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UNA PREFAZIONE DA RILEGGERE SULLA SCIENZA E SU UN GRANDE PROTAGONISTA DEL NOVECENTO una prefazione sorprendente su W. Reich
Di rilievo nel libro tra i vari capitoli della storia e del futuro delle ricerche dello scienziato europeo, allievo di Freud, la Prefazione alla Biofisica di Reich da parte del Matematico di RomaTre Fulvio Bongiorno oramai giunto alla seconda edizione come Ebook insieme alla presentazione turbolenta del volume alla Sapienza tra una telefonata e l'altra di Rocco e i suoi fratelli.
Sulla decadenza scientifica e industriale del Bel Paese ci sarà da riflettere, assieme alle imprese parascientifiche che pretenderebbero di imporre un ordine "Scientifico", silenziando, fino alle estreme conseguenze, il pensiero critico e scienziati di alto livello da Reich a Benveniste da Preparata a Widom da Montagnier a Josephson, fino a Scalia facendoci rimpiangere i tempi di Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella e Galileo Galilei, che almeno ricevettero dei lunghi processi con sentenze discutibili ma "legali".
Oltre a fare lezioni di Morale e di etica a destra e manca, sarà bene riflettere e agire, in quanto sempre più abbiamo di fronte QUEL GRANDE AVVENIRE DIETRO LE SPALLE che non basta più, in particolare se vogliamo rilanciare il Bel Paese e la Vecchia Europa, bisognerà riprendere la via indicata dai grandi del nostro tempo da Galilei a Fermi fino a Preparata, che come disse il fisico russo Zhadin, grazie ai loro abbiamo avuto la leadership mondiale della fisica teorica e di molto altro.
Valenzi
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GIORDANO BRUNO: UN UOMO DI SCIENZA CONTRO LA PREPOTENZA DEL POTERE COSTITUITO
Dagli infiniti Mondi alla Città del Sole
Oggi (17 febbraio) ricorre il 423° anniversario della salita al rogo di Giordano Bruno. Era il 17 febbraio del 1600” quando venne bruciato vivo sul rogo nel Campo de’ Fiori a Roma. Precisamente in quel luogo sorge ora una statua che ricorda il filosofo di Nola. Ornano il basamento otto medaglioni in bronzo, che riproducono il volto di altrettanti intellettuali che nei secoli hanno sfidato i poteri del tempo. Tra questi, sul frontespizio, il volto del filosofo di Stilo, Tommaso Campanella. I due filosofi meridionali, Bruno e Campanella, hanno segnato con le loro idee, e con il corso delle loro vite, la seconda metà del cinquecento e l’inizio del seicento.
Francesco Sorgiovanni Errigo con queste righe su FB è tra i pochi ad aver ricordato la malizia e la volgare cattiveria del Potere Temporale del tempo che condannò al rogo uno dei più fini Pensatori del Rinascimento.
In una veloce ricerca su GOOGLE bisogna risalire ad un ricordo delle FORMICHE per avere una nota che ricordi questo bruttissimo 17 febbraio del 1600 con un articolo che per la sua sinteticità ed efficacia ripropongo integralmente, a nostra Scuola di distratti sui grandi delitti della nostra Roma.
In memoria di Giordano Bruno
Di Redazione | 17/02/2008 https://formiche.net/2008/02/in-memoria-di-giordano-bruno/
Mentre l'attualità ci ripropone lo scontro tra laicismo e Chiesa, in una sorta di "eterno ritorno", Alberto Biuso ci ricorda l'anniversario dell'uccisione del filosofo che aprì le porte dell'infinito.
All’alba del 17 febbraio 1600, la Chiesa cattolica compiva uno dei suoi crimini più gravi bruciando vivo il filosofo che abbatté le pareti del cosmo aprendo la percezione dell’infinito: «Or ecco quello, ch’ha varcato l’aria, penetrato il cielo, discorse le stelle, trapassati gli margini del mondo, fatte svanir le fantastiche muraglia de le prime, none, decime ed altre, che vi s’avesser potuto aggiungere, sfere, per relazione di vani matematici e cieco veder di filosofi volgari» (La cena de le ceneri, in «Dialoghi italiani», a cura di G. Gentile e G. Aquilecchia, Sansoni 1985, p. 33)
L’immagine “democratica” che la cultura laica dell’Ottocento ha tramandato di Bruno è naturalmente del tutto ingenua. Egli era un platonico, anche in politica, e credeva in una gerarchia intellettuale che distinguesse «gl’ignobili dai nobili» ed evitasse «certa neutralità e bestiale equalità, quale si ritrova in certe deserte ed inculte repubbliche» (De gli eroici furori, ivi, p. 1114), dove invece «il numero de stolti e perversi è incomparabilmente più grande che de sapienti e giusti» (Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, ivi, p. 550). E chi è il “nobile”? Colui che comprende la costanza delle cose nella varietà delle loro espressioni, che non reputa il male e il bene degli assoluti «stimando l’uno e l’altro come cosa variabile e consistente in moto, mutazione e vicissitudine» (Ivi, p. 976), poiché «nessuna cosa è absolutamente mala…ma è mala rispetto a qualcos’altro» ( Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, ivi, p. 686). La perfezione del mondo bisogna misurarla, come pensa anche Spinoza, secondo le sue proprie strutture e non a partire dai criteri dell’umanità. E ancora come Spinoza, Bruno ritiene che «Natura est deus in rebus» (Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, ivi, p. 776). Solo la forza di simili convinzioni -diventate la sua stessa carne- permise al filosofo di non abiurare perché “nulla aveva di che pentirsi”, di andare incontro al fuoco rispondendo ai suoi giudici «maiori forsitan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam» [avete più paura voi a emanare questa sentenza che io a riceverla].
In più abbiamo l’ultima parte della sua vita viene narrata in un leggendario film di Giuliano Montaldo che ancora una volta affidò a una delle sue produzioni più impegnate a Gian Maria Volonté in "Giordano Bruno" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBYEtHTb6Z8 di cui può essere utile leggere la recensione del film “Giordano Bruno” https://www.locchiodelcineasta.com/giordano-bruno/
Avevo letto di Bruno nell’Assassinio di Cristo, opera filosofica principe dell’allievo di Freud W. Reich, che 15 anni fa ricordammo con Luigi De Marchi e molti altri studiosi in occasione dei 59 anni dalla sua morte in carcere https://www.gruppomacro.com/prodotti/wilhelm-reich-epub
Secondo Reich, Bruno aveva anticipato con i suoi pensieri le teorie sull’energia Primordiale Cosmica dagli Orientali chiama CHI e Prana e da lui rinominata Orgone, che sembra tanta vicina alla moderna energia oscura, e al vecchio etere, forse tutti rientranti nelle parti enigmatiche e nei numeri mancanti delle Equazioni di Maxwell, in particolare sull’origine del Potenziale Vettore che tra l’altro e; la fonte sorgente del campo elettromagnetico come tentò per spiegarmi l’allieva di Preparata Renata Mele e come vanno indagando tra gli altri Allan Widom di Boston e il duo moscovita Victor Koledov e Svetlana Von Gratossky come ci raccontarono a COHERENCE 2021 alla Casa dell’Aviatore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsMZxTxVuGE...
La statua del Nolano a Campo dei Fiori sia da monito a quanti ancora insistono ad abusare del loro potere temporale e di ogni altro genere di potere contro la scienza.
Oggi, 19 febbraio 2023, quattrocento ventitré anni e due giorni, ricordiamo il rogo che spense la vita terrena di Giordano Bruno, elevandolo tra i Grandi di ogni tempo, dopo aver ricordato ai suoi Giudici che “avete più paura voi a emanare questa sentenza che io a riceverla”.
La storia gli ha dato ragione e si auspica che sia da Lezione per i contemporanei che da più parti tendono a ripetere gli errori del passato da Socrate a Cristo, da Bruno a Reich e molti altri, usando la clava della scienza nel più antiscientifico dei modi, poco degno del rango scientifico che si pretende di rappresentare, come fece tra gli altri il direttore di NATURE nell’editorial reservation all’articolo di Benveniste, di cui riparleremo il 12 marzo a Campi Bisenzio in occasione del suo anniversario delle nascita https://www.iiimb.me/.../COHERENCE-GP-JB--12-MARCH-23--1... e dal 9 al 12 ottobre in Crimea dove saranno assegnati gli AWARD BENVENISTE ai migliori lavori presentati alla conferenza SPACE AND BIOSPHERE https://www.iiimb.me/files/SPACE-AND-BIOSPHERE-2023-IL.pdf
Dal Central Park di Prato il 19 febbraio 2023 Vincenzo Valenzi
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Vincenzo -
I want to express to each of you my deep gratitude for helping to create an unprecedented grassroots political campaign that has had a profound impact in changing our nation.
I want to thank the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who knocked on millions of doors in the freezing winters of Iowa and New Hampshire and in the heat of Nevada and South Carolina – and in states throughout the country.
I want to thank the 2.1 million Americans who have contributed to our campaign and showed the world that we can take on a corrupt campaign finance system and run a major presidential campaign without being dependent upon the wealthy and the powerful. Thank you for your 10 million contributions – averaging $18.50 per donation.
I want to thank those who phone banked for our campaign and those of you who came together to send out millions of texts. I want to thank the many hundreds of thousands of Americans who attended our rallies, town meetings and house parties from New York to Los Angeles. Some of these events had over 25,000 people. Some had a few hundred and some had a dozen. But all were important. Let me thank those who made these many events possible.
I want to thank our surrogates, too many to name. I can't imagine that any candidate has ever been blessed with a stronger and more dedicated group of people who have taken our message to every corner of the country. And I want to thank all those who made music and art an integral part of our campaign.
I want to thank all of you who spoke to your friends and neighbors, posted on social media and worked as hard as you could to make this a better country.
Together, we have transformed American consciousness as to what kind of country we can become, and have taken this country a major step forward in the never-ending struggle for economic justice, social justice, racial justice and environmental justice.
I also want to thank the many hundreds of people on our campaign staff. You were willing to move from one state to another and do all the work that had to be done – no job was too big or too small for you. You rolled up your sleeves and you did it. You embodied the words that are at the core of our movement: Not me, us. And I thank each and every one of you.
WE HAVE WON THE IDEOLOGICAL BATTLE
As many of you will recall Nelson Mandela, one of the great freedom fighters in modern world history, famously said; "It always seems impossible until it is done." And what he meant by that is that the greatest obstacle to real social change has everything to do with the power of the corporate and political establishment to limit our vision as to what is possible and what we are entitled to as human beings.
If we don't believe that we are entitled to health care as a human right, we will never achieve universal health care.
If we don't believe that we are entitled to decent wages and working conditions, millions of us will continue to live in poverty.
If we don't believe that we are entitled to all of the education we require to fulfill our dreams, many of us will leave school saddled with huge debt, or never get the education we need.
If we don't believe that we are entitled to live in a world that has a clean environment and is not ravaged by climate change, we will continue to see more drought, floods, rising sea levels and an increasingly uninhabitable planet.
If we don't believe that we are entitled to live in a world of justice, democracy and fairness – without racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia or religious bigotry – we will continue to have massive income and wealth inequality, prejudice and hatred, mass incarceration, terrified immigrants and hundreds of thousands of Americans sleeping out on the streets of the richest country on earth.
Focusing on that new vision for America is what our campaign has been about and what, in fact, we have accomplished. Few would deny that over the course of the past 5 years our movement has won the ideological struggle. In so called "red" states, and "blue" states and "purple" states, a majority of the American people now understand that we must raise the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour; that we must guarantee health care as a right to all of our people; that we must transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, and that higher education must be available to all, regardless of income.
It was not long ago that people considered these ideas radical and fringe. Today, they are mainstream ideas – and many of them are already being implemented in cities and states across the country. That's what you accomplished.
In terms of health care, even before the horrific pandemic we are now experiencing, more and more Americans understood that we must move to a Medicare for All, single-payer system. During the primary elections exit polls showed, in state after state, a strong majority of Democratic primary voters supported a single government health insurance program to replace private insurance. That was true even in states where our campaign did not prevail.
And let me just say this: In terms of health care, this horrific crisis that we are now in has exposed how absurd our current employer-based health insurance system is. The current economic downturn we are experiencing has not only led to a massive loss of jobs, but has also resulted in millions of Americans losing their health insurance. While Americans have been told, over and over again, how wonderful our employer-based, private insurance system is, those claims sound very hollow now as a growing number of unemployed workers struggle with how they can afford to go to the doctor, or not go bankrupt with a huge hospital bill. We have always believed that health care must be considered as a human right, not an employee benefit – and we are right.
Please also appreciate that not only are we winning the struggle ideologically, we are also winning it generationally. The future of our country rests with young people and, in state after state, whether we won or whether we lost the Democratic primaries or caucuses, we received a significant majority of the votes, sometimes an overwhelming majority, from people not only 30 or under, but 50 years of age or younger. In other words, the future of this country is with our ideas.
THE CURRENT CRISIS
As we are all painfully aware, we now face an unprecedented crisis. Not only are we dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, which has taken the lives of many thousands of our people, we are also dealing with an economic meltdown that has resulted in the loss of millions of jobs.
Today, families all across the country face financial hardship unimaginable only a few months ago. And because of the unacceptable levels of income and wealth distribution in our economy, many of our friends and neighbors have little or no savings and are desperately trying to pay their rent or their mortgage or even to put food on the table. This reality makes it clear to me that Congress must address this unprecedented crisis in an unprecedented way that protects the health and economic wellbeing of the working families of our country, not just powerful special interests. As a member of the Democratic leadership in the United States Senate, and as a senator from Vermont, this is something that I intend to be intensely involved in, and which will require an enormous amount of work.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
That takes me to the state of our presidential campaign. I wish I could give you better news, but I think you know the truth. And that is that we are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden, and the path toward victory is virtually impossible. So while we are winning the ideological battle, and while we are winning the support of young people and working people throughout the country, I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful.
And so today I am announcing the suspension of active campaigning, and congratulate Joe Biden, a very decent man, on his victory.
Please know that I do not make this decision lightly. In fact, it has been a very painful decision. Over the past few weeks Jane and I, in consultation with top staff and many of our prominent supporters, have made an honest assessment of the prospects for victory. If I believed we had a feasible path to the nomination I would certainly continue the campaign. But it's not there.
I know there may be some in our movement who disagree with this decision, who would like us to fight on to the last ballot cast at the Democratic convention. I understand that position. But as I see the crisis gripping the nation – exacerbated by a president unwilling or unable to provide any kind of credible leadership – and the work that needs to be done to protect people in this most desperate hour, I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour.
But let me say this very emphatically: As you all know, we have never been just a campaign. We are a grassroots multi-racial, multi-generational movement which has always believed that real change never comes from the top on down, but always from the bottom on up. We have taken on Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex and the greed of the entire corporate elite. That struggle continues. While this campaign is coming to an end, our movement is not.
Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us that "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." The fight for justice is what our campaign was about. The fight for justice is what our movement remains about.
And, on a practical note, let me also say this: I will stay on the ballot in all remaining states and continue to gather delegates. While Vice President Biden will be the nominee, we should still work to assemble as many delegates as possible at the Democratic convention where we will be able to exert significant influence over the party platform and other functions.
Then, together, standing united, we will go forward to defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history. And we will fight to elect strong progressives at every level of government – from Congress to the school board.
As I hope all of you know, this race has never been about me. I ran for the presidency because I believed as president I could accelerate and institutionalize the progressive change that we are all building together. And, if we keep organizing and fighting, I have no doubt that our victory is inevitable. While the path may be slower now, we WILL change this country and, with like-minded friends around the globe, the entire world.
On a very personal note, speaking for Jane, myself and our entire family, we will always carry in our hearts the memory of the extraordinary people we have met across the country. We often hear about the beauty of America. And this is an incredibly beautiful country.
But to me the beauty I will remember most is in the faces of the people we have met from one corner of this country to the other. The compassion, love and decency I saw in them makes me so hopeful for our future. It also makes me more determined than ever to work to create a country that reflects those values and lifts up all our people.
Please stay in this fight with me. Let us go forward together. The struggle continues.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
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One Hundred and Fifty Years Since the Birth of Lenin
By David North
22 April 2020
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in the Russian city of Simbirsk on April 22, 1870. Known in history under the name of Lenin, he was the founder of the Bolshevik Party, leader of the 1917 October Revolution and, undoubtedly, a towering figure in the political and intellectual history of the twentieth century.
Leon Trotsky once wrote that all of Lenin is summed up in the October Revolution. Trotsky illuminated the meaning of his observation when he wrote, in his history of the events of 1917: “Besides the factories, barracks, villages, the front and the soviets, the revolution had another laboratory: the brain of Lenin.”
This brain had been at work on the problem of revolution for decades. The conquest of power by the Russian working class in October 1917 marked the intersection of two world historical processes: 1) the development of the contradictions of Russian and world capitalism; and 2) Lenin’s protracted struggle, based on a philosophical materialist, i.e., Marxist, analysis of objective socio-economic conditions, to build the revolutionary socialist party necessary for the working class to establish its independence from all the political agencies of the bourgeoisie.
Lenin speaking in 1919
Attempting to describe the genius and unique historical role of Lenin, it can be said that there is not another figure in the history of the socialist movement, apart from Marx and Engels, in whose political work the relationship between the conscious application of philosophical materialism—enriched by the latest developments in natural science (especially physics)—and the development of political analysis and revolutionary strategy, achieved such explicit, systematic and internally unified expression.
The most striking characteristic of Lenin’s theoretical-political work was its concentrated effort, spanning decades, to raise the class consciousness of the working class and, thereby, enable the alignment of its practice with objective socio-economic necessity. Bourgeois moralists, innumerable academics, and other enemies of Leninism have frequently denounced the great revolutionary’s “ruthlessness.” But they misuse the word. The political essence of Lenin’s “ruthlessness” was, to quote Trotsky again, “the highest qualitative and quantitative appreciation of reality, from the standpoint of revolutionary action.”
It is worth noting that among Lenin’s earliest writings, titled What the “Friends of the People” Are and How they Fight the Social Democrats (written in 1894 and published in Volume One of his Collected Works), was a passionate defense of philosophical materialism, in which he opposed the “subjective sociology” of the populist theoretician, Nikolai Mikhailovsky. Lenin wrote that the materialist position—that “the course of ideas depends on the course of things”—is “the only one compatible with scientific psychology.” Lenin continued:
Hitherto, sociologists had found it difficult to distinguish the important and unimportant in the complex network of social phenomena (that is the root of subjectivism in sociology) and had been unable to discover any objective criterion for such a demarcation. Materialism provided an absolutely objective criterion by singling out “production relations” as the structure of society, and making it possible to apply to these relations that general scientific criterion of recurrence whose applicability to sociology the subjectivists denied. [Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 140]
Underlying Lenin’s defense of materialism were decisive questions of political perspective and strategy: to what social force should the work of the socialist movement be oriented? To the peasantry or the working class?
Lenin’s insistence on a rigorous analysis of objective socio-economic processes had nothing in common with political passivity, in which the socialist had merely to wait on history to take its course. Lenin contrasted materialism to objectivism. In a further attack on populism, written in 1894–95, he wrote:
The objectivist speaks of the necessity of a given historical process; the materialist gives an exact picture of the given social-economic formation and of the antagonistic relations to which it gives rise. When demonstrating the necessity for a given series of facts, the objectivist always runs the risk of becoming an apologist for these facts: the materialist discloses the class contradictions and in so doing defines his standpoint. The objectivist speaks of “insurmountable historical tendencies”; the materialist speaks of the class which “directs” the given economic system, giving rise to such and such forms of counteraction by other classes. Thus, on the one hand, the materialist is more consistent than the objectivist, and gives profounder and fuller effect to his objectivism. He does not limit himself to speaking of the necessity of a process, but ascertains exactly what social-economic formation gives the process its content, exactly what class determines this necessity … [M]aterialism includes partisanship, so to speak, and enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in any assessment of events. [Collected Works, Vol, 1, pp. 400-01]
This passage was written in response to Pyotr Struve, the “Legal Marxist” and future leader of Russian bourgeois liberals. But it also anticipated Lenin’s struggle, a decade later, against the Menshevik tendency, which required the acceptance by the working class of the political leadership of the capitalist class in a future bourgeois democratic revolution.
Lenin was arrested in 1895 by the Tsarist police, and was to spend the next five years in prison and Siberian exile. These were valuable years of intense theoretical work, which included his study of the Hegelian philosophy and his engagement with and eventual mastery of dialectics.
Lenin’s term of exile ended in 1900 and he soon made his way to Western Europe, where he began, despite a difficult initial encounter, a close collaboration with the “Father of Russian Marxism,” G. V. Plekhanov.
By the turn of the century, the European Social Democratic movement was confronted with a revisionist challenge, led by Eduard Bernstein, to Marxism. Politically, revisionism sought to replace the program of socialist revolution with bourgeois labor reformism. Theoretically, it advanced the idealist philosophy of academic neo-Kantianism in opposition to dialectical materialism.
It is especially significant, in the light of the subsequent development of the European social democratic movement between 1898 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, that the most important contributions to the theoretical and political fight against revisionism were made, not by the German social democrats, but by the Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, and the two major figures in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), Plekhanov and Lenin.
Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution was a devastating exposure of the political consequences of Bernstein’s revisionism. Plekhanov’s critique of the neo-Kantian revisionism of Bernstein and his supporters remains, to this day, among the most brilliant expositions of historical development and the theoretical methodology of dialectical materialism.
However, it was Lenin’s contribution to the struggle against revisionism and opportunism, What Is To Be Done?, that proved to be the most theoretically acute and politically far-sighted. With greater depth and consistency than any other Marxist of his time, including Kautsky, Lenin revealed and explained the objective significance and political implications of the belittling of Marxist theory.
Moreover, Lenin demonstrated the inextricable connection between the struggle against the influence of opportunism in all its diverse forms—theoretical, political and organizational—and the building of the revolutionary party and the establishment of the political independence of the working class.
Denouncing as opportunist all tendencies that downplayed the significance of the explicit struggle for the development of socialist consciousness and, instead, glorified the spontaneous development (i.e., without the intervention of Marxists) of the consciousness and practice of the working class, Lenin wrote:
Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is—either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk about spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology. [Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 384]
Drawing a sharp contrast between socialist consciousness and trade unionism, which he defined as the bourgeois ideology of the working class, Lenin wrote:
Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social-Democracy. [Ibid, pp. 384-85]
What Is To Be Done? was published in 1902. But it was not until 1903, at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, that the far-sightedness of Lenin’s analysis of the political implications of the struggle against opportunism was substantiated. The split that occurred at the Second Congress—ostensibly over a “minor” difference over the definition of party membership, which gave rise to the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions—was initially seen by many delegates as an unnecessary and even malign disruption of party unity, caused by Lenin’s excessive factionalism.
Lenin’s answer to this accusation was to undertake a detailed analysis of the proceedings of the Second Congress, which spanned 37 sessions held over a period of three weeks. This analysis, which was published under the title One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, demonstrated that the Menshevik faction was a manifestation, within the Russian socialist movement, of politically opportunist tendencies—inclining toward compromise and conciliation with the liberal and reformist parties of the bourgeoisie—that had developed in Social Democratic parties throughout Europe.
Subsequent developments in Russia, particularly during and in the aftermath of the revolution of 1905, substantiated Lenin’s analysis of the class character and democratic-liberal orientation of the revisionist and opportunist tendencies. To trace, even in outline form, the evolution of the political differentiation of Bolshevik and Menshevik tendencies in the years that followed the Second Congress is necessarily beyond the scope of this commemoration of Lenin’s life.
However, it must be stressed that Lenin’s understanding of the “inner-party struggle” against opportunism, in all its diverse forms, was profoundly different from that which generally prevailed throughout the Second International. Lenin analyzed conflicts over matters of tactics, organization and program as manifestations, within parties and factions, of objective divisions within society. Such divisions were not to be seen as distractions from the socialist movement’s engagement in the class struggle, but as an essential and unavoidable element of that struggle.
Striving to uncover the socio-economic processes underlying the development of the struggle between tendencies, Lenin saw opportunism as the manifestation of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois interests and pressure upon the revolutionary vanguard. The appropriate response to such pressure, in whatever form it exerted itself, was not to seek accommodation and compromise. Opportunism was not, in Lenin’s view, a legitimate part of the workers’ movement. It was, rather, a debilitating, demoralizing and reactionary force, working to divert the working class away from the program of social revolution and toward capitulation to the bourgeoisie.
It was this uncompromisingly hostile attitude toward opportunism that distinguished Bolshevism from all other political parties and tendencies within the Second International prior to the outbreak of World War I.
The world historical significance of the struggle that Lenin had waged against opportunism was substantiated in 1914. Almost overnight, the leading parties of the Second International abandoned the pledges they had made to uphold the solidarity of the international working class and capitulated to the ruling classes in their countries. Lenin’s opposition to the betrayal of the Second International, and call for the building of a Third International, elevated him and the Bolshevik Party to the forefront of the world socialist movement.
The outstanding features of Lenin’s response to the collapse of the Second International were first, that he demonstrated the connection between the betrayal of August 1914 and the antecedent development of revisionism and opportunism in the Social Democratic parties. Second, Lenin proved that the growth of opportunism was not to be explained in terms of personal treachery (though treachery there certainly was), but in powerful socio-economic tendencies arising out of the development of imperialism in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first decade and a half of the twentieth. In a series of brilliant theoretical works—above all, the monumental Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism—Lenin provided a comprehensive analysis of the economic essence of imperialism, its place in the history of capitalism, its role in the growth of opportunism and the general corruption of the labor organizations affiliated with the Second International, and, finally, its relationship to the development of world socialist revolution.
In a concise summation of his work on the causes and significance of the war, titled Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, Lenin wrote:
Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: imperialism is monopoly capitalism; parasitic, or decaying capitalism; moribund capitalism. The supplanting of free competition by monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism. Monopoly manifests itself in five principal forms: (1) cartels, syndicates and trusts—the concentration of production has reached a degree which gives rise to these monopolistic associations of capitalists; (2) the monopolistic position of the big banks—three, four or five giant banks manipulate the whole economic life of America, France, Germany; (3) seizure of the sources of raw material by the trusts and the financial oligarchy (finance capital is monopoly industrial capital merged with bank capital); (4) the (economic) partition of the world by the international cartels has begun. There are already over one hundred such international cartels, which command the entire world market and divide it “amicably” among themselves—until war redivides it. The export of capital, as distinct from the export of commodities under non-monopoly capitalism, is a highly characteristic phenomenon and is closely linked with the economic and territorial-political partition of the world; (5) the territorial partition of the world (colonies) is completed. [Collected Works, Vol. 23, P. 195]
Lenin called attention to several critical political characteristics of the imperialist epoch.
The difference between the democratic-republican and the reactionary-monarchist imperialist bourgeoisie is obliterated precisely because they are both rotting alive … Secondly, the decay of capitalism is manifested in the creation of a huge stratum of rentiers, capitalists who live by “clipping coupons”. … Thirdly, export of capital is parasitism raised to a high pitch. Fourthly, “finance capital strives for domination, not freedom”. Political reaction all along the line is a characteristic feature of imperialism. Corruption, bribery on a huge scale and all kinds of fraud. Fifthly, the exploitation of oppressed nations—which is inseparably connected with annexations—and especially the exploitation of colonies by a handful of “Great” Powers, increasingly transforms the “civilised” world into a parasite on the body of hundreds of millions in the uncivilised nations. The Roman proletarian lived at the expense of society. Modern society lives at the expense of the modern proletarian. Marx specially stressed this profound observation of Sismondi. Imperialism somewhat changes the situation. A privileged upper stratum of the proletariat in the imperialist countries lives partly at the expense of hundreds of millions in the uncivilised nations. [Ibid, pp. 106-07]
For all the developments in the global economy over the past century, Lenin’s analysis of both the economic and political characteristics of imperialism retains immense contemporary relevance. A passage which resonates with exceptional force in the present period calls upon socialists “to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism.” [Ibid, p. 120]
Imperialism and the Split in Socialism was written in October 1916. Lenin was living in Zurich, which served as his political headquarters as he provided political leadership for the revolutionary internationalist opposition to the war. In January 1917, Lenin delivered a lecture commemorating the twelfth anniversary of the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution. He said:
We must not be deceived by the present grave-like stillness in Europe. Europe is pregnant with revolution. The monstrous horrors of the imperialist war, the suffering caused by the high cost of living everywhere engender a revolutionary mood; and the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie and its servitors, the governments, are more and more moving into a blind alley from which they can never extricate themselves without tremendous upheavals. [Ibid, p. 253]
Just six weeks later, the revolution anticipated by Lenin was born in the streets of Petrograd. The Tsarist regime was overthrown by a mass uprising of the working class, bringing to power a bourgeois Provisional Government, supported by the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties. With Lenin trapped in Zurich, the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, who were in Petrograd, principally Lev Kamenev and Josef Stalin, offered critical support to the Provisional Government and to the continuation of Russia’s participation in the World War.
Lenin dispatched “Letters from Afar” to Petrograd, in which he made clear his opposition to the Provisional Government. But it was not until he managed to return to Russia, aboard a “sealed train” in April, that Lenin was able to initiate the political struggle that brought about a fundamental change in the program and strategic orientation of the Bolshevik Party and set it on the course that led to the conquest of power in October 1917.
The struggle initiated by Lenin, immediately upon his return to Russia, represents the most politically consequential of his life. Lenin’s “April Theses” repudiated the program of “the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry” that had directed the political strategy and practice of the Bolshevik Party since the revolution of 1905. This program had defined the struggle for the overthrow of the tsarist regime as a bourgeois democratic revolution. The Bolshevik formula insisted upon the leading role of the working class in the coming revolution, and aspired toward the destruction of all the feudal and anti-democratic remnants of the tsarist regime. But the program of the Bolsheviks did not call for the overthrow of the Russian bourgeoisie and the elimination of capitalist property relations.
Moreover, the programmatic formulation of the Bolsheviks—defining the new revolutionary regime as a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”—imparted a significant degree of ambiguity regarding the precise nature of the state power that was to emerge from the overthrow of the tsarist regime.
In the years between 1905 and 1917, the most comprehensive left-wing critique of the Bolshevik program of the democratic dictatorship was that advanced by Leon Trotsky. His theory of permanent revolution envisaged the overthrow of tsarism as leading, more or less rapidly, to the conquest of power by the working class. Notwithstanding the economic backwardness of Russia, the global development of capitalism and imperialist geopolitics foreclosed the possibility of the development of the Russian Revolution along bourgeois democratic and capitalist lines, as had been traditionally anticipated by Marxists. The Russian Revolution would place before the working class the task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and taking power in its own hands. Viewing the Russian Revolution as the opening of the world socialist revolution, Trotsky insisted that the survival of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia would depend upon the overthrow of capitalism by the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, above all, in Germany.
Prior to 1914, Lenin had discounted Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution as “absurdly left.” However, it is undoubtedly the case that the outbreak of the world war led Lenin to reevaluate the old Bolshevik formula and reconsider his attitude toward Trotsky’s program. This was not a case of political plagiarism. Lenin arrived at conclusions very close to those of Trotsky, if not entirely identical, as a consequence of his own analysis of the global economic and political dynamic of the world war. Immensely principled in his approach to politics, Lenin recognized the need to change the party program. In the course of a political struggle that extended over several weeks, he was able to reorient the Bolshevik Party and set it on a course that led to the conquest of political power in October.
There is one further episode in the drama of 1917 that testifies to the extraordinary link between theory and practice in the work of Lenin. In the aftermath of the defeat suffered by the Petrograd working class during the July Days, the eruption of counterrevolution forced Lenin into hiding. Under the most difficult of political conditions, with his life in constant danger, Lenin prepared for the renewal of the struggle for power by writing The State and Revolution. Lenin’s conception of how the Marxist party prepared itself and the working class for great political tasks finds characteristic expression in his preface to this remarkable work, whose significance has not been diminished even by the passage of a century.
The struggle to free the working people from the influence of the bourgeoisie in general, and of the imperialist bourgeoisie in particular, is impossible without a struggle against opportunist prejudices concerning the “state”. …The question of the relation of the socialist proletarian revolution to the state, therefore, is acquiring not only practical political importance, but also the significance of a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny. [Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 388]
The seizure of power by the Russian working class, led by the Bolshevik Party, took place on October 25–26. In his account of Ten Days that Shook the World, John Reed witnessed Lenin’s triumphant entry into the Petrograd Soviet, and wrote this evocative description of the great revolutionary leader. “Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange popular leader—a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies—but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms, of analyzing a concrete situation. And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.”
One can legitimately dispute Reed’s description of Lenin as “colorless” and “humorless.” There are many accounts of Lenin’s personality that provide ample evidence of the qualities that Reed did not notice on the day when the Bolshevik Party leader was entirely absorbed with the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a revolutionary government. But Reed’s characterization of Lenin as “a leader purely by virtue of intellect” is, apart from a certain one-sidedness, justified. Lenin represented a new type of political leader, who sought to base the program and practice of his party and the working class on a scientific understanding of objective reality.
The problem of establishing the proper alignment of theory and practice was a central preoccupation of Lenin’s entire political life. “The highest task of humanity,” Lenin wrote in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, “is to comprehend this objective logic of economic evolution (the evolution of social life) in its general and fundamental features, so that it may be possible to adapt to it one’s social consciousness and the consciousness of the advanced classes of all capitalist countries in as definite, clear and critical a fashion as possible.”
IN MEMORIA DI CARLO MARX.
Il 14 marzo, alle due e quarantacinque pomeridiane, ha cessato di pensare la più grande mente dell'epoca nostra. L'avevamo lasciato solo da appena due minuti e al nostro ritorno l'abbiamo trovato tranquillamente addormentato nella sua poltrona, ma addormentato per sempre.
Non è possibile misurare la gravità della perdita che questa morte rappresenta per il proletariato militante d'Europa e d'America, nonché per la scienza storica. Non si tarderà a sentire il vuoto lasciato dalla scomparsa di questo titano.
Così come Darwin ha scoperto la legge dello sviluppo della natura organica, Marx ha scoperto la legge dello sviluppo della storia umana e cioè il fatto elementare, finora nascosto sotto l'orpello ideologico, che gli uomini devono innanzi tutto mangiare, bere, avere un tetto e vestirsi prima di occuparsi di politica, di scienza, d'arte, di religione, ecc.; e che, per conseguenza, la produzione dei mezzi materiali immediati di esistenza e, con essa, il grado di sviluppo economico di un popolo e di un'epoca in ogni momento determinato costituiscono la base sulla quale si sviluppano le istituzioni statali, le concezioni giuridiche, l'arte ed anche le idee religiose degli uomini, e partendo dalla quale esse devono venir spiegate, e non inversamente, come si era fatto finora.
Ma non è tutto. Marx ha anche scoperto la legge peculiare dello sviluppo del moderno modo di produzione capitalistico e della società borghese da esso generata. La scoperta del plusvalore ha subitamente gettato un fascio di luce nell'oscurità in cui brancolavano prima, in tutte le loro ricerche, tanto gli economisti borghesi che i critici socialisti.
Due scoperte simili sarebbero più che sufficienti a riempire tutta una vita. Fortunato chi avesse avuto la sorte di farne anche una sola. Ma in ognuno dei campi in cui Marx ha svolto le sue ricerche - e questi campi furono molti e nessuno fu toccato da lui in modo superficiale - in ognuno di questi campi, compreso quello delle matematiche, egli ha fatto delle scoperte originali.
Tale era lo scienziato. Ma lo scienziato non era neppure la metà di Marx. Per lui la scienza era una forza motrice della storia, una forza rivoluzionaria. Per quanto grande fosse la gioia che gli dava ogni scoperta in una qualunque disciplina teorica, e di cui non si vedeva forse ancora l'applicazione pratica, una gioia ben diversa gli dava ogni innovazione che determinasse un cambiamento rivoluzionario immediato nell'industria e, in generale, nello sviluppo storico. Così egli seguiva in tutti i particolari le scoperte nel campo dell'elettricità e, ancora in questi ultimi tempi, quelle di Marcello Deprez .
Perché Marx era prima di tutto un rivoluzionario. Contribuire in un modo o nell'altro all'abbattimento della società capitalistica e delle istituzioni statali che essa ha creato contribuire all'emancipazione del proletariato moderno al quale Egli, per primo, aveva dato la coscienza della propria situazione e dei propri bisogni, la coscienza delle condizioni della propria liberazione: questa era la sua reale vocazione. La lotta era il suo elemento. Ed ha combattuto con una passione, con una tenacia e con un successo come pochi hanno combattuto. La prima Rheinische Zeitung nel 1842, il Vorwärts di Parigi nel 1844, la Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung nel 1847, la Neue Rheinische Zeitung nel 1848-49, la New York Tribune dal 1852 al 1861 e, inoltre, i numerosi opuscoli di propaganda, il lavoro a Parigi, a Bruxelles, a Londra, il tutto coronato dalla grande "Associazione Internazionale degli Operai", ecco un altro risultato di cui colui che lo ha raggiunto potrebbe esser fiero anche se non avesse fatto niente altro.
Marx era perciò l'uomo più odiato e calunniato del suo tempo. I governi, assoluti e repubblicani, lo espulsero; i borghesi, conservatori e democratici radicali, lo coprirono a gara di calunnie. Egli sdegnò tutte queste miserie, non prestò loro nessuna attenzione e non rispose se non in caso di estrema necessità. È morto venerato, amato, rimpianto da milioni di compagni di lavoro rivoluzionari in Europa
e in America, dalle miniere siberiane sino alla California. E posso aggiungere, senza timore: poteva avere molti avversari, ma nessun nemico personale.
Il suo nome vivrà nei secoli, e così la sua opera!
( 17/03/1883 Discorso di Engels sulla tomba di Karl Marx)