A famous title of Engels's underscores the essential distinction between Marxism and previous socialist doctrines: before Marx, socialist doctrines were merely utopian ; Marx's doctrine is scientific.[1] What is a utopian socialist doctrine? It is a doctrine which proposes socialist goals for human action, yet which is based on non-scientific principles, deriving from religious, moral or juridical, i.e. ideological, principles. The ideological nature of its theoretical foundation is decisive, because it affects how any socialist doctrine conceives of not only the ends of socialism, but also the means of action required to realize these ends. Thus, utopian socialist doctrine defines the ends of socialism - the socialist society of the future - by moral and juridical categories; it speaks of the reign of equality and the brotherhood of man; and it translates these moral and legal principles into utopian - that is, ideological, ideal and imaginary - economic principles as well: for example, the complete sharing-out of the products of labour among the workers, economic egalitarianism, the negation of all economic law, the immediate disappearance of the State, etc. In the same manner it defines utopian, ideological and imaginary economic and political means as the appropriate means to realize socialism: in the economic domain, the workers' co-operatives of Owen, the phalanstery of Fourier's disciples, Proudhon's people's bank; in the political domain, moral education and reform - if not the Head of State's conversion to socialism. In constructing an ideological representation of the ends as well as the means of socialism, utopian socialist doctrines are, as Marx clearly showed, prisoners of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois economic, juridical, moral and political principles. That is why they cannot really break with the

 
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bourgeois system, they cannot be genuinely revolutionary. They remain anarchist or reformist. Content, in fact, to oppose the bourgeois politico-economic system with bourgeois (moral, juridical) principles, they are trapped - whether they like it or not - within the bourgeois system. They can never break out towards revolution.
    Marxist doctrine, by contrast, is scientific. This means that it is not content to apply existing bourgeois moral and juridical principles (liberty, equality, fraternity, justice, etc.) to the existing bourgeois reality in order to criticize it, but that it criticizes these existing bourgeois moral and juridical principles, as well as the existing politico-economic system. Thus its general critique rests on other than existing ideological principles (religious, moral and juridical); it rests on the scientific knowledge of the totality of the existing bourgeois system, its politico-economic as well as its ideological systems. It rests on the knowledge of this ensemble, which constitutes an organic totality of which the economic, political, and ideological are organic 'levels' or 'instances', articulated with each other according to specific laws. It is this knowledge that allows us to define the objectives of socialism, and to conceive socialism as a new determinate mode of production which will succeed the capitalist mode of production, to conceptualize its specific determinations, the precise form of its relations of production, its political and ideological superstructure. It is this knowledge that permits us to define the appropriate means of action for 'making the revolution', means based upon the nature of historical necessity and historical development, on the determinant role of the economy in the last instance on this development, on the decisive role of class struggle in socioeconomic transformations, and on the role of consciousness and organization in political struggle. It is the application of these scientific principles that has led to the definition of the working class as the only radically revolutionary class, the definition of the forms of organization appropriate to the economic and political struggle (role of the unions; nature and role of the party comprised of the vanguard of the working class) - the definition, finally, of the forms of ideological struggle. It is the application of these scientific principles that has made possible the break not only with the reformist objectives of utopian socialist doctrines, but also with their forms of organization and struggle. It is the application of these scientific principles that has allowed the definition of a revolutionary tactics and strategy whose irreversible first results are henceforth inscribed in world history, and continue to change the world.
    In 'Our Programme', Lenin writes:

We take our stand entirely on the Marxist theoretical position: Marxism was the first to transform socialism from a utopia into a science, to lay a firm

 
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foundation for this science, and to indicate the path that must be followed in further developing and elaborating it in all its parts. It disclosed the nature of modern capitalist economy by explaining how the hire of labour, the purchase of labour-power, conceals the enslavement of millions of propertyless people by a handful of capitalists, the owners of the land, factories, mines, and so forth. It showed that all modern capitalist development displays the tendency of large-scale production to eliminate petty production and creates conditions that make a socialist system of society possible and necessary. It taught us how to discern - beneath the pall of rooted customs, political intrigues, abstruse laws, and intricate doctrines - the class struggle, the struggle between the propertied classes in all their variety and the propertyless mass, the proletariat, which is at the head of all the propertyless. It made clear the real task of a revolutionary socialist party: not to draw up plans for refashioning society, not to preach to the capitalists and their hangers-on about improving the lot of the workers, not to hatch conspiracies, but to organize the class struggle of the proletariat and to lead this struggle, the ultimate aim of which is the conquest of political power by the proletariat and the organization of a socialist society.[2]

And, having condemned the Bernsteinian revisionists who 'have . . . not . . . advanced . . . by a single step . . . the science which Marx and Engels enjoined us to develop', Lenin adds:

There can be no strong socialist party without a revolutionary theory which unites all socialists, from which they draw all their convictions, and which they apply in their methods of struggle and means of action.[3]

    From one end of Lenin's work to the other, the same theme is tirelessly repeated: 'without revolutionary theory , no revolutionary practice' .[4] And this revolutionary theory is exclusively defined as the scientific theory produced by Marx, to which he gave most profound form in his 'life's work' - the work without which, says Engels, we would still ' be groping in the dark ': Capital.[5]
 

2. Marx's Double Scientific Doctrine

Once we advance the principle that the revolutionary action of Communists is based on scientific Marxist theory, the following question must be addressed: what is Marxist scientific doctrine?

 
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    Marxist scientific doctrine presents the specific peculiarity of being composed of two scientific disciplines, united for reasons of principle but actually distinct from one another because their objects are distinct: historical materialism and dialectical materialism.
    Historical materialism is the science of history. We can define it more precisely as the science of modes of production, their specific structure, their constitution, their functioning, and the forms of transition whereby one mode of production passes into another. Capital represents the scientific theory of the capitalist mode of production. Marx did not provide a developed theory of other modes of production - that of primitive communities, the slave, 'Asiatic', 'Germanic', feudal, socialist, and Communist modes of production - but only some clues, some outlines of these modes of production. Nor did Marx furnish a theory of the forms of transition from one determinate mode of production to another, only some clues and outlines. The most developed of these outlines concerns the forms of transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production (the section of Capital devoted to primitive accumulation, and numerous other passages). We also possess some precious, if rare, indications concerning aspects of the forms of transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production (in particular, the 'Critique of the Gotha Programme', where Marx insists on the phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat). The first phase of these forms of transition is the object of numerous reflections by Lenin (State and Revolution, and all his texts of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period). In fact, the scientific knowledge in these texts directly governs all economic, political and ideological action directed towards the 'construction of socialism'.
    A further clarification is necessary concerning historical materialism. The theory of history - a theory of the different modes of production - is, by all rights, the science of the organic totality that every social formation arising from a determinate mode of production constitutes. Now, as Marx showed, every social totality comprises the articulated ensemble of the different levels of this totality: the economic infrastructure, the politico-juridical superstructure, and the ideological superstructure. The theory of history, or historical materialism, is the theory of the specific nature of this totality - of the set of its levels, and of the type of articulation and determination that unifies them and forms the basis both of their dependence vis-à-vis the economic level - 'determinant in the last instance ' - and their degree of 'relative autonomy' . It is because each of these levels possesses this 'relative autonomy' that it can be objectively considered as a 'partial whole ', and become the object of a relatively independent scientific treatment. This is why, taking account of this 'relative autonomy', one can legitimately

 
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study the economic 'level', or the political 'level', or this or that ideological, philosophical, aesthetic or scientific formation of a given mode of production, separately. This specification is very important, because it is the basis of the possibility of a theory of the history (relatively autonomous, and of a degree of variable autonomy according to the case) of the levels or the respective realities - a theory of the history of politics, for example, or of philosophy, art, the sciences, etc.
    This is also the basis of a relatively autonomous theory of the 'economic level' of a given mode of production. Capital, as it is offered to us in its incompleteness (Marx also wanted to analyse the law, the State, and the ideology of the capitalist mode of production therein), precisely represents the scientific analysis of the 'economic level' of the capitalist mode of production ; this is why Capital is generally and correctly considered as, above all, the theory of the economic system of the capitalist mode of production. But as this theory of the economic 'level' of the capitalist mode of production necessarily presupposes, if not a developed theory, at least some adequate theoretical elements for other 'levels' of the capitalist mode of production (the juridico-political and ideological levels), Capital is not limited to the 'economy' alone. It far exceeds the economy, in accordance with the Marxist conception of the reality of the economy, which can be understood in its concept, defined and analysed only as a level, a part, a partial whole organically inscribed in the totality of the mode of production under consideration. This is why one finds in Capital fundamental theoretical elements for the elaboration of a theory of the other levels (political, ideological) of the capitalist mode of production. These elements are certainly undeveloped, but adequate for guiding us in the theoretical study of the other levels. In the same way one finds in Capital, even as it proposes to analyse only 'the capitalist mode of production', theoretical elements concerning the knowledge of other modes of production, and of the forms of transition between different modes of production - elements that are certainly undeveloped, but adequate for guiding us in the theoretical study of these matters.
    Such, very schematically presented, is the nature of the first of the two sciences founded by Marx: historical materialism.
    In founding this science of history, at the same time Marx founded another scientific discipline: dialectical materialism, or Marxist philosophy. Yet here there appears a de facto difference. Whereas Marx was able to develop historical materialism very considerably, he was not able to do the same for dialectical materialism, or Marxist philosophy. He was able only to lay its foundations, either in rapid sketches (Theses on Feuerbach ) or in polemical texts (The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy ), or again in a very dense methodological text

 
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(the unpublished Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1857) and in some passages of Capital (particularly the Postface to the second German edition). It was the demands of the ideological struggle on the terrain of philosophy that led Engels (Anti-Dühring, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy ) and Lenin (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Philosophical Notebooks, the latter unpublished by Lenin) to develop at greater length the principles of dialectical materialism outlined by Marx. Yet none of these texts, not even those by Engels and Lenin - which are also, essentially, polemical or interpretative texts (Lenin's Notebooks ) - displays a degree of elaboration and systematicity - and hence scientificity - in the least comparable to the degree of elaboration of historical materialism that we possess in Capital. As in the case of historical materialism, it is necessary carefully to distinguish between what has been given to us and what has not, so as to take stock of what remains to be done
    Dialectical materialism, or Marxist philosophy, is a scientific discipline distinct from historical materialism. The distinction between these two scientific disciplines rests on the distinction between their objects. The object of historical materialism is constituted by the modes of production, their constitution and their transformation. The object of dialectical materialism is constituted by what Engels calls 'the history of thought ', or what Lenin calls the history of the 'passage from ignorance to knowledge ', or what we can call the history of the production of knowledges - or yet again, the historical difference between ideology and science, or the specific difference of scientificity - all problems that broadly cover the domain called by classical philosophy the 'theory of knowledge'. Of course, this theory can no longer be, as it was in classical philosophy, a theory of the formal, atemporal conditions of knowledge, a theory of the cogito (Descartes, Husserl), a theory of the a priori forms of the human mind (Kant), or a theory of absolute knowledge (Hegel). From the perspective of Marxist theory, it can only be a theory of the history of knowledge - that is, of the real conditions (material and social on the one hand, internal to scientific practice on the other) of the process of production of knowledge. The 'theory of knowledge', thus understood, constitutes the heart of Marxist philosophy. Studying the real conditions of the specific practice that produces knowledges, Marxist philosophical theory is necessarily led to define the nature of non-scientific or pre-scientific practices, the practices of ideological 'ignorance' (ideological practice), and all the real practices upon which scientific practice is founded and to which it is related - the practice of the transformation of social relations, or political practice; and the practice of the transformation of nature, or economic practice. This last practice puts man in relation to nature, which is the material condition

 
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of his biological and social existence.
    Like any scientific discipline, Marxist philosophy presents itself in two forms: a theory which expresses the rational system of its theoretical concepts; and a method which expresses the relation the theory maintains with its object in its application to that object. Of course, theory and method are deeply united, constituting but two sides of the same reality: the scientific discipline in its very life. But it is important to distinguish them, in order to avoid either a dogmatic interpretation (pure theory) or a methodological interpretation (pure method) of dialectical materialism. In dialectical materialism, it can very schematically be said that it is materialism which represents the aspect of theory, and dialectics which represents the aspect of method. But each of these terms includes the other. Materialism expresses the effective conditions of the practice that produces knowledge - specifically: (1) the distinction between the real and its knowledge (distinction of reality), correlative of a correspondence (adequacy) between knowledge and its object (correspondence of knowledge); and (2) the primacy of the real over its knowledge, or the primacy of being over thought. None the less, these principles themselves are not 'eternal' principles, but the principles of the historical nature of the process in which knowledge is produced. That is why materialism is called dialectical : dialectics, which expresses the relation that theory maintains with its object, expresses this relation not as a relation of two simply distinct terms but as a relation within a process of transformation, thus of real production.
    This is what is affirmed when it is said that dialectics is the law of transformation, the law of the development of real processes (natural and social processes, as well as the process of knowledge). It is in this sense that the Marxist dialectic can only be materialist, because it does not express the law of a pure imaginary or thought process but the law of real processes, which are certainly distinct and 'relatively autonomous' according to the level of reality considered, but which are all ultimately based on the processes of material nature. That Marxist materialism is necessarily dialectical is what distinguishes it from all previous materialist philosophies. That Marxist dialectics is necessarily materialist is what distinguishes the Marxist dialectic from all idealist dialects, particularly Hegelian dialectics. Whatever historical connections might be invoked between Marxist materialism and anterior 'metaphysical' or mechanical materialisms, on the one hand, and between Marxist and Hegelian dialectics, on the other, there exists a fundamental difference in kind between Marxist philosophy and all other philosophies. In founding dialectical materialism, Marx accomplished as revolutionary a work in philosophy as he effected in the domain of history by founding historical materialism.

 
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3. Problems Posed by the Existence of these Two Disciplines

The existence of these two scientific disciplines - historical materialism and dialectical materialism - raises two questions: (1) Why did the foundation of historical materialism necessarily entail the foundation of dialectical materialism? (2) What is the proper function of dialectical materialism?

    1. Very schematically, it can be said that the foundation of historical materialism, or the science of history, necessarily provoked the foundation of dialectical materialism for the following reason. We know that in the history of human thought, the foundation of an important new science has always more or less overtumed and renewed existing philosophy. This applies to Greek mathematics, which to a great extent provoked the recasting that led to Platonic philosophy; to modem physics, which provoked the recastings that led first to the philosophy of Descartes (after Galileo), then of Kant (after Newton); and also to the invention of infinitesimal calculus, which to a great extent provoked Leibniz's philosophical recasting, and the mathematical logic that put Husserl on the road to his system of Transcendental Phenomenology. We can say that the same process occurred with Marx, and that the foundation of the science of history induced the foundation of a new philosophy.
    We must go further, however, to show how Marxist philosophy occupies a privileged place in the history of philosophy, and how it has transformed philosophy from the condition of an ideology into a scientific discipline. In fact, Marx was in some sense compelled, by an implacable logic, to found a radically new philosophy, because he was the first to have thought scientifically the reality of history, which all other philosophies were incapable of doing. Thinking the reality of history scientifically, Marx was obliged, and able, to situate and treat philosophies - for the first time - as realities which, while aiming for 'truth', while speaking of the conditions of knowledge, belong none the less to history, not only because they are conditioned by it but also because they play a social role in it. Whether idealist or materialist, classical philosophies were incapable of thinking about their own history: either the simple fact that they appeared at a determinate moment in history; or, what is much more important, the fact that they have an entire history behind them and are produced in large part by this past history, by the relation of properly philosophical history to the history of the sciences and the other social practices.
    Once a genuine knowledge of history had finally been produced, philosophy could no longer ignore, repress or sublimate its relation to

 
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history; it had to take account of, and think about, this relation. By means of a theoretical revolution it had to become a new philosophy, capable of thinking - in philosophy itself - its real relation to history, as well as its relation to the truth. The old philosophies of consciousness, of the transcendental subject - just like the dogmatic philosophies of absolute knowledge - were no longer possible philosophically. A new philosophy was necessary, one capable of thinking the historical insertion of philosophy in history, its real relation to scientific and social practices (political, economic, ideological), while taking account of the knowledge-relation it maintains with its object. It is this theoretical necessity that gave birth to dialectical materialism, the only philosophy that treats knowledge as the historical process of production of knowledges and that reflects its new object at once within materialism and within dialectics. Other transformations in philosophy were always based upon either the ideological negation of the reality of history, its sublimation in God (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz), or an ideological conception of history as the realization of philosophy itself (Kant, Hegel, Husserl): they were never able to attain the reality of history, which they always misunderstood or left aside. If the transformation imposed on philosophy by Marx is genuinely revolutionary from a philosophical point of view, this is because it took the reality of history seriously for the first time in history, and this simple difference comprehensively overturned the bases of existing philosophy.

    2. As for the proper function of philosophy, and its absolute necessity for Marxism, this too is based on profound theoretical reasons. Lenin expounded them very clearly in Materialism and Empirio-criticism. He showed that philosophy always played a fundamental theoretical role in the constitution and development of knowledge, and that Marxist philosophy simply resumed this role on its own account, but with means that were, in principle, infinitely purer and more fertile. We know that knowledge - in its strong sense, scientific knowledge - is not born and does not develop in isolation, protected by who-knows-what miracle from the influences of the surrounding world. Among these are social and political influences which may intervene directly in the life of the sciences, and very seriously compromise the course of their development, if not their very existence. We are aware of numerous historical examples. But there are less visible influences that are just as pernicious, if not still more dangerous, because they generally pass unnoticed: these are ideological influences. It was in breaking with the existing ideologies of history - at the end of a very arduous critical labour - that Marx was able to found the theory of history; and we know, too - from Engels's struggle against Dühring and Lenin's against the disciples of Mach -

 
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that, once founded by Marx, the theory of history did not escape the onslaught of ideologies, did not escape their influence and assaults.
    In fact, every science - natural as well as social - is constantly submitted to the onslaught of existing ideologies, and particularly to that most disarming - because apparently non-ideological - ideology wherein the scientist 'spontaneously' reflects his/her own practice: 'empiricist' or 'positivist' ideology. As Engels once said, every scientist, whether he wants to or not, inevitably adopts a philosophy of science, and therefore cannot do without philosophy. The problem, then, is to know which philosophy he must have at his side: an ideology which deforms his scientific practice, or a scientific philosophy that accounts for it? An ideology that enthrals him to his errors and illusions, or, on the contrary, a philosophy that frees him from them and permits him really to master his own practice? The answer is not in doubt. This is what justifies the essential role of Marxist philosophy in regard to all knowledge: if based upon a false representation of the conditions of scientific practice, and of the relation of scientific practice to other practices, any science risks slowing its advance, if not getting caught in an impasse, or finally taking its own specific crises of development for crises of science as such - and thereby furnishing arguments for every conceivable kind of ideological and religious exploitation. (We have some recent examples with the 'crisis of modern physics' analysed by Lenin.[6]) Furthermore, when a science is in the process of being born, there is a risk that it will put the ideology in which it is steeped into the service of its bad habits. We have some striking examples with the so-called human sciences, which are all too often merely techniques, blocked in their development by the empiricist ideology that dominates them, prevents them from perceiving their real foundation, defining their object, or even finding their basic principles in existing disciplines which are rejected because of ideological prohibitions or prejudices (like historical materialism, which should serve as the foundation of most of the human sciences).
    What goes for the sciences holds in the first place for historical materialism itself, which is a science among others and holds no privilege of immunity in this matter. It too is constantly threatened by the dominant ideology, and we know the result: the different forms of revisionism which - in principle, and whatever form they take (economic, political, social, theoretical) - are always related to deviations of a

philosophical character: that is, to the direct or indirect influence of distorting philosophies, of ideological philosophies. In Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin clearly demonstrated this, affirming that the raison d'ê:tre of dialectical materialism was precisely to furnish principles that enable us to distinguish ideology from science, thus to unearth the traps of ideology, in interpretations of historical materialism as well. In this way, he demonstrated that what he calls 'partisanship in philosophy' - that is, the refusal of all ideology, and the precise consciousness of the theory of scientificity - was an absolutely imperative requirement for the very existence and development not only of the natural sciences but of the social sciences, and above all of historical materialism. It has aptly been said that Marxism is a 'guide to action'.[7] It can act as this 'guide' because it is not a false but a true guide, because it is a science - and for this reason alone. Let us say, with all the precautions required by this comparison, that in many circumstances the sciences also require a 'guide', not a false but a true guide; and among them, historical materialism itself has a vital need for this 'guide'. This 'guide' is dialectical materialism. And since there is no other 'guide' over and above dialectical materialism, we can understand why Lenin attributed an absolutely decisive importance to the adoption of a scientific position on philosophy; we can understand why dialectical materialism demands the highest consciousness and the strictest scientific rigour, the most careful theoretical vigilance: because it is the last possible recourse in the theoretical domain - at least for men and women who, like us, are liberated from religious myths of divine omniscience, or their profane version: dogmatism.
 

4. Nature of a Science, Constitution of a Science,
Development of a Science, Scientific Research

If, as we think, Marx's doctrine is a scientific doctrine, if all the goals and all the means of action of Communists are based on the application of the results of Marx's scientific theories, our first duty clearly concerns the science that furnishes us with the means to understand the reality of the historical world and to transform it.
    We thus have a categorical duty to treat Marx's theory (in its two domains: historical materialism, dialectical materialism) as what it is - a true science. In other words, we must be fully aware of what is implied

This practice presupposes a whole series of specific theoretical conditions, into whose details it is not possible to enter here. The important point is that a science, far from reflecting the immediate givens of everyday experience and practice, is constituted only on the condition of calling them into question, and breaking with them, to the extent that its results, once achieved, appear indeed as the contrary of the obvious facts of practical everyday experience, rather than as their reflection. 'Scientific truth,' Marx writes, 'is always paradoxical, if judged by everyday experience, which captures only the delusive appearance of things.'[9]
    Engels says the same thing when he declares that the laws of capitalist production

prevail although those involved do not become aware of them, so that they can be abstracted from everyday practice only by tedious theoretical analysis . . . [10]

    This theoretical work is not an abstraction in the sense of empiricist ideology. To know is not to extract from the impurities and diversity of the real the pure essence contained in the real, as gold is extracted from the dross of sand and dirt in which it is contained. To know is to produce the adequate concept of the object by putting to work means of theoretical production (theory and method), applied to a given raw material. This production of knowledge in a given science is a specific practice, which should be called theoretical practice - a specific practice, distinct, that is, from other existing practices (economic, political, ideological practices) and absolutely irreplaceable at its level and in its function. Of course this theoretical practice is organically related to the other practices; it is based on, and articulated with, them; but it is irreplaceable in its domain. This means that science develops by a specific practice - theoretical practice - which can on no account be replaced by other practices. This point is important, because it is an empiricist and idealist error to say that scientific knowledges are the product of 'social practice

 
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in general', or of political and economic practice. To speak only of practice in general, to speak solely of economic and political practice, without speaking of theoretical practice as such, is to foster the idea that non-scientific practices - spontaneously, by themselves - produce the equivalent of scientific practice, and to neglect the irreplaceable character and function of scientific practice.
    Marx and Lenin put us on guard on this point, in showing us that the economic and political practice of the proletariat was, by itself, incapable of producing the science of society, and hence the science of the proletariat's own practice, but was capable only of producing utopian or reformist ideologies of society. Marxist-Leninist science, which serves the objective interests of the working class, could not be the spontaneous product of proletarian practice; it was produced by the theoretical practice of intellectuals possessing a very high degree of culture (Marx, Engels, Lenin) and 'introduced from without'[11] into proletarian practice, which it then modified and profoundly transformed. It is a leftist theoretical error to say that Marxism is a 'proletarian science', if by this one means that it was or is produced spontaneously by the proletariat. This error is possible only if one passes over in silence the existence and irreplaceable functions of scientific practice, as the practice productive of science. A fundamental condition of this scientific practice is that it works on the 'givens' of the experience of the economic and political practice of the proletariat and other classes. But this is only one of its conditions, for all scientific work consists precisely in producing, by starting from the experience and results of these concrete practices, knowledge of them, which is the result of another practice, an entire, specific theoretical labour. And we can get an idea of the immense importance and considerable difficulties of such work by reading Capital, knowing that Marx worked for thirty years to lay its foundations and develop its conceptual analyses.
    It must be remembered, then, that no science is possible without the existence of a specific practice, distinct from other practices: scientific or theoretical practice. It must be remembered that this practice is irreplaceable, and that - like any practice - it possesses its own laws, and requires its own means and conditions of activity.

    2. To know what a science is, is simultaneously to know that it can live only on condition that it develops. A science that repeats itself, without discovering anything new, is a dead science - no longer a science, but a fixed dogma. A science lives only in its development -

that is, from its discoveries. This point is likewise very significant because we may be tempted to believe that we possess completed sciences in historical and dialectical materialism as they are given to us today, and to be suspicious on principle of any new discovery. Naturally, the working-class movement has cause to be on guard against revisionisms that are always decked out in the robes of 'novelty' and 'renovation', but this necessary defence has nothing to do with suspicion of the discoveries of a living science. Were we to fall into this error, it would govern our attitude towards the sciences in question, and we would save ourselves the bother of what we nevertheless must do: devote all our efforts to developing these sciences, forcing them to produce new knowledges, new discoveries.
    Marx, Engels and Lenin expressed themselves on this issue without any ambiguity. When, in a celebrated outburst, Marx said he was 'not a Marxist ',[12] he meant that he considered what he had done as simply the commencement of science, and not as a completed knowledge - because a completed knowledge is a non-sense that sooner or later leads to a non-science. Engels said the same when he wrote, for example, in 1877:

With these discoveries [by Marx] socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details.[13] Political economy . . . as the science of the conditions and forms under which the various human societies have produced and exchanged and on this basis have distributed their products - political economy in this wider sense has still to be brought into being. Such economic science as we possess up to the present is limited almost exclusively to the genesis and development of the capitalist mode of production . . .'[14]

Lenin states this even more forcefully, if possible, in 1899:

There can be no strong socialist party without a revolutionary theory which unites all socialists, from which they draw all their convictions, and which they apply in their methods of struggle and means of action. To defend such a theory, which to the best of your knowledge you consider to be true, against unfounded attacks and attempts to corrupt it is not to imply that you are an enemy of all criticism. We do not regard Marx's theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all

    Our position must consist in drawing theoretical and practical conclusions from these principles. In particular, if both historical and dialectical materialism are scientific disciplines, we must of necessity develop them, make them produce new knowledges - expect from them, as from any living science, some discoveries. It is generally admitted that it must be thus for historical materialism, but it is not always clearly enough stated in the case of dialectical materialism, because we do not have a precise idea of the character of a scientific discipline, because we remain fixed on the (idealist) idea that philosophy is not really a discipline of a scientific character. In fact, we would be hard pressed to indicate the discoveries produced since Lenin in the domain of dialectical materialism, which has remained in practically the same state that Lenin brought it to in Materialism and Empirio-criticism. If this is so, it

 
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and effects are governed by the structure of class relations (the class struggle, law and the State). These same people participate in other activities - religious, moral, philosophical, etc. - either in an active manner, through conscious practice, or in a passive and mechanical manner, through reflexes, judgements, attitudes, etc. These last activities constitute ideological activity, they are sustained by voluntary or involuntary, conscious or unconscious, adherence to an ensemble of representations and beliefs - religious, moral, legal, political, aesthetic, philosophical, etc. - which constitute what is called the 'level' of ideology.
    Ideological representations concern nature and society, the very world in which men live; they concern the life of men, their relations to nature, to society, to the social order, to other men and to their own activities, including economic and political practice. Yet these representations are not true knowledges of the world they represent. They may contain some elements of knowledge, but they are always integrated into, and subject to, a total system of such representations, a system that is, in principle, orientated and distorted, a system dominated by a false conception of the world or of the domain of objects under consideration. In fact, in their real practice, be it economic or political, people are effectively determined by objective structures (relations of production, political class relations); their practice convinces them of the existence of this reality, makes them perceive certain objective effects of the action of these structures, but conceals the essence of these structures from them. They cannot, through their mere practice, attain true knowledge of these structures, of either the economic or political reality in whose mechanism they nevertheless play a definite role. This knowledge of the mechanism of economic and political structures can derive only from another practice, distinct from immediate economic or political practice, scientific practice - in the same way that knowledge of the laws of nature cannot be the product of simple technical practice and perception, which provide only empirical observations and technical formulae, but is, on the contrary, the product of specific practices - scientifc practices - distinct from immediate practices. None the less, men and women, who do not have knowledge of the political, economic and social realities in which they have to live, act and perform the tasks assigned them by the division of labour, cannot live without being guided by some representation of their world and their relations to this world.
    In the first instance men and women find this representation ready-made at birth, existing in society itself, just as they find - pre-existing them - the relations of production and political relations in which they will have to live. Just as they are born 'economic animals' and 'political animals', it might be said that men and women are born 'ideological

 
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animals'. It is as if people, in order to exist as conscious, active social beings in the society that conditions all their existence, needed to possess a certain representation of their world, a representation which may remain largely unconscious or, on the contrary, be more or less conscious and thought out. Thus, ideology appears as a certain 'representation of the world ' which relates men and women to their conditions of existence, and to each other, in the division of their tasks and the equality or inequality of their lot. From primitive societies - where classes did not exist - onwards, the existence of this bond can be observed, and it is not by chance that the first form of this ideology, the reality of this bond, is to be found in religion ('bond' is one of the possible etymologies of the word religion ). In a class society, ideology serves not only to help people live their own conditions of existence, to perform their assigned tasks, but also to 'bear' their condition - either the poverty of the exploitation of which they are the victims, or the exorbitant privilege of the power and wealth of which they are the beneficiaries.
    The representations of ideology thus consciously or unconsciously accompany all the acts of individuals, all their activity, and all their relations - like so many landmarks and reference points, laden with prohibitions, permissions, obligations, submissions and hopes. If one represents society according to Marx's classic metaphor - as an edifice, a building, where a juridico-political superstructure rests upon the infrastructure of economic foundations - ideology must be accorded a very particular place. In order to understand its kind of effectivity, it must be situated in the superstructure and assigned a relative autonomy vis-à-vis law and the State; but at the same time, to understand its most general form of presence, ideology must be thought of as sliding into all the parts of the edifice, and considered as a distinctive kind of cement that assures the adjustment and cohesion of men in their roles, their functions and their social relations.
    In fact, ideology permeates all man's activities, including his economic and political practice; it is present in attitudes towards work, towards the agents of production, towards the constraints of production, in the idea that the worker has of the mechanism of production; it is present in political judgements and attitudes - cynicism, clear conscience, resignation or revolt, etc.; it governs the conduct of individuals in families and their behaviour towards others, their attitude towards nature, their judgement on the 'meaning of life' in general, their different cults (God, the prince, the State, etc.). Ideology is so much present in all the acts and deeds of individuals that it is indistinguishable from their 'lived experience', and every unmediated analysis of the 'lived' is profoundly marked by the themes of ideological obviousness. When he

 
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thinks he is dealing with pure, naked perception of reality itself, or a pure practice, the individual (and the empiricist philosopher) is, in truth, dealing with an impure perception and practice, marked by the invisible structures of ideology; since he does not perceive ideology, he takes his perception of things and of the world as the perception of 'things themselves', without realizing that this perception is given him only in the veil of unsuspected forms of ideology.
    This is the first essential characteristic of ideology: like all social realities, it is intelligible only through its structure. Ideology comprises representations, images, signs, etc., but these elements considered in isolation from each other, do not compose ideology. It is their systematicity, their mode of arrangement and combination, that gives them their meaning; it is their structure that determines their meaning and function. The structure and mechanisms of ideology are no more immediately visible to the people subjected to them than the structure of the relations of production, and the mechanisms of economic life produced by it, are visible to the agents of production. They do not perceive the ideology of their representation of the world as ideology ; they do not know either its structure or its mechanisms. They practise their ideology (as one says a believer practises his religion), they do not know it. It is because it is determined by its structure that the reality of ideology exceeds all the forms in which it is subjectively lived by this or that individual; it is for this reason that it is irreducible to the individual forms in which it is lived; it is for this reason that it can be the object of an objective study. It is for this reason that we can speak of the nature and function of ideology, and study it.
    Now a study of ideology reveals some remarkable characteristics.

    1. We notice, first of all, that the term ideology covers a reality which - while diffused throughout the body of society - is divisible into distinct areas, into specific regions, centred on several different themes. Thus, in our societies, the domain of ideology in general can be divided into relatively autonomous regions: religious ideology, moral ideology, juridical ideology, political ideology, aesthetic ideology, philosophical ideology. Historically, these regions have not always existed in these distinct forms; they only appeared gradually. It is to be expected that certain regions will disappear, or be combined with others, in the course of the development of socialism and Communism, and that those which remain will participate in the internal redivisions of the general domain of ideology. It is also important to remark that, depending upon the historical period (that is, the mode of production), and within identical modes of production, according to the different social formations in existence, and also, as we shall see, the different social classes, this or

 
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that region of ideology dominates the others in the general domain of ideology. This explains, for example, the remarks of Marx and Engels on the dominant influence of religious ideology in all the movements of peasant revolt from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and even in certain early forms of the working-class movement; or, indeed, Marx's remark (which was not in jest) that the French have a head for politics, the English for economics, and the Germans for philosophy[17] - a significant remark for understanding certain problems specific to the working-class traditions in these different countries. The same kind of observations might be made regarding the importance of religion in certain liberation movements in former colonial countries, or in the resistance of Blacks to white racism in the United States. Knowledge of the different regions within ideology, knowledge of the dominant ideological region (whether religious, political, juridical, or moral), is of prime importance for the strategy and tactics of ideological struggle.

    2. We note as well another essential characteristic of ideology. In each of these regions, ideology, which always has a determinate structure, can exist in more or less diffuse or unthought forms, or, contrariwise, in more or less conscious, reflected, and explicitly systematized forms - theoretical forms. We know that a religious ideology can exist with rules, rites, etc., but without a systematic theology; the advent of theology represents a degree of theoretical systematization of religious ideology. The same goes for moral, political, aesthetic ideology, etc.; they can exist in an untheorized, unsystematized form, as customs, trends, tastes, etc., or, on the contrary, in a systematized and reflected form: ideological moral theory, ideological political theory, etc. The highest form of the theorization of ideology is philosophy, which is very important, since it constitutes the laboratory of theoretical abstraction, born of ideology, but itself treated as theory. It is as a theoretical laboratory that philosophical ideology has played, and still plays, a very significant role in the birth of the sciences, and in their development. We have seen that Marx did not abolish philosophy; by a revolution in the domain of philosophy he transformed its nature, rid it of the ideological heritage hindering it and made of it a scientific discipline - thus giving it incomparable means with which to play its role as the theory of real scientific practice. At the same time, we must be aware that - with the

    5. An important remark concerning class societies must be added. If in its totality ideology expresses a representation of the real destined to sanction a regime of class exploitation and domination, it can also give rise, in certain circumstances, to the expression of the protest of the exploited classes against their own exploitation. This is why we must now specify that ideology is not only divided into regions, but also divided into tendencies within its own social existence. Marx showed that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class'.[18] This simple phrase puts us on the path to understanding that just as there are dominant and dominated classes in society, so too there are dominant and dominated ideologies. Within ideology in general, we thus observe the existence of different ideological tendencies that express the 'representations' of the different social classes. This is the sense in which we speak of bourgeois ideology, petty-bourgeois ideology, or proletarian ideology. But we should not lose sight of the fact that in the case of the capitalist mode of production these petty-bourgeois and proletarian ideologies remain subordinate ideologies, and that in them - even in the protests of the exploited - it is always the ideas of the dominant class (or bourgeois ideology) which get the upper hand. This scientific truth is of prime importance for understanding the history of the working-class movement and the practice of Communists. What do we mean when we say, with Marx, that bourgeois ideology dominates other ideologies, and in particular working-class ideology? We mean that working-class protest against exploitation expresses itself within the very structure of the dominant bourgeois ideology, within its system, and in large part with its representations and terms of reference. We mean, for example, that the ideology of working-class protest 'naturally' expresses itself in the form of bourgeois law and morality.
    The whole history of utopian socialism and trade-union reformism attests to this. The pressure of bourgeois ideology is such, and bourgeois ideology is so exclusively the provider of raw ideological material (frames of thought, systems of reference), that the working class cannot, by its own resources, radically liberate itself from bourgeois ideology ; at best, the working class can express its protest and its aspirations by using certain elements of bourgeois ideology, but it remains the prisoner of that ideology, held in its dominant structure. For 'spontaneous' working-

 
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The terminological difficulty is itself only the index of another, more profound difficulty, which has to do with the theoretical nature of our discourse.
    What is a theoretical discourse? In the most general sense, it is a discourse that results in the knowledge of an object.
    At this point, in order to make what follows intelligible, we must offer a few clarifications, anticipating theoretical developments that will be published later.
    We shall say that, in the strong sense of the term, only particular real and concrete objects exist. At the same time, we shall say that the ultimate purpose of any theoretical discourse is 'concrete' knowledge (Marx) of these particular real and concrete objects. This is the sense in which abstract history or history in general does not exist (in the strong sense of the term) but only the real, concrete history of those concrete objects that are the particular concrete social formations we can observe in the accumulated experience of humanity. It is in this sense that production in general, abstract production, does not exist (Marx),[1] but only this or that concrete-real conjunction-combination of hierarchically structured modes of production in this or that determinate social formation: the France of 1848 (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, Class

 
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Struggles in France ); the Russia of 1905 or 1917 (Lenin); etc. All knowledge, and hence any theoretical discourse, has as its ultimate goal the knowledge of these particular concrete real objects: either their individuality (the structure of a social formation) or the modes of this individuality (the successive conjunctures in which this social formation exists).
    However - and this is the decisive point - we know that knowledge of these particular, concrete, real objects is not an immediate given, nor a simple abstraction, nor the application of general concepts to specific data. These are the positions of empiricism and idealism. Knowledge of particular, concrete, real objects is the result of an entire process of production of knowledge, whose outcome is what Marx calls 'the synthesis of many determinations' - this synthesis being the 'concrete knowledge' of a concrete object (1857 Introduction ).[2] What does this 'synthesis', as Marx calls it, consist in? And what are these 'determinations'?
    This synthesis consists in the correct combination-conjunction of two types of elements (or determinations) of knowledges, which, for the sake of clarity, we will for the moment call theoretical elements (in the strong sense) and empirical elements - or, in other terms, theoretical concepts (in the strong sense) and empirical concepts.[3]
    Theoretical concepts (in the strong sense) bear on abstract-formal determinations or objects. Empirical concepts concern the determinations of the singularity of concrete objects. Thus, we will say that the concept of mode of production is a theoretical concept which concerns the mode of production in general - an object which does not exist in the strong sense but is indispensable to the knowledge of any social formation, since every social formation is structured by the combination of several modes of production. In the same way, we will say that the concept of the capitalist mode of production is a theoretical concept, that it concerns the capitalist mode of production in general - an object that has no existence in the strong sense (in the strong sense, the capitalist mode of production does not exist, but only social formations dominated by the capitalist mode of production) but is none the less indispensable for the knowledge of any social formation characterized by the domination of what we call the capitalist mode of production, etc. The same goes for all Marx's theoretical concepts: mode of production, productive forces (or technical relations of production), social relations

of production, the political instance, the ideological instance, the concept of determination in the last instance by the economy, the concept of the articulation of instances, the concept of social formation, the concept of conjuncture, the concept of practice, of theory, etc. These concepts do not give us concrete knowledge of concrete objects, but knowledge of the abstract-formal determinations or elements (we will say objects) that are indispensable to the production of concrete knowledge of concrete objects. In saying that these are abstract-formal objects, we are only noting the terminology used by Marx himself, who in Capital, engaged in 'abstraction' and produced knowledge of 'forms' and 'developed forms'.[4]
    Empirical concepts bear on the determinations of the singularity of concrete objects - that is, on the fact that such a social formation presents such and such a configuration, traits, particular arrangements, which characterize it as existing. Empirical concepts thus add something essential to concepts that are theoretical in the strong sense: precisely the determinations of the existence (in the strong sense) of concrete objects. It might be thought that with this distinction we have reintroduced, under the guise of theoretical concepts, something resembling empiricism - namely, empirical concepts. This term (which will be modified in subsequent works to avoid any ambiguity) must not lead us into error. Empirical concepts are not pure givens, not the pure and simple tracing, not the pure and simple immediate reading, of reality. They are themselves the result of a whole process of knowledge, containing several levels or degrees of elaboration. Of course, these empirical concepts express the absolute requirement that no concrete knowledge can do without observation, experiment, and the data they provide (this corresponds to the gigantic empirical research, bearing on 'the facts', of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and to the concrete investigations and inquiries that sustained every 'concrete analysis of a concrete situation' for all the great leaders of the working-class movement. But at the same time they are irreducible to the pure data of an immediate empirical investigation. An investigation or an observation is in fact never passive: it is possible only under the direction and control of theoretical concepts directly or indirectly active in it - in its rules of observation, selection, classification, in the technical setting that constitutes the field of observation or experiment. Thus, an investigation or an observation, even an experiment, first of all only furnishes the materials which are then worked up into the raw material of a subsequent labour

of transformation that is finally going to produce empirical concepts. By 'empirical concepts', then, we do not mean the initial material but the result of successive elaborations; we mean the result of a process of knowledge, itself complex, wherein the initial material, and then the raw material obtained, are transformed into empirical concepts by the effect of the intervention of theoretical concepts - present either explicitly, or at work within this transformative process in the form of experimental settings, rules of method, of criticism and interpretation, etc.[5]
    In no case is the relation of theoretical concepts to empirical concepts a relation of exteriority (theoretical concepts are not 'reduced' to empirical data), or a relation of deduction (empirical concepts are not deduced from theoretical concepts), or a relation of subsumption (empirical concepts are not the complementary particularity - the specific cases - of the generality of theoretical concepts). Rather, it should be said (in a sense close to Marx's expression when talking about the 'realization of surplus-value') that empirical concepts 'realize' theoretical concepts in the concrete knowledge of concrete objects. The dialectic of this 'realization' - which has nothing to do with the Hegelian concept of the speculative 'realization' of the Idea in the concrete - will obviously demand sustained clarification, which can be produced only on the basis of a theory of the practice of the sciences, and of their history. Be that as it may, we can say that the concrete knowledge of a concrete object indeed appears to us as the 'synthesis' of which Marx spoke: a synthesis of the requisite theoretical concepts (in the strong sense) combined with elaborated empirical concepts. There is no concrete knowledge of a concrete object without the necessary recourse to the knowledge of those specific objects that correspond to the abstract-formal concepts of theory in the strong sense.
    For the moment, these specific points suffice for introducing an important distinction between the possible objects of a theoretical discourse. If we retain the distinction just advanced between abstract-formal objects and concrete-real objects, we may say that a theoretical discourse can, according to its level, bear either on abstract and formal objects, or on concrete and real objects.
    For example, the scientific analysis of a concrete historical reality - the French social formation in 1966 - will indeed constitute a theoretical discourse in the general sense, since it provides us with a knowledge. But in that case, it will be said that the discourse concerns a real-concrete

their theoretical object, their method. For example, a discourse like Stalin's little treatise (on dialectical and historical materialism),[6] which played a big role, since it taught Marxism to millions of militants over dozens of years, treats its object by a pedagogical method. It expounds the fundamental principles of Marxism, and in a generally correct manner. It offers the essential definitions, and above all makes the essential distinctions. It has the merit of being clear and simple, and thus accessible to the broad masses. But it exhibits the great defect of enumerating the principles of Marxism, without demonstrating the necessity of the 'order of exposition' (Marx) - that is, without demonstrating the internal necessity that links these principles, these concepts. Now the order (of exposition), which connects these concepts to each other, pertains to their necessary relations, these relations to their very properties: this order constitutes their system, which gives its real meaning to each of the concepts. For example, if the distinction between Marxist science (historical materialism) and Marxist philosophy (dialectical materialism) is clearly marked in Stalin's text, their internal relation and the specific necessity of their relation are not really thought through and demonstrated. For example, if the principles of materialism and of the dialectic are indeed affirmed, their internal, necessary relation is neither expounded nor demonstrated in its specific content.
    For practical, de facto reasons a pedagogical method of exposition can assuredly leave certain of these relations - if not the necessary system that links the concepts and gives them their sense - in the shade. For de jure reasons, a theoretical method of exposition cannot do this. It must rigorously expound the necessity of these relations; that is its purpose. Marx was perfectly conscious of this in Capital, when he said that the 'method of exposition ', as distinct from the method of investigation (or method of research and discovery) was an integral part of all scientific (we can add: and philosophical) discourse - that is, of all theoretical discourse.[7]
    The difficulty of a theoretical discourse in the strong sense derives, on the one hand, from the formal-abstract nature of its object, and on the other, from the rigour of its 'order' - that is, its method of exposition. What was said of the object must equally be said of the method: like the object, it is necessarily formal-abstract.
    Of course, this does not mean that a theoretical discourse must constantly remain at the level of theoretical abstraction alone. It can be illustrated by a great many possible 'concrete' examples. Here again,

 
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Marx showed us the way in Capital : he continually illustrates his analysis of the capitalist mode of production with examples drawn from a real-concrete object, the nineteenth-century British social formation. We have a perfect right to resort to this method of illustration, which is pedagogically sound and may play an important role in certain conditions. But we may do this only on the condition that we carefully distinguish the theoretical analysis of our theoretical (abstract) object from all its concrete 'illustrations', that we know that the object of theory in the strong sense cannot be reduced to, or confused with, the real objects used to illustrate it.
    If care is not taken to treat illustrations for what they are - illustrations only, and not concrete knowledges in the sense we have defined along with Marx - one risks falling into misunderstandings, like the celebrated misunderstanding to which many historians who read Capital fall victim. A historian looks for the concrete knowledge of a concrete object: some social formation in some conjuncture or in the dialectic of conjunctures that cover an entire period. Now Capital apparently contains some chapters of concrete history: on labour in England and the history of manufacture and industry; on primitive accumulation, etc. One may be tempted to see in this the Marxist theory of history at work in empirical concepts produced and displayed before our very eyes. Now if these chapters have so fascinated historians, it is precisely because they are not chapters of concrete Marxist history in the proper sense; it is because they bear a fraternal resemblance to the empirical chronological descriptions in which ordinary ideological history abounds. Marx does not in fact present them to us as chapters of a Marxist history, but as simple illustrations of theoretical concepts: the concepts of absolute and relative surplus-value, and of the non-capitalist origin of capitalism. In these pseudo-chapters of concrete history, he confined himself to giving us what he had to: facts designed to illustrate - that is, to repeat in empirical reality - a concept (labour in England) or partial genealogies (the transition from primitive accumulation to large-scale industry). As has been powerfully demonstrated,[8] these are elements for a concrete history - either materials or raw material for a Marxist history - but not chapters of Marxist history. If we want examples of concrete Marxist history, we must look for them where they are to be found: in Marx's historical works (The Eighteenth Brumaire, etc.), or in Lenin's historical analyses (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, etc.) and the great political analyses from 1917 to 1922. On this condition, we will avoid

 
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the confusions between a concrete illustration of a theoretical concept and Marxist history.
 

D. Final Difficulty: the Revolutionary Novelty of the Theory

To conclude this section on difficulties, we must offer yet another reason - the most important - for the difficulty of Marxist theoretical work.
    A theoretical text on Marx contains another difficulty besides that which pertains to the theoretical nature of its object or its method. This further difficulty is the revolutionary novelty of Marxist theory.
    We have seen what threatens the words used by a theoretical discourse: a rapid reading may construe them as having the same meaning they would possess in everyday life, when they actually have an entirely different meaning - that of theoretical concepts. We have seen what threatens the object of a theoretical discourse in the strong sense: a rapid reading can take this object as a real-concrete object, when it actually possesses an entirely different nature - that of a formal-abstract object. In these two cases, the specificity of theoretical language (terminology) and of the theoretical object is reduced and destroyed by the intervention of familiar 'obvious facts': those of 'everyday' ideology - i.e., of empiricist ideology.
    We cannot have any illusions about this: it cannot be otherwise for Marxist theory. It is not only Marxist theory's sworn adversaries who loudly proclaim that it has contributed nothing new ; it is also Marxism's partisans, when they read Marx's texts and 'interpret' Marxist theory through the established 'self-evident truths', those of the reigning ideological theories. To take only two examples, Marxists who spontaneously - without difficulties, scruples, or hesitation - read and interpret Marxist theory within the schemes of evolutionism or humanism in fact declare that Marx contributed nothing new - at least in philosophy and, by implication, in science - regarding the method of conceiving theoretical objects, and hence their structure. These Marxists reduce the prodigious philosophical novelty of Marx's thought to existing, ordinary, 'obvious' forms of thought - that is, to forms of the dominant theoretical ideology. In order clearly to perceive and grasp the revolutionary novelty of Marxist philosophy and its scientific consequences, it is necessary lucidly to resist this ideological reduction, to combat the ideology that supports it, and to state what distinguishes the specificity of Marx's thought, what makes it a revolutionary thought, not only in politics, but also in theory.
    This is where the last difficulty resides. For it is not easy to break with the 'self-evident truths' of theoretical ideologies like evolutionism or 'humanism', which have dominated all of Western thought for two hundred years. It is not easy to say that Marx was not Hegelian

 
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(Hegelianism is the 'rich man's' evolutionism), that Marx was not evolutionist, that Marx was not theoretically 'humanist'; it is not easy to show positively how Marx, because he is neither Hegelian nor 'humanist', is something else entirely, something which must then be defined. And when one tries to show this, it is not easy to make it understood and have it acknowledged.
    Any theoretical text, however limited, that treats Marxist principles inevitably contains this fundamental difficulty. Unless we are going to cede to the false 'self-evidence' of the dominant theoretical ideologies (whether evolutionism, humanism, or other forms of idealism) and thus betray the most precious aspect of Marx's thought - what makes it theoretically revolutionary - we must confront this difficulty, and struggle against the ideologies that continually threaten to suffocate, reduce and destroy Marxist thought. This is not an imaginary difficulty; it is an objective historical difficulty, as real in its way as the difficulties of revolutionary practice. The world does not undergo 'fundamental' change easily [9] - neither the social world, nor the world of thought.
    We know that a revolution is first of all required for the social world to 'change fundamentally'. But after the revolution, it is further necessary to undertake an extremely long, arduous struggle, in politics and ideology, to establish and consolidate the new society, and make it prevail. The same goes for the world of thought. Following a theoretical revolution, another extremely long and arduous struggle is required, in theory and ideology, to establish the new thought, have it recognized and make it prevail, especially if a form of thought that founds a new ideology and a new political practice is involved. Prior to the success of this struggle, the revolution in society, like the revolution in thought, runs a very great risk: of being smothered by the old world and, directly or indirectly, falling back under its sway.
    It will be understood why, again today, it would require a real effort to represent accurately the theoretical revolution accomplished by Marx in philosophy and in science, against the old ideologies that tend constantly to submit this revolution to their own law - that is, to smother and destroy it.
    This is why, although one certainly wants to take account of the bad reasons (errors, omissions, awkwardness and limits), any theoretical work will also have good reasons, inevitable and necessary reasons, for sometimes being difficult - reasons that pertain on the one hand to the theoretical nature of its object and its method, and on the other to the revolutionary novelty of Marx's thought.

    1. We will first of all obtain Marxist principles where they are produced and set forth: in the theoretical works of Marx and his important disciples.
    Yet we need only know a little about these works to see that reading them immediately raises a certain number of difficulties.
    The first of these difficulties concerns the works of Marx himself. In fact, there are some very tangible theoretical differences between Marx's first works (the so-called 'philosophical' or 'Early' works) and the later works, such as the Manifesto, the Poverty of Philosophy, the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Capital, etc. Similarly, there are tangible differences in object between these two groups of works. For example, Marx talks directly and at length about philosophy and ideology in the works of his youth and in The German Ideology, but talks of these very little, if at all, in Capital. If we want to obtain some Marxist principles concerning philosophy or ideology, to which texts do we refer? To the texts that speak of these directly and explicitly, whatever their date, or to other, subsequent texts that have the great inconvenience of speaking very little, or not at all, about such concerns?
    To obtain the principles of Marxism from Marx, then, we must have posed and resolved this preliminary problem: which of Marx's texts can be taken as Marxist? In other words, we must have asked Marx himself a simple and perfectly natural question: from what moment, from which work, did Marx - who, like any bourgeois intellectual of the 1840s necessarily thought in the dominant (idealist) ideology - break with that ideology, at what moment did he lay the foundations of his revolutionary theory? It is evident that if we take the content and the letter of the texts prior to this rupture and this revolution as Marxist - for example, the idealist and humanist texts of his youth - we remain fascinated by

 
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the fetishism of the signature, and regress to a pre-Marxist position; it is not Marx's signature but Marx's 'thought', in the strong sense, which authenticates a text as Marxist.
    To identify the pre-Marxist and the Marxist texts, clearly to distinguish these two series of texts - this is a project that presupposes an entire labour of critique on Marx's work itself. This indispensable critical work has been commenced.[10] It must be understood that any discourse on Marxist theory presupposes this preliminary work of critique.
    If we take this preliminary work seriously, this implies that we are then able to answer a second question: can we derive certain Marxist principles from the Marxist works of Marx (e.g. Capital ), even if these works do not directly or explicitly treat or state these principles? By what right, and via what procedures, may we do this? Let us consider, for example, the Marxist conception of philosophy : the question of philosophy abounds in the Early Works, and in The German Ideology, but little, if anything, is said about it in Capital. If we know that the works of Marx's youth are not 'Marxist', we will not take their formulations on philosophy as Marxist; we will not be able to retain them. We will turn to Capital in search of what defines Marxist philosophy. Now, Capital does not give us the principles of Marxist philosophy in person, since it does not treat philosophy; the capitalist mode of production, not philosophy, is its object.
    Nevertheless, Marxist philosophy is very much present in Capital, which is a 'realization ' of it. We will say, then, that Marxist philosophy can be found there, because it is at work there. We will say that Marxist philosophy exists in Capital 'in the practical state', that it is present in the theoretical practice of Capital - to be precise, in the way the object of Capital is conceived, in the way its problems are posed, in the way they are treated and resolved. The expression 'in the practical state ' should not mislead us. In this case, the expression designates a mode of existence of philosophy in a scientific work, in a theoretical practice, thus a theoretical mode of existence, and not (something we shall encounter shortly) a mode of existence in a political and historical work, hence 'practical' in the usual sense of the term. The existence of Marxist philosophy 'in the practical state ' in Capital designates the particular modality of the existence of the object, the problems, the scientific and thus theoretical method, of Capital. To say that Marxist philosophy is found in a practical state in Capital signifies, then, that the content of Marxist philosophy is indeed present in Capital, but that it lacks its

 
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theoretical form. Dialectical materialism (Marxist philosophy) is not dealt with there in its own right, as a distinct entity independent of historical materialism (science of history), but in, by, and through this chapter of historical materialism, which analyses the essence of the capitalist mode of production.
    It is the existence of Marxist philosophy 'in the practical state' in Capital that authorizes us to 'derive' the Marxist conception of philosophy from Capital. If Marxist philosophy were not present in Capital, we could not derive it therefrom. If it were present there, not only in its content but also in its form, spelled out explicitly, we would not need to 'derive' it. Since it is present therein in the 'practical state' (content), but not in the theoretical state (form), we must endow its content with its proper form. To do that we must identify its content, and give it its corresponding form.
    This work is a real theoretical work: not merely a work of simple extraction, abstraction in the empiricist sense, but a work of elaboration, transformation and production, which requires considerable effort. At least we can carry out this work, once we know that Marxist philosophy can really exist, in actuality, in the practical state, independently of its form and thus of its theoretical formulation. And when we affirm this possibility, we should know that we are affirming not only a fact ('it is thus') but a fundamental principle of Marxism itself, a principle that ultimately concerns the relation between a philosophy and a science, the relation between theory and practice: the principle which holds that philosophy exists first of all in the practice of the sciences, before existing for itself.
    Everyone will understand that what has just been said regarding the principles of Marxist philosophy applies to a great many other principles of Marxism: we often find ourselves obliged to 'derive' them, by a protracted labour of theoretical elaboration, transformation and production, from the 'practical state' in which they are given to us in the texts of Marx and his successors. What applies to certain essential principles (e.g. philosophy, the union of theory and practice, etc.) obviously applies, a fortiori, to their consequences. Marx did not 'say everything', not only because he did not have the time, but because to 'say everything' makes no sense for a scientist: only a religion can pretend to 'say everything'. On the contrary, a scientific theory, by definition, always has something else to say, since it exists only in order to discover, in the very solution of problems, as many, if not more, problems than it resolves. Thus, in order to define certain Marxist concepts and their consequences, we will often have to 'derive' them from the works of Marx and his successors, and to extend their effects by a complex labour of theoretical elaboration and production.

 
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    This indispensable and difficult work has been begun elsewhere, in a rudimentary and imperfect form.[11] But we must understand that any discourse on Marxist theory presupposes this work, without which we would go no further than resetting and rededicating the 'foundation stone' (Lenin)[12] laid by Marx.
    Of course - and this is an absolutely determinant remark - we are not alone before Marx's works, and before Capital. The work of elaboration to which I have just alluded has been under way for a long time, and its results are to be found in the theoretical works of Marx's main disciples. For example, we find something in Engels and Lenin that explicitly and directly takes up certain of the principles which are found only in the 'practical state' in Capital. Anti-Dühring, The Dialectics of Nature, and Materialism and Empirio-criticism allow us to pose in much more explicit terms the problem of the nature of Marxist philosophy, of the relation between theory and practice, etc., that remained implicit in Capital. The same applies to other principles pertaining to historical materialism - for example the concept of social formation, the concept of the combination of several modes of production in every social formation : Lenin formulated these, 'deriving' them from Marx through a rigorous theoretical examination, etc.
    Any work on Marxist theory must commence by carefully identifying and recording the results we owe to Marx and to his successors, and furthering this effort within the objective and subjective limits of possibility. Of course, we must apply the same method of theoretical 'extraction-elaboration' to the works of Marx's successors. We will thus come to 'derive' such-and-such theoretical elements present in the 'practical state' in these works, in order to impart an adequate theoretical form to their theoretical content.
    It will be understood that this work - if it is not a simple 'extraction', but a genuine elaboration - is rarely limited to the production of a made-to-order form, just the right match for a ready-and-waiting content. To believe that it is simply a matter of identifying an already adequate content, in order then to provide it with the appropriate form, as one chooses a suit according to the size of a customer, is insufficient. There is no pure content. Any content is always already given in a certain form. To give an adequate form to a theoretical content existing 'in a practical state' almost always presupposes, then, two conjoint operations: the critical rectification of the old form and the production of the new, in one and the same process. This means that the production

 
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of the new, more adequate, theoretical form presupposes the critique of the old - the perception of its inadequacy and of the reasons for that inadequacy. This means that a work of theoretical elaboration - even one bearing on theoretical contents existing in a theoretical discourse in the 'practical state' - presupposes a critical rectification of what is given in the practical state. There is nothing surprising about this: this is how any theoretical discipline proceeds in its development. A science or philosophy that is new, even revolutionary, always begins somewhere - in a certain universe of extant, and thus historically and theoretically determined, concepts and words; it is by means of the available concepts and terms that any new, even revolutionary, theory must find what it requires in order to think and express its radical novelty. Even in order to think against the content of the old universe of thought, any new theory is condemned to think its new content in certain of the forms of the existing theoretical universe which it is going to overturn. Neither Marx nor his successors escaped this condition, which governs the dialectic of all theoretical production. This is why we have not only to remove the pre-Marxist content of the thought of the young Marx, but also to criticize, in the name of the logic and coherence of the system of Marxist principles, certain of the forms in which the new content is presented. Evidently, this rule also applies to certain forms of existence of Marxist theoretical principles 'in the practical state' in the mature works of Marx and his successors. This is why any production of an adequate form for a theoretical content 'in the practical state' is in fact, at the same time, a critical rectification of the old form, wherein this content existed 'in the practical state'.
    The important thing to grasp here is that this operation of critical rectification is not imposed from without on the works of Marx and his successors, but results from the application of these works to themselves ; very specifically, it results from the application of their more elaborated forms to their less elaborated forms - or, if one prefers, of their more elaborated concepts to their less elaborated concepts, or again, of their theoretical system to certain terms of their discourse, etc. This operation reveals some 'blanks', 'plays on words', lacunae, inadequacies, which rectification can then reduce. All this work proceeds concurrently: it is by bringing to light the most elaborated forms and concepts, the theoretical system, etc., that rectification can be carried out, and it is rectification that foregrounds forms, concepts and systems which determine its objects. Is it necessary to give some examples? It is the application of the conceptual system of Capital to the conceptual system of the young Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that makes visible the theoretical break between the two texts; it is in this way, to be quite precise, by the application of the

 
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concept of 'wage labour' (which figures in Capital ) to the concept of 'alienated labour' (which figures in the Paris Manuscripts ), that the ideological, non-scientific character of the concept of 'alienated labour' - and thus of the concept of 'alienation' that supports it - becomes visible. In the same way, within Capital itself, it is by the application of the well-defined concepts of labour process, labour-power, concrete labour, abstract labour, wage labour, etc., to the concept of 'labour ' (also found in Capital ), that one discovers this concept of 'labour' (by itself) to be, in Capital, only a word, one of the old forms belonging to the conceptual system of classical political economy and Hegelian philosophy. Marx made use of it, but to lead to some new concepts which, in Capital itself, render this form superfluous and constitute its critique. It is extremely important to know this in order to avoid taking this word (labour) for a Marxist concept; otherwise, as many current examples attest, one may be tempted to erect upon it all the idealist and spiritualistic interpretations of Marxism as philosophy of labour, of the 'creation of man by man', of humanism, etc.
    Such, then, is the first response that can be given to the question: where are we to obtain the principles of Marxism? - from the theoretical works of Marx and his successors. On condition, first of all, of having accurately identified those works of Marx that are Marxist. On condition, next, of knowing that Marxist principles can be given to us in those works either in person, in an adequate theoretical form, or in another form, in the practical state. On condition, finally, of knowing that to 'derive' certain of the principles of Marxism from the works of Marx and his successors, especially when those principles are there in a practical state, presupposes an elaboration that must sometimes take the form of a work of critical rectification.

    2. All this, however, concerns only the theoretical works among the classics of Marxism. We must now speak of something else: the practical works of Marxism - that is, the political practice of the organizations of class struggle born of the union of Marxist theory and the workers' movement, and its results.
    We have shown that Marxist principles can exist 'in the practical state' in the theoretical works of Marxism. Now it must be shown that they can also exist 'in the practical state' in the practical works of Marxism.
    The political practice of Communist Parties can in fact contain, in the practical state, certain Marxist principles, or certain of their theoretical consequences, which are not to be found in existing theoretical analyses. From the viewpoint of the theoretical content itself, the political practice of organizations of class struggle can thus find itself - in certain cases

 
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and on certain points, and sometimes very considerably - in advance of existing theory. One can then 'derive', from the political practice that contains them, theoretical elements in advance of the state of existing theory.
    Of course, it is not a matter of just any 'spontaneous' practice, but of the practice of revolutionary parties that base their organization and their action on Marxist theory. Of course, it is not a matter of just any of these practices 'based' on Marxist theory, but of a practice whose relation to Marxist theory is correct.[13] With this dual qualification in mind, the political practice of a revolutionary party, the structure of its organization, its objectives, the forms of its action, its leadership of the class struggle, its historical achievements, etc., constitute the realization of Marxist theory in determinate real-concrete conditions. As these principles are theoretical, if this realization is correct, it inevitably produces results of theoretical value. Among these results, some simply represent the application of theoretical principles already known and stated by theory; others, by contrast, can represent theoretical elements - some new theoretical effects or even principles - that do not figure in the actual state of theory. Under the conditions just mentioned, it is in this way that the political practice of revolutionary Marxist parties can contain, in the practical state, theoretical elements, effects, or principles in advance of existing theory.
    This is why, to the question: where do we find the principles of Marxism?, we can answer: at once in the theoretical works or the classics of Marxism, and in the practical works of the Communist Parties.
    Let us clarify what is meant by the 'practical works' or political practice of Communist Parties.
    These can be political analyses of the concrete situation, resolutions fixing the party line, political discourses defining it and commenting on it, programmatic slogans recording political decisions or drawing out their conclusions. These can be actions undertaken, the way they are conducted as well as the results obtained. These can be forms of organization of the class struggle, the distinction between its different levels and between the corresponding different organizations. These can be methods of leadership of the class struggle and of the union with the masses, the way problems of the union of theory and practice in the

practice - that is, one of the most profound questions of dialectical materialism, not only in the domain of political practice but also in the domain of theoretical practice (for, in its relation with the non-theoretical, and especially the political, conjuncture, the theoretical conjuncture defines the link that allows us to think, in the necessity of its 'play', the nature of theoretical practice).
    That a principle of such theoretical fecundity and importance was contained in the practical state in Lenin's political analyses and interventions from 1917 to 1923 is an incontestable fact. That this principle remained in a practical state, no one being sufficiently advised to 'derive' it from Lenin's political works, is, unfortunately, also a fact. A theoretical treasure was there, within reach, in Lenin's political works; no one 'discovered' it, and it remained sterile. Even the officially proclaimed primacy of practice, and of political practice, did not inspire systematic research on Lenin's political works. There have certainly been important lessons drawn from them in the practice of the Communist Parties. But, leaving aside Stalin's Questions of Leninism,[*] no systematic theoretical work was derived, bearing on Lenin's political principles. Moreover, there has been no systematic theoretical work drawn from Lenin's political practice, bearing on the theoretical concepts of historical materialism and dialectical materialism and thus on the important theoretical, even philosophical, discoveries produced by Lenin's political practice. In the same way, a number of theoretical concepts remained in the 'practical state' in the works of Marx himself. To what do we owe this regrettable situation, whose effects can be painfully felt today? Without a doubt, to the urgency of the political tasks of the working-class movement, which was not allowed the leisure of calm study by its class enemy. But also to the conception of Marxism constructed by 'intellectuals of the working class', cut off as they were either from its real practice or from the practice that produced its theory, and thus subject, despite their political loyalty, to bourgeois ideologies - empiricism, evolutionism, humanism, pragmatism - which they projected on to the great classical texts, as they did on to the great deeds of the working-class movement. Be that as it may, this situation lays a precise task before us: to draw from Marx, from Lenin, and from the great Communist leaders, not only what they said in their theoretical works, but also whatever these works contain in the practical state, as well as whatever their political works contain by way of theoretical discoveries. An urgent task.
    Thus, important theoretical events do not always or exclusively occur in theory: it happens that they also occur in politics, and that as a result, in certain of its sectors, political practice finds itself in advance of theory. It happens that theory does not take notice of these theoretical

events, which occur outside its official, recognized field, even though they are decisive, in many respects, for its own development.[14]
    If, to reprise an excellent formula (applied to Galileo by Georges Canguilhem), we declare that the peculiarity of theory is to 'speak the truth ' [dire le vrai ], in the strong sense of the word - to isolate, define, state and demonstrate it with theoretical arguments; thus in a discourse subject, as Marx wished, to a rigorous 'order of exposition' - we must note, at the same time, that one can 'be in the truth ' [être dans le vrai ], without therewith being able to 'speak the truth'.[15] This distinction may be understood in a very broad sense: one 'is in the truth' not only when one 'tells' it but also when one produces a theoretical content 'in the practical state', without at the same time producing its theoretical form, the form of its 'telling', or of its theoretical discourse. We have seen that one can thus be in the truth in theory itself, without in the same breath being able to speak the truth therein. It is thus that Marxist philosophy is found in the practical state in Capital: Capital is indeed in Marxist philosophy, without also being able to 'speak' it, without producing its rigorous discourse. We have just seen that one could thus 'be in the truth' in political practice, without being able to 'speak' this truth there, in the strong sense of theoretical discourse.
    This possibility of being in the truth without saying the truth, the distinction between a theoretical content in the practical state and a theoretical content in the theoretical state - all these propositions are not conveniences or devices of an expository rhetoric ; they are propositions that directly concern Marxism itself, because they involve the relation of theory and practice, they affirm the 'primacy of practice' - in theory as well as in practice - and, most crucially, they also show us the variations of this relation, which can oscillate between the extremes of a false relation and a correct relation.
    Just because a new theoretical content can exist in the practical state in Marxist theory or in the practice of Communist Parties, it does not follow that everything existing there in a 'practical state' has a theoretical value. It is not true that one is in the truth solely by virtue of the fact that one is in 'practice', just as it is not true that one is in the truth solely by virtue of the fact that one decides to 'speak' it - that is, solely by virtue of the fact that one has a discourse with a 'theoretical' appearance, or