Its Mystification

Marx's explicit diagnosis: "My dialectical method is not only fundamentally different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite"

For Hegel: the process of thought (converted, under the name "Idea", into a subject with its own life) is "the demiurge of the real" — reality is merely the external form thought takes

For Marx: the reverse — the material is primary, thought its reflection

Three forms of mystification in Hegelian dialectic: 🌀 First Mystification: The Ideal Substance as Starting Point

Hegel begins with an ideal substantial principle (Absolute Idea)

Universal Laws of this unique principle explain all manifestations of natural or social reality indiscriminately

Universal History is the exposition of the Universal Spirit laboring to know what it is "in itself"

This sacrifices the study of real concrete situations to universal principles — infinite variety of phenomena "interpreted" through a universal schema

🤖 Second Mystification: Substance as Self-Determining Subject

The spiritual substance of reality acts as an active, self-determining subject

"To say that substance is subject means, for Hegel, highlighting the capacity for self-creation and self-knowledge of this Spirit"

🎯 Third Mystification: Finalism

Dialectic as the process of a Subject aimed at an ultimate end

This ultimate end Hegel sees realized in his own epoch

The closed system serves to justify the necessity of the present order — not to reveal the necessity of its revolutionary transcendence

Three levels of finalism:

Historical: The Germanic world as the culminating moment

Political-social: Bourgeois society and the constitutional monarchical state (idealization of the Prussian state) as definitive structures

Cultural: Romanticism as supreme art, Christianity as definitive religion, Hegelian philosophy as ultimate philosophy

Marx's authentic dialectic by contrast:

Consists in exhaustive analysis of the concrete laws presiding over the birth, existence, development, and death of a specific historical-social process

Its revolutionary value: "in the positive understanding of what exists it also includes the understanding of its negation, its necessary destruction"

🧬 The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): A Theory of Knowledge

Written during the period of Jena — Hegel defines his positions against his predecessors, especially Schelling, and constitutes himself as a universal thinker

Function within the system: Introduction to the Logic and to all of philosophy

Shows the path consciousness must traverse if it wishes to elevate itself to philosophical consciousness

While Schelling's access to philosophy occurs at once as "intellectual intuition", Hegel insists subjective finite reason must traverse a long process of development

The political-historical context:

Written during the Battle of Jena — Hegel (like Goethe) celebrates Napoleon's victory over the Prussian army as a triumph of civilization over feudal barbarism

Hegel, as fervent supporter of the Rhenish League, hopes Napoleon will introduce bourgeois social, political, and juridical structures into Germany

The French Revolution signifies a new era for humanity — philosophy must be its intellectual expression

The central idea: Freedom and knowledge are paired

Both Hegel and his disciple-critic Feuerbach attributed to human knowledge the property of liberating or de-alienating humanity

For Feuerbach: freedom conquered through philosophical critique of religion and speculation

For Hegel: conquest of freedom is consequence of a long process of development of social reality and knowledge — it is the daughter of time

The structure of the phenomenological ascent:

Starting point: Immediate object given to natural consciousness

Process: Each grade gives different objects — the subject also intuits itself in the process of knowing the object

The "path to the subject" is an objective path — not the introspective reflection of the cogito

Dialectical base: The experience of "phenomenological" change in the object corresponds to a change in the subject

The whole is experience: Not only consciousness changes, but the object and the criterion — "everything becomes fluid"

Against the charge of relativism:

An "interior necessity" directs the entire series of forms of consciousness

When the process terminates, science discovers that the knowing subject and its object are identical

The subject is the substance itself — the process culminates in the Absolute Spirit's self-knowledge

"The truth is in the whole" = the truth of the Spirit is in the process and its result

✝️ V. PROLOGUE TO THE CUBAN EDITION OF FEUERBACH'S THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

Published in: La esencia del cristianismo de L. Feuerbach, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1976

Epigraph from Marx: "The human essence is not something abstract and immanent to each individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of social relations"

📣 A. Knowing Marxism Means Knowing Its Critique of What Came Before

Between 1845–1846, through three fundamental works, Marx and Engels "settle accounts with their previous philosophical conscience":

The Holy Family

Theses on Feuerbach

The German Ideology

The rupture: Clear demarcation between their new conception of social reality and the human being and the "ideological" — deformed or illusory — conception of German classical philosophy

Especially: Hegel and Feuerbach, then a leading figure of the Young Hegelians

This rupture enables:

A new theoretical and revolutionary direction

Fundamental critique of the contemplative and "pseudo-revolutionary" position of the German left-Hegelian philosophers

The change of terrain:

From the plane of ideas to the plane of reality

Not what men think or imagine they are — but what men actually are

Abandoning the "old terrain" of philosophical battles (critiquing ideas from within ideas) for the new path of revolutionary transformation of social reality — analyzing production relations within a concrete historical social structure

🧠 B. Feuerbach's Achievement and Its Fundamental Limitation

Feuerbach's attempt: Critique of speculative philosophy and religion through inversion — laying the foundations of what he called "the philosophy of the future": an anthropological philosophy of naturalist and sensualist character

The fatal limitation: Critique through simple inversion cannot break the framework of the philosophical problematic encompassing both German classical idealism and Feuerbach's own contemplative materialism

The materialist inversion of speculative idealism does not allow Feuerbach to transcend the limits of speculative and contemplative thought

Hence: "with Feuerbach precisely takes place 'the end of German classical philosophy'"

Feuerbach's relative merits (credit where it is barely due):

He surpasses other Young Hegelians in philosophical development

Develops a more progressive political ideology

The young Marx, though detecting Feuerbach's insufficiencies early (letter to Ruge, November 30, 1842), openly acknowledges advances of Feuerbachian thought

Marx: "Feuerbach is the purgatory of our epoch" — playing on "Feuerbach" = "river of fire" in German (a Marx wordplay noted by Rodríguez Ugidos)

But passing through "the burning passage" of Feuerbachian thought does not mean permanent residence there — as Marx's development makes abundantly clear

🧬 C. Feuerbach's Anthropology: The Generic Being

The key concept: The human being as "generic being" (ser genérico)

Unlike the animal (which has only feeling of self through an exterior object), man alone possesses consciousness of self — consciousness of his generic essence

Even the objects most remote from man are, as his objects, manifestations of his human essence

The essential relation of the finite individual human is with his genus or species — understood as the ideal sum of perfections present in each particular individual

In the interiority of human consciousness: the relation between the limited, finite subject and his unlimited, infinite genus

Feuerbach as a disciple of Aristotle:

Uses the notion of genus in its double logical-biological sense (per Aristotle's Posterior Analytics)

Man is a generic being biologically (engenders man in the fundamental relation of I and Thou)

And conceptually (recognizes in himself his membership in the species through his relation with the other)

The derivation toward religion:

The individual, thinking of himself, feels limited physically, sensibly, spiritually

Only form of surpassing this: thinking of others or of generic essence

From this Feuerbach derives the natural and necessary origin of human religion

"Not to have religion means: thinking only of oneself; to have religion means: thinking of others"

"God and his difference is the origin of religion: the Thou is the god of the I, for without Thee I am not; I depend on Thee; non-Thou = non-I"

Result: religion becomes the solemn revelation of man's hidden treasures — the "public confession of his love secrets"

🔬 D. Feuerbach's Empiricist Naturalism and Its Contradictions

The philosophical foundation: Empiricist naturalism and sensualism — whose central principle is man (not Nature as abstract, not God)

While Hegelian speculative philosophy found its ally in theology, anthropology develops in alliance with natural sciences

If idealist philosophy reduces man to pure consciousness, anthropology must define man "from head to foot" — as a psychophysical unity, a corporeal and natural being with needs, desires, reason, and sensibility

The principle of the new philosophy:

Not the I, not the Absolute Spirit — but the real and total essence of man

Based on reason, but reason "impregnated with the blood of man"

Science as "consciousness of the genera" — object of anthropological philosophy: humanity or human genus with its essential faculties: reason, will, heart

The fundamental contradiction:

Feuerbach rejects the label of materialist and defines himself as anthropologist

Yet understands the relation between nature and spirit, being and consciousness, as one where the subject is being and the predicate is thinking

"Only where thinking is not a subject for itself but predicate of a real being, is thinking also not separated from being"

🚫 E. The Contemplative Materialism of Feuerbach: Marx's Critique

The central failure of Feuerbach's naturalist empiricism:

Complete ignorance of practical and social activity as the fundamental principle of the man-nature relation and of human relations

German classical philosophy (Kant through Hegel) had, in ascending line, emphasized the active and conditioning character of the subject in cognitive and historical-cultural activity

Feuerbach reverses this — restates the human problem in different terms: "You rise to the object only by lowering yourself to being an object for another"

This is the contemplative character of Feuerbachian materialism that Marx widely highlights in the Theses on Feuerbach

The abstract "concrete" man of Feuerbach:

His naturalist empiricism leads him to completely ignore historical and social practice as the fundamental principle

The instincts, love, sex, sensuality constitute the basis of social relations

Sensation, pathos, love or pain link men to each other and to nature in a relation of ahistorical and asocial passivity

This supposed "concrete, real, singular" man is actually an abstract and ideal construction

To rebut Hegel's speculative-spiritual man, Feuerbach constructs a new modality of speculation: sensualist speculation

The irony: The Hegelian conception of man (as a historical-cultural product, living expression of his epoch's spirit, however essentialist) is more concrete and real than Feuerbach's man of flesh and blood

Feuerbach sought the common and general present in both the proletarian and the peasant, the intellectual, the merchant, the painter — independent of epoch and place

What could he find but an ideological image of man, a man who exists nowhere? 🎪

⚓ F. Freedom in Feuerbach vs. Freedom in Hegel

Both thinkers share: Freedom as central problem; knowledge as liberating force

Hegel: Freedom as product of the slow dialectical, ascending process of Absolute Spirit — a long history of cultural and spiritual struggles and conquests; freedom as consciousness of necessity

Feuerbach: Freedom obtained through the critical and demystifying activity of modern philosophy

The Socratic "know thyself" as method

Religion and theology as products of human self-deception — a "philosophical reading" of religion suffices to bring enlightenment

This makes Feuerbach's method a return to 18th-century rationalism — an illuminist method applied to a 19th-century problem

Feuerbach's "genetic-critical" method:

Understanding religion = understanding its origin

Inverting the inversion: returning to profane man what he had hypostasized in the sacred individual

Suppression of religion is not expressed as "God does not exist" (merely negative or atheist) — but positively: "Man is the God of man"

But this positive suppression remains within the contemplative plane — Feuerbach's utopian communism rests on the premise that social inequality is a product of Christianity rather than the inverse

💥 G. The Mechanism of Religious Alienation According to Feuerbach

The gnoseological and psychological mechanism of religious inversion:

Step 1: Separation of concepts and thoughts (predicate) from real being (subject)

Step 2: Granting independent and primary value to abstract thought (inversion of the real relation)

Result: thoughts and ideas are extrapolated, hypostatized — transformed into an independent substance, an omnipotent creative substantial principle: God or the Absolute Idea

The anti-humanist phenomenon of alienation

For Feuerbach: "if the secret of theology is anthropology, the secret of speculative philosophy is theology"

The empiricist reduction:

Whether God exists reduces to: does the general concept have existence independent of human consciousness?

Religion explained ultimately by psychological reasons — "pathological psychology"

God = the imagined and fantasized principle of the totality of satisfied human wishes and desires

"God is what I am not and desire to be" — the fantasized sublimation of human pain

"To enrich God, man must impoverish himself; for God to be everything, man must be nothing"

Marx's definitive critique:

"Feuerbach starts from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world, and a real one. His work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular foundation lifts itself above itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness of this secular basis"

(Thesis IV on Feuerbach)

Therefore: one must theoretically critique and practically revolutionize the terrestrial family — not merely discover the earthly secret of the holy family

🕊️ VI. NOTES ON JOHN PAUL II'S ENCYCLICAL LABOREM EXERCENS

Published: September 14, 1981

🎭 A. The Encyclical as Intelligent Anti-Marxist Document

Context: Published 90 years after Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum — the foundational theses of the Catholic Church on the social question

Acknowledges: Growing concern of the Church with economic-political problems — the direction of the international workers' movement, the role of unions, peace, human rights, liberation from exploitation and colonialism

Why? Because objective reality and its contradictions impose themselves — forcing Catholic ideologues and theologians to take sides

Tactical brilliance of the document:

Uses language close to Marxist economic and sociological theory

While defining a political-social option against Marxism and the international communist movement

The language of "worker," "labor," "capital," "exploitation" — deployed to systematically undercut the Marxist analysis

The "third position" illusion:

Claims to oppose both capitalism and collectivism

Rodríguez Ugidos destroys this pretense: "In matters of ideological struggle, third positions are always impossible"

A third position always indicates, in the final instance, an apology for prevailing capitalism or, at best, a reformist policy that can only benefit bourgeois society

📊 B. The Philosophical Foundation: Neothomism and Personalism

Core philosophical base:

Neothomist and personalist philosophies

Based on divine creation and the generic human essence of labor

Apparent paradox: Man is simultaneously a divine creature and a product of his own labor activity

Resolution: The dimension of labor is fundamental, but man receives from God the mandate to dominate the earth

Man is active and creative principle — but "in the image and likeness of his Creator" — a God who appears as "worker-God"

Work defined as: the characteristic that defines man as an active and responsible person

🔍 C. The Strategic Abstraction: Destroying the Class Analysis

The key methodological move:

Establishes difference between objective labor (technique) and subjective labor (man as subject of work)

The Church is interested predominantly in the subjective dimension — because therein lie the sources of human dignity

"If we abstract from the objective aspect of work and the different types of work... 'the very foundation of the ancient division of men into social classes disappears'"

Rodríguez Ugidos: EXACTLY. This is the point. If you strip work of its historical-concrete conditions, of the relations of social production, you obtain the abstract category of labor-in-general — and thereby make class analysis impossible by design 🎯

The result: concepts as vague as "work in general," "man in general," "work for man and not man for work" — behind which there are no real objects, only carefully generated empty ideas in service of well-defined interests

🏦 D. Work and Capital: The Manufactured Unity

Encyclical's claim: Work and capital cannot be separated or counterposed — any more than the men behind them can be

The capitalist error (economism): Treating work and capital in the same perspective — interpreting work only economically

The materialist error (materialism): Establishing primacy of material over spiritual and personal

Result: dialectical materialism is characterized as "anti-humanist" — "incapable of offering to reflection on human work sufficient and definitive bases" for the primacy of man over capital

The hidden conclusion: Since the principle of priority of labor over capital can be violated equally in both social systems — capitalism and "collectivism" — the Church erects itself as guardian of a divine principle applicable regardless of which system is in question

This includes: Cuba, the USSR, Poland, the United States — all equally subject to the Church's humanist critique

The intention is crystal clear: to place both the socialist world and the capitalist world on the same moral plane, denying the fundamental distinction between exploiting and exploited systems

🔑 E. Property and the "Authentic Socialization" Swindle

The encyclical endorses the right to private property — but "in the broader context of the universal right to use the goods of creation"

Rejects: "Rigid capitalism" defending exclusive right to private property as an "untouchable dogma"

Also rejects: Socialist collectivization — because transferring means of production from private owners to society "does not sufficiently" constitute socialization

Under collectivism: they pass to the administration of "another group of people" who "dispose of them" at national scale and could monopolize their administration disregarding human rights

The "authentic" socialization proposed:

Associating labor to ownership of capital through autonomous bodies with respect to public powers and the State

In other words: socialization within capitalism, from capitalism

The eternal structure of work presupposes the unity of work and capital — not their antagonism

The explicit statement: "These multiple and so desired reforms cannot be implemented THROUGH THE APRIORISTIC ELIMINATION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION" (emphasis in original)

Rodríguez Ugidos's verdict:

"The social doctrine of the Church, contained in the papal encyclical 'Laborem Exercens,' without doubt represents a reformist formula in the service of the interests of capital, sanctioned by the grace of God and the Holy Scriptures" ✂️

🇨🇺 VII. OBJECTIVITY AND VALUATION IN HISTORY WILL ABSOLVE ME

Presented at: "XXX Anniversary of the Assault on the Moncada Barracks" event, Academy of Sciences of Cuba, 1983

Published in: Revolución y Cultura, No. 7, 1983; Universidad de La Habana, No. 223, 1984

🔫 A. History Will Absolve Me as the First Programmatic Document of the Cuban Revolution

Context: The January 1, 1959 triumph answered demands for economic, political, and social liberation after 57 years of neocolonial dependence

The speech: Pronounced by Fidel Castro during the trial against the Moncada Barracks assailants — collecting the aspirations of over half a century of struggle by the working class, poor and middle peasantry, students, revolutionary intelligentsia, and urban petty bourgeoisie

The social foundation:

A movement of the people and inspired by the people — specifically "that great unredeemed mass"

Not a movement of accommodated and conservative sectors

The revolutionary movement of democratic-popular and anti-imperialist tendency was destined to:

Rescue national sovereignty from imperialist domination

Destroy the dependent structures of an underdeveloped society

Agrarian reform, liquidation of inequality, social injustice, unemployment, illiteracy, racial discrimination

📊 B. The Three Planes of Concrete Analysis in the Document

Political plane:

Progressive process of dependence and subjugation of national sovereignty to Yankee interests

Disappearance of the few democratic freedoms existing before the treacherous coup of March 10, 1952

Central political objective: conquest of public freedom, political democracy, constitutional guarantees

Economic plane:

Denunciation of economic deformation under foreign capital penetration

Domination of latifundist and bourgeois oligarchy

Balance: underdeveloped economy structurally deformed by monocultural agriculture and precarious industrialization

Chronic unemployment as permanent threat

Conclusion: declining living standards of popular masses contrasting with growing enrichment of large industrial and latifundist proprietors

Social plane:

Inhuman living conditions of rural peasantry and agricultural workers

Illiteracy, deplorable public health, racial and gender discrimination

Generalized corruption, looting of public treasury

🔑 C. The Six Revolutionary Problems

"The problem of land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education, and the problem of the health of the people" — six points toward which the revolutionary process would resolutely direct its efforts

"The future of the nation and the solution of its problems cannot continue depending on the selfish interest of a dozen financiers, the cold calculations on profits traced in their air-conditioned offices by ten or twelve magnates"

Social problems of this magnitude require revolution and revolutionary procedures that go to the root of problems and eradicate them definitively

"In the modern world, no social problem is resolved by spontaneous generation"

🌀 D. The Marxist Character of the Moncada Program (NOT Socialist, but Marxist)

The paradox: The PCC Platform insists on the Marxist character of the Moncada program while acknowledging it is not a socialist program

Resolution:

The democratic-popular, agrarian, and anti-imperialist objectives respond to a concrete analysis of the contradictions specific to Cuban society at that historical-concrete phase of development

This is an important methodological problem of Marxist-Leninist method regarding the tactics of revolutionary struggle

Lenin: "It would be a cardinal error to think that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution" — on the contrary, the proletariat cannot prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie without a struggle on all fronts for democracy

The revolutionary method: Given the social conditions of Cuba in the 1950s, the armed struggle is and must be the primary form of combat

Fidel Castro's conclusion: The only way to successfully combat the Batista regime was to organize an independent movement and unleash popular armed insurrection as the highest form of mass struggle

Opposition parties of the bourgeois opposition were incapable of mobilizing the people — vacillating, inept, subordinated to reactionary and anti-communist imperialist policy

📅 E. The Stages of the Cuban Revolutionary Process

October 15, 1960: Fidel Castro proclaims the Moncada program has been fulfilled — only then does the socialist transformation of society become the objective

The specific characteristic of the Cuban transition:

Democratic-revolutionary to socialist stage under the same social-class leadership in a relatively brief period

This transition is explained by the fusion of objective analysis and class-valorative perspective throughout the programmatic document

Objective understanding of the social situation is possible precisely by virtue of the valorative, ideological-class perspective — and this class perspective guarantees the objective analysis of the concrete historical-social situation

🚫 F. Refuting Bourgeois Distortions of the Cuban Revolution

The book Cuba Under Castro: The Limits of Charisma (among others by authors including E. González, Andrés Suárez, C. Mesa-Lago, J. Domínguez, A. de la Cuesta, B. Goldenberg, T. Draper):

"Fidelism became essentially a non-class revolutionary doctrine; therefore, it differed from orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which emphasizes class analysis and prescribes the vanguard role to the Cuban proletariat"

These theorists place subjective factors and voluntarist motivations as determinants of the revolutionary situation

Claim: Cuba in the 1950s was not an agrarian society but an "urban society" with some of the most highly developed socioeconomic profiles in Latin America — therefore no objective conditions for revolution

The "generational phenomenon" theory: Wars of Ten Years = generation of 1868; Independence War = generation of 1895; abortive revolution of 1933 = generation of 1930; Revolution of January 1, 1959 = generation of the Moncada, the young "bearded ones"

Conclusion: The 1959 Revolution is a "purely generational phenomenon" — an elite of young Fidelists, not popular masses

Rodríguez Ugidos's definitive response:

The distortion of statistical data and intentional falsification of reality alone can explain these conclusions

Behind all attempts to falsify the reality of the Cuban revolutionary process: the same idea, the same interest, the same logic — the idea, interest, and logic of reaction

Against the subjectivist logic of reaction stands the objective logic of reality and of Marxist-Leninist theory — "the simple logic of the people", expounded masterfully by Fidel in the Moncada program

🧪 VIII. THE NEO-ALTHUSSERIAN MODEL OF MARXIST PHILOSOPHY IN ITS LATIN AMERICAN VERSION

Published in: Materialismo histórico en la etapa contemporánea, Editorial de la Academia de Ciencias de Bulgaria, 1986

Presented at: Encounter of Philosophers at the Varna Summer School, 1984

🇫🇷 A. Althusser's Influence and the "Chain Reaction" of Vulgarization

Louis Althusser exercises strong influence on Latin American Marxism — particularly in Mexico, where the greatest concentration of Althusserian influence is found

The Latin American exile (from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, etc.) concentrated many Marxist theorists in Mexico from the second half of the 1960s

Althusser arrived accompanied by other neo-Marxist influences: L. Colletti, K. Korsch, G. Lukács

The two Althussers: Not one but two — whose conceptions are also contradictory and incomplete:

First Althusser: Scientific positions — dialectical materialism as "theory of theoretical practices", philosophy as metacience

Second Althusser: Practicist positions — the "dissolution of philosophy into politics"

The chain reaction:

Althusser pretends to fill the "gaps of Marx"

Latin American neo-Althusserians pretend to fill the "gaps of Althusser"

Result: "untracing the path trod by Marx, Engels, and Lenin" — an impressive feat of intellectual regression

🇲🇽 B. Enrique González Rojo: The Scientificist Neo-Althusserian

Key work: Para leer a Althusser (Editorial Diógenes, S.A., México, 1974)

Three readings of Althusserian texts:

First: "blind reading" from pre-Althusserian traditionalist instruments

Second: properly Althusserian reading — convinces him of the "unjust ideological criticisms" of dogmatism

Third: "post-Althusserian" critical reading — "beyond Althusser"

González Rojo's premises (from Althusser):

Marxist theory comprises: a philosophy (dialectical materialism) and a science (historical materialism)

From the logical viewpoint: dialectical materialism has preeminence over historical materialism (its object is the scientificity of all sciences)

From the "chrono-epistemological" viewpoint: historical materialism has preeminence over dialectical materialism (science of history precedes "theory of theoretical practices")

The two "deviations" González Rojo claims to eliminate:

The "Soviet-Hegelian deviation" — whereby historical materialism is conceived as dialectical materialism applied to social life

The false subordination of philosophy to historical materialism (characteristic of "philosophers of praxis" like Labriola and Gramsci)

Rodríguez Ugidos's critique: These premises are not argued or demonstrated — González Rojo simply declares "the Althusserian truth" and attributes a gratuitous thesis to "Soviet-Hegelian deviations"

Lenin's actual position: Marx's fundamental contribution was the extension of materialist philosophy (not dialectical materialism) to the knowledge of human society — enriched by dialectics as the doctrine of development in its most complete, profound, and non-one-sided form

The scientificist consequence:

Philosophy conceived as science of sciences or metacience — its contents de-ideologized

Philosophy and science coincide: their "theoretical practices" operate from "theoretical means of production" reflecting things objectively

Philosophy's object: the sciences — its practice limited to theoretically and methodologically elaborating the results of science

The "new ontology" demand:

González Rojo criticizes Althusser for not posing the problem of "new ontology" within Marxist philosophy

His "new ontology": the philosophical study of "natural reality in its profundity and infinity"

Rodríguez Ugidos's response: This is not a new ontology — it is a regression to "natural philosophy" of metaphysical and speculative character — precisely what Engels demolished in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy

The Leninist principle of the unity of dialectics, logic, and theory of knowledge excludes any possibility of an ontology in the traditional sense

González Rojo's "new ontology" separates the theory of being from the theory of thinking — a metaphysical separation foreign to dialectical materialism

🇲🇽 C. Raúl Olmedo: The Practicist Neo-Althusserian

Key work: El anti-método: introducción a la filosofía marxista (Editorial J. Mortiz, S.A., México, 1980)

Goes much further than Althusser — in directions Althusser explicitly rejected (per Althusser's letter to Olmedo, Paris, January 8, 1975, published in Historia y Sociedad, No. 17, Mexico, 1978)

The central thesis: With the emergence of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the need for a philosophical theory of knowledge procedures disappears — as do the categories and logical or methodological rules that ground the dialectical order of the knowledge process

Any attempt to construct a general theory and logic of the knowledge process within Marxism opens a fissure through which idealism enters and materialism escapes

Therefore: Marxist philosophy neither produces knowledge nor constitutes a methodology — it consists exclusively in a (materialist) taking of position and leaving the particular sciences freely to produce their knowledge and methods

Conclusion: One is a materialist by doing sciences and an idealist by doing philosophy 🤡

The "de-philosophizing of sciences" principle:

Philosophy = politics in the sciences

Function: affirm the primacy of matter over consciousness — and protect science from all idealist (i.e., philosophical) interference

After historical materialism: philosophy has definitively lost its "last refuge" — its real function is to be "condensed reflection of historical materialism"

Even this is not permanent: in practice, philosophy continues to exist as effect of the class struggle — but it has no content of its own, no right to delimit its own field of action

Rodríguez Ugidos's verdict:

The "only unique contribution" of Olmedo to Althusserianism: incorporating a metaphysical and foreign ontology of nature — which degrades the Althusserian conception rather than elevating it

The path from Althusser to González Rojo to Olmedo = the path of progressive vulgarization of Marxism — its simplification and abstract, metaphysical comprehension

Quoting Marx on vulgar economy: "all systems lose what animates and gives them vigor and end up forming a hodgepodge on the compilers' table"

The vulgarization of Marxist philosophy consists in: "smoothing out contradictions, reducing and eliminating the specific character of dialectical and historical materialism vis-à-vis the sciences, ideological forms, and practice"

✝️ IX. PROLOGUE TO THE CUBAN EDITION OF KAUTSKY'S CHRISTIANITY: ITS ORIGINS AND FOUNDATIONS

Published in: El cristianismo, sus orígenes y fundamentos de K. Kautsky, Editorial Política, La Habana, 1986

📜 A. Engels on the Study of Early Christianity

Engels's 1882 article: "Bruno Bauer and Primitive Christianity" — published in Der Socialdemokrat

The revolutionary relevance: Understanding Christianity's origins and triumph is necessary for modern socialism

"It is not possible to get rid of a religion that subjected all the Roman world empire and dominated for 1800 years the greater part of civilized humanity with merely declaring that it is a collection of nonsense gathered by fraudsters"

Must be explained from the historical conditions in which it arose and reached its dominant position

Engels's comparison: Early Christianity and the modern workers' movement share points of similarity and essential differences:

Both are movements of exploited and oppressed masses — a "revolutionary party"

But: early Christian socialism seeks salvation not in transformation of society (as modern labor movement) but in eternal life after death

📚 B. Kautsky's Work (1905–1908): El Cristianismo, sus Orígenes y Fundamentos

Written between 1905 and 1908 — when Kautsky was still considered a faithful interpreter of Marx and Engels

Method: Materialist conception of history applied to religion's origins

Key demonstrations:

The popular and revolutionary origin of primitive Christianity — a movement of the poor, oppressed, and exploited

Christianity did not transform into a world religion until it lost its revolutionary character — following Engels's 1895 theses

"Christianity did not triumph as a subversive force, but as a conservative one, as a new prop of oppression and exploitation, which not only did not eliminate imperial power, slavery, poverty of the masses, and concentration of wealth... but perpetuated these conditions"

🔄 C. Kautsky's Contradictory Evolution: From Marxist to Renegade

Lenin's characterization in The State and Revolution:

"In the person of Kautsky, German Social Democracy seemed to declare: I maintain my revolutionary conceptions (1899). I recognize... the inevitable character of the social revolution of the proletariat (1902). I recognize that a new era of revolutions has begun (1909). But despite all this, I retreat with respect to what Marx said already in 1852, as soon as the question is posed of the tasks of the proletarian revolution in relation to the State (1912)"

Kautsky's evolution:

1880s–1890s: Positive role in spreading Marxist ideas:

Economic Lessons of C. Marx (1887) — popular version of Capital

The Agrarian Question (1899)

Commentary to the Erfurt Program (1892) — exposed central Marxist theses accessibly

Already deviating: Considered the economic struggle the decisive form of class struggle, relegating political struggle — sometimes placed parliamentary struggle as the fundamental means

Engels criticized Erfurt program's errors — particularly the omission of recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat

The Parlamentarism, Popular Legislation, and Social Democracy (1893): defended conquest of state power through parliamentary majority

Anti-Bernstein (1899): inconsistent and vacillating in opposition to revisionism — avoided the cardinal problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat — essentially delivered to the opportunist position

The Road to Power (1909): Lenin's assessment as "the last and best Marxist work of Kautsky" — yet still placed peaceful forms of class struggle in the foreground and avoided the question of armed insurrection and destruction of the bourgeois state machinery

The Vorwärts Scandal:

Engels's 1895 Introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France was mutilated by the social-democratic editors

Engels wrote to Kautsky on April 1, 1895: "I read today, with astonishment, an extract of my 'Introduction' published without my knowledge, truncated in such a way that I appear in it as a peaceful worshipper of legality at any cost"

Kautsky's own role in the tergiversation was documented — he acknowledged in Neue Zeit (1909) that "revolutionary passages were crossed out... in Berlin... as too revolutionary"

Lenin's notation: Kautsky himself was not innocent of the reformist mutilation

The First World War (final rupture):

Develops the anti-Marxist theory of "ultra-imperialism"

Thought it possible to overcome production anarchy and war by conciliating interests of different countries' capitals through international cartels and trusts — divorcing economics from politics

Lenin demolished this: The Bankruptcy of the Second International (1915); Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)

After October Revolution: Pronounced against it and against dictatorship of the proletariat — defending "pure democracy"

Lenin's The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) delivered the definitive verdict

Final works (1927–1929):

The Materialist Conception of History — revises philosophical foundations of Marxism, dissolves the social into the biological, proposes supra-class conception of the State

Admitted the possibility of conciliating dialectical materialist world-conception with positivism, empiriocriticism, and other contemporary idealist doctrines

Lenin's balanced assessment:

"Many of his works tell us that he knew how to be a Marxist historian, and those works will remain as the lasting patrimony of the proletariat, despite the subsequent apostasy of their author"

The Cuban edition presents the Kautsky of the Marxist period — not the Kautsky of the renegade period

🏝️ X. THE RATIONAL SENSUALISM OF JOSÉ DE LA LUZ Y CABALLERO AND HIS STRUGGLE AGAINST 19TH-CENTURY ECLECTIC SPIRITUALISM

Unpublished chapter destined for a scientific work on the History of Philosophy, in collaboration with the Academy of Sciences of the USSR — completed 1984

👤 A. Luz y Caballero: The Man and His Historical Position

José de la Luz y Caballero (1800–1862) — one of the towering figures of Cuban and Latin American thought of the first half of the 19th century

Born into a wealthy Cuban family of clergy and militia:

Father was perpetuo regidor of the Havana City Council from 1797, lieutenant colonel

Renounced 31,701 pesos in chaplaincies — lacked genuine religious vocation

Sympathizer of Protestant ideas — saw Luther as the Descartes of religion and Descartes as the Luther of philosophy 🎯

Intellectual formation:

Read Descartes, Maine de Biran, Malebranche initially; then Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Bentham, Voltaire

Traveled through the United States and Europe — met personally: Walter Scott, Longfellow, Gay-Lussac, Cuvier, Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe

In 1824: Substituted José Antonio Saco in the chair of philosophy at the Seminary of San Carlos

Declared himself disciple of Félix Varela from the opening discourse

Already an admirer of Descartes (method, not innatism), Newton, and physiology

Influenced by Scottish Hamilton, knowledgeable of German classical philosophy (though not a partisan of great speculative systems)

Admired Kant for his critique of dogmatic ontology and metaphysics

Scientific breadth:

Logic, ethics, history, jurisprudence, political economy

Mathematics, hydraulics, mechanics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, psychology, pathology, physiology

A determinist, informed of Lamarck and the debates between E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and J. Cuvier

Partisan of phrenologist Juan José Gall's ideas; inclined toward evolutionism and progressive organization of matter

(Darwin published his fundamental work three years after Luz's death)

🏛️ B. The Class Determination of His Political Positions

Represents the interests of the nascent Cuban Creole bourgeoisie — maintaining reformist political positions, fearful that an independence movement could trigger a Black rebellion like Haiti and ruin their properties

His political restraint:

At the time he began as thinker and educator (1820s), independence attempts had already occurred and failed — lacked popular support (movements of Infante and Agüero, the Conspiracy of the Rays and Soles of Bolívar)

The Creole bourgeoisie was willing only to fight for reforms from the Metropolis — at most, autonomous provincial government within the Spanish state

Even Félix Varela, who openly advocated independence, later became skeptical and recommended prudence to disciples

His actual political role:

Defines himself as "active member of the homeland's beehive"

Led the liberal intellectual group after Saco's exile, assumed defense of Saco against Captain General Tacón's despotism

Ramiro Guerra (Cuban historian): The failure of these efforts "ruined his health and led him to make the irrevocable decision to renounce all political activity"

Result: life of Luz as mute protest against the colonial regime — when politics closed, he consecrated himself to teaching

Assessment by Carlos Rafael Rodríguez: 🏆

"Neither revolutionary chief nor retarding force was Don José de la Luz"

"Awakener of consciences, ideologue of bourgeois groups, reformist at the moments when reformism was an acceptable path, though not the only one"

"The political resonance of his work was greater than he himself had thought at the end of his days"

José Martí's characterization:

"He did not write in books, which reward, but in souls, which tend to forget. He knew everything that was known in his epoch, but not to teach what he knew, but to transmit it. He sowed men"

His aphorism on systems: "All systems and no system, there is the system"

🌎 C. Latin American Context: The Ideological Battlefield of the First Half of the 19th Century

🗺️ The Post-Independence Landscape

Independence culminates in 1825 for most Latin American territories — except Cuba and Puerto Rico (remain under Hispanic colonial domination until end of century)

The fundamental contradiction: Independence did not liberate definitively from feudal structures — national bourgeoisies were still weak, the working class not yet constituted as independent social group

After independence wars remain unresolved: conquest of political democracy, final abolition of slavery and peonage, unimpeded development of industry and commerce

The political reality:

Most states fall under the power of oligarchic landowner sectors in structural alliance with the reactionary Catholic Church

Only Paraguay (with a progressive government supported by popular masses) could temporarily expropriate the Creole oligarchy and impede penetration of foreign capital

The rest: from colonized to neo-colonized status — British capital penetrating and subjugating the new states

🧭 The Three Philosophical Currents

Progressive tendencies (inspired by Enlightenment and revolutionary France):

Argentina: Lafinur, Fernández Agüero, Diego Alcorta (under Condillac, Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy influence); Alcorta takes frankly materialist positions under Cabanis's influence; later López and Alsina incline to La Mettrie's materialism and ideas of Condorcet and Turgot

Colombia: Destutt de Tracy and Maine de Biran exercise determining influence

Guayaquil: José Joaquín Olmedo and Vicente Rocafuerte (encyclopedist deism)

Chile: Camilo Henríquez (Rousseau-style encyclopedism)

Cuba: Félix Varela and José de la Luz y Caballero (Lockean ideas in fierce struggle against eclectic spiritualism and scholasticism)

Eclectic spiritualism (dominant in bourgeoisies once in power):

Represented in Brazil (Mont' Alverne, Magalhaes); Uruguay (De la Peña, Ellauri); Bolivia (Terrazas, San Román); and even in Cuba (José Zacarías and Manuel González del Valle — but with limited diffusion due to Cuba's particular conditions)

"Formula suitable" for those wanting to leave Condillac without returning to Saint Thomas

Victor Cousin as the leading figure — his eclectic spiritualism exercises indubitable influence in Cuba and especially in other Latin American countries from the 1830s–1840s

Catholic philosophy (most rigid and intransigent):

Pedro Gual, José Ignacio Moreno, Vicente Solano — defending Thomist world-conception

Later: Jaime Balmes's influence — admitting compatibility of philosophy and religion

Bishop of Michoacán, Jesús Munguía — receives influences of Descartes, Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, Cousin — advocates Catholic world-conception updated to historical requirements

Other progressive currents:

Phrenology (materialist threat to idealist-religious currents) — represented in Mexico by José Ramón Pacheco, with some influence on Luz y Caballero

Bourgeois liberalism — Lastarria and Bilbao (Chile), José María Luis Mora (Mexico) — fighting for reforms against latifundist domination

Utopian socialism (Sainsimonian) — in Argentina: Esteban Echeverría and Juan Bautista Alberdi; spreads to Chile and Uruguay

🔍 The Class Dynamics Behind the Philosophical Struggle

During independence: Landowner class adopts Enlightenment ideas and encyclopedism to fight scholasticism and colonial regime's dominant ideology

Once in power: Landowner class and most reactionary bourgeois sectors abandon Enlightenment ideas and adopt eclectic spiritualist positions

Small bourgeoisie and progressive bourgeois sectors: Radicalize their ideological and philosophical positions

The eclectic current represents a philosophy of compromise with the post-independence social status quo — opposing sensualist materialism and atheism while not openly rejecting the development of sciences and reason

📝 D. Luz y Caballero's Philosophical Forms and Their Significance

Three fundamental forms in which Luz exposes his thought:

Aphorisms: Brief sentences formulating conceptions synthetically — without developed argumentation

Elencos (academic-didactic writings): Central theses as basis for oral development with disciples — don't permit knowing his thought in full amplitude

Philosophical polemic (published in Cuban newspapers and journals, 1838–1840): The key to understanding his whole doctrine — explicitly exposes ideas on philosophical method, origin of ideas, eclecticism, ideology, and ethics

Five tomes of polemical works — the obligatory reference for clarifying aphorisms and elencos

Manuel Sanguily's insight: Luz "identified philosophy with the homeland, truth with justice" — explains why he preferred teaching and polemic to systematic elaboration

The Elencos de Carraguao of 1835:

Elaborated as director of Colegio San Cristóbal de Carraguao in 1834

Served as "primer" for many Cubans before 1868

The "Appendix-Critique" of 152 theses most evidently expresses Luz's empiricist-sensualist positions (per Antonio Sánchez de Bustamante y Montoro)

🔬 E. The Epistemology of Luz y Caballero: Senso-Rationalism

🌡️ The Problem of Method as the Central Question

The "Advertencia" to the Elencos de Carraguao (published May 1838 in the Gaceta de Puerto Príncipe) initiates the famous polemic on method

Opponents: Manuel Castellanos Mojarrieta ("Rumilio"), Miguel Storch ("El Dómine"), and a disciple signing as "El Adicto"

Luz's thesis: The study of natural sciences must precede the study of logic and spiritual or moral sciences

Against scholastic method which began teaching with speculative disciplines: logic and metaphysics

"The method question" = same question debated between spiritualist and sensualist systems — "the to be or not to be of the illustrious British bard" — a matter of life or death for philosophy

Published in 13 extensive articles in the Diario de la Habana and Gaceta de Puerto Príncipe, May 1838–end 1839

🔭 The Theory of Knowledge: Sensualism and Its Rational Completion

Empiricist foundation (Lockean):

First thesis of Elencos de Carraguao 1835: "Experience is the starting point of every kind of knowledge"

"The understanding necessarily begins with the concrete"

Knowledge goes from the particular to the general

The role of abstraction:

Abstraction is not diminished by empiricism — it is required for science

"The invariable law of human reason consists in beginning with the concrete to elevate itself to the abstract; practice before theory, to then with the progress of science be fecundated anew by theory"

Without abstraction: impossible to raise the edifice of science

Abstractions have an objective foundation: geometry elaborates abstractions from observation of nature — "the line was in nature, but not separately, but as the contour or term of extension... and on these bases, and from abstraction to abstraction, the understanding raises the sumptuous edifice of science"

Against Condillac: Luz opposes the idea that reform of the language of science depends on the exactness of language — "observation is the cause, exactness of language is the effect, and not the inverse"

The practice-theory dialectic:

Agriculture and land measurement drove the development of geometry from the needs of Nile inhabitants

Political economy was born in Great Britain stimulated by growing industrial and commercial development

Theory and practice must go together — not only does practice determine theory, but ideas effectively influence actions

The progress of science: A genuinely empiricist conception of sciences founded on practice means understanding that human knowledge is not absolute or immutable but "perfectible" — in constant process of renewal

Even logic is susceptible to development

Languages of science are objects of progress — but language is the effect, not the cause

🧩 Logic: Inductive versus Formal

Traditional formal logic:

"More for avoiding errors than for producing truths, or what is equal, more negative than positive"

Has barely advanced since Aristotle systematized its principles

Modern logic (from Bacon to Kant): Studies mental faculties to direct them to the investigation of truth — is essentially method and guide of knowledge

Needs data from other sciences to obtain the method of knowledge

The key insight:

Logic is not an "instrument or universal key with which all doors of human knowledge are opened"

"In each science is found exemplified the method without it being necessary to bring it from another part"

Logic is "a legitimate child of nature and the sciences, and once formed, it contributes to the development of human knowledge"

Against scholastic belief: All knowledge derives from logic — sciences are simply applied logic

Luz inverts this: Know nature before knowing the instrument of knowledge

"Man must first begin with the exterior than with the interior; better said, he cannot know his interior except precisely by virtue of the knowledge of the exterior"

Logical processes are not innate or instinctive:

Developed from the procedure we necessarily and naturally follow in the investigation of things

Reflection of objects in the mind awakens the desire to know causes — then begins analysis, deduction by induction, analogy, comparison

The human being as both spectator and actor on earth — as intelligence develops, "begins to inquire the why of what has been observed, in which inquiry he fulfills his role as actor"

🏗️ The Reform of Education in Cuba

Based on: Principle of precedence of natural sciences over intellectual sciences AND idea of the unity of sciences

Following Félix Varela's teachings: Shake the yoke of authority and instill critical spirit among Cuban youth

The teacher's task: Develop true critical spirit of philosophical criticism and freedom of thought based on:

Observation of natural facts

Knowledge of all sciences

Critical study of the history of philosophy — serving "to instruct oneself on the achievements and wanderings of the understanding and glimpse their causes"

Why natural sciences first?

History of sciences shows natural sciences developed first — knowledge of natural phenomena is less complex

Knowledge of man is "the most complex, since in his being are united the properties of all bodies and the faculties of all of his genus with the addition of rationality"

Therefore: study of man is first in order of importance but last in the order of time and difficulty

Natural sciences have proven Bacon's method — this must be applied to human sciences as well

A single philosophical-scientific method:

"Will prevent the adult humanity from being lulled with the same instrument, or with the same tone that lulled infant humanity"

Against "flat empiricism":

"As long as the facts are not reduced to a key, but float as independent and scattered, there is no theory, or science properly speaking: one will not have passed the most superficial empiricism"

⚔️ F. The Battle Against Eclectic Spiritualism: Luz vs. Victor Cousin

👻 Cousin's Eclecticism: The Enemy Defined

Victor Cousin's philosophical conception:

Selects "critically" philosophical truths from preceding systems using "common sense" as guiding criterion

Divides philosophical systems into four groups: sensationalism (starts from the object of sensations), idealism (reduces all to objects of reason), skepticism (emerges from contradiction between the two), and mysticism (only way out through faith)

These four = four moments of consciousness — history of philosophy as perpetual transit and fusion between them

Based on Scottish school + Cartesian cogito ergo sum — pretends to fuse the true ideas of all four systems to elevate reason to absolute ideas

The actual function of Cousin's eclecticism:

Open struggle against revolutionary bourgeois ideology and 18th-century materialism whose foundation is in Lockean empiricism and Condillac's sensationalism

Ultimate objective: Confront sensualist-tinged revolutionary ideas and submit university teaching to the Church

From philosophical standpoint: dilutes philosophy into religion, uses decontextualized facts and formulas — instead of multilateral vision it deforms the object investigated

🎯 Luz's Critical Penetration of Eclecticism's Essence

The third position gambit exposed:

Eclecticism adopts a pretended third position — apartándose (distancing itself) from idealism, accusing sensationalists of being "materialists" and "exclusivists" to frighten and confuse the unwary

In essence: explains some phenomena from one doctrine, others from the opposed doctrine — the sensationalism and spiritualism in conflict

Its futile attempt to concile the contradictory and irreconcilable is the characteristic sophistry of eclecticism

The "official" character of eclectic philosophy:

A philosophy "on payroll" — its critique of sensationalism and its connection to the French Revolution expresses the petty sectarianism of those wanting to "lower the carat value of one of the greatest centuries of humanity"

"Being an eclectic means always being prepared for retreat: the pro and the contra: diluting thought with so many supports, distinctions, and tangles that the poor youth (who is the only one I truly pity) doesn't know which card to stick with"

1839: "One of the reasons eclecticism found echo in France was the application made of it to politics: to a people tired of the struggle of opinions, it came to dazzle them with a sedative by speaking of conciliation"

🧪 The Specific Philosophical Errors of Eclecticism

The "psychological method" of Cousin:

For eclecticism, the first and absolute knowledge is the I — supreme criterion of truth

Luz opposes: empiricist principle by which knowledge requires the presence of exterior objects

Observation and objective representation constitute the touchstone of all scientific knowledge — including psychology

Cousin's supposed psychology without this criterion: establishes unjustified abyss between external and internal observation — deducing a pretended spiritualist psychology as aprioristic foundation for subsequent ontological and metaphysical constructions

The critique of ontology:

Luz's empiricist-inductionist principle: the idea of God cannot appear in human understanding except through the exterior world

Man arrives at the idea of God through scientific knowledge of nature — a "grandiose induction"

Therefore the idea of God is relative — derived from objective knowledge of nature

"The science of this century can only be led to the sanctuary of religion through the vestibule of science"

"We feel God everywhere: we see Him, touch Him, admire Him in all phenomena of the exterior world; we feel Him, experience Him, adore Him in the depths of our hearts; but our understanding cannot reach to perceive Him and penetrate His nature"

Explains the diversity of religions throughout human history: polytheism, monotheism, and the true religion or natural religion propounded by Luz

The dialectic of contradictory determinations:

Luz arrives at understanding the dialectic of contrary determinations of reality

"The same object is contingent under one aspect and necessary under another diverse one: thus there does not exist an entity which in all rigor we can call contingent"

And: "Let us suppose that matter is undergoing thousands of modifications; in this sense we will affirm that matter is contingent; but if we notice that it is always extended, impenetrable, resistant, we will say that it is necessary, unalterable in its elements"

Both extremes of the same relation exist alternately in the physical objects themselves: necessary and casual; simple and composed; constant and changeable

This is incipient dialectical thinking — not a fully developed dialectic, but a genuine materialist approach to the contradictory nature of reality

Against ontological substantivation of abstract ideas:

The ontologist attempts "de jure to extract the concrete from the abstract, to construct things with words"

"Ideas have reality only as phenomena of our understanding: they are mere functions of the faculty of thinking, which in no case can produce objects; the latter being the originals from which the former are derived"

Luz reaches the gnoseological roots of metaphysics in the same way as Feuerbach — though by a different route — demonstrating the unjustified ontologization of abstract ideas

🏛️ The Political Roots of Eclecticism: The Final Verdict

Per researcher Antonio Sánchez de Bustamante y Montoro (quoting Marx on Schelling):

Luz's Cuban disciples of eclecticism — the González del Valle brothers, Del Monte, and others — represent not merely a philosophical school but "the colonial politics of Spain sub specie philosophiae"

In Cuba: Unlike Brazil and other Latin American countries, eclectic philosophy does not proliferate and its influence is ephemeral

Because: by the mid-19th century, ideological-political contradictions in Cuba sharpen — culminating in the 1868 revolutionary explosion

The Independence War sweeps eclectical spiritualist ideology from Cuban soil — similar to what occurred in France with the revolutionary movements of 1848

Luz's ultimate significance:

His critique of eclecticism and unconditional defense of empiricism and the scientific-naturalist spirit exercised a liberating function in Cuban philosophical thought

Contributed to accelerating the decomposition of the ideological values propping up colonial power

In the context of Latin American ideological and philosophical struggles of the first half of the 19th century, Luz emerges as a progressive thinker who not only placed himself far above eclecticism and prevailing philosophical idealism but anticipated the positions that would later confront the pseudo-rationalism of Latin American positivism

Enrique José Varona's assessment: "The writer of most vast philosophical erudition, the thinker of most profound and original ideas with which the New World is honored, is José de la Luz y Caballero"

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