Pages in English of the Materialists

Nothing is indivisible ! The universe is eternal !

The law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law

of nature and of society and therefore also the fundamental law of thought!

1.

On the contrary to what religions explain, there is not the matter on one side, the soul on the other side. Only matter exists, and it has always existed, and it will always exist. The universe is infinite and eternal; there is neither a beginning, nor an end.

This is the basic conception of materialism, which negates that something “outside” the matter would exist, like a god, the “spirit”, the soul, etc.

In ancient Greece, philosophers like Epicurus and Democritus (or later the Roman Lucretius) supported this materialist thesis. Nevertheless, in their conception the universe was a passive one.

It was so the scientific current opened by the Greek Aristotle and continued by the Islamic philosophers Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes which developed the conception of an universe which is eternal and in movement.

2.

Later, humanism continued this affirmation, from the the Parisian Latin averroism of the 13th century to Spinoza, which surpassed the conception of God and recognized nature as the sole reality.

Materialism in Europe, carried in different manners through averroism, humanism, the different variants of protestantism, English materialism, the French Lumières, etc., permitted the nascent bourgeoisie to have its own ideology and to transform reality.

The bourgeoisie profited from the Romanesque and Gothic ages, where a centralized state began to form itself, which peak is the absolute monarchy, notably of Louis XIV of France. The nations began to be formed in this process of development of an unified market; in France the national culture was so formed at the 17th century, whose great figures were Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Molière.

The era of the bourgeois revolution was the climax of this process of the growing bourgeoisie; the French revolution was a phenomenon of the greatest historical value. Great philosophers affirmed materialism, like de la Mettrie and Diderot.

3.

The bourgeois affirmation of materialism could not be protracted, because the bourgeoisie was prisoner of the development of Capital itself. Nevertheless, this transformation of reality through the new mode of production produced the working class.

Transforming reality i.e. matter, the working class is historically condemned to materialism; moreover, it understands the contradiction between itself and the reality which is transformed, and between itself and the bourgeoisie which exploits his work.

Therefore, the working class is the most revolutionary class of history, because it carries the understanding of the law of the contradiction, coming from the fact that it transforms reality through work (therefore the symbols of hammer and sickle).

So, with the working class, materialism reaches the level of understanding of how humans are indeed subjected to the process of reproduction of the means of life; their conceptions are only the reflect of this process.

As Karl Marx pointed out in a famous sentence: “In the social production of their life, humans enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production.

The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general.

It is not the consciousness of humans that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters.

Then begins an epoch of social revolution.”

4.

This is not all: the working class understands also the way the matter comes to transform itself. It permits to come back to a total materialism like with Epicurus, but this time with matter in movement, surpassing the idealism opened with Aristotle.

The working class, in transforming reality, acquires the understanding of reality and understands that the contradiction is the motor of movement in history, but also of all phenomena, of matter itself.

According materialism, there is neither a “cause” nor a “consequence”, there is only transformation, the movement from matter itself: the law of contradiction is universal.

Materialism is only genuine materialism when based on dialectics, which is explained by Lenin in this way: “Dialectics is the teaching which shows how Opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical, – under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another, – why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another.”

Dialectics is universal; as Mao Zedong pointed out: “The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the fundamental law of nature and of society and therefore also the fundamental law of thought.”