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−	= Whiteboard =	+	'''CURRICULUM OF'''<br />
		+	'''THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF MARXISM-LENINISM'''<br />
		+	'''PART 1'''
−	https://theanarchistlibrary.org/action/text/edit/cracks-in-a-grey-sky-an-anthology-of-do-or-die/28688	+	'''THE WORLDVIEW AND PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY OF MARXISM-LENINISM'''
−	#title Cracks in a Grey Sky: An Anthology of Do or Die	+	''For University and College Students''
−	#subtitle Voices from the Ecological Resistance
−	#author Various
−	#date 2016
−	#lang en
−	#pubdate 2024-06-11T08:44:21.471Z
−	#topics Earth First!, Earth Liberation Front, Do or Die!, Little Black Cart, anthology, UK, green, anti-civ, Ardent Press
−	#source <[[https://www.activedistributionshop.org/product/cracks-in-a-grey-sky/][activedistributionshop.org/product/cracks-in-a-grey-sky/]]>
−	#cover c-i-cracks-in-a-grey-sky-an-anthology-of-do-or-die-1.jpg
−	#publisher Ardent Press
−	#isbn 978–1620490822
−	#notes End footnotes 1, 2 & 3 were missing from “Bashing the GE-nie back in the Bottle” source book & [[https://files.libcom.org/files/do-or-die_09.pdf][original source magazine]] and so marked as missing. Text body footnotes were marked, but missing from “Reports and Thoughts on the Action in Derbyshire”, but found from the original source magazine and so added back in. A marked, but missing footnote from “An Open Letter to the Minister for Transport” was found in the original source magazine and so added back in.
−	** An Introduction	+	''Not Specializing in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought''
−	It’s strange to put together a collection of articles from a publication that has been defunct for 13+ years and from nearly 9000 km away. Do or Die, Voices from the Ecological Resistance filled a void that US publications (Live Wild or Die!, Green Anarchy, and Black Seed) have attempted, in their ways, to fill but with nowhere near the quality or quantity of the original. Do or Die (DoD) was the expression of a singular moment by strong writers who agreed about how to approach and discuss a high point of ecological resistance. Here I want to contextualize the struggles discussed in DoD, to speak to the parallels between that time and our current moment, to take seriously the critique and proposals in the paper generally and in “Down with the Empire, Up with the Spring” and “The Four Tasks” specifically. Ultimately we want to introduce a new generation of warriors to the intelligent approach presented in DoD nearly 20 years ago and discuss how this approach is still relevant today.	+	'''FIRST ENGLISH EDITION'''
−	*** The Project and Audience	+	Translated and Annotated by Luna Nguyen
−	<quote>	+	Foreword by Dr. Vijay Prashad
−	<em>DoD was produced by and largely aimed at a few hundred people in the</em> UK <em>eco scene. Although it had a wider circulation than this, it was largely produced with this audience in mind. But, DoD has also been really liked by all sorts of other people who often didn’t like each other at all. For example lots of more traditional anarchist communists really liked DoD, as did lots of conservationists--the magazine was big enough that very few people read all of it--people just read the bits they liked and ignored the rest. We’d get comments from more traditional anarchists saying that they really liked it, but it was a shame about the articles about beaver restoration or Native American spirituality. And then we’d get almost exactly opposite comments from other people who liked the beavers but weren’t so into class struggle.</em>
−	<br>--From the .EF! postmortem interview circa 2006
−	</quote>
−	DoD was a pre-Internet project and we can only mourn the differences between then and now. Today print publications--that rare and dying breed-cannot accept contradiction or lack of coherence. When they exist at all it tends to be for a small group of true believers, rather than a broad audience of fellow travelers, which is what DoD eventually pulled together. The idea of having something of value to share with your ideological opponents seems increasingly rare within radical politics. There is no more kumbaya as we clamor for smaller and smaller crumbs from a body politic that has a decreasing appetite for the big dreams and declarations about what is ahead, from radicals who are barely able to demonstrate ambulation and mastication (much less simultaneity).	+	Introduction by Dr. Taimur Rahman
−	DoD had dozens of contributors each issue. While that is also true for the Earth First! Journal here in the US, DoD, in addition to having commentary based on first-person observation and testimonial (especially as the journal grew in size in the last four issues -issue 10 was nearly 400 pages long), also had lengthy theoretical works. EF! barely has theoretical texts at all, and what there are tend to be short and ranty rather than the massive accomplishment of the pieces “Down with the Empire, Up with the Spring” (DwtE) and “The Four Tasks” (TFT), and even smaller but still engaging ones like the pieces on Critical Mass, Action Theater, and the impact of the dole on activism. That kind of effort has to nurtured and celebrated to find its pace.	+	Edited, Annotated, and Illustrated by Emerican Johnson
−	It’s also worth noting the decision to shut down the project rather than hand it to the next generation. As they make clear, it wasn’t for lack of relevance or reader enthusiasm. Clearly the same problems and even some of the efforts and solutions offered by DoD make sense to a new generation (hence this collection). But each new generation has to find their own voice, to express even old problems in a way that makes sense to new ears, and dusty old projects (think Rolling Stone) really do tend to stink up the room.	+	Proofread by David Peat
−	*** Road Building	+	Additional Contributions and Editorial Support by Iskra Books
−	What DoD told us about the UK-and about how direct action against the mega-machine looks different when away from forests and wilderness-was wonderful. The imagery and storytelling of road resistance seems like something out of science fiction, not a British parallel to tree sitting and its accompanying culture. In the US the road-protest scene is arguably more needed than it is in the UK, but apart from a few, meager protests (I-69, Loop 202 in AZ, etc), the US innovation seems to be having protests ON freeways rather than efforts against their construction in the first place.	+	Published in association with ''The International Magazine''
−	The struggle against the M11 link was inspiring on a number of levels. In particular the imagery of tunnels to burrow under and befuddle construction was amazing. The growth of road-building protests in the 90s seemed so much more salient to the everyday life of someone in civilization, rather than tree-spiking and -sitting in far-off locales. The protest against roads seemed like the right kind of action to come from a country that had so little official wildness left to fight for.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-2.png]]
−	Clearly the fight for the Earth is complex and the war against roads was lost, or perhaps just the battle, although the protestors doubled the cost of the M11 link (which eventually became the ninth most congested road in the UK), and ended, in embryo, similar road-building attempts (the M12 was cancelled on first review). The fight against such an existential opponent roads are the primary circulation system of capitalism-was a worthy one, but it’s hard to believe that anyone involved ever believed that this fight was enough: necessary, but not sufficient. But the grind of an enormous campaign (the Newbury campaign was attempting to stop construction on a nine-mile piece of land, every day, for months) meant that bigger issues could not be debated-exhaustion, drinking, and politics would not allow for it.	+	=== License ===
−	The story of roads is inspirational and a great piece of UK EF! cultural currency but ultimately an open wound--the gap between building a movement of the disparate forces that engage in these forms of struggle and the motivation of those groups being ephemeral and contradictory.	+	This work is licensed under a<br />
		+	Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
−	*** Winning and Losing	+	You are free to:
−	<quote>	+	'''Share''' — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
−	Basically what happened within EF! was that we won. DoD and the political perspective it represented was relatively unpopular at the beginning. DoD was essentially trying to fulfil the same role that Live Wild or Die! did in the States--a radical anarchist fringe publication <em>trying to ginger things up a</em> bit. When we <em>say that we won, in that the green anarchist perspective went from being the minority to the majority perspective within EF! in the</em> UK <em>over the course of the 1990s, that isn’t quite as arrogant as it sounds... this may have been partly due to our efforts but is probably more due to people’s own experiences of resistance over time. This resulted in lots of people dropping much of the non-violent pacifist</em> ideology, <em>moving more towards an anarchist position and supporting sabotage actions.</em>
−	<right>	+	'''Adapt''' — remix, transform, and build upon the material
−	--From the EF! postmortem interview circa 2006
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	This quote is deep. ft holds a lot of history in a few, easily-missed words and refers to a before that is hard so see from the position of one who has only been in the now. There was a time when EF! held at the same time very different ideas of what comprises direct action in defense of the earth. This is outside of debates about peaceful (or not) tactics or what shape a better world should take. This quote refers to a time when EF! (alongside many other social justice groups) wasn’t homogenous. That is no longer true.	+	The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
−	On the one hand political people (who describe themselves with terms like anarchist) want to have deep and engaged conversations about the implications of ideas to daily life. On the other this has created a cultural context where participation has entailed a type of conformity.	+	Under the following terms:
−	The example above doesn’t refer to the split between rednecks and hippies but a time when summit protests were being challenged by anarchists as having a limited depth of strategic vision. These same people were developing a tighter connection between a green anarchist perspective and EF! activities. The unforseen consequence of this move has been a further whittling of the kind of opinions, actions, and ideas that EF! participates in. There hasn’t been a rondy in a decade that doesn’t have some sort of identity politics drama attached to it.	+	'''Attribution''' — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
−	*** Down with the Empire	+	'''NonCommercial''' — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
−	This essay is a strong conclusion to the DoD project. It does it all: savors the victories, names the defeats, and tells the story of a decade of attempts by human beings to defend the Earth against the rapacious industrial system. It is a thoughtful, considered, un-depressed summation of years and years of thinking and acting.	+	'''ShareAlike''' — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
−	DwtE frames the history of UK EF! and, like any frame, is perhaps unfair to future ecological actions in the UK theater. It’s a story of birth, land struggle, localism, and ultimately the globalization of the movement. This might be cold solace to those who are still fighting against roads and industrialism in the nooks and valleys of the greater UK. The article implies, “Keep trying but your story has already been told:’ That said, DwtE was a fantastic introduction to the section that followed it, the rare strategic document, or at the very least a solid set of proposals.	+	'''No additional restrictions''' — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
−	*** The Four Tasks	+	The full text of this license is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
−	Somewhere between strategy and tactics is the conversation all of us in the change-the-world movement need to have. At this point I would say that strategy is easy, if silly. It’s easy to declare that peace will be the result of peace, or killing tyrants will make leaders behave. In fact, the focus required to do either enough to test whether the hypotheses work, is in short supply. Grandiose statements-especially since the Internet is so frequently the way we communicate with each other-have become a principle form of non-communication. Tactics is also easy enough. It is simple to talk about the technics, specifics, and experiences of how to deal with meetings, windows, and equipment in the field. But the gap between what we can do and what we want is enormous, it’s existential, and it touches on everything we love and hate about people.	+	<br />
−	TFT attempts to bridge this strategy-tactics gap and its effort is worth engaging with, even 20 years later, because of how prescient and accurate (if not precise) it was (with regard to the shape of ecological resistance). TFT is, from our perspective, the zenith of DoD.	+	<blockquote>
		+	“Step by step, along the struggle, by studying Marxism-Leninism parallel with participation in practical activities, I gradually came upon the fact that only socialism and communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working people throughout the world from slavery.”
−	*** Growing Counter-Cultures	+	''- Ho Chi Minh''
		+	</blockquote>
−	<quote>	+	=== Support for This Work ===
−	We need to catalyse living, loving, .fighting counter cultures that can sustain rebellion across generations. In both collective struggle and our everyday lives we must try to live our ecological and libertarian principles. Our counter-cultures must be glimmers of ecological anarchy--fertiliser for the growth of collective imagination. Fulfilling <em>this task is what will enable the others to be fulfilled over the long haul. The counter-cultures must be bases from which to carry out ‘thumb in the dam’ actions and give support to rebellions beyond the core. In times of crisis they should act decisively against authoritarian groups. The counter-culture’s eventual aim should be total social transcendence-(r)evolution.</em>
−	</quote>
−	In the US the perspective that counter culture is valuable has fallen entirely out of favor. This is mostly because of the Internet (also somewhat because of the surprising popularity and mis-reading-or at least highly attenuated reading-of “Introduction to Civil War” by Tiqqun). These days in the US there is a disdain for all “things counter cultural. Of course the disdainers were also once the royalty of the same counter cultures they are oh-so-over, but that isn’t the point. The Internet killed counter culture[1], especially what was most visually distinctive about it. For the spectacularized American, that was enough. These days no one is allowed their own special little treehouse in which to foment (r)evolution, not without a thousand blogs of light shining down upon them. And this will not do.	+	Translating, annotating, and typesetting this book has taken three years, which would not have been possible without the support of our supporters on GoFundMe. GoFundMe is also the reason we are able to make the digital version of this entire text available for free online. We would therefore like to recognize all of our supporters:
−	The tension for us, as people who were formed pre-Internet, is that to eschew the counter culture is to embrace mainstream culture: Mom & Dad, jobs and retirement, home ownership and life insurance, kids, dogs, and white picket fences. We claimed counter culture as the escape from that, but mainstream culture has already, mostly, consumed each individual component. You want Mom & Mom, a shared job, no home or insurance, and a cat? Go for it! To put this another way, the problem with American counter culture is that we had no culture in the first place. Since WWII we have had nothing but capitalism’s throbbing successes at solving the problems of human storage and survival. Counter culture, especially as defined by DoD (and by us), is about something else entirely. For starters, it’s about something that spans generation, which we absolutely do not have.	+	{|
		+	| | ''Zach L.''
		+	| ''Jake B.''
		+	| ''Katia S.''
		+	| ''Jimi C.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Kathryn S.''
		+	| ''Matthew S.''
		+	| ''Manuel V.''
		+	| ''Luiza S.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Timothy P.''
		+	| ''Joshua E.''
		+	| ''Sarah K.''
		+	| ''Sarah F.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''De’Vonte'' ''T.''
		+	| ''Corey K.''
		+	| ''Aidan M.''
		+	| ''Danion S.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Douglas H.''
		+	| ''Justin F.''
		+	| ''Blake P.''
		+	| ''Liam H.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Ayodele E.''
		+	| ''Jesse T.''
		+	| ''Patrick O.''
		+	| ''Mendel A.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Stephanie P.''
		+	| ''Christopher R.''
		+	| ''Daniel H.''
		+	| ''Marcos F. T.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Bryan D.''
		+	| ''Helios A. C.''
		+	| ''Ryan P.''
		+	| ''Peter L.-D.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Jeff H.''
		+	| ''Michael M.''
		+	| ''Matthew P.''
		+	| ''Abby L.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Matheus G. P.''
		+	| ''Ellenore M.''
		+	| ''Duy V.''
		+	| ''Erin P.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Luke F.''
		+	| ''Jason T.''
		+	| ''Georgio M.''
		+	| ''Astor C.''
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		+	|-
		+	| | ''Ayo E.''
		+	| ''Michael E.''
		+	| ''Noah B.''
		+	| ''Alex E.''
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		+	|-
		+	| | ''David B. G.''
		+	| ''Heath H.''
		+	| ''Ian H.''
		+	| ''Simon L.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Joel V.''
		+	| ''Boyles B.''
		+	| ''Jackson M.''
		+	| ''Andrew H.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Jake B.''
		+	| ''Ashley C.''
		+	| ''Karen N.''
		+	| ''Robert D.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''K. Masunungure''
		+	| ''Daniel S.''
		+	| ''Mckenzie P.''
		+	| ''Chandler F.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Daniel A.''
		+	| ''Aadil B.''
		+	| ''Julianna D. P.''
		+	| ''Audrey M.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Ville I.''
		+	| ''Joshua R.''
		+	| ''Kyle R.''
		+	| ''Larry V. K. III''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Ariel G.''
		+	| ''Maximilian H.''
		+	| ''Peter F.''
		+	| ''Zero P.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Aaron L.''
		+	| ''John P.''
		+	| ''Josh P.''
		+	| ''Daniel G.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Jason T.''
		+	| ''John M.''
		+	| ''Kayla D.''
		+	| ''Dmitri S.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Crescenzo P.''
		+	| ''Matthew L.''
		+	| ''Lindsay H.''
		+	| ''Jeremy A. C.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Antonio R.''
		+	| ''Glenn A.''
		+	| ''Adam M.''
		+	| ''Anthony M.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Roger W.''
		+	| ''Edward C.''
		+	| ''Dennis C.''
		+	| ''Amiad H.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Hunter S.''
		+	| ''Caitlin B.''
		+	| ''Griffin M.''
		+	| ''Mat C.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Joseph Z. B.''
		+	| ''Aaron W.''
		+	| ''Nicholas H.''
		+	| ''Pastor J.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Cam S.''
		+	| ''Benjamin S.''
		+	| ''Brandon H.''
		+	| ''Richard M.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Adam K.''
		+	| ''Michael C.''
		+	| ''Ashley E.''
		+	| ''Robert D.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Olga C.''
		+	| ''Megan B.''
		+	| ''Simon C.''
		+	| ''Alexandria J.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Roberto P.''
		+	| ''Manuel G. F.''
		+	| ''Jonis F.''
		+	| ''Darsius'' ''ACAB''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Gerard D.''
		+	| ''Sam W.''
		+	| ''John G.''
		+	| ''Anna N.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Voltie'' ''M.''
		+	| ''James H.''
		+	| ''Eric R.''
		+	| ''Anthony Z.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Kaylee C.''
		+	| ''Kevin P.''
		+	| ''Audrin'' ''T.''
		+	| ''Joshua B.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Edil F.''
		+	| ''Calum S.''
		+	| ''Nam T.''
		+	| ''Kyril W.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Zeke T.''
		+	| ''Jesse R.''
		+	| ''Orhan M.''
		+	| ''Morgan H.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Gideon S.''
		+	| ''Taylor H.''
		+	| ''Ross P.''
		+	| ''Tarana'' ''I.-M.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Saumya I.''
		+	| ''Siddharth P.''
		+	| ''Sam P.''
		+	| ''Dirk K.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Jason G. A., Jr.''
		+	| ''Melinda K.''
		+	| ''Jillian R.''
		+	| ''Jacob N.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Richard H.''
		+	| ''Shane F.''
		+	| ''Derric A.''
		+	| ''Robyn M.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | ''Lachlainn'' ''H.''
		+	| ''Marc G.''
		+	| ''Blaine H.''
		+	| ''The Slopstache''
		+	|
		+	|}
−	To put this conundrum into slightly more positive language, we feel outside of and opposed to mainstream culture but strongly desire something-like-a-community to fulfill both the spiritual and material needs a culture could provide-so we endure counter culture. We have big dreams for counter culture-which has time and time again disappointed-and believe something connected to our daily life must also be the mechanism by which we participate in the change we’d like to see in the world (which I don’t mind calling (r)evolution even though it sounds dorky to a North American ear).	+	There is still plenty of work to be done to complete the translation of this entire curriculum. If you would like to financially support our efforts, you can support us at:
−	I think the common criticism of this position is a communist one. We, by whatever broad definition you want to give counter culture, will never be large enough to be a force-to-be-reckoned-with on the stage where a revolution (or even a (r)evolution) would need to be waged. We, to put it gently, are not enough. We aren’t even talking about a Russian Revolution-style change but about survival, fertilizer and safe houses, dance parties and hookups, and even putting thumbs in the dam. It seems hard to fathom a new type of counter culture-mostly comprised of the most educated from the current counter culture that is attempting to build (political) parties, study groups, and gestures towards effects-will have anywhere near the 8keletal structure shown by even the shadow of the previous counter culture.	+	BanyanHouse.org
−	Forgive us our internal critiques. This first task of TFI still rings true. We need some place where our probable hostility for each other can look and feel much more like conviviality than a civil war. We need this because if there ever were the requirement for the kind of solidarity and unity of action a radical transformation of this world requires, we don’t currently have it. It is possible that the fragmentation of counter culture (a fragmentation that is largely concurrent to the rise of the Internet) is irreversible. That would mean that the corollary to the First Task may be something like reconciling the irreconcilable of a unitary counter culture vs a diverse one that recognized itself and its boundaries, and had an honest self assessment of the accompanying strategic limitation and opportunities.	+	=== Dedication and Gratitude ===
−	*** Putting Our Thumb in the Dam	+	This book is dedicated to all the backers of the GoFundMe campaign that raised the funds to allow me to translate this text. What I initially believed would be a straightforward three-month process of translating ended up taking over three ''years'' of not just translation but also research, study, review, annotation, editing, proofreading, peer review, and more — with the incredible support of a full team of talented comrades — in order to make sure that everything would be digestible and intelligible for audiences outside of Vietnam. So, sincerely, thank you to everyone who backed this project for your patience, support, and encouragement.
−	<quote>	+	Thank you to my husband and comrade, Emerican Johnson, who helped me throughout the translation process, and who did such a fantastic job editing, annotating, and illustrating this text. He was my constant dialectical companion as we grappled together with the spirit and meaning of the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Engels that are the bedrock of this text.
−	Just as counter-cultures must open up space for (r)evolution to grow <em>we must also open up time. The life support systems of the earth are under unprecedented attack. Biological meltdown is accelerating. (R) evolution takes decades to mature. Unless force is used on the margins of the global society to protect the most important biological areas we may simply not have enough time. The last tribal examples of anarchy, from whom we can learn a lot, could be wiped out within decades if not militantly defended. Thumb-in-the-Dam struggles aim to protect ecological diversity understanding that this civilisation WILL be terminated, by either the unlikely possibility of global (r)evolution or the certainty of industrial collapse.</em>
−	</quote>
−	This argument is similar to the assertion by EF! types that there is something metaphysical about wildness, therefore justifying its defense at any cost. This kind of argumentation has fallen out of vogue (alongside, thankfully, the deep vs social ecology debate). There are still a thousand not-radical non-profits that are thumbing dams all over the place: saving rhinos. gorillas, rain forests, and other regions and species that will be eliminated as the violence of global capitalism completes its consumption of resources.	+	Thank you, also, to Iskra Books for the absolutely vital work they have done in helping us to edit this book and hold it to a high standard. We literally could not have done it without you. In particular, thank you to Ben Stahnke for organizing and cheerleading us through to the end, and to David Peat, for the painstaking, meticulous, and no-doubt frustrating work of proofreading our very, very, very imperfect writing!
−	An aspect of the radical version of thumbing dams that wasn’t discussed by DoD that is more likely to “open up time “ is green capitalism. Shipping global-north tourists to locations and species in the wild is, perhaps, a more humane and sustainable option to zoos and safaris. The past 20 years has seemed to vindicate this approach more than the one of environmental extremism. Native struggles, which are largely struggles of cultural survival, have been most effective when there are resources under control of natives (whether byways for pipelines or casino revenues) that allow them to get a seat at the table for control of their own destinies. Thumbs in the dam indeed.	+	Thanks also to ''The International Magazine'', who have provided guidance and suggestions throughout the process of developing this translation. I have had the opportunity to work with ''The International Magazine'' on various projects and I can recommend no better monthly periodical for internationalist communists to learn about socialist movements around the world.
−	The other approach that has some appeal for some radicals (most notably a specific kind of communist) is accelerationism. This perspective is more-or-less the opposite of any kind of ecological concern unless you believe that gaian homeostasis is only possible in the absence of humans. In which case, turning up the heat on human activity, with the resulting crises and collapse, may be the only solution. This is the opposite of putting a thumb in the dam but is one of the interesting propositions since DoD ended.	+	We owe a great deal of gratitude to Dr. Vijay Prashad and Dr. Taimur Rahman for taking the time to read through our translation and, in addition to providing their feedback and encouragement, also taking the time to write the foreword and introduction to the text. I know that you are both extremely busy with your own important literary, academic, and political work, so this assistance is so very much appreciated.
−	*** Preparing for Crises	+	Finally, I would like to thank the Vietnamese intellectuals and experts who have done such an amazing job at taking hundreds of texts and distilling them down into the original volume which I have translated here. The elegance and precision with which they have been able to capture the essence of Marxism-Leninism is a monumental contribution to the workers of the world, and I only hope my translation does their work justice.
−	We must have the ability to defend ourselves, survive, and exploit crises in society including capitalist attempts to destroy us. The divided and industrial nature of today’s society has already determined the instability of tomorrow.	+	March, 2023<br />
		+	Luna Nguyen
−	Task Three falls gently from Task One and Two. If we have a place that is something like True Community and we commit to emergency struggles, then we must necessarily prepare for upcoming events. Ecological crises has already been a more salient part of daily life in the past 15 years than in the 50 before it. The only quibble with this Task is that it is necessary but not sufficient to the scale of the crises ahead.	+	=== Foreword ===
−	*** Supporting Rebellion Beyond the Core	+	In December 1998, Fidel Castro addressed the Young Communist League’s 7<sup>th</sup> Congress in Havana, Cuba. The Soviet Union and the Communist state system in Eastern Europe had collapsed, which greatly weakened the cause of socialism. Not only was Cuba hit hard by the loss of its major trading partners and political ally, but socialists in general were penalised by the lethal argument made by the imperialist sections that “socialism had been defeated.” After 1991, Fidel revived the phrase “Battle of Ideas,” which was had been used in The German Ideology by Marx and Engels. To the Young Communists, Fidel said:
−	The counter culture must act in real solidarity with our struggling sisters and brothers on other islands. Aid them in whatever we can and bring the majority world battlefronts to the boardrooms, bedrooms, and barracks of the bourgeoisie.	+	<blockquote>
		+	We must meet, in the heat of the battle, with the leading cadres to discuss, analyse, expand on, and draft plans and strategies to take up issues and elaborate ideas, as when an army’s general staff meets. We must use solid arguments to talk to members and non-members, to speak to those who may be confused or even to discuss and debate with those holding positions contrary to those of the Revolution or who are influenced by imperialist ideology in this great battle of ideas we have been waging for years now, precisely in order to carry out the heroic deed of resisting against the most politically, militarily, economically, technologically and culturally powerful empire that has ever existed. Young cadres must be well prepared for this task.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Once you have a real fighting force, one committed to doing something meaningful in the world. then of course the list of what you have to do, what different pressure groups will try to get you to do, can get quite long. The main criticism we would make of the Four Tasks is that they bury thousands of tasks in the four. What is an engaging and critically important conversation about “What is to be Done?” is mostly a series of four principles with little to direct a reader. It is largely a list that details the dozens of complicated projects that could be embraced given infinite time and energy.	+	Bourgeois ideology had tried to sweep aside its most fundamental critique – namely Marxism – by saying that “socialism had been defeated” and that Marxism was now obsolete. Marxist criticisms of the “casino of capitalism” – as Fidel called it – were being set aside both inside and outside the academy, with neoliberal policy confident enough to ignore each and every criticism. Fidel argued that young communists must learn the fundamentals of Marxism – including both dialectical and historical materialism – and must learn this in a way that was not religious thinking but would allow them to become “new intellectuals” of the movement, not those who repeat dogma but who learn to understand the conjuncture and become “permanent persuaders” for socialism (the two phrases in quotations are from Gramsci’s prison notebooks). The general ideological confidence of the cadre was not clear, and that confidence and their clarity needed to be developed in a project that Fidel called the Battle of Ideas.
−	The challenge of Task Four (which is basically to help others) is the challenge of environmental activism (actually, all activism): how do we help people who are outside of our experience in real material, cultural, and spiritual ways. The usual answer is that our actions should be directed by solidarity and not charity but this distinction is nearly impossible to define and, in practice, hard lo find examples for. This is not to say that charity is de facto bad but hoping and wishing an action isn’t charity evades an important principle, which is that the people who have money, resources, and power get to decide who they shower those things upon. not need, value, or the people who actually receive the largesse. This privilege is mostly discussed as a type of crime committed by those who have it which seems to have resulted in less and less generosity from rich people.[2]	+	During this period, communists around the world conceded that the demise of the Soviet Union had created a serious dilemma for the left. Not only were we penalised by the argument that “socialism has been defeated,” but our own arguments to explain the turbo-charged drive toward globalisation and neoliberalism and to make the case for a socialist alternative were not strong enough. One indication of that weakness was the 2001 World Social Forum meeting held in Brazil, which promoted the slogan – Another World is Possible, a weak slogan in comparison to a more precise slogan, such as – Socialism is Necessary. Young people drifted into our ranks in this decade, angered by the wretched social conditions created by the permanent austerity of neoliberalism, but bewildered about how to transform the political environment. The lack of Marxist political education was felt by socialist forces across the world, which is why many parties around the world began to revive a conversation about internal political education for cadre and active engagement with other social forces regarding the pressing issues of our time. Fidel called these two processes – internal education for the Party and external engagement on the dilemmas of humanity – the Battle of Ideas.
−	At the heart of Task Four is an imperative. We must aid our brothers and sisters. This may be the case if we assume some brutal categorizations. “Brothers and sisters on other islands “ seems synonymous with “the poor and huddled masses” of the world. Bringing their fights to the bourgeoisie is a type of restatement of the classic Marxist hagiography with, perhaps, a humanist twist. If we thought categorization of the Marxist variety were a solution to ecological devastation why wouldn’t we be Marxists? Do we really think that bringing new data to the boardrooms and bedrooms would change them one iota? Perhaps what I was hoping for from this Fourth Task was a new model of revolution, a social change movement that was different, but it seemed there wasn’t nearly the imagination about how to do things differently as there was about how many things there are to do.	+	In line with this broad direction, the government of Vietnam worked with the national publishing house Sự Thật (The Truth) to develop a curriculum for universities and colleges in the country. They developed this order of study along five subject areas: Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Marxist-Leninist Political Economy, Scientific Socialism, Vietnamese Communist Party History, and Ho Chi Minh Thought. This project worked to educate an entire population that would be able to understand the world in a rational and factual manner, outside the illusions of bourgeois ideology. Four years later, Communist Party of Vietnam adopted a resolution to take this work forward, and – under the leadership of Professor Nguyễn Viết Thông – produced this textbook that brought together the many themes of Marxism into focus for the introductory student and cadre. A book such as this is never easy to create, since it must introduce a form of thought that is critical of the foundations of bourgeois ideology – so it is a critique – but at the same time it provides a worldview to understand the actual world in which we live – so it is a science. The text must, therefore, show how bourgeois thought is partial and at the same time how socialist thought, creatively applied, will allow one to have a firmer grip of reality and be able to participate in fighting to transcend the obstinate facts of human indignity that are reproduced by capitalism. No manual such as this is without its flaws and without its limitations, but no education can start without a manual such as this one. The Vietnamese comrades have done a great service to the left movement by producing a text such as this, which can be used for study and then used as a model to develop similar texts in different parts of the world.
−	We’ve drifted again towards having a critical analysis of The Four Tasks but that is only because this nearly 20-year old document is still entirely relevant to the form and function of radical activity today. Almost none of this document feels dated. Today there would be sections on Global Wanning and Intersectionality but fundamentally this text is still a relevant starting point for any group attempting to answer the questions herein. This is an incredible feat and for that I’d place it at the head of the pack of articles that attempt a similar feat-but much more modestly-like <em>Desert,</em> “Earth First Means Social War,:’ “The Issues are not the Issue;’ “You Make Plans--We Make History;’ and various pieces by the Green Anarchy Collective.	+	Ho Chi Minh, whose interpretation of Marxism and whose ideas about the Vietnamese Revolution, are all over this text once said: “Study and practice must always go together. Study without practice is useless. Practice without study leads to folly.” There can be no better injunction to get to work, to study and develop one’s theoretical armour and to use that theory as the guide to one’s work in the Battle of Ideas and in the battle for the streets, because this unity between theory and action is indeed praxis (thực tiễn), not just practice, but conscious human activity. That is what Fidel encouraged in his lectures on the Battle of Ideas.
−	*** But What If It is Too Late?	+	Dr. Vijay Prashad.<br />
		+	5 March 2023<br />
		+	Caracas, Venezuela.
−	If you will indulge us for a few minutes we’d feel remiss if we didn’t mention a topic that DoD didn’t emphasize. What if we are too late? This question of “lateness” has a material, cultural, and metaphysical component that we will address. There were people in the eco-scene that were asserting something along the lines of this question but they made the mistake of confusing means and ends and as a result blamed the first victims of our lateness rather than keeping the conversation abstract. Abstraction has the benefit of not summoning emotions, of seeming to be removed from a particular interest group or daily life, which allows us, strangers, to discuss something big and profound. It is an abstraction to say that the world is going to end and there is no hope of redemption (just as saying the opposite is also an abstract ion). But of course endings will impact a great deal of people and are incredibly dramatic and even cataclysmic. For the sake of talking to strangers and talking about something impossibly difficult, for the rest of this section let us ride the line between abstraction and something real.	+	=== Preface to the First English Edition ===
−	It is very much in the ecological tradition to abandon hope: in human agency, in our capacity to slow the gears of Empire’s machinery, that we could make a difference on any stage we’d think worth our energy. This tradition tends to argue for a return to nature, for a withdrawal from the affairs of man (or civilization or society), or towards a spiritual life. Of course there is no escape but there is a principle that is at odds with the Four Tasks and doesn’t require its fundamental hope. What if instead of building a counter culture that doesn’t appear possible-in order to effect a holding action to the decay of this civilization, to prepare for crises, and to (poorly) support the actions of others around the world who are doing the same--what if instead of all that, we just live our lives. What if we accept that we are just a few human creatures among billions?	+	The text of this book constitutes part one of a four-part curriculum on Marxism-Leninism developed and published by the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam. This curriculum is intended for students who are not specializing in the study of Marxism-Leninism, and is intended to give every Vietnamese student a firm grounding in the political philosophy of scientific socialism.
−	Instead of becoming activists, or politicians with no constituency, we do something else. We don’t try to run and hide (as if that were possible), but instead live as a native to our habitats, do something horrific to bourgeoisie society, live quietly, outside of the organizational model of the Christian sects. Let people be and live on the land, perhaps wildly, perhaps in all the countercultural glory you possess.	+	The entire curriculum consists of:
−	If it is too late to, save humanity from itself then it may be time to wrap up our affairs. In that cause, a more nihilistic ecological perspective has a few modem faces that make sense to mention as a way of concluding. Two of them are publishing projects, inheritors of the <em>DoD</em> legacy but perhaps, in addition to The Four Tasks, also participants in a Fifth Task. Dark Mountain, a publishing project from the UK, is comprised of dozens of authors, many of whom participated in the anti-road activities of the 90. They are best summed up by this, The <em>machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them</em> (Dark Mountain Manifesto).	+	Part 1: Dialectical Materialism (this text)
−	The second project, in which the editors of this book have some involvement, is Black Seed. a newsprint project somewhere in the intersection of indigeneity, green anarchism, and direct action. And the third, non-publication project is the actions of eco-extremists, especially in Mexico, like Individuals Tending Towards the Wild, or Wild Reaction, tendencies that attempt to treat human life as if it is not. in fact. at the center of creation. The influence of The Four Tasks weighs heavily on all these projects.	+	Part 2: Historical Materialism
−	*** Conclusion	+	Part 3: Political Economy
−	While we have spent most of our energy here focusing on the impressive and influential conclusionary documents “Down with the Empire, Up with the Spring” and “The Four Tasks;’ we intended only to highlight what was great about <em>DoD.</em> By maintaining some semblance of an editorial line, a set of high-quality production efforts, and a theoretical axis around a broad green anarchist perspective. it has maintained its position as one of the most important radical green publications ever. We found the lack of memory of this great publication to be offensive and put forward this book take to remedy that situation.	+	Part 4: Scientific Socialism
−	We hope in the following four hundred plus pages you will find agreement with us as well as your own uses for the great material of Do or Die: Voices from the Ecological Resistance.	+	In Vietnam, each part of the curriculum encompasses one full semester of mandatory study for all college students. Each part builds upon the previous, meaning that this text is the foundation for all political theory education for most college students in Vietnam.
−	[1] Interesting but partial examples <br> [[http://www.complex.com/style/2015/03/photographers-prove-that-the-internet-has-killed-individual-style][http://www.complex.com/style/2015/03/photographers-prove-that-the-internet-has-killed-individual-style]] <br> [[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061008/153603.shtml][https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061008/153603.shtml]]	+	However, it is important to note that this is not the first encounter with dialectical materialism which Vietnamese students wil have had with these ideas, because Vietnamese students also study dialectical materialism, historical materialism, political economy, and scientific socialism from primary school all the way through high school.
−	[2] [[http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiasavchuk/2014/10/06/wealthy-ameri-cans-are-giving-less-of-their-incomes-to-charity-while-poor-are-donating-more/][http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiasavchuk/2014/10/06/wealthy-ameri-cans-are-giving-less-of-their-incomes-to-charity-while-poor-are-donating-more/]]	+	As such, the text of this book — in and of itself — would probably seem overwhelmingly condensed to most foreign readers who are new to studying dialectical materialism. Therefore, we have decided to extensively annotate and illustrate this text with the information which would have been previously obtained in a basic Vietnamese high school education and/or provided by college lecturers in the classroom.
−	* Environment	+	It is our desire that these annotations will be helpful for students who hope to learn these principles for application in political activity, but we should also make it clear to academic researchers and the like that our annotations and illustrations are ''not'' present in the original Vietnamese work.
−	** The Day They Drove Twyford Down! (from issue 1)	+	We hope that this book will be useful in at least three ways:
−	*** The battle for Twyford Down	+	* As a comprehensive introductory textbook on dialectical materialism and for selfstudy, group study, classroom use, cadre training, etc.
		+	* As a quick and easy to reference handbook for reviewing the basic concepts of dialectical materialism for students of theory who are already familiar with dialectical materialism.
		+	* As a companion book for further reading of theory and political texts rooted in dialectical materialist philosophy.
−	For those who don’t already know, Twyford Down is an area of outstanding natural beauty just east of Winchester in Hampshire. With that designation, numerous S.S.S.I.s [Sites of Special Scientific Interest] including the water meadows lining the Itchen valley south of the Down, and two significant scheduled Ancient monuments-an Iron Age Village and a bunch of medieval tracks-the Dongas. Twyford is also one of the last known habitats of the Chalk Blue butterfly and six different species of orchid. It was supposed to be one of the most protected natural sites in England. Indeed, it was placed in the trust of Winchester College by two old boys that bought it in the 1920s to preserve it from the city’s urban sprawl.	+	Also, please note: because this book is intended to be used as a quick reference and handbook for further study, there are many instances where we duplicate references, quotations, and other such information. We hope that this repetition may be an aid for study by reinforcing important concepts and quotations.
−	The year’s actions to protect the Dongas have been well covered. Since February 2, many blockades and occupations of the work site have taken place, but still the Department of Transport [DoT] carried on regardless, determined to build their precious motorway. During the summer a camp was set up on the Dongas, where activists planned and based actions against the work site on the water meadows, which by then was being raped by the contractors. By the Autumn the contractors were looking towards the Dongas to begin their motorway monster. This is when the most oppressive and intimidating , tactics against the campaign took place.	+	This book — Part 1 of the curriculum, which focuses on the universal philosophical system of dialectical materialism — serves as the foundation of all political theory and practice in the Vietnamese educational system as well as in the Communist Party of Vietnam and other organizations such as the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union, the Women’s Union, the Farmer’s Union, the Worker’s Union, etc. Dialectical materialism is the framework for theory and practice as well as the common lens through which Vietnamese socialists relate, communicate, and work together.
−	The Dongas Tribe declared the site an autonomous zone in September, and began building fortifications to defend their land. Tarmac [a British building materials company] had now got the contract to go forth with the cutting, and at this point a virtual siege began with paid security guards having their lookouts next to the Dongas.	+	This book focuses almost exclusively on the written works of three historical figures:
−	The siege effectively ended on the 29<sup>th</sup> of October after sheer incompetence on the legal front. The previous Monday, (26<sup>th</sup> of October), the DoT successfully pressured the Estates Bursar of Winchester College into applying to the local court to evict the Dongas Tribe. The summons was so ill-made that that when presented to court that Thursday, the judge ordered the case adjourned until 9<sup>th</sup> of December, well-past the end of the Cooper Lyons contract. With the tribe securely in place and no police cover, all the contractors could do was finish work on the Water Meadow and cut their losses.	+	''Karl Marx'' and ''Friedrich Engels''... who initially developed the universal philosophy of dialectical materialism by synthesizing various pre-existing philosophical, political, economic, and historical tendencies including the idealist dialectical system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the political economics of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the materialist positions of Ludwig Feuerbach, and countless others.
−	*** The main contract begins	+	''...and Vladimir Illyich Lenin'', who further developed and defended dialectical materialism, expanded the analysis of imperialism, demonstrated how to apply dialectical materialism to local material conditions specific to Russia at the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, and made many other important contributions to dialectical materialist theory and practice.
−	Tarmac spent well after midnight on the 1<sup>st</sup> of November moving into their depot in Compton, two miles south of the Down. The next morning forty contractors started work on four different sites along the south side of the Itchen Valley, the Tribe were desperately outnumbered and somewhat intimidated. This was compounded by the fact that one of the security guards was suspected of an Arson attack against the Tipi watch post in the trench field a couple of nights after Tarmac arrived. It took until 4<sup>th</sup> of November for EF! to react nationally. Sixty EF!ers marched across the Itchen Valley and stopped the work on all four sites, freaking out Roger Jackson so much that that he lost control of his car and parked it half way up a bank for the rest of the day.	+	Obviously, there are countless other writers, revolutionaries, philosophers, and scientists who have contributed to dialectical materialism and scientific socialism. This book focuses primarily on Marx, Engels, and Lenin, because these figures laid the foundations and formulated the basic principles of the philosophy of dialectical materialism and the methodology of materialist dialectics which are most universally applicable in all endeavors.
−	The Dongas tribe continued to obstruct work on the North End site until around the 30<sup>th</sup> of November. On this day, a Tarmac foreman frustrated by continuous disruption charged demonstrators with a JCB and one of the workers threatened a second arson attack on the camp. The cambers took this second threat seriously and demanded that no further action be taken against the contractors. The Tribe member that came closest to injury in the first attack was outraged at this decision and walked out of the camp, saying that by allowing themselves to be intimidated, the Tribe had made themselves hostages of the good behavior of others opposing the destruction of the down. The camp had vetoed ecotage around the area of the camp for months for fear of retaliation-by vetoing all action, the original reason for the establishment of the camp had been lost the day when Winchester college’s summons was to be heard, the DoT felt that they were in a strong enough position to invade the Dongas. Due to the lack of co-operation from Hampshire Constabulary from the 27<sup>th</sup> of October, the home office recommended Tarmac hire Group Four for the invasion instead.	+	It is our desire that translating this important work into English will lead to further study, understanding, and appreciation of dialectical materialism as an applied philosophy which socialists can find value in returning to periodically. At the end of the book, we offer a glossary of terms which doubles as an index, appendices with summaries of important concepts and principles, and an afterword, in which we offer advice for further study and application of dialectical materialism.
−	At dawn, a bulldozer spearheaded the assault, followed up by one hundred Group Four thugs and all the workers at Twyford. Although the tribe had been supplied with a mobile phone to call for support, it had broken down and had not been repaired in the malaise preceding that day’s events. Despite the paucity of communications, over fifty EF!ers had turned up by noon. The contractors put up a barbed wire compound around DoT land and started to remove turf within, but the tribe weren’t taking this without a fight. Their attempts to invade the compound in the next two days were met by violence that hospitalised four of the demonstrators. To control the situation, a hundred cops were drafted in and they in turn made arrests when EF!ers attempted to stop the destruction of the woods at the bottom of the Dongas by occupying trees and the contractors vehicles bulldozing them down on Friday 11<sup>th</sup> of December, despite this unbelievably wanton destruction on the side of Tarmac, the tree-sitters saved a small stand of sycamores and this became their camp site as the tribe began clearing off Winchester College’s land ready for the 14<sup>th</sup> December evictions.	+	At the time of publication, we are already in the process of translating and annotating Part 2 of this curriculum, which focuses on historical materialism, with the hopes of eventually releasing the full curriculum. Once it is complete, it will also be made available at ''BanyanHouse.org'' — where we also invite questions, constructive feedback, and suggestions.
−	On the Wednesday, Hampshire County Council objected to Tarmac’s spurious claims that the two footpaths across the Dongas had been diverted. The 13<sup>th</sup> of December was an unlucky day for the contractors. Armed with cuttings from the local paper about the destruction of the paths, fifty members of the Ramblers Association turned up at the Down and insisted on the right to walk one of the original tracks. Joined by the tribe and their supporters, the ramblers laid siege to the compound. After ripping the compound gate off its hinges, they barged through fifty Group 4 guards that had linked arms across the breach, and proceeded to walk to the far side of the compound before the cops arrived to “restore order:’ Those biffed out of the compound are now taking the obstruction to court to rip it wide open.	+	=== Introduction ===
−	*** A tribe member describes Yellow Wednesday!	+	Just a generation ago, Vietnam was the site of the most brutal war of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. More tonnage of bombs were dropped on the Vietnamese people than were dropped by all sides combined throughout the Second World War. In addition, countless acts of cruelty were used to scorch the very soil of the nation. By the end of Vietnam’s Resistance War Against Imperialist USA (known to the world as “the Vietnam War”), Agent Orange, napalm, and unexploded munitions had left a land deeply scarred and a people traumatised by decades of death and murder. The impression one had was that although Vietnam had won the war, it was so badly devastated that it could not hope to win the peace. But, miraculously, Vietnam is winning this war today, as the Vietnamese economy has become one of the fastest growing in the world and quality of life for the people is improving at a pace which could scarcely have been predicted in 1975.
−	At the battle of the Dongas we witnesses the lengths to which other human beings were prepared to go-to enable destruction of nature to continue.	+	No one could have imagined that Vietnam would turn around so dynamically and rapidly. How did they achieve this economic miracle? How could this nation — so recently devastated by imperialism and war — possibly be able to reconstruct, revive, rejuvenate, and rebuild? That story is now unfolding before our eyes.
−	We saw outnumbered protesters being assaulted, then arrested for assault. Activists sustained injuries that the police surgeon described as evidence of systematic beatings. When several arrests failed to enable machinery onto the Dongas-arrests were forgotten as a tactic, and were replaced by brute force and scare tactics by 70 men in yellow jackets.	+	Vietnam’s development has not come without hardship, struggle, setbacks, and mistakes. The people of Vietnam have had to learn hard lessons through struggle and practice to develop and strengthen ideological and theoretical positions. In this manner, the philosophical development of Vietnam deserves study and attention from socialists around the world. To outsiders, Vietnam can appear to be rife with contradictions. As depicted by Western journalists, Vietnam is simultaneously a success story driven by capitalist markets and a failing socialist state. Every victory is chalked up to private enterprise, while every setback is attributed to socialism. In this sense, the media has failed to understand the essential character of the core contradictions which drive the development of Vietnam politically, socially, and economically.
−	As the Earth defenders persistence in the face of arm twisting, head-butting, pressure pointing... etc, became evident 50 black hats waded in.	+	Luna Nguyen has used social media and played an incredibly important role in helping the English speaking world understand the complexities of such contradictions that beguile so many academics and experts. She has helped to give an insider’s perspective on her own country’s path of development towards socialism.
−	Instead of making arrests they took over the administration of violence. Two courageous earth sisters were rendered unconscious by wind pipe constriction and suffered torn neck and shoulder ligaments-one being kept in hospital for observation. Many others visited casualty, with barbed-wire cuts, bruises, muscle strain, and abrasions, charges are being brought.	+	Nguyen’s translation of Part 1 of this influential work, ''Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism'', a textbook studied by university and college students across Vietnam, is yet another big step in the direction of making Vietnam’s understanding of their own country’s development available to the English reading world.
−	Despite these tactics and heavy outnumbering the tribe succeeded in keeping machinery out of the enclosed area of the Dongas-From dawn until dusk, throwing their all into the blockade, oblivious to personal injury, risking their lives in one final effort to protect that beautiful piece of land, as if the very planet depended on it!	+	For me, as an outsider, it is fascinating not only to see how deeply Vietnamese society takes an interest in European philosophical development (referencing Hume, Hegel, Descartes, Marx, Engels, and so many other Europeans, almost as if they are figures seated in some ancient monastery in Fansipan), but, even more importantly, how they have assimilated that knowledge into the wider context of their own history, society, and culture. The textbook truly comes alive in all the parts where these ideas are shown to be relevant to Vietnam itself. For instance, the textbook stands out with discussions of Ho Chi Minh’s concept of “proletarian piety,” which artfully blends elements of Vietnamese culture with Marxist concepts of class consciousness, or the story of Chi Pheo, who stands as a sympathetic stand-in for the interpretation of the unique characteristics of the Vietnamese Lumpenproletariat. The book itself is an instance of the dialectic of the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete.
−	Dawn the next day saw 19 people who were left fit for the protest and 100 black-hats joining the yellow jackets. After attempts at a gate blockade were repelled by a wall of black-hats, physically and mentally numbed protesters wandered around the perimeter fence, watching the surreal massacre that followed. It was like watching a strange dream, by midday all the trees and scrub had been bulldozed, and the unturfed part of the ancient track-ways had been reduced to a huge field of chalk.	+	Just as importantly, it shows that, in Vietnam, Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought are not mere perfunctory rituals that are repeated like a learnt formula for this or that exam; but that although the Vietnamese political economy in its current form certainly contains contradictions which must be negated in the process of building the lower stage of socialism, the government remains seriously committed to the goals, theory, and practice of Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought.
−	The only obstruction left was three trees, in the middle of the site occupied by the “never say die” tree sitting club. Huge clouds of smoke billowed over the site from the burning pile of murdered trees, as the bulldozers continued their work. The battle was lost...there were a lot of sad moments but our spirit was not broken. We gained insight and an overwhelming sense of unity. We also saw that other human beings were willing to go to any lengths to achieve their destructive aims...we must be strong ...we must stand together... the Tribe lives on! The Dongas are dead! Long live the Dongas Tribe!	+	Hence, I highly recommend this book, not merely because it is a well-illustrated and easy-to-read book on the principles of dialectical materialism, but more importantly because it offers an insight into how the Vietnamese government collects and synthesises the philosophical developments that are, on the one hand, the collective legacy of all of humanity, and, on the other hand, the concrete manifestations of a revolutionary theory of (and for the oppressed yearning for) freedom in every corner of the world.
−	*** What now?	+	March, 2023
−	Many, particularly the media, who like a nice, neat story. will see the move on the Dongas Camp as the closing act of the Twyford drama. They do not understand how precarious Tarmac’ s current position is. Prior to starting the Twyford contract, Tarmac lost millions when a contract collapsed in Swindon. That on top the general damage the recession has done them, forced Tarmac to beg for a £30 million hand out from the government. They have put in a £24 million bid for the Twyford contract, a third below its proper value, meaning any delay will push them into penalty clauses. The intervention of activists aside, there will certainly be such delays. They will have to cut chalk through Winter and attempt road building across the bottom of the Itchen Valley, which used to be a complex of water meadows meaning they are prone to turn into quagmires. This contract is set to run for two years and the political rationale for it-building infrastructure for European economic union-is looking more tenuous by the day as the Major administration wastes away. The battle for Twyford has not ended-it’s beginning. With proper organisation and determination we can win this crunch battle with the road lobby. The implications of this victory will carry far beyond a small corner of Hampshire.	+	Dr. Taimur Rahman<br />
−	The events of 4<sup>th</sup> November show that we can stop work across Twyford using traditional tactics, given the numbers. If they think they can stop us with threats and violence, we’ve got to make damn sure they don’t. Hunt Sabs regularly get hassle but carry on regardless-learn from their example. They don’t hesitate to document violence against them and bring prosecution.	+	=== Editor’s Note ===
−	Obstruction on site needs to be coordinated and supported. The number of days’ work lost is what counts in defeating Tarmac. Consequently, it’s better we have a sixty-strong demonstration two days a week than one demonstration twice that size-that’s overkill. Those on site should make sure that they take down full details of works ongoing and subcontractors involved.	+	Working on this project has been one of the most illuminating experiences of my life. In translating this work, Luna has opened a door for English speakers into the wide world of Vietnamese scholarship and pedagogy as it relates to socialist theory and philosophy.
−	Consideration should also be given to those groups too far from Twyford shouldn’t be confined to the Home Counties. To broaden it out nationally, every Tarmac and associated subcontractors office, depots and sites in the country should be targeted, (A list can be obtained from South Downs EF!). As subcontractors addresses become known, they should join the hit list, not least because they are more vulnerable to persuasion than the larger companies raping the down. Those that can’t make it to Twyford on their day of the week must hit their local target instead. Solidarity actions are already ongoing against the DoT in London and ARC (who supply stone to Tarmac for Twyford) at Whatley Quarry in Somerset. Additional action against the Dean of Bristol University who also happens to run Winchester College are already in the pipeline.	+	Luna and I have done our best to capture the original meaning and spirit of the text. Furthermore, as we have mentioned elsewhere, our annotations and illustrations are intended only to contextualize and expand on the core information of the original text similarly to the class/lecture setting for which the curriculum is intended.
−	Its urgent that people explore whether Tarmac or any other subcontractors use freepost addresses or freephone numbers--armchair activists across the country can cost them thousands, legally and from the comfort of their own homes. The possibility of phone, fax and telex blockades should also be explored.	+	In their lives, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were never able to finish clarifying and systematically describing the philosophy of dialectical materialism which their work was built upon. Engels attempted to structurally define the philosophy in Dialectics of Nature, but unfortunately that work was never completed since he decided to prioritize publishing the unfinished works of Marx after his untimely death.
−	There is another string to our bow, too. Tarmac have shown by their behavior on the 9<sup>th</sup> December that they don’t care for the law and only understand money. Well, we can. beat them at their own game on that one, cant we! There is no point in fighting with one arm tied behind our back. After all, Earth First! only respects natural laws. Every leaflet you produce could contain the information needed for a cell to wreak £10,000s of havoc against the contractors and even put smaller subcontractors out of business. If you feel so inspired, study eco-defense and the A.L.F. publications doing the rounds so you know how to do it what it takes. As every channel for negotiation now seems closed, ultimately the only way Tarmac are going to be stopped is by being destroyed.	+	I believe that this text is a great step forward in that work of systematically describing the philosophical system of dialectical materialism and the methodological system of materialist dialectics. I also believe it’s worth noting how the Vietnamese scholars who crafted this curriculum have embedded the urgent necessity of action — of creative application of these ideas — throughout the text in a way that I find refreshing and reflective of the works of Marx and Engels themselves.
−	No Compromise in Defense of Planet Earth!	+	As the text will explain, dialectical materialism is a universal system of philosophy which can be utilized to grapple with any and every conceivable problem which we humans might encounter in this universe. In Vietnam, dialectical materialism has been used to delve into matters of art, ethics, military science, and countless other fields of inquiry and endeavor. It is my hope that this book will, likewise, lead to a wider and fuller understanding and (more importantly) application of dialectical materialism in the Western world.
−	** Trees for Life: The Amazon on our Doorstep (from <em>issue 2)</em>	+	March, 2023
−	Earlier this year, some EF!ers went to see Alan Watson at Trees for Life [TfL] in Scotland. He says:	+	Emerican Johnson
−	<quote>	+	=== A Message From ''The International Magazine'' ===
−	<em>Deforestation and loss of biological diversity are now global phenomena, and I believe it is vital for the world to have positive examples showing how the return of natural forests can help heal degraded lands... Trees for Life has been working since 1987 to restore the Caledonian forest in the Highlands of Scotland.. one of the most biologically impoverished parts of the world, where only one percent of the original forest remains.</em>
−	</quote>
−	Scotland is in the position now that the Amazon will be in in less than 100 years time (unless EF! and others can make a difference). The industrial system that was born in the British Isles began by razing its own environment to the ground, then moved further afield, poisoning the Americas, Asia, Africa, and so on. This is one of the beauties of the TfL project-it sets a global precedent for wilderness restoration and the rejection of civilisation, in the very place where industrialism originated.	+	''The International Magazine'' began in 2020 to connect international socialist movements and to strengthen the voice of oppressed people across the globe. We have been following the work of Vietnamese communists in their unique path towards peace, prosperity, and the construction of socialist values with a keen eye and much interest. It is with this spirit of international solidarity and a deep desire to learn from and share wisdom from our comrades around the world that we celebrate the release of this First English Edition of The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism Part 1: The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism.
−	Alan Watson has a strong commitment to the idea of wilderness. As an article in the <em>Independent</em> newspaper stated: his scheme has <em>no room for ‘sustainable’ woodland, worked and marketed for timber. When he says he wants a natural wilderness he means exactly that. No exploitation, just woods.</em> This is just the kind of vision we need in the badly-degraded and tamed British landscape, and with the return of the wildwood, the malignant, oppressive influence of modern-day society will progressively ebb away.	+	Ho Chi Minh once said: “In order to build socialism, first and foremost, we need to have socialist people who understand socialist ideology and have socialist values.”
−	EF! in the U.S. has a slogan: <em>As wolves die, so does freedom.</em> The last wolf on these islands was killed in 1743. We have forgotten the meaning of freedom. With projects such as TfL we have a chance to remember.	+	To this end, Vietnamese communists have expended tremendous resources building a curriculum on Marxist-Leninist philosophy and analysis which includes dialectical materialism, materialist dialectics, scientific socialism, historical materialism, and political economy. These topics are taught in primary and secondary schools and are mandatory subjects for all students attending public universities in Vietnam. Beyond that, Vietnam offers free degrees to students who wish to study Marxist theory and philosophy and Ho Chi Minh Thought (defined as the application of Marxist philosophy to the unique material conditions of Vietnam). In this manner, Vietnam has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to developing “socialist people” “with socialist values.”
−	Watson’s plan is truly vast in scale; he is targetting a 600-square mile area of largely bare, roadless hills in the North Central highlands, which happens to contain three of the best surviving forest .remnants. Using these remnants as a nucleus, his ultimate aim is to reafforest 150,000 hectares, and when possible, to reintroduce the large mammal species that previously inhabited the area. This means that we could be seeing brother beaver, sister bear, wolf, lynx, and bison, return to these shores before long, thanks to the efforts of TfL and others. There is already talk of establishing a wolf pack on the Isle of Rhum, off the Western Coast of Scotland.	+	We are, therefore, extremely excited to have worked with Luna Nguyen on the translation and annotation of Part 1 of the Vietnamese university curriculum on the worldview and philosophical methodology of Marxism-Leninism into English, which will make this unique perspective of socialist theory available to comrades around the world for the first time.
−	This is another important symbolic move-experts reckon that most of the large mammals with whom we share the planet will have been rendered extinct shortly into the next century. To reintroduce species shows that this trend is not inevitable or irresistible.	+	After having read through this volume, which outlines the fundamentals of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics, we find the most important lesson to be the relationship between theory and practice. According to the Vietnamese scholars who authored the original text, Marxist-Leninist philosophy must be considered a living, breathing philosophy which requires application in the real world — through practice — in order to be made fully manifest.
−	TfL are keen on the idea of earth repair work. An apparently irreversibly-damaged piece of land can be brought back from the brink. This shows that humanity can co-operate with nature instead of trying to dominate it, and that “nature bats last.” No matter how hard the power junkies and business-beasts try, nature (meaning ordinary humans as well as other species) will ultimately overwhelm them, and their tarmac.	+	We hope that readers of this volume will carry forward this guidance through practice which suits your material conditions, wherever you are in the world.
−	EF! needs to widen what is at present a very narrow definition of direct action. One member of the TfL work party describes his experiences as follows,	+	If you would like to learn the perspective of socialists from other nations around the world, we invite you to visit our website at InternationalMagz.com — the home of ''The International Magazine'' online. There, you will find articles written by comrades from a wide variety of backgrounds and nationalities with a clear bias towards anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-imperialism!
−	<quote>	+	In solidarity,
−	my week <em>in Glen Affric was wonderful because it made me realise that</em> L<em>as an individual, could do something constructive to help heal our Earth. Not only could I do something, but that it was only through the efforts of everyone that changes happen.</em>
−	</quote>
−	He took these lessons and applied them to other areas of his life. As a graphic designer, when asked to design a report for a temperate forest-destroying pulpmill in BC, he at first refused, and later resigned his job. His experiences can be summed up in that buzzword, “empowerment;’ a feeling familiar to many EF!ers. What TfL are doing is as much direct action as blockading an ICI plant or a bulldozer at Twyford Down. We need to recognise that we can help to actively heal the earth, as well as carrying out the essential work of stopping business and governments from wounding it further.	+	The Editorial Team of ''The International Magazine''
−	*** What Can I Do?	+	=== Notes on Translation ===
−	<quote>	+	Vietnamese is a very different language from English, which has presented many challenges in translating this book. Whenever possible, I have tried to let the “spirit” of the language guide me, without altering the structure, tone, and formatting of the book.
−	We were amazed at the scale of destruction in the areas we looked at. We are all used to the idea of far-away places being ravaged deserts, but here is something on our own doorsteps that needs to be done. No more buying newsletters about death and destruction, here’s some people doing direct action right here, and they need help. There are a series of nine work weeks in Glen Affric between March and June this year. Glen Affric is still a beautiful place to be, and if you can leave it better than you found it, then this could be a real example of that much abused non-word, eco-tourism. The work involves planting native Scots pine and other related tasks. If you can’t make the time for this, you could support them by becoming a member, finding out more (so you can tell other people), and perhaps doing some fundraising.
−	There are many similarities between EF!‘s outlook and that of Trees for Life. We thus urge all EF!ers to support them. You, as well as the Caledonian forest, will be the richer for it.	+	One thing you will likely notice right away: this book is highly condensed! This is because most Vietnamese students are already familiar with these concepts. We have added annotations to try to make the book more digestible for those of you who are new to Marxism-Leninism, and these annotations are explained on the next page.
−	They can be contacted at [[http://treesforlife.org.uk/][http://treesforlife.org.uk/]]	+	I have worked hard to try to make the language in this book consistent with the language used in popular translations of works from Marx, Lenin, etc., that would be familiar to English-language students of Marxism-Leninism. That said, different translators have been translating these texts into English for over a century, such that different word choices have been used to relate the same concepts, and even Marx, Engels, and Lenin used different terms to describe the same concepts in many instances (not to mention the fact that Marx and Engels wrote primarily in German, whereas Lenin wrote primarily in Russian).
−	If you would like to do something about the rest of this devastated isle, please contact SDEF! ...Perhaps we can get something started.	+	As such, I have made it my first priority to keep the language of this translation internally consistent to avoid confusion and, again, to match the spirit of the original text as much as possible. As a result, you may find differences between the translation choices made in this text and other translations, but it is my hope that the underlying meaning of each translation is properly conveyed.
−	<right>	+	March, 2023
−	-Noddy, MA
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	** A Letter from Scotland (from issue 3)	+	Luna Nguyen
−	For those who are ‘ aware of the real history of Scotland, the consequences of the actions taken by the colonial administrators on the Scots are self evident. Individuals took advantage of the shattering of customary law to accrue power and influence for themselves at the expense of their own communities collective ownership and security. Traditions stood in the way of profits, so traditions were disregarded. Culture stood in the way of market extension because culture usually involved community ties, solidarity and reciprocity. The wholesale eviction of the indigenous population was then carried out with a blind economic totality and is still a matter touching our inner-most feelings. In this rough and ready article emphasis has been placed on the redefining of land as private property and then its transfer to an elite leading to the mass removal of whole communities for financial gain in a process which is alive today.	+	=== Guide to Annotations ===
−	The phasing out of Scotland’s culture was top priority as it offered a real challenge in the form of a viable, self-reliant and alternative way of life which wasn’t massively wealthy, but did tend to protect the poor and regulate injustice. The elimination of the native systems, justified by perpetrators and apologists as improvements has been ignored by the education departments, whose task it is to condition a labour force of ignorant and eager consumers.	+	This book was written as a textbook for Vietnamese students who are not specializing in Marxism-Leninism, and so it is meant to be a simple and condensed survey of the most fundamental principles of dialectical materialism to be used in a classroom environment with the guide of an experienced lecturer. That said, a typical Vietnamese college student will already have been exposed to many of the concepts presented herein throughout twelve years of primary and secondary education. As such, in translating and preparing this book for a foreign audience who are likely to be reading it without the benefit of a lecturer’s in-person instruction, we realized that we would need to add a significant amount of annotations to the text.
−	Private property has been legitimised through the imposition of Anglo law via the Scottish office. The poll tax and more recently the water privatisation issue serve to reveal the imposed structure of colonialism clearly.	+	These annotations will take the following forms:
−	The Scottish office play a leading role in the undermining of real democracy in Scotland but they are not alone. The powerful corporate bureaucracy of Strathclyde regional council along with the rest of the regions have shown no resistance to the imposition of poll tax. Instead they took on board the unpopular tax in co-operation with the Tories and have used all the powers at their disposal to enforce it, showing that they have virtually transferred their allegiance to the colonial regime. Strathclyde region have already been caught out buying water shares south of the border and meeting with prospective developers.	+	* Short annotations which we insert into the text itself [will be included in square brackets like these].
−	The people of Scotland are landless as a result of historic coercion into the capitalist labour force. Glasgow, historically a slave camp of the industrial era, doubling as a reservation for the dispossessed natives has been assimilated into the British capitalist system. For this relatively new economic order to be adopted by people, firstly their communal systems of land tenure had to be broken up to substitute with private ownership. Assimilation is ongoing and capitalist ideals are enshrined within schools and institutions for that purpose. Accounts of real history are smothered as a calculated act of policy. Defunct economic theory replaces free thought and the mercenary ideology continues to usurp native intelligence and morality.	+	-----
−	The cost of this deception is very high and only those who are prepared to DoDge their social/cultural integrity find themselves wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the crisis they are helping to create, be they aware of it or not. While a self-destructive and sociopathic business elite remain in the cockpit of the planet, locked into a suicidal doctrine of economic growth at all costs, our future will remain in the balance. Degradation of people and the environment is the price that must be paid on this path.	+	Longer annotations which add further context and background information will be included in boxes like this.
−	Yesterday the Caledonian forests fell to the speculators from the south, today from Amazonia to the Siberian forests, the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of market forces continues to wreak environmental havoc. Beyond third world debt and economic destruction and the sharpening division between rich and poor, the market logic now threatens the fundamental biological diversity on which life itself depends.	+	-----
−	We now live in a world where we are acted upon globally, where decisions affecting our lives are made at levels so far removed from ordinary democratic practices that no citizen has a hope of influencing them. The power of transnational corporations (TNCs) and multinationals cannot be ignored.	+	We have also added diagrams to our annotations, as well as a detailed glossary/index and appendices, which are located in the back of the book. We hope these will resources will also be of use in studying other texts which are rooted in dialectical materialist philosophy.<br />
−	- 703 of world trade is now controlled by just 500 corporations, which also control 803 of foreign investment.	+	=== Original Vietnamese Publisher’s Note ===
−	- Shell Oil’s 1990 gross income ($132 billion) was more than the total GNP of Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Zaire, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, and Pakistan combined. 500 million people inhabit these countries-nearly a tenth of the worlds human population.	+	In 2004, under the direction of the Central Government, the Ministry of Education and Training, in collaboration with Sự Thật [Vietnamese for “The Truth,” the name of a National Political Publishing House], published a [political science and philosophy] curriculum for universities and colleges in Vietnam. This curriculum includes 5 subjects: Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Marxist-Leninist Political Economy, Scientific Socialism, Vietnamese Communist Party History, and Ho Chi Minh Thought. This curriculum has been an important contribution towards educating our students — the young intellectuals of the country — in political reasoning, so that the next generation will be able to successfully conduct national innovation.
−	- Cargill, the Canadian grain giant, alone controls 603 of the world trade in cereals.	+	With the new practice of education and training, in order to thoroughly grasp the reform of the Party’s ideological work and theory, and to advocate for reform in both teaching and learning at universities and colleges in general, on September 18<sup>th</sup>, 2008, the Minister of Education and Training, in collaboration with Sự Thật, have issued a new program and published a textbook of political theory subjects for university and college students who are not specialized in Marxism — Leninism with Associate Professor and Doctor of Philosophy Nguyen Viet Thong as chief editor. There are three subjects:
−	- Just 13 corporations supply 803 of all cars; five of them sell half of all vehicles manufactured each year.	+	Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism
−	US corporations spend more than one million dollars annually on advertising. The average US citizen views 21,000 TV commercials a year. Control of the collective consciousness plays a vitally important role for the success of big business.	+	Curriculum of Ho Chi Minh Thought
−	These corporations are the dominant force in our world. Disembodied from any one culture and any one environment, they owe no loyalty to any community, any government, or any people anywhere on Earth. These institutions, from the military to government departments and international agencies are driven by a desire to promote their own interests, to perpetuate themselves and increase their power and influence. Decisions are made not because they benefit the community or on environmental grounds but because they serve the institutions’ particular vested interest.	+	Curriculum of the Revolutionary Path of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
−	Employees are similarly disembodied from the real world. When acting for the organisation, company loyalty takes priority over moral and cultural restraints that mediate the rest of their lives. The power wielded by these organisations is greater than that of many, if not all, governments and makes a mockery of certain countries claim to democracy. On the far flung frontiers of the developing world, governments and multinationals are forcing resettlement schemes pushing indigenous peoples off traditional lands, often backed up by the military as part of their assimilation policy, which aims to civilise tribal peoples. This development process frequently begins with widespread brutality and extermination and ends with forest lands being systematically destroyed and plundered for their natural resources.	+	Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism was compiled by a collective of scientists and experienced lecturers from a number of universities, with Pham Van Sinh, Ph.D and Pham Quang Phan, Ph.D as co-editors. This curriculum has been designed to meet the practical educational requirements of students.
−	It’s probably fair to say most people are finding it difficult to make sense of the increasingly complex situation we are in. Many don’t give a damn and the present government-apart from a catalog of major disasters-generally reflects the desires of an ever more materialist society. Most people are busy fighting for a fairer slice of the capitalist cake and don’t have much objection to the system itself but only to the way the cake is sliced. The socialists are telling rights. A fragment of non-feudal land on which we have traditionally known and cherished liberty.	+	We hope this book will be of use to you.
−	Both socialism and capitalism are concerned with exploiting this planet and so cannot be supported by anyone who wishes to preserve the various ecosystems that make up our home. Socialism is an understandable reaction to a brutally unfair distribution of wealth but it is not enough-we must help recreate a system based on needs not greed.	+	April, 2016
−	For Scotland to go forward into a genuinely enlightened future we must prepare the ground by illuminating the present in the light of the past, ending the cultural curfew. These sentiments are not racist but pro-culture, based upon the principle that we can’t fully understand or appreciate other cultures if we don’t understand or appreciate our own. Real possibilities for positive change will take place if we shrug off our colonial status, breaking the chains of a system that has fatally undermined our local institutions and cultural patterns, which previously prevented one set of private interests within our society from monopolizing power and imposing its will on the community. We must shut the back door that has been opened to personal gain at the expense of the community’s security, both social and environmental.	+	NATIONAL POLITICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE — SỰ THẬT
−	The challenge remains for local people to reclaim the political process and to reroot it back in the local community. For people to have inadequate information about their past and little means of acquiring it is a tragedy. It’s vital that we fill in the information gap with an account of real history from our own uniquely Scottish perspective as opposed to the imperial chauvinism which usually passes as such.	+	=== Original Vietnamese Preface ===
−	** Car Chases, Sabotage, and Arthur Dent (From issue 3)	+	To implement the resolutions of the Communist Party of Vietnam, especially the 5<sup>th</sup>
−	*** Twyford Diary-Part 2	+	Central Resolution on ideological work, theory, and press, on September 18<sup>th</sup>, 2008, The Ministry of Education and Training has issued Decision Number 52/2008/QD-BGDDT, issuing the subject program: The Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism for Students Non-Specialised in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought. In collaboration with Truth — the National Political Publishing House — we published the Curriculum of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism for Students Non-Specialised in MarxismLeninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought.
−	Twyford Down has become a symbol of resistance, a training ground, a life changer, and a kick up the arse to the British green movement! Below is a brief chronology of events at Twyford since 22 March. The reports of actions dating from mid-February to March 22<sup>nd</sup> can be found in The Twyford Diary Part One--DoD Issue 2. To avoid security fuck ups mentions of monkeywrenching will be limited to quotes from DoT affidavits. Action at Twyford may seem hectic but what I cannot put to text was one of the greatest things to come out of Twyford. That is the camp, the community.	+	The authors of this text have drawn from the contents of the Central Council’s previous programs (Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Marxist-Leninist Political Economy, and Scientific Socialism) and compiled them into national textbooks for Marxist-Leninist science subjects and Ho Chi Minh Thought, as well as other curriculums for the Ministry of Education and Training. The authors have received comments from many collectives, such as the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics and Administration, the Central Propaganda Department, as well as individual scientists and lecturers at universities and colleges throughout the country. Notably:
−	The last diary finished off on March 20<sup>th</sup> with the Arch Druid of Wessex cursing companies at Twyford. This is a transcript of the conversion he had with Mr. Chapman, the Mott MacDonald officer, it is taken from DoT evidence in the Twyford 76 High Court case.	+	Associate Professor To Huy Rua, Ph.D, Professor Phung Huu Phu, Ph.D, Professor Nguyen Duc Binh, Professor Le Huu Nghia, Ph.D, Professor Le Huu Tang, Ph.D,
−	Druid-I will give you my title. This is an official message from the Arch Druid of Wessex, also a Bard of St. Catherine. This site has been declared officially a sacred site... We would like to inform you....that we have issued a curse against your company. This curse is not a curse against your workers; none of your workers need fear anything personal against them. It is not a death curse but your company will find it will lose money, your workers will lose their jobs, your equipment up here will start breaking down, and you will find this enterprise up here is a white elephant and this thing will not finish until you leave the landscape alone.	+	Professor Vo Dai Luoc, Ph.D, Professor Tran Phuc Thang, Ph.D, Professor Hoang
−	Mr. Chapman-- wait a minute, we understand-I just want to make it clear whose authority has put this.	+	Chi Bao, Ph.D, Professor Tran Ngoc Hien, Ph.D, Professor Ho Van Thong, Associate
−	Druid-This authority is from the Order of St. Catherine who are responsible for the site up there. St. Catherines Hill and the environment around.	+	Professor Duong Van Thinh, Ph.D, Associate Professor Nguyen Van Oanh, Ph.D,
−	Mr. Chapman-Responsible for-and who declared this on the site as well then?	+	Associate Professor Nguyen Van Hao, Ph.D, Associate Professor Nguyen Duc Bach, PhD. Pham Van Chin, Phung Thanh Thuy, M.A., and Nghiem Thi Chau Giang, M.A.
−	Druid-This is declared by the Council of British Druid Orders which contains all the Druid Orders of the country including Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Manx, Brittany, and suchlike !	+	After a period of implementation, the contents of the textbooks have been supplemented and corrected on the basis of receiving appropriate suggestions from universities, colleges, the contingent of lecturers of political theory, and scientists. However, due to objective and subjective limitations, there are still contents that need to be added and modified, and we would love to receive more comments to make the next edition of the curriculum more complete.
−	promise, you will find every one of you will be out of a job. Over the next few months these words were in many ways to become true, as protest activity increased and equipment started breaking down.	+	MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
−	**** 22<sup>nd</sup> March	+	=== Table of Contents ===
−	17 protesters hightailed it around the site causing much havoc, no work is done due to the combined effect of protester intervention and Mother Earth pouring fourth buckets.	+	'''Introduction to The Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism'''
−	**** 23<sup>rd</sup> March	+	'''I. Brief History of Marxism Leninism'''
−	Ten people as above.	+	1. Marxism and the Three Constituent Parts
−	**** 24<sup>th</sup> March	+	2. Summary of the Birth and Development of Marxism-Leninism
−	According to a DoT affidavit, “There was fairly substantial vandalism to Hockley bridge overnight”. 22 people including a number of Nicaraguan activists, split into three groups and ran all over the site, DoDging flying tackles from group 4. It was a half day and we caused a total of seventy five minutes down time.	+	'''II. Objects, Purposes, and Requirements for Studying the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism'''
−	**** 25<sup>th</sup> March	+	1. Objects and Purposes of Study
−	It rained, no site work done.	+	2. Some Basic Requirements of the Studying Method
−	**** 26<sup>th</sup> March	+	3. Excerpt from ''Modifying the Working Style''
−	We arrived 26 strong at 7:45am. How we managed to get up this early, god only knows! We succeeded in occupying one of the large excavators. Two group 4 men pushed an activist off the top of the digger arm 25 foot up, this resulted in a number of chipped ribs. After three attempts six protesters succeeded in stopping a smaller mechanical monster. The Hockley road was then blocked by a sympathetic driver while demonstrators swarmed onto the stranded digger caught in the middle of the road. Up the hill comes an assortment of vans and landies containing over 50 of our local constabulary. Hopelessly outnumbered and standing in a sea of black hats, most demonstrators leave the digger with two people locked to the arm. Two people are arrested on the small digger and by midday the remaining locked-on activists have been cut off by hydraulic bolt croppers. We then went down to what was the Dongas site and blockaded the entrance causing a tail back of three dumper trucks. Group 4 eventually got their act together and pulled us off the road. <em>The actual loss of production was four hours</em> (DoT affidavit). Police later arrested two demonstrators for Criminal Damage to batter rails-charges were not pressed.	+	'''Chapter I: Dialectical Materialism'''
−	**** March 27	+	'''I. Materialism and Dialectical Materialism'''
−	Thirty of us once again spent the morning from 7:15 onwards stopping this and blockading that. As well as group 4 we were once again confronted with thirty police officers. Our numbers were a third of the opposition and due to this we were not as effective as the day before. During the protests there were six arrests including the co-editor of <em>The Ecologist</em> magazine. Five out of the six in the nick went on hunger strike. This lasted until after the court case three days later.	+	1. The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues
−	**** March 29	+	2. Dialectical Materialism — the Most Advanced Form of Materialism
−	Ten minutes after midnight two people are caught by group 4 amongst the machines in the cutting. When the police arrived they found another two others hiding. None were equipped to cause criminal damage so they were released with cautions. The court case of the six arrested on the 27<sup>th</sup> resulted in them all getting unconditional bail However one defendant was done for contempt of court-e.g. he punctuated the Tarmac laccies sentences with bleats.	+	'''II. Dialectical Materialist Opinions About Matter, Consciousness, and the Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'''
−	**** April 3	+	1. Matter
−	Twenty-three of us arrived on the site at 7 am, after stopping the work for a short while and after various hair raising events including the tipping of a dumper trucks full load of chalk onto an activists head, group 4 managed to get us off the site. A number of people then started to <em>Dance through an area of wet concrete which had just been laid.</em> This happened several times until a contractor kicked down one dancer and while two held him down, tried to hit him over the head with a spade. Luckily the demonstrator came off with a fair amount of bumps and bruises and nothing worse. On this action as on others a number of female activists were groped and had some articles of their clothing pulled off. This led to group 4 being nicknamed grope 4 and a recommendation that considering the violence of contractors, security, and police towards specifically female activists, we should not go onto the site in women only groups, or in groups under twenty.	+	2. Consciousness
−	A number of group 4, we are unaware of the figure, had by this time been injured. Injuries ranged from sprained knees, from slipping while trying to rugby tackle us. to more serious fractures. Whenever we tried to occupy a digger the drivers spun the shovels like psychopaths, none of us were hit but group 4 were not so lucky. Tarmac and the police have often cited these incidents to back up the idea that Twyford Activists are a violent mob. This is not true, we are not in any way responsible for the accidental injuries and deaths of DoT employees. It simply shows the idiocy of some security guards and the danger of putting macho men in charge of very big hunks of moving metal.	+	3. The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness
−	We sauntered home, rather disempowered. As we left the site the police arrived in force. immediately arrested three people for breach of bail conditions. At this time the courts were often giving out outrageous bail restrictions saying we couldn’t go within an exclusion zone three miles long. This included the railway, the A33, and large parts of Winchester itself. They even banned us from going to St. Catherine’s Hill. Of course we were still observed on site and figures were often seen in the trees of St. Catherine’s.	+	4. Meaning of the methodology
−	**** April 4–16	+	'''Chapter 2: Materialist Dialectics'''
−	For much of this period the sky opened up and our feet got muddy. This made the contractors’ work impossible and once again Mother Earth did our job for us. For various reasons our numbers lowered, however the situation soon changed...	+	'''I. Dialectics and Materialist Dialectics'''
−	**** April 17	+	1. Dialectics and Basic Forms of Dialectics
−	An overwhelming day of action attended by over 250 people, led into the cutting by David Gee (Ex-director of FoE). Media reports concerning rampaging mobs and security guards receiving fractured skulls were very imaginative and came originally from surprise, surprise the police. However back on the real world the consultative engineers in court evidence said Two group four men received minor injuries in the scuffle. Another DoT affidavit goes on to say:	+	2. Materialist Dialectics
−	The protesters came to the top of the hill arriving on site just north of Arethusa clump Almost immediately 50 or so protesters rushed the line of group 4 guards who fell back to the position of the nearest machine. Another machine was overrun by protesters almost straight away. Group 4 fell back to the second machine in an attempt to keep it working. The protesters actions were very vigorous and within a short time (three minutes) one protester got onto the machines boom and this stopped work.	+	'''II. Basic Principles of Materialist Dialectics'''
−	No work was done in the cutting all that day and: There was considerable damage done to machinery all taking place during the protest. Tarmac claim that about a dozen machines were “seriously” damaged, some written off while others remained inoperative till May. Needless to say no one or nothing was caught.	+	1. The Principle of General Relationships
−	**** April 19	+	2. Principle of Development
−	About 10 of us occupied the Mott MacDonald office in Winchester. This and the previous raid/occupation, (see “Twyford Diary, part 1,” page 1) was not only useful in that it disrupted work, but also in that it brought to light just how DoDgy they are. From <em>obtained</em> documentation we found that not satisfied with being one of the most hated Consultative engineers in Britain, they are also involved in building a logging road through the Venezuelan Rainforest, urban redevelopment in Jakarta (knocking down slum dwellings!), the horrendous World Bank Bangladeshi Flood Action Plan and they are even building a bypass around Bagdad!. Well, I think we can truly say BASTARDS! One minor was arrested for breach of the peace, e.g. being locked onto a radiator and singing, but was released six hours later with no charge.	+	'''III. Basic Pairs of Categories of Materialist Dialectics'''
−	**** April 20	+	1. Private and Common
−	We attended the opening of the nearby controversial M36 Salisbury Bypass Inquiry. One activist being infuriated with the actions of the Inspector did a sit in with his coat over his head to the chorus of <em>Jam being muffled,</em> much to the outrage of the inspector who closed the inquiry for the day.	+	2. Reason and Result
−	**** April 21 Second day of the Salisbury inquiry	+	3. Obviousness and Randomness
−	Outside the hall where the Inquiry was being held was a riot van and a police landie. Inside a collection of sturdy Security men were making their presence known. Three of us were removed by police while trying to ensure a democratic Inquiry. Our actions, in the end, secured the production of written & audio transcripts of the proceedings, an objectors office, a creche, and evening sessions.	+	4. Content and Form
−	**** April 22–23	+	5. Essence and Phenomenon
−	It rained and rained and rained, I love the rain!	+	6. Possibility and Reality
−	**** April 24	+	'''IV. Basic Laws of Materialist Dialectics'''
−	Environment Day at Winchester Cathedral. The protest camp set up stall. A large banner was hung saying “Has the environment had its day?” on scaffolding outside the cathedral, and some happy Twyford campers were subsequently chased around the grounds by Cathedral vergers.	+	1. Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality
−	**** April 28	+	2. Law of Unification and Contradiction Between Opposites
−	Meeting with Ecover to discuss boycott	+	3. Law of Negation of Negation
−	**** April 29	+	'''Chapter 3: Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism'''
−	The request by the Department of Tarmac for an order to Injunct the Twyford 76 was adjourned as the judge ruled that the governments “case evidence was inadequate”. Much jigging outside the high court.	+	1. Praxis, Consciousness, and the Role of Praxis in Consciousness
−	**** April 30	+	2. Dialectical Path of Consciousness to Truth
−	Beltain gathering of the tribes. 2–300 came to stay for the weekend. The gathering lasted all weekend, and was the first, (and unfortunately one of the only) free festies of the year. The greenwood was once again awoken.	+	'''Afterword'''
−	**** May 1	+	'''Appendices'''
−	Work was stopped on three sites by 150 people. According to a DoT affidavit:	+	Appendix A: Basic Pairs of Categories Used in Materialist Dialectics
−	<quote>	+	Appendix B: The Two Basic Principles of Dialectical Materialism
−	At <em>8.45 hrs a group of protesters raided one of the small earth-moving operations at Shawford Down and did some very severe damage to the excavator before making off There were between 35–50 of them and they seemed to know exactly what to do to cause the most damage to the machine. At the time much of the detailed setting out of the structure in the area of the site was destroyed.</em>
−	</quote>
−	The graffiti on the digger indicated that it was one of the cat 245’s only just back in service after the April 17. The driver of this digger the next week jacked in his job and moved to the Skye Bridge contract in an effort to escape “eco maniacs.” Bad location for an escape!	+	Appendix C: The Three Universal Laws of Materialist Dialectics
−	<quote>	+	Appendix D: Forms of Consciousness and Knowledge
−	At 10:20 <em>another group of protesters were at the top of the down and they then started to invade the site as they usually do until...the Blackwells foreman decided to park up the machines to prevent damage...There were many scuffles with protesters in the intervening time where they succeeded in partially stopping several machines...At 10:25 another group of40-50protesters went to the Bar End Bridge and succeeded in stopping all works for an hour or so until they started to walk up to join the other group on the top of Twyford Down. There were two machines damaged adjacent to the Bridge: a bulldozer and a grader.</em>
−	</quote>
−	On the way to meet action group 2 we spotted dumper trucks whizzing here and there, and after a few minutes we managed to stop them. Then without warning one of the drivers revved up his engine and drove straight into a group of protesters, most jumped out of the way but two held their ground. Alex from Aire Valley EF! (Leeds), was knocked over by 17 tons of dumper truck and for 10 minutes or so had one of its tires on his chest, for a while we thought he was a gonna. An ambulance came & took him to hospital, amazingly he only sustained a sprained shoulder! Guess who’s got the goddess on his side! He is pressing charges so if you were there, contact Aire Valley EF! NOW.	+	Appendix E: Properties of Truth
−	**** May 2	+	Appendix F: Common Deviations from Dialectical Materialism
−	The festival of Fire-Another great day of celebration. It was however marred slightly by a couple of hundred police evicting the techno rave in the adjacent field. A very violent situation was narrowly avoided. The ravers after two days of dancing didn’t have the energy to resist, so many a riot shield wielding policeman didn’t get the fight they were so obviously looking forward too.	+	'''Glossary and Index'''
−	**** May 3	+	<br />
−	This day turned out to be another bizarre one. Overnight two people had been arrested for criminal damage, for allegedly cutting down the fencing around the cutting. One of the activists was badly roughed up by group 4 while waiting for the police. The sun came up and the action began. We didn’t need to take action against the main site at Olivers Battery as the ravers were still using the site as a carpark. Eager not to be out-staged two groups hit the cutting while a third allegedly hit the Compton site. In the words of yet another DoT affidavit, (staked they now reach a foot and a half):	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-3.png|''“Great Victory for the People and Army of South Vietnam!”'']]
−	<quote>	+	<br />
−	9.30 hrs the first group were now moving up plague pits valley...Blackwells decided to suspend operations and move all plant at the top of the site down to the Hockley traffic lights, where they felt Group 4 could contain the trouble more easily. Unfortunately the protesters were too quick and succeeded in stopping one of the excavators...and preventing another from coming across...A second group of forty came onto the site and started to create problems. 10.00 hrs. The three large motor scrapers were parked up and the protesters tried to rush the larger excavators and there was a serious incident, when one Group 4 man was hit hard in the back by one of the excavators ...He collided with another Group 4 man who was also injured.
−	</quote>
−	Howie who the police are busy framing with an assault charge on a site he wasn’t even at: on April 17, was seen on the demonstration (a breach of his bail conditions), and, two constables gave chase but he eluded them. A car chase around the South of Hampshire then commenced. We believe the Tarmac Site Supervisor broke speed restrictions on numerous occasions! Tut tut. Howie however once again eluded them, Hurrah!	+	= Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism =
−	<quote>	+	== I. Brief History of Marxism-Leninism ==
−	At <em>10.40 hrs the machines were parked up and left. At 11.00 hrs there were reports of damage to machinery at Compton by a group of people in 8 cars who stormed the area of the site when no work was in progress. They did a severe amount of damage to a medium excavator and to another medium excavator, a large road roller, a track shovel, and compacting plate. A large amount of setting out detail was also destroyed.</em> Shortly after the time these incidence are alleged to have happened those who just happened to have been there were confronted by a horrific site. A quarter of a mile away and running towards us were 60 group 4, and coming down the opposite end of the road were about the same number of police.
−	</quote>
−	Now knowing that the Group 4 would almost definitely beat us up and the police only probably, we decided to run towards the police. We could not get the road due to a 20-foot metal sound barrier skiting down the side of the road. Our cars were nowhere to be seen as a crash had happened causing a massive tailback with our vehicles about half a mile away. About thirty seconds before we would have met with the police the jam cleared and our cars appeared. Two carloads raced off, resulting in more car chases but the police then blocked the road and six cars were left stranded, some even pushed onto the hard shoulder by police cars. The cars, the site, and everyone present were searched by the police, no tools were found. After all this was a bank holiday excursion of The Roadside Botanical Society. We were interested in the rare Yellow Cradwort, not horrible greasy monkey-wrenches. Two people were arrested under suspicion of criminal damage but were later released and the charges dropped. The whole fracas caused great inconvenience to many Mayday holidaymakers, These incidence happened on the North bound carriageways of the A33, causing a large traffic jam in both directions for 45 minutes. Oh dear!	+	=== 1. Marxism and the Three Constituent Parts ===
−	**** May 4–21	+	Marxism-Leninism is a system of scientific opinions and theories which were built by Karl Marx<ref>Karl Marx, 1818–1883 (German): Theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, political economist, founder of scientific socialism, leader of the international working class.</ref> and Friedrich Engels<ref>Friedrich Engels, 1820–1895 (German): Theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, leader of the international working class, co-founder of scientific socialism with Karl Marx.</ref>, and defended and developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin<ref>Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1870–1924 (Russian): Theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, defender and developer of Marxism in the era of imperialism, founder of the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union, leader of Russia and the international working class.</ref>. Marxism-Leninism was formed and developed by interpreting reality as well as building on preceding ideas. It provides the fundamental worldview* and methodology of scientific awareness and revolutionary practice. It is a science that concerns the work of liberating the proletariat from all exploitative regimes with the ambition of liberating all of humanity from all forms of oppression.
−	Many EF! actions in other places, injunction hearings and gatherings etc. resulted in a drop of activity. The camp was also evicted by Ideal Homes and moved to an abandoned army camp nearby.	+	Marxism-Leninism is made up of three basic theories which have strong relationships with each other. They are: ''Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, Marxist-Leninist Political Economics,'' and ''Scientific Socialism''.
−	Greenfly, Market Gardens and the Pernicious Tarmac Weed On 22 May an amazing overnight action took place at Twyford Down. In order to stop Tarmac the planet wreckers from building a massive construction bridge over the bypass (codenamed Operation Market Garden by the Dept. of Roads), 300 activists gathered at the protest camp that day for the counter operation Operation Greenfly. There was an overwhelming sense of pessimism and helplessness as reccys had shown that Tarmac were preparing for battle by erecting razor wire barricades all around the site. Group 4, we learnt, had taken the precaution of hiring hundreds more guards and giving them instructions to use more than usual force. The police were there in large numbers and the situation looked pretty fucking scary.	+	''Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism'' studies the basic principles of the movement and development of nature, society and human thought. It provides the fundamental worldview and methodology of scientific awareness and revolutionary practice.
−	Well, we worried, we work-shopped, we briefed, we painted our faces, gathered ourselves, and set off to get to the site before the bypass closed down for the night.	+	Based on this philosophical worldview and methodology, ''Marxist-Leninist Political Economics'' studies the economic rules of society, especially the economic rules of the birth, development, and decay of the capitalist mode of production, as well as the birth and development of a new mode of production: the communist mode of production.
−	The procession of 200 activists looked amazing. Our courage and determination grew as we walked through the water meadows towards the ready built bridge which was about to be pushed across the road. The next sequence of events is amazing and shows what a group of determined people can do. It surprised even the most experienced and seasoned of activists. We formed into a tortoise formation, linked arms and marched onto the site. Rope was tied onto the razor wire, it was pulled away, the other fence was pulled onto it and we stormed in, united. There was nothing Group 4 or the police could do! As Paul said; We almost seemed to fly over the wire. It was as if we were carried. The greenfly buzzed all over the 30 foot high, 200 foot long bridge, WOW WHAT A FEELING!	+	''Scientific Socialism''** is the inevitable result of applying the philosophical worldview and methodology of Marxism-Leninism, as well as Marxist-Leninist Political Economics, to reveal the objective rules of the socialist revolution process: the historical step from capitalism into socialism, and then communism.
−	For five hours we held that bridge, drumming into the night, until the police had to call in reinforcements from all over the south to get us down. By 2am, there were in total 550 police and 320 group. There were 52 arrests for obstruction of the police and the whole action had been carried out, from our side, with an amazing lack of aggression. It was so empowering. About another 150 people had gathered on the other side of the razor wire, fires burned, and a man breathed fire. On the bridge it was Party time. Night fell, the road closed down, the arc lights roared into action.	+	-----
−	A horrific event unfolded as one activist, while under arrest, was run over by a Tarmac tractor and fuel tank. The driver, laughing, parked up on the site road obstructing an ambulance from entering. Darren received serious injuries and was critical for a while. Darren’s injuries included: a flailed left chest, (i.e. six multiply-broken ribs), a punctured and collapsed left lung, five pelvic fractures, a ruptured urethra, and a broken ankle. He remained in hospital for about a month and a half and was on crutches for longer.	+	==== Annotation 1 ====
−	Meanwhile the rest of the action was going much better. We drummed on the monster structure and the deafening metallic beat echoed across the valley. One man climbed a 40 foot lighting rig and flew the dragon flag and the dragon dancers took the road!	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> A ''worldview'' encompasses the whole of an individual’s or society’s opinions and conceptions about the world, about ourselves as human beings, and about life and the position of human beings in the world.
−	A bank of TV cameras and press photographers lapped up this spectacular action, there was live footage on TV. It was splashed all over the national press the next day.	+	<nowiki>**</nowiki> The word “science,” and, by extension, “scientific” in Marxism-Leninism has specific meaning. Friedrich Engels was the first to describe the philosophy which he developed with Marx as “Scientific Socialism” in his book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
−	What was not reported was that, according to Blackwells, during that morning several excavators and water pumps had been trashed. That night as the greenfly fired up the night on the bridge, elsewhere an excavator was torched, a stretch of Tarmac burned and part of the work site flooded. People have cost Tarmac and the DoT millions in lost time and damaged machinery.	+	However, it should be noted that the English phrase “scientific socialism” comes from
−	**** May 24-July 1	+	Engels’ use of the German phrase “wissenschaftlich sozialismus.”
−	No major action happened at Twyford in this period. Ihe time was taken up with a concoction of smaller actions, court cases and even an invasion of Tarmac’s AGM in London on the 16<sup>th</sup> of June. There was a large Twyford contingent at Glastonbury festival, (a consumer hype if ever I saw one), who gave talks and direct action training all through the festival.	+	“Wissenschaft” is a word which can be directly translated as “knowledge craft” in German, and this word encompasses a much more broad and general concept than the word “science” as it’s usually used in English.
−	**** July 2	+	In common usage, the word “science” in English has a relatively narrow definition, referring to systematically acquired, objective knowledge pertaining to a particular subject. But “wissenschaft” refers to a systematic pursuit of knowledge, research, theory, and understanding. “Wissenschaft” is used in any study that involves systematic investigation. And so, “scientific socialism” is only an approximate translation of “wissenschaftlich sozialismus.” So, “scientific socialism” can be understood as a body of theory which analyzes and interprets the natural world to develop a body of knowledge, which must be constantly tested against reality, with the pursuit of changing the world to bring about socialism through the leadership of the proletariat.
−	Tarmac’s injunction against 76 protesters was finally given the nod in the High Court only two days before a planned mass trespass of the work site. This injunction, and others that have appeared since, are near direct copies of the American S.L.A.p.p.s, (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation), and as a legal precedent it brings situations into the fray that EF!ers in this country have not encountered before. Firstly, a possible stay in prison, for contempt of court, for all named injunctees who break the injunction. Secondly, all the injunctees become “jointly and severally liable;’ for all legal costs and damages. The DoT is intending to claim damages of £2 million, and theoretically under this injunction one injunctee who was on the site once could be held entirely responsible for the two million pounds the DoT is claiming. An appeal against the injunction has now been set up and is contactable via, David Plumstead, 0303–265737. (For more details of SLAPPS read “SLAPPS come to Britain;’ Sept/Oct 93 issue of The Ecologist).	+	-----
−	**** July 4	+	Even though these three basic theories of Marxism-Leninism deal with different subjects, they are all parts of a unified scientific theory system: the science of liberating the proletariat from exploitative regimes and moving toward human liberation.
−	It was evident to all how tyrannical the injunction was and it was decided that it should be made a laughing stock from the very beginning. Two days after the passing of the injunction a ceremonial mass trespass entitled “reclaiming the land” was held. 600 people including a group of injunctees who put their liberty on the line, surrounded the cutting in a massive circle, climbing over into the cutting. This was the biggest Twyford action yet and it seemed, (happily) more like a festie than anything else. There was a healthy mix, sabs, travelers, doctors and EF!ers. Police vans were circled around and the sun blazed down reflecting on the chalk.	+	=== 2. Summary of the Birth and Development of Marxism-Leninism ===
−	Tarmac had learnt its lesson and had moved the machinery out of the cutting and into a compound at the other end of the Bailey Bridge. There was no way the police were going to let us in there. An attempt was made but only resulted in exhaustion and twenty or so arrests. There was a severe problem with the lack of drinking water so many just jumped into the River Itchen and cooled off. Needless to say, no site work was carried out and from the onset we had made a mockery of the injunction.	+	There have been two main stages of the birth and development of Marxism-Leninism:
−	**** July 23	+	''1.'' ''Stage of formation and development of Marxism'', as developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
−	In the High Court, “the lord” Just-us Alliot, who had passed the injunction a month earlier, ruled that seven injunctees who had taken part in the Reclaiming the Land demo, were in contempt of court. He said in his summing up that there was one more important thing than nature and that is...the rule of Law! Well he would say that I suppose, being the law.	+	''2.'' ''Stage of defense and developing Marxism into Marxism-Leninism'', as developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
−	He sentenced them to 28 days in prison, (more than many wife beaters get!), and hereby created the biggest PR disaster the DoT had ever seen. There was condemnation against his decision from all sides and the prisoners, serving in Holloway (women) and Pentonville (Men), were visited by many notables. These including Carlo Ripa da Meana, the EC minister who resigned in rather suspicious circumstances, after initiating legal action against the English government over Twyford and Oxlees. The prisoners received much media coverage and about 50 letters of support a day from all around the world.	+	==== a. Conditions and Premises of the Birth of Marxism ====
−	They were finally released after serving 13 days of their sentence. Other injunctees face a spell inside if the combined forces of Bray’s detective agency, the police and group 4 catch up with them. Considering this and the likely spread of these injunctions we can expect many of us to be prisoners in the future. However, we must not let the government’s intimidation tactics work.	+	-----
−	The cutting at Twyford gets ever deeper and the down, the water meadows and of course most of the Dongas are now destroyed, but its destruction has given birth to a movement and the fight goes on. ‘Ihe road is doomed. We invite all like minded folk to come to the M3 extensions opening ceremony next year with a pick axe, and we will dig this abomination up! But in the mean time Please show your anguish at the loss of this precious place, your solidarity with the injuncted protesters, and your commitment to fight earth rapists everywhere!	+	==== Annotation 2 ====
−	Lots of Love and no compromise, ever!!	+	The following sections will explain the conditions which led to the birth of Marxism. First, we will examine the Social-Economic conditions which lead to the birth of Marxism, and then we will examine the theoretical premises upon which Marxism was built. Later, we will also discuss the impact which 18<sup>th</sup> and 19<sup>th</sup> century advances in natural science had on the development of Marxism.
−	Boudicca and Snufkin.	+	''- Social-Economical Conditions''
−	xxxxx	+	Marxism was born in the 1840s. This was a time when the capitalist mode of production was developing strongly in Western Europe on the foundation of the industrial revolution which succeeded first in England at the end of the 18<sup>th</sup> century. Not only did this industrial revolution mark an important step forward in changing from handicraft cottage industry capitalism into a more greatly mechanized and industrialized capitalism, it also deeply changed society, and, above all, it caused the birth and development of the proletariat.
−	The main part of the Diary was written by Snufkin, and “Operation Greenfly” is by Boudicca.	+	-----
−	Both are small round shiny red insects from Camelot EF!	+	==== Annotation 3 ====
−	** News From the Autonomous Zones (from issue 4)	+	Marx saw human society under capitalism divided into classes based on their relation to the means of production.
−	*** The Zone Protects its Own	+	''Means of production'' are physical inputs and systems used in the production of goods and services, including machinery, factory buildings, tools, and anything else used in producing goods and services. ''Capitalism'' is a political economy defined by private ownership of the means of production.
−	So what has made the M11 Link Road such a cause celebre? Firstly, it has the advantage of being in London, close enough to embarrass Britain’s politicians and catch the media’s attention. Secondly it is a linchpin of the European Round Tables plans for economic euro-routes in Western Europe. By halting the road in London we can save woodlands, rivers & heathlands all the way to Newcastle, without endangering their ecology by having mud fights with hundreds of security guards and police in their midst.	+	Within the framework of Dialectical Materialism, all classes are defined by internal and external relationships [see ''The Principle of General Relationships'', p. 107]; chiefly, classes are defined by their relations to the means of production and to one another.
−	The area threatened by the Link Road comprises two very different localities. At the Eastern end of the route is Wanstead, a reasonably affluent, conservative leafy-green London suburb. To the West are Leyton and Leytonstone, areas of high-density urban housing, built at the turn of the century, but badly neglected ever since the proposal for the Link Road first blighted the area forty years ago. To look at it now, you could be forgiven for thinking that the best thing for Leyton and Leytonstone would be to demolish them and grow a forest.	+	The ''proletariat'' are the working class — the people who provide labor under capitalism, but who do not own their own means of production, and must therefore sell their labor to those who ''do'' own means of production: the ''bourgeoisie''. As the owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie are the ruling class under capitalism.
−	Overall management of the road-building project has been entrusted to WS Atkins Consulting Engineers. They have divided the road into four separate sections, each of which will be built by a different contractor. So far, only one of the four contracts has been awarded. Norwest Holst have now started work on “Contract 4” in Wanstead, since it is expected to take the longest time to complete. Our hope is that if Norwest Holst can be made to suffer both financially and in PR terms through their involvement in the Link Road, then it will become extremely difficult for the DoT to find three other construction companies who are daft enough to take the remaining contracts! “Contract 2” covers the crucial stretch through Leyton and Leytonstone; although advance preparation works (knocking down houses, or just damaging them enough to make them uninhabitable) are already underway there. the actual road-building contract will not now be awarded until August 1994. It was originally due to have started in January, so they are at least nine months behind schedule already. So the campaign is undoubtedly having some sort of an effect!	+	According to Marx and Engels, there are other classes within the capitalist political economy. Specifically, Marx named the ''petty'' ''bourgeoisie'' and the ''lumpenproletariat''. Marx defined the ''petty bourgeoisie'' as including semi-autonomous merchants, farmers, and so on who are self-employed, own small and limited means of production, or otherwise fall in between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
−	**** The Start of the Action: 13<sup>th</sup> September: November 1, 1993	+	In the ''Manifesto of the Communist Party,'' Marx described the petty bourgeoisie as:
−	The first big event-a march along the route of the road-took place in mid-August 1993, with just one month to go before the start of the contract. The second event was on September 13, the day the bulldozers were due to arrive! Around 100 people were there to greet the contractors that day-needless to say, the contractors didn’t dare to show up! So the protesters celebrated their first victory in the full glare of the national media, by reclaiming a vacant house which had been compulsory-purchased by the Department of Transport (DoT). By the end of the day, the house had its roof repaired, and was covered in banners. 1–0 to the campaigners!	+	<blockquote>
		+	... fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society... The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Contractors Norwest Holst duly arrived the following morning, and immediately met with stiff opposition. Norwest Holst’s first task was to clear a patch of woodland, which took them nearly three weeks, due to regular tree-sits, bulldozer lock-ons and other delaying tactics. On one day, forty men employed for a full day only managed to cut down four small trees!	+	Vietnam’s Textbook of History for High School Students gives this definition of the petty bourgeoisie in the specific context of Vietnamese history:
−	Yet in other respects the campaign was not taking off as we might have hoped. The real challenge was (and still is) to find enough people willing to occupy the many houses which the DoT has already purchased and left vacant along the route. Generally the houses are structurally sound, although several have had their first-floor ceilings knocked out, with the aim of making them uninhabitable. The campaign has held a number of house-rebuilding days, in an effort to tempt more squatters to come and live in what can otherwise be fairly unpleasant conditions. Other houses have been barricaded, and we have already had some success in resisting evictions. But the DoT has now accelerated its efforts to destroy the houses.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The petty bourgeois class includes: intellectuals, scientists, and small business owners, handicraftsmen, doctors, lawyers, and civil servants. The vast majority of contemporary intellectuals before the August Revolution of 1945, including students, belonged to the petty bourgeoisie. In general, they were also oppressed by imperialism and feudalism, often unemployed and uneducated.
−	**** The Chestnut Tree: November 2--December 7, 1993	+	The petty bourgeoisie were intellectually and politically sensitive. They did not directly exploit labor. Therefore, they easily absorbed revolutionary education and went along with the workers and peasants.
−	At the heart of Wanstead lies George Green, a highly valued local park. ‘Ihe focal point of the Green was a magnificent 250-year-old sweet chestnut tree. Local people had been led to believe that the road would pass under the green in a tunnel, so they assumed that their tree was safe. What they were not told was that the tunnel was only a shallow cut and cover tunnel, and that the tree would have to be cut down to allow it to be built. On Tuesday 2<sup>nd</sup> November, Norwest Holst started to put up wooden hoardings around the chestnut tree. Local people were horrified, especially the children who, for the rest of that week, came out from school as often as they could, and lay down in the way of the contractors to stop them putting up the fences. By Saturday 6<sup>th</sup> November they had finally completed the fencing, just in time to prevent us from holding a planned “Tree Dressing” ceremony. Several hundred local people, furious at this, came out that day and tore the fences down again! Suddenly, the campaign had found a focus and a symbol-local support, which had so far been dormant, now sprang into life!	+	However, the intelligentsia and students often suffer from great weaknesses, such as: theory not being coupled with practice, contempt for labor, vague ideas, unstable stances, and erratic behavior in political action.
−	The next day, a local nursery donated a number of plants, and the children created a Peace Garden in the shadow of the tree, bearing the words “Save the World:’ A tree-house was built in the branches of the chestnut tree. A bender was set up beside the tree, and for the following month, the camp fire became a focal point for the campaign. Local people, including grandmothers and children, came down to George Green each night, bringing food for the tree-dwellers. People from different backgrounds began to get to know one another; professional people, retired people, and Twyford Down veterans spent long evenings together, talking, forming new friendships, exchanging ideas about roads, the environment, consumerism, life, the universe and everything................................. Something new and beautiful had been created	+	Some other petty bourgeoisie (scientists and small businessmen, freelancers, etc.) were also exploited by imperialism and feudalism. Their economic circumstances were precarious, and they often found themselves unemployed and bankrupt. Therefore, the majority also participated in and supported the resistance war and revolution. They are also important allies of the working class.
−	in the community. Many local people talk of their lives having been completely changed by the experience.	+	In general, these members of the petty bourgeoisie had a number of weaknesses: self-interest, fragmentation, and a lack of determination. Therefore, the working class has a duty to agitate and spread propaganda to such members of the petty bourgeoisie, organize them, and help them to develop their strong points while correcting their weaknesses. It is necessary to skillfully lead them, make them determined to serve the people, reform their ideology, and unite with the workers and peasants in order to become one cohesive movement. Then, they will become a great asset for the public in resistance war and revolution.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Word of the George Green Chestnut Tree spread via a small article in the Guardian newspaper. Two days later, the postman delivered a letter addressed to the Chestnut Tree itself! One of the campaign’s solicitors immediately seized on this to argue in the law courts that the tree-house should be formally recognized as a dwelling! The strategy worked, the tree-house had made legal history, and hundreds more letters started to pour in from all around the country! The DoT now had to apply for a court order to evict the tree-dwellers from their new home, a process that delayed them for several more days. By the time they had obtained the court order, they knew that any attempt to remove the tree-dwellers would meet with serious resistance. They would have to organize a major police operation, and this in tum took several weeks to plan.	+	Marx defined the “lumpenproletariat” as another class which includes the segments of society with the least privilege — most exploited by capitalism — such as thieves, houseless people, etc.
−	Actions continued sporadically, but in practice Norwest Holst were hardly managing to do any work worth stopping! On Tuesday November 30, a crane arrived to start digging the entrance to the tunnel a few yards up the road from George Green. At midday, two protesters evaded the security guards, climbed to the top of the crane, and “locked on” with bike locks 30 metres above the road below! The contractors attempted to remove them with fire engines, high hoists, hydraulic bolt-cutters-but nothing could bring them down! They stayed up until after work had finished at 6pm that evening, before descending voluntarily.	+	In the ''Manifesto of the Communist Party,'' Marx defined the lumpenproletariat as: “The ‘dangerous class’ (''lumpenproletariat''), the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” Marx did not have much hope for the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, writing that they “may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”
−	A more sinister development occurred in the early hours of Friday morning, December 3. Protesters were subjected to two attacks within 20 minutes of one another, at different places on the route. The first took place in Claremont Road, a threatened street in Leyton which houses a number of protesters and other squatters. At l:OOam, two men passed down the street, one driving slowly in a car, the other walking beside him, smashing through the window of every parked vehicle in sight. Twenty minutes later, six men struck at Wanstead. They poured petrol over the tree and the bender, and threw a Molotov inside the bender for good measure. Protesters were asleep in both the bender and the tree itself. It is very fortunate that only one protester suffered slight burns-the attackers’ intentions were clearly murderous. Police arrested two people caught escaping the area, and charged them with “arson with intent to endanger life:’ We always knew that roads were built, not for the good of the public, but to suit the interests of the roads lobby. This attack shows just how deeply entrenched those vested interests are, and the extent to which they are prepared to go to defend their interests, once threatened.	+	''Political Theories'', an official journal of the Ho Chi Minh National Institute of Politics, discussed the lumpenproletariat in the specific context of Vietnamese revolutionary history:
−	**** Black And Blue Tuesday: December 7	+	<blockquote>
		+	It should be noted that Marxism-Leninism has never held that the historical mission of the working class is rooted in poverty and impoverishment. Poverty and low standards of living make workers hate the regime of capitalism, and causes disaster for workers, but the basic driving force behind the revolutionary struggle of the working class lies in the very nature of capitalist production and from the irreconcilable contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie.
−	By early December, rumors began to circulate of a major police operation to evict the tree-dwelling, and it soon became clear that the rumors were serious. Within 24 hours phone calls had gone out to people all around the country. On Monday evening, 6<sup>th</sup> December, about 150 people gathered for an all-night vigil around the base of the tree. Many more people arrived during the early hours of the following morning. One group locked themselves into a ring around the tree trunk, with their arms linked by steel tubing; others climbed up into the tree itself. As predicted, about 400 police officers arrived at Sam that morning, and immediately started to clear people out of the way from around the base of the tree. Pensioners were dragged away without warning, one had his face punched, smashing his glasses. Another protester had his foot broken when it was deliberately stamped on by a policeman. The police used pressure points extensively whilst removing them. After about an hour of scuffles, the police had the tree surrounded, and started to bring in reinforcements to cordon it off. At 1 lam a cherry picker (a high hoist hydraulic platform) arrived to remove protesters from the tree itself!. People lay in the road blocking its path, and were again dragged away by the police. At one point the cherry picker became stuck in the mud as it approached the tree; one security guard and one demonstrator were injured as it attempted to free itself. One tree occupant managed to climb onto the arm of the cherry picker, and locked himself to it with handcuffs.	+	Moreover, it should not be conceived that a class is capable of leading the revolution because it is the poorest class. In the old societies, there were classes that were extremely poor and had to go through many struggles against the ruling class, but they could never win and keep power, and did not become the ruling class of society.
−	Eventually they demolished the tree after nine hours and a police operation that cost £100,000. It had forced the DoT to humiliate itself in a very public manner. Virtually all the national newspapers carried reports and photographs of the incident in many cases on the front page. The loss of the tree was a tragic day, and yet also a truly wonderful day. It had hammered another huge nail into the coffin of the DoT’s roads programme.	+	History has proven that the class that represents newly emerging productive forces which are able to build a more advanced mode of production than the old ones can lead the revolution and organize society into the regime they represent. Fetishizing poverty and misery is a corruption of Marxism-Leninism...
−	Soon afterwards, local families gathered for a march through central London to the Department of Transport’s offices in Westminster. A nine year old boy presented the DoT with a young sweet chestnut tree, and requested that Roads Minister MacGregor should plant the new tree on George Green to replace the one he had demolished, and of course, halt the motorway construction.	+	The very existence of the lumpenproletariat is strong evidence of the inhumane nature of capitalist society, which regularly recreates a large class of outcasts at the bottom of society.
		+	</blockquote>
−	**** Wanstonia	+	In the late 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries, millions of Vietnamese people were forced to leave their homes in rural farmlands to work for plantations and factories which were owned by French colonialists. These workers were functionally enslaved, being regularly physically abused by colonial masters, barred from any education whatsoever, and receiving only the bare minimum to survive. As a result, under French colonial rule, about 90% of Vietnamese were illiterate and the French aimed to indoctrinate Vietnamese people into believing that they were inferior to the French.
−	A long Christmas break in the construction industry gave the campaign some time to recover our energy. But it was soon clear that a new threat was looming. On December 30 the DoT served notices to quit on the tenants of a row of large Edwardian houses next to George Green itself. These houses included the homes of Patsy Braga and Mike Edwards, two local anti-road campaigners; another of the houses had been colonized by the campaign in October, for use as a direct action centre! So at the start of 1994, these houses officially became squats. The campaign needed to do something dramatic to make a big issue of these houses. On Sunday January 9, with the threat that the houses could be demolished immediately after a High Court hearing the following Thursday, a meeting of the inhabitants and other local people decided that they would make a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the UK, and set up the “Independent Free Area of Wanstonia.” The campaign’s solicitors wrote to the Foreign Office to advise them of our intentions & a Declaration of Independence was drawn up. The outcome of the High Court case was unexpectedly favorable; one house was reprieved completely (forcing the DoT to go back to square one), and a stay of execution was granted on the others.	+	The French colonialists also worked with Vietnamese landlords to exploit peasants in rural areas. Those peasants received barely enough to survive and, like the plantation slaves, were prohibited from receiving education. Because Vietnamese peasants and colonial slaves composed the majority of workers while being so severely oppressed and living in conditions of such abject poverty, it was difficult to fully distinguish between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat in Vietnam during the colonial era.
−	**** Actions, Actions and Yet More Actions	+	During this time, Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese communists developed the philosophy of “Proletarian Piety.” The word “piety,” here, is a translation of the Vietnamese word ''hiếu'', which originally comes from the Confucianist philosophy of “filial piety.” Filial piety demanded children to deeply respect, honor, and obey their parents. Through the concept of Proletarian Piety, Ho Chi Minh adapted this concept to proletarian revolution, calling for communists to deeply love, respect, and tirelessly serve the oppressed masses. This philosophical concept sought to unite the proletariat, lumpenproletariat, and petty bourgeoisie into one united revolutionary class. Even some feudal landlords and capitalists — who were, themselves, oppressed by the colonizing French — were willing to fight for communist revolution and were welcomed into the revolutionary movement if they were willing to adhere to the principle of proletarian piety. The working class and peasantry would lead the revolution, the more privileged classes would follow, and all communist revolutionists would serve the oppressed masses through sacrifice and struggle.
−	Meanwhile outside the Free Area on January 10. the contractors returned from a long Christmas and New year holiday. Activists tree-sat threatened trees and there was much chainsaw diving including one activist head-butting a working chainsaw while wearing a crash helmet. This went on for a number of days. On the 20<sup>th</sup>, 20 Wanstonians blockaded a pile driver being driven onto the construction site at Wansted Green and were met with 50 Territorial Support Group with police dogs-one happily wielding his truncheon.	+	During this period, many novels were written and circulated widely which featured main characters who were members of the lumpenproletariat or enslaved by the French, such as ''Bỉ'' ''Vỏ,'' a story about a beautiful peasant girl who was forced to become a thief in the city, and ''Chí Phèo'', the story of a peasant who worked as a servant in a feudal landlord’s house who was sent to prison and became a destitute alcoholic after being released. The purpose of these stories was to show the cruelty of the colonialist-capitalist society of Vietnam in the 1930’s and to inspire proletarian piety, including empathy and respect for the extreme suffering and oppression of the lumpenproletariat, peasantry, and colonial slaves. These stories also presented sympathetic views of intellectuals and members of the petty bourgeoisie: for instance, in the novel ''Lão'' ''Hạc'', the son of a peasant leaves to work for a French plantation and the father never sees him again. The aged peasant becomes extremely poor and sick without the support of his son, and the only person in the village who helps him is a teacher, representing the intellectual segment of the petty bourgeoisie.
−	**** Site Invasions & Grappling Hooks	+	The writers of these novels were communists who wanted to promote the principles of proletarian piety. Rather than looking down on the most oppressed members of society, and rather than sewing distrust and contempt for the petty bourgeoisie, Vietnamese communists inspired solidarity and collaboration between all of the oppressed peoples of Vietnam to overthrow French colonialism, feudalism, and capitalism. Proletarian piety was crucial for uniting the divided and conquered masses of Vietnam and successfully overthrowing colonialism. Note that these strategies were developed specifically for colonial Vietnam. Every revolutionary struggle will take place in unique ''material conditions''<ref>Material conditions include the natural environment, the means of production and the economic base of human society, objective social relations, and other externalities and systems which affect human life and human society. See Annotation 79, p. 81.</ref>, and the composition and characteristics of each class will vary over time and from one place to another. It is important for revolutionists to carefully apply the principles of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics to accurately analyze class conditions in order to develop strategies and plans which will most suitably and efficiently lead to successful revolution.
−	The next action saw a dynamic shift of tactics. Three hundred turned up for a day of action on January 22, shifting gear into the offensive. Fort Norwest-Holst was held siege for an entire day, with the formidable defenses breached on several dramatic occasions, (even if the grappling hook proved over-ambitious!). The security excelled themselves again, old Andy “Chipped Tooth” got so excited he had to be revived with the old “paper bag over the head routine” (apparently it is a recognized first aid technique!). Many of the other guards smashed their own computers in the furore. By the end of the day, the main site on Cambridge Park Road was without security cameras, electricity, or an intact set of blueprints.	+	The deep contradictions* between the socialized production force** and the capitalist relations of production*** were first revealed by the economic depression of 1825 and the series of struggles between workers and the capitalist class which followed.
−	**** Leytonstonia established	+	-----
−	On the same day, (January 25). as the government published four greenwash reports on sustainable eco-rape, tree surgeons arrived to chainsaw down a copse of Yew, Oak, and Holly trees in Leytonstone. Opening the gates they were surprised to find their work site turned into a camp site of assorted benders and tree hammocks. Police arrived to evict trespassers but realized that the protesters had legal possession of the land. {f you want to remove my clients you will have togo through the court! smirked a campaign solicitor to a disgruntled police officer. Nearly the whole of the street was by now under the control of the campaigners and Fillebrooke Road is declared independent. Long live the Autonomous Free Area of Leytonstonia!	+	==== Annotation 4 ====
−	**** Bash Wednesday	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> See: ''Definition of Contradiction and Common Characteristics of Contradiction'', p. 175.
−	Direct action slowed down in preparation for the upcoming eviction of Wanstonia and we concentrated on digging ditches and erecting barricades. We didn’t have to wait long, the big day came on Ash Wednesday, now renamed Bash Wednesday, and what a surreal day it turned out to be. Far too surreal, in fact, for this scribe so I will leave it to of all people--The Daily Telegraph.	+	<nowiki>**</nowiki> In Marxism, “socialization” is simply the idea that human society transforms labor and production from a solitary, individual act into a collective, social act. In other words, as human society progresses, people “socialize” labor into increasingly complex networks of social relations: from individuals making their own tools, to agricultural societies engaged in collective farming, to modern industrial societies with factories, logistical networks, etc.
−	<quote>	+	The production force is the combination of the means of production and workers within any society. The “Socialized Production Force,” therefore, is a production force which has been socialized — that is to say, a production force which has been organized into collective social activity. Under capitalism, the “Socialized Production Force” consists of the proletariat, or the working class, as well as means of production which are owned by capitalists.
−	**Link Road Protesters in handcuffs cut away from**
−	<br>**concrete-filled spin drier...**
−	<br>**but now they plan to regroup in Leytonstone.**
−	<br>**The Battle for Wanstonia-Self-styled republic smashed by police**
−	<br><em>The battle of Wansted began at dawn yesterday when police officers taking part in Operation Barnard converged on what protesters had dubbed, “Ihe Independent Free Area of Wanstonia.[3] In their attempt to stop the M11 link road, the protesters had called on the foreign office and the United Nations to recognize the row of Edwardian houses they had occupied as an independent country. Both appeals were rebuffed and they found themselves in breach of court orders requiring them to leave. They refused and the court officials prepared to move in, backed by uniformed officers and units of the Territorial Support Group,[4] who are specialists in public order confrontations, detectives from the area major investigation team, and a small number of horseman. Police detailed to enter the occupied properties had protective clothing and riot helmets... By 6am, the houses had been filled with protesters who were waiting with a mix of apprehension and good humor. Some sang folksy protest songs and one even rang the police station complaining that he was cold and asking them to hurry up. Ihe police arrived in a procession of coaches an hour later ... officers stopped traf c, sealed off the area, and made way for the court of cials to attack the barricadedfront doors with sledgehammers. Once inside the properties, officers worked their way up, systematically clearing each room and ejecting the occupants to behind a cordon of 200 yards away. Protesters used a variety of tactics. Two were chained together through a hole in the chimney breast. Another two were handcuffed to an old spin dryer with cement. When the upper and lowerfloors of the houses had been sealed, the police turned their attention to the roofs. Initial attempts to lift protesters off using one cherry picker crane were unsuccessful; but officers had more success using two cranes. As each house and roof was cleared, the properties were demolished by mechanical diggers, filling the air with choking dust.</em> <em>A</em> <em>handful of demonstrators who had occupied a tree in front of one of the properties was cleared last. By then, the officials were working under lights. Demonstrators appeared demoralized, but said they were planning new occupations on another part of the route in nearby Leytonstone. It has taken them</em> this long to clear a small row of houses, but there are... another 250 for us to occupy before this road is built,” said one... Sabatage and damage to contractors equipment since early <em>December has been estimated at</em> <em>£35,000</em><em>...</em><em>Since last September, when the Wansted protests began in earnest, about 100 people have been arrested, mainly for obstruction and criminal damage to site equipment.</em> <em>A</em> <em>spokesman for the Department of Transport denied any accusation of having ridden roughshod over the wishes of local people.</em>
−	</quote>
−	**** Wanstonia Rising	+	<nowiki>***</nowiki> Marx and Engels defined “relations of production” as the social relationships that human beings must accept in order to survive. Relations of production are, by definition, not voluntary, because human beings must enter into them in order to receive material needs in order to survive within a given society. Under capitalism, the relations of production require the working class to rent their labor to capitalists to receive wages which they need to procure material needs like food and shelter. This is an inherent contradiction because a small minority of society (the capitalist class) own the means of production while the vast majority of society (the working class) must submit to exploitation through wage servitude in order to survive.
−	Just when they thought they’d smashed Wanstonia up it pops again, only 500 yards down from where the Chestnut grew. An empty tobacconist due for eviction was squatted and turned into a drop in centre for the campaign. On the following Monday Squibb & Davies the demolition men illegally entered hitting protesters with sledge hammers. After re-enforcement’s of protesters arrived they left, the same rigmarole happens a couple of days later, but the protest regained occupancy. After a few weeks of occupation the contractors smashed apart Wanstonia Rising, but within days a new house was squatted, Wantonia Rising 2. At the time of writing Wanstonia is still Rising, Leytonstonia is still awaiting attack with a 24-hour watch on guard and more houses are coming under our control daily.	+	Examples of such early struggles include: the resistance of workers in Lyon, France in 1831 and 1834; the Chartist movement in Britain from 1835 to 1848; the workers’ movement in Silesia (Germany) in 1844, etc. These events prove as historical evidence that the proletariat had become an independent political force which pioneered the fight for a democratic, equal, and progressive society.
−	**** Beware the Ides of March	+	-----
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 5 ====
−	And that is where Operation Roadblock came in. With the new Criminal Justice Bill imminent, and lets face it, minor amendments aside, imminent is the word, and with the roads programme virtually on its knees, (which it is), we have no choice but to go big time with the current campaigns. Operation Roadblock was planned to form a national rota of activists and get 100 people per day to the M11 for at least a month, starting from March 15, which is of course the Ides of March when Julias Caesar got stabbed-the beginning of the end of the last great road building empire. Operation Roadblock switched the campaign once again on to the offensive. No longer would the state decide the agenda, 1,200 people over one month took part in direct action, digger diving, and all that jazz. Using a rota system turned out to be a very effective means of mobilizing people-a model for other protests maybe? Operation Roadblock 2 is on the horizon as well as the ambiguous sounding Operation Liquidate. So come down to the Autonomous Zones and experience some peaceful urban warfare.
−	<right>	+	Here are some brief descriptions of the early working class movements mentioned above:
−	-Written by a DoDgy group of shady characters including Roger Geffin, Secret Squirrel, and Yellow Pinky.
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<quote>	+	'''Resistance of Workers in Lyon, France:'''
−	On closer examination we find that trees perform many more offices in relation to the soil than that of merely pegging it down. By virtue of cooling the air and spraying the sky and multiplying the clouds they exert considerate influence upon the fall and distribution of rain; by virtue of sponging the earth around their feet they enormously influence the behavior offloods, the discipline of rivers, the supply of springs, the health of fish;... and by the virtue of their power to suck up moisture by the ton they dry the swamps and control the malarial mosquitoes. Forests are much more than meets the eye. They arc fountains. They are oceans. They are pipes. They are dams. Their work ramifies through the whole economy of nature.
−	<right>	+	In 1831 in France, due to heavy exploitation and hardship, textile workers in Lyon revolted to demand higher wages and shorter working hours. The rebels took control of the city for ten days. Their determination to fight is reflected in the slogan: “Live working or die fighting!”
−	-J. S. Collins,
−	<br>“The Triumph of the Tree” 1950
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	[3] It may seem strange that it took the contractors so long to get a cherry picker to the tree, however this can be explained quite simply. The contractors fearing that monkey-wrenchers would be in the area, put their cherry picker under 24 hour guard, and being completely paranoid hired another and hid it down the road in a school car park. According to sources in Norwest Holst there fears were realized and despite the guards the Hydraulic Platform started to fall apart when they attempted to move it. Without hesitation they drove down to their ‘secret* backup platform only to find it WRENCHED! Cherry pickers are rather sparse in East London, especially for companies who have a reputation for “not looking after hired machinery”. Do or Die, of course condemns all acts of illegality!	+	This resistance was brutally crushed by the government, which supported the factory owners. In 1834, silk mill workers in Lyon revolted again to demand the establishment of a republic. The fierce struggle went on for four days, but was extinguished in a bloody battle against the French army. About 10,000 insurgents were imprisoned or deported.
−	[4] The Territorial Support Group are highly trained police units only used in times of public ‘disorder’. Originally named the SPG (Special Patrol Groups), they changed name a couple of years back after a number of embarrassing instances. One involved a baker who was driving his mini to work, unfortunately for him he passed a SPG unit who mistook him for an escaped kidnapper and immediately shot him dead leaving his car careering into others at a roundabout. Numerous occasions of black lads finding themselves bleeding in the gutter after encountering the SPG also surfaced. The SPG now with a very dirty public record disbanded and a day later the TSG was formed--with nearly exactly the same employees. All in all not a nice bunch.	+	'''The Chartist Movement in Britain:'''
−	<br>	+	Chartism was a working class movement in the United Kingdom which rose up in response to anti-worker laws such as the Poor Law Amendment of 1834, which drove poor people into workhouses and removed other social programs for the working poor. Legislative failure to address the demands of the working poor led to a broadly popular mass movement which would go on to organize around the People’s Charter of 1838, which was a list of six demands which included extension of the vote and granting the working class the right to hold office in the House of Commons.
−	** Biodiversity and the British Isles (from issue 4)	+	In 1845, Karl Marx visited Britain for the first time, along with Friedrich Engels, to meet with the leaders of the Chartist movement (with whom Engels had already established a close relationship). After various conflicts and struggles, Chartism ultimately began to decline in 1848 as more socialist-oriented movements rose up in prominence.
−	Species loss like many ecological issues has entered this island’s mass psychology while remaining fundamentally misunderstood. Obscured by a haze of large numbers and strange sights, species loss is seen as something solely in relation to rainforest, pandas, and David Attenburgh talking of brightly colored fungi. Biodiversity is seen as something distant, something separate from day to day life. Something foreign, which has no relation to our “green & pleasant land:’	+	'''Workers’ Movement in Silesia, Germany:'''
−	Biodiversity is the expression of healthy ecology. It may seem distant to these Isles because these Isles are sick. It has been said that civilised man walks the earth leaving deserts in his footprints. As the frontiers of this civilization opened up, so the cedars of Lebanon and the Broadleaf forests of this island were trampled underfoot. With the great forests all but destroyed the soils of Lebanon eroded, and washed and blew away. Thanks to this island’s mild temperate climate, its fate was to remain. a different kind of desert. A desert of ploughed fields, of a thousand swaying barley stalks. Soon the last sizable remnants of the great forests were slashed, to provide timber for the growing naval machine, to undermine the free who still lived in the forest and to build the new cities and bring more money into the government coffers. All that was left was a spiderweb-like network of hedges and tree lines, draped over an otherwise barren landscape; acting as corridors between, with little exception, small managed woodland. The very symbol of the concept that destroyed the land, <em>property,</em> became the final refuge of diversity. With the advent of agri-business, even the hedges are now being destroyed and the diversity of crop species is decreasing. In short this island’s eco-system has been devastated.	+	In June, 1844, disturbances and riots occurred in the Prussian province of Silesia, a major center of textile manufacturing. In response, the Prussian army was called upon to restore order in the region. In a confrontation between the weavers and troops, shots were fired into the crowd, killing 11 protesters and wounding many others. The leaders of the disturbances were arrested, flogged, and imprisoned. This event has gained enormous significance in the history of the German labor movement.
−	<quote>	+	In particular, Karl Marx regarded the uprising as evidence of the birth of a German workers’ movement. The weavers’ rebellion served as an important symbol for later generations concerned with poverty and oppression of the working class in German society.
−	<em>Since 1945 the</em> UK <em>has lost 30% o.fits rough grazing land, 65% of song thrushes, 90% of meadows, 50% of lowland woodlands, heaths andfens and 140, 000 miles of hedgerow. 80 commons have been deregulated.</em>
−	<right>	+	It quickly became apparent that the revolutionary practice of the proletariat needed the guidance of scientific theories. The birth of Marxism was to meet that objective requirement; in the meantime, the revolutionary practice itself became the practical premise for Marxism to continuously develop.
−	-Council for the Protection of Rural England
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	You would think then that biodiversity would be the environmental movement’s main priority, but no. Most local groups involved in stopping new developments, (roads, supermarkets etc.), are more likely to talk about damage to landscape than damage to ecology. To oppose a cutting soley because it destroys a hill fort or the view, rather than because it trashes an ancient woodland or destroys 2,000 year old badger sets is yet more anthropocentric rubbish.	+	''- Theoretical Premises''
−	We live in what is mostly an ecological catastrophe. An anatomy diagram is beautiful, but is nevertheless a dead body. The summer lushness of pasture land is deceptive, after all, the lawns at Wimbledon are green but not particularly healthy. We must start to talk of life, of biodiversity. We must change the way we think about the country. You cannot escape urbanism in the countryside, today’s countryside is, on the whole, an extension of urbanism. The dominant interaction in the country is, as in cities, the oppression and degradation of eco-sytems by civilised man. We must understand the land’s ecology and take further action against those who destroy its remaining diversity, for if we don’t, soon there will be nothing but man and his creations.	+	The birth of Marxism not only resulted from the objective requirement of history, it was also the result of inheriting the ''quintessence''* of various previously established frameworks of human philosophical theory such as German classical philosophy, British classical political economics, and utopianism in France and Britain.
−	<br>	+	-----
−	** An Open Letter to the Minister for Transport	+	==== Annotation 6 ====
−	<em>(from</em> <em>issue 5)</em>	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> In the original Vietnamese, the word ''tinh'' ''hoa'' is used, which we roughly translate to the word ''quintessence'' throughout this book. Literally, it means “the best, highest, most beautiful, defining characteristics” of a concept, and, unlike the English word ''quintessence'', it has an exclusively positive connotation. ''Quintessence'' should not be confused with the universal category of ''Essence'', which is discussed on p. 156.
−	<quote>	+	German classical philosophy, especially the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel<ref>Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 — 1831 (German): Philosophy professor, an objective idealistic philosopher — representative of German classical philosophy.</ref> and Ludwig Feuerbach<ref>Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804 — 1872 (German): Philosophy professor, materialist philosopher.</ref>, had deeply influenced the formation of the Marxist worldview and philosophical methodology.
−	<em>I do not want to encourage day-dreaming, we are in a world of practical realities...</em>
−	<right>	+	-----
−	-Brian Mawinney,
−	<br>Minister for Transport[5]
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 7 ====
−	<em>My people shall never work. Those who work can not dream, and wisdom comes to us in dreams.</em>
−	<right>	+	German classical philosophy was a movement of ''idealist'' philosophers of the 18<sup>th</sup> and 19<sup>th</sup> centuries. Idealism is a philosophical position that holds that the only reliable experience of reality occurs within the human consciousness. Idealists believe that human reason is the best way to seek truth, and that consciousness is thus the only reliable source of knowledge and information.
−	--Smohalla, Native American, 1887 Be <em>Realistic—Demand the Impossible!</em>
−	<br>graffiti, Paris May ’68
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<quote>	+	One of Hegel’s important achievements was his critique of the metaphysical method.
−	Mr. Mawinney-- Welcome to the Nightmare.
−	After three years of sustained direct action against road building you wish us to sit down at the negotiation table, to be civil and polite to the very same people who have sent riot police, security guards, spies and infiltrators to destroy us. You called for a <em>ceasefire inhe serile feuding overtransport issues,</em> a <em>fresh start... [a] move backoroperly informed, rational argument, with respectfor opposing views, in a manner more fitting to the demo- cratic traditions of our country.[6]</em> You issued this call on the 7<sup>th</sup> of December, exactly one year after the eviction and destruction of the Chestnut Tree at the M11. It took the DoT over 400 cops and 200 security to take the land and that wasn’t the end of it, things for the govt only got worse. Daily site invasions, numerous acts of sabotage; no wonder you want us to sit and talk--when we’re talking we’re not fighting.	+	-----
−	Let’s pretend for a moment that we could suppress our feelings of nausea and rage and sit down to negotiate; what in fact could you offer us? The end of the industrial system-can you offer us that? An end to the assault against the life support systems of the earth, a society within nature, a life where only our passions and desires rule, an earth alive; can you offer us that? Of course not!	+	==== Annotation 8 ====
−	What <em>can</em> you offer us-A “rational reasoned debate on transport”? Why should we debate, we know what you are going to say, you’ve said it countless times before, we are bored of listening. The modern ecology movement is over 30 years old; in the bowels of your office there is a whole forest of reports on the ecological stupidity ofwhat you are doing, you know the situation. Capitalism-and its petrochemical/car making economy--must keep moving. The need for transport infrastructural development is the need of the multinational corporations. ‘Ihe economy, (both nationally and internationally), must expand or die. We have consistently argued that to build more infrastructure simply creates more traffic, that as greater capacity is produced it is filled. More roads = more cars = more roads = more cars, a disastrous spiral down into ecological collapse. You must maintain the demand for cars and petrochemical byproducts as an end in itself. You must preside over the ever increasing centralization of production and consumption-with the lorry on the motorway as the rolling warehouse-making it progressively more difficult to get by in this society without a car. None of this worries you of course, what we call a disastrous spiral you call economic growth. What worries you is the short term survival of the economy. Congestion is what worries you.	+	Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that attempts to explain the fundamental nature of reality by classifying things, phenomena, and ideas into various categories. Metaphysical philosophy has taken many forms through the centuries, but one common shortcoming of metaphysical thought is a tendency to view things and ideas in a static, abstract manner. Metaphysical positions view nature as a collection of objects and phenomena which are isolated from one another and fundamentally unchanging. Engels explained the problems of metaphysics in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'':
−	What is congestion? On the whole simply the process of earth destruction slowed down by its own mass. Every morning hundreds of commuters arrive late for work, contracts are broken and goods delivered late--all because of the jam. The CBI estimated it costs the economy around £15 Billion a year. Are we meant to feel distressed about this? Do you really expect us to sit down and work out solutions for <em>your</em> problems? We want no more roads but we also know that the need for most journeys is the need of those we oppose. We are not about to start doing your research for you, we are not going to let <em>your</em> needs monopolise <em>our</em> imaginations. We have better things to do, defending the earth, building communities, growing our carrots and dancing!	+	<blockquote>
		+	The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — hese were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years.
		+	</blockquote>
−	You illustrate your ignorance of natural processes very well with your request for a ceasefire and debate. This nation state owes a massive carbon debt to nature, and apparently is committed to adding to this crisis through its pathetic “reduction of emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000” programme. On the basis of your efforts so far it appears you will not even meet this dismal target! You can try to negotiate with us but how do you plan to “negotiate” with nature-with the nature that is going to flood your petty parliament and destroy your fragile economy as global warming--or any number of impending environmental catastrophes-come home to roost. You have nothing to offer nature-as an ecological cretin you don’t even know what to say. The earth’s carbon cycle now demands the elimination of fossil fuel use and the massive reafforestation of the British Isles and the earth-in other words, the extinction of your civilisation and the resurgence of our culture. That is the ecological reality-your “political realities;’ your “reasoned debate”’ is an <em>absolute</em> irrelevance.	+	<blockquote>
		+	But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.
		+	</blockquote>
−	In short in return for us climbing off our barricades, destroying our emerging communities and halting real resistance, you are willing to hold a debate we have already had and make a decision that we are already forcing you into making. If that were not bad enough we would resign ourselves forever to be in effect a capitalist think lank whose aim would be the smooth running of this genocidal, ecocidal system. Well thanks, but no thanks! We will never join you. To negotiate is to already accept the death of nature. The society which you represent is a constant war against the earth. A ceasefire is the putting down of weapons on both sides. You are not about to put down the weapons with which you fight, not the truncheons, not the factories. There will only be a ceasefire, there will only be <em>real</em> peace when the earth is purged of institutions like that of which you are presently a part.	+	Francis Bacon (1561 — 1626) is considered the father of empiricism, which is the belief that knowledge can only be derived from human sensory experience [see Annotation 10, p. 10]. Bacon argued that scientific knowledge could only be derived through inductive reasoning in which specific observations are used to form general conclusions. John Locke (1632 — 1704) was another early empiricist, who was heavily influenced by Francis Bacon. Locke, too, was an empiricist, and is considered to be the “father of liberalism.”
−	Brian, why not dance the forbidden dance, rediscover your humanity, rediscover your wildness, throw all your files out of the window, burn down your office, smash up your TV, break free, and join us, for we will never join you!	+	Engels was highly critical of the application of metaphysical philosophy to natural science. As Engels continues in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:''
−	Yours with love,	+	<blockquote>
		+	To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes — ideas — are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses... For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.
−	<right>	+	At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees.
−	-Some @nonymous digger diving agitators	+	</blockquote>
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	We received a copy of this letter anonymously--it was, we are told, sent lo Brian Mawinney’s private fax number. Just as we were going to print, he was elevated (maybe the wrong word to use) to the post of Chairman of the Tory party. During his stay as Minister for Transport some activists took his “great transport debate” to mean that it was time for us to stop saying no all the time and put forward practical solutions to his society’s problems--this was often called ironically, “setting our own agenda:’ In the last couple of hours of his post at the DoT nice Mr. Mawinney announced that the Newbury by-pass would go ahead. He may think that he had the last laugh but Brian, we know where you live! It matters little who the minister is, an individual in these cases is merely the role he plays out, therefore this letter equally applies to the new minister. --Eds (allegedly)	+	Dialectical Materialism stands in contrast to metaphysics in many ways. Rather than splitting the world into distinct, isolated categories, Dialectical Materialist philosophy seeks to view the world in terms of relationships, motion, and change. Dialectical Materialism also refutes the hard empiricism of Bacon and Locke by describing a dialectical relationship between the material world and consciousness [see: ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'', p. 88].
−	[5] DoT Press Notice no. 471. 7.12.94	+	-----
−	[6] DoT Press Notice no. 54. 27.2.95	+	For the first time in the history of human philosophy, Hegel expressed the content of dialectics in strict arguments with a system of rules and categories.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	Dear Nora,
−	Motorway flyover, superstores, shitty yuppie development--we don’t need them and here’s how to stop them.	+	-----
−	Fast: Sneak onto building site and dump icing sugar into cement mixers, bags of sand etc. This stops the cement setting. Slow: Do the same as above, except using rock salt (available in bulk from road gritting bins). Rain will wash the crystals out of the set cement eventually, so weakening it. When the construction is finished, anonymously contact the local planning office and tell them that Elves have been at work. The development will have to be pulled down again as structurally unsound.	+	==== Annotation 9 ====
−	Often the threat of salting is enough to make developers back off. Sweetening cement is usually a good final warning if you are inclined to give one.	+	Dialectics is a philosophical methodology which searches for truth by examining contradictions and relationships between things, objects, and ideas. Ancient dialecticians such as Aristotle and Socrates explored dialectics primarily through rhetorical discourse between two or more different points of view about a subject with the intention of finding truth.
−	<right>	+	In this classical form of dialectics, a thesis is presented. This thesis is an opening argument about the subject at hand. An antithesis, or counter-argument, is then presented. Finally, the thesis and antithesis are combined into a synthesis, which is an improvement on both the thesis and antithesis which brings us closer to truth.
−	Flo and flying Listards
−	<br>from DoD #2
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<quote>	+	Hegel resurrected dialectics to the forefront of philosophical inquiry for the German Idealists. As Engels wrote in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'':
−	<em>...One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.</em>
−	<right>	+	<blockquote>
−	-John Muir, (1838–1914)	+	Hegel’s work’s greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought.
−	</right>	+	</blockquote>
−	</quote>
−	*** A Review (from issue 5)	+	Hegel’s great contribution to dialectics was to develop dialectics from a simple method of examining truth based on discourse into an organized, systematic model of nature and of history. Unfortunately, Hegel’s dialectics were idealist in nature. Hegel believed that the ideal served as the primary basis of reality. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels strongly rejected Hegel’s idealism, as well as the strong influences of Christian theology on Hegel’s work, but they also saw great potential in his system of dialectics, as Marx explained in ''Capital (Volume 1)'':
−	by John C. Stauber	+	<blockquote>
		+	The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<em>Going Green: How To Communicate</em>
−	<br><em>Your Company’s Environmental Commitment</em>
−	<br>by E. Bruce Harrison
−	More than any other author Rachel Carson is credited with giving birth to popular ecological awareness. Silent Spring, her bombshell 1962 bestseller, gave a dramatic, prophetic, and factual account of massive agrichemical poisoning. Written with the goal of shocking the public, government and industry into action, it sowed seeds of consciousness that burst forth eight years later when millions of people demonstrated in the streets on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970.	+	-----
−	Now PR executive E. Bruce Harrison, who led the fight to silence <em>Silent Spring,</em> has written his own book, a how-to guide entitled <em>Going Green: How to Communicate Your Company’s Environmental Commitment.</em>	+	Starting with a critique of the mysterious idealism of Hegel’s philosophy, Marx and Engels inherited the “rational kernel” of Hegelian dialectics and successfully built materialist dialectics.
−	Harrison’s commitment began when, at age 30, he was appointed Manager of Environmental Information for the manufacturers of agricultural pesticides and other poisons, and assigned to coordinate and conduct the industry’s attack against <em>Silent Spring.</em> They hit back with the PR equivalent of a prolonged carpet bombing campaign. No expense was spared in defending the fledgeling agrochemical industry and its 300 million dollars per year in sales of DDT and other toxins. The national Agricultural Chemical Association doubled its PR budget and distributed thousands of book reviews trashing <em>Silent Spring.</em>	+	-----
−	Along the way, they pioneered environmental PR crisis syndicated from the <em>Earth First! Journal Mabon 1994</em> management techniques that have now become standard industry tactics. They used emotional appeals, scientific misinformation, front groups, extensive mailings to the media and opinion leaders, and the recruitment of doctors and scientists as so-called objective third party defenders of agrichemicals.	+	-----
−	Rachel Carson succumbed to cancer on April 14, 1964, never seeing herself vindicated. Due in part to Harrison’s PR work, the warnings of Silent Spring have never been adequately understood or heeded. Today agrochemical contamination of soil, air, water, animals, and people is one of the most ubiquitous and difficult environmental health disasters we face.	+	==== Annotation 10 ====
−	Harrison, however, is alive and thriving. In 1973, he and his wife established their own PR company, drawing in clients such as Monsanto and Dow Chemical, who were among the sponsors of the campaign against Silent Spring. The PR trade publication Inside PR named him as its 1993 PR All Star, stating that by writing Going Green he had confirmed his status as the leading [PR] thinker on environmental issues and as a continuing pioneer in the field.	+	In order to understand the ways in which the critique of Hegel’s philosophy by Marx and Engels led to the development of dialectical materialism, some background information on materialism — and the conflicts between idealist and materialist philosophy in the era of Marx and Engels — is needed.
−	The E.Bruce Harrison Company has offices in Washington DC, Dallas, Austin, New York, and San Francisco, and recently opened a new office in Brussels that will, in the words of Inside PR, help its transnational clients work through the complexity of Europe’s new environmental regulations. The company employs more than 50 staff and does 6 million dollars’ worth of business annually for about 80 ofthe world’s largest corporations and associations, including Coors [notoriously right-wing US brewing giant], Clorox, l\J Reynolds, the American Medical Association, and Vista Chemical.	+	Materialism is a philosophical position that holds that the material world exists outside of the mind, and that human ideas and thoughts stem from observation and sensory experience of this external world. Materialism rejects the idealist notion that truth can only be sought through reasoning and human consciousness. The history and development of both idealism and materialism are discussed more in the section ''The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues'' on page 48.
−	Harrison’s clients include the “wise use” [American term for groups campaigning for GREATER environmental destruction-often funded by industry] Global Climate Coalition (which opposes environmental action to prevent global warming), and the Coalition for Vehicle Choice (which opposes emission-control regulations for automobile manufacturers). He even receives taxpayer funding from one of his clients, the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).	+	In the era of Marx and Engels, the leading philosophical school of materialism was known as ''empiricism''. Empiricism holds that we can ''only'' obtain knowledge through human sense perception. Marx and Engels were materialists, but they rejected empiricism (see Engels’ critique of empiricism in Annotation 8, p. 8).
−	<br>	+	One reason Marx and Engels opposed the strict empiricist view was that it made materialism vulnerable to attack from idealists, because it ignored objective relations and knowledge that went beyond sense data. The empiricist point of view also provided the basis for the ''subjective idealism'' of George Berkeley [see Annotation 32, p. 27] and the ''skepticism'' of David Hume. Berkeley’s Subjective Idealism is empiricist in that it supports the idea that humans can only discover knowledge through direct sense experience. Therefore, Berkeley argues, individuals are unable to obtain any real knowledge about abstract concepts such as “matter.”
−	In Going Green, Harrison shares some of his perspective and methods. The book includes self-promotional chapters in which he discretely brags of the PR green washing successes that he has arranged for clients such as Uniroyal, General Motors, Cosmair, and Zoecon. Of course, he doesn’t use the word greenwashing. The text is filled with environmentally-correct sounding jargon that makes for clumsy reading. The phrase he uses to describe his PR work, for example is •‘sustainable communications:’	+	Similarly, David Hume’s radical skepticism, which Engels called “agnosticism,” denied the possibility of possessing any concrete knowledge. As Hume wrote in ''A Treatise on Human Nature'': “I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.” Hume’s radical skepticism lay in his empiricist belief that the only source of knowledge is sense experience; but Hume went a step further, doubting that even sense experience could be reliable, adding: “The essence and composition of external bodies are so obscure, that we mustnecessarily, in our reasonings, or rather conjectures concerning them, involveourselves in contradictions and absurdities.”
−	In Going Green, Harrison declares that environmental activism has died and that its death presents corporations with a tremendous opportunity to define and dominate the future of environmentalism in the name of “sustainable development” by which he means corporate business-as-usual, made palatable for the public through “sustainable communications:’	+	Later, in the appendix of the same text, Hume argues that conscious reasoning suffers from the same unreliability: “I had entertained some hopes (that) the intellectual world ... would be free from those contradictions, and absurdities, whichseem to attend every explication, that human reason can give of the material world.”
−	Who or what killed environmental activism? According to Harrison, the activist movement that began in the early 1960s, roughly when the use ofpesticides was attacked in the book Silent Sprint succumbed to success over a period roughly covering the last 15 years. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, he argues, ecological activism has been transforming itself from a grassroots movement into dozens ofprofessionally-run, competitive, non-profit businesses, epitomized by groups like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).	+	Engels dismissed radical skepticism as “scientifically a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world.” Engels directly refutes radical skepticism in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:''
−	Going Green says that today’s environmental groups are first and foremost business ventures run by managers. Groups like EDF are tax-exempt, customer-based firms primarily concerned with fund-raising and maintaining a respectable public image. This preoccupation with funding and respectability makes them willing to sit down with industry and cut deals in which their main concern is their own financial bottom line. In Harrisons’s words, to <em>stay in the greening business,</em> the goal of environmental groups <em>is not to green, but to ensure the werewithal that enable it to look green.</em>	+	<blockquote>
		+	... how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? ... whenever we speak of objects, or their qualities, of which (we) cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on (our) senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation, there was action... And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Everywhere he looks, Harrison sees the rise of pro-corporate environmentalism and the demise of grassroots eco-activism. Especially since the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil, *corporate environmentalism is now more lively than external activist environmentalism, and this trend will continue to grow.* [On the subject of the Earth Summit, the larger green groups were cleverly coopted by according them some sort of insider status-access to the hallowed portals of power at last!-designating them as “NGOs” and allotting them a place at the conference table with the big boys. They were even allowed to stay up late! This sort of thing is the illusion of influence. A joke now doing the rounds amongst the more cynical activists in the US states that corporate boardrooms now feature nine white men, a woman (suitably power dressed, no doubt), a black person, and an environmentalist.]	+	This concept of determining the truth of knowledge and perception through practical experience is fundamental to dialectical materialist philosophy and the methodology of materialist dialectics, and is discussed in further detail in Chapter 3, p. 204.
−	This opens the door to tremendous opportunities for Harrison’s corporate and government clients, whom he assists in building issue coalitions and alliances with carefully chosen environmentalists ready to reap mutual business benefits.	+	Another weakness of empiricism is that it denies the objectiveness of ''social relations'', which cannot be fully and properly analyzed through sensory experience and observation alone. Marx saw that social relations are, indeed, objective in nature and can be understood despite their lack of sensory observability, and that doing so is vital in comprehending subjects such as political economy, as he observes in ''Capital Volume I'':
−	As an example, Harrison points to the partnership between McDonald’s and the Environmental Defense Fund. In the late 1980s, the company slipped into its worst sales slump ever-and the anti-McDonald’s drive of the green movement was at least partly blamed. <em>[EDF’s Executive Directer] Krupp saw the golden arches of McDonald’s, the nation’s fastfood marketing king, as a sign of opportunity...Krupp was ready to deal, and so was McDonald’s.’’</em>	+	<blockquote>
		+	(The true) reality of the value of commodities contrasts with the gross material reality of these same commodities (the reality of which is perceived by our bodily senses) in that not an atom of matter enters into the reality of value. We may twist and turn a commodity this way and that — as a thing of value it still remains unappreciable by our bodily senses.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Harrison is quite happy that the professional environmental establishment is rejecting the tactics of community organizing, street demonstrations, and noisy conflicts with industry. Ironically the unseemly confrontational tactics that the eco-professionals scorn are acknowledged by Harrison to be the main impetus for any real ecological reform.	+	In other words, Marx pointed out that no amount of sense data about a commodity will fully explain its value. One can know the size, weight, hardness, etc., of a commodity, but without analyzing the social relations and other aspects of the commodity which can’t be directly observed with the senses, one can never know or understand the true value of the commodity. The materialism of Marx and Engels acknowledges the physical, material world as the ''first basis'' for reality, but Marx and Engels also understood that it was vital to account for other aspects of rational knowledge (such as social relations). Marx and Engels believed that empiricist materialism had roughly the same flaw as idealism: a lack of a connection between the material and consciousness. While the idealists completely dismissed sense data and relied exclusively on reasoning and consciousness, the empiricists dismissed conscious thought to focus solely on what could be sensed.
−	<quote>	+	It is important to note that, while Marx and Engels rejected ''empiricism,'' they did not reject ''empirical knowledge'' nor ''empirical data'' which is collected from scientific observation [see Annotation 216, p. 210]. On the contrary, empirical data was key to the works of Marx and Engels in developing dialectical materialism. As Lenin explained: “(Marx) took one of the economic formations of society – the system of commodity production – and on the basis of a vast mass of data which he studied for not less than twenty-five years gave a most detailed analysis of the laws governing this formation and its development.” And so, the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels served to bridge the gap between idealism and materialism. They believed that our conscious thoughts are derived from ''material'' processes, but that consciousness can also influence the material world. This is discussed in more detail in the section ''“Materialism and Dialectical Materialism”'' on page 48.
−	In <em>Going Green,</em> Harrison observes that <em>Greening and the public policy impact ofgreenism are being propelled by what I refer to as the</em> ‘AMP <em>syndrome’-a synergy of Activists + Media + Politicians. Activists stir up conflict, naming ‘victims’ (various people or public sectors) and ‘villains’ (very often, business interests). The news media respond to conflict and publicize it. Politicians respond to media and issues, moving to protect ‘victims’ and punish ‘villains’ with legislative and regulatory actions.</em>
−	</quote>
−	Some environmentalists haven’t yet accepted the message that protest tactics are dead. In one chapter Harrison advises businesses <em>what to do when you’re attacked by an activist group.</em> He first suggests hiring a private detective to investigate the activists [Bray’s, McLibel, anyone?]-making sure, of course, not to get caught. But strategic co-optation remains his primary strategy for achieving “sustainable communications:” [What are the new Department of Transport ‘conflict resolution’ roundtables if not a device for “strategic co-optation”?]	+	-----
−	<quote>	+	Marx and Engels also criticized many limitations of Feuerbach’s methodology and viewpoint* — especially Feuerbach’s prescriptions for how to deal with social problems — but they also highly appreciated the role of Feuerbach’s thought in the fight against idealism and religion to assert that nature comes first, and that nature is permanent and independent from human willpower.
−	<em>Remember that your organization and the green action group are quite similar when it comes to management goals,” Harrison advises. ‘You’re both trying to create customers... the [activist] group must bepublicly observed in action, on behalf of a cause that has appeal topotential customer-publics Offer to meet with them... Your task is to try and deflate their balloon and to get direct information about what’s motivating them, how serious they are, who they are, what they will consider ‘success’...Be friendly. Politely put off giving more direct information. Offer to meet with them again. As long as you are talking, you may not befighting. [And as has been said, it is the fighting’ they really dislike— e.g. Brian Mawhinney’s plaintive requests for a ‘ceasefire’.] Maybe you can come up with multiple optionsfor mutual benefit that will satisfy their needs.</em>
−	</quote>
−	<em>Going Green</em> is a book that activists should read to identify and counter the sophisticated tactics of the greenwashers, and to understand industry’s co-optation of the environmental movement. As for E. Bruce Harrison, the godfather of greenwashing is “going green” all the way to the bank.	+	-----
−	The syndrome so cynically described by E. Bruce Harrison is nothing new. A strong historical parallel to it appears in John Nicholson’s book on the Gordon Riots (“The Great Liberty Riot of 1780”, Bozo Press 1985.) The following excerpt shows that the attitude of the green groups described by Harrison is but the latest manifestation of an age old process-presenting us with the cosy illusion of dissent:	+	==== Annotation 11 ====
−	<quote>	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> Viewpoint, point of view, or perspective, is the starting point of analysis which determines the direction of thinking from which problems are considered. Marx and Engels were critical of Feurbach’s hyper-focused ''humanist'' viewpoint.
−	<em>[on the subject of the widespread corruption in government around 1780:] Before the administration is cast as the villain it should be realized that these cynics [those in power] were not fools. Ihey were not in the habit of’offering bribes for nothing. On the contrary, the offer was merely half the bargain. Ihese administrators were accomplices in the creation of such corruption but they were only recognizing what had become standard practice. Someone had to be open to the bribery to make such a practice into a system. Not only was it acceptable to make oneself a nuisance to provoke an offer to be bought of but some persons rivaled the administration in cynicism. A few actually made careers out of manipulating popular causes in order to sell out to the highest bidder. Ihe mostfamous example in recent times had been John Wilkes, yet he wasfar from alone. As late as .1802 Burdett would cause a stir by arousing popular hopes and then never raising the cause in Parliament.</em>
−	</quote>
−	These standard bearers, these power brokers, dash our hopes time and time again, as they use pressing popular concerns as a passport to membership of the elite. They are our enemies as much-perhaps more so, since they are contemptible traitors-as the authority figures that they appeal to. In the horsetrading game of politics, they have a pivotal role to play-it is their connivance that keeps the whole sorry show on the road, lending it a spurious air of credibility. Those who agree to some, without demanding it all, fritter away the possibility of real, substantive change. Or have they lost sight of the true magnitude of the ecological crisis that we face in the reams of (recycled) press releases that they put out?	+	Feuerbach’s atheism and materialism offered an important foundation for Marx and Engels to develop from an idealist worldview into a materialist worldview, which led them directly to developing the philosophical foundation of communism.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	<em>Those who make revolution by half, dig their own graves.</em>
−	<right>	+	==== Annotation 12 ====
−	St. Just
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<br>	+	Ludwig Feuerbach was one of the “Young Hegelians” who adapted and developed the ideals of Hegel and other German Idealists. Feuerbach was a humanist materialist: he focused on humans and human nature and the role of humans in the material world. Like Marx and Engels, Feuerbach dismissed the religious mysticism of Hegel. Importantly, Feuerbach broke from Hegel’s religious-mystical belief that humans descended from supernatural origins, instead describing humans as originating from the natural, material world.
−	** Shoreham: Live Exports and Community Defence (from issue 5)	+	Feuerbach also distinguished between the objectivity of the material external world and the subjectivity of human conscious thought, and he drew a distinction between external reality as it really exists and external reality as humans perceive it. Feuerbach believed that human nature was rooted in specific, intrinsic human attributes and activities. As Feuerbach explains in ''The Essence of Christianity'': “What, then, is the nature of man, of which he is conscious, or what constitutes the specific distinction, the proper humanity of man? Reason, Will, Affection.”
−	<quote>	+	Feuerbach explained that the actions of “thinking, willing, and loving,” which correspond to the essential characteristics of “reason, will, and love,” are what define humanity, continuing: “Reason, Will, Love, are not powers which man possesses, for he is nothing without them, he is what he is only by them; they are the constituent elements of his nature, which he neither has nor makes, the animating, determining, governing powers — divine, absolute powers — to which he can oppose no resistance.”
−	<em>Author’s note: Foa reasons of time, space, etc this short article cannot be a full analysis of live-exports in general or Shoreham in particular.</em> <em>Nor</em> <em>can it adequately deal with the thorny issue of ‘animal rights’.</em> The <em>focus of this article is on the reaction of the local community to l</em><em>i</em><em>v</em><em>e</em><em>-</em><em>e</em><em>x</em><em>po</em><em>rt</em><em>s and the attitude ofpoliticos in Brighton to the growing movement.</em>
−	</quote>
−	*** Intro	+	In his ''Collected Works'', Feuerbach further explains that materialism is supported by the fact that nature predates human consciousness:
−	<quote>	+	<blockquote>
−	<em>Intense lobbying from animal welfare groups designed to discourage passengers from using ports which exported livestock, caused major ports like Dover to pull out of the live-export trade. Ihe major ports realised that if they continued live-exports (a relatively small part of their business) they wouldface losing passengers to otherferry companies who were not involved in the trade and to the newly-opened channel tunnel. By seizing the opportunity presented by an increasingly competitive passenger trade, animal welfare groups were able to bounce one port after the other into banning live-exports. The result of this was that the exporters were forced to find new ports, ones that had no significant passenger trade to speak of These new ports tended to be much smaller and were often located in the heart of closely-knit local community, particularly in the case of Brightlingsea. Spurred on by emotive videos of calves in veal crates and witnessing their suffering atfirst hand, many locals became determined to stop the trade.</em>	+	Natural science, at least in its present state, necessarily leads us back to a point when the conditions for human existence were still absent, when nature, i.e., the earth, was not yet an object of the human eye and mind, when, consequently, nature was an absolutely non-human entity (''absolut'' ''unmenschliches Wesen''). Idealism may retort: but nature also is something thought of by you (''von dir gedachte''). Certainly, but from this it does not follow that this nature did not at one time actually exist, just as from the fact that Socrates and Plato do not exist for me if I do not think of them, it does not follow that Socrates and Plato did not actually at one time exist without me.
−	</quote>	+	</blockquote>
−	Going down to Shoreham at the start ofJanuary was like going to a picket-line, people were sitting in the road trying to block the trucks coming in, the police were dragging people away, in short all the usual push and shove of any major public order situation. At this point it’s important to note the bitter irony that whilst residents of both Brightlingsea and Shoreham were prepared to go to huge lengths to stop the live-export trade, few lifted a finger to stop scab coal being brought in through these same ports to break the miners strike. For the first two nights Sussex police were totally humiliated, as the sheer weight of numbers of the crowd relative to the lack of police meant that they had to back the trucks up to prevent a major public order incident. On the second night the crowd ran wild with people rushing up and down ripping air lines out of the trucks and smashing headlights. One person climbed atop a truck and smashed its windscreen. Sussex police were totally powerless and were unable to control, let alone arrest, most ofthe crowd.	+	Marx and Engels were heavily influenced by Feuerbach’s materialism, but they took issue with Feuerbach’s sharp focus on human attributes and activities in isolation from the external material world. As Marx wrote in ''Theses on Feuerbach:'' “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that... reality... is conceived only in the form of the object... but not as sensuous human activity.”
−	Realising they could not deal with the protests alone, on the third night they called in police from five other forces, including public order units from the 1\let. Over 1,500 police turned up. Everywhere you looked there were riot vans, parked nose to tail as far as the eye could see. Whole areas of Brighton were sealed off to allow the passage of riot vans, and huge convoys of green armoured TSG buses could be seen driving down from London on a daily basis. Not only were the Met being paid ridiculous amounts of overtime to come down and beat up the local community, but they were being put up at top-notch hotels, with five-star catering. And it wasn’t long before Shoreham protesters invaded these hotels, resulting in yet more scuffles and arrests.	+	“Sensuous human activity” has a very specific meaning to Marx; it grew from two conflicting schools of thought:
−	Back at Shoreham protesters were outnumbered five to one and could only watch as the trucks went in, anyone who tried to do anything more was immediately arrested. On the third night and several others there was widespread scuffling, with people throwing bottles and repeated baton charges by riot cops. Many of the people scuffling with the cops were local residents, some of them local youths who had simply come for a ruck. Most people were masked up, including pensioners, and this was not just because it was bitterly cold. The third night set the tone for the next six months of resistance to live-exports, although after a month or so the Met were replaced and their role was taken on by a revitalised and reorganised Sussex police. Many people had thought that the nature of the policing would change when the Met left, particularly as some people in the alternative community think Brighton police are somehow progressive simply because they tolerate raves. But less naive people, particularly those who live on the estates and have seen Brighton police in action, were well aware of their public order reputation. For the next six months protests continued with crowds fluctuating from a few dozen to a thousand, but usually averaging a couple of hundred, in all weathers and at all times of the day and night. And with the continuing protests came continuing arrests, mostly under the public order act, which by the end of the trade amounted to almost 400.	+	The idealists believed the external world can only be understood through the ''active'' subjective thought processes of human beings, while the empiricist materialists believed that human beings are ''passive'' subjects of the material world. Marx synthesized these contradicting ideas into what he called “sensuous activity,” which balanced idealist and materialist philosophical concepts.
−	After the initial shock of the police invasion local residents began to organise themselves, throwing up a number of separate and often competing groups, all of them eager to represent the mass of protesters down at the dockside. Meetings were held, leaflets distributed, surveillance of the lairages and the convoys were carried out, and demonstrations and sea actions continued. Those politicos who choose to look saw the emerge of a real community of struggle, with all its attendant contradictions. The struggle against live-exports brought people in Shoreham together with the result that many residents feel ambiguous about stopping the trade, on the one hand they oppose it and want it to end, but on the other they want to continue protesting and have no desire to return to their previously atomised existence. Local residents, many of whom have never been part of any campaign, are enjoying the thrill of direct action, the satisfaction of sticking a finger up to the authorities and refusing to compromise. It is this spirit of sheer awkwardness, a refusal to give in, and a determination to continue until they get what they want that is inspiring. Also it is the way they go about getting what they want that is important. Shoreham protesters are not interested in politicians and interminable lying and stitch-ups, you only have to witness the total contempt with which Waldegrave’ s announcement on journey times was greeted.	+	According to Marx, humans are simultaneously ''active'' in the world in the sense that our conscious activity can transform the world, and ''passive'' in the sense that all human thoughts fundamentally derive from observation and sense experience of the material world (see Chapter 2, p. 53). So, Marx and Engels believed that Feuerbach was misguided in defining human nature by our traits alone, portraying “the essence of man” as isolated from the material world and from social relations. In addition, Feuerbach’s humanism was based on an abstract, ideal version of human beings, whereas the humanism of Marx and Engels is firmly rooted in the reality of “real men living real lives.” As Engels wrote in ''Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy'':
−	But on the other hand there is far too much tolerance for media celebrities like Carla Lane, local MPs like Andrew Bowden (an anti-hunting, pro-animal welfare Tory), and organisations like Compassion In World Farming (who withdrew from the demos after the clashes with the police and then threatened to grass on the protesters who fought back). However such contradictions within a campaign are part of the nature of a community struggle, in the sense that as a ‘community issue’ it includes anyone who claims to be against live-exports. The kind of community we want is not one that is defined geographically, like the Shoreham area, and thus by its nature includes local politicians, businessmen, and celebrities, but a community of struggle. The problem with the anti-live export campaign is that such a large number of people are in favour of ending live exports, they include local politicians, businessmen, and right-wing local newspapers. Even sections of the Shoreham harbour board were opposed to the trade because it was giving the port a bad name and deterring other custom. Sussex police opposed the trade because the protests were rapidly draining their budget, tying up their personnel, and losing them the support of many of their traditional supporters.	+	<blockquote>
		+	He (Feuerbach) clings fiercely to nature and man; but nature and man remain mere words with him. He is incapable of telling us anything definite either about real nature or real men. But from the abstract man of Feuerbach, one arrives at real living men only when one considers them as participants in history... The cult of abstract man, which formed the kernel of Feuerbach’s new religion, had to be replaced by the science of real men and of their historical development. This further development of Feuerbach’s standpoint beyond Feuerbach was inaugurated by Marx in 1845 in ''The Holy Family''.<ref>''The Holy Family'' is a book co-written by Marx and Engels which critiqued the Young Hegelians, including Feuerbach.</ref>
		+	</blockquote>
−	However instead of getting involved and trying to explode the contradictions between the mass of protesters, who wanted to end live exports through the threat of public disorder, and their would-be representatives, who wanted to win media attention and parliamentary support through respectable lobbying, Brighton politicos have remained aloof. Why? The answer seems to be because the campaign concerns the dreaded issue of ‘animal fights’. If it was any other issue you wouldn’t be able to move for people trying to flog you turgid papers, stuff your hands with crappy leaflets, and demand you attended their meetings to create yet new fronts for their pathetic organisations. Whilst avoiding these things has its compensations, it is more than outweighed by the fact that the campaign lacks experienced activists.	+	Marx and Engels believed that human nature could only be understood by examining the reality of actual humans in the real world through our relationships with each other, with nature, and with the external material world. Importantly, it was Marx’s critique of Feuerbach which led him to define political action as the key pursuit of philosophy with these immortal words from ''Theses on Feuerbach:'' “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
−	Given the reputation, often undeserved, that Brighton has for being a centre ofradicalism we have to consider why its political groups proved incapable and unwilling to get involved in a struggle on their doorstep. And we have to examine whether this lack of involvement was merely peculiar to Brighton or whether it marks a more general inability to connect with struggles outside of our own particular community, whether that is the workplace (in the case of the Socialist Workers Party [SWP] and to a lesser extent Militant) or the unemployed/alternative community (in the case ofJustice? and Brighton Autonomists).	+	-----
−	The SWP have been perhaps the most disconnected of all the groups, their only practical involvement at Shoreham has been to go down to try and shift a few papers, on a more useful note they have used their union contacts to raise a modest amount of money to assist Shoreham defendants. The struggle at Shoreham like the anti-Criminal Justic Act [CJA] movement has exposed just how deeply entrapped in workerism the SWP are. By workerism I mean the idea that the workplace is the site of our power, and it is here that we should be concentrating on organising. The consequence of such an attitude is that struggles outside ofthe workplace are seen at best as secondary and subordinate to workplace struggles, and at worst are denounced as irrelevant and a distraction to the real struggle. So for example the SWP tried to connect to the anti-CJA struggle by saying the act was really all about trying to prevent picketing, presumably all the arrests of sabs and eco-waniors etc are just a smoke screen to divert us. Such workerist attitudes basically end in the demand that we get a job, join a union and go on strike.	+	The British classical political economics, represented by such economists as Adam Smith<ref>Adam Smith, 1723 — 1790 (British): Logic professor, moral philosophy professor, economist.</ref> and David Ricardo<ref>David Ricardo, 1772 — 1823 (British): Economist.</ref>, also contributed to the formation of Marxism’s historical materialist conception [see p. 23].
−	However for many young people who might have previously joined the SWP there is now a choice between getting involved in the anti-CJA/direct action movement which means hanging out with people of your own age, going to parties, taking drugs, living in trees, d-locking yourself to bulldozers, squatting, fighting with the cops etc or you can go to meetings about Trotsky and stand outside supermarkets trying to sell papers. Consequently it appears the SWP has suffered a drop in its youth membership, and given that students and ex-students arc its life-blood it appears to be in crisis. The only thing that is keeping it going appears to be the ANL. Given that the SWP had nothing to say about Shoreham beyond stating how ‘under socialism’ factory farming would be more efficient and animal research would be even better, and that we should all get a job and join in the ‘real struggle’, they resorted to claiming that the BNP had been down at Shoreham leafleting against live-exports. To my knowledge this is completely untrue and I have heard no mention of it. It is possible fascists have been to Shoreham, but they have not done so openly and have made no attempt to distribute their filth. And given the number of sabs and the attitude of the local residents any fascists who tried to openly organise at the demos would have been severely kicked in, not to mention the fact that the police would probably have arrested them on sight to try and avoid provoking yet more public disorder.	+	Smith and Ricardo were some of the first to form theories about labor value in the study of political economics. They made important conclusions about value and the origin of profit, and about the importance of material production and rules that govern economies. However, because there were still many limitations in the study methodology of Smith and Ricardo, these British classical political economists failed to recognise the historical characteristic of value*; the internal contradictions of commodity production**; and the duality of commodity production labor***.
−	One timber importer gets it in the neck to the tune of £800, 000 when one of its warehouses is arsoned. The protests didn’ t just hit the livestock exporters. The constant blockades meant that the other firms at Shoreham “went through the most financially damaging two months many of them have experienced” (Evening Argus, 15.3.95). Companies at Shoreham include BP, Texeco, dredging firms and timber firms. Shoreham is the second biggest importer of dead trees in the country; importing from the wildernesses of Brazil, Canada, the US, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe. It is Britain’s biggest importer of Russian woods. ARC, one of Britain’s largest quarry companies (and responsible for Whatley Q}iarry in Somerset), have lost so much trade they are considering moving. Shipping agent Jim Glover said: “Frequently you can be stranded on the port side of the police cordon in a queue of 60 vehicles waiting to get out.” HA HA HA!	+	-----
−	It is right to claim that there was a little-Englander mentality among some of the protesters, particularly at the beginning, which saw live-exports bound for veal crates as yet another example of the decadent and wicked nature of “Johnny foreigner” and as a reason why the British state should immediately withdraw from the European Union. Some Tory blue-rinse types at Shoreham did hold this view, one articulated by a Daily Express article that was photocopied and distributed by some of the more naive protesters. This article expressing outrage at French Muslims importing sheep for a religious festival simply allowed the Daily Mail to give vent to its prejudices, allowing them to attack not only French people in general but French Muslims in particular. However such attitudes among the Shoreham protesters are more than outweighed by people’s new found realisation of the nature of factory farming in Britain, and their opposition to a British veal industry.	+	==== Annotation 13 ====
−	Members of Militant have been much more directly involved in the campaign at Shoreham, but when they have done so it has not been explicitly as members of Militant. They have got involved on their own initiative, initially in the face of hostility from other members of their party, who have failed to adjust to the new realities of life outside of Labour Party subcommittees. Given their experience of canvassing and community organising, particularly in places like Pollok, Militant seem to be gearing up to take a major role in the campaign against live-exports at Dover, through their anti-CJA front the Kent Defiance Alliance.	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> '''Historical Characteristic of Value'''
−	Whilst the trots have been unable to connect to Shoreham, because it isn’t a workplace struggle, other groups like Brighton’s anti-CJA organisation Justice? have failed to get involved in any meaningful sense. Justice? did go to Shoreham, en-masse on a couple of occasions, but the novelty soon wore off. Even though ten percent or more of its active members have been arrested at Shoreham, there has been little collective involvement beyond some office support for the defendants and regular Schnews coverage of protests. Given that Justice? was and probably still is the largest and most active of the anti-CJA organisations, its failure to break out of the alternative ghetto and connect with a real community struggle is disturbing. Justice’s lack of collective involvement is attributable to all the usual reasons, e.g. the fact that most of the organisational work is done by a few very over-worked people, that it was busy organising squats in Brighton, and that many people were off doing direct action at places as far apart as Pollok, Solsbury Hill, and even Berlin!	+	Marx generally admired the work of Smith and Ricardo, but saw major flaws which undermined the utility of their classical economic theories. Perhaps chief among these flaws, according to Marx, was a tendency for Smith and Ricardo to uphold an ''ahistoric'' view of society and capitalism. In other words, classical economists see capitalism as existing in harmony with the eternal and universal laws of nature, rather than seeing capitalism as a result of historical processes of development [see Annotation 114, p. 116]. Marx did not believe that the economic principles of capitalism resulted from nature, but rather, from historical conflict between different classes. He believed that the principles of political economies changed over time, and would continue to change into the future, whereas Smith and Ricardo saw economic principles as fixed, static concepts that were not subject to change over time. As Marx explains in ''The Poverty of Philosophy:''
−	But its lack of involvement can’t simply be reduced to this, it’s more the case that the anti-live-export campaign was never seen as a priority for Justice?. This was partly because the police have not used the C.JA on a large scale at Shoreham. Only two people have been charged with aggravated trespass and both charges were thrown out of court. Also .Justice?‘s disconnection from Shoreham reflects the fact that most of the sabs in the Brighton area have chosen not to get involved in Justice?, and most members of.Justice? are not interested in sabbing. In the absence of a large sab presence within Justice?, pushing the organisation to get actively involved in the anti-live-export 56 campaign, Shoreham was always going to remain a side-issue. More importantly, Justice’s failure to connect with a real community struggle was mainly due to the fact that most of its members see themselves as part of an alternative community of young unemployed, one which is ill at ease with a community struggle made up of so called ordinary people, many of whom are middle aged and have jobs.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Economists express the relations of bourgeois production, the division of labour, credit, money, etc. as fixed, immutable, eternal categories... Economists explain how production takes place in the above mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement that gave them birth... these categories are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Most disturbing was the predictable failure of Brighton Autonomists to get involved in the struggle at Shoreham, beyond supporting individual defendants. As the most together political group in the Brighton area, comprising an assortment of anarchists and communists, it has been able to avoid both the pitfalls of workerism and the isolation of the alternative ghetto. And significantly it is well aware of the importance of community organisation given its involvement in the anti poll-tax campaign. The reason it has refused to get involved at Shoreham is simply because it sees it as merely an animal rights issue. As a group it is opposed to both the ideology and practice of the animal rights movement. The leading members of Brighton Autonomists are representative of the mid 80’s split in the anarcho movement between class struggle anarchists and animal rights activists. Indeed they were actively involved in this acrimonious rupture and its personal recriminations still haven’t been forgotten by either side. If the struggle at Shoreham was about any other issue all the members ofBrighton Autonomists would be actively involved.	+	<nowiki>**</nowiki> '''Internal Contradictions of Commodity Production'''
−	For Brighton Autonomists animal rights is seen as a liberal side issue with no potential for connecting to anything else. Some of their criticisms are valid. Unlike our fellow humans they can’t organise themselves or make their own demands. We can’t have relations of solidarity with animals, because they can’t struggle. We can only have relations of sympathy with them, projecting our own feelings of alienation and powerlessness onto dewy eyed calves as symbols ofpurity and innocence in a world out of our control. But it has to be said that the fact that people are moved to confront the state by the suffering of animals at least gives us hope that people are not completely alienated.	+	In Marxist terms, a commodity is specifically something that has both a use value and a value-form (see Annotation 14, p. 16), but in simpler terms, a commodity is anything that can be bought or sold. Importantly, capitalism transforms human labor into a commodity, as workers must sell their labor to capitalists in exchange for wages. Marx pointed out that contradictions arise when commodities are produced under capitalism: because capitalists, who own the means of production, decide what to produce based solely on what they believe to be most profitable, the commodities that are being produced do not always meet the actual needs of society. Certain commodities are under-produced while others are over-produced, which leads to crisis and instability.
−	Also Brighton Autonomists’ criticism of the obsessive insularity of many people in the animal rights ghetto strikes a cord with anyone who has spent time in Brighton. But at the very moment when the anti live-export campaign is involving local communities in daily confrontation with the state, groups like Brighton Autonomists can only sit on the sidelines and worry about the expansion of the animal rights movement.	+	<nowiki>***</nowiki> Duality of Commodity Production Labor
−	*** Conclusion	+	In ''Capital'', Marx describes commodity production labor as existing in a duality — that is to say, it exists with two distinct aspects:
−	<quote>	+	First, there is ''abstract labor'', which Marx describes as “labor-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure.” This is simply the expenditure of human energy in the form of labor, without any regard to production or value of the labor output. Second, there is ''concrete labor'', which is the aspect of labor that refers to the production of a specific commodity with a specific value through labor.
−	Over the <em>last six months we’ve seen a local community coming together and using direct action to oppose live-exports. Residents have quickly learnt that direct action means con.fronting the police, which means risking arrest and should mean supporting those who have been arrested. Local people have faced down and humiliated Sussex police, ivho were forced to call in the Met and otherforces to put down the protests. Despite having their area invaded by over a thousandpolice and almost.four hundred people arrested, local residents have refused to be intimidated. Most importantly Shoreham residents have won, the exporters have pulled out because Sussex police could only afford to escort convoys two days a week, and this didn’t allow the traders to make a profit. Not only has the public order operation almost bankrupted Sussex police, but it has earned them the undying hatred of the most active Protesters. People who previously supported the police now treat them with contempt.</em>
−	<em>Some protesters are now making connections between their struggles and those of other working class communities. I’ve heard middle aged protesters taunt the police about the Brad.ford riots. I’ve seen previously respectable Shoreham ladies holding a police doll, voodoo style, engaged in a heated argument about which coppers need pins sticking in them. And at a meeting, after the end of shipments from Shoreham, 700 local residents cheered when one of the speakers tentatively pointed out that the police were agents of the state whose role was to protect politicians and the rich. This was followed by proposals for Waldegrave to do a sponsored parachute jump with only an empty rucksack.</em>	+	Marx argues that human labor, therefore, is simultaneously, an activity which will produce some specific kind of product, and also an activity that generates value in the abstract. Marx and Engels were the first economists to discuss the duality of labor, and their observations on the duality of labor were closely tied to their theories of the different aspects of value (use value, exchange value, etc.), which was key to their analysis of capitalism.
−	<em>Furthermore many protesters don’t see the stopping of live-exports .from Shoreham as the end, they see it as an opportunity to</em> get involved in other struggles either at Dover or against the local Shamrock monkey farm. Many people are enjoying the feeling of solidarity that comes from standing together against the state and have no wish to return to their previous existence. For many the campaign against live-exports is the best thing that ever happened to them. It is up to local activists, who have been involved at Shoreham, to show these people that they can use the same tactics in other situations. As eco-activists when we talk about ‘community support’ we normally mean a few people bringing us cups of tea. Imagine what effect three hundred local residents who were <em>prepared to disrupt road-construction on a daily basis would have.</em>	+	-----
−	<right>	+	Smith and Ricardo also failed to distinguish between simple commodity production and capitalist commodity production*, and could not accurately analyse the form of value** in capitalist commodity production.
−	Animal Antics
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	In Ceres, California, a gopher was found on school grounds by a student, who turned it over to three school janitors. The janitors attempted to kill the gopher by freezing it to death with the spray from several cans of a freezing solvent used to clean floors. After the attempted extermination, one of the janitors tried to light a cigarette, which ignited the solvent and blew the janitors out of the utility room. Nineteen people were injured by the explosion. The gopher survived, and was later released to a field.
−	<right>	+	==== Annotation 14 ====
−	<em>--EF! Journal,</em> Brigid 1996 <em>from DoD #6</em>
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<br>	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> '''Commodity Production'''
−	** No Opencast! (from issue 7)	+	''Simple commodity production'' (also known as ''petty commodity production'') is the production of commodities under the conditions which Marx called the “Simple Exchange” of commodities. ''Simple exchange'' occurs when individual producers trade the products they have made directly, themselves, for other commodities. Under simple exchange, workers directly own their own means of production and sell products which they have made with their own labor.
−	No Opencast is a campaign run by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and supported by Women Against Pit Closures and members of the Miners Support Groups. Since early 1995 there has been an informal co-operation between the No Opencast campaign and Earth First!ers. This has culminated, so far, in the action in Derbyshire on Friday 31<sup>st</sup> October 1997. On this action an opencast site, owned by HJ Banks mining company, was visited early in the morning by around 250 activists. Within two hours the mine was put out of operation, with estimates of the damage caused ranging from £375,000 to £4 million. This article attempts to give some background information to this campaign and action but also raises some questions and possible contradictions about its history and aims.	+	Simple commodity production and simple exchange use what Marx referred to as “C'''→'''M'''→'''C mode of circulation” [see Annotation 60, p. 59]. Circulation is simply the way in which commodities and money are exchanged for one another.
−	Opencast mining (or strip mining as it is also known) is one of the most ecologically destructive mining methods in use today. To gain access to the raw material wanted it involves the excavation, removal and irreparable destruction of huge quantities of the surface eco-system and the earth below it. Local people have to endure noise, vibration and severe dust pollution. Villages are torn apart by heavy trucks and evidence is growing to show the link between the pollution caused by opencast mining and the incidence of respiratory diseases in children. When the mine is exhausted and the operators have made off with their profits, the problems for the people that live near the site persist. Although the process is the same for whatever is being mined, this article is specifically referring to the issues surrounding opencasting mining for coal here in the UK.	+	'''C→M→C stands for:'''
−	*** Recent History	+	Commodity '''→''' Money '''→''' Commodity
−	Opencast mining has undergone a massive expansion in recent years, yet this has nothing to do with any particular energy policy pushed by the government. It has far more to do with a political vendetta by the State to smash the militant resistance to exploitation shown by mining communities over the years.	+	So, with simple commodity production and simple exchange, workers produce commodities, which they then sell for money, which they use to buy other commodities which they need. For example, a brewer might make beer, which they sell for money, which they use to buy food, housing, and other commodities which they need to live.
−	In 1972 and 1974 the miners went on strike to protest against the government’s policy of drastic cuts in public sector workers’ pay. In 1972 the State was unprepared; coal stocks were low and this caused an energy crisis resulting in extensive power cuts. In 1974 the then Prime Minister decided to call a snap general election under the slogan: ‘Who rules the country-the miners or the government?’ He lost and was bundled out of power.	+	In the C'''→'''M'''→'''C mode of circulation, the producers and consumers of commodities have a direct relationship to the commodities which are being bought and sold. The sellers have produced the commodities sold with their own labor, and they directly consume the commodities which they purchase with the money thus obtained.
−	Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, nursing a desire for revenge against the miners. She bided her time and by 1984 was ready. Coal stocks were high and she set out to provoke the miners’ unions into strike action in the spring when energy demand was lower. A programme of deep shaft mine closures was announced. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) predicted that if it went ahead more would follow and the industry would be decimated. They went on strike-not just to protect their jobs, but also their communities and their way of life. What transpired was a year long strike, one of the hardest fought and bitterest in this country’s history.[7] It eventually ended in defeat for the miners and a further round of pit closures ensued.	+	''Capitalist commodity production'' and ''capitalist exchange'', on the other hand, are based on the M'''→'''C'''→'''M’ mode of circulation.
−	By 1992 the coal industry in this country was down to a fraction of its former size and only the most modern and productive pits had survived. Michael Heseltine, the then President of the Board of Trade, announced the closure of a further 31 pits. The pretext for this was that there was no longer a market for British coal-yet the real reason was to pave the way for the casualisation of labour and the privatisation of the coal industry by destroying any last vestiges of resistance from the miners. Hand in hand with this closing of the deep shaft mines came the expansion of the opencast coal mining industry with its smaller casual workforce that is easier to exploit without organised resistance.	+	'''M→C→M’ stands for:'''
−	It is these very towns and villages that bore the brunt of the 1984/5 strike which, having had their communities and future weakened-and in some cases destroyed, are now under attack from destructive opencast sites.	+	Money '''→''' Commodity '''→''' More Money
−	*** Opposition to Opencast Grows	+	Under this mode of circulation, capitalists spend money to buy commodities (including the commodified labor of workers), with the intention of selling commodities for MORE MONEY than they began with. The capitalist has no direct relationship to the commodity being produced and sold, and the capitalist is solely interested in obtaining ''more money.''
−	Opencast mining, as mentioned earlier, is notorious for its air, noise and water pollution and increasingly is being linked with respiratory problems. The main focus, so far, for local opposition groups fighting opencast mining have been these health issues and most planning applications have been fought on this aspect of opencast alone.	+	Capitalist commodity production, therefore, uses the M'''→'''C'''→'''M’ mode of circulation, in which capitalists own the means of production and pay wages to workers in exchange for their labor, which is used to produce commodities. The capitalists then sell these commodities for profits which are not shared with the workers who provided the labor which produced the commodities.
−	Since 1995, however, EF!ers have been addressing the wider ecological effects of opencasting. One of the first groups to do this-Leeds EF!-took action in early 1995 targeting an opencast site in Yorkshire, and at about the same time Welsh activists were setting up camps at Selar and Brynhenllys sites near Swansea.[8] Ihese actions, amongst others, led to an increasing alliance between EF!ers and the No Opencast campaign-which raises some questions I will attempt to address later.	+	<nowiki>**</nowiki> '''Value-Form'''
−	*** Smash the (E)state!	+	This is one of the most important, and potentially most confusing, concepts in all of Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Marx explains these principles at length in ''Appendix of the 1<sup>st</sup> German Edition of Capital, Volume 1'', but here are some of the fundamentals:
−	On 5<sup>th</sup> January 1997 a group of around a hundred anti-opencast campaigners descended on Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, the ancestral home of the Duke of Devonshire. The Duke owns huge swathes of Derbyshire and allows developers to opencast large areas of it--although not near Chatsworth of course!	+	One of Marx’s key breakthroughs was understanding that commodities have many different properties which have different effects in political economies.
−	A sound system played loud recordings of noise from an opencast site so that the people who are routinely subjected to it could give him a feeling of what it was like. Three people got inside his house and waved flags from the windows whilst others held banners outside. The Duke’s right hand man mingled with the activists handing out press statements and saying that the Duke would be out in a minute. His peace offering of warm soup was turned over on the ground and after much venom flying in his direction he eventually retreated behind his wrought iron gates for protection.	+	Just as Commodity Production Labor exists in a duality of Concrete Labor and Abstract Labor (see Annotation 13, p. 15), commodities themselves also exist in duality according to Marx:
−	Scotland, too, increasingly was being ripped up for opencasting, as many at last year’s EF! Gathering near Glasgow witnessed first hand. However, due to the fact that all the villages affected were small, and the rural population distribution was fragmented, the opposition mounted was fairly ineffective.	+	Commodities have both “use-value” and “value.”
−	The No Opencast campaign was getting increasingly frustrated by the loaded planning process and the blatant attempts to destroy mining communities and decided to take more radical action. This led to a series ofjoint actions with Earth First!ers-the first of which was the initial visit to Heseltine’s garden. (See box- ‘Heselmine PLC!’) After this the No Opencast campaign and EF!ers started to work closely together.	+	Use-Value (which corresponds to Concrete Labor) is the commodity’s ''tangible form'' of existence; it is what we can physically sense when we observe a commodity. By extension, use-value encompasses how a commodity can be used in the material world.
−	As well as this the widespread opposition against opencasting across most of the country lead to, amongst other things, Friends of the Earth (FoE) organising a conference of anti-opencast campaigners in early 1996. It was attended by local opposition groups and led to the creation of an English and Welsh network, administered by FoE[9] and now comprising over 120 anti-opencast groups. (There is a separate Scottish network managed by the Scottish Opencast Action Group (SOAG)).	+	Value, or the Value-Form, is the ''social form'' of a commodity, which is to say, it represents the stable relationships intrinsic to the commodity [see ''Content and Form'', p. 147].
−	[7] To give some indication of this look at the arrest statistics for this strike. They included: 4089 for conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace, 1682 for obstruction of the police, 640 for obstruction of the highway, 1015 for criminal damage. 359 for assault on the police, 137 for riot and 509 for unlawfol assembly. (All from ‘Miners Strike 1984–1985. People versus State.’ by David Reed and Olivia Adamson. (Larkin: London 1985.)) The strike also provided the final fine tuning of the police into the paramilitary force that they are today. For more details on this read: ‘State of Siege: Politics and Policing in the Coalfields-Miners’ Strike 1984’ by Jim Coulter, Susan Miller and Martin Walker. (Canary Press: London 1984.)	+	Note that this relates to the dialectical relationship between the material and the ideal [see ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'', p. 88].
−	[8] For an account of resistance to opencasting in Wales see ‘Autonomy, Resistance and Mediation. The dynamics of Reclaim the Valleys!’ on page 74 in DoD No.6.	+	Value-forms represent relational equivalencies of commodities, i.e.: '''20 yards of linen = 10 pounds of tea'''
−	[9] More specifically it is co-ordinated by Tim Sander of Chesterfield FoE. Tim is now being sued by John Wilson of Fitzwise Ltd., a notorious opencast company. Wilson alleges that in November 1995 Tim produced an agenda for a public meeting libelling him as a hypocrite for moving house in anticipation of an opencast mine being opened nearby. Tim denies the libel, refuses to apologise, and is contesting the case. There is no legal aid for libel cases anti so Tim is representing himself Tis is clearly an attempt to squash resistance to opencasting and to act as a warning to others. Messages of support and donations for legal costs to: Tim Sander c/o Friends of the Earth, 26–28 Underwood Street. London. Nl 7JQ, UK. Telephone: 0171 490 1555.	+	These relational equivalencies are tied to the equivalent labor value (see Annotation 15 below, and Annotation 26, p. 23) used to produce these commodities. The value-form of a commodity is the ''social form'' because it embodies relational equivalencies:
−	*** Reports and Thoughts on the Action in Derbyshire	+	1. The value-form represents the relationship between the commodity and the labor which was used to produce the commodity.
−	What follows are three accounts of, and some opinions on, the No Opencast action in Derbyshire on Friday 31<sup>st</sup> October 1997 all written by activists who were there. As well as this there is a short piece on some possible contradictions and problems with the nature of the alliance between radical ecologists and the No Opencast campaign.	+	2. The value-form represents the relationship between a commodity and one or more other commodities.
−	**** “All this lurking about in the dark inspired a lot of giggling.”	+	As Marx explains in ''Appendix to the 1<sup>st</sup> German Edition of Capital'': “Hence by virtue of its value-form the (commodity) now stands also in a social relation no longer to only a single other type of commodity, but to the world of commodities. As a commodity it is a citizen of this world.”
−	We met in a squat in London and there were maybe 60 people or so. The idea was that we would hide out there, leave in the middle of the night and arrive at the opencast site in Derbyshire at 5 or 6 in the morning. The time until then was to be well spent in planning our actions.	+	Understanding the social form of commodities — the value-form — was crucial for Marx to develop a deeper understanding of money and capitalism. Marx argued that classical economists like Ricardo and Smith conflated economic categories such as “exchange value,” “value,” “price,” “money,” etc., which meant that they could not possibly fully understand or analyze capitalist economies.
−	We were given briefing sheets, explaining what we were going to do. These were counted out and counted back in again and then burnt before we left the building. No one was supposed to go in or out of the building until we all left together. I was posted on guard duty to make sure no one got out. All very Mission: Impossible! Meanwhile, with the aid of some big bits of paper on the floor and marker pens, everyone crowding around was given some idea of the layout of the site and what targets we should head for when we were in.	+	-----
−	This action appears to have been one of the few occasions when all the rhetoric about how affinity groups are the way forward constantly spouted by EF!ers in this country actually seemed to materialise into something. We split up into affinity groups to go off and decide in private what we were each individually up for-running about, trashing stuff, occupying machinery etc. and what we wanted to head for-machinery, vehicles, offices etc. You have to come equipped if you’re going to be sabotaging things and as none of my spectacularly well-prepared group had brought anything or thought about it at all we decided we weren’t going to be monkeywrenching.	+	British classical political economists like Ricardo and Smith outlined the scientific factors of the theories of labor value* and contributed many progressive thoughts which Marx adapted and further developed.
−	However, some people in my group did have a clever plan which could be more widely adopted. They were dressed head-to-toe in standard activist colours (green and black is the new green and black dahling!) with hooded tops and combat boots etc.. Yet underneath this regulation anarcho-garb they were wearing rainbow-coloured hippy jumpers. Thus they could cunningly evade police surveillance and confuse police stereotypes.	+	==== Annotation 15 ====
−	We had a big school-trip type coach to take us to the site, so we all piled on-the tough kids grabbing the back seat and the swots sitting up front in time-honoured fashion. As we hit the motorway we were informed that all mobile phones had to wrapped in the silver foil that was being passed around to prevent them being used to track our progress by the police. The whole planning of the action operated on roughly this level of paranoia.	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> Adam Smith and David Ricardo revolutionized the labor theory of value, which held that the value of a good or service is determined by the amount of human labor required to produce it.
−	**** Over the top? Well, maybe...	+	Thus, Marx was able to solve the contradictions that these economists could not solve and he was able to establish the theory of surplus value*, scientific evidence for the exploitative nature of capitalism, and the economic factors which will lead to the eventual fall of capitalism and the birth of socialism.
−	We were woken up 5 or 10 minutes before arrival with chocolate and whiskey which made us all feel a lot better about being in the middle of nowhere at 6 in the morning. As per usual prior to an action I was all nerves and butterflies in the stomach. I’ve never been able to account for this, as when the action starts I’m relatively calm and in control. We all piled out of the coach and attempted to keep quiet and hid behind a hedge that ran along the side of the road. It was cold and dark but dawn was just breaking.	+	==== Annotation 16 ====
−	Because of the military precision of the timing we had to hide behind the hedge for about 5 minutes until exactly the time set for us to go over the top into the site. People from other towns and areas would be entering the site from different directions at 1 minute intervals to meet up with our London crew. All this lurking about in the dark inspired a lot of giggling that did not sit well with the highly organised timing and precision. This wasn’t helped by the fact that we had to keep our heads down below the hedge every time a car came past-the bobbing up and down only produced more giggling and noisy shushing and more giggling.	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> David Ricardo developed the concept of surplus value. Surplus value is the difference between the amount of income made from selling a product and the amount it costs to produce it. Marx would go on to expand on the concept of surplus value considerably.
−	We all poured over the flimsy barbed wire fence and up the steep embankment that marked the perimeter of the opencast site. Getting to the top of the slope was rather an anticlimax--there was just a big deserted site on the other side. We stopped running and sort of ambled in a big straggly group-all semblance of military order now gone. We weren’t really sure which direction to go so we all just followed the crowd. “Baaaa!” shouted some wit from the rear.	+	Utopianism'''' had been developing for a long time and reached its peak in the late 18<sup>th</sup> century with famous thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon<ref>Claude Henri de Rouvroy Saint Simon, 1760 — 1825 (French): Philosopher, economist, utopianist activist.</ref>, François Marie Charles Fourier<ref>Charles Fourier, 1772 — 1837 (French): Philosopher, economist, utopianist activist.</ref> and Robert Owen<ref>Robert Owen, 1771 — 1858 (British): Utopianist activist, owner of a cotton factory.</ref>. Utopianism sought to elevate the humanitarian spirit and strongly criticised capitalism by calling attention to the misery of the working class under capitalism. It also offered many far-ranging opinions and analyses of the development of human history and laid out some basic foundational factors and principles for a new society. However, Utopianism could not scientifically address the nature of capitalism. It failed to detect the Law of Development of Capitalism<ref>The Law of Development of Capitalism referenced here is the Theory of Accumulation/Surplus Value, which holds that the capitalist class gains wealth by accumulating surplus value (i.e., profits) and then reinvesting it into more capital to gain even further wealth; thus the goal of the capitalist class is to accumulate more and more surplus value which leads to the development of capitalism. Over time, this deepens the contradictions of capitalism. This concept is related to the M'''→'''C'''→'''M mode of circulation, discussed in Annotation 14, p. 16, and is discussed in detail in Part 3 of the book this text is drawn from (Political Economy) which we hope to translate in the future.</ref> and also failed to recognise the roles and missions of the working class as a social force that can eliminate capitalism to build an equal, non-exploitative society.
−	The whole action had this weird character-we encountered no resistance which gave the whole thing rather an odd dynamic. It’s like the two sides define each other by opposition-take away our opposition and it all felt rather formless. As often is the case when we are successful we become victims of our own success and don’t know what to do with the totally unexpected situation of actually outwitting the cops and not being faced with a set-piece everyone-knows-their-role cops vs. activists confrontation. With no antagonism, no adrenaline rush of confrontation, there is no opposition to give us a focus. There was no such focus here, so we just sort of ambled about. Our affinity group sort of fell apart as one guy said he’d catch us up as he just had to go off and chat to a friend. It was good the way the whole event was a chance to catch up with old friends from the other end of the country; faces remembered from past actions and evictions, but it did mean the planned organisation of people into affinity groups kind of fell apart.	+	==== Annotation 17 ====
−	A van with headlights full on was driving around the site and seemed to have seen us but drove off in a different direction. There was an initial impulse to hide from them but we quickly realised this was pretty pointless-if they didn’t know we were here yet they soon would do. The few mine workers or security who were on site basically stayed out of our way in their little portacabin things throughout the action.	+	The early industrial working class existed in miserable conditions, and the political movement of utopianism was developed by people who believed that a better world could be built. The utopianists believed they could create “a New Moral World” of happiness, enlightenment, and prosperity through education, science, technology, and communal living. For instance, Robert Owen was a wealthy textile manufacturer who tried to build a better society for workers in New Harmony, Indiana, in the USA. Owen purchased the entire town of New Harmony in 1825 as a place to build an ideal society. Owen’s vision failed after two years for a variety of reasons, and many other wealthy capitalists in the early 19<sup>th</sup> century drew up similar plans which also failed.
−	My affinity group/bunch of useless mates (ho ho only joking) soon spotted a great big digging thing on the edge of a rather large hole which we quickly climbed all over. On the top of the pneumatic arm thing we got a great view of the whole site and also got covered in great globs of disgusting grease. From our vantage point we could see other groups arriving from every side of the site. One bunch marched below us led by a bloke in a silly wizard’s hat and a drum. “That’s Manchester” someone said. We exchanged a few yips and whistles and clenched-fist salutes with them and saw another bunch arriving a bit further around the perimeter of the site. This lot looked like locals/ex-miners, and they climbed all over some digging things.	+	Utopianism was one of the first political and industrial movements that criticized the conditions of capitalism by exposing the miserable situations of poor workers and offering a vision of a better society, and was one of the first movements to attempt to mitigate the faults of capitalism in practice.
−	We sang revolutionary songs and posed on the top of the digging arm doing clenched-fist salutes for the locals/ex-miners’ cameras (which in retrospect was probably not very smart thing to do-even though we were all de rigeur masked-up). From our vantage point we could see various bits of machinery—diggers, huge trucks etc. around the site from which banging, crashing sounds were emanating. Soon I was told we had to vacate our adopted digger because some people had come to trash it.	+	Unfortunately, the utopianists were not ideologically prepared to replace capitalism, and all of their attempts to build a better alternative to capitalism failed. Marx and Engels admired the efforts of the utopianist movement, and studied their attempts and failures closely in developing their own political theories, concluding that the utopianists failed in large part because they did not understand how capitalism developed, nor the role of the working class in the revolution against capitalism.
−	This kind of set the tone for the whole action-I had gone along with our affinity group decision just to occupy the site and not to trash anything, but now it seemed the only thing to do was trash things. The only things in an opencast mine are trucks, diggers, big bits of machinery etc. It is very unwise to be sitting on a piece of machinery that has been sabotaged when the police arrive. Its kind of like asking for it. So seeing as pretty much every piece of machinery in the place was damaged in some way within half an hour of arrival I felt pretty redundant	+	As Engels wrote in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:''
−	Almost as soon as we were into the site people were saying: there’s nothing to do now-everything’s been trashed, we might as well leave. Which was kind of odd and disempowering. The attitude of the ‘ego-warrior’ that if you can’t climb a tree then there’s no point in you being here and there’s nothing you can do <em>except make the tea</em> has been recognised as an actual and potential problem in our movement. The opencast action did to an extent suffer from the same division oflabour-ifyou weren’t prepared enough (or knowledgeable enough) to trash machinery then you could end up feeling pretty superfluous. Was this just another example of the production of a hierarchical division between the full-on activists and the ‘ground support’? What’s the point of a mass action if it’s all over so quickly and there is nothing for the mass of people to do?	+	<blockquote>
		+	(The) historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.
		+	</blockquote>
−	l got the impression that people were getting more bold as dawn broke, the sun rose and there were still no police or security. It felt like we were a bunch of kids who had been left completely unsupervised at playtime. I think there is some similarity here with the Newbury Reunion Rampage ofJanuary 1997 when equipment was torched that had earlier been sabbed. I think this shows an escalating threshold of confidence in what people think they can get away with. It was a similar thing here-various bits of kit had some initial damage done to them, i.e. slashing or letting down the tires which was then ‘improved’ on by people going round an hour or so later making sure the job was done more thoroughly. These have been nick-named quality control teams--people were going around asking has that been done?, and then checking to make sure it had been done properly.	+	Engels is explaining, here, that — in a sense — the utopian socialists were victims of arriving ''too early''. Capitalism had not yet developed enough for its opponents to formulate plans based on actual material conditions, since capitalism was only just emerging into a stable form. Without a significant objective, material basis, the utopians were forced to rely upon reasoning alone to confront capitalism.
−	Most damage was fairly invisible, not like the spectacular fres at the Reunion Rampage. Fire looks really cool, but we had been informed in no uncertain terms at the pre-meeting that fire in a coal mine was a not a very good idea. The main visible damage I saw was some very obvious smashing of windows. It felt very odd seeing such highly illegal nightwork being carried out in the light ofday, as the early morning sun was rising and the mist still clung to the damp grass-bizarre and exhilarating.	+	In this sense, the early historical utopianists fell into ''philosophical utopianism'' in its broader sense — defined by the mistaken assertion that the ideal can determine the material [see Annotation 95, p. 94]. In believing that they could build a perfect society based on ideals and “pure fantasy” alone without a material basis for development, the utopians were, in essence, idealists. As Engels explained: “from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism.” Engels concluded that in order to successfully overthrow capitalism, revolution would need to be grounded in materialism: “To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.”
−	After everyone had explored a. bit, chatted to friends new or old and most stuff had been disabled in at least some form, people began to congregate at a point where an access road to the mine workings cut between two very steep slopes or semicliffs. Perched on top of one of these was one of the mobile lighting rigs used to illuminate the mine workings at night. It was just too inviting. Pretty soon a group of 20 or 30 of us were trying our damnedest to push it over the edge. Although our efforts were fairly feeble (it’s not as easy as you think, pushing a lighting rig down a hill!) and the end result was something less than the spectacular crash we had hoped for, this was an example of collective action somewhat different to the sabbing of diggers etc. that had been going on earlier. That seemed to rely on a division between those with the specialised skills, tools and confidence to take it on, and those who lacked these things, whereas here anyone could get involved with the already existing mass of people attempting to heave the lighting thing off the cliff. It was the sort of damage that could only be carried out by a mass of people. It was much more inclusive.	+	-----
−	However despite this most people didn’t join in but stood around as spectators to our efforts (some with cameras!) Maybe they couldn’t see us or didn’t realise we could do with some help. Even on an action it takes time to break out of everyday passivity and become an active collectivity. e.g: at the Newbury protests in early 1996 there were examples of whole groups of people standing around watching others being arrested and not diving in and attempting to de-arrest them. Even . on an action, feelings of powerlessness can overwhelm you or you can fall into regarding the actions of others as a spectacle (even in the case of the most radical actions)-this is where any ‘division of labour’ into ‘climbers’ and ‘ground support’ or ‘saboteurs’ and ‘ordinary protesters’ can be a real liability and where confrontation can help-it focuses us as an antagonistic mass-unifies our purpose. I know. I’ve felt both things myself-quite often at Newbury I felt like a powerless spectator to a drama of security guards and tree-house dwellers carried out before a backdrop of crashing trees. Likewise I have on occasion felt myself as part of a powerful united mass with a common purpose-usually in opposition to a common enemy-almost always the police.	+	The humanitarian spirit and compassionate analysis which the utopians embodied in their efforts to lay out concrete features of a better future society became important theory premises for the birth of the scientific theory of socialism in Marxism.
−	Of course the main feeling on actions is just weirdness, any action that is half-way successful is just not like ordinary life. You can tell a really bad demo because it is just like ordinary life-there is no question of rupture in the seamless banality of the everyday.	+	''- Natural Science Premise:''
−	Normally if you were merely physically obstructing the site, the strategy would be to stay as long as possible. Here, staying on the site any longer than absolutely necessary would have been foolish-just asking to be carted off (like at the Whatley ilirnrry national action of December ’95). We were faced with a dilemma-stay and fuck things up more since we had the chance and risk getting caught, or scarper while the going was good? The general feeling seemed to be that we should all leave en masse now that the job had been done. Wejust walked past the two or three cops at the front gate. We had trashed an entire opencast site right under their noses and they were powerless to stop us. It felt good seeing the cops so powerless. We must have looked so smug-no wonder they arrested everyone later in the day at the office occupation.	+	Along with social-economic conditions and theory premises, the achievements of the natural sciences were also foundational to the development of arguments and evidence which assert the correctness of Marxism’s viewpoints and methodology.
−	We had a big circle meeting just outside the gate to the site and decided to split up-some people went to leaflet the local town, some went to the offices of the opencast company and the rest of us went to the local cafe and were shocked to find we had just trashed an entire opencast mine to the tune of hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions of pounds and had finished the job in time for breakfast. Qyickest action I’ve ever been on.	+	==== Annotation 18 ====
−	This action shows we can pull off big actions with enough planning and organisation. Since Whatley in December ’95, and excluding the semi-spontaneous pyromania of the Reunion Rampage, there has been rather a record of failure with big national EF! actions, for example-the Sea Empress anniversary action at Milford Haven in February ’97, the abortive action at Shoreham harbour in May ’97. Superior planning and organisation plus the handy expedient of not telling them beforehand where we were going allowed us on this occasion to totally outwit them. The police can’t act spontaneously and are very bad at responding if you catch them by surprise; it is here that our advantage lies, and when we do successfully surprise them we can get away with an incredible amount.	+	''Natural science'' is science which deals with the natural world, including chemistry, biology, physics, geology, etc.
−	We need to make links, build numbers and have more big mass actions that are inclusive of people from outside the activist community. Leafleting the local area and talking to local people was a most valuable and decidedly unsexy job that needed to be done and I am ashamed to an extent that I did not join the leafleting-the-village posse.	+	Three major scientific breakthroughs which were important to the development of Marxism include:
−	One big fried breakfast later and everyone seemed to have split up-lots of people had gone to the pub I think, but we couldn’t find which one, so school-trip over, we lazed about in the sun waiting for the coach to take us home. We got talking to a bunch of local kids (quite possibly the kids of local ex-miners) who told us they regularly broke into the site and nicked and damaged things! A fitting end to our childlike playtime of unsupervised sabotage-there was mutual respect between rebellious kids of all ages.	+	''•'' ''The law of conservation and transformation of energy'' scientifically proved the inseparable relationships and the mutual transformation and conservation of all the forms of motion of matter in nature.
−	**** “A smashing good time!”	+	''•'' ''The theory of evolution'' offered a scientific basis for the development of diverse forms of life through natural selection.
−	Around 200 activists arrived by three different routes at the opencast mine at Tibshelf: Derbyshire at approximately 6.15am. The site was completely undefended and the activists were immediately confronted with diggers and six CAT dumpers lined up. At first people sat on the diggers, but it became increasingly obvious that there was no-one to obstruct. Two security guards in a landy approached the diggers, sized up the number of activists and then buggered off again.	+	''•'' ''Cell theory'' was a scientific basis proving unity in terms of origins, physical forms and material structures of living creatures. It also explained the development of life through those relationships.
−	What followed was systematic actions of revenge for earth-rape-the like of which I haven’t seen for a while. The six superdumpers, four or five standard CAT diggers. one super-duper digger (I don’t know the makes!) and at least four lighting rigs were trashed before the activists had even recced the entire site. Not content with only superficial damage ‘quality control’ teams were doing the rounds of the site putting the finishing touches to any of the machinery! Near the northern entrance of the site more plant was attacked, and when finally confronted with a police presence (all six/seven of them) a digger had its hydraulics trashed in front of them by a mainly-masked up crowd!	+	These scientific discoveries led to the rejection of theological and metaphysical viewpoints which centered the role of the “creator” in the pursuit of truth.
−	Probably the best lessons of the action were the surprise factor gained by the frankly paranoid organisation of the action (e.g. meeting at one place, revelation of the target site at the last moment and in person) and the fact that at last the majority of people on site were masked-up or at least attempted some form of disguise. The action was euphoric and good-natured (with the possible exception ofMrs. Scargill) with the workers waved at rather than intimidated. Damage estimates have been suggested at around £4m-all in all an incredible start to a week of Earth Nights!	+	==== Annotation 19 ====
−	**** “What were the aims of the action?”	+	For centuries in Europe, natural science and philosophy had been heavily dominated by theological viewpoints which centered God in the pursuit of truth. Descartes, Kant, Spinoza, and many other metaphysical philosophers who developed the earliest theories of modern natural science centered their religious beliefs in their philosophies. These theological viewpoints varied in many ways, but all shared a characteristic of centering a “creator” in the pursuit of philosophical and scientific inquiry.
−	We have a strange history. Largely a series of victorious defeats which may have muddied the water when it comes to assessing levels of success and failure. The No Opencast action on Friday 31<sup>st</sup> October was very well organised and certainly no failure, but I find it difficult to go along fully with the celebrations of its success. For me the action raised a number of difficult questions about our strategy and direction. And it left me with a gnawing feeling that when the £ signs light up on the criminal damage register our critical attitude goes to the wind.	+	Together, the law of conservation and transformation of energy, the theory of evolution, and cell theory provided an alternative viewpoint which allowed scientists to remove the “creator” from the scientific equation. For the first time, natural scientists and philosophers had concrete theoretical explanations for the origin and development of the universe, life, and reality which did not rely on a supernatural creator.
−	So, what were the aims of our action? To inflict the maximum financial damage on HJ Banks? To create an interface, an active living point of contact between the No Opencast campaign, the local population, other interested angered people and the workforce? To build the campaign, catalyse further actions and help it gain strength? To generate a feeling ofempowerment and collectivity within the movement?	+	Marx and Engels closely observed and studied the groundbreaking scientific progress of their era. They believed strongly in materialist scientific methods and the data which they produced, and based their analysis and philosophical doctrines on such observations. They recognized the importance and validity of the scientific achievements of their era, and they developed the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism into a system which would help humans study and understand the whole material world.
−	This action mainly achieved the first and fourth objectives. However, I would argue in this instance that on this particular day the first objective was the least important. Let’s face it, in anything other than exceptional circumstances a one day action will not bring a company to its knees. But because we privileged this course of action we could never get to grips with any wider objectives.	+	In ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'', Engels explained that ancient Greek dialecticians had correctly realized that the world is “an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away.”
−	My main criticism is that while a small group of committed activists succeeded in bringing the site to a halt it was done in way that made involving others very difficult. Sure, I helped hand out leaflets in the local town, Tibshelf, but that was after the action had occurred. All that people could do then was join a small group standing round the entrance gates of a site that wasn’t working. Of course, it’s a good thing it wasn’t working, but if it hadn’t been working because we were in occupation. people could have come and been part of an active crowd stopping the work. Presumably the campaign against opencast mines will only grow if it can somehow engage people. Some may argue that mobilising support occurs before the event as part of the networking process, but surely the revolutionary potential of direct action can only be realised when people see it as something that they can get involved with; when it creates circumstances which can catalyse farther acts of subversion.	+	Engels goes on to explain that it was understandable for early natural scientists to break their inquiries and analysis down into specialized fields and categories of science to focus on precise, specific, narrow subject matters so that they could build up a body of empirical data. However, as data accumulated, it became clear that all of these isolated, individual fields of study must somehow be unified back together coherently and cohesively in order to obtain a deeper and more useful understanding of reality.
−	Was the action empowering? People certainly felt empowered, but still, questions remain. Individual feelings of empowerment may or may not be connected to whether we are being successful on a much wider level. A mass action is surely at it’s best when through our collective power we achieve things that would have been difficult or impossible for a smaller group to do. Sometimes of course it’s just better to have shit loads of people.	+	As Engels wrote in ''On Dialectics:''
−	You only need one person to occupy a crane but with 30 it just feels so much better. In an ongoing campaign where the sites are well secured it may only be possible to damage machinery with a crowd for cover. On the day of the opencast action, as far as I’m aware we didn’t do much that five people with a spare night and some aluminium oxide couldn’t have done.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Empirical natural science has accumulated such a tremendous mass of positive material for knowledge that the necessity of classifying it in each separate field of investigation systematically and in accordance with its inner inter-connection has become absolutely imperative. It is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not work, here only theoretical ''thinking'' can be of assistance.
		+	</blockquote>
−	In practical terms what I’m suggesting is that some of us should have occupied the machinery for the day while others went round the area trying to get people involved in the occupation. People may think that would have been a waste of time when we could effectively stop work through criminal damage without the effort of an occupation and if financial damage were our prime objective this would be true. If it was just one of a number of objectives then some kind of occupation makes more sense. As it was, the action took place in a vacuum in which there was little opportunity for it to go beyond itself. Also, (and this is easy to suggest in retrospect) couldn’t we have occupied a much larger site, a site where the numbers we had would have actually counted?	+	As science grows increasingly complex, a necessity develops for a philosophical and cognitive framework which can be used to make sense of the influx of information from disparate fields. In ''Dialectics of Nature,'' Engels explains how dialectical materialism is the perfect philosophical foundation for unifying scientific fields into one cohesive framework'':''
−	Given the absence of mainstream media interest, and the very real problems of dealing with a capitalist media, it seems even more crucial to look at how our activities actually communicate their message. For me the best media is the action itself and the build up to it. Knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, stalls, flyposting etc. Actions bring these activities to life, but only actions where there is a real presence. Sometimes it feels as if we are becoming some Bakuninist revolutionary cadre who believe change will come through our actions alone.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Dialectics divested of mysticism becomes an absolute necessity for natural science, which has forsaken the field where rigid categories sufficed, which represent as it were the lower mathematics of logic, its everyday weapons.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Although the damage on the day seemed opportunistic rather than planned it may still be worth reflecting on how we situate this activity. Criminal damage is not necessarily a good or bad thing (although it’s difficult to see what could be bad about a profound dislike of private property). It’s a tactic, and the context in which it is used gives the act its meaning and value. Like violence or non-violence it can become ideological, i.e.: be given a value outside its tactical importance, a value in itself. One of the problems with criminal damage is that it feels so damn good. More real perhaps than other methods. For an activist it can become a kind of identity-forming ritual in the same way that happens with the martyrdom of non-violence or the revolutionary heroism of violence. This is not to suggest we should be striving for some neutral tactics which we then apply coldly to our strategy. Obviously methods create and incur meanings. It’s really just to say that we should be wary of privileging a method over it’s context.	+	So, Marx and Engels developed Dialectical Materialism not in opposition to science, but as a way to make better use of scientific data, and to analyze the complex, dynamic, constantly changing systems of the world in motion. While distinct scientific discoveries and empirical data are invaluable, each data point only provides a small amount of information within a single narrow, specific field of science. Dialectical Materialism allows humans to view reality — as a whole — in motion, and to examine the interconnections and mutual developments between different fields and categories of human knowledge.
−	One last question-was it necessary for this action to be secret? If it had been open there would have been more opportunity to involve people from the surrounding area, and-in all likelihood-have a bigger overall turnout. Given the nature of an opencast site it would be very difficult for the police to stop a determined crowd from carrying out an occupation. And on the other hand if somehow they managed to stop us, forcing a gigantic police mobilisation on behalf of opencasting might itself be a kind of success. Sometimes, a more open approach may help develop a larger and more political crowd and in consequence force up the political cost of countering our actions.	+	-----
−	**** “Re-open the deep mines? Over my dead body!”	+	These scientific principles confirmed the correctness of the dialectical materialist view of the material world, with such features as: endlessness, self-existence, self-motivation, and self-transformation. They also confirmed the scientific nature of the dialectical materialist viewpoint in both material processes and thought processes.
−	The action in October 1997 at Dole Hill Opencast site sparked off some thought on the collaboration between radical eeologists and the No Opencast campaign and this particular alignment raises interesting questions about the nature of forming alliances with other groups engaged in struggle. There seems to be two areas that are potentially problematic with this particular coalition. These are; firstly the nature of a driving force behind the campaign: the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and then secondly the stated aims of the No Opencast campaign itself.	+	-----
−	Although the NUM is radical in appearance, in reality just like all the other unions-a reformist and bureaucratic organisation. This can be seen, not just from a purely theoretical standpoint, but by it’s actual behaviour in times of heightened struggle.[10]	+	==== Annotation 20 ====
−	The traditional leftists view of unions is as workers’ selfdefence organisations, there to fight for the needs of the workers themselves. Yet, if we look though history, we see there is far more to unions than this.[11] What then do they do if not the above?	+	''Endlessness'' refers to the infinite span of space and time in our universe. ''Self-existence'' means that our universe exists irrespective of human consciousness; it existed before human consciousness evolved and it will continue to exist after human consciousness becomes extinct. ''Self-motivation'' and ''Self-transformation'' refer to the fact that motion and transformation exist within the universe independent of human consciousness.
−	The answer is that they negotiate with the bosses-they negotiate the going rate for the exploitation of the workers and thus act as a ‘manager’ for the needs of capital. Unions play out a particular role in this society and this is summed up by Lord Balfour when he said; Trade Union organisation was the only thing between us and anarchy.[12] The accusation has also been made that the NUM and the No Opencast campaign have latched onto the ecological direct action movement in order to advance their inherently reformist and unecological aims of re-opening the deep shaft mines. Is this true-are we being used as ‘cannon fodder’ for these aims-or are we using them to forward our aims of shutting down all opencast sites without re-opening the deep mines?	+	Engels wrote of the scientific nature of the dialectical materialist viewpoint in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'':
−	Whilst I stand with the miners in supporting their struggle to defend their communities there are limits. This is especially true when the publicity put out by the campaign about actions I am on is something I fundamentally disagree with. i.e: Re-open the deep shaft mines![13] There are potential problems with workers run industries-evidenced by the fact that Tower Hill Colliery, a mine that was threatened with closure and then bought, and since run, by the workers themselves has recently entered into a partnership with Celtic Energy-notorious and hated opencast company.[14]	+	<blockquote>
		+	Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that... Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The similarity with the support given to the Liverpool Dockers has been noted by other people, yet I feel that there are two fundamental differences here. Firstly; not only were the dockers fighting the Merseyside Docks and Harbour Company (MHDC) who sacked them, but they were also battling against their union, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) that had deserted and actively worked against them. This is partly why the link-up with the dockers was so important-we were working with the people themselves, not their ‘representatives’ the union. Yet with the No Opencast campaign we are working alongside the NUM, a union of the same ilk that sold the dockers out so cold heartedly.[15]
−	Secondly; the docks, in my ideal world, would be closed--they are an integral part of the insane system of mass production and consumption that I oppose. Despite this, whilst they are open, we should support and fight for the demands of the traditional workforce of the dockers to work there; as opposed to casual labour with all its vestiges of organised resistance crushed. Yet, were the docks to close, I would not get involved in a fight to re-open them-which in essence is half of what the No Opencast campaign is asking to happen with the deep mines! What are we, as radical ecologists, doing getting involved in a struggle to re-open major industries? For instance, when nuclear power is finally wound up, and car factories closed down, are we going to get involved in campaigns to re-open them as well?	+	-----
−	Having said all of the above, contradictions are not something we should be afraid of and aim to avoid by adopting some puritanical Green line-even if that it were actually possible. People change their views and aims; particularly through being involved with direct action, and also when arguments are presented to them in a coherent way. It is, although we seem not to know it, possible to be in a working alliance with people that we share some common ground with and still criticise them on particular aspects of their views. Maybe it is as a result of our relative political naivete that this does not seem to have happened with this campaign. \Vhat we do need to decide is on what grounds we form coalitions on, with whom and why. To do this we need to talk, both amongst ourselves and also to others-this is how we will learn and advance our actions.	+	In conclusion, the birth of Marxism is a phenomenon which is compatible with scientific principles; it is the product of the social-economic conditions of its time of origin, of the human knowledge expressed in science at that time, and it is also the result of its founders’ creative thinking and humanitarian spirit.
−	I have, rather sadly (and yes I admit it-as a bit of a cop-out) no final conclusion to this writing and the questions, if any, it raises about Earth First! and the No Opencast campaign. If truth be told I have attempted to provoke some thought on thorny issues by trying to raise them in the above article-which should in. no way be taken as total rejection and criticism of any of the individuals or groups involved in past and present struggles against the farther encroachment of the capital and the state. I respect, and acknowledge that we have much to learn from, the miners and similar struggles. What I am suggesting is that we do not lose our critical faculties when it comes to these issues. We must, if we are to change the world to one we want-an ecological one devoid of exploitation, oppression and hierarchy-get involved with other people resisting particular aspects of this system. This will involve working with people that we do not necessarily totally agree with on every ideal; and even if we do- as some great wit once said; If you feel comfortable in your coalition--<em>then it’s not broad enough.</em>	+	==== b. The Birth and Development Stage of Marxism ====
−	There is a forthcoming No Opencast action later this year- for more details of this and the ongoing resistance to opencast mining contact: No Opencast Campaign, c/o 190 Shepherds Bush Road, London, W6 7NL, UK. Telephone: 0181 767 3142 or 0181 672 9698. For current anti-mining/quarrying camp details see ‘Carry on Camping’ on page 54 in this issue of <em>DoD.</em>	+	Marx and Engels initiated the birth and development stage of Marxism from around 1842~1843 through around 1847~1848. Later, from 1849 to 1895, Marxism was developed to be more thorough and comprehensive, but in this early period of birth and development, Marx and Engels engaged in practical activities [Marx and Engels were not just theorists, but also actively supported and participated with various revolutionary and working class organizations including the Chartists, the League of the Just, the Communist League, the International Workingmen’s Association, etc.] and studied a wide range of human thought from ancient times on through to their contemporaries in order to methodically reinforce, complement and improve their ideas.
−	[10] For examples of this during the 1984/5 miners strike see page 4 in Outside and Against the Unions-a pamphlet published by Wildcat. Send a donation to: BM CAT, London, WCIN 3XX, UK. See also Occupational Therapy-The Incomplete Story of the University College Hospital Strikes and Occupations of 1992/314 published by News from Everywhere, Box 14, 138 Kingsland High Street, London, E8 2NS, UK.	+	Many famous works such as ''The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts'' (Marx, 1844), ''The Holy Family'' (Marx and Engels, 1845), ''Thesis on Feuerbach'' (Marx, 1845), ''The German Ideology'' (Marx and Engels, 1845–1846), and so on, clearly showed that Marx and Engels inherited the quintessence [see Annotation 6, p. 8] of the dialectical and materialist methods which they received from many predecessors. This philosophical heritage led to the development of the dialectical materialist viewpoint and materialist dialectics.
−	[11] See, for example, “Who Killed Ned Ludd?” in Elements of Refusal by John Zerzan (Left Bank: USA 1988)-an account of how the unions were partly responsible for the repression and dispersal of the revolutionary fervour of the Luddite movement in 19<sup>th</sup> century Britain.	+	-----
−	[12] Lord Balfour quoted in Unfinished Business-the politics ofClass Warpage 28.	+	==== Annotation 21 ====
−	[13] Part of the text from No Opencast campaign sticker distributed at the action on Friday 31<sup>st</sup> October 1997.	+	There is a subtle, but important, distinction between Dialectical Materialism and Materialist Dialectics. This will be explained further in chapters I (p. 48) and II (p. 98).
−	[14] See The Guardian’-Friday 27<sup>th</sup> February 1998.	+	With works such as ''The Poverty of Philosophy'' (Marx, 1847) and ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (Marx and Engels, 1848), Marxism was presented as a complete system of fundamental views with three theoretical component parts.
−	[15] Not to mention, amongst others, the Hillingdon Hospital Workers recently expelled from their union Unison.	+	-----
−	<br>	+	==== Annotation 22 ====
−	** The New Luddite War (from issue 8) We Will Destroy Genetic Engineering!	+	According to Lenin, the three component parts of Marxism (and, by extension, of Marxism-Leninism) are:
−	Two years ago direct action against genetic engineering in Britain was non-existent. Two years later and it has become one of the main struggles in which our movements are involved. Hundreds of new people have got active in everything from mass trashings to night time sabotage. With over seventy experimental Genetically Modified (GM) test sites destroyed, our action is crippling the advance of the technology. This article will cover how the campaign has evolved and some of the reasons why it is so important that genetic engineering is stopped. Many newspapers have covered the ecological and health disasters that could arise if genetic engineering goes badly wrong. Instead this article will chart the ecological, social and health disasters that will arise if genetic engineering goes badly right.	+	<blockquote>
		+	1. The Philosophy of Marxism: Including Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism
−	Though Britain has been the (First World) country where actions against genetic engineering have really kicked off, people have been resisting for over a decade all over the world. The first outdoor genetic test site was a crop of genetically engineered strawberries at the University of California in 1987. The night after the plants had been transplanted Earth First!ers climbed fences, evaded security guards and succeeded in pulling up all 2,000 plants.[16] In 1989 Earth First!ers destroyed yet more test sites in the US which in turn inspired actions in Holland where three test sites were dug up. Claiming responsibility for the Dutch attacks, the ‘Raging Diggers’ stated in their July 1991 communique:	+	2. The Political Economy of Marxism: A system of knowledge and laws that define the production process and commodity exchange in human society.
−	<quote>	+	3. Scientific Socialism: The system of thought pertaining to the establishment of the communist social economy form.
−	The destruction of a test field is designed to both start a <em>discussion on the subject of bio-technology, as well as to offer a direct counter to pro-biotechnology propaganda in the form of sabotage![17]</em>	+	</blockquote>
−	</quote>
−	Throughout the early and mid nineties a growing alliance of Indian peasant groups organised against GM and the patenting of seeds. The campaign, which involved everything from setting up community seed banks to the mass destruction of an installation belonging to the multinational Cargill, culminated in a 500,000 strong demonstration. Back in Europe, 1996 saw German eco-anarchists squatting fields to stop them being planted as genetic test sites. A third of all sites were prevented from being sown that year and many of those which had been sown were subsequently sabotaged. By the end of the year twelve sites had been dug up, and the remaining experiments were under 24 hour police guard.[18] Crop squats and anti-GM actions in Germany continued throughout the following year. The growing international nature of the resistance showed itself on April 21<sup>st</sup> ’97 when activists simultaneously occupied Monsanto’s head offices in both Britain and America. Two weeks later a GM potato test site was dug up belonging to the Federal Research Institute of Germany. The leader ofthe research project described it as ‘a direct hit’.	+	These are discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, p. 38.
−	<quote>	+	In the book ''The Poverty of Philosophy'', Marx proposed the basic principles of Dialectical Materialism and Scientific Socialism,* and gave some initial thoughts about surplus value. ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' laid the first doctrinal foundation of communism. In this book, the philosophical basis was expressed through the organic unity between the economical viewpoint and socio-political viewpoint.
−	On the 8<sup>th</sup> of June [1997] justfive days after the action in Germany the Super Heroes Against Genetix decided to play cricket on a GM potato testfield site just outside Cambridge. Due to the nature of a somewhat muddy and sticky wicket, potatoes replaced the traditional red ball. Fielders had a dif cult time ofit-most of the batting resulting in the ‘balls’ being smashed to pieces, or else being lost amongst upturned soil. The entire GM crop was destroyed.[19]
−	</quote>
−	Days after the first British GM test site sabotage, Germany saw another field dug up, this time GM sugar beet. Around two months later more sites were dug up in Britain followed in November ’97 by the first of many GM site trashings by the French Confederation Paysanne (p. 103). The following year saw a massive escalation of direct action in Britain with numerous office occupations and test site sabotages. In 1998 over thirty test sites were destroyed, including seven rape-seed-oil experiments in different parts of the country on the same night. Last year also saw the first genetic experiment planted in Ireland. Almost immediately the experiment was dug up, never to be replaced. The year ended with the Indian farmers in Karnataka launching ‘Operation Cremate Monsanto’ by setting fire to three of the company’s crops.	+	-----
−	Already this year over thirty three sites have been destroyed in Britain either through covert action at night (p. 101) or mass trashings in daylight (p. 99). During the glorious Carnival against Capital in the City of London on June 18<sup>th</sup>, the British HQ of agribusiness multinational Cargill was closed down and its windows and foyer smashed up (p. 1). The international aspect has grown too, with Indian farmers visiting a squatted genetic test site in Essex and blockading a pro-GM greenwash institute in London (p. 97). On the other side of the Channel, the French peasants are continuing their actions, while across the Atlantic, American activists have destroyed three test sites-one action claimed by the ‘Cropatistas’. As I write, three people have been remanded in prison for alleged ‘Conspiracy to Cause Criminal Damage’ at a GM maize field in Lincolnshire (p. 104). For those unaware of what lies behind genetic engineering this explosion of activity around the globe might seem strange. The next part of the article will aim to give a bit of background to the issues of power behind the struggle.	+	==== Annotation 23 ====
−	**** Elite Technology “Weaponry for the Class War	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> Scientific Socialism is a series of socio-political-economic theories intended to build socialism on a foundation of science within society’s current ''material conditions'' [see Annotation 79, p. 81]. Scientific Socialism is the topic of Part 3 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.
−	Enveloped in darkness, they walked silently through the fields, groups offriends intent on destruction. The elite’s new technology was their target and night after night they laid their blows at progress. The repression started, but while captured comrades languished in prison, others walked the night time paths. I could be describing today’s campaign against genetic engineering but I am not. These bands of merry friends are of the past and despite bravery, imagination and countless escapades they failed. The war waged at the beginning of the last century by the Luddites of Northern England against the elite’s new technology-the emerging factory system-was lost, drowned in blood and compromise. The following years saw an armed uprising . (the Swing Riots) by the rural poor against new technologies in agriculture, but that too was defeated. The price of such deafets is the ecological destruction, pathologcally warped emotions and wage slavery of global industrialism.	+	''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' outlined the laws of movement in history,* as well as the basic theory of socio-economic forms.
−	A strange tale to tell in an article about the resistance to genetic engineering? No. On the nights I have helped destroy genetic test sites I have thought of people, like those described above, who walked the night time paths before me. Listening to their voices both inspires me and helps me pick out the truth otherwise drowned out by the cacophony of corporate propaganda. With vast budgets the PR departments of the GM companies are trying to convince us that their technology is aimed at feeding the poor and increasing food production[20]. The Luddites of the past remind us of the reality, that the technologies foisted upon the poor by the elite are aimed at accruing profit and power. As one Indian scientist put it, Monocultures spread not because they produce more, but because they control more.[21]	+	-----
−	We and the Luddites are fighters in the same war. Two hundred years ago the English elite’s main enemy was the peasantry who lived for the most part outside the cash economy and were forever rising up. The elite used the enclosure of land and the mechanisation of crafts and agriculture to crush the rebellious autonomy of the English poor. The class was eradicated by physical force and the elite’s technology and forced either to become either wage slaves in the emerging factories or on the farms of the rich.	+	==== Annotation 24 ====
−	Two hundred years, and many struggles later, the British poor are for the most part wasting their life in crap jobs or depressed and drug-ridden on the dole-their rebelliousness almost totally extinguished, our history forgotten.Meanwhile the-now global-elite continues to wage a war on the class that remains the main threat to its existence-the global peasantry. The relative autonomy and link with the land which fuelled the Zapatiastas in Mexico, the Viet Cong in Vietnam and the MST in Brasil has to be destroyed. This is where genetic engineering comes in.	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> The laws of movement in history are the core principles of ''historical materialism'', which is the topic of Part 2 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.
−	The new technologies being pushed by the food industry-a sector which has more companies in the top 1000 than any other-aim to purposefolly destroy the social fabric that keeps the land community together and to fully incorporate the peasantry into the global cash economy. The threat is neutralised and becomes fuel for the machine’s forther expansion.	+	The basic theory of socio-economic forms dictates that material production plays a decisive role in the existence and development of a society, and that the material production methods decide both the political and ''social consciousness'' of a society.
−	To understand genetic engineering you have to look at the process it is part of. The last thirty years have seen, in what was called the ‘green revolution’ (sic), massive industrialisation of agriculture in the Third World. The highly expensive inputs for industrial agriculture; machines, pesticides etc. have forced millions of small farmers off their land. Mechanisation has made redundant many jobs done by agricultural labourers. This process is purposeful, as it was two hundred years ago when the elite dispossessed our ancestors. As one pro-industrialisation advocate put it:	+	-----
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 25 ====
−	Economic development. is not compatible with the maintainance of a people’s traditional customs. What is needed is a change in the totality of their culture and theirpsychological attitude, their way of life. What is therefore required amounts to social disorganisation. Unhappiness and discontentment in the sense of wanting more than is obtainable is to be generated. ‘Ihe suffering and dislocation that is caused <em>is the price that has to be paidfor economic development.[22]</em>
−	</quote>
−	The poor pay the price while the elite reap the profit. Radical social movements usually can’t keep up with the rapid rate of social change, failing to effectively organise. As a result the dispossessed turn the violence of the green revolution, not on their enemies (who sit back comfortably in air conditioned offices often thousands ofmiles away), but on their own class and families. Increases in suicide, the domestic abuse of both women and children, and the re-emergence of serious communal/religious conflict have all been linked by Indian eco-feminists to this social dislocation[23]. In general women bear the brunt of the horror caused, especially the malnourshiment and hunger. In her new book, Germaine Greer points out that women are also increasingly burdened with the sole responsibility of child rearing. Lone female headed families are the poorest sector of the worlds population.	+	''Social consciousness'' refers to the collective experience of consciousness shared by members of a society, including ideological, cultural, spiritual, and legal beliefs and ideas which are shared within that society. This is related to the concept of base and superstructure, which is discussed later in this chapter.
−	<quote>	+	''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' also showed that for as long as classes have existed, the history of the development of human society is the history of class struggle. Through class struggle, the proletariat can liberate ourselves only if we simultaneously and forever liberate the whole of humanity. With these basic opinions, Marx and Engels founded Historical Materialism.
−	<em>As the extendedfamily has crumbled under the pressure of urbanisation, increasing landlessness and economic change men no longer constrained by their elders to live as husbands andfathers have backed awayfrom women and children. One quarter of allJam ilies in the world are headed by a loan female. In the Caribbean, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa it is about a third and rising.[24]</em>
−	</quote>
−	Going hand in hand with the destruction of human lives, has been devastation of the ecologies those lives were once a part of. In the Third World, as in Britain, industrial agriculture is responsible for more ecological destruction than any other factor. Corporate PR agencies have been spreading the idea that GM crops will need less chemical spraying and are therefore good for the environment. The truth is that the most common GM plant varieties have been engineered to be herbicide tolerant. This enables a crop to be sprayed with more chemicals than ever before.	+	By applying Historical Materialism to the comprehensive study of the capitalist production method, Marx made an important discovery: separating workers from the ownership of the means of production through violence was the starting point of the establishment of the capitalist production method. Workers do not own the means of production to perform their labor activities for themselves, so, in order to make income and survive, workers have to sell their labor to capitalists. Labor thus becomes a special commodity, and the sellers of labor become workers for labor-buyers [the proletariat and capitalist class respectively]. The value that workers create through their labor is higher than their wage. And this is how surplus value* is formed. Importantly, this means that the surplus value belongs to people who own the means of production — the capitalists — instead of the workers who provide the labor.
−	In general, genetic-industrial agriculture is characterised by both continuities and discontinuities with the chemical-industrial approach of green revolution agriculture.	+	-----
−	It is continous with it to the extent that they both share a static, one-dimensional, commodified, fragmented, uniform, toxic, and capital- and input-intensive approach to agriculture. Genetic-industrial agriculture will continue, and indeed extend, the industrialisation of agricultural production, including the practice of monoculture cropping, the replacement of diverse plant varieties with static laboratory-bred varieties, and the use of toxic inputs.	+	==== Annotation 26 ====
−	Genetic engineering will also enable the destructive practices of industrial agriculture to continue where they may otherwise have reached their limits by creating plants that can tolerate greater quantities of chemical inputs or that are adapted to the soils degraded by industrial agricultural practices. For these reasons, the new genetically engineered seeds and inputs wil perpetuate and intensify the environmental problems and concentrations of power and wealth produced by chemical-industrial agriculture. Indeed it is the very same multinational corporations that have developed and continue to sell chemical products and hybrid seeds that are now developing and commercialising the products of genetic engineering.	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> Surplus value is equal to labor value (the amount of value workers produce through labor) minus wages paid to workers. Under capitalism, this surplus value is appropriated as profit by capitalists after the products which workers created are sold.
−	Despite these continuities, the elite’s new technologies differ significantly in the mode in which they take hold of nature and reconstitute it in new forms, since they now engage with organisms at the molecular level. In being able to tamper directly with the genetic structure of organisms, and to transfer genes across species boundaries, genetic engineering creates new kinds of ecological dangers as well as new forms of social control.[25]	+	So, in discovering the origin of surplus value, Marx pointed out the exploitative nature of capitalism [because capitalists essentially steal surplus labor value from workers which is then transformed into profits], though this exploitative nature is concealed by the money-commodity relationship.
−	**** The Colonisation of the Seed	+	-----
−	The relative autonomy of the peasantry has always rested on its ability to grow its own food without the major involvement of the market. Every harvest farmers can collect the seeds from their crops and resow the following year. In many ways, the seed both symbolically and actually holds the key to freedom. Understanding this, the elite’s new technologies change the seed from a key to freedom to a key to further slavery.	+	==== Annotation 27 ====
−	One of the most important weapons being developed for use against the rural poor is terminator technology. Terminator technology allows seed companies to sterilise new varieties, meaning that farmers will not be able to obtain healthy seeds for the following year at harvest. Instead, every year they will have to buy seeds off the corporations. This is once again an extension of the green revolution that created hybridised seeds that were by nature sterile. However, in the past, hybridisation has not been possible with many crops. Terminator technology will allow companies to sterilise any of their seeds. Research at the moment is aimed at crops such as rice, wheat, sorghum, and soya beans, the basis of a large section of the world’s daily survival. To paraphrase Brecht; “First control their fodder, then you’re in control of their philosophy”.	+	Under capitalism, a worker’s labor is a commodity which capitalists pay for with money in the form of wages. Workers never know how much of their labor value is being withheld by employers, which conceals the nature of capitalist wage-theft.
−	<quote>	+	The theory of surplus value was deeply and comprehensively researched and presented in ''Capital''<ref>''Das Kapital:'' Karl Marx’s most important contribution to political economy. It is composed of four volumes. It is the work of Marx’s whole career and an important part of Engels’ career, as well. Marx started writing ''Das Kapital'' in the 1840s and continued writing until he died (1883). ''Das Kapital I'' was published in 1867. After Marx’s death, Engels edited and published the second volume in 1885 and the third volume in 1894. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the USSR edited and published ''Das Kapital IV'', also known as ''Theories of Surplus-Value'', in the 1950s, long after the death of Marx and Engels.</ref> by Marx and Engels. This work not only paves the way to form a new political-economic theory system based on the working class’s viewpoint, it also firmly consolidates and develops the historical-materialist viewpoint through the theory of socio-economic forms.
−	Through patents and genetic engineering, new colonies are being carved out. The land, the forests, the rivers, the oceans, and the atmosphere have all been colonised, eroded, and polluted. Capital now has to look for new colonies to invade and exploitfor its further accumulation. These new colonies are, in my view, the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants and animals. Resistance to [biotechnology] is a resistance to the ultimate colonisation of life itself-of the future of evolution as well as thefuture of non-Western traditions of relating to and knowing nature. It is a struggle to protect the freedom of diverse species to evolve. It is a struggle to protect the freedom of diverse cultures to evolve.[26]
−	</quote>
−	Like most dominant technologies in this society, genetic engineering is an ecologically destructive, socially devastating weapon used by the elite in its continuing war of expansion against the wild and the world’s poor. In this context it is handy to remember that Monsanto was the producer of Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant used by America in its war with the peasantry of Vietnam. It is no accident that Chiapas, home to the Mexican Zapatistas, is the first place where GM trees are being commercially grown.[27]	+	-----
−	**** Disarming the Elite	+	==== Annotation 28 ====
−	What strategies can we use? Many reformist campaigners have mistakenly pinned their hopes on two tactics; (a) lobbying government and (b) consumer boycotts. Neither of these tactics can stop or seriously slow down genetic engineering. Lobbying the state will never have an impact because Western governments are in fact corporate fronts and genetic engineering is too important to them. Third World elites who see genetic engineering as a further grasping back of the small amounts of power they have over their turf, almost unanimously oppose patents on life and GM technology. They are irrelevant, none have the power to stand up to the global elite pushing genetic engineering. This was graphically shown at the 1999 International Bio-Safety Protocol Negotiations:	+	Karl Marx explained that the goal of writing ''Capital'' was “to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society.” By “laws of motion,” Marx refers to the origins and motivations for change within human society. Historical materialism holds that human society develops based on internal and external relationships within and between aspects of society. Historical materialism is the topic of Part 2 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.
−	<quote>	+	According to the theory of socio-economic forms [which is the basis of historical materialism], the movements and developments of human society are natural-historical processes based on dialectical interactions between forces of production and relations of production; between infrastructure basis [commonly referred to as “base” in English] and superstructure.
−	<em>As ever the motives were money and power, with the N. Americans wanting to continue in their global control, the Europeans trying to re-assert their right to the globalforay at par with N. Americans; and the Southerners trying to be sparedfrom continuing to be the prey.[28]</em>
−	</quote>
−	The above quote is the view of Dr Tewolde Egziabher, the general manager of Ethiopia’s Environmental Protection Authority and chairperson of the African group of delegates at the negotiations. His conclusion was that global elite’s aim in running the conference was probably that <em>it merely wished to fool its own public.</em>	+	-----
−	On the surface, consumer boycotts look more hopeful; at least they hit the companies in the pocket. Due to mad cow disease and other similar crises the European public are very suspicious of anything the companies and government say about food. Most people also feel that GM is inherently wrong, that is tampering with nature. Despite massive PR propaganda by both the state and the corporations this view only solidifies. A report leaked to Greenpeace, written for Monsanto reveals:	+	==== Annotation 29 ====
−	An ongoing collapse of public support for biotechnology and GMfoods. At each point in this project, we keep thinking that we have reached the low point and that public thinking will stabilise, but we apparently have not reached thatpoint.[29]	+	The forces of production consist of the combination of means of production and workers within society. Under capitalism, the production force consists of the proletariat (working class) and means of production which are owned by the bourgeoisie (capitalist class).
−	Some retailers interviewed believed there was a fifty-fifty chance of losing to the pressure groups. Against the odds, thanks mainly to small local demonstrations, trolley blockades, determined leafleting, and pure public cynicism many retailers are backing out of GM foods. Indeed, the elite is getting very worried at this situation. The deputy head of the American Treasury said in a statement to the Senate this spring that the campaign against genetic engineering in Europe is the greatest block to global economic liberalisation presently in existence. People deserve to give themselves a pat on the back for this. However, as the main market for GM crops will be in the Third World consumer boycotts in the first world cannot stop the advancement of genetic engineering.	+	Marx viewed society as composed of an ''economic base'' and a ''social superstructure''. The base of society includes the material relationships between humans and the means of productions and the material processes which humans undertake to survive and transform our environment. The superstructure of society includes all components of society not directly relating to production, such as media institutions, music, and art, as well as other cultural elements like religion, customs, moral standards, and everything else which manifests primarily through conscious activity and social relations.
−	Two hundred years ago the English elite was forced to construct its new technological weaponry-the factory systemin hostile territory. Night after night the Luddites of northern England laid waste to the technology they knew was aimed directly at the destruction of their communties. Two hundred years later, the elite designs its new technological weapons thousands of miles from the people who will eventually feel the effects. Unable to reach and destroy the experiments themselves the peasantry are forced to rely on us to be the long anns of the third world. We must make the territory hostile again.	+	In the preface to ''A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'', Marx explained:
−	The challenge has been taken up and people all over Europe are walking in the footsteps of the Luddites. The test site sabotage is crippling the development of the technology, giving valuable breathing space to Third World movements and really beginning to intimidate companies. This year after many of its test sites were destroyed, Britain’s leading plant breeding company, CPB Twyford, announced that it was pulling out of the development of GM crops. In a press statement they said;	+	<blockquote>
		+	In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<quote>	+	RELIGION GOVERNMENT EDUCATION
−	...it was felt that the risks of continuing work with GMOs were not worth taking while the threat of indiscriminate vandalism exists.
−	</quote>
−	Other research organisations have also given up on genetics due to the possibility of their crops being uprooted. This includes the Royal Agricultural College, who were told by their insurers that premiums would rise massively if GM crops were planted. Nearly half of all test sites in Britain have been destroyed this year and the number will continue to rise.	+	POLITICAL ECONOMY NATURE
−	As the Luddites of today, we know that given the continuation of this society, halting-forever-the development of new technological weaponry might not be possible. Even if we don’t succeed in stopping genetic engineering we have already slowed down the introduction of this technology. What this means in real terms is that we’ve succeeded in delaying the further degradation of the lives of millions of people. We have delayed for months, maybe years the ecological destruction, hunger, dispair and domestic abuse that social dislocation brings. If that is all we succeed in then we have achieved much.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-4.png|''The base of society includes material-based elements and relations including political economy, means of production, class relations, etc. The superstructure includes human-consciousness-based elements and relations including government, culture, religion, etc.'']]
−	**** Growing the Global Land Community	+	In other words, Marx argued that superstructure (which includes social consciousness) is shaped by the infrastructural basis, or base, of society. This reflects the more general dialectical relationship between matter and consciousness, in which the material, as the first basis of reality, determines consciousness, while consciousness mutually impacts the material [see ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'', p. 88]. So, the base of society — being material in nature — ''determines'' the superstructure, while the superstructure ''impacts'' the base. It couldn’t possibly be the other way around, according to the dialectical materialist worldview, because the primary driving forces of conscious activity are rooted in material needs.
−	As well as the ‘thumb in the dam’ aspect of anti-GM, campaigns, the resistance is serving other purposes. Groups all over the world are linking up, training and learning from each other. France, America, Britain, Holland, Germany, Ireland and India-people are together taking action. The hope for a free and ecological future lies in these embryonic movements which understand their enemies are the machine and its masters, and their comrades the land and its lovers. In helping to catalyse the growth of these revolutionary ecological groups around the world the elite may have designed a weapon which will rebound on themselves.	+	The theory of socio-economic forms proves that the materialist viewpoint of history is not just a hypothesis, but a scientifically-proven principle.
−	Under the cover of the mass, masks and midnight we, the new Luddites, will continue to fight back in the land struggle that has never ended.	+	-----
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 30 ====
−	<em>Together</em> we, the <em>peasants and you, the poor of Europe will</em> fi<em>ght the multinationals with our sweat, and together we will succeed in de</em>f<em>eating them!</em>
−	<right>	+	As Lenin explains in ''What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats:''
−	-from a speech in London by an Indian peasant of the Bharta Kissan Union-Punjab, May 1999
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	**** The Triumph of the Code	+	<blockquote>
		+	Now — since the appearance of Capital — the materialist conception of history is no longer a hypothesis, but a scientifically proven proposition. And until we get some other attempt to give a scientific explanation of the functioning and development of some formation of society — formation of society, mind you, and not the way of life of some country or people, or even class, etc. — another attempt just as capable of introducing order into the “pertinent facts” as materialism is, that is just as capable of presenting a living picture of a definite formation, while giving it a strictly scientific explanation -until then the materialist conception of history will be a synonym for social science. Materialism is not ‘primarily a scientific conception of history’... but the only scientific conception of it.
−	Enabled by the total colonisation of the seed, control of the global food industry will be further centralised into the hands of transnational corporations. This is the technologies’ aim. This fusion of the agribusiness corporation and techno-science now culminates in the triumph of the logic of the code; in particular, the genetic-code of biotechnology, and the bar-code of consumerindustrial capitalism. The genetic-code and the bar-code are the means through which ever more aspects of contemporary life are being colonised, commodified and controlled. In this context, perhaps the fusion of these two codes may even lead to the imprinting ofbar codes directly onto the DNA of genetically engineered organisms. Scientists at the Novagene corporation have apparently already <em>devoted enormous time and money to write the company logo into a cell, the world’sirst living trademark.</em> (Cary Fowler et.al, “The Laws of Life;’ <em>Development Dialogue,</em> 1/2 1988, p. 55.)	+	-----
−	**** Further Reading	+	''Capital'' is Marx’s main work which presents Marxism as a social science by illuminating the inevitable processes of birth, development, and decay of capitalism; the replacement of capitalism with socialism; and the historical mission of the working class — the social force that can implement this replacement. Marx’s materialist conception of history and proletarian revolution continued to be developed in ''Critique of Gotha Programme'' (Marx, 1875). This book discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transitional period from capitalism to socialism, and phases of the communism building process, and several other premises. Together, these premises formed the scientific basis for Marx’s theoretical guidance for the future revolutionary activity of the proletariat.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<em>Colonising the Seed: Eenetic Engineering and Techno-Industrial Agriculture</em> by Gyorgy Scrinis. Available from AK Press see page 332 for contact details. If you read one thing on genetics, read this pamphlet.
−	<em>Biopoltics</em><em>: A Feminist and Ecological reader on Biotechnology,</em> ed. Vandana Shiva and Ingunn Moser, (Zed Books 1995) £14.95, 294 pages, Overly academic but nevertheless illuminating collection of essays on everything from genetics and the Third World to the flawed reductionism ofwestern science!	+	-----
−	“Farmageddon: Confronting Industrial Agriculture;’ <em>Do or #</em>ie #7, p40 An over view of the history of land struggle and the horrors of industrial agriculture.	+	==== Annotation 31 ====
−	“The Luddites War on Industry: A story of machine smashing and spies,” DoD #6, p. 65 Learn about some of our inspirational political ancestors.	+	When Marx refers to a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” he does ''not'' mean “dictatorship” to mean “totalitarian” or “authoritarian.” Rather, here “dictatorship” simply refers to a situation in which political power is held by the working class (which constitutes the vast majority of society). “Dictatorship,” here, refers to full control of the means of production and government. This stands in contrast to capitalism, which is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, in which capitalists (a small minority of society) have full control of the means of production and government.
−	<em>BioPiracy</em><em>: The Plunder ofNature and Knowledge</em> by Vandana Shiva, (Green Books 1998), 143 pages. £7.95 Without a doubt the best book written on genetics and power, even more powerful as it comes from a Third World author.	+	==== c. The Defending and Developing Stage of Marxism ====
−	<em>Genetic Engineering, Food and Our Environment</em> by Luke Anderson, (Green Books, 1999), 160 pages, £3.95 A newly published intro guide to the subject, though coming from a rather reformist perspective is definitely worth reading. Contains good scary facts.	+	''- Historical Background and the Need for Defending and Developing Marxism''
−	[16] <strong>Earth First! Journal,</strong> June/July 1987	+	In the late 19<sup>th</sup> century and early 20<sup>th</sup> century, capitalism developed into a new stage, called imperialism. The dominant and exploitative nature of capitalism became increasingly obvious. Contradictions in capitalist societies became increasingly serious — especially the class struggles between the proletariat and capitalists. In many colonised countries, the resistance against imperialism created a unity between national liberation and proletarian revolution, uniting people in colonised countries with the working class in colonial countries. The core of such revolutionary struggles at this time was in Russia. The Russian proletariat and working class under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party became the leader of the whole international revolutionary movement.
−	[17] Attacks on biotechnology in the Netherlands, <strong>Do or Die</strong> #1	+	During this time, both capitalist industry and natural sciences developed rapidly. Some natural scientists, especially physicists, lacked a grounding in materialist philosophical methodology and therefore fell into a viewpoint crisis. Idealist philosophers used this crisis to directly influence the perspective and activities of many revolutionary movements.
−	[18] Anti-Genetics Actions: Crop Circle Chaos and Vegetable Vandalism, <em>Do or Die</em> <em>#6,</em> p. 57.	+	-----
−	[19] <em>Genetix</em> <em>Update</em> June 1997, #1.	+	==== Annotation 32 ====
−	[20] The increased food production ofgreen revolution agriculture is yet another development fallacy. Study after study has shown that labor intensive small scale agriculture is far more efficient in producing food than capital intensive large scale agriculture. Nonindustrial farming techniques produce a large supply of food. consisting of many crops. Industrial-monoculture on the other hand produces a larger supply of one particular crop but a smaller amount of food in general. 1bis uniform production of crops lends itself to mass society and the non-local-and therefore formal—economy. Production from the perspective of capitalist economics is relevant only if it is commodified. In the starving of the millions we see the conflict between commodity production for the market and food production for the stomach.	+	==== Imperialism ====
−	[21] <em>Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity. Biotechnology and the Third World,</em> by Vandana Shiva, Third World Network, 1993, p.7.	+	Lenin defined imperialism as “the monopoly stage of capitalism,” listing its essential characteristics as “finance capital (serving) a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists” and “a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.”
−	[22] “The Social Anthropology ofEconomic Underdevelopment:’ by Sadie, <strong>].L,</strong> <em>Ihe Economic Journal,</em> No. 70. 1960, p. 302.	+	==== Subjective and Empiricist Idealism ====
−	[23] The <em>Violence of the Green Revolution</em> by Vandana Shiva, (Zed Books, 1991)	+	In the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, natural scientists were exploring various philosophical bases for scientific inquiry. One Austrian physicist, Ernst Mach, attempted to build a philosophy of natural science based on the works of German-Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius known as “Empirio-Criticism.” Empirio-Criticism, which also came to be known as Machism, has many parallels with the philosophy of George Berkeley. Berkeley (1685 — 1753) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose main philosophical achievement was the formulation of a doctrine which he called “immaterialism,” and which later came to be known as “Subjective Idealism.” This doctrine was summed up by Berkeley’s maxim: “''Esse est percipi''” — “To be is to be perceived.” Subjective Idealism holds that individuals can only directly perceive and know about physical objects through direct sense experience. Therefore, individuals are unable to obtain any real knowledge about abstract concepts such as “matter”.
−	[24] <em>The Whole Woman</em> by Germaine Greer, (Transworld, Doubleday, 1999), p.320	+	The philosophy of Empirio-Criticism, which was developed by Avenarius and Mach, also holds that the only reliable human knowledge we can hold comes from our sensations and experiences. Mach argued that the only source of knowledge is sense data and “experience,” but that we can’t develop any actual knowledge of the actual external world. In other words, Mach’s conception of empirio-criticism holds all knowledge as essentially subjective in nature, and limited to (and by) human sense experience. Mach’s development of Empirio-Criticism (which can also be referred to as ''empirical idealism'' or ''Machism'')'''' was therefore a continuation of Berkeley’s subjective idealism. Both Berkeley’s Immaterialism and Empirio-Criticism are considered to be ''subjective idealism'' because these philosophies deny that the external world exists — or otherwise assert that it is unknowable — and, as such, hold that all knowledge stems from experiences which are essentially ''subjective'' in nature.
−	[25] <em>Colonising the Seed</em> by Gyorgy Scrinis (FOE Australia)	+	Mach argued that reality can only be defined by our sensual experiences of reality, and that we can never concretely know anything about the objective external world due to the limitations of sense experience. This stands in direct contradiction to dialectical materialism, which holds that we can develop accurate knowledge of the material world through observation and practice. Whereas Berkeley developed subjective idealist theological arguments to defend the Christian faith, Mach employed subjective idealism for purely secular purposes as a basis for scientific inquiry.
−	[26] <em>Bio-Piracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge</em> by Vandana Shiva, (Green Books, 1998) pll	+	''Note: all quotations below come from Lenin’s book:'' Materialism and Empirio-Criticism''.''
−	[27] See the June 1999 report “Eucalyptus, Neoliheralisrn and NAFTA in Southeastern Mexico;’ as yet not published on paper but available on the web [[http://www.acerca.org/eucatyptus][http://www.acerca.org/eucatyptus]] _rnexico2.html [Seems to have moved as of 22/7/02: follow the “ACERCA” link from http://www. acerca.org/ then find the paper listed.]	+	Vladimir Lenin strongly opposed Empirio-Criticism and, by extension, Machism, which was becoming popular among communist revolutionists in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, because it pushed forward idealist principles which directly opposed the core tenets of dialectical materialism.
−	[28] “Of Power Affirmed to Men and of Safety Denied to Life:’ by Dr Tewolde Egziabher, <em>Third World Resurgence Magazine,</em> #106 Web: http:// www. twnside. org. sg/	+	Lenin believed that revolutionaries should be guided not by idealism, but by dialectical materialism. He believed that Empirio-Criticism and Machism consisted of mysticism which would mislead political revolutionaries.
−	[29] <em>Genetix</em> <em>Update</em> December/January 1999 #11	+	Lenin outlined Machian arguments against materialism:
−	<br>	+	<blockquote>
		+	The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable — ’things-in-themselves’ — matter ‘outside of experience’ and outside of our knowledge [see: Annotation 72, p. 68]. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of ‘experience’... When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the ‘unknown,’ nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge?
		+	</blockquote>
−	** My First Genetic Crop Trashing (from issue 8)	+	Lenin argued that this new form of Machist subjective idealism was, in fact, simply a rehashing of “old errors of idealism,” disguised and dressed up with new terminology. As such, Lenin simply reiterated the longstanding, bedrock dialectical materialist arguments against idealism [see Annotation 10, p. 10]. He was especially upset that contemporary Marxists of his era were being swayed by Machist Empirio-Criticism because he found it to be in direct conflict with dialectical materialism, writing: “(These) would-be Marxists… try in every way to assure their readers that Machism is compatible with the historical materialism of Marx and Engels.”
−	Actions on genetics test sites were increasing and our group thought it was high time we took part. I’d taken part in riskier actions before and ones involving more damage, but walking to the meet up point I still felt a pang of misapprehension. I met up with my friends and after waiting for someone who was (as usual) horrendously late, we set off.	+	Lenin goes on to describe the work of philosophers such as Franz Blei, who critiqued Marxism with Machist arguments, as “quasi-scientific tomfoolery decked out in the terminology of Avenarius.” He saw Empirio-Criticism as completely incompatible with communist revolution, since idealism had historically been used by the ruling class to deceive and control the lower classes. In particular, he believed that Machist idealism was being used by the capitalist class to preach bourgeois economics, writing that “the professors of economics are nothing but learned salesmen of the capitalist class.”
−	Bundled as we were, five in the back of a pretty small car. I worried about whether we’d get stopped for simply being overloaded. Then I worried about not having a mask (which I quickly improvised by ripping off my long johns below the knee). I worried when a cop car behind us started flashing its lights motioning for the car behind us. to pull over. Thankfully after about quarter of an hour on the road the little voice in my head saying ‘this is madness’ became less audible. If you’ve never been involved in risky direct action then you may have a view of those of us who do it as brave and courageous. The reality is everyone gets scared-you just learn to ignore the nagging voice in your head. Experience pushes up the threshold so that you find it easier and easier to silence that voice in riskier and riskier situations. In truth it’s only our fear that holds us back.	+	Lenin was deeply concerned that prominent Russian socialist philosophers were adopting Machist ideas and claiming them to be compatible with Marxism, writing:
−	After about half an hour in the car. yabbering with my mates, the feelings of misapprehension turned into ones of anticipation. The adrenalin started to rise.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The task of Marxists in both cases is to be able to master and adapt the achievements of these ‘salesmen’... and to be able to lop off their reactionary tendency, to pursue your own line and to combat the whole alignment of forces and classes hostile to us. And this is just what our Machians were unable to do, they slavishly follow the lead of the reactionary professorial philosophy.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Halfway to the target site we met up with another van full. We didn’t know everyone but we trusted those we did to bring only sensible accomplices. We still had a few hours of driving ahead of us so those of us in the back went to sleep. Awoken from our dreams with the news that we were fifteen minutes away from the target we gobbled some chocolate and psyched ourselves up.	+	Lenin further explains how Empirio-Criticism serves the interests of the capitalist class:
−	One of us had recced the site out beforehand so despite the rather vague grid references on the government register we knew exactly where to go. Our car drove past the field first to check it out. All seemed quiet. We parked up a nearby lane and our ragged looking army piled out. We stretched our legs and went to sit behind a hedge-waiting a while for our eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. Someone started nattering and was answered by the first of many shushes. After about ten minutes, we started trudging through the fields. Walking along the side of the hedgerow, we ducked down so that any cars passing on the (now deserted) country road would not see us. Anticipation, anticipation...	+	<blockquote>
		+	The empirio-criticists as a whole... claim to be non-partisan both in philosophy and in social science. They are neither for socialism nor for liberalism. They make no differentiation between the fundamental and irreconcilable trends of materialism and idealism in philosophy, but endeavor to rise above them. We have traced this tendency of Machism through a long series of problems of epistemology, and we ought not to be surprised when we encounter it in sociology.
		+	</blockquote>
−	A few fields and a lot ofshushes later, we arrived at the target-a test site of genetically engineered wheat. Silently we got to work trashing the crop. We all had different techniques--some edged forward kneeling on the ground and breaking armfulls of wheat-methodical but slow. Others simply trampled the crop, while some munched a path through the experiment with gardening shears. A house was in sight, but we were all dressed head to toe in black and it being late, we hoped the inhabitants were wrapped up in bed.	+	In the conclusion of the same text, Lenin explains why communists should reject Empirio-Criticism and Machism with four “standpoints,” summarized here:
−	As we had given ourselves half an hour to carry out our mission, we checked our watches regularly. After what seemed like twenty minutes I looked at my watch to find we had only been there for eight. It had rained all day so the wheat was wet and soon we were all soaking. We didn’t care-the adrenaline was rushing. Our faces were sombre and we were concentrating on the job at hand. Suddenly the halogen security lights on the house came on--shining with surprising force directly onto us. After a moment ofpanic we realised they’d probably just been set off by a fox or something and we got back to our work. Soon afterwards the lights blinked off. After quarter of an hour boredom was setting in-then someone realised that the crop would be destroyed quicker if we all lay down in a line and rolled over it. As we all rolled around bumping into each other the sober faces tuned to maniacal grins. Apart from swimming I challenge anyone to find a quicker way to get soaked than rolling around wet fields in the rain. It was truly great.	+	1. The theoretical foundations of Empirio-Criticism can’t withstand comparison with those of dialectical materialism. Empirio-Criticism differs little from older forms of idealism, and the tired old errors of idealism clash directly with Marxist dialectical materialism. As Lenin puts it: “only utter ignorance of the nature of philosophical materialism generally and of the nature of Marx’s and Engels’ dialectical method can lead one to speak of ‘combining’ empirio-criticism and Marxism.”
−	Time was running out and so we sped up our rolling. This induced lots of dizziness, maybe not the best thing to happen on an action you may need to run away from at any time. It was at this point that a car drove past. It’s headlights reached out towards us but thankfully we remained in the pitch dark. What a surreal sight would have greeted the driver if his headlights hadn’t been so dirty. As we came to the end of our “mission time” every minute seemed to go quicker. By now it was pouring and we were all pretty weary but a third of the crop was still intact. Breaking our own (sensible) rule we stayed ten minutes extra. The tension had really built by now and mixed with a bit of action hysteria every sound of a distant car brought worried expressions.	+	2. The philosophical foundations of Empirio-Criticism are flawed. “Both Mach and Avenarius started with Kant (see: Annotation 72, p. 68) and, leaving him, proceeded not towards materialism, but in the opposite direction, towards Hume and Berkeley (see: Annotation 10, p. 10)... The whole school of Mach and Avenarius is moving more and more definitely towards idealism.”
−	We finished off the crop and happy but tired from our manic work we trudged back to our vehicles. Walking bent over, once again a sudden rash of cars drove past-oblivious to our little tribe five feet away on the other side of the hedge-we hoped. Just as we got to the car someone realised they’d left a pair of shears-with their fingerprints on-in the middle of the field. (Always wear gloves!). After a moment of worry we realised another one of us had picked it up-phew!	+	3. Machism is little more than a relatively obscure trend which has not been adopted by most scientists; a “reactionary (and) transitory infatuation.” As Lenin puts it: “the vast majority of scientists, both generally and in this special branch of science... are invariably on the side of materialism.”
−	Driving off. our different vehicles in different directions, we remained tense until we were around ten miles away. Then the smiles and giggling started. Chaos erupted in the back as we took off our top layer of clothes-bought the previous day from a charity shop. We changed shoes chucking the cheap trainers we had bought for the occasion in a bin liner with the clothes and tools. We drove into a town and dumped it all in a skip. We stopped at a phonebox and rang up the van’s mobile to see if they were all right-they were. With no evidence of our crimes on us and entering a different county we all fell pretty pleased with ourselves. We got out the chocolate biscuits and put on some loud music. Too buzzing to sleep we \ chattered about future plans and took the piss out of each other for being too jumpy. In the early hour ofthe morning I was dropped off at home. A contented sleep followed.	+	4. Empirio-Criticism and Machism reflect the “tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society.” Idealism represents the interests of the ruling class in modern society, and is used to subjugate the majority of society. Idealist philosophy “stands fully armed, commands vast organizations and steadily continues to exercise influence on the masses, turning the slightest vacillation in philosophical thought to its own advantage.” In other words, idealism is used by the ruling class to manipulate our understanding of the world, as opposed to materialism (and especially dialectical materialism) which illuminates the true nature of reality which would lead to the liberation of the working class.
−	The sabotage was both successful and fun. It was one of the first actions our affinity group had done and therefore unsurprisingly we made a few mistakes, mistakes we’ve learnt from. Having done a few more site trashings, we’ve refined our techniques. The biggest mistake we made was leaving our vehicles in a nearby layby. Their number plates if spotted would have led the cops right to our doorsteps. In subsequent actions we’ve been dropped off by the drivers, meeting them again at a prearranged pickup point and time. For this reason we have not overstayed our “mission time’ again even if it has meant not entirely finishing the crop.	+	At this time, Marxism was widely disseminating throughout Russia, which challenged the social positions and benefits of capitalists. In reaction to Marxism, many ideological movements such as empiricism, utilitarianism, revisionism, etc. [see: Appendix F, p. 252] rose up and claimed to renew Marxism, while in fact they misrepresented and denied Marxism.
−	Trashing genetic test sites has really helped our group. New activists are now experienced and willing to go on and organise more actions. Activists who have been around for a while have also been re-empowered.	+	In this context, new achievements of natural science needed to be analyzed and summarized in order to continue the authentic development of Marxist viewpoints and methodologies. Theoretical principles to fight against the misrepresentation of Marxism needed to be developed in order to bring Marxism into the new era. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would fulfill this historical requirement with his theoretical developments.
−	From the looks of things more and more sites are being destroyed so there must be a lot of you feeling the same thing as us. Despite the mistakes we made the memory of My First... Genetic Test Trashing will always make me smile. Good luck to you all. especially those of you with night harvests!	+	''- The Role of Lenin in Defending and Developing Marxism.''
−	<br>	+	Lenin’s process of defending and developing Marxism can be separated into three periods: first, from 1893 to 1907; next, from 1907 to 1917; and finally from the success of the October socialist revolution in 1917 until Lenin’s death in 1924.
−	** Sabbing Shell: Office Occupation A-Go-Go! (from issue 8)	+	From 1893 to 1907, Lenin focused on fighting against populists<ref>Populist faction: A faction within the Russian revolution which upheld an idealist capitalist ideology with many representatives such as Mikhailovsky, Bakunin, and Plekhanov. Populists failed to recognise the important roles of the people, of the farmers and workers alliance, and of the proletariat. Instead, they completely centered the role of the individual in society. They considered the rural communes as the nucleus of “socialism.” They saw farmers under the leadership of intellectuals as the main force of the revolution. The populists advocated individual terrorism as the primary method of revolutionary struggle.</ref>. His book ''What the Friends of the People are and How They Fight Against the Social Democrats (1894)'' criticized the serious mistakes of this faction in regards to socio-historical issues and also exposed their scheme of distorting Marxism by erasing the boundaries between Marxism’s materialist dialectics and Hegel’s idealist dialectics. In the same book, Lenin also shared many thoughts about the important roles of theory, reality, and the relationship between the two.
−	On January 4, the first working day of 1999, the Managing Directors at Shell-Mex House in London returned from their Christmas vacations to find their offices barricaded. The fact that it was Ogoni Day[30] was not marked on their corporate calendars. Nor was there a reference in their smart new year diaries to the massacre of the Ijaw people in the occupied lands of Nigeria.	+	==== Annotation 33 ====
−	Other activists, Shell employees and the media scrambled for more information on the office occupation, which was being broadcast on a live website from inside the building. Meanwhile, in Nigeria the Ijaw people were busy ensuring that Shell’s image was not the only thing being damaged. Nigerian oil production has been cut by a up to a third thanks to occupations of oil refineries and machinery sabotage.[31] The resulting military crackdown had begun to filter through during the Christmas holidays. As an act of solidarity the action could not have been better timed. The Ijaw people had demanded the withdrawal of Shell from their lands by January 11, 1999. The Shell-sponsored Nigerian state response had been to execute eight youths and commit a series of atrocities including rape, torture, and looting in the first days of the new year. News of the occupation reached the Niger Delta via the offices of Environmental Rights Action in Port Harcourt. Perhaps it provided a few shreds of hope for the extraordinary people-Ijaw, Ogoni, or part of the grassroots Chikoko resistance movement-who have consistently put their lives and livelihoods on the line by calling for a complete end to multinational corporate oil production in their lands.	+	The ''populist'' philosophy was born in Russia in the 19<sup>th</sup> century with roots going back to the Narodnik agrarian socialist movement of the 1860s and 70s, composed of peasants who rose up in a failed campaign against the Czar. In the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, a new political movement emerged rooted in Narodnik ideas and a new party called the Socialist Revolutionary Party was formed. The political philosophy of this movement, now commonly translated into English as “populism,” focused on an agrarian peasant revolution led by intellectuals with the ambition of going directly from a feudal society to a socialist society built from rural communes. This movement overtly opposed Marxism and dialectical materialism and was based on subjective idealist utopianism (see Annotation 95, p. 94).
−	Back in the UK the occupation provided a taste of things to come for Shell and other multinational corporations, in what is turning out to be an interesting year. Cries of “Our resistance is as transnational as capital!” are already reverberating in multinational head offices. While refiling various bits of paper in one of the offices, activists found a document entitled ‘Global Scenarios’. This booklet predicted a rise in the globalisation of protest which would be difficult to police and control. Shell had already decided that its strategy would be to detach itself from its global corporate domination image and focus instead on its contribution to local communities [‘Glocalisation’, in wanky new business parlance]. European environmental activists got a special mention. Apparently Shell and other multinational organisations are at a loss to explain our ability to become so angry at their behaviour. Teir concern centred on our apparent ability to organise quickly and effectively via friendship links and the internet.	+	With the book ''What is to be Done?'' (1902), Lenin developed Marxist viewpoints on the methods for the proletariat to take power. He discussed economic, political, and ideological struggles. In particular, he emphasized the ideological formation process of the proletariat.
−	The occupation ofthe Shell-Mex offices in central London was looked upon as an outstanding success. While we would not wish to preach or claim that we have a monopoly on being organised, certain well known but too frequently ignored tactics used during the organisation of this action certainly helped. In a nutshell, a healthy cocktail of elaborate planning, a few splashes of chaos and a whole heap of luck ensured that bosses of multinational corporations in London were reminded on the first working day of 1999 that their days are numbered.	+	==== Annotation 34 ====
−	Good and bad things about the Shell Action: a personal view.	+	In ''What is to be Done?,'' Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously attain class consciousness and push for political revolution simply due to economic conflict with employers and spontaneous actions like demonstrations and workers’ strikes. He instead insists that a political party of dedicated revolutionaries is needed to educate workers in Marxist principles and to organize and push forward revolutionary activity. He also pushed back strongly against the ideas of what he called “economism,” as typified by the ideas of Eduard Bernstein, a German political theorist who rejected many of Marx’s theories.
−	**** The Good Things	+	Bernstein opposed a working class revolution and instead focused on reform and compromise. He believed that socialism could be achieved within the capitalist economy and the system of bourgeois democracy. Lenin argued that Bernstein and his economist philosophy was opportunistic, and accused economists of seeking positions within bourgeois democracies to further their own personal interests and to quell revolutionary tendencies. As Lenin explained in ''A Talk With Defenders of Economism:''
−	***** We Achieved Our Aims	+	<blockquote>
		+	The Economists limited the tasks of the working class to an economic struggle for higher wages and better working conditions, etc., asserting that the political struggle was the business of the liberal bourgeoisie. They denied the leading role of the party of the working class, considering that the party should merely observe the spontaneous process of the movement and register events. In their deference to spontaneity in the working-class movement, the Economists belittled the significance of revolutionary theory and class-consciousness, asserted that socialist ideology could emerge from the spontaneous movement, denied the need for a Marxist party to instill socialist consciousness into the working-class movement, and thereby cleared the way for bourgeois ideology. The Economists, who opposed the need to create a centralized working-class party, stood for the sporadic and amateurish character of individual circles. Economism threatened to divert the working class from the class revolutionary path and turn it into a political appendage of the bourgeoisie.
		+	</blockquote>
−	By the time the action happened, we were, as one of the participants put it, a group that knows exactly what it wants to achieve and why. Some of us had become involved in the action simply in response to the question We’re going to hit an oil company on January 4. Wanna come?The problem is that sometimes, as activists, we don’t get any further than this. We know who the enemy is-what more could we need to know? On the Shell action we thought and thought about why we were doing it. Principles and objectives were thrashed out early on. At the time the process seemed pretentious but in retrospect it pulled us together. A briefing document was prepared so that everyone was equipped with the same amount of knowledge. It goes without saying that a sense of passion and anger provided the motivation to act. What made the Shell action a success was that this passion was combined with pragmatic considerations of where to hit, how and why.	+	''The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Vietnam'', published by the National Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, defines opportunism, in this context, as “a system of political opinions with no direction, no clear path, no coherent viewpoint, leaning on whatever is beneficial for the opportunist in the short term.”
−	***** The Aims of the Action	+	Lenin critiques opportunist socialism — referring to it as a “critical” trend in socialism — in ''What is to be Done?:''
−	- To show real solidarity with people in the Niger Delta rebelling against Big Oil and its private security force (the Nigerian army). It has becoming increasingly easy for multinational corporations to isolate struggles and resistance. The strength of linking together undermines their ability to do this.	+	<blockquote>
		+	He who does not deliberately close his eyes cannot fail to see that the new “critical” trend in socialism is nothing more nor less than a new variety of opportunism. And if we judge people... by their actions and by what they actually advocate, it will be clear that “freedom of criticism” means “freedom for an opportunist trend in Social-Democracy, freedom to convert Social-Democracy into a democratic party of reform, freedom to introduce bourgeois ideas and bourgeois elements into socialism.”
−	Economic sabotage, in the form of disruption of Shell’s working day by direct action. An important factor highlighted at one of the planning meetings was that the Shell-Mex offices was where images were manufactured. The office occupation and banner drop made it harder for Shell to maintain their respectable facade for a day.	+	-----
−	- To spread dissent and lower the morale not only of Shell’s workforce, but ofother oil industry companies and the corporate world in general.	+	The first revolution of the Russian working class, from 1905 to 1907, failed. Lenin summarized the reality of this revolution in the book ''Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution'' (1905). In this book, Lenin explains that the capitalist class in Russia was actively engaged in its own revolution against Czarist feudalism. In this context of this ongoing bourgeois revolution, Lenin deeply developed Marxist concepts related to revolutionary methodologies, objective and subjective factors that will affect the working class revolution, the role of the people, the role of political parties etc.
		+	</blockquote>
−	- To carry out a symbolic occupation of the seat of power within Shell-Mex House.	+	==== Annotation 35 ====
−	In this glorious anti-corporation year the message was clear and simple. Shell also provided an ideal target. Too often we get side-tracked on single issues. Oil companies, with their hideous environmental and social record, combine a series of struggles not only in the developing world but in the UK too.	+	From 1905 to 1907, Russia was beset by political unrest and radical activity including workers’ strikes, military mutinies, and peasant uprisings. Russia had just suffered a humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese war which cost tens of thousands of Russian lives without any benefits to the Russian people. In addition, the economic and political systems of Czarist Russia placed a severe burden on industrial workers and peasant farmers.
−	***** It Was Well Planned	+	In response, the Russian proletariat rose up in various uprisings, demonstrations, and clashes against government forces, landlords, and factory owners. In the end, this revolutionary activity failed to overthrow the Czar’s government, and the Czar remained firmly in power until the communist revolution of 1917.
−	Meetings were held well in advance to ensure that the jobs that needed to be done were parcelled out. Tasks were taken on and separate working groups sorted out the internet site, the banner, the text of the leaflet to employees. Each job was valued, criticism was kept to a minimum and praise was dished out regularly. People split up into discussion groups to make decisions and affinity groups were sorted out.	+	Lenin wrote ''Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution'' in 1905 in
−	Logistics of how to get into the building, where the Managing Directors’ offices were, how to get there, how to barricade, what to wear, and how to negotiate were discussed well in advance. Too many office occupations simply fail because the main concern is how to get into the building. Once we’ve made it through the door all hell breaks loose. This time we knew where we were going and how to get there. As one group walked up the stairs, they had a long and detailed conversation about someone’s sister who was undergoing fertility treatment. The result was that we were calm and other office staff smiled as they overheard the conversation.	+	Geneva, Switzerland. In it, he argues forcefully against the political faction within the Russian socialist movement that came to be known as the “Mensheviks.” The Mensheviks, as well as the Bolsheviks (Lenin’s contemporary faction) emerged from a dispute within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which took place in 1903.
−	***** We Had the Joy of Watching Shell’s Of ces Get Totally Trashed	+	In the same text, Lenin argued that the Mensheviks misunderstood the forces that were driving revolutionary activity in Russia. While the Mensheviks believed that the situation in Russia would develop along similar lines to previous revolutionary activity in Western Europe, Lenin argued that Russia’s situation was unique and that Russian Marxists should therefore adopt different strategies and activities which reflected Russia’s unique circumstances and material conditions.
−	...not by us, but by the forces of evil themselves. Knowing how to barricade an office certainly helps. Filing cabinets, expensive desks, computers, and chairs were piled high in front of doors and inner walls. Shell employees and the police then decided to smash through the walls after failing in their exasperating attempts to negotiate with us (the usual Come out now, you’ve made your point!), and they caused thousands of pounds worth of damage. The situationist group occupying Malcolm Brinded’s office on the fourth floor arranged seats for a theatre-like view of the Tactical Support Group as they smashed their way in. Offers of tea and biscuits neatly arranged on the coffee table somewhat undermined the police’s orders of “On the floor! Now! Everybody!” The police were made to look like fools and we had a good laugh!	+	Specifically, the Mensheviks believed that the working class should ally with the bourgeoisie to overthrow the Czar’s feudalist regime, and then allow the bourgeoisie to build a fully functioning capitalist economy before workers should attempt their own revolution.
−	***** It Was Well-Timed	+	Lenin, on the other hand, presented a completely different analysis of class forces in Russia. He believed the bourgeoisie would seek a compromise with the Czar, as both feudal and bourgeois classes in Russia feared a proletarian revolution.
−	Firstly because ofwhat was happening in Nigeria. Activists’ access to the Web while in the building meant that we could get hold of information directly. News of the recent killings in the Niger Delta was still coming through, which had the effect of making us ever angrier. Doubts and fears about what we were doing were instantly dispelled as we continued to hear of the atrocities being carried out by the Nigerian Army. As one activist stated to a Shell bigwig: “you have blood on your hands:’ Secondly because January 1999 marked the handover from the outgoing head of Shell UK, Chris Fay, to the new man at the top, Malcolm Brinded-both their offices were occupied on January 4<sup>th</sup>, letting them know that whoever’s in charge we’re going to be watching them. Also, when Shell turned off the phones and electricity we were self-sufficient. Mobile phones meant that we could continue contact with each other and the outside world.	+	It’s important to note that Russia’s industrial workforce was very small at this time, and most Russians were peasant farmers. The Mensheviks believed Russian peasants would not be useful in a proletarian revolution, which is why they argued for allowing capitalism to be fully established in Russia before pushing for a working class revolution. They believed it was prudent to wait until the working class became larger and more dominant in Russia before attempting to overthrow capitalism. They believed that the peasant class would not be useful in any such revolution.
−	***** We Didn’t Go To Jail	+	In contrast, Lenin believed that the peasants and industrial workers would have to work together to have any hope of a successful revolution. He further argued that an uprising of armed peasants and workers, fighting side by side, would be necessary for overthrowing the Czar.
−	We thought we would. But we didn’t. Instead, we got a few hours in a police cell, followed by release with no charges, presumably because Shell did not want the embarrassment of a court case. All this had the added bonus of the police being cheesed off with Shell for using them as their private security force. Pissed off Shell, pissed off the pigs, and we’re free. Cool. The Website	+	From 1907 to 1917, there was a viewpoint crisis among many physicists. This strongly affected the birth of many idealist ideologies following Mach’s Positivism that attempted to negate Marxism [See: Annotation 32, p. 27]. Lenin summarized the achievements of natural science as well as historical events of the late 19<sup>th</sup> century and early 20<sup>th</sup> century in his book ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'' (1909). By giving the classical definitions of matter, proving the relationships between matter and consciousness and between social existence and social consciousness, and pointing out the basic rules of consciousness, etc., Lenin defended Marxism and carried it forward to a new level. Lenin clearly expressed his thoughts on the history, nature, and structure of Marxism in the book ''The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism'' (1913). He also talked about dialectics in ''Philosophical Notebooks'' (1914–1916) and expressed his thoughts about the proletarian dictatorship, the role of the Communist Party, and the path to socialism in his book ''The State and Revolution'' (1919).
−	One of the concerns around this innovation was that it might be a media gimmick. In the event, this concern was well-founded--the Guardian’s piece on the action focused entirely on the website, went on about other revolutionary groups who use the internet (my, how clever of us), turned it into an advert for Undercurrents, and didn’t mention the Ijaw once. Seriously.	+	The success of the October revolution in Russia in 1917 brought about a new era: the transitional period from capitalism to socialism on an international scale. This event presented new theoretical requirements that had not existed in the time of Marx and Engels’ time.
−	However, that says more about mainstream media than about the real reason why we went live on the internet with a site which closely resembled Shell’s own. We were both using our own media and subverting theirs. By the end of the week a large number of people had visited the site, including Shell in the UK the Netherlands, the US and Australia; Texaco in the UK and US: oil company Amerada Hess; the US military and US government and some DoDgy-looking Romanian finance house. The site received 10,230 hits on January 4<sup>th</sup> alone. The next day Shell threatened to injunct the web site which appears alongside its own when the word “Shell” is searched for.	+	In a series of works including: “''Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder'' (1920),
−	***** The Banner	+	''Once Again on the Trade Unions'', ''The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin'' (1921), ''The Tax in Kind'' (1921), etc., Lenin summarized the revolutionary practice of the people, continued defending Marxist dialectics, and uncompromisingly fought against eclecticism and sophistry.
−	The banner that appeared mid-morning between two lamp posts on Waterloo Bridge as crowds were beginning to gather around the Shell-Mex offices was excellent. It read <em>Shell: Filthy, Thieving Murderers-It’s Time To Go:</em> our message, our thoughts, completely unadulterated by the media circus. Discussions that we had after the action focused on how this had more power than any press article. Imagine if there had been a series of banner drops around London to coincide with the occupation!	+	==== Annotation 36 ====
−	***** The Leaflet	+	In ''Anti-Dühring'', Engels identifies the historical missions of the working class as:
−	A group of five individuals went back the next day and leafleted employees. Shell employees were dying to know what had happened and why. Workers had to file through police lines, collecting flyers as they went. After, suggestions were made about writing up a version of the action and distributing this to workers with an invitation to leak further information to us.	+	1. Becoming the ruling class by establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.
−	Such follow-ups limit the ability of companies to whitewash actions and lower morale generally.	+	2. Seizing the means of production from the ruling class to end class society.
−	***** The Affinity Groups Worked	+	''Eclecticism'' is an incoherent approach to philosophical inquiry which attempts to draw from various different theories, frameworks, and ideas to attempt to understand a subject, applying different theories in different situations without any consistency in analysis and thought. Eclectic arguments are typically composed of various pieces of evidence that are cherry picked and pieced together to form a perspective that lacks clarity. By definition, because they draw from different systems of thought without seeking a clear and cohesive understanding of the totality of the subject and its internal and external relations and its development over time, eclectic arguments run counter to the ''comprehensive'' and ''historical'' viewpoints [see p. 116]. Eclecticism bears superficial resemblance to dialectical materialism in that it attempts to consider a subject from many different perspectives, and analyzes relationships pertaining to a subject, but the major flaw of eclecticism is a lack of clear and coherent systems and principles, which leads to a chaotic viewpoint and an inability to grasp the true nature of the subject at hand.
−	Of course, it’s easy to be all luvvie and self-congratulatory after a good action, but there are good reasons why the group dynamics worked surprisingly well:	+	''Sophistry'' is the use of falsehoods and misleading arguments, usually with the intention of deception, and with a tendency of presenting non-critical aspects of a subject matter as critical, to serve a particular agenda. The word comes from the Sophists, a group of professional teachers in Ancient Greece, who were criticized by Socrates (in Plato’s dialogues) for being shrewd and deceptive rhetoricians. This kind of bad faith argument has no place in materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics must, instead, be rooted in a true and accurate understanding of the subject, material conditions, and reality in general.
−	We didn’t agree on everything, but through some fairly heavy and long discussions before the action (actually, even before we got down to the planning), we thrashed out what our aims were and whittled them down to some fairly hardcore objectives.	+	Simultaneously, Lenin also developed his Marxist viewpoint of the factors deciding the victory of a social regime, about class, about the two basic missions of the proletariat, about the strategies and tactics of proletarian parties in new historical conditions, about the transitional period, and about the plans of building socialism following the New Economic Policy (NEP), etc.
−	There were differing levels of experience within the group, but everyone worked on respecting each other. There were disagreements but we had the tools to deal with these and the ability to finally reach a consensus. We also didn’t break the agreements that we’d made with each other about how we would conduct the negotiations.	+	-----
−	--------	+	==== Annotation 37 ====
−	**Make Your Own Millennium Bug!**	+	The early 1920s were a period of great internal conflict in revolutionary Russia, with various figures and factions wanting to take the revolution in different directions. As such, Lenin wrote extensively on the direction he believed the revolution should be carried forth to ensure lasting victory against both feudalism and capitalism. He believed that the October, 1917 revolution represented the complete defeat of the Czar, however he believed the proletarian victory over the bourgeoisie would take more time. Russia was a poor, agrarian society. The vast majority of Russians under the Czar were poor peasants. Industry — and thus, the proletariat — was highly undeveloped compared to Western Europe. According to Lenin, a full and lasting proletarian victory over the bourgeoisie could only be won after the means of production were properly developed. In ''Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution'', Lenin wrote:
−	<em>There’s a lot ofjob satisfaction in de-activating silicon-based life forms on an office occupation, so we thought we’d offer you the beneft of years ofour experience at crashing computers. Ile three basic techniques thatfollow apply to Windows 95 or 98, and probably to Windows NT too. Start by opening the Windows Explorer and check how many drives there are-if there are more than four, the computer is probably attached to the office network.</em>	+	<blockquote>
		+	This first victory [the October, 1917 revolution] is not yet the final victory, and it was achieved by our October Revolution at the price of incredible difficulties and hardships... We have made the start... The important thing is that the ice has been broken; the road is open, the way has been shown.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<strong><em>Re-formatting:</em></strong> <em>While this may cause the least damage of the three methods, if there is no network attachment it may be your best option.</em> To <em>format the disk, simply select ‘Start menu-shutdown-restart computer in MSDOS mode’. When you get the C:\>Prompt, type ‘format c:/u’.</em>	+	So, Lenin knew that the victory over the Czar and feudalism was only a partial victory, and that more work needed to be done to defeat the bourgeoisie entirely. He believed the key to this victory over the capitalist class would be economic development, since Russia was still a largely agrarian society with very little industrial or economic development compared to Western Europe:
−	<strong><em>Repartitioning:</em></strong> If you’re going to re-format a hard disk, you might as well repartition it too-this makes it harder to recover data than just re-formatting it. Stick a floppy disk in when you get to the C:\>Prompt, and type ‘sys a:’, followed by ‘copy c:\windows\command\fdisk. a:’. If no file is found, type ‘copy c:\dos\fdisk. *a:’ andformat as described above. Reboot the PC with the floppy disk in the machine and type fdisk’. Delete all rartitions, reboot again, type f’disk’ again and finally create two or three new partitions.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Our last, but most important and most difficult task, the one we have done least about, is economic development, the laying of economic foundations for the new, socialist edifice on the site of the demolished feudal edifice and the semi-demolished capitalist edifice.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<em>Deleting_files</em> <em>on the hard disk is pretty straightforward. Highlight those you want to delete-select lots by holding the ‘Shift’ or ‘control’ key down as you click. Hold down the ‘Shift’ key before you press the ‘delete’ key, and don’t release it until the ‘confirm file delete’ box appears. It is also worth emptying the recycle bin after deleting-click on the bin and choose ‘empty recycle bin’ from the file’ menu. Installing a Disk cleanup utility (www. ex-ecpc.com/~nbd/CleanUp.html) after deleting should make it almost impossible to recover the data, is much more effective than simply formatting the disk. and the utility is also small enough tofit conveniently onto a floppy disk.</em>	+	Lenin’s plan for rapidly developing the means of production was his New Economic Policy, or the NEP. The New Economic Policy was proposed to be a temporary economic system that would allow a market economy and capitalism to exist within Russia, alongside state-owned business ventures, all firmly under the control of the working-class-dominated state. As Lenin explains in ''Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution'':
−	To <em>deletefiles</em> <em>from a network drive follow the same procedure as above, but when you’ve deleted something, go to ‘Start menu-Run and type ‘command’. Change to the drive that you have deleted from by typing the drive letter and a colon (eg. ‘u:’), then type ‘cd!’,followed by ‘purge*/a’. On most networks this should ensure that files are completely deleted.</em>	+	<blockquote>
		+	At this very moment we are, by our New Economic Policy, correcting a number of our mistakes. We are learning how to continue erecting the socialist edifice in a small-peasant country.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<em>(From a more extensive article at:</em> [[http://www.eco-action.org/efau/][<em>http://www.eco-action.org/efau/</em>]]<em>).</em>	+	He continues later in the text:
−	-------	+	<blockquote>
		+	The proletarian state must become a cautious, assiduous and shrewd “businessman,” a punctilious wholesale merchant — otherwise it will never succeed in putting this small-peasant country economically on its feet. Under existing conditions, living as we are side by side with the capitalist (for the time being capitalist) West, there is no other way of progressing to communism. A wholesale merchant seems to be an economic type as remote from communism as heaven from earth. But that is one of the contradictions which, in actual life, lead from a small-peasant economy via state capitalism to socialism. Personal incentive will step up production; we must increase production first and foremost and at all costs. Wholesale trade economically unites millions of small peasants: it gives them a personal incentive, links them up and leads them to the next step, namely, to various forms of association and alliance in the process of production itself. We have already started the necessary changes in our economic policy and already have some successes to our credit; true, they are small and partial, but nonetheless they are successes. In this new field of “tuition” we are already finishing our preparatory class. By persistent and assiduous study, by making practical experience the test of every step we take, by not fearing to alter over and over again what we have already begun, by correcting our mistakes and most carefully analyzing their significance, we shall pass to the higher classes. We shall go through the whole “course,” although the present state of world economics and world politics has made that course much longer and much more difficult than we would have liked. No matter at what cost, no matter how severe the hardships of the transition period may be — despite disaster, famine and ruin — we shall not flinch; we shall triumphantly carry our cause to its goal.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The actual affinity groups were very small (four, four, and five), which made us focused and enabled individuals to work very closely with one another in equality.	+	With these great works dedicated to the three component parts of Marxism [see Annotation 42, p. 38], the name Vladimir Ilyich Lenin became an important part of Marxism. It marked a comprehensive developing step from Marxism to Marxism-Leninism.
−	We were ‘experts’ on the Niger Delta situation	+	==== d. Marxism-Leninism and the Reality of the International Revolutionary Movement ====
−	Thanks to the briefing document it was difficult for Shell to sidetrack us. When the outgoing Managing Director Chris Fay wheeled out a Nigerian employee who assured us from behind the barricades that he knew we were doing this for him, activists promptly replied and demanded to discuss the current situation in the Delta with the Ijaw. The Nigerian employee disappeared as quickly as he had arrived.	+	The birth of Marxism greatly affected both the international worker movements and communist movements. The revolution in March 1871 in France could be considered as a great experiment of Marxism in the real world. For the first time in human history, a new kind of state — the dictatorship of the proletariat state (Paris Commune) was established.
−	**** Things That Were Not So Good	+	-----
−	***** We Wanted To Be In There For 24 Hours	+	==== Annotation 38 ====
−	Unforlunately the combined force of 30 Tactical Support Unit bods in riot gear smashing through the walls and our lack of ingenuity (D-Locking ourselves to a wheelie chair in one instance) meant that we were dragged out once the office had been dismantled. Planning An Action Over The Winter Holidays.	+	The Paris Commune was an important but short-lived revolutionary victory of the working class which saw a revolutionary socialist government controlling Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871.
−	The resulting disruption (no one was where they usually were) on top of a few hangovers and transport nightmares caused plenty of preparation stress which should have been unnecessary. Not least of these was a few of us arriving really late to the planning meeting the day before the action. But then perhaps it’s a cop-out to blame it all on Christmas-maybe the truth is that deep inside every sorted activist there’s a lunchout dying to escape. [Damn right! (See ya...)-Ed.]	+	During the brief existence of the Paris Commune, many important policies were set forth, including a separation of church and state, abolishment of rent, an end to child labor, and the right of employees to take over any business which had been abandoned by its owner. Unfortunately, the Paris Commune was brutally toppled by the French army, which killed between 6,000 and 7,000 revolutionaries in battle and by execution. The events of the Paris Commune heavily influenced many revolutionary thinkers and leaders, including Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and was referenced frequently in their works.
−	***** Lack of a collective decision about the presence of the alternative media.	+	In August 1903, the very first Marxist proletariat party was established — the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. It was a true Marxist party that led the revolution in Russia in 1905. In October 1917, the victory of the socialist revolution of the proletariat in Russia opened a new era for human history.
−	Those who invited Undercurrents assumed that it would be okay with everyone else, while those who would have preferred them not to be involved had not articulated the good reasons why not. This was then compounded by the issue being discussed the night before the action with the Undercurrents person already part of the group. Kinda hard to start a big political discussion at that point.	+	In 1919, the Communist International* was held; in 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic was established. It marked the alliance of the proletariat of many countries. With the power of this alliance, the fight against Fascism not only protected the achievements of the proletariat’s revolution, but also spread socialism beyond the borders of Russia. Following the lead of the Soviet Union, a community of socialist countries was built, with revolutions leading to the establishment of socialism in the following countries [and years of establishment]: Mongolia [1921], Vietnam [1945], the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [1945], Yugoslavia [1945], Albania [1946], Romania [1947], Czechoslovakia [1948], East Germany [1949], China [1949], Hungary [1949], Poland [1956], and Cuba [1959].
−	***** Total Lack Of Security after the Action Happened	+	-----
−	Most activists appear to have rather large egos! Enough said!	+	==== Annotation 39 ====
−	***** Liaison with Nigerian Groups in London	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> The First International, also known as the International Workingmen’s Association, was founded in London and lasted from 1864–1876. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were key figures in the foundation and operation of this organization, which sought better conditions and the establishment of rights for workers.
−	<quote>	+	The Second International was founded in Paris in 1889 to continue the work of the First International. It fell apart in 1916 because the members from different nations could not maintain solidarity through the outbreak of World War I.
−	...prior to the action was a bit farcical. But then it’s not realistic to expect an action-level relationship after two rushed phone calls to a group or person not familiar with the direct action ethic. Fortunately, such relationships are beginning to be fostered since the occupation took place.
−	</quote>
−	***** Post-Action Idea: Reallocating the Press Role	+	The Third International, also known as the Communist International (or the ComIntern for short), was founded in Moscow in 1919 (though many nations didn’t join until later in the 1920s). Its goals were to overthrow capitalism, build socialism, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. It was dissolved in 1943 in the midst of the German invasion of Russia in World War II.
−	Given the emphasis above on direct communication it might be thought that the action did not bother with conventional press. Wrong-we had a press officer, put out a press release, and also had the participation of an Undercurrents activist. (One participant lost all their hardcore credibility instantly when, upon learning of the arrival of TV crews outside, they danced across the room saying <em>The cameras are here! The cameras are here!)</em>	+	These great historical events strongly enhanced the revolutionary movement of the working class all around the whole world. The people awakened and encouraged the liberation resistance of many colonised countries. The guiding role of Marxism-Leninism brought many great results for a world of peace, independence, democracy, and social progress.
−	Some interesting suggestions were made after the action about an alternative role for a press worker or Publicity and Communications Person as they could now be known, such as: • Ringing around EF! and other similar groups to let them know about the action and asking for support-support possibly taking the form of a phone or fax blockade, bogus press calls, leafleting and shutting down local Shell garages.	+	However, because of many internal and external factors, in the late 1980s, the socialist alliance faced a crisis and fell into a recession period. Even though the socialist system fell into crisis and was weakened, the socialist ideology still survived internationally. The determination of successfully building socialism was still very strong in many countries and the desire to follow the socialist path still spread widely in South America.
−	- Faxing other oil companies to let them know what’s happening and informing them that they are equally a target.	+	Nowadays, the main feature of our modern society is fast and varied change in many social aspects caused by technology and scientific revolution. But, no matter how quickly and diversely our society changes, the nature of the capitalist production method never changes. So, in order to protect the socialist achievements earned by the flesh and blood of many previous generations; and in order to have a tremendous development step in the career of liberating human beings, it is very urgent to protect, inherit and develop Marxism-Leninism and also innovate the work of building socialism in both theory and practice.
−	- Contacting groups in other countries struggling against the same company.	+	The Communist Party of Vietnam declared: “Nowadays, capitalism still has potential for development, but in nature, it’s still an unjust, exploitative, and oppressive regime. The basic and inherent contradictions of capitalism, especially the contradictions between the increasing socialization of the production force and the capitalist private ownership regime, will never be solved and will even become increasingly serious. The feature of the current period of our modern society is: countries with different social regimes and different development levels co-exist, co-operate, struggle and compete fiercely for the interests of their own nations. The struggles for peace, independence, democracy, development, and social progress of many countries will still have to cope with hardship and challenges but we will achieve new progress. ''According to the principles of historical development, human beings will almost certainly go forward to socialism.”''<ref>''Delegate Document of the 11<sup>th</sup> National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam.''</ref>
−	- Directly contacting the group you’re trying to support in your solidarity action.	+	-----
−	There was a feeling amongst individuals that far too much time was spent discussing the conventional press. It is well to remember that the deep fundamental change we want will never be achieved by relying on the media industry, which after all is as much part of global capitalism as Shell.	+	==== Annotation 40 ====
−	**** Conclusion	+	Historical materialism is the application of dialectical materialist philosophy and materialist dialectical methodology to the analysis of human history, society, and development. The principles of historical materialism, as developed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, indicate that human society is moving towards socialism and will almost certainly — in time — develop into socialism, and then proceed towards a stateless, classless form of society (communism). These principles of historical materialism were initially formulated and discussed in several books by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, including:
−	Clearly a one-off office occupation in solidarity with indigenous groups in the Niger Delta is not going to change the world nor bring a company like Shell to its knees.	+	''•'' ''The German Ideology'', by Marx and Engels
−	However as a symbolic act of solidarity it made its point, made the participants feel positive and with any luck gave some hope to those fighting in the Niger Delta. In the game of cricket that has developed with the state (our tactics are well known and the police know how to deal with them), the ‘ Shell action proved that if we spend the time and energy in preparation and organisation then office occupations and other such actions still have a role to play. As we were occupying Shell-Mex House, news filtered through ofthe Reclaim The Streets occupation of London Underground’s head offices in support of the striking tube workers, and of 60 people up trees and down tunnels in a Crystal Palace eviction alert: Triple Whammy!!!!!!	+	''•'' ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'', by Marx and Engels
−	Update: 21/4/99 The Shell Centre-their other London headquarters--splashed with red and green paint as Mark Moody-Stuart (annual salary £1.4m) launched Shell’s second annual report, called People, <em>Planet, ProfitAn</em> Act <em>of Commitment.</em> This was an act taken in solidarity with the people of the Niger Delta and to make clear that despite the greenwash, there is blood on their hands and there can never be a green or ethical oil industry.	+	''•'' ''Karl Marx'', by Lenin
−	We Must Devastate the Hard Drives Where the Wealthy Live!	+	The Communist Party of Vietnam has also declared:
−	[30] Ogoni Day has been celebrated since 1993 to mark the anniversary of the day the Ogoni people launched their struggle against Shell and forced the oil company off their lands.	+	“In the opinion of the Vietnam Communist Party, using Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought as the foundation for our ideology, the guideline for our actions is an important developmental step in cognition and logical thinking<ref>''Delegate document of the 9<sup>th</sup> national congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam.''</ref>. Achievements that the Vietnamese people have gained in the war to gain our independence, in peace, and in the renovation era, are all rooted in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought. Therefore, we have to ‘creatively apply and develop Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought in the Party’s activities. We have to regularly summarise reality, complement and develop theory, and soundly solve the problems of our society.’”<ref>''Delegate document of the 10<sup>th</sup> national congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam.''</ref>
−	[31] Nigeria produces 2 million barrels a day of oil-up to a third <em>of output was halted at one point last year by piracy and sabotage by activists demanding a fairer share of revenues for the region’s impoverished inhabitants. -The Financial Times</em> 09/06/99.	+	-----
−	<br>	+	==== Annotation 41 ====
−	** Take a Sad Song and Make it Better? (from issue 8)	+	Ho Chi Minh Thought refers to a system of ideas developed by Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese communists which relate to the application of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and methodology to the specific material conditions of Vietnam during the revolutionary period.
−	**** Ecological Restoration in the UK	+	There is no universal road map for applying the principles of Marxism-Leninism. How the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism should be applied will vary widely from one time and place to another. This is why Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese communists had to develop Ho Chi Minh Thought: so that scientific socialism could be developed within the unique context of Vietnam’s particular historical development and material conditions.
−	<quote>	+	It is the duty of every revolutionary to study Marxism-Leninism as well as specific applied forms of Marxism-Leninism developed by revolutionaries for their own specific times and places, such as: Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Mao Zedong (China), Fidel Castro and Che Guevera (Cuba), etc. However, it must be recognized that the ideas, strategies, methodologies, and philosophies developed in such particular circumstances can’t be applied in exactly the same way in other times and places, such as our own contemporary material conditions.
−	I see what is possible when we stand our ground, our common <em>ground.</em> <em>I</em> <em>seeforests</em> <em>and grasslands filled with masses of flowers and the native birds and wildlife that had long ago disappearedfrom this part of the planet. I see what can be done from the barest beginnings and under the most impossible conditians, with hardly any means or resources. Not by calculating, or waiting for the opportune moment, orthe big money, orfor a conference to confirm what must be done. I see what can be done by the power of simply doing it. And as I turn toward the starkly contrasting landscape behind me, I see all that is yet to be done.[32]</em>
−	</quote>
−	Ecological restoration is one of the most compelling tasks that <em>we</em> face, if we are to patch up the battered cradle of life that sustains us, as well as renewing our own bruised mental ecologies. Successfully removing the sources of the ongoing destruction will simply bring us round to our first full realisation of the scale of capitalism’s ecologically fractured legacy. The challenge will be to steer ourselves to a gentle landing: not only the unglamorous work of clean-up, but the pre-eminent adventure of remaking an idyll from the wreckage. This unfolding process holds out the promise of a new accord: alienation banished, reconciled with ourselves and the world around us.	+	''The Renovation Era'' refers to the period of time in Vietnam from the 1980s until the early 2000s during which the Đổi Mới (renovation) policies were implemented. These policies restructured the Vietnamese economy to end the previous subsidizing model (which was defined by state ownership of the entire economy). The goals of the Renovation Era were to open Vietnam economically and politically and to normalize relations with the rest of the world. The Đổi Mới policies were generally successful and paved the way to ''the'' ''Path to Socialism Era'' which Vietnam exists in today. The goals of the Path to Socialism Era are to develop Vietnam into a modern, developed country with a strong economy and wealthy people, which will allow us to transition towards the lower stage of communism, which Lenin called “socialism.”
−	One obvious question is: why restore at all? Nature is resilient, with an immense capacity for recovery, so long as natural processes are given sufficient space and time to operate freely. (Even in a hostile environment, life still crowds irrepressibly up through the cracks.) History is littered with stories of the detritus of past empires redeemed by the encroaching vegetation. Bill McKibben describes “an explosion of green” in the northeastern US after farming was largely abandoned in the 19<sup>th</sup> century-in New York State alone <em>forest cover... continued to grow by more than a million acres a decade through 1980.[33]</em> Closer to home, thousands of acres of woodland sprang up on derelict <em>land in south-east Essex in the 1930s and 1940s.[34]</em>	+	And, finally: “We have to be consistent with Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought. We have to creatively apply and develop the ideology correspondingly with the reality in Vietnam. We have to firmly aim for national independence and socialism.”
−	Enabling natural colonisation and regeneration, rather than the artifice of planting, is widely favoured. This will <em>allow the most appropriate species for each location and site to establish and in the long term will be most likely to develop into healthy, biologically diverse woodland ecosystems.[35]</em> Conversely, the (understandable) <em>human desire to see instant results or at least appreciable results within our lifetime[36]</em> risks contriving inferior, quick-fix ersatz ecosystems-or “quite areas”:[37]	+	== II. Objects, Purposes, and Requirements for Studying the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism ==
−	The desire to leave nature to its own regenerative devices is not just sound ecological sense, but a reasonable reaction to the depths of conservation’s mania for management. After the Great Storm of 1987, one organisation blithely proclaimed that <em>Trees are atgreat dangerfrom nature,</em> and another that <em>unless... positive encouragement [is] given to owners to restore these woods... they will revert to scrub and never recover.[38]</em> Preposterous statements like <em>it is important that woodland is effectively managed to ensure its survival[39]</em> seem to spring more from an insecure need to feel wanted and indispensable-and thus engaging in frenetic busywork to obtain some kind of therapy through landscape. Conservationists often appear to suffer from a paternalist philosophy of Spare the Saw and Spoil the Tree.	+	=== 1. Objects and Purposes of Study ===
−	Others have a valid objection to any energies devoted to restoration, given the continuing onslaught against the vestiges of the natural that still remain-comparing it to <em>repaint[ing] the kitchen cabinets when the house is on fire.[40]</em> Amongst practitioners however, there is a widespread assumption that restoration is never a substitute for preservation-rather that the two should complement one another, particularly in a country as devoid of healthy ecosystems as ours.[41] Developers, on the other hand, routinely abuse the concept of restoration-and the related translocation[42]-of habitats, as a pretext smoothing the way for further destruction. Talk of planning gain, end use, mitigation, and exchange land is predicated on the spurious assumption that we can build a better habitat, as good as new-as if they were just so many interchangeable parts on a Fordist assembly line. This kind of habitat engineering is reminiscent of the environment industry’s end of pipe approach to pollution, as applied to physical landscapes rather than toxic chemicals: rejecting any inconvenient changes to their processes, instead concentrating on lucrative cures to treat the problems that invariably arise. (Don’t forget that the Department of Transport [now DETR] is,-, laughably, the nation’s biggest planter of trees.) Possibly one of the most repellent examples of this is English Nature (the government’s abysmal wildlife watchdog) allowing peat-stripping scum Levington to take what it can from the fantastic Thorne and Hatfield Moors SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), only to so-called restore them in about 25 years’ time.[43]	+	The objects of study of this book, ''The Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism,'' are the fundamental viewpoints of Marxism-Leninism in its three component parts.
−	However, the fact that nature can and does bounce back unaided should not be cause for complacency. Recovery-particularly back to its original condition-is not inevitable; nature can roll with most but not all of the punches we throw: <em>‘Forests precede civilisation, it is said, ‘deserts follow’...The [Roman] Empire’s North African breadbasket, where 600 cities onceflourished, is now a desert, as are theforests that were the breeding grounds of Hannibal’s elephants.[44]</em> There is a place for human agency in the work of restoration.	+	-----
−	*** Why Restore?	+	==== Annotation 42 ====
−	<quote>	+	Remember that a viewpoint is the starting point of analysis which determines the direction of thinking and the perspective from which problems are considered. Also remember that Marxism-Leninism has three component parts:
−	Whether or not a devastated area recovers depends on a number of conditions. Most.fundamentally, the site needs its original topsoil... if the top horizon [of the soil] is altered--by adding chemicals, ploughing or planting crops--a different kindofvegetation emerges when the site is abandoned... But if neitherfertilisers nor crops are introduced, even heavily used areas can return to the condition pfnearby undisturbed areas.[45]
−	</quote>
−	Unfortunately for us, since at least 1945, virtually all of lowland Britain (and much of the uplands) has been subjected to substantial soil ‘modification’. It may seem odd to define this as a problem, but huge tracts of our countryside are suffering from ‘eutrophication’, or excessive fertility-either as a result of direct application of chemicals, or indirectly felt on adjoining land through ‘drift’ of the chemicals.	+	'''1. The Philosophy of Marxism:'''
−	<quote>	+	Including Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism
−	The intensity of the seed rain (from a once rich countryside) is much diminished, and though the seed bank in the soil may be long-livedfor some species, decades of herbicide and inorganicfertiliser use have transformed soils to make a return to the previous norm difficult without a helping hand.[46]
−	</quote>
−	While natural regeneration may, in time, make good some <em>of</em> the losses, without any remedial intervention-including drastic measures such as actually stripping the topsoil[47]--we might find ourselves locked into an intractable spiral of decline. An example of this ‘defertilising’ work-perhaps better described as rehabilitation than restoration-is the ‘biomanipulation’ practised on the Norfolk Broads to reduce accumulated phosphate pollution and the accompanying algal blooms.[48] Such intervention has been described as a kickstart approach[49]--striving not to prejudice its future direction, but setting nature back down on the launch pad, to go its own way.	+	'''2. The Political Economy of Marxism:'''
−	Looked at more broadly, our restoration efforts may at least help by <em>undoing the constraints our industrialism have placed upon [nature</em>}.[50] For instance, while <em>artificially straightened rivers tend to ‘recover’ naturally,[51]</em> this can’t always be relied upon; extensive work was carried out on the Afon Ogwen (which <em>resembled a land drainage channel, not the Welsh river it once was)</em> in Snowdonia in 1998, because <em>the natural... regime of the river had not shown any indication of being able to repair itselffrom the degradations.</em>[52] Rivers and their floodplains have fared as badly as the soil; there is a powerful case for reversing our ubiquitous drainage works, and reinstating coherent hydrological regimes, in <em>what must have been a gloriously wet natural landscapil[53]—as</em> long as we can keep the ague (malaria) at bay this time!	+	A system of knowledge and laws that define the production process and commodity exchange in human society.
−	The scanty (semi) natural areas that we do still enjoy are in anything but robust shape-ill-equipped to absorb the threats that future change and upheaval might bring. Much of conservation is dedicated to shoring up these wobbly, fragmented habitat islands-atomised, overcrowded life rafts, whose species are being inexorably worn down by ‘biogeographical’ attrition.[54] As the National Trust’s Rob Jarman explains, <em>each unit of habitat</em> 108 <em>lost [outside] makes the [ecological] communities on the Trust’s properties that much more vulnerable to external change.[55]</em> An injury to all is an injury to one-for example, other reservoir populations are less available to bail out local extinctions.[56] Probably the most critical challenge confronting the fragments in their already weakened and susceptible state is that of climate change[57]-or more correctly, the accelerated volatility of the Broken Thermostat effect.[58] As climate change brings the crisis of fragmentation to a head, now more than ever the agenda not only should be, but must be one of <em>restoration, enhancement and expansion... rather than just trying to harm [the environment] le</em><em>s</em><em>s</em><em>[59]</em>-joining up the dots to allow for migration in the face of rapidly changing conditions. It is not just the physical movement of individuals and species that is at stake here, but opportunities for the exchange of unique, locally adapted genetic material, which have been so long constrained; basic genetic diversity is the ultimate insurance policy against unpredictable change.[60]	+	'''3. Scientific Socialism'''
−	In a country-like Britain-plagued with an advanced state of ecological decomposition, what might be termed <em>emergency ward</em> or <em>basket case</em> conservation also becomes very important--this is, perhaps literally, clutching at straws. It can cover particular regions-eg. the Caledonian pine forest ofthe Highlands, or the native woodlands of Orkney and Shetland-where the habitat is at such a perilously low ebb that it is losing its grip on the cliff edge, and may not currently be able to help itself. It can also encompass country-wide habitat types (and indeed species) whose near or total absence leaves a jarring gap in the continuum of the landscape. To pull a few names out of the hat, the following might fall into this category: the natural transitions of woodland up to and beyond the treeline, flooded or “carr” forest, lowland valley mires,[61] and so on.	+	The system of thought pertaining to the establishment of the communist social economy form.
−	One must not overlook the inward and social dimensions of ecological restoration-they may even be its most crucial attributes. It is at the least a statement of intent. Without getting too carried away with a sense of our collective power, restoration is ripe with the liberating, even alchemical, promise of transformation-finding its material expression in our immediate surroundings. It offers an exhilarating taste of that most dangerous commodity: hope, and a way out; there’s everything to play for, all bets are off. As ever, when people are truly able to make their world-even the tiniest little scrap-the grinding malaise of destruction and loss begins to dissipate, prospects for creation and renewal rebound, and imprisoning notions of ‘human nature’ go out the window. By getting to grips-down and dirty-with their common patch, so rarely permitted except under the auspices of government and industry, the barren and hostile can become convivial space. We can begin to explore the links between conservation and conversation, between re-creation and recreation. As the Mattole Restoration Council came to realise in Northern California, through engaging with the fundamental processes of a particular place, we might discover the appropriate models for our own activities and organisation.[62] The restorer restored; the doing (praxis) is as important as the done (it’s never done). Tara Garnett writes of the ‘emboldening’ effect of, in this case, urban farming: it can <em>stimulate a sense of common ownership and, in doing so, spur a sense of community into existence. Ihis community may then move on to further collective action[63].</em>.. During the riots in Benwell, Newcastle in the early 1990s, the <em>sense of ownership of the Park [which they had created] by the local community became very apparent... Many houses and the local pub were burnt, but the Nature Park-right in the centre-was untouched.[64]</em>	+	These objects of study stand as the viewpoints — the starting points of analysis — of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and the three component parts of which it’s composed.
−	There is also an argument for efforts to maintain the rich, characteristic cultural-or vernacular-landscapes, whose <em>patterns in particular places were created locally by the daily work of ordinary people.[65]</em> While requiring potentially problematic management, they developed, at least in part, to satisfy local subsistence needs from local means, in the absence of today’s national and global economy. In view of the pressing need to wean ourselves off petrochemical dependence, and to avoid stomping our ecological footprints across the globe[66], habitats like orchards, reedbeds, perhaps coppice, etc., could have a lot to teach us. In conjunction with more recent techniques such as permaculture, they could rejuvenate our sorely depleted skills base, and thus our own resilience and autonomy.[67]	+	-----
−	*** Conservation and the Control Complex	+	In the scope of '''Marxist-Leninist Philosophy''' [the first component part of Marxism-Leninism], these objects of study are:
−	Conservation has been described as <em>a unique enterprise in which industry expands as the resource diminishes, and there is no product.[68]</em> In this respect it is a quintessentially post-modern industry, and conservationists are masters of meta-work (work about work)-ceaselessly networking and strategising within the charmed circle of accredited bodies-and while <em>ever more effort has gone into conservation of nature ... ever greater loss and destruction have</em> occurred.[69] When considered in historical context, the actual effect of most restoration efforts is only to replace the lost with the new-imparting no net gain. At best, depending on the vagaries of the economy, it is a holding operation[_:_]managing the crisis, knife-edge stabilising of the rate of decline. By virtue of being ‘non-politicai’ realists, conservationists are of course anything but. Refusing to wrestle with the explosive questions of power relations, land ownership and distribution, they are forced to rely upon the fruitless Voluntary Principle, and its unholy trinity of incentives, policy, and guidance-the beseeching, red-carpet treatment for any landowner gracious enough to change their ways.	+	* Dialectical Materialism — the fundamental and most universal worldview and methodologies which form the theoretical core of a scientific worldview*. [See Part 1, p. 44]
		+	* Materialist Dialectics — the science of development, of common relationships, and of the most common rules of motion and development of nature, society and human thought. [See Chapter 2, p. 98]
		+	* Historical Materialism — the application and development of Materialism and Dialectics in studying social aspects. [Historical materialism is the topic of Part 2 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.]
−	W.M. Adams argues that it is <em>an anathema to many conservationists to consider letting nature go,</em> and that <em>caution about the abandonment of land is partly about the loss of control. Much of our conservation is based very precisely on the idea of controf.[70]</em> He likens it to <em>gardening on a vast s</em>c<em>ale</em>[71]-“lawn order.” At times, conservationists seem far more forgiving of economic growth than scrub growth-laissez faire for capitalism, zero tolerance for wild nature. (Maybe it is the only thing over which they can exercise control in this society.) Wildness must be quarantined[72] or taken into protective custody-kept in its place and made literally managable. The ferocity with which they fall upon scrub raises suspicions that it is a displacement activity-anything to divert attention from the uncomfortable realisation that you can’t restore your way out of a social relationship. Habitat loss has come primarily through social factors, and can only truly be made good by social transformation— not by swimming against the tide with more acute and technically proficient land management programmes.	+	-----
−	Conservationists are incorrigible planners-partly through necessity, as fragmentation demands “an ever more detailed and complex knowledge of the remaining [wildlife] interest”[73]-and its corollary, an ever more specialist and thus inaccessible conservation, reduced to a technical question. Continually sharpening management tools is not a bad thing in itself: but does seem part of the quest for the holy grail of the “perfect plan’, balancing every conceivable need, at which point everything will fall neatly into place. At worst, it smacks of the hubris of the technocrat, inhabiting an ordered, predictable and empirical universe-the tyranny of the measurable-and a reluctance to admit to uncertainty and doubt-lhere are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your management plan. Not being armed with a plan is to go naked and exposed into the wood.	+	==== Annotation 43 ====
−	Market values permeate the conservationist worldview:	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> Remember that ''Scientific'' in Marxism-Leninism refers to a systematic pursuit of knowledge, research, theory, and understanding [see Annotation 1, p. 1]. Note, also, that ''Worldview'' refers to the whole of an individual’s or society’s opinions and conceptions about the world, about humans ourselves, and about life and the position of human beings in the world. This is discussed in more detail on page 44.
−	<quote>	+	Thus, a ''scientific worldview'' is a worldview that is expressed by a systematic pursuit of knowledge of definitions and categories that generally and correctly reflect the relationships of things, phenomena, and processes in the objective material world, including relationships between humans, as well as relationships between humans and the world.
−	From economics have come words and ideas such as ‘produc<em>ers’, ‘consumers’ and ‘efficiency’, and using them ecologists have interpreted ecological change as working like a modem industrial consumer society... [leaving] conservation with a strong legacy of an instrumentalist view of nature... [and] nature as system.</em>[74]
−	</quote>
−	But it’s not quite this straightforward. Traditional ways of ‘working’ the land did at least enable some natural value to endure intact. Intensification on the other hand has meant the disappearance of even the commonplace[75], and a situation in which those areas which are ‘zoned’ for wildlife-like reserves— often have <em>no natural environment left in between them.[76]</em> The archaic and unproductive <em>1930s agriculture that conservationists practice</em>[77] has become increasingly alienated from the rest of the countryside. Hence there is a tension in conservation. On the one hand there is an impetus to detach land from (at least) the modern, intensive form of economic circulation. Thus there is an implied critique of economic practices; both because, on a practical level, conservationists are only too well aware of the way in which these practices thwart and frustrate their best efforts, and philosophically, because of a sense of nature as being, at heart, unassimilable: other than and perhaps diametrically opposed to the economy. On the other hand, conservationists pursue a strategy of safeguarding and justifying ecological value by assigning economic value (the tail wagging the dog?): pricing, or enclosing, everything that moves (and some that doesn’t)--running around with a butterfly net and a bar coder.[78] From this perspective the problem is not the market itself, but those things that hang in valueless limbo outside it. They must be reincorporated, if only by being enclosed within a policy framework.	+	In the scope of '''Marxist-Leninist Political Economics''' [the second component part of Marxism-Leninism], the objects of study are:
−	As well as being self-serving squealing for more snout space in the government trough, the following quote illustrates this well:	+	* The theory of value and the theory of surplus value.
		+	* Economic theory about monopolist capitalism and state monopolist capitalism.
		+	* General economic rules about capitalist production methods, from the stage of formation, to the stage of development, to the stage of perishing, which will be followed by the birth of a new production method: the communist production method.
−	Neglect is a real issue, because the heathlands play no real role in any economic system and are simply not cared for. What is needed is better funding of conservation schemes which will enable owners and managers to produce the environmental goods that society now demands.[79]	+	-----
−	**** Farming for Wildlife, Farming of Wildlife	+	==== Annotation 44 ====
−	The crisis now afflicting farming is the spectre haunting conservation. Their banal big idea, in response to the looming problems triggered by overproduction, liberalisation of world trade under the GATT Treaty and so on, is to reform the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Apparently our basic structures are sound, it is just the details that need tweaking or fine-tuning--this is a job for the policy wonks! (Some are even still resorting to an ‘unfettered’ free market-as opposed to the distortions of the CAP-as the answer to all our woes.[80]) CAP subsidies will be redirected towards ‘agri-environment’ grants, the panacea which will help to reposition farming, and enable farmers to ‘diversify’. Agriculture’s new identity will primarily be as purveyor of intangible luxury environmental goods, such as delivering biodiversity targets-farming for wildlife-the food surplus presenting us with a tremendous window of opportunity for redesigning the countryside for other purposes:[81] in theory, making good those habitat losses. As the Council for National Parks say, the main product is a wild and sustainable landscape, not stock or timber.[82] (Whether any of this is ‘sustainable’ is open to question-it-hinges upon the continuation of surplus, and a highly sophisticated economy that is able to forego economic return on land and set it aside.)	+	Marxist-Leninist political economics is the topic of Part 3 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.
−	According to Raoul Vaneigem,	+	In the scope of '''Scientific Socialism''' [the third component part of Marxism-Leninism], the objects of study are:
−	<quote>	+	* The historical mission of the working class and the progression of a socialist revolution.
−	so <em>brutal has the exploitation of nature been that its resources-the very nature of its profitability-are threatened with exhaustion; there is thus no choice but to develop ecological markets in order to get the economy out of its present morass.[83]</em>	+	* Matters related to the future formation and development periods of the communist socio-economic form.
−	</quote>	+	* Guidelines for the working class in implementing our historical mission.
−	Central to this is the task of devising virtuous products, along with <em>virtuous</em> jobs like conservation-zealous self-alienationworking long hours for low pay, for the cause.	+	''The purposes'' of studying ''The Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism'' are:'''' to master Marxist-Leninist viewpoints of science, revolution, and humanism*; to thoroughly understand the most important theoretical foundation of Ho Chi Minh Thought, the revolutionary path, and the ideological foundation of the Vietnam Communist Party. Based on that basis, we can build a scientific worldview and methodology and a revolutionary worldview; build our trust in our revolutionary ideals; creatively apply them in our cognitive and practical activities and in practicing and cultivating morality to meet the requirements of Vietnamese people in the cause of building a socialist Vietnam.
−	Farming for wildlife readily becomes farming ofwildlife: its discrete commodification (and heaven help those uncharismatic species that are left out in the cold, that can’t be commodified[84]). For example, Landlife are administering the <em>Market Gardening with Indigenous Species</em> project, under which <em>local .farmers will be planting wildflower crops</em> [sic] <em>thanks to a grantfrom the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund.[85]</em> (By the way, their National Wildflower Centre’s mission is to promote <em>the creation of new habitats that have economic, environmental, and ecological benefits for the nation.[86])</em>	+	-----
−	Many nature reserves already seem akin to beauty factories, governed by aesthetic productivism. What are sometimes known as Physical Outputs are maximised; one manager, discussing the merits of non-intervention, bemoaned the fact that <em>funders [of reserves]... want to see action and colour—</em> hence coppicing, which <em>bring[s] about a short burst of bluebells and butterflies</em>[87]--all fluttering, all flowering habitats, practically on performance-related pay. Nature is <em>consumed in special places... and made to yield predictable products,</em> becoming <em>one among a range of commodities that can be purchased by the wealthy to enhance their leisure time.[88]</em>	+	==== Annotation 45 ====
−	Reserve cramming (like town cramming)-or high unit productivity-is partly a consequence of fragmentation. For instance, <em>woods often act as reserves for the whole landscape, especially in intensively arable regions. Afony... should be regarded as grassland reserves, as well as woodland reserves.[89]</em> They must work flat out to be all things to all taxa-to please all of the species all of the lime. But the more efort that <em>is put in to make</em> <em>it rich, thefurther it departs from naturalness.[90]</em>	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> The humanism of Marxism-Leninism differs greatly from the humanism of Feuerbach discussed in Annotation 12, p. 13. Marxist-Leninist humanism concerns itself with the liberation of all humans. As Marx and Engels wrote in ''The Communist Manifesto:'' “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
−	With restoration there is also the temerity of zoning for wildlife-striding grandly about the landscape, prescribing Here a hay meadow, there a salt marsh (but not There), or This is a wood for butterflies, that one is for lichens (a kind of comparative advantage-one hopes with trickle-down-effect benefits for other species).	+	=== 2. Some Basic Requirements of the Studying Method ===
−	Reading RSPB[91] reports I am mesmerised by the dance of the graphs. Conservation is reminiscent of an EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) stock-taking system, monitoring a steady stream of population data-eg. such-and-such has just made it into the Red Data Book (the species emergency list)-their stock is low-Darren, we need more garganey. The habitat-creation trucks then get rolling for this just-in-time production, bringing new waders on line to match identified need.	+	There are some basic requirements for studying the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism:
−	Restoration and management for wildlife might actually have detrimental indirect effects on the surrounding area. ‘Rewetting’ of depleted wetland reserves may exacerbate the serious problem of water abstraction: it can cause the already degraded neighbouring countryside to become even drier and less hospitable, by creaming off what little surplus water there is.[92] These refugia might therefore consolidate habitat fragmentation, monopolising the wildlife, acting like a vortex which strips its hinterland of biodiversity, or like an out of town supermarket, emptying value out of its vicinity. For example, Pulborough Brooks in Sussex’s Arnn valley (see profile in the Roundup) now harbours up to <em>75% of the total Arun valley wintering birds</em> every January.[93] While <em>bird counts on the reserve are soaring... counts for the area are stillfalling disastrously.[94]</em> By concentrating the “resource” like this, the very visible spectacular displays at Pulborough may be masking the decline rather than reversing it. (Although it seems likely that in the long run the whole of the Arnn valley may actually benefit from Pulborough.)	+	First, Marxist-Leninist theses were conceptualized under many different circumstances in order to solve different problems, so the expressions of thought of Marxist-Leninists can vary. Therefore, students studying the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism must correctly understand its spirit and essence and avoid theoretical purism and dogmatism.
−	In an era when the dollar is being encoded into DNA-the final, molecular, frontier of enclosure-the question, what is nature?, is no longer just a matter for dry philosophical discourse.[95] David Helton reported on the 1992 meeting of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), where the doctrine of sustainable utilisation-and by extension, the question of nature’s Identity-was up for grabs. Like “farming for wildlife;’ it involves a species being taken out of the economics of nature and brought into the economics of man[96] [sic] and is heralded as some <em>kind of solution to the problems of human growth, both numeric and economic, without that growth having to stop.</em> The rhino is <em>the one large mammal in the world whose existence is conspicuously threatened by international trade,</em> and has therefore been purposefully excluded from the economic sphere by CITES. And yet, the proposal in 1992 was still to actually “harvest” horn from live rhinos and <em>put [it]... on the legalised, reopened market,</em> with the result that <em>rhinos would be paying their own way in the world.</em>	+	-----
−	Thankfully the proposal was rejected, but as Helton observes, the future foreshadowed by this approach	+	==== Annotation 46 ====
−	<quote>	+	Marxism-Leninism should be understood as an applied science, and application of this science will vary based on material conditions. As Engels wrote in a personal letter in 1887, remarking on the socialist movement in the USA: “Our theory is a theory of evolution, not a dogma to be learned by heart and to be repeated mechanically. The less it is drilled into the Americans from outside and the more they test it with their own experience... the deeper will it pass into their flesh and blood.”
−	<em>doesn’t look like one worth living in, for people or rhinos either. The reason we save the rhino... is because it’s... living wild on its own terms and deserving to. Ifwe have to use emergency measures now... it’s only so that some time in the future rhinos can return to their proper existence, in a world made sane again, with humanity under its own control and for the other species a normal wild life, not as livestock in a global barnyard-not with the rhino as some kind of tonicproducing cow, an ongoing business. It would almost be better of extinct.</em>
−	</quote>
−	It’s a clearcut choice, albeit one that has been foisted upon us: to	+	As an example, Lenin tailored his actions and ideas specifically to suit the material conditions of Russia under the Czar and in the early revolutionary period. Russia’s material conditions were somewhat unique during the time of Lenin’s revolutionary activity, since Russia was an agrarian monarchy with a large peasant population and a relatively undeveloped industrial sector. As such, Lenin had to develop strategies, tactics, and ideas which suited those specific material conditions, such as determining that the industrial working class and agricultural peasants should work together. As Lenin explained in ''The Proletariat and the Peasantry'':
−	<quote>	+	<blockquote>
−	<em>either stop growing or go for a desperate long shot and put absolutely everything under human management.[97]</em>	+	Thus the red banner of the class-conscious workers means, first, that we support with all our might, the peasants’ struggle for full freedom and all the land; secondly, it means that we do not stop at this, but go on further. We are waging, besides the struggle for freedom and land, a fight for socialism.
−	</quote>	+	</blockquote>
−	**** Disturbing Climaxes	+	Obviously, this statement would not be specifically applicable to a society with highly developed industry and virtually no rural peasants (such as, for instance, the modern-day USA), just as Lenin’s remarks about the Czar would not be specifically applicable to any society that does not have an institution of monarchy.
−	Natural succession is the “process of change in plant communities over time towards a natural climax, for example from grassland to scrub and then woodland.”[98] Conservationists have been fighting the ‘wars of succession’ since at least the 1960s, in an attempt to retain those wildlife values that flow from continuity of traditional management features such as heathland. (It should be pointed out here that it can be very difficult to precisely define the traditional practices that conservation harks back to.[99] Also, that arresting ecosystem change in this way has been pointedly compared to the futility of trying to hold back a flood with a raincoat.[100]) However, conservationists are now beginning to stage what might be called a managed retreat (a la Dunkirk?) from universally regulating such natural processes--perhaps learning to let go.	+	As another example, take the works of Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh Thought is defined by the Communist Party of Vietnam as “a complete system of thought about the fundamental issues of the Vietnam revolution.” In other words, Ho Chi Minh Thought is a specific application of the principles of Marxism-Leninism to the material conditions of Vietnam.
−	The orthodox model of nature emphasised predictability and continuity. Change did figure in the equation, but only as part of an orderly and inexorable progression, with each stage in the succession obligingly laying down the conditions for the next, until it achieved a stable equilibrium-a relatively steady-state (revealing term![101]) climax vegetation like woodland[102] This is of course at least in part a cultural construct reflecting the political climate out of which it sprang as much as it does nature. The theory was strongly rooted in Darwinian ideas of biological evolution, and spin-off ideas of social ‘progressr,’[103] redolent of a time of Eternal Verities, a naturally ordained and fixed social order and a linear and cumulative conception ofhistory. Humanity was perched in its rightful place atop the evolutionary tree-the Crown of Creation, or climax species-with the imputed hierarchy in nature serving to endorse the ranking of classes and races within humanity itself.	+	One unique aspect of Vietnam’s revolution which Ho Chi Minh focused on was colonization. As a colonized country, Ho Chi Minh realized that Vietnam had unique challenges and circumstances that would need to be properly addressed through revolutionary struggle. Another unique aspect of Vietnam’s material conditions was the fact that the colonial administration of Vietnam changed hands throughout the revolution: from France, to Japan, back to France, then to the USA. Ho Chi Minh was able to dynamically and creatively apply Marxism-Leninism to these shifting material conditions. For instance, in ''Founding of the Indochinese Communist Party,'' written in 1930, Ho Chi Minh explains some of the unique problems faced by the colonized people of Indochina (modern day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and proposes solutions specific to these unique material conditions:
−	However, we now find that	+	<blockquote>
		+	On the one hand, they (the French) use the feudalists and comprador bourgeoisie (of Vietnam) to oppress and exploit our people. On the other, they terrorize, arrest, jail, deport, and kill a great number of Vietnamese revolutionaries. If the French imperialists think that they can suppress the Vietnamese revolution by means of terror, they are grossly mistaken. For one thing, the Vietnamese revolution is not isolated but enjoys the assistance of the world proletariat in general and that of the French working class in particular. Secondly, it is precisely at the very time when the French imperialists are frenziedly carrying out terrorist acts that the Vietnamese Communists, formerly working separately, have united into a single party, the Indochinese Communist Party, to lead the revolutionary struggle of our entire people.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<quote>	+	During this period, the nations of Indochina were predominantly agricultural, prompting Ho Chi Minh to suggest in the same text that it would be necessary “to establish a worker-peasant-soldier government” and “to confiscate all the plantations and property belonging to the imperialists and the Vietnamese reactionary bourgeoisie and distribute them to the poor peasants.” Obviously all of these considerations are specific to the material conditions of Indochina under French colonial rule in 1930.
−	<em>climax, like the horizon, may be a useful concept, but it... can never be reached... when ecologists examined climax vegetation their studies were upset by disturbance. It soon became clear that disturbance was not an exception, a temporary upset, but a central part of the ecology of a habitat.</em>[104]
−	</quote>
−	Disturbance, from grazing, windblow, fire, flooding, erosion and a host of other factors, is perpetually disrupting <em>the progression towards theoretical climax,[105]</em> resetting the clock back. In a sense, there is no beginning and there is no end-it’s all process-an open-ended question. It has been pointed out that people respond to events rather than processes-particularly in spectacular society, where social phenomena are prised loose from their context and reproduced as disembodied and mystifying events. (Conversely, ecology is, if nothing else, the story of context-the antithesis of spectacular amnesia.) Looked at in this light, nature reserves-managed as frozen moments in ecological time-represent soundbite or event habitats.	+	By 1939, the situation was changing rapidly. Ho Chi Minh was operating from China, which was being invaded by fascist Japan. He knew that it was only a matter of time before the Japanese imperial army would come to threaten Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. As such, Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to the Indochinese Communist Party outlining recommendations, strategies, and goals pertaining to the precipitating material conditions. At that time, France had not yet been invaded by Germany, but Ho Chi Minh was very aware of the looming threat of fascism both in Europe and in Asia. He realized that rising up in revolutionary civil war against the French colonial administration would give fascist Japan the opportunity to quickly conquer all of Indochina, which is why he made the following recommendations in a letter to the Communist Party of Indochina in 1939:
−	This new-found taste for disturbance and uncertainty has led ecologists away from <em>nature as a well-behaved deterministic system</em>[106] towards <em>instability, disorder, a shifting world of upheaval and change that has no direction to it</em>[107] (Mao’s permanent revolution, perhaps?!) Since <em>autonomy is [now] viewed as a fundamental characteristic of ‘real’ nature, it tends to operate as more of a game than a controllable system.</em>[108] This suggests possibilities of a more gratifying, sensuous character to humanity’s interactions with nature-as a player within the game, not an engineering outsider-whose role might be to <em>conserve the capacity of nature to re-create itself.</em>[109]	+	<blockquote>
		+	Our party should not strive for demands which are too high, such as total independence, or establishing a house of representatives. If we do that, we will fall into the trap of fascist Japan. For now, we should only ask for democracy, freedom to organize, freedom to hold meetings, freedom of speech, and for the release of political prisoners. We should also fight for our party to be organized and to operate legally.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Disturbance is the engine of ecological variety in the landscape, preventing those species that would dominate under (e.g.) a closed canopy climax having it all their own way. There is what might be called a dialectic between structure (such as the canopy) and disturbance here:	+	Once France fell to Germany in 1940, Indochina was immediately handed over to Japanese colonial rule. The Japanese army was brutal in its occupation of Vietnam, and the French colonial administrators surrendered entirely to the Japanese empire and helped the Japanese to administer all of Indochina. Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam in January of 1941 and participated directly with the resistance struggle against Japan until 1945, when the situation once again changed dramatically due to the Japanese military’s surrender to allied forces and withdrawal from Vietnam. He immediately took advantage of this situation and held a successful revolution against both the Japanese and French administrators. In the Declaration of Independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh wrote:
−	<quote>	+	<blockquote>
−	<em>Too little disturbance leads to dominance of a few strong competitors, while a heavy disturbance regime [as in most of Britain] is tolerated only by a few hardy species.[110]</em>	+	After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the homeland.
−	</quote>	+	</blockquote>
−	Our best bet could be the supremely difficult practice of faithfully emulating the effects of natural disturbance-the commdrum of planning for chance. We’ve already been unknowingly engaged in a form of this for centuries:	+	As France began to make their intentions clear that they would be resuming their colonialist claim to Indochina, Ho Chi Minh began preparing the country for a new chapter in revolutionary struggle. In his 1946 letter to the people of Vietnam, entitled ''A Nationwide Call for Resistance'', Ho Chi Minh wrote:
−	<quote>	+	<blockquote>
−	<em>As the original wildwood became cleared andfragmented, disturbance from management gradually took over from natural disturbance... which can not operate on the small scale.</em> However, this supplanting of natural processes by management represents a coarsening and simplification-only <em>some of the attributes of natural disturbance [have] continued[111]--the effects of our management have been too uniform, and some crucial components have fallen by the wayside.</em>	+	We call everyone, man and woman, old and young, from every ethnic minority, from every religion, to stand up and fight to save our country. If you have guns, use guns. If you have swords, use swords. If you have nothing, use sticks. Everyone must stand up and fight.
−	</quote>	+	</blockquote>
−	**** What Are We Missing?	+	As these historical developments illustrate, Ho Chi Minh was able to creatively and dynamically apply the principles of Marxism-Leninism to suit the shifting material conditions of Vietnam, just as Lenin had to creatively and dynamically apply these principles to the emerging situation in Russia in the early 20<sup>th</sup> century. So is the task of every student of Marxism-Leninism: to learn to apply these principles creatively and dynamically to the material conditions at hand.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	<em>The ecological effect of most woodland management is to artificially remove the late mature and decaying elements of the regeneration cycle,[112]</em> including the dead wood <em>which accounts for 50% of the timber in oldforest,[113]</em> and is <em>one of the two or three greatest resources of the woodland habitat.[114]</em>
−	Without this, we miss out on the <em>healthy fungal</em> <em>flora [which] contributes significantly to the ecological health of the wood[115],</em> by breaking the dead wood down and making its nutrients available to other plants. As Rambler and Speight point out, a whopping <em>70% of the energy flow through a terrestrial ecosystem is through the decomposer community,[116]</em> including fungi. In our woodlands, this flow is blocked.	+	Second, the birth and development of Marixst-Leninist theses is a process. In that process, all Marixst-Leninist theses have strong relationships with each other. They complement and support each other. Thus, students studying each Marxist-Leninist thesis need to put it in proper relation and context with other theses found within each different component part of Marxism-Leninism in order to understand the unity in diversity [see: Annotation 107, p. 110], the consistency of every thesis in particular, and the whole of Marxism-Leninism in general.
−	</quote>
−	Another vital element is one that many of us only saw for the first time after the 1987 storm: the “pit and mound” topography formed by the upended root plates of toppled trees, which can cover <em>14–50% of the forestfloor in some unmanaged American woods.[117]</em> Ordinarily, rain leaches nutrients away from an undisturbed soil’s surface. The upturned trees instead turn and mix the soil, bringing nutrients back up to the surface and encouraging plant germination-acting as <em>“an added degree of soil rejuvenation.</em>	+	Third, an important goal of studying the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism is to understand clearly the most important theoretical basis of Ho Chi Minh Thought, of the Vietnam Communist Party and its revolutionary path. Therefore, we must attach Marxist-Leninist theses to Vietnam’s revolutionary practice and the world’s practice in order to see the creative application of Marxism-Leninism that President Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnam Communist Party implemented in each period of history.
−	According to Tony Whitbread, <em>woodland soils would not naturally form, layer on layer, without... [such] mixing.[118]</em> Deprived of such intrinsic features as these, who can now imagine the ensuing richness and vibrancy that our countryside lacks?	+	Fourth, we must study the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism to meet the requirements for a new Vietnamese people in a new era. So, the process of studying is also the process of self-educating and practicing to improve ourselves step-by-step in both individual and social life.
−	Finally, there are the ecotones-twilight zones where a palette of habitats melt seamlessly into and out of one another, in a kind of hybridising. <em>Many species rely on [this] interface between one habitat and another,[119]</em> but not only do roads, intensive farming, etc, dismember this delicate habitat continuum, fluid	+	Fifth, Marxism-Leninism is not a closed and immutable theoretical system. On the contrary, it is a theoretical system that continuously develops based on the development of reality. Therefore, the process of studying Marxism-Leninism is also a process of reflection: summarizing and reviewing your own practical experiences and sharing what you’ve learned from these experiences in order to contribute to the scientific and humanist development of Marxism-Leninism. In addition, when studying the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism, we need to consider these principles in the proper context of the history of the ideological development of humanity. Such context is important because Marxism-Leninism is quintessentially<ref>See Annotation 6, p. 8.</ref> the product of that history.
−	<quote>	+	These requirements have strong relationships with each other. They imbue the studying process with the quintessence of Marxism-Leninism. And more importantly, they help students apply that quintessence into cognitive and practical activities.
−	<em>change is often prevented by management</em>[120] as well. For example, <em>there may be a sharp boundary between a wood and a hay meadow. Scrub invasion, left unchecked, would soon overwhelm the meadow, but the regime that resists it eliminates the ecotone instead. Such harsh zonation is often the only way to preserve habitat fragments, but leaves no room for natural processes to operate.</em>[121]
−	</quote>
−	It is difficult to manage for ecotones[122], emblematic as they are of a dynamic, supple landscape of flux-which leaves us with a straight choice between zoning and process. Zoning causes the pattern of habitats to ossify, in a kind of habitat reductionism.	+	==== Part I: The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism — Leninism ====
−	Work, and other ‘socially polluting’ alienated activities, can be seen as a ‘habitat fragmentation’ of the time of our lives; with ‘management’ leading to zoning-artificial disjunctions-and eliminating soft-edged ecotones. As Andre Gorz says, “The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices:[123] If you don’t believe me, think about how your lunch hour feels (assuming you are still allowed one), or the slow, ominous countdown of a Sunday night.	+	''Worldview'' refers to the whole of an individual’s or society’s opinions and conceptions about the world, about humans ourselves, and about life and the position of human beings in that world. Our worldview directs and orientates our life, including our cognitive and practical activities, as well as our self-awareness. Our worldview defines our ideals, our value system, and our lifestyle. So, a proper and scientific worldview serves as a foundation to establish a constructive approach to life. One of the basic criteria to evaluate the growth and maturity of an individual or a whole society is the degree to which worldview has been developed.
−	**** The National Forest and the Community Forests-Managing People and Nature	+	''Methodology'' is a system of reasoning: the ideas and rules that guide humans to research, build, select, and apply the most suitable methods in both perception and practice. Methodologies can range from very specific to broadly general, with ''philosophical methodology'' being the most general scope of methodology.
−	The National Forest, the twelve Community Forests, and the activities of the Groundwork organisation are all examples of a restoration which is as much concerned with the management of people as it is of nature. The National Forest, which aims to create a <em>multi-purpose forest[124]</em> over 200 square miles of the Midlands, sees itself as a <em>model of sustainable development.[125]</em> The Community Forests are situated on the urban fringe of major English towns, subscribe to the same multi-function forestry framework, and constitute, allegedly, <em>the most significant environmental programme to be launched in Britain this century.[126]</em> Pretty much as you’d expect, they are therefore crap. Both kinds of ‘forest’ have the superficially laudable goal of increasing Britain’s pathetic average tree cover of 73 to around 303 in their area. However, ‘multi-purpose forestry’ is such that one of them actually thought it necessary to remind itself that <em>Trees will play a vitally important role in achieving the community forest.”[127]</em>	+	-----
−	So puny are most of their new woodlands that they deserve to be known as fun-sized woods-in honour of the unsatisfying and anything but Mars Bar ofthe same name.[128] It seems to be a case of drawing lines on a map and designating publicity or 120 policy forests, composed of enterprise glades[129], the modern day bureaucrat’s equivalent of the treeless Deer Forests of Scottish feudalism.. (There’s no shortage of (bureaucratic) deadwood in these forests.) Since the objective is to <em>improve the image”,</em> one gets the impression that they would be as content with just the early impression of forest cover99 as with the real McCoy-so long as things are seen to be done.	+	-----
−	The true agenda of Groundwork and the various forests is one ofregeneration and reclamation. By and large they are superimposed on the former strongholds of heavy industry in the Midlands and the North-those areas most badly abused by and then, in the 1980s, abandoned by capitalism. It is about <em>managing change</em>[130]-using trees as a device to bring unsightly derelict land back into economic circulation, and addressing agricultural overproduction through farm diversification into forestry and leisure. It is about trying to ensure a smooth transition to the post-modern service or information economy, where the intangible environmental goods and quality of life issues are paramount-cg. as at the new Earth Centre, near Doncaster.[131] In the National Forest, <em>this regenerated coalfield land, which provided the local community with jobs in the past, will serve them in other ways in thefuture by providing recreationalfacilities, wildlife habitats and an attractive landscape.[132]</em> It is about tailoring a flexible. multi-tasking landscape for a flexible economy-the (relative) solidarity of the old heavy industries giving way to the (relative) atomisation of the casual, service sector-where, doubtless, we’ll all work in partnership.	+	==== Annotation 47 ====
−	The Red Rose Forest (Manchester) claim, in a particularly howling non-sequitur, that <em>economic, environmental and social regeneration cannot proceed without one another.[133]</em> Providing <em>an attractive environment in which business can flourish[134]</em> is the Forests’ main weapon in the mad, begging-bowl scramble to attract inward investment, giving them <em>a competitive advantage over competitor areas[135]-a</em> pitiful Pretty please to developers. Because, more than anything else, <em>this forest means business,</em> [136] if all goes according to plan these forests might actually end up more heavily developed than before: where ... [planning] policies allow for increased industrial development, a high quality landscape can be a valuable first step in an aeva’s revitalisation [sic].[137] As well as having their office premises or surplus sites tarted up-what the Mersey Forest calls <em>screen[ing] industry,[138]</em> or landscaping as physical PR-usually at public expense, it offers another more subtle service to business. This is the philanthropic advantage that comes when you <em>display your environmental credentials,</em> helping to <em>generate goodwill... [and] raise... product and brand awareness.[139]</em> Thus we have Manchester Aiq>ort supporting a trifling new tree planting programme-mulched with <em>bioregional</em> Bollin Valley woodchips, no doubt-through the Manchester Aviation Tree Challenge, and sanctimonious noises about the <em>important part [that trees play] in reducing greenhouse gases and global warming.[140]</em>	+	Tran Thien Tu, the vice-dean of the Department of Marxist-Leninist Theoretical Studies at the Le Duan Political Science University in Quang Tri, Vietnam, defines three degrees of scopes of Methodology. They are, from most specific to most general:
−	Nor have the older, more classically industrial uses entirely gone away. Grotesque ‘planning gain’ and ‘end use’ scams are rife: “Mining will continue to be a major activity within the Forest... The case for [minerals] development is certainly strengthened if the developer can show a benefit to the National Foresft.”[141] At Broxtowe in the Greenwood Community Forest (Nottinghamshire), <em>opencast mining operations</em> will, in the topsy-turvey world these people inhabit, <em>ultimately [bring]... about economic and environmental benefits:</em> a new woodland of 14 hectares which will <em>provide an attractive backdrop</em> for a <em>new employment site of eight hectares.[142]</em> (This is presumably the kind of thing they have in mind when they talk of-in Groundwork’s <em>words-integrating the economy and the environment.[143])</em>	+	'''1. Field Methodology'''
−	**** Community, Partnership, and All That jazz	+	The most specific scope of methodology; a field methodology will apply only to a single specific scientific field.
−	All of this-particularly in the case of Groundwork-comes robotically decked out in odious communitarian jargon, such as stakeholding, capacity building, zero tolerance (controlling anti-social behaviour through environmental design[144]), participation, and partnership. It is consistent with Blairite big-tent politics-subsuming most potential opponents and marginalising those that won’t be co-opted.[145] The insidious weed of partnership, with its smothering, spurious consensus (like being love bombed), seems to be springing up everywhere nowadays.	+	'''2. General Methodology'''
−	Partnership mendaciously supposes that we all come to the table as equals, and, conveniently, that we all bear a shared responsibility for what has gone wrong-nasty, disruptive blame and dissension must not intrude on these mature deliberations. Class and other power differentials are submerged in the bland, ostensibly classless interest in saving the planet (a union sacree)-political questions are reframed as dispassionate technical ones--the quest for the perfect plan again. It’s just a new way-their latest wheeze-for us to get screwed.	+	A more general scope of methodology; a general methodology will be shared by various scientific fields.
−	<quote>	+	'''3. Philosophical Methodology'''
−	The cleverly constructed notion of “sustainable development” with its emphasis on harmonious consensus in decision-making, combined with the incorporation of the environment into the market system, has dissipated the imperative that environmental deterioration once hadfor social and political change.[146]
−	</quote>
−	Community-partnership’s medium-seems to be the elusive Philosopher’s Stone of ‘90s politics; the supreme value before which-irrespective of political persuasion-we must all prostrate ourselves. (Interestingly, the term is most commonly used either where it patently does not exist-eg. the business..., international, the rural community of the Countryside March--or where it is in some way threatened or in question-eg. the black..., the gay...)	+	The most general scope of methodology, encompassing the whole of the material world and human thought.
−	Groundwork constantly brag of their presence in depressed, no-go areas-there is more than a hint of the ‘community development’ troops being parachuted in: <em>Throughout the western world states are characterised by one of the two symbols of control in capitalist society: the tank or the community worker.[147]</em> The environmental focus of the work also serves to locate the community’s problems squarely within its own physical fabric, rather than as emanating from wider, structural forces-as if by simply beautifying the area, you will beautify the social relationships that people experience.	+	-----
−	The partnership and participation must only extend so far. The communities must not realise too uppity a sense of their own strength-which is to say, truly become a community-or the development workers and their political masters might become expendable. In the same way that capitalism, from the 1920s on, had to <em>simultaneously... encourage and repress the ‘creation of dissatisfaction’</em>[148] if it was to shift its surplus goods,	+	''Worldview'' and ''philosophical methodology'' are the fundamental knowledge-systems* of Marxism-Leninism.
−	this community development must simultaneously unleash and rein in empowerment. Like derelict land, derelict communities are brought back into economic circulation, and their members enlisted in gilding their cage. Forget building the Situationists’ hacienda, mate-you don’t want to do it like that-this is building the strategic hamlet.	+	==== Annotation 48 ====
−	Local communities are deployed as proxies-a cost-effective means of delivering the desired results?[149] In a hidden subsidy to industry, we do the dirty work of clearing up the ‘externalities’ they leave behind.	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> In the original Vietnamese, the word ''lý'' ''luận'' is used, which we roughly translate to the phrase “knowledge-system” throughout this book. Literally, ''lý luận'' is a combination of the words ''lý'' ''lẽ,'' which means “argument,” and ''bàn'' ''luận,'' which means “to infer.”
−	<quote>	+	The full meaning of ''lý'' ''luận'' is: a system of ideas that reflect reality expressed in a system of knowledge that allows for a complete view of the fundamental laws and relationships of objective reality.
−	<em>Working in partnership with local authorities and businesses, Community Forests harness the commitment and enthusiasm of local people, mobilising them to regenerate their area.[150]</em>
−	</quote>
−	(Oooh, it sounds so good since you put it like that.) Paul Goon (appropriately) of the government’s ‘English Partnerships’ congratulates Groundwork on	+	<br />
−	<quote>	+	==== The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism ====
−	<em>their unrivalled ability to co-ordinate local communities, engender enthusiasm and deliver the goods at excellent valuefor money.[151]</em>
−	</quote>
−	It echoes Paulette Goudge’s comment on Third World aid, that	+	Marxist-Leninist worldview and philosophical methodology emerge from the quintessence [see Annotation 6, p. 8] of dialectical materialism, which itself developed from other forms of dialectics, which in turn developed throughout the history of the ideological development of humanity.
−	<quote>	+	Materialism is foundational to Marxism-Leninism in two important ways:
−	<em>‘sustainable development’ no longer refers to preserving the environment; it now means developments that communities canfinancially sustain themselves</em>[152]
−	<right>	+	''Dialectical Materialism'' is the ideological core of a scientific worldview.
−	--the Polluted Pays principle.
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	In contrast to the economy’s flexible landscape, in which we are obliged to accept the loss of cherished features, as decreed, heritage is constructed as a reassuring beacon of stability-that <em>which isforever England.</em> There is a tension between the frequent appeals to such sentiments of a <em>common</em> heritage <em>(our</em> patch), and otherwise jealously guarded property rights. It only becomes <em>ours</em> when it suits them-we only get to inherit their cast off dregs, and must be suitably gratefol when granted that much. (Many of the Groundwork and Community Forest sites are, for instance, former chemical waste dumps and landfills.) Perhaps the residents of the Amazon will one day be exhorted to restore <em>their</em> forest, when it has finally been logged out for tremendous private gain. Bottom-up is employed to correct the miserable failures of top down. However they choose to label the bottle it always tastes like shit-instead, we must choose praxis over proxy.	+	''Historical Materialism'' is a system of dialectical materialist opinions about the origin of, motivation of, and the most common rules that dominate the movement and development of human society.
−	According to Ulrich Beck, the ecological movement is not so much an environmental movement but a social, inward movement which utilises ‘nature’ as a parameterfor certain questions.[153] While one can quibble with his distinction between the environmental and the social, basically there’s a lot of truth to this view. Perhaps the major revolutionary contribution of environmentalism (in the broadest possible sense) is in exploring issues of control over space, the ways in which its use is currently determined, and the ways in which those uses can be radically transformed. These questions may have assumed a greater relative importance in recent years, given the seeming decline of the power to organise and act in the workplace. Like “the Street Party of Street Parties”,[154] our very first need, (the one which prefigures and makes possible the rediscovery of all our myriad other needs), is for a place in which people [can] gather-a common ground-andfocus their attentions on things that could improve the quality of their general existence, and that of wild-life.[155] The act-of occupying a place and remaking it as a space used for interaction and renewal-is an answer to many of our questions in itself. Restoration can be harnessed to make the world safe for capital-by replenishing the regions whose profitability it has exhausted-or can create something which is inimical to it: headstrong communities savouring their own innate resourcefulness. When asked how people might spend their time after the revolution, Marcuse replied that We will tear down the big cities and build new ones[156]--whose districts... could <em>correspond to the whole opedivum ofdiversefeelings that one encounters by chancein everyday life,[157]</em> multifarious nefarious space in which hitherto unrequited lives and blighted potential might at last find expression, freed from the monocultural dictates of capital. We are a very long way from that now, but wherever we see <em>the restoration of whole ecosystems and the empowerment of communities together,</em> [158] its allure beckons, and we are another step closer.	+	Dialectics are also foundational to Marxism-Leninism, specifically in the form of ''Materialist Dialectics,'' which Lenin defined as “the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge.”<ref>''The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1913.</ref> Lenin also defined Materialist Dialectics as “what is now called theory of knowledge or epistemology.”<ref>''Karl Marx'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.</ref> [Note: Epistemology is the theoretical study of knowledge; for more information see ''Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism'', p. 204.]
−	The only half-decent thing to come out of the horrific M3 extension through Twyford Down was the ripping up, re-contouring and grassing over of the old A33 Winchester bypass. It gave the people of Winchester easy access across the flood meadows of the River Itchen to St. Catherine’s Hill for the first time in decades. A mere 5 years after the work was done, however, and the local council already wants to re-tarmac 20 acres of the site as a park-and-ride facility. There is strong local opposition to being robbed of their precious green space once more.	+	-----
−	[32] “Revisiting Auroville”, Alan Lithman, in “Helping Nature Heal: An Introduction to Environmental Restoration,” Ed. Richard Nilsen, Whole Earth/Ten Speed Press 1991, p.96.	+	==== Annotation 49 ====
−	[33] “An Explosion of Green”, Bill McKibben, Atlantic Monthly April 1995, p.63.	+	For beginning students of Marxism-Leninism, distinguishing between ''Dialectical Materialism'' and ''Materialist Dialectics'' may at first be confusing. Here is an explanation of each concept and how they relate to one another:
−	[34] “Planting Amenity Trees”, Oliver Rackham, in “TIie Tree Book”, J. Edward Milner, Collins and Brown 1992, p.152. For other examples, see also: “From Waste to Wildlife”, Charles Couzens, Natural World Winter 1992; “Orchids rise from the ashes”, New Scientist 30/9/95; “Return to Paradise”, Laura Spinney, New Scientist 20/7/96; “A real waste”, Fred Pearce, New Scientist 11/4/98; “The Lowdown on Dirt”, Chris Baines, BBC Wildlife Nov. 1990.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-5.png|''Dialectical Materialism and Materialist Dialectics.'']]
−	[35] “Wild By Design in the National Parks of England and Wales”, Council for National Parks 1997, p.14.	+	''Dialectical Materialism'' is a scientific understanding of matter, consciousness and the relationship between the two. Dialectical Materialism is used to understand the world by studying such relationships.
−	[36] Ibid, p.11.	+	''Materialist Dialectics'' is a science studying the general laws of the movement, change, and development of nature, society and human thought.
−	[37] Actually, this was a misprint of “quiet areas” in a management plan, but the voices in my head made it seem like a good idea at the time.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-6.png|''Relationship between Dialectical Materialism and Materialist Dialectics.'']]
−	[38] “Aftermath”, Richard Mabey, BBC Wildlife October 1997. Toy’s Hill, Kent is cited as a particularly good case study; the cleared areas needed planting, . and are still struggling, while the uncleared are experiencing “prolific regrowth”.	+	And so, we use Dialectical Materialism to understand the fundamental nature of reality. This understanding is used as a basis for changing the world, using Materialist Dialectics to guide our activities. We can then reflect on the results of our activities, using Dialectical Materialism, to further develop our understanding of the world.
−	[39] “Setting the Scene for Growth”, The Mersey Forest, p.3.	+	As Marxist-Leninists, we utilize this continuous cycle between studying and understanding the world through Dialectical Materialism and affecting change in the world through Materialist Dialectics with the goal of bringing about socialism and freeing humanity.
−	[40] Gar Smith, in “Pitfalls on the Way to Lasting Restoration”, Seth Zuckerman, in Op.Cit.1, p.12.	+	It is also important to understand the nature of ''dialectical relationships.''
−	[41] Eg. see: “General information about habitat creation”, Habitat Restoration Project Factsheet 1, English Nature, undated, p.2; “Habitat Creation-A Critical Guide”, D.M. Parker. English Nature Science Report 21, 1995. p.l.	+	A dialectical relationship is a relationship in which two things mutually impact one another. Dialectical materialism perceives all things in ''motion'' [see ''Mode and Forms of Existence of Matter'', p. 59] and in a constant state of ''change'', and this motion and change originates from relationships in which all things mutually move and change each other through interaction, leading to development over time.
−	[42] Eg. see: “Can you really move places?”, Trevor Lawson, BBC Wildlife January 1997; “Removals no go” [on Teigngrace], Trevor Lawson, BBC Wildlife September 1998; “Sod Off’, [on Ashton Court] SchNEWS 183.	+	-----
−	[43] See: “The Environment Industry: Profiting from Pollution”, Joshua Karliner. The Ecologist March/April 1994. For Thorne and Hatfield. see: “Bogged down in details”, Catherine Caufield, The Guardian 24/9/97; “English Nature in mire over bog”. David Harrison. The Observer 30/11/97.	+	Thoroughly understanding the basic content of the worldview and methodology of Marxism-Leninism is the most important requirement in order to properly study the whole theory system of Marxism-Leninism and to creatively apply it into cognitive and practical activities in order to solve the problems that our society must cope with.
−	[44] World Wide Fund for Nature “Forests” Supplement to The Observer, 1992, p.10.	+	-----
−	[45] “Natural Restoration-When Humans Walk Away”, Susan E. Davis, in Op.Cit.1, p.22/23.	+	=== 3. Excerpt From ''Modifying the Working Style'' By Ho Chi Minh ===
−	[46] “Creative conservation: a way forward”, Richard Scott and Grant Luscombe, Ecos 16 (2) 1995. p.13. See also: “General information about habitat creation”, Op.Cit.lO., p.3.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-7.jpg|''Ho Chi Minh training cadres in 1959.'']]
−	[47] Eg. See “Habitat Restoration Project: Factsheets and Bibliographies”, Rob Dryden, English Nature Research Reports No. 260, 1997.	+	Training is a must. There is a proverb: “without a teacher, you can never do well;” and the expression: “learn to eat, learn to speak, learn to pack, learn to unpack.”
−	[48] See “Future Nature-a vision for conservation”, W.M. Adams, Earthscan 1996, p.168.	+	Even many simple subjects require study, let alone revolutionary work and resistance work. How can you perform such tasks without any training?
−	[49] See Op.Cit.4. p.12; Also pp.9, 14, 42. See debate on p.12 regarding ‘future nature’.	+	But training materials must be aimed at the needs of the masses. We must ask: after people receive their training, can they apply their knowledge immediately? Is it possible to practice right away?
−	[50] Op.Cit.17. p.169.	+	If training is not immediately practical, then years of training would be useless.
−	[51] Ibid, p.166.	+	Unfortunately, many of our trainers do not understand this simple logic. That’s why there are cadres who train rural people in the uplands in the field of “economics!”
−	[52] River Restoration News 1, November 1998, p.3.	+	In short, our way of working, organizing, talking, propagandizing, setting slogans, writing newspapers, etc., must all take this sentence as a model:
−	[53] “Biodiversity Conservation in Britain: Science Replacing Tradition”, Clive Hambler and Martin Speight, British Wildlife February 1995. p.144.	+	“From within the masses, back into the masses.”
−	[54] See “The Eternal Threat: Biodiversity Loss and the Fragmentation of the Wild” in Do or Die 5 for a fuller explanation of this process. Also, “Conserving wildlife in a black hole”, Adrian Colston, Ecos 18 (1) 1997, p.65, for an excellent example.	+	No matter how big or small our tasks are, we must clearly examine and modify them to match the culture, living habits, level of education, struggling experiences, desire, will, and material conditions of the masses. On that basis we will form our ways of working and organizing. Only then can we have the masses on our side.
−	[55] “Habitat restoration-recanting the status quo”, Rob Jarman, Ecos 16 (2) 1995. p.31.	+	Otherwise, if you just do as you want, following your own thoughts, your subjectivity, and then force your personal thoughts upon the masses, it is just like “cutting your feet to fit your shoes.” Feet are the masses. Shoes are our ways of organizing and working.
−	[56] Eg. See “Gambling with nature? A new paradigm of nature and its consequences for nature management strategy”, Johan van Zoest, in “Coastal Dunes-Geomorphology. Ecology and Management for Conservation”. Eds. Carter et al., Balkema 1992, p. 515.	+	Shoes are made to fit people’s feet, not the other way around.
−	[57] See: “Some Like it Hot”, Markham et al, WWF-International 1993; especially p.121 and pp.125–128.	+	= Chapter 1: Dialectical Materialism =
−	[58] See: “Nature Strikes Back!”, Jack Straw [shurely shome mishtake?], Fifth Estate Summer 1994.	+	Dialectical Materialism, one of the materialist foundations of Marxism-Leninism, uses the materialist worldview and dialectical methods to study fundamental philosophical issues. Dialectical Materialism is the most advanced form of Materialism, and serves as the ''theoretical core of a scientific worldview.'' Therefore, thoroughly understanding the basic content of Dialectical Materialism is the essential prerequisite to study both the component principles of Marxism-Leninism in particular, and the whole of Marxism-Leninism in general.
−	[59] “A Natural Method of Conserving Biodiversity in Britain”, A. Whitbread and W. Jenman, British Wildlife 7 (2), December 1995, p.84.	+	== I. Materialism and Dialectical Materialism ==
−	[60] Eg. See “Global WarmingiG!obal Warning: Plant the Right Tree”, Marylee Guinan, in Op.Cit. I, p.44.	+	=== 1. The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues ===
−	[61] Eg. See “Lowland Valley Mires” and “Restoration of Valley Mires”, New Forest LIFE Project Information Sheets, Forestry Commission, undated--“The New Forest contains 90 of the 120 valley mires in Europe”.)	+	''Philosophy is a system of the most general human theories and knowledge about our world, about ourselves, and our position in our world.''
−	[62] “To Learn the Things We Need to Know”, Freeman House, in Op.Cit!, p.50.	+	Philosophy has existed for thousands of years. Philosophy has different objects of study depending on different periods of time. Summarizing the whole history of philosophy, Engels said: “The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more modern philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being<ref>''Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy'', Friedrich Engels, 1886.</ref>.”
−	[63] “Farming the City-The Potential of Urban Agriculture”, Tara Garnett, The Ecologist November/December 1996, p.305.	+	So, philosophy studies the relations between consciousness and matter, and between humans and nature.
−	[64] “Changing Places” booklet, BBC Natural History Unit, February 1999, p.5.	+	In philosophy, there are two main questions:
−	[65] Op.Cit.17, p.173.	+	'''Question 1: The question of consciousness and matter: which came first; or, to put it another way, which one determines which one?'''
−	[66] Eg. See Op.Cit.32, p.299; also “Cultivated Cities”, BBC Wildlife, August 1996, p.56. See: “World Hunger: 12 Myths”, Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Earthscan 1988, Chapter 6, for examples of the vastly increased efficiency of small farmers as opposed to large ones.	+	In attempting to answer this first question, philosophy has separated into two main schools: ''Materialism,'' and ''Idealism.''
−	[67] However, see Op.Cit.22 for a convincing argument that traditional practices are antagonistic to wildlife.	+	'''Question 2: Do humans have the capacity to perceive the world as it truly exists?'''
−	[68] ‘Twitcher’, in British Wildlife February 1998, p.175.	+	In answer to this second question, two schools: ''Intelligibility'' — which admits the human cognitive capacity to truly perceive the world — and ''unintelligibility'' — which denies that capacity.
−	[69] Op.cit.17, p.xi.	+	Materialism is the belief that the nature of the world is matter; that matter comes first; and that matter determines consciousness. People who uphold this belief are called materialists. Throughout human history, many different factions of materialists with various schools of materialist thought have evolved.
−	[70] Ibid, p.162.	+	Idealism is the belief that the nature of the world is consciousness; consciousness precedes matter; consciousness decides matter. People who uphold this belief are called idealists. Like materialism, various factions of idealists with varying schools of idealist thought have also evolved throughout history.
−	[71] Ibid. See also: Op.Cit.4, p.7.; Op.Cit.22, p.139; Op.Cit.28, p.85, 86 and 87; “When the Wind Blew”, Tony Whitbread, RSNC February 1991, p.22; “Laird ofCreation”, Richard 1V1abey, BBC Wildlife January 1992, p.30.	+	<br />
−	[72] Eg. see: Op.Cit.4, p.10.	+	Idealism has cognitive origins and social origins.
−	[73] Op.Cit.28, p.87.	+	-----
−	[74] Op.Cit.17, p.163. See also: “Bionomics-The Inevitability of Capitalism”, .Michael L. Rothschild, Futura 1992. For a view affirming pleasure for its own sake-in contrast to these mechanistic models of animal behaviour-as part of nature, see “Watching Birds”, Peter Porcupine, Here and Now 18, Winter 1997/98. (‘Birds just want to have fun’.) See also “When Elephants Weep--111e Emotional Lives of Animals”, Jeffrey 1\fasson and Susan McCarthy, Jonathan Cape 1994.	+	==== Annotation 50 ====
−	[75] Eg. see the British Trust for Ornithology’s deeply depressing “Common [sic] Birds Census”.	+	''Cognitive origin'' refers to origination from the human consciousness of individuals.
−	[76] Op.Cit.24. p.29.	+	''Social origin'' refers to origination from social relations between human beings.
−	[77] Op.Cit.28, p.86.	+	So, idealism originates from both the conscious activity of individual humans as well as social activity between human beings.
−	[78] Eg. see: “Laird of Creation”, Richard Mabey, BBC Wildlife January 1992, p.33.	+	These origins are ''unilateral consideration'' and ''absolutization'' of only one aspect or one characteristic of the whole cognitive process.
−	[79] Sean Reed, RSPB, quoted in “A do-something charter”, BBC Wildlife May 1998, p.31.	+	-----
−	[80] Eg. see: ‘“Ihe Killing ofthe Countryside”, Graham Harvey, Vintage 1998; also: “Is there life after subsidies? The New Zealand experience”, Gordon Stephenson, Ecos 18 (3/4) 1997.	+	==== Annotation 51 ====
−	[81] “Plenty and Wilderness? Creating a new countryside”, Bryn Green, Ecos 16 (2) 1995, p.3.	+	''Unilateral consideration'' is the consideration of a subject from one side only.
−	[82] Op.Cit.4, p.17.	+	''Absolutization'' occurs when one conceptualizes some belief or supposition as ''always'' true in ''all'' situations ''without'' exception.
−	[83] “The Movement of the Free Spirit”, Raoul Vaneigem, Zone Books 1994, p.8.	+	Both unilateral consideration and absolutization fail to consider the dynamic, constantly changing, and interconnected relations of all things, phenomena, and ideas in our reality.
−	[84] Eg. see “The Bap and the ugly”, Trevor Lawson, Guardian 6/8/98. These ‘Biodiversity Action Plans’ for particular endangered species, with their private sponsorship, seem to have a similar effect to ‘Education Action Zones’, and the ‘Private Finance Initiative’ in the health service. (See the comments on the possibility of a ‘two-tier’ reserve system in “ ‘Beyond 2000’-will it deliver’?”, Trevor Lawson, Ecos 18 (3/4) 1997, p.58.) Also, under the Earth Summit’s Biodiversity Convention, scientists have apparently come to the pragmatic conclusion that not everything can he saved. They have therefore decided to concentrate on those species of potential benefit to us-glorified Research & Development.	+	Idealism originates from unilateral consideration because idealists ignore the material world and consider reality ''only'' from the perspective of the human mind. It also originates from absolutism because idealists ''absolutize'' human reasoning as the ''only'' source of truth and knowledge about our world ''without exception.''
−	[85] Landlife Annual Report 1997/98, p.7.	+	As Lenin wrote in ''On the Question of Dialectics'': “Philosophical idealism is a unilateral development, an overt development, of one out of many attributes, or one out of many aspects, of consciousness.”
−	[86] Ibid, p.4.	+	Historically, idealism has typically benefitted the oppressive, exploitative class of society. Idealism and religions usually have a close relation with each other, and support each other to co-exist and co-develop.
−	[87] “Biodiversity in Conservation” letter, Matthew Frith, British Wildlife August 1995, p.405.	+	-----
−	[88] Op.Cit.17, p.173.	+	==== Annotation 52 ====
−	[89] Fuller and Peterken, quoted in “Management for Biodiversity in British Woodlands-Striking a Balance”, Robert Fuller and Martin Warren, British Wildlife October 1995, p.36.	+	Idealists, in absolutizing human consciousness, have a tendency to only give credence to the work of the mind and ignore the value of physical labor. This has been used to justify class structures in which religious and intellectual laborers are given authority and privilege over manual laborers.
−	[90] “Ancient Woodland: A Re-creatable Resource?”, Keith Kirby, Tree News Summer 1992, p.13.	+	This situation has also led to the idea that mental factors play a decisive role in the development of human society in particular and the whole world in general. This idealist view was supported by the ruling class and used to justify its own power and privilege in society. The dominant class has historically used such idealist philosophy as the justifying foundation for their political-social beliefs in order to maintain their ruling positions.
−	[91] Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.	+	Marx discusses this tendency for rulers to idealistically justify their own rule in ''The German Ideology'':
−	[92] Eg. See “Hydrological Management for Waterfowl on RSPB Lowland Wet Grassland Reserves”, Self et al, RSPB Conservation Review 8, 1994.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an ‘eternal law.’
		+	</blockquote>
−	[93] “Restoration of lowland wet grassland at Pulborough Brooks RSPB Nature Reserve,” Timothy Calloway, in UK <em>Floodplains: Proceedings of a</em> Joint RSPB, Linnaen Society, Environment Agency Symposium, Eds. Bailey et al., Westbury Publishing 1998.	+	Marx goes on to explain how the idealist positions of the ruling class tend to get embedded in historical narratives:
−	[94] “Nature and Nurture”, Maev Kennedy, “A Living Countryside”, RSPB/Co-op Bank supplement to The Guardian, undated, p.11.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true. This historical method which reigned in Germany, and especially the reason why, must be understood from its connection with the illusion of ideologists in general, e.g. the illusions of the jurist, politicians (of the practical statesmen among them, too), from the dogmatic dreamings and distortions of these fellows; this is explained perfectly easily from their practical position in life, their job, and the division of labour.
−	[95] Eg. See Ihe End <em>ofNature</em><em>,</em> Bill McKibben, Viking 1990.	+	-----
−	[96] “Sustainable Tuesday;’ David Helton, BBC <em>Wildlife,</em> May 1992, p.46.	+	In history, there are two main forms of idealism: ''subjective'' and ''objective''.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[97] Ibid, p.47.	+	''Subjective idealism'' asserts that ''consciousness'' is the primary existence. It asserts that all things and phenomena can only be experienced as subjective sensory perceptions while denying the objective existence of material reality altogether.
−	[98] Op.Cit.4, p.9.	+	''Objective idealism'' also asserts the ideal and consciousness as the primary existence, but also posits that the ideal and consciousness are objective, and that they exist independently of nature and humans. This concept is given many names, such as “absolute concept”, “absolute spirit,” “rationality of the world,” etc.
−	[99] Eg. see: Op.Cit.22, p.141; Op.cit.58, p.29/30; Op.cit.24, p.30; Op.Cit.61, p.47.	+	-----
−	[100] “Pitfalls on the Way to Lasting Restoration”, Seth Zuckerman, in Op.Cit. I, p.13.	+	==== Annotation 53 ====
−	[101] Founded on an assumption that empires aren’t fleeting and anomalous-that they won’t appear and disappear, as habitats do.	+	''Primary existence'' is existence which precedes and determines other existences.
−	[102] Or possibly peatland-eg. see: “Forests destined to end in the mire”, Fred Pearce, New Scientist 7/5/94.	+	Idealists believe that consciousness has primary existence over matter, that the nature of the world is ideal, and that the ideal defines existence.
−	[103] “Natural Restoration-When Humans Walk Away”, Susan E. Davis, in Op.Cit.I, p.23.	+	Materialists believe the opposite: that matter has primary existence over the ideal, and that matter precedes and determines consciousness.
−	[104] “When the Wind Blew”, Tony Whitbread, RSNC February 1991, p.32.	+	Dialectical Materialism holds that matter and consciousness have a dialectical relationship, in which matter has primary existence over the ideal, though consciousness can impact the material world through willful conscious activity.
−	[105] Ibid, p.34.	+	The primary existence of matter within Dialectical Materialism is discussed further in ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'', p. 88.
−	[106] Op.Cit.25, p.510.	+	Willful activity (''willpower'') is discussed in ''Nature and Structure of Consciousness'', p. 79.
−	[107] David Cayley quoted in Op.Cit.17, p.163.	+	The key difference between ''subjective'' and ''objective'' idealists is this:
−	[108] Op.Cit.25, p.503. Although, inexplicably, van Zoest goes on to say that autonomous processes are allowed or stimulated as long as they lead to the <em>desired goals.</em> (p.514.) While this may be a good working description of liberal democracy, it is not autonomy, which must surely be unconditional-the quality of autonomy is not strained...	+	Subjective idealists believe that there is no external material world whatsoever — that what we imagine as the material world is merely illusory — and that all reality is created by consciousness, whereas objective idealists believe that there ''is'' a material world outside of human consciousness, but it exists independently of human consciousness; therefore (according to objective idealists), since humans can only observe the world through conscious experience, the material world can never be truly known or observed by our consciousness.
−	[109] Op.Cit.17, p.163.	+	In opposition to Idealism, Materialism originated through practical experience and the development of science. Through practical experience and systematic development of human knowledge, Materialism has come to serve as a universally applicable theoretical system which benefits progressive social forces and which also orients the activities of those forces in both perception and practice.
−	[110] Op.Cit.25, p.507.	+	-----
−	[111] Op.Cit.73, p.59.	+	==== Annotation 54 ====
−	[112] David Streeter, quoted in “On the Sidelines”, Richard Mabey, BBC Wildlife October 1990, p.728.	+	Materialism benefits progressive social forces by showing reality as it is, by dispelling the idealist positions of the ruling class, and by revealing that society and the world can be changed through willful activity.
−	[113] Op.Cit.7, p.74.	+	Materialism guides progressive social forces by grounding thought and activity in material reality, enabling strategies and outcomes that line up with the realities of the material world. For instance, we must avoid utopianism [see Annotation 17, p. 18] in which emphasis is placed on working out ideal forms of society through debate, conjecture, and conscious activity alone. Revolution against capitalism must, instead, focus on affecting material relations and processes of development through willful activity.
−	[114] Charles Elton, quoted in Op.Cit.22, p.144.	+	As Engels pointed out in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'': “The final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.”
−	[115] Op.Cit.73, p.12.	+	=== 2. Dialectical Materialism — the Most Advanced Form of Materialism ===
−	[116] Op.Cit.22, p.142.	+	In human history, as human society and scientific understanding have developed, materialism has also developed through three forms: ''Primitive Materialism, Metaphysical Materialism,'' and ''Dialectical Materialism.''
−	[117] Op.Cit.73, p.41.	+	''Primitive Materialism'' is the primitive form of materialism. Primitive materialism recognizes that matter comes first, and holds that the world is composed of certain elements, and that these were the first objects, the origin, of the world, and that these elements are the essence of reality. These Primitive Materialist concepts can be found in many ancient materialist theories in such places as China, India, and Greece. [These Primitive Materialist elemental philosophies are discussed more in ''Matter'', p. 53] Although it has many shortcomings, Primitive Materialism is partially correct at the most fundamental level, because it uses the material of nature itself to explain nature.
−	[118] Ibid, p.15.	+	''Metaphysical Materialism'' is the second basic form of Materialism. This form of materialism was widely discussed and developed in Western Europe in the 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries. During this time, the metaphysical method of perceiving the world was applied to materialist philosophy. Although Metaphysical Materialism does not accurately reflect the world in terms of universal relations [see p. 108] and development, it was an important step forward in the fight against idealist and religious worldviews, especially during the transformational period from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in many Western European countries.
−	[119] Op.Cit.28, p.86.	+	==== Annotation 55 ====
−	[120] Op.Cit.73, p.44.	+	Metaphysical materialism was strongly influenced by ''mechanical philosophy'', a scientific and philosophical movement popular in the 17<sup>th</sup> century which explored mechanical machines and compared natural phenomena to mechanical devices. Mechanical philosophy led to a belief that all things — including living organisms — were built as (and could theoretically be built by humans as) mechanical devices. Influenced by this philosophy, metaphysical materialists came to see the world as a giant mechanical machine composed of parts, each of which exists in an essentially isolated and static state.
−	[121] Op.Cit.28, p.86.	+	Metaphysical materialists believed that all change can exist only as an increase or decrease in quantity, brought about by external causes Metaphysical materialism contributed significantly to the struggle against idealistic and religious worldviews, especially during the historical transition period from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in Western European countries. Metaphysical materialism also had severe limitations; especially in failing to understand many key aspects of reality, such as the nature of development through change/motion and relationships.
−	[122] Eg. see Op.Cit.73, p.51.	+	''Dialectical Materialism'' is the third basic form of materialism. It was founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and defended and developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as well as many of his successors. By inheriting the quintessence of previous theories and thoroughly integrating contemporary scientific achievements, Dialectical Materialism immediately solved the shortcomings of the Primitive Materialism of ancient times as well as the Metaphysical Materialism of modern Western Europe. It reaches the highest development level of materialism so far in history.
−	[123] “Dear Motorist... The Social Ideology ofthe Motorcar”, Andre Gorz, Institute of Social Disengineering, undated, p.8.	+	By accurately reflecting objective reality with universal relations and development*, Dialectical Materialism offers humanity a great tool for scientific cognitive activities and revolutionary practice. The Dialectical Materialist system of thought was built on the basis of scientific explanations about matter, consciousness, and the relationship between the two.
−	[124] National Forest Company Annual Report 1997/98.	+	-----
−	[125] Chairman’s Comment, National Forest News Autumn 1998, p.2.	+	==== Annotation 56 ====
−	[126] “Thames Chase: Community Forest Facts” information sheet, undated.	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> Materialist Dialectical methodology explains the world in terms of relationships and development. This is discussed in ''Basic Principles of Materialist Dialectics'', p. 106.
−	[127] Forest Plan Summary, Great Western Community Forest March 1994, p.6. See also “Magic Forest up Mr. Downing’s Street,” Greenwood Community Forest Annual Report 1996/97, p.11, and the National Forest Corporate Plan, July 1997, for similar inane remarks.	+	== II. Dialectical Materialist Opinions About Matter, Consciousness, and the Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness ==
−	[128] English Nature recommends that New woodlands should be a minimum of two hectares in area, and preferably larger than five hectares, if they are to be of any value. (“Woodland Creation for Wildlife;’ EN Habitat Restoration Project Fact Sheet 3.) In England more than 50% of approved Woodland Grant Schemes [the mainfina11cial mechanism for new planting] were under 3 hectares and over 75% were under 10 hectares. (Op.Cit.4, p.35.) In the Red Rose Community Forest, much of the planting “was on plots averaging 2.35 hectares in size:’ (Red Rose Community Forest Annual Report 1997/8, p.3.)	+	=== 1. Matter ===
−	[129] This is the actual address of the National Forest, if you can believe it. 99. Op.cit.8.	+	==== a. Category of “Matter” ====
−	[130] Forest Plan Summary, Great Western Community Forest, March 1994, p.4.	+	<br />
		+	''Matter'' is a philosophical subject which has been examined for more than 2,500 years. Since ancient times, there has been a relentless struggle between materialism and idealism around this subject. Idealism asserts that the world’s nature, the first basis of all existence, is consciousness, and that matter is only a product of that consciousness. Conversely, materialism asserts that nature, the entirety of the world, is composed of matter, that this material world exists indefinitely, and that all things and phenomena are composed of matter.
−	[131] Eg. see “Phoenix Park”, John Vidal, The Guardian 24/3/99.	+	Before dialectical materialism was born, materialist philosophers generally believed that matter was composed of some self-contained element or elements; that is to say some underlying substance from which everything in the universe is ultimately derived. In ancient times, the five elements theory of Chinese philosophy held that those self-contained substances were ''metal — wood — water — fire — earth;'' in India, the Samkhya school believed that they were ''Pradhana'' or ''Prakriti''<ref>According to the Samkhya school, Pradhana is the original form of matter in an unmanifested,indifferentiated state; ''Prakriti'' is manifested matter, differentiated in form, which contains potential for motion.</ref>'';'' in Greece, the Milesian school believed they were ''water'' (Thales’s<ref>Thales, ~642 — ~547 B.C. (Greek): Philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, politician.</ref> conception) or ''air'' (Anaximene’s<ref>Anaximene, ~585 — ~525 B.C. (Greek): Philosopher.</ref> conception); Heraclitus<ref>Heraclitus, ~540 — ~480 B.C. (Greek): Philosopher, founder of ancient dialectics.</ref> believed the ultimate element was ''fire;'' Democritus<ref>Democritus, ~460 — ~370 B.C. (Greek): Philosopher, naturalist, a founder of atom theory.</ref> asserted that it was something called an “atom,”'''' etc. Even as recently as the 17<sup>th</sup>-18<sup>th</sup> centuries, conceptions about matter belonging to modern philosophers such as Francis Bacon<ref>Francis Bacon, 1561 — 1626 (British): Philosopher, novelist, mathematician, political activist.</ref>, Renes Descartes<ref>Rene Descartes, 1596 — 1650 (Fench): Philosopher, mathematician, physicist.</ref>, Thomas Hobbes<ref>Thomas Hobbes, 1588 — 1679 (British): Political philosopher, political activist.</ref>, Denis Diderot<ref>Denis Diderot, 1713 — 1784 (French): Philosopher, novelist.</ref>, etc., still hadn’t changed much. They continued following the same philosophical tendency as ancient philosophers by focusing their studies of the material world through elemental phenomena.
−	[132] Scumbag head of the Forestry Commission David Bills (see Do or Die #7, p.19) in National Forest News, Autumn 1998, p.3.	+	These conceptions of matter which were developed by philosophers before Marx’s time laid a foundation for a tendency to use nature to explain nature itself, but that tendency still had many shortcomings, such as: oversimplification of matter into fictitious “elements;” failure to understand the nature of consciousness as well as the relationships between matter and consciousness; failure to recognize the significance of matter in human society, leading to a failure to solve social issues based on a materialist basis, etc.
−	[133] Lord Macclesfield, in “Red Rose Forest-A Place for Life”, Red Rose Forest, undated, p.2. (I can only assume he must be talking about the famous Manchester on Mars, because it can’t be on my planet.)	+	-----
−	[134] Councillor Round, quoted in “Invest in the Success of the Mersey Forest”, The Mersey Forest, undated.	+	==== Annotation 57 ====
−	[135] “Community Forests”, Countryside Commission Fact Sheet 1994, quoted in ibid. Other fawning references to inward investment in Forest literature are too numerous, and too nauseating, to mention.	+	Here are further explanations of these shortcomings of early materialists:
−	[136] Forest News 7, Forest of Avon, Autumn/Winter 1998, p.2.	+	'''Oversimplification of matter into fictitious “elements”'''
−	[137] Op.Cit.95.	+	Due to a lack of understanding and knowledge of matter, metaphysical materialists created erroneous conceptions of “elements” which do not accurately describe the nature of matter. By using such an erroneously conceived system of non-existing elements to describe nature, metaphysical materialists were prevented from gaining real insights into the material world which delayed and hindered scientific progress.
−	[138] Op.Cit.99. Also: “Gaining public acceptance ... [by] improving the image of development” in Op.Cit.104.	+	'''Failure to understand the nature of consciousness as well as the relationships between matter and consciousness'''
−	[139] Op.cit.99, p.5.	+	Many early materialists believed that consciousness was simply a mechanical byproduct of material processes, and that mental events (thoughts, consciousness) could not affect the material world, since these events were simply mechanically determined ''by'' the material world.
−	[140] Op.cit.103, p.24.	+	As a first principle, Dialectical Materialism does hold that consciousness is ''created by'' matter. However, Dialectical Materialism also holds that consciousness can ''influence'' the material world through conscious action. This constitutes a dialectical relationship.
−	[141] Susan Bell, Countryside Commission, in “Greening the Heart of England”, Fred Pearce, New Scientist 24/9/94, p.33. See p.35 here for an excellent summation of the bullshit ofthe National Forest in action.	+	As Lenin explains in ''Materialism and Empirio-criticism'': “Consciousness in general ''reflects'' being—that is a general principle of ''all'' materialism... social consciousness ''reflects'' social being.”
−	[142] Greenwood Community Forest Annual Report 1995/96, p.10.	+	Whereas early materialists erroneously held that consciousness is simply an “accidental” byproduct of matter, Dialectical Materialism holds that consciousness is a characteristic of the ''nature'' of matter. As Engels wrote in the notation of ''Dialectics of Nature'':
−	[143] One of their “three key themes” in: “Environments for people”, Groundwork Information Sheet, undated.	+	<blockquote>
		+	That matter evolves out of itself the thinking human brain is for mechanism a pure accident, although necessarily determined, step by step, where it happens. But the truth is that it is the nature of matter to advance to the evolution of thinking beings, hence this always necessarily occurs wherever the conditions for it (not necessarily identical at all places and times) are present.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[144] Eg. See ‘Direct Action News’ (oh my god!) 19, Autumn 1998, Groundwork Creswell/Ashfield & Mansfield, p.4; “Bringing people into the process”, Groundwork Today 26, undated, p.7.	+	Dialectical materialism also breaks from early materialism by positing that consciousness has a dialectical relationship with matter. Consciousness arises from the material world, but can also influence the material world through conscious action. In other words, mental events can trigger physical actions which affect the material world.
−	[145] The textbook strategy of ‘greenwashers’ worldwide-see “ ‘Democracy’ for Hire: Public Relations and Environmental Movements”, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, The Ecologist September/October 1995. Also: “Environmental groups and the business community: A fatal attraction?”, Jamie Wallace, Ecos 18 (3/4) 1997.	+	-----
−	[146] Review of “Conflict Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives”, Eds. Avruch et al, by Sharon Beder, The Ecologist November/December 1994, p.236.	+	As Marx explains in ''Theses on Feuerbach'':
−	[147] “Community Work and the State”, Eds. Craig et al, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1982, p.2. However, it would be a mistake to think that these are communities threatening militant working-class action-instead, they are mostly experiencing the inchoate rather than the organised workingclass <em>response to the changes taking place in advanced capitalist society</em> (“Hard Lines and Soft Options: A Criticism of Some Left Attitudes to Community Work;’]. Smith, in <em>Political Issues and Community Work,</em> Ed. p. Curno, Routledge 1978, p.23)-responses such as crime, vandalism, drug (ab)use, family breakdown, etc.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice... Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[148] “Scenes from a California Maul: Execution and Riot”, Red Wood, <em>Fi</em>ft<em>h Estate,</em> Autumn 1992, p.7.	+	Put more simply, we as humans are capable of “revolutionary practice” which can “change the world” because our consciousness allows us to “change circumstances.” This is discussed further in ''Nature and Structure of Consciousness'', p. 79.
−	[149] See the remarkably frank Majid Rahnema, quoted in “The Business of Conservation, or the Conservation of Business?”, <em>Do or Die</em> #6, p.23.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Failure to recognize the significance of matter in human society, leading to a failure to solve social issues based on a materialist basis
		+	</blockquote>
−	[150] “What are Community Forests?”, Countryside Commission leaflet, undated.	+	Dialectical materialists believe that matter exists in many forms, and that human society is a special form of existence of matter. Lenin referred to the material existence of human society as ''social being'', which stood in contrast with human society’s ''social consciousness.'' Social being encompasses all of the material existence and processes of human society.
−	[151] Rioted in: “Wren’s Nest Agenda for the 21<sup>st</sup> Century”, Groundwork Black Country leaflet, undated.	+	As Lenin wrote in ''Materialism and Empirio-criticism'':
−	[152] “Own Goals”, Paulette Goudge, The Guardian 17/3/99.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Social being is independent of the social consciousness of men. The fact that you live and conduct your business, beget children, produce products and exchange them, gives rise to an objectively necessary chain of events, a chain of development, which is independent of your social consciousness, and is never grasped by the latter completely. The highest task of humanity is to comprehend this objective logic of economic evolution (the evolution of social life) in its general and fundamental features, so that it may be possible to adapt to it one’s social consciousness and the consciousness of the advanced classes of all capitalist countries in as definite, clear and critical a fashion as possible.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[153] Rioted in a review of his “Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk”, Ecos 16 (2) 1995, p.76.	+	Early materialists failed to recognise the relationship between matter and consciousness — as Lenin puts it, specifically, between ''social being'' and ''social consciousness''. Thus in contemplating social issues, these early materialists were unable to find proper materialist solutions.
−	[154] See “Reclaim the Streets”, Do or Die 6, p.6.	+	-----
−	[155] “It’s an orchard, Jim-but not as we know it: Community Orchards and Local Agenda 21”, Duncan MacKay, Ecos 18 (1) 1997, p.47.	+	These shortcomings resulted in a non-thorough materialist viewpoint: when dealing with questions about nature, the early materialists had a strong materialist viewpoint but when dealing with social issues, they “slipped” into an idealist viewpoint.
−	[156] Q!wted in Op.Cit.92.	+	-----
−	[157] “Formulary for a New Urbanism”. Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953. If you will allow me to sketch in some of the intoxicating possibilities (‘moveable feasts’ -the ‘instantly revocable delegates of the landscape’), in what might be the world’s most self-indulgent footnote: orchards, beekeeping, community composting, reedbeds, pleasure gardens, adventure playgrounds, orreries, ponds, ‘abandoned’ wilderness (‘a dark wood’), hanging gardens, greenhouses, moots. dance halls. speakeasies (shebeens), helter skelters, dance halls, climbing walls, bandstands, rockeries, cairns, stupas, prayer wheels, dovecotes, samizdat (community) walls. zen gardens, windmills/turbines. pagodas, hollow hills/earth houses. houseboats, raft villages, mudslides, burrows and tunnels, gigantic mirrors reflecting one another, gongs, amphitheatres, trampolines, mazes, rope swings, bouncy castles. flags, kites (as in the Pakistani kite festivals), trellis walkways, an intractable swamp, sacred groves, maypoles, topiary, sundials, follies, mushroom cellars, haylofts, stills. birdtable and birdbath forests, wicker men, giant metronomes, ‘Ames rooms’, stockades, crypts... this gets addictive, I must stop now and take my pills. Even if you don’t like my suggestions, they are intended merely to give a sense of the wealth of opportunities available to us in ‘dealienated’ settlements. Spare a thought for your own desires and invent your own list.	+	==== Annotation 58 ====
−	[158] Op.Cit.17, p.162.	+	Lenin explains this concept of “slipping into” idealism through a non-thorough materialist viewpoint in ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:'' “Once you deny objective reality, given us in sensation, you have already lost every one of your weapons against fideism, for you have slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism — and that is all fideism wants.”
−	<br>	+	''Note: fideism is a form of idealism which holds that truth and knowledge are received through faith or revelation. Subjectivism is the centering of one’s own self in conscious activities and perspective; see Annotation 222, p. 218.''
−	** Bashing the GE-nie Back in the Bottle (from issue 9)	+	In the same work, Lenin upholds that objective reality can be known through sense perception:
−	*** Borders No Barrier to Sabotage	+	<blockquote>
		+	We ask, is a man given objective reality when he sees something red or feels something hard, etc., or not? [...] If you hold that it is not given, you... inevitably sink to subjectivism... If you hold that it is given, a philosophical concept is needed for this objective reality, and this concept has been worked out long, long ago. This concept is matter. Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The last year has seen a global expansion of resistance to genetic technology. Across the world shadows in the moonlight have razed GE crop trials to the ground. Spades, sticks, scythes, sickles and fire have brought in the harvest. Doors have splintered as labs are broken into. Pies have been aimed at the arrogance of the powerful. Harassment and disruption has greeted the biotech industry wherever it has gathered...	+	Lenin also explains that proper materialism must recognize objective/absolute truth:
−	Since the last issue ofDo or Die was published in August 1999, there have been anti-biotech actions in America, Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, India, Australia, Greece, Ecuador, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Bangladesh and the Philippines. (Undoubtedly there have been actions we haven’t heard about in other countries. This especially applies to the Third/Majority World.) Many of these countries are new to trashing the GM-technocrats’ tools. In other countries where resistance to genetic engineering is more established, tactics have evolved, groups consolidated and actions have become increasingly audacious.	+	<blockquote>
		+	To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs. To acknowledge objective truth, i.e., truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one way or another, to recognise absolute truth.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Our success-especially in Britain-is remarkable, but we should not fall for the myth of imminent victory. At least in terms of genetic engineering, resistance is not as transnational as capital. Corporate and state bodies have been channelling more and more funds and time into GM crops. Actions are slowing this rate of acceleration but we’re still losing the race.	+	A failure to recognize the existence of such objective, absolute truth, according to Lenin, constitutes “relativism,” a position that all truth is relative and can never be absolutely, objectively knowable.
−	This should not dissuade us from doing what needs to be done. To ‘merely’ delay massive social dislocation and biological pollution is worthy of the risks involved. As well as the ‘finger in the dam’ aspect of anti-GM campaigns, the resistance is serving other purposes. Groups all over the world are linking up, training and learning from each other. The hope for a free and ecological future lies in these embryonic movements which understand their enemies are the machine and its masters and their comrades the land and its lovers. The resistance against genetic engineering has catalysed the growth of revolutionary ecological groups around the world. The elite may have designed a weapon which will rebound on themselves.	+	<blockquote>
		+	It is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology (as distinct, for instance, from religious ideology), there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature. You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: yes, it is sufficiently ‘indefinite’ to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but it is at the same time sufficiently ‘definite’ to enable us to dissociate ourselves in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner from fideism and agnosticism, from philosophical idealism and the sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant. Here is a boundary which you have not noticed, and not having noticed it, you have fallen into the swamp of reactionary philosophy. It is the boundary between dialectical materialism and relativism.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The aim of this article is to give an overview of actions over the last year in this global anti-technology war. It will not give a political, ecological or strategic background to genetic engineering. If you’re new to this struggle it would be a good idea to read ‘The New Luddite War’ in the last issue of Do or Die, which also includes some recommended reading.	+	In other words, while proper materialism must contain a degree of relativistic thinking sufficient to challenge assumptions and reexamine perceived truth periodically, materialists must not fall into complete relativism (such as that espoused by Hume and Kant) lest they fall into idealist positions. Ultimately, Absolute Truth — according to Lenin — constitutes the alignment of conscious understanding with objective reality (not to be confused with Hegel’s notion of Absolute Truth; see Annotation 232, p. 228).
−	**** Hurricane Sabotage Hits GM Harvest	+	Lenin recognized the development of Marx and Engels as “''modern materialism'', which is immeasurably richer in content and in comparably more consistent than all preceding forms of materialism,” in large part because Marx and Engels were able to apply materialism properly to social sciences by taking the “direct materialist road as against idealism.” He goes on to describe would-be materialists who fall to idealist positions due to relativism and other philosophical inadequacies as “a contemptible ''middle party'' in philosophy, who confuse the materialist and idealist trends on every question.”
−	Over the last year the country that has seen the most dramatic growth of anti-GM sabotage has been the US. The world’s first outdoor genetic test crop was of strawberries at the University of California in 1987. The night after the crop had been transplanted, EF!ers climbed fences, evaded security and succeeded in pulling up all 2,000 plants.[159] In 1989 American EF!ers destroyed yet more test sites, but as the ‘80s slipped into the ‘90s the US sabotage stopped.	+	Lenin warned that a failure to hold a thoroughly materialist viewpoint leads philosophers to become “ensnared in idealism, that is, in a diluted and subtle fideism; they became ensnared from the moment they took ‘sensation’ not as an image of the external world but as a special ‘element.’ It is nobody’s sensation, nobody’s mind, nobody’s spirit, nobody’s will — this is what one inevitably comes to if one does not recognise the materialist theory that the human mind reflects an objectively real external world.”
−	Twelve years after the first action, the decade-long lull came to a dramatic end. On the 27<sup>th</sup> ofJuly 99, The University of California once again became the launch pad for a wave of action--this time much bigger than the first. That night a group calling itself ‘The California Croppers’ trashed 14 rows of GM corn. The following night saw an acre of GM corn elsewhere in California destroyed. A month later, resistance had spread to the East Coast where yet more experimental GM corn was destroyed, this time al the University of Maine. A week later Vermont, two days after that Minnesota. Two weeks later 50 rows ofGM corn were destroyed at a Pioneer facility and the campaign moved up a notch with company vehicles damaged. Corn sites continued to be laid waste. GM melons, walnut trees and tomatoes got mashed.	+	In other words, idealist conceptions of sensation inject mysticism into philosophy by conceiving of sensation as otherworldly, supernatural, and detached from material human beings with material experiences in the material world.
−	June 2000: The Anarchist Golfing Association destroys GE grass at Pure Seed Testing in Canby, Oregon causing $500,000 worth of damage and causing 10–15 years of research.	+	The development of natural sciences in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries (especially the inventions of Roentgen<ref>Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, 1845–1923 (German): Physicist.</ref>, Becquerel<ref>Henri Becquerel, 1852–1908 (French): Physicist.</ref>, Thomson<ref>Sir Joseph John Thomson, 1856–1940 (British): Physicist, professor at London Royal Institute.</ref> etc.), disproved the theories of “classical elements” such as fire, water, air, etc. [see ''Primitive Materialism'', p. 52]. These innovations led to a viewpoint crisis in the field of physical science. Many idealists used this opportunity to affirm the non-material nature of the world, ascribing the roles of supernatural forces to the birth of the world.
−	After only two months of the campaign there had been twelve successfol sabotages, proceeding to a point where in one action saboteurs could destroy 50 rows of transgenic corn, an acre of herbicide tolerant sunflowers, one hundred melons and trash irrigation equipment and greenhouses undetected.	+	-----
−	The last year has seen more and more crop experiments destroyed, ranging from sugar beet to GM trees. While straight site trashings continue, actions have also escalated to levels which Europe has yet to reach. In the third month of the campaign, all the windows on one side of a GM company’s offices were caved in.	+	==== Annotation 59 ====
−	Five months in and a communique announces that 3 hours before the beginning of the new ‘biotech century’ the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) had broken into the office of a Michigan University GM researcher, dousing it with gasoline and setting it on fire, causing $400,000 of damage. The work destroyed was funded in part by the multinational Monsanto, which led the communique to claim the action as the first US burning in solidarity with the Indian KRRS (Karnataka State Farmers Association) Cremate Monsanto campaign. State response was quick and a month after the attack Craig Rosebraugh, who had been acting as ELF Press Officer, was raided at 8.00am by 15 FBI agents with guns drawn. Simultaneously other agents raided the offices of the Portland Liberation Collective. Though obviously triggered by the arson, these raids were linked to a Grand Jury investigation into the ELF.	+	Lenin discussed this viewpoint crisis extensively in ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism''. Here Lenin discusses relativist reactions to new breakthroughs in natural science, which led even scientists (who proclaimed to be materialists) to take idealist positions:
−	As the year has gone on, daytime actions have grown like their nighttime counterparts. The road to Cargill’s international HQ was barricaded in March causing two mile tailbacks. The blockade was initially carried out by the normal criminal band of EF!ers and anarchos but they were later joined by a noisy carnival of supportive locals, scientists and farmers. After the cops dislodged the barricade the diverse bunch slowed the traffic around the HQ for hours. Outside the citadel of corporate agribusiness, voices joined together chanting: Burn the Buildings, <em>Pull the Crops, This is Where the Research Stops!</em>	+	<blockquote>
		+	We are faced, says Poincaré [a French scientist], with the “ruins” of the old principles of physics, “a general debacle of principles.” It is true, he remarks, that all the mentioned departures from principles refer to infinitesimal magnitudes; it is possible that we are still ignorant of other infinitesimals counteracting the undermining of the old principles... But at any rate we have reached a “period of doubt.” We have already seen what epistemological deductions the author draws from this “period of doubt:” “it is not nature which imposes on [or dictates to] us the concepts of space and time, but we who impose them on nature;” “whatever is not thought, is pure nothing.” These deductions are idealist deductions. The breakdown of the most fundamental principles shows (such is Poincaré’s trend of thought) that these principles are not copies, photographs of nature, not images of something external in relation to man’s consciousness, but products of his consciousness. Poincaré does not develop these deductions consistently, nor is he essentially interested in the philosophical aspect of the question.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The same month saw Bio-Devastation 2000, a series of actions in Boston aimed at America’s biggest gathering of GM scientists and business. 2,500 people took part in an anti-corporate, anti-GM carnival. Thirty gallons of GM soya beans were dumped blocking the conference centre’s entrance. Activists infiltrated and caused chaos in meetings, disrupting speeches and flanning the faceless bureaucrats. One woman even managed to sneak on the special conference shuttle bus and harangue a captive audience of delegates. Outside the conference centre the police had panicked and prepared for a Seattle. Windows of high street shops, even a pizza emporium, were boarded up, whilst cops patrolled the streets.	+	Lenin concludes by stating that the non-thorough materialist position has lead directly to these idealist positions of relativism:
−	Minneapolis was the host for the next confrontation when the International Society for Animal Genetics (ISAG) met at the end of]uly.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The essence of the crisis in modern physics consists in the breakdown of the old laws and basic principles, in the rejection of an objective reality existing outside the mind, that is, in the replacement of materialism by idealism and agnosticism.
		+	</blockquote>
−	A police helicopter hovers above us. At least 30 people have been arrested. Three hours ago one hundred unmasked people broke a police line intended to box us into a street. Using plywood sign/shields and a plastic banner that repelled tear gas andpepper spray, the frontline rocked our world and we escaped from their trap, only to re-take the WHOLE STREET downtown, where later we were separated and one group was surrounded. Last night we had a two hour teach-in and speak <em>out, attended by 300weople, who then marched together in the night. Our presencewas strong andwe got awaywith no arrests. A cop got tossedfrom his horse. Today was our time to take to the streets, we chanted “Reclaim the Streets, Reclaim the Genes “ and “l-5-A-G, Fuck your Biotechnology.</em>’[160]	+	With this historical background, in order to fight against the distortions of many idealists and to protect the development of the materialist viewpoint, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin simultaneously summarized all the natural scientific achievements in late 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> century and built upon Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ thought to develop this definition of matter:
−	Only a few months before in Boston the state had prepared while the rebels were unable to put up street resistance. By the time the ISAG conference came along, the police needed to use heavy force. They fired bean bag rounds, rubber bullets, pepper spray and used batons and still failed to clear the streets of resistance. That night, gun wielding cops stormed one activist house and tried to frame some of its inhabitants on drug dealing charges. This repression will not break the rebels’ resolve.	+	''“Matter is a philosophical category denoting objective reality which is given to man in his sensations, and which is copied, photographed, and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.”''
−	The tailing off of anti-GM sabotage at the end of the 80s was due to contemporary events in EF!. A widespread state repression campaign culminated in the FBI car bombing California EF!ers, and a SWAT team arresting EF!ers attempting to down powerlines in the Arizona desert. Dave Foreman, EF!‘s co-founder and editor of the sabotage handbook <em>Ecodefence</em> awoke in bed looking down the barrel of a cop’s gun.	+	Lenin’s definition of matter shows that:
−	People became understandably afraid. A split within EF! partly exacerbated by repression led to it taking an ostensibly more revolutionary path, but one that was more concerned with civil disobedience than sabotage. Even wilderness defence saw a decrease in ecotage, and the anti-GM campaign as a new front simply didn’t survive.	+	''First,'' we need to distinguish between the definition of “matter” as a philosophical category (the category that summarizes the most basic and common attributes of all material existence, and which was defined with the objective of solving the basic issues of philosophy) from the definition of “matter” that was used in specialized sciences (specific and sense-detectable substance).
−	The 90s have seen the US movement trying to reconcile the contradictions these times left it with. In the re-emergence of anti-GM resistance we see the convergence of mass street action with social change aims and wilderness-ethic sabotage. This is extremely healthy for the movement as a whole. Let’s hope however that this new flurry of action does not lead to the type of attacks the movement suffered from a decade ago. Even if it does, maybe now the movement is more prepared. As one of those raided after ISAG put it in a statement to the City Council:	+	''Second,'' the most basic, common attribute of all kinds of matter [and under both definitions listed in the previous paragraph] is ''objective existence,'' meaning matter exists outside of human consciousness, independently of human consciousness, no matter whether humans can perceive it with our senses or not.
−	We will continue no matter how many times you kick us in the face orpepper spay us. We will continue despite your truncheon blows or shooting us with rubber bullets, because what does not kill us makes us stronger.[161]	+	''Third,'' matter, with its specific forms, can cause and affect mental events in humans when it directly or indirectly impacts the human senses; human consciousness is the reflection of matter; matter is the thing that is reflected by human consciousness.
−	As of October 2000 there have been 40 anti-GM sabotages in America. Despite Grand Juries and police surveillance our friends are still uncaptured.	+	Lenin’s definition of matter played an important role in the development of materialism and scientific consciousness.
−	For more details contact the Bioengineering Action Network (BAN), who are the best contact for the States. Serving the same function over there as the Genetic Engineering Network does over here, they are however openly loads more radical, militant, and wild.	+	''First,'' by pointing out that the most basic, common attribute of matter is objective existence, Lenin successfully distinguished the basic difference between the definition of matter as a philosophical category and the definition of matter as a category of specialized sciences. It helped solve the problems of defining matter in the previous forms of materialism; it offered scientific evidence to define what can be considered matter; it layed out a theoretical foundation for building a materialist viewpoint of history, and overcame the shortcomings of idealist conceptions of society.
−	Web: [[http://www.tao.ca/-ban][http://www.tao.ca/-ban]]	+	''Second,'' by asserting that matter was ''“objective reality,” “given to man in his sensations,”'' and “''copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations,”'' Lenin not only confirmed the primary existence of matter and the secondary existence of consciousness [see ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88''] but he also affirmed that humans had the ability to be aware of objective reality through the “copying, photographing and reflection of our sensations” [in other words, sense perceptions].
−	Email: [[mailto:ban@tao.ca][ban@tao.ca]]	+	==== b. Mode and Forms of Existence of Matter ====
−	[159] [**Archivists note:** Footnote missing from source book and original source magazine.]	+	According to the dialectical materialist viewpoint, ''motion'' is the mode of existence of matter; ''space'' and ''time'' are the forms of existence of matter.
−	[160] [**Archivists note:** Footnote missing from source book and original source magazine.]	+	-----
−	[161] [**Archivists note:** Footnote missing from source book and original source magazine.]	+	==== Annotation 60 ====
−	<br>	+	<blockquote>
		+	Mode refers to the way or manner in which something occurs or exists. You can think of mode as pertaining to the “how,” as opposed to the “what.” For example, the ''mode'' of circulation refers to ''how'' commodities circulate within society [see Annotation 14, p. 16]; ''mode'' of production refers to ''how'' commodities are produced in society. So, mode of existence of matter refers to ''how'' matter exists in our universe.
−	* Extra-environmental	+	Form comes from the category pair [see ''Basic Pairs of Categories of Materialist Dialectics'', p. 126] of Content and Form [see p. 147]. Form refers to how we perceive objects, phenomena, and ideas. So, form of existence of matter refers to the ways in which we perceive the existence of matter [explained below] in our universe.
		+	</blockquote>
−	** Derek Wall Fingers the Green Nazis (from issue 1)	+	''- Motion is the Mode of Existence of Matter''
−	Have you heard rumours of Satrivi Devi, the Hindu fascist, who praised the SS for their protection of animals and Hitler for his love of trees? Perhaps you have read Ecology in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century, where Anna Bramwell, an ex-young member officer of the Conservative Monday Club, argues that much of Green philosophy is rooted in the ideas of conservative and sometimes racist thinkers! What the hell is going on? Perhaps you have been approached by the distributists to help co-ordinate an anti-McDonalds day. Or been sent a copy of Green Dawn, an innocuous looking and rather environmentalist paper, put out by the National Front [NF]. Or have you been fooled, as Jonathan Porritt and the Centre for Alternative Technology were, into writing for Scorpion, published by Martin Walker, the former NF organiser for Central London.	+	As Friedrich Engels explained: ''“Motion, in the most general sense, conceived as the mode of existence, the inherent attribute of matter, comprehends all changes and processes occurring in the universe, from mere change of place right up to thinking.”''
−	A few years ago, some Deep Ecologists said some racist and extreme things. Ed Abbey complained of Mexicans swamping the US, forgetting that all sorts of races propelled not by genetics but economics and greed had formed the US on the blood of the Indians. The despicable Chris Manes in his EF! Miss Anthrope column claimed to be taking the piss with his view but briefly associated EF! US with the view that AIDS was a good thing and the Ethopian famine victims (who starved while we in the West dined on their countries) deserved to die. Deep Ecology is no longer associated with such unpleasant views: loving nature and all species requires respect for our own species. Real fascists, the guys and gals who back up their racist views with baseball bats and on occasion bombs, the European equivalent of Guatamalan death squads-who believe in an international Jewish conspiracy, the Fuhrer prinzip, celebrate Hitler’s birthday-have for a long time been trying to infiltrate the green movement.	+	According to Engels, motion encompasses more than just positional changes. Motion embodies “all the changes and processes happening in this universe;” matter is always associated with motion, and matter can only express its existence through motion.
−	Eco-fascism is on the march with a three pronged assault that if successful will destroy Ecology.	+	-----
−	The first prong is ideological. Martin Walker set up the magazine Scorpion to link neo Nazis with the Green movement, and has over the past four years hoodwinked a whole series of prominent Greens from John Papworth (former editor of Resurgence and an ex-advisor to Zambian leader Kenneth Kaunda) to Peter Cadogan, the pacifist and decentralist, into attending its conferences. Another <em>Scorpion</em> conference goer Anna Bramwell (see <em>Searchlight</em>) in her books <em>Ecology in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century</em> and <em>Blood and Soil: Walther Darre and Hitler’s Green Party,</em> has argued that the first Greens were to be found in Hitler’s Germany and that “Ecologism” is a phenomenon of the “despised white European north:’ As far back as 1973 racists were blaming Third World overpopulation for the problems created by First World greed, in what was termed The Lifeboat Thesis, arguing against aid to famine victims but saying nothing about the links between Third World starvation and First World overconsumption. New Right ecologists have little to say of the brave struggle of African, Asian, and South American greens like Chico Mendes (the Brazilian trade unionist killed for protecting the rainforests), or the rural women involved in the Kenyan Green Belt movement. The plight of the Tasmanian aborigines and other Native people who lived in balance with the environment but were exterminated by European colonialists is forgotten. According to Anna who somehow managed to attend the 1989 Green Party conference, ecology should not be confused with the fight for social justice.	+	==== Annotation 61 ====
−	The second prong is organisational. Suddenly the brown shirts are green. The Strasserite blood and soil wing of the NF has been followed by other Fascist groups into exploiting environmental issues. Where NF once accused the anti-nuclear movement of being financed by Moscow gold, they now endorse opposition of the building of Hinckley point. The myth of a racially pure rural Britain peppered by nationalistic communes is closely linked to NF protests over the grubbing up of hedges and acid rain. Hull NF have advertised for members worried by “the growing scandal of filth and pollution in our waterways:’ Despite their hatred of other races the far right have become animal lovers. In fact the far right think of everything: Mosley supposedly invented Keynsian economic growth, Hitler built the first motorways, and both were supposedly advocates of the EC before anyone else thought of it. Thal the far right have taken up green issues should not fool us to their real nature, it should not lull us into inaction.	+	In Dialectical Materialist philosophy, “motion” is also known as “change” and it refers to the changes which occur as a result of the mutual impacts which occur in or between subjects through the negation of contradictions. Motion is a constant attribute of all things, phenomena, and ideas (see Characteristics of Development, p. 124).
−	The final element is of direct infiltration. The far right have a strategy of moving into all major political parties and former members of the NF and British National Party have turned up as Labour, Liberal and Conservative candidates in the past. The NF are reputed to have put candidates under the Green or Ecology label in the past in areas where the real Greens are thin on the ground. Further afield Die Gruenen have had major problems with fascist infiltration and have closed down several local Green groups. The NF have gone as far as to stand a candidate under the title of Greenwave, a name ripped off an organisation set up by members of Greenpeace. Obviously neo-nazis find it easier to get votes under bogus green banners than as fascists. In 1989 a parliamentary by-election candidate for the real Green Party was offered help by a mysterious individual from the East End of London, who suggested that she campaigned under the slogan On the Crest of the Greenwave, she declined and other members have been warned of the threat. Yet as long ago as the mid 1970s other would-be environmentalists campaigned under the title of the Survival Party, complete with far right ideology and Mosleyite Flashes of lightning insignia on their publications. The far right soil everything they come into contact with and the greens must be aware of their corrupting influence, step up their vigilance and work for radical policies that attack the racism and inequality that underpins ecological destruction.	+	Because matter is inseparable from motion (and vice versa), Engels defined motion as the ''mode'' of matter — the way or manner in which matter exists. It is impossible for matter in our universe to exist in completely static and unchanging state, isolated from the rest of existence; thus matter exists in the ''mode'' of motion. Over time, motion leads to ''development'' as things, phenomena, and ideas transition through various stages of quality change [see Annotation 117, p. 119].
−	The animal rights movement, bizarrely, has been plagued by former and existing members of the NF. There is no doubt the fascists will attempt to infiltrate Earth First! Many of them appear like your average hippy! They are by no menas all skinhead thugs (equally groups like Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice and all the sound Gay/Lesbian suedeheads illustrate that having short hair doesn’t mean you are a nasty nazi!). Be warned! They are thin on the ■ ground but beware. Tlie British National Party, the largest (perhaps 600 plus) nazi group, ignore Deep Ecology, but equally demand opposition. There is an excellent article in the latest issue of Green Anarchist, on the psychology of the BNP and fighting the fascists in general. Larry O’Hara, an exmember of the excellent Big Flame group, bizarrely associated by Searchlight with the far right, is doing some good work on the subject. Ian Coates of Bristol university has produced a useful paper entitled “A Cuckoo in the Nest” on the NF infiltration of the Green movement. Send him an SAE and a small, donation to cover photocopying and I am sure he will let you have a copy (Ian Coates, c/o Dept of Sociology, Bristol University, Woodlands Road, Bristol). Also get hold of The Bigger Tory Vote by Nick Toezek, published by AK Press.	+	Matter exists objectively, therefore motion also exists objectively. The motion of matter is self-motion<ref>In the original Vietnamese, the word tự vận động is used here, which we roughly translate to the word ''self-motion'' throughout this book. Literally, tự vận động means: “it moves itself.”</ref>.
−	Finally why not join your local Anti-Fascist Action group or Anti-Fascist Alliance group, remember the Anti-Nazi League is a naff vehicle for those merchants of debased Leninist bollocks, the Socialist Workers Party.	+	-----
−	Remember, people are dying because of Nazis in France, Spain, Germany, and in this country.	+	==== Annotation 62 ====
−	Derek Wall is an Eco-Socialist and a good friend ofEF! (some of <em>this is from an article first published in</em> Searchlight, June 1989).	+	It is important to note that “matter,” in the philosophical sense as used in dialectical materialist phlosophy, includes all that is “objective” (external) to individual human cosnciousness. This includes objective phenomena which human senses are unable to detect, such as objective social relations, objective economic values, etc. Objectiveness is discussed more in Annotation 108, p. 112; objective social relations are discussed more in Annotation 10, p. 10.
−	<br>	+	In ''Dialectics of Nature'', Friedrich Engels discussed the properties of motion and explained that motion can neither be created nor destroyed. Therefore, motion can only change form or transfer from one object to another. In this sense, all objects are dynamically linked together through motion:
−	** Critical Mass: Reclaiming Space and Combating the Car (from issue 5)	+	<blockquote>
		+	The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies we understand here all material existence extending from stars to atoms... In the fact that these bodies are interconnected is already included that they react on one another, and it is precisely this mutual reaction that constitutes motion. It already becomes evident here that matter is unthinkable without motion. And if, in addition, matter confronts us as something given, equally uncreatable as indestructible, it follows that motion also is as uncreatable as indestructible. It became impossible to reject this conclusion as soon as it was recognised that the universe is a system, an interconnection of bodies.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<quote>	+	In other words, every body of matter is in motion relative to other bodies of matter, and thus matter is inseparable from motion. Motion results from the interaction of bodies of matter. Because motion and matter define each other, and because motion can only exist in relation to matter and matter can only exist in relation to motion, the motion of matter can be described as “self-motion,” because the motion is not created externally but exists only within and in relation to matter itself. Engels further explains that if this were not true — if motion were external to matter — then motion itself would have had to have been created external to matter, which is impossible:
−	What a difef rence there was between the old and new parts of Mexico City only twenty years ago. In the old parts of the city, the streets were still true commons. Some people sat on the road to sell vegetables and charcoal. Others put their <em>chairs on the road to sell tequila. Others held their meetings on the road to decide on the new headman for the neighborhood or to determine the price of a donkey. Others drove their donkeys through the crowd, walking next to the heavily-loaded beast of burden; others sat in the saddle. Children played in the gutter, and still people walking could use the road to get from one place to another. Such roads were not builtfor people. Like any true commons, the street itself was the result ofpeople living there and</em> making <em>the space liveable. Ihe dwellings that lined the roads were not private homes in the modern sense-garages for the overnight deposit of workers. Ihe threshold still separated two living areas, one intimate and one common. But neither homes in this intimate sense nor streets as commons survived economic development. In the new sections of Mexico City, streets are no more for people. They are nowadays for automobiles, for buses, for cars, for taxis and trucks. People are barley tolerated on the streets unless they are on their way to a bus stop. Ifpeople now sat down or stopped on the street they would become obstacles for the traffic, and traffic would be dangerous to them. Ihe road has been degradedfrom a commons to a simple resourcefor the circulation of vehicles.”</em>
−	<right>	+	<blockquote>
−	-Ivan Illich, “Silence is a Commons”, <em>The Co-evolution Quarterly,</em> Winter 1983.	+	To say that matter during the whole unlimited time of its existence has only once, and for what is an infinitesimally short period in comparison to its eternity, found itself able to differentiate its motion and thereby to unfold the whole wealth of this motion, and that before and after this remains restricted for eternity to mere change of place — this is equivalent to maintaining that matter is mortal and motion transitory. The indestructibility of motion cannot be merely quantitative, it must also be conceived qualitatively; matter whose purely mechanical change of place includes indeed the possibility under favourable conditions of being transformed into heat, electricity, chemical action, or life, but which is not capable of producing these conditions from out of itself, such matter has forfeited motion; motion which has lost the capacity of being transformed into the various forms appropriate to it may indeed still have dynamis but no longer energeia, and so has become partially destroyed. Both, however, are unthinkable.
−	</right>	+	</blockquote>
−	</quote>
−	As Ivan Illich says, it is about “making (our) spaces liveable”-reasserting our control, in a myriad of different ways, over those spaces that once belonged to us but have since been illegitimately wrested away from us, through the process known as “enclosure;” This is what happened to the Dongas at Twyford Down on December 9<sup>th</sup> 1992, to George Green in Wanstead, and to countless other places. This is where demos, or actions, come in--in a sense the issue that they are ostensibly concerned with is of secondary importance to the feelings that our actions engender within ourselves and others--how much of a scene we make and the imprint that it leaves behind. The US anarchist writer Hakim Bey talks of temporary autonomous zones, and this is at the heart of what every demonstration is, or should be striving for-a glimpse of the future (present?) society we long for. The best demos are a gap opening in the clouds of alienation, apathy, and impotence, and a sliver of electrifying sunlight breaking through. The stranglehold of orthodox reality is broken-to quote one example, it seems that at a recent Oxford Cycle action, the traffic was brought to a standstill by a prank that subverted police’s public order expectations and left them confounded-they were confronted by waiters who had appeared out of nowhere and were causally serving tea at Oxford’s newest cafe, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. The street had been redefined.	+	So, motion can change forms and can transfer from one material body to another, but it can never be created externally from matter, and neither motion nor matter can be created or destroyed in our universe. Thus, matter exists in a state of “self-motion;” motion can never externally be created nor externally applied to matter.
−	This brings us to Critical Mass-an idea and an attitude for bike actions that sprang up in San Francisco, and has now spread to other US cities and international locales, as the potential for mayhem inherent in bikes has been realized and refined. The Mass began as an informal commute home together to show bike solidarity with no real agenda (Maximum Rock n’Roll, Feb. 1994)--Just 50 riders cycling home in the dark. It has since proved to have an irresistible momentum, as hundreds more cyclists have gotten involved in Critical Mass manifestations, and the actions themselves have become more intentional. Their experience has shown the willingness of police and motorists to resort to potentially lethal force to defend what?-One of the supreme totems of our age-the private motor car, and the inalienable right of the motorist to drive, without hindrances of any kind. In one incident in San Francisco in April 1993, a driver reportedly rammed a group of cyclists on the Mass, and proceeded to run over one of its members. The police present duly charged the victims and threatened to arrest other witnesses. I’m sure such experiences will be familiar to those who have participated in Carmageddon actions in the U.K-or indeed, in anti-roads campaigns in general.	+	To put it another way, motion results from the fact that all things, phenomena, and ideas exist as assemblages of relationships [see The Principle of General Relationships, p. 107], and these relationships contain opposing forces. As Lenin explained in his ''Philosophical Notebooks'':
−	When death may be the penalty for enjoying an innocuous pleasure such as communal cycling, your ideas tend to become radicalized. Critical Masters now see cars (as) embodying the epitome of ‘American destruction (Maximum R ‘n R). Consequently, aggressive drivers are spat upon or blocked in for longer. The focus of the masses has broadened, with people biking through supermarkets, McDonalds (stealing their flags and causing the manager to lock himself in the process), and other temples of latter day capitalism. Most notably, hordes of cyclists attempted the world’s first cyclotron, surrounding the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange in a bid to levitate it. (Remind you of anything?)	+	<blockquote>
		+	The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the ‘struggle’ of opposites.
		+	</blockquote>
−	One of the most recent events involved blocking a Berkeley motorway, which led to the worst police reprisal so far seen: some of the participants were charged with “felony assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon, to wit: one bicycle” and 61 bikes were confiscated, some ofwhich disappeared while in police hands. The officer who masterminded this operation hit the nail on the head in hilarious fashion when he accused Critical Massers of being <em>nothing more than self proclaimed anarchists and local activists who have adopted innovative tactics to create civil disorder in an attempt to carry out the ‘anarchist revolution’.</em> Give that man a D-lock!
−	Two of those involved in Critical Mass make a very significant point when they say it “above all builds community...at San Francisco Critical Mass in September for its first birthday, people brought huge cakes and brownies and we all sang happy birthday, and had fun in Golden Gate Park:’ <em>(Maximum R n’R).</em> Again, this feeling of community, and, ideally, tribal links will be familiar to many UKEF!ers. If revolution is the festival of the oppressed, struggling for something you believe in helps to bind you together, restoring the connections between people that this society so often severs as it tries to atomise us. A new zine culture-the “Xerocracy”-has emerged to cater to Critical Mass, fostering communication between strangers whose only previous connection was ownership of a bike and a desire for change, or (equally valid) some excitement. This brings us back to lllich’s point about commons, and the way in which cars (along with a host of other factors) destroy this social space. Numerous studies support such a conclusion-for example, David Engwight’s research (see The Guardian 5/11/93) into how people living on streets with heavy traffic flows experience much less social contact than those living on streets with light flows. The Policy Studies Institute compare roads to <em>crocodile-infested rivers</em> that people dare not cross (New Scientist 24/10/92)-also, think of the traffic canyons that are prevalent in many cities.	+	-----
−	An example of resistance to this trend, and reclamation of this space for the people and community was Claremont Road at the M 11. The contents ofhouses-chairs, sofas, a bath tub, a pool table, etc.--were turned out onto the street, breaking down the odious division between public and private spheres. There could be no greater contrast with David Engwight’ s findings, where <em>Heavy Street (high traffic levels)...was used solely as a corridor between the sanctuary of individual homes and the outside world. There was nofeeling of community and residents kept themselves to themselves.</em> In our society, it is not just the physical environment that is colonized and enclosed-it is our minds also. By and large, cultural products are manufactured for us, we passively consume them, and our own idiosyncratic imaginations begin to atrophy. Critical Mass, and many other similar actions in the UK, are thus also important because they subvert this trend. A platform-a vehicle even (excuse the pun)-is provided for people to act out their fantasies, to play, to let rip. One example is Xerocracy, another is that <em>often (the mass) is chaotic, and indecision in the middle of the intersection can be annoying-or lead to outbursts of theater andfun like die-ins and resuscitating people with bikes. (A1aximum R n’R)</em> People exult in the atmosphere and surprise themselves with their hitherto-neglected capabilities. The first time that the A33 at Twyford was blocked (March 1992) was such an occasion-having stilled the ceaseless roar of the traffic (the lifeblood of the cybernetic machine that we inhabit), we reveled in our power and new found freedom. We capered about, danced, sang, hooted, and grunted through road cones as if regressing to primal selves, did an absurd Conga through the stalled cars, openly attempted rash acts of sabotage-possessed by an almost palpable spirit of the moment: for a brief moment, anything seemed possible. To refer back to what I said at the beginning, we were sunbathing.	+	Based on the scientific achievements which occurred in his lifetime, Engels classified motion into 5 basic forms: ''mechanical motion'' (changes in positions of objects in space); ''physical motion'' (movements of molecules, electrons, fundamental particles, thermal processes, electricity…); ''chemical motion'' (changes of organic and inorganic substances in combination and separation processes…); ''biological motion'' (changes of living objects, or genetic structure…); ''social motion'' (changes in economy, politics, culture, and social life).
−	Critical Masses have been happening all over the country, with over 1,500 at the last London CM and over 300 in Brighton. Join these explosions of bike power: Last Friday of every month: Aberdeen, Bath, Bradford, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lancaster, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Middlesborough, Sheffield, Southampton, Stoke, Wolverhampton, York. 1<sup>st</sup> Friday: Birmingham. 2<sup>nd</sup> Friday: Nottingham, 1<sup>st</sup> Saturday: Brighton.	+	These basic forms of motion are arranged into levels of advancement based on the level of complexity of matter that is affected.
−	Addresses:	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-8.png]]
−	1) Bike Not: London	+	The basic forms of motion each affect different forms of matter, but these forms of motion do not exist independently from each other; they actually have strong relationships with each other, in which the more advanced forms of motion develop from lower forms of motion; the more advanced forms of motion also internally include lower forms of motion. [I.e., biological motion contains chemical motion; chemical motion contains physical motion; etc.]
−	2) The Broken Spoke: San Francisco, CA	+	Every object exists with many forms of motion, but any given object is defined by its most advanced form of motion. [I.e., living creatures are defined in terms of biological motion, societies are defined in terms of social motion, etc.]
−	3) The Bicycle Terrorist: Berkeley, CA	+	By classifying the basic forms of motion, Engels laid out the foundation for classification and synthesization of science. The basic forms of motion differ from one another, but they are also unified with each other into one continuous system of motion. Understanding this dialectical relationship between different forms of motion helped to overcome misunderstandings and confusion about motion.
−	4) Mudflap: San Francisco, CA	+	-----
−	5) Bicycle Threat: Sacramento, CA	+	==== Annotation 63 ====
−	<br>	+	In ''Dialectics of Nature'', Engels clears up a great deal of confusion and addresses many misconceptions about matter, motion, forces, energy, etc. which existed in both science and philosophy at the time by defining and explaining the dialectical nature of matter and motion.
−	** Reclaim the Streets (from issue 6)	+	When Dialectical Materialism affirmed that motion was the mode of existence — the natural attribute of matter — it also confirmed that motion is absolute and eternal. This does not mean that Dialectical Materialism denies that things can become ''frozen;'' however, according to the dialectical materialist viewpoint, ''freezing is a special form of motion, it is motion in equilibrium'' and ''freezing is relative and temporary.''
−	We are not going to demand anything. We are not going to ask for anything. We are going to take. We are going to occupy.	+	''Motion in equilibrium'' is motion that has not changed the positions, forms, and/or structures of things.
−	The direct action group Reclaim the Streets (RTS) has developed widespread recognition over the last few years. From road blockades to street parties, from strikes on oil corporations to organising alongside striking workers, its actions and ideas are attracting more and more people and international attention. Yet the apparent sudden emergence of this group, its penetration of popular alternative culture, and its underlying philosophy have rarely been discussed.	+	Freezing is a ''relative'' phenomenon because freezing only occurs in some forms of motion and in some specific relations, it does not occur in all forms of motion and all kinds of relations. Freezing is a temporary phenomenon because freezing only exists for a limited period of time, it cannot last forever.
−	*** The Evolution of RTS	+	-----
−	RTS was originally formed in London in Autumn 1991, around the dawn of the anti-roads movement. With the battle for Twyford Down rumbling along in the background, a small group of individuals got together to take direct action against the motor car. In their own words they were campaigning: FOR wa <em>lking</em><em>, cycling, and cheap, or free, public transport, and AGAINST cars, roads, and the system thatpushes them.[162]</em>	+	==== Annotation 64 ====
−	Their work was small-scale but effective and even back then it had elements of the cheeky, surprise tactics that have moulded RTS’s more recent activities. There was the trashed car on Park Lane symbolising the arrival of Car-mageddon, DIY cycle lanes painted overnight on London streets, disruption of the 1993 Earls Court Motor Show, and subvertising actions on car adverts around the city. However the onset of the No Ml1 Link Road Campaign presented the group with a specific local focus, and RTS was absorbed temporarily into the No M11 campaign in East London.	+	Equilibrium can exist at any advancement of motion. Lenin discussed ''equilibrium'' as it pertains to the social form of motion in discussing an equilibrium of forces existing in Russia in 1905 in this article, ''An Equilibrium of Forces:''
−	This period of the No M11 Campaign was significant for a number of reasons. Whilst Twyford Down was predominantly an ecological campaign-defending a natural area-the urban setting of the resistance to the M11 construction embodied wider social and political issues Beyond the anti-road and ecological arguments, a whole urban community faced the destruction of its social environment with loss of homes, degradation to its quality of life, and community fragmentation.	+	<blockquote>
		+	1) The result to date (Monday, October 30) is an equilibrium of forces, as we already pointed out in Proletary, No. 23.
−	Beyond these political and social considerations, the M11 developed the direct action skills of those involved. Phone trees were established, lots of people were involved in site invasions, crowds of activists had to be manoeuvred cunningly to outwit police. The protesters also gained experience of dealing with associated tasks such as publicity, the media, and fund-raising.	+	2) Tsarism is no longer strong enough, the revolution not yet strong enough, to win.
−	Then in late 1994 a political hand-grenade was thrown into the arena of the M11 campaign: the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Overnight civil protesting became a criminal act, but. what the government hadn’t counted on was how this piece of legislation would unite and motivate the very groups it was aimed at repressing. The fight of the anti-road activists became synonymous with that of travellers, squatters, and hunt saboteurs. In particular, the suddenly politicised rave scene became a communal social focus for many people.	+	3) Hence the tremendous amount of vacillation. The terrific and enormous increase of revolutionary happenings (strikes, meetings, barricades, committees of public safety, complete paralysis of the government, etc.), on the other hand, the absence of resolute repressive measures. The troops are wavering.
−	The M11 Link Road campaign culminated in the symbolic and dramatic battle of Claremont Road. Eventually, and with the repetitive beats ofThe Prodigy in the background, police and security overpowered the barricades, lock-ons, and the scaffold tower, but the war was only just beginning. The period of the Ml1 Campaign had linked together new political and social alliances and in the midst of the campaign’s frenzied activities strong friendships had been formed. When Claremont Road was lost, this collective looked for new sources of expression and Reclaim the Streets was reformed in February 1995.	+	4) The Tsar’s Court is wavering (The Times and the Daily Telegraph) between dictatorship and a constitution.
−	The years that followed saw the momentum of RTS flourish. Street Parties I and II were held in rapid succession in the summer of 1995 and there were various actions against the likes of Shell, the Nigerian Embassy, and the 1995 Motor Show. More recently, in July 1996 there was the massive success of the M41 Street Party, where for nine hours 8,000 people took control of the M41 motorway in West London and partied and enjoyed themselves, whilst some dug up the tarmac with jack-hammers and in its place planted trees that had been rescued from the construction path of the M 11.	+	The Court is wavering and biding its time. Strictly speaking, these are its correct tactics: the equilibrium of forces compels it to bide its time, for power is in its hands.
−	At a base level the focus ofRTS has remained anti-car but this has been increasingly symbolic, not specific. RTS aimed initially to move debate beyond the anti-roads struggle, to highlight the social, as well as the ecological, costs of the car system.	+	The revolution has reached a stage at which it is disadvantageous for the counter-revolution to attack, to assume the offensive.
−	<quote>	+	For us, for the proletariat, for consistent revolutionary democrats, this is not enough. If we do not rise to a higher level, if we do not manage to launch an independent offensive, if we do not smash the forces of Tsarism, do not destroy its actual power, then the revolution will stop half way, then the bourgeoisie will fool the workers.
−	The cars that fill the streets have narrowed the pavements.. If pedestrians ... want to look at each other, they see cars <em>in the background, if they want to look at the building across the street they see cars in the foreground: there isn’t a single angle of viewfrom which cars will not be visible, from the back, in front, on both sides. Their omnipresent noise corrodes every moment of contemplation like acid.[163]</em>
−	</quote>
−	Cars dominate our cities, polluting, congesting, and dividing communities. They have isolated people from one another, and our streets have become mere conduits for motor vehicles to hurtle through, oblivious of the neighbourhoods they are disrupting. Cars have created social voids: allowing people to move further and further away from their homes, dispersing and fragmenting daily activities and lives and increasing social anonymity. RTS believe that ridding society of the car would allow us to re-create a safer, more attractive living environment, to return streets to the people who live on them, and perhaps to rediscover a sense of social solidarity.	+	5) Rumour has it that a constitution has been decided upon. If that is so, then it follows that the Tsar is heeding the lessons of 1848 and other revolutions: he wants to grant a constitution without a constituent assembly, before a constituent assembly, apart from a constituent assembly. What kind of constitution? At best (for ’the Tsar) a Constitutional-Democratic constitution.
−	But cars arc just one piece of the jigsaw and RTS is also about raising the wider questions behind the transport issue--about the political and economic forces that drive car culture. Governments claim that “roads are good for the economy.” More goods travelling on longer journeys, more petrol being burnt, more customers at out-of-town supermarkets-it is all about increasing “consumption;’ because that is an indicator of “economic growth.” ‘Ihe greedy, short-term exploitation of dwindling resources regardless ofthe immediate or long-term costs. Therefore RTS’ s attack on cars cannot be detached from a wider attack on capitalism itself.	+	This implies: achievement of the Constitutional-Democrats’ ideal, skipping the revolution; deceiving the people, for all the same there will be no complete and actual freedom of elections.
−	<quote>	+	Should not the revolution skip this granted constitution?
−	<em>Our streets are as full of capitalism as of cars and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious.[164]</em>
−	</quote>
−	More importantly, RTS is about encouraging more people to take part in direct action. Everyone knows the destruction that roads and cars are causing, yet the politicians still take no notice. Hardly surprising-they only care about staying in power and maintaining their authority over the majority of people. Direct action is about destroying that power and authority, and people taking responsibility for themselves. Direct action is not just a tactic: it’s an end in itself. It is about enabling people to unite as individuals with a common aim, to change things directly by their own actions.	+	-----
−	Street Parties I, II, and III were ingenious manifestations of RTS’s views. They embodied the above messages in an inspired formula: cunning direct action, crowd empowerment, fun, humour, and raving. They have evolved into festivals open to all who feel exasperated by conventional society.	+	''- Space and Time are Forms of Existence of Matter''
		+	</blockquote>
−	To some extent it is possible to trace the tactics behind the Street Parties in RTS’s history. The mobilisation, assembly, and movement of large crowds draws on skills from road protests. The use ofsound systems draws on dominant popular culture whereas the initial inspiration for Street Parlies certainly reflects the parties of the Claremont Road days. However. RTS have retrospectively also realised that their roots lie deeper in history. The great revolutionary moments have all been enormous popular festivals-the storming of the Bastiile, the Paris Commune, and the uprisings in 1968, to name a few. A carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchy, rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Crowds ofpeople on the street seized by a sudden awareness of their power and unification through a celebration of their own ideas and creations. It follows then that carnivals and revolutions are not spectacles seen by other people, but the very opposite in that they involve the active participation of the crowd itself. Their very idea embraces all people, and the Street Party as an event has successfully harnessed this emotion.	+	Every form of matter exists in a specific position, with specific space particularity (height, width, length, etc.), in specific relation (in front or behind, above or under, to the left or right, etc.) with other forms of matter. These positional relations exist in what we call ''space.'' [Space is defined by positional relations of matter.]
−	The power that such activities embody inevitably challenges the state’s authority, and hence ihe police and security services’ attention has increasingly been drawn, to RTS. The organisation of any form of direct action by the group is closely scrutinised. RTS has been made very aware of this problem. Vehicles carrying equipment have been broken into, followed, and impounded en route to Street Parties. RTS’s office has been raided, telephones have been bugged, and activists from RTS have been followed, harassed, and threatened with heavy conspiracy charges. On top of this a secret RTS action in December 1996 (an attempt to seize a BP tanker on the M25) was foiled by the unexpected presence of two hundred police at the activists’ meeting point. How such information is obtained by the police is uncertain and can easily lead to paranoia in the group: fear of infiltration, anxiety, and suspicion that can themselves be debilitating.	+	On the other hand, the existence of matter is also expressed in the speed of change and the order in which changes occur. These changes occur in what we call ''time.'' As Engels wrote: “For the basic forms of all existence are space and time, and a being outside of time is as absurd as an existence outside space.” Matter, space, and time are not separable; there is no matter that exists outside of space and time; there is also no space and time that exist outside of matter’s motion.
−	Yet RTS has not been deterred: they hold open meetings every week, they continue to expand and involve new people, and are also frequently approached by other direct action groups. Alliances have sprouted with other groups-the striking Liverpool Dockers and Tube Workers to name two-as recognition has grown of common ground between these struggles. Throughout the UK and Europe new local RTS groups have formed and late this summer there are likely to be Street Panics worldwide. These new groups have not been created by London RTS. they are fully autonomous. London RTS has merely acted as a calalyst; stimulating individuals to replicate ideas if they are suitable for others to use as well.	+	-----
−	In many ways the evolution of RTS has been a logical progression that reflects its roots and experiences. Equally the forms of expression adopted by RTS are merely modern interpretations of age-old protests: direct action is not a new invention. Like their historic revolutionary counterparts, they arc a group fighting for a better society at a time when many people feel alienated from, and concerned about, the current system. Their success lies in their ingenuity for empowering people, their foresight to forge common ground between issues, and their ability to inspire.	+	==== Annotation 65 ====
−	*** The Future Street Party?	+	Space and time, as the forms of matter, i.e.: the ways in which we perceive the existence of matter. We are only able to perceive and understand material objects as they exist within space and time.
−	From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.--A.N,Whitehead	+	Space and time, as forms of existence of matter, exist objectively [see Annotation 108,
−	Tactics need to move. If they do not those involved become tired or bored. One way to move is to grow; doing it all bigger and better. Relying on tighter organisation and a more specialised activist. This can have immediate benefits that confer success on the group using them: wider media coverage, more ‘subscribers’ to your mailouts, a certain notoriety. Another way-dialectically opposed to the former, though also a type of growth-is to diffuse. Enable more and more people to experience organising the tactic or be affected by its presence and possibilities directly.	+	p. 112], and are defined by matter. [Space is defined by the positional relations between material objects; time is defined by the speed of change of material objects and the order in which these changes occur.] Space has three dimensions: height, width, length; time has one direction: from the past to the future.
−	The Street Party tactic has, to date, been growing in both ways. Three parties in London, each more organised and successful than the last, and the erupting of parties around the country, locally organised and controlled, have shown that, as well as being a serious affair, resistance can be a festival. But what is the point of the street party? What is its future ? What could it be potentially? These questions should be answered if the street party, conceived as a means to a free and ecological end, is not to become a victim of its own success.	+	==== c. The Material Unity of the World ====
−	A simple, but limiting, answer to the first question is: “to highlight the social and environmental costs of the car system.”[165] Which is fine, as far as it goes, but the rationale of the street party, certainly the experience, suggests that a more organic, transformative, even Utopian approach may bring other replies and an answer to the last two questions-its future and potential. The concern is that the street party risks becoming a caricature of itself if it becomes too focused on the spectacular and its participant-the mass. The speculation is that, inherent within its praxis-its mix of desire, spontaneity, and organisation-lie some of the foundations on which to build a participatory politics for a liberated, ecological society.	+	Dialectical Materialism affirms that the nature of the world is matter, and the world is unified in its material properties. [In other words: the entire universe, in all its diversity, is made of matter, and the properties of matter are the same throughout the known universe.]
−	*** Selling Space	+	The material nature of the world is proven on the following basis:
−	The words “street” and “road” are often taken to mean the same thing, but they can be defined in opposition to each other, to represent different concepts of space. In everyday usage the distinction is still common. We talk of the word on the streets, taking to the streets, and street culture. A street suggests dwellings, people, and interaction, in a word: community. A road, in contrast, suggests the tarmac, the horizon, progress, and the private enclosure of the motor car. We speak of ‘*roadworks*’ and ‘*road rage*’.[166]	+	''First,'' there is only one world: the material world; the material world is the first existence [i.e., it existed before consciousness], it exists objectively, and independently, of human consciousness.
−	The road is mechanical, linear movement epitomised by the car. The street. at best, is a living place of human movement and social intercourse, of freedom and spontaneity.[167] The car system steals the street from under us and sells it back for the price of petrol. It privileges time over space, corrupting and reducing both to an obsession with speed or, in economic lingo, turnover. It doesn’t matter who drives this system for its movements are already pre-determined. As Theodore Adorno notes in Iv1inima Moralia: “Which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children, and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hardhitting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment.”	+	''Second,'' the material world exists eternally, endlessly, infinitely; it has no known beginning point and there is no evidence that it will ever disappear.
−	Or, as an RTS Street Party flyer put it. <em>Cars can’t dance</em><em>...</em>[168]	+	''Third,'' all known objects and phenomena of the material world have objective relations with each other and all objects and phenomena exist in unity with each other. All of them are specific forms and structures of matter, or have material origin which was born from matter, and all are governed by the objective rules of the material world. In the material world, there is nothing that exists outside of the changing and transforming processes of matter; all of these processes exist as causes and effects of each other.
−	The modern city is the capitalist ‘machine’ extended. A factory city serving dominant elites; a transportation hub for import and export, its citizens, as wage slaves, are kept in huge dormitories close to their place of labour. Its inhuman scale, impersonality, and sacrifice of pleasure to efficiency are the very antithesis of a genuine community.The privatisation of public space in the form of the car continues the erosion of neighbourhood and community that defines the metropolis. Road schemes, business “parks;’ shopping developments-all add to the disintegration of community and the flattening of a locality. Everywhere becomes the same as everywhere else. Community becomes commodity-a shopping village, sedated and under constant surveillance. The desire for community is then fulfilled elsewhere, through spectacle, sold to us in simulated form. A tv soap “street” or square mimicking the arena that concrete and capitalism are destroying. The real street, in this scenario, is sterile. A place to move through, not to be in, it exists only as an aid to somewhere else-through a shop window, billboard, or petrol tank.	+	-----
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 66 ====
−	Startled Mr. Lacey? Thought you had just taken a job managing an obscure little port, then suddenly there are street battles outside your office, your car gets trashed four times, you can’t go shopping without being attacked by grannies, your house gets trashed and you have to move two times, your wife leaves you and your kids won’t talk to you. Bad career move, eh Phillip.
−	</quote>
−	To rescue what is left of the public arena, to enlarge and transform that arena from a selling and increasingly sold space to a common.. free space-from controlled locality to local control-is fundamental to the vision of reclaiming the streets. The logic of this vision implies not only ending the rule of the car and recreating community, but also the liberation of the streets from the wider rule of hierarchy and domination. From economic, ethnic, and gender oppressions. From the consumerism. surveillance, advertising, and profit-making that reduces both people and planet to saleable objects.	+	The most important thing to understand here is that every object and phenomenon in the universe arises as matter, all material objects and phenomena are dynamically linked to one another in an infinite chain of causes and effects and changes and transformations, all governed by the material laws of our reality. This understanding is the material foundation of dialectical materialism.
−	<quote>	+	=== 2. Consciousness ===
−	The barricade blocks the road but opens the way -Paris, May ’63
−	</quote>
−	*** Street Party as Public Meeting	+	==== a. The Source of Consciousness ====
−	That the city space presently given over to traffic and trafficking can be transformed into a festival site, beach, or forest is clear. But equally important is the potential for this space to be used for an authentic politics. For the recreation of a public arena where empowered individuals can join together to collectively manage social affairs. Without the communal sphere, defined here as “the street”, there can be no real community. Without this sphere community is easily identified with the nation-state, and politics-the self-management of the community-is reduced to the practice of statecraft.	+	According to the materialist viewpoint, consciousness has natural and social sources.
−	The street party, in theory, suggests a dissolution of centralised power structures in favour of a network of self-controlled localities. The street party could easily involve a public meeting or community assembly that works in opposition to the state: towards taking direct control of its locality and giving all an equal voice in decision-making. By including and engaging with other struggles, by involving more local associations, clubs, and tenants, work, and community groups, by helping others organise smaller street parties that bypass official channels, we extend the practice of direct action and make such a politics possible. In practice that is already what is happening, but without an understanding of where we wish the street party to go it becomes all too easy for authority to co-opt or subvert its form.	+	-----
−	The participatory party or street meeting could be a real objective for the future street party. For an event that goes beyond temporarily celebrating its autonomy to laying the ground for permanent social freedom. Discussion areas, decision-making bodies, delegates mandated to attend other parties; in short the formation of a body politic, could all happen within the broader arena of the street party. Such participatory communities in traditional anarchist theory, were called communes. Based on self-government through face-to-face grassroots or street level assemblies they were the final authority for all public policy. Linked together in confederal co-ordination they formed the Commune of communes which, translated into current terminology, gives us the Network of networks or, more appropriately: the Street Party of street parties. That such a street party would tend to undermine centralised state and government structures, constituting a dual power in direct opposition to them, is obvious.	+	==== Annotation 67 ====
−	*** The Street Party of Street Parties	+	Consciousness arises from ''nature'', and from ''social'' activities and relations.
−	Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life <em>celebrates its unification with a regenerated society</em> wrote Raoul Vaneigem.[169] The street party can be read as a situ-esque reversal of this assertion; as an attempt to make Carnival the revolutionary moment. Placing “what could be” in the path of “what is” and celebrating the “here and now” in the road ofthe rush for “there and later,” it hopes to re-energize the possibility of radical change. The continuing emergence of street parties in Britain and increasingly in other countries shows that the desire for this change is not limited to economic equality, to ending injustice, or ensuring survival. It is an expansive desire: for freedom, for creativity; to truly live. This desire, for the present social order, is revolutionary.	+	''Natural'' refers to the material world. Without the material world of matter, material processes, and the evolution of material systems — up to and including the human brain — consciousness would never have formed.
−	While four out of five westerners live in the city, while two-thirds of the world’s population share the common space of its thoroughfares, it is: On the <em>streets that power must be dissolved; for the streets, where daily life is endured, suffered, and eroded, and where power is con.fronted and.fought, must be turned into the domain where daily life is enjoyed, created, and nourished.[170]</em>	+	''Social'' activities and relations also contributed to the development of consciousness. The social processes of labor and language were also prerequisites for the development of conscious activity in human beings.
−	To street party is to begin reconstructing the geography of everyday life; to re-appropriate the public sphere; to rediscover the streets and attempt to liberate them. To street party is to rescue commonality from the dissection table of capitalism: to oppose the free market with a vision of the free society. This vision, which the street party embodies, is collective imagining in practice. It radically dissolves political, cultural, social, and economic divisions in a Utopian expression. A Utopia defined, not as no-place, but as this-place, here and now.	+	''- Natural Source of Consciousness''
−	The ultimate street party-the Street Party of street partiesis one where each person in each street in every village, town, and city. joins with every other in rejecting capitalism, its exploitation and divisions, Indeed rejecting all hierarchy and domination, embracing instead an ecological vision of mutual aid. freedom, complementarity, and interdependence. When the streets are the authentic social sphere for a participatory politics based on self-activity and direct action. When co-operation and solidarity are the social practice of society. When the ‘street party’ helps make possible, and dissolves into such a future, then, we can begin...	+	There are many factors that form the natural sources for consciousness, but the two most basic factors are ''human brains'' and ''the relationship between humans and'' ''the objective world which makes possible creative and dynamic reflection.''
−	<quote>	+	''About human brains:'' consciousness is an attribute of a highly organized form of matter, which is the brain. Consciousness is the function and the result of the neurophysiological activities of human brains. As human brains evolved and developed over time, their neurophysiological activities became richer, and, as these activities progressed, consciousness developed further and further over time. This explains why the human evolution process is also a process of developing the capacity for perception and thinking. Whenever human neurophysiological activities don’t function normally because of damaged brains, our mental life is also disturbed.
−	<em>At first</em> <em>the people stop andoverturn the vehicles in their path... here they are avenging themselves on the traffic by decomposing it into its inert original elements. Next they incorporate the wreckage they have created into their rising barricades: they are recombining the isolated inanimate elements into vital new artistic and political .forms Fur one luminous moment, the multitudes of solitudes that make the modern city come together in a new kind of encounter, to make a people. The streets belong to the people’: they seize control</em> of the city’s elemental matter a11d make it their own.[171]
−	</quote>
−	For more information contact:	+	''About the relationship between humans'' and ''the objective world which made possible creative and dynamic reflection:'' The relationship between humans and the objective world has been essential for as long as humans have existed. In this relationship, the objective world is reflected through human senses which interact with human brains and then form our consciousness.
−	Reclaim The Streets	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-9.png|''Consciousness exists as a dynamic set of relationships between the external material world, human sense perception, and the functions of the human brain.'']]
−	E-mail: [[mailto:rts@gn.apc.org][rts@gn.apc.org]]	+	''Reflection'' is the re-creation of the features of one form of matter in a different form of matter which occurs when they mutually impact each other through interaction. Reflection is a characteristic of all forms of matter.
−	They have an internet web site at	+	There are many forms and levels of reflection such as [from more simple to more complex]: physical and chemical reflection, biological reflection, mental reflection, creative and dynamic reflection, etc.
−	http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk./campaigns/rts.html	+	-----
−	[162] Reclaim The Streets leaflet	+	==== Annotation 68 ====
−	[163] <em>Immortality</em> by Milan Kundera (Faber and Faber: London 1991)-page 271	+	Change is driven by mutual impacts between or within things, phenomena, and/or ideas. Any time two such subjects impact one another, ''traces'' of some form or another are left on both interacting subjects. This characteristic of change is called ''reflection''.
−	[164] Reclaim The Streets Agit-Prop (distributed at the M4I Street Party on Saturday 13<sup>th</sup> July 1996)	+	The concept of reflection, first proposed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, has been advanced through the work of various Soviet psychologists, philosophers, and scientists (including Ivan Pavlov, Todor Pavlov, Aleksei Leontiev, Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Voloshinov, and others), and is used as a basis for scientific inquiry up to this day by mainstream researchers in Cuba, Vietnam, China, and Laos. The information provided below is somewhat simplified and generalized to give the reader a basic familiarity with the theory of reflection and the development of reflection in nature.
−	[165] What is Reclaim the Streets? leaflet.	+	Dialectical materialist scientists have developed a theory of the development of evolution of forms of reflection, positing that forms of reflection have become increasingly complex as organic processes and life have evolved and grown more complex over time.
−	[166] To take a facile example, imagine singing: “We’re on the “street’ to nowhere”-not quite right is it? On the other hand, how about: “Our house, in the middle of our ‘road”.1* Trivial maybe, but indicative of the difference.	+	The chart below gives an idea of how different forms of reaction have evolved over time:
−	[167] And to “reclaim the streets’ is to enact the transformation of the former to the latter. In this context the anti-roads movement is also a pro-streets movement. The struggle against the destruction of nature’ is also a struggle for the human-scale, the face-to-face, for a society in harmony with its natural surrounding.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-10.png|''This chart outlines the basic development tendency of Forms of Reflection in matter which lead from inorganic matter, to life, to human consciousness and society.'']]
−	[168] Leaflet for Street Party II, Rage against the Machine-Saturday 23<sup>th</sup>.July 1995	+	Obviously, not all subjects develop completely along the path outlined above. Thus far, to our knowledge, only human beings have developed entirely to the level of consciousness and society. It is also unknown whether, or how, human society may develop into some future, as-yet-unknown, form.
−	[169] Ihe Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem. < 1967)	+	-----
−	[170] <em>Post-Scarcity Anarchism</em> by Murray Bookchin, (1971)	+	''Physical and chemical reflection'' is the simplest form of reflection, dealing with the ways in which inorganic matter is reflected in human consciousness. Physical and chemical reflection is the reflection of mechanical, physical, and chemical changes and reactions of inorganic matter (i.e., changes in structures, positions, physical-chemical properties, and the processes of combining and dissolving substances). Physical and chemical reactions are passive: when two objects interact with each other physically or chemically, they do not do so consciously.
−	[171] All That Is <em>Solid Melts into</em> Air by Marshal Berman. (1982)-quoted in A <em>Shout in the Str</em>ee<em>t</em> by Peter Jukes (1990)	+	-----
−	<br>	+	==== Annotation 69 ====
−	** Stop Making Sense: Direct Action and Action Theatre (from issue 6)	+	Reflection occurs any time two material objects interact and the features of the object are transferred to each other. Below are some very simplified illustrations to relate the basic idea of the physical reflection of material objects.
−	In 1973 Jacques Camatte indicated	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-11.png]]
−	<quote>	+	'''Reflection as Change in Position:'''
−	It <em>is now becoming generally accepted that demonstrations, marches, spectacles and shows, don’t lead anywhere. Waving banners, putting up posters, handing out leaflets, attacking the police are all activities which perpetuate a certain ritual--a ritual wherein the police are always cast in the role of invincible subjugators. The methods of struggle therefore must be put through a thorough analysis because they present an obstacle to the creation of new modes of action. Andfor this to be ef ctive, there has to be a refusal of the old terrain of struggle-both in the workplace and in the streets.</em>[172]
−	</quote>
−	The response to insights like Camatte’s has been, to a certain extent, a shift of the terrain of struggle away from demonstrations and street fighting to the creation of autonomous -‘zones and communities of resistance, as well as, of course, the development of direct action tactics. In spite of this shift in emphasis, however, a ritualistic element still remains in many direct actions. As in the forms of resistance Camate discusses, the ritual all too often, still casts resisters as valiant, earnest protesters set over and against stern, repressive cops and security guards, and all too frequently the resisters end up playing the roles of victim and martyr-victim of police brutality and martyr to the direct action cause.	+	1. Round Object moves towards Square Object.
−	This essay is intended to make some suggestions as to how this ritual-of casting resisters as victims, and cops as victimizers--can be disrupted and perhaps broken. I want to state though that this essay can only offer suggestions, not answers. Moreover, some of these suggestions may already be taking place. Ihe blossoming of actions means that it is impossible to keep up with all the developments currently taking place. No claim to originality is being made here! I also want to stress that the proposals in this paper should not be regarded as an alternative to or a replacement for direct action, but as supplemental to it.	+	2. Round Object impacts Square Object.
−	When I spoke just now about ritual (the scenario that is set up for resisters and cops). I deliberately used a theatrical terminology. Resisters, I suggested, were cast as victims and cops were cast as victimizers. In short, in the scenario that has emerged at the sites of many direct actions, the participants assume particular roles. As a result, direct actions are already theatrical events in which the various players act out their parts. My proposals are based on a recognition of this fact, and suggest that direct action activists should take advantage of direct action’s dramatic elements. This does not mean deliberately staging events for the media as Greenpeace, for example, has, because that means merely playing for the cameras-and once the cameras have gone, the whole momentum of the action can disappear, which sometimes means that the whole campaign disintegrates. On the contrary, taking advantage of the dramatic nature of direct actions means manipulating events by consciously intervening and shaping them in ways that are positive for the resistance.	+	3. Square Object changes position; Round Object “bounces” and reverses direction.
−	In “Notes on Political Street Theatre, Paris 1968–1969;’ Jean-Jacques Lebel deliberately talks of the Paris uprising of May 1968 in theatrical terms. He says,	+	4.Thus, Square Object’s change in position ''reflects'' the motion of Round Object (and vice-versa). Traces of both contradicting objects are reflected in the respective motion and position of each object.
−	<quote>	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-12.png]]
−	<em>The first stage of an uprising... the first stage ofany revolution, is always theatrical... The }day uprising was theatrical in that it was a giganticfiesta, a revelatory and sensuous explosion outside the ‘normal’ pattern of politics.[173]</em>
−	</quote>
−	It is in this sense that I wish to propose direct action as theatre: not as a dull ritualized scenario with pre-formulated roles for cops and resisters, and with an almost inevitable outcome, but rather as an explosion, as a riot of colour and effective action. In short, I propose the direct action as a prefiguration of uprising, as insurrection in miniature.	+	'''Reflection as Change in Structure:'''
−	As part of the theatrical outburst of the May ’68 uprising, Lebel refers to actual theatrical events on the street:	+	1. Round Object moves toward Square Object.
−	<quote>	+	2. Round Object impacts Square Object.
−	<em>Street theatre as such started to pop up here and there in mass demonstrations, such as the 13<sup>th</sup> of May, which gathered more than a million people. Large effigies appeared of the CRS (French riot police), ofDeGaulle, and other political clowns. Short, funny, the</em>atrical rituals were performed <em>around them as they burned. When the officially-subsidised</em>
−	<em>Odeon Theatre was occupied by the movement, many small groups of students and actors began to interpret the daily news in the street in short comic dramas followed by discussions with the passing audience.[174]</em>	+	3. Structural changes (traces) occur in both Round and Square Object as a result of impact.
−	</quote>
−	Lebel, who was directly involved in what he calls political street theatre, or guerrilla theatre, indicates the rationale for utilizing drama in this way,	+	4. These changes constitute structural, physical ''reflection''.
−	<quote>	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-13.png]]
−	<em>The main problem, then as now. is to propagandise the aims and means of the revolutionary movement among those millions who, while not actually being hostile, have not yet taken part in the action. Since the mass media are totally controlled by the State, all they pour out are lies befitting the State’s psychological warfare ... [So] we tried to use street theatre as a means to provoke encounters and discussions among people who usually shut themselves offfrom each other.[175]</em>
−	</quote>
−	Here, Lebel is referring to extending agit-prop (agitation and propaganda) theatre to the streets. In the 1920s and 1930s radicals staged agit-prop plays in theatres and community centres, on picket lines and dole queues. These were explicitly didactic plays-i.e. they had specific political messages to convey, and were designed as a form of political agitation and propaganda. Lebel indicates that in May 1968 these agit-prop productions were shifted even further away from the private space of the theatre to the public space of the streets, in order to address wider audiences. Lebel comments,	+	'''Chemical Reflection:'''
−	<quote>	+	1. Atom C is attached to Atom B.
−	<em>Our orientation was agit-prop, yet we wanted to be creative and notjust limited to old political cliches-above all we considered “theatre” only as a means of breaking down the Berlin Wall in peoples’ heads and helping them out of their state of passive acceptance. We didn’t give a shit about “art”--we were interested in sabotaging capitalism by helping to blow its arsenal of images, moods, perceptual habits, and tranquilislng illusions of security.[176]</em>
−	</quote>
−	In other words, political street theatre was regarded not as a work of art but as a weapon, an important tool in the revolutionary struggle.	+	2. Atom C detaches from Atom B and transfers to attach to Atom A.
−	This is an important issue, but the scripts of the two street plays from May ’68 appended to Lebel’s essay now appear very stagey and hackneyed. Remember that Camatte writing five years after May 68 remarked that demonstrations, marches, spectacles, <em>and shows don’t lead anywhere.</em> And the reproduced scripts seem very much like spectacles and shows. Conditions have changed— not least through the development of direct action tactics-and although something could perhaps he achieved through the kind of political street theatre discussed by Lebel, it no longer seems particularly relevant to the needs of today.	+	3. This is a process of ''chemical reflection'', in which both molecules mutually reflect one another after A <sub>C</sub>B a process of chemical reaction (one molecule loses Atom C while the other gains Atom C).
−	Nevertheless, Lebel points the way to uses of the theatrical that could be used to complement and increase the effectiveness of direct actions.	+	As dialectical materialists, we must strive to develop our understanding of the reflections of physical and chemical changes and reactions so that our conceptions reflect the material world as accurately as possible. For example: we must not ascribe consciousness to physical processes. Example: a gambler who comes to believe that a pair of dice is “spiteful” or “cursed” is attributing conscious motivation to unconscious physical processes, which is an inaccurate ideological reflection of reality.
−	Avant-garde artists have often dreamed of demolishing the barriers between life and art, and have indicated that this dream is part of the revolutionary project. In one respect, the trajectory of political theatre in the twentieth century shows a progression towards precisely that aim.	+	-----
−	Agit-prop theatre began the process by reclaiming and redefining the theatrical. Agit-prop took drama out of the private space of the theatre and into more public spaces: away from professional writers and actors and toward amateurs and activists: away from a middle class audience and toward a more popular audience: away from depoliticised representations of bourgeois life and manners, and toward explicitly politicised representations of resistance: and away from spectacularised, commodified forms of theatre and toward more every-day, face-to-face, interactive types of theatre.	+	''Biological reflection'' is a higher, more complex form of reflection [compared to physical reflection]. It deals with reflection of organic material in the natural world. As our observations of biological processes have become more sophisticated and complex [through developments in natural science, the development of better tools for observation such as microscopes and other technologies, and so on], our conscious reflections of the natural world have also become more complex.
−	Political street theatre, as Lebel indicates, took this process to a stage farther (no pun intended!), by taking drama into the streets, and the sites of resistance. It attempted to use street theatre as a way of breaking down allegiance to capital and the State without replacing that allegiance with the cosy answers provided by alternative political ideologies. Now. however, with the advent of direct action, this process-the process of integrating art and life as part of the revolutionary project-can be taken even further.	+	Biological reflection is expressed through ''excitation, induction,'' and ''reflexes.''
−	In political street theatre, although the script is collectively written and the actors are activist-amateurs, the relationship between performance and audience remains unchanged. The actors act out a play and the audience passively watches a performance. Moreover, the theatrical performance only plays an indirect role in events. In the case of direct action, however, this need not be the case. The performance can become an integral component of the direct action. This is what I term “action theatre:	+	''Excitation'' is the reaction of simple plant and animal life-forms which occurs when they change position or structure as a direct result of physical changes to their habitat [i.e., a plant which moves toward the sun throughout the day].
−	Action theatre would take planning and preparation of course, but there is no need to write a script-all that is needed is a general scenario and a broad understanding among participants that they know what roles they are playing. Suppose, for example, that there is a small group ofpeople of different ages, races, genders, shapes, sizes, etc-some ofwhom look straight or conventional. They plan a scenario, the parts they will play, and what they intend to achieve. They target a site: maybe a shop, a bank, a McDonalds. They enter the site separately, at different times, and pretend not to know one another. One starts making a fuss, asks to see the manager, and starts having a loud row with him/her. One by one, others join in. Some may initially appear to offer counter-arguments to the politicised points put forward by the initiator, but then be won over. Maybe the real customers will be drawn into the seemingly spontaneous debate (maybe they could be drawn in by someone asking them, “what do you think?”). Maybe they won’t, but even so, they will be alerted to some issues. The security guards will be loath to get heavy with seemingly legitimate customers-particularly if there seem to be many people involved.	+	''Induction'' is the reaction of animals with simple nerve systems which can sense or feel their environments. Induction occurs through unconditioned reflex mechanisms.
−	The concrete achievements of this scenario are many: business will be disrupted, alternative perspectives raised in public spaces, everyday people will be alerted to or even drawn into issues, and a general impression will be given that unrest and dissatisfaction are widespread and regarded as legitimate by many. Moreover, with this type of theatrical direct action, particularly if it is terminated at the right time, arrests are likely to be minimal or non-existent.	+	-----
−	A variation on this scenario is to place the group of actors in (say) a store that is about to be occupied. Again, these plants will act as legitimate customers. When the direct action commences, the plants can support the action, complaining to staff about security guards and police, threatening to report them, and encouraging real customers to do the same. The outcomes here would be preventing cop brutality and false arrest, as well as indicating to store managers, cops, and customers that direct action is legitimate and widely supported.	+	==== Annotation 70 ====
−	Alternatively, staged events that do not look staged but spontaneous could be used to create diversions-at a construction site. a store, wherever a direct action is taking place-with the aim of diverting cop attention, and gaining valuable lime for direct action activists. Additionally-and this is where the “stop making sense” part of the essay title comes in-action theatre activists could arrange scenarios in which they (and other protesters) confuse cops by acting in unpredictable, absurd ways. Camatte talks about changing the terrain of struggle. The terrain of the cops is one of seriousness and rational, behaviour, so shifting the terrain could involve emphasising the humorous and irrational. If prepared properly, this could really spook cops. It could also very directly challenge the scenario that casts resisters as earnest but also as victims. It could empower resisters in ways that cops might find it hard to cope with.	+	''Unconditioned reflexes'' are characterized by permanent connections between sensory perceptions and reactions. Such reactions are not learned, but simply occur automatically based on physiological mechanisms occurring within the organism. An example of an unconditioned reflex response would be muscles in the leg twitching at the response of a tap on the knee. Such responses are purely physiological and are never learned (“conditioned” into us) — these reactions are simply ''induced'' physiologically.
−	Action theatre is not an alternative to direct action; rather action theatre can complement direct action. It can cause disruption, but also be funny and fun to do. Moreover, it can get people involved who, because of their age, fitness, criminal record, job, or personal commitments, can’t engage in direct action or can’t afford to get nicked, but can still provide invaluable support for direct action activists, as well as directly contributing to the revolutionary project.	+	''Mental reflections'' are reactions which occur in animals with central nervous systems. Mental reflections occur through conditioned reflex mechanisms.
−	[172] Jacques Camatte, Against Domestication (Black Thumb Press 1981) plS.	+	-----
−	[173] Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Notes on Political Street Theatre, Paris 1968–1969;’ <em>Drunken Boat</em> #1 (Autonomedia, n.d.), p.27.	+	==== Annotation 71 ====
−	[174] Ibid.	+	''Conditioned reflexes'' are reactions which are learned by organisms. These responses are acquired as animals learn to associate previously unrelated neural stimuli to elicit a particular reaction. The Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov famously developed our understanding of conditioned responses by ringing a dinner bell shortly before giving dogs food. After a few repetitions, dogs would begin to salivate upon hearing the dinner bell being rung, even before any food was offered. Any dog which did not receive this conditioning would not salivate upon hearing a dinner bell. This is what makes it a learned, conditioned response — a type of mental reflection.
−	[175] Ibid.	+	''Dynamic and creative reflection'' is the most advanced form of reflection. It only occurs in matter that has the highest structural level, such as the human brain. Dynamic and creative reflection is done through the human brain’s nervous physiological activities whenever the objective world impacts human senses. This is a kind of reflection that actively selects and processes information to create new information and to understand the meaning of that information. This dynamic and creative reflection is called consciousness.
−	[176] Ibid. p.28.	+	-----
−	** Lights, Camera... Activism! (from issue 7)	+	==== Annotation 72 ====
−	**Video Media and Direct Action**	+	Remember Lenin’s definition of matter from ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'': “Matter is a philosophical category denoting objective reality which is given to man in his sensations, and which is copied, photographed, and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.”
−	This article has been written in an attempt to stimulate much-needed discussion in direct action circles about alternative media and its role in our struggles. With the space available the article cannot look at all areas of alternative media, nor tackle the areas it does look at in any great detail. I hope it will, however, act as a catalyst for discussions that should, for once, include the activists on the other side of the lens...	+	An intrinsic property of matter is that it can be sensed by human beings, and through this sensation, ''reflected'' in human consciousness. Thus, all forms of matter share the characteristic of being able to be reflected in the human mind.
−	Ifyou live and work in a city you are, on average, filmed by over 400 CCTV cameras per day. If you also manage to squeeze in an early morning national action you could potentially add another dozen cameras to that figure-but that’s OK because it’s our own media-isn’t it?	+	Criticizing Karl Pearson, who said that it was not logical to maintain that all matter had the property of being conscious, Lenin wrote in brackets: “But it is logical to suppose that all matter possesses a property which is essentially kindred to sensation: the property to reflect.” Understanding the concept of dynamic and creative reflection is critical to understanding the role of consciousness and the ideal in Dialectical Materialism. In particular, reflection differentiates Dialectical Materialism from the idealist form of dialectics used by Hegel [see Annotation 9, p. 10]. As Marx famously wrote in ''Capital Volume I'':
−	<quote>	+	<blockquote>
−	I was surprised that not only were people quite happy to send mefootage of actions without asking for any control over its use, but some of them had sent tapes to TV stations and couldn’t remember getting them back again afterwards.	+	My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos [craftsman/artisan/creator] of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<right>	+	In other words, Hegelian idealism saw human consciousness as defining the material world. Dialectical Materialism inverts this relationship to recognize that what we conceive in our minds is only a reflection of the material world. As Marx explains in ''The German Ideology'', all conscious thought stems from life processes through reflection:
−	Researcher, Channel 4, November 1997.
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	There is a basic philosophy underpinning direct action that goes a lot deeper than the net result of the day’s action. As the RTS poster states: Direct action is founded on the idea that people can develop the ability for self rule only through practice, and proposes that allpersons directly decide the important issues facing them. It is not a last resort when other methods have failed, but the preferred way of doing things. The issues that have to be tackled are how the ideas and theories behind direct action transfer to the alternative media; whether there are certain ethical criteria that have to be fulfilled for the alternative media to interact successfully with other areas of direct action, rather than become part of the mainstream with a profit motivated agenda.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Although there are many areas of campaign support that need to be looked at in detail, this article focuses primarily on video cameras because, in the wrong hands and with the current state of understanding, they can prove incredibly dangerous.	+	Marx and Engels argued that consciousness arose from the ''life-processes'' of human beings. Life-processes are processes of motion and change which occur within organisms to sustain life, and these processes have a dialectical relationship with consciousness: the processes of life, therefore, reflect consciousness, just as consciousness reflects human life-processes. Conscious activities (such as being able to hunt, gather, and cook food, build shelter, and so on) improve the life-processes of human beings (by improving our health, extending our life-spans, etc.); and as our life-processes improved, our consciousness was able to develop more fully. As a concrete example of the dialectic between life processes and consciousness, it is now widely believed by scientists that the advent of cooking and preparing food (conscious activity) improved the functioning of the human brain<ref>Source: “Food for Thought: Was Cooking a Pivotal Step in Human Evolution?” by Alexandra Rosati, ''Scientific American'', February 26, 2018.</ref> (a life process) which, in turn, developed human consciousness, and so on. Life-processes thus determine ''how'' consciousness reflects reality, while consciousness impacts back on life-processes, reflecting the dialectical relationship between matter and consciousness [see p. 88] and between practical activities and consciousness [see Annotation 230, p. 226].
−	Misuse of video cameras can adversely affect the action itself, as well as increasing the risk of arrest for the activists involved.	+	Because consciousness arose from life-processes of human beings in the material world, we know that the material world is reflected in our consciousness. However, these reflections do not ''determine'' the material world, and do not mirror the material world exactly [see Annotation 77, p. 79]. It is also important to understand that, since life-processes in the material world predate and determine consciousness, consciousness can never be a first basis of seeking truth about our world. As Marx further explains in ''The German Ideology:''
−	One case occurred at the launch of a new car in London.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The camera operator, working on the Undercurrents video news magazine, had been allowed to record the planning process as well as the action itself. On the day all went as planned, with the car at the centre of the action finishing up covered with paint, and the activists quickly leaving the scene before the police arrived. Incredibly, the person with the camera decided to remain to film the police response-and was subsequently arrested. The tape inside the camera not only contained all the footage of the action but also the build up to it, and the faces and voices of those involved. Although no one was prosecuted as a result of the seizure of the footage it gave the police unnecessary intelligence that could be used in the future.	+	In other words, Hegelian idealism makes the critical mistake of believing that the ideal — consciousness — is the first basis of reality, and that anything and everything can be achieved through mere conscious activity. Marx, on the other hand, argues that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,” and that we must understand the ways in which reality is reflected in consciousness before we can hope to affect change in the material conditions of human beings:
−	On another occasion people were arrested after a demonstration at Hackney Town Hall; unedited activist footage from the action was given straight to the local TV station-who then handed it to the police. During the action the videographer was questioned and claimed to be filming for Undercurrents. This was later found out to be untrue-but, despite the person with the camera being a stranger to everyone on the action, one word acted as a passport to record every intimacy and potentially incriminating act during the action itself.	+	<blockquote>
		+	In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here [in the materialist perspective] we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.
		+	</blockquote>
−	There are always two sides to every debate however. Many of those currently taking direct action are there after watching Undercurrents at a festival, whilst others may have read through a copy of Squall or Do or Die and been motivated by the dramatic photographs that complement the articles. But even that raises questions about the movement’s potential to recreate itself in the image of its media representation....... All of which leads to the	+	So, the work of the Dialectical Materialist is not to try to develop Utopian conceptions of reality first, to then proceed to try and force such purely ideal conceptions onto reality (see Annotation 17, p. 18).
−	same point: there has to be a continuous appraisal of the methods and motivations of those involved (at all levels) in alternative media-and at the moment that is not happening. The following aims to highlight points in the process from action to advert and examine the image, theory, and motivation.	+	Rather, we must understand the material basis of reality, as well as the material processes of change and motion which govern reality, and only then can we search for ways in which human beings can influence material reality through conscious activity. As Marx explains, the revolutionary must not be fooled into believing we can simply conceive of an ideal world and then replicate it into reality through interpretation and conscious thought alone. Instead, we must start with a firm understanding of material conditions and, from that material basis, determine how to build our revolutionary movement through conscious impact of material relations and processes of development in the material world.
−	More often than not, the first part of the process is the recording of the image. People will often try and avoid getting their faces near a police Evidence Gatherer (EG) film unit; likewise most will avoid trashing machinery with police filming nearby, yet many appear happy to trust those on site with cameras-as long as they’re wearing green and black. Quite a few will remember the open cast action in Derbyshire, when every machine on site was trashed and over 350 000 damage was caused <em>(SchNEWS,</em> November 7, 1997); police attendance was negligible and no arrests took place on site. People may also remember the video cameras filming the smashing of machinery from afar, whilst others stood at the side taking photographs.	+	As Marx wrote in ''The German Ideology:'' “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” This distinction may seem subtle at first, but it has massive implications for how Marx suggests we go about participating in revolutionary activity. For Marx, purely-idealist debates and criticisms are an unproductive waste of time:
−	What action was taken to ensure that none of the footage taken was incriminating-or distributed without the control of those recorded? The answer, as usual, appeared to be very little. Ifyou see someone turning up on their first action with a camera-or even if you see someone you know and trust filming anything potentially incriminating-you have a responsibility to others on the action to question exactly where their motivations lie, and to take appropriate (intelligent) action. Actually taking part in direct action should come before the recording of the event for others. It should not be seen as a spectacle, but as the way to achieve results-people taking back control of their lives.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly ‘world-shattering’ statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against ‘phrases.’ They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.
		+	</blockquote>
−	At present, the activist community seems to have lost control of the image that is often the only connection those not involved have with what is going on and why. The camera can be there as an integral part of the action, a key weapon to be used as part of the greater campaign, but the camera operator should never be-or be seen as-an outside unit. They are there to complement the action, and to support those on the front line; this means working with the various campaigns before hitting the Record button, and finding the balance necessary for the relationship to work. Trust can only be built up over a long time. If those with the cameras haven’t got the patience to get to know at least some of those taking part in the action they want to record, they certainly haven’t got the patience or knowledge necessary to be given control over the resultant images.	+	Marx also discusses the uselessness of idealist conjecture:
−	The current alternative media network on which this article is based developed primarily from inside the environmental direct action movement, and this should have ensured that the whole process-from the recording of the initial image through to final distribution-remained within the control of those actively involved in the movement. It should also have ensured our media could develop as an independent and ethically sound means of information dissemination-but the image, from inception to distribution, has fallen from being part of the process to its current position apparently very distant from the ethic it claims to represent.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own: out of all such muck we get only the one inference that these three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another, because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact that intellectual and material activity — enjoyment and labour, production and consumption — devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labour. It is self-evident, moreover, that ‘spectres,’ ‘bonds,’ ‘the higher being,’ ‘concept,’ ‘scruple,’ [terms for idealist conceptions] are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move.
		+	</blockquote>
−	According to iVlichael Albert (Z Magazine, Oct. 1997):	+	What Marx means by this is that we should focus on the material processes and conditions of society if we intend to change society, because idealist speculation, conjecture, critique, and thought alone, at the individual level, will never be capable of affecting revolutionary change in our material world.
−	<quote>	+	Instead, we must focus on the material basis of reality, the material conditions of society, and seek revolutionary measures which are built upon materialist foundations. Only by understanding material processes of development, as well as the dialectical relationship between consciousness and matter, can we reliably and effectively begin to impact reality through conscious activity. This begins with the recognition that conscious thought itself is a ''reflection'' of material reality which developed and results from ''life-processes'' of material motion and processes of change within the human brain.
−	What <em>makes alternative media alternative can’t be its product in the simplest sense [It] can’t just mean that the institution’s editorialfocus is in this or that topical area; being alternative must have to do with how the institution is organised and works.</em>
−	</quote>
−	At present there is one agency that specialises in the production and distribution of alternative video in the UK: Undercurrents. Based initially in London, and now in Oxford, there are a number of lessons that can be learnt from recent revelations about the working ethics of the organisation (see box).	+	This concept of reflection, pioneered by Marx and Engels, was significantly developed by V. I. Lenin in his response to Machian positivists who posited that what we perceive is not truly reality [see Annotation 32, p. 27]. In his ''Philosophical Notebooks,'' Lenin wrote: “Life gives rise to the brain. Nature is reflected in the human brain.”
−	We should note the ease with which control over footage from actions can be taken away from the activist community and placed in the hands of those who may have very little or no experience of direct action. Undercurrents have stated that there has always been a hierarchical regime in place within the organisation, and expect the video activist to accept that fact as a fait accompli.	+	In ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'', Lenin further defined the relationship between matter and consciousness through reflection.
−	However, whilst it may be easier to work with such an organisation on their terms, the activist community must both challenge those ideas with which it disagrees, and as necessary find or create alternative outlets for the work. As already stated, direct action does not end when the camera goes back in the bag, and the same ethic has to follow the images from beginning to end. There should be a fluid process in place that allows both common sense to prevail and for overall control to remain within the represented community.	+	'''LENIN’S PROOF OF THE THEORY OF REFLECTION'''
−	Whilst Undercurrents may state they are not deliberately taking control of the image for their own ends, they are demonstrating enough of a lack of understanding to trigger warning bells in all those who come into contact with them. Their explanation. that because the mainstream media want moral rights over all works they use, the activist community must also sign away their moral rights to an outside force, is incredible in its simplicity. If Undercurrents were fulfilling their perceived role as intermediaries between the ‘naive’ activist and the mainstream media, they should be informing activists of their rights, not working to the agenda of the mainstream. To create an environment where those with expert knowledge in a particular area can develop a symbiotic relationship with the activist community at large, the ‘experts’ must also practice the underlying ethics apparent within the images they record.	+	In ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,'' Lenin offered the following arguments to back up the theory of reflection.
−	---------	+	<blockquote>
		+	1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin [a chemical substance which was newly discovered at time of writing] existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Lenin is saying that the material world must exist outside of and independent from our consciousness. He cites as evidence the discovery of a chemical substance which until recently we had no sensory perception of, noting that this substance must have existed long before we became aware of it through sensory observation.
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the thing-in-itself is “beyond” phenomena (Kant) or that we can or must fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which exists outside us (Hume) — all this is the sheerest nonsense, [unfounded belief], trick, invention.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Lenin is referencing a centuries-old debate about whether or not human beings are capable of having real knowledge of a “thing-in-itself,” or if we can only perceive ''phenomena'' of things (characteristics observable to our senses). The “thing-in-itself” refers to the actual material object which exists outside of our consciousness. So the question being posed is: can we REALLY have knowledge of material objects outside of our consciousness, or does consciousness itself act as a barrier to ever REALLY knowing anything about material objects and the material world outside of our consciousness?
		+
		+	Immanuel Kant argued that we can never know the true nature of the material world, writing: “we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing-in-itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something.” This idea that the senses could not be trusted to deliver accurate knowledge — and thus, the “thing-in-itself” is essentially unknowable — was carried forward by later empiricists such as Bacon and Hume [see Annotation 10, p. 10]. In ''Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy'', Marx and Engels refute this notion, arguing that ''practice'' allows us to discover truth about “things-in-themselves:”
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Lenin expanded on this argument, explaining that the phenomena of objects which we observe with our senses ''do'' accurately reflect material objects, even though we might not know everything about these objects at once. Over time, as we learn more and more about material objects and the material world through practice and repeated observation, we more fully and accurately come to understand “things-in-themselves, as he writes in ''Empirio-Criticism and Materialism:''
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as readymade and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Here, Lenin further elaborates on the dialectical nature of knowledge: we must simultaneously accept that our knowledge is never perfect and unchanging, but we must also recognize that we are capable of making our knowledge more exact and complete over time. To further defend his ideas about reflection, Lenin cited Czech philosopher Karl Kautsky’s argument against Kant:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	That I see green, red and white is grounded in my faculty of sight. But that green is something different from red testifies to something that lies outside of me, to real differences between the things... The relations and differences between the things themselves revealed to me by the individual space and time concepts are real relations and differences of the external world, not conditioned by the nature of my perceptive faculty... If this were really so [i.e., if Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of time and space were true], we could know nothing about the world outside us, not even that it exists.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Lenin followed from Marx and Engels that, in order to further develop our understanding and knowledge of the material world, it was necessary to engage in ''practice'' [see Annotation 211, p. 205]. Engels wrote in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'':
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we [use] these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is positive proof that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Notice that Engels is careful to use the words ''so far'': “its qualities, ''so far'', agree with reality outside ourselves.” Engels does not argue that human understanding of the material world is infallible: mistakes are often made. But over time, as such mistakes are discovered and our understanding improves, our knowledge of the material world develops. This is only possible if the phenomena of objects which we observe — the reflections within our consciousness — do actually and accurately represent material reality. Lenin elaborated on this necessity to constantly update and improve dialectical materialist philosophy as new information and knowledge became available:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	Engels, for instance, assimilated the, to him, new term, energy, and began to employ it in 1885 (Preface to the 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. of Anti-Dühring) and in 1888 (Ludwig Feuerbach), but to employ it equally with the concepts of ‘force’ and ‘motion,’ and along with them. Engels was able to enrich his materialism by adopting a new terminology.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Engels provided further elaborations on how practical experience and mastery of the material world refutes the notion that it is impossible to have real knowledge of the material world in ''Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy'':
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical fancies is practice, viz., experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and using it for our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end of the Kantian incomprehensible or ungraspable... The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such thingsin-themselves until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the thing-in-itself became a thing for us, as for instance, alizarin [a dye which was originally plant-based], which we no longer trouble to grow in in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	So, dialectical materialism holds that there is a material world external from our consciousness; that conscious thoughts are reflections of this material world; that we can have real knowledge of the material world through sensory observation; and that our knowledge and understanding of the material world is best advanced through ''practice'' in the material world.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	''- Social Sources of Consciousness''
		+
		+	There are many factors that constitute the social sources of consciousness. The most basic and direct factors are ''labor'' and ''language.''
		+
		+	''Labor'' is the process by which humans interact with the natural world in order to make products for our needs of existing and developing. Labor is also the process that changes the human body’s structure [i.e., muscles developing through exercise].
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 73 ====
		+
		+	In ''Dialectics of Nature'', Engels describes the dialectical relationship between labor and human development:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.
		+
		+	Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation.
		+
		+	Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.
		+
		+	But the hand did not exist alone, it was only one member of an integral, highly complex organism. And what benefited the hand, benefited also the whole body it served.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	Labor also allows us to discover the attributes, structures, motion laws, etc., of the natural world, via observable phenomena.
		+
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 74 ====
		+
		+	We discover truth about the natural world through labor — through physical ''practice'' in the material world. See the discussion of ''practice'' in Annotation 211, p. 205.
−	**Focus on Undercurrents**	+	All of these phenomena, through our human senses, impact our human brains. And through brain activity, knowledge and consciousness of the objective world are formed and developed.
−	A document was circulated last year that detailed some concerns about Undercurrents. Written by several activists with experience of working within the organisation, the main points raised were: Ihat Undercurrents’ contracts ask contributors to waive all moral rights to their work, whilst claiming incorrectly that work could not be used by the mainstream without the waiver.	+	''Language'' is a system of material signals that carries information with cognitive content. Without language, consciousness could not exist and develop.
−	That the contracts asked contributors to sign exclusive rights over to Undercurrents for between 20 to 25 years.	+	The birth of language goes hand in hand with labor. From the beginning, labor was social. The relationships between people who perform labor processes require them to have means to communicate and exchange thoughts. This requirement caused language to arise and develop along with the working processes. With language, humans not only communicate, but also summarise reality and convey experience and thoughts from generation to generation.
−	That the contract demands contributors agree to promote the video in any way possible in order to widen distribution.	+	-----
−	That the majority of money from the sale offootage (70 per cent after all costs have been taken) remains within Undercurrents instead of being <em>offered back to the campaign that produced the images in the first place.</em>	+	==== Annotation 75 ====
−	<em>That</em> <em>Undercurrents have been quietly working as a (fairly) exclusive news agency; acting as mainstream when dealing with outside media, yet still claiming to be activists when working in the activistfield.</em>	+	From ''Dialectics of Nature'':
−	<em>That the explicit hierarchy at work within the organisation disallows much sense of ownership to anyone who comes to work there.</em>	+	<blockquote>
		+	It has already been noted that our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social of all animals, from non-gregarious immediate ancestors. Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour, and widened man’s horizon at every new advance. He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown properties in natural objects. On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other. Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another.
−	<em>That</em> <em>Undercurrmts can only profit in this way because its actual methods of operation radically contradicts what we feel is most activists perception of the organisation.</em>	+	Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the origin of language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one. The little that even the most highly-developed animals need to communicate to each other does not require articulate speech. In its natural state, no animal feels handicapped by its inability to speak or to understand human speech. It is quite different when it has been tamed by man. The dog and the horse, by association with man, have developed such a good ear for articulate speech that they easily learn to understand any language within their range of concept. Moreover they have acquired the capacity for feelings such as affection for man, gratitude, etc., which were previously foreign to them. Anyone who has had much to do with such animals will hardly be able to escape the conviction that in many cases they now feel their inability to speak as a defect, although, unfortunately, it is one that can no longer be remedied because their vocal organs are too specialised in a definite direction. However, where vocal organs exist, within certain limits even this inability disappears. The buccal organs of birds are as different from those of man as they can be, yet birds are the only animals that can learn to speak; and it is the bird with the most hideous voice, the parrot, that speaks best of all. Let no one object that the parrot does not understand what it says. It is true that for the sheer pleasure of talking and associating with human beings, the parrot will chatter for hours at a stretch, continually repeating its whole vocabulary. But within the limits of its range of concepts it can also learn to understand what it is saying. Teach a parrot swear words in such a way that it gets an idea of their meaning (one of the great amusements of sailors returning from the tropics); tease it and you will soon discover that it knows how to use its swear words just as correctly as a Berlin costermonger. The same is true of begging for titbits.
−	<em>That</em> <em>unless there is a large scale change within the organisation activists should begin to view it very much as they do mainstream media organisations.</em>	+	First labour, after it and then with it speech — these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which, for all its similarity is far larger and more perfect. Hand in inevitably accompanied by a corresponding refinement of the organ of hearing, so the development of the brain as a whole is accompanied by a refinement of hand with the development of the brain went the development of its most immediate instruments — the senses. Just as the gradual development of speech is all the senses. The eagle sees much farther than man, but the human eye discerns considerably more in things than does the eye of the eagle. The dog has a far keener sense of smell than man, but it does not distinguish a hundredth part of the odours that for man are definite signs denoting different things. And the sense of touch, which the ape hardly possesses in its crudest initial form, has been developed only side by side with the development of the human hand itself, through the medium of labour.
		+	</blockquote>
−	------	+	So, the most basic, direct and important source that decides the birth and development of language is labor. Language appeared later than labor but always goes with labor. Language and labor were the two main stimulations affecting the brains of the primates which evolved into humans, slowly changing their brains into human brains and transforming animal psychology into human consciousness.
−	There are numerous publications that attempt in different ways to fulfil the alternative criteria. Examples include <em>SchNEWS</em><em>,</em> published each week in Brighton, and the <em>Earth First! Action Update.</em> Both work in different ways, and have put in place criteria that attempt to ensure the media (and thus the image) remains within the control of activists and is not taken over by an unrepresentative elite. In the case of <em>SchNEWS</em><em>,</em> all articles are written, edited, and published by activists; this should ensure that not only do those involved in a campaign get an opportunity to represent themselves, but that training is freely available for all those who want to become more involved in the process. In the case of the <em>EF!Action Update,</em> the creation of an elite is avoided by rotating publication ofthe newsletter each year.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-14.png|''This diagram is based on work from an article titled'' “Evidence in Hand: Recent Discoveries and the Early Evolution of Human Manual Manipulation<ref>Written by Professor Tracy L. Kivell and published in ''The Royal Society''.</ref>.”''Modern research has discovered strong evidence<ref>''Stone Tools Helped Shape Human Hands'' by Sara Reardon, published in New Scientist Magazine.</ref> that the human hand evolved along with tool use, in line with Engels’ analysis in'' Dialectics of Nature.]]
−	Where we go from here needs debate that must take place at all levels. The action and current standpoint of Undercurrents should be seen as unacceptable. We need to challenge, change, and learn from our current position to ensure that we never find ourselves in the situation where control of the image has passed to those who place their own survival above the greater good of the movement. The next time someone asks you where you’re from, and tells you to put the camera away, it’s not necessarily part of an ego-war, it could be because they have never seen you before, and want to know where your motivations lie. Do you know?	+	-----
−	[Do or Die is obviously not immune to the problems outlined in this article. Opinions and suggestions are welcome.]	+	==== Annotation 76 ====
−	**** Grassroots Video Contacts	+	It is also worth noting that, just as human consciousness derived from labor and language ''and'' social activity, so too did society itself arise from language and labor, as Engels explained in ''Dialectics of Nature'':
−	i-Contact, [New networking centre for those interested in video activism. Looks promising.] Bristol, UK. E-mail: [[mailto:lostit@gifford.co.uk][lostit@gifford.co.uk]]	+	<blockquote>
		+	The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both labour and speech an ever-renewed impulse to further development. This development did not reach its conclusion when man finally became distinct from the ape, but on the whole made further powerful progress, its degree and direction varying among different peoples and at different times, and here and there even being interrupted by local or temporary regression. This further development has been strongly urged forward, on the one hand, and guided along more definite directions, on the other, by a new element which came into play with the appearance of fully-fledged man, namely, society.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Organic Chaos Productions (Rampenplan): Sittard, ‘Ihe Netherlands.	+	In other words, these factors of human’s physical nature and human society have a dialectical relationship with one another. Elements of human nature — in particular labor and language — led to the development of human society, which in turned played a key role in the development of human language and labor.
−	E-mail: [[mailto:ramp@antenna.nl][ramp@antenna.nl]]	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-15.png|''Human language and human labor mutually develop one another through a dialectical process to develop human nature. Simultaneously, human nature and human society mutually develop one another through a dialectical process.'']]
−	Direct Action Media Network (DAMN): Morgantown, WV, USA. E-mail: [[mailto:direct@tao.ca][direct@tao.ca]]	+	Elements of human nature — in particular labor and language — led to the development of human society, which in turned played a key role in the development of human language and labor.
−	HHH Video Magazine: UK	+	-----
−	Left of Center: Nashville, TN E-mail: [[mailto:christopher.lugo@nashville.com][christopher.lugo@nashville.com]]	+	==== b. Nature and Structure of Consciousness ====
−	Since the original document (referred to in the Focus on Undercurrents box) was circulated, we have heard that there may have been some changes at Undercurrents--but it remains to be seen whether these amount to anything substantial. (We certainly hope so’) People at Undercurrents have been requesting a right to reply in this issue, as they saw this article before publication. After much debate we decided we are not happy with this. Firstly, space was a consideration-inclusion of a reply would mean sacrificing other articles that people had spent months working on. More importantly, why do Undercurrents deserve a reply any more than anyone else criticised in a piece printed in Do or Die? We felt that they could write a letter of under 500 words for the next issue or submit a longer piece as an article, and it will be read and considered for publication as all other submissions are. Undercurrents have had plenty of opportunities to respond to these criticisms in a meaningful way (indeed the author of this article waited fl)r a response from them before concluding it), but have so far consistently failed to do so. Instead they have chosen to misrepresent it as an attack on all video-activism, motivated by a personal grudge. It is nothing of the sort-as you can tell. it seeks to strengthen video activism (and all DIY media) by applying the ethics of direct action to the media which represent it.	+	''- Nature of Consciousness''
−	<br>	+	''Consciousness is the dynamic and creative reflection of the objective world in human brains; it is the subjective image of the objective world.'' [See discussion of dynamic and creative reflection on p. 68]
−	** Friday June 18<sup>th</sup>, 1999 (from issue 8)	+	''The dynamic and creative nature'' of reflection is expressed in human psycho-physiological activities when we receive, select, process, and save data in our brains. Within the human brain, we are able to collect data from the external material world. Based on this information, our brain is capable of creating new information, and we are able to analyze, interpret, and understand all of this information collectively within our consciousness.
−	**Confronting Capital and Smashing The State!**	+	The dynamic and creative nature of reflection is also expressed in several human processes:
−	As the economy has become increasingly transnational, so too has the resistance to its devastating social and ecological consequences. The June 18<sup>th</sup> (118) International Day of Action in financial and banking districts across the world was probably the largest and most diverse day of action against global capital in recent history. Hundreds of actions took place in over 30 countries on every continent,[177] all <em>in recognition that the global capitalist system is based on the exploitation of people and the planet for the profit of a few and is at the very root of our social and ecological troubles.[178]</em> But where did this extraordinary show of international solidarity spring from? And how and why are such diverse groups building global networks of struggle to counter the globalisation[179] of misery under capitalism? What follows is a personal account of the history, context and organisation of the events leading up to June 18<sup>th</sup>. It is a story that needs telling...	+	* The creation of ideas, hypotheses, stories, etc.
		+	* The ability to summarize nature and to comprehend the objective laws of nature.
		+	* The ability to construct models of ideas and systems of knowledge to guide our activities.
−	*** Contradictions Of Globalisation	+	''Consciousness is the subjective image of the objective world.'' Consciousness is defined by the objective world in both Content and Form [see Annotation 150, p. 147]. However, consciousness does not perfectly reflect the objective world. It modifies information through the subjective lenses (thoughts, feelings, aspirations, experiences, knowledge, needs, etc.) of humans. According to Marx and Engels, ideas are simply “sublimates [transformations] of [the human brain’s]... material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.”<ref>''The German Ideology'', Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1846.</ref>
−	International solidarity and global protest is nothing new. From the European-wide revolutions of 1848, through the upheavals of 1917–18 following the Russian Revolution, to the lightning flashes of resistance nearly everywhere in 1968[180], struggle has always been able to communicate and mutually inspire globally. But what is perhaps unique to our times is the speed and ease with which we can communicate between struggles and the fact that globalisation has meant that many people living in very different cultures across the world now share a common enemy. An enemy that is increasingly becoming less subtle and more excessive (capitalism with its gloves off) and therefore easier to see, understand and ultimately dismantle.[181]	+	-----
−	*** A Common Enemy	+	==== Annotation 77 ====
−	The irony is that before the onslaught of globalisation, the system was sometimes hard to recognise in its diverse manifestations and policies. Abstract critical theory was confronting an abstract multifaceted system. But the reduction of diversity in the corporate landscape and the concentration of power within international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the financial markets, has clarified things and offered a focal point for protest and opposition. It is a lot easier to oppose concentrated uniform power than diverse and flexible forms.[182] As power heads further and further in this direction, those opposing it seem to become more and more diverse and fluid, and hence much harder to diffuse and undermine.[183] As the elite, their transnational corporations and their puppets the IMF and WTO impose free market policies on every country on the planet, they are unwittingly creating a situation where diverse movements are recognising each others’ struggles as related and are beginning to work together on an unprecedented scale.	+	In ''The German Ideology'', Marx and Engels refer to ideas somewhat poetically as “the phantoms formed in the human brain,” and explains that ideas arise directly from material human life processes [see Annotation 72, p. 68]. Lenin makes it very clear in ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'' that consciousness is not a ''mirror image'', or ''exact'' reproduction of reality, quoting Engels:
−	The global race to the bottom in which workers, communities and whole countries are forced to compete by lowering wages, working conditions, environmental protections and social spending, all to facilitate maximum profit for corporations, is stimulating resistance all over the world. People everywhere are realising that their resistance is pointless if they are struggling in isolation. For example-say your community manages, after years of tireless campaigning, to shut down your local toxic waste dump, what does the transnational company that owns the dump do? They simply move it to wherever their costs are less and the resistance weaker-probably somewhere in the Third World or Eastern Europe. Under this system, communities have a stark choice; either compete fiercely with each other or co-operate in resisting the destruction of our lives, land and livelihoods by rampaging capital.[184]	+	<blockquote>
		+	The great basic question of all philosophy,” Engels says, “especially of modern philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being,” of “spirit and nature.” Having divided the philosophers into “two great camps” on this basic question, Engels shows that there is “yet another side” to this basic philosophical question, viz., “in what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality?” “The overwhelming majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question,” says Engels, “including under this head not only all materialists but also the most consistent idealists.
		+	</blockquote>
−	*** Diversity Versus Uniformity
−	To accelerate profit and create economies of scale, global capital imposes a monoculture upon the world with the result of making everywhere look and feel like everywhere else-the same restaurants, the same hotels, the same supermarkets filled with the same musak. Sumner Redstone, the multibillionaire owner of MTV, summed up this denial of diversity when he said, <em>Just as teenagers are the same all over the world, children are the same all over the world.</em> On his business trips, he obviously forgets to stop and visit the slums of Delhi or the impoverished rural villages of Africa. In New York, London,[185] and Berlin, kids may have succumbed to his spell of sameness, as they sit prisoners of their own homes, their dull eyes glued to the screen. But the majority of the world’s children would rather have clean water than Jamiroquai.	+	-----
−	Herbert Read in The Philosophy of Anarchism wrote that, <em>Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.</em> The president of the Nabisco Corporation would obviously disagree, as he is <em>looking forward to the day when Arabs and Americans, Latins and Scandinavians will be munching Ritz crackers as enthusiastically as they already drink Coke or brush their teeth with Colgate.[186]</em> Progress under the capitalist system is measured by economic growth-which inevitably means monoculture. Just because more money is changing hands doesn’t mean that life is getting any better, it is quite the opposite for the majority ofthe world. But by embracing diversity, social movements are proposing powerful challenges to capital’s addiction to uniformity.	+	Of extra importance is Lenin’s footnote to the above passage, regarding what he purports to be Viktor Chernov’s mistranslation of Engels:
−	*** Space For Utopias	+	<blockquote>
		+	Fr. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, etc., 4<sup>th</sup> Germ. ed., S. 15. Russian translation, Geneva ed., 1905, p. 12–13. Mr. V. Chernov translates the word Spiegelbild literally (a mirror reflection) accusing Plekhanov of presenting the theory of Engels “in a very weakened form” by speaking in Russian simply of a “reflection” instead of a “mirror reflection”. This is mere cavilling. Spiegelbild [mirror reflection] in German is also used simply in the sense of Abbild [reflection, image].
		+	</blockquote>
−	Capital was only able to become truly global after the fall of the Berlin wall and the break-up of the Eastern Bloc. The fall of Communism not only opened up the space for capital to be unrestrained, but also gave a new lease of life to radical movements.[187] For more than <em>70</em> years, Soviet-style socialism was seen as the main model of revolutionary society, and of course it was a total social and ecological disaster. But its shadow lingered over most radical movements. Those who wished to discredit any forms of revolutionary thinking simply pointed to the Soviet model to prove the inevitable failures of any utopian project.	+	Here, Lenin reaffirms and clarifies Engels’ idea that consciousness is not a perfect, exact duplicate of reality; not a “mirror image.” This, however, does not contradict the fact that we can obtain real knowledge of the real world in our consciousness, and that this knowledge improves over time through practice and observation. Indeed, Lenin’s passage on practice cited first in this annotation directly follows the above passage in ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism''.
−	Now that the Soviet Union has ceased to exist, it has become a lot easier for those of us working in radical movements to conceive of different societies without having to refer to a failed model. Ideas of utopia can return unhindered. The space has been cleared and the power of radical imagination is back at the centre of revolutionary struggle. Not only has the imagination been freed, it has also become more diverse and fluid than it was ever able to be under the shadow of the strict monolithic ideology of Soviet socialism. There is no longer any need for universal rules, there is not just one way, one utopia to apply globally, because that is exactly what the Free Marketeers are trying to do. The radical social movements that are increasingly coming together don’t want to seize power. but to dissolve it. They are not vanguards but catalysts in the revolutionary process. They are dreaming up many autonomous alternative forms of social organisation, and they are celebrating variety and rejoicing in autonomy.	+	See: Natural Source of Consciousness, p. 64, and Annotation 32, 27.
−	*** The Ecology of Struggle	+	-----
−	In Post Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin wrote that “in almost every period since the Renaissance, the development of revolutionary thought has been heavily influenced by a branch of science.” [188] He gives the examples of mathematics and mechanics for the Enlightenment, and evolutionary biology and anthropology for the 19<sup>th</sup> Century. Ecology has influenced many movements today, and that is perhaps why their model of organisation and co-ordination resembles an ecological model, working like an ecosystem. Highly interconnected, it thrives on diversity, works best when imbedded in its own locality and context and develops most creatively at the edges, the overlap points, the in-between spaces-those spaces where different cultures meet, such as the coming together of the American Earth First! and logging unions or London tube workers and Reclaim the Streets. The societies that they dream of creating will also be like ecosystems-diversified, balanced, and harmonious.	+	''Consciousness is a social phenomenon and has a social nature.'' Consciousness arose from real life activities. Consciousness is always ruled by natural law and by social law.
−	*** Enough Is Enough	+	-----
−	The ecological crisis changes the way many of these movements think and act. Kirkpatrick Sale illustrates the scale of the biological meltdown. Afore goods and services have been consumed by the generation alive betiveen 1950 and 1990, measured in constant dollars and on a global scale, than by all the generations in all of human history before.[189] The level of ecological destruction is mind-blowing, and the present generation feels an incredible urgency about the future.[190] We know that mere reform is useless because it is clear that the whole basis of the present system is profoundly anti-ecological, and that there is no longer any use waiting for the right historical conditions for revolution as time is rapidly running out.	+	==== Annotation 78 ====
−	Radically creative and subversive change must happen now, because there is no time left for anything else. During the May ’68 insurrection in Paris, a message was scrawled on the walls of the Theatre de L’Odeon: Dare to go where none has gone before you. Dare to think what none has ever thought. Despite capital’s rapacious ability to enclose and recuperate everything, the space has now been opened up, and we can finally pay attention to that message.	+	''Natural law'' includes the laws of physics, chemistry, and other natural phenomena which govern the material world. Consciousness itself can never violate natural law as it arises from the natural processes of the natural world.
−	*** Transnational Resistance	+	''Social law'' includes the objective and universal relationships between social phenomena and social processes. Human society was created through labor, and this labor was performed in very specific material relations between humans and the natural world.
−	On New Year’s Day 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAYfA) came into effect, 2,000 indigenous people from several groups came out from the mountains and forests of Chiapas, the most Southern state of Mexico. Masked, armed, and calling themselves Zapatistas, their battle cry was Ya Basta (Enough is Enough). An extraordinary popular uprising which was to change the landscape of global resistance forever had begun. Five towns were occupied and 12 days of fighting followed. This was not an isolated local act of rebellion; through the Zapatistas’ resourceful use of the internet, which could not be censored by the Mexican state, people all over the world soon heard of the uprising.[191] These masked rebels from poverty stricken communities were not only demanding that their own land and lives be given back, neither were they just asking for international support and solidarity. They were talking about neoliberalism, about the death sentence that NAITA and other Free Trade agreements would impose on indigenous people. ‘They were demanding the dissolution of power and the development of civil society, and they were encouraging others all over the world to take on the fight against the enclosure of our lives by capital. Public sympathy in Mexico and abroad was overwhelming, on the day of the ceasefire, celebratory demonstrations took place in numerous countries. In Mexico City, 100,000 marched together shouting “First World HAHAHA!” Phenomenal poetic communiques came out of Chiapas and were rapidly circulated through the internet. There was a new sense of possibility, and the Zapatistas and their supporters were weaving an electronic fabric of struggle to carry the seeds of revolution around the world.[192]	+	''Note: social law is a key concept of historical materialism, which is the topic of Part 2 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.''
−	*** People’s Global Action	+	In ''A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'', Marx explains how social existence and social laws govern the consciousness of individuals:
−	In 1996 the Zapatistas, with trepidation as they thought nobody might come, put out a call for a gathering-an ‘encuentra’ (encounter)-of international activists and intellectuals to meet in Chiapas and discuss common tactics, problems and solutions to the common enemy: capitalism?[193] Over 6,000 people attended and spent days talking and sharing their stories of struggle. This was followed a year later by a gathering in Spain, where the idea of a more concrete global campaign, named People’s Global Action (PGA), was hatched by a group made up of ten of the largest and most innovative social movements, including the Movimento Sem Terra, the Brazilian Landless Peasants Movement (see DoD #7, page 88) and the radical Indian Farmers-the Karnataka Stale Farmers Union (KRRS). Four hallmarks were proposed by this group in an attempt to get people to rally around shared principles. These were:	+	<blockquote>
		+	In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
		+	</blockquote>
−	- A very clear rejection of the institutions that multinationals and speculators have built to take power away from people, like the WTO and other trade liberalisation agreements (like APEC, the EU, NAITA, etc..)
−	- A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations in which transnational capital is the only real policy maker.	+	-----
−	- A call for non-violent [hmmm] civil disobedience and the construction of local alternatives by local people, as answers to the actions of governments and corporations.	+	Consciousness is determined by the social communication needs of human beings as well as the material conditions of reality.
−	- An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy.	+	-----
−	In February 1998, PGA was born and for the first time ever, the world’s grassroots movements were beginning to talk and share experiences without the mediation of established Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). The first gathering of the PGA was held in Geneva-home of the much hated WTO. More than 300 delegates from 71 countries came to Geneva to share their anger over corporate rule. From the Uwa peoples of Columbia, Canadian Postal Workers, European Reclaim the Streets activists, anti-nuclear campaigners, French farmers, Maori and Ogoni activists, through to Korean Trade Unionists, the Indigenous Women’s Network of North America, and Ukrainian radical ecologists, all were there to form a global instrumentfor <em>communication and co-ordination for all those fighting against the destruction of humanity and the planet by the global market, while building local alternatives and people power.[194]</em>	+	==== Annotation 79 ====
−	One of the participants spoke of this inspiring event:	+	The term ''material conditions'' refers to the external environment which humans inhabit. Material conditions include the natural environment, the means of production and the economic base<ref>See Annotation 3, p. 2 and Annotation 29, p. 24.</ref> of human society, and other objective externalities and systems which affect human life and society. Note that material conditions don’t refer to physical matter alone, but also include objective social relations and phenomena. In ''A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'', Marx argues that “neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life.”
−	<quote>	+	Consciousness is dynamic in nature, constantly learning and changing flexibly. Consciousness guides humans to transform the material world to suit our needs.
−	<em>It is difficult to describe the warmth and the depth of the encounters we had here. The global enemy is relatively well known, but the global resistance that it meets rarely passes through the filter of the media. And here we met the people who had shut down whole cities in Canada with general strikes, risked their lives to seize lands in Latin America, destroyed the seat of Cargill in India or Novartis’ transgenic maize in France. Ihe discussions, the concrete planning for action, the stories of struggle, the personalities, the enthusiastic hospitality of the Genevan squatters, the impassioned accents of the women and men facing the police outside the WTO building-all sealed an alliance between us. Scattered around the world again, we will notforget. We remain together. This is our common struggle.</em>
−	</quote>
−	One of the concrete aims of this gathering was to co-ordinate actions against two events of global importance that were coming up in May of that year, the G8 meeting (an annual event) of the leaders of the eight most industrialised nations, which was to take place in Birmingham and the second ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation which was being held a day later in Geneva.	+	-----
−	For four consecutive days in May 1998, acts of resistance echoed around the planet. In Hyderabad, India, 200,000 peasant farmers called for the death of the WTO; in Brasilia landless peasants and unemployed workers joined forces and 50,000 of them took to the streets; over 30 Reclaim the Streets parties took place in many countries, ranging from Finland to Sidney, San Francisco to Toronto, Lyon to Berlin. In Prague, the biggest single mobilisation since the Velvet Revolution in ’89, brought over thousands into the streets for a mobile street party that ended with several McDonalds being redesigned and running battles with the police. Meanwhile in the UK, 5,000 people were paralysing central Birmingham as the G8 leaders fled the city to a local manor to continue their meeting in a more tranquil location. The following day, the streets of Geneva exploded. The GS plus many more world leaders had congregated there for the WTO ministerial and to celebrate the 50<sup>th</sup> Anniversary of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GAAT), the forerunner of the WTO. Over 15,000 people from all over Europe and many from other continents demonstrated. Banks had their windows smashed, the WTO Director General’s Mercedes was turned over and three days of the heaviest rioting ever seen in Geneva followed. The dust settled, the world leaders stuck in their glass bunker beside Lake Geneva made a statement saying that they wanted the WTO to become more <em>transparent!</em> As if that was going to make the blindest bit of difference.	+	==== Annotation 80 ====
−	*** June 18<sup>th</sup>-Keep on Building	+	Consciousness and material conditions have a dialectical relationship with one other, just as the base of society and the superstructure have a dialectical relationship with one other [see Annotation 29, p. 24]. Consciousness arises from material conditions, though conscious activity can affect material conditions.
−	It was clear that things were really moving and that we had to keep the momentum going, and build on the success of the May actions. The question was how? Then came an idea-why not go for the jugular this time? Why not aim at the heart of the beast, the pulsating core of the global economy, the financial and banking districts, the engine room of all ecological and social devastation? This time we could make it bigger, better and even more diverse. According to an article in <em>The Daily Mail[195]</em> entitled “Invitation to a Riot;’ June 18<sup>th</sup> was organised by ringleaders during a <em>secret council of war,</em> several other papers mentioned <em>cells</em> and <em>shadowy groups;</em> while others concentrated on the <em>protest by Stealth,</em> the fact that it was all <em>plotted on the internet[196]</em> and was therefore <em>secret.</em> If you believe the papers, the internet is so secret that <em>The Sunday Times</em> had to <em>intercept an e-mail-</em> which happened to be on the open discussion list-to show to its readers. Apparently the fact that it was “hatched” on the internet also meant it was impossible for the police to estimate how many protesters[197] might be involved[198] or know what the protest was actually about!	+	As Marx explains in ''Capital Volume I'':
−	**Geneva 1998:** oops that was a director general’s posh car The media go to extraordinary lengths to make people believe that this kind of thing can’t be organised by fairly normal people, using fairly normal everyday life tools such as conversations, phone calls[199] and public meetings. Only shadowy types using weird and highly unusual things like computers and the internet and meeting in strange, secret places like pubs and community centres could possibly organise such an event. But how did it all start, and in what ways was it really organised? If you work for MIS or the police, don’t get all excited and think I’m about to divulge the names and techniques of all the <em>organised anarchists[200]</em> that you so desperately want to catch.[201] I’m going to do no such thing, but what I do want to attempt however, is to demystify the whole process of organising June 18<sup>th</sup>.	+	<blockquote>
		+	At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.
		+	</blockquote>
−	*** Desiring The Impossible	+	In ''A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'', Marx explains how the development of material conditions eventually leads to conscious activity which will in turn lead to changes in society:
−	Those moments where incredible dreams are first shared and aired, where imagination becomes actual by speaking, are wonderful to look back on. Sometimes it takes so little, just a conversation at the right time with the right people, and the seed of an idea is planted and takes root. Like all good ideas, lots of people were thinking the same thoughts at the same time, and all it took was a bit of talking to make those dreams real.	+	<blockquote>
		+	At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Last year for the May ’98 actions, Reclaim the Streets had spent some time trying to work out how to hold an event in the City of London, this was before it was decided to move the whole thing up to Birmingham. But the ring of steel, the blanket CCTV coverage and the fact that the event was going to be during the weekend and the City would be empty of office workers put us right off. However, the desire to do something in this small square mile of land right on our doorsteps, Europe’s leading financial centre, and one of capital’s oldest and most powerful sites, proved too strong. Having a tendency to believe in the reality of our desires, we couldn’t let this one go.	+	As Marx further explains, material conditions must first be met before such revolutionary social changes can be made through conscious activity:
−	Then during a hot summer’s day in June 1998, a conversation occurred between an RTS activist and someone from London Greenpeace (LGP-the anarchist collective not linked to Greenpeace International) who had been involved in the Stop the City demonstrations during the ‘80s. It turned out that they had been thinking similar thoughts about having an event in the City that year to bring all the single issue campaigns together around the common enemy of capital, and a date[:] had already been set for a public meeting. LGP felt that the time was right to take on such an audacious target. The Stop the Citys in the ‘80s had come out ofthe momentum ofthe peace movement. In the last few years, the ecological direct action movement had been getting stronger. There seemed to be an upsurge in workplace action-the Jubilee line wildcat strikes, and the Thameside care workers being two examples. Street Parties had sprouted up across the country with thousands taking direct action and there was a sense that there was enough momentum to take on such an ambitious and cheeky action.	+	<blockquote>
		+	No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The idea was taken back to RTS’s weekly public meeting and to LGP’ s. In mid-August, the first ofmany public meetings about June the 18<sup>th</sup> was held in a community centre in Central London. As well as RTS and LGP, several groups were present, ranging from the Mexico Support Group, London Animal Action, through to McLibel and Class War. A date was decided, June 18<sup>th</sup>, to coincide with the G8 summit. It was a Friday-therefore a work day in the City. An initial proposal text was agreed and rough ideas of a timetable for the day and different groups to approach for involvement were discussed. It was agreed to hold open co-ordinating meetings every month, and these continued to take place right up to a few weeks before the actual day.
−	At this point, there was much debate and some pretty dire brainstorming sessions trying to find a title for the day. Suggestions like A Carnival against Commerce, Laughing All the Way to the Bank, For a Millennium Without Multinationals, Reclaim the City, and Reclaim the World all were mentioned, yet nobody could agree on a suitable name. Time passed and still no title had been thought of, so we stuck to the date-June 18<sup>th</sup>-with a subtitle of a day of action, protest, and carnival in financial centres across the globe. For some extraordinary reason, perhaps due to the fact that a date provides the ultimate in global ownership, no one is taking on someone else’s tag, it seemed to work and eventually, many groups began simply calling it J18.[202]	+	-----
−	*** Good Ideas Spread Like Wildfire	+	''- Structure of Consciousness''
−	By the end of August <strong>1998,</strong> the first leaflet was put together-an A4 cut and pasted photocopied sheet-and it was taken to the EF! Summer Gathering for discussion. A small number of people thought it was a suicide mission to try and occupy and transform the city on a work day, when many people would be unable to attend because they were working,[203] but others were excited by it and they agreed to take the idea back to their localities and discuss it. By the beginning of September 1998, an international proposal had been written was taken to the PGA Convenors’ Committee meeting in Finland and discussed with social movements from each continent, who gave the go-ahead for it to be networked internationally. Soon after this, an international networking group was established to distribute and translate the proposal into eight languages. Paper copies found themselves in many backpacks and were taken to far flung places on people’s travels.	+	Consciousness has a very complicated structure, including many factors which have strong relationships with each other. The most basic factors are ''knowledge, sentiment'' and ''willpower.''
−	Preparation pays off-but how many emails before we too get this? (Narita Airport protestors in Japan in the 1970s)	+	-----
−	A J18 e-mail discussion list was set up, where any message sent from anywhere in the world is automatically distributed to everyone who is signed up. This list was entirely public, anyone with an e-mail account could join. During the run up to the action, over 1,000 people passed through the list, and there was a steady membership of about 400 people. Over 300 different people sent an e-mail contributing to the discussion, which showed a suprising level of participation. Someone who had very little experience designing web pages used a web page making programme and set up a basic web site with the proposal on it.	+	==== Annotation 81 ====
−	Academics and corporations agree that the internet has become one of the most potent weapons of resistance for activists fighting global capital. A PR manager teaching multinationals how to deal with modern day activist groups was quoted as saying The greatest threat to the corporate world’s reputation comes from the internet, the pressure groups’ newest weapon. Their agile <em>use of global tools such as the internet reduces the advantage that corporate budgets once provided.</em> Harry Cleaver, a professor of economics in the USA, has written that <em>the most serious challenge to the basic institutional structures of modem society flowfrom the emergence of computer-linked global social movements.[204]</em>	+	As with the concept of reflection (see Annotation 68, p. 65), the analysis of the structure of consciousness which follows is rooted in ideas first proposed by Marx, Engels and Lenin, and later developed through the work of various Soviet psychologists, philosophers, and scientists including Ivan Pavlov, Todor Pavlov, Aleksei Leontiev, Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Voloshinov, and others, and is used as a basis for scientific inquiry and development up to this day. According to ''Where is Marx in the Work and Thought of Vygotsky?'' by Lucien Sève (2018), much of this work, such as the groundbreaking work of Lev Vygotsky, has been heavily “de-Marxized,” stripped of all aspects of Marxism and, by extension, dialectical materialism, in translation to English.
−	Despite the fact that most people on the planet don’t own a phone, let alone a computer linked up to the internet, many social movements in both the North and South now have some sort ofinternet access. It’s a relatively cheap medium that enables small groups with very few resources to communicate on a mass scale. June 18<sup>th</sup> could not have happened globally without it. The cost of sending letters or making phone calls halfway across the world would have been prohibitive. But ifs the way the internet spreads ideas rapidly and in every direction through web sites, discussion lists etc. which is extraordinary. Once a message has gone out, a simple click of a button can send it to thousands of people and each one of these in turn can forward that message within seconds. Ideas spread and multiply at the speed of light.	+	''Knowledge'' constitutes the understanding of human beings, and is the result of the cognitive process. Knowledge is the re-created image of perceived objects which takes the form of language. Knowledge is the mode of existence of consciousness and the condition for consciousness to develop.
−	There is a great anecdote which describes the decentralised multiplying nature ofthe internet. Someone in the international networking group sent an e-mail to an anarchist group in New York, which was then forwarded by them to Chicago, who in turn forwarded it to Boston and so on to several other cities in the US until eventually it reached Mexico City, where it was forwarded to Zapatista supporters in Chiapas, who were friends of the originator of the e-mail in the UK but who had no idea that she knew anything about J18. They then e-mailed her saying <em>Wow, have you seen this proposal? Have you heard about this action?</em> The message had literally gone around the world.	+	-----
−	Traditional media was also of key importance, and by the time 20,000 red, green and black leaflets[205] had been printed and mailed out (yes, real stamps and licking envelopes) to around 1,000 groups around the world, many countries and groups had already got involved-including the North Sumatran Peasants Union, the Policy Information Centre for International Solidarity (PICIS) in South Korea, Chicoco (the coalition of tribal people fighting the oil industry in Nigeria), the Canadian Auto Workers Union, Green Action in Israel and a coalition of several groups in the United States and Australia.	+	==== Annotation 82 ====
−	J18 was spreading like wildfire. Like a virulent virus, it had taken hold of people’s imaginations. Uncontrollable and untameable, it had moved from city to city and country to country. Like the financial markets, it fed on rumour and speculation. Unlike the markets, it needed co-operation, community and hope to keep it alive.	+	Marx and Engels discussed the relationship between language and consciousness extensively in ''The German Ideology'', explaining that language — the form of knowledge which exists in human consciousness — evolved dialectically with and through social activity, and that consciousness also developed along with and through the material processes that gave rise to speech:
−	*** The Importance of Process	+	<blockquote>
		+	From the start the ‘spirit’ is afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.”So, language, physical speech organs, and human society all developed in dialectic relations with one another. Since language is the form of knowledge in human consciousness, this means that knowledge arose directly from these dialectical processes:
−	Although what happened on the day went beyond many people’s wildest dreams, the process that led up to it was just as important. Although it had some failings, it did achieve much which will strengthen many of the movements who worked on ]18. Primarily, I believe there are three key areas in which the process succeeded-group building, education and networking, both on local and international level. I can only speak about the first two in terms of what happened in the UK, but I’m sure similar processes happened in many places where actions were organised.	+	Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious.
		+	</blockquote>
−	*** Acting Together	+	The fact that knowledge has a language-form in human consciousness is also important to understand because it shows that consciousness arose dialectically as, and through, social activity, and indeed, language and social activity gave rise to consciousness as a replacement for animal instinct in our relations with nature.
−	Produced in the months leading up to June 18<sup>th</sup> were two useful action oriented publications. “Squaring up to the Square Mile” was a 32-page pamphlet detailing the institutions and workings of the city. The accompanying publication was an A3 map of the city, marking financial institutions and places. See the resources section for how to get your own copy.	+	-----
−	In terms of group building, what seemed clear was that the process of local groups getting together to plan their autonomous actions on the day was incredibly important. June 18<sup>th</sup> was providing a common focus for groups up and down the country. New groups were forming and existing groups were coalescing and expanding. Local meetings which brought together diverse interest groups began happening in Sheffield, Cardiff, Newcastle, Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester and Southampton to name but a few (eventually there were over 35 different UK groups and places that had their own.June 18<sup>th</sup> point of contact.) Local posters and stickers were produced, stalls and exhibitions appeared in cafes and at festivals. With the freedom to act completely autonomously, yet knowing that there would be many other groups doing actions on the day providing both cover and support, groups found extra confidence and security and felt part of a wider process. All sense of feeling too small and too isolated seemed to evaporate. The success of the day itself will also help inspire them further. Hopefully many of these groups will continue working together for many years to come.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Man’s consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. This beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere herd-consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one.
		+	</blockquote>
−	*** Learning Together	+	And, as language and social activity dialectically developed through one another, human society became complex enough to give rise to human societies and human economies:
−	There has been a tendency in the UK direct action movement to concentrate on action at the expense of more conscious thinking and theoretical clarity.[206] 1l1e positive side of this is that it has enabled wildly imaginative actions and strategies to take place. It has also helped avoid the ideological factionalisation and bickering that has beset much of ‘traditional’ politics. The downside of this however, is that if we want to build organised popular movements which think things through, which debate, which act, which <em>experiment, which try alternatives. which develop seeds of the future in the present society,[207]</em> then we have to get a lot better at thinking, talking and educating ourselves and others. June 18<sup>th</sup> once again acted as a focusing agent, bringing together diverse people from different single issue campaigns, and getting them to think about one question-the question of capital.	+	<blockquote>
		+	This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops the division of labour…
		+	</blockquote>
−	Few people seriously understand economics, and even fewer understand the complexities of the arcane currency, futures and options markets that lie at the heart of the world’s economy. There are very few places which will tell you about such things in clear and simple language.[208] It is in the interest of the elites to make these things inaccessible and difficult to understand for the average citizen. In many ways, it resembles the hold on power that has gone on for millennia within religious societies. The high priesthood would often hold arcane ceremonies in temples hidden from the populace. and for over a thousand years, mass was held in Latin which excluded the majority of the population from understanding it. Now, in their towering glass temples of Mammon, the elite, the bankers, traders and financiers are still waking up at dawn and engaging in secret rituals. Aloof and isolated from the devastating effects of their magic, they sit safely in front of their screens playing with numbers and abstract mathematical equations, knowing that most people will never make a connection between these arcane games and the misery of their everyday life.
−	As a first step towards unlocking the City’s mystique[209] and to help educate ourselves on the issues of contemporary capital and financial markets, Corporate Watch and Reclaim the Streets produced a clear and concise 32 page illustrated booklet entitled <em>Squaring Up to The Square Mile-A rough Guide to the City of London.</em> 4000 copies of this excellent publication were distributed to groups preparing for ]18, alternative bookshops and conferences, and a version was also put up on the web. Tucked inside the booklet was a full colour map of potential targets in the City-banks, exchanges, corporate HQs, investment houses etc., all to help people planning their autonomous actions. A wonderful way of showing that theory without action is useless.	+	-----
−	Face-to-face debate is as important as radical literature, and at the end of February 1999, a day of self education was held in a squatted social ‘ centre in Stoke Newington, London, which involved over <em>100</em> people participating in theoretical workshops and debates about the issues surrounding J18. As well as this, various people travelled around giving workshops at conferences and gatherings, sometimes illustrating them with slide shows and the J18 video. This 1 8-minute video featured an amusing spoof Hollywood trailer for J18, complete with deep husky American voice and superfast paced edits, an ironic short film on the resistance to the IMF and World Bank and a couple of spoof adbusters adverts about growth economics and the G8. One hundred free copies of this were distributed globally, and it was shown in many places ranging from Israeli and US Cable TV, squatted social centres in Europe, through to benefit gigs in London. Some people even illegally dubbed it onto the beginning of rented video tapes!	+	Knowledge can be separated into two broad categories: knowledge of nature, and knowledge of human society. Each of these categories of knowledge reflects its corresponding entity in the external world.
−	*** Sharing Together	+	-----
−	As has been described extensively above, one of the central ideas behind J18 was the need to create international and local networks of resistance. But perhaps describing this amorphous and fluid form of communication as a network is misleading. Harry Cleaver describes a net as a woven fabric made up of interlinked knots-which in social terms means interlinked groups. This is <em>applicable enough when it comes to easily identifiable, co-operating groups, such as NGOs.[210]</em> But, what is missing from this description, continues Cleaver, <em>is the sense of ceaseless, fluid motion within ‘civil society’ in which ‘organising’ may not take theform of ‘organisations’ but an ebb andflow of contact at myriad points.</em>	+	==== Annotation 83 ====
−	For Cleaver, the perfect metaphor for the type of organising that is presently taking place between grassroots groups is water, <em>especially of oceans with their ever restless currents and eddies, now moving faster, now slower, now warmer, now colder, now deeper, now on the swface. At some points water does freeze, crystallising into rigidity, but mostly it melts ugain, undoing one molecularform to return to a process of dynamic self-organising that refuses crystallisation yet whose directions and power can be observed and tracked.</em> The process ofJ18 was exactly like this, and this fluidity is one of our greatest strengths against the rigid constraints of capital.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-16.png|''Each category of knowledge reflects a corresponding entity in the external world.'']]
−	*** The Day Gets Nearer-The State Prepares...	+	It’s also important to note that human society and nature have a dialectical relationship with each other and mutually impact one another, and, by extension, knowledge of nature and knowledge of human society also dialectically influence one another. So these categories of knowledge are not isolated from one another but rather dynamically shape and influence each other continuously through time.
−	It was no coincidence that on January 29, a full-page article appeared in <em>The Daily Mirror,</em> with the headline “Police spy bid to smash the anti-car protesters.” Including 10 surveillance mug shots with WANTED printed above them, the article began <em>An Anti-Car group is being targeted by police whofear it plans to bring chaos to Britain’s roads. Every police station in Britain has been circulated with photographs of Reclaim Ihe Streets demonstrators in a bid to identify ringleaders.</em>	+	-----
−	Five months to go ‘til J18 and the state had begun their counteroffensive. According to an article, a Special Branch document obtained by <em>171e Mirror</em> admits it is almost impossible for police to monitor groups like Reclaim The Streets. It says: <em>Increasingly, the environmentalists represent an impenetrable</em> <em>problem for conventional intelligence gathering. Ihe needfor an enhancement in covert pro-active intelligence bypolice is clear.</em> Which was great news, and was further evidence of the fact that the state is completely unable to grasp the way fluid disorganisations work. They are so used to hierarchy, orders, and centralisation that they just can’t see us, let alone catch us. Perhaps this is why Operation Jellystone, as it was called by the police, did not succeed in rounding up ringleaders or preventing Jl8 happening.	+	Based on levels of cognitive development, we can also classify knowledge into categories of: daily life knowledge and scientific knowledge, experience knowledge and theory knowledge, emotional knowledge and rational knowledge.
−	The Angry Brigade knew this in <em>1970</em> when they declared <em>We were invincible because we were everybody. Ihey could notjail usfor we did not exist.[211]</em> You would have thought that 25 years later, the state would have cottoned onto us!	+	-----
−	*** The Day Gets Even Nearer-We Prepare...	+	==== Annotation 84 ====
−	J18 stickers, which were printed with over 30 different designs, were beginning to be seen everywhere-lamp posts, cash machines, bus stops-you could hardly walk down a street in Central London without seeing one. A Virgin Airways advertising campaign proved particularly apt for stickering, as Virgin had recuperated Communist slogans such as “A revolution is in the Air;’ “Up the Workers”-and orange stickers on the deep red background below these slogans looked great! A sticker was even seen stuck to the back of an unsuspecting police officer during the Mayday Reclaim the Streets tube party![212]	+	The following information is from the ''Marxism-Leninism Textbook of Students Who Specialize in Marxism-Leninism'', released by Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training:
−	Numerous gigs took place to raise awareness and money. Fifty thousand club-like metallic gold J18 flyers[213] which opened up to reveal a quote from Raoul Vaneigem saying <em>To workfor delight and authenticfestivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for general insurrection[214]</em> somehow disappeared within a month as did 10,000 fly posters.	+	'''Daily Life and Scientific Knowledge'''
−	Meanwhile, NATO was bombing Serbia back to the stone age in order that Western Capital could enclose this last enclave of the Eastern Bloc. We asked ourselves who was going to rebuild the bridges, oil refineries, roads, schools, hospitals and power stations and who is going to replace the millions of pounds worth of weapons used every day? Could it possibly be Western oil, engineering, construction and arms companies? Many of us felt compelled to do something, to take action. But the timing was dreadful, and as we were are all overworked with June 18<sup>th</sup> preparations, there was no way we could organise anything else. Would the war still be going on on June 18<sup>th</sup>? The issues were so clearly identical, but how could we sucessfully integrate it into the action?	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-17.png]]
−	With only four weeks to go, the media war began, The Sunday Telegraph’s Business Section front page headline declaring “City faces mass protest threat” went on to claim: <em>Banks and finance houses are being urged by the City of London Police and the British Bankers Association to tighten security and alert their staff after uncovering plans by protest groups to bring Britain’s financial centre to a standstill.[215]</em> After describing ]18 fairly accurately, mostly quoting the web site, the article went on to quote a City professional as saying: <em>We will not bow to these people. We have money to make here.</em> But it was clear that the City was taking things very seriously. All leave was cancelled for City of London police officers on the day. The Corporation of London sent letters out to the Managing Director ofevery firm in the square mile (and many outside it) with instructions to circulate the warning of <em>major disruption</em> and the need for extra security measures to be taken on June 18<sup>th</sup> to all staff. Two weeks to go and the Big Issue’s front cover had a montage of a businessman on fire, with the headline “Breaking the Banks” and a five page feature on J18 inside. The heat was on...	+	''Daily Life Knowledge'' is the knowledge we acquire in our daily lives to deal with our daily tasks. From our interactions with nature and human society, we cultivate life experience and our understanding of every aspect of our daily lives in relation to human society and nature.
−	Leaked letters from firms in the City showed that enormous amounts of security precautions were being taken, including barricades erected in entrances to buildings, extra security guards, minimising meetings with people not normally in the particular offices, discouraging visitors to the building and keeping deliveries to an absolute minimum for the day. There were even rumours that several firms told workers not to bother coming into the City on the day and to work from home.	+	''Scientific Knowledge'' arises from Daily Life Knowledge: as our daily lives become more complex, we develop a need to understand the material world and human society more deeply and comprehensively. Scientific Knowledge is thus a developed system of knowledge of nature and human society. Scientific Knowledge can be tested and can be applied to human life and activity in useful ways.
−	One particularly worried and especially aggressive city worker sent an abusive e-mail to one of the groups, threatening to <em>smash your pinko faces in.</em> He sent it via a hotmail account, thinking it was an anonymous way of e-mailing someone. Within hours a cyber-geek on the ]18 discussion list had managed to trace the origin of the e-mail to merchant bankers Merryl Lynch. The IT manger there was immediately told of his worker’s abuse of company computers-we never heard of him again!	+	'''Experience and Theory Knowledge:'''
−	*** The Last Few Days...	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-18.png]]
−	Now with only a short time left to go, 8,000 red, green, black and gold masks were printed and painstakingly hand threaded with elastic. Final preparations were happening across the country: autonomous action plans tightened up in Bristol, giant carnival heads with sound systems inside were nearing completion in Sheffield, the London International Futures Exchange (LIFFE) was measured up so that it could have a wall built in front of its entrance, the web masters and mistresses put finishing touches to the special web pages which would stream live video from London and Sidney on the day, wigs and disguises were bought, freshly painted banners hung up to dry, four different sound systems donated separate pieces of equipment so that a communal sound system can be driven in on the day, blockading teams memorised maps and mobile phone numbers, people had to file past a competing team of police surveillance and media cameras to get into a meeting, and a crew of Red Bull junkies sat up all night editing a 32-page spoof newspaper. called Evading Standards, for distribution across London.	+	''Experience Knowledge'' is cultivated from direct observation of nature and human society. This kind of knowledge is extremely diverse, and we can apply this kind of knowledge to guide our daily activities.
−	A year on from that hot summer’s day’s conversation, everything was set to go. Hundreds of groups in 43 countries had said they were going to do something on the day, and the City of London Police estimated 10,000 people would turn up for the actions in the Square Mile. But despite all the endless meetings, careful preparations and military precision planning we knew that only one thing will enable the day to succeed-the active spontaneous actions of the participants. Spontaneity is one more vital tool of resistance to join fluidity and diversity. It is the freedom to play. The desire beyond want and external compulsion. It’s the play of life itself and the very opposite of work, order and hierarchy.	+	''Theory Knowledge'' arises from Experience Knowledge. Theory Knowledge is composed of abstract generalizations of Experience Knowledge. Theory Knowledge is more profound, accurate, and systematically organized than Experience Knowledge and gives us an understanding of the laws and dynamics of nature and human society.
−	Revolutionary epochs are periods of convergence when apparently separate processes collect to form a socially explosive crisis-perhaps it was an unwittingly accurate description of our times, when the leader of The Express claimed that it was Critical Mass which planned...[June 18<sup>th</sup>]...across the world. You and I know that Critical Mass does not exist, that it’s just an .	+	'''Emotional and Rational Knowledge:'''
−	idea-the blocking of rush hour traffic by mass bike rides-and it certainly didn’t organise June 18<sup>th</sup>. But perhaps there is no better way of describing what is happening around the world. A critical mass is building-and every year, every month, and every day it gets bigger and stronger. Reports of strikes, of direct actions and ofprotest and occupations from across the world flow along the same lines of communication that carry the trillions ofpounds involved in the reckless unsustainable money game of transnational capital. Soon there is going to be an explosion-an explosion that will be so different from any other revolutionary upsurge that those in power won’t even realise that it is about to transform their world forever. There is much work to be done, but the hope and possibility expressed during the process and events ofJune 18<sup>th</sup> have brought us one step closer to this wondrous moment...	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-19.png]]
−	[177] See the June 18<sup>th</sup> website for a complete list ofactions: http://www.j18.org/	+	Less Developed More Developed
−	[178] From the first June 18<sup>th</sup> leaflet, published 1998.	+	''Emotional Knowledge'' is the earlier stage of cognitive processing. Emotional Knowledge comes directly to us from our human senses. We obtain emotional knowledge when we use our human senses to directly learn things about nature and human society. Emotional Knowledge is usually manifested as immediate cognitive responses such as pleasure, pain, and other such impulses.
−	[179] Globalisation has become a buzzword and can be a confusing term. I prefer the term Neoliberalism, used in Europe and Latin America, but will use the more common English term. My understanding of globalisation is best summed up in the following section of Reclaim the Streets Agitprop: <em>Capital has always been global. From the</em> slave trade of earlier centuries to the imperial colonisation of lands and cultures across the world. its boundless drive for expansion—for short term financial gain-has recognised no limits. Backed up by state power, capitalist accumulation has created widespread social and ecological devastation where it ever extended. But now, capitalism is attempting a new strategy to reassert and intensify its dominance over us. its name is economic globalisation, and it consists of the dismantling of national limitations to trade and to the free movement of capital. It enables companies, driven by the demands of the rapacious gambling of money markets, to ransack the entire globe in search for ever higher profits, lowering wages and environmental standards in their wake. Globalisation is arguably the most.fundamental redesign of the planet’s political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution. Global Street Party Agitprop-May 16<sup>th</sup> 1998.	+	''Rational Knowledge'' arises from Emotional Knowledge. It is a higher stage of cognitive processing, involving abstract thought and generalization of emotional knowledge.
−	[180] See: Year of the Heroic Guerilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968, by Robert V. Daniels, Harvard University Press 1989, for an overview of the global struggles in 1968. Or for a very readable pictorial account: 1968, Marching in the Streets, by Tariq Ali, Castelle 1998.	+	Rational Knowledge is usually manifested as definitions, conjectures, judgments, etc.
−	[181] Ironically, this was one of the central weaknesses of the Soviet-Style state. Uniformity undermines diversity and the capacity to diffuse opposition.	+	''See also: Principle of Development, p. 119; Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism, p. 204.''
−	[182] The engines of capital, the financial markets, may be ‘anarchic’, flexible and fluid-but they are still governed by one unbreakable law-profit.	+	-----
−	[183] A further irony is that the same tools that enable capital to disregard borders and produce commodities thousands of miles away from their markets, the internet and cheap air travel, are the same tools which are helping global social movements to meet and work with each other. Of course I am aware of the ecological and social costs of the computer industry and air travel. The only way I can resolve this contradiction is by applying a homeopathic metaphor to it. The word homeopathy comes from the Greek and means “similar suffering:’ The idea is that a substance that can produce symptoms in a healthy person can cure those symptoms in a sick person. For instance, if you suffer from hayfever, running nose, and eyes, then you take a minute dose of onion, because onion juice produces similar symptoms (something anyone cutting up onions wil have experienced.) The concept of this minimum dose states that we must only use as little medicine as possible to stimulate the body’s own healing mechanism. So if we apply this to the use of destructive technologies to enable social change, it is clear that the amount of air travel and internet used by activists is minute, compared with what is used for capitalist gain and perhaps this minute amount of poisonous substance may actually stimulate the healing capacities of the social body.	+	''Sentiment'' is the resonant manifestation of human emotions and feelings in our relationships. Sentiment is a special form of reality reflection [see Annotation 68, p. 65]. Whenever reality impacts human beings, we feel specific sensations and emotional reactions to those impacts. Over time, these specific sensations and emotions combine and dialectically develop into generalized human feelings, and we call these generalized feelings ''sentiment.'' Sentiment expresses and develops in every aspect of human life; it is a factor that improves and promotes cognitive and practical activities.
−	[184] See Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello’s excellent book about global struggle: <em>Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up,</em> Second Edition, South End Press, Cambridge 1998.	+	-----
−	[185] Despite the fact that a recent government statistics reveal that one in three children in the UK is brought up in poverty.	+	==== Annotation 85 ====
−	[186] Quoted in <em>Trilaterism</em><em>,</em> edited by Holly Sklar, 1980, quoted in <em>The Case Against the Global Economy</em>, and <em>For a Turn Toward the Local</em>, edited by Mander and Goldsmith. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco 1996.	+	As Marx explains in ''Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:'' “Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being — and because he feels that he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential power of man energetically bent on its object.” Marx further elaborates that sentimental emotion is essential to human nature: “The domination of the objective essence within me, the sensuous eruption of my essential activity, is emotion which thereby becomes the activity of my nature.”
		+	Depending on the subjects that are perceived, as well as our human emotions about them, sentiments can be manifested in many different forms such as: moral emotion, aesthetic emotion, religious emotion, etc.
		+	-----
−	[187] See: A Handicap Removed by Dominique Vidal, Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1998.	+	==== Annotation 86 ====
−	[188] Post Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin, Black Rose Books, Montreal 1971.	+	''Moral Emotion'' is the basic manifestation of moral consciousness at an emotional level. For example: when we see people helping other people, we have positive emotional responses, yet when we see people harming other people, we have negative emotional responses. ''(Source: Nguyen Thi Khuyen of the National Institute of Administration of Vietnam)''
−	[189] Rebels Against theFuture-Lessonsfor the Computer Age by Kirkpatrick Sale, Qyartet Books 1996.	+	''Aesthetic Emotion'' refers to the the resonant feelings which arise from our interaction with beauty, sadness, comedy, etc., in life and in art. For example: when humans encounter beauty, we feel positive emotional responses. When humans encounter ugliness, we feel negative emotional responses. When we witness pain, we feel sympathetic feelings of pain and a desire to help. When we witness comedy, we feel humorous emotions ourselves. ''(Source: Textbook of General Aesthetic Studies from the Ministry of''
−	[190] The generations ofthe ‘sos to the ‘80s had the threat of nuclear apocalypse hanging over them, but that was a question of probability— lfthere were a nuclear war. The question is no longer an if, because there is certainity that as long as business continues as normal, the biosphere will be irrevocably damaged. If it hasn’t already been so.	+	''Education and Training of Vietnam)''
−	[191] Emanating from Subcommandante Marcos’ now legendary jungle-battered Olivetti laptop.	+	''Religious Emotion'' is the human belief in supernatural or spiritual forces which can’t be tested or proved through material practice or observation. However, belief in these forces can give human beings emotional responses such as hope, love, etc. ''(Source: Pham Van Chuc, Doctor of Philosophy, Central Theoretical Council of the Communist Party of Vietnam)''
−	[192] See the excellent writings of US academic Harry Cleaver about computer linked social movements-available on the web at: http:// [[http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/hmchtmlpapers.html][www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/hmchtmlpapers.html]]	+	These are just a few illustrative examples; there are many other ways in which human emotion and sentiment can manifest.
−	[193] Subcommandante Marcos said in his speech to the Convention: We ... ask in the name of all men and women that you save a moment, a few days, a few hours, enough minutes to find the common enemy.	+	''Willpower'' is the manifestation of one’s own strength used to overcome obstacles in the process of achieving goals. Willpower is a dynamic aspect of consciousness, a manifestation of human consciousness in the material world.
−	[194] From PGA manifesto, February 1998-see: [[http://www.agp.org/][http://www.agp.org/]] for more details on the PGA.	+	-----
−	[195] The Daily Mail, Monday June 21 1999, p. 23 ‘Invitation to a Riot’ by Steve Doughty and Peter Rose.	+	==== Annotation 87 ====
−	[196] The Daily Express. Saturday June 19 1999, p. 3 ‘Day of Chaos Planned on the Interne’ by Danny Penman.	+	An unnamed poem by Ho Chi Minh, written in 1950 for the Revolutionary Youth Pioneers, addresses the phenomenon of willpower:
−	[197] So does that mean that when actions were organised using leaflets and posters. they were able to use their psychic powers and guess exactly how many protestors would be in the City of London? The irony is that police figures, weeks before the protest, estimated 10,000 people which was good deal more accurate than the figures quoted on the day by the majority of the media, which ranged from 3000–7000.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Nothing in this world must be difficult
−	[198] The Daily Telegraph, Saturday June 19 1999, p. 5 Protest Hatched on the Internet by Tom Sykes.	+	The only thing that we should fear is having a waivering heart
−	[199] Phone calls are not normal tools in most ofthe world. I am obviously referring to the ‘affluent’ societies here.	+	We can dig up mountains and fill the sea
−	[200] The Financial Times, Friday June 18 1999, ‘Organised Anarchists’	+	Once we’ve willfully made a firm decision
		+	</blockquote>
−	[201] After June 18<sup>th</sup> (and at time of writing in August 1999) the police had 60 officers working on the case full time, looking at 5000 hours of CCTV footage and other evidence.	+	Today, this poem serves as the lyrics for anthem of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union (formerly the Revolutionary Youth Pioneers).
		+	-----
−	[202] There is a very unfortunate similarity between J 18 and the name of the violent ultrafascist group C18 (which stands for combat and then the initials ofAdolfHitler, A and H the first and eighth letters of the alphabet). None of us clocked on to this until too late, but some of the media did mention it!	+	Willpower arises from human self-awareness and awareness of the purposes of our actions. Through this awareness and through willpower, we are able to struggle against ourselves and externalities to successfully achieve our goals. We can consider willpower to be the power of conscious human activity; willpower controls and regulates human behaviors in order to allow humans to move towards our goals voluntarily; willpower also allows humans to exercise self-restraint and self-control, and to be assertive in our actions according to our views and beliefs.
−	[203] Most large-scale action, especially street parties, have taken place on weekends. Holding something which required thousands to participate, if it was going to work, on a weekday was admittedly quite a risk.	+	-----
−	[204] Computer Linked Social Movements and the Global Threat to Capitalism by Harry Cleaver, [[http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/][http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/]] hmchtrnlpapers.html	+	==== Annotation 88 ====
−	[205] Three colours representing Anarchism, Communism, and Ecology.	+	In ''Dialectics of Nature'', Engels explains how willpower developed in human beings as we separated from animals through the development of consciousness: “The further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards definite preconceived ends.”
−	[206] See George MacKays introduction to DJY Culture, Party and Protest in ‘90s Britain, Verso, London 1998 for an academic but interesting critique.	+	In ''Capital Volume I'', Marx explains how willpower uniquely allows humans to consciously change our own material conditions to suit our needs according to pre-conceived plans:
−	[207] From J18 international leaflet-quoted from Noam Chomsky. No further reference available.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[208] If you are going to read any paper that tells you the real stories about what is going on in the world, who pulls the strings and how the system works, then you have to fork out 85p for the <em>Financial Times.</em> Or go into a large branch ofWH Smiths, where they trust you to pay just by dropping the change (a few coppers can do) into a bucket. It will be the most educating shoplifting you have ever done.
−	[209] From the introduction of <em>Squaring Up to the Square Mile-A Rough Guide to the City ofLondon,</em> Corporate Watch and Reclaim the Streets, ]18 Publications 1999.	+	-----
−	[210] <em>Computer-linked Social Movements and the Global Threat to Capitalism</em> by Harry Cleaver, see above.	+	The true value of willpower is not only manifested in strength or weakness, but is also expressed in the content and meaning of the goals that we try to achieve through our willpower. Lenin believed that willpower is one of the factors that will create revolutionary careers for millions of people in the fierce class struggles to liberate ourselves and mankind.
−	[211] The Angry Brigade Communique 6/7, 1970.	+	-----
−	[212] RTS organised a Tube Party in support ofTube workers and against the privatisation of the London Underground, which took place on May 1<sup>st</sup>, 1999.	+	==== Annotation 89 ====
−	[213] Many people assumed that these gold flyers cost the earth to print, in fact they cost the same amount as if we had done them in any other colour.	+	In “''Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder'', Lenin explains how revolutions are born from the collective willpower of thousands of people:
−	[214] <em>The Revolution of Everyday Life,</em> Raoul Vaneigem, Rebel Press 1994.	+	<blockquote>
		+	History as a whole, and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more multiform, more lively and ingenious than is imagined by even the best parties, the most class-conscious vanguards of the most advanced classes. This can readily be understood, because even the finest of vanguards express the class-consciousness, will, passion and imagination of tens of thousands, whereas at moments of great upsurge and the exertion of all human capacities, revolutions are made by the class-consciousness, will, passion and imagination of tens of millions, spurred on by a most acute struggle of classes. Two very important practical conclusions follow from this: first, that in order to accomplish its task the revolutionary class must be able to master all forms or aspects of social activity without exception (completing after the capture of political power — sometimes at great risk and with very great danger — what it did not complete before the capture of power); second, that the revolutionary class must be prepared for the most rapid and brusque replacement of one form by another.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[215] <em>The Sunday Telegraph,</em> May 16 1999 “City Faces Mass Protest Threat” by Grant Ringshaw.
−	<br>	+	-----
−	** Desire is Speaking: Utopian Rhizomes (from issue 8)	+	All of these factors [knowledge, sentiment, and willpower] which, together, create consciousness, have dialectical relationships with each other. Of these factors, knowledge is the most important, because it is the mode of existence of consciousness, and also the factor which guides the development of all the other factors, and it also determines how the other factors manifest.
−	The similarity of squatters’ cultures in various Western European countries is remarkable, I wrote in a report of a tour of my band in May 1995 through four or five different West European countries. The buildings, music, clothes, codes, and of course, the inevitable dogs, are practically the same everywhere. Can it be that the dominant West European mass culture produces its own subculture? Isn’t it time for something new? This observation points to the existence of a West (and increasingly East) European network of people who do not necessarily know each other, but share ideals, practices, and preferences that are different and opposed to the dominant culture: a network of bands, squats, zines, labels, mail orders, newsgroups, and people.	+	=== 3. The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness ===
−	The ‘70s are generally considered to be the last utopian period.[216] After the failure of the near-revolution of 1968 it became clear that the spectacle transforms our desires into something it can cope with. The spontaneous explosion of desires was absorbed through student councils, democratic reforms, wage increases, employee participation, and freedom of the press. In the Netherlands, the actions of the Provos and Kabouters were overruled by Marxist student leaders and the politicians of the New Left. The desires became harmless, the utopian moment passed by.	+	The relationship between matter and consciousness is dialectical. In this relationship, ''matter comes first, and matter is the source of consciousness; it decides consciousness. However, consciousness is not totally passive, it can impact back to matter through the practical activities of human beings.''
−	After the utopian period of Love and Peace, the ‘80s with all its No Future attitude can be considered to be an atopia. With their dark clothes and nihilistic attitude, punks were not exactly flower children. They had no poetic vision of the future. Only the here and now existed, with the notion that you have to make the best out of that. If the system sucks, create something yourself, something different, something better, or at least something more fun.	+	-----
−	When mainstream punk died a few years after it appeared on stage, the punk movement could start. Bands sprouted like weeds because according to the DIY ethos ofpunk anyone can play: you’re a musician if you want to, not because a producer of a record company or journalist says so. With the bands came the venues, labels, rehearsal rooms, mail orders, zines. An inspiring underground culture appeared, while the media had lost their interest.	+	==== Annotation 90 ====
−	The same can be said for the squatters’ movement. In Holland, and also abroad, the punk and the squatters’ movements of the ‘80s were very much interwoven. Especially in the beginning, punk bands depended on squats for their gigs. If a huge house was occupied, the first thing you did was open a bar and try to create a gig space where (punk) bands could play. Famous in Amsterdam were the Emma-a huge warehouse, and the music studio-Jokes Koeienverhuurbedrijf. Not just Amsterdam, but many other towns had their own squats with gig spaces as well. Some of these have been legalized, others still exist as squats, some have disappeared. Nowadays they don’t only feature punk bands, because in the end, even squatters learned to dance to techno and jungle.	+	Engels explained in ''Dialectics of Nature'' that “matter evolves out of itself the thinking human brain,” which means that matter must necessarily come prior to consciousness.
−	The squatters’ movement did not only offer space for bands but for a lot of other things as well. It was supposed to have died in 1984, after the eviction of a huge squat called the Wyers.[217] I always considered this notion funny, because I arrived in Amsterdam in 1984 and since then the main part of my life has taken place in squats or legalized squats. Most of my friends used to live in squatted houses, and we frequented squatted bars, discos, gig venues, and restaurants. Almost everything you needed or wanted could be found in squatted buildings, from grocery stores to saunas. Some of these facilities were especially directed at squatters, but a lot were also accessible to the general public. Back then it was no problem at all to live in what might be called a squatted zone for almost 24 hours a day; you could even travel to squats in other European countries in your holidays. You only dropped in at the dole office for this month’s cash, or sometimes you got yourself a job (although this was not done back Lhen).	+	As Marx explains in ''Capital Volume I'', matter determines conscious activity:
−	Some people just squatted out of necessity, while for some it fitted into a broader ideology. But no matter how many squatters flirted with revolutionary ideas-for example, there were many support committees for the guerrillas in Central America, and some people went to Nicaragua to support the Sandinista revolution-most of them dissociated themselves from the theoretical discussions of young anarchists and communists in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Most squatters didn’t want to change the world, but live their life here and now the way they chose to. If we can speak of any ideology, it was the ideology that there was none. As a female squatter said to a journalist of the newspaper de Volkskrant:[218] Not an abstract ideal, nor the adherence to an ideology, or even a better society, but the improvement of a lousy personal situation. Ihat is why I am involved.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Just as in the women’s movement, the slogan “the personal is political” was in vogue. Squatting and direct action became an attitude to life. Politics starts in you daily life, where power relations take hold, where you can start changing things and create room for different ways of living, working and relating to each other. In the squatters’ magazine <em>Bluf!,[219]</em> someone said in an article called “Utopia,”	+	However, it’s important to remember that the relationship between matter and consciousness is ''dialectical'', and that conscious activity — through the combination of willpower and labor — can also impact the material world; social change arises through the combined willpower of many human beings. See: Annotation 80, p. 81.
−	<quote>	+	==== a. The Role of Matter in Consciousness ====
−	<em>/feel at home in the squatters’ movement because</em> I <em>can live</em> and work <em>there and be politically active, together with people who generally have no illusions, without getting stuck in a ‘no-future’ attitude. People who have no illusions about the welfare state regarding housing, work, culture, love and whatever else is for sale. No illusions about parliamentary politics. People who resist nonetheless, not against the establishment, nor randomly, but because they have their own ideas about how they want to live and who want tofightfor a space to realise that. In short: people who do not want the patterns and perspectives of their lives being dominated by what society has to ‘offer’, but by their own insights and desires.</em>
−	</quote>
−	There are altogether fewer squats now than in the ‘80s, due to hassle through new laws which have resulted in quicker and easier evictions. A lot of squats only exist for a few months. The problem with this is that it’s harder to create gig venues, cafes, shops, and other facilities. At the end of the ‘80s and the beginning of this decade a lot of the projects and infrastructure of the squatters’ movement disappeared or chose some legalized form to continue their activities. Some of the initiatives now make use of state-subsidized jobs, employing each other on workfare schemes. Squatters are idealistic, but also pragmatic, or perhaps strategic is a better word here. In order to survive you have to use the various possibilities the system unintentionally offers you. But in Amsterdam it’s still squatday (squats are being opened) almost every Sunday, and many young people opt for the uncertain but exciting life in a squat.	+	Dialectical Materialism affirms that:
−	According to social scientists and journalists,[220] social movements are considered important when they play a role in the political arena, the media, or both. The squatters movement did so between <strong>1976</strong> and <strong>1984,</strong> at least in Amsterdam. Squatters were large in number and well organised into neighbourhood groups; they had political impact and staged spectacular riots, and because of that, gained a lot of media attention. The squatters’ movement disappeared as a political factor and as a media event after <strong>1984,</strong> but the (new or legalized) squats and networks survived, and they turned out to be fertile soil for other initiatives and experimental ways of life.[221]	+	'''• Matter is the first existence, and that consciousness comes after.'''
−	Out of the squatters’ movement came a network of squats, communally owned houses, food co-ops, LET-systems (local exchange systems without money, based on trading skills), sound systems, bands, mailorders, festivals, direct-action groups, research groups, no-paper (immigration) groups, publishers, magazines, internet providers and newsgroups, infoshops, people’s kitchens, mobile kitchens, etc. Within this movement, a few thousand people are on the move. A lot ofpeople are disappointed that there isn’t a shared utopia anymore, no expectation of a better future. According to some of them, the shared utopian vision has always been the core of left politics, and that has to stay that way.[222] Well, if this is true, then perhaps the movement isn’t left anymore. But the dischord with the existing order and the desire to create something different here and now still remains. The shared utopia disappeared, but the utopian practices didn’t.	+	'''• Matter is the source of consciousness, it decides consciousness.'''
−	At the moment, when neo-liberalism is the only ideology and the market economy has colonized everything-even our genes-these practices show us possibilities for other ways of living. other economies, or even the end of economy. There is an ongoing discussion about the necessity of creating an alternative economy that is less dependent on the mainstream market and the state. The Dutch VAK-group, for example-a federation of houses, studios, work places, companies, a farm, and financial institutions-strives towards an alternative infrastructure based on anarchist ideas, such as local democracy and federation. By supplying financial means, skills, experiences, and other services, new projects can be supported and existing projects can network.	+	We know that matter determines consciousness because consciousness is the product of the high-level-structured matter such as the human brain. Consciousness itself can only exist after the development of the material structure of the human brain. Humans are the result of millions of years of development of the material world. We are, therefore, products of the material world. This conclusion has been firmly established through the development of natural science, which has given us great insight into the long history of the Earth and of the evolution of living organisms, including human beings.
−	Desire, however, doesn’t know exchange, but only theft and gift. ‘Ihe market economy expands by appropriating things that were freely available before. It is only after claiming exclusive ownership that things can be bought and sold. In this context, de-economizing is the breaking down of exclusive ownership: the reclaiming of public and private spaces, goods, and provisions. The struggle against the economization of our daily lives is not merely a struggle against the market, but against economy itself, against the notion of scarcity. Most of the movement’s practices are based on this notion of abundance.	+	All of this scientific evidence stands as the basis for the viewpoint: ''matter comes first, consciousness comes after'' [see Annotation 114, p. 116].
−	According to the squatting movement, there are enough places to live in; you only need to occupy them. Punk and DIY culture show that anyone can make music, records, organise gigs, make ‘zines, just do it. Like primitives, travellers are the hunters and gatherers of contemporary wild nature: the technological megacity, which offers more than enough waste to live on. The refugee aid movement or no-paper groups (supporting illegal immigrants) show that hospitality costs nothing, but is a way to meet new friends, come into contact with other cultures, and enhance your experience. Q!ieers show that there is more than heterosexuality or homosexuality, more than man and woman. A collective like Rampenplan, which consists of a mobile kitchen, a publisher, and a direct action video group, shows that it is possible to cook organic meals based on the principle of a fair price and in doing so generate money for other projects, without expecting anything in return. Even the LET-schemes, which use the principle of exchange, are based on the notion that everybody has some skills to offer somebody else, on abundance instead of scarcity. But most important is that the movement shows that you can have fun doing what you do, that you can play instead ofwork.	+	We have already discussed the factors which constitute the natural and social sources of consciousness:
−	So what kind of community is the Dutch movement? It is clear that people participate together in direct actions and demonstrations, read the same magazines, go to the same bars, gigs and festivals and some of them live together in squats or communally owned houses. They certainly meet. But they also meet people ‘outside’; they attend schools or universities, or have a job. Hardly anyone is a full-time squatter anymore. You can live in a squat and study and work and play in a band and make love with men and women...	+	'''•''' Human brains
−	Although there are always people who try to formulate criteria as to who is inside and who is not, the movement of the ‘90s is relatively open, and because of that also lacks the sometimes suffocating pressure towards uniformity that was characteristic of the social movements of the ‘70s and ‘80s, like the women’s and gay movements, and also the squatters movement.	+	'''•''' Impacts of the material world on human brains that cause reflections
−	What we see here is not a community, nor solidarity groups, but configurations of desire: networks of friendship and expression that undermine the prevailing relations of production, society, politics, family, the body, sex, and even the cosmos. Lacking a single clear goal or programme, we see a multitude of struggles. There is no utopian tree from which readymade ideas about another world can be picked, but endless rhizomes on which, at unexpected moments, flowers appear.	+	'''•''' Labor
−	The concept of rhizomes, modelled on the strange root systems of certain plants, was introduced by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They’re opposed to the tree, which stands for the dominant Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, and also gnosticism, theology, ontology, philosophy. The tree exists in a hierarchical order of a central trunk with larger and smaller branches. The trunk forms the connection between all parts, thus in a way limiting connections. A rhizome, on the contrary, can be connected with any other at any point. A tree can be cut down, whereas rhizomes are much less subject to destruction.	+	'''•''' Language
−	Rhizomes can grow again along another line if broken at some point. Rhizomes are abundant; if weeded out in one place, they will definitely show up somewhere else. Rhizomes are endless, as are desire and the imagination.	+	[See Annotation 72, p. 68 and Annotation 73, p. 75]
−	So utopianism didn’t disappear after the ‘70s, it’s everywhere-sometimes hidden, sometimes exposed. It can’t be exterminated, because it’s like a weed. It’s the voice of desire and the imagination in a world dominated by material interests and reason. Like weeds. desire can be ‘cultivated’ for a shorter or longer period, it can be locked up within political organisations or single issue groups, but it can never be weeded out. In some periods it’s more underground, voluntarily so or because the state or political organisations (right or left) force it to be. But it will always find a way to break out. It will always find a hole to break through and flow free, a hole in the spectacle, temporarily or permanent.	+	All of these factors also assert that ''matter is the origin of consciousness.''
−	submitted by Ravage, bi-weekly magazine, Van Ostadestraat 233n, 1073 TN Amsterdam, Holland	+	-----
−	[216] Saskia Poldervaart, ‘Anti-utopisten maken zich er gemakkelijk vanaf in ‘de Volkskrant’, June 1998	+	==== Annotation 91 ====
−	[217] See Virginia Mamadouh, ‘De stad in eigen hand’, Amsterdam 1992.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-20.png]]
−	[218] 8 March, 1980	+	The material basis of consciousness is rooted in the following phenomena:
−	[219] No. 79, 28 September, 1983	+	<ul>
		+	<li><ol style="list-style-type: upper-alpha;">
		+	<li><p>The material structure of the human brain.</p></li></ol>
		+	</li>
		+	<li><ol start="2" style="list-style-type: upper-alpha;">
		+	<li><p>Impacts from the material world cause reflections in human consciousness.</p></li></ol>
		+	</li>
		+	<li><ol start="100" style="list-style-type: upper-roman;">
		+	<li><p>Human Labor — physical process which dialectically develops consciousness.</p></li></ol>
		+	</li>
		+	<li><ol start="500" style="list-style-type: upper-roman;">
		+	<li><p>Human Speech — physical process which dialectically develops consciousness.</p></li></ol>
		+	</li>
		+	<li><ol start="5" style="list-style-type: upper-alpha;">
		+	<li><p>Evolution of human brains and consciousness through material processes of the material world.</p></li></ol>
		+	</li></ul>
−	[220] Scum [editor’s comment]	+	For more information, see: Nature and Structure of Consciousness.
−	[221] I prefer not to use the word <em>lifestyle,</em> because its meaning has been obscured, both by marketeers and the American social ecologist Murray Bookchin. See his essay ‘Social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism, an unbridgeable chasm’, AK Press 1995.	+	-----
−	[222] Ronald van Haasteren et al in ‘Het Gelijk...uitnodiging tot een debat’, Papieren Tijger 199	+	Consciousness is composed of reflections and subjective images of the material world, therefore ''the content of consciousness is decided by matter'' [see Annotation 68, p. 65]''.'' The development of consciousness is determined by natural laws and by social laws<ref>For a discussion of the material basis of social laws, see Annotation 10, p. 10, Annotation 78, p. 80, and Annotation 79, p. 81.</ref> as well as the material environment which we inhabit. All of these factors which determine consciousness are material in nature. Therefore, matter determines not only the content but also the development of consciousness.
−	** Running to Stand Still <em>(from issue 9)</em>	+	==== b. The Role of Consciousness in Matter ====
−	*** Globalisation, Blagging, and the Dole	+	In relation to matter, ''consciousness can impact matter through human activities.''
−	Over the years the government has helpfully financed many campaigns and actions against itself. Lots ofpeople in the direct action movement rely on dole money from the state in order to survive. However, over the last few years there has been a big shake up of the welfare state. What has our response been to this? How will it affect us? And has the supply of free money finally run dry?	+	When we discuss consciousness we are discussing ''human'' consciousness. So, when we talk about the role of consciousness, we are talking about the role of human beings. Consciousness in and of itself cannot directly change anything in reality. In order to change reality, humans have to implement material activities. However, consciousness controls every human activity, so even though consciousness does not directly create or change the material world, it equips humans with knowledge about objective reality, and based on that foundation of knowledge, humans are able to identify goals, set directions, develop plans, and select methods, solutions, tools, and means to achieve our goals. So, consciousness manifests its ability to impact matter through human activities.
−	Throughout the past two decades, the dole has provided the basis for a number of creative projects and movements, some of which have been overtly political. In the 1980s, the relaxed benefit regime allowed many to drop out ofwork and form new types of antagonistic lifestyles and tendencies, for example around the anarcho-punk scene. This was carried on into the 1990s when the dole became the basis for the growing anti-roads movement, the campaign against the Criminal Justice Bill, as well as the more recent development of the militant direct action movement. Being on the dole has simply given us the time to become full-time politicos; the dole has in effect been a trouble-maker’s grant. After all, who can find the time to do an office action on a Monday morning, spend days waiting for an eviction or take part in days of action from J18 to Bastille Day that always seem to be on a week day? Fair enough, phoning in sick became part of the action on J18, but we can’t exactly phone in sick every week when we want to go to an action, let alone risk being locked up in a cell for days. But apart from giving us the time to become full-time politicos, in an important sense opting out of work has become a political statement in itself in the direct action scene.	+	The impact of consciousness on matter can have positive or negative results.
−	Riot to Work? The unemployed did things differently then... A march of the Right to Work Campaign in London in 1908. There was a national Right to Work movement in the early years of the last century with committees being set up across the country between 1904 and 1908. Their threat was not an idle one-in 1905 there was serious Right to Work rioting in Manchester.	+	-----
−	The first major attack on this lifestyle came in the mid-1990s when the Conservative government replaced the old-style benefit regime with the Job Seekers Allowance (JSA). This was followed shortly by the workfare scheme, ‘Project Work’, which was piloted in a number of towns and then implemented more widely by the New Labour government. Both were met by some collective resistance. However, when New Labour introduced a much more ambitious quasi-workfare based programme, the New Deal, the limited collective resistance there had been previously was reduced to individual solutions, characterised by blags and scams.	+	==== Annotation 92 ====
−	It was this lack of collective resistance to the New Deal, and more recently to the Welfare Reform Act, that led some to emphasise the tragic consequences this would have for the direct action scene.[223] Arguing that the dole was the financial basis for the so-called full-time politico, the recent attacks on the dole were seen as potentially a threat to this movement. Whereas previously long-term unemployment, and hence the political opportunities it afforded, could almost be thought of as a lifetime career, the slogan <em>no fifth option</em>[224]-repeatedly voiced by the Blairites in No. 10-served to illustrate that such careers would no longer be possible.	+	“Positive” and “negative,” in this context, are subjective and relative terms which simply denote “moving towards a goal” and “moving away from a goal,” based on a specific perspective.
−	However, two years into the New Deal, it seems that all this fuss was over nothing. Quite a few people have been on the introductory stage of the New Deal as well as on placements, and contrary to the doom and gloom predictions, in some areas at least, people have found it quite easy to blag their way through it. Perhaps the introduction of Welfare to Work-type schemes wasn’t such a big threat to the movement after all.	+	From the perspective of revolutionary communism, “positive” can be taken as moving towards the end goal of the liberation of the working class from capitalist oppression and the construction of a stateless, classless society. Likewise, “negative” can be taken as moving away from that goal. See: Annotation 114, p. 116.
−	**** The Global Workhouse	+	Humans have the ability to overcome all challenges in the process of achieving our goals and improving our world, so long as our conscious activities meet the following criteria:
−	Before discussing the effectiveness of blagging, it is necessary brief y to examine the rationale behind the current tendency for workfare-type programmes and to situate their introduction in the context of our struggles. After all, what has the New Deal got to do with genetics, road building, animal liberation, prison actions or reclaiming our streets?	+	* We must perceive reality accurately.
		+	* We must properly apply scientific knowledge, revolutionary sentiments, and directed willpower.
		+	* We must avoid contradicting objective laws of nature and society.
−	The concept of globalisation is one that many in the direct action movement have used to make the link between our diverse struggles. As has been discussed in these pages, “globalisation” is the problematic term commonly used to describe the strategy pursued by capital in response to the last revolutionary upsurge which took place at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.[225] In Britain and other advanced industrialised countries, the post-war compromise between capital and labour was essentially based on a productivity deal in which higher wages were conditional upon a growth in productivity. But by the end of the 1960s, workers demanded higher wages only now for less and less work. At its highest point, this tendency expressed itself as a refusal ofwork at the point of production. The link between wages and work was being stretched to the limit and beyond. Te response of capital was flight from investment in those industries and countries characterised by this bloody-mindedness and refusal. Such flight thus served to outflank areas of working class strength.	+	Successfully achieving our goals and improving the world in this manner constitutes the ''positive'' outcome of human consciousness.
−	This restructuring was particularly acute in Britain. Unlike some of the other advanced industrialised countries, Britain was a relatively developed centre of finance capital, and therefore could afford to abandon huge swathes of its manufacturing industry. Politically, therefore, the Thatcherite project meant the introduction of policies that capitalised on the transformation of large-scale manufacture into footloose global finance capital.	+	On the contrary, if human consciousness wrongly reflects objective reality, nature, and laws, then, right from the beginning, our actions will have negative results which will do harm to ourselves and our society.
−	Most importantly, the post-war consensus around full employment was abandoned. Instead, unemployment was allowed to let rip. Along with anti-strike legislation, the creation of a pool of unemployed workers was intended to eliminate some of the more militant sections and to discipline the working class as a whole.	+	Therefore, by directing the activities of humans, consciousness can determine whether the results of human activities are beneficial or harmful. Our consciousness thus determines whether our activities will succeed or fail and whether our efforts will be effective or ineffective.
−	While the neo-liberal policies employed by many of the governments in the advanced industrialised countries had some success in curbing militant and revolutionary tendencies among workers, they also served to create a number of barriers to further capital expansion. From the point of view of capital, a pool of unemployed workers encourages those within work to work harder and accept lower wages by operating as the competition. Yet if the pool of unemployed is allowed to become stagnant, it will no longer represent such competition, and instead existing workers will still retain some leverage in their relations with the bosses. What had in fact emerged was a dual labour market where those out of work were either unwilling to find work or perceived as being unemployable; as a result, the people in work could move around from job to job still demanding relatively high wages.[226] It therefore became hard to impose flexible working conditions. Some of the highest expressions of this unemployed recalcitrance were among those who consciously used the dole as the basis for various anti-capitalist projects. In effect, the refusal of work that had previously appeared at the point of production had now been displaced onto the dole.	+	By studying the matter, origin, and nature of consciousness, as well as the relationships between matter and consciousness, we can see that:
−	Industrial capital in countries such as Britain transformed itself into globally footloose finance capital in order to seek the most accommodating labour markets. Yet, in proletarianising workers in less-industrialised countries such as Taiwan and Korea, it served to create militants where they hadn’t previously existed. The multinational companies and investment firms that we associate with globalisation therefore continually need nation-states to re-impose the most conducive labour conditions so that they can flee those countries where they are threatened by worker militancy. In short, globalisation is essentially about the re-imposition of work.	+	* Matter is the source of consciousness <ref>See: Annotation 72, p. 68.</ref>.
		+	* Matter determines the content and creative capacity of consciousness <ref>See: Annotation 90, p. 88.</ref>.
		+	* Matter is the prerequisite to form consciousness <ref>See: ''The Role of Matter in Consciousness,'' p. 89.</ref>.
		+	* Consciousness only has the ability to impact matter, and this impact is indirect, because it has to be done through human material activities within material reality <ref>See: ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness,'' p. 88.</ref>.
−	In Britain and other advanced industrialised countries, the stagnant reserve army of labour had to be done away with in order to attract greater capital investment. It is no coincidence that all these countries are now pursuing similar policies in order to develop compliant labour market conditions. The policies in Britain, the USA, France, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Canada, Australia and New Zealand go by a number of names and vary in their degree of compulsion, but all are variations on the theme of work-for-dole, or workfare. Workfare, then, is the face of globalisation for many of us. Workfare overcomes the problem of recalcitrance in the reserve army of labour by inculcating work discipline in everyone. Both those who seek a job but who have been out of work for too long and those who found in mass unemployment an opportunity to pursue anti-capitalist lifestyles are to be instilled with the necessary work discipline to participate in the labour market. Although in Britain it is New Labour which has made the principles of workfare the keystone of its attempt to restructure the labour-market, the foundations were already laid by the Conservatives, with the introduction of the Job Seekers Allowance (]SA) in 1996. Being unwilling to increase public spending, the Conservatives hoped that the dual labour-market could be overcome simply by pressuring people into the existing jobs. By putting in place sanctions for any of us who couldn’t provide proof that we had been applying for jobs, it replaced the notion of us being passive claimants with one of us being active job-seekers. A further advance was made in the re-imposition of work with Project Work-a quasi-workfare scheme presented as a work experience programme rather than work-for-your-benefits.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-21.png|''Matter determines consciousness while consciousness impacts matter indirectly through human activity.'']]
−	But as with other overtly neo-liberal measures introduced by the Tories, these policies not only failed to gather public support, but the orthodox neo-liberal insistence on not increasing public spending on welfare was to be their downfall. The punitive approach to unemployment meant that not only claimants directly affected by the measures came out in opposition, which on the direct action and anarcho scene mainly manifested itself in the actions of the Groundswell network, but the dole workers themselves put up considerable resistance, in some areas downing tools on the day the ISA came into force.[227] But although this resistance did prevent the smooth implementation of both the ISA and Project Work, the limits of both ultimately became obvious more as a result of them being grossly under-funded, and consequently serving more to fiddle the unemployment figures by pushing people off the dole than dealing sufficiently with the dual labour market.	+	The strength with which consciousness can impact the material world depends on:
−	**** The New Deal and the Welfare Reform Act	+	* The accuracy of reflection of the material world in consciousness <ref>See:Annotation 68, p. 65.</ref>.
		+	* Strength of willpower which transmits consciousness to human activity <ref>See: ''Nature and Structure of Consciousness,'' p. 79.</ref>.
		+	* The degree of organization of social activity <ref>See: Annotation 93, below.</ref>.
		+	* Material conditions in which human activity occurs <ref>See: Annotation 10, p. 10.</ref>.
−	When New Labour, shortly after they came into office, launched the New Deal as the government’s flagship policy, it was hoped that both the problem of public perception of the schemes and the problem of their overtly punitive nature could be effectively avoided. In line with the so-called Third Way between social democracy and neo-liberalism, they abandoned Conservative dogma against state intervention. By investing £3.5 billion in the programme (a lot more than they could ever hope to save in the short-term from getting people off the dole}, their intention was clear: the New Deal was not just supposed to slash a few million quid off the welfare bill, but was an altogether more ambitious scheme aimed at tackling the dual labour market once and for all.	+	-----
−	And unlike the old punitive schemes relying on merely pushing people off the dole, the New Deal was sold as a state-led attempt to do away with social exclusion. Consequently, when the New Deal was launched as a compulsory scheme for 18–24 year olds in April 1998, the initial Gateway stage was presented not as an extension of the intensive job-search introduced with the JSA, but as a three-month period of individualised job counselling. The subsequent four options of educational training, sweeping streets on the Environmental Task Force, or a placement either in the voluntary sector or a subsidised job were presented not as working for your dole but as work experience programmes that would provide the unemployed with a smooth entry into the job market. The New Deal has since been extended to most other age groups, single parents, and partners of the unemployed.	+	==== Annotation 93 ====
−	With the recent introduction of the Welfare Reform Act, this help has been extended to all other claimants not sufficiently covered under the other schemes: by the simple act of centralising all the benefit offices into a one-stop-shop, the work-focused interviews associated with the JSA will now be extended to all other claims. Under the banner of helping the disabled back into the community, they are justifying getting people off the sick (whereas encouraging people to go on the sick previously served as a means to fiddle unemployment figures, New Labour has made it clear that whatever your condition, there is now no safe haven from the labour market). Moreover, abandoning the social-democratic dogma of public ownership, New Labour have sought to introduce the dynamism of the market into the Job Centres themselves, by privatising Employment Service functions at the same time as some of the new elements of Welfare Reform have been introduced. Thus not only is the New Deal delivered by private firms (such as Reed Employment) in some areas, but the new intensive Employment Zones are the responsibility of consortia made up of partnerships between the Employment Service and companies such as Ernst & Young and Manpower.[228]	+	The importance of organization in determining the outcomes of human social activity is one of the most important concepts of Marxism-Leninism and is discussed frequently by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and nearly every other important communist revolutionary in history. Marx explains the connections between social organization and conscious human activity in ''Capital Volume I'' [see Annotation 80, p. 81].
−	In other words, although New Labour tries to present their Welfare to Work programme as a more integrative approach to the issue of unemployment, and as such a departure from the punitive and openly neo-liberal approach of the previous government, the reality is that they do this only because it is a more efficient way of integrating the recalcitrant unemployed into a flexible labour market. The language and state-intervention normally associated with social democracy has come to the service of a neo-liberal agenda. And as is acutely clear for anybody who has had to sit through one of their work-focused interviews, and politely turn down their help, the bedrock of the New Deal is of course still the harsh JSA regime they so proudly proclaim themselves to have departed from: refuse the counselling or the ‘options’ and you will have all your benefits stopped.	+	=== 4. Meaning of the methodology ===
−	**** Dole Workers and Activists	+	Dialectical Materialism builds the most basic and common methodological<ref>For discussion of the meaning of methodology, see ''Methodology,'' p. 44.</ref> principles for human cognitive and practical activities on the following bases:
−	Despite the clear discrepancy between the reality of the recent attacks on the dole and the ideological offensive that has accompanied it, a lot of lefty-liberals seem to have bought into it. Indeed it has to some extent succeeded in getting the people on board who had previously shown the most fierce and effective resistance to the JSA and Project Work, namely many of the dole workers. To some extent identifying with the concept of work being important for your self-respect, many see their role as being one of helping the individual claimants into a better existence. The New Deal with its seemingly individualised claimant-based approach and job counselling seems to do just that, and as a result the resistance of the past has become more muted, despite continuing cynicism among dole workers about government policies.[229]	+	* The viewpoint of the material nature of the world [''matter comes first, consciousness comes after''].
		+	* The dynamic and creative nature of consciousness <ref>See: ''Nature of Consciousness,'' p. 79.</ref>.
		+	* The dialectical relationship between matter and consciousness <ref>See: ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness,'' p. 88.</ref>.
−	A similar thing seems to have happened in the direct action scene. Where there was at least some collective resistance against the JSA and Project Work, resistance to the New Deal has been if not non-existent, then much less visible-mostly taking the form of individual blags. Has the direct action scene been taken in by NewLabourSpeak? We think not. In fact, in an important sense, they couldn’t be further apart. Where the lefty-liberals’ part endorsement of New Labour’s Welfare to Work programme, in contrast to their opposition to the previous schemes, is essentially based on an identification with social democracy, the people in the direct action scene seem, to have no such illusions about the supposedly progressive nature of this. The notion of duties and responsibilities to society is quite clearly seen as duties to state and capital. And the notion of work being good for your soul hasn’t exactly had any resonance either.	+	All cognitive and practical activities of humans ''originate from material reality'' and ''must observe objective natural and social laws,'' however, our activities are capable of ''impacting the material world through dynamic and creative conscious activity''. [See ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'', p. 88].
−	The reason why there has been no overt resistance to the New Deal and the Welfare Reform Act in the activist scene lies not so much in ideology as in practicalities. The very inclusiveness of New Labour’s Welfare to Work scheme has made it a great deal easier for us to blag our way through than it was at first thought. Ironically, one of the reasons why this has been the case in at least some areas around the country lies in the fact that the dole workers have in certain unforeseen ways taken seriously the new ethos of the New Deal. Many dole workers resent the policing aspects of their job and have taken advantage of the flexibility of the new schemes to avoid pressuring people; they have allowed people to stay on the Gateway job counselling stage well beyond the three months limit set by the government. Their acceptance of the New Deal and the Welfare Reform Act as genuine measures to help claimants also means that they have welcomed claimants’ own initiatives, thereby making it easier for us to sort out our own soft placements. The result has in many areas been that a lot of claimants have found it easier to stay on the dole without much hassle.	+	-----
−	But apart from this, people in the direct action scene have, as always, been quick in developing a number of elaborate blags and scams. Before the current purge of those entitled to sickness benefit, the easiest and quickest way to avoid being included in the New Deal would be to fake depression or an unidentifiable physical illness. But even if this is no longer possible, plenty of other avenues are still open. Out of a whole number of scams, the most common one has been to find some fake placement with a friend or contact in which you are officially placed on a work experience programme in whatever company. In this way many have been able to keep the dole office off their back, without ever having to show up either at the so-called placement or to sign on every fortnight. Of course, not all of us are so lucky— instead we find that we are actually expected to help out a bit at our fake placement (a favour for a favour). But even so, digging some organic allotment once in a while, helping out in some right-on book shop, political archive, or Third World centre isn’t really that much of a hassle. In fact, it might not even be that far removed from what we would be doing anyway. Even better, some have been able to turn the New Deal to their own advantage by getting on an otherwise pricey mountaineering, desk top publishing or web design course-all handy skills when you want to set up a road camp. occupy buildings, or produce political magazines and web sites.	+	==== Annotation 94 ====
−	And if things start to get tough, if you are signing on with your partner, you can always swap the claim, or alternatively just sign off for about three months, do a bit of work and go abroad. So even if schemes such as the New Deal initially appeared as a potential threat to the movement, in some cases quite the opposite would seem to have happened. Not only have a substantial amount of people around the direct action scene been able to work their way around it, but it has arguably helped us to become more effective political activists. If the old dole regime was characterised as a trouble-maker’s grant, this term has now gained an added meaning (a trouble-maker’s training scheme?).	+	The above paragraph summarizes an important methodological concept which is critical for undestanding the philosophical framework of Dialectical Materialism. Dialectical Materialism, as a philosophy, synthesizes earlier materialist and idealist positions by recognizing the fact that the material determines consciousness, while consciousness can impact the material world through willful activity.
−	However, it is quite likely that the effects the changes in the dole have had on our movement are not at present visible. For largely unrelated reasons there are currently no large-scale campaigns involving loads of people. There are very few protest sites now and those which there are are smaller. The sort of activity that direct action people have been engaging in recently is more compatible with work; single big demos, one-day things, etc.--not living up a tree for a year. It is possible that were there again to be a large campaign which would require people to be on the dole we would notice our depleted ranks more than at present.	+	From this philosophical basis, the methodology of Materialist Dialectics has been developed to provide a deeper understanding of dialectical development, which is rooted in contradiction and negation within and between subjects. Materialist Dialectics is the subject of Chapter 2, p. 98.
−	**** Working to Avoid Work	+	-----
−	Not everyone can blag all the time, and the government is slowly catching up on our different blags. As a lot of people have come to realise lately, remaining on the sick is becoming increasingly difficult.[230] The government has even picked up on the phenomenon of the full-time politico and has used it to cut our benefits by arguing that we can’t be actively seeking work if we are involved in these sorts of activities. This has obviously been hard for them to prove unless they have got evidence of us living on site or otherwise engaged in some clearly ‘full-time’ activity.	+	According to this methodological principle [i.e., the Principle of the Dialectic Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness], if we hope to succeed in accomplishing our goals in the material world, then we must ''simultaneously'' meet two criteria:
−	But as people who have been PANSIED (Politically Active Not Seeking Employment-apparantly one of the dole office’s official categories!) at various protest sites have found out, it is even possible for them to overcome this barrier. At the Manchester Airport protests in 1997, the dole office tried a new strategy. They simply matched up the signing records to where different sites had been (e.g. someone who had suspiciously moved between Exeter, Newbury, and Manchester), and attempted to cut people’s dole on the basis that they weren’t actively seeking work. (In this case, the protesters were able to successfully argue that they were religious and not political activists, threatening to take the DSS to court if they didn’t give everybody their dole back.) In November 1999, a similar thing happened to 15 activists who had been living on or associated with the Gorse Wood site in Essex-only this time it seems that it came about through co-operation between the dole office and police intelligence, as people who had been spotted on site but weren’t actually living there were amongst the 15 who got their dole money stopped on the basis that they were fraudulently claiming benefits.	+	1. We must ensure that our knowledge reflects the objective material world as much as possible, respecting the objective natural and social laws of the material world.
−	In general, then, while a given individual might be able lo blag for a certain amount of time, the government is always seeking to close these loopholes. Blags that existed in the 1980s dole heyday no longer exist; and by the same token, today’s blags will eventually be snuffed out: you can run but you can’t hide!	+	2. We must simultaneously recognize the dynamic and creative nature of our conscious activity.
−	The inherently temporary nature of dole-blags means that the search for new blags becomes an objective in itself. But a culture of blagging-blagging as an end in itself-has side-effects upon ourselves and what we are striving to do as a movement. The need to find individual blags can obscure the overall situation in which we are all having to channel our creativity in these ways. It is as if this culture of blagging has taken on a life of its own, to the extent that we become blind to the overall facts of the situation. It is as if we are so used to being on the receiving end of countless state attacks, that we have given up on trying to collectively resist them and instead pat ourselves on the backs when we have found a new way of fiddling them individually.	+	When we say that human activities ''originate from material reality'' and ''must observe objective natural and social laws'' we'''' mean that human knowledge must originate from the material world. This means that if we hope to be successful in our activities, we should respect the natural and social laws of the material world.
−	But whilst we pat each other on the back for all our scheming, the government has meanwhile succeeded in getting what the Conservatives could only have dreamt of: in a very short space of time they have managed to dispose of the idea of passive claimants, and made it into an active process. Only five years ago we could have sat back content in the knowledge that if we wanted a life of leisure (if a rather low-budget one) all we had to do was to show up at the dole office every fortnight. Now, if not actively seeking work, we are actively avoiding work. And this in itself has become a full-time occupation.	+	This means that in our human perception and activities, we must determine goals, and set strategies, policies, and plans which are rooted firmly in objective material reality. Humans have to take objective material reality as the foundation of our activities and plans, and all of our activities must be carried out in the material world. Humans have to examine and understand our material conditions and transform them in ways that will help us to accomplish our goals.
−	In fact, the extent to which the culture of blagging has taken on a momentum of its own also becomes obvious in our relation to work. Whereas the whole alternative scene of the 1980s and 90s was accompanied by an anti-work ethic-a sentiment carried forward into the direct action scene today-it seems that our idealisation of blagging has gone so far that we are even willing to do a bit of work if this becomes necessary. This has become clear in cases where our fake placements actually expect us to help out by playing on the good old unwritten rules of favour for favour-a crude form ofwhat can only be termed moralistic blackmailing that most of us might be annoyed by, but are nevertheless willing to accept. In effect, although blagging was only supposed to be a means to avoid work, we have conceded to working in the name of blagging.	+	When we talk about ''impacting the material world through dynamic and creative conscious activity,'' we mean we must recognize the positive, dynamic, and creative roles of consciousness. We must recognize the role human consciousness plays in dynamically and creatively manifesting our will in the material world through labor. Impacting the material world through conscious activity at a revolutionary scale requires humans to respect and understand the role of scientific knowledge; to study laboriously to master such knowledge; and then to propagate such knowledge so to the masses to develop public knowledge and belief so as to guide the people’s action.
−	**** Assets to Globalisation	+	Moreover, we also have to voluntarily study and practice<ref>See: Annotation 211, p. 205.</ref> in order to form and improve our revolutionary viewpoint<ref>See: Annotation 114, p. 116.</ref> and willpower<ref>See: ''Nature and Structure of Consciousness'', p. 79.</ref> in order to have both scientific and humanitarian activity guidelines.
−	In addition, the resourcefulness of people around the direct action scene has also helped the implementation of the recent attacks on all claimants. One of the major problems the government has encountered in implementing their Welfare to Work schemes has been that of finding the necessary amount of placements needed for the people they still haven’t managed to push into a job on the Gateway stage of the New Deal. This might at first seem strange as from the employer’s point of view New Deal placements would seem like an offer they couldn’t possibly resist. Here’s the deal: get people on the New Deal to work for you for free. And don’t worry, there’s no catch. You don’t even have to commit yourself to employing them afterwards. As soon as the 6 month period of free labour is up, you just get rid of them and take on some new trainees. However, if there is one thing that employers like less than paying £3.60 an hour to their employees, it is having workers they can’t even rely on to show up, let alone do an honest day’s work, hence the cautious take-up rate for the New Deal placement schemes. So by finding our own placements we are helping the government in one of the tasks they have found most difficult to complete. Insofar as these are soft placements, this is obviously not a direct substitute for what the state would have wanted, but it increases the success rate of New Deal placements, hence giving it more credibility.	+	To implement this principle [i.e., the Principle of the Dialectic Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness], we have to avoid, fight against, and overcome the diseases of subjectivism<ref>See: Annotation 222, p. 218.</ref> and idealism<ref>See: ''The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues,'' p. 48.</ref> through such errors as:
−	More importantly though, finding placements (real or otherwise) serves to justify putting more pressure on all other claimants who might not be as resourceful or have as many (green) middle class connections as some people in the direct action scene do. Measures such as the New Deal and the Welfare Reform Act have actually met substantial passive resistance from most claimants, which is exactly why the government has decided to increase some of its sanctions lately. But if there are claimants who, before even being forced into a placement, continually manage to find their own, as well as successfully completing them without any complaints from either the claimant or the placement provider, it obviously legitimises putting more pressure on the remaining claimants. They appear less co-operative and therefore become the undeserving poor, those who have had the offers of work and who must be ‘scroungers’ because they have refused such offers. They are therefore to be subject to more pressure and sanctions. It is ironic that the people who are actively trying to resist measures such as the New Deal, by doing so with individual blags, actually end up leaving the rest in the shit.	+	* Attempting to impose idealist plans and principles [which are not rooted in material conditions] into reality.
		+	* Considering fantasy, illusion, and imagination instead of reality.
		+	* Basing policies and programs on subjective desires.
		+	* Using sentiment as the starting point for developing policies, strategies, etc.
−	The seemingly boundless resourcefulness of people around the direct action scene does mean that we have avoided what was otherwise depicted as a doom and gloom scenario of welfare reform being a serious threat to the movement. But not only does it require more and more work for us to simply avoid being forced off the dole, but our continuous blags have also had the effect of justifying increased pressure on other claimants. Maybe more importantly though, it seems to have made us blind to the overall picture of why and how the state chooses to attack us. We constantly talk about the evils of globalisation and neo-liberalism, but when we actually experience what that means in Britain in our own lives we don’t even seem to notice, let alone do anything about it except as individuals. Yet individual solutions are effectively collective problems. The welfare reform we have seen the government pursuing for the past three years has entailed attacks on the benefits of different groups, one at a time (single parents, the disabled, under 25s etc.); the government has been carefol not to attack everyone at once for fear of prompting collective resistance. By using individual solutions such as blagging we are relying on the atomised and fragmented climate they are seeking to create and therefore just playing into their hands. As mentioned, globalisation has been one concept the direct action movement has drawn upon in order to overcome the fragmentation of struggles. Yet, since globalisation is actually about the re-imposition of work, and since the struggle within and against work is part of our daily existence, the concrete link we really need to make is between global capital and our own experience of being pressured to work. Individual blagging, when posited as the principal solution to the attack on benefits, only serves to further the very globalisation we are supposedly resisting in our trips to Prague or Seattle. Blagging isn’t against globalisation; it is part of it..	+	On the other hand, in cognitive and practical activities, we also have to fight against empiricism<ref>See: Annotation 10, p. 10.</ref>, which disregards scientific knowledge and theories, and which is also very conservative, stagnant and passive.
−	[223] See the pamphlet Dole autonomy versus the re-imposition ofwork: “Analysis of the current tendency to workfare in the UK’ by Aufheben.	+	-----
−	[224] The New Deal for 18- to 24-year olds entails four options: subsidised employment, study or training, work in the “voluntary”’ sector, or work on the Environmental Task Force. Refusing the options can mean a benefit sanction.	+	==== Annotation 95 ====
−	[225] See “Globalisation: Origins-History--Analysis—Resistance” in DoD #8.	+	Process of Developing Revolutionary Public Knowledge
−	[226] 1iough there is often talk of a skills gap, what apparently puts bosses most off employing the unemployed is our lack of soft skills-by which they mean basic work-discipline.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-22.png|''Developing revolutionary public knowledge must be preceded by mastery of knowledge and a firm grounding in the role and nature of knowledge.'']]
−	[227] Job Centre workers and claimants had different reasons for opposing the JSA, but both were opposed to the increased ‘policing’ aspects--the dole workers because they realised that it would bring them into greater conflict with claimants. Although the common ground of discontent between claimants and dole workers could have been used to our advantage, in most areas around the country it wasn’t. In fact, the struggle against the JSA by some people around the Groundwell network often manifested itself in very personalised struggles against the dole workers themselves (e.g. Three Strikes and You’re Out, an initiative whereby individual dole workers who gave claimants hassle would receive warnings on their first and second offences and action would be taken against them on the third). In Brighton, however, an alliance was made, and occupations ofJob Centres were accompanied by downing tools.	+	In ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'', Engels makes a scathing critique of idealist socialist revolutionary thought, writing:
−	[228] Employment Zones involve a personal job account whereby money is supposedly spent on whatever the claimant and advisor regard as maximising employability-be it wage subsidies or training schemes. Any money left over when the claimant is shoved into a job is kept by the providers as profits. Employment Zones were introduced in 14 high-unemployment areas in April 2000. The scheme is compulsory for those over 24 who have been claimingJSA for over 12 months.	+	<blockquote>
		+	To all these [idealist socialists], Socialism is the expression of absolute truth<ref>See: Annotation 232 and ''The Properties of Truth,'' on p. 228.</ref>, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive of one another.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[229] This simmering down of resistance should not be overstated, however. It was always more overtly collective than that of claimants themselves and has expressed itself in continuing opposition to the incursion of private companies into the Employment Service; the involvement of such private firms threatens not only the new ethos of the New Deal but also the wages and conditions of the relatively entrenched public sector dole workers. Indeed the latter is the key reason for the government’s decision to involve the private sector in the Employment Service.
−	[230] Just as the Conservatives introduced the All Work Test to make the conditions of claiming sickness benefit more stringent, New Labour have introduced further hurdles with their Personal Capability Assessment test: if you can lick a stamp you can work, never mind that you’re dying of heart disease.	+	-----
−	** Space Invaders: Rants about Radical Space (from issue 10)	+	Here, Engels points out the absurdity of the idea that some abstract, purely ideal “truth” could liberate workers in the material world. Engels continues on, explaining how such idealist socialism could never lead to meaningful revolutionary change:
−	In the last few years, there has been a small wave of new radical social centres in Britain. A number of people involved in Earth First! and the direct action scene have been involved in opening these co-operatively owned and managed spaces. Some of these places are up and running, others are still in the early stages. As is healthy in any movement, there are different views on this subject. Here we present two different pieces, one critical of these social centres and another from someone heavily involved in one of the new projects.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.
		+	</blockquote>
−	*** Social Dis-Centres	+	In other words, idealist revolutionary movements only tend to result in endless debate and meaningless theories which are divorced from objective reality and material conditions. Such theories and idealist constructions do not lead to effective action in the real world. Socialism must become ''real'' (i.e., based in objective material conditions and praxis<ref>See: ''Praxis, Consciousness, and the Role of Praxis in Consciousness,'' p. 204.</ref> in the real world) to affect change in the material world, as Engels explains elsewhere in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'' [see Annotation 17, p. 18].
−	Mortgages, loans, investment, property development, licence applications, accountancy, endless legislation, business plans, backbiting, membership lists, the dead time absorbing activists and the debt, oh the debt!	+	In ''Critique of the Gotha Program'', Marx lays out an excellent case study of the failings of incoherent, idealist socialism. He begins by quoting the Gotha Program, which was an ideological program which the German Workers Party hoped to implement. In this text, Marx cites the Gotha Program line by line and offers his materialist critique of the idealist principles presented. In the following passage, Marx refutes some key errors caused by idealism and offers materialist correction:
−	Welcome to legal social centres! Have a pleasant stay. The Cowley Club in Brighton just opened. It’s a posh looking bar. It has a bookshop, the prices are cheaper than normal, the front door of the building is made of Indonesian hardwood (Solidarity South Pacific?!), and the plants were bought at Ikea. It has no dedicated meeting space (yet), only the bar area-revealing its priorities in the design. In themselves, legal social centres are what they are; a social enterprise-cafes, bars, possible gathering spaces. But the danger is that, springing up on the back of the direct action movement, they will divert activist time and energy into an essentially non-radical and liberal project. A project perceived, by dint of association, as a radical social space.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power... But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The Cowley Club is not the only new legal social centre. There is the Sumac Centre in Nottingham, which has filled a community space left behind by the now defunct Rainbow Centre. The 1 in 12 Club in Bradford is a longstanding example of a legal club. The recent social centre boom has taken a lot of time and energy in the last couple of years, and caused some tension amongst those involved (directly and indirectly). In a way, people feel they have had to take sides as people’s politics are thrown into sharper relief. An example of this is some of the discussions that have emerged, the sudden imposition of legal hurdles and ownership allowing more liberal concepts to push into the agenda: should people be paid or not, the merits of CCTV, how the need to appear to be a legitimate cafe and drinking hole means that people should perhaps refrain from offering too many hardcore books in the library or bookshop or from holding radical meetings or events for a while.	+	Here, Marx points out the importance of having a firm understanding of the material reality of ''labor'' and its relation to the material, natural world. Marx points out that the idea that labor, alone, is the source of all wealth is an idealist notion of the bourgeoisie, a false consciousness [see Annotation 235, p. 231] which prevents proper material analysis and props up the capitalist viewpoint. A failure to grasp the truth of the material basis of reality weakens the socialist position, and any movement built on such weak idealist foundations will lead to failure in trying to bring about revolutionary change.
−	The Sumac Centre considered asking people not to hold Earth First! Winter Moot meetings there due to the threat of not getting their bar license. We were collectively requested to respect the fact that the Sumac Centre was in a vulnerable position and did not want to be too obviously connected with the Moot. While I respect many of the radical people involved in the creating and running of the space, this request implied that we were obliged to have some allegiance to it as a project, even though we had not been able to use it for the purpose for which we thought it had partly been created. Instead there is a sense of coercion attached to these centres, from Drink-here-rather-than-elsewhere,-comrade, through to Don’t-set-up-free-squatted-spaces-that-might-compete. These notions coupled with walking on eggshells around the demands of legislation results in policing. An insidious selfpolicing of radical agendas by those’ more willing to make concessions, creating division and fucking around with grassroots support-no room at the inn for autonomous groups who potentially compromise the legal status of the centre.	+	We have already discussed the shortcomings of empiricism in Annotation 10, p. 10, but it might be helpful to see another case study, this time from Engels, pointing out the flaws of empiricist analysis in his text ''Anti-Dühring''. Engels begins by quoting the empiricist Eugen Dühring, who wrote:
−	How do we fight against property speculation and ownership, gentrification, and corporate public space with a legal social centre that has more in common with these things than not? How can we engender radicalism in our society if people’s first point of contact with non-mainstream politics is a space built on compromise, which exists only because the state says it can? The bricks and mortar, the signatures on legal and financial papers, the SWP-style membership structure, the boredom on the faces of volunteer staff paying off the bank, the ghetto-all these things that come with toeing the line, turn our politics into rhetoric. Running a legal social centre is, at best, the equivalent of working for an NGO.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Philosophy is the development of the highest form of consciousness of the world and of life, and in a wider sense embraces the principles of all knowledge and volition. Wherever a series of cognitions or stimuli or a group of forms of being come to be examined by human consciousness, the principles underlying these manifestations of necessity become an object of philosophy. These principles are the simple, or until now assumed to be simple, constituents of manifold knowledge and volition. Like the chemical composition of bodies, the general constitution of things can be reduced to basic forms and basic elements. These ultimate constituents or principles, once they have been discovered, are valid not only for what is immediately known and accessible, but also for the world which is unknown and inaccessible to us. Philosophical principles consequently provide the final supplement required by the sciences in order to become a uniform system by which nature and human life can be explained. Apart from the fundamental forms of all existence, philosophy has only two specific subjects of investigation — nature and the world of man. Accordingly, our material arranges itself quite naturally into three groups, namely, the general scheme of the universe, the science of the principles of nature, and finally the science of mankind. This succession at the same time contains an inner logical sequence, for the formal principles which are valid for all being take precedence, and the realms of the objects to which they are to be applied then follow in the degree of their subordination.
		+	</blockquote>
−	It may be green money that has enabled people to build them, but pursuing social change through the mainstream means being forced to acquire skills applicable to the terms and conditions of mainstream ventures, it means creating a respectable business to gain the confidence of investors. What does any of this have to do with a movement in revolt against the machinery of capital and which fights the idea of exclusion and powerlessness based on social, political, and economic leverage?	+	Engels then proceeds to critique this empiricist worldview, showing that it does not properly reflect the material world and amounts to idealism in its own right:
−	But, we hear the Management Committees cry, these centres are for the people, they are welcome, it is their space too. Well sort of, but let’s take the idea of membership. If meetings do take place in The Cowley Club, for example, and run into bar time, those attending the meeting must sign in to the club. We complain about a lack of security in our culture and then set up formalities requiring people to put their names and addresses to political activity. The idea also clearly promotes the feeling that other people are in charge of your access to social space, either alienating you from that space because you aren’t a member or from those outside the space if you are. Furthermore, buying £400,000 buildings is not something everyone can do, it does not empower other people to do the same, it only perpetuates the idea that some people are consumers dependent on the product of those, the elite, who have the power and connections to access resources that most people can’t. People can work for the centres, they can get nominated into the inner circle, the decision-making body, but how challenging, radical, or empowering a process is that? A squatted social centre or an action can inspire us and we can do it ourselves too.	+	<blockquote>
		+	What [Dühring] is dealing with are therefore principles, formal tenets derived from thought and not from the external world, which are to be applied to nature and the realm of man, and to which therefore nature and man have to conform. But whence does thought obtain these principles? From itself?
−	If we think we need access points for new people to be inspired by our political perspective, then surely this is best achieved through practising direct action-not through acquiring crippling mortgages, obeying a myriad of regulations set by the state, and spending years doing Di’Y of the conventional sort. The energy that has gone into legal social centres during what has been an action-quiet couple of years might well have found other avenues for action had a lot of very energetic people not been engaged in property development. And it doesn’t stop when the centre is up and running, as the mantra goes.	+	No, for Herr Dühring himself says: the realm of pure thought is limited to logical schemata and mathematical forms (the latter, moreover, as we shall see, is wrong). Logical schemata can only relate to forms of thought; but what we are dealing with here is solely forms of being, of the external world, and these forms can never be created and derived by thought out of itself, but only from the external world. But with this the whole relationship is inverted: the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter, and Herr Dühring’s contrary conception is idealistic, makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of ideas, out of schemata, schemes or categories existing somewhere before the world, from eternity — just like a Hegel.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Lenin also heavily criticized empiricism in his work ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'', which we discuss at length in Annotation 32, p. 27.
		+
		+	= Chapter 2: Materialist Dialectics =
		+
		+	Materialist dialectics is one of the basic theoretical parts that form the worldview and philosophical methodology of Marxism-Leninism. It is the “science of common relations” and also the “science of common rules of motion and development of nature, society, and human thoughts... Dialectics, as understood by Marx, and also in conformity with Hegel, includes what is now called the theory of knowledge, or epistemology.”<ref>''Karl Marx'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.</ref>
		+
		+	[Note: Epistemology is the theoretical study of knowledge; for more information see ''Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism'', p. 204.]
		+
		+	== I. Dialectics and Materialist Dialectics ==
		+
		+	=== 1. Dialectics and Basic Forms of Dialectics ===
		+
		+	==== a. Definitions of Dialectics and the Subjective Dialectic ====
		+
		+	In Marxism-Leninism, the term ''dialectic'' refers to regular relationships, interactions, transformations, motions, and developments of things, phenomena, and processes in nature, society and human thought.<ref>See Annotation 9, p. 10.</ref>
		+
		+	There are two forms of dialectic: the ''objective dialectic'' and the ''subjective dialectic.'' The objective dialectic is the dialectic of the material world, while the subjective dialectic is the reflection of objective dialectic in human consciousness. [See Annotation 68, p. 65].
		+
		+	According to Engels, “Dialectics, so-called ''objective'' dialectics, prevail throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics (dialectical thought), is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature.”<ref>''Dialectics of Nature'', Friedrich Engels, 1883.</ref>
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 96 ====
		+
		+	''Dialectics'' is an umbrella term which includes both forms of dialectical systems: ''subjective'' and ''objective'' dialectics.
		+
		+	''Objective dialectics'' are the dialectical processes which occur in the material world, including all motion, relationships, and dynamic changes which occur in space and time.
		+
		+	''Subjective dialectics'', or ''dialectical thought'', is a system of analysis and organized thinking which aims to reflect the objective dialectics of the material world within human consciousness. Dialectical thinking has two component forms: dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics [see Annotation 49, p. 45].
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	''Subjective dialectics'' is the theory that studies and summarises the [objective] dialectic of nature into a system with scientific principles and rules, in order to build a system of methodological principles of perception and practice. Dialectics is opposed to ''metaphysics'' — a system of thought which conceives of things and phenomena in the world in an isolated and unchanging state [See Annotation 8, p. 8].
		+
		+	==== b. Basic Forms of Dialectics ====
		+
		+	Dialectics has developed into three basic forms and levels: ancient primitive dialectics, German idealist dialectics, and the materialist dialectics of Marxism-Leninism.
		+
		+	''Ancient primitive dialectics'' is the earliest form of dialectics. It has developed independently in many philosophical systems in ancient China, India and Greece.
		+
		+	Chinese philosophy has two major forms of ancient primitive dialectics:
		+
		+	* “Changing Theory” (a theory of common principles and rules pertaining to the changes in the universe)
		+	* The “Five Elements Theory” (a theory of the principles of mutual impact and transformation of the five elements of the universe) of the School of Yin-Yang. [See: ''Primitive Materialism'', p. 52]
		+
		+	In Indian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy is a quintessential [see Annotation 6, p. 8] form of ancient primitive dialectics, which includes such concepts as “selflessness,” “impermanence,” and “predestination.”
		+
		+	An ancient, primitive form of dialectics also developed in Ancient Greek philosophy.
		+
		+	Friedrich Engels wrote: “The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought… This primitive, naive, but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.”<ref>''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'', Friedrich Engels, 1880.</ref>
		+
		+	Engels also wrote of Greek dialectics: “Here, dialectical thought still appears in its pristine simplicity, as yet undisturbed by the charming obstacles which the metaphysicists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — Bacon and Locke in England, Wolff in Germany — put in its own way... Among the Greeks — just because they were not yet advanced enough to dissect and analyse nature — nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particular; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation.”<ref>The Old Preface to ''Anti-Dühring'', Friedrich Engels, 1878.</ref>
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 97 ====
		+
		+	Engels, here, is explaining how the ancient Greek dialecticians were correct to view nature as a cohesive system, a “whole, in general,” which they determined through direct observation of the natural world. The major shortcoming of this ancient Greek form of dialectics was a lack of inquiry into the specific processes and principles of nature. Engels laments that seventeenth and eighteenth century metaphysicists took us backwards by disregarding this view of nature as a cohesive, general whole.
		+
		+	Ancient, primitive dialectics had an accurate awareness of the dialectical characteristic of the world but with its primitive and naive perspective, it still lacked evidence-based forms of natural scientific achievements.
		+
		+	Jumping forward to the late 16<sup>th</sup> century, natural sciences started developing rapidly in Europe. Scientists began deeply analysing and studying specific factors and phenomena of nature which led to the birth of modern European metaphysical analysis. In the 18<sup>th</sup> century, metaphysics became the dominant methodology in philosophical thought and scientific study. However, when natural scientists moved from studying each subject separately to studying the unification of all those subjects in their relationships, the metaphysical method proved insufficient. Thus, European scientists and philosophers had to transition into a more advanced system of thought: dialectical thought.
		+
		+	''The classical German idealist dialectics'' were founded by Kant and completed by Hegel. According to Engels: ''“The second form of dialectics, which is the form that comes closest to the German naturalists [natural scientists], is classical German philosophy, from Kant to Hegel.”''<ref>The Old Preface to ''Anti-Dühring,'' Friedrich Engels, 1878.</ref>
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 98 ====
		+
		+	Engels discusses this history, and the shortcomings of the metaphysical philosophy of his era, in ''The Old Preface to Anti-Dühring.'' First, Engels explains why early modern natural scientists initially did not feel constrained by their adherence to metaphysics, since inquiries in the initial revolution of scientific study were limited to the narrow development of specific fields of inquiry by necessity:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	Empirical natural science has accumulated such a tremendous mass of positive material for knowledge that the necessity of classifying it in each separate field of investigation systematically and in accordance with its inner inter-connection has become absolutely imperative.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Engels goes on to explain that at the time he was writing, enough knowledge had been accumulated within specific, distinct fields that it becomes necessary to begin studying the connections and overlaps between different fields, which called for theoretical and philosophical foundations:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	It is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not work, here only theoretical thinking can be of assistance.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Unfortunately, natural scientists were held back by the existing metaphysical theoretical foundations which were dominant at the time as, according to Engels, “theoretical thinking is an innate quality only as regards natural capacity. This natural capacity must be developed, improved, and for its improvement there is as yet no other means than the study of previous philosophy.”
		+
		+	Metaphysical theory and formal logic were in common use by natural scientists at the time. As Engels explained in ''On Dialectics'' and ''Dialectics of Nature,'' metaphysics and formal logic could never be as useful as dialectical analysis for examining and unifying concepts from wide-ranging dynamic systems of overlapping fields of inquiry.
		+
		+	Unfortunately, dialectics had not yet been suitably developed for use in the natural sciences before the work of Marx and Engels in developing dialectical materialism, as Engels explained in ''On Dialectics:''
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	Formal logic itself has been the arena of violent controversy from the time of Aristotle to the present day. And dialectics has so far been fairly closely investigated by only two thinkers, Aristotle and Hegel. But it is precisely dialectics that constitutes the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	The Idealist Dialectics of Hegel [see Annotation 9, p. 10] constituted a major development of dialectics, but the idealist nature of Hegelian dialectics made them unsuitable for natural scientists, who therefore discarded “Old-Hegelian” dialectics and were thus left without a suitable dialectical framework. Again, from ''On Dialectics:''
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	The year 1848, which otherwise brought nothing to a conclusion in Germany, accomplished a complete revolution there only in the sphere of philosophy [and] the nation resolutely turned its back on classical German philosophy that had lost itself in the sands of Berlin old-Hegelianism... But a nation that wants to climb the pinnacles of science cannot possibly manage without theoretical thought. Not only Hegelianism but dialectics too was thrown overboard — and that just at the moment when the dialectical character of natural processes irresistibly forced itself upon the mind, when therefore only dialectics could be of assistance to natural science in negotiating the mountain of theory — and so there was a helpless relapse into the old metaphysics.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Engels goes on to explain that, having rejected Hegel’s dialectics, natural scientists were set adrift, cobbling together theoretical frameworks from the works of philosophers which were plagued by idealism and metaphysics, and which were therefore not suitable for the task of unifying the disparate fields of natural sciences together:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	What prevailed among the public since then were, on the one hand, the vapid reflections of Schopenhauer, which were fashioned to fit the philistines, and later even those of Hartmann; and, on the other hand, the vulgar itinerant-preacher materialism of a Vogt and a Büchner. At the universities the most diverse varieties of eclecticism competed with one another and had only one thing in common, namely, that they were concocted from nothing but remnants of old philosophies and were all equally metaphysical. All that was saved from the remnants of classical philosophy was a certain neo-Kantianism, whose last word was the eternally unknowable thing-in-itself, that is, the bit of Kant [see Annotation 72, p. 68] that least merited preservation. The final result was the incoherence and confusion of theoretical thought now prevalent.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Engels explains that this lack of a proper dialectical materialist framework had frustrated natural scientists of his era:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	One can scarcely pick up a theoretical book on natural science without getting the impression that natural scientists themselves feel how much they are dominated by this incoherence and confusion, and that the so-called philosophy now current offers them absolutely no way out. And here there really is no other way out, no possibility of achieving clarity, than by a return, in one form or another, from metaphysical to dialectical thinking.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	After explaining that Hegel’s system of dialectics came closest to meeting the needs of contemporary science, Engels explains why Hegelian dialectics were ultimately rejected by the scientific community:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	Just as little can it be a question of maintaining the dogmatic content of the Hegelian system as it was preached by the Berlin Hegelians of the older and younger line. Hence, with the fall of the idealist point of departure, the system built upon it, in particular Hegelian philosophy of nature, also falls. It must however be recalled that the natural scientists’ polemic against Hegel, in so far as they at all correctly understood him, was directed solely against these two points: viz., the idealist point of departure and the arbitrary, fact-defying construction of the system.”
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	In other words, it was the idealism and the unworkable structuring of Hegelian dialectics that prevented its adoption by natural scientists. Engels finally explains how Marx was able to modify Hegel’s idealist dialectics into a materialist form which is suitable for empirical scientific inquiry:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	It is the merit of Marx that... he was the first to have brought to the fore again the forgotten dialectical method, its connection with Hegelian dialectics and its distinction from the latter, and at the same time to have applied this method in Capital to the facts of an empirical science, political economy.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	These Classical German philosophers [Kant, Hegel, etc.<ref>Kant’s “transcendental dialectic” was used to critique rationalism and pure reason, but was not a fully developed dialectical system of thought. Hegel’s idealist dialectics were more universal in nature. See Annotation 9, p. 10.</ref>] systematically organized idealist dialectics into formal philosophies. Of particular note was Hegel’s belief that the dialectical process would eventually lead to an “absolute idea.” This foundational belief in an “absolute idea” is what chiefly defines Hegelian dialectics as idealist in nature [see Annotation 98, p. 100].
		+
		+	Hegel believed that the subjective dialectic is the basis of the objective dialectic. [In other words, Hegel believed that ''dialectical thought'' served as the ''objective dialectics'' of the material world.]
		+
		+	According to Hegel, the “absolute idea” was the starting point of all existence, and that this “absolute idea,” after creating the natural world, then came to exist within human consciousness.
		+
		+	Engels wrote that in Hegelian dialectics: “... spirit, mind, the idea, is primary and that the real world is only a copy of the idea.”<ref>''The Old Preface to Anti-Dühring, On Dialectics'', Friedrich Engels, 1878.</ref>
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 99 ====
		+
		+	In the above quoted passage, Engels was explaining why Hegelian dialectics were unsuitable for use in natural sciences. Here is a longer excerpt:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	First of all it must be established that here it is not at all a question of defending Hegel’s point of departure: that spirit, mind, the idea, is primary and that the real world is only a copy of the idea... We all agree that in every field of science, in natural as in historical science, one must proceed from the given facts, in natural science therefore from the various material forms and the various forms of motion of matter; that therefore in theoretical natural science, too, the inter-connections are not to be built into the facts, but to be discovered in them, and when discovered to be verified as far as possible by experiment.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	The German idealists (most notably Hegel) built an idealist system of dialectics organized into categories and common laws along with a strict logic of consciousness.
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+	Lenin stated that: “Hegel brilliantly ''divined'' the dialectics of things (phenomena, the world, ''nature'') in the dialectics of concepts.”<ref>''Conspectus of Hegel’s'' ''Science of Logic'', Vladimir Ilyich. Lenin, 1914.</ref>
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 100 ====
		+
		+	What Lenin means, here, is that Hegel inadvertently and unconsciously discovered the concept of reflection [see Annotation 68, p. 65]. Hegel intuitively understood that the material world was reflected in human consciousness, and, by extension, subjective dialectics (dialectical thought) reflected objective dialectics (of the material world). Hegel’s error was an inversion of the ideal and the material. As Marx later pointed out in the Afterword to the Second German Edition of ''Capital Volume I,'' it is the material which precedes the ideal, and not the other way around:
		+
		+	<blockquote>
		+	My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos [craftsman/artisan/creator] of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	Engels also quoted and emphasized Marx’s thoughts [in ''the Old Preface to Anti-Dühring'', citing another quote of Marx from the ''Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital Volume I,'' further quoted in Annotation 100 above]: “The mystification which dialectics suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”<ref>Afterword to the Second German Edition of ''Capital Volume I'', Karl Marx, 1873.</ref>
		+	</blockquote>
		+
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 101 ====
		+
		+	In ''the Old Preface to Anti-Dühring,'' Engels explains some of the contemporary currents of science and philosophy of his era. Engels explains that Hegelian philosophy had been dismissed by a newer current of natural scientists who dismissed “the idealist point of departure and the arbitrary, fact-defying construction of the system.” In other words, the natural scientists rejected Hegelianism because it was both idealist and was not built on a foundation of objective facts.
		+
		+	Engels points out, however, that Marx “was the first to have brought to the fore again the forgotten dialectical method” of Hegel.
		+
		+	The dialectical method was forgotten in the sense that the natural scientists ignored and dismissed dialectics along with the rest of Hegel’s philosophy. So, Engels is pointing out that one of the great contributions of Marx was salvaging the dialectical method from Hegel while rejecting the idealist and non-fact-based characteristics of Hegelian philosophy.
		+
		+	Marx, according to Engels, proved that the dialectical method could be separated from idealism by “[applying the dialectical method] in ''Capital'' to the facts of an empirical science, political economy.” This was the origin of dialectical materialism: the resurrection of the dialectical method and the development of a dialectical method in a materialist and scientific form.
		+
		+	The idealist characteristics of classical German dialectics and Hegelian philosophy was a limitation that needed to be overcome [so that it could be utilized for scientific inquiry]. Marx and Engels overcame that limitation and in so doing developed ''materialist dialectics.'' This system of dialectics is the most advanced form of dialectics in the history of philosophy to date. It is the successor of previous systems of dialectics, and it arose as a critique of the classical German dialectics.
		+
		+	Engels said: “Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics from German idealist philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and history.”<ref>''Anti-Dühring'', The 1885 Preface, Friedrich Engels, 1878.</ref>
		+
		+	=== 2. Materialist Dialectics ===
		+
		+	==== a. Definition of Materialist Dialectics ====
		+
		+	Materialist dialectics have been defined in various ways by many prominent Marxist-Leninist philosophers.
		+
		+	Engels defined materialist dialectics as: “nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought.”<ref>''Anti-Dühring'', Friedrich Engels, 1878.</ref>
		+
		+	Engels also emphasized the role of the principle of general relations.<ref>See p. 107.</ref> As John Burdon
		+
		+	Sanderson Haldane noted in the 1939 preface to ''Dialectics of Nature'': “In dialectics they
		+
		+	[Marx and Engels] saw the science of the general laws of change.”<ref>''Dialectics of Nature'', Friedrich Engels, 1883.</ref>
		+
		+	Lenin emphasized the important role of the principles of development<ref>See Annotation 117, p. 119.</ref> (including the theory of cognitive development) in the dialectics that Marx inherited from Hegelian philosophy.
		+
		+	Lenin wrote: “The main achievement was ''dialectics'', i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest, and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter.”<ref>''The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1913.</ref>
		+
		+	==== b. Basic Features and Roles of Materialist Dialectics ====
		+
		+	There are two basic features of the materialist dialectics of Marxism-Leninism:
		+
		+	''First, the materialist dialectics of Marxism-Leninism is a system of dialectics that is based on the foundation of the scientific materialist viewpoint.''
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 102 ====
		+
		+	Remember that ''scientific'' in Marxism-Leninism refers broadly to a systematic pursuit of knowledge, research, theory, and understanding [see Objects and Purposes of Study, p. 38]. Remember also that ''materialism'' in Marxism-Leninism has specific meaning as well, which differentiates it from other forms of materialism [see ''Dialectical Materialism — the Most Advanced Form of Materialism'', p. 52]. Here, materialism includes an understanding that the material is the first basis of reality, meaning that the material determines the ideal (though human consciousness can impact the material world through willpower and labor [see ''Nature and Structure of Consciousness'', p. 79]). Materialism is also built upon scientific explanations (rooted in empirical data and practice, i.e. systematic experimentation and observation) of the world. And finally, remember that ''viewpoint'' is the starting point of inquiry [see Annotation 11, p. 12].
		+
		+	Thus, a ''scientific materialist viewpoint'' is a perspective which begins analysis of the world in a manner that is both scientifically systematic in pursuit of understanding and firmly rooted in a materialist conception of the world.
		+
		+	''Note:'' Materialist Dialectics contains ''Twelve Basic Pairs of Categories'', ''Two Basic Principles'' and ''Three Universal Laws''. These are summarized, respectively, in Appendix A (p. 246), Appendix B (p. 247), and Appendix C (p. 248), and explained in depth throughout the rest of this chapter.
		+
		+	In this way, materialist dialectics fundamentally differs from the classical German idealist dialectics, and especially differs from Hegelian dialectics<ref>See Annotation 98, p. 100.</ref> (as these dialectics were founded on idealist viewpoints).
		+
		+	Moreover, it also has a higher level of development compared to other dialectical systems of thought found in the history of philosophy going back to ancient times. Such previous forms of dialectics were fundamentally based on materialist stances, however the materialism of those ancient times was still naive, primitive and surface-level.
		+
		+	''Second, the materialist dialectics of Marxism-Leninism unifies dialectical materialist viewpoints and materialist dialectical methodology, so it not only explains the world, but is also a tool humans can use to perceive and improve the world.''
		+
		+	Every principle and law of Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectics is both:
		+
		+	1. An accurate explanation of the dialectical characteristics of the world.
		+
		+	2. A scientific methodology for perceiving and improving the world.
		+
		+	By summarizing the general interconnections and development of all things — every phenomenon in nature, society and human thought — Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectics provides the most general methodological principles for the process of perceiving and improving the world. They are not just objective methodological principles; they are a comprehensive, constantly developing, and historical methodology.
		+
		+	This methodology can be used to analyze contradictions [see Annotation 119, p. 123] in order to find the basic origins and motivations of both motion and developmental processes. Therefore, materialist dialectics is a great scientific tool for the revolutionary class to perceive and improve the world.
		+
		+	With these basic features, materialist dialectics plays a very important role in the worldview and philosophical methodology of Marxism-Leninism. Materialist dialectics are the foundation of the scientific and revolutionary characteristics of Marxism-Leninism and also offer the most general worldview and methodology for creative activities in scientific study and practical activities.
		+
		+	== II. Basic Principles of Materialist Dialectics ==
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 103 ====
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-23.png|''The Principle of General Relationships and the Principle of Development are the most basic principles of materialist dialectics. These two principles are dialectically related to one another.'']]
		+
		+	The following sections will outline the Principle of General Relationships and the Principle of Development, which are the most fundamental principles of materialist dialectics. These two concepts are closely (and dialectically) related:
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	=== 1. The Principle of General Relationships ===
		+
		+	''a. Definition of Relationship and Common Relationship''
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 104 ====
		+
		+	The ''Principle of General Relationships'' describes how all things, phenomena, and ideas are related to one another, and are defined by these internal and external relationships
		+
		+	The ''Principle of Development'' relates to the idea that motion, change, and development are driven by internal and external relationships.
		+
		+	These two principles are dialectically linked: any given subject is defined by its internal relationships, and these same relationships drive the development of every subject.
		+
		+	Note: The foundation of the principles of Materialist Dialectics were laid out by
		+
		+	Engels in ''Dialectics of Nature''. Engels began working on ''Dialectics of Nature'' in February, 1870 and had to stop in 1876 to work on ''Anti-Dühring''. He then restarted work on ''Dialectics of Nature'' in 1878 and continued working on it until 1883, when Karl Marx died. Engels felt that it was more important to try and put together Marx’s great unfinished works, ''Capital Volumes 2, 3, and 4'', and so stopped working on ''Dialectics of Nature'' once again. So, unfortunately, Engels died before this seminal work on Materialist Dialectics could be completed, and what we have instead is an unfinished assemblage of notes.
		+
		+	What follows in the rest of this book is a cohesive system of Materialist Dialectics which was built upon the foundations laid out by Engels in ''Dialectics of Nature'' and many other works of political and scholarly writing from various sources. This is the system of Materialist Dialectics studied by Vietnamese students and applied by Vietnamese communists today.
		+
		+	Because this text comes from predominantly Vietnamese scholarship and ideological development, we have had to translate some terms into English which are not derived from the “canon” of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In some cases, various terms have been consolidated into one concept. For example: Engels used the term “interconnection” (German: ''innern'' ''Zusammenhang'', literally: “inner connections”) in ''Dialectics of Nature'', but Vietnamese political scientists use the term “relationship.” Where Engels uses the term “motion” (German: ''Bewegung'') modern Vietnamese communists tend to use the word “development.” Wherever this is the case, we have chosen to use the words in English which most closely match the language used in the original Vietnamese of this text.
		+
		+	In materialist dialectics, the word ''relationship'' refers to the regulating principles, mutual interactions, and mutual transformations which exist between things, phenomena, and ideas, as well as those existing between aspects and factors within things, phenomena, and ideas.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 105 ====
		+
		+	Throughout this book, ''phenomenon/phenomena'' simply refers to anything that is observable by the human senses.
		+
		+	Materialist dialectics examines relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas and ''within'' things, phenomena, and ideas. A relationship which occurs between two separate things or phenomena is referred to as an ''external relationship''. A relationship which occurs ''within'' a thing or phenomenon is referred to as an ''internal relationship''.
		+
		+	These terms are relative; sometimes a relationship may be internal in one context but external in a different context. For example, consider a solar system:
		+
		+	When considering a solar system as a whole, the orbit of a moon around a planet may be considered as an internal relationship of the solar system. But when considering the moon as an isolated subject, its orbit around a planet may be seen as an external relationship which the moon has with the planet.
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-24.png]]
		+
		+	The diagram above illustrates different types of relationships:
		+
		+	Object 1 has its own internal relationships (A), and, from its own perspective, it also has external relationships with Object 2 (B). From a wider perspective, the relationship between Object 1 and Object 2 (B) may be viewed as an internal relationship.
		+
		+	This ''system of relationships'' (between Object 1 and Object 2) will also have external relationships with other things, phenomena, and ideas (C).
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	Relationships have a quality of ''generality'', which refers to how frequently they occur between and within things, phenomena, and ideas. When we refer to ''general relationships'', we are usually referring to relationships which exist broadly across many things, phenomena, and ideas. General relationships can exist both internally, ''within'' things, phenomena, and ideas, and externally, ''between'' things, phenomena, and ideas.
		+
		+	The most general relationships are ''universal relationships'': these are relationships that exist between and within ''everything'' and ''all phenomena'', and they are one of the two primary subjects of study of materialist dialectics. [The other primary subject of study is the ''Principle of Development''; see page 119.]
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 106 ====
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-25.png]]
		+
		+	The discussion of generality of relationships can seem confusing at first. What’s important to understand is that generality is a spectrum ranging from the least general relationships (''unique relationships'', which only occur between two ''specific'' things/phenomena/ideas) and the most general relationships (''universal relationships'', which occur between or within ''all'' things/phenomena/ideas).
		+
		+	Of particular importance in the study of materialist dialectics are ''universal'' relationships which exist within and between all things, phenomena, and ideas [see below].
		+
		+	''Translation Note'': In the original Vietnamese, the word “universal” is not used. Instead, the compound term “phổ biến nhất” is used, which literally means “most general.” In Vietnamese, this phrasing is commonly used to describe the concept of “universal” and it is thus not confusing to Vietnamese speakers. For this translation, we have opted to use the word “universal” because we feel it is less confusing and better explains the concept in English.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	The universal relationships include (but are not limited to):
		+
		+	* Relationships between basic philosophical category pairs (Private and Common, Essence and Phenomenon, etc.). <ref>See ''Private and Common'', p. 128; ''Essence and Phenomenon'', p. 156.</ref>
		+	* Relationships between quantity and quality. <ref>See Annotation 117, p. 119.</ref>
		+	* Relationships between opposites. <ref>See Annotation 190, p. 181.</ref>
		+
		+	Together, in all forms of relationships in nature, society and human thought (special, general, and universal) there is unity in diversity and diversity in unity.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 107 ====
		+
		+	==== Principle of General Relationships ====
		+
		+	According to ''Curriculum of the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism For University and College Students Specializing in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought: “''Materialist dialectics upholds the position that all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in mutual relationships with each other, regulate each other, transform into each other, and that nothing exists in complete isolation. That is the core idea of the ''Principle of General Relationships''.”
		+
		+	From this Principle, we find the characteristics of ''Diversity in Unity'' and ''Unity in Diversity''; the basis of Diversity in Unity is the fact that every thing, phenomenon, or idea, contains many different relationships; the basis of Unity in Diversity is that many different relationships exist — unified — within each and every thing, phenomenon, and idea.
		+
		+	==== Diversity in Unity ====
		+
		+	There exist an infinite number of diverse relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas, but all of these relationships share the same foundation in the material world.
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-26.png|''An infinite diversity of relationships exist within the unity of the material world.'']]
		+
		+	The material world is not a chaotic and random assortment of things, phenomena, and ideas. Rather, it is a system of relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas. Likewise, since the material world exists as the foundation of all things, phenomena, and ideas, the material world is thus the foundation for all relationships within and between things, phenomena, and ideas. Because all relationships share a foundation in the material world, they also exist in unity, even though all relationships are diversified and different from one another.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-27.png|''Universal relationships which unite all things, phenomena, and ideas manifest in infinitely diverse ways.'']]
		+
		+	'''Unity in Diversity'''
		+
		+	When we examine the universal relationships that exist within and between all different things, phenomena, and ideas, we will find that each individual manifestation of any universal relationship will have its own different manifestations, aspects, features, etc. Thus even the universal relationships which unite all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in infinite diversity.
		+
		+	''Paraphrased From: Curriculum of the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism For University and College Students Specializing in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought''
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== b. Characteristics of Relationships ====
		+
		+	Objectiveness, generality, and diversity are the three basic characteristics of relationships.
		+
		+	''-'' ''The Characteristic of Objectiveness of Relationships''
		+
		+	According to the materialist dialectical viewpoint, relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas have objective characteristics.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 108 ====
		+
		+	In materialist dialectics, objectiveness is an abstract concept that refers to the relative externality of all things, phenomena, and ideas. Every thing, phenomena and idea exists externally to every other thing, phenomena, and idea. This means that to each individual subject (i.e., each individual thing/phenomena/idea), all other things, phenomena, and ideas are external objects
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-28.png|''All things, phenomena, and ideas have the relative characteristic of objectiveness.'']]
		+
		+	All together, the collection of all things, phenomena, and ideas in the universe create the external reality of any given subject. So, objectiveness is relative. In the case of human beings, every individual person exists as an individual subject to which all other things, phenomena, and ideas (including other human beings) have ''objective characteristics.''
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-29.png|''Alice and Bob are external to one another; each is objective from the other’s perspective.'']]
		+
		+	Of course, objectiveness is always relative. Something might be external from a certain perspective but not from another perspective. For example, say there are two people: Bob and Alice. From Bob’s perspective, Alice has objective characteristics. But from Alice’s perspective, Bob would have objective characteristics.
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-30.png|''The relationship between Alice and Bob has objective characteristics to both Alice and Bob.'']]
		+
		+	As all relationships are inherently external to any given subject (even subjects which are party to the relationship), relationships also have objective characteristics.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	Whenever two things, phenomena, or ideas have a relationship with one another, they form a pair. The relationship is inherent to this pair and external to any subject which exists outside of the pair. The mutual interaction and mutual transformation which occurs to the things, phenomena, or objects within the pair as the result of the relationship are ''inherent'' and ''objective'' properties of the pair.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 109 Translation note: ====
		+
		+	In the original Vietnamese text, the word for “objective” is ''“khách quan.”'' This is a compound word in which ''“khách”'' means “guest,” and ''“quan”'' means “point of view.” Therefore, ''“khách quan”'' literally means “the guest’s (or outsider’s) point of view.”
		+
		+	Thus we translate this to “objectiveness/objective,” the characteristic of being viewed from the outside.
		+
		+	The word “inherent” in the original Vietnamese is ''“vốn có.”'' This is another compound word: ''“vốn”'' is a shortened form of the word ''“vốn dĩ,”'' which means “by or through nature,” “naturally,” and “intrinsically.” ''“Có”'' means “to have” or “to exist.” '''''“Vốn có”''''' thus means “already existing naturally” or “already there, through nature.”
		+
		+	So we use the word “inherent” to mean “existing intrinsically or naturally within, without external influence.”
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	Human beings can’t change or impact external things and phenomena — and the relationships between them — through human will alone. Humans are limited to perceiving relationships between things and phenomena and then impacting or changing them through our practical activities.
		+
		+	''-'' ''The Characteristic of Generality of Relationships''
		+
		+	According to the dialectical viewpoint, there is no thing, phenomenon, nor idea that exists in absolute isolation from other things, phenomena and ideas.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 110 ====
		+
		+	Although all things, phenomena, and ideas have the characteristic of ''externality'' and ''objectiveness'' to all other things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 108, p. 112], this does not mean that they exist in ''isolation''. Isolation implies a complete lack of any relationships with other things, phenomena, and ideas. On the contrary, according to the ''Principle of General Relationships'' [see p. 107], ''all'' things, phenomena, and ideas have relationships with ''all other'' things, phenomena, and ideas.
		+
		+	Simultaneously, there is also no known thing, phenomenon, nor idea that does not have a systematic structure, including component parts which in turn have their own internal relationships. This means that every existence is a system, and, moreso, is an ''open'' system that exists in relation with other systems. All systems interact and mutually transform one another.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 111 ====
		+
		+	As explained above, a ''systematic structure'' is a structure which includes within itself a system of ''component'' parts and relationships. It has been postulated by some scientific models that there may be some “fundamental base particle” (quarks, preons, etc.), which, if true, would mean that there is a certain basic material component which cannot be further broken down. However, this would not contradict the Principle of Materialist Dialectics of General Relationships (which states that all things, phenomena, and ideas interact with and mutually transform one another — see Annotation 107, p. 110).
		+
		+	''- The Characteristic of Diversity of Relationships''
		+
		+	In addition to affirming the objectiveness<ref>See Annotation 108, p. 112.</ref> and generality<ref>See p. 108.</ref> of relationships, the dialectical viewpoint of Marxism-Leninism also emphasizes the ''diversity'' of relationships. The characteristic of diversity is defined by the following features:
		+
		+	* All things, phenomena, and ideas have different relationships. Every relationship plays a distinct role in the existence and development of the things, phenomena, and ideas which are included within.
		+	* Any given relationship between things, phenomena, and ideas will have different characteristics and manifestations under different conditions and/or during different periods of motion and/or at different stages of development.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 112 ====
		+
		+	One of Marx’s most critical observations was that things are defined by their internal and external relationships, including human beings. For example, in ''Theses on Feuerbach,'' Marx wrote that “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.” It is only through relationships — through mutual impacts and transformations — that things, phenomena, and ideas (including human beings and human societies) change and develop over time. All of these relationships — which both define and transform all things, phenomena, and ideas in existence — exist in infinite diversity [see Annotation 107, p. 110].
		+
		+	Just as things, phenomena, and ideas change and transform through the course of relations with one another, the nature of the relationships themselves also change and develop over time.
		+
		+	''Characteristics'' refer to the features and attributes that exist ''internally'' within a given thing, phenomena, or idea.
		+
		+	''Manifestation'' refers to ''how'' a given thing, phenomena, or idea is expressed ''externally'' in the material world.
		+
		+	For example, a ball may have the ''characteristics'' of being made of rubber, having a mass of 100 grams, and having a melting point of 260℃. It may ''manifest'' by bouncing on the ground, having a spherical shape, and having a red appearance to human observers.
		+
		+	If ten such balls exist, they will all be slightly different. Even if they have the same mass and material composition, they will have slightly different variations in size, shape, etc. Even if each ball will melt at 260℃, the melting will manifest differently for each ball — they will melt into slightly different shapes, at slightly different speeds, etc.
		+
		+	Relationships also have characteristics and manifestations. For example, the moon’s orbit around the Earth is a relationship. It has characteristics such as the masses of each related body, forces of gravity, and other factors which produce and influence the orbit. The same orbital relationship also has manifestations such as the duration of the moon’s orbit around the Earth, the size of its ellipse, the orbit’s effects on the tides of the Earth’s ocean, etc.
		+
		+	''Characteristics'' and ''Manifestation'' correspond, respectively, to the philosophical category pair of ''Content'' and ''Form,'' which is discussed in section page 147.
		+
		+	Therefore, no two relationships are exactly the same, even if they exist between very similar things, phenomena, and ideas and/or in very similar situations.
		+
		+	It is also important to note that the characteristic of diversity also applies to things, phenomena, and ideas themselves. In other words, every individual thing, phenomenon, and idea in existence also manifests differently from every other thing, phenomenon, and idea in existence, even if they seem quite similar.
		+
		+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
		+
		+	Based on the objective and popular characteristics of relationships, we can see that in our cognitive and practical activities, we have to have a ''comprehensive viewpoint''.
		+
		+	Having a ''comprehensive viewpoint'' requires that in the process of perceiving and handling real life situations, humans have to consider the internal dialectical relationships between the component parts, factors, and aspects within a thing or phenomenon. We also need to consider the external mutual interactions they have with other things, phenomena, and ideas. Only on such a comprehensive basis can we properly understand things and phenomena and then effectively handle problems in real life. So, the comprehensive viewpoint is the opposite of a unilateral and/or metaphysical viewpoint [see Annotation 51, p. 49] in both perception and practice.
		+
		+	Lenin said: “If we are to have true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all of its facets, its connections, and ‘mediacies [indirect relationships].’”<ref>''Once Again On The Trade Unions'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1921.</ref>
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 113 ====
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-31.png|''The comprehensive viewpoint sees the subject in terms of all of its internal and external relationships.'']]
		+
		+	Consider a factory. A factory exists as a collection of internal relationships (between the workers, between machines, between the workers and the machines, etc.) and external relationships (between the factory and its suppliers, between the factory and its customers, between the factory and the city, etc.). In order to have a comprehensive viewpoint when examining the factory, one must consider and understand all of the internal and external relationships which define it.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	The diversified characteristic of relationships [see Annotation 107, p. 110] shows that in human cognitive and practical activities, we have to simultaneously use a comprehensive viewpoint and a historical viewpoint.
		+
		+	Having a ''historical viewpoint'' requires that, in perceiving and handling real life situations, we need to consider the specific properties of subjects, including their current stage of motion and development. We also need to consider that the exact same methods can’t be used to deal with different situations in reality — our methods must be tailored to suit the exact situation based on material conditions.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 114 ====
		+
		+	While the ''comprehensive viewpoint'' focuses on internal and external ''relationships'' of subjects, the ''historical viewpoint'' focuses on the specific ''properties'' of subjects — especially the current stage of motion and development. In order to have a proper historical viewpoint, we must study and understand the way a subject has developed and transformed over time. To do this, we must examine the history of the subject’s changes over time, hence the term “historical viewpoint.” In addition, it’s important to understand that no two situations which we might encounter will ever be exactly the same. This is because the component parts and relationships that make up any given situation will manifest differently.
		+
		+	So, in order to properly deal with situations, we have to understand the component parts and relationships of examined subjects as well as their histories of development so that we can develop plans and strategies that are suitable to the unique circumstances at hand.
		+
		+	For example, it would be disastrous if communists today tried to employ the ''exact same'' methods which were used by the Communist Party of Vietnam in the 20<sup>th</sup> century to defeat Japan, France, and the USA. This is because the material conditions and relationships of Vietnam in the 20<sup>th</sup> century were very different from any material conditions existing on Earth today. It is possible to learn lessons from studying the methods of the Vietnamese revolution and to ''adapt'' some such methods to our modern circumstances, but it would be extremely ineffective to try to copy those methods and strategies — ''exactly'' as they manifested then and there — to the here and now.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	In order to come up with suitable and effective solutions to deal with real life problems, we must clearly define the roles and positions of each specific relationship that comes into play, and the specific time, place, and material conditions in which they exist.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 115 ====
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-32.png|''A historical viewpoint focuses on the roles and positions of relationships and properties of subjects as well as their development over time.'']]
		+
		+	The role of a relationship has to do with how it functions within a system of relationships and the position refers to its placement amongst other subjects and relationships.
		+
		+	Consider once again the example of the factory [see Annotation 113]. In addition to its internal and external relationships, the factory also has various roles — it functions within various systems and from various perspectives. For instance, the factory may have the role of financial asset for the corporation that owns it, it may have the role of place of employment for the surrounding community, it may have the role of supplier for various customers, etc.
		+
		+	The factory is also ''positioned'' among other subjects and relations. If it’s the only employer in town then it would have a position of great importance to the people of the community. If, on the other hand, if it’s just one of hundreds of factories in a heavily industrialized area, it may have a position of much less importance. It may have a position of great importance to an individual factory worker who lives in poverty in an economy where there are very few available jobs, but of less importance to a freelance subcontractor for whom the factory is just one of many customers, and so on.
		+
		+	These positions and roles will change over time. For example, the factory may initially exist as a small workshop with a small handful of workers, but it may grow into a massive factory with hundreds of employees. It is vital to understand this Principle of Development, which is discussed in more detail on the next page.
		+
		+	In summary, proper dialectical materialist analysis requires a ''comprehensive and historical viewpoint'' — we must consider subjects both ''comprehensively'' in terms of the internal and external relationships of the subject itself as well as ''historically'' in terms of roles and positions of subjects, as well as their relationships, material conditions, and development over time.
		+
		+	So, in both perception and practice, we have to avoid and overcome sophistry and eclectic viewpoints.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 116 ====
		+
		+	''Sophistry'' is the use of falsehoods and misleading arguments, usually with the intention of deception, and with a tendency of presenting non-critical aspects of a subject matter as critical, to serve a particular agenda. The word comes from the Sophists, a group of professional teachers in Ancient Greece, who were criticized by Socrates (in Plato’s dialogues) for being shrewd and deceptive rhetoricians. This kind of bad faith argument has no place in materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics must, instead, be rooted in a true and accurate understanding of the subject, material conditions, and reality in general.
		+
		+	''Eclecticism'' is an incoherent approach to philosophical inquiry which attempts to draw from various different theories, frameworks, and ideas to attempt to understand a subject, applying different theories in different situations without any consistency in analysis and thought. Eclectic arguments are typically composed of various pieces of evidence that are cherry picked and pieced together to form a perspective that lacks clarity. By definition, because they draw from different systems of thought without seeking a clear and cohesive understanding of the totality of the subject and its internal and external relations and its development over time, eclectic arguments run counter to the comprehensive and historical viewpoints. Eclecticism is somewhat similar to dialectical materialism in that it attempts to consider a subject from many different perspectives, and analyzes relationships pertaining to a subject, but the major flaw of eclecticism is a lack of clear and coherent systems and principles, which leads to a chaotic viewpoint and an inability to grasp the true nature of the subject at hand.
		+
		+	=== 2. Principle of Development ===
		+
		+	==== a. Definition of Development ====
		+
		+	According to the metaphysical viewpoint, development is simply a ''quantitative'' increase or decrease; the metaphysical viewpoint does not account for ''qualitative'' changes of things and phenomena. Simultaneously, the metaphysical viewpoint also views development as a process of continuous progressions which follow a linear and straightforward path.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 117 ====
		+
		+	In materialist dialectics, it is important to distinguish between ''quantity'' and ''quality''.
		+
		+	''Quantity'' describes the total ''amount'' of component parts that compose a subject.
		+
		+	''Quality'' describes the unity of component parts, taken together, which defines the subject and distinguishes it from other subjects.
		+
		+	Both quantity and quality are dynamic attributes; over time, the quantity and quality of all things develop and change over time through the development of internal and external relationships. Quantity and quality itself form a dialectical relationship, and as quantity develops, quality will also develop. A given subject may be described by various quantity and quality relationships.
		+
		+	'''''Example 1:'''''
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-33.png|''In the process of development, Quantity Change leads to Quality Change'']]
		+
		+	A single football player, alone, has the quantity value of 1 football player and the quality of ''a football player''. Eleven football players on a field would have the quantity value of 1 and will develop the quality of ''a football team''. This subject, ''football'' ''team'', is composed of the same component parts as the subject ''football player'', but the quantity change and other properties (being on a field, playing a game or practicing, etc.) change the quality of the component parts into a different stable and unified form which we call a ''football team''.
		+
		+	The relationship between quantity and quality is dynamic:
		+
		+	If one of the players doesn’t show up for practice, and there are only ten players on the field, it might still have the quality of ''football team'', but in a live professional game there will be a certain threshold — a minimum number of players who must be present to officially be considered a ''team''. If this number of players can’t be fielded then they will not be considered a full ''team'' and thus won’t be allowed to play.
		+
		+	Likewise, if there are only one or two players practicing together in a park, they would probably not be considered a ''football team'' (though they might be described in terms of having the quality of being ''on the same team).''
		+
		+	'''''Example 2:'''''
		+
		+	Quantity: 1 O + 2 H atoms Quantity: Billions of H2O Molecules Quantity: ~5,000 Drops of Water Quality: Water Quality: Drop of Water Quality: Cup of Water
		+
		+	DEVELOPMENT: QUANTITY CHANGE LEADS TO QUALITY CHANGE
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-34.png|''All of these have the quality of water because of the molecular quantities of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, however, from the perspective of volume, quantity changes still lead to quality changes.'']]
		+
		+	The properties of quantity and quality are relative, depending on the viewpoint of analysis.
		+
		+	A single molecule of water has a quantity of one in terms of molecules, but it still retains the quality of “water” because of the ''quantities'' of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms per molecule which, in this stable form, give it the ''quality'' of water.
		+
		+	A drop of water might have a quantity of many billions of molecules, but it would still have the quality of “water.” It would also now assume the quality of a “drop.”
		+
		+	When you combine enough drops of water, you will eventually have a quality shift where the “drops” of water combine to form another quality — i.e., a “cup” of water. The quantity change leads to a change in quantity; we would no longer think of the water in terms of “drops” after the quantity rises to a certain level.
		+
		+	In terms of ''temperature'' and physical properties, if the water is heated to a certain point it will boil and the water will become ''steam''. The quantity of water in terms of drops wouldn’t change, but the quantity-value of temperature would eventually lead to a quality value change from “water” to “steam.”
		+
		+	'''''Example 3:'''''
		+
		+	AS QUANTITY OF AGE INCREASES, QUALITY CHANGES
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-35.png|''The same human being will undergo various quality changes as age quantity increases over time.'']]
		+
		+	As humans age and the quantity of years we’ve lived builds up over time, our “quality” also changes, from baby, to child, to teenager, to young adult, to middle age, to old age, and eventually to death. The individual person is still the same human being, but the quality of the person will shift over time as the quantity-value of age increases.
		+
		+	'''Metaphysical vs. Dialectical Materialist Conceptions of Change'''
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-36.png|''Metaphysics only consider linear properties of'' quantity''change; Materialist Dialectics takes'' quantity changes ''and'' quality shifts ''into consideration when considering change over time.'']]
		+
		+	Because the metaphysical perspective tries to define the world in terms of static, isolated subjects, only ''quantity'' is considered and ''quality shifts'' are not taken into account. Thus, metaphysical logic sees development as linear, simple, and straightforward. Materialist dialectics, on the other hand, sees development as a more complicated, fluid, and dynamic process involving multiple internal and external relationships changing in quantity and quality over time.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	In contrast to the metaphysical viewpoint, in materialist dialectics, ''development'' refers to the ''motion'' of things and phenomena with a forward tendency: from less advanced to more advanced, from a less complete to a more complete level.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 118 ====
		+
		+	In materialist dialectics, ''motion (also known as change)'' is the result of mutual impacts between or within things, phenomena, and ideas, and all motion and change results from mutual impacts which themselves result from internal and external relationships with other things, phenomena, and ideas. Any given ''motion/change'' leads to quantity changes, and these quantity changes cumulatively lead to quality changes [see Annotation 117, p. 119]. Grasping this concept — that development is driven by relations — is critically important for understanding materialist dialectics.
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-37.png|''The concept of “change” in materialist dialectics centers on internal and external relationships causing mutual impacts which lead to quantity changes which build into quality shifts.'']]
		+
		+	This process, taken in total, is referred to as ''development''. Development represents the entire process in which internal and external change/motion leads to changes in quantity which in turn lead to changes in quality over time. The process of development can be fast or slow, complex or simple, and can even move backwards, and all of these properties are relative. Development has a ''tendency'' to develop from less advanced to more advanced forms. The word ''tendency'' is used to denote phenomena, development, and motion which inclines in a particular direction. There may be exceptional cases which contradict such tendencies, but the general motion will incline towards one specific manner. Thus, it is important to note that “development” is not necessarily “good” nor “bad.” In some cases, “development” might well be considered “bad,” or unwanted. For example, rust developing on a car is typically not desired. So, the tendency of development from lower to higher levels of advancement implies a “forward motion,” though this motion can take an infinite number of forms, depending on the relative perspective. Development can also (temporarily) halt in a state of equilibrium [see Annotation 64, p. 62] or it can shift direction; though it can never “reverse,” just as time itself can never be “reversed.”
		+
		+	For example, during a flood, water may “develop” over the land, and as the floodwaters recede this may alternatively be viewed as another “forward” development process of ''recession'' — a development of the overall “flooding and receding” process. The flood is not actually “reversing” — the development is not being “undone.” Flood water may recede but it will leave behind many traces and impacts; thus it is not a true “reversal” of development.
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-38.png|''Both flooding and flood recession are development processes with the same forward tendency. Flood recession may appear to be a “reversal,” but it is in fact forward development.'']]
		+
		+	The false belief that development can be reversed is the root of conservative and reactionary positions [see Annotation 208].
		+
		+	Development can be considered positive or negative, depending on perspective. Some ecosystems have natural flood patterns which are vital for sustaining life. For a person living in a flood zone, however, the flood would most likely be considered an unwanted development, whereas flood recession would be a welcomed development.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	It is important to note that the definition of development is not identical to the concept of “motion” (change) in general. It is not merely a simple quantitative increase or decrease, nor a repetitive cyclic change in quantity. Instead, in materialist dialectics, development is defined in terms of ''qualitative'' changes with the direction of advancing towards higher and more advanced levels. [See diagram ''Relationship Between Motion,''
		+
		+	''Quantity/Quality Shifts, and Dialectical Development'', Annotation 119, below]
		+
		+	Development is also the process of creating and solving objective ''contradictions'' within and between things and phenomena. Development is thus the unified process of negating negative factors while retaining and advancing positive factors from old things and phenomena as they transform into new things and phenomena.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 119 ====
		+
		+	A ''contradiction'' is a relationship in which two forces oppose one another. Although a contradiction might exist in ''equilibrium'' for some amount of time [see Annotation 64, p. 62], eventually, one force will overcome the other, resulting in a change of ''quality''. This process of overcoming is called ''negation''. In short, ''development'' is a process of change in a subject’s quantity as well as negation of contradictions within and between subjects, leading to quality shifts over time.
		+
		+	==== b. Characteristics of Development ====
		+
		+	Every development has the characteristics of objectiveness,<ref>See: Annotation 108, p. 112.</ref> generality,<ref>See: Annotation 106, p. 109.</ref> and diversity.<ref>See: Annotation 107, p. 110.</ref>''The characteristic of objectiveness of development'' stems from the origin of motion.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 120 ====
		+
		+	Remember that, in materialist dialectics, objectiveness is the relative characteristic that every subject has of existing and developing externally to all other subjects [see Annotation 108, p. 112]. Since motion originates from mutual impacts which occur between external things, objects, and relationships, the motions themselves also occur externally (relative to all other things, phenomena, and objects). This gives motion itself objective characteristics.
		+
		+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-39.png|''Dialectical Development consists of Quantity and Quality Shifts, which in turn derive from motion.'']]
		+
		+	Development is derived from motion as a process of quality shifting which arise from quantity changes which arise from motion [see Annotation 117, p. 119]. Since development is essentially an accumulation of motion, and motion is objective, development itself must also be objective.
		+
		+	The ''Principle of Development'' states that development is a process that comes from within the thing-in-itself; the process of solving the contradictions within things and phenomena. Therefore, development is inevitable, objective, and occurs without dependence on human will.
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 121 ====
		+
		+	The “thing-in-itself” refers to the actual material object which exists outside of our consciousness [see Annotation 72, p. 68]. Development arises from motion and self-motion [see Annotation 62, p. 59] with objective characteristics. Although human will can impact motion and development through conscious activity in the material world [see ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'', p. 88], motion and development can and does occur without being dependent on human will. Human will is neither a requirement nor prerequisite for motion and development to occur.
		+
		+	Development has the ''characteristic of generality'' because development occurs in every process that exists in every field of nature, society, and human thought; in every thing, every phenomenon, and every idea and at every stage* of all things, phenomena, and ideas. Every transformation process contains the possibility that it might lead to the birth of a new thing, phenomenon, or idea [through a change in quality, i.e. development].
		+
		+	-----
		+
		+	==== Annotation 122 ====
		+
		+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> In materialist dialectics, “stage” (or “stage of development”) refers to the current quantity and quality characteristics which a thing, phenomenon, or object possesses. Every time a quality change occurs, a new stage of development is entered into.
		+
		+	---------
−	My best experience of a social centre (A-Spire in Leeds) is my counter-argument. I like A-Spire-a lot. And although I haven’t personally been to them, the OK Cafe in Manchester and Radical Dairy in London are projects that through their process and their inherent conflict with the state have been truly radical and desirable spaces. Squatted spaces are temporary autonomous zones reclaimed from property owners and councils. They explode through the cracks in the system and when they are crushed-often forcibly-they leave pieces of themselves everywhere, in the hearts of the people who went there, in new behaviour, new alliances, new thoughts. They are a practical attempt to get free from the state, to be free from the compromises and creeping obedience of a legal space.	+	Development has the ''characteristic of diversity'' because every thing, phenomenon, and idea has its own process of development that is not totally identical to the process of development of any other thing, phenomenon, or idea. Things and phenomena will develop differently in different spaces and times. Simultaneously, within their own processes of development, things, phenomena, and ideas are impacted by other things, phenomena, and ideas, as well as by many other factors and historical conditions. Such impacts can change the direction of development of things, phenomena, and ideas. They can even temporarily set development back, and/or can lead to growth in one aspect but degeneration in another.
−	Everyone there holds the squatted space together, with no formal membership, no nominations, no rulebook, just based on a self-determined responsibility for each other and the people who may use or simply neighbour the space. As a radical project, the group process of working together to choose and crack a building, open it up, decide what it’s going to do and run it until an eviction, develops collectivity, responsibility, mutuality, and autonomy. It has no management committee, just a bunch of people who’ve come together. It does not have to make money, no one gets paid for anything. There are no legal rules or bureaucratic strangleholds limiting what can be done with the space beyond those we internally discuss and evaluate. After much discussion about whether to be selling anything at all, A-Spire had a really cheap bar with proceeds going directly to various radical projects (not to pay off debts and the mortgage) but you could bring your own too, it had a donations cafe (with skipped and stolen food), a free shop, an indoor skating ramp, an art space, and many meeting spaces. It was radical to a level that I believe a legal social centre can never be.	+	-----
−	It is radical because the squatted social centre endeavours to get to the heart of the matter by removing itself from questions of legality and compliance. The space is laid bare. The people who occupy the space are laid bare. Each squat, each A-Spire or OK Cafe or Radical Dairy is a new world. Psychologically, the space is liberating. It is an action. It is about clearing a way through formal structures and accepted ways of organising social spaces. It is about how we relate to each other outside the dominant system. It is hard enough to explore fundamental questions of social transformation, process, mutuality, inclusivity, and hard enough to break down ingrained power structures and behaviours in a squatted space that has gone a long way to clearing its head of legal constraints and practical ownership, but it is even harder to find those the questions if you still shuffling along head and shoulders bowed under the added weight of legal and state apparatus, to reach anything resembling autonomy.	+	==== Annotation 123 ====
−	The squatted social centre is radically politicising in and of itself. As radicals, we try to challenge or bypass laws, regulations, routine, hierarchy. Not only this, but I would argue that by desiring and seeking permanence through legal social centres, in a sense we collaborate with the system. Every time we leave the state behind, every time we accept that what we have created in a squatted space may get moved on, we confirm our refusal of the system because we understand that the state will only allow to be permanent that which is compliant, corrupt, no threat. By accepting transience, by re-evaluating a desire for permanence in a world we wish to move on from, we expand our ability and desire to transform the world as it is into what we want it to be. The temporary autonomous zone is characterised by an intensity, militancy, and dynamism only possible under those circumstances. For the time it exists, it is everything-not a daily or weekly shift in a permanent space.	+	Because development has the characteristic of generality and the characteristic of diversity, the principle of diversity in unity and unity in diversity also applies to development [see: Annotation 107, p. 110].
−	In my experience, people are very different in a squatted social centre. They are more open and creative, more communicative and questioning. While doing the bar at A-Spire one night I spent a long time talking to a young guy who’d just left prison and heard that A-Spire was happening (this is a very important word-a legal social centre doesn’t happen!), that it was pretty cool and decided to give it a go even though he didn’t know anyone involved. He’d never experienced anything like it and was really excited. I was excited too and we talked for hours about our lives, and politics and the politics of the space. I don’t hear those conversations happening at the Cowley Club, and I’m pretty sure that had it been a legal social centre with regular clientele and sign-up book, this guy might well not have come in, would certainly not have been that excited by it and I doubt whether I would have communicated with him in the way I did. There would have been less to talk about for a start. A job is so much less exciting and dynamic than an action.	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	That intensity creates an explosion of political understanding and bonding that is harder to achieve in a permanent, legal space. When the last A-Spire was evicted, it brought everyone together, it introduced people to crackdown by the state. It wasn’t rhetoric, it wasn’t an eviction described to someone new to evictions over morning coffee, or read in a book. It was a clear and actual political situation, an experience of us against them, inspiring solidarity. It was difficult yet invigorating. If the Cowley Club or the Sumac Centre got closed down, I believe it would divide rather than unify. We would probably see blame put on the heads of other people in the community rather than on the authorities. It would be a cause of resentment between those who have put money and work into it and those who have transgressed, who have “disrespected the space:’	+	Materialist dialectics upholds that the principle of development is the scientific theoretical basis that we must use to guide our perception of the world and to improve the world. Therefore, in our perception and reality, we have to have a ''development viewpoint''.
−	To me, the legal social centre is a worrying development, selling the illusion of a politicised and radicalising public space when in fact it can by its very nature be nothing of the sort. It poses in a hoody and mask, keeping pretty well clear of the front line. The desire for accessible space is the same desire that underpins autonomous, squatted spaces-to reach out beyond the ghetto. But setting down roots in polluted ground is not going to develop healthy politics or healthy communities. They are a sell-out and a buy-in. We already compromise on so many things (from a place to live, to schooling our kids). Surely we can conspire to at least keep our public spaces radical and admit that if we have to make that many compromises to keep them, then they’re probably not worth having?	+	According to Lenin: “dialectical logic requires that an object should be considered in development, in change, in ‘self-movement.”<ref>''Once Again On The Trade Unions,'' Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1921. See also: ''Mode and Forms of Matter'', p. 59.</ref>
−	Disclaimer: This piece probably contains factual errors, omissions, wild sweeping statements, vicious lies and blissful abuse of punctuation! It’s an opinion piece. In terms of the ethos and spirit of what I think “we” stand for and what I would like to see in society in general, I stand by the caution and criticism expressed in this piece regarding the inherent liberalism and dangers of entering establishment space. A culture of tense whispers has grown up around the recent legal social centres: I hope this article wil open up space for more discussion about what legal social centres should expect from the communities they demand energy and allegiance from, and I hope that we can distance ourselves enough from these extremely stressful and confusing projects to reflect more deeply on the political character of the spaces we are creating.	+	This development viewpoint [which holds that all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly developing, and that development is thus unavoidable] requires us to overcome conservatism, stagnation<ref>See Annotation 62, p. 59.</ref>, and prejudice, which are all opposed to development.
−	**** Stable Bases	+	-----
−	The last couple of years have seen a few social centres with an anarchist and radical ecological outlook opening up by buying their premises, with other similar projects aiming to open soon. These spaces have been created to fulfil a need that has been felt for a long time-the need for social spaces under our collective control.	+	==== Annotation 124 ====
−	What goes on there can be as varied as the people involved, but a few current uses that spring to mind are-cheap bar, cheap cafe, library, infoshop, space for meetings, gigs, film shows, kids’ events, self defence sessions, office space, self-managed housing, advice and solidarity for benefit and work problems, and not least an easily accessible way for people to wander in off the street and find all this!	+	Conservatism and prejudice are mindsets which seek to prevent and stifle development and to hold humanity in a static position. Not only is this detrimental to humanity, it is also ultimately a wasted effort, because development is inevitable in human society, as in all things, phenomena, and ideas. Therefore, we must avoid and fight against such stagnant mindsets.
−	So far, so good, but there are two main ways of getting a building to house these kind of activities. The first is to buy one, as has started happening recently, the second is to squat one.[231] All things being equal, it’s obviously a better idea to just occupy what we need than it is to borrow loads ofmoney and buy somewhere. Unfortunately though, all things are not equal, and there are different problems with both options.	+	According to this development viewpoint, in order to perceive or solve any problem in real life, we must consider all things, phenomena, and ideas with their own forward tendency of development taken in mind. On the other hand, the path of development is a dialectical process that is reversible and full of contradictions. Therefore, we must be aware of this complexity in our analysis and planning. This means we need to have a ''historical viewpoint'' [see Annotation 114, p. 116] which accounts for the diversity and complexity of development in perceiving and solving issues in reality.
−	The problems involved in buying a building are fairly obvious. Typically, the buildings have been bought with money from “green” or “ethical” banks, co-operative support groups such as Radical Routes, and small loans from groups and individuals, all of which involves a few people dealing with a lot of bureaucratic bollocks. There are various state agencies to deal with, although this is mostly during the renovations stage (fire and building standards regulations etc.). Once the centre’s open there’s much less of this. with the two main exceptions of keeping accounts, and alcohol sales. For the latter you need a licence, you have to keep to certain opening hours (unless you’re somewhere where lock-ins are common of course) and if the bar runs as a members club people have to give a name and address when they join, and sign in with that name when they come for a pint. Most importantly though, there can be a need to make a certain amount of money every month to pay the debts off (although this can come largely, or entirely, from rental income from housing, i.e. probably from housing benefit).	+	-----
−	There are also problems with squatting the spaces we need, the main one being that whatever you do isn’t going to be there very long! Before getting involved in a (hopefully) more permanent space, I’d been part of lots of squatted social centres, which lasted for an average of four to six weeks each. While they were there, they were often great places, and sometimes shitholes, but I got very frustrated by the constant moves. Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs) sound good on paper[232], but I’m a lot less keen on them when waiting for angry builders and cops to show up first thing in the morning, after shifting everything across town in shopping trolleys, four weeks after you last went through the process. The first time it’s an adventure, the tenth time it’s a pain in the arse. Inevitably, this kind of hassle means that there are long periods when there’s no space of this kind around at all. When the space does exist there’s usually no incentive to develop the building much-if it’s going to be evicted soon, why bother to fix the toilets, or make il wheelchair accessible? And if somebody wants to sort out a venue for a gig, or a talk in a month’s time, the best we can say is that there might be somewhere for it... Of course none of this is a problem with squatting itself, it’s more a reflection of the current weakness of the movements that squat buildings. Resistance movements in other times and places have been able to take and hold the spaces they needed, and that is something I want to see developing here and now. Squatting in the current situation is certainly one way of trying to move towards this, but it’s not the only way.	+	==== Annotation 125 ====
−	Some problems can potentially arise with any social centre, whether it’s squatted or not. For a start, there’s always some people who have the time, inclination, and energy to put more into a centre (or any other project) than most, and it’s hard to run things in a way that means these people aren’t seen as the de facto leaders. Certainly, having no formal structures is no guarantee that this situation won’t arise. The fear of repression causing a more or less subtle self-policing within centres can also be a problem, whether it’s fear of losing a licence, or fear of provoking an eviction. I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed in squats, other social centres, and road camps, and it’s a tendency that we should beware of-while it’s not always clever to shout about what we’re doing, these kind of considerations shouldn’t put us off doing things that we’d otherwise want to do. Another common problem is the ghettoisation of social spaces, whether deliberate or unintentional. Creating spaces where we can put some of our ideas into practice also means there are more possibilities for reconnecting radical politics to the working class communities around us. Not so much by getting our ideas across,[233] but by providing a way for different people pissed off with the way things are to meet, talk and act together, and a resource for people to explore their own ideas. Obviously, this can only happen in social centres if people come to them, and centres need to be welcoming. In my experience it’s not class war or riot posters on the walls that put most people off, it’s feeling like you need to have a certain haircut, or be a certain age, or be middle class (to give a few common examples) that excludes people. Nor does exclusivity have much to do with legality-squats can be accessible places on the high street; just as bought buildings can be exclusive hangouts for a particular scene.	+	Materialist dialectics requires us to consider the complexity and constant motion of reality. By comparison, the metaphysical viewpoint (which considers all things, phenomena, and ideas as static, isolated entities which have linear and simple processes of development) stands as a barrier to understanding this complexity and incorporating it into our worldview. Thus, it is vital that we develop comprehensive and historical viewpoints which acknowledge the diversity and complexity of reality.
−	I’d like nothing better than to see the emergence of a movement strong enough to occupy the spaces it needed and keep them for as long as they were of use. But that movement undeniably isn’t here now. What is here now is a movement that needs space for its activities, space for living our lives. Sometimes that space is squatted and temporary, sometimes it’s in co-operatives and less temporary. I don’t see a conflict between the two-more stable bases should be a way of fomenting and co-ordinating action, including squatting. At the moment, they’re not likely to conflict, because squats don’t last long enough to compete-if squats do become able to fulfil the same functions as more long term centres, then I’ll be the first to celebrate and throw the mortgage repayment forms in the bin!	+	In summary, as a science of common relations and development, Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectics serve a very important role in perception and practice. Engels affirmed the role of materialist dialectics in this passage:
−	[231] In other European countries there have been, and are, other options such as being given buildings by lefty councils, or squats being offered permanent contracts. These have typically been ways of trying to buy off militant mass movements, and aren’t likely to be a realistic choice here right now!	+	“An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics, with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes.”
−	[232] Hakim Bey’s theory of temporarily liberating space in a ‘guerrilla’ fashion. with TAZs coming into existence, melting away and reappearing at another time and place, in another form. It has could be argued that this is a way of convincing ourselves that current weaknesses, during a low ebb of class struggle, are actually virtues.	+	Lenin also said: “Dialectics requires an all-round consideration of relationships in their concrete development, but not a patchwork of bits and pieces.”<ref>''Once Again On The Trade Unions'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1921.</ref>
−	[233] Since anarchist politics probably has at least as much to gain from a closer connection to working class communities and struggles as vice versa.	+	== III. Basic Pairs of Categories of Materialist Dialectics ==
−	**** Social Centres	+	''Category*'' is the most general grouping of aspects, attributes, and relations of things, phenomena, and ideas. Different specific fields of inquiry may categorize things, phenomena, and/or ideas differently from one another.
−	Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh	+	-----
−	<br>17 West Montgomery Place Edinburgh EH7 5HA
−	<br>Web: [[http://www.autonomous.org.uk/][http://www.autonomous.org.uk/]]
−	The Cowley Club	+	==== Annotation 126 ====
−	<br>12 London Road Brighton BNl 4JA
−	<br>[[http://www.cowleyclub.org.uk/][http://www.cowleyclub.org.uk/]]
−	<br>Social centre in the heart of Brighton with members bar, vegan cafe and radical bookshop. Has regular events.
−	Rants about Radical Space	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> ''Translation note:'' In Vietnamese, the word “phạm trù” is used here, which translates in this context more closely to the English philosophical term “category of being,” which means “the most general, fundamental, or broadest class of entities.” “Category of being” is sometimes simplified in English-language philosophical discourse to “category,” which we have chosen to do here for ease of reading and to better reflect the way it reads in the original Vietnamese.
−	<br>62 Fieldgate Street London El lES
−	<br>[[http://www.londonarc.org/][http://www.londonarc.org/]]
−	<br>Collectively run building providing computers, roof garden, reference library, and space for non-hierarchical projects for radical social change.
−	Sumac Centre	+	Every science has its own systems of categories that reflect the aspects, attributes, and basic relations that fall within its scope of study. For example, mathematics contains the categories “arithmetic,” “geometry,” “point,” “plane,” and “constant.” Physics contains the categories of “mass,” “speed,” “acceleration,” and “force,” and so on. Economics includes “commodity,” “value,” “price,” “monetary,” and “profit” categories.
−	<br>245 Gladstone Street Nottingham NG7 6HX
−	<br>http://www.veggies.org.11k/rainbow/welcome.htm
−	<br>vegan cafe, bar, radical information, resource library, space for radical events
−	56(q) Infoshop	+	Every such category reflects only the common relations found within the specific fields that fall within the scope of study of a specific science.
−	<br>56 Crampton Street London SE17 3AE
−	<br>[[http://www.safetycat.org/56a/][http://www.safetycat.org/56a/]]
−	<br>radical bookshop, anarchist archive, wholefood co-op, and bike workshop
−	Kebele Community Centre	+	''Categories of materialist dialectics'', on the other hand, such as “matter,” “consciousness,” “motion,” “contradiction,” “quality,” “quantity,” “reason,” and “result,” are different. Categories of materialist dialectics reflect the most general aspects and attributes, as well as the most basic and general relations, of not just some specific fields of study, but of the whole of reality, including all of nature, society and human thought.
−	<br>14 Robertson Road Eastville Bristol BS5 6JY
−	<br>[[http://www.kebele.org/][http://www.kebele.org/]]
−	<br>ex-squatted social centre, cafe, bike workshop, anarchist library, housing co-op, more
−	1 in 12 Club	+	Every thing, phenomenon, and idea has many properties, including: a reason for existing in its current form, a process of motion and change, contradictions, content, form, and so on. These properties are aspects, attributes, and relations that are reflected in the categories of materialist dialectics. Therefore, the relationship between the categories of specific sciences and categories of materialist dialectics is a dialectical relationship between the Private and the Common [see ''Private and Common,'' p. 128].
−	<br>21–23 Albion Street Bradford BDl 2LY
−	<br>[[http://www.1inl2.com/][http://www.1inl2.com/]]
−	<br>anarchist-managed social centre with cheap beer, punk gigs, information, resources
−	Warzone	+	-----
−	<br>3–5 Donegal Lane Belfast
−	<br>[[http://www.martinx.demon.co.uk/about.htm][http://www.martinx.demon.co.uk/about.htm]]
−	<br>anarcho-punk social centre since 1984, includes a cafe, gig space, practice room, food co-op, recording studio, arts studio, etc.
−	The Initiative Factory	+	==== Annotation 127 ====
−	<br>29 Hope Street Liverpool L1 9BQ
−	<br>[[http://www.gn.apc.org/initfaCtoryI][http://www.gn.apc.org/initfaCtoryI]]
−	<br>club run on co-operative principles by sacked Liverpool Dockers, profits go towards an employment-training centre
−	The Autonomy Club	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-40.png|''The categories of specific sciences are limited to the scope of study, while the categories of materialist dialectics encompass all things, phenomena, and ideas.'']]
−	<br>84b Whitechapel High Street London El 7QX
−	<br>new social centre in the East End sharing the same building as the long-running Freedom Press bookshop, distro, and publishers
−	We haven’t listed squatted social centres because they move and change frequently. For information on these, you could try contacting the London Social Centres Network:	+	Unlike the categories contained within specific scientific fields, the philosophical categories of materialist dialectics can be used to analyze and define all things, phenomena, and ideas. The categories of specific scientific fields and the materialist dialectical categories have a Private/Common dialectical relationship [discussed on the next page].
−	<br>Email: [[mailto:londonscn@yahoo.co.uk][londonscn@yahoo.co.uk]]
−	<br>Discussion list: [[mailto:londonscn-forum-subscribe@lists.riseup.net][londonscn-forum-subscribe@lists.riseup.net]]
−	<br>Events list/newsletter: [[mailto:londonscn-events-subscribe@lists.riseup.net][londonscn-events-subscribe@lists.riseup.net]]
−	<br>	+	-----
−	* Movement	+	As a science of general relations and development, materialist dialectics summarizes the most general relations of every field of nature, society, and human thought into basic category pairs: ''Private and Common, Reason and Result, Obviousness and Randomness, Content and Form, Essence and Phenomenon, Possibility and Reality.''
−	** Earth First! and Tribalism: A Lesson from Twyford Down (from issue 2)	+	-----
−	After over a year of Earth First! activity in this country, it is time to reassess the situation and ask fundamental questions about the way groups run themselves. Looking through the British EF! Contact list one thing stands out: EF! Groups seem to exist mainly in urban areas.	+	==== Annotation 128 ====
−	There are obvious reasons for this-there are more people in cities and many EF!ers are students or ex-students. This pattern is reflected in all radical groups. However, is this pattern healthy, and if not, are there any alternatives?	+	Every individual materialist dialectical category has a dialectical relationship with another materialist dialectical category. Thus, all categories in materialist dialectics are presented as ''category pairs.'' So, a ''category pair'' is simply a pair of categories within materialist dialectics which have a dialectical relationship with one another.
−	Reviewing EF! actions on this isle, the most effective campaign has undoubtedly been Twyford Down. The first action happened in February of last year, and there have been hundreds of actions since. A campaign that has been so successful that Tarmac Construction spends just under a quarter of a million a week on security to combat it, and the DoT employs a private detective firm to find out who activists are.	+	Note that the this formalized system of category pairs reflects many decades of work by Vietnamese philosophical and political scientists based on the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other socialist thinkers. Also note that these are not the only category pairs that can be discussed; there are potentially an infinite number of categories which can be used in materialist dialectical analysis. However, universal category pairs, which can be applied to analyze any and all things, phenomena, and ideas, are much fewer and farther between. That said, the universal category pairs discussed in this book are the ones which have most often been used by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other prominent materialist dialecticians.
−	What, I ask you, has been the reason for this success? The answer is that since April last year the resistance at Twyford Down has had a physical and spiritual focus-a community! Since the end of this February, Camelot EF! Has managed to have an action nearly every day. This is because of empowerment. connection with the Earth, and community.	+	=== 1. Private and Common ===
−	Ninety-nine percent of Earth First!ers are ill; not half as ill as Sun readers, but nevertheless ill. We walk around with this beautiful dream of wilderness and small happy communities emblazoned in our hearts, but we walk on concrete, and go to sleep in a house where at best we live with two or three friends, if that. The group comes together in some room above a pub once a month, and the only life we see is the occasional park or piece of wasteland. For Christ’s sake, we can’t even see the stars because of the horrible yellow glow given out by thousands of streets lights.	+	==== a. Categories of Private and Common ====
−	There is no point in us fighting to help the Earth survive if we ourselves make ourselves unhealthy, if we are stressed out, exhausted, and feeling spiritually low. I put it to you that if the movement is to really be effective, we must be strong and after an action be able to return to the camp fire and sing and drum and smile and cry-not be surrounded by concrete madness, the antithesis of everything we believe in.	+	The ''Private Category'' encompasses specific things, phenomena, and ideas; the ''Common Category'' defines the common aspects, attributes, factors, and relations that exist in many things and phenomena.
−	Moving into the country is easier than you think, all you need is say eight or so friends, some tarps to make benders with, and a peep at the land register to find land with Ownership Unknown. You will of course need new skills (like lighting a fire and building benders) but you can always learn these skills at the Winchester Institute of Outdoor Living, a.k.a. Camelot EF! Get yourself sacked from your job. Money is no problem, the state pays for people to be eco-activists-it’s called the dole. You will be surprised at how little it costs to actually live communally: a tenner a week at most. You can spend the rest on campaigning. If you think you need access to a computer, you can always stick a microchip nightmare in a van, and fix it up to a generator or wind turbine (Generators are freely available from all road building sites around the country).	+	Within every Private thing, phenomenon, and idea, there exists the Common, and also the Unique. The Unique encompasses the attributes and characteristics that exist in only one specific thing, phenomenon, or idea, and does not repeat in any other things, phenomena, or ideas.
−	Let us live on the edge of town, commute to our office occupations (!) and our Carmaggedon actions, let us sabotage the city rather than let the city sabotage us. Let’s live wild, take back the hill forts and Visualize Industrial Collapse.	+	-----
−	-Eldrum	+	==== Annotation 129 ====
−	<br>	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-41.png]]
−	** Direct Action Six Years Down the Road (from issue 7)	+	The ''Private'' category includes specific individual things, phenomena and ideas.
−	The British EF! movement has been dominated over the last six years by campaigns against roadbuilding. These seem to have had results-for instance, roads budgets slashed, miles of media column inches written, and the anti-roads “ecowarrior” enshrined as a cultural stereotype. This article discusses how successful our struggles have been, whilst also attempting to look to the future.	+	The ''Common'' category includes aspects, factors, and relations that exist in many things, phenomena, and ideas. For example, say there are two apples: Apple A and Apple B. Apple A is a specific individual object. Apple B is another distinct, separate object. In that sense, both apples are ''private'' apples, and fall within the ''Private'' category.
−	The wider anti-roads movement has many agendas. Many local groups and activists with no involvement in direct action have also been working harder than ever in the last few years, as have mainstream anti-road groups such as Transport 2000, Alarm UK and Friends of the Earth (FoE). Although we combine on a practical level to “stop the road” with various tactics, underlying objectives may vary from a sustainable transport policy (whatever that means!), to promotion of a lifestyle or an organisation, or to global industrial collapse. To what extent you judge the last five years to have been a success may depend on your objective.	+	However, both Apple A and Apple B share common attributes. For instance, they are both fruits of the same type: “apple.” They may have other attributes in common: they may be the same color, they may have the same basic shape, they may be of similar size, etc. These are ''common'' attributes which they share. Thus, Apple A and Apple B will also fall within the ''common'' category, based on these common attributes.
−	In terms of stopping roads being built, direct activists don’t have a very good record. With some notable recent exceptions--Guildford, for instance-most roads we have fought have been, or are being, constructed. Roadbuilders don’t like publicly backing down to hippy law-breakers, however much we cost them otherwise. Meanwhile, the English roads budget has been sliced from about £23 billion to a few £billion since 1992; nearly 500 out of 600 road schemes have been scrapped since 1989; that’s 500 places untrashed, saved-for now. These are massive cuts; Construction News wrote in May ...the major roadbuilding programme has <em>virtually been destroyed</em>[234]. The important question is: how much did all our bulldozer-diving, fly-posting, phone-calling, tree-sitting, media-tarting, etc. contribute towards this?	+	Apple A and Apple B will also have ''unique'' attributes. Only Apple A has the exact molecules in the exact place and time which compose Apple A. There is no other object in the world which has those same molecules in that same place and time. This means that Apple A also has ''unique'' properties.
−	A broad range of activists have been inspired by direct action protests, and road-blighted local communities have been radicalised. As one East London resident said of the protest against the M11 Link: ...<em>all I was trying to do was defend our local bit of land. I’ve never thought of myselfas political be.fore but this has</em> <em>shown me that all life is politics-if you step out of line.[235]</em> Nimbys have redefined their patch, as described by a local anti-M25 campaigner: <em>Our whole approach is ‘not in my back yard, not in our county, not in our country and not on this planet’</em><em>..[236]</em>. In addition, national groups have been keen to take advantage of the public interest direct action has generated. Anti-roads protest has had a huge impact on the modern green movement.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-42.png|''All private subjects have attributes in common with other private subjects.'']]
−	Today’s EF! movement cut its teeth on fighting roads, and has thus been shaped in many ways, in terms of tactics, attitude, ambitions, and politics. The energy and activity of our movement owes a great deal to anti-road campaigns. It is important to recognise this, whilst acknowledging that different issues may need different approaches.	+	The Common and Private categories have a dialectical relationship. The Common contains the Private, and the Private contains the Common. Every private subject has some attributes in common with other private subjects, and common attributes can only exist among private subjects. Thus every thing, phenomenon, and idea in existence contains internally within itself dialectical relationships between the Private and the Common, and has dialectical Private/Common relationships externally within other things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	The road-building issue has been relatively successful in creating wide debate. The broad relevance of the issue must be a factor; there were so many road plans in the early 90’ s that there was one near most people, and everyone’s life is affected by road transport. Holes in the ozone layer, burning rainforests, and even nuclear power stations, are much less immediate to most British lives. Road building allowed a crucial link to be made between consumer lifestyles and environmental destruction. The struggle against the M11 Link in 1993/4 added a crucial social element-resistance to the destruction done to urban communities by car culture, a mission continued by the subsequent rapid spread of Reclaim The Streets (RTS) actions.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-43.png|''All private subjects have attributes in common with other private subjects.'']]
−	It seems fair to link the rise in direct action with the diminishing road budget (down every year since 1993, the year of the big Twyford actions). The controversy generated by our protests has surely made this budget an expedient target for Treasury cuts, and the roads lobby has had a miserable few years as a result. Of course, the cuts are motivated by the need lo save cash more than anything else, as illustrated by the promotion of privately-financed roadbuilding, such as Design Build Finance Operate (DBFO) schemes, and by Labour’s approval of the Birmingham Northern ReliefRoad (BNRR) this summer.	+	It is also true that every private subject contains within itself ''Unique'' attributes which it does ''not'' share with any other thing, phenomenon, or idea. For example, Mount Everest is unique in that it is 8,850 meters tall. No other mountain on Earth has that exact same height. Therefore, the private subject “Mount Everest” has unique properties which it does not share with any other subject, even though it has other attributes in common with countless other private entities.
−	The government has no idea what to do with the roads programme. In their rhetoric they combine the totally irreconcilable aims of economic growth and “environmental protection”, trying to placate both us and their capitalist mates at the same time. Because protest has made roadbuilding such a tricky issue, the government reacts by doing (and spending) as little as possible-building few roads, hoping we’ll go away, and launching reviews and consultation exercises. The roads budget would not be so small if roads got built without confrontation-and if pressure doesn’t continue, the budget is more likely to grow again.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-44.png|''All things, phenomena, and ideas contain the unique, the private, and the common.'']]
−	The Noisy Defeats, Qiiet Victories scenario suggests that anti-road direct action is very unlikely to stop that particular road, but creates a climate of opinion where other road schemes are more likely to be defeated before they start. It’s hard to quantify any such general link. However, pro-roads lobbyists and local green activists agree that the Twyford protests were a major factor in the scrapping of the East London River Crossing through Oxleas Wood in 1993; and that Newbury had an effect on the decision to drop the Salisbury Bypass because of its “environmental disbenefits”[237] in 1997. In both cases the threat of large-scale direct action was there, and in the case of Oxleas, explicitly spelt out. The threat was coupled with the involvement of a wide range of mainstream groups, and a strong local campaign. (Of course, the threat of direct action often doesn’t stop roads, as illustrated by Newbury )	+	Whenever two individual subjects have a relationship with one another, that relationship is a ''unique relationship'' in the sense that it is a relationship that is shared only by those two specific subjects; however, there will also be common attributes and properties which any such relationship will share with other relationships in existence. This recalls the ''principle of Unity in Diversity and Diversity in Unity'' [see Annotation 107, p. 110]. So, every thing, phenomenon, and idea contains the Common ''and'' the Unique and has unique ''and'' common relationships with other things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	A crucial ingredient in the Noisy Defeats, Quiet Victories scenario is a hungry, broadly sympathetic media. Direct action can only make roads controversial, and news consumers aware, if we get coverage. This has generally worked surprisingly well for us. An important side effect has been the elevation of the roads protester to (sub)cultural icon status, appearing in TV and radio soap operas, in several novels, on children’s TV... the list goes on. These days everyone knows that roadbuilding means dreadlocked hippies up trees, just as foxhunting means saboteurs.	+	This category pair is very useful in developing a comprehensive viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116]. Remember that a comprehensive viewpoint indicates an understanding of the internal and external relations of a given subject. This means that in order to develop a comprehensive viewpoint, you must know the private aspects of each individual relation, component, and aspect of the subject, and you must also study the commonalities of the subject as well. It’s also important to study a variety of ''private'' information sources or data points to look for ''commonalities'' between them. In other words, if you want to have a proper comprehensive viewpoint [see Annotation 113, p. 116] about any subject, you have to find and analyze as many ''private'' data points and pieces of evidence as possible.
−	This media and cultural focus on protester lifestyles and spectacular tactics helps to alienate many people from our struggles, to stereotype activists, and thus to fit the movement into a pigeonhole (or perhaps a tunnel?). Everyone’s heard of Swampy, but few know what he was digging under, or why, or could relate 235 this to their own lives. Our impact on the public consciousness has been large, but few seem prepared to get out of their car, still less to demand an ecological revolution!	+	For example: If a person only ever saw one apple, a green apple, then that person might believe that “all apples are green.” This conclusion would be premature: the person is attempting to make an assumption about the ''Common'' without examining enough ''Privates''. This is a failure of mistaking mistaking the ''Private'' for the ''Common'' which stems from a lack of a comprehensive viewpoint.
−	Let’s turn from hearts and minds to pockets. As tactics have evolved, and our mobilisation abilities grown, our power to inflict economic damage has increased. This damage doesn’t just mean trashing machines etc, but also includes extra security costs, and delays to work-time is money, remember? Although costs we inflict are dwarfed by those caused by an industrial labour dispute, for instance, this is something we’re quite good at. Unfortunately, our enemies are increasingly good at countering it.	+	Now, let’s take a look at an example of how the “Unique” can become “Common,” and vice-versa: 1947 TODAY
−	There are now a host of specialists who have made a career out of trying to contain us. Individuals like John Chapman, site engineer at Twyford and then Newbury, spring to mind; he rates himself as an expert in finishing roads on time despite protests. Andrew Wilson, the Under Sheriff of Lancashire, touts for business (along with sidekick Amanda Webster) as a consultant to beleaguered contractors, with a 24-hour phoneline for those really urgent protest problems. Devon’s Under Sheriff Trevor Coleman, with his recently-launched Major Protest Unit available for hire, is his major competitor.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-45.png]]
−	We think also of Brays Detectives, who have grown from a small firm tailing unfaithfol husbands to become the British specialists in protester surveillance; and Richard Turner Ltd, transformed from cleaners and painters of tall buildings to the market leaders in dishing out violence in doomed treetops. The security sector has of course received a big boost from our struggles, not to mention fencing contractors, manufacturers of fluorescent jackets, and so on. We have created opportunities for a whole new sector of capitalism.	+	''“Unique” things, phenomena, and ideas can become “common” through development processes (and vice-versa).''
−	This is market forces in full effect; just as specialist drainage contractors might be hired to deal with problematical ground conditions, so the anti-anti-roads gang can be hired to thwart those pesky protesters. Contractors are judged by their ability to deal with protests; Tarmac’s pious public declaration that the Newbury Bypass was too environmentally damaging for them (with no chance of securing the contract anyway) was a PR coup. They were assisted by FoE’s foolish public praise for this cynical greenwash, exposed a few months later by Tarmac accepting a Newbury aggregates subcontract! Tarmac, complete with new green logo, have also established an Environment Advisory Panel to fight the PR war for them. Market forces again: our struggles are a challenge for corporations to adapt to, or risk losing business to more sophisticated competitors. As protesterbashing consultant Amanda Webster says: Ihe advent of the protest movement will actually provide market advantages to those contractors who can handle it effectively.[238] We are a market risk. Thus, DBFO contractors now routinely take Protester Risk into account when submitting their bids. One way to avoid being “taken into account” is to spread, diversify, and increase the risk. Companies have found themselves (and their suppliers and subcontractors) increasingly targeted in their offices and distant sites, at AGMs and at directors’ homes, not just on the construction site. Anti-roads battles are also anti-corporate battles; this will become more evident as privately-funded road building continues. The forthcoming important campaign against the BNRR must also aim to do damage to Kvaerner/Trafalgar House.	+	In 1941, a Soviet soldier named Mikhail Kalashnikov was in the hospital after being wounded in the Battle of Bryansk. Another soldier in the hospital said to Kalashnikov, “why do our soldiers only have one rifle for two or three of our men, while the Germans have automatics?” To solve this problem, Kalashnikov designed the AK-47 machine gun. When he finished making the first prototype, it was the only AK-47 in the world.
−	Civil engineers are coping with the lack of British road jobs by diversifying into rail projects, and, more significantly, by seeking more roads business in underdeveloped overseas markets, like Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and South and Central America. This puts our successes in curbing the British roads programme into perspective. In the face of an increasingly globalised corporate hegemony, the importance of linking global struggles, and of sharing information between activist groups world-wide, also increases.	+	At this precise moment, the AK-47 was simultaneously ''Unique'', ''Private'', and ''Common.''
−	Our enemies can’t just accommodate our threat by adapting their business practice, so must attack our movement more directly. The GAndALF trial is very significant here; it is (amongst other things) an attempt to forge a link between extreme animal liberationists and extreme EF!ers. The animal lib movement has long been demonised, largely via the media, in the public eye, and we may soon get more of the same treatment, backed up by legal sanctions. Smear stories about anti-road campaigns have already been around for years.	+	It was ''Unique'' because it was the first and only AK-47 in the world, and no other object in the world had those properties. It was ''Private'' because it was a specific object with its own individual existence. It was ''Common'' — even though it was the only existing prototype — because it shared Common features with other rifles, and with other prototypes. It was the only AK-47 in existence.
−	A classic divide-and-rule tactic to marginalise a radical movement is to incorporate it as much as possible into the mainstream, whilst isolating and discrediting those who refuse to be incorporated. The Guardian thinks that The challenge facing John Prescott...is how to bring such [direct action] protesters back into the political system.[239] Bollocks to that; the challenge facing us is to resist all attempts to artificially divide our movement into reasonable vs. extreme, arid show solidarity for those collared for conspiracy charges or other serious offences.	+	Soon, however, the Soviet Union began manufacturing them, and they became very common. Now there are millions of AK-47s in the world. So, today, that prototype machine gun remains simultaneously ''Unique, Private,'' and ''Common,'' with some slight developments:
−	We want to be a real threat to the malignant cancer of corporate capitalism, rather than a media freakshow or irritating market risk. To do this on even a local level, we must innovate and expand at least as much in the next five years as we have in the last five. Broadening our support base, maximising our subversive edge, linking struggles, taking the fight to the enemy, working in (not with, in) local communities-these, surely, are key factors in making us strong enough to be that threat.	+	It remains ''Private'' because it is a specific object with its own individual existence. Even though it is no longer the only AK-47 in existence, it remains ''Unique'' because it is still the very first AK-47 that was ever made, and even though there are now many other AK-47s, there is no other rifle in the universe that shares that same unique property. It remains ''Common'' because it still shares common features with other rifles and other prototypes, but it now also shares ''commonality'' with many other AK-47 rifles. It is no longer ''Unique'' for having the properties of an AK-47 in and of itself.
−	It’s been an eventful and exciting few years. Much has changed since the first protests at Twyford Down, and we have achieved a lot. As the EF! and anti-road movements develop and diversify, and our opponents gear up their determination to defend their oily industrial interests, we can expect the next few years to be no less eventful.	+	If someone were to destroy Kalashnikov’s prototype AK-47, the ''Private'' of that ''object'' would no longer exist — it would remain only as an ''idea'', and the Private would transform to whatever becomes of the material components of the rifle. The ''Unique'' would also no longer remain specifically as it was before being destroyed. However, there would still be many other AK-47s which would share common features related to that prototype; for instance, that they were all designed based on the prototype’s design.
−	Shortly after the announcement that the Newbury Bypass would be postponed for a year, an exasperated local pro-roader was heard to wonder what the hell will it take to shut these people up?We’re not going to shut up, but must continue to build on our successes, keeping our anger, and our hunger for real change, sharp. We need to show that we won’t be satisfied with deep cuts in the road budget, better public transport, and more cycle lanes, or whatever. We must demand the earth.	+	''Translator’s Note:'' The words “Private,” “Common,” and “Unique” may seem unusual because they are direct translations from the Vietnamese words used to describe these concepts in the original text. Various other words have been used by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other materialist dialecticians when discussing the underlying concepts of these philosophical categories. For instance, in most translations of Lenin, his discussion of such topics is typically translated into English using words such as “universal,” “general,” “special,” “particular,” etc.
−	<quote>	+	Example (from Lenin’s ''Philosophical Notebooks''): “Language in essence expresses only the universal; what is meant, however, is the special, the particular. Hence what is meant cannot be said in speech.” Here, “universal” refers to that which is ''Common'' in all things, phenomena, and ideas, and “special/particular” refers to the ''Private — s''pecific individual things, phenomena, and ideas — along with their ''Unique'' properties.
−	They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago.
−	Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know	+	Here are excerpts from Lenin’s ''Philosophical Notebooks'' discussing these concepts:
−	There was once a road through the woods	+	<blockquote>
		+	(‘It?’ The most universal word of all.) Who is it? I. Every person is an I.
−	Before they planted the trees.	+	Das Sinnliche? It is a universal, etc., etc. ‘This??’ Everyone is ‘this.’
−	It is underneath the coppice and heath	+	Why can the particular not be named? One of the objects of a given kind (tables) is distinguished by something from the rest...
−	And the thin anemones.	+	Leaves of a tree are green; John is a man; Fido is a dog, etc. Here already we have dialectics (as Hegel’s genius recognised): the individual is the universal... And a naïve confusion, a helplessly pitiful confusion in the dialectics of the universal and the particular — of the concept and the sensuously perceptible reality of individual objects, things, phenomena.
−	Only the keeper sees	+	Further, the ‘subsumption’ under logical categories of ‘sensibility’ (Sensibilität), ‘irritability’ (irritabilität) — this is said to be the particular in contrast to the universal!! — and ‘reproduction’ is an idle game.
		+	</blockquote>
−	That, where the ring-doves broods,	+	Marx, too, discussed these concepts using words which are commonly translated into English using different terms. For example, in ''Capital'':
−	And the badgers roll at ease,	+	<blockquote>
		+	The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities, converts the single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part of equivalent – here the linen – into the universal equivalent.
		+	</blockquote>
−	There was once a road through the woods.	+	Here, “general form” refers to the ''commonalities'' of form that exist between all commodities. The “single commodity” refers to a private commodity; a specific commodity that exists separately from all other commodities. And when referring to a “universal equivalent,” Marx is referring to equivalence which such a commodity has in ''common'' with every other commodity.
−	<right>	+	The rest of this passage continues as a materialist dialectical analysis of the ''Private, Common,'' and ''Unique'' features and aspects of commodities:
−	-Rudyard Kipling.
−	<br>The Way Through the Woods
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	[234] Construction News, 15/5/97	+	<blockquote>
		+	The bodily form of the linen is now the form assumed in common by the values of all commodities; it therefore becomes directly exchangeable with all and every of them. The substance linen becomes the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state of every kind of human labour. Weaving, which is the labour of certain private individuals producing a particular article, linen, acquires in consequence a social character, the character of equality with all other kinds of labour. The innumerable equations of which the general form of value is composed, equate in turn the labour embodied in the linen to that embodied in every other commodity, and they thus convert weaving into the general form of manifestation of undifferentiated human labour. In this manner the labour realised in the values of commodities is presented not only under its negative aspect, under which abstraction is made from every concrete form and useful property of actual work, but its own positive nature is made to reveal itself expressly. The general value form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour power. The general value form, which represents all products of labour as mere congelations of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social resumé of the world of commodities. That form consequently makes it indisputably evident that in the world of commodities the character possessed by all labour of being human labour constitutes its specific social character.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[235] The Observer Life, 27/2/94	+	We have chosen to use the terms “Private,” “Common,” and “Unique” in the translation of this text because they most closely match the words used in the original Vietnamese. In summary, it is important to realize that you may encounter the underlying ''concepts'' which are related by these words using various phrasings in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc.
−	[236] The Daily Telegraph, 28/7/97	+	==== b. Dialectical Relationship Between Private and Common ====
−	[237] Department of Environment, Transport, and the Regions News Release #176/Transport, 28/7/97	+	According to the materialist dialectical viewpoint: the Private, the Common and the Unique exist objectively [see Annotation 108, p. 112]. The Common only exists within the Private. It expresses its existence through the Private.
−	[238] Construction News, 28/5/97	+	-----
−	[239] The Guardian, Editorial, 21/5/97	+	==== Annotation 130 ====
−	<br>	+	The ''Common'' can’t exist as a specific thing, phenomenon, or idea. However, every specific thing, phenomenon, or idea exists as a ''private'' subject which has various features in ''common'' with other ''private'' things, phenomena, and ideas. We can therefore only understand the ''Common'' through observation and study of various ''private'' things, phenomena, and ideas. For example, a human can’t perceive with our senses alone the ''Common'' of apples. Only by observing many ''private'' apples can begin to derive an understanding of what all ''private'' apples have in ''common''.
−	** Action Stations! (from issue 9)	+	The Common does not exist in isolation from the Private. Therefore, commonality is inseparable from things, phenomena, and ideas. The Private only exists in relation to the Common. Likewise, there is no Private that exists in complete isolation from the Common.
−	*** Planning direct action	+	-----
−	This article explains some of the things to think about when planning an action. It’s been written for smaller affinity group actions, rather than for mass street mobilisations. It is not intended to be a comprehensive guide that has to be strictly followed, but more a list of things that might need to be sorted out for an action to happen successfully. Remember, in the best tradition of transferable skills and multitasking, many of the ideas mentioned here could be used in other areas of subversive activity. Eco-bank robbers anyone?	+	==== Annotation 131 ====
−	*** Pre-Action	+	No commonality can possibly exist outside of private things, phenomena, and ideas because commonality describes features which different things, phenomena, and ideas share. No private thing, phenomenon, or idea can possibly exist ''absolutely without'' commonality because there is no thing, phenomenon, or idea that shares ''absolutely no features'' with ''any other'' thing, phenomenon, or idea.
−	**** Aims and Activity	+	The Private category is more all-encompassing and diverse than the Common category; Common is a part of Private but it is more profound and more “essential” than the Private. This is because Private is the synthesis of the Common and the Unique; the Common expresses generality and the regular predictability of many Privates.
−	What would you like the action to achieve? It may be education and agitation, economic damage, physical disruption, solidarity with others in struggle, or elements of all of these and more. It is best to clarify which is your priority. This helps identify the activity needed to achieve your aims.	+	-----
−	You may decide on a banner drop, GM crop trashing, machine sabotage, office or site occupation, leafletting, propaganda production or something else completely.	+	==== Annotation 132 ====
−	**** Target	+	The Private encompasses all aspects of a specific, individual thing, phenomenon, or idea; thus it encompasses all aspects, features, and attributes of a given subject, including both the Common and the Unique. In this way, the Private is the synthesis of the Common and the Unique.
−	You may have a target in mind already. If so, think through whether it is possible to achieve the aims wanted with the activity you’ve decided upon.	+	Common attributes require more consideration, effort, and study to properly determine, because multiple private subjects must be considered and analyzed before common attributes can be confidently discovered and understood. They offer us a more profound understanding of the essence [see ''Essence and Phenomenon,'' p. 156] and nature of things, phenomena, and ideas because they offer insights into the ''relationships'' between and within different things, phenomena, and ideas. As we discover more commonalities, and understand them more deeply, we begin to develop a more comprehensive perspective of reality. We begin to develop an understanding of the laws and principles which govern relations between and within things, phenomena, and ideas, and this gives us the power to more accurately predict how processes will develop and how things, phenomena, and ideas will change and mutually impact one another over time.
−	When you have an idea of the aims, activity and target you have an outline plan. That is-you know what you want to achieve, and will do so by taking a certain type of action on a specific target.	+	Under specific conditions, the Common and the Unique can transform into each other [See Annotation 129, p. 128].
−	When you have this you can move onto the first reconnaissance (recce) for the action.	+	The dialectical relationship between Private and Common was summarised by Lenin:
−	**** Primary Reece	+	“Consequently, the opposites (the individual as opposed to the universal) are identical: the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other '''kinds''' of individuals (things, phenomena, ideas) etc.”<ref>''On the Question of Dialectics'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.</ref> [Note: “individual and universal” here refer the same underlying concepts of “Private and Common” (respectively); see translator’s note on p. 132].
−	Even if the action is to be done at night it may be best to make this first recce a daylight one. Use it for gathering ‘hard infonnation’. Get maps, photographs and plans of the target and the surrounding area. Look for likely drop off points for people, entrance and exit points from the target as well as escape routes. Also look for places for the driver to park up away from the target, or circular routes that could be driven whilst the action takes place.	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	**** Primary Plan	+	We must acknowledge and recognize the Common in order to study the Private in our cognitive and practical activities. If we fail to acknowledge the Common, then whenever we attempt to understand and comprehend any Private thing, phenomenon or idea, we will make mistakes and become disoriented. To understand the Common we have to study and observe the Private because the Common does not exist abstractly outside of the Private.
−	After the first recce sit down with your fellow planners in a secure location and work out a basic plan. This should include a route to the target that is free of CCTV, a drop off or park up point, entrance point/s into the target, exit point/s and escape route/s.	+	-----
−	It should be decided when the action will take place, what time of day or night, roughly how long each part will take (getting to the drop off point, drop off point to target, doing the action, re-grouping. getting back to the pick up point and getting away) and how many people will be needed. The plan should also include where the vehicle will be left/taken and possible routes there.	+	==== Annotation 133 ====
−	The plan should also involve communications. This includes who might need to communicate with who and how on the action. This might be between drivers and the people they have dropped off, lookouts and people on the action or a radio scanner monitor and everybody else.	+	Our understanding of Common attributes arise from the observation and study of private things, phenomena, and ideas. At the same time, developing our understanding of Commonalities between and within Private subjects deepens our understanding of their essential nature [see: Essence and Phenomenon].
−	**** Secondary Reece	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-46.png|''Dialectical analysis of private and common characteristics involves observing private subjects to determine common attributes and considering common attributes to gain insights about private subjects.'']]
−	If the action is going to be at night make this second recce at night as well so as to familiarise yourself with the area in the dark. It may be possible to do both recces on the same day, and then have time for planning the action afterwards.	+	It is impossible to know anything at all about the Common without observing Private subjects, and attempting to understand Private subjects without taking into consideration the attributes and features which they have in Common with other Private subjects will lead to incomplete and erroneous analysis.
−	On this second recce look at the target in more depth. Pay particular attention to any security systems. Actually time the different stages of the action. Think about what tools you will need to do the job and what you will do with them afterwards. Check out the approach and escape routes in more detail, and also the vehicle park up/driving route for during the action. They should all be CCTV-free and there should be alternatives in case of unpredictable circumstances such as cops, roadworks or other people parked up.	+	-----
−	Check that the drop off and pick up points are away from buildings and lights, and there is space to turn a vehicle around. If the pick-up point is quite away from the target you may need to decide on a re-group point near the target so everyone leaves together.	+	In addition, we must identify the Common features and attributes of every specific Private subject we study. We must avoid being dogmatic, metaphysical, and inflexible in applying our knowledge of commonalities to solve problems and interpret the world.
		+	-----
−	Decide what communications equipment you will need and test that it works in the area. Think about the likelihood of carrying away evidence on your clothes and look for places on the getaway route for dumping clothes and perhaps tools. Look for possible regroup points (perhaps a mile or so away) where people could meet up if the action goes wrong and everyone has to scatter.	+	==== Annotation 134 ====
−	**** Detailed Action Plan	+	==== Dogmatism and Revisionism in Relation to the Private and Common ====
−	This plan should fill out the basic plan with all the rest of the information needed to carry out the action. It should go from the point people meet to go on the action to the point people disperse at the end. It needs to include precise timings, which routes will be taken, what will be happening at each stage of the action, who will be communicating with who, what tools and other equipment will be needed, what will happen to the vehicle, and what roles need to be filled, e.g. driver, navigator, spotters etc.	+	''Dogmatism'' is the inflexible adherence to ideals as incontrovertibly true while refusing to take any contradictory evidence into consideration. Dogmatism stands in direct opposition to materialist dialectics, which seeks to form opinions and conclusions only after careful consideration of all observable evidence.
−	The plan should also identify places to dump incriminating evidence as well as regroup point/s. If possible try and arrange to have a trusted person on the end of a phone, well away from the area the action is taking place in, who can be called in an emergency. It might be helpful if they had a large detailed map of the area to direct you if you ring up and are lost. Use a secure mobile for this rather than a landline.	+	Dogmatism typically arises when the Common is overemphasized without due consideration of the Private. A dogmatic position is one which adheres to ideals about commonalities without taking Private subjects into consideration.
−	**** Made up Plans	+	Dogmatism can be avoided by continuously studying and observing and analyzing
−	The back up plan/s should be done in the same way as the main action plan. Back ups could be alternative actions to do at the target selected, or new targets entirely.	+	Private subjects and taking any evidence which contradicts erroneous perceptions of “false commonalities” into consideration. This will simultaneously deepen our understanding of the Private while improving our understanding of the Common. For example: Sally might observe a few red apples and arrive at the conclusion: “all apples are red.” If Sally is then presented with a green apple, yet refuses to acknowledge it by continuing to insist that “all apples are red,” then Sally is engaging in dogmatism.
−	Consideration should be given to the conditions in which the initial plan will be abandoned and how the decision to revert to a back up plan will be made and communicated to others.	+	According to Vietnam’s ''Curriculum of the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism For University and College Students Specializing in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought,'' the opposite of Dogmatism is ''Revisionism''. Revisionism occurs when we overestimate the Private and fail to recognize commonalities. In failing to recognize common attributes and features between and within things, phenomena, and ideas, the Revisionist faces confusion and disorientation whenever they encounter any new things, phenomena, and ideas, because they lack any insight into essential characteristics of the subject and its relations with other subjects.
−	**** Running Through the Plans	+	For example: if Sally has spent a lot of time studying a red apple, she may start to become confident that she understands everything there is to know about apples. If she is then presented with a green apple, she might become confused and disoriented and draw the conclusion that she has to start all over again with her analysis, from scratch, thinking: “this can’t possibly be an apple because it’s not red. It must be something else entirely.” Sally can avoid this revisionist confusion by examining the other common features which the red and green apples share before making any conclusions.
−	If possible everyone going on the action should be involved in talking through the plan and making any changes needed. Roles identified should be filled so everyone knows who is doing what. Decisions should be made about what to take (see Checklist for Recces/Actions) and it should be established who is going to acquire the different items and bring them to the meeting point for the action. Everyone should make sure they have any mobile phone numbers or radio channels being used on the action. This is the point to identify any new skills the group will need to use and arrange to practice them in a ‘neutral’ setting rather than in the middle of an action.	+	==== Metaphysical Perception of the Private and Common ====
−	Finally, people should decide how to organise themselves on the action. You could pair off in buddies or split into smaller groups. Doing this makes it easier to look after one another, move quickly and know if anyone is missing. Make sure everybody knows the names and addresses they will be using if arrested.	+	The ''metaphysical'' position attempts to categorize things, phenomena, and ideas into static categories which are isolated and distinct from one another [see Annotation 8,
−	**** Action	+	p. 8]. In this way, the metaphysical perception ultimately fails to properly understand the role of both the Private ''and'' the Common. Categories may be arranged in taxonomic configurations based on shared features, but ultimately every category is seen as distinct and isolated from every other category. This perspective severs the dialectical relationship between the Private, the Common, and the Unique, and thus leads to a distorted perception of reality. As Engels wrote in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'':
−	Before going to the meeting point for the action, run through the checklist of what you will need and give yourself time to get it all together. Be on time to meet up so people aren’t left suspiciously hanging around. It may be best to meet up at a neutral place rather than somebody’s house or the centre of town.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.”
		+	</blockquote>
−	Once on the way to the action, make sure everyone is clear about what they are doing. Try notto stop on the way unless you really have to, and remember that if you do have to stop most petrol stations and town centres have CCTV. All being well, you’ll arrive at your destination without incident. Put any disguises, such as hoods, masks or gloves, on at the last moment, as if you get pulled by the cops it’s good to look straight.	+	In other words, Engels points out that separating and dividing Private subjects into distinct and isolated categories without acknowledging the dialectical nature of the Private and the Common leads to severe limitations on what we can learn about the world. Instead, we have to examine things, phenomena, and ideas ''in relation to one another'', which must include the analysis of Commonalities.
−	If the action is taking place at night it’s best not lo use torches or internal car lights for around 20 minutes before you get dropped off. This allows your eyes to become accustomed to the dark	+	Rather than divide subjects into distinct, separate categories, materialist dialectics seek to examine Private subjects as they really exist: as a synthesis of Unique and Common attributes; and simultaneously to examine commonalities as they really exist: as properties which emerge from the relations of Private objects.
−	Once the action starts try to keep focussed on what you are doing, but aware of where others are and what is going on around you. It’s important to follow the communication structures you have decided on, e.g. making sure you are in earshot/ sight of each other if you need to pass a message on/check everyone is there. Everyone should have a watch that has been synchronised beforehand, so at the designated finishing time for the action people know to re-group and get ready to leave. If there is no finish time maybe have an easily identifiable signal.	+	In our cognitive and practical activities, we must be able to take advantage of suitable conditions that will enable transformations from the Unique and the Common (and vice versa) for our specific purposes.
−	Get together at the re-group point and check everybody is there and okay. This is easier to do if everybody has teamed up into buddy pairs before the action and then sticks together and keeps an eye on each other. If people are missing try and find out what has happened to them. Depending on the type of action and what happened this may be a point where you want to destroy any incriminating evidence.	+	-----
−	If the action doesn’t go according to plan and people are forced to scatter, try to stay with your buddy or group, move fast and keep in mind the direction you are going. If it’s taking place at night you can very easily get disorientated and lost, so before the action have a look at the map and get a clear idea of what direction and where you could head to if this happens.	+	==== Annotation 135 ====
−	The most important thing is to not panic. Remember that many people have got out of the most pear-shaped situations by having a clear head and a grim determination not to be caught!	+	In advancing the cause of socialism, revolutionaries must work to transform our Unique positions into common positions. For instance, the process of developing revolutionary public knowledge [see Annotation 94, p. 93] begins with studying and understanding revolutionary knowledge. Initially, this knowledge will be ''unique'' to the socialist movement. By disseminating the knowledge to the public, we hope to transform this knowledge into ''common knowledge''.
−	If it’s possible get to the pre-arranged meeting point. If that’s not an option get out of the area as quickly as you can, and ring the emergency mobile as soon as it is safe to do so so people know you’re okay.	+	Likewise, we hope to transform other common things, phenomena, and ideas back towards the Unique. For instance, the capitalist mode of production is currently the most common mode of production on Earth. In order to advance humanity towards communism, we must transition the capitalist mode of production from the Common towards the Unique, with the ambition of eventually eliminating this mode of production altogether.
−	*** Post-Action	+	=== 2. Reason and Result ===
−	**** Debrief	+	==== a. Categories of Reason and Result ====
−	Try and have a meeting of all those that were on the action to discuss how the planning and execution of it went. Think about what was good and bad and try and learn lessons for the next action. This is best done in the first few days after before memories get fuzzy and important details are forgotten.	+	The ''Reason'' category is used to define the mutual impacts between internal aspects of a thing, phenomenon or idea, or between things, phenomena, or ideas, that bring about changes.
−	*** Mutual Aid	+	The ''Result'' category defines the changes that were caused by mutual impacts which occur between aspects and factors ''within'' a thing, phenomenon, or idea, or ''externally'' between different things, phenomena, or ideas.
−	Look after yourself and one another. Don’t pressure people to go on actions if they are tired or stressed out. Take time out to relax and don’t get into ‘the struggle is my life’ martyrdom headspace. Address problems and power relations within the group. In the longer term make an effort to learn skills that only one or two people have. This stops lhem being put under unnecessary pressure, and ensures a balance of responsibility.	+	-----
−	*** Security	+	==== Annotation 136 ====
−	Don’t let your security slacken because the action is in the past. The cops have longer memories than we do and if your action is considered serious by the state an investigation into it can continue for months-or even years.	+	''Translation note:'' the Vietnamese words for “reason and result” can also be translated as “cause and effect.” We have chosen to use the words “reason and result” to distinguish materialist dialectical categories from metaphysical conceptions of development.
−	*** Political Understanding	+	In metaphysics [see Annotation 8, p. 8], any given ''effect'' is seen to have a single ''cause''. In materialist dialectics, we instead examine the ''mutual impacts'' which occur within and between subjects through motion and development processes.
−	Analyse the tactical and strategic impact of your actions. Are there better targets or ways of operating? Read our history and learn from current and past struggles, movements and groups. Communication	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-47.png|''Metaphysical vs. Materialist Dialectical conceptions of development.'']]
−	It is sometimes useful to communicate to other people what you have done. Maybe write a short article reporting the action for SchNEWS, BF! Action Update and other newsletters. Consider issuing an anonymous press release/communique to other media. These could be done through an anonymous web based email service set up for this purpose and then only used once. Maybe produce flyposters or stickers about the action and put them up around your local area and send them to other groups. If useful lessons were learnt from the action let other people know by writing a leaflet, discussion document or article.	+	In the metaphysical conception of cause and effect, (A) causes effect (B), then effect (B) causes effect (C), and so on. Materialist dialectics, on the other hand, uses the model of ''development'' (see Annotation 117, p. 119), wherein objects (A) and (B) mutually impact one another, resulting in development (C). (C) will then have relations with other things, phenomena, and/or ideas, and the mutual impacts from these new relations will become the reasons for future results. Consider the following example:
−	*** Broadening the Struggle	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-48.png|''Metaphysical vs. Materialist Dialectical conceptions of frying and eating an egg.'']]
−	Help facilitate other people’s involvement in the resistance. If you have a closed cell/group help interested people set up another group. If you work in an open group let people know what you are doing and how they can get involved. Doing stalls and printing leaflets with your contact details on are two ways of doing this. Continue with your own activity!.	+	In the metaphysical “cause and effect” model, putting an egg in a hot pan is the cause which results in the effect of producing a fried egg. The egg being fried has the effect of the egg now being suitable for eating, which is the cause of the egg being eaten by a hungry person.
−	*** Further Reading	+	This is a simplification of the metaphysical conception of causes and effects, since metaphysics does recognize that one cause can have branches of multiple effects, but the essential characteristic of the metaphysical conception of causality is to break down all activity and change in the universe into static and distinct episodes of one distinct event causing one or more other distinct events.
−	Ecodefence! A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching edited by Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood (Third Edition, Abbzug Press, 1993) Ozymandias Sabotage Skills Handbook Volume 1-Getting Started by Anonymous (Self Published, First Edition 1995). [[http://cafeun-derground.com/Cafesite/Rooms/Ozymandia/sabotage_index][http://cafeunderground.com/Cafesite/Rooms/Ozymandia/sabotage_index]]. html [See [[http://www.reachoutpub.com/osh/][http://www.reachoutpub.com/osh/]]]	+	In contrast, the materialist dialectical model of development holds that every result stems from mutual impacts which occur relationally between things, phenomena, and ideas, and that the resulting synthesis — the newly developed result of mutual impacts — will then have new relations with other things, phenomena, and ideas, and that these ''relations'' will become new reasons for new results through ''mutual impact''.
−	Road Raging: Top Tips for Wrecking Road Building published by Road Alert! (SelfPublished, Second Edition 1998}. http://www.eco-action.org/	+	In this example, the egg and the hot pan will mutually impact each other. The frying pan will become dirty and need to be washed (the result of putting an egg in the frying pan); meanwhile, the egg will become a fried egg, which is fit for human consumption (the result of being cooked in the frying pan). The fried egg will then have a relationship with a hungry human, and this relationship will be a new reason which will lead to further results (i.e., the human eating and digesting the egg).
−	An Interview with an ALF Activist’ in Without a Trace by Anonymous (Self Published pamphlet).	+	So, the key difference between the classical metaphysical conception of causality and the materialist dialectical model of development is that metaphysics focus more on individual events in time whereas materialist dialectics focus on the relations and mutual impacts between things, phenomena, and ideas over time.
−	*** Checklist for RECCES/Actions	+	==== b. Dialectical relationship between Reason and Result ====
−	What follows is a checklist of equipment that may be needed for your recce or action. Use it as it stands or modify it for your particular group, way ofworking or task. Hopefully it will help avoid those awkward moments in the van when somebody asks, “So, who brought the map then?” and everybody looks blank.	+	The relationship between Reason and Result is objective, and it contains inevitability: there is no Reason that does not lead to a Result; and likewise, there is no Result without any Reason.
−	**** Group Tat	+	Reasons cause Results, which is why Reason always comes before Result, and Result always comes after Reason.
−	Transport with a full tank of petrol and keys	+	A Reason can cause one or many Results and a Result can be caused by one or many Reasons.
−	Vehicle breakdown and recovery details!	+	When many Reasons lead to a single Result, the impacts which lead to the Result are mutual between all things, phenomena, and ideas at hand. These mutual impacts can have many relational positions or roles, including: direct reasons, indirect reasons, internal reasons, external reasons, etc.
−	Spare vehicle keys	+	-----
−	Road map	+	==== Annotation 137 ====
−	Detailed map of action area	+	As stated in the previous annotation, Reasons which lead to Results stem from mutually impacting relations between things, phenomena, and ideas. There is no way for one subject to affect another subject without also being affected itself in some way.
−	Communications gear with new batteries	+	Reasons can take many forms, including (but not limited to):
−	Emergency money	+	'''Types of Reasons and Results'''
−	Binliners for post-action evidence disposal First Aid kit	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-49.png|''Direct Reasons stem from immediate relations.'']]
−	As well as this you will need equipment that is specific to the recce or action that you are doing. Amongst other things it may be worth taking binoculars, radio scanner, notebook and pen, flag, camera, and a Global Positioning System (GPS). You’ll also need any tools or props specific to the tasks you are going to do on the action itself, i.e. sabotage tools, crowbar, sticks etc. Remember to take any spares or back up gear like new batteries.	+	'''Direct Reasons''' are Reasons which stem from immediate relations, with no intervening relations standing between the Reason and Result.
−	**** Individual Tat	+	For example, dropping a coffee cup causes an immediate relationship between the cup and the ground, and that relation leads directly to the Result of the coffee cup breaking to pieces.
−	Spare clothes and shoes	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-50.png|''Indirect Reasons have an intervening relationship between the Reason and the Result.'']]
−	<em>Waterproof jacket and trousers</em>	+	'''Indirect Reasons''' are Reasons which have intervening relations between a Reason and a Result.
−	<em>Watch</em>	+	For example, the dropped coffee cup above may have smashed into pieces directly because it hit the ground, but it may also have indirect Reasons. The person holding the cup may have been frightened because she heard a loud noise, and the loud noise was caused by a car backfiring, and the car backfiring was caused by the driver not maintaining his car engine.
−	<em>Masks and other disguises</em>	+	In materialist dialectical terms, the driver’s relationship with his car would be an indirect Reason for the car backfiring; the relationship between the car (which backfired) and the person holding the coffee cup would be the direct Reason for dropping the cup; and the cup’s relationship with the ground would be the direct reason for the cup smashing. At the same time, the driver’s relationship with his car would be an indirect Reason for the Result of the coffee cup smashing to pieces.
−	<em>Gloves</em>	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-51.png|''Internal Reasons stem from internal relationships.'']]
−	<em>Small torch</em> (best with red or blue filter) <em>Compass and unmarked map</em> of the area <em>Food and water</em> (maybe a flask of hot drink) <em>Petrol and emergency money</em>	+	'''Internal Reasons''' are Reasons which stem from internal relations that occur between aspects and factors ''within'' a subject.
		+	For example, if a building collapses because the steel structure ''within'' the building rusts and fails, then that could be viewed as an ''internal Reason'' for the collapse.
−	**** Bag to carry stuff in	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-52.png|''External Reasons stem from external relations.'']]
−	In addition to all this everybody going on the action should have a working knowledge of the whole plan and their role in it.	+	'''External Reasons''' are reasons which stem from external relations that occur between different things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	**** Security	+	For example, if a building collapses because it is smashed by a wrecking ball, then that could be viewed as an ''external Reason'' for the collapse.
−	To have a completely secure action is impossible. Whatever you do there is a risk of getting caught. Security is about taking measures to lessen the chances of this. A few ways people get caught include	+	All of these roles and positions can be viewed ''relatively''. From one viewpoint, a Reason may be seen as internal, but from another viewpoint, it might be viewed as external. For example, if a couple has a disagreement which leads to an argument, the disagreement may be seen as an external Reason from the perspective of each individual within the couple. But to a relationship counselor viewing the situation from the outside, the disagreement may be seen as an internal Reason which leads to ''the couple'' (a subject defined by the internal relationship between the husband and wife) arguing.
−	**** Physical Evidence	+	From one perspective, a government official ordering a building to be torn down may be seen as the direct Reason for the Result of the building being torn down. But from a different perspective, one can see many intervening relations: complaints from local residents may have led to the government official making the order, the order would be delivered to a demolition crew, the demolition crew would assign a crew member to operate a wrecking ball, the crew member would operate the wrecking ball, the wrecking ball would smash the building. All of these can be seen as intervening relations which constitute indirect reasons leading up to the direct Reason of the wrecking ball smashing the building. Choosing the right viewpoint during analysis is critical to make sure that Reason and Result relations are viewed properly and productively, and care must also be taken to ensure that the correct Reasons are attributed to Results (see ''Reason and Result'', p. 138).
−	Diaries, plans, manuals, stuff left at the action by accident or on purpose, communiques, stored information on computers and paper trails from the use of bank cards and the hire or purchase of equipment. Avoid these by always paying cash and destroying or removing everything relating to the action before you go on it. Don’t take anything traceable to you (like ID or engraved jewellery) on actions. Consider using false ID if you are hiring gear. If you must use a computer encrypt all files with PGp.	+	Likewise, a Reason can cause many Results, including primary and secondary Results.
−	**** Forensic Evidence	+	-----
−	Mainly just fingerprints and DNA, but also includes matching up of tool usage, soil samples and footprints. Watch out for prints on things that aren’t immediately obvious like torch batteries. Ensure everything is fingerprint free before the action and wear gloves and hats. Dispose of traceable items like clothes and tools as soon as possible post-action.	+	==== Annotation 138 ====
−	**** Witnesses	+	'''Primary''' Results are Results which are more direct and predictable.
−	People being able to identify you or your vehicle, not just at the action, but also on the way there, or even just leaving your house at a connected time. Includes images from CCTV or police video/stills teams. Plan meet-ups, routes to the action, etc. avoiding cameras and nosy neighbours. Disguise yourselves and wear indistinguishable clothes. Don’t tell people what they don’t need to know.	+	'''Secondary''' Results are Results which are indirect and less predictable.
−	**** Surveillance	+	For example, an earthquake may have ''primary'' Results such as the ground shaking, buildings being destroyed, etc. ''Secondary'' Results from the earthquake might include flights being rerouted from local airports, shortages at grocery stores, etc.
−	Includes phone taps, post and email interception, listening devices, and following you or placing tracking units in your vehicles. Conducted by numerous, and sometimes competing, state and private agencies. Operates at various levels from the fairly routine, which shouldn’t effect your activity that much, through to ones where everything you say and do is listened to and watched. Avoid talking or communicating about anything action related in your home, over email or on a phone. Look out for cops following you on actions.	+	In the motion of the material world, there is no known “first Reason” or “final Result.”
−	<br>	+	-----
−	** Down with the Empire, Up with the Spring! <em>From</em> <em>issue 10)</em>	+	==== Annotation 139 ====
−	<quote>	+	With our current understanding of the universe, it is uncertain what might have caused the creation of all existence. Was it the Big Bang? If so, did the Big Bang have some underlying reason? There is also no way to know if there will ever be a “final Result.” Will the heat death of the universe occur, and if so, will that end all transpiring of relations which would end the cycle of development — of Reasons and Results?
−	After over a decade of radical ecological resistance i11 Britain, it’s time to look back on our actions and look forward to the future.
−	<em>It’s time to CELEBRATE</em> <em>our resistance: digger diving, window smashing, pleasant picnicking, office occupying, hoody wearing, gene-modified [GM] crop trashing, squat cracking, su11 lit</em> <em>Lovin’,</em> <em>machine burning, treeliving-total fucking anarchy. It’s time to AiOURNfor our moment. Over the last decade thousands of species have been wiped out of existence. Vast fiirests-charred stumps. Coral reefs bleached dead by warmed seas. Millions starved within the prison of civilisation. Wild peoples massacred, enslaved. and pauperised. It’s time to</em> STRA TEGISE <em>how to make a real impact on this apocalypse. Look seriously at our strengths and weaknesses and pull together to RE-SIST. The empire</em> <em>is powerful but the spring is</em> <em>growing. It’s a challenge like no other, but with love, luck and hard resolve we can TRANSCEND.</em>	+	As of now, we do not have solid answers to these questions. If and when answers arise, it is possible that the materialist dialectical framework will need to be updated to reflect new scientific knowledge, just as Marx, Engels, and Lenin have updated materialist dialectics in the past [see Annotation 72, p. 68]. What’s important to understand in the meantime is that within our realm of human experience and understanding, for all practical purposes, every Result which we live through and observe has some underlying Reason, and will itself lead to one or more Results.
−	</quote>
−	*** Part One: Recent Pre-History<br>An Insurgency of Dreams	+	Engels said: “we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis [see Annotation 200, p. 192], positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate [are mixed together]. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.”<ref>''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'', Friedrich Engels, 1880.</ref>
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	Defend the Collective Imagination.
−	<br>Beneath the cobblestones, the beach
−	<right>	+	==== Annotation 140 ====
−	--Slogan daubed in Paris, May 1968
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	The radical ecological movement was born from the world-wide revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and ‘70s. Love of the earth and for each other has always been with us, but in that period these feelings exploded across the world in a way they hadn’t for decades. In nearly every land people came together and resisted. In some areas there were decisive victories for people in the battle against power; in others, power won hands down.	+	In the above passage, Engels is simply explaining that since all things, phenomena, and ideas are relationally linked and inter-related [see ''Basic Principles of Materialist Dialectics'', p. 106], the mutual impacts and processes of change which lead to development (the reasons and results which transpire between all things, phenomena, and ideas) are also all linked and inter-related. What might be viewed as a Reason is also a Result of one or more prior Reasons, just as every Result is also a Reason for future Results.
−	The epic struggle of the Vietnamese people and the anti-Vietnam war actions across the world; urban guerrillas across Europe; barricades in Paris; the European squatting movement, the brutal end of the Prague Spring; the rise of the Black Power movement.	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	This upsurge brought with it the (re)birth of the feminist, ecological, indigenous and libertarian ideas that now form the basis of our worldview.	+	Because the relationship between Reason and Result is objective and inevitable, we can’t ignore the relationship between Reason and Result in our perception and practice. In reality, there is no thing, phenomenon or idea that can exist without any underlying Reason or Reasons; and vice versa, there is no Reason that does not lead to any Result.
−	Authoritarian Communism had dominated the radical movements ever since the Bolshevik coun-ter-revolution. After having been physically exterminated in country after country, anar-chist/libertarian groups started once again to grow.	+	-----
−	Industrial development accelerated in the ‘Third World’ following World War IL l1ie global elite extended its tentacles, attempting to assimilate or exterminate tribes and band societies outside its control. In turn indigenous peoples fought back. In the 1970s the American Indian Movement (AIM) re-launched indigenous armed resistance in North America, reminding us that even the capitalist core countries were always colonies.	+	==== Annotation 141 ====
−	Seeing the horrors inflicted on our imprisoned non-human relations-in laboratories, abattoirs and factory farms-the animal liberation movement was born with sabotage at its centre.	+	In political activity, it is important to remember that ''every'' interaction within every relationship will lead to mutual impacts which will cause change and development; in other words, everything we choose to do will be the Reason for one or more Results. We must be aware of unintended or unpredicted Results from our activities.
−	New generations took up the standard of Women’s Liberation, challenging not only the dominant society but also its patriarchal (loyal) opposition that forever sidelined women’s lives in the cause ofthe (male) workers struggle.	+	Reason-Result relationships are very complicated and diverse. Therefore, we must accurately identify the types of Reasons [direct, indirect, internal, external, etc.] so that we can come up with proper solutions which are suitable for the specific situation in both perception and practice. A Reason can lead to many results and, likewise, a Result can be caused by many Reasons, which is why we must have a comprehensive viewpoint and a historical viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116] in our perception of reality so we can properly analyse, solve and apply Reason-Result relationships.
−	After decades of almost universal techno-worship, not least by radicals, many people began to see that the earth was being destroyed, and started trying both to defend it and regain understanding.	+	-----
−	**** ‘The Rise of Environmentalism	+	==== Annotation 142 ====
−	<quote>	+	It is critical to understand that there may be many events or relationships which might be falsely ascribed as Reasons for a given Result (and vice-versa).
−	It’s time for a warrior society to rise up out of the Earth and throw <em>itself in front of the juggernaut of destruction.</em>
−	<right>	+	For example: in 1965, the United States of America officially declared war on North Vietnam after the so-called “Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” in which Vietnamese forces supposedly fired on a United States Navy ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is often described as the “cause” or the “Reason” that the Vietnam War began.
−	-Dave Foreman, US EF! co-founder.
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	The Western environmental movement grew as part of the upsurge, but also in large part as a postscript. When the barricades-both actual and metaphorical-were cleared, a generation of Western radicals looked to new fronts while many others retreated to rural idylls and communes. What they both found was strength in nature and a burning urge to defend it. This early envi-ronmental movement fundamentally challenged the established conservation organisations which for so long had acted as mere (ineffective) park keepers.	+	However, the real “Reason” why the USA declared war on North Vietnam had to do with the underlying contradiction between capitalist imperialism and communism in Vietnam. This contradiction had to be resolved one way or another. The United States of America willfully decided to try to negate this contradiction by instigating war, and this was the true reason the war began. In fact, the so-called “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” never even occurred as described — the attack on the USA’s ship never really occurred. A document released by the Pentagon in 2005 revealed that the incident was completely fabricated. So, saying that the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” was the Reason for the war is nonsensical, since it’s an event which never even occurred in reality.
−	At sea a raw energy propelled tiny dinghies to confront the nuclear and whaling industries. On land new organisations were forming, fighting toxic waste dumps, logging, mining and other es-sentials of industry. Scientists were uncovering huge cataclysms facing the earth and-to elite horror-breaking ranks. This environmentalism had a threatening potential that had to be defused--an army of hacks, cops, advertisers and ideologues got to work.	+	Understanding the true nature of Reason and Result is very important for making decisions and choosing a path forward in political action. Attributing the wrong Reason to a Result, or misunderstanding the Results which stem from a Reason, can lead to serious setbacks and failures. Therefore, it is vital for revolutionaries to properly identify and understand the ''actual'' Reasons and Results which drive development.
−	Capital and state both attacked environmentalists while simultaneously funding counter-tendencies to steer the movement away from confrontation and towards co-operation. This carrot and stick approach co-opted many; groups which had looked promising succumbed to respecta-bility and corporate funding. Environmentalists were given a seat at the table but the talk was not of nature but of compromise, techno-fix and corporate greenwash. Assimilation.	+	=== 3. Obviousness and Randomness ===
−	In fact, as early as 1972, The <em>Ecologist</em> magazine (at the time printing articles on the links be-tween ecology and anarchy) carried an editorial entitled “Down with Environmentalism” saying: <em>We must repudiate the term ‘environmental.’ It is too far gone to be rescued.[240]</em>	+	==== a. Categories of Obviousness and Randomness ====
−	All through the ‘70s environmental groups were gaining increased support and membership lists were expanding dramatically. By building mass based organisations environmentalism was split into campaigners and supporters. Bigger offices and bigger salaries were needed to manage the movement. This division-a creation of scale-acted (and still acts) as a terrible internal pres-sure crushing the radical content and practical usefulness of groups.	+	-----
−	Those attracted to campaign jobs were often exactly the wrong class of people (inclined to pa-per pushing rather than physical action) while most of the support their supporters gave was the annual return of cheques and membership forms-conscience-salving exercises. When serious people got involved in groups their action was often curtailed by other campaigners (or the cop in their own head) reminding them that it could alienate the public and thus cut into membership and funding.	+	==== Annotation 143 ====
−	This process was as prevalent in what was then the most radical ofthe environmental groups-Greenpeace (GP). In 1977 Paul Watson one of GPs directors (who became an icon when he drove a dinghy straight into the path of a whaling harpoon) was heading an expedition to the Newfoundland ice floes. At one point he grabbed a club used to kill baby harp seals and threw it into the waters. The sealers dunked and nearly drowned him yet worse was to come on return to the office-betrayal. Throwing the club into the sea was criminal damage and he was told by a faceless lawyer, I don’t think you understand what Greenpeace is all about. He was expelled from the corporation.	+	In Vietnamese, the words for these categories are “tất nhiên” and “ngẫu nhiên,” which respectively translate to “obvious” and “random.” In socialist literature, various words have been used by different authors to convey the underlying meaning of these categories (Engels, for instance, used the terms “necessary” and “accidental” to mean “obvious” and “random,” respectively). We have chosen to use words which closely match the Vietnamese used in the original text, but the reader should be aware that these same concepts may be described using many different words in various English translations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, etc.
−	Watson went on to found the whaler-sinking. Sea Shepherd (more of them later) while Greenpeace just got bigger, gaining millions of members while all the time becoming more symbolic and less of a threat. As GP’ s founder Bob Hunter said with an air of depression. Nothing could be done to stop it.from growing. It’ll keep growing and growing, a juggernaut that is out of control.[241]	+	The ''Obviousness'' category refers to events that occur because of the essential [see ''Essence and Phenomenon'', p. 156] internal aspects of the material structure of a subject. These essential internal characteristics become reasons for certain results under certain conditions: the Obvious ''has'' to happen in a certain way, it ''can’t'' happen any other way.
−	Meanwhile the global attack on the wild was left largely unabated. Christopher Maines in Green <em>Rage</em> put it well:	+	-----
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 144 ====
−	Like the Youth movement, the women’s movement, and rock <em>and roll, the eeform environmental movement suffered from tsown success. It entered the ‘70s as a vague criticofour society and exited as an institution, wrapped in the consumerism andpolitical ambitions it once condemned. In their drive to win credibility with the government agencies and corporations... the new professional environmentalists seemed to have wandered into the ambiguous world of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where it was increasingly difficult to tell the farmers from the pigs.[242]</em>
−	</quote>
−	**** The Birth of Earth First!	+	''Obviousness'' can only apply to material subjects in the material world and results which are certain to happen based on the material laws of nature. Obviousness arises from the internal aspects, features, and relations of physical objects. Paper ''will'' burn under certain specific conditions, due its internal material structure. If those conditions (i.e., temperature, the presence of oxygen, etc.) exist, then paper ''will'' catch fire predictably. In other words, paper will ''obviously'' burn under certain circumstances due to its internal composition,.
−	<quote>	+	The ''Randomness'' category refers to things that happen because of external reasons: things that happen, essentially, by chance, due to impacts from many external relations. A Random outcome ''may'' occur or it ''may not'' occur; a Random outcome could happen ''this'' way or it could happen ''that'' way.
−	<em>So, from the vast sea of raging moderation, irresponsible compromise, knee-jerkrh etorical Sierra Club dogma, and unknowing (OK, sometimes knowing) duplicity in the systematic destruction of the earth, a small seed of sanity sprouts: Earth First!</em>
−	<right>	+	-----
−	--Howie Wolke, EF! co-founder.
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	In 1980 five friends hiked into the desert. All long-term activists sick of careerism, legality, and failure, they knew a new kind of group was needed. One that would break the law, push open the envelope, hit the corporations where it hurt (in the pocket), and most of all never EVER compromise in defence of mother earth. Around their camp fire Earth First! was born.	+	==== Annotation 145 ====
−	EF!s first act was one of sarcastic symbolism-and defection. In a land full of memorials to the genocidal victor, EF! raised a plaque commemorating Victoria, an Apache who wiped out a mining camp.	+	As we discussed above, paper ''will'' burn if it reaches a certain temperature — that much is ''obvious''. If your friend holds paper over the flame of the lighter, the paper ''will'' burn — that’s ''obvious''. But you can’t be certain whether your friend will actually hold the paper to the flame or not. This demonstrates ''Randomness''. Whether your friend will ultimately hold the paper to the flame or not depends on an external relation which is not defined by the internal structure of the paper, and which can’t be predicted with the same predictability as obvious events which are rooted in internal material aspects.
−	**** Victoria, Outstanding Preservationist and Great American.	+	==== b. Dialectical relationship between Obviousness and Randomness ====
−	<quote>	+	Obviousness and Randomness both exist objectively and play an important role in the motion and development of things and phenomena. Obviousness plays the decisive role.
−	This monument celebrates the 100<sup>th</sup> Anniversary of the great <em>Apache chief Victoria’s, raid on the Cooney mining camp near Mogollon, New Mexico, on April 28, 1880.</em> <em>Victoria strove to protect these mountainsfrom mining and other destructive activities of the white race. Ihe present Gila Wilderness is partly a fruit of his efforts. Erected by the New</em> <em>Mexico Patriotic Heritage Society.</em>
−	</quote>
−	The next action EF! pulled off was at the Glen Canyon Dam, where a three hundred foot poly-thene banner was unfurled down the side of the dam, looking for all the world like a vast crack opening up. lhe demonstrators chanted RAZE THE <em>DAM.</em> People had campaigned in the past against new dams but no one had ever had the audacity to campaign to pull down those already built. lhe Glen Canyon Dam in fact held special significance. In a sickening deal the big environmental groups had accepted the damming of the canyon in return for the cancellation of a dam elsewhere. lhis was exactly the kind of compromise EF! was founded to resist.	+	-----
−	Thus from the very beginning EF!ers set themselves not only the task of defending the last fragments but of reversing the process: pulling down the dams and the powerlines. EF! launched its proposal for a network of vast wilderness preserves-half of Nevada for instance would be declared <em>off limits to industrial human civilieation, as preserves for the free flow of naturalprocesses.</em> EF! didn’t want people to wait for the state to set them up. Instead the people themselves should make them happen-direct action. If logging needed stopping-stop it, blockade it, trash the machines. If a road needed digging up--DIG IT UP! This militancy was a touchstone of even early EF!, but it wasn’t just its militancy that made it stand out globally (though it shocked Americans). All around the world groups were turning to direct action in environmental struggles. In both Britain and Germany, for example, anti-nuclear mass action had been growing apace. What was unique in the environmental movement was EF!s militant biocentrism.	+	==== Annotation 146 ====
−	The wilderness proposals preamble stated, the central idea of EF! is that humans have no divine right to subdue the Earth, that we are merely one of several million forms of life on this planet. We reject even the notion of benevolent stewardship as that implies dominance. Instead we believe that we should be plain citizens of the Land community.	+	Obviousness plays the decisive role simply because Obviousness is far more predictable and the laws which govern material phenomena are essentially fixed. We can’t change the laws of physics, the nature of chemical reactions, etc.
−	Echoing The Ecologist’s earlier denunciation of environmentalism Dave Foreman goes one step further.	+	Obviousness and Randomness exist in dialectical unity; there is no pure Obviousness, nor pure Randomness. It is obvious that Randomness shall occur in our universe, however Obviousness clears a path through this Randomness.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	Wilderness is the essence of everything we’re after. We aren’t an environmental group. Environmental groups worry about environmental health hazards to human beings, they worry about clean air and waterfor the benefit ofpeople and ask us why we’re so wrapped up in something as irrelevant and <em>tangential and elitist as wilderness.</em> Well, I <em>can tell you a wolf or a redwood or a grizzly bear doesn’t think wilderness is elitist. Wilderness is the essence of everything. It’s the real world.[243]</em>
−	</quote>
−	Within a year EF! moved beyond symbolism to direct struggle. Around the country a combination of civil disobedience and sabotage halted logging and oil drilling. Groups were setting up all over. What many in industry had originally written off as a joke was quickly becoming a nightmare. In 1985 EF!ers published <em>Ecodefence</em><em>:</em> <em>A</em> <em>Field Guide to kfonkeywrenching.</em> This was unashamed, heads held high 350-page manual on how to trash pretty much any machine with which civilisation attacks the wild. Written by over 100 contributors to the <em>Earth First! Journal,</em> this book was information for action.	+	==== Annotation 147 ====
−	Diggers trashed, forests occupied, billboards subverted, logging roads dug up, trees spiked, offices invaded, windows smashed, snares disabled, computers scrapped-EF! was on the move. But so now was the state.	+	Our universe is incredibly complex and there are many different potential external relations which could impact any given situation, such that some degree of Randomness is always present in any situation; in other words, the presence of Randomness can be seen as Obvious.
−	The FBI wasn’t about to let a crew of hippies, feminists, cowboys. and desert anarchists continue to hammer company profits. The late ‘80s onwards saw a wave of reaction that included infiltra-tion, set ups, conspiracy trials, raids, corporate directed anti-environmental hate groups and even assassination attempts on ‘leading’ EF!ers. This was a continuation of the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Insurgency Programme) previously unleashed in the ‘60s/‘70s upsurge against the Weather Underground, the New Left, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers and the Puertorican liberation movement. Now some of the same agents that had destroyed those movements were overseeing the attack on EF!	+	In 1922, Ho Chi Minh identified objective internal characteristics of the working class of France and its colonies. He wrote: “The mutual ignorance of the two proletariats gives rise to prejudices. The French workers look upon the native as an inferior and negligible human being, incapable of understanding and still less of taking action. The natives regard all the French as wicked exploiters. Imperialism and capitalism do not fail to take advantage of this mutual suspicion and this artificial racial hierarchy to frustrate propaganda and divide forces which ought to unite.”
−	Pre-existing divisions over philosophy, tactics, and, not least, personality were exacerbated by the crisis that engulfed EF! A split begun to emerge between supporters of EF! co-founder Dave Foreman and long-term California organiser Judi Bari. All the while both were under serious corporate/state attack. Foreman was woken up one morning with an FBI gun to his head and charged with conspiracy to down power lines. Bari was carbombed.	+	In this example, Ho Chi Minh identifies prejudice as an obvious outcome of mutual ignorance. The prejudice arises as a matter of course from internal objective aspects of the two proletarian groups. As long as French and native workers remain ignorant of one another, prejudice will arise. The specific forms which this prejudice will take, however, and their resulting impacts and developments, will be more or less Random because there are many external factors (including the external impacts of the capitalist class, which seeks to take advantage of these prejudices) which can’t be predicted. Therefore, it is necessary for political revolutionaries to account for both random and obvious factors in confronting such prejudice. Ho Chi Minh’s suggestion for overcoming these difficulties was concise and to-the-point: “Intensify propaganda to overcome them.” Only by negating the internal aspects of mutual ignorance through education and propaganda could communists hope to negate the resulting prejudice.
−	The split and the state attacks seriously weakened US EF! and it would never fully recover its accelerating drive. Nevertheless it did survive and at the beginning of the ‘90s it was still the kickass environmental movement of the developed world. It’s actions, ideas and attitude would inspire a massive wave of aclion across the Atlantic.	+	As Engels said: “One knows that what is maintained to be necessary [''obvious''] is composed of sheer accidents, and that the so-called accidental [''random''] is the form behind which necessity hides itself — and so on.”<ref>''Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy'', Friedrich Engels, 1886.</ref>
−	**** EF! Crosses the Atlantic	+	Obviousness and Randomness are not static properties: Randomness and Obviousness continuously change and develop over time. Under specific conditions, Obviousness and Randomness can transform into each other: Obviousness can become Random and Randomness can become obvious.
−	The climate in Britain in 1991 was similar to that which had given birth to US EF! Organisations that had started off quite radical in the ‘70s were well and truly assimilated. Big offices, good salaries. lobbying, and little else.	+	-----
−	Back in 1972, in its first ever newsletter, FoE UK stated:	+	==== Annotation 148 ====
−	<quote>	+	Randomness can be introduced to an obvious situation: it may be obvious that a mineshaft will collapse, until human beings come along and intervene by repairing the structural integrity of the mineshaft. It may seem Random whether a city’s economy will grow or shrink, until a volcano erupts and buries the city in lava and ash, making it obvious that the economy will not grow because the city no longer exists.
−	We want to avoid the centre-periphery situation, whereby an organisation’s forces and resources tend to be drawn to the centre, to ‘head office’ while patently the strength of the group ... is derivedfrom experience in the field.[244]
−	</quote>
−	By the ‘90s <em>FoE</em> had undeniably failed to avoid the “centreperiphery situation” (to put it politely). Greenpeace was even more centrist-its local groups simply fundraisers.[245] The late ‘80s had seen a massive increase in support for environmental groups yet nothing real was happening. Something more radical-and practical-was needed.	+	Most situations are in a flux, as Obviousness and Randomness dialectically develop and change over time, with outcomes becoming more or less obvious or Random over time. It is vital that we, as political revolutionaries, are able to distinguish between Obviousness and Randomness and to leverage this understanding to our advantage.
−	On the south coast in the seedy kiss-me-quick seaside town of Hastings some sixth form students were plotting. They were bored out of their minds by A-levels and disillusioned with OE. In contrast the biocentric approach of US EF! and its victorious direct action tactics were inspiring. The wild was calling...	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	They formed Britain’s first EF! group with a handfol of people and no resources. Within a few months they would be making headlines-for now they spraypainted Hastings. A year later they had kick-started the biggest wave of ecological defence Britain has seen since the vanquishing of the peasantry... [246]	+	Basically, in our perception and reality, we have to base our plans, strategies, and actions as much as possible on the Obvious, not the Random. However, we must not ignore Randomness, nor try to separate the Obvious from the Random. When faced with situations which seem very Random, we must find ways to develop Obviousness. When faced with what seems obvious, we must keep an eye out for Randomness. Obviousness and Randomness can mutually transform, so we need to create suitable conditions to hinder or promote such transformation to suit our purposes.
−	So as to cover the last decade relatively briefy I’m going to have to paint with big strokes. The time covered divides (pretty) neatly into three overlapping stages:	+	-----
−	- Earth First! Birth Period (1991–1993)	+	==== Annotation 149 ====
−	- Land Struggle Period (1993–1998)	+	We must always remember that no situation is purely obvious, nor purely Random, and to take this into account in all of our planning and activity.
−	- Consolidation and Global Resistance Period (1998–2002)	+	A skyscraper made from heavy steel beams may seem quite sturdy and stable; it may appear obvious that the structure will remain stable and sound for decades. However, it is still important for engineers to periodically ''confirm'' that the steel is still sound through testing and observation. Engineers must also be prepared for Random events like lightning, earthquakes, storms, etc., which may affect the seemingly obvious structural integrity of the building.
−	**** EF! Birth Period (1991–1993)	+	Likewise, when faced with extremely complex situations which seem completely Random, we must seek out (or bring about) the obvious. Wildfires are extremely chaotic and difficult to predict. However, firefighters can rely on certain obvious patterns and natural laws which govern the spread of fire. By digging trenches, lighting counter-fires, spraying water, and other such actions, firefighters can bring wildfires under control. This illustrates how humans are able to make situations less Random by bringing about an increasing amount of Obviousness over time through practical activity.
−	Earth First! hit the headlines when two EF!ers flew from Britain to the rainforests of Sarawak. At the time the Penan tribes were barricading logging roads and standing up to the corporate attack on their home-the forest. The two joined the blockades and for their efforts were locked up for two months in a stinking Malay jail. This news story went through the roof-much to the annoyance of both the Malaysian government and the UK’s leading environmental groups.	+	=== 4. Content and Form ===
−	FoE Central Office publicly denounced EF!, arguing that by taking action in Sarawak the EF!ers AIDED the Malaysian government who wanted to paint all opposition as emanating from the West. This position ignored that the Penan had requested that people join them and that the Malaysian government was unlikely to halt the destruction without increased PHYSICAL opposition. As one of the imprisoned EF!ers said:	+	==== a. Categories of Content and Form ====
−	fa our absence from Britain we had been tried and convicted by the mainstream groups. They have convicted us of a crime they themselves could never be accused of action. With friends like these, the Earth doesn’t need enemies.	+	The ''Content'' category refers to the sum of all aspects, attributes, and processes that a thing, phenomenon, or idea is made from.
−	This was the first of many public attacks on the new generation of radical ecological activists by the headquarters of the environmental NGOs. The difference between the two tendencies was shown in July 1991. While the Sarawak Two were in prison the annual meeting of the G7 (world’s seven leading state powers) came to London. EF!ers with no money and few numbers carried out a number of actions-banner drops outside and disruption of meetings inside. The NGOs submitted reports. This mobilisation by EF! was small but a portent of things to come. The next time the G7 came to Britain the radical ecological movement would field not dozens but thousands...	+	The ''Form'' category refers to the mode of existence and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. ''Form'' thus describes the system of relatively stable relationships which exist internally within things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	Thanks to the Sarawak campaign the Hastings lot quickly began to make links with people around the country from a variety of pre-existing networks: Green Anarchist, the (embryonic) Rainforest Action Network, ALF, Green Student groups, peace groups, local FoE, and the hunt saboteurs. Out of a generation largely consisting of students and doleys disillusioned with mainstream environmentalism, groups sprang up in London, Brighton, Glastonbury, Liverpool, Oxford, Manchester, and Norwich.	+	-----
−	**** Roads, Rebels and Rainforests	+	==== Annotation 150 ====
−	Inspired by abroad the handful of new activists went about importing the North American/Australian model. What this meant was a combination of non-violent civil disobedience, me-dia stunts, and monkey-wrenching. Actions were organised as part of international rainforest days co-ordinated in the US and Australia. Australia had seen some recent big dock blockades and the tactic was quickly brought to Britain.	+	Content and Form can be difficult to comprehend at first because the ways in which Content and Form manifest and interact can vary wildly depending on the subject being discussed and the viewpoint from which the subject is being considered.
−	On 4<sup>th</sup> December 1991, in what was EF!‘s first really successful action, 200 people invaded Tilbury docks in London. That month the EF! Action Update also reported under the headline ‘Re-claim the Streets’ a small roadblock done by South Downs	+	<blockquote>
		+	Content represents the component things, materials, attributes, features, etc., which, together, make up a thing, phenomenon, or idea. You can think of it as the “ingredients” from which a subject is made.
−	EF! More was to be heard of Reclaim the Streets...	+	Form refers to a stable system of internal relationships which compose a thing, phenomenon, or idea, as well as the mode of existence and development [see Annotation 60, p. 59] of those relations.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Tilbury was followed by a 400-strong protest at Liverpool docks.	+	Remember that from a dialectical materialist perspective, everything in our universe is defined by internal and external relations. If a thing, phenomenon, or idea has internal relations which are ''relatively'' stable, then it has a Form.
−	<quote>	+	We would not call all of the assorted ingredients which are used to make a cake “a cake” unless they have been assembled together and baked into the stable form which we interpret as “a cake.” Once a portion is removed from the cake, the portion itself assumes a new stable form which we call “a slice of cake.” The slice of cake will maintain its relatively stable form until being eaten, discarded, or otherwise transitioning into some other form. It is only considered a “slice of cake” for as long as it maintains its own specific stable form.
−	On the first day we stormed the fences, occupied cranes, piles of dead rainj(Jrest, observation towers and machinery; we <em>hung banners off everything and blocked the busy dock road... Police relations were good; because offull liaison work, violence on both sides was prevented and we all got on like good mates. This was helped with good legal backup, and non-violence training from experienced CND activists... People stayed up the cranes all night... The second day saw a complete change in attitude by the authorities. They’d let us have ourfun on the first day and they were determined that the ship would dock on the Wednesday. Underfear of violence, our press office got the media straight down there-our strongest weapon againstfoul play, but al-ready the police were wading in and holdingpeople in a big cage.[247]</em>
−	</quote>
−	The description of state force as “foul play” and our greatest protection from it being the media illustrates well the startlingly naive views held by many at the time. The dockworkers refused to unload the shipment while EF!ers were still running around in danger. Eventually the police cleared the dock and the shipment was unloaded.	+	Stability itself is also ''relative'': a “spray” of water may only last for a few seconds but we can still conceive of it as having Form. On the other hand, a mountain has a set of stable internal relations (a Form) which might last for millions of years.
−	February saw the first anti-road direct action at Twyford Down. FoE held a symbolic chaining up of the site which they ended when injucted. At the request of the TWyford Down Association, EF!ers from all over the country started a wave of site actions, sabotage, and blockades.	+	We can think of Form as having two aspects: inner Form and outer Form.
−	Offices started to be targeted around this time with an example being the chaining up of the Malaysian airline office by 29 activists in solidarity with 31 Penan on trial.[248]	+	''Inner form'' refers to the internal stable relations which we have already discussed.
−	While the national days of actions at Twyford continued down south, up north the campaign to stop peat extraction from Thorne Moors hotted up. On Monday 13<sup>th</sup> April £100,000 of damage was done to Fisons machinery. A telephone call to the media claimed the action for Earth First! The FoE central office quickly condemned the action on television.	+	''Outer form'' is how an object “appears” to human senses.
−	In many ways the first few months of 1992 set a pattern of activism prevalent for much of the next decade-a cycle of national actions, anti-road campaigns, office occupations, nighttime sabotage and street blockades.	+	In this book, we are primarily concerned with the ''inner Form'' of subjects, however, in other contexts (such as art and design), the ''outer Form'' plays a more prominent role.
−	The South Downs hosted Britains first EF! gathering in April 1992. Around 60 people turned up to discuss direction, aims and plan future actions. While EF! was quite unified at the time, divi-sions were definitely present. The recent Moors sabotage and unwise interviews to the press con-cerning the future environmental use of explosives caused quite a stir. Most agreed that if EF! itself was seen to do criminal damage then it would put groups at risk. A line of “We neither condemn nor condone” was agreed upon. For some this was simply a legal technicality-in reality EF!ers would still be doing damage. For the less militant faction it was seen as meaning civil disobedience was the tactic for EF! while sabotage was secondary, separate, and something done by others. Though I’d still say that the wet faction was wrong, it was understandable given the widespread paranoia following the then-recent Arizona conspiracy trial and the FBI bombing of EF!ers.	+	Now, let’s identify some of the common viewpoints from which Content and Form might be considered.
−	In this period EF! was primarily involved nationally in two campaigns: rainforests and anti-roads. While similar tactics were used for both they had fundamentally different characters. While rain-forest days of action would trail off, anti-road action would get bigger and bigger.	+	'''Material vs. Ideal'''
−	While the rainforest actions were often very successful-on their own terms-they rarely lasted more than a day. On May 11<sup>th</sup> ’92 over 100 invaded the yard of Britain’s biggest mahogany importer. Though a successfol action in itself, it remained in the whole a media stunt. The site remained operative, the offices weren’t trashed, and next day it opened up again as usual. We all felt empowered by the action, but there was a different feeling at Twyford Down. At Twyford the movement could engage in protracted physical resistance. It was a land struggle. You could feel the land you were struggling over with your hands and your soul. When people started to move onto the land itself they connected with it, became part of it. Standing in the sun, grass between your toes looking to the diggers on the horizon the rage grew. It wasn’t a single issue-it was war.	+	When discussing the ''material'' — i.e., ''objective'' systems and objects<ref>See Annotation 10, p. 10 and Annotation 108, p. 112.</ref> — discussion of Content and Form is more straightforward.
−	On an entirely practical level it was a focus; an easily accessible battleground local groups could drive their vans to. In this struggle EF! grew and evolved. Most actions through ’92 were done by between 10–50 people and commonly resulted in minor arrests for breach ofthe peace. Sabotage commenced almost immediately. The site was regularly flooded by redirecting the River ltchens water and machines were wrenched. Just as it was new for us so too it was for the state, who were suprisingly unprepared. In these first few months it would be case of running onto site, climbing a crane or locking onto a digger. An hour or so later the state’s most regular foot soldier would arrive-Bill Aud, a copper with a sideline in mobile disco. lhe Camps Begin...	+	'''Material'''
−	The need for groups to have somewhere to sleep after travelling distances for days of action was the catalyst that set up Britains first ever ecological direct action camp. A traveller site had long graced one side of the hill, but in June an obviously separate action camp was set up on the don-gas-an area of threatened downland furrowed deep with sheep droves. This became a base for action against the road-building that was going on further down the hill. On the dongas a real feeling of tribe developed as many more were attracted to the site by summer beauty and direct action.	+	With material things and phenomena, the ''Content'' is what the thing is made out of: the physical parts, aspects, attributes, and processes that compose the subject. For example, the Content of a wooden chair might be the wood, nails, paint, and other materials which are used to create the chair.
−	While some travellers had early on got involved in EF!,[249] it was at Twyford that a real mix started to develop between (predominately urban) EF!/Animal Lib types and (predominately rural) travellers. Each threw different ingredients into the campfire cauldron (of veggie slop). The activists-action techniques; the Travellers-on the land living skills. Teepees and benders sprung up, machines were trashed. This crossover would propel ecological direct action into a potent cycle of struggle with big numbers and big successes.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-53.png|''A material object can be described in terms of content, inner form, and outer form.'']]
−	However while both sides complemented each other it would be ridiculous to iron over the very real family squabbles. As the summer progressed there was tension within the Dongas Tribe over what offensive actions should be taken and what defensive measures should be put in place. Discussion of how to resist the (obviously imminent) eviction was silenced with the classic hippy refrain: If you think negative things, negative things will happen. It was even suggested, in a basically religious formulation, that mother earth would simply not allow the destruction of the dongas to happen. This tendency grew as the months went on until by autumn serious conflict reared up. Following a threat by security to repeat an earlier arson attack on the camp in retaliation for site sabotage, offensive action was actually banned by a “meeting of the tribe:’ Hippie authoritarian pacifists[250] practically banished EF!ers who had been involved from the start. Predictably, however, the state wasn’t standing idle-it was preparing.	+	The ''inner Form'' of a material object refers to ''stable internal relations'' which compose the object. The stable relationship between the wood and the nails — the nails bind the wood together, the wood is cut in certain patterns, the paint adheres to the wood through physical and chemical bonds, etc. ''Stability'' is, again, relative — over time, the paint will chip and flake, the wood will rot, the nails will rust, etc. Dialectical processes of change will eventually reduce the chair into something other than a chair (i.e., through rotting, burning, disassembly, etc.), but as long as the internal relations maintain the Form of a chair we conceive of it as a chair.
−	Elsewhere the campaign against roads was building apace. New road openings were disrupted and the newspapers were already talking about the “next Twyford”-the battle for Oxleas Wood in London. Across the country the government boasted it was building the biggest road programme since the Romans. These roads smashed through some ofthe most biologically im-portant areas-SSSis (Special Sites of Scientific Interest) and so it was obvious that by fighting roads one could take on Thatcher’s Great Car Economy, while directly defending important habitat. Direct action was starting to spread beyond roads. At Golden Hill in Bristol an impressive community resistance against the destruction of local green space by Tesco, resulted in arrests and mass policing. A new air was definitely abroad. Back at Twyford the inevitable eviction came brutally on the 9<sup>th</sup> ofDecember-Yellow Wednesday. A hundred flouro-jacketed Group 4 security guards escorted bulldozers in to trash the camp. Throwing themselves in front of the landrovers and machines those in the camp slowed the eviction-suffering arrests and injuries. Two were rendered unconscious by cops; lines of coiled razor wire crossed the down. The drama appearing live on television brought local ramblers, environmentalists, kids, and the simply shocked to the site, many of whom without hesitation joined the resistance. Others came from around the country, making the eviction last three days. The eviction was an important moment-deeply depressing to most involved, it nevertheless captured the imagination of thousands.	+	The ''outer Form'' of a material object refers to the way it appears to human consciousness. Its shape, aesthetics, etc.
−	Many, particularly the media, who like a nice neat storywill see the move of the Dongas Camp as the closing act of the Twyford drama, but the battle has not ended-it’s beginning. Ifthey think they can stop us with threats and violence, we’ve got to make damn sure they don’t. Hunt sabs regularly get hassle but carry on regardless-let’s learn from their example. Obstruction on site needs to be co-ordinated and supported. The number of days work lost is what counts. To broaden it out nationally, every Tarmac and associated subcontractors office, depots and sites in the country should be targeted. Every leaflet produced should contain the infor-mation neededfor a cell to wreak £10,000 of havoc against the contractors and even put smaller sub-contractors out of business. No Compromise in Defence of Planet Earth!’--Do or Die, #1, Jan 1993	+	==== Ideal ====
−	**** From the Ashes ... Twyford Rising!	+	With the ideal — i.e., ''abstract'' ideas and concepts — discussion of Content and Form becomes more complicated. As Vietnam’s ''Marxism-Leninism Textbook for Students Who Specialize in Marxism-Leninism'' explains:
−	In February following an eventful invasion of Whatley Quarry, a new camp was set up at Twyford. Off route and up on the hill overlooking the cutting, this camp, and those that fol-lowed it, would have a very different attitude than the one on the dongas. Not defence, ATTACK!	+	<blockquote>
		+	Many times, human consciousness has difficulty in trying to clearly define the Content of a subject — especially when the subject is an abstract idea. We often mistake Content with inner Form. Usually, in this situation, there is a strong combination and intertwining between both Content and Form. In such a situation, the Form can be referred to as the “inner Form,” or the “Content-Form.”
−	Starting with half a dozen campers (Camelot EF!) the site steadily grew through spring with di-rect action practically everyday-and many nights too! Some actions were carried out by a handful of people locking onto machines, others were mass invasions by hundreds. Diggers were trashed, offices invaded. A sunrise circle-dance was followed by an eight car sabotage convoy.	+	With physical things and phenomena, this type of Form usually belongs to a very specific Private, it doesn’t exist in any other Private, it is the Unique [see Annotation 129, p. 128].
		+	</blockquote>
−	The state response to these actions grew more organised: hordes of guards, private investigators and cops were stationed daily to stop the actions. They failed. Endless arrests, restrictive bail conditions, camp evictions and harassment only hardened resolve. By late April the Department of Transport was in the High Court pushing for an injunction on 76 named individuals. To back up their case they produced evidence nearly a foot thick with hilarious daily reports from Twyford. A not unusual entry read thus:
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	<em>At 08.45 hrs a group of protestors raided one of the small earthmoving operations at Shawford Down and did some very severe damage to the excavator before making of There were between 35–50</em> <em>of them and they seemed to know exactly what to do to cause the most damage to the machines.[251]</em>
−	</quote>
−	Unsurprisingly the High Court backed the DoT and injuncted the 76. lhe reaction from our side was swift, two days after the hearing 500 joined a Mass Trespass at the cutting. In a moving sign of multi-generational resistance the crowd was addressed by Benny Rothman, one of the leaders of the 1932 Kinder Scout Trespass. The mass injunction breaking resulted in six being sent to jail for a month-the first of many to end up in the clink for fighting road building. On the day of their release they were greeted by friends, smiles, hugs and... sabotage. In Collingham, Linconshire, under the spray painted title <em>For the Prisoners of Twyford Down,</em> the following was wrenched: three bulldozers, three Tarmac trucks, two diesel pumps, one work shed and a control station.[252]	+	The reason the inner Form of physical objects usually exists in ''Private'' as the ''Unique'' is because the stable internal relations of any given physical object are equivalent to the specific material components which distinguish one physical object from all other physical objects. In other words, if you have two chairs which are exact copies of each other, made from the same kind of wood, cut into the same shape, using the same type and configuration of fasteners, etc., they are still not the exact same object. The internal relations of one chair are what make it ''that'' chair and distinguish it from all other objects in the universe. The ''outer Form'' of these chairs may have many commonalities (they look similar, they have the same color, etc.), but the ''inner Form'' is what distinguishes one chair from the other.
−	Tarmac PLC was feeling the pressure. Across the country many of its offices were occupied, its machines targeted. When its AGM was disrupted the directors made their fears known. Thanks to good research their home addresses had been uncovered and published. Some had been freaked enough to hire security guards-their apprehension heightened by past targeting of directors by Animal Liberationists. Considering the relatively few ‘radical eco’ home visits since, this may seem surprising. However at this time the movement was influenced by quite divergent groups. The fact that directors were largely left unscathed in the years to come was not a given-it was a choice.	+	<blockquote>
		+	However, within the realm of abstract ideas, there are also Forms which many abstract Privates share. In the context of abstract ideas, we call this kind of Form the “outer Form,” the “form-Form,” or the “common Form.”
−	During that summer everything from Druid curses to burning tarmac was hurled at the contractors in a hectic campaign which was; <em>a symbol of resistance, a training ground, a life changer and a kick up the arse to the British green movement.[253]</em> Nevertheless, though it slowed it, the M3 was not stopped. <em>The cutting at Twyford Down gets ever deeper and the down, the water meadows and of</em> 263 course most of the dongas are now destroyed, but its destruction has given birth to a movement and the fight goes on.[254]	+	When we try to define the Content of a subject which is an abstract idea, our consciousness usually tries to answer the question: “what is the subject?”
		+	</blockquote>
−	As the resistance at Twyford waned anti-road actions were spreading across the country like wildfire. Digger diving was organised on a near daily basis at Wymondham near Norwich, and in Newcastle hammocks were strewn in the trees at Jesmond Dene. Like Twyford, once again it was local EF!ers and residents that catalysed the intial actions that burgenoned into widescale tribal resistance on the land.	+	This is usually a simple matter. Take, for example, the abstract idea of “freedom.” When we try to think of the Content of ''freedom'' we can answer it pretty easily. What is the subject of ''freedom''? It is the condition which allows humans to follow their own will, it is the absence of external coercion, etc., etc.
−	Further north, action was hotting up in Scotland with tree and crane sits, some lasting days, connected to the M74 in Glasgow. Even further north was the campaign against the Skye Bridge, a monstrosity cutting across the Kyle of Lockash, immortalised in the environmental classic, The Ring of Bright Water. The bridge not only affected the direct habitat (famous for its otters) but connected the Hebrides into the mainland infrastructure, endangering the whole regions ecology by exposing it to further development.	+	<blockquote>
		+	But, when we try to define the Form of an abstract idea, our consciousness tries to answer the question: “how is the subject?” — this is when we have to define the mode of existence (the Form) of that subject.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Unfortunately at the time there was only limited active local support for resistance. The first and only day of action against the building was carried out by around a dozen, who, bar a few from Skye and Glasgow EF!, were all from south of the border. As cops stationed on the island could be counted on one hand, reinforcements were brought in. Inflatables were launched as the main work was being carried out off barges. The reaction of the construction firm was brutal-industrial hoses were used as water-cannons in an attempt to knock those up floating cranes into the sea. The Scottish press were present in numbers and also enjoyed some corporate PR. The front page of Ihe Scotsman put it like this:	+	This is where things get more complicated. The mode of existence of an abstract idea can usually be considered to be language, since our ideas are usually expressed through language, but it can take on other modes of existence as well, such as visual media (paintings, photographs), physical motions of the human body (body language, dance), etc. This is how the field of art studies is concerned with the philosophical categories of Content and Form.
−	Journalistic objectivity is a wonderful thing. However, it is easily damaged, especially by people trying to ram your boat, sink you, throw rocks at you, then threatening you first with a crowbar and then a grappling hook, not to mention attacking you with a tracked excavator.[255]	+	==== Content and Form in Art ====
−	The boats were impounded and most were arrested. Bussed a hundred miles away, the group was given strict bail by an all-powerful Roving Sheriff (another great colonial legacy) not to return to the Highlands and Islands for over a year. Police escorted the van most of the way to the border. Elsewhere actions were taken against the projects funders, The Bank of America, but the campaign was effectively stillborn by low local involvement and immediate corporate/state direct action.	+	Many readers may already be familiar with the subject of Content and Form from studying art, design, communications, and related fields. At first glance, the definitions of Content and Form may seem different from what we’ve been discussing so far.
−	A very different situation had produced a very different result at Oxleas Wood in London. These woods in SE London were widely believed to be the next big battle and 3,000 people had signed a pledge to Beat the Bulldozers. After over a year of direct action at Twyford and with resistance spreading the government knew it couldn’t risk hitting such a beautiful place within “recruitment distance” of millions. The summer of 1993 saw this £300 million scheme dropped, a major victory after just a year of sustained action against infrastructural growth. Not Single Issues, Just One <strong>War</strong> This success was all the more impressive considering that this campaign, though then becoming the dominant terrain of struggle for the movement, was still only one of the battles it was in-volved in. The daily fight on the land was interspersed with national and local days of action across the country on a range of issues.	+	This is because art concerns itself with ''abstract ideas'' expressed through various Forms of ''physical representations.''
−	Timber depots in Oxford, Rochdale, and London were all targeted by days of action. One national week of action against mahogany saw ethical shoplifting (the seizure of illegally logged timber from shops), in towns across the country; and abroad the simultaneous total destruction of logging equipment by the Amazonian Parkana Indians![256] Other actions included bank occupations (against Third World debt), an ICI factory invasion (to highlight continued ozone depletion), road blockades (against car culture) and regular quarry blockades at Whatley in Somerset. These different battles were all viewed as part of the same war by EF!ers. Many of the hundreds that invaded Oxford Timbnet for the second time had come direct from a weekend of action at Twyford. lhe next day a cavalcade moved onto Bristol to help disrupt the opening of the disputed Golden Hill Tesco. Then, as now (maybe more so) many EF!ers were also involved in the animal liberation movement.	+	These physical representations may include physical objects (photographs, paintings, sculptures), performed and/or recorded physical activities (dance, music, theater, film), human language recorded in stable physical Forms of written language (novels, poems, stories) or spontaneously performed oral language (storytelling, impromptu spoken-word poetry).
−	The campaigns were carried out in a global context of escalating radical ecological resistance. Anti-road campaigns in the (French) Pyranees, anti-whaling action by Sea Shepherd (around Norway), the campaign against the Narmada Dam (in India), the Ogoni struggle against Shell (Nigeria), EF! defence of the Danube (in Slovakia), biotech companies bombed (in Switzerland), GM crop experiments dug up (in the Netherlands), and of course anti-logging battles (in North America, the Pacific, the Amazon, and Australia).	+	Because the study of art is primarily concerned with interpreting and understanding ideas expressed through these physical manifestations, art is concerned with the ''stable inner relations'' of the ''ideas'' which artists imbue within their works of art — much more than the stable inner relations of the physical components of the object.
−	It’s a long way from North America to Newcastle but in 1993 the tactic of protracted tree-sits crossed the Atlantic. Following demos earlier in the year the bulldozers had gone into Jesmond Dene unannounced on June 16<sup>th</sup>. The state, however, hadn’t factored in skiving Geordie kids, who stopped the machines working while the alarm went out. The next morning protestors barricaded the site entrance. More kids came back and shovelled earth with plastic flowerpots to build up the barricade-the Flowerpot Tribe was born. The campfire was set burning and a strong community formed. A combination of local talent and reinforcements from Twyford and elsewhere made the next five months an avalanche of site occupations, tree-sitting, piss-taking and nightly sabotage. The legendary winds of Newcastle seemed to blow down the construction site fencing again and again! The kids sang: Ihe <em>Chainsaws, the Chainsaws--they cut down all our trees. Ihe Pixies, the Pixies, trashed their JCBs.</em> Of course despite the laughs it was hard.	+	According to the Vietnamese art textbook ''Curriculum of General Aesthetics'':
−	<quote>	+	<blockquote>
−	<em>Everyone</em> is <em>getting very knackerd and pissed of tree sitting is saving the trees that are hammocked, but it’s tiring, cold, stressful, and often boring. Ground support people face prison for breaking injunctions as they take food to trees. It’s</em> GRIM <em>for sitters when the trees are felled near them. Local people sab a Cement mixer under the copper beech by throwing rock salt into it-a workman goes berserk and tries attacking the beech with a JCB, trying to knock the tree-sitters out. He survived but the copper beech loses another couple of branches.[257]</em>	+	What is the Form of a work of art? Form is the way to express the Content of an artwork. Form and Content within a work of art have a strong unity with each other and they regulate each other. Form is the organization, the inner structure of the Content of an artwork. Therefore, Form is the way that the Content expresses itself, and that way is described by two features. We must ask:
−	</quote>
−	In 1991 EF!‘s handful of activists were the radical ecological movement. By the end of the summer of 1993, EF! not only had 45 local groups but had catalysed thousands to take direct action-mostly not under the EF! banner. Now one could really begin to talk about a movement. After the Jesmond Dene camps were evicted, one of the Flowerpot Tribe wrote:	+	First: what expresses the Content of a work of art?
−	<quote>	+	Second: how is it expressed?
−	Those who’ve been involved are also gearing up to fight other <em>schemes... What we’ve learnt will spread out to other road and environmentalprotests... itjustgets bigger and bigger. If we can’t stop the bastards totally we can COST them, show them there’s no easy profit in earth rape. They’ve already been cost millions-let’s cost them some more.[258]</em>
−	</quote>
−	**** Land Struggle Period (1993–1998)	+	Art exists when two conditions are met: first, there must be a subject with an outer Form. Second, an artist must convey aesthetic meaning, or humanization, of that subject. This aesthetic meaning is the Content.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<quote>	+	So, in studying works of art, we are less concerned with the ''physical content'' of the artwork (the canvas, paint, etc.) than we are with the ''abstract content'' of the artwork (the ideas which the artist imbues within the artwork).
−	<em>Land struggles were infectious, the next period seeing an explosion of activity. The winning combination was relatively solid networks of long term anti-road campaigners (AL.ARAI UK), a nationwide network of</em> EF! <em>groups and most importantly a swelling ‘tribe’ willing to travel across the land.</em>
−	</quote>
−	**** Welcome to the Autonomous Zones	+	As for Form, the ''inner Form'' of art represents the stable internal relations which compose the art (both ideal, i.e., the stable internal relations of the abstract ideas imbued within the art by the artist, as well as physical, i.e., the stable internal relations of the physical media of the art).
−	While the state had backed down at Oxleas it intended to go full steam ahead with the M11 link through East London. DoT bureaucrats and politicians probably thought the movement wouldn’t pull together over the destruction of a small amount of trees and hundreds of working class homes. They were wrong.	+	The ''outer Form'' of art represents how our human senses perceive the art, such as composition techniques, the use of color, etc.
−	Hundreds of the houses were already squatted, long since having been compulsorily purchased. This vibrant scene was joined by others from Jesmond and Twyford. With much of the road smashing through a long-term squatting community and a solidly working class area, this more than any previous anti-road campaign was a defence ofhuman lives as well as wildlife. Nevertheless, there were beautiful patches of overgrown gardens and <em>Copses</em><em>,</em> and the struggle was also understood in the national ecological context.	+	The chart below breaks down the differences in a general, non-artistic viewpoint of physical objects and processes in materialist dialectical terms (i.e., the viewpoint an engineer might have), as compared with the artistic viewpoint of physical objects and processes (which an art critic might have). Some fields, such as designing products for human use, might draw from both viewpoints.
−	<quote>	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-54.png]]
−	<em>By halting the road in London we can save woodlands, rivers and heathlands all the way to Scotland, without endangering their ecology by having mud fights with hundreds of security guards and police in their midst.[259]</em>
−	</quote>
−	The first real flashpoint came at a chestnut tree on George Green, common land in the heart ofWanstead. The lOft hoardings which had been erected to enclose the common were trashed by a jolly mob of kids, activists, and local people. On the Green a hunched woman in her eighties was crying. She had always felt powerless, but when she pushed the fences down with hundreds of others, she said she felt powerful for the first time in her life. Empowerment is direct action’s magic, and the spell was spreading.	+	==== Content and Form in Specific Artistic Media ====
−	<quote>	+	Every medium of art will interpret Content and Form in its own way. For example:
−	A treehouse was built in the branches of the chestnut tree... For the following month the camp-fire became a focal point... <em>People from different backgrounds began to get to know one another, spending long evenings together, talking, forming new friendships. Something new and beautiful had been created in the community. Many local people talk of their lives having been completely changed by the experience.[260]</em>
−	</quote>
−	The eviction came in December and was carried out by 400 police. With 150 people resisting it took nine hours to bring down one tree! Sabotage also played a part-both of the contractor’s hydraulic platforms had been wrenched the night before.	+	'''Literature''' is a specific art discipline which deals with recorded human language in the Form of writing. In written literature, the Content would be the ideas expressed in a piece of writing; what the words say. The inner Form would be the way the ideas relate to each other — i.e., story structure, pacing, character development, etc. The outer form would be the physical format of the writing — i.e., manuscript, magazine article, paperback book, ebook, etc.
−	<quote>	+	'''Painting''' is a specific art discipline in which pigments are applied to objects to create images which convey ideas and emotions. In painting, the Content would be the meaning which an artist embodies in a work of art. The inner Form would include the stable internal relations within the artwork (i.e., the bonds and mixtures between the pigments, the canvas, etc.), while the outer Form would be how the artwork appears to human senses (composition, aesthetics, etc.). Generally speaking, the creator of the art will have to make decisions about the inner Form (i.e., selection of oil vs. acrylic vs. watercolor, selection of shade, tint, and hue, physical brush strokes, etc.) so as to produce the desired outer Form (the way the finished artwork will appear to viewers).
−	<em>The eviction had forced the Do</em> T <em>to humiliate itself in a very public way. The loss of the tree was a tragic day, and yet also a truly wonderful day. It had hammered another huge nail in the coffin of the roads programme.[261]</em>
−	</quote>
−	The state hoped this was the end of No Ml I, but it was just the beginning. Other areas had already been occupied, and regular action against the contractors continued. It was a fitting end to the second year of concerted action against roads.	+	'''Theater''' is a specific art discipline in which human beings perform physical actions and use their voices to convey ideas to an audience. In theater, the Content includes the ideas which are being presented, such as the script, the musical score, the story, the performance choices of actors, costumes, props, etc. The inner Form would include the stable relations between the members of the cast, the director, the physical stage, the lighting, etc., and the outer Form would be the way the play appears to the audience.
−	On January 1, 1994, the Indigenous Zapatistas of Mexico launched themselves on to the stage of world history. Liberating town after town, freeing prisoners, redistributing food, declaring themselves autonomous of the new economic order. They didn’t just redistribute food; they redistributed hope worldwide, and were to have a significant impact on the movement here.	+	These are just some examples. Each medium of expression will have its own variations in how Content and Form are considered.
−	Meanwhile in Britain the year nearly started off with a big bang. In January a very small amount of broadsheet coverage reported the police detonation of an explosive device under the main bridge at Twyford Down. Coverage also reported a bomb found at Tarmac’s HQ.[262]	+	Engels described the manifestation of Content and Form in ''Dialectics of Nature:''
−	The Spring saw camps sprout up against the Wymondham Bypass near Norwich, the Leadenham Bypass in Lincolnshire, the Batheastern-Swainswick Bypasses outside Bath and the Blackburn Bypass in Lancashire. In inner-city Manchester, a threatened local park got a dose of eco-action at Abbey Pond. Back in the East End, Spring saw vast defensive and offensive road-resisting. A row of large Edwardian houses were next en route-they were barricaded, and Vvanstonia was born: it was <em>declared an autonomous free zone. People made joke passports and the like. We were digging this huge trench all the way around the site. Doing that probably had zero tactical effectiveness but it really made us feel that this was where the</em> UK <em>ended and our space started.</em>[263]	+	<blockquote>
		+	The whole of organic nature is one continuous proof of the identity or inseparability of form and content. Morphological and physiological phenomena, form and function, mutually determine one another. The differentiation of form (the cell) determines differentiation of substance into muscle, skin, bone, epithelium, etc., and the differentiation of substance in turn determines difference of form.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The State does not take well to losing territory.	+	Content and Form are discussed frequently in analysis of human social systems and objective relations which occur within society. For example, Marx made many criticial insights into economics by analyzing and explaining the form of value [see Annotation 14, p. 16] under capitalism.
−	<quote>	+	Indeed, the entire capitalist system can be viewed in terms of content and form. The current form of human civilization is capitalism. That is to say, capitalism is the stable set of relations and characteristis of the current political economy which dominates the planet. The content of capitalism includes all the components of the base and superstructure, including the various classes (capitalists, working class, etc.), the means of production, government institutions, corporate institutions, etc. All of these elements are configured together into the relatively stable form which we call “capitalism.”
−	In <em>a scene reminiscent of a medieval siege, around</em> 800 <em>police and bailif supported by cherry-pickers and diggers besieged the independent state of Wanstonia. After cordoning off the area the invaders preceded to storm thefive houses. The police had to break through the barricades to enter only to find the staircases removed thus forcing them to get in through roofs or upperfloors. Some protestors were on the roofs having chained themselves to the chimneys, the con-tractors preceded to destroy the houses while many people were still occupying them... It took ten hours to remove 300</em><em>people.[264]</em>
−	</quote>
−	This impressive and costly eviction was followed up by Operation Roadblock-a month of rota-based daily direct action, where groups booked in which days they would take action. It worked remarkably well, with sizeable disruption every day through March. Elsewhere many of the resistance techniques developed at the M 11, both for the defence of houses and trees, were now being used against other schemes.	+	==== Other Viewpoints of Content and Form ====
−	**** Progress, Yuck-Time to Go Back to the Trees	+	Of course, there are many other viewpoints for discussing Content and Form of abstract ideas. Every philosophical field will have its own unique ways of utilizing Content and Form analysis. One example is the concept of Content and Form in legal philosophy. Vietnamese legal expert Dinh Thuy Dung writes:
−	Tactics were evolving fast. At Jesmond, temporary hammocks had graced the branches: at George Green a single treehouse had been built; at Bath the first real network of treehouses hit the skyline; in Blackburn there was a full-on Ewok-style Tree Village. Unable to defeat the bailiffs on the ground, resistance had moved skyward.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The law has internal and external forms:
−	<quote>	+	The inner Form is the internal structure of the law, the relationships and the connections between the elements constituting the law. The inner Form of the law is called the legal structure, which includes the constituent parts of the legal system such as the branch of law, legal institutions, and legal norms.
−	You’d be standing at the fire at night, and it would be thefirst time you’d been down on the ground all day. You’d look up <em>and there would be all these little twinkles from candles up above you... How were they going to get us out?</em>... I <em>don’t think</em> I <em>can describe here how special it is to sleep and wake in the branches of a tree. To see the stars and the moon. To feel the sunshine andfeel the rain.[265]</em>
−	</quote>
−	Hundreds were now living on-site across the country, with many, many more weekending or visiting for days of action. Most campaigns were now setting up multiple camps, each taking a slightly different form according to the lay of the land. Previously, barricades had been built around houses and woodlands-now they themselves were transformed into barricades--complex networks of walkways, treehouses, lock-ons, concrete and determination.	+	The outer Form is the manifestation, or mode of existence, of the law. In other words, the outer Form of the law is how we view and understand the law [i.e., who enforces the law and what repercussions will occur if we violate the law]. Based on the outer Form of the law, one can know how it exists in reality, and where and to whom it applies. The external Form of the law is also approached in relation to its Content.
−	Solsbury Hill’s fourth site eviction at Whitecroft was the first full-on, all-treetop eviction. Using cherry-pickers and standard chainsaw men, the Sheriff failed to take down a single tree; the camp had defeated him... for now. The cost was high; one protestor hospitalised with spinal injuries and a collapsed lung. Ten days later the Sheriff returned, this time with madder baliffs--Equity card-holding stunt men. These were more crazy, muscular, and willing to take risks with their own lives as well as of those in the trees. By the end of the day Whitecroft was no more. This-the most spectacular at the time-was only one of the many conflicts countrywide. These evictions were becoming hugely costly-to the contractors, to the state, and to social stability. Most sites at this time continued offensive action as well, using the by then standard for-mula; digger diving, office occupations and crane-sits, alongside overt and covert sabotage. The state was being challenged-it would soon escalate its response.	+	According to this understanding, the Content of the law includes all the elements that make up the law, while the Form of the law is understood as the elements which contain or express the Content.
−	With every campaign the movement seemed to be going from strength to strength, with one exception, Leadenham. A camp had set up, and the DoT said it was putting the scheme into review, but victory was not to be. The contractors launched a surprise attack-during the reprieve-while those still on site were dealt with a few weeks later by local thugs. Vigilante attacks on sites had always been an occasional occurrence, but they were usually minor in scale. At Leadenham though there was a sizeable group of pro-road locals willing to take direct action.	+	If you understand that the Content of the law is the will of the state, then the legal Form is the way of expressing the will of the state.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The attack happened.following a demo by local people in favour of the bypass. Leadenham villagers decided in their infinite wisdom that a road was preferable to a few trees’. Masked vigilantes arrived at the camp at Sam armed with chainsaws. They proceeded to hack down trees protestors had been sitting in. Anyone getting in their way was punched and violently assaulted.[266]	+	There are countless other ways in which Content and Form can be used to analyze and understand things, phenomena, and ideas. We hope that these examples have given you a better idea of the various ways in which Content and Form can be used to understand the world. In general, socialist texts deal with the ''inner Form'' of things, phenomena, and ideas. That is to say, the inner relations which compose the subject being considered. The outer form — how things appear to our senses — tends to be less relevant in analysis of human social systems, though it is often important in consideration of specialized fields of revolutionary activity such as aesthetics, propaganda, etc.
−	This basically put an end to site occupation at the scheme, though days of action still followed. What Leadenham showed was the absolute necessity ofhaving significant community support IF a camp was set up. Without it, there was a danger of being sitting/sleeping targets. Thankfully, through this period no other sites were mass attacked by local vigilantes in this way.[267]	+	==== b. Dialectical relationship between Content and Form ====
−	While in this article I’ll give an overview of this period, from so high up one can’t hope to focus on the detail-and it’s the detail that counts. The incredible moments, the passion, the exhilaration, the waiting, the amazing people, the occasional twat-the tribe. Not to mention the holy trinity: dogs, mud, and cider. On site and in the trees, this feeling of togetherness and otherness grew. Leaving site to get food or giros, the harshness and speed of the industrial world hit you; but by living a daily existence of resistance we were hitting back.	+	Content and Form have a strong dialectical relationship with one other. There is no Form that does not contain any Content. Simultaneously, there is no Content that does not exist in a specific Form. The same Content can manifest in many Forms and a Form can contain many Contents.
−	**** Hunting the Machines	+	The relationship between Content and Form is a dialectical relationship in which Content decides Form and Form can impact Content.
−	Every month brought news of an increase in sabotage despite minimal coverage in either main-stream or radical press, not least because communiques were rarely sent. Sabotage largely centred around projects where ongoing daytime campaigns were underway, but some was done in soli-darity with campaigns further afield. With so many groups fighting multiple schemes by the same companies actions often ended fulfilling both roles. ARC, for instance, had supplied roadstone to Twyford Down and was trying to expand quarries in North Wales and Somerset. Afterforcing their way into the control room [of ARC Penmaemawr quarry] the <em>intruders smashed a glass partition and then caused</em> £10,000 <em>worth ofdamage to computer equipment.[268]</em>	+	-----
−	The scale of sabotage carried out during the ‘90s land struggles is often forgotten. Altogether the direct costs of replacement and repair at construction sites must have easily run into the tens of millions. Fantasists may dream that this was the work of highly organised anonymous cells, striking and then disappearing[269], but in truth most trashings were carried out by those camping on-site; either subtley during digger diving, raucously as a mob, or covertly after heavy drinking sessions around the campfire. Basically, whenever it was possible, people fucked shit up. The sensible and commendable desire not to boast has left these actions hidden behind newspaper images of smiling tree-people. The grins though were often those of mischievous machine-wreckers; near campfires no yellow monster was safe from the hunt.	+	==== Annotation 151 ====
−	Some celebrity liberals[270] argued criminal damage should not have a place in campaigns as it would put off normal everyday people. This ridiculous idea was even stupider considering one of the main groups consistently carrying out sabotage were those locals with jobs and families who didn’t have available (day)time to live on site, and for whom arrests for minor digger-diving could lead to unemployment and family problems. For many normal everyday people” covert sabotage was less risky than overt civil disobedience. Another group of locals that always took to environmental vandalism like ducks to water were kids, nearly always the most rebellious section of any community, often with the most intimate relationship to the local environment.	+	For example, if you want to make a table, and all you have available are wood and nails, then that Content (the wood and the nails) will determine the Form the table ends up taking. You are going to end up with a wooden table, and it will therefore have to have certain characteristics of Form.
−	Of course despite what I say above, some ecotage was carried out entirely covertly with modus operandi borrowed from the Animal Liberation Front [ALF].	+	When Content changes, the Form must change accordingly. If, instead of wood, you have iron, then the table you end up building will have a much different Form. Form can also ''influence'' the Content, but not nearly as much as Content ''determines'' Form. For instance, if you have wood and nails, but you develop a technique for building a table that doesn’t need any nails, then the result (a wooden table without any nails) would be an example of a development in Form reflecting as a change in Content.
−	<quote>	+	The main tendency of Content is change. On the other hand, Form is relatively stable in every thing and phenomenon. As Content changes, Form must change accordingly. However, Content and Form are not always perfectly aligned.
−	<em>Police believe a</em> £2 <em>million blaze at an Essex construction site could be the work of Green Activists. The fire swept through Cory Environment’s aggregates and waste disposal site at Barling, near Southend, ruiningfour bulldozers, two diggers,</em> and a fleet of six trucks owned by the main contractor. The police say thatforensic evidence confirms arson.[271]
−	</quote>
−	**** There is no justice, just Us!	+	-----
−	It was becoming obvious that the ecological land struggles were really getting in the way ofprogress.	+	==== Annotation 152 ====
−	The government (correctly) saw the movement as part of a social fabric (travelling culture, festivals, squatting, hunt sabbing) born of the ‘60s/‘70s upsurge. With the Criminal Justice Bill it sought to tear this fabric apart. No more toleration, the government announced; it was giving itself new powers to close free parties, ban demonstrations, create huge exclusion zones, evict squats and jail persistent road-protest trespassers. Unsurprisingly this challenge was met with a sudden flurry of activity. High street squat info centres around the country; local and national demos. Thousands turned up for marches in London. Rather than deterring people the new laws brought people together-Unity in Diversity the call of the day.	+	Since all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly changing, it stands to reason that the internal components (things, phenomena, and ideas, and their relations) which compose the Content of a subject will constantly be undergoing processes of change and development. Thus, we say that the tendency of Content is change. Since the Form is based on the ''internal relations'' of the components of Content, it stands to reason that a change in Content will lead to change in Form. These kinds of changes in Content and Form also occur through the dialectical process: changes in quantity lead to changes in quality [see Annotation 117, p. 119].
−	On October 9 a demo of 75,000 ended in Hyde Park for the normal ritual of platform speakers. When a sound-system tried to get in at Speakers Corner to turn it into an illegal “party in the park;’ it was attacked by police. In turn people fought back. The call went out across the Park-Defend the System; thousands ran from the speeches to the action-the Hyde Park Riot had begun.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-55.png|''Quantity changes in Content lead to quality shifts in Form.'']]
−	<quote>	+	As soon as a wooden chair is finished being built, the paint is already beginning to degrade. The wood is already beginning to rot. The iron nails are already beginning to rust. These changes may be imperceptibly slow — they may even take centuries to occur, if the chair is kept in a hospitable environment — but the changes are occurring, quantitatively, over time, none-the-less.
−	Although some peoplefaced up to the police in Park Lane itself, most of the crowd ended up inside the park separated by the metal railings from the riot cops. This made it dif cult for the police to launch baton charges or send in the horses, and when they tried to force their way through the small gates in the railings they were repelled with sticks, bottles and whatever was to hand.
−	There were some ve1y surreal touches while all this was going on: people dancing notfarfrom the police lines, a unicyclist weaving his way through the riot cops, a man fire-breathing. Some people have argued that the police deliberately provoked a riot to make sure the Criminal Justice Bill was passed, but this ignores thefact that there was never any danger of the CJB not being passed, as there had never been any serious opposition within parliament.[272]	+	Eventually, changes in quantity will lead to changes in quality. At some point, the chair might weaken and begin to wobble whenever it’s sat in. Human beings might recognize this quality and begin to think of it as a “wobbly chair.” The chair might degrade to the point where it can’t be safely used at all, in which case it will have quality shifted into a “broken chair.” If the chair is repaired, that would represent another quality shift. If it is used for firewood, that would be another quality shift.
−	</quote>
−	Hyde Park-like the eviction of the Dongas-was a landmark confrontation. At Twyford the movement was forced to face up to the reality of state violence. At Hyde Park it was forced to face the reality of movement violence, the reality being simple-when faced with riot cops many saw nothing wrong with fighting back to defend temporarily liberated space. At the beginning of the march, Keep it Fluffy stickers had been handed out liberally. Later as the helicopter floodlights shone down on a riot, the sight of a crusty with a rainbow jumper emblazoned with one of the stickers-throwing a bit ofpaving slab at the cops-showed how moments of collective power can change people. The following months would see an intensification of violence/nonviolence discussions around the country.	+	Keep in mind that changes in Form do not directly cause changes in Content. If you disassemble a wooden chair into the constituent wood and nails, the wood and nails remain more or less unchanged. But if you burn a wooden chair, it’s the ''change in Content'' which leads to the change in Form from “chair” to “pile of ash.”
−	When the Bill became an Act in November everyone understood that the only way to defeat a possible ‘crackdown’ was by defying it. As the EF! Action Update put it: As far as it af cts Earth First!ers ... its purpose is not so much to imprison us as to <em>intimidate us-and we mustn’t let that</em> work[273] The day the Act went through on November 4<sup>th</sup>, activists from No M11 climbed onto the roof of Parliament and unfurled a banner-DefyThe Act. Hunt sabs went out in bigger numbers, more road protest camps were established, free parties flourished. By the end of the month a big confrontation came that would test whether the government had succeeded in intimidating the resistance.	+	Form simply represents the stable relationships between the component parts of the subject’s Content. The only way to change Form is to change those inner relations, or to change the components which are relating. There is no way to change Form without changing the Content, and changing the Content changes the Form by definition.
−	**** A Street Reclaimed	+	Content determines Form, but Form is not ''fully'' decided by Content, and Form can impact back on Content. If a Form is suitable with its Content, it can improve the development of its Content. If a Form is not suitable with its Content, it can constrain the development of its Content.
−	Throughout the Summer, evictions and resistance on the M11 had continued and most of the route was rubble. One major obstacle lay in the path of the bulldozers-Claremont Road, an entire squatted street had been transformed into a surreal otherworld. Turned inside-out, the road itself became the collective living room, the remaining cars flowerbeds. Above the sofa, huge chess board, and open fire a vast scaffolding tower reached daily further up to the sky. This state of the art reclaimed street was not going to take eviction easy. When it did come, it became the longest and most expensive in English history-5 days, 700 police, 200 bailiffs and 400 security guards, costing £2 million.	+	-----
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 153 ====
−	When the bailiffs arrived they were met by 500 people using every delay tactic possible. A concrete filled car with protruding scaffold poles stopping the cherry pickers moving in. People locked on to the road. Others hung in nets strung across the street. People in bunkers, others huddled on rooftops and in treehouses. Lastly, 12 people scrambled up the 100ft scaffold tower painted with grease and tied with pink ribbons.[274]
−	</quote>
−	One by one, minute by costly minute, the state forces removed the 500-taking the best part of a week. The sheer ingenuity of the tactics, the resolve of the people involved, and the incredible barricading techniques made this an amazing moment. Like the Chestnut Tree, Salsbury Hil , and a dozen other evictions, the state won the battle-but they were losing the war. With every hugely-expensive eviction, every trashed machine, every delayed contract, every citizen turned subversive, every tree occupied-the social and economic cost of pushing through the roads programme was becoming unbearable.	+	The dialectical relationship between Content and Form is somewhat similar to the dialectical relationship between the material and the ideal (see ''Matter and Consciousness'',
−	Yet Claremont-like all anti-roads sites-wasn’t simply a reaction to destruction, it was also a reaffirmation of life, of autonomy. It was an experience that changed hundreds of people; its memory would remain precious and propel a whole new wave of streets to be reclaimed. Reclaim the Streets had been formed by EF!ers in ’92 to combat the car culture on the city streets. With the expansion of anti-road resistance the idea had gone into hibernation, but many who had seen the topsy-turvey, inside-out world of Claremont Road wanted to feel the like again. After the end of the M 11 campaign, RTS was reformed. The state had foolishly thought Claremont Road lay in rubble; in fact it haunted those who’d been there and its festive rebel spectre would reappear on streets across the country.	+	p. 88). Just as the material world ''determines'' consciousness while consciousness ''impacts'' the material world, the Content of a subject ''determines'' the Form while the Form ''impacts'' the Content.
−	It started with a reclamation of that bastion of consumption, Camden High Street.	+	''Suitability'' describes the applicability of a subject for a specific application or role. Whether or not something is “suitable” or not can be highly subjective (i.e., which music would be “suitable” to play at a party), or it can be more objective (i.e., what kind of batteries to use with an electronic device).
−	<quote>	+	We might say that hardwood is “suitable” Content for the Form of a chair because it is durable, strong, relatively inexpensive, and long-lasting. It might be “unsuitable” to have a chair made of hardwood if it is to be used as an office chair, because the hard surfaces might cause strain and discomfort. However, we can utilize conscious activity to adjust and develop suitability between Content and Form. Changing the Content by adding cushioning or padding might make the Content and Form more suitable with each other. Similarly, changing the Form by designing contours and adding adjustability to the chair might make the Content and Form more suitable with each other for their intended application as an office chair.
−	Two cars entered the high street and to the astonishment of passing shoppers ceremoniously piled into each other-crash! Thirty radical pedestrians jumped on top and started trashing them-soon joined by kids. An instant cafe was set up distributing free food to all and sundry, rainbow carpets unrolled, smothering the tarmac, and a host of alternative street decor... A <em>plethora of entertainmentfollowed including live music, firebreathing... and the Rinky-Dink bike-powered sound system.[275]</em>
−	</quote>
−	A month later and the action was much bigger; word had got around-1,500 met at the meet-up point, jumped the Tube and arrived at Islington High Street.	+	If a Form is not suitable with the Content, it restrains the development of the Content. Just think of a shovel (Form) made of wood (Content), which will degrade very rapidly over time, vs. a shovel (Form) made of steel (Content) which will last much longer. This works in both directions. Consider the Content of drinking cups: a porcelain cup might last for a long time and even develop positively over time (by acquiring a desirable patina), while a cup made out of mild steel would not be desirable, as it would be highly prone to rust from extended use containing liquids.
−	<quote>	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	<em>They swarmed across the dual carriageway asfive 25ft tripods were erected blocking all the access roads. Half a ton ofsand was dumped on the tarmacfor kids of all ages to build sand castles with. An armoured personnel carrier blasting out rave set up, fire hydrants were opened up-spraying the ravers dancing in the sunshine. All the cops could do was stand to the side and sweat.[276]</em>
−	</quote>
−	While the Claremont eviction was the first major sign of the failure of the CJA, street parties spreading across the country were basically dancing on its grave. With the Act’s implementation resistance became a bit more difficult, but its deterrent effect was dead in the water. The rebellion against the CJA had brought together different alternative culture currents and coalesced them into a serious counter culture; now RTS was making more connections. Above the wonderful spectacle of the Islington Street Party flew a banner declaring solidarity with the Tubeworkers. Back on the Farm	+	Content and Form always have a dialectical relationship with each other. Therefore, in our perception and practice, we must not try to separate Content and Form, nor should we solely focus on one and ignore the other.
−	While London events got the lion’s share of media coverage, people were defying the CJA all over, most by simply carrying on with actions-business as usual. The eviction of urban camps at Pollock in Glasgow against the M77 involved hundreds-250 kids even broke out of school to help slop one eviction. The act had been meant to neuter direct action. Instead in the climate of opposition, whole new struggles opened up, such as those against the live export of sheep and calves, involving thousands more in direct action.	+	Because Content determines Form, whenever we are considering a thing, phenomenon, or idea, we must base our consideration first on its Content. If we want to change a thing or phenomenon, we have to change its Content first.
−	In the Southwest the one year anniversary gathering at Solsbury Hill went off with a bang. An Anti-CJA event on the hill ended with lots of fencing pulled down, trashed machinery and secu-rity thugs in hospital. As one woman from the local Avon Gorge EF! group put it: I <em>guess people had had enough of being used as punch bags.</em>[277] This was followed by a day of action with 200 people-stopping most of the work along the route.	+	In reality, we must promote the positive impact of Form on Content by making the Form fit the Content. Likewise, we must also change the Form that is no longer suitable with its Content and therefore constrains the development of its Content.
−	Up North the campaign against the M65 saw a major shift in tactics by both those in the trees and those who’d taken the job of getting them out. Three camps had already been evicted, but the crescendo came at Stanworth Valley, an amazing network ofwalkways, platforms, nets and over 40 treehouses. Through the valley surged the River Ribblesworth. It was truly a village in the sky, which was lucky as the ground was pure quagmire half the time. You’ve never seen such mud!	+	-----
−	As well as new people and local activists there was now a dedicated nomadic tribe, seasoned at many previous evictions. After over a year of life in the branches, some were agile and confident at height-at home in the trees. The state realised that it needed a new force that was as confident on the ropes-Stanworth became the first place where members of the climbing community took sides against nature.	+	==== Annotation 154 ====
−	Upon entering the treetops they were quite shocked to find the people were notjust passive spectators to their own removal. A gentle butfirm push with the foot often kept them out of a treelwuse. Two climbers tried to manhandle an activist out of the trees, mistakenly thinking they were alone. The calls for help were quickly answered and to the climbers’ astonishment out of the thick shroud of leaves above, activists abseiled down, others painered up .from below and yet more appearedfrom both sides running along the walkways and branches. The climbers could beforgiven for thinking they were caught in a spiders web.[278]	+	In any analysis, it is very important that we carefully consider whether or not Content and Form are suitable with each other in our own projects and activities. We can learn a lot about suitability from observation and practice (see ''Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism'', p. 204) and improve suitability through conscious activity.
−	Eventually after five days, all 120 people had been ripped from the trees-bringing the total contract cost increased by the No M65 campaign to £12.2 million. The climbers had found new lucrative employment but they would do their best to avoid ever repeating an eviction under leaf cover. From now on most evictions would be when the leaves were off the trees; the combined factor of nature’s abundance and activist up-for-it attitude a severe deterrent.	+	Marx believed that it is vital to consider Content and Form when analyzing human society and political economy. One of his core critiques of political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo was a failure to consider Content and Form when it comes to value, commodities, and money. He discusses this extensively in ''Capital Volume 1'', as in this excerpt:
−	The spread of anti-road camps was by now incredible with ’95 probably the highpoint in terms of national spread. On top of the established camps, new areas were occupied in Berkshire, Kent, Devon, and Somerset. Over the next year the struggle moved well beyond just fighting roads. Camps were set up to protect land from open-cast mining in South Wales, leisure development in Kent and quarrying in the South West. No surprise then that one of the major voices spurring on this culture of resistance got some special attention from some special people.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Green Anarchist [GA] magazine in the mid ‘90s was a meeting point of movements. Its readership included significant numbers of travellers, hunt sabs, class struggle anarchos, Green Party members, eco-warriors, and animal liberationists. It was an obvious target for the secret state. A set of 17 raids aimed at GA and the ALF resulted in the jailing of a number of its editors. This repression, like the CJA, backfired. Instead of marginalising GA it actually made them far more well known; an alliance of largely liberal publications swung behind them, motions of support were even brought up at the Green Party and FoE annual conferences. This increased exposure, combined with MlS fears about court documents released in appeal hearings compromising their agents, secured their release. A major aim of the repression against GA had been to deter sabotage, while large parts of the CJA were aimed at stopping Aggravated Trespass. Their absolute failure to deter the radical ecological direct action movement was shown clearly one morning in Somerset.	+	Marx, here, is saying that studying the economy is more difficult than studying the human body because it can’t be physically observed and dissected. Rather, we have to rely on abstraction, which leaves us prone to making many more mistakes in analyzing Content and Form.
−	**** Whatley Qyarry-Yee Ha!	+	<blockquote>
		+	But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour – or value-form of the commodity – is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The ‘national’ EF! action to shut down Whatley Q.uarry was an even greater success than expected. A week later the owners hadn’t managed to restart work. At 5.30am, 400 activists de-scended on the quarry. Small teams ensured gates were blockaded and all plant and machinery occupied... Detailed maps and a predetermined plan ensured police and security were out ma-noeuvred. Tripods were carried nine miles overnight and set up on the quarry’s rail line whilst lorries were turned away. Press reports state that £250,000 worth of damage was caused-not counting the cost of a week’s lost production, for a quarry normally selling 11,000 tonnes per day! Twenty metres of railway track leading out of the quarry ‘disappeared’; the control panelfor video monitoring of the plantfell apart; a two storey crane pulled itself to bits; three control rooms dismantled themselves; and several diggers and conveyor belts broke down.[279]	+	Marx’s analysis of capitalism relies to great extent upon recognizing the commodity-form of the product (Content) of labor. Labor existed long before capitalism. Labor has existed for as long as humans have worked to change our own material conditions. But under capitalism, labor specifically takes on the Form of a ''commodity'' which is bought by capitalists. This becomes the basis for Marx’s entire critique of capitalism.
−	The police managed to arrest 64 people, mostly under the CJA for aggravated trespass. In time, most of the cases were dropped. All through the land struggle period EF! had been organising national actions-this was by far the most effective. It had come on the back of four years of concerted actions at Whatley and showed what can be achieved by good organisation and the element of surprise. While the cops had prepared in their hundreds, they simply hadn’t factored in that ‘hippies’ could get up at 4am. This action really set the mood for the next year.	+	Obviously, there is much more to Marx’s use of Content and Form in analyzing capitalism and human society, but this should hopefully give you some idea of the importance of Content and Form in analysis of human society and revolutionary activity.
−	“An Adrenaline Junkie’s Idea of Heaven”	+	-----
−	<quote>	+	=== 5. Essence and Phenomenon ===
−	Police on the Newbury Bypass site today condemned the tactics of those who last night took a heavy tractorfrom road-works and drove <em>to a construction area, where they damaged compoundfencing, lighting equipment and a portacabin building. Police were called but the ofenders ran away before they arrived at the scene.[280]</em>
−	</quote>
−	The Newbury bypass was the big battle. The scale was immense. Nine miles long, over 30 camps, ten thousand trees, over a thousand arrests. A daily struggle with up to 1,600 security guards[281], hundreds ofpolice, private detectives, and state climbers lined up against tribes of hundreds of committed, mud-living activists. Day after relentless day, evictions and resistance. “Every morning, cider and flies:”	+	==== a. Categories of Essence and Phenomenon ====
−	I don’t have space to cover all the campaigns across the country, so I am focusing on those that saw important changes. Equally, I can’t hope to give a true impression of what it was like to be living on site, at Newbury least of all. Crazy and medieval--in both good ways and bad-is all I’ll say. (The book <em>Copse</em><em></em> captures the spirit of those times best, with a mix of photos, interviews, and cartoons. VERY highly recommended!)	+	The ''Essence'' category refers to the synthesis of all the internal aspects as well as the obvious and stable relations that define the existence, motion and development of things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	The stale had by this time learnt from some of its previous mistakes; no longer would it try to clear the road in stages at the same time as building works progressed. In the past this allowed a healthy mix of offensive action against construction as well as defensive action against clearance. At Newbury the chainsaws were given five months to clear the site. Initially when protests had started the massive increased cost of clearence had pushed up costs-billed straight to the corporations, destroying any profits. Now when the contracts were tendered these millions were fac-tored in-billed straight to the state. This made the campaigns of this period increasingly defensive in nature. Though there were attempts to move beyond this, to a certain extent it was an inevitable result of a change in terrain. Yet the costs of keeping a force capable of clearing a route dotted with camps, with highly evolved defence techniques, needing highly paid specialist climbers to evict, was now immense.	+	The ''Phenomenon'' category refers to the external manifestation of those internal aspects and relations in specific conditions.
−	Newbury, more than any other, was a national campaign in one locale. Practically everyone who had been heavily involved in radical eco stuff over the preceding five years bumped into each other in the wasteland. This was no accident-everyone knew that at Newbury the state wanted to break the movement. In reply people were determined to break the state’s resolve to build roads beyond Newbury. Glorious defeats for us meant economic defeat for the Department of Transport. This war of attrition had been rolling now for years but at Newbury both sides wanted to put in the death blow. After over a year of building defences, five months of fighting evictions, night after night of sabotage and a lifetime of manic moments, the clearance was finished; but in the aftermath so were the roads programme. Of course it took a while to die. Some projects were still in the pipeline and others were continuing, but after Newbury the conclusion was not in doubt.	+	-----
−	A year after the clearance work had started, hundreds arrived at Newbury for the anniversary, now known as the Reunion Rampage. After minor scuffles and tedious speeches from the likes of FoE leadership, fencing surrounding a major construction compound was cut, and the crowd surged in.	+	==== Annotation 155 ====
−	<quote>	+	Understanding Essence and Phenomena can be challenging at first, but it is very important for materialist dialectical analysis.
−	So we put <em>sand in the fuel tanks of generators, took spanners to the motor of the crane. As we were leaving the site, a tipper truck on fire to my left and the crane on fire down to my right; there was one man standing straight in front of me, silhouetted against the bright billowing flames rolling up out of the portacabin. He stood in an X</em> <em>shape, his hands in victory’ V signs, shouting</em> YES! YES! YES!’ <em>It wasn’t chaotic, there was a sense ofpurpose, of collective will, ofcarnival, celebration, strong magic, triumph ofpeople power, of a small but very real piece ofjustice being done.[282]</em>
−	</quote>
−	**** After Defeats, Victories!	+	Essence should not be confused with ''Form''. Form represents the stable internal relations of the component content of a subject, whereas Essence represents the ''synthesis'' of all internal aspects as well as all obvious and stable attributes which ''define the existence, motion, and development'' of a subject.
−	If this kind of disorder freaked the nation state, local government was terrified. At Guildford, Surrey Council cancelled a scheme where five camps had been set up-it simply couldn’t afford the economic and social costs of taking on the movement. Opencast mines were shelved in South Wales thanks to the sterling resistance at the evictions of the Selar and Brynhennlys camps. Camps saved nature reserves from destruction by agribusiness in Sussex. Camps stopped supermarket developments. Camps stopped leisure developments in Kent, and quarries were put on hold in the Southwest after costly evictions at Dead Woman’s Bottom.	+	Phenomena are simply external manifestations of a subject which occur ''in specific conditions''.
−	If Newbury put the final nail in the coffin of the Roads to Prosperity building programme, the A30 camps were shovelling in the soil. Put into full use for the first time, tunnels became another tactic of delay. Tree defence and complex subterranean networks made the eviction at Fairmile last longer than every previous eviction-with the tunnels staying occupied six days in. While the resistance to the A30 was amazing it was also a waymarker. Following the evictions there was <em>no</em> daytime offensive action against the construction contract, though a one day camp and some impressive nightwork did get done. The amazing community had evolved over two and half years of occupation-its effect would last far longer.	+	The Essence of a subject is not dependent on conditions, whereas in different conditions, the same subject will exhibit different Phenomena. For example, COVID-19 is, ''essentially'', a specific virus strain. That is to say, all of the internal aspects and stable relations that define the existence, motion, and development of COVID-19 are synthesized as a virus which we call COVID-19.
−	By mid 1997 Road Alert! could happily report the demise of the national roads programme.	+	The ''Phenomena'' of COVID-19 which we can observe in patients would include symptoms such as fever, coughing, trouble breathing, etc.
−	<quote>	+	The Essence of a cloud is water vapor in the atmosphere: that is the synthesis, the coming-together, of all the internal stable relations and aspects which will determine how a cloud exists, moves, and develops over time.
−	<em>It has been slicedfrom about £23 billion to a few £billion since 1992; nearly</em> 500 <em>out of the</em> 600 <em>road schemes have been scrapped; that’s</em> 500 <em>places untrashed, saved-for now. Ihese are massive cuts; Construction News wrote ‘...the major road-building</em> programme has virtually been destroyed’... It seemsfair to link the rise of direct action with the diminishing budget, down every year since 1993, the year of the big Twyford actions.[283]
−	</quote>
−	On TV even the ex-Transport Minister Stephen Norris, of all people, presented a documentary on how “the protesters were right” and he was wrong. Contractor newspapers sounded more and more like obituary columns every week.	+	The Phenomena of clouds are all the things we can sense: the appearance of big fluffy white things in the air, shadows on the ground, and, sometimes, rain.
−	The unlikely had happened, the movement’s main immediate objective had been largely attained, and the ‘threat capacity’ generated by the struggle now deterred developments in other fields. More sites were still being set up-now against disparate targets; logging in Caledonia, housing in Essex, an airport extension at Manchester.	+	Essence defines Phenomenon: the internal attributes and stable relations will produce the Phenomena which we can observe. A cloud is not ''essentially defined'' as a fluffy white thing in the air; that is just the appearance a cloud has to our human senses in certain specific conditions.
−	**** Fly, Fly into the Streets!	+	==== b. Dialectical relationship between Essence and Phenomenon ====
−	While most camps were in the countryside, contestation was also spreading in the streets. After the success of the London ’95 street parties, RTS followed up with an 8,000 strong take over of the M41; across the country RTSs were held in dozens of towns often more than once. Some were amazing revelatory moments--windows into future worlds-others were just crap. In ’96/’97 RTS London had mobilised the alternative culture ghetto-now it was organising a break out, first making connections with the striking tube-workers, then with the locked-out Liverpool Dockers. In an inspiring act of solidarity radical eco-types climbed cranes, blockaded en-trances and occupied roofs at the Docks. Around 800 protestors and dockers mingled on the ac-tion and a strong feeling of connection was born.	+	Essence and Phenomenon both exist objectively as two unified but opposing sides.
−	Following on the back of this action came a massive mobilisation just before the May election, around 20,000 marched and partied with the Dockers at the March for Social Justice. The plan had been to occupy the then-empty Department of Environment building in Whitehall. Though the police succeeded in stopping this happening, the march ended in a huge party/riot at Trafalgar Square, above the crowd a massive banner-“Never Mind the Ballots, Reclaim the Streets:’ More and more street parties were continuing around the country.	+	''The unity between Essence and Phenomenon:'' Essence always manifests through Phenomena, and every Phenomenon is always the manifestation of a specific Essence. There is no pure Essence that exists separately from Phenomena and there is no Phenomenon that does not manifest from any kind of Essence.
−	**** National Actions	+	When Essence changes, Phenomena also change accordingly. When Essence appears, Phenomena also appear, and when Essence disappears, Phenomena also disappear. Therefore, Lenin said: “The Essence appears. The appearance is essential.”<ref>''Philosophical Notebooks'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914–16.</ref>
−	After Whatley had been such a success, people wanted more. Unfortunately, the police were once bitten, twice shy. Any whiff of an EF! national mobilisation resulted in massive policing that made most actions just impossible. While the cops were still often outfoxed, mostly by moving location (an action in North Wales moved to Manchester, an action at an oil refinery moved to an opencast site), it was largely making the best of a bad situation.	+	''The Opposition of Essence and Phenomenon'': Essence is that which defines a thing, Phenomenon, or idea, while Phenomena are diversified and conditional. Essence is internal, while Phenomena are external. Essence is relatively stable, while Phenomena continuously change.
−	Yet it wasn’t just the state that caused problems here. The big Whatley action had come out of discussion at an EF! national gathering, with groups all over committing themselves to both turning up and organising it. Other national actions that followed were often organised by local groups that wanted an injection of collective power into their campaign. lhis meant that effectively they were local campaigns calling on the national movement for support-very different from the national movement organising to support a local campaign.	+	-----
−	One of the biggest failures came when a local group-Cardigan Bay EF!-declared a national day of action on the anniversary of the Milford Haven oil spill. This was to be followed by actions against opencast in the Welsh valleys.	+	==== Annotation 156 ====
−	Vans arrived from around the country to find little local work had been done by CBEF! (not ’even accommodation had been sorted) and no decent plans were in place, the organising group not even turning up to sort out the mess. J\Ieanwhile hundreds of cops waited at the port. Thankfully, the wonderful Reclaim the Valleys stepped in days before they were due to and sorted a squat and a few decent actions. Nevertheless, it was a disempowering experience to say the least.	+	Essence and Phenomenon are simultaneously unified and opposite because neither can exist without the other, yet they have completely opposite features from one another.
−	It was followed by an action at Shoreham Docks that drew 60 people... and 800 cops. Like at Milford Haven where the refinery had been closed despite no action, ah work at Shoreham stopped for the day. On one level these actions were successful, in that they stopped work comprehensively, but disempowerment meant they stifled any chance of long-term organising around the issue.	+	Discussing the Essence and Phenomena of physical objects is relatively straight-forward. The Essence will typically encompass the physical object or system itself. For example, a car engine is ''essentially'' a machine; that is to say, the synthesis of all the internal aspects (the engine parts) as well as the obvious and stable relations (the relations between the parts of the engine; how they are assembled and work together in the engine system) that define the existence, motion and development of the engine (the way it works) are what ''essentially make it'' a car engine. All of these essential characteristics are internal, relatively stable, and remain the same regardless of the condition of the engine (i.e., they continue to exist whether the engine is turned on, turned off, inoperable, etc.).
−	Public defeats also resulted in a loss to the movement’s “threat capacity”-something that had the power to stall developments before they started. Though even successful national actions (such as that at Doe Hill opencast in Yorkshire, which turned into a smorgasbord of criminal damage) did not result in local campaign numbers swelling, the threat capacity factor meant that local groups looked a whole lot scarier to the target involved. This fear was a factor in many developments not going ahead.	+	The Phenomena of the car engine are all the things that we can sense from it, but this can vary a great deal depending on conditions. When the car engine is turned off, it will be silent. It may be cool to the touch. It will be at rest. If the engine is turned on, the parts will move, it will become hot, it will make noise. In some situations it might smoke or even catch on fire. All of these Phenomena are conditional, unstable, and external to the engine itself.
−	Attempts to go beyond individual land struggles to get “at the root of the problem” usually meant taking a step backwards to occasional, media-centric events with no easily winnable immediate objectives. National direct action campaigns against the oil industry and ruling class land ownership both died early on.	+	With ''ideas'' and abstract thought, Essence and Phenomenon becomes more difficult to determine and analyze. Lenin discussed this in his ''Philosophical Notebooks'', beginning with a quote from Hegel:
−	**** A Shift from the Local to the Global	+	<blockquote>
		+	Dialectics in general is “the pure movement of thought in Notions“ (i.e., putting it without the mysticism of idealism: human concepts are not fixed but are eternally in movement, they pass into one another, they flow into one another, otherwise they do not reflect living life.
		+	</blockquote>
−	In 1997 a major shift of emphasis happened in the movement. At the time it wasn’t so obvious, but after a while it would become seismic. The last massive eviction-based land struggle with multiple camps was the resistance at Manchester airport. This was near Newbury in scale and saw weeks of sieges and evictions, scraps in the trees, night-time fence pulling and underground tunnel occupations: What Newbury didfor the South, Manchester Airport did for the North in terms o,f attracting thousands of new people and cementing the network.[284]	+	Knowing that Hegel was an idealist, Lenin wanted to strip all idealism from his conception of dialectics, and thus made it clear that “the pure movement of thought” simply refers to the fact that human thoughts are constantly changing, always in motion, within the living human mind, writing:
−	Both sides of the conflict were now highly -evolved, with complex delay tactics and well-trained state tunnel and tree specialists; on one level it became a clash of professionals. Manchester probably continues to have an impact on the speed at which the government is prepared to build new airports, but the campaign-unlike that against roads or quarries-was not easily reproducible. After all, there weren’t any major expansions elsewhere happening at the time.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The analysis of concepts, the study of them, the “art of operating with them” (Engels) always demands study of the movement of concepts, of their interconnection, of their mutual transitions).
		+	</blockquote>
−	Once the evictions had finished, some moved onto smaller camps around the country-but many of those who remained active moved off site and onto new terrains of struggle. Britain’s higgeldy-piggeldy mix of land occupations, office invasions, and national actions were happening in a global context, and that context was changing. In 1997 two landmark events happened, one in Cambridgeshire and one in Southern Spain; both would shape the next period.	+	This is a description of materialist dialectical analysis of human thought. We must understand that human thoughts are always in motion, always developing, and always mutually impacting other thoughts.
−	The Mexican Zapatista rebels had inspired strugglers around the world and in 1996 held an encuentro of movements for “land, liberty, and democracy” in their Lacandon rainforest home. A diverse mix of 6,000 turned up. The following year in 1997 a second global encuentro was held in Spain. Attended by many from Britain, this proposed the formation of the Peoples’ Global Action (PGA). It seemed a new global movement was being born and EF!ers wanted in. At the same time it turned out that the globe was soon coming to Britain.	+	<blockquote>
		+	In particular, dialectics is the study of the opposition of the Thing-in-itself, of the essence, substratum, substance — from the appearance, from “Being-for-Others.” (Here, too, we see a transition, a flow from the one to the other: the essence appears. The appearance is essential.) Human thought goes endlessly deeper from appearance to essence, from essence of the first order, as it were, to essence of the second order, and so on without end.
		+	</blockquote>
−	In the Autumn of 1997 a handful of activists started to talk about the May 1998 GB summit. It seemed an opportunity not to be missed-world leaders meeting in the UK and the chance to kickstart the debate on globalisation.[285]	+	This is where Lenin introduces the concept of Essence and Phenomenon (or “appearance,” as Lenin puts it) as simultaneously oppositional and in unity. Essence refers to the qualities and nature of the “thing-in-itself” (its internal components, relations, etc.) while Phenomena represents “being-for-others” (that which external observers can sense or witness of a subject). However, as Lenin notes, Essence and Phenomena have a dialectical relationship with each other — a “flow from the one to the other.” The Essence “appears” by exuding Phenomena which we can sense.
−	On the continent there was increasing resistance to genetic engineering; but in Britain, none. In the summer of ’97 in a potato field somewhere in Cambridgeshire activists carried out the first sabotage of a GM test site in Britain. It was the first of hundreds to come.	+	Conscious thoughts also have Essence and Phenomena of their own. With thought, the development from Essence to Phenomena is constant and inevitable. The Essence of each thought leads to thought-Phenomena which develop in turn into the Essence of new thoughts in a constant flow.
−	Land Struggles-though still useful and active-would soon no longer be the main hook the movement hung on. Camps would continue to be set up and many victories (and some defeats) were yet to come but the radical ecological movement was definitely now going in a new direction. The Land Struggle Period had inspired, involved, and trained thousands. Let’s make no mistake--it played the major role in the cancellation of 500 new roads, numerous quarry/opencast expansions, and many house building projects. An amazing coming together of rebel subcultures (travellers, animal liberationists, EF!ers, city squatters, Welsh ex-miners, ravers, local FoE activists, and the mad) forged the biggest wave of struggle for the land Industrial Britain had ever seen.	+	In this sense, Essence and Phenomenon of abstract thought is somewhat different from Essence and Phenomenon of physical objects, but physical objects can have this same dialectical pattern of development. For example, the emissions from the engine of a car can be considered Phenomena of the engine, but as these Phenomena build up in the air (along with the emissions from many other cars), they can develop into a physical subject with a new Essence of its own, which we call “air pollution.”
−	**** Consolidation and Global Resistance Period (1998–2002)	+	We can also think of the light which comes from the sun. The light itself can be thought of as Phenomena of the sun, but the light energy can be captured by a solar panel and converted into energy, creating a new subject with its own Essence which we would describe as “solar energy.” In this sense, it is possible for Phenomena to have Phenomena. If you witness light waves in the desert which cause an optical illusion, then the illusion is a Phenomenon of the light waves (the light waves being the Essence which exuded the Phenomenon of illusion), and the light waves are the Phenomena of the sun (the essential subject which exudes the Phenomena of the light waves).
−	The spectacular growth of our action through much of the ‘90s was in part thanks to the clear ecological priority ofthe moment-stop roads. While many camps continued after Newbury against other developments, without the obvious and nationally unifying factor of major road-building the movement was a bit lost. We had never had to really think about what to defend before; the Department ofTransport did that job for us. By moving into a period of Consolidation and Global Resistance we could pretty much sidestep this question-for a time anyway. Tribal Gatherings	+	Essence and Phenomena can also be contextual. In some contexts, physical objects which have their own Essence (and Phenomena) may be the Phenomena of some other entity. For example, archaeologists can’t observe prehistoric civilizations directly. They can only study the things which are left behind. In this sense, we can think of an archaeological artifact, like a stone tool, as a Phenomenon of a prehistoric civilization. The tool has its own Essence and Phenomena, but it is also itself a Phenomenon. A single stone tool can’t tell archaeologists much about an ancient civilization, however, archaeologists can gather many Phenomena (tools, structural ruins, nearby animal bones and seeds, human remains, etc.) to look for patterns which reveal more insights about the Essence of the prehistoric civilization which exuded those Phenomena.
−	Throughout the ‘90s EF! gatherings were the main place that activists from all over got together to discuss and organise. While most that attended felt some allegiance to the EF! banner, many were not active in listed EF! groups and would not consider themselves EF!ers. More, the gatherings were/are a place:	+	<blockquote>
		+	Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects: not only are appearances transitory, mobile, fluid, demarcated only by conventional boundaries, but the essence of things is so as well.
		+	</blockquote>
−	<quote>	+	Lenin, here, points out that proper analysis hinges on understanding the ''Essence'' of a subject, since the Phenomena are fleeting and subject to change. Most notably, we should look for ''contradictions'' within the subject (see ''Definition of Contradiction and Common Characteristics of Contradiction'', p. 175), because contradictions are what drive dialectical development of a subject over time.
−	...where people involved in radical ecological direct action-or <em>those who want to be-get together for four days o</em><em>f</em> <em>time and space to talk, walk, share skills, learn, play, rant, find out what’s on, find out what’s next, live outside, strategise, hang out, incite, laugh, and conspire.[286]</em>
−	</quote>
−	At the 1997 gathering near Glasgow, attended by around 400 people in total, it was obvious that with the roads programme massively scaled down, some major things were going to change. While there were many discussions throughout the week, these were some ofthe key points:	+	-----
−	- The national roads programme would continue to create individual aberrations (such as Birmingham Northern Relief Road) but it would not provide so many sites for resistance nation-wide.	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	- The road campaigns had been very successful as struggles, but had largely failed to leave solid groups or communities of activists behind after the direct action camp roadshow moved on.	+	If we want to be accurately aware of things, phenomena, and ideas, we must not just stop at studying their Phenomena, we have to study their Essence. Only through examining many Phenomena of a subject can we fully and correctly understand the Essence of said subject.
−	- Most of those present saw the radical ecological movement (and EF! in particular) as a network of revolutionaries, part of a global libertarian, ecological movement of movements.	+	-----
−	Of course these things converged. Given that revolution wasn’t looking immediate that week, as revolutionaries we had to be in it for the long haul. The ‘90s had seen rapid growth, thousands had taken action but the movement, being relatively new, didn’t have the infrastructure to support long term participation. With less major land struggles, fewer people would get involved in direct action. There was a high risk that established groups might entropy when activists got disil-lusioned. Nonaligned individuals who had been active against roads, yet who hadn’t become part of any network, might simply drift into reformist politics/work/drugs/mental asylums.[287]	+	==== Annotation 157 ====
−	Unsurprisingly the gathering didn’t cook up any magical formulae, but it did throw together something passable. To tackle a drop in ‘recruitment’ concerted outreach would be done and to keep what activists the movement did have, local groups would consolidate. The fight against GM test sites was enthusiastically accepted as a new terrain of action.[288] The keynote evening talk on the weekend was done by a woman recently returned from the Zapatista autonomous ter-ritories. With the first congress of PGA coming up the following Spring it looked like, despite the drop in sizeable confrontations on the land, we were in for an exciting few years...	+	With physical objects, we must study the Phenomena to know anything about a subject, since Phenomena is, by definition, that which we can observe. Only through systematic, repeated observations can we come to understand the Essence of the object which exudes the Phenomena. Because Phenomena can change based on conditions, we must observe Phenomena under various conditions in a systematic way. This is the basis of all scientific inquiry.
−	**** Local Consolidation and Outreach	+	This is also true for analyzing aspects of human society. To understand a social system, we must observe its Phenomena systematically over time and look for patterns which form under various conditions. We must also keep in mind that social systems develop and change over time, and so the Essence might develop with or without changes in certain Phenomena. For example, the phenomena of the United States of America have changed significantly over the years. The national flag, military uniforms, seals, and other iconography have changed throughout the history of the USA. Similarly, there have been many presidents, and the government and constitution have also been through many changes. That said, the essential nature of the USA’s political economy has not changed significantly since its foundation; the USA has been a capitalist bourgeois democracy since the beginning and remains so to this day. Regardless of which bourgeois-dominated political party holds power in the white house and congress — Whig, Republican, Democrat, or otherwise — the essential nature of the USA as a capitalist bourgeois democracy has remained the same.
−	Squat cafes were nothihg new, but 1998 saw a sudden proliferation around the country, as groups took over buildings in highly prominent locations, creating autonomous spaces where people interested in direct action could mix and conspire. In January, Manchester EF! opened up the first of many OKasional Cafes: The squats were intended mainly to get political ideas across through socialising; as political groups in Manchester were quite inaccessible.[289] Similar projects were carried out in Brighton, London, North Wales, Leeds, Worthing and Nottingham. In Norwich a squat cafe was opened because the local group thought it would be a good idea to do a squat centre as a form of outreach and as a group building exercise.[290] In this period direct action forums sprung up all over-regular town meetings for mischief-making miscreants.	+	According to Lenin: “Human thought goes endlessly deeper from appearance to essence, from essence of the first order, as it were, to essence of the second order, and so on, ''without end.''”<ref>''Philosophical Notebooks'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914–16.</ref> On the other hand, Essence is what defines a thing, phenomenon, or idea. Therefore, in our perception and practice, we must recognize a thing, phenomenon, or idea based on its Essence, not its Phenomena, to evaluate it correctly, and after that, we can make fundamental improvements.
−	Both the forwns and the centres were essentially attempts to bring together the diverse scenes of animal liberationists, class struggle anarchists, forest gardeners, EF!ers, and the like.	+	-----
−	In parallel with this outreach, many radical eco circles were working to give themselves permanent bases and support mechanisms-needed for the long haul.[291] The number oftowns with activist housing co-ops would increase substantially over the next four years. In the countryside quite a few communities of ex-road protesters would consolidate in bought or occupied land/housing from the Scottish Highlands, to Yorkshire, and through to Devon. Others went onto the water in narrow boats. Following the last evictions at Manchester airport dozens moved into the Hulme redbricks in inner-city Manchester. Other needed supports such as vans, printing machines, a mobile action kitchen, prisoner support groups, and propaganda distribution were slowly built up. This process of consolidating local direct action communities has paid a large part in making sure that the radical ecological movement hasn’t been a one hit wonder: dying off after the victory against the roads programme. At its centre was the obvious truth; what’s the point in trying to get more people involved if you can’t keep those who already are?	+	==== Annotation 158 ====
−	**** On the Streets, In the Fields	+	For example: Thousands of years ago, people observed that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west everyday. Based on these Phenomena, many human civilizations developed the belief that the Essence of our solar system was that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun rotated around it. Today, thanks to scientific observation and practice, we have proven that the sun is the center of the solar system and that the earth is rotating around it, which is totally opposite to what many believed hundreds of years ago. In this case, the initially observed Phenomena were misleading, and it was only by getting a better grasp of the essential nature of the solar system that we could better comprehend its functioning.
−	This period saw an escalation of crowd action on the streets and covert sabotage in the fields: both types of action increasingly seen as part of a global struggle.	+	It is usually easy to observe Phenomena (since they are defined by being observable) but it’s also easy to misunderstand relationships between Essence and Phenomena. Sometimes people get a false perception of Essence from real Phenomena, such as believing the Sun revolves around the Earth. Sometimes people attribute the wrong Phenomena to Essences as well, such as believing that all poor people are lazy.
−	In February ’98 the first ever meeting of the PGA was held in Geneva, home of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The congress, despite in-built problems, was an amazing coming together of over 300 people from movements across the globe:	+	Phenomena can easily be mistaken for essence. For example, bourgeois liberal political parties often portray themselves as being pro-worker and therefore exhibit phenomena such as rhetoric, slogans, propaganda, and even platform positions which appeal to workers. These phenomena may confuse many into believing that they are workers’ parties when, in reality, they are essentially dominated by the capitalist class. The reverse can also occur. For example, workers may be fooled into believing that a ruthless capitalist politician or celebrity is “working class at heart,” falsely believing that the capitalist’s class position is merely a phenomenon when in fact it is essential.
−	<quote>	+	Understanding true Essence based on real Phenomena is one of the most important aspects of analysis. It is the primary realm of science. In politics, misunderstanding or mischaracterizing Essence and Phenomena can reinforce false beliefs about the way society works which can lead to promulgation of dangerous and reactionary ideologies like neoliberalism and fascism amidst the working class. For this reason, we must avoid examining Phenomena alone. We have to dive deep to discover and understand the essential nature of things, phenomena, and ideas in our analysis.
−	There’s a woman from the Peruvian guerrilla group Tupac Amaru chatting to an Russian environmentalist. Nearby, activists <em>from the Brazilian land squatters movement are doing some funky moves on the dancefloor with a guyfrom the Filipino seafarers union. Then some Brits brashly challenge a bunch of lvlaori indigenous activists to a drinking contest.[292]</em>
−	</quote>
−	Needless to say, the Brits lost. Ideas were swapped, arguments had, and plans laid to take action around two events coming up in May-the annual G8 meeting and the second ministerial of the WTO a day later. Back in Britain Reclaim the Streets parties were continuing around the country-Leeds’ fourth RTS was typical:	+	=== 6. Possibility and Reality ===
−	<quote>	+	==== a. Categories of Possibility and Reality ====
−	<em>West Yorkshire coppers threatened to ruin the party before it had started, petulantly waving around side handled batons and vigorously wrestling the not-yet-inflated bouncy castle from the vigorously bouncy crowd. But ajier halfan hour of unrest the</em> police suddenly withdrew. Then a full on 600-strong party: bouncy castle, billowing banners, free food, and techno... At the end of the afternoon everyone escorted the system safely away, whilst the police sent a few cheeky snatch squads into the <em>crowd’s dwindling remainder; one person was run down and then beaten with truncheons.</em> 22 <em>arrests.[293]</em>
−	</quote>
−	Meanwhile sabotage of GM sites was on the up. The first action against a test site may have been in ’97, but by the end of ’98, 36 had been done over. Most were destroyed by small groups acting at night-covert, anonymous, prepared, and loving every minute. Others were carried out by hundreds in festive daytime trashings. GM sabotage by this time was becoming an international pursuit with actions throughout the Global South and trashings in four other European countries. One of the best aspects of test-site sabotage is that it has been a lot less intimidating for people to do if they have had no experience of sabotage. After all, you don’t need to know your way around aJCB engine (or an incendiary device) to work out how to dig up sugar beet. Alongside sabotage, other actions against GM proliferated, ranging from office occupations to the squatting of a (recently trashed) test site.	+	The ''Possibility'' category refers to things that have not happened nor existed in reality yet, but that would happen, or would exist given necessary conditions.
−	<quote>	+	The ''Reality'' category refers to things that exist or have existed in reality and in human thought.
−	Activists were getting more sorted, as Police Review attested: <em>The protesters are ingenious, organised, articulate... They use inventive tactics to achieve their aims. Forces are having to deploy increasingly sophisticated techniques in the policing of environmental protests.[294]</em> These “sophisticated techniques” were often quite comical: <em>Undercover cops who’d set up a secret camera in a Tayside farmer’s barn and parked up in their unmarked car, hoping to catch some of the Scottish folk who are decontaminating their country by removing genetic test crops, had to run for their lives when the car exhaust set the barn on fire. Both the barn and the car were destroyed.”[295]</em>
−	</quote>
−	On May 16<sup>th</sup> the annual G8 meeting came to Britain. The last time it had been here in 1991, half a dozen EF!ers had caused trouble. In 1998 things were a bit different-5,000 people paralysed central Birmingham in Britain’s contribution to the Global Street Party. Tripods, sound-systems, and banners were all smuggled into the area.	+	==== b. Dialectical Relationship Between Possibility and Reality ====
−	There were some great comic scenes of police incompetence, including them surrounding the small soundsystem (disguised as a family car) and escorting it into the middle of the party. They never once asked why the ‘frightenedfamily’ inside wanted to escape by deliberately driving the wrong way around the roundabout towards the crowd. By the time they realised their mistake it was all too late... the decks were under the travel blankets, boys. What threw you off the scent? The baby seat, or the toys?[296]	+	Possibility and Reality have a unified and inseparable relationship: Possibility can transform into Reality and Reality contains new Possibility; any given Possibility, under specific conditions, can transform into Reality.
−	The party, populated by ranks of scary clowns and gurning ravers, lasted for hours, the normal strange combination of ruck and rave. Unamused, the leaders of the most powerful nations on earth fled the city for the day to a country manor. This being their showpiece, the day was a major victory.	+	Given specific conditions, there could be one or many possibilities for the development of any given thing, phenomenon, or idea: practical Possibility, random Possibility, obvious Possibility, abstract Possibility, near Possibility, far Possibility, etc.
−	Simultaneously other PGA affiliates were on the streets in the first International Day of Action. In India 200,000 peasant farmers called for the death of the WTO, in Brasilia, landless peasants and unemployed workers joined forces and 50,000 took to the streets. Across the world over 30 Reclaim the Streets parties took place, from Finland to Sydney, San Francisco to Toronto, Lyon to Berlin.	+	-----
−	The world leaders flew off our island, no doubt with TV images of dancing rioters on their minds, thinking Ah now to genteel Geneva and wine by the lake at the lVTO. On arrival a huge (molotov) cocktail party welcomed them, the car of the WTO Director General was turned over and three days of heavy rioting followed. While the movement against power was always global, now it was networking and co-ordinating at a speed and depth rarely seen before.	+	==== Annotation 159 ====
−	Street parties and GM sabotage continued throughout the Summer. No longer content with holding one massive street party, RTS London organised two on the same day-in both North and South London. By now state counter-action was a real problem; following the M41 action, the RTS office had been raided and activists arrested for conspiracy. Despite the surveillance, the parties were both pulled off beautifully, with 4,000 in Tottenham and a similar number in Brixton.	+	'''Excerpt From Marxism-Leninism Textbook of Students Who Specialize in Marxism-Leninism'''
−	<quote>	+	''Editor’s notes in [brackets]''
−	<em>I remember two of us standing at Tottenham in the hot sun, getting drenched by a hose directed at us by a laughing local in a flat above. North London RTS had entirely outfoxed the cops and we knew so had South London. Three sound-systems, thousands ofpeople-all blocking some ofLondon’s main arteries. Itfelt wonderful.</em>
−	<em>A</em> <em>couple of nights before, seven oil seed rape test sites had been destroyed across the country on one night.</em> I <em>mean, both of us were usually pretty positive about the movement, yet ifa couple of years befoee someone had predicted that one night multiple affinity groups would covertly hit seven dife rent targets and that that would be almost immediately followed by the simultaneous take-over of two main streets in the capital; well both of us would have thought they were a nutter. Thinking about those actions and looking around us at the smiling crowd we both cracked up, our dreams were becoming reality, we were getting stronger, the music was thumping, and the party even had tented pissoirs over the drains![297]</em>	+	Reality has many aspects. It also has many tendencies of development. These aspects and tendencies of Reality have different roles and positions in the development process of Reality. For example, manifesting any given Possibility into Reality requires us to change a specific subject from one status to a different status. Some subjects are easier to transform and others are more difficult to transform. Some require us to change quality, others only require quantity changes [see Annotation 117, p. 119].
−	</quote>
−	**** The Struggle is Global, lhe Struggle is Local	+	Because Reality has many aspects and tendencies of development, it is useful to classify Possibility. There are at least four types of Possibility, in two separate categories.
−	The PGA International Day of Action and the Global Street Party catalysed a wave of actions across the globe, unprecedented in recent times in terms of both scale and interconnection.	+	[The categorization below draws a distinction between the ''obvious'' and the ''practical.''
−	Hundreds of Indian farmers from PGA affiliated organisations travelled across Europe holding meetings and demos and carrying out anti-GM actions. Strange occasions proliferated. A squatted ex-test site in Essex hosted a visit from the farmers, one <em>of</em> whom (to much applause) sang an old Indian song about killing the English. The farmers’ organisations had destroyed test sites and a laboratory in India, so despite the huge cultural differences, this was a meeting of comrades. As one Indian put it: <em>Together we, the peasants, and you, the poor of Europe, willfight the multinationals with our sweat and together we will succeed in defeating them.</em> That month nine test sites were destroyed in one night and a major research organisation pulled out of GM due to being constantly attacked by direct action.[298] The year would see over 50 experiments trashed.	+	The ''obvious'' is that which will ''certainly'' occur. If you drop an object, it will ''obviously'' fall. The ''practical'' is that which we ''certainly could make occur'' through human will. If you are holding an object, you could ''practically'' drop it.]
−	Next came J18, bringing actions in 27 countries by over a hundred groups. Thousands closing down the centre of the capital in Nigeria, besieging Shell, and 12,000 storming the City of London-one of the hearts of the global financial system--were just two of the highlights. ]18 in London was more successful than anyone could have imagined. Many offices were closed for the day in fear of the action. Many of those that weren’t probably wished they had been. As the soundsytems played, a festive masked crowd (9,000 had been handed out) took advantage of their control of a slice of the city to dance and destroy.	+	'''Obvious Possibility and Random Possibility''' [see: Obviousness and Randomness, p. 144].
−	I ran into the LIPPE building [the Futures Exchange], smashing a .few mirrors in the .of yer and then looked round to see this masked upfigure light a distress flare and hurl it up the escalators towards the offices. Fuck I thought, this is really full on.	+	''Obvious Possibility'' refers to Possibility that ''will'' happen, because conditions to make it happen are set in place so that the Possibility developing into Reality is unavoidable.
−	I was nicked... so I was in the police station... one cop came in drenchedfrom head to toe in white paint. I really had to control myselfto stop laughing-it looked like he’d been shat 011 by a huge bird.[299]	+	[If the conditions arise for a hurricane to form, it eventually becomes ''obvious'' that a hurricane will form.]
−	The HQ of the GM food giant Cargill had its foyer trashed as were the fronts of countless other banks, posh car showrooms and the like. The police were solidly defeated on the day. Above the crowd glittered beautiful banners, one proclaiming “Resist, Refuse, Reclaim, Revolt;” and to back up the statement, hidden inside the banner were half a dozen broom handles-seen the next day on front covers being used against the cops to great effect. Another banner high above the street declared-“Our Resistance is as Global as Capital,” with a huge list of places where actions were happening across the planet. June 18<sup>th</sup>, more than any event before it, saw the coming together of generations of radical opposition in a celebration of our power to create another world-unified around the planet by action.	+	''Random Possibility'' is Possibility which may or may not happen depending on how external factors develop, our actions, the actions of others, etc. [Whether or not a hurricane may develop on any given day is, from our human perspective, random, since we do not have any technology to cause or prevent the development of hurricanes. Other events may be more or less random. We can, for instance, ''prepare'' for an incoming hurricane to minimize the risk of harm to human communities.]
−	l1ie success of the first two days of action had now created a global cycle of inspiration. In November 1999, N30 saw more action. Timed once again to coincide with the meeting of the WTO, actions happened in Britain but undoubtedly the main event was in the US-Seattle. Tens of thousands brought the city to a standstill and in three incredible days forced the meeting to close. This was understandably seen as an amazing victory, especially considering the paucity and assimilated nature of much of American opposition. lhe victory in America was mirrored in Britain by what many saw as a defeat. RTS London were now in a pickle. People expected them to organise big mass events, but apart from being very busy many were worried about the (violent) genie they had let out of the bottle on J18. N30 in London was a static rally, masks were not handed out. Despite the burning cop van (always a pretty sight) N30 London remained contained by the police, and to a certain extent by the organisers. For good or bad you can’t turn the clock back-from now on any RTS style event in the capital would see massive policing and people coming expecting a major ruck.	+	Second, based on the practical relationships between subjects, we have:
−	Of course, resistance was not only centred around GM and the International Days of Action, or for that matter around internationalism; the local was still at the forefront for many. While the big days got the column inches, everywhere activists were fighting small local land struggles and in-creasingly getting stuck into community organising. In fact, in the 12 months following the Global Street Party, there were 34 direct action camps across the country.[300] Most of these were now a combination of tree-houses, benders and tunnels and set up against a diverse set of developments. While most were populated by what The Sun described as the “tribe of treepeople;’ some were almost entirely done by locals-the type of people who before the road wars might have simply written to their Mp. Direct action was so big in the ‘90s that it was seen as a normal tactic for fighting projects.	+	'''Practical Possibility vs. Abstract Possibility:'''
−	This generalisation of direct action is one of the many hidden but hugely important victories the movement has had.	+	''Practical Possibility'' means that conditions in Reality which ''could'' make something happen are already in place. [If you have all the ingredients, knowledge, and equipment needed to make a pie, you ''could'' make a pie. The material conditions are in place.]
−	While there were no major technical innovations in camps over this period (Nine Ladies in 2002 looked pretty like Manchester Airport in 1997-but smaller) there were many victories. Simply the threat of a site stopped many developments and many camps had to “tat down” after victories, usually against local authorities or developers. Even evicted camps sometimes resulted in victory. In London a camp ran for a year against a major leisure complex in Crystal Palace Park. The eviction came at the cost of over £1 million.	+	''Abstract Possibility'' is Possibility which may become Reality in the future but the conditions which would make this Possibility become Reality have not yet developed.
−	Bailifsf, accompanied by around 350 police, moved on to the site and began removing thefifty people presentfrom the various tree <em>and bunker defences. The eviction was completed a record breaking</em> 19 <em>days later when the last two occupants came out of the bunker they had been in since the beginning of the eviction.[301]</em> This campaign won. The eviction cost, and the prospect of more trouble, freaked out the council no end. Though this period saw far fewer victories than the fight against the national roads programme, it saw many more victories where camps themselves actually won there and then. Despite this, without the unifying nature of the previous period (and with many activists both “looking to the global” and not willing to go to sites), camps decreased in number.	+	[It is an abstract Possibility that you ''could'' make a pie, even if you don’t have the tools, ingredients, or knowledge. It is possible, in the abstract, that you could buy the ingredients and equipment and learn the necessary skills to make a pie. ''Near Possibility'' simply refers to Possibility which may become Reality in the shorter term, ''far Possibility'' refers to things which may happen in a more distant future, relative to the subject being discussed.]
−	Other factors also included increased police harassment (especially following J18) and of course “defeat through victory:’ In the South Downs during this time, two major developments, the Hastings Bypass and a house building project in Peacehaven[302] were both halted (for now) after direct action pledges were launched. Many other groups have been in this situation, which, while a cause for jubilation, has meant that the culture of camps has suffered setbacks while its spectre wins victories. The year and a half between July ’99 and January ’01 saw only 10 camps operate, a quarter of the number that had been active in the previous year and a half. Since January ’02 there have never been more than four ecological direct action camps at any given time.	+	-----
−	Other local struggles such as those against casualised workplaces or for access to the land have continued, never though really become period-setting events.[303] One major area that many have moved into-often at the same time as night-time sabotage and irregular big days out-has been community organising. From helping run women’s refuges and self defence, to doing ecological education with kids and sorting out local food projects, this work has been an important extension of direct action.[304] While these actions don’t directly defend ecologies they work (we hope) to grow libertarian and ecological tendencies in society, an integral part of the revolutionary process.[305]	+	In social life, in order to transform a Possibility into Reality, there must be objective conditions and subjective factors. Subjective factors include the ability of humans to change Possibility into Reality. Objective conditions refer to the situations needed to make such a change occur. [In other words, humans are able to ''subjectively'' change possibility into reality, but only when the ''objective'' circumstances exist in the external world.]
−	**** Guerrilla Gardening	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	The next PGA International Day of Action was Mayday 2000. Once again there were actions all over the globe. Across Britain events happened in quite a few established activist towns, many very successfully; unfortunately overshadowing them was the mess that was the London Guerrilla Gardening event.	+	We must base our perception and practice on Reality.
−	The idea of doing another big national action was mooted at an EF! gathering in Oxford the previous winter-nearly everyone thought it a terrible concept. The state would massively prepare, the number of imprisoned activists would no doubt increase. As has been argued elsewhere,[306] Mayday 2000-and most of its follow ups-were essentially attempts to copy J18 minus the street violence and sound systems.	+	Lenin said: “Marxism takes its stand on the facts, and not on possibilities. A Marxist must, as the foundation of his policy, put [forth] ''only'' precisely and unquestionably demonstrated ''facts''.”<ref>''To N. D. Kiknadze'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, written after November 5, 1916.</ref>
−	J18 had come from a momentum built up by street parties and anti-road protests, and it worked in part because it involved groups all over the country and had the element of surprise. As with national EF! actions after Whatley, the police were once bitten, twice shy. Containment of the crowd by both the cops, and in part by the organisers, created what most saw as both a rubbish party and a rubbish riot. Up until this event there had always been quite a strong working relationship between radical eco groups nationwide and activists in London. Following Mayday this would sadly decrease.	+	However, in our perception and practice, we also need to comprehensively recognize possibilities which could arise from Reality. This will allow us to develop methods of practical operation which are suitable to changes and developments which might occur. We must actively make use of subjective factors in perception and practice to turn Possibility into Reality whenever it would serve our purposes.
−	Ironically, the symbolic guerrilla gardening at Parliament Square only succeeded in reminding activists across the country why they liked actual guerrilla action, like covert GM sabotage, and actual gardening on their allotments. The next year’s London Mayday was hardly better. The double whammy of N30 followed by Mayday resulted in RTS London losing its great party reputation, at the same time as street parties were happening less and less regularly across the country.	+	-----
−	Meanwhile actions against GM continued to increase in scale, some involving up to 800 people. The vast majority, however, continued to be carried out covertly at night. Globally, GM sabotage was now spreading even more. Across the world shadows in the moonlight were razing GM crops trials to the ground. Spades, sticks, scythes, sickles, and fire brought in the harvest.	+	==== Annotation 160 ====
−	Doors splintered as labs were broken into. Pies were aimed at the arrogance of the powerful. Harassment and disruption greeted the biotech industry wherever it gathered. lhe deputy head of the American Treasury said in a statement to the Senate that the campaign against genetic engineering in Europe is the greatest block to global economic liberalisation presently in existence.	+	This idea is perhaps best exemplified in the traditional Vietnamese proverb: “you can’t just open your mouth and wait for fruit to drop into your mouth.” We have to actively apply our will, through practice and labor, to develop the best possibilities into manifested Reality. See more about subjective factors in Annotation 207, p. 202.
−	The actions were hugely successful in frightening institutions into not extending GM research and forcing many supermarkets to withdraw from pushing GM food. Sadly though, pure research was rarely attacked in Britain. Apart from the major successes the campaign achieved/is achieving, GM sabotage schooled hundreds in covert cell-structured sabotage-a capacity that will no doubt become ever-more useful.	+	== IV. Basic Laws of Materialist Dialectics ==
−	**** Channel Hopping	+	''Laws'' are the regular, common, obvious, natural, and objective relations between internal aspects, factors, and attributes of a thing or phenomenon or between things and phenomena.
−	Given the decrease in day-to-day struggle and the failure of the London street actions, there was a sharp turn towards international riot tourism. Te biggest workshops at the 2000 EF! Summer gathering were for those preparing to go to the next meeting of the World Bank and the IMF in Prague. Hundreds went from Britain, experiencing an exciting range of success and failure.	+	There are many types of laws in this world and they all have different prevalence, reach, characteristics, and roles in regard to the motion and development processes of things and phenomena in nature, society, and human thought. So, it is necessary to classify different laws for humans to understand and apply them effectively into practical activities. Classifying laws based on prevalence, we have: private laws, common laws, and universal laws [see: ''Private and Common'', p. 128].
−	Divisions over violence and symbolism that were always present in the British scene were thrown into relief by the extremes of the situation. Some joined the street-fighting international black block, others (both pro- and anti-violent attacks on the summit), formed together in the Pink and Silver Block. This Barmy Army was a contradictory group of people with quite divergent views, pulled together by a desire for national unity. Diversity in this case was definitely not strength. Putting the problems aside (dealt with well elsewhere[307]), Prague was immensely inspiring. Thousands from all over Europe converged and forced the conferences to close early, creating a surreal, almost civil war atmosphere. Though the crowds failed to break into the conference, they shattered the desire of future cities to host these events. Previously, a visit from one of these august ruling class bodies was the dream of any town bureaucrat or politician-now it was their nightmare.	+	''Private laws'' are laws that only apply to a specific range of things and phenomena. For example: laws of mechanical motion, laws of chemical motion, laws of biological motion, etc.
−	The following year, many more from the movement would go to Genoa in Italy where an unparalleled number of people on the street would clash with the state (and sometimes each other). Many also went to the anti-summit actions in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and France. Only three years after the Global Street Party and the riot in Geneva started the wave of summit actions, the global elite was having to organise massive defence operations to stay safe behind their barricades. This wave of action not only inspired thousands, and spread the wildfire of resistance worldwide, it also forced many of these meetings to cut down the length of their events, move to ever-less accessible fortresses and in some cases cancel their roving showcases all together.[308]	+	''Common laws'' are laws that apply to a broader range of subjects than ''private laws,'' and they impact many different subjects. For instance: the law of preservation of mass, the law of preservation of energy, etc.
−	Beyond the big street spectaculars many British activists were increasingly spending time abroad, inspired by the often more up-for-it squatting scenes. This acted as a further drain on the movement, but it also brought new experiences into the collective mind, aided future action, made real human links across borders and just as importantly gave some amazing moments to those involved. The move to the territory of other nations, temporary for most, comes as no surprise in a period defined by its internationalism.	+	''Universal laws'' are laws that impact every aspect of nature, society, and human thought. Materialist dialectics is the study of these universal laws.
−	**** International Solidarity	+	If we classify laws based on the ''reach of impact'', we will have three main groups: laws of nature, laws of society, and laws of human thought.
−	Back in Britain, the radical ecological scene was increasingly involved in solidarity with (largely so-called Third World) groups abroad. As the Malaysia campaign showed, this had always been a major part of the movement. Following the ’95 EF! gathering, activists invaded a factory that built Hawk aircraft and hoisted the East Timorese flag. Throughout the land struggle period, office actions, AGM actions, embassy blockades, petrol station pickets and home visits to corporate directors had all been used to support the Ogoni/Ijaw struggle in Nigeria and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army in Papua New Guinea. Yet in this period solidarity with struggling communities beyond the capitalist core became a much bigger part of the movement. This was part and parcel of the shift in emphasis towards people seeing the radical ecological movement as part of a global revolutionary movement.	+	''Laws of nature'' are laws that arise in the natural world, including within the human body. They are not products of human conscious activities.
−	On the first business day of 1999, three groups barricaded themselves into two senior management offices and the corporate library in Shell-Mex House in London.	+	''Laws of society'' are the laws of human activity in social relations; these laws only apply to the conscious activities of humans, yet they are still objective.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	January 4 was Ogoni Day, celebrated since Shell wasforced out of Ogoni through massive resistance. The concerned individuals seized three key locations in the building, some of which had a pleasing view of Waterloo bridge and the banner being hung across-by others-reading Shell: Filthy Theiving Murderers.[309]
−	</quote>
−	In 1999 the keynote speech at the EF! Summer gathering was made by a visiting Papuan tribesman from the OPM. His inspirational talk resulted in actions across the country that Autumn against various corporations involved. Sporadic actions would continue in solidarity with this South Pacific struggle, as well as financial support for refugees and medical aid for prisoners, both actions which literally kept people alive.	+	==== Annotation 161 ====
−	Less theory, it was more lived experience abroad that inspired solidarity work back at home. By 2001, most towns listed with EF! groups had at least one returnee from the jungles of the Mexican South West. In 2001 a steady stream of activists going to Palestine started, many doing valuable on-the-ground solidarity work in the heat of the second Intifada-and the Israeli crackdown.	+	We have already discussed how relations between human beings are objective [see Annotation 108, p. 112]. By extension, the human relations which compose human societies are objective, and thus, any laws which govern objective human relations must also be objective.
−	Those returning from abroad wanted to “bring the war home” with a range of actions, speaking tours, and fundraising pushes. Of course GM actions are also in part solidarity actions with Third World peasants. From benefit gigs to demos at the Argentinian embassy-solidarity work was increasingly filling the gap a lack of land struggles left behind.	+	Marx’s assertion that human social relations are objective is critical to understanding his work. Marx pointed out that social relations may not be “physical,” in the sense that they can’t be observed directly with human senses, but that they still have an ''objective character'' — they exist externally to a given subject, and they have objective impacts on reality. For instance, the class relations between the capitalist class and the working class result in objective manifestations in reality, such as wealth accumulation, modes of circulation, etc.
−	**** Then and Now	+	''Laws of human thought'' are laws of the intrinsic relationships between concepts, categories, judgments, inference, and the development process of human rational awareness.
−	This decade-long retrospective ends at the end of 2001. I did think of extending it when this issue of Do or Die became ever later and later but I thought better of it for a number of reasons. Firstly it seemed a neat end point; secondly much of this issue of DoD covers the next year and a half to Summer 2003; and thirdly Part Two of this article was released in January 2002 and some of what the movement has engaged in since then has been, at least partially, as a result of its suggestions. For good or bad I’ll leave it to others to use hindsight to judge whether some proposals were blind alleys or blinding campaigns. To analyse them here would be definitely to put the cart before the horse.	+	As the science of common relations and development, materialist dialectics studies the ''universal laws'' that influence the entire natural world, human society, and human thought, all together as a whole.
−	Nevertheless, I’ll say a little about where we find ourselves. Looking at the first EF! AU of 2002, it seems strange, slightly worrying, but also inspiring that 10 years on there is an obvious continuity of action through the decade: a new protest site, nighttime sabotage actions, actions against summits, anti-war demos. The centre spread is a briefing for the campaign to defend Northern peat bogs, a struggle from right back in 1991 (and further) that re-started in 2001 and is covered elsewhere in this issue.	+	These universal laws are:
−	In a way the last year or so has reminded me of the film Back to the Future (now I’m showing my age); not only was the peat campaign back up and running, but also there was an anti-road gathering in Nottingham, and actions were announced to aid tribal groups in the Pacific.	+	* The law of transformation between quantity and quality.
		+	* The law of unification and contradiction between opposites.
		+	* The law of negation of negation.
−	There are now far fewer EF! groups listed than in the mid ‘90s, and the travelling culture many site activists came from has been largely destroyed by state force and drugs. Nevertheless, the radical ecological movement is in a surprisingly healthy state and has succeeded in not being assimilated into the mainstream. Ten years on and we’re still more likely to be interviewed by the police than a marketing consult or academic (remember to say “No Comment” to all three!). The movement is still active and still raw. Many places continue to be saved by ecological direct action, our threat potential still puts the willies up developers, and people are still, getting involved and inspired.	+	-----
−	Our gathering this year will probably be attended by around 350–400 in total-the same kind of number it has been since 1996. While we don’t want to build up the movement like a Leninist party-“more members, please more members”-the fact that we have stayed at this number despite catalysing situations of struggle involving thousands should give us some pause for thought.	+	==== Annotation 162 ====
−	Two prime contradictions have haunted the radical ecological resistance on this island. British EF! was born as a wilderness defence movement with no wilderness, and evolved into a network of revolutionaries in non-revolutionary times. The process of consolidation that was started in 1997 enabled radical ecological circles to survive the slowdown of domestic land struggles after the viclory against national roadbuilding. This process combined with the upsurge in global resistance enabled us in part to side-step the questions posed by the above contradictions.	+	Each of these laws is considered ''universal'' because they apply to all things, phenomena, and ideas, and all the internal and external relations thereof, in human perception and practice. All things, phenomena, and ideas change and develop as a result of mutual impacts and relationships in accordance with these universal laws. On a fundamental level, materialist dialectics is the study of these universal laws and their utility.
−	If we want to see the wildlands defended and any chance of libertarian, ecological (r)evolution increase then practical action is needed. Much is already underway, but more is needed and without a clear strategy we are bound to fail. “Part Two: The Four Tasks” aims to provide some pointers towards a unified strategy and an attempt to resolve, or at least overcome, some of the contradictions of our movement.	+	=== 1. Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality ===
−	On a personal note the ten years of radical ecological action documented here have been immensely inspiring to me. It’s been an honour to stand on the frontlines (as well as lounge about in lounges) with some lovely, brave, insightful, and amazing people. Thank you.	+	The law of transformation between quantity and quality is a universal law which concerns the universal mode of motion and development processes of nature, society, and human thought.
−	*** Appendix	+	-----
−	**** Friend or FoE?	+	==== Annotation 163 ====
−	In the early 1990s Friends of the Earth (FoE) central office made a concerted effort to restrict the growth of the new movement. Negative public statements about EF! were issued (most notably about the Sarawak jailings) but it wasn’t until the April 1992 Thorne Moors sabotage that FoE central office showed its true colours when Andrew Lees-then head ofFoE-condemned the action on TV.	+	Remember that mode refers to ''how'' something exists, functions, and develops [see Annotation 60, p. 59]. The universal mode of motion and development processes thus refers to ''how'' all things, ideas, and phenomena move, change, and develop.
−	<quote>	+	Friedrich Engels defined the law of transformation between quantity and quality in ''Dialectics of Nature'':
−	We have to be very careful that this style of anti-environmental action does not actually get misrepresented as something the environment movement support. We decry, we deny it. It has noplace in a democracy which relies, and must rely, on public demanding thepoliticians deliver the goods.[310]
−	</quote>
−	This public condemnation of the very essence of direct action showed how far FoE central office had come from its early radical days. Contrast it with a statement by FoE’ s first director twenty years previously.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa. For our purpose, we could express this by saying that in nature, in a manner exactly fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion (so-called energy).
		+	</blockquote>
−	<quote>	+	In other words, ''quantitative'' changes of things, phenomena, and ideas lead to ''quality'' shifts.
−	Whilst it is the case that the Japanese experience of people physically fighting the construction of an airport or motorway has not been repeated in Britain that is not to say that it will not occur here. Indeed... it is almost inconceivable that clashes... will be avoided... when patience runs out we won’t really be--<em>what’s the word?</em>--militant. After all is said and done, putting sugar in a bulldozer’s petrol tank is relatively undramatic compared with blowing up a mountain.[311]
−	</quote>
−	After slagging the action publicly Lees got to work on his own members. Worried (correctly) that many local FoE groups were showing interest in direct action, an edict was issued banning them from working with EF! It even went as far as to warn FoE groups that if they demonstrated with EF! their right to use the FoE Ltd. name might be revoked. This intimidation was too much for some of the FoE grassroots. At FoE National Conference local groups led by Birmingham and Brighton challenged Lees on this and defeated him.	+	-----
−	Lees and others at FoE Central had seen the new movement as a potential threat to power. They thought they could nip it in the bud-they couldn’t. It would grow much bigger and gain vast public sympathy. The strategy of FoE changed-from one of strength to one of weakness. By the mid-‘90s a new director was trying to court EF!-even turning up to an EF! Gathering with a large block of dope (whisky for the natives). He invisaged a series of meetings at which he and two or three other top staff could meet a similar number of EF! representatives behind dosed doors. This was of course out of the question. Just as no one could represent EF! at a national level, EF! could not represent everyone involved in eco-direct action. Over 20 EF!ers came to the first meeting, most to make this point and make sure no one could sell the movement down the river. FoE said it had learnt from its past mistakes-most EF!ers looked sceptical.	+	The universal mode of motion and development processes follows the law of transformation between quantity and quality, which states:
−	At the same time the Newbury Bypass saw FoE Central’s biggest push to capitalise on direct action. It even managed to take over the campaign’s media liaison, (resulting in a major increase in its media profile and resultant subs money). Promises not to publicly slag direct action were hastily forgotten when over a hundred stormed an office throwing computers out of the window. When hundreds took part in the festive burning of diggers, FoE Central once again condemned the resistance.	+	Qualitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas arise from the inevitable basis of the quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and, ideas; and, vice versa: quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas arise from the inevitable basis of qualitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	The experience of dealing with FoE Central would be just the first of its kind. A few years later, following the J18 global day of action, the Socialist Workers Party [SWP] (another reformist hierarchical racket) would try to boost its membership by fronting itself as the backbone of the movement. Just like FoE it condemned militant and genuine resistance while trying to build bridges to mainstream groups.	+	-----
−	NGOs, political parties. These professional priests of assimilation are simply vampires-let’s do some staking.	+	==== Annotation 164 ====
−	**** Utter Contempt for the Court	+	Put simply: quantity changes develop into quality changes, and quality changes lead to quantity changes [see Annotation 117, p. 119]. We say that these changes to quantity and quality occur on the “inevitable basis” of one another because quality changes always, invariably, arise from quantity changes, and, likewise, quantity changes always, invariably, arise from quality changes.
−	During Jesmond Dene, people were still being picked up for having broken the Twyford injunction. Qyolobolox knew the cops would nick him sooner or later at the Dene and send him down to the High Court, but he was prepared. When the inevitable arrest came he gave the High Court quite a surprise. Stripping off to orange suspenders, worn all summer under his trousers especially for this occasion, he goosestepped up and down in front of the judge sieg-heiling. The judge closed the court in horror. This was a not-so-subtle reference to the recent death of Steven Milligan, the Tory MP for Eastleigh (near Twyford). Milligan, (who had once memorably described the Dongas Tribe as “weirdoes”) was found dead hanging from the ceiling after an erotic auto-asphyxiation disaster, wearing nothing but suspenders with an amyl nitrate-soaked orange in his mouth. Unsurprisingly the judge added weeks to Q_uolobolox’s sentence for Contempt of Court.	+	Just as quantity shifts lead to quality shifts, it is also true that quality shifts lead to quantity shifts. For example, if you have 11 donuts, then add 1 donut, you now have ''1 dozen'' donuts. If you add 12 more donuts, you would then have ''2 dozen''.
−	<br>	+	Another example of quality shift leading to quantity shift would be a pond filling with rain water. Once enough drops of water collect and the pond is considered full — that is to say, once it is considered to be “a pond” of water — we will no longer think of the pond in terms of “drops.” We would think of the pond as “filled,” “overfilled,” “underfilled,” etc.
−	*** Part Two: The Four Tasks	+	Note that both of these examples are related to our human perceptions and understanding of the material world. The material world does not change based on our perceptions, nor how we classify the quantity or quality of a given subject. There are also objective aspects related to quality shifts leading to quantity shifts. For example, if we adjust the quantity of the temperature of a sheet of paper to the point of burning, and the paper burns, then the quantity of paper would be reduced from one sheet to zero sheets. In other words, the quality shift arising from temperature quantity increase (i.e., the paper burning into ash) results in a quantity shift in how many pieces of paper exist (from one sheet to zero sheets). However, even this is ultimately a subjective assessment rooted in human consciousness, since we subjectively think in terms of “sheets of paper,” and the concept of a “sheet of paper” is essentially a classification rooted in human consciousness. It is merely an abstract way of perceiving and considering the quantity and quality of the material subject which we think of as “paper.”
−	In Part One we looked at some of radical ecology’s recent history; now it’s time to stop looking back and start looking forward. I called Part One “Recent Pre-History” because the past is prologue. An understanding of our own movement’s evolution so far is essential when discussing in which direction(s) we want to evolve.	+	The law of transformation between quantity and quality is an inevitable, objective, and universal relationship that repeats in every motion and development process of all things, phenomena, and ideas in nature, human society, and human thought.
−	For if we are going to help catalyse a movement that can “confront, stop, and eventually reverse the forces responsible for the <em>destruction of the earth and its inhabitgnts,”</em> we <em>are going to need ood stratey.</em>	+	==== a. Definitions of Quality and Quantity ====
−	<em>We live in important times. This moment does not allow us much margin of error.</em>	+	''- Definition of Quality''
−	<em>This is an attempt to solidify my ideas on our strategy and put them across in a digestible form. Though</em> I <em>am doing the typing and the mentalfiling, the ideas are by no means mine alone. Some are very common in our circles, in the lastfew years having reached the point of cross-group consensus.</em> I<em>will</em> <em>state them nonetheless as it’s useful for those who’ve recently entered our arcane world, who may not know the subtext. Ihey are alsoworth clarifying for those of ushose minds, filledwith the subtext, become murkier every day. A1any of the ideas are not in anyway cross-group consensus. 7Jiey are offered up and can be treated as delicacies or dogfood depending on your taste.</em>	+	''Quality'' refers to the organic unity which exists amongst the component parts of a thing, phenomenon, or idea that distinguishes it from other things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	<em>This is a strategy documentwritten to promote discussion in Britain’s radical ecological direct action movement. Much of it may be useful for people from other circles and countries. BUT it is</em> NOT <em>an attempt to build some overriding strategy for “the emerging global resistance” or any similar abstraction. While it may be useful for readers in the global North,</em> I <em>reckon it’s largely out of context in the Majority World. Even within Western Europe, culture, terrains of struggle and movements vary a lot. It’sworth reiterating the obvious. Strategy should be informed by the global context but primarily shaped by the local conditions.</em>	+	-----
−	A Small Editorial Note	+	==== Annotation 165 ====
−	“Part Two: The Four Tasks” was pre-published for the EF! Winter Moot in 2002 where 150 copies were given out free. I did this for two reasons. Firstly I wanted to get feedback with an aim to improvement, and secondly I feared that DoD #10 would not come out for months... or years. DoD #10 came out 17 months later and by then I had gotten quite a lot of wise responses. Many of those thoughts from good warriors and friends have been incorporated in the re-written text printed here. In large part this project, despite its meglomaniacal undertones, was always a collective effort-a bringing together of many of the strands that bind us together as movements. The many helpful suggestions, criticisms and funny chats that resulted have made it all the more so.	+	Note: we have already given basic definitions of quantity and quality in Annotation 117, p. 119. What follows are more comprehensive philosophical definitions of quality and quantity. Our world exists as one continuity of matter. All things and phenomena in our universe exist essentially as one unified system — namely, the entity which we call “the universe.” This unified nature of existence is extremely difficult for human beings to comprehend. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pointed out that, in this sense, the unity of “pure being” is indistinguishable from “nothingness.” In ''Science of Logic'', Hegel noted that if we try to comprehend pure material existence, as a whole, without distinguishing any component thing or phenomenon from any other, then all is incomprehensible. Human consciousness needs to delineate and distinguish the component parts of this unified system from each other in order to make sense of it all.
−	As a strategy document it is of its time more that most writings, maybe. As you are reading this well over a year after it was written, action has moved on. One glaring example is the peat campaign, mentioned as an embryonic campaign, when in fact it has now succeeded in most of its original objectives. Some recommendations in this Part Two have been taken up, others ignored. While some increased activity in some areas may seem-in hindsight-a result of this text it would mostly be more true to see the four tasks as mirroring existing trends, not necessarily inspiring them. In some places I have updated the text to take consideration of this time lag, mostly though I have just left the text unchanged with the occasional [editorial intermission].	+	<blockquote>
		+	Pure light and pure darkness are two voids which are the same thing. Something can be distinguished only in determinate light or darkness... [F]or this reason, it is only darkened light and illuminated darkness which have within themselves the moment of difference and are, therefore, determinate being.
		+	</blockquote>
−	**** I: Growing Counter Cultures	+	The human mind has evolved to perceive various things, phenomena, and ideas as ''differentiated''. Quality is the basis on which we perceive subjects as distinct from one another. Every thing, phenomenon, and idea is composed of internal components and relations. The unity of these internal components and relations is what we refer to as ''quality''. For example, a human being’s ''quality'' refers to the unity of all the internal components and relationships of which the human being is composed (i.e., the cells, organs, blood, etc., as well as the thoughts, memories, etc., which make the human) ''in unity''. Quality is also a subjective phenomenon: a ''reflection'' of the material world in human consciousness [see Annotation 68, p. 65]. Therefore we may conceive of various qualities for the same subject. We can think of 12 donuts as “a box of donuts,” “a dozen donuts,” or as 12 individual donuts. We could consider a building as “one apartment building” or “forty apartments,” depending on the viewpoint of analysis.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	We need to catalyse living, loving, fighting counter-cultures that can sustain rebellion across generations. In both collective struggle and our everyday lives we must try to live our ecological and libertarian principles. Our counter cultures must be glimmers of ecological anarchy-fertiliser for the growth of collective imagination. Fulfilling this task is what will enable the others to be fulfilled over the long haul. The counter cultures must be bases from which to carry out thumb-in-the-dam actions and give support to rebellions beyond the core. In times of crisis they should act decisively against authoritarian groups. The counter culture’s eventual aim should be total social transcendence-(r)evolution.
−	[An anarchist society] can hardly come about when isolated groups follow a policy of resistancefor the sake of resistance. Unless we can first prove that anarchism works through creating libertarian communities, the critical level of support that we need will never materialise, for the mass of workers will otherwise continue to be influenced by authoritarian propaganda...	+	So, objective and inherent attributes form the quality of things, phenomena, and ideas, but we must not confuse quality and attribute with one another. Every thing, phenomenon, and idea has both fundamental and non-fundamental attributes. Only fundamental attributes constitute the quality of things, phenomena and ideas. When the fundamental attributes change, the quality also changes. The distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental attributes of things, phenomena, and ideas must depend on the purpose of the analysis; the same attribute may be fundamental when analyzing with one purpose but non-fundamental when analyzing with another purpose.
−	[One] reason for developing a libertarian social and work structure is that it is a bulwark against authoritarian groups <em>when the upheaval comes. If we have not yet learnt the lessons of the Rus-sian and Spanish revolutions when the communists savagely attacked thefreedom of anarchism, then we do not deserve to survive as a movement. We start at a severe disadvantage vis-a-vis our authoritarian ‘comrades’, and they will easily destroy us again unless the shoots of libertarianism are already pushing through the crumbling remains of the old society.</em>	+	-----
−	<right>	+	==== Annotation 166 ====
−	--Stuart Christie, <em>Towards</em> A <em>Citizens Militia</em>
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	***** Map Reading in the Social Desert	+	Whether or not an attribute is considered “fundamental” depends entirely on conscious perspective. For example, one baker may consider chocolate chips to be “fundamental” for baking cookies while another baker may not. This subjective characteristic of what might be considered “fundamental” or not is reflected in how we consider quality. If you are trying to determine how much water you need to fill a swimming pool, you may think of a pool in terms of size (i.e., “this is an Olympic sized pool”), but if you just want to go for a swim, you are likely to just think in terms of the water level (i.e., “the pool is empty, we can’t swim”).
−	Things are going to shit. They have been for a long while (10,000 years) but now it’s getting really serious. Social solidarity is imploding and ecological systems are being ravaged as never before. What is needed is an entire change of direction for global human society. We need to find each other and together find our way back to nature.	+	If you are planning the construction of a school and want to know how many classrooms it will need, you might think in terms of “classrooms of students.” But if you are considering funding for a school year, you might consider the ''total number of students''.
−	We must totally dismantle the technological web of slavery and dependence that we have been born into. For the earth’s remaining forests to stay up, the world’s factories have to come down. To do this we will have to take on the most murderous ruling classes ever to disgrace the earth.	+	The quality of a thing, phenomenon, or idea is determined by the qualities of its component parts.
−	Of course, within the realm of contemporary politics, these solutions are not only unrealistic, but also unintelligible. That hardly matters. The biological meltdown is fast making the logic of industrial society irrelevant.	+	-----
−	Reformist manoeuvres in this context resemble rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Global ecological and libertarian revolution, though incredibly unlikely, is a far more realistic strategy for defeating apocalypse and global slavery than recycling or voting for the Socialist Alliance.	+	==== Annotation 167 ====
−	A consensus in plenary at the 1997 EF! Gathering was that the movement saw itself as an ecological revolutionary network.[312] This is a considerable change from the past radical ecological view that sees no hope for positive social change this side of industrial collapse.	+	Qualities are composed of qualities, combined, in unity. “A swimming pool” may consist of a certain amount of concrete in a specific configuration combined with 5,000 gallons of water. A car may be composed of a body, an engine, four tires, etc. Each individual component exists as a quality — a unity of component attributes — in and of itself.
−	So, if we set ourselves the task of advancing (r)evolution here in the core, how are we going to go about it’? We are talking vast change here. Lefties just want to change the rules of the game leaving hierarchy, ideology, and industry intact. We want to stop the game and start living. While they want to build workers power (power for lefty ex-students mostly) we want to destroy power and abolish work. This is a massive (though not a mass[313]) undertaking.	+	Quality is also determined by the structures and connections between component parts which manifest in specific relations. Therefore, distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental attributes is also relative.
−	The mythical Revolution is not something that will just happen suddenly one day after we’ve polished some ideology long enough. (R)evolution is a process of individuals and collectives reclaiming what has been taken from us, rediscovering our power and creativity together. Sometimes gradually, sometimes in huge leaps during times of greater struggle.	+	-----
−	***** Expand the Cultural Oases	+	==== Annotation 168 ====
−	If we are to actually change things then there are some things we have to do: We have to build our own economic, justice and social systems. We have to do this all the while main-taining an equal emphasis towards destroying the existing culture and its fucked up systems.	+	It’s not just the component parts of a subject which define its quality, but also the relations of those component parts. For instance, a quantity of wood and nails configured in one set of structural relations may have the quality of a chair, whereas the same component parts arranged with different structures and relations may have the quality of a table. In this sense, quality can be thought of as a synthesis of the Content and Form [see ''Content and Form'', p. 147] of a thing, phenomenon, or idea from a certain perspective.
−	***** Making Punk A Threat Again[314]	+	For example, if we see two shoes, we may think of each shoe as an individual qualitative object (two shoes). On the other hand, we may think of the shoes, together, as a single qualitative “object” in terms of its utility and in terms of synthesis of content and form (“a pair of shoes”), so much so that if one shoe is lost then the remaining shoe is considered useless and discarded as trash.
−	(R)evolution is about practical change in everyday life, class consciousness, solidarity, love, and imagination.	+	Because there are countless ways in which quality — the configuration and relations and composition of constituent parts of any given subject — can manifest, we must recognize that quality itself, based on the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental attributes, is a relative and subjective phenomenon of human consciousness.
−	(R)evolution is the evolutionary process of the creation of new worlds.	+	Any given subject will have multiple qualities, depending on the relations which exist between and within that subject and other subjects.
−	Ecological direct action could be just an exciting holiday of autonomy between leaving school and entering the world of work and parenting. If that’s all it ends up being, then it has still given me and thousands of others some of the most beautiful, exhilarating, and just plain weird moments in our lives.	+	-----
−	However if we really want to kick this system in and grow a new world we have got to build a multigenerational culture that can sustain us for the long haul.	+	==== Annotation 169 ====
−	In growing ecological libertarian counter cultures it is worth looking at past experiences of anarchist (r)evolution. Probably the best example in the West remains that of the historical Spanish anarchist movement.	+	Any thing, phenomenon, or idea may be perceived from various different perspectives which would cause us to consider it as having different qualities. A single shoe may be considered as: a shoe, 3 pounds of leather, half of a pair, etc., depending on its internal and external relations and the perspective of the person considering the shoe.
−	***** The Spanish Anarchist Counter-Society	+	We can’t consider things, phenomena, and ideas apart from quality. Quality exhibits a subject’s relative stability.
−	Us anarchists have a tendency to fetishise Spain 1936. In the non-insurreclionary times that we live, looking back to a golden age of anarchism can seriously get in the way of analysing and struggling in the here and now. We are a long way off from the cataclysm, and clashes of the Spanish civil war. However there is a lot to learn from the Spanish experience-less in the trenches ofAragon and more in the movement that gave them birth.	+	-----
−	A simplistic view sees the Spanish revolution as starting in 1936 and ending with Franco’s victory. In fact the (r)evolution started decades before. Franco’s attempted coup d’etat and the ensuing civil war was the rich’s (eventually successful) attempt to stall the growth of a culture that was reaching transcendent levels in many parts of Spain. Increasingly class conscious and combatative workers organising in /largely) anarchist unions were immersed in a multigenerational culture that not only opposed, but replaced, much of Spain’s state/church-backed infrastructure; they were maturing into a movement that, given a few more years, would have been almost impossible to destroy. In learning about the movement that Franco had to unleash a sea ofblood to wash away we can see in part what needs to be done in our own times.	+	==== Annotation 170 ====
−	In his brilliant book about the pre-civil war anarchist movement Murray Bookchin has this to say,	+	Remember that ''quality'' is the way in which the human mind conceives of the world as a collection of distinct things, phenomena, and ideas. These perceptions of quality are purely relative, but they are important, because they are what allow us to develop an understanding of the complicated system of things, phenomena, and ideas which make up our universe. In our perception, quality represents the relative stability of a thing, phenomenon, or idea which makes it a subject that we can consider and analyze in and of itself. Understanding how we distinguish between different subjects is crucial in developing a scientific understanding of the world which is rooted in observation and practice.
−	<quote>	+	''- Definition of Quantity''
−	<em>The Spanish anarchists left behind them a tangible reality that has considerable relevance for social radicalism today. Iheir movements ‘heroic years’</em> 1868–1936 <em>were marked by a fascinating process ofexperimentation... [They] had evolved an astonishingly well organised subculture within Spanish society thatfostered enormousfreedom of action</em>...[315]
−	<em>What these Spanish anarchists aimed for, in effect, was a ‘counter-society’ to the old one. It is easy to mistake thisfor an ‘alternate society’, one that would co-exist with capitalism as an enclave of purity and.freedom, however, nothing could be .furtherfrom the truth. The Spanish anarchists expressly rejected the concept of an ‘alternate society’ with its hope of peaceful reconstruction and its privileged position in a world of general misery... Since social or personal freedom could not be acquired within the established ordyr, they viewed a ‘countersociety’ as terrain in which to remake themselves into revolutionaries and remove their interests from any stake in bourgeois society... The bureaucracy, state, and church were the anarchist’s mortal enemies; any voluntary dealings with these institutions were to be avoided. Children were sent to libertarian or union schools.</em>	+	''Quantity'' refers to the amount or extent of specific attributes of a thing, phenomenon, or idea, including but not limited to:
−	<em>Wherever the [anarchist movement] had a substantial following it established Centro Obreros, which functioned not merely as union headquarters but as cultural centres. Depending upon its resources, the Centro Obrero might provide literature, books, classes, and meeting halls for discussion on a wide variety of subjects. This institution exercised a profound influence on the personal life ofthe worker who belonged to anarchist influenced unions... Ricardo l’vfella recalls Seville ‘with its enormous Centro Obrero, capable of holding thousands of people.’[316]</em>	+	* The amount of component parts.
		+	* Scale or size.
		+	* Speed or rhythm of motion.
−	<em>Far more important than the episodic revolutionary uprisings, individual atentados [assassination of bosses or bosses men], or the daring escapes of small circles ofcomrades was the ability of the Spanish anarchists to patiently knit together highly independent groups (united by ‘social conviviality’ as well as by social views) into sizeable, coherent organisations, to coordinate them into effective social forces when crises emerged, and to develop an informed mode of spontaneity thatfuelled the most valuable traits of group discipline with personal initiative.</em>”	+	A thing, phenomenon, or idea can have many quantities, with each quantity determined by different criteria. [i.e., a car may be measured by many criteria of quantity, such as: length in meters, weight in kilograms, speed in kilometers per hour, etc.]
−	<em>Out of this process emerged an organic community and a sense of mutual aid unequalled by any workers movement of that era.</em>[317]	+	Quality and quantity embody two different aspects of the same subject. Both quality and quantity exist objectively [see Annotation 108, p. 112]. However, the distinction between “quality” and “quantity” in the process of perceiving things, phenomena, and ideas has only relative significance: an attribute may be considered “quantity” from one perspective but “quality” from another perspective.
−	</quote>
−	We are in a very different situation today and we are quite different people. The Spanish counter culture was an expression of a transitional class captivated by an ideal that reflected its rural communal past and its harrowing social present.[318] Yet we should take inspiration and practical guidance from their example.	+	-----
−	In Britain a similar-but signif cantly different-workingclass culture of mutual aid grew in nineteenth-century industrial communities. This culture sought to resist the intrusions of an industrial system into every aspect of people’s lives and was the domestic flipside of defensive work-place struggles.	+	==== Annotation 171 ====
−	People endeavoured to mitigate for each other visitations of sickness, the death of children, the perishing of women in childbirth, and a continuing inadequacy of basic resources. Much of this was the work of women, and was possible thorough networks of kinship and neighbourhood, as well as the associations in the workplace, through trade unions. co-operative societies, burial clubs, and friendly societies.	+	If you are filling a box with a dozen donuts, then once you add the 12<sup>th</sup> donut, one “dozen” may represent the ''quality'' which you seek. From the perspective of a customer buying donuts for a party, “dozen” may represent the “quantity.” In other words, you need to make an ''order'' (quality) of ''three dozen donuts'' (quantity). And the manager of the store, at the end of the day, may tally ''twenty'' ''orders'' (quantity) as the day’s ''sales goal'' (quality). Quantity and quality, therefore, are both considered ''relatively'', based on perspective and the purpose of analysis at hand.
−	Many radicals saw in this lived working class solidarity culture an embryo of a non-capitalist society, but thanks to industry and ideology it never embraced libertarian insurrectionry fervour like its Spanish relative; in fact’, the opposite. Despite-or perhaps because of-the monumental mistakes made, we can learn a lot from the still warm corpse of the British labour movement	+	==== b. Dialectical Relationship Between Quantity and Quality ====
−	Its continuation into the relatively recent past underlines what many libertarians have pointed out. Under the veneer of illusory command it is voluntary co-operation, mutual aid, nurturing, human solidarity, and love that keeps society from imploding. Here though we are concerned with something grander than mere survival-living free.	+	Every thing, phenomenon, and idea exists as a unity of two aspects: quality and quantity. Quantity and quality do not exist separate from one another. Quantity and quality dialectically and mutually impact one other. Changes in quantity lead to changes in quality. However, not every change in quantity will cause a change in quality.
−	***** 30 Years ofTemporary Counter-Cultures	+	-----
−	Beyond the First World, significant counter cultures are arising. Yet here in the capitalist core since the proletarian glory days there have been no (r)evolutionary counter cultures on the kind of seismic scale that evolved in Spain. This is no surprise given that the “class in transition” that defended the barricades of Paris, Barcelona, and Kronstadt is largely no longer found in the core.	+	==== Annotation 172 ====
−	Since the ‘60s upheaval Britain has seen quite a number of anarchist/ecological counter cultures form then dissipate through inertia, state repression, or simply assimilation. These autonomous cultures-squatting, feminism, travelling, punk, back to the land, ecological direct action camps, animal liberation, anarchism, etc.-have all been predominantly youth movements operating in the heady (and vanishing) space of dole autonomy.	+	In order for quantity change to lead to quality change, a certain amount must be met.
−	They have remained temporary because they have largely been generational; failing to either accommodate the changing needs of their ageing members or have any ability to involve younger generations. The one major exception has been travelling which has evolved into a multigenerational culture-there are now three generations of new travellers on the road together. Unfortunately travellers have suffered more state repression then anyone-resulting in a mass exodus from Britain of tens of thousands.	+	This amount is called the ''threshold'', which is explained further below in this section. A threshold may be exact and known (i.e., it takes exactly 12 donuts to make a dozen donuts) or it may be relative and unknown (i.e., a certain quantity of air inflated into a balloon may cause it to burst, but the exact, specific quantity of air may be relative to other factors such as air temperature and may be unknown to the observer until the balloon actually bursts).
−	The temporary nature of these counter cultures-though not invalidating them-does significantly limit their scope from a (r) evolutionary perspective. The struggle then is to first join the dots, link up these generations of libertarians by creating multi-generational counter cultures.	+	With any given subject, there will be a range of quantity changes which can accumulate without leading to change in quality. This range is called the ''quantity range''.
−	To a certain extent we have been going down this road for a few years. The inspiring actions of the ‘90s have brought many different age ranges together. Yet our radical ecological circles still remain very much ‘Clubl8-30‘. [I first wrote the previous sentence around four years ago and it may be truer now to say Club 21–33! Rather worrying considering the next paragraph... ho hum.]	+	''Quantity range'' is defined as a relationship between quantity and quality: the range of intervals in which the change in quantity does not substantially change the quality of a given subject. Within the limits of a quantity range, the subject retains the same quality.
−	The next few years will show whether our movement will share the fate of the Trots (who, bar students, are mostly in their late 40s having been in their 20s in the ’60/‘70s upsurge)-an isolated political generation moving through time shrinking with every year.	+	-----
−	The creation of multigenerational counter cultures is essential simply from the perspective of our network survival.	+	==== Annotation 173 ====
−	***** Opening Up Space	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-56.png|''The quantity range is a range of quantities between quality shifts.'']]
−	More than anything else we need to open up space for (r)evolution to grow. Keeping ourselves undigested within the bowels of the system is going to be difficult. Later in Task II I will talk about biological meltdown and some of the steps we must take to combat it. Yet just as civilisation is destroying nature all over the globe so too it is haemorrhaging our internal nature. (The best kept state secret is the misery of everyday life.-Raoul Vaneigem ) This ever-speeding emotional meltdown is resulting in an epidemic of depression, self-harm, and violence. Without hope the oppressed will always turn their violence on themselves and each other. Ever more people in the core are turning to damaging pseudo-escapism; alcoholism, drug addiction, and even religion are all on the rise. These panaceas only further poison society. Those without hope but also without the ability to fool themselves turn in larger numbers to an escapism that is in no way pseudo-suicide.	+	Quantity range can be thought of as the range of quantities which exists between thresholds. For instance, between the qualities of “''one donut''” and “''one dozen donuts'',” there is a quantity range of 10 donuts (2 donuts through 11 donuts) which can be added before the quality shifts to “''one dozen donuts''.” You can keep adding additional donuts, up to the quantity of 11 donuts, without reaching the threshold of quality shift to “one dozen donuts.” This is the ''quantity range'' between the qualities of ''donut'' and ''one dozen donuts''. Again, the quantity range is relative to the perspective and the nature of analysis. One person may only be concerned with “dozens of donuts,” while another may consider the quality of “half dozens,” which would consider a quality shift to “one half-dozen donuts” to occur once the sixth donut (quantity) is added.
−	Suicide is now the single biggest killer of men under 35... The rate-three times that of women of the same age-has nearly doubled since 1971. Working class men are atparticular risk, with suicide rates four times those of men in professional occupations... The Samaritans believe thefigures could be much worse as examination of road-traffic accidents involving just one driver suggests that some of them may well have been deliberate.[319]	+	Motion and change usually begins with a change in quantity. When changes in quantity reach a certain amount, quality will also change. The amount, or degree, of quantity change at which quality change occurs is called the ''threshold.''
−	Although women-especially the young-lag behind men as successful suicides, they are way ahead when it comes to attempts.	+	-----
−	Speaking personally I have already lost too many friends and comrades to death, depression, and drugs. Many of these were great warriors and brave, good people who shone during the ‘90s land struggles. But after these struggles and the culture it spawned ended, their shield from the world was gone. Soon after, so were many of them-if not in body then in spirit. I believe that for quite a few the temporary counter culture of land struggle put off for years their not-inevitable descent. It is from this that I take the beliefthat the growth of counter cultures can go some way to re-instilling-and sustaining-hope and authentic human behaviour. Yet if we are to make these cultures (at least Semi-) Permanent Autonomous Zones then we need radical spaces and communities that will hold. To a large extent we have already started building (well, buying or breaking into mostly) the structures we need:	+	==== Annotation 174 ====
−	- Communes: Housing co-ops, traveller sites, big shared houses, farms, squats, direct action camps, and land projects	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-57.png]]
−	- Social Centres: Squats, members clubs, resource centres	+	Note that the threshold is an approximate range. At a certain quantity, a glass may be considered “half full” and at another certain quantity, after passing the threshold, the glass will be considered “full,” though there may be a wide range of quantities at which the glass would be considered to have the quality of being “full,” depending on perspective and purpose of analysis.
−	Our strength is in our ability to take action ourselves and by doing so inspire others to take action. To a large extent both the Land Struggle Period and the Global Resistance Period were catalysed initially by a very small number of people. Our network’s strategy has been one of empowering others to replicate our activity rather than expand ourselves as such. It is both a duty and a pleasure to live our ecological and libertarian principles and if we do so as coherently and consistently as possible I believe it is quite infectious. Most of us, after all, got hooked on the laughs and commitment of others.	+	When quantity change meets a threshold, within necessary and specific conditions, quality will change. This change in quality, which takes place in the motion and development process of things, phenomena, and ideas, is called a ''quality shift''.
−	While counter cultures should act as partial sanctuaries we should never forget the importance of defence through attack. In the words of the SPK (the ‘70s armed German psychological self-help group): Civilisation: This sick society has made us sick. Let us strike a death blow at this sick society.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-58.png|''A quality shift occurs when a quantity changes beyond a threshold, leading to a change in quality.'']]
−	***** Changing Change	+	''Quality shifts'' inevitably occur as transformations in the development processes of things, phenomena, and ideas. Qualitative changes can be expressed or manifested through many forms of quality shifts which are determined by the contradictions, characteristics and conditions of a given subject, including such characteristics as: fast or slow, big or small, partial or entire, spontaneous or intentional.
−	Too often radicals decry others’ inability to face up to the desperate need for change. A few years back Jeremy Seabrook interviewed many radicals in an attempt to find the root of their failure to change society:	+	-----
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 175 ====
−	We were becoming uneasy about the recurring theme that ‘people <em>must change’. We began to wonder if the reason why the parties advocating radical change were so unsuccessful was be-cause they were striking against the resistance of people who had changed, who had been com-pelled to change, too much. The experience of industrialisation had been driven and relentless change, and continues to be so. Even countries which pride themselves on having reached an advanced stage of development, of being post-industrial, of being ‘developed’, constantly require accelerating change from their privileged populations. So why should we expect that exhortations to</em> change will be welcomed by those who have known little else for at least two centuries? In this context, the desire to conserve, to protect, to safeguard, to rescue, to resist, becomes <em>the heart of a radical project.[320]</em>
−	</quote>
−	In the capitalist core, development is simply renamed progress and the ground is always moving from under our feet. Our thumb-in-the-dam defence of ecologies over the last decade has garnered vast levels of support. A similar but far more subtle process must be carried out to defend threatened positive social relationships.	+	Quality shifts are ''inevitable'' because there is no thing, phenomenon, nor idea which can exist statically, forever, without ever undergoing change. Eventually, any given subject will undergo quality shifts, even if such transformation may take millions of years to occur.
−	We must first root ourselves in surviving communal and ecological practises, preserve them, extend them, and link them with the emerging counter culture.	+	Quality shifts can take various forms, depending on the nature of internal and external relationships, contradictions, and mutual impacts. For instance, a river may dry up or it may flood depending on internal and external relations and characteristics, but it will not simply flow at the same level forever without ever undergoing any quality shifts.
−	In this way the base for (r)evolution is not merely new relationships fostered by radicals but age-old radical (in the original meaning) relationships. One example is allotments and the connection to the land and sense of autonomy they breed--under constant threat from development.	+	The rate and degree of quality shifts can vary considerably based on such internal and external factors, and may be “spontaneous,” that is to say, without human intervention, or may be the result of the intentional, conscious action of human beings.
−	The oppressed multitude needs to wrest control of change from the elite, becoming no longer change’ s subjects but its agents.	+	''Quality shifts'' mark the end of one motion period and the start of a new motion period.
−	***** Counter (R)evolution	+	-----
−	The elite pre-empt counter cultural transcendence with civil war. To attempt to seriously change the world is to put realism in the attic, a worthy piece of Spring cleaning. Yet to embark on a project of change without taking heed of the likely reaction is not merely idiotic but terribly irresponsible.	+	==== Annotation 176 ====
−	<quote>	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-59.png|''The Quantity Range (A) refers to the range of quantities between two qualities in the process of development. The Quality Shift (B) refers to the point at which quantity accumulates to the point of changing the Quality of the developing subject. The Period of Motion (C) includes both the quantity range and the quality shifts themselves.'']]
−	A <em>truly revolutionary culture that is eJ]ective (demonstrating realistic, sincere designs aimed at the overthrow of established power) will be attacked by the built-in automatic survival instincts of the established power complex creating a need to counterpoise the violence ofpower. Without the ability to organise a counterforce to neutralise the violence of established power, antithesis dies. We are not contending with fools.</em>
−	<right>	+	''Period of motion'' refers to the development which occurs between two quality shifts, including the quality shifts themselves.
−	-George Jackson[321]
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	The rich will try to pre-empt and destroy by military means any movements of the multitude with the potential to transcend and destroy power. In Spain, Hungry, Latin America, Indochinasocial threats and state massacres.	+	''Period of motion'' differs from ''quantity range'' because quantity range only includes the range of quantity change which can occur ''between'' quality shifts, without including the quality shifts themselves.
−	Relatively peaceful social struggle and construction is only possible up to a point--the point at which it begins to seriously undermine elite power.	+	For example, a ''period of motion'' for a cup filling with water from a half cup would include all of the change which occurs from the cup being half full to the cup becoming entirely full. The ''quantity range'' of this same process would only include the quantities of water that stand between half-full and full, where the cup is neither considered to be “half full” or “full” but somewhere in between, i.e., between quality shifts.
−	It is of course most likely that we will never get anywhere and therefore fail to bring the roof down on ourselves. However if we believe radical social change is at all possible than we must think and prepare for the reaction.	+	Quality shift represents ''discontinuity'' within the continuous development process of things and phenomena. In the material world, all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly undergoing continuous sequences of quantitative changes leading to quality shifts, creating an endless line of nodes, showing how all things, phenomena, and ideas move and develop to increasingly advanced degrees [see illustration on p. 121 for a visualization of this “endless line of nodes”].
−	The leaflets for June 18<sup>th</sup> 1999 proclaimed that: *To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for general insurrection*. I’m a bit of a sucker for Situation-ist semantics but I have to say that pretty banners and samba bands do not armed militias make! Don’t get me wrong, I like a good street party as much as the next twenty something; but let’s call a spade a spade.	+	As Friedrich Engels summarised: “merely quantitative changes beyond a certain point pass into qualitative differences.”<ref>''Anti-Dühring'', Friedrich Engels, 1878.</ref>
−	Situ slogans like this have been made common radical currency by the events of France 1968: rioting students in the Sorbonne, factory occupations, red and black flags in the sunshine. France ’68 is often used as justification for the idea that spontaneous revolution can succeed without the need for significant (r)evolutionary preparation. In fact the failure ofFrance ’68 proves the opposite.	+	==== Annotation 177 ====
−	From the boredom and misery of everyday life a momentous social upsurge swept across France without warning. President De Gaulle, freaked out and doubting the loyalty of the French army, left French soil for the relative safely of troops stationed in Germany. Great! But just as the upsurge had appeared, suddenly so too it dissipated. Why?	+	Processes of change and development in our universe are continuously ongoing. Whenever a quality shift occurs, it represents a brief ''discontinuity'' in the sense that we perceive a definite and ''distinct'' transformation from one thing, phenomenon, or idea into another; in other words, we can ''distinguish'' between the mode of existence of the thing, phenomenon, or idea before and after the quality shift.
−	There are a number of reasons-the Stalinist stranglehold on the unions chief among them. One simple factor, often ignored, was De Gaulle’s appearance on national television to basically proclaim if you want civil war I’ll give it to you.[322] He insinuated he had the loyalty of a large part of the army while revolutionaries could claim the loyalty of none. While this was not entirely true (action committees had been formed within camps of conscripted soldiers to organise break outs), it was mostly true. Trusted regiments were deployed around Paris and widely photographed.	+	Take, for example, the “lifespan” of a house. A human being could easily distinguish between the empty land which exists before the house is built, the construction site which exists as it’s being built, and the house itself once construction is completed. In reality, this process of change is continuous, but to our human perception, each quality shift represents a definite and distinct period of change and discontinuity in terms of our perception of the “thing” which is the house.
−	A near million strong mass march of the forces of reaction took to the streets. Faced by this threat and sizing up the fight, a large section of the working class, already disorganised by the Stalinists, understood its own weakness and abandoned the moment. Skirmishes at factories continued but De Gaulle’s broadcast really was the turning point. Imagination is Power but the power ofimagination is not enough when confronted with the armed might of the state. What is needed is class strength--an armed people.	+	This is related to the ''historic perspective'' of things, phenomena, and ideas, in which we recognize the continuity of existence between different stages of development of things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 201, p. 195].
−	The failure ofFrance in ’68 was that coming so suddenly, the rebellion never really went beyond negative opposition to move to positive social growth and defence.	+	When a quality shift occurs, there is an impact on the quantity. Quality impacts quantity in a number of ways, including [but not limited to]:
−	When offered civil war-the blood and the horror-many workers couldn’t envision a future worth it. They also knew that they didn’t have the class strength to get through a civil war. lhe lack of a decade-by-decade counter culture left those who occupied the factories nothing tangible to defend and expand and not enough weapons to do it with.	+	* Changing the structure, scale, or level of the subject.
		+	* Changing the rhythm or speed of the motion and development of the subject.
−	By resigning itself to the resumption of party politics instead of engaging in a bloody slug fest it would lose, the French working class was entirely logical. The failure of many radicals to size up fights-and as a result see the centrality of an armed class in (r)evolution-says more about their class background than anything else. Stuart Christie, long-term British anarchist, founder of Black Flag magazine and attempted assassin of Franco, puts it well:	+	''In summary,'' dialectical unity between quantity and quality exists in every thing, phenomenon, and idea. A gradual quantitative change [through the ''quantity range''] will eventually meet the ''threshold'', which will inevitably lead to a qualitative change through ''quality shift''. Simultaneously, the new quality will mutually impact the quantity, causing new quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas. This process takes place continuously, forming the fundamental and universal mode of movement and development processes of all things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 178 ====
−	One <em>of thefundamental rules of guerrilla warfare is to spread the struggle to every piece of terri-tory and to every facet of life. Unless the seeds of anarchistfreedom have already been sown there, we are doomed to perish however good our military preparation might be.[323]</em>
−	</quote>
−	***** Surplus Baggage	+	Transformation between quantity and quality is the mode of movement and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas, because it reflects the way in which human consciousness perceives movement and development.
−	Despite our professed militancy and radicalism we still carry a lot of baggage from, the political terrain many of us first got involved in-single issue campaigns. As has been pointed out elsewhere, our move into revolutionary politics has often been carried out by pressure group methods.	+	So, it is important to understand that there is no ''material manifestation'' of quantity and quality. They are simply mental constructs which reflect the ways in which we observe and understand change, motion, and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. Transformation processes in the material world are fully fluid and continuous, but our consciousness perceives change in ''stages of development''. Quality simply reflects how we distinguish one subject from another subject, as well as how we recognize the transformation process (and stages of development) of a single subject over time.
−	Our responsibility to any (r)evolutionary process is not to make revolution, but to evolve counter cultures that can make revolutionaries.	+	There is no specific point, metaphysically distinct point at which a “puppy” becomes an “adult dog,” but human beings will distinguish between a puppy and an adult dog, or recognize at a certain point that a puppy has “become” an adult dog, based on observation of quality.
−	Ideally counter cultures can have enough time to evolve, through struggle, to a point at which social transcendence, total (r)evolution, is possible. By such a time it would be able to field considerable armed class strength and possibly defeat elite attempts to drown it in bloody counter (r)evolution.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-60.png|''Quality refers to the differences which are distinguished in human consciousness between one subject and another, or changes in a subject’s form over time.'']]
−	Of course history rarely leaves anyone alone with their plans and this is just such a case. Here lies the rub, in the words of a Canadian army military historian:	+	There is no metaphysically distinct point at which a “puppy” becomes an “adult dog,” but human beings will distinguish between a puppy and an adult dog, or recognize at a certain point that a puppy has “become” an adult dog, based on observation of quality. We create categories which reflect quality to organize and systematically understand the world around us, and to distinguish between different subjects, and to distinguish between different stages of development of a given subject.
−	Revolutions are not, in fact made by revolutionaries. Ihe professional agitators, the terrible exiles of history have seldom succeeded in raising even the smallest revolutionary mob. Ihe best they can hope for is to seize control of the course of the revolution once it has started. The thing itself is caused by the persistent stupidities and brutalities of government.[324]	+	We can also distinguish differences of quality between different subjects: we can distinguish a cat from a dog, and we can distinguish one dog from another dog. These distinguishing attributes constitute differences in quality. Note that this conception of differentiation of things, phenomena, and ideas into qualities which constantly change and develop over time is fundamentally distinct from ''metaphysical'' categorization, which seeks to divide all things, phenomena, and ideas into static, perpetually unchanging categories (see Annotation 8, p. 8).
−	That revolutionaries don’t make revolution is no bad thing considering those who executed most of the last century’s revolutionary hopes were the very people who described themselves as revolutionaries-socialists like Lenin and Hitler. As libertarians a large part of our job is to stop these murderous parasites from seizing control of the course of tidal waves of change. How far we are away from crises of this scale is unknowable but discussed in Task III-Preparing for Crises.	+	Distinction within the human mind is reflected in the concept of quantity and quality. If we do not observe quality differences between subjects, then we would not be able to distinguish between different subjects at all. If we could not recognize the quality shifts of any given subject, then we would not be aware of change or motion at all.
−	By strolling on to the terrain of revolution (at least theoretically) we are confronted by a plethora of leftist ideologies. Thankfully as libertarians we are inoculated against infection from some of most virulent-and stupid-authoritarian dogmas. For instance we have rightly rejected out of hand much of the (ridiculous) party building and fetishism of organisation which characterise the revolutionary (HA!) left in particular and capitalism in general.	+	-----
−	There is an opposing left tendency that disagrees with almost any activity aimed at preparing for the tumultuous events that punctuate history. In times of social crisis faith is put in the revolutionary impulse of the proletariat. One can sum up the theory of this tendency as It’ll Be Alright on the Night. There is unfortunately little evidence from history that the working class-never mind anyone else-is intrinsically predisposed to libertarian or ecological revolution. Thousands of years of authoritarian socialisation favour the jackboot and this is the very reason why libertarian counter cultures are so important.	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	***** Some Proposals	+	Every thing, phenomenon and idea has characteristics of quality and quantity which mutually impact and transform one another. Therefore, in perception and practice, we need to understand and take into account the law of transformation between quantity and quality in order to have a comprehensive viewpoint of things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 114, p. 116].
−	The practical work involved in this task is far more than all the others.	+	Quantitative changes of things, phenomena and ideas inevitably lead to qualitative changes in all things, phenomena, and ideas. Therefore, in our perception and practice, as we plan and enact change in our world and in human society, it is necessary to gradually accumulate changes in quantity in order to make changes in quality. At the same time, we must recognize and make use of the fact that quality shifts also lead to changes in quantity.
−	- It means growing real friendships that can weather the storms of struggles and relationships.	+	-----
−	- It means creating our lives so parenting and activism neither conflict with each other nor are seen as separate things.	+	==== Annotation 179 ====
−	- It means growing food on our allotments and rebuilding the land community.	+	We have to understand and utilize the law of transformation between quantity and quality in our activities. For instance, if a group of activists hopes to address hunger in their community, they have to realize that they can’t immediately enact a quality shift which solves the entire problem of hunger across the city instantaneously. Instead, the activists must recognize that quantity shifts lead to quality shifts through stages of development. In planning and acting, they may need to set certain development targets, predict thresholds at which quality shifts will occur, etc.
−	- It means consolidating locally.	+	For instance, the first goal for these activists may be to provide free lunches to houseless people in a particular park every weekend. If they can accomplish this, then they will not have completely eliminated hunger in the city, but they will have reached a threshold — a quality shift — in that nobody in that specific park will be hungry at lunch time on weekends. From there, they can continue to build quality shifts through accumulation of changes in quantity, one stage of development at a time.
−	- It means if forced into jobs continuing the struggle in the workplace.	+	Quality shifts leading to quantity shifts must also be recognized and utilized in our planning and activities. For example, once an effective strategy is developed for eliminating hunger in one park through quantity changes leading to quality shifts, this strategy can then be implemented in other parks. Thus the quality shift of “eliminating hunger in one park” can lead to a quantity shift: “eliminating hunger in two parks, three parks, etc.,” until the quantity shift of “eliminating hunger in parks” leads to the quality shift of “eliminating hunger in all the parks in the city.” This entire process of enacting quantity changes to lead to quality shifts, and accumulating quality shifts to change quantity, are all focused toward the ultimate goal of achieving the quality shift of “eliminating hunger in the entire city.”
−	- It means solidarity between groups.	+	In short, it’s vital for us to understand the ways in which quantity and quality mutually impact each other so that we can formulate plans and activities which will lead to motion and development which accomplish our goals, step by step, through one stage of development at a time.
−	- It means being vigilant against cultural assimilation, patriarchy, and depression.	+	Changes in quantity can only lead to changes in quality provided the quantity accumulates to a certain threshold. Therefore, in practice, we need to overcome impatient, left-sided thought. Left-sided thinking refers to thinking which is overly subjective, idealistic, ignorant of the laws which govern material reality. Left-sided thinking neglects to acknowledge the necessity of quantity accumulation which precedes shifts in quality, focusing instead on attempting to perform continuous shifts in quality.
−	- It means safe houses.	+	On the other hand, we must also recognize that once change in quantity has reached a threshold, it is ''inevitable'' that a quality shift will take place. Therefore, we need to overcome conservative and right-sided thought in practical work. Right-sided thinking is the expression of conservative, stagnant thought that resists or refuses to recognize quality shifts even as changes in quantity come to meet the threshold of quality shift.
−	- It means acting together informally in our shared interest. Your mates landlord won’t return her deposit-a short office visit by her mates should sort that out.	+	-----
−	- It means demolishing authoritarian socialists in general and Nazis and Stalinists in particular.	+	==== Annotation 180 ====
−	- It means not allowing us to drift apart.[325]	+	“Right-sided thinking” and “left-sided thinking” are Vietnamese political concepts which are rooted in the ideas of Lenin’s book: ''Leftwing Communism: an Infantile Disorder''. In Vietnamese political philosophy, “left-sided thinking” is a form of dogmatic idealism which upholds unrealistic conceptions of change and development. Left-sided thinkers don’t have the patience for quantity accumulation which are prerequisite to quality shifts, or expect to skip entire stages of development which are necessary to precipitate change in the real world. An example of left-sided thinking would be believing that a capitalist society can ''instantly'' transition into a stateless, classless, communist society, skipping over the transitions in quantity and quality which are required to bring such a massive transformation in human society to fruition.
−	- It means training.	+	“Right-sided thinking,” on the other hand, is conservate resistance to change. Right-sided thinkers resist quality changes to human society; they either want to preserve society as it exists right now, or reverse development to some previous (real or imagined) stage of development. Right-sided thinkers also refuse to acknowledge quality shifts once they’ve occurred, idealistically pretending that changes in material conditions have not occurred. For example, right-sided thinkers may refuse to recognize advances which have been made in the liberation of women, or even attempt to reverse those advances in hopes of returning to previous stages of development when women had fewer freedoms. Here is a practical example of these concepts in use, from the ''Vietnam Encyclopedia'', published by the Ministry of Culture and Information of Vietnam:
−	- It means laughing together as we fight together.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Opportunism is a system of political views that do not follow a clear direction nor a clear line, do not have a definite stance, and are inclined toward the immediate personal gain of the opportunist. In the proletarian revolutionary movement, opportunism is a politics of compromise, reform, and unprincipled collaboration with the enemy which run contrary to the basic interests of the working class and the working people. In practice, opportunism has two main trends, stemming from right-sided thinking and from left-sided thinking, respectively:
−	Really the list is too long to go through. I will not even attempt to catalogue what ingredients good counter cultures needs-social evolution and the individual situation will do that.	+	Right-wing opportunism is reformist, favors undue compromise, and aims to peacefully “convert” capitalism into socialism while abandoning the struggle for meaningful victory of the working class. Right-wing opportunism, typified by Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, has its origins in the Workers’ Parties of the Second International era and exists to this day.
−	The two primary divisions in this society that need to be overcome are our disconnection from each other and our disconnection from the land. Practically there are some very obvious things we can do now as an evolving counter-culture.	+	Left-wing opportunism is a mixture of extremism and adventurism, dogmatism, arrogance, subjectivity, cults of violence, and disregard for the objective situation.
−	<br>	+	Both “right” and “left” opportunism push the workers’ movement to futile sacrifice and failure.
		+	</blockquote>
−	***** Reconnecting with Each Other
−	1) Build a British Social Centre Network	+	-----
−	Social centres-which place politics where they should be, in friendship-are the key to viable counter-cultures. Probably because of the post ‘70s travelling culture Britain is unusual in not de-veloping a social centre network. Across Europe social centres are at the very heart of anarchist counter-cultures. (This is also true incidentally of Irish Republicanism and Basque separatism). This process has begun and from this one act of organisation a thousand acts of resistance will follow. [Since this was first published a London Social Centres Network has formed and plans are afoot for one nationwide.]	+	Quality shifts are diverse and plentiful, so we need to promote and apply quality shifts creatively and flexibly to suit the specific material conditions we face in a given situation. This is especially true in changing human society, as social development processes depend not only on objective conditions but also on subjective human factors. Therefore, we need to be active and take the initiative to promote the process of converting between quantity and quality in the most effective way.
−	2) Prepare for Strike Support	+	-----
−	Our circles, despite inhabiting a economically peripheral social position (casual labour, dole, sin-gle parenthood) have a far better record in the last 10 years in supporting strikes than the left. To quote a shop steward from the Liverpool Dockers: “others talk, these people do!” A small amount of thought can make our ability to use direct action to intervene in workplace struggles much easier. Solidarity among the poor-the very basis of counter-cultures and anarchy.	+	==== Annotation 181 ====
−	3) Resist Together, Train Together	+	Put simply, we have to use our human will and labor to actively promote quantity changes which lead to quality changes, and quality changes which lead to quantity changes, which move us towards our goal of ending all forms of oppression in human society. This will involve not just objective factors<ref>See Annotation 108, p. 112.</ref> (i.e., material conditions which are necessary to accomplish something), but subjective factors<ref>See Annotation 207, p. 202.</ref> as well (factors which we, as a subject, are capable of impacting directly).
−	While a (r)evolutionary culture can include everything from cabbage growing to hip-hop, without active resistance a culture will not hold. We need to be up against it to make sure both that the petty things don’t split us and the big things bring us together. Living in a mundane world you can know someone for years and not truly know them as you do after a day of struggle.	+	=== 2. Law of Unification and Contradiction Between Opposites ===
−	Acts of purposeful resistance build our collective strength but we shouldn’t just rely on events but train to grow our power. Run Faster-go running with a mate. Trash Better-learn sabo-tage skills before you need them. Find Direction-go orienteering at night. Get Fitter-give up smoking collectively. Hit Harder-spar with friends. Strength is infectious.	+	The law of unification and contradiction between opposites is the ''Essence'' of dialectics [see: ''Essence and Phenomenon'', p. 156]. According to Lenin: “In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This embodies the Essence of dialectics, but it requires explanations and development.”<ref>''Summary of Dialectics'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.</ref> According to the law of unification and contradiction between opposites, the fundamental, originating, and universal driving force of all motion and development processes is the inherent and objective contradiction which exists in all things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	Reconnecting with the Land 1) Grow the Land Community Allotments are available to us all thanks to Nineteenth Century arson, but hundreds of sites every year are being destroyed by developers. More direct action is needed to stop this haemorrhaging of an inheritance born of struggle. More work allotments in Britain than work in farming and it is only from this land community that any hope for ecological autonomy can grow. The experience ofgrowing your own food is (r)evolutionary.	+	-----
−	Allotments also offer a jump point for those committed to leaving the cities and towns. On these small patches we can learn many of the skills in miniature needed if we are to grow out of our dependency on the industrial. From farm communities in Cornwall to land projects in the Scottish Highlands many of our circles have gone back to the land in the last decade. Many more will follow. The call of the soil cannot be drowned by the cacophony of traffic.[326]	+	==== Annotation 182 ====
−	In the final analysis, all revolutions are fought over the question of land. -Malcolm X[327]	+	In other words, ''contradiction'' (defined further in the next section) is the force which serves as the fundamental, originating, and universal force which drives all motion and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	2) Rewild Ourselves	+	Contradiction is a ''fundamental driving force'' because it is the most basic driving force which all other forms of motion and development are based upon.
−	Get out beyond the streetlights andjoin the stars. Hear the darkness and see the sounds of the night. Learn skills, light fires. Discover wild foods. Sit quietly in a wood and wait. Guide kids to the true joy of mud and spiders. Wear down the soles ofyour walking boots, harden the soles of your feet. Get naked in the sun and snow. Pack a heavy rucksack with everything you’ll need for a weekend camping, then leave it on the bed and walk out the door. Nurture saplings, plant the spring. Improvise shelters, get nifty with a knife. Don’t go to work-fuck in forests.	+	Contradiction is the ''originating driving force'' because all motion and development arises from contradiction.
−	3) Continue Ecological Land Struggles	+	Contradiction is the ''universal driving force'' because ''all'' things, phenomena, and ideas — without exception — are driven to motion and development by contradiction.
−	In Britain our struggles over ecology and wildness are powerful theatres for the growth of ecological sensibility. In living on, for, and in defence of the land, one forges an immensely strong connection. Fluorescent-bibbed cops grappling with tree defenders brings out into the open the age-old conflict. On one side the property/state axis, on the other wildness,	+	==== a. Definition of Contradiction and Common Characteristics of Contradiction ====
−	diversity, freedom. By creating these situations of struggle, mythic discourse is shattered with a power no essay or clever turn of phrase will ever have. Unleashing these revelatory (r)evolutionary moments is at the heart of our action. With every broken illusion we take a step back from the abyss.[328]	+	''- Definition of Contradiction''
−	***** Task Conclusion: Grow and Live	+	In dialectics, the concept of contradiction is used to refer to the relationship, opposition, and transformation between opposites which takes place ''within'' all things, phenomena, and ideas, as well as ''between'' all things, phenomena, and ideas. This dialectical concept of contradiction is fundamentally different from the metaphysical concept of contradiction. The metaphysical concept of contradiction is an illogical conception of opposition without unity and without dialectical transformation between opposites.
−	For new worlds of land, liberty, and love there will be both kisses and gunfire.	+	-----
−	Taking responsibility for our own lives and those around us is daunting. It’s not just the cops, the bosses, the scabs, and the poverty that keeps people working for the man. It’s the terror of the blank page. We are schooled to be dependent on fictions and commands, not to believe in ourselves. Growing and defending new worlds is a daunting task, yet the alternative is far worse. An acceptence of a tide ofvoid that consumes species and peoples while it daily drains us of dignity.	+	==== Annotation 183 ====
−	The aim of our counter cultures should be total social transcendence-(r)evolution. That (r)evolution is extremely unlikely (there is no point pretending otherwise) does not fundamentally question the need for counter cultural growth. Counter cultures are not only new worlds for the future but barracks and sanctuaries for today.	+	A contradiction is, fundamentally, just a type of relationship. In a contradictory relationship, two things, phenomena, and/or ideas mutually impact one another, resulting in the eventual ''negation'' of one subject and the ''synthesis'' of the negator and the negated into some new form.
−	**** II. Putting Our Thumb in the Dam	+	The metaphysical concept of contradiction is considered illogical because it establishes no connection between that which is negated and the resulting synthesis.
−	Just as counter cultures must open up space for (r)evolution to grow we must also open up time. The life support systems of the earth are under unprecedented attack. Biological meltdown is accelerating. (R)evolution takes decades to mature. Unless force is used on the margins of the global society to protect the most important biological areas we may simply not have enough time. The last tribal examples of anarchy, from whom we can learn a lot, could be wiped out within decades if not militantly defended. ‘Thumb in the Dam’struggles to protect ecological diversity understanding that this civilisation WILL be terminated, by either the unlikely possibility of global (r)evolution or the certainty of industrial collapse.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-61.png|''In the metaphysical conception of contradiction, the negated “disappears” and is not represented in the resulting synthesis.'']]
−	<quote>	+	Metaphysical contradiction presents contradicting subjects as isolated from one another and completely distinct, when in reality the relationship between the negated and the negator essentially defines the contradiction. The negated subject is seen as completely negated; that is to say, it is conceived of as essentially “disappearing” into the synthesized result of the contradiction. In this sense, this metaphysical conception of negation is inaccurate in that it is represented as a complete, terminating process.
−	<em>What would the world be, once bereft,</em>
−	Of <em>wet and of wilderness? Let them be left,</em>	+	In the above example, once the fox eats the rabbit, the rabbit is considered “gone” after a terminal negation process (see Annotation 196, p. 188) ends the contradiction.
−	O let them be left, wildness and wet;	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-62.png|''The materialist dialectical conception of contradiction recognizes that contradicting subjects are defined by their relationship and that the synthesis of the contradiction carries forward attributes and characteristics from both the negator and the negated.'']]
−	<br>Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet	+	Materialist dialectical contradiction recognizes that every contradiction is defined by the relationship between the negated and the negator. Materialist dialectics also recognizes that attributes and characteristics of the negated subject are carried forward into the synthesized subject [see Annotation 203, p. 198]. Materialist dialectics also recognizes that contradiction continues indefinitely, as the negated becomes negated again, and so on, continuously, forever [see ''Negation of Negation'', p. 185].
−	<right>	+	In the example on the previous page, the fox consuming the rabbit constitutes a negation process in which the fox takes on characteristics from the rabbit (i.e., nutritional and energy content, any diseases which may be carried forward to the fox, etc.).
−	--Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid.
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<quote>	+	Contradiction arises from opposition which exists within or between things, phenomena, and ideas. The concept of opposing “sides” refers to such aspects, properties, and tendencies of motion which oppose one another, yet are, simultaneously, conditions and premises of the existence of one another. Examples include:
−	Our job is to save the evolutionary building blocks and to make sure there are grizzly bears andgreat blue whales and rainforests and redwoods somewhere, so that in thefinal thrashing of the industrial monster everything else that’s good on this planet isn’t destroyed.
−	<right>	+	* Negative charge and positive charge within atoms.
−	--Dave Foreman, Earth First! co-founder.	+	* Anabolism and catabolism within living organisms [anabolism refers to the growth and building up of molecules within an organism, while catabolism refers to the digestion and breaking down of molecules within an organism].
−	</right>	+	* Production and consumption as socioeconomic activities.
−	</quote>	+	* Trial and error which leads to cognitive development.
−	***** Here Come the End Days	+	==== Annotation 184 ====
−	The aim of this piece is to help prioritise and direct our action and organising. However our absolute action priorities are not left to us to determine. They have been decided for us by the point in history in which we live. For this reason I have made this task section considerably longer than the others.	+	All of the above forms of contradiction ''drive motion and development''. These processes exist in ''unity and opposition''. For example, in political economics, production is driven by consumption and consumption is facilitated by production. Even though these are fundamentally opposite forces (production adds to the total quantity of products, while consumption reduces the total quantity of products), they can’t exist without one another, and they drive each other forward. This is the dialectical nature of contradiction as the driving force of all motion and development as defined in materialist dialectics.
−	Industrial Capitalism has continued civilisation’s age-old attack on the wild and free-resulting in unparalleled biological and cultural meltdown. lhe decimation of wild peoples (cultural melt-down) and the devastation of ecological diversity (biological meltdown) are now reaching truly apocalyptic proportions.	+	''- The General Properties of Contradictions''
−	***** Biological Meltdown	+	Contradiction is objective and universal. According to Friedrich Engels: “If simple mechanical change of position contains a contradiction, this is even more true of the higher forms of motion of matter, and especially of organic life and its development. We saw above that life consists precisely and primarily in this — that a being is at each moment itself and yet something else. Life is therefore also a contradiction which is present in things and processes themselves, and which constantly originates and resolves itself; and as soon as the contradiction ceases, life, too, comes to an end, and death steps in. We likewise saw that also, in the sphere of thought, we could not escape contradictions, and that, for example, the contradiction between man’s inherently unlimited capacity for knowledge and its actual presence only in men who are externally limited and possess limited cognition finds its solution in what is — at least practically, for us — an endless succession of generations, in infinite progress.”<ref>''Anti-Dühring'', Friedrich Engels, 1877.</ref>
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 185 ====
−	Indeed, all the indications are that we are standing at the opening phase of a mass extinction event that will be comparable in scale to thefive great extinction episodes that have taken place in the history of life on earth, the most recent being the loss of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Impending extinction rates are at leastfour orders of magnitude than is found in thefossil record. That means in the order of 10,000 times greater, a frightening prospect to say the least. If allowed to continue the current extinction episode, could well eliminate between a third and two thirds of all species... [within this] century.[329]
−	</quote>
−	One third to two thirds of all species on earth-GONE! Stop a while, attempt to conceptualise the magnitude of the moment.	+	Here, Engels is explaining how contradiction is the driving force in both material and conscious processes of motion and development. The process of life is a process of contradiction — all organic life forms must consume organic matter so that they can produce growth and offspring, must produce certain molecules and metabolic processes so that they can consume nutrients, and so on. Once these contradictory processes stop, as Engels says, “death steps in” (though even death is a transition forward).
−	Nothing in the history ofhumankind has prepared us for this appalling event, but our generation will probably witness the disappearance of a third to one half of the earth’s rich and subtle forms of life, which have been evolving for billions of years. In the early 1990s Michael Soule, founder of the Society for Conservation Biology, made this chilling assessment of the status of the earth’s biosphere: For theffrst time in hundreds of million of years significant evolutionary change in most higher organisms is coming to a screeching halt... Vertebrate evolution may be at an end.[330] Soule is saying that humanity’s disruption of the environment has been so systematic and profound that it has halted the same natural processes that have brought everything we know into existence, including our very bodies and minds.	+	Conscious motion and development are also rooted in contradictory forces. Engels points out the contradiction between humanity’s seemingly infinite capacity for learning with the seemingly infinite amount of knowledge which can be obtained in the world. This great contradiction drives a seemingly endless process of expanding human knowledge, collectively, over countless generations.
−	***** Cultural Meltdown	+	Contradictions are not only objective and universal, but also diverse and plentiful. The diverse nature of contradictions is evident in the fact that every subject can include many different contradictions and that contradictions manifest differently depending upon specific conditions. Contradictions can hold different positions and roles in the existence, motion, and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. These positions and roles include [but are not limited to]:
−	It is tempting when facing this scale of doom to think of humanity as an intrinsically ecocidal organism. A pox on the earth. This however lets us and our society-city culture-off the hook.	+	* Internal and external contradictions
		+	* Fundamental and non-fundamental contradictions
		+	* Primary and secondary contradictions
−	Numerous cultures have developed a sustainable and harmonious relationship with their surroundings: the Mbuti, the Penan, the !Kung, to name but a few. These societies chose not to dominate nature. In the larger history of humankind, they are the norm and we are the exception.	+	==== Annotation 186 ====
−	On civilisation’s periphery, some of these wild peoples live on. Their very existence is a serious threat to city culture; simply in the fact that they show that there is a reality outside our world. Defending their autonomy and the land of which they are a part, they are the best protectors of some of the earth’s wildest places.	+	''Internal'' contradictions are contradictions which exist in the ''internal relations'' of a subject, while ''external'' contradictions exist ''between'' two or more subjects as external relations.
−	Just as wild nature is being denuded and domesticated, so too is wild humanity. This century will probably be the last for many cultures ages old. Civilisation aims to wipe out their other worlds. Men of money and men of god conspire. If these tribes are wiped out by our culture, it will be the first time in millions of years that no human communities have lived in harmony with nature.	+	For example: a sports team might have ''internal contradictions'' between players, between the players and the coach, between the coach and management, etc. External contradictions might exist between the team and other teams, between the team and league officials, between the team and the landlords who own the team’s practice space, etc.
−	Guns, gold, god, and diseases could make Homo Sapiens extinct in our lifetime. For when the last gatherer-hunters are hunted down, all that will be left of humanity will be in the entrails of Leviathan-having the potential for life but unliving.	+	A ''fundamental'' contradiction is a contradiction which defines the Essence of a relationship [see ''Essence and Phenomenon'', p. 156]. Fundamental contradictions exist throughout the entire development process of a given thing, phenomenon, or idea. A ''non-fundamental'' contradiction exists in only one aspect or attribute of a thing, phenomenon, or idea. A non-fundamental contradiction can ''impact'' a subject, but it will not control or decide the essential development of the subject. Whether or not a contradiction is fundamental is relative to the point of view.
−	<quote>	+	For example: the ''fundamental contradiction'' of one nation engaged in war against one another might be the war itself. There will exist many other contradictions; one nation at war might have a trade dispute with a third nation which is not participating in the war. From the “war perspective,” this contradiction is ''non-fundamental'', as it does not define the essential characteristic of the nation at war (though from the perspective of a diplomat charged with ending the trade dispute, the war may be seen as a non-fundamental contradiction while the dispute would be seen as fundamental).
−	<em>Land, the mother earth from which we are born and to which we die, on whom our lives depend, through which our spiritual ways remain intact. To impose changes on this ancient order would serve to destroy our dignity and identity as Indigenous people. Without the land, the peoples are lost. Without the Indigenous peoples the land is lost.</em>
−	<right>	+	In the development of things, phenomena, and ideas, there are many development stages. In each stage of development, there will be one contradiction which drives the development process. This is what we call the ''primary'' contradiction. ''Secondary'' contradictions include all the other contradictions which exist during that stage of development. Determining whether a contradiction is primary or secondary is relative: it depends heavily upon the material conditions and the situation.
−	-Declaration oflndigenous Peoples, 1987
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	***** A Critical Moment	+	For example: when restoring an old car that doesn’t run any more, a mechanic may consider the ''primary contradiction'' to be the non-functioning engine. There may be many ''secondary contradictions'' which contribute to the problems with the car’s engine problems. The battery may be dead, the spark plugs may need to be bad, the tires may need replacement, the timing belt may be loose, etc. Those are all ''secondary contradictions'' which do not define the stage of development which is “repairing the engine.” Some of these secondary contradictions may need to be resolved (such as replacing the spark plugs) before the primary contradiction can be fully addressed; others, such as a cracked windshield, may not need to be addressed before the primary contradiction can be dealt with.
−	It is in this context that we must see ourselves. Not simply as rebels against empire, like so many before us, but rebels at the most critical moment in human history.	+	On the other hand, a secondary contradiction may become the primary contradiction: if a mechanic resolves every problem with the engine ''except'' for one bad spark plug, then the bad spark plug will shift from being a secondary contradiction to being the primary contradiction: the bad spark plug is now the primary reason the car won’t start and this stage of development can’t be completed.
−	Our generation will likely see the decimation of remaining ecological/anarchic cultures and the haemorrhaging of the earth’s life support systems. As I outlined in Task I reformist strategies are irrelevant but (Revolution is not only unlikely but also takes time. This has often been acknowledged by radicals in the past. Emma Goldman in her last years wrote that she believed anarchy was too huge an idea for her age to move to in one step. She looked to future generations, seeing in them hope for the spring. Her feelings echo that of many over the aeons. Looking back, an example arises from the ashes and war cries of arson and insurrection in early 19<sup>th</sup> century England. One rebel anthem sung with gusto at the time resonates.	+	Within all the various fields of inquiry, there exist contradictions which have a diverse range of different properties and characteristics.
−	<quote>	+	==== Annotation 187 ====
−	<em>A hundred years, a thousand years,</em>
−	<br><em>We’re marching on the road.</em>
−	<br><em>The going isn’t easy yet,</em>
−	<br><em>We’ve got a heavy load.</em>
−	<em>The way is blind with blood and sweat,</em>	+	Different fields of study will focus on different forms of contradictions, and any given thing, phenomenon, or idea may contain countless contradictions which can be analyzed and considered for different purposes. For example, consider a large city, which might contain far too many contradictions to count. Civil engineers may focus primarily on contradictions in traffic patterns, the structural integrity of bridges and roads, ensuring that buildings are safe and healthy for inhabitants, etc. Utilities departments will focus on contradictions related to sewage, electrical, and sanitation systems. The education system will focus on contradictions which prevent students from achieving success in schools.
−	<br><em>And death sings in our ears.</em>
−	<br><em>But time is marching on our side.</em>
−	<br><em>We will defeat the years.[331]</em>
−	</quote>
−	They fought, but like many before and after, failed to get to the promised land. Yet they took solace in believing their path was right and others would follow, reaching where they had not. Their belief in an almost endless future of possibility, in the unswerving progressive march of humanity through and with time gave hope to the weary.	+	All of these various methods of analysis may focus on specific forms of contradictions, though there will also be overlap. For instance, designing a school bus system will require the education system and civil engineers to discover and grapple with contradictions which might be hindrances for transporting students safely to school.
−	We no longer have that luxury.	+	==== b. Motion Process of Contradictions ====
−	Today time is not marching on our side, but against us. We must fight all the faster. We cannot pass the gauntlet of defending the wild to unborn generations. It is that wildness and those un-born generations that are in peril today. What we do in our lives, in this moment, is of utmost importance. For no other generation has the weight of the future rested so heavily on the present.	+	In every contradiction, the opposing sides are united with each other and opposed to each other at the same time. The concept of “unity between opposites” refers to the fact that a contradiction is a binding, inseparable, and mutually impacting relationship which exists between opposites.
−	Given the urgency, the pain, the horror, and the magnitude of the unfolding catastrophe, the questions what to do and where to start are daunting ones. Thankfully the way has been charted in part by the last 25 years of radical ecological action. “Thumb in the Dam” struggles have been at the very centre of our activity.	+	-----
−	How can one best defend wild areas and cultures? In the absence of significant (r)evolution the answer lies in a combination of conservation, direct action and the strengthening of ecological cultures. Groups such as the Wildlife Trusts (in Britain) and Conservation International (globally) have adopted land purchase as their main tactic. lhis has its place but the times call for a more militant attitude. Most of us have little money to protect habitats by buying them up, while protected areas are often far from safe. Direct action on the other hand puts the costs onto those who attack nature not those who wish to defend it. Trashing a digger poised to level a Copse feels like a far more authentic reaction to ecological destruction than any amount of paper shuffling. For most of us, well targeted direct action is the most effective and efficient use of our lim-ited time and resources. In the early ‘80s the failure of reform environmentalism made this clear and the radical ecological resistance was born. Militant direct action by warrior societies putting the earth first!	+	==== Annotation 188 ====
−	What objectives and strategy can we base our actions around, given the vast scale of the attack and the minute scale of the resistance? This task section will hopefully give at least a partial answer.	+	Contradictions are ''binding'' and ''inseparable'' because they hold a relationship together. If two opposing things, phenomena, or ideas simply ''separate'', then contradiction, by definition, no longer exists. For example, an economy is bound together by the contradiction of production and consumption; if production exists without consumption (or vice-versa), it can’t be considered to be an economy.
−	***** Defending the Living Land	+	Contradictions are said to be ''mutually impacting'' because any time a contradiction exists between two opposing sides, both sides are mutually impacted for as long as the contradiction exists and develops. Of course, it is possible for two opposing sides to separate from one another; for example, a factory which produced buggy whips may have failed to find consumers after the invention of the car. Thus, there would exist a situation in which production exists without consumption. In this situation, the termination of the contradiction between production and consumption leads to a new contradiction: the factory will now be in the midst of a crisis which will require it to either provide a different product or go out of business.
−	Though it was from an understanding of the global ecological crisis that our movement was born it was in local ecological land struggles that our movement grew. As stated earlier, we can take pride in the beauty and vitality of habitats throughout Britain that are alive today because of our resistance to infrastructure growth (roads), resource extraction (quarrying, opencast coal mining, peat digging, timber cutting) and city expansion (house building).	+	Thus we see that production and consumption can’t be separated from one another without leading to a change in the essential nature of the relationship and the opposing subjects, and we see that the opposing sides mutually impact one another (a change in consumption will affect production, and vice-versa).
−	These struggles have changed forever all of us who have taken part in them. They have connected us to the earth in a deeply emotional and meaningful way. Exhilaration, fear, empowerment, true human communication, anger, love, homes, and a feeling of belonging in both communities and the land; these are just some of what we have been given by these struggles. I emphasise this so that what I say next is not taken as a disavowal of British local ecological land struggles.	+	In any given contradictory relationship, each oppositional side is the premise for the other’s existence. Unity among opposites also defines the identity of each opposing side. Lenin wrote: “The identity of opposites (it would be more correct, perhaps, to say their ‘unity,’—although the difference between the terms identity and unity is not particularly important here. In a certain sense, both are correct) is the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society).”<ref>''On the Questions of Dialectics'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.</ref>
−	To those of us brought up in Britain’s woodlands, copses, downland, and dales, these habitats have an immense importance-reaching deep into our soul. However, from a global perspective how important are these ecologies given the accelerating biological meltdown?	+	-----
−	We must direct our action where it will have most effect. Trauma medics use triage to sort casualties according to priority-which lives are most threatened, which lives are most saveable. In this way they can put their resources where they will have most effect. What we need then is a form of global habitat triage for the biological casualties of civilisations war on the wild. Thankfully in the last 15 years such a system has taken shape, in the form of the Hotspot Theory.	+	==== Annotation 189 ====
−	Hotspot Theory was first conceived by British ecologist Norman Myers. First, it makes the task of defending biodiversity more approachable by demonstrating that we can conserve a major share of terrestrial biodiversity in a relatively small portion of the planet. Secondly, it demonstrates specifically where these areas are located, and why they are so important, entering into considerable detail on what each of them contains. Third, it elucidates the different threats faced by each of the hotspots.	+	Here, Lenin is explaining that ''identity'' and ''unity'' are (more or less) the same concept when it comes to understanding the nature of contradiction between opposites. In material processes of nature, social processes, and processes of consciousness, we perceive and define oppositional forces by recognizing mutually exclusive and contradictory tendencies within and between things, phenomena, and ideas. In other words, whenever we think of an oppositional relationship, we ''define it'' in terms of the opposition.
−	lhe Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Eco-Regions Myers’ Hotspot priority system uses vascular plants as the main determinant, given that plants are the primary fixers of energy from the sun and are necessary for the survival of most other organisms.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-63.png|''War, disease, and economy are all examples of unity in contradiction.'']]
−	Hotspots are defined with two criteria. First, biological diversity. Secondly, degree of threat. A minimum of 0.53 of total global vascular plant diversity endemic to the area in question is the primary cut-off point for inclusion on the hotspot list. The theory uses the most current estimate of vascular plants as 300,000 i.e. the cut off is an area must have 1,500 endemic vascular plants within its borders. Also bird, mammal, reptile and amphibian diversity is taken into account, in that order of importance. The second criteria, degree of threat, has a cut off measure that is, a hotspot should have 253 or less of its original primary natural vegetation cover remaining intact.	+	When we think of a war, we think of the contradictions which exist ''between'' the opposing nations. When we think of a disease, we define it by the oppositional forces ''between'' the ailment and the human body. When we think of an economy, we think of the oppositional forces of production and consumption ''within'' the economy.
−	Hotspot analysis carried out between 1996–1998 resulted in a list of 25 hotspots and two exceptional mini-hotspots (the Galapagos and Juan Fernadez islands). The hotspots are:	+	In other words, the identity of contradictory relationships is ''defined'' by the ''unity'' of the opposing sides with one another.
−	Tropical Andes, Meso-america, Caribbean, Choco Darien, Atlantic Forest Region, Brazilian Cerrado, Central Chile, California Floristic Province, Madagascar and Indian Ocean Islands, Easter Arc Mountains, Cape Floristic Province, Succulent Karoo, Guinean forests of West Africa, Mediterranean Basin, Caucasus, Sundaland, Wallacea, Philippines, Indo-Burma, Mountains of Central China, Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Polynesia, South West Australia.	+	The concept ''struggle of opposites'' refers to the tendency of opposites to eliminate and negate each other. There exist many diverse forms of struggle between opposites. Struggle can manifest in various forms based on:
−	Cumulatively, these 25 areas plus the mini-hotspots have almost <strong>883</strong> of their original area destroyed or denuded with only 12.283 remaining intact. This intact percentage amounts to just 1.443 of the land surface of the planet-a little smaller than the EU!	+	* The nature of a given thing, phenomenon, or idea.
		+	* Relationships within a thing, phenomenon, or idea (or between things, phenomena, and ideas).
		+	* Specific material conditions [see Annotation 10, p. 10].
−	A staggering 131,399 vascular plants are endemic to the hotspots representing 43.83 of all plants on earth. Adding in estimations of non-endemic plant species found within the hotspots brings us to an even larger figure.	+	The process of unity and struggle of opposites inevitably leads to a ''transformation between them''. The transformation between opposites takes place with rich diversity, and such transformations can vary depending on the properties of the opposite sides as well as specific material conditions.
−	At least 65. 7% and more likely 70% or more of all vascular plants occur within the 1.44% of earth’s land surface occupied by the hotspots.[332]	+	-----
−	This indicates a vast percentage of all life in other species groups-mammals, avi-fauna etc. In fact 35.53 of the global total of non-fish vertebrates are endemic to the hotspots. Once again, adding in estimations of non-endemic non-fish vertebrates, we come to a figure of at least 623. Maybe perhaps 703 or more of all non-fish vertebrates occurring in the hotspots. As the authors of Hotspots say themselves:	+	==== Annotation 190 ====
−	If 60% or more of all terrestrial biodiversity occurs in the most threatened 1.44% of the land surface of the planet, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these areas deserve a lion’s share of our attention over the nextfew decades. Indeed, if .. we are at risk of losing one third to two thirds of all species within the foreseeable future, and if almost two thirds of at least the terrestrial species are in the hotspots, then it seemsfairly obvious that we may make a major dent in the entire endangered species/mass extinction problem by placing very heavy emphasis on the hotspots.[333]	+	Opposing sides, by definition, ''oppose'' one another. If forces or characteristics which exist within or between things, phenomena, or ideas do ''not'' oppose one another, then they are not, by definition, ''opposites''. Thus, it can be understood that opposing sides have a tendency to ''struggle against'' one another. It is this very struggle which defines two sides as opposites, and as contradictory.
−	This analysis is immensely useful, and has been refined further. Lots of number crunching later leads to a Top 9 Hotspot list: Tropical Andes, Sundaland, Meso-America, Indo-Burma, Caribbean, Atlantic Forest Region of Brazil, Madagascar, Mediterranean Basin, & Choco-Darien (Western Ecuador).	+	Lenin explained that some contradicting opposite sides can exist in what he described as ''equilibrium'', but that this is only ever a temporary state of affairs, as exemplified in his article ''An Equilibrium of Forces.''
−	These nine areas account for 29.53 of all vascular plants and 24.93 of non-fish vertebrates. This in just 0.733 of the planet’s land surfaCe-around half of the size of the EU!!	+	[See Annotation 64, p. 62 for relevant text and more info on equilibrium.]
−	Further analysis on threat highlights three hotspots; the hottest of the hot. They are: The Caribbean, the Philippines,[334] and Madagascar.	+	Clearly, Lenin sees that this equilibrium of contradictory forces is not permanently sustainable. Indeed, ''no'' equilibrium of contradictory forces can be permanent. Eventually, one opposing side will overtake the other, and eventually, any given contradiction will result in one opposing side overcoming the other.
−	If this theory is correct, and there is every reason to think it is, some solid conclusions can be drawn:	+	According to the law of unification and contradiction between opposites, the struggle between two opposing sides is absolute, while the unity between them is relative, conditional, and temporary; in unity there is a struggle: a struggle in unity. According to Lenin: “The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.”<ref>''On the Questions of Dialectics'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.</ref>
−	1. At this moment in time radical ecologists around the world must do everything in our power to defend the 25 Hotspots.	+	-----
−	2. Serious action must be taken to halt or slow the destruction of the three hottest hotspots.	+	==== Annotation 191 ====
−	3. Northern Europe appears nowhere on the hotspot list. In fact it has a relatively low level of biological diversity thanks to a combination of climate, past glaciation and human habitat destruction. We should obviously continue to defend Northern European habitats. However in the context of the global biological meltdown, struggles to defend Northern European habitats are entirely peripheral.	+	“Absolute” and “Relative” are philosophical classifications which refer to interdependence. That which is ''absolute'' exists independently and with permanence. That which is ''relative'' is temporary, and dependent on other conditions or circumstances in order to exist.
−	4. The appearance in the hotspots list of the Mediterranean Basin should focus us in Europe. The fact that a hotspot covers parts of the EU is a surprising revelation and one that has serious repercussions.	+	So Lenin’s point is that ''unity'' exists temporarily in any given pair of opposing sides, as the unity only exists as long as the opposing sides are opposing one another. As soon as one side eliminates or negates the other, the unity subsides. However, ''opposition'' is considered absolute, because it is opposition which drives motion and change in all things, phenomena, and ideas through contradictory processes of opposing sides.
−	5. Given serious action, the preservation of significant sections of global biodiversity is a real possibility, if only because it could involve such a small percentage of global land surface.	+	In the same text quoted in the passage above, ''On the Questions of Dialectics,'' Lenin notes:
−	These conclusions combined with a sensible analysis of our powers (as radical ecologists primarily in Northern Europe) begin to give us answers to the urgent question posed earlier. Where to start?	+	<blockquote>
		+	The distinction between subjectivism (skepticism, sophistry, etc.) and dialectics, incidentally, is that in (objective) dialectics the difference between the relative and the absolute is itself relative. For objective dialectics there is an absolute within the relative. For subjectivism and sophistry the relative is only relative and excludes the absolute...
−	A hierarchy of global priority setting can follow the pattern: global>regional>national>local>specific sites. Obviously, given our location and limited powers, the priorities set by such a system cannot be transferred immediately to a list of practically realisable objectives. Beyond this we can also set a hierarchy of priorities for local habitat defence here on our island and its environs-understanding all the time these struggles’ largely peripheral role in the global direct defence of diversity. For now I will talk of the global terrain. What follows is a hierarchy of top priorities for terrestrial habitat defence set in light of the hotspot theory.	+	Such must also be the method of exposition (i.e., study) of dialectics in general... To begin with what is the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., with any proposition: the leaves of a tree are green; John is a man: Fido is a dog, etc. Here already we have dialectics (as Hegel’s genius recognised): the individual is the universal.
−	***** The Hottest of the Hot	+	The individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes) etc. Here already we have the elements, the germs, the concepts of necessity, of objective connection in nature, etc. Here already we have the contingent and the necessary, the phenomenon and the essence; for when we say: John is a man, Fido is a dog, this is a leaf of a tree, etc., we disregard a number of attributes as contingent; we separate the essence from the appearance, and counterpose the one to the other.
		+	</blockquote>
−	At the moment the three hottest are undeniably the global priority areas for defence. Unfortunately, facing reality we can have very little direct effect on these areas-at present. This is likely to remain so for the medium term at least. Let’s not fool ourselves. We often ignore threatened habitats in Britain because they’re more than a few hours drive from an activist centre: the Caribbean, Madagascar, and the Philippines. I don’t see any of our ropey vans getting there any time soon. However, let’s look at them one by one.	+	In other words, we must understand that in materialist dialectics, the absolute and the relative exist within one another; in other words, the absolute and the relative have a ''dialectical relationship'' with one another in all things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	<strong><em>Madagascar:</em></strong> This amazing island has been at the centre of global conservation concern for decades. A number of British companies are involved in trashing it, our old friends RTZ for example. Actions against them would be very. very good. It is here, if anywhere, that the global conservation NGOs have some chance of using big money to big effect. Like it or not, they are probably the islands greatest hope. Many of them are using the Hotspot Theory to set their priorities so their targeting of Madagascar is increasing.	+	''Relative unity'' refers to the nature of ''unity'' between contradictory subjects. Contradictory subjects are ''unified'' in the sense that any given contradiction is essentially defined by the contradiction between two subjects. Thus, the two subjects are ''unified'' in contradiction. However, this unity is ''relative'' in the sense that this unification is temporary (the unity will end upon negation and synthesis) and relative (i.e., defined by the relationship between the two contradicting subjects).
−	Philippines: Of the three hottest hotspots it is in the Philippines that we have most extensive contacts. A number of EF! groups are active. Growing out of anarcho-punk there is a small but growing active eco-minded anarchist scene. Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) called international days saw sizeable mobilisations. and anti-GM direct action by peasants is on the up. A number of communities are resisting the logging and mining that is destroying their areas. A remnant of the original gatherer-hunter population of the Philippines survives. We need to talk more to Filipino groups to find out how we can best help. Solidarity actions, communication, and funds should all be disproportionately channelled their way. UK-based companies are active and possibilities for joint action should be pursued. While this responsibility belongs to us all. some people from our scene need to take on acting as primary intermediaries and push this forward-catalysing communication and action.	+	''Absolute struggle'' refers to the fact that contradiction, negation, and synthesis will go on forever; in this sense, contradictory processes are ''absolute'' because such struggle exists ''permanently;'' struggle has no set beginning or end point, and exists independently of any specific thing, phenomenon, or idea.
−	<strong><em>The Caribbean:</em></strong> To put it lightly, many more people in Britain have links with the Caribbean than with either the Philippines or Madagascar! At a guess I’d say that of the Majority World hotspots it is with the Caribbean that Britain has most personal (rather than corporate) connections. Unfortunately environmentalism, for reasons around race and class, is almost devoid of British Afro-Caribbean involvement. Thus ecological struggles are happening in the region but are largely off our radar.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-64.png|''Relative Unity refers to the temporary and relative nature of specific relationships which define and unify specific contradictions; Absolute Struggle refers to the permanent, constant nature of development through contradiction.'']]
−	While steps must be taken to remedy this,[335] our potential as a (predominantly white) movement to support this region is much smaller than that of the Afro-Caribbean communities. Some within these communities are working on the issue. It’ll be nothing to do with us if any major expansion of activity happens, so there is little point going into detail here. One thing is worth emphasising though. Mobilisation by Afro-Caribbean groups has the potential to be the most meaningful support work done by Brits for any of the Majority World hotspots.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-65.png|''The relationship between relative unity and absolute struggle defines and drives change, motion, and development through contradiction.'']]
−	Given the regions position as one of the three hottest hotspots it could be the most globally important eco-action carried out here. We have reason to hope for such a situation, and corporate ravagers of the Caribbean based in Britain have reason to fear it.	+	This applies to contradictions. The ''relative unity'' and the ''absolute struggle'' between opposing sides have a dialectical relationship with one another. The permanent absoluteness of struggle — the fact that all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly undergoing processes of change through contradictory forces — can only manifest in the relative unity of opposing sides, which can only exist through the temporary existence of conditional relations between opposing sides.
−	One of our main entry points for far off lands-anarchism--is little use to us in the Caribbean where anarchist groups are pretty much non-existent. Cuba is the only island where a sizeable movement ever took root, and no organisations survive now thanks to Castro’s social weeding.[336]	+	-----
−	The Caribbean is one of only two hotspots whose area is partly within the US. Unsurprisingly we know more people in Florida than say, Haiti. EF!ers are active in Florida and good solidarity actions for them would he great.	+	The interaction that leads to the transformation between opposites is a process. At the beginning, contradictions manifest as differences and then develop into two opposing sides. When the two contradictions are fiercely matched and when the conditions are ripe, they will transform each other, and finally, the conflict will be resolved. As old contradictions disappear, new contradictions are formed and the process of mutual impact and transformation between opposites continues, which drives the motion and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas. The relationship, impact and transformation between opposites are the source and driving force of all movement and development in the world. Lenin affirmed: “Development is the ‘struggle’ of opposites.”<ref>''On the Questions of Dialectics'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.</ref>
−	***** The Top Nine Hotspots	+	-----
−	Moving down one level of priority to the top nine we find similar patterns to the top three. These regions are largely out of our direct reach. We can do little at the moment bar actively supporting radical ecological influenced groups in these areas. Groups in the top nine should be given dis-proportionate support and direct aid.	+	==== Annotation 192 ====
−	Covering less than 13 of global land surface, mostly in Majority World locations, the top nine are ofimmense importance. In this context even relatively minor conservation programs are worth supporting-physically and financially.[337]	+	Any given process of development — that is to say, of transformation or motion — can be seen as a struggle between opposites. Various forms of struggle can exist simultaneously for any given subject, and the way we interpret struggle can depend on our point of view.
−	Of course this kind of thing is all well and good but we’ve rarely shown ourselves to be particularly brilliant at sustained international solidarity. We need to build a strategy based solidly on our strengths. Stopping developments. Fucking shit up. Blockades. Sabotage. Land occupations. Broken windows and crippled corporate confidence. To be really effective we need terrains of struggle which are both easily reachable and globally important.	+	For an engineer, a car moving along a road might be seen as a struggle between the power generated by the engine against the mass of the car itself and the friction of the tires on the ground. The driver of the car might see the process in terms of the struggle between the driver and the environment as they navigate across town avoiding accidents and following traffic laws.
−	Thankfully one of the top nine is within our reach-the Mediterranean Basin. The Med is both amazingly hiodiverse and under serious threat. Due to this hotspot’s direct relevance to us and our activity I have re-printed here an essay by N. Myers and R. M. Cowling from the Hotspots book. I have shortened it due to space constraints. It’s more eloquent than I, so read it and then return to me.	+	An organism’s life can be seen as a struggle between the organism’s life processes and its environment, or it might be seen as a struggle of contradictory forces within the organism itself (i.e., forces of consumption of nutrition vs. forces of expending energy to survive, forces of disease vs. forces of the organism’s immune system, etc.).
−	I read that essay and was struck by its importance for us. Travel becomes ever cheaper. Less than 24 hours away on a coach is one of the nine most important terrestrial eco-regions on earth. Victories and defeats in this arena are of the utmost global importance. The same cannot be said of many of the places we have fought for in the last 10 years. As I said earlier, I do not mean to lessen the importance of those campaigns, and our many victories, only to point to the reality that they mean little when it comes to confronting global biological meltdown. For a whole host of reasons they should continue, but it’s time for us to join other battles.	+	Materialist dialectics requires us to identify, examine, and understand the opposing forces which drive all development in our universe. Only through understanding such contradictions can we intercede and affect changes in the world which suit our purposes.
−	Looking at the map of the Med we can quickly come to some obvious basis for our action. Though there are conservationists in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey,[338] Libya, Egypt, Jordon, and Syria, there are no radical ecological groups to link up with. Israel is the only country in the Near East with a listed EF! contact. Ecological struggles are of course going on but are largely off our radar.[339] Work should be carried out to rectify this situation, but to be brutally honest I don’t fancy doing direct action in Morroco much. Ask the Saharawians about it! We should support struggling communities and aid conservationists if and where we can in North Africa and the Near East-but let’s face it we’re not likely to very much. However, unlike other hotspots we can get stuck in to a large part of the area relatively easily. We have contacts in the European half of the Mediterranean hotspot and getting there is a cinch.	+	For example, in order to fight against capitalism and other forms of oppression, we must first understand the contradictory forces which exist within and between those oppressive social structures. Only then can we determine how we might best apply our will, through labor processes, to dismantle such oppressive structures. We might do this by exacerbating existing contradictions within oppressive structures, by introducing new contradictions, by negating contradictions which inhibit our own progress, etc.
−	It is within this area that some of Europe’s most militant ecological action has been taken. In fact at the time of writing there are eco-saboteurs serving time in Spain (for fucking up construction of the Itoiz Dam}, Italy (for trashing a high speed rail construction site in the Sosa Valley) and Greece (attempting to bomb the Ministry oflndustry in solidarity with communities fighting mega-port construction). The struggles these prisoners are part of are all being fought by anarchist/radical ecological groups our scene is in direct contact with, and there are many more.	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	Looking for allies lets take a trip around the European section of the basin anti-clockwise. We start with Greece. Much of it is a red alert area and has a sizeable and very militant anarchist scene with a slowly-increasing green hue. Albania has no established radical ecological groups. There are smatterings of anarchos and radical eco-types throughout the ex-Yugoslav republics.	+	Given that contradictions are objective and universal, and that they are the source and driving force of movement and development, it is therefore necessary to detect, recognize, and understand contradictions, to fully analyze opposing sides, and to grasp the nature, origin and tendencies of motion and development in our awareness and practice.
−	Italy’s anarchists are pretty full on and increasingly engaged in some ecological resistance (The Italian-French Maritime Alps red alert area is relatively near Turin’s anarchists and the area someone is in jail for defending). Southern France also has many active groups from GM trashing Confederation Paysanne to anarchists, with the French Pyrenees being the site of the ten year resistance to the road through the Valle d’Aspe.	+	Lenin said: “The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts… is the ''essence…'' of dialectics.”<ref>''On the Questions of Dialectics'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.</ref>
−	On the other side of the Pyrenees in Spain there are large anarchist groups and at present probably the biggest squatting movement in Europe. The Basque country (which borders the hotspot) has a history of mass struggles against mining, dams, etc. with even ETA getting in on the act. The Spanish section of the Rif-Betique red alert area has become home for a sizeable British punk and crusty exile community. The Canaries red alert area (which despite being off Western Sahara is part of Spain) has a few environmental groups and like the Basque country has a (much smaller) nationalist movement with ecological tendencies.	+	-----
−	Portugal has a number of eco-influenced anarchist groups and significant clashes continue between its peasant past and the onslaught of modernity.	+	==== Annotation 193 ====
−	Over the last few years many of our circle have increasingly turned to the continent for adventure and action. The relatively low level of struggle in Britain since the end of the anti-road period, the rising (and now setting?) sun of the Spanish squatting scene, the strength of sterling, riot tourism, cheaper travel, and the warmer climate of parts of Europe have all been factors. In the ‘90s the transient tribes of anti-road activists moved around Britain with little concern for distance. Now a similar situation is evolving for which the terrain is the whole of Europe. This situation will expand significantly over the next decade. For while some of its causes have their origin in Britain’s present,[340] others arise from the increasingly unified nature of Europe’s planned future.	+	In other words, materialist dialectics is simply a system of understanding the world around us by viewing all things, phenomena, and ideas as collections of relationships and contradictions which exist within and between all things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	While this causes some problems for sustaining local organising in Britain it also opens up amazing opportunities.	+	Since contradictions exist with such rich diversity, it is necessary to have a historical point of view [see Annotation 114, p. 116] — that is, to know how to analyze each specific type of contradiction and have appropriate methods for resolving them. In our perception and practice, it is necessary to properly distinguish the roles and positions of different types of contradictions in each situation and condition; we must also distinguish between different characteristics which contradictions might have in order to find the best method of resolving them.
−	Of the ten red alert areas, the ones nearest Mediterranean activist hubs are the Spanish section of the Rif-Betique, the Maritime Alps of the French/Italian border and southern/central Greece. Campaigns and targets in these areas should be relatively easy to find out about. If we in Britain added our weight to our comrades in these countries and convinced other Northern Europeans to do so, we would be moving towards serious defence of a globally important area-making an actual impact on biological meltdown.	+	-----
−	Experience and contacts made through struggle in these easily accessible three areas will chart the way forward towards action in other parts of the Med. A full scale migration is not needed. Some of our circle are planning to move to the Med’s warmer climate. Many others are already wintering or taking small sojourns there. Significant contact has been made with groups in these areas. All that is needed is that this pre-existing process be consciously and collectively shaped to the immediate goal at hand.	+	==== Annotation 194 ====
−	It is important in some areas to join local campaigns. In others, covert holiday sabotage is more in order. The latter is really just a call for the European adoption of one of North American EF!‘s longest running tactics-roving monkeywrenching. With the consolidation of the European su-per-state, travelling across borders to trek into and defend wildness seems ever more like crossing US states to defend wilderness. A practice, despite the distance, our North American friends think little of.	+	The historical viewpoint is vital because in order to fully understand any given contradiction, we must understand the process of development which led to its formation.
−	***** The Remaining 15 Hotspots	+	For example, before a car engine can be repaired, we must first find out what caused the engine to stop working to begin with. If the car is out of fuel, we must determine what caused it to run out of fuel. Did the driver simply drive until the fuel tank was empty, or is there a hole or leak in a fuel line, in the tank, etc.?
−	I am not going to go into much detail about the remaining hotspots; it would take too much space and be rather repetitive.	+	It is vital to know the history of development of a given pair of opposing sides, as well as the characteristics and other properties of both opposing sides, to fully understand the contradiction. Since all conscious activity (like all processes of motion and change) ultimately derives from the driving force of contradiction, it is vital for us to develop a historical and comprehensive perspective of any contradictions we hope to affect through our conscious activities.
−	Of the 15, all bar three are in the Majority World; countries at the moment largely out of our direct reach. As stated earlier, active ecologically-minded groups in the hotpots should be given priority when it comes to support actions and funding. We do, in fact, have contacts in most of these areas. Some EF!ers do conservation work abroad and it would make sense that it is concentrated within the hotspots. If we can be of any practical help to efforts in these areas we should muck in wholeheartedly.	+	=== 3. Law of Negation of Negation ===
−	Three of the remaining 15 stand out, for us, if only because they’re predominately English speaking and Western-South West Australia, New Zealand, and the Californian Floristic Province. In all three areas serious land battles are being fought and we have quite extensive contacts.	+	The law of negation of negation describes the fundamental and universal tendency of movement and development to occur through ''dialectical negation'', forming a cyclical form of development through what is termed “''negation of negation''.”
−	Aoterea: In Aoterea (New Zealand) there is a large indigenous resistance movement keyed into the PGA. There is also a sprinkling of anarchos and radical eco-types.	+	==== a. Definition of Negation and Dialectical Negation ====
−	South West Australia: This region has a history of aboriginal land defence stretching from the invasion to the present day. The last three decades have also seen significant struggles by white radical environmentalists, defectors to the side of the indigenous and the land. When EF! first came to Britain, Australia was probably at the forefront of ecological resistance in the West. Large-scale actions against the importation of tropical timber were carried out hand-in-hand with direct land defence. Over the last decade this scene has shrunk but is still never the less both active and pregnant with great possibility. Australians have been responsible for some of the largest summit actions of the Global Resistance Period. It has the normal assortment of anarchists-many being very eco in word and deed.	+	The world continuously and endlessly changes and develops. Things, phenomena, and ideas that arise, exist, develop and perish, are replaced by other things, phenomena, and ideas; one form of existence is replaced with another form of existence, again and again, continuously, through this development process. This procedure is called ''negation''.
−	For obvious reasons there is a reasonable amount of three way traffic between Britain, Australia and New Zealand. While these areas are not as important or threatened as some other hotspots higher up the global diversity/threat hierarchy, for cultural reasons it is simply more likely that links will continue and consolidate with these areas.	+	All processes of movement and development take place through negation. From certain perspectives, negations can be seen as end points to the development (and thus, existence) of a given thing, phenomenon, or idea [which we can think of as “terminal negations;” see Annotation below]. But from other perspectives, negations can also create the conditions and premises for new developments. Such negations, which create such conditions and premises for the development of things and phenomena, are called ''dialectical negation''.
−	Californian Floristic Province: This hotspot is probably the one we have historically had most ties with. Though the latter ‘90s have seen an increasing turn towards Europe, in the early ‘90s British EF! oriented itself primarily with reference to North American EF! By the time of the birth of our movement EF! had internationalised, yet it was still very much a North American export. For this reason I will go into more detail about the only hotspot found predominantly in North America.	+	-----
−	The Californian Floristic Province stretches along the western coast of North America, most of it within the state of California. However, it also extends north into Oregon and south into Baja California, Mexico.	+	==== Annotation 195 ====
−	Approximately 603 of California’s land is included within the floristic province. The total number of plant species present is greater than that for central and northern US and the adjacent portion of Canada, an area almost ten times as large.[341]	+	''Negation'' refers to any act of motion or transformation which arises from contradiction. Specifically, negation is what occurs when one opposing side completely overcomes the other. Nothing in our universe can transform or move all by itself, without any contradiction. Thus, negation drives all development and motion of all things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 119, p. 123]. There are various forms of negation, and the same negation process may be seen to take different forms depending on viewpoint of analysis [see Annotation 11, p. 12, and Annotation 114, p. 116], as depicted in the diagram below.
−	This rich biodiversity is seriously threatened. California is the most populous of the United States, its economy ranks among those of the world’s top seven countries and it produces half of the food the US consumes. Among the main threats faced by this hotspot are urbanisation, air pollution, expansion of large scale agriculture, livestock grazing, logging, strip mining, oil extraction, road building, the spread of non-native plants, an increasing use of off-road vehicles, and the suppressing of natural fires necessary for reproduction of key plant species.[342]	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-66.png|''An overview of various forms of negation as they relate to dialectical development.'']]
−	In defending this region against attacks North American EF! has had some of its most memorable moments. The massive Redwood Summer campaign which led to the car bombings of EF!ers Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney. The amazing direct action victory at Warner Creek, the killing of EF!er David Chain by a logger from Pacific Lumber. Two Eugene radical eco-anarchists are serving long sentences in the region for arson attacks on an off-road vehicle showroom.	+	''Dialectical negation'' occurs when the end of development leads directly to some new development process. Dialectical negation occurs through quality shifts [see Annotation 117, p. 119], which, themselves, occur through negation of opposite sides.
−	In the early ‘90s we did quite a few solidarity actions for our North American friends. More recently most have been for Majority World groups. Those actions should continue but we should not neglect supporting North American EF!, especially in its struggle over this immensely im-portant hotspot. Apart from the Mediterranean Basin, this hotspot is the one people from our circles visit more than any other. Big wilderness, cheap flights and an impressive (English speaking) movement will continue to be a pull for many. What we can offer those defending this hotspot is regular communication, occasional solidarity actions and itinerant Brits. Well, it’s better than a bag of beans. Defending the Land: Medium Term Global Objectives Here, I am attempting to set, using the hotspot theory and an understanding of our strengths, a hierarchy of our top global biological objectives for the next ten years.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-67.png|''Replacement negation refers to the replacement of one thing, phenomenon, or idea with another through dialectical negation.'']]
−	In many ways this seems ridiculous. However, in 1992 we set ourselves the task of stopping 600 roads which were ripping through a significant proportion of Britain’s most important habitats. Within five years 500 had been cancelled. I am confident that unified action can have a momentous effect. Those who believe less than I in our cumulative power should see the utility of strategising all the more clearly. Here then is what I think our top global objectives should be, in order of their importance to us.	+	'''Translation Note:''' ''The terms “terminal negation” and “replacement negation” do not appear in the original Vietnamese text. We chose to assign terms to these concepts for clarity.''
−	6. Get Militant in the Med: A big push is needed to directly defend the Mediterranean Basin Hotspot. It is the only one of the Top 9 found in the West and the only hotspot to include part ofEurope. Over the next few years we should consolidate links with Basin groups and start to engage directly in action within it. The Med’s 10 Red Alert Areas are of greatest importance. Of these the Maritime Alps, the Spanish section of the Rif-Betique and Southern and Central Greece should be our first concern. Involvement in resistance in these areas should build our ability to engage and support struggle elsewhere in the northern part of the hotspot. Within a relatively short period of time we could be involved in serious defence of a globally important areamaking an actual impact on biological meltdown.	+	''Replacement negation'' occurs when one thing, phenomenon, or idea takes the place of another. Replacement negation is always a dialectical process, where one subject is replaced gradually by another. Replacement may be relatively fast or slow, but it is never instantaneous — nothing can pop in and out of existence instantaneously. For example: swords were gradually replaced by firearms as the primary weapons of war over the course of many centuries. Today, swords have been completely replaced by firearms on the battlefield. This was a process of ''replacement negation'' — weapons are still used in war, but the type of weapon used has been completely replaced. Development continues, even though development of swords as battle weapons has essentially ended.
−	7. Uncompromising Aid for the Three Most Threatened Hotspots: The Philippines, Madagascar, and the Caribbean are the priorities at the moment, yet as we are unlikely to actually get to them they are not our highest objective. However we should target solidarity and aid to radicals, resisters and conservationists in these three hotspots as a matter of urgency. Of the three it is with the Philippines that we have most extensive links-these should be consolidated. Filipino EF!ers and anarchists should be given substantial aid. [Since this was first distributed EF!ers from Leeds have formed the Philippine Solidarity Group, providing practical aid for EF! and indigenous groups there. This has included direct financial aid, on-the-ground solidarity, prisoner support etc.]	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-68.png|''Terminal negation refers to the end of a specific cycle of development.'']]
−	8. Go <strong><em>Wild for the ‘Western’ Hotspots:</em></strong> For various cultural and economic reasons our direct involvement with struggles is more likely in ‘Western’ countries than Majority World ones. The areas under occupation by the West largely do not appear in the hotspot list. Apart from the Med and a small part of the Caribbean, those that do are South Western Australia, New Zealand, and the Californian Floristic Province. Already existing links should be solidified, solidarity actions carried out and the steady flow of our visitors to these hotspots should continue. Just remember to wrench at least one big machine for each long-haul flight!	+	''Terminal negation'' is what happens when development completely ends for a given thing, phenomenon, or idea. For example, from one viewpoint, the development of swords as weapons of war can be seen as having ended — having been ''terminally negated'' — due to the innovation of firearms. In essence, swords are no longer developed, nor implemented, in modern warfare.
−	Beyond this we should do anything we can to assist the preservation of all hotspots, not just those mentioned above. Wild areas not included in the hotspots should of course also be defended. However if we want to have any meaningful impact on biological meltdown, as much of our activity as possible should be aimed at the hotspots in general and the above objectives in particular.	+	Replacement negation and terminal negation must be considered in relative terms. From one viewpoint, we can see the rise of firearms as the underlying reason for the ''terminal negation'' of military use of swords. Today, no army on Earth uses swords as primary battlefield weapons and militaries no longer develop sword technology for battlefield use. However, from another viewpoint, the development of battlefield weapons has continued on long after the end of the primacy of swords, and it could be said that firearms have ''replaced'' swords as the primary battlefield weapon.
−	***** Back to Britain, ‘Back to Reality	+	Consider the death of a human being. From one perspective, death is a ''terminal negation'' — the person’s consciousness has ended, and no further development of consciousness will occur for that individual. From other perspectives, development continues. The individual may have had children who will continue their familial lineage, they may have contributed ideas which will continue to impact other people for centuries to come, and so on. In that sense, replacement negation may be viewed as dialectical negation. For example, someone studying modes of transportation in the history of the USA may see the process of steam locomotives replacing horses, and then cars replacing steam locomotives, as processes of dialectical negation from the overarching perspective of the transportation system.
−	So far I have charted what I believe we should do on the global terrain. Yet most of what we have done over the last decade has been defending the land of these dear isles. I am not calling for abandonment of this struggle. It is important for both us and the ecology of Britain. It is also what we have shown ourselves to be pretty good at. Hundreds of habitats remain living due to ecological direct action. Kiss the earth and feel proud. We-among many-have done well.	+	-----
−	Though many of us wil take action in the global hotspots, few will spend most of our time there. One criticism of following a hotspot based global triage strategy is that it lacks soul. Species diversity surveys do not an ecological sensibility make! While that’s true, the global crisis calls for globally important action and I believe that the hotspot theory has utility. Yet acceptance of the globally peripheral nature of British habitat defence does not extinguish our desire or duty to de-fend our land. An authentic land ethic must be rooted in where we are. My bioregion may be ‘species poor’ compared to a rainforest but I love it. It’s the bracing wind on its bright hills that whisper to me to live wilder. On a totally practical level it’s far easier to defend land nearby.	+	Materialist dialectics is concerned with all forms of negation, but focuses primarily on dialectical negation. Therefore, materialist dialectics is not just a theory of transformation in general, but fundamentally a theory of development
−	As I said earlier in Part One, throughout the 1993–1998 Land Struggle Period our action priorities were largely set by the Department ofTransport. When we decimated the state road building program we lost a terrain of struggle that unified and strengthened us nationally. The question posed, then, is what is the greatest and most geographically spread threat to British ecology?	+	-----
−	The tactically unfortunate answer is industrial agriculture.[343] The great thing about road building was that wherever you were in the country it produced a front to attack, land to defend. It bit into Britain’s ecology in big bites. The terrible thing about industrial agriculture is that though it devours more, it does so incrementally, with small bites. Fronts rarely present themselves. The camps at Offham,[344] The Land is Ours occupations and trespasses,[345] and most of all the growth of anti-GM actions, are all in part attempts to bypass this impasse.	+	==== Annotation 196 ====
−	The post 1998 wave of global resistance allowed us to totally side step the question of what land to defend (of course, some camps continued but little on the previous scale). Now we are faced once again with this question. Essentially without a national programme to attack, the question divides further-at least from the perspective of strategy. There are three categories of British land habitat defence to take into consideration: a) Bio-regional Habitat Defence. Specific local sites under threat that may not be perceived as either ecologically or strategically national priorities should none the less be defended by local groups.	+	All transformation is driven by negation. Development is a process, specifically, of ''dialectical'' negation, which is a specific form of transformation in which an end of development creates the conditions for new development, either through internal quality shifts or through replacement by some external subject.
−	b) National Co-ordinated Habitat Defence. Land deemed ecologically or strategically[346] of prime national importance, which the movement as a whole can recognise and act on.	+	Materialist dialectics is primarily concerned with dialectical negation (which drives development) because it is ''development'' which brings forth continuous change in our world. Terminal negations and other forms of transformation which do not drive further development are of limited utility, and can only represent certain limited viewpoints [i.e., the viewpoint of that which is terminated].
−	c) Defence of the Wild Periphery. Areas beyond the bioregions of any local groups and far from large population centres that have some character of wilderness about them.	+	From a broader perspective, nearly all “terminations” are replaced in some way or another by some other form of development. For instance, even when a person dies, although the consciousness of that person may terminate, there will be continuous impacts which will be carried forward from the deceased person’s lifetime of consciousness, as well as from the developments which arise from the death itself.
−	With roads, local bio-regional habitat defence fed into national co-ordinated habitat defence. Any terrains which mirror this hugely advantageous situation should be pursued. At the moment I can see no such terrain, but let’s keep a look out! I’ll go through each category in order with some suggestions. Bio-regional Habitat Defence	+	This dialectical definition of negation differs greatly from metaphysical conceptions of development [see Annotation 201, p. 195], which are essentially viewed as terminal. From the metaphysical perspective, all things, phenomena, and ideas are viewed as separate from one another; therefore negations are viewed as terminal processes which bring development processes to their ends.
−	Essentially this is a question for us as individuals, groups and hopefully eventually as local counter cultures. We should be intimately aware of the ecologies around us. Only through a deep knowledge of, and connection with the land can we hope to defend our bio-regions from further damage. Looking at local biodiversity studies[347] is worthwhile, but it is our feet across the landscape that is most informative. Get out into the countryside around you. Make sure you are familiar with the wildness on your doorstep. Know your land and you’ll know when it’s threatened.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-69.png|''The metaphysical perspective of terminal negation views negation as an essentially terminal process representing the end point of the existence of a static and isolated thing, phenomenon, or idea.'']]
−	Put yourselfabout in peculiar circles. Conservationists, twitchers, ramblers, insect lovers; in most areas there are a smattering of nature nerds. If you’re not one, make sure you’re friends with some. They’ll know about the housing development that’ll destroy ancient woodland or the farmer who’s draining some amphibian rich marshland for subsidies. Keep your ear to the ground.	+	In the above example, the metaphysical framework would present smashing a vase with a hammer as a terminal negation from the perspective of the observer. Once the vase is smashed, the vase is considered to no longer exist, and the broken shards are not considered to be “a vase” any more. Materialist dialectics, on the other hand, view “the shards” as merely a developed form of the vase; a transition to a new stage of development; the negation was only terminal from the perspective of the vase itself.
−	Many of our most important habitats are listed as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. SSSis are Britain’s ecological backbone, but nevertheless are often threatened. Make sure to keep an eye on the ones nearby.	+	'''''Excerpt From'' Vietnam’s High School Freshman Civic Education textbook:'''
−	I am not going to go into detail about what tactics are needed in local battles. After 10 years it’s pretty obvious. Community mobilising, occupations, blockades, bulldozer pledges, sabotage. Threatening the destroyers with costly chaos and giving it to them if they try it on.	+	Metaphysical and dialectical negation share one commonality: they both see development as the replacement of an old subject with a new subject. However, metaphysical negation happens when outside forces impact on a subject, deleting completely the existence of the old subject. According to this metaphysical perspective, the old subject and the new subject which replaces it do not have any connection.
−	***** Nationally Co-ordinated Habitat Defence	+	Dialectical negation fundamentally differs from metaphysical negation because it views development as a process of internal development. Dialectical negation does not view complete erasure or deletion of any former subject; instead, dialectical development sees the older subject, which is replaced (negated), as the premise or basis of existence for the new subject.
−	Since Newbury/Manchester there hasn’t been a piece of land that we have all pulled together to defend. This has been a great shame. Together we are quite a force/farce to be reckoned with. National co-ordination has some real advantages. For a start it maintains our circle’s bad reputa-tion, which is invaluable. Countless sites have been saved with just the threat of camps and direct action. However, significant and loud struggles are needed to keep this threat potential alive.	+	'''Comparison Examples:'''
−	Beyond tactical considerations, some ecosystems are simply so precious they call upon us all to cram into crummy vans, meet joyously in the mud, and fuck shit up. Above all else, these moments can be bonding, inspiring and educational (when they don’t go horribly wrong).	+	{|
		+	| | '''Metaphysical Negation'''
		+	| '''Dialectical Negation'''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | The earthquake destroyed the house.
		+	| The house was impacted by the external force of an earthquake, which caused it to collapse, due to internal characteristics of the house itself (which could not withstand the forces of the earthquake). The debris from the collapsed house will be cleared away, and will continue to develop. The space where the house stood will also continue to develop in some way, with the earthquake and the resulting collapse serving as the basis for this further development.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | Water eroded the mountain.
		+	| The external force of water caused erosion by transferring material away from the mountain, due to the internal characteristics of the mountain’s composite material. The water, the material which was washed away, and the mountain will all continue to develop. The erosion process will be the basis for this further development.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | The car has a new tire because it ran over a nail.
		+	| The external force of the nail caused the tire to permanently deflate, due to the internal characteristics of the tire, which could not withstand running over a nail. This served as the basis for further development: the old tire was removed and will be disposed of, which will serve as the basis for further development (i.e., the tire may be recycled or sent to a landfill); the removal of the tire serves as the basis for the further development of a new tire being installed.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | When you add water, sunlight, and nutrition to a seed, it will grow into a plant.
		+	| The seed went through a process of negation as a sprout grew, through various stages of development, into a plant, facilitated by outside forces (such as water, nutrition, sunlight, etc. — the seed would not grow in isolation) as well as the internal characteristics of the seed itself; the seed served as the basis of the sprout’s development. The sprout then served as the basis for the growth of a seedling, and the seedling served as the basis for the growth of a fully grown plant. All of this development was driven by negation processes as quantity shifts gradually led to quality shifts through those various stages of development.
		+	|
		+	|}
−	When deciding whether a particular piece of land should be coalesced around nationally, a few questions should be asked. Is it highly ecologically important? Is it winnable? Is it easily accessible nationally? Is the actual physical terrain conducive to action? Will a victory or noisy defeat on this land help save habitats elsewhere?	+	As you can see from the examples above, the metaphysical perspective focuses on external forces affecting a given subject and views every development process as terminal, with a beginning, middle, and end. The metaphysical perspective thus views negation as a termination of the subject (and, by extension, of development).
−	Mid to late 2001 saw the re-emergence of direct action in defence of the Thorne & Hatfield raised peat bogs. To all the above questions this habitat answers with an enthusiastic YES! At the risk of seeming foolish from the perspective of a few years hence, I believe this campaign to be immensely important. Not only does its re-emergence allow us to co-ordinate nationally but direct victory is quite conceivable. [Since this text was first distributed the campaign escalated and secured the end of peat extraction on Thorne & Hatfield and other sites.]	+	Materialist dialectics, on the other hand, views development as a continuous and never-ending process of mutual impact, negation, and further negation of each negation. A comprehensive and historical viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116] must thus be sought to fully comprehend development and negation processeses.
−	Reform environmentalism has spectacularly failed to save this hugely ecologically precious habitat. If we win this battle and choose our next equally well we could end up in a cycle of success. One noisy victory leads to another and many quiet ones besides.	+	Dialectical negation has two basic characteristics: ''objectivity'' and ''inheritance''.
−	A recent good example of such a cycle is when animal rights groups got on a roll after closing down Consort, who bred dogs for vivisection.[348] Once they had shown their mettle by closing Consort they followed up by forcing closed Hillgrove (cat breeders) and Shamrock Farm (a monkey quarantine centre). By the time the cycle reached Regal (rabbit breeders), the owners were so freaked that they packed up the day after the campaign was launched!	+	Dialectical negation is ''objective'' because negation arises from contradictions which exist between two opposite sides. These opposing sides may exist within a thing, phenomenon, or idea, but the opposing sides are still, by definition, externally opposed to one another from the perspective of either side.
−	These successes understandably led animal liberationists to become too cocky too quickly and take on a much bigger target--Huntingdon Life Sciences [HLS]. HLS is integral to corporate Britain. The state saw the danger of animal liberationists on a roll and realised that if HLS was brought down the animal rights extremists would feel unstoppable. Smaller companies would crumble at the sound of their approach. lhanks in large part to the targeting of its financial backers things were getting economicaly dicey for HLS. The state reacted and stabilised the company by arranging a large injection of capital. From then on HLS has acted as a firebreak, stopping the spread of animal liberation. The cycle may have been broken. The teeth of this trap should not be allowed to cut into resistance again.	+	-----
−	A comprehensive analysis ofnational land defence priorities is too big a job for this piece. Such a study must take place. For the moment we can concentrate on the peat bogs, but we should not wait till victory to map out our next targets. It is around our ability to act nationally that our network survival (rather than just that of our local groups) rests. Previous waves ofnational action have been defeated by either our victory in a particular battle (i.e. roads) or the pig’s success in swamping us (i.e. Sea Empress, Target Tarmac, etc). Hopefully this time we’ll get the wagon rolling fast enough that it can’t be stopped-at least for a while!!!	+	==== Annotation 197 ====
−	One priority that can definitely be set is confronting corporations in the National Parks. As long as they succeed in one development, one quarry, one pipeline, the vampires will push on with another attack. It should be our job to make them scared enough to retreat-at least out of some of the National Parks.	+	Though any given negation may be viewed as terminal from a certain perspective, materialist dialectics is most concerned with processes of development wherein the end of one stage of development creates the conditions for further development [see Annotation 117, p. 119].
−	The National Parks are immensely important and the hold they have over popular imagination makes them easier to organise around than other areas. It is also often easier to find out about threats facing the Parks. If the companies are given an inch they’ll take a mile, but if their profits are threatened they’ll run a mile.	+	Therefore, every development is simultaneously an ''internal'' and an ''external process,'' depending on perspective. Development processes may, from certain perspectives, be seen to take place ''within'' a subject or ''between'' two subjects, but they are always ''external'' (and, therefore, objective — see Annotation 108, p. 112) from the perspective of either opposing side while simultaneously ''internal'' to the relationship.
−	The present Nine Ladies action camp in the Peak District National Park stands a fair chance of success. has strengthened the resolve oflocal conservationists and is deterring other destructive projects.	+	For example: The relationship between a husband and wife may be seen as an ''internal process of development'' of “the marriage” from the perspective of a marriage counselor. However, from their own perspectives, each “opposing side” (i.e., the husband and the wife) see one another as external to each other.
−	***** Defence ofthe Wild Periphery	+	Therefore, the development of a marriage may be seen as an internal process, but the mutual impacts and negations which occur within the relationship are objective and external forces from the perspective of either opposing side.
−	Our movement for the wild has evolved in a physical and political environment lacking big wilderness. Habitats near large human population centres are more likely to defended by us than wilder and more precious eco-systems far from the cities. Wildness is everywhere from the grass between the paving slabs to the high mountains. It’s good that we defend wild pockets in deserts of development (the M11, Abbey Pond, Crystal Palace, etc.)-primarily for such struggles’ (r)evolutionary potential-but we should not ignore ‘the mountains’ altogether. So far this has largely been the case.	+	This is important because it means that all development and all negation are essentially objective processes; therefore no entity has complete, omniscient control over any development process. We must, therefore, understand the nature of development and negation in order to be able to properly plan and affect change in our world.
−	With the exception of some good work in North Wales, the stillborn (but dramatic) campaign against the Skye Bridge and the victorious defence of the Pressmenan \Voods Caledon remnant, defence of the wild periphery has been pretty paltry.	+	Dialectical negation is, therefore, the result of the process of resolving inevitable contradictions within a subject [i.e., a relationship] itself. Dialectical negation allows for the old to be replaced by the new, thereby creating trends of development. Therefore, dialectical negation is also self-negation.
−	An example of our failures can be found in the Cairngormsone of Britain’s largest roadless areas. For at least eight years I remember occasional campfire/pub chat about the possible construction of a funicular railway up Cairngorm. It’s been very contentious as the train replacing the ageing chairlift (itself an aberration) will massively increase the amount of people on the Cairngorm Plateau (1,000 a day is a figure bandied about). With them we knew would come much damage and significant building work, shops and all. Plans are even being discussed for hotels! This isn’t fucking Mayfair-it’s the summit plateau of one the wildest areas in Britain. Many said that direct action should be used if construction started. The project was put on hold at one point and I for one presumed it had been cancelled.	+	-----
−	Yet no one kept their ear to the ground or acted if they knew. ‘The first I heard about the railway being actually built was Autumn 2001 and on January 1, 2002 the first public train ride up Cairngorm was broadcast across the nation. A carriage filled with smiling politicians toasting the New Year-pass the sick bag (No wonder they were smiling-there was no way the parasitic slobs could have got up the mountain in January if they had had to walk it. That would have made far more amusing TV). The glint in their eyes was the reflection of our failure. If one of the last British bastions of wildness can become a site for development, what chance have we got of re-wilding London or Liverpool!	+	==== Annotation 198 ====
−	In the Cairngorms 103 of the area below the treeline is still covered by native woodlands and is the <em>most extensive example of Borealforest in the</em> UK <em>and one of the largest tracts of comparatively unmanaged and still mainly unenclosed woodland.</em>[349] If we have failed to defend the wildness of the Cairngorms Plateau it is essential we protect these remnants of Caledonia and other sites like them. Though a signiflcant proportion of the massif is now under conservation ownership, a lot of damaging economic/ ecocidal activity continues. If anywhere calls for some occasional monkeywrenching, it’s these wildlands.	+	To reiterate: from the perspective of either opposing side, development is an ''external, objective'' process. From the perspective of the contradictory ''relationship'', processes of development are ''internal'' processes of ''self-negation''. Thus, dialectical negation is both an objective process which no entity can completely control, while, simultaneously, an internal process of self-negation and self-development.
−	I use this example because it’s horriflc and it’s in Scotland. If protecting SSSis and the like is of primary national importance it is worth pointing to one simple fact: 203 of the total area of Scotland is designated either an SSSI, National Nature Reserve, or National Scenic Area. Scotland’s total species diversity is far less than England’s but its habitats are far less fragmented.	+	If two nations go to war, either nation may view the war as an objective, external development process, but from a wider perspective, the war is an internal development process of the diplomatic relationship between the two warring nations. This is drastically different from the metaphysical perspective, which views any negation process as a purely external process of development wherein one subject is permanently deleted from existence, then replaced by another subject [see Annotation 196, p. 188]. From the metaphysical perspective, a war is simply a conflict between two distinct and separate nations, and the conclusion of the war is a terminal negation which ends development of the war. From the materialist dialectical perspective, on the other hand, the end of the war would be seen as the basis of future development of the relationship between the two formerly warring nations.
−	<quote>	+	Dialectical negation also has an ''inheritance'' characteristic: when one opposing side negates another, the remaining side inherits factors from the negated side which are suitable with present conditions.
−	<em>We have species and habitats in Scotland that are important, in both the national and international context. Examples are the native pinewoods, the extensive blanket bogs, the bryophyte-rich Atlantic woodlands and the enormous colonies of breeding seabirds.[350]</em>
−	</quote>
−	These areas should be militantly defended. Yet apart from the exceptional actions of some communities, few stand up to defend these wild areas from the threats of plantations, logging, development, etc. In large part this is because of the absence of people in much of the Scottish countryside-excluded by one of the highest concentrations of land ownership anywhere in the world. Given this, it is all our responsibility to protect these areas. If not you, who’? In the long run it would be good to formulate ways of confronting this destruction in a coordinated fashion. Until then, happy hikers with wrenches in their backpacks have an important role to play.	+	-----
−	Unfortunately what makes Scottish bio-diversity globally unique-its climate edge position resulting in an amazing coexistence of species from different ecologies-is itself under threat from climate change. This should not dissuade us from action but remind us all the more of the need in times of flux for massive wilderness restoration; and situate our local British struggles in the global context. As one contributor at a conference on biodiversity in Scotland put it: Our Scottish action on biodiversity is in danger of being reduced to trivial tinkerings on the margin: <em>another example of deckchair-shifting on the Titanic.[351]</em>	+	==== Annotation 199 ====
−	As in Scotland, so it is across the divided queendom-many habitats main protection lies in their remoteness and the efforts of an array of often relatively powerless conservationists. Not even on this domesticated isle has the wild been vanquished, but it is under threat. I’m not going to specify the areas in need of special defence-across the wild periphery diversity is being whittled away. We are a people in love with the wild. We are committed to the wild-to its power and its defence. By spending more time out in it, we will better know which areas are threatened and gain the inspiration to take the action needed.	+	Every negation process arises from contradictions between two opposing sides. Within any such negation process, we can think of one side as the “negator” and the other side as the “negated.” Negation, like all relational processes, leads to mutual impact between both sides [see Annotation 136, p. 138]. Therefore, the negated will impact the negator; in other words, the negated side will be somehow ''reflected'' in the negator [see Annotation 68, p. 65]. This means that the negator will inherit and carry forward certain attributes, factors, and characteristics which it receives from the negated side.
−	Many tens of thousands desire these areas, finding solace and strength in them. One of Newbury’s greatest moments was when the state’s use ofclimbers catalysed the involvement of many from the climbing fraternity. Those who took the state’s silver were seen by other climbers for what they truly were--scabs, traitors to the land. A leading climbing magazine stated that what Britain’s wild areas really need is a monkeywrench gang unity forged between us, two tribes of the outdoors. I couldn’t agree more.	+	Again, consider a war between two nations. Even if one nation completely conquers and subjugates the other in total victory, the victorious nation will still inherit certain factors from the defeated nation. Which factors are inherited will depend on the conditions. The victorious nation may pick up some cultural aspects from the defeated nation, such as cuisine, fashion, etc., they may incorporate tactics and strategies which they observed the defeated enemy using on the battlefield, and so on. The point is that the victorious nation will be impacted in some way by the defeated nation.
−	Many committed to the wild will not engage in our (r)evolutionary organising. They may scent defeat and futility or simply disagree with our ‘political’ aims. This is understandable. Thumb in the Dam resistance enables those without hope for any positive change in culture to take action, by militantly defending wildness from negative change by culture. In this they can create hope for nature even ifthey see little hope for humanity. In the masses of climbers, walkers, hill runners, and mountain risk freaks is an untapped force, that if unleashed could become a formidable biocentric army for the wild. Against such a force incursions like the Cairngorm Railway would have little chance.	+	The factors which are adopted will be ''suitable with the present conditions''. Take, for example, a car breaking down due to engine failure. This can be seen as an opposing relationship between the car itself and the car’s owner. If the present conditions are suitable [i.e., the owner has the funds and resources available, and the desire to repair the car], then the car may be repaired and continue operating for years to come. If, on the other hand, conditions aren’t suitable [i.e., the owner does not have the funds or resources or the owner no longer wants the car], then the car may be sent to the scrapyard.
−	Through walking the wildlands we become more able to defend them and unite with others who hold them in their hearts. As John Muir said: One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books. Or a radical eco rag like this for that matter. Defending the Land: Immediate British Objectives Having gone through each of the categories in turn I’ll outline some objectives for British habitat defence. These I believe are realistic objectives, some of which we have already got our teeth in-to. In defending the wildness of our isles we can find both great peace and great excitement. We have shown ourselves capable of being adequate habitat defenders. Let us march on to the defence ofmany more.	+	As another example, if a fox eats a rabbit, it will inherit certain characteristics from the rabbit. It will inherit nutrition from the rabbit’s body. It may also inherit other characteristics, such as a disease the rabbit was carrying, if the conditions of the fox’s biological composition are suitable [i.e., if the disease can be transferred from the rabbit to the fox].
−	1. Build Bioregional Defence: Locally we should all continue to expand knowledge of our bioregions and take action when important habitats are threatened. Our ability to generalise the skills and confidence needed for direct action is what will protect areas.	+	Dialectical negation is not a complete negation [i.e., deletion] of the old. Rather, dialectical negation is a continuity of growth in which the old develops into the new. In processes of dialectical negation, “the new” forms and develops on its own [see Annotation 62, p. 59], through the process of filtering out unsuitable factors, while retaining suitable content. Vladimir Lenin described dialectical negation as:
−	2. Save Thorne/Hatfield Moors and Kickstart a National Cycle ofSuccesses: Despite considerable success throughout the ‘90s direct action is often seen as a last stand rather than a tactic that wins. As a network we should pull together for a loud and undeniable victory which can catalyse others. The defence of Hatfield Moors is an excellent terrain of struggle. The habitat is very precious, on the brink of unrecoverable damage and yet it is winnable. It’s strategically and ecologically in all our interests that the campaign succeeds. [The campaign has succeeded!]	+	“Not empty negation, not futile negation, not skeptical negation, vacillation and doubt is characteristic and essential in dialectics — which undoubtedly contains the element of negation and indeed as its most important element — no, but negation as a moment of connection, as a moment of development, retaining the positive, i.e., without any vacillations, without any eclecticism.”<ref>''Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic,'' Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.</ref>
−	3. Keep Camp Culture Alive: The high cost ofevicting action camps is the reason many habi-tats are still alive. As recently as 2001 the state cancelled the Hastings Bypass when camps were threatened. Unfortunately the last few years have seen a steady decline in camps. If allowed to continue a decline in our threat potential to stop developments may follow. It’s make or break time. We should do all we can-as predominantly urban activists-to keep camp culture alive; otherwise much of the ground gained by the Land Struggle Period could be lost.	+	-----
−	At the time of writing there are only three ecological defence camps. The responsibility for aiding them lies with all of us-not just those groups nearest. Tat, cash and bodies are always needed on site. Next time the bailiffs go in we should descend en masse to kick shit, up costs.	+	==== Annotation 200 ====
−	Ok, so I sound a bit old school; after all many of us lived on camps but now choose not to. However we should not let our present cloud the continuing and future importance of camps. For nearly 10 years there has not been one month in which a camp hasn’t held out against development. Let’s make sure we can say the same in another ten.	+	The passage from Lenin above comes from Clemence Dutt’s popular English translation of one of Lenin’s notebooks. Below is our translation from the Vietnamese version of this text from the original text of this book, which we hope might be somewhat easier to understand:
−	4. Increase Action on the Wild Periphery: Our movement for the wild has too long neglected the wild areas far from the cities. As many in our circles spend more time ‘out in it’ this action will increase. Let’s remember to pack a wrench as well as our waterproofs!	+	<blockquote>
		+	Dialectical negation is not empty negation, it’s not negation without any thoughts, it’s not skeptical negation, it’s not hesitation. Skepticism is not a feature of the essence of the dialectic — of course, dialectics include the negative, it even plays as one of the important factors of a given subject — no, it is negation as the moment of development. Dialectical negation retains the positive, meaning there is no hesitation, there is no eclecticism.
		+	</blockquote>
−	A concerted effort should be made to push militancy among the many tens of thousands who walk the wild. We should aim to empower those who don’t wish to join our movement, but nevertheless embrace the land ethic and want to defend the areas they love. Boltcroppers for every hiker!	+	In order to understand what Lenin is saying here, we should first understand what Lenin is responding to. The above notes are referring to the chapter titled “The Absolute Ideal” within Hegel’s ''Science of Logic [see note at the end of this Annotation]''. In this chapter, Hegel recounts various critiques of dialectics and counters them.
−	Links should be consolidated with the small number of organisations representing non-ruling class interests in the wilder parts of the British countryside (prime among them of course the Crofters Union[352]).	+	''Skepticism'', here, refers to the tendency to address all human knowledge with doubt.
−	We should build towards a future where we can make significant interventions on behalf of threatened habitats even when they are far from activist centres. Until then, it’s monkeywrench gang time!	+	Philosophical skepticism never moves past two questions: 1. “Is this knowledge true?” 2. “Will human beings ever obtain true knowledge?” Skeptics of this nature engage in a sort of metaphysical inquisition in which every thesis that is ever encountered is immediately and utterly refuted and thus “negated” in the metaphysical sense of termination [see Annotation 196, p. 188].
−	Given the onslaught of climate change and the highly fragmented nature of British ecology-especially in England--ecological restoration is essential from a Thumb in the Dam perspective. Isolated reserves will be little use in the long term, what is needed here is the regeneration of big ecosystems that can manage themselves. Before we are finished let’s see bison and wolves in the Cotswolds!	+	''Eclecticism'' refers to philosophical and ideological conceptions which draw from a variety of theories, styles, and ideas in an unsystematic manner. Lenin contends that dialectical negation is non-eclecticist because it rises above mere rhetorical combativeness and “total negation.” [This concept is explained more below within this annotation.]
−	***** Defending the Living Sea	+	With all this in mind, we see that Lenin is refuting the notion that dialectics are and can only be ''negative'' in nature. The metaphysical-skeptic conception of dialectics holds that negation takes the form of rhetorical arguing and refutation, in which one idea is presented, and a second idea is offered to counter the first idea, which completely and totally negates the first idea. According to this argument, dialectics is, therefore, a ''totally negative process''.
−	Most of this earth is covered by sea. The oceans, birth place of all life. Despite civilisation’s ravaging they remain wild. Two centuries ago Byron said it well:	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-71.png|''A common misperception of dialectical development is that it is “fully negative,” insomuch as the initial thesis (initial subject) is completely negated by the antithesis (impacting subject). In fact, characteristics from both the thesis and antithesis are carried forward into the synthesis.'']]
−	There is a murmur on the lonely shore. There is a society where none intrudes. By the deep sea and music in it’s roar. Roll on thou deep and dark blue Ocean. Four thousandfleets sweep over thee in Vain. Man marks the earth with ruin. His control stops with the Shore.	+	In the chapter from ''Science of Logic'' which Lenin is responding to in the referenced text, Hegel is arguing that the conception of dialectics as ''only negative'' — i.e., a system of thinking in which counter-arguments are presented to completely negate initial arguments — is inaccurate. Hegel explains that when one opposing side negates another, it thereafter “contains in general the determination of the first [opposing side] within itself.” In other words, after one opposing side negates another, it retains features and aspects from the opposing side which was negated. Lenin found this particular point to be so important that he wrote “this is very important for understanding dialectics” in the margin of his notebook.
−	Since Byron’s time the fleets have grown. Huge factory ships sweep the seas leaving ruin in their wake; fisheries that must have seemed endless now brought to the edge by machines which must have been unthinkable;[353] giants of the sea hunted to extinction. Yet Byron is still right. The oceans are the largest wilderness left on earth, injured but untamed.	+	The reason both Hegel and Lenin found this idea, that the “negator” contains elements of the “negated” after negation [see Annotation 231, p. 227], is that this counters the accusation that dialectics are “only negative.” This is why Lenin’s notes highlight the importance of the negator “retaining the positive” after negation. Lenin is pointing out the importance of the retention of features of the negated in the negator because it is this retention which prevents dialectical development from becoming a purely negative process.
−	It is unlikely that the ecologies of the seas will suffer the fate of many of their land cousins; dehabilitated, denuded, and finally enclosed within the prison of agriculture.[354] Yet many are under serious threat of being wiped out. In the seas are some of the planet’s oldest species and systems, survivors of hundreds of millions of years. Now, they drown in man.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-72.png|''In materialist dialectics, it is understood that negation is a process of retention: characteristics from both the thesis (initial subject) and antithesis (impacting subject) are retained in the resulting synthesis'']]
−	Climate change, pollution, factory fishing, whaling, oil exploration, and increasing volumes of shipping are some of the main threats to the oceans. How, if at al , can we combat these attacks?	+	We must also understand what Lenin means when he refers to “skepticism” in his notes. Lenin, here, is referring to the philosophical view that we can never know whether or not our beliefs are true. This belief was popularly known as Machism, or Empirio-Criticism, in Lenin’s time (see Annotation 32, p. 27).
−	As always, when looking into the chasm we have to accept that much of what is alive today will be dead tomorrow, whatever we do. Coral reefs are one example. Already climate change-induced warming of high sea temperatures has killed most of the coral reefs in the Indian Ocean, Western Pacific, and Eastern Pacific. Corals in the Caribbean and Brazil have also been badly damaged.[355] Given the time lag inherent in climate change, if we had global insurrection tomorrow (unlikely), we could still expect the death of most of our reefs and the life that depends on them. Depressing, but as the hackneyed old slogan goes: Don’t Mourn, Organise! We can take some practical action to slow some assaults on the sea.	+	A common critique of dialectics is that it is an inherently skeptical system of thought, since dialectics is seen as a process of presenting counter-arguments to suppositional arguments. Lenin, in his notes, presents the idea that such skepticism is “not a feature of dialectics” precisely because nothing is ever completely, totally, and entirely negated. In other words, the accusation that dialectical analysis is essentially skeptical is rooted in the mistaken notion that one opposing side (i.e., a counter-argument) ''completely negates'' the original supposition. In fact, according to materialist dialectics, the negator ''always'' retains features and aspects from the negated side, which counters this critique. Thus, dialectical development, which occurs through dialectical negation, is a process of forward motion — not a process of “vacillating” back and forth from one position to another — and there is no skeptical “hesitation” preventing forward progress.
−	Despite the spectacular image of Greenpeace dashing around in natty zodiacs, relatively little direct action has been carried out to protect the seas. This is largely for entirely understandable reasons. We are, after all, land mammals and few of us spend much time at sea. When compared to the odd roll of poly-prop the cost of running anything sea-worthy is astronomical. Yet we in the British Isles are ideally placed to get to grips with the problem.	+	This same idea (that the negator retains features from the negated) also counters another common critique of materialist dialectics: that dialectical analysis is simply a system of rhetorical sophistry [see Annotation 36, p. 33] and eclecticism.
−	So far the only serious group to take Gaia’s side on the oceans is the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society [SSCS]. Its founder, Paul Watson, declared: <em>Earth First! is mother earth’s army and we are her navy.</em> Their first action was the 1979 ramming and disabling of a whaling ship off the Portuguese coast. The whaler managed to limp into port only to be mysteriously bombed a few months later sunk with a magnetic limpet mine.	+	''Eclecticism'' is a conceptual approach that is completely unsystematic, drawing from a variety of theories, styles, and ideas without any cohesive and all-encompassing philosophical framework.
−	Since then Sea Shepherd has been confronting enemies of the oceans with an arse kicking attitude. Slicing the nets of driftnetters, ramming and scuttling whalers, and sabotaging seal and turtle kills. As I write they are patrolling the waters off the Galapagos Islands. The last year has seen them make headway in eliminating the ecocidal ships attacking this immensely important area.[356] If they succeed it will be one of ecological direct action’s biggest victories. It should be no surprise that they might be responsible. In fact, if it weren’t for Sea Shepherd, mass commercial whaling probably would have restarted, pushing numerous species to extinction.	+	Some critics claim that dialectics must be eclecticist and sophistic in nature. These critics claim that dialectics is simply rhetorical disputation in which any given supposition is counter-argued, and that this counter-argument is negation. But materialist dialectics defines negation as one contradicting side overtaking the other while retaining traces and characteristics from the negated side — it is in no way simply an act of rhetorical dispute or refutation.
−	Though predominately based in North America, Sea Shepherd has operated all over the world carrying out many operations in European waters. Most recently Norwegian and Faeroes whalers have been targets. Its mere presence has a serious deterrent effect. The Italian fishing industry halted its most damaging practices on hearing Sea Shepherd had entered the Mediterranean.	+	In summary, materialist dialectics upholds that nothing is ever completely and utterly deleted or erased from existence through negation. Instead, any time one opposing side negates another, aspects of the negated side are ''inherited'' by the negating side.
−	Though a smattering of Brits have crewed, the number is surprisingly small when you think how many of our mad lot it might appeal to. There are a number of reasons. Real lasting links have never been made between us and Sea Shepherd. Personality politics is also a factor. The figure of Captain Paul Watson is both immensely inspiring and deeply off-putting to circles with a dislike for hierarchy and the media. Our height was also their low point. The mid to late ‘90s coincided with a relatively Jess active period for Sea Shepherd. That period has thankfully now ended with two large boats in the fleet and a growing international organisation.	+	''Note:'' For reference, here is Hegel’s passage which Lenin is referring to from ''Science and Logic'' in the cited notes above:
−	Though few links exist now, if ever there is a meaningful attempt by our circles to contribute to the defence of the seas, we will have lots to learn from Sea Shepherd. A major driving force be-ind their success has been good strategy and well-applied tactics. So let’s have a look.	+	<blockquote>
		+	...a universal first, considered in and for itself, shows itself to be the other of itself. Taken quite generally, this determination can be taken to mean that what is at first immediate now appears as mediated, related to an other, or that the universal appears as a particular. Hence the second term that has thereby come into being is the negative of the first, and if we anticipate the subsequent progress, the first negative. The immediate, from this negative side, has been extinguished in the other, but the other is essentially not the empty negative, the nothing, that is taken to be the usual result of dialectic; rather is it the other of the first, the negative of the immediate; it is therefore determined as the mediated — contains in general the determination of the first within itself. Consequently the first is essentially preserved and retained even in the other. To hold fast the positive in its negative, and the content of the presupposition in the result, is the most important part of rational cognition; also only the simplest reflection is needed to furnish conviction of the absolute truth and necessity of this requirement, while with regard to the examples of proofs, the whole of Logic consists of these.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Most of Sea Shepherds most spectacular actions can be divided into two categories: sea confrontations and harbour sabotage. The terrain of struggle they operate in is one of both waves and laws. A lot ofwhat they confront is illegal and often beyond state territorial waters. Political considerations make the extradition and jailing of anti-whaling activists difficult. Sea Confrontations: Slicing driftnets and ramming enemies of the sea is what has made Sea Shepherd famous. The keys to the success of many SSCS sea confrontations is that they’re militant--though non-violent, media friendly-though not merely stunts, carried out on an international level but rarely against Sea Shepherd host nations, largely against illegal activity, and regularly in international waters. The main key of course is having big fuck-off boats and crews committed enough to plough them into target ships. Keeping these ships running is expensive.
−	<strong><em>Harbour Sabotage:</em></strong> Sea Shepherd’s most infamous action was a daring raid in 1986 that left half of Iceland’s whaling fleet at the bottom of a harbour and its major processing plant trashed. This action needed only good intelligence, cunning, a little funding, and two brave souls to open up the boats’ sea water intake valves. By the time the action was discovered, the two, a Native American and a Cornishman, were on their way to the airport to leave Iceland forever. Since ’86 Sea Shepherd has carried out other impressive scuttling, most notably against Norwegian whalers. So far no one in Sea Shepherd has served any major time for any of their actions! Despite SSCS’s glaring victories no other groups have successfully copied them by taking to the seas. It would be excellent if an autonomous Sea Shepherd-like organisation evolved in Europe. But with no such groups coming into existence, those who wish to take action at sea must join the long volunteer lists of SSCS.	+	-----
−	Readers who have served aboard Sea Shepherd or have general maritime experience should seriously consider the need for a European addition to Neptune’s Navy.	+	Therefore, dialectical negation is the inevitable tendency of progression of the inner relationship between the old and the new. It is the self-driving assertive force of all motion and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	Much money and commitment would be needed to set it up, but it would be an immense asset to ecological resistance in Europe. Such a project, if handled right, could bring together energy and resources from a range of circles-radical eco-types, ex-members of Greenpeace’s direct action units, animal liberationists & rights groups, ex-Sea Shepherd crew, etc. Indeed, the years have proven that there is significant mass support for radical action at sea-especially when it comes to dosh. Two decades ago, a third of the cost of the first Sea Shepherd boat was put up by the RSPCA. The Faeroes campaign in ’86 was funded mainly by English school children who raised £12,000 in a save-the-whale walkathon?[357]	+	==== b. Negation of Negation ====
−	While Sea Shepherd is alone in carrying out militant sea confrontations, the tactic of harbour sabotage has been taken up by others. Even here in Britain serious sabotage was carried out against seal cullers in the mid ‘70s, resulting in the destruction of one vessel and damage to another.[358] Across Europe a number of ecocidal ships have been scuttled. Recently, Norway has been the prime target.	+	In the perpetual movement of the material world, dialectical negation is an inexhaustible process. It creates a development tendency of things from lower level to higher level, taking place in a cyclical manner in the form of a “spiral.”
−	On 11/12/01 one of Norway’s main meat processing plants at Loften Dock was destroyed by fire, causing damage totalling at least £1.5 million. Five days earlier, the whaler Nehella had burned and sunk at the same dock costing £150,000. Another whaler, the Nybraena, was damaged when the factory fire spread to the dock. The Nybraena had been scuttled by Sea Shepherd agents in Christmas 1992, for which Norway sought in vain to extradite Captain Watson.	+	-----
−	These recent actions also follow another action on 27/2/00. Then, another Norwegian whaling vessel, the Villduen, was destroyed when an explosion sunk the ship at its moorings. The blast collapsed the deck and the ship sank to the bottom of the harbour half an hour later. Sea Shepherd stated publicly that they were not responsible. It has always denied the use of explosives and this is what it said about the attacks. We neither take, nor condone actions that might result in any injuries. None the less, we are pleased for the whales![359]	+	==== Annotation 201 ====
−	While putting a new fleet afoat would take a lot of work, basic harbour sabotage takes few resources bar pluck. While the recent Norway bombing and arson were obviously very effective, monkeywrenching can be effectively done with just hand tools. An exact and proven guide to the subject has been written by Sea Shepherd Agent #013. S/he says in the intro:	+	The concept of the “spiral” form of development in dialectical materialist philosophy stands in contrast to the metaphysical conception of “linear” development.
−	With the scuttling of ecologically destructive ships comes the possibility of doing tens of millions of dollars of economic damage. We are talking megatage here. Thejoy of bringing down a whaler can be one of the great pleasures in an eco-warrior’s life. It can be the most treasured offeathers in one’s spiritual war bonnet.[360]	+	==== Metaphysical Conception of Linear Development ====
−	S/he should know-the author was one of the team that scuttled the Nybraena in 1992.	+	The metaphysical viewpoint holds that development is more or less a straight line: as one subject is negated, it is replaced by another. This subject will then be negated by another, and so on, in what is essentially conceived of as a straight line of development [see Annotation 196, p. 188].
−	We have looked at direct action tactics used in the defence of the sea and posited some possible conclusions. Now maybe it’s worth looking at the situation around the British Isles directly. Beyond the unconfrontable cataclysms of climate change and the like, a variety of processes threaten the marine ecologies around our shores. The oil industry (especially expansion into the Atlantic frontier), factory fishing, industrial shoreline expansion, marine aggregate dredging, and pollution.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-73.png|''The metaphysical “line development” model sees an initial form as being “replaced” or entirely negated into a completely distinct entity.'']]
−	In my opinion we can have little impact on pollution given the continuation of the system. It’s a hydra with too many heads/ outflow pipes. The odd concrete blockage might be good for press attention and a bit ofjustice, but it’s not really meaningful.	+	In the above example, metaphysical line development simply sees raw aluminum as being negated and “replaced” in the real world. Once the aluminum can is created, the “raw aluminum” as a metaphysical entity is considered no longer to exist. Likewise, when the soda can is transformed into recycled aluminum, the can is considered “replaced,” and is no longer considered to have a metaphysical existence.
−	Of the other threats, we have only done action against industrial shoreline expansion. The best example is the campaign against the Cardiff Bay Barrage, which though unsuccessful is credited with discouraging some other similar schemes. A similar struggle could soon arise al Dibden Bay on the edge of the New Forest. These campaigns are really just an extension of the land struggles, with the possible added excitement of zipping around in dinghies, so I will not go into detail here.	+	This conception of metaphysical line development directly contradicts the materialist dialectical concept of ''historical viewpoint'' [see Annotation 114, p. 116].
−	The oil industry at sea has been largely ignored by us bar the ridiculous debacle that was the Sea Empress Spill Anniversary Action. As it happened it would have been far better had we ignored it. (1bough all credit to Reclaim the Valleys, which tried to rescue the situation when the organising group Cardigan Bay EF! went AWOL on the day, after 70+ activists from around the country turned up!) So far only Greenpeace has done actions around the Atlantic Frontier. It is beyond me how with our present resources we could carry out direct defence of this globally important marine ecosystem-but let’s at least get our grey cells working on the issue. Though it’s not actually getting in the way on the Atlantic Frontier itself, blockades, etc of Britain’s oil infrastructure may be useful.[361] When jewels like the St. Kilda region are under threat, action must be taken.	+	==== Dialectical Materialist Conception of Development ====
−	As for factory fishing, Britain is both a base and a stopping port for fleets of driftnetters and klondkyers from around the world. Look through the eyes of agent #013 to see the work ahead.	+	The dialectical materialist conception of cyclical development stems from essential attributes of dialectical negation processes:
−	Fishing quotas are resulting in the elimination of over half of the British fishing fleet. Unfortunately this is not automatically a cause for celebration. The elite are using the collapse of fish stocks to eliminate small fishing boats while leaving large factory boats to trawl the seas. There is potential for some level ofjoint action by radical ecologists and militant fishing communities against big ships and the economic forces steering them. The barriers and conflicts which would need to be overcome to build such a unity are maybe too big and it’s maybe too late already.	+	1. In every dialectical negation, the negating side inherits features and characteristics from the negated side.
−	Aggregate dredging-aka quarrying the sea-is set to become a significant threat to marine life around this island. Massive expansion plans are afoot which among other things threaten “fish stock breeding areas:’ Fisherfolk in France have already shown their opposition, and ironically there could be a point of tactical unity between us around this attack. As far as I know, no one is organising on this.	+	2. When the negating side is, itself, negated (i.e., ''negation of the negation''), the new negating side will retain features and aspects of the old negator.
−	***** Defending the Living Sea: Medium Term Objectives	+	3. This development process will continue indefinitely, so that negation is not simply a straight line of complete negation, but rather takes the shape of a “spiral” of negations of negations which always inherit features from previous forms.
−	I have been more vague when dealing with defending the living sea than I was when discussing defending the living land. This is not a reflection of their relative importance; just on our position today and the powers we have developed. Though hotspot style analysis does exist for the seas, it is both less developed, less accurate, and, for us anyway, less relevant. As mentioned before, some of the most diverse marine ecosystems-such as many coral reefs-are probably doomed thanks to climate change. Nothing we can do will save them. However, I do believe there are some steps we can take to move towards the challenge of defending the living seas	+	Note that this conception of development as a spiral is simply an abstraction to help understand the essential characteristics of dialectical development and to distinguish this form of development from metaphysical conceptions of “linear development.”
−	1. Engage with Sea Shepherd: The SSCS has a UK contact but no office. We should build connections and aid them if possible. At the very least we should distribute their material and give whatever support we can when their boats visit Britain. We should raise awareness of their mission and do solidarity actions if and when they are arrested. Despite reservations, more Brits should volunteer to serve aboard Sea Shepherd vessels.	+	In the example below, we see a depiction of the spiral development of aluminum through various stages of development. After raw aluminum is mined from the Earth, it begins a repeating spiral development process of being refined into usable goods, then recycled into raw material.
−	2. Expand Neptune’s Navy: There is no innate reason for the non-existence of European Sea Shepherd-style boats. This project could take years to come to fruition but would be immensely valuable as both a tool for direct action and a training ship for marine wilderness defenders.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-74.png|''The “Spiral Development” model of materialist dialectics sees every stage of development as a higher form of the previous stage which carries forward characteristics from previous stages.'']]
−	3. Sink ‘Em My Hearties: No massive organisation is needed to scuttle a whaler or similar ship. Serious thought should go on before such action is taken. Illegal whalers should primarily be targeted as they are presently trying to expand their ‘harvest’. All that holds us back is our fear.	+	The illustrated example on the previous page plots the spiral development of aluminum as it cycles between stages defined as raw materials and refined products. Another perspective might depict development differently. For example, if we are examining development in terms of external relations between aluminum other elements, the development pattern would look different. In reality, all subjects have countless internal and external relations and development processes which can be examined.
−	4. Investigate and Take Action off British Shores: Research needs to be done, similar in scope to that needed for British land habitats, to find out which marine ecosystems are both threatened and within our capacity to defend. Solid conclusions should lead to solid action, setting national priorities for action.	+	The “raw aluminum” stage of development pictured in the illustration is not truly the beginning of this development process; there were millions of years of development which occurred before it was first discovered by humans. Similarly, the landfill will not be the end of this development process; there will be continued development forever for as long as motion in the universe continues.
−	5. Skill Up: Our circles should try to increase our watery skills.	+	This is a simplified and abstract model of development of aluminum. A more accurate representation might show any number of interim steps between each step depicted in the graphic above. For example: it must also be recognized that in reality the molecules of aluminum which the development process began with will be scattered and mixed with other subjects throughout the development process, and various other complexities exist in terms of the mutual impacts of internal and external relationships.
−	Scuba, ships, zodiacs, sailing, navigation—-whatever. Worse case scenario is we have a fun time with little political payoff. Best scenario is we have fun and prepare ourselves for campaigns to come.	+	Determining the amount of detail to include or exclude in materialist dialectical analysis is crucial: too much detail and analysis might become unwieldy; too little detail and analysis might become too abstract and idealized to be useful in the real world. So, the idea of development as a spiral should not be taken literally; it is simply a way of conceptualizing the differences between dialectical negation and development as opposed to “straight-line” development upheld by metaphysical conceptions of negation and development, always carrying forward traces of previous stages of development.
−	***** Defending Living Culture	+	In the chain of negations that make up the development processes of things, phenomena, and ideas, each dialectical negation creates the conditions and premises for subsequent developments. Through many iterations of negation, i.e., “negations of negations,” dialectical negation will inevitably lead to a ''forward tendency of motion''.
−	Radical ecology has always taken its cue from indigenous resistance. Our crossed wrench and stone axe symbol holds the very essence of our movement; a fighting unity between primal people and those deep in industrial society who want to wrench their way out.	+	-----
−	While the Fourth World survives enveloped within the borders of some First World countries, most indigenous people live in the Majority World. In Europe, only a minority of Sarni live in any way similar to our ancestors. Thus as with biological meltdown, the struggle against cultural meltdown calls us over the water.	+	==== Annotation 202 ====
−	Beyond the core the tribes are everywhere under attack. Many are engaged in large-scale resistance to Leviathan: the Papuans, the Zapatistas, and the Ijaw for example. Our circles have already done quite a lot of action to support these indigenous communities and this should continue. Here I am less concerned with them (cultures with significant populations capable of major action), than with those small shrinking wild societies that if left without allies will undoubtedly soon perish. I cover the work needed to aid struggling indigenous communities later at length in Task IV-Supporting Rebellions Beyond the Core.	+	The ''forward tendency of motion'' describes the tendency for things, phenomena, and ideas to move from less advanced to more advanced forms through processes of motion and development.
−	There are many scattered individuals trying to help endangered primal cultures but no solid network that enables them to co-operate internationally. The nearest to what is needed is Friends of People Close to Nature (FPCN). FPCN has carried out serious no-compromise work around the world. Unfortunately it revolves largely around a man who has severe problems working with other people and has dubious ideas around gender and race. Nevertheless, many practical things can be learned from this network.	+	As a reminder, “lower level” and “higher level,” i.e., “less advanced” and “more advanced,” should not be taken to have any connotations of “good” and “bad,” nor of “desirable” and “undesirable,” nor even of “less complex” and “more complex.”
−	FPCN concentrates less on solidarity actions than with getting out there and helping directly. Two examples of some recent campaigns illustrate their attitude.	+	Development from “lower levels” to “higher levels” is simply a shorthand for understanding the fact that development processes always move “forward,” that is to say, development can never happen in reverse, just as time itself can never be reversed. For example, society in Italy will never go back to the civilization of the Roman empire. It is conceivable that Italian society could develop to be ''more similar'' to Ancient Rome, but it would be impossible for Roman society to ever take on the ''exact characteristics'' of the Roman Empire ever again.
−	Within the territory of Tanzania live the Hadzabe-East Africa’s last gatherer-hunters. One band are typical. Pushed to the most marginal land, banned from using the only watering hole in miles unless they perform for tourists, their children abducted by soldiers and forced into schools; under siege from all sides by settlers & missionaries. While Western White trophy hunters armed with modern weapons zip around in Land Rovers decimating the local mega-fauna, Hadzabe hunters are jailed for hunting with bows and arrows in their traditional lands. They don’t have hunting licences, just an unbroken history thousands of years old.	+	Cyclicality of development processes usually takes place in the form of a spiral, which is another result of “negation of negation.” Negations of negations lead to a development cycle in which things, phenomena, and ideas often undergo two fundamental negations carried through three basic forms. Through this negation pattern, basic features of the initial form are ultimately inherited by the “third form,” but at a higher level of development.
−	FPCN activists visited the scattered camps to see how they could help. They provided basic humanitarian aid and protested against the local powers. Best of all, they hired a truck and rescued abducted Hadzabe children from enforced schooling and returned them to their families in the bush. There, as everywhere, missionaries are the advance guard of civilisation. The simple presence ofWesterners who decry the missionaries for the fools, charlatans, and profiteers they are strengthened the tribal resolve.	+	-----
−	Ihe hatred against these strangers grows among the Hadzabe. FPL”‘N stands ready to sanction and assist with the burning out of churches on Hadzalandfollowing a similar explosion where a church was completely destroyed by local tribespeople.[362]	+	==== Annotation 203 ====
−	Many thousands of miles away, the last gatherer-hunters surviving in the Philippines face similar threats. Like many tribes across the world, genocide has whittled down the Agta to the low hundreds. They are Red Book humans! They have become landless refugees in their own land.	+	Dialectical development tends to take place through a cyclical pattern in which development is carried through a triad of forms which develop through a pair of dialectical negation processes:
−	In 2001 FPCN raised £8,000 and purchased 10 hectares of stolen Agta tribal land in Dipuntian. This land is meant to be a base for a significant section of the Agta population and for action against local logging of the rainforest. FPCN have called for sorted Western visitors to help out on the reserve and in the resistance:	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-75.png|''The cyclical pattern of development is an abstract pattern of dialectical change over time.'']]
−	***** I would suggest you stay here and look what can be done.	+	The graphic above illustrates this cyclical pattern, in which:
−	<quote>	+	1. The initial form (the Assertion) begins the pattern. Contradiction within the initial subject or between it and another subject leads to the first negation.
−	<em>Watch the non-hierarchic and soft way of Agta life, so you will perhaps love them andfeel the need to protect them.[363]</em>
−	FPCN is now trying to raise another £10,000 to buy an adjoining piece of land for another 100 Agta who want to stay. FPCN list a number of things western visitors can do at Dipuntian from <em>watch the small scale loggers not to cut the trees to Keep missionaries out of the place. The Agta feel safer when foreigners are around.[364]</em>	+	2. The first negation leads to a second form (the Negation). This second form inherits some features or characteristics from the initial form.
−	</quote>
−	In Task IV I go into detail about practical work that can be done to support rebellions beyond the core, much ofwhich is directly applicable to the defence of primal cultures. So to avoid repetition I will not go into tactical detail here. The two campaigns mentioned above provide good examples of what might be needed to slow cultural meltdown.	+	3. The second form then encounters opposition, which leads to a second negation.
−	***** Defending Living Culture: Immediate Objectives	+	4. The second negation leads to a third form (Unity), which retains the features or characteristics of the second form, but now more closely resembles the first, initial form, only at a higher level of development.
−	I will draw out some objectives to further us on the path to aiding tribes in general and gatherer-hunters in particular.	+	Imagine a new car (initial form) crashes into another car (contradicting subject). The new car is dialectically developed (negated) into a second form: a wrecked car. This second form is now contradicted by a new subject — a recycling center — and negated into a third form: new steel. The third form possesses characteristics of the first form, but in a more developed form: after being recycled, the resulting steel it is newly made, in good condition for sale, etc., similarly to the first form of the new car.
−	1) Forge Links with Allies	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-76.png|''In this example, a new car goes through a cyclical pattern of development in which the third form (new steel) possesses characteristics of the first form (a new car).'']]
−	A real effort needs to be made to link up supporters of gathererhunters interested in solidarity actions and direct aid. The lack of a well-functioning network is hindering activity. [In the first published version of this text I advocated consolidating links with FPCN. Unfortunately despite a lot of good will on the side ofEF!ers FPCN’s leader had been obstructive, rude, and downright difficult to deal with from the start. Other problems specifically around FPCN and the Agta have also surfaced. Despite this I believe they have done more to help out gatherer-hunters than nearly any other Western group. This should not blind us to the group’s serious problems, but instead underline the need for activists from our networks to learn from and in large part replace them.]	+	Keep in mind that this is relative to one’s perspective. If you consider the wrecked car to be the first form, then the steel would be the second form. The new steel will then need to be developed in some way (melted, hammered, cut, etc.) in order to be processed into some new product. From this perspective, the third form (i.e., molten steel) will have characteristics of the first form (i.e.: “unrefined”).
−	2) Provide Direct Aid to Gatherer-Hunters, starting with the Agta By aiding the Agta we can have a real impact on a perilous situation. Only £10,000 is needed to buy the adjacent land to the Dipuntian reserve. Raising a substantial proportion of the cash needed should not be impossible. Flights from Europe plus internal connections to the reserve cost just over £400. Once there, living costs are low. This is an unusually cheap opening for on-the-ground support work, not to mention an amazing experience. Don’t let this opportunity pass by! [People didn’t-see below.]	+	According to Marx and Engels, the development of capitalism from feudalism assumed this cyclical pattern:
−	The Agta are defenders of the local rainforest. Earlier I stated that the Philippines are one of the three hottest hotspots: in facing global biological meltdown one of our highest priorities. Here we have an opportun ity to give direct aid and on-the-ground solidarity to an endangered gatherer-hunter community struggling to protect an ecology within one of the three hottest of the global hotspots, in one of the few Majority World countries with active EF! groups. The imp ortance of any action on this field cannot be overstated.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-77.png|''The development of class structure is a dialectical process in which different classes synthesize to form the next era of class society. For example, the capitalist class emerged primarily as a synthesis of the feudal lords and peasants of the medieval era.'']]
−	Any involvement by our circles with the Agta would act as a jumping board, extending experience and contacts-thus enabling similar work elsewhere. [In January of 2003 four Leeds EF!ers went over to the Philippines with the express purpose of helping at Dipuntian and working with EF! Philippines. Meanwhile quite a few in the movement had pulled together around the inspirational sounding project and raised the needed funds for the second land purchase through a mix of benefit gigs, beer selling, personal donations. and grants. Unfortunately Dipuntian was definitely different than is publicity stated. As the EF!ers said on return; <em>For the past year, much of the work of Solidarity South Pacific [SSP) on the Philippines has centred around the FPCN project at Dipuntian... We provided publicity and volunteers, and secured.funding to buy more landfor the project. Having now visited and worked on the project we have made the decision to withdraw our support for it.</em> While this was very disapointing, the visit was by no means a waste of time. Not only did the fact-finding mission uncover some unfortunate facts-it also orged links with Agta bands elsewhere and tribes throughout the islands, as well as supporting Filipino EF!ers. The Leeds visit achieved a number of decent things itself and has opened up the way to further, targeted action. More info can be found on continuing work and the probems involved on [[http://www.eco-action.org/ssp][www.eco-action.org/ssp]].] 3) Reconnect with Young Lions EF!	+	Note that this is only an abstract description of a tendency of dialectical development; exceptions can and do occur. Presumably, the development of communism as a stateless, classless society would constitute the negation of the “Class Society” form of human civilization. The Post-Class stage of development which follows would, itself, be a higher form — a unity — of pre-class human civilization, carrying forward traces from the Class Society stage of development.
−	Six years ago Young Lions EF! (South Africa) were aiding the San Bushman, setting up bush skill training camps where elders taught the old knowledge to assimilated San. The last we heard from them they were planning to smuggle a considerable member of San back into the Kalahari desert from which they had been expelled. We have heard nothing since despite some attempts at contact. YLEF! were an exceptional group, we must hope they’re alright. Serious attempts should be made to find out what happened and aid them if they are still active.	+	Also note that determining which form is the “first” or “initial” pattern is entirely relative. Using the example of the development of class society: from one perspective, the Patricians may be seen as the initial form, but from another perspective the Plebeians might be considered the initial form. This depends entirely on the viewpoint and purpose of analysis. These conceptions of “spirals of development” and the pattern of “three forms through two negations” are, in essence, models which describe general tendencies and patterns of development and which help us understand the basic characteristics of dialectical negation and development.
−	4) Continue to Build Indigenous Solidarity Work	+	Lenin describes this cycle of dialectical development as going “[f]rom assertion to negation — from negation to ‘unity’ with the asserted — without this, dialectics becomes empty negation, a game, skepsis [examination, observation, consideration].”<ref>''Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic,'' Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.</ref>
−	Those struggling indigenous peoples we have aided so far (Ogoni, Ijaw, Papuan, Bougainvillian, Zapatista etc.) deserve our support. This will involve a lot of activity, but we are well on our way. A detailed look at what is needed can be found in Task IV. The last wild peoples call us over the water. I know some of us will answer them, yet we must be very careful not to cause damage with our good intentions-Mosquito Coast style. These are incredibly delicate situations. Tribal people already have a plague of do gooders, what they need is allies.	+	-----
−	Most tribes have no voice. They need people like us as allies because all the otherpotential allies have agendas they want to impose in return for help. They are fighting forfreedom, not for rights within our culture. Since freedom doesn’t exist in our culture then theirs is truly the same.[365]	+	==== Annotation 204 ====
−	***** Task Conclusion: Warriors for the Earth	+	Here, “assertion” simply refers to the initial form of a dialectical development cycle. The negation is the second form, and the “unity” is the third form, which resembles the first form (the assertion) at a higher stage of development. So, in this quotation, Lenin is simply recounting the “three steps” of a typical dialectical development cycle, and indicating that it is necessary to recognize this process, which is rooted in the inheritance of properties of prior forms through development into ever-higher forms, to prevent dialectics from becoming “empty negation,” or otherwise falling prey to the critiques that dialectics are purely negative, skeptical, and eclectic in nature [see Annotation 200, p. 192 and Annotation 36, p. 33].
−	To the land of these Isles most of us will return one day-dying, rotting, giving life. Until then, the wind and soil in our soul should direct us. When our leaps halt machines, our scythes cut through experiments, our wrenches disable diggers, and our matches start fires-we are the land.	+	The law of negation of negation generalizes the pervasive nature of development: dialectical development does not take the form of a straight path, but rather in the form of a spiral path. Lenin summarised that this path is “[a] development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (‘the negation of the negation’), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line…”<ref>''Karl Marx'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.</ref> The tendency to develop in a spiral curve demonstrates the dialectical nature of development; i.e., the cycle of inheritance, repetition, and progression. Each new round of the spiral appears to be repeating, but at a higher level. The continuation of the loops in a spiral reflects an endless progression from lower levels to higher levels of things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	Though we love this land, we love this entire earth and thus the global crisis calls us over the water. In the biological/cultural meltdown Britain’s diversity is marginal. To confront the meltdown we will need to join the battle to defend the earth’s last big wildernesses on land and at sea. However, many of us will be unable to reach these global ecological frontlines and will have to fight to preserve fragments behind enemy lines. Above all else, the wild areas in the Mediterranean call us.	+	In short, the law of negation of negation in materialist dialectics reflects the dialectical relationship between the negative and the assertion [i.e., the second and first forms of a dialectical development cycle; see Annotation 203, p. 198] in the development process of things, phenomena and ideas. Dialectical development is driven by dialectical negation; in the development of all things, phenomena, and ideas, the new is the result of inheriting characteristics from prior forms. This process of inheritance, repetition, and progression through negation leads to cyclical development. Engels wrote: “what is the negation of the negation? An extremely general — and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important — law of development of nature, history, and thought.”<ref>''Anti-Dühring'', Friedrich Engels, 1878.</ref>
−	To slow cultural meltdown, the last remaining wild peoples must be aided in every way. If most of our species are ever to break out of this nightmare of our own making and find our way back to the earth, we will have a lot to learn from them.	+	-----
−	Back in Britain, let’s expand and escalate our action. In the conflict over road building ecological direct action took on the <em>state</em> and won. Let’s zero in on particular attacks on wildness and stop them one after the other.	+	==== Annotation 205 ====
−	We have the power to defeat some of civilisation’s attacks on the wild, both here and in the hotspots; will we unleash it? While community mobilising may win the day in some battles, sometimes vanguard action is called for. Here lies a contradiction for us. The militant action needed could in fact alienate and hinder the (r)evolulionary process. It could result in increased state repression and a cut in public support. These are big problems but do not mean we should preclude militant action-for the price may be worth paying. After all, Thnmb-in-the-Dam struggles aim to protect ecological diversity while waiting not just for the possibility of global (Revolution but the certainty of industrial collapse. As warriors for the earth we must put the earth first!	+	In the same text quoted above, Engels elaborates that dialectical development is composed of “processes which in their nature are antagonistic, contain a contradiction; transformation of one extreme into its opposite; and finally, as the kernel of the whole thing, the negation of the negation.”
−	**** III. Preparing for Crises	+	==== c. Meaning of the Methodology ====
−	We must have the ability to defend ourselves, survive, and exploit crises in society including capitalist attempts to destroy us. The divided and industrial nature of today’s society has al-ready determined the instability of tomorrow.	+	The law of negation of negation is the basis for correct perception of the tendency of motion and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. Development and motion processes do not take place in a straight line; rather, it is a winding, complex road, consisting of many stages, and each process can be broken down into many different sub-processes. However, it must be understood that this complexity of development is only the manifestation of the general tendency to move forward [see Annotation 118, p. 122]. It is important to understand the nature of motion and development so that we can systematically change the world according to our revolutionary viewpoint. In order to consciously impact the development of things, phenomena, and ideas, we need to know their characteristics, nature, and relationships so that we can influence their motion and development in the direction that suits our purposes. We must comprehend and leverage the tendency of forward movement — in accordance with a scientific and revolutionary worldview — in order to effectively and systematically change the world.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	It <em>is difficultfor the British with their tradition of stability to imagine disorders arising beyond the powers of the police to handle.. but already there are indications that such a situation could arise, and this at a time of apparently unrivalled affluence...</em>
−	<em>If a genuine and serious grievance arose, such as might result from a significant drop in the standard of living, all those who now dissipate their protest over a wide variety of causes might concentrate their efforts andproduce a situation which was beyond the power of the police to handle. Should this happen the army would be required to restore the position rapidly.</em>	+	==== Annotation 206 ====
−	<em>Fumbling at this juncture might have grave consequences even to the extent of undermining confidence in the whole system of government.</em>	+	Understanding the forward tendency of motion is vital for cultivating a worldview which is both ''scientific'' and ''revolutionary.'' Such a worldview is ''scientific'' because it recognizes the material reality that all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly undergoing change and development. Nothing in our universe is static, and all things are connected and defined by internal and external relationships (which are also constantly developing). Furthermore, this development progresses with a ''forward tendency'', meaning that no process can be completely “reversed.” For example, you can clean rust from a car [which would be forward progress], but you can’t reverse the temporal process of rust.
−	<right>	+	Once we understand that all things, phenomena, and ideas in our universe are constantly developing and moving forward, we can then begin to find ways to ''impact'' motion and development systematically to consciously change the world around us. This is the foundation of a ''revolutionary'' worldview, since revolutionary change requires us to leverage and influence development processes to suit our needs and revolutionary ambitions. Thus, materialist dialectics are an applied system of observation and practice through which we seek to understand development processes and consciously impact them to suit our needs.
−	— General Sir Frank Kitson,
−	<br>ex-Commander-in-Chief of UK Land Forces.
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<quote>	+	According to the rule of negation of negation, in the objective world, the new must inevitably come to replace the old. In nature, the new develops according to objective laws. In social life, new things arise from the purposeful, self-conscious, and creative actions of human beings. Therefore, it is necessary to leverage ''subjective factors'' as we seek to consciously impact the development of things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	Imagine having no running water to drink.
−	Chemicals contaminate the pipes leading to your sink.	+	-----
−	<em>Just think, if the grocery stores close their doors.</em>	+	==== Annotation 207 ====
−	<em>And they saturate the streets with tanks and start martial law. Would you be ready for civil war?</em>	+	Subjective factors are factors which we, as a subject, are capable of impacting. This may seem confusing, since we have previously established that all external things, phenomena, and ideas have ''objective'' relationships with all other things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 108, p. 112], meaning that any given subject is ''external'' to every other subject, and thus no subject can directly and completely control the motion and development of any other subject.
−	<right>	+	However, from the perspective of any given individual, there are certain things, phenomena, and ideas [as well as processes of motion and development] which we can ''impact''. For example, if I see an apple on a table, the apple is ''objective'' to me. I can’t simply will the apple to move with my consciousness alone. However, I can ''impact'' the apple through conscious activity — I can consciously will my hand to pick up the apple and move it to another location.
−	--dead prez The Myth of Stability
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	The myth is that though we may see crisis on the TV in other countries, Western Europe will be forever stable. This is an idea that our generation holds; other living generations are not so ahistorical-they, after all, have lived through history.	+	Thus, factors which an individual can consciously impact are ''subjective factors''. As revolutionists, we must focus on subjective factors. In other words, we must concentrate on ''that which we are capable of changing'', since our purpose is to change the world. Focusing on factors which we can’t impact is a waste of time; we must simply determine what ''can be changed'' and then determine the most efficient and effective ways of impacting development processes and changing the world.
−	Our grandparents experienced the Second World War and all of its horrors and the cold war partition of Europe. Many of our parents were teenagers during the fall ofthe Spanish and Portu-guese fascist regimes in the ‘70s, the rise and fall of the CIA-backed military coup in Greece, the May ’68 revolt in France, and serious social conflict in Italy in the ‘70s, to name but a few of Western Europe’s recent crises. Not to mention internment of radicals, soldiers on the streets for nearly 30 years, bombings and guerrilla warfare in Northern Ireland.	+	As revolutionists, we must have faith that we can introduce the “new,” faith in the success of the “new,” we must support the “new,” and fight for the victory of the “new.” Therefore, it is necessary to overcome conservative, stagnant, and dogmatic thoughts which restrain the development of the “new” and resist the law of negation of negation.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	For those who think <em>that sort of thing couldn’t happen here</em> it’s worth remembering that Britain came perilously close in 1968–75 to a military coup spearheaded by leading industrialists, high ranking army officers, and members of the secret services.[366]
−	</quote>
−	Social crises are regular occurrences in societies based on class warfare.	+	==== Annotation 208 ====
−	***** The Living Earth in Crisis	+	Change is inevitable. All things, phenomena, and ideas undergo processes of motion and development. Any philosophy, ideology, or strategy which attempts to restrain motion and development is doomed to failure because change can neither be halted nor restrained. Thus, our strategies and actions must align with the material reality that change is inevitable, and we must seek to change the world by ''impacting'' processes of development and motion rather than attempting to reverse, restrain, or halt such processes.
−	The crises we’ve known are likely to look pretty minor compared to what’s on the horizon. Climate change and biological meltdown are already kicking off serious crises, killing hundreds of thousands and the ride hasn’t even got going yet. The extremes of ecological instability are most visible at the ecological extremes-the Tropical, Arctic and Antarctic zones. However the evolving global crises <em>will</em> reach us in the Temperate zone. Things are gonna go a bit fucking weird. There is no way out of it; the ecological effects of yesterday’s industry have already decided the ecological instability of tomorrow. If the climate and life support systems of the earth destabilise, you can guarantee that society will also.	+	Ideologies which erroneously strive to restrict change and development include ''rigidity'' (see Annotation 222, p. 218) and ''conservativism'' (see Annotation 236, p. 233).
−	***** The Megamachine in Crisis	+	In the process of negating the old we must leverage the principle of inheritance with discretion: we must encourage the inheritance of factors that are beneficial to our goals as we simultaneously attempt to filter out, overcome, and reform factors which would negatively impact our goals.
−	Economic crisis, though connected to crises arising from class struggle and ecological destabilisation, are capable of creating chaos in their own right. In the last five years of the twentieth century a wave of economic crises crashed whole economies; Albania, Russia, the Asian Tiger countries. In a globalised system the collapse of one economy can create a domino effect. For those assimilated into these fragile economies living standards get worse. Many people simply cannot afford to let things continue as they are.	+	-----
−	The Indonesian uprising which ousted Suharto and the 1997 insurrection in Albania[367] show what happens to regimes when their economies collapse. So, unfortunately, does the depression-era rise of the Nazis.	+	==== Annotation 209 ====
−	Tiianks to heavy economic manoeuvring West European societies have not experienced the destabilisation that has swept East Asia and the Second World in the last decade. Their economies are inherently less robust than those of the core capitalist countries, but that does not mean that the core capitalist countries are untouchable. Listen hard-you can hear the crash before the impact.	+	If we understand the principle of inheritance, we can impact inheritance processes which derive from negation. For example, when repairing a car, we can seek out parts of the car which do not function properly or which do not suit the use-case of the car and add or replace parts which are more suitable.
−	***** The Flesh in Crisis	+	In the same way, we can impact inheritence processes in our revolutionary political activities. We can seek to inherit characteristics from previous stages of development of our political organizations, social institutions, culture, etc., while simultaneously seeking to prevent the inheritence of traits and characteristics which are unsuitable for our revolutionary purposes. Over time, we can attempt to impact the inheritance of traits and aspects which are more conducive to our purposes while limiting and filtering out traits and aspects which are hindrances.
−	The mass nature of industrialism-a society evolved to consolidate oppressor order-itself produces mass ‘personal’ disorders in the oppressed. Incremental changes in mental and physical health can seem trivial until a threshold is reached. Under certain circumstances these personal disorders can seriously re-order civilisation.[368]	+	In an article titled “New Life” written in 1947, Ho Chi Minh wrote about the dialectical relationship between the new and the old in building a new society, writing:
−	With herd medicine and transport systems turning humanity ever more into a mono-culture, we can expect future epidemics to reap an unparalleled harvest of heads. In the mean time a divided society will continue to create divisions, not just between people but within people. Despite the glossy charade, such a fractured society is always on the edge of implosion. As in the past, it is just a matter of time and chance how soon it will be before the personal becomes political in a cataclysmic fashion. Crisis Breeds Change	+	<blockquote>
		+	Not everything old must be abandoned. We do not have to reinvent everything. What is old but bad must be abandoned. What is old but troublesome must be corrected appropriately. What is old but good must be further developed. What is new but good must be done.
−	For all the reasons stated above it is highly likely that British society will be hit by serious crises within our lifetime. Any movement that does not take this into consideration is unlike-ly to survive. Crises by their very nature contain truckloads of both danger and possibility. Crises are moments of the extreme and when the shit hits the fan people look for extreme solutions. Times of sudden (r)evolutionary possibility often arise out of war, chaos and social collapse. The period after both world wars saw massive revolutionary waves. The First World War brought us the Russian revolution as well as workers and peasant uprisings across much ofEurope. The Second World War seriously damaged much of the social fabric of empire leading the way to insurgencies across the Third World. In turn the horror of the Vietnam War opened up faultlines across American society.	+	... Growing up in the old society, we all carry within us more-or-less bad traces of the old society in terms of our ideas and habits... Habits are hard to change. That which is good and new is likely to be considered bad by the people because it is strange to them. On the contrary, that which is evil yet familiar is easily mistaken as normal and acceptable.
		+	</blockquote>
−	While insurrections have often arisen out of crises, crises may not be fertile ground for harmonious social (r)evolution. Though people look for extreme solutions, there are no pre-ordained reasons for them to turn to anarchist ideas rather than authoritarian ones. In fact libertarian tendencies in the people are likely to be heavily curtailed when confronted with the interwebbed complexity of industrial society, people’s alienation from their own food and the scale of modern warfare.	+	Ho Chi Minh understood the principles of development very well, as well as the difficulties we will face as revolutionaries as we try to change ourselves and our society. We must strive to develop a similar understanding as we move forward and attempt to affect the development of our world through practice and struggle.
−	Read no more odes my son, read timetables: they’re to the point. And roll the sea charts out before it’s to late. Be watchful, do not sing, for once again the day is clearly coming when they will brand refusers on the chest and nail up lists of names on people’s doors.	+	-----
−	Learn how to go unknown, learn more than me: To change yourface, your documents, your country. Become adept at every petty treason, The sly escape each day and any season.	+	= Chapter 3: Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism =
−	For lighting fires encyclicals are good:	+	In Marxism, epistemological reasoning (or epistemology) is the foundation of dialectics. Dialectical materialist epistemology is a theory of applying human cognitive ability to the objective world through practical activities. It explains the nature, path and general laws of the human process of perceiving truth and objective reality to serve human practical activities.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	And the defenceless can always put to use,
−	<br>As butter wrappers, party manifestos,
−	<br>Anger and persistence will be required
−	<br>To blow into the lungs ofpower the dust
−	<br>Choking, insidious, ground out by those who,
−	<br><em>Storing experience. stay scrupulous: by you.</em>
−	<right>	+	==== Annotation 210 ====
−	--Hans Magnus Enzenburger Hope for the Best-Prepare For the Worst
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	Once again this is where I depart from what I’ve earlier called the It’ll Be All Right On The Night tendency. Two factors that are likely to partly decide what happens in a crisis are: 1) How well known are anti-authoritarian ideas? In crises people’s perception of the possible widens. Ideas that under normal circumstances are rejected out of hand, in moments of crises can be judged sensible. However, they can only be judged if they have been put forward in the past. Thus antiauthoritarian educational work to the non-aligned[369] majority today, can influence decisions over aims and forms of organisation they make in crises tomorrow.	+	Epistemology is the theoretical study of knowledge. It also deals with the philosophical question of: “how do we know what is true?”
−	2) How experienced and organised libertarian groups are. In any crises in British society today the main course of events will primarily be determined by the elite and the previously nonaligned. However, history has shown that relatively small groups can have a decisive effect in moments of crises. Spain in the 1920s and 1936, Northem Ireland, the Ukraine in 1919, and the French resistance provide some examples.	+	Throughout history, philosophers have tried to determine the nature of truth and knowledge. In the era of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, there was an ongoing dispute between the materialists, who believed that truth could only be sought through sense experience of the material world, and the idealists, who believed that truth could only be sought through reasoning within the human mind.
−	I am not advocating organising an armed vanguard force to lead the people to revolution in times of crisis. I’ll leave these ridiculous notions to the Leninists. I am saying that as groups which understand what might be coming and have the ability in part to affect it we have a duty to inter-vene in times of crises. It’s our role as anarchists to stop authoritarian organisations--right wing or left wing-gaining ground in times of crisis, or at least to attempt to do so.	+	Marx and Engels developed the philosophical system of dialectical materialism to resolve this dispute. Dialectical materialism upholds that the material and the ideal have a dialectical relationship with one another: the material ''determines'' the ideal, while the ideal ''impacts'' the material [see ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'', p. 88].
−	If a group is to have any effect it must: a. Have an intimate knowledge of its local area. b. Have a range of basic skills and resources available from those needed for fighting to medicine, printing and the use of communication equipment. c. Consist of members who through previous struggle have pushed back their fear barriers and extended their creative operational vision of the possible.	+	However, it’s important to understand that Marx and Engels didn’t develop the system of dialectical materialism simply to understand the world. As Marx wrote in ''Theses on Feuerbach:''
−	d. Have an understanding of what actions authoritarian organisations are likely to carry out in moments of crisis.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
		+	</blockquote>
−	e. Have a number of members entirely unknown to the state as subversives.	+	So, Marxist dialectical materialist epistemology is developed specifically to enable human beings to not only perceive truth and objective reality, but to then be able to apply our conscious thought, through practical activity, in order to bring about change in the world.
−	Thankfully, actions taken under other areas of strategy from Thumb-in-the-Dam struggles to the growing of a combatative counter culture prepare us in part for what might need to be done in crises. The experience affinity groups get in the present from involvement in mass actions, anti-GM sabotage, strikes, hunt sabbing, monkeywrenching, animal liberation, pirate radio, general criminality, and anti-fascist activity are all useful training for the unexpected future.	+	-----
−	The anarchist scene in Britain is growing but it’s still a small shoal in a sea of sixty million fishes. Nevertheless it’s easy to underestimate our ability to intervene in a crisis by concentrating on our present number of activists. In fact one consistent aspect of crises is that when the barricades go up many ex-activists/militants come out of retirement.	+	== 1. Praxis, Consciousness, and the Role of Praxis in Consciousness ==
−	Thanks to dole cheques and the low level of generalised class struggle the British radical ecological and libertarian scenes have existed as alternative youth cultures. These cultures have encapsulated the lives of tens upon tens of thousands of people over the last three decades.[370] By their very nature youth cultures are cultures of the young, and when the young get older they usually leave. However, I believe that most of those who have “left;’ “dropped out of politics;’ “got disillusioned;’ “burnt out;’ etc. rejected not the principles of anarchism but the practice of activism. In times of social crises those who got offthe hamster wheel will know that action not only has purpose but is in their interest. Those who have once stood up are likely to stand again.	+	=== a. Praxis and Basic Forms of Praxis ===
−	***** Visualise Industrial Collapse	+	''Praxis'' includes all human material activities which have purpose and historical-social characteristics and which transform nature and society. Unlike other activities, praxis is activity in which humans attempt to materially impact the world to suit our purposes. Praxis activities define the nature of human beings and distinguish human beings from other animals. Praxis is objective activity, and praxis has been constantly developed by humans through the ages.
−	The above sub-header is an oft-used North American EF! slogan. Ecologically this civilisation (unfortunately probably not civilisation itself) is doomed-maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but within the lifetime of our children’s children, our children, or possibly even ourselves. We should not mourn for the death of this tyrannical, earth destroying culture but we should prepare for its end.	+	<br />
−	For the second time in this pamphlet I’m emphasising the need-in times of crisis, in times of stability-to know how to feed yourse(f, yourfamily, friends, and comrades! We will not always be able to rely on the destruction and imperialism of industrial agribusiness to feed us like babies; nor should we.	+	-----
−	George Bradford of the American anarchist magazine Fifth Estate is instructive in his essay “We All Live In Bhopal:’ In the aftermath of the 1984 chemical explosion in Bhopal, India (which killed and continues to kill thousands), the population fled.	+	==== Annotation 211 ====
−	The New York Times quoted one man, who said, ‘They are not believing the scientists or the state or anybody. They only want to save their lives... All the public has gone to the village.’ the reporter explained that ‘going to the village’ is what Indians do when trouble comes. A wise and age-old strategy for survival by which little communities always renewed themselves when bronze, iron, and golden empires with clay feetfell to their ruin. But subsistence has been and is everywhere being destroyed, and with it, culture. What are we to do when there is no village to go to?...	+	In English, the words “practice” and “praxis” are often distinguished from one another. “Practice” is often used to refer to human activity which provides more information about the world around us and improves our knowledge and understanding, whereas “praxis” often refers to conscious human activity which is intended to change the world in some manner. In their original German, Marx and Engels used the same German word — ''Praxis'' — to refer to both concepts. Similarly, in the original Vietnamese text of this book, the same word — ''thực tiễn'' — is used for both “practice” and “praxis.”
−	The corporate vampires are guilty of greed, plunder, murder, slavery, extermination and devastation. We should avoid any pangs of sentimentalism when the time comesfor them to pay for their crimes against humanity and the natural world. But we will have to go beyond them, to ourselves: subsistence... We mustfind our way back to the village, or as the North American natives said, ‘back to the blanket,’ and we must do this not by trying to save an industrial civilisation that is doomed, but in the renewal of life which must take place in the ruin.	+	One reason that these concepts are so closely related is that all conscious activity serves both rolls by simultaneously telling us more about reality ''and'' consciously changing reality in some way. For example, by pushing a heavy stone, you may be able to move the stone a small amount — constituting praxis — while simultaneously learning how heavy the stone is and how difficult it is to move — constituting practice. The main point of distinction, therefore, is ''intention''. Virtually all conscious activity is practice, but only activity which has ''purpose'' and ''historical-social characteristics'' might be considered praxis:
−	Until recently people were adept at subsistence even in Britain-birth place of industry. For most people it is only a few generations that separate their fingers from the soil. One does not need to go back to the times of the peasantry to see this connection. On an allotment site anywhere in Britain you’ll find elderly working-class people who know both the satisfaction and the personal and political reasons for growing.	+	''Purpose'' simply describes a goal or desired outcome; specifically: a desired change in nature or human society. Activities with ''historical-social characteristics'' are activities which contribute in some way to the development of human society.
−	Subsistence skills can be learnt by us all, and passed on to our children. Non-industrial medicine must also be strengthened. In preparing for The Collapse we also build our autonomy and reconnect with living systems. There are few things more satisfying, and sensible, than sitting down to eat a meal grown by the combined powers of nature and one’s own hands. Let us rebuild the generational connection with the land now. And as Bradford says, Let us do so soon before we are crushed.	+	In this translation, we use “practice” and “praxis” interchangably to mean “conscious activity which improves our understanding, and which has purpose and historical-social characteristics.” You are likely to find these words used differently (as described above, or in other ways) in other texts. Engels explains the importance of practice/praxis in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'':
−	Counter (R)evolution’?-We should be so lucky (lucky, lucky, lucky) In this section I have been talking about how we should prepare for a number of types of crises. I have not mentioned counter (r)evolution which I have largely dealt with in Task I: Growing Counter Cultures. To many it may seem strange that I have separated preparing for crises and preparing for counter revolution-surely a type of crisis?	+	<blockquote>
		+	The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we [use] these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is positive proof that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves.
		+	</blockquote>
−	My answer is that in this section I have been talking about what preparation our existing movement can make in anticipation of crises that are likely to be coming. On the other hand, discussions of counter revolution presume a revolution worth countering: a class movement of vast scale. I have argued that in Western Europe only a significant working-class counter culture can seriously threaten the elite. That does not exist in Britain and no doubt is unlikely to in the immediate to medium term-if at all. In other words, preparations to defeat counter revolution could only be made by a movement as yet not in existence in anticipation of crises that without its existence are unlikely to come.	+	Marx wrote in ''Theses on Feuerbach'' that “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice [German: ''revolutionäre Praxis''].” Engels further expounds upon this concept in ''Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy'', writing:
−	As I argued earlier in Task 1, only a combination of military disaffection and an armed people has any hope of successfully defeating a counter (r)evolution-winning a civil war. I also argued that rebellions such as France in ’68 will remain only temporary when they are not products of past struggles and a strong counter culture that can not only propel a vision of the future but field considerable armed class strength.	+	<blockquote>
		+	The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical fancies is practice [original German: Praxis], viz., experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and using it for our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end of the Kantian incomprehensible or ungraspable.
		+	</blockquote>
−	***** Task Conclusion: Don’t Call Up Blood	+	Praxis defines the nature of human beings because human beings are (to our present knowledge) the only beings which undertake actions with conscious awareness of our desired outcomes and comprehension of the historical development of our own society, which distinguishes human beings from all other animals. Praxis is ''objective'' activity, meaning that all praxis activities are performed in relation to external things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 108, p. 112].
−	It is worth here underlining the point that we should not look forward to these moments of cataclysm with relish. Anarchist history is brim-full with stories of social crises leading to uprisings that have in turn lead to the extermination , of libertarians.	+	Praxis has been constantly developed by humans through the ages, meaning that as we learn more about the nature of reality, of human society, and the laws of nature, we are able to develop our praxis to become more efficient and effective.
−	All powennongers are our foes and as a result anarchists have a tendency to get it in the neck. While harmony can be born of crisis, the child is more often horror.	+	Praxis activities are very diverse, manifesting with ever-increasing variety, but there are only three basic forms: material production activities, socio-political activities, and scientific experimental activities.
−	However, an understanding that crises are likely in our lifetime shows that being in a sorted counter culture rooted in the land yet with an ability to act in conflict is in our own interest. Radical groupings are essentially gangs (see Camatte!) and gangs are what you need to survive and prosper in times of crises. IV Supporting Rebellion Beyond the Core The counter culture must act in real solidarity with our struggling sisters and brothers on other islands. Aid them in whatever we can and bring the majority world battlefronts to the boardrooms, bedrooms, and barracks of the bourgeoisie.	+	''Material production activity'' is the first and most basic form of praxis. In this form of praxis activity, humans use tools through labor processes to influence the natural world in order to create wealth and material resources and to develop the conditions necessary to maintain our existence and development.
−	<quote>	+	''Socio-political activity'' includes praxis activity utilized by various communities and organizations in human society to transform political-social relations in order to promote social development.
−	Our intention is to disrupt the empire. To incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody .functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.
−	<right>	+	''Scientific experimental activity'' is a special form of praxis activity. This includes human activities that resemble or replicate states of nature and society in order to determine the laws of change and development of subjects of study. This form of activity plays an important role in the development of society, especially in the current historical period of modern science and technological revolution.
−	--Prairie Fire.
−	<br>The Weather Underground Organisation, 1974
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	Mohammed Singh Azad. Sindabad! No apologies. Not a shot in <em>the dark. This is a warning. The sleeping tiger awakes each and every morning. The time is now right to burst the imperial bubble. And my act of revenge is just a part of the struggle. A bullet to the head won’t bring back the dead. But it will lift the spirits of my people. We’ll keep on fighting. bee’ve been a nation abused. Your stif upper lip will bleed. And yourpride will be bruised. I’ll shake hands with the hangman. I’ll wear the noose with pride. For unlike the British I’ve no crimes to justify. Pentonville will be my last place on earth. And then death will return me to the land of my birth.</em>
−	<right>	+	==== Annotation 212 ====
−	--Assassin,
−	<br>Asian Dub Foundation[371]
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	***** Solidarity is also a Weapon	+	The three basic forms of praxis activities listed above obviously do not include all forms of human activity, as praxis only includes activities which have ''purpose'' and ''historical-social characteristics''.
−	All over this earth millions ofpeasants, workers, and tribals are defending themselves and the land against constant assaults by capital. In every nation the war between the classes es-calates and at present it is the rich that are winning most of the battles.	+	''Material production activity'' has a very clear purpose: to improve the material conditions of an individual human being or a group of human beings. Material production activity has historical-social characteristics because developing material conditions for human beings leads directly to the development of human society. For example, as food production increases in terms of yield and efficiency, society can support a larger number of human beings and a wider range of human activities, which leads to the development of human society.
−	Ever since the radical ecological direct action movement emerged, one of its central themes has been support for struggles in the Majority World. The communities we have chosen to support have reflected changes in our worldview and how we see ourselves.	+	''Socio-political activity'' has the purpose of promoting social development, which is obviously inherently historical-social in nature. An example of socio-political activity would include any sort of political campaign, liberation struggle, political revolutionary activity, etc.
−	At first, only non-violent struggles were given any support. This can be illustrated by looking at the Direct Action Empowerment Video-produced in early 1993. The film (which I like, despite some cringe-worthy moments) covers ecological conflicts around the world. The only Majority World struggles given space were the Narmada protests, the Ogoni in Nigeria, and the Penan logging blockades in Sarawak. At the time, all three communities professed some sort of non-violence code. The tactic of non-violent confrontation is pretty rare in the Majority World, for sensible reasons, so this selection is quite revealing. During the ‘90s most of our circles abandoned the ideology of non-violence and as a result we have increasingly been supporting those engaged in armed resistance to the global empire. Now perceiving ourselves as revolutionaries, we are engaged with revolutionary communities.	+	''Scientific experimental activity'' has the purpose of expanding our understanding of nature and human society, which leads directly to historical-social development in a variety of ways. For example, improving our scientific understanding of medicine through scientific experimental activity leads to longer lives and improved quality of life. Improving our scientific understanding of chemistry through scientific experimental activity leads to all sorts of materials which improve the quality of life and enable human beings to solve a variety of social problems.
−	Originally our actions were media-centric, trying to bring press attention to the plight of our adopted peoples. Now that we see ourselves involved in a growing network of communities in resistance, how do we engage in real solidarity’?	+	In order to qualify as praxis activity, a given human activity must have a purpose and it must have historical-social characteristics. For instance, drawing is not always praxis in the sense of the word used in this text, but it would be praxis if it would qualify as material production activity (i.e., making art in order to sell, so as to make a living) or if the art is made with the intention of invoking social change.
−	Real solidarity with a rebellion abroad is (as the Zapatistas hammer on at us) creating rebellion at home. Only a truly global rising will put an end to class society/civilisation and give birth to a new world, fighting not for them but with them against a common enemy. However, there are some important things that we are well placed to do. Below is by no means a complete list.	+	Every basic praxis activity form has an important function, and these functions are not interchangeable with each other. However, they have close relationships with each other and different praxis activity forms often interact with each other. In these relationships, material production is the most important form of praxis activity, playing a decisive role in determining other praxis activities because material production is the most primitive activity and exists most commonly in human life. Material production creates the most essential, decisive material conditions for human survival and development. Without material production there cannot be other praxis activities. After all, all other praxis activities arise from material production praxis and all praxis activities ultimately aim to serve material production praxis.
−	***** Direct Cash Aid to Struggling Communities	+	-----
−	Thanks to exchange rates small amounts of hard currency can have a much larger effect in Majority World countries than it does here. Providing practical financial aid for revolutionary groups abroad should not be seen as charity. It’s merely a tool of solidarity that we have available to us as a result of our position in the highly moneterised capitalist core.	+	==== Annotation 213 ====
−	1) Money for Community Health and Survival	+	Without material production activity, human beings would not be able to live at all.
−	The types of low intensity warfare that many groups find themselves in are not fought out simply between soldiers and armed groups. They are fought out in the hearts and minds ofthe community as a whole. A long-established tenet of counterrevolutionary warfare is to firstly grind down the subsistence and health of a population. Secondly, at the moment of desperation, offer medical, educational and technical aid to families and villages within the conflict zone who are willing to take sides with the state and corporations. The carrot-and-stick approach aims to disconnect the population from radicals in its midst, and form counter gangs to oppose them. By supplying aid money directly to struggling communities we can in part oppose this process through positive action. For instance one minor punk benefit gig in America paid for a Zapatista (EZLN) community to be connected up to clean water. One US/Mexican anarchist federation quickly raised enough money to set up a women’s health clinic in Chiapas.	+	Thus, material production activities make all other forms of human activities possible. In addition, the primary reason we participate in socio-political activity is to ensure material security (food, water, shelter, etc.) for members of society, which ultimately relies on material production activity. Therefore, the primary reason we engage in scientific experimental activity is to improve material production activities in terms of efficiency, yield, effectiveness, etc
−	Regimes often purposefully spread diseases in rebellious populations and put up medical block-ades. This is exacerbated by the fact that many struggling communities do not have basic immun-ity to Western diseases and live on marginal land, or in slums and shanty towns. Thanks to mal-nutrition they often have weakened immune systems from the start.	+	Of course, we engage in scientific experimental activity and material production activity for other reasons (art, entertainment, recreation, etc.), but these activities require that material security be secured first for those participating in the production and consumption of such products. In other words, material production activity is a prerequisite for all other forms of activity, since without some measure of material security humans cannot survive.
−	One Bougainvillian told me that due to the medical blockade by Papua New Guinea (PNG), £25 raised in Britain to smuggle in medical aid could save the life of half a dozen revolutionaries on Bougainville. If that’s not a good deal I don’t know what is! Saving the lives of six, self-described ecological revolutionaries, for the price of a couple of rounds down the pub and a curry!	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-78.png|''Material production activity has a dialectical relationship with all other praxis activity, with material production activity determining, while being impacted by, all other forms of praxis activity.'']]
−	2) Money for Refugee Camps	+	Thus, material production activity has a dialectical relationship with other forms of praxis activities, in which material production activity determines both socio-political and scientific experimental activity while socio-political and scientific experimental activity impact material production activity.
−	When people try to defend themselves and their land, the resulting military repression often forces a significant proportion of the population to flee over borders to the relative safety of neighbouring countries. The resulting life of the refugee can vary tremendously but is almost always hard, poor, and crammed. Often forced to rely on outside support, refugee communities sometimes find none at all.	+	-----
−	When the Nigerian military cracked down on the Ogoni resistance against Shell Oil, around a third of the Ogoni fled their home villages, many of which had been razed to the ground. Thousands fled to camps in neighbouring countries where they lived for months in squalid conditions. A small amount of medical aid, clothing and funds were collected in Britain and sent over by a solidarity group and by Ogoni living in London. In a desperate situation this aid made a real difference.	+	=== b. Consciousness and Levels of Consciousness ===
−	However, it was still very little compared with what could have been raised. At the time the Ogoni were big in the newspapers and hundreds were willing to risk arrest in petrol station blockades across the country. Tens of thousands could easily have been raised by local groups. Even without public fundraising a sizeable amount could have been raised very quickly. At least 300 people took part in the petrol station blockades. If.just those 300 people had each put in a fiver £1,500 could have been raised at the click of our movement’s fingers-enough for a sizeable aid package!	+	The dialectical materialist perspective sees consciousness as a process of reflecting the objective world within the human brain on a practical basis to create knowledge about the objective world. Consciousness is a self-aware process that is productive and creative.
−	Recently a couple of hundred quid was sent to Papua New Guinea. This paltry amount paid for a consignment of anti-malarial drugs for West Papuan refugees.	+	This view stems from the following basic principles:
−	3) Money for Prisoners	+	* The dialectical materialist worldview acknowledges that the material world exists objectively and independently of human consciousness.
		+	* The dialectical materialist worldview recognizes the following human abilities:
		+	** To perceive the objective world.
		+	** To reflect the objective world into the human mind, which enables human subjects to learn about external objects. [see Annotation 66, p. 64]
		+	** To admit that there are no material things nor phenomena which are unrecognizable, but only material things and phenomena that humans have not yet recognised. [see ''The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues,'' p. 48]
−	Of course, any movement which gains any success will quickly find some of its number in prison. Being in prison in Europe is no picnic and our movement’s prisoners desperately need more sup-port than they get. Most of the problems we associate with prison support here are similar outside of the West but in more drastic ways.	+	The dialectical materialist worldview affirms that conscious reflection [see Annotation 67, p. 64] of the objective world is a dialectical, productive, self-aware, and creative process. This reflection process develops from the unknown to the known, from knowing less to knowing more, from knowing less profoundly and less comprehensively to knowing more profoundly and more comprehensively.
−	Family visits, if allowed at all, are often costly both in travel and in bribes. In many Majority World countries a prisoner will not be fed from the prison budget but will have to rely on his community to supply either food itself or money to the prison in order to stay alive. (It’s worth pointing out this used to be the case in many British prisons hundreds of years ago!) In the usually horrendously unhygienic conditions decent doctors also have to be paid for. Even the smallest privilege can be impossible without bribes to prison officials. Legal aid will also have to be paid. This financial burden can cripple families. Increasingly, the time and energy a community used to put into revolutionary action has to be put into raising funds to keep its prisoners alive and relatively healthy.	+	-----
−	Over the last few years British Anarchist Black Cross activists have raised hundreds ofpounds for East European anarchist prisoners and their support campaigns. This money has been a large boost because hundreds of British pounds in countries like the Czech Republic and Poland translates into a lot of money. In the Third World this is even more the case. Ridiculously small amounts of money can make a real difference to those in cages in the colonies.	+	==== Annotation 214 ====
−	4) Money for Agitation and Propaganda	+	The above principle (that human knowledge develops from less, and less comprehensive, to more, and more comprehensive states) stands in contrast to various other philosophical systems of belief, including:
−	Why not sponsor a pamphlet, leaflet, book or poster campaign by an anarchist/ecological group outside of the West? You’ll definitely get more propaganda for your pennies! As an example a donation of $40 from anarchists in the US paid for a campaign of stickers, posters and leaflets by anarchists in universities across the Czech Republic. Another good recent example is the funding and provision of basic radio transmission and studio equipment by Black liberationists in the US to the anarcho-syndicalist Awareness League in Nigeria.	+	Hegel’s ''Absolute Idealism'' upholds a belief in an “absolute ideal” which constitutes an ultimate limit or “end point” of knowledge which humanity is moving towards. Dialectical materialism upholds that there is no such absolute ideal and thus no such terminal end point of human understanding. [See Annotation 234, p. 230] As Engels wrote in ''Anti-Dühring'':
−	***** Travelling to and Joining their Struggle	+	<blockquote>
		+	If mankind ever reached the stage at which it should work only with eternal truths, with results of thought which possess sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to truth, it would then have reached the point where the infinity of the intellectual world both in its actuality and in its potentiality had been exhausted, and thus the famous miracle of the counted uncountable would have been performed.
		+	</blockquote>
−	Revolutionary tourism-a contentious subject! I would say that, despite limitations, Western activists can be very useful on the ground in Majority World struggles-as long as they take their cue from native groups and don’t just follow their own agenda. This opinion is shared by the Mexican EZLN, the Free Papua Movement (OPM), the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA), Anti-Dam communities in India and the Rainbow Keepers in Russia; all of which have recently asked for foreign radicals to come to their lands. From the perspective of the volunteer, sojourns in others struggles can be extremely instructive.	+	''Fideism'', which is the belief that knowledge is received from some higher power [i.e., God]. Fideism upholds that all knowledge is pre-existing, and that humanity simply receives it from on high. Dialectical materialism, on the other hand, argues that knowledge is developed over time through dialectical processes of consciousness and human activity.
−	Activists should only take part in this on-the-ground solidarity at the invitation of the communities themselves. In some situations, the presence of a foreigner can bring down hassle on the community and just be another mouth to feed. The communities will know what is needed and what is applicable.	+	''Positivism, or empiricist materialism'', which holds that there are hard limits to human knowledge, or that human knowledge — which can only be obtained from sense data — can’t be trusted. Dialectical materialism upholds that all things and phenomena can be known and understood, and that sense data can be trusted as an objective reflection of reality. For more information about skepticism about human sense data as well as positive and empiricist materialism, see Annotation 10, p. 10, and Annotation 58, p. 56].
−	Three years ago some EF!ers and friends published a great basic guide to what one can practically do on-the-ground in Chiapas. Though much of it will be inapplicable to other struggles, I urge anyone thinking of engaging in a bit of revolutionary tourism to read this book, which goes into far greater detail than I do here.[372]	+	-----
−	Essentially, the useful work that can be done by Western activists can be divided into work involving 1) Specialist practical skill and 2) Work which involves very little specialist practical skill. I’ll deal with these two areas separately.	+	The dialectical materialist worldview considers praxis as the primary and most direct basis of consciousness, and as the motive and the purpose of consciousness, and as the criterion for testing truth. [See: ''The Relationship Between Praxis and Consciousness'', p. 216]
−	<strong>On-the-Ground Solidarity Work with Specialist Practical Skills</strong>	+	-----
−	The nature of the struggle will define what skills outside radicals can provide that might not be available or plentiful to struggling communities. In general, external specialist technological expertise is more useful in less urban struggles. I’ll list just a few of the most obvious useful skills that have been requested by movements in recent years.	+	==== Annotation 215 ====
−	<strong>Medical Expertise</strong>	+	Given the above principles — that human consciousness exists independently from the material world yet is capable of accurately perceiving and reflecting the material world, and that knowledge develops over time through a synthesis of consciousness and practical activity — we can conclude that consciousness is a self-aware process which is productive and creative.
−	This is the one skill that without a doubt is always needed and never available enough to radical groups. Whatever form the struggle takes-violent or non-violent-resisters will get attacked by the state. Whether it is mass demonstrations, small blockades or guerrilla actions, those en-gaged. in struggle risk injury and often death. Medical support on the ground can make all the difference. Whole movements sometimes operate with practically no medical support at all-at a terrible cost. This is especially true of indigenous groups such as the OPM.	+	Consciousness is productive and creative in the sense that conscious processes, in conjunction with practical experience and activity in the material world, leads to the development of knowledge and practical experience which allows humans to develop our understanding of the world as well as our own material conditions through the application of knowledge to our own labor activities.
−	<strong>Radio and Communication Technology</strong>	+	Next, we will examine different ways of categorizing conscious activities as they pertain to developing knowledge and practical understanding of our world.
−	Many movements have got this sorted but many more have not. Communication technology needs divide into three areas:	+	From the dialectical materialist point of view, consciousness is a process of development. Consciousness develops from ''empirical consciousness'' to ''theoretical consciousness''; and from ''ordinary consciousness'' to ''scientific consciousness''.
−	a) Internal organisational communication-such as radio links between different groups throughout a country and different cells on actions and demonstrations.	+	-----
−	b) External communication to the domestic population at large--such as mobile pirate radio systems.	+	==== Annotation 216 ====
−	c) International communication to movements and groups world-wide-such as mobile phones, long distance radio and internet set ups. Lack of electronic communication systems can leave movements-especially guerrilla ones-isolated within themselves, from the people as a whole and from international solidarity. They are by no means essential-and in some situations an unnecessary danger-but they can make the way easier.	+	In dialectical materialist philosophy, all systems of relation exist as processes of development in motion [see Annotation 120, p. 124]. Thus, consciousness can be defined as a system of relations between human brain activity and two forms of data input:
−	<strong>Appropriate Technology</strong>	+	''•'' ''Sense experience'': observations of the external world detected by our senses.
−	If you’re good at turning rubbish into useful things, there is always a place for you. At whatever stage of struggle innovation is always needed. Bougainville showed how far you can get with appropriate technology-water power turbines running lighting and lathes for making home-made guns and coconuts fuelling cooking, BRA unit jeeps and pretty much everything else. However, be wary of any tendency to push development through technology!	+	''•'' ''Knowledge'': information which exists in the human mind as memories and ideas.
−	<strong>Weaponry and Warfare</strong>	+	Consciousness is thus a process of the development of knowledge through a combination of human brain activity and human practical activity in the physical world (i.e., labor).
−	It’s extremely unlikely that if a group has modem weaponry it will need Westerners to tell it how to suck eggs. However, if you’re an ex-squaddie, you might be useful in some strugglesnot so much as some sort ofunpaid mercenary, but more for any specialist knowledge the state may have taught you.	+	In the section below, we will explore different forms of consciousness, the development of consciousness, and the relationship between consciousness and knowledge. Note that these are ''abstractions'' of consciousness and knowledge, meant to help us understand how knowledge and consciousness develop over time. Thought processes are extremely complex, so we seek to develop a fundamental understanding of how consciousness develops and how knowledge develops because these processes are fundamental to the development of human beings and human societies.
−	On the Ground Solidarity Work not with Specialist Practical Skills	+	Just as consciousness is a process of developing knowledge through brain activity, consciousness itself also develops over time. The development of consciousness can be considered based on the criteria of ''concrete/abstract'' and of ''passive/active''.
−	If you have little of the skills described above you can still-depending on the struggle-be of possible great use on-the-ground. As an anarchist Westerner one is in the peculiar position of, upon leaving the West, being able to do certain things merely because of the passport one carries or the colour of one’s skin. lhe following is just a short list of some useful roles. It is worth under-lining that these can largely only be carried out in situations no more intense than low intensity warfare.	+	Consciousness develops from a state of direct and immediate observation of the world which results in concrete knowledge to a higher stage which constitutes a more abstract and general understanding of the world. We call consciousness which is focused on direct, immediate, concrete, empirical observation of the world ''empirical consciousness'', and we call consciousness which is focused on forming abstract generalizations about the world ''theoretical consciousness''.
−	***** Human Shield/Human Rights Observer	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-79.png]]
−	The presence of Westerners can decrease the likelihood of some forms of assault on communities. As an example, aerial bombardment and artillery are less likely if there’s awkward Westerners who it’s embarrassing to kill hanging about. In some situations making the state do its massacres by hand decreases the state’s in-built military advantage. Sometimes the mere presence of a Westerner can cool a situation-albeit temporarily. Such work has been very useful in various places but most solidly in Chiapas. Situations are different between countries and within countries. One activist who went to West Papua found his presence did have a positive effect in one area, a negative effect in another.	+	Empirical consciousness is a process of collecting data about the world, which we call knowledge. We can gather two forms of knowledge through empirical consciousness: ordinary knowledge, and scientific knowledge.
−	***** Media Work	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-80.png]]
−	As Western activists we have greater access to the international media than native communities. Though liberals put too much stock in raising the profile of struggling groups, it can. make a real difference. Footage and reportage of strikes, rebellions, armed struggle, riots, and general chaos can be the deciding factor that convinces a company it is not worth investing in such a trouble spot.	+	Ordinary knowledge is the knowledge we accumulate through our everyday experiences in the world. Scientific knowledge is gathered through more systematic scientific observations and experiments. Scientific knowledge usually develops from ordinary knowledge, as we begin to seek a more formal and systematic understanding of the things we witness in our daily lives.
−	***** Travel Companion	+	According to ''Themes in Soviet Marxist Philosophy,'' edited by T. J. Blakely:
−	The presence of a Westerner with limited immunity to arrest, torture and disappearance can be very useful when exiled radicals attempt to re-enter their homeland. Airports and border crossings can be very dangerous. A Majority World friend told me once that despite being wanted by the state, when he was back among the mass of his people he felt relatively safe. But entering his country was terrifying. Would the patrolling secret police become suspicious and guess who he was? Would they check his passport was fully in order? Alone in the airport, he could have been picked up and nobody would know that he had been taken. No outside support would come to a man no one knew was missing. For this reason, a British activist went with him so that at least his people and solidarity groups would know they needed to look for him. Of course, the very fact of travelling with a Westerner can arouse suspicion so it is not always a good idea. One Kurdish anarchist was asked if she wanted such a travelling companion, but she believed in Turkey it would make no difference. For her, possible torture or worse was merely the luck of the draw.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Ordinary knowledge notes what lies on the very surface, what happens during a certain event. Scientific knowledge wants to know why it happens in just this way. The essence of scientific knowledge lies in the confirmed generalization of facts, where it becomes necessary rather than contingent, universal instead of particular, law-bound, and can serve as a basis for predicting various phenomena, events and objects...
−	***** Prison Visiting	+	The whole progress of scientific knowledge is bound up with growth in the force and volume of scientific prediction. Prediction makes it possible to control processes and to direct them. Scientific knowledge opens up the possibility not only of predicting the future but also of consciously forming it. The vital meaning of every science can be expressed as follows: to know in order to predict and to predict in order to act.
−	Westerners can sometimes get into places that might be difficult for locals. Also for different reasons there may be no organised prison visiting programme by a native community. Prisoners could be held in far offjails maybe hundreds of miles away from their friends and families. Visits by a prisoner’s comrades may only result in the visitor himself being interrogated and possibly jailed. This is less likely for Westerners.	+	An essential characteristic of scientific knowledge is that it is systematic, i.e., it is a set of information which is ordered according to certain theoretical principles. A collection of unsystematized knowledge is not yet science. Certain basic premises are fundamental to scientific knowledge, i.e., the laws which make it possible to systematize the knowledge. Knowledge becomes scientific when the collection of facts and their descriptions reach the level where they are included in a theory.
		+	</blockquote>
−	***** Agricultural Work	+	Theoretical consciousness arises from conscious reflection on accumulated knowledge, as human beings seek to develop general and abstract understanding of the underlying principles of processes we experience in the world. Once general principles of natural and social law are established, human beings then test those general conclusions against empirical reality through further observation (i.e., through empirical consciousness).
−	One of the commonest forms of on-the-ground solidarity with struggling peasant communities has been just getting stuck in and lending a hand with rural work. In the ‘70s Cuba was one of the New Left’s favourite resorts and many US rads worked the sugar harvest. Similarly in the 80s bundles of British lefties went to Nicaragua to join agricultural work brigades. They in some small way acted like an international Red version of the WW2 Land Girls-enabling peasants (this time men and women) to go to the front without their land falling fallow. Putting aside (big) political differences over the nature of the Sandinista and Cuban states, the work these anti-imperialists did was practically useful (though minor in scale).	+	Thus, there is a dialectical relationship between empirical consciousness and theoretical consciousness, as one form leads to another, back and forth, again and again, continuously.
−	In Chiapas, Human Rights Observers have taken part in the work of the communities too, rather than just hang about waiting for the next military incursion. At the time of writing, similar work is underway in Palestine where Israelis and foreign activists are picking olives in frontline Palestinian villages. This is in reaction to the shootings, by Zionist settlers and the army, of Palestini-ans doing the harvest on exposed positions. While I have put agricultural work under the general heading of non-specialist it would be foolish to underestimate the skill and labour involved in peasant work. Friends have remarked on their sudden-found frailty compared to much older Zapatista peasants. Even those with agricultural experience will find the day demanding. But all are likely to find the work rewarding, and working with others can be the best way to really get to know them.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-81.png|''Empirical and theoretical consciousness have a dialectical relationship in which empirical consciousness and theoretical consciousness lead to and mutually develop one another.'']]
−	***** Hosting Majority World Radicals	+	Consciousness also develops from passive and surface-level observation and understanding of the world (i.e., simply considering what, where, and when things happen) to more active pursuit of the underlying meaning of the world (i.e., trying to understand how and why things happen).
−	For a whole range of reasons (safety, educational, economic, operational), Majority World radicals can crop up in the core capitalist countries. More often than not they join already existing communities of radical ex-pats, (see “Immigrant Communities in Rome” below), but for some there may be no community to join. In these cases it is our responsibility to act as good hosts.	+	Consciousness which passively observes the world, directly, in daily life is referred to as ''ordinary consciousness''. Ordinary consciousness often develops into more active consciousness. This active pursuit of understanding through systematic observation and indirect experiences (i.e., experiences that do not occur in daily activity — such as scientific experimentation) is referred to as ''scientific consciousness''.
−	Arrival here can be very confusing and we can be useful simply in terms of aiding orientation. Also there are basic needs such as cash, food and accommodation-all ofwhich might be be-yond the reach of lone radicals. With ever more repressive state action against economically poor immigrants these basic needs will increasingly come to the fore. If they are here legally they will probably need help dealing with visas and travel arrangements.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-82.png]]
−	Depending on the purpose and duration of their stay they may want help in projects here in the core aimed directly at helping their people, or they may wish to start conventional solidarity campaigns with speaking tours, newsletters etc. It should be left to them to ask what they want of us, rather than we presupposing what would be useful.[373] We can also be of use in providing many types of information-from the political to the technical.	+	These concepts will be discussed in further detail below.
−	We can catalyse communication between them and members of other similar groups from their regions who may be in the core. Ironically it is often within the core that many groups from the Majority World meet for the first time. Logistics and state repression at home can be a major barrier to inter-movement/international discussion.	+	-----
−	A recent example comes to mind. Despite a common enemy (the Indonesian State in particular and the capitalist system in general) communication between the East Timorese and West Papuan resistance movements has been rare.[374] The beginning of renewed communication between the two movements in part came when people from both were introduced by common friends at a British EF! Winter Moot.	+	''Empirical consciousness'' is the stage of development of consciousness in which perceptions are formed via direct observations of things and phenomena in the natural world, or of society, or through scientific experimentation and systematic observation. Empirical consciousness results in ''empirical knowledge''.
−	Such instances are bizarre but regular occurrences in history-during the 20<sup>th</sup> century anti-colonial wave it was within the core that many militants from different countries first met each other. The recent growth of a number of non-centralised libertarian Internationals (People’s Global Action, Via Capensina, International Anarchist Federation, EF!, International Workers Association, and many radical global internet networks), is easing communication between majority world radicals (and us in the core of course!) and our minor role as inter-movement communication enablers is likely to decrease but it is still unlikely to disappear.	+	''Empirical knowledge'' has two types: ''ordinary empirical knowledge'' (knowledge obtained through direct observation and in productive labor) and ''scientific empirical knowledge'' (knowledge obtained by conducting scientific experiments). These two types of knowledge can be complementary, and can enrich one other.
−	Issues around security have to be given serious thought when hosting a foreign radical. The state(s) their groups are resisting at home are likely to have embassies and agents here. Whether or not their foes find out who they are and what they have been doing can decide life or death, freedom or prison when re-entering the home country. In many cases states share intelligence so it is not merely a case of avoiding foreign state interest but also domestic state interest.	+	''Theoretical consciousness'' is the indirect, abstract, systematic level of perception in which the nature and laws of things and phenomena are generalized and abstracted.
−	Hosting Majority World activists is not just our responsibility-it can be immensely rewarding and illuminating.	+	Empirical consciousness and Theoretical consciousness are two different cognitive stages but they have a dialectical relationship with each other. In this dialectical relationship, empirical consciousness is the basis of theoretical consciousness; it provides theoretical consciousness with specific, rich material [i.e., knowledge]. Empirical consciousness is linked closely to practical activities [since practical activity in the material world is the chief method of gathering knowledge through empirical consciousness], and forms the basis for checking, correcting, and supplementing existing theories and summarizing, and generalizing them into new theories. However, empirical consciousness is still limited in that empirical consciousness stops at the description and classification of data obtained from direct observation and experimentation. Therefore, empirical consciousness only brings understanding about the separate, superficial, discrete aspects of observed subjects, without yet reflecting the essence of those subjects nor the underlying principles or laws which regulate those subjects.
−	***** Supporting Prisoners	+	Therefore, empirical consciousness, alone, is not sufficient for determining the scientific laws of nature and society. To determine such laws and abstractions, theoretical consciousness must be applied. So, theoretical consciousness does not form spontaneously, nor directly from experience, although it is formed from the summation of experiences.
−	Writing letters to prisoners in jails outside the core is one of the easiest-and most real-ways to aid our distant struggling sisters and brothers. Amnesty International rarely sup-port those who are in prison for resisting something, as opposed to just saying something. So it’s up to us to support imprisoned libertarian and ecological saboteurs, rioters, guerrillas, politicos and tribal warriors. Anarchist Black Cross groups have been doing a brilliant job but it shouldn’t just be left to them. A letter from a far-off land can help brighten a prisoners day and remind the wardens that people on the outside are looking in.	+	-----
−	ChipasLink received a message from a Zapatista prisoner organisation in response to its letter writing campaign. Jose from the Autonomous Municipality of the 17<sup>th</sup> of November stated: Aforale had been extremely low due to a wave of recent arrests. We were feeling depressed. Letters from the UK helped raise morale and made us feel we were not alone. We want to say thank you.	+	==== Annotation 217 ====
−	<br>	+	The knowledge we gain from our daily activity often inspires scientific inquiry and more systematic observation, which can yield scientific knowledge which will enrich and improve our daily practice and allow us to experience daily life with a deeper understanding of what we’re experiencing. Thus, the ordinary knowledge we gain through daily practice can enrich and yield scientific knowledge (and vice versa).
−	***** Solidarity Actions	+	Empirical consciousness and theoretical consciousness have a dialectical relationship with each other in which empirical consciousness provides the basis for theoretical consciousness. Theoretical consciousness attempts to derive general abstractions and governing principles from empirical knowledge which is gained through empirical consciousness. Once theoretical principles, generalities, and abstractions are determined, they are then tested against reality through empirical consciousness (i.e., practical observation and systematic experimentation) to determine if the theory is sound.
−	For years we have been barricading ourselves inside corporate offices, disrupting AGMs, block-ading petrol stations and going to directors’ houses. These are all valuable and should continue but do they effectively hinder the system or do they largely symbolically oppose it? Let’s first look at what we have done so far.	+	''Empirical consciousness and theoretical consciousness have a dialectical relationship with one another. Our observations of the material world lead to conscious activity which we then test in reality through conscious activity, and so on, in a never-ending cycle of dialectical development.''
−	Our solidarity actions have usually had three objectives: a) Raising the Spirits: Hearing that people far away care about you and have taken action, however small, can really raise the spirits.	+	For example, a farmer may notice that plants grow better in locations where manure has been discarded — an act of empirical consciousness. The farmer might then form the theory that adding manure to the soil will help plants grow — an act of theoretical consciousness. This theory could then be tested against reality by mixing manure into the soil and observing the results, which would be another act of empirical consciousness. The farmer may then theorize that ''more'' manure will help plants grow ''even more'' — another act of theoretical consciousness — continuing the cycle of testing and observing.
−	b) Harassing the Attackers: The functionaries ripping the world will back down from individual attacks only if their profits or their wellbeing is threatened.	+	This dialectical relationship between ordinary and theoretical consciousness is what allows human beings to develop and improve knowledge through practical experience, observation, and theoretical abstraction and generalization of knowledge.
−	c) Exposing the Struggles: Actions increase awareness of both the individual struggle involved and the global struggle in general. This helps us here and sometimes builds direct aid for over there.	+	Theoretical consciousness is relatively independent from empirical consciousness. Therefore, theories can precede expectations and guide the formation of valuable empirical knowledge. Theoretical consciousness is what allows human beings to sort and filter knowledge so as to best serve practical activities and contribute to the transformation of human life. Through this process, knowledge is organized and therefore enhanced, and develops from the level of specific, individual, and solitary knowledge to a higher form of generalized and abstract knowledge [what we might call ''theoretical knowledge''].
−	Some solidarity actions over the last decade have needed meticulous planning like the Shell-Mex office occupation.[375] Others like the daytime smashing of the Nigerian Embassy windows just took two dozen people with pluck.	+	-----
−	These actions can sometimes have quite an impact. One office occupation yielded an internal report that stated the actions were harrowing company moral and public image. When loads of us around the country were doing blockades at Shell petrol stations it felt, to be honest, a bit naff. Occasionally we would close down a petrol station for a few hours or even half a day, sometimes co-ordinated across the country, but was it really having any effect? The surprising answer is yes!	+	==== Annotation 218 ====
−	After the Nigerian state/Shell executed Ken SaroWiwa, 21 of his co-conspirators lay in jail awaiting a similar fate. Against expectation after months of suffering, the prisoners were released. Once outside the bars they wrote a letter to their supporters in Britain. The letter thanked everyone for their support and specifically mentioned the petrol station blockades as a major factor in their survival.	+	Knowledge which comes from empirical observations (empirical consciousness) is ''empirical knowledge.'' ''Theoretical knowledge'' is a product of theoretical consciousness. Over time, as repeated and varied observations are made through theoretical consciousness activities, knowledge becomes more generalized and abstract; this general and abstract knowledge is what we call ''theoretical knowledge''.
−	The Shell campaign built up a head of steam over years and garnered significant mainstream support after Ken was killed (little of which turned into any meaningful aid). It was exceptional but not, thankfully, an absolute exception.	+	Note that empirical and theoretical knowledge can be ''ordinary'' or ''scientific'' in nature; if the knowledge arises passively from daily life activities, it will be ordinary knowledge, regardless of whether or not it is empirical or theoretical in nature. If, on the other hand, the knowledge arises from methodological measurement and/or systematic observation, then it is scientific knowledge.vSo far, we have discussed ways of understanding consciousness based on the criteria of directness vs. abstractness. Next, we will discuss another way of looking at consciousness, based on the criteria of passiveness vs. activeness.
−	Most of the time the power of our actions comes from constancy, confronting targets over and over again. However in times of foreign crisis lone acts can be useful. A recent funny example was when Those Pesky Kids invaded the Argentine embassy pulling down its flag and hoisting up the black and red. It will not make much difference on the Argentina streets but its image has travelled the world through papers and the web. Argentinian anarchos were really jollied up, their spirits raised.	+	''Ordinary consciousness'' refers to perception that is formed ''passively'' and ''directly'' from the daily activities of humans. Ordinary consciousness is a reflection of things, phenomena, and ideas, with all their observed characteristics, specific details, and nuances. Therefore, ordinary consciousness is rich, multifaceted, and associated with daily life. Therefore, ordinary consciousness has a regular and pervasive role in governing the activities of each person in society.
−	Other solidarity actions, notably those done for the Zapatistas, have succeeded to differing levels in raising the spirits, harassing the attackers and exposing the struggles. Over the last decade I think our solidarity actions, given our numbers, have been remarkably successfol in achieving these objectives. Sometimes, though, it could be said that we are using Majority World struggles as scripts with which we can act out our own politics.	+	''Scientific consciousness'' refers to perception formed ''actively'' and ''indirectly'' from the reflection of the characteristics, nature, and inherent relationships of research subjects. This reflection takes place in the form of logical abstraction. These logical abstractions include scientific concepts, categories, and laws. Scientific consciousness is objective, abstract, general, and systematic, and must be grounded in evidence.
−	***** The Clouds are Gathering?	+	Scientific consciousness utilizes systematic methodologies to profoundly describe the nature of studied subjects as well as the principles which govern them. Therefore, scientific consciousness plays an increasingly important role in practical activities, especially in the modern age of science and technology.
−	The type of solidarity actions described above should continue but let’s face it-they rarely hinder the system, but symbolically oppose it. Symbolism has a lot of power-but not as much as force.	+	-----
−	In 1997 a British/South African mercenary outfit acting for British mining giant RTZ was planning, from their London offices on the Kings Road, to burn up the rebel-held territory in Bougainville, carpet bomb the heart of the resistance. Helicopters were to rain down bombs and bullets on friends, families, and forest. Poison. Fire. Blood.	+	==== Annotation 219 ====
−	The mercenaries would be richer and the murdered land would be back under control-ripe for mining again. Thankfolly this plan was scuppered at the last moment by an uprising on PNG that forced the mercenaries out of the country.	+	Logical abstraction refers to an understanding of the underlying rules which govern things, phenomena, and ideas which underly objective processes, relationships, and characteristics. Logical abstraction is the result of scientific inquiry. Over time, our understanding of the rules which govern the things, phenomena, and ideas in our lives become more reliable and applicable in practical activities. This attainment of understanding and practical ability through scientific practice is ''scientific consciousness''.
−	Imagine that had not occurred and put yourself in the shoes of one of the self-described ecological revolutionaries on Bougainville, looking the 1,000s of miles from the Jaba river valley to the streets of London. What would you do if you could be on the Kings Road in London rather than a jungle in the Pacific awaiting death? Hold a banner? Shout at a few people? Occupy an oflice?	+	Ordinary and scientific consciousness are two different qualitative steps of cognitive processes which, together, allow humans to discover truth about our world. Ordinary and scientific consciousness have a strong dialectical relationship with each other. In this relationship, ordinary consciousness precedes scientific consciousness, as ordinary consciousness is a source of material for the development of scientific consciousness.
−	If such a situation arose again, and it will, what will be the reaction of our circles? While British mercenaries on PNG were preparing to decimate Bougainville, Greek, and Italian troops were crushing the Albanian insurrection. It is likely that Western European troops will be increasingly used to counter revolutions in the Majority World. Direct action must be used to hinder the functioning of the militarised arms of capital when they reach out to destroy libertarian and ecological rebellions. We are where they are based. We are where the guns are produced. Sited as we are in the heart of the beast small amounts of intense action can have a disproportionate affect.	+	Although it contains the seeds of scientific knowledge, ordinary consciousness mainly stops at the reflection of superficial details, seemingly random events, and non-essential phenomena [see ''Essence and Phenomenon'', p. 156]. Ordinary consciousness, therefore, cannot transform effortlessly into scientific consciousness. To develop ordinary consciousness into scientific consciousness, we must go through the process of accurate summarizing, abstracting, and generalization using scientific methods. Likewise, once scientific consciousness has been developed, it impacts and pervades ordinary consciousness, and therefore develops ordinary consciousness. Scientific consciousness therefore enhances our everyday passive perception of the world.
−	It’s worth taking a quick look back at what attempts at solidarity were made by previous generations of capitalist core radicals.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-83.png|''Ordinary consciousness refers to the passive observation of reality which takes place in our daily lives. Scientific consciousness refers to the systematic application of consciousness to solve specific problems in a methodological manner.'']]
−	In the 1960s and 70s western solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle[376] took many forms, most of which was pretty useless. As an American Indian Movement activist put it: holding candlelit vigils and walking down the street does not constitute “acts of solidarity” with those engaged in armed struggle.[377] However there were rare actions with real effects. The German left wing urban-guerrilla group, the Red Army Faction, attacked a whole array of US army targets. One of its most successful actions was a major attack on a key US base from which the laying of mines in Vietnam was organised. Across the water the Weather Underground bombed the Air Force wing of the Pentagon. The consequent flooding crashed the central computer of the US military’s global communication system. These two acts had a real effect. By “bringing the war home” they directly joined the struggle in the jungles of Vietnam and contributed to the crippling of US military morale. That both actions were born out of a politics of despair, (arising from the orchestrated apocalypse in Vietnam and the selfpacifying, racist and delusional character of mother country radicals), did not diminish their utility in supporting rebellion beyond the core, merely the ability of the organisations carrying them out to survive.	+	-----
−	From the perspective of domestic (r)evolution most of the ’60-‘70s European guerrilla movements were counterproductive. Irish Republicanism and Basque Separatism (Europe’s longest running armed struggles) were both expressions of communities in rebellion. The European New Left guerrillas on the other hand, (with the exception ofItaly), were largely the project of middle class student radicals with little social base. Often seeing themselves as vanguards who would lead the working class to victory, they became self destructive cliques that probably even regressed the building of (r)evolution in their countries.	+	==== Annotation 220 ====
−	This does not however detract from the fact that some of things they did were extremely effective ‘fourth column operations’ carried out in time of war. Given the absence of generalised struggle in the capitalist core these radicals were given a choice. They effectively decided to defect. While other New Left formations immersed themselves in (largely futile) domestic (r)evolutionary activity (such as supporting unions) the Weather Underground concentrated on the global struggle. Their (amazingly arrogant) attitude to the rest of their country was summed up well when they reacted to an opposing left wing groups slogan Serve the People. Weather replied that they would .fight the people if to do so would further the international revolution.[378]	+	For example, before developing scientific consciousness of farming, a farmer might go through daily life having no idea what makes plants grow to be larger and more healthy and might have no idea how to avoid common problems such as pests. After developing scientific consciousness of farming through scientific experimentation and other systematic methodologies, the farmer will look at things differently in daily life activities. They may see signs of pest infestation and immediately recognize it for what it is, and they may see other indications that plants are unhealthy and know exactly what to do to remedy the situation.
−	The question is not whether vanguard adventurism is a way of rousing domestic (r)evolution (it isn’t) but whether the potential gains to revolutions elsewhere outweigh the negative effect it has on domestic social evolution.	+	In this way, scientific consciousness enhances ordinary consciousness. Meanwhile, ordinary consciousness — passive observation of the world during daily activities — will lead to scientific consciousness by inspiring us to actively seek understanding of the world through scientific consciousness.
−	To a certain extent a pretty stupid question, but a real one posed by the contradictions inherent in the global struggle. It all depends how one weighs up at this point in time (r)evolutionary possi-bilities in the core-and political activists relationship to such possibilities if they exist-and (r)evolutionary/anti-enclosure struggles in the Majority World.	+	=== c. The Relationship Between Praxis and Consciousness ===
−	If we came to the conclusion that as a movement we were going nowhere yet were either in a position to: a) significantly aid an allied struggle with a better chance of success, orb) significantly decrease the level ofviolence visited on friends being drowned in blood; what would we do?	+	Praxis serves as the ''basis, driving force,'' and ''purpose'' of consciousness. Praxis serves as the criterion of truth by testing the truthfulness of our thoughts. [See Annotation 230, p. 226]
−	Any really effective action might bring down a level of repression that our circles could not survive. Yet if serious action is not taken solely so as to avoid personal hardship (rather than for any real strategic reason) we are guilty of ‘posing as progressives’ while accommodating ourselves to power. It is worth here repeating the well-known quote by Black Panther Assata Shakur. Back in 1984 she said:	+	Praxis is able to serve these roles because reality is the direct starting point of consciousness; it sets out the requirements, tasks, and modes of consciousness, as well as the movement and development tendencies of consciousness. Humans have an objective and inherent need to explain the world and to transform it.
−	<quote>	+	-----
−	It is the obligation of every person who claims to oppose oppression to resist the oppressor by every means at his or her <em>disposal. Not to engage in physical resistance, armed resistance to oppression, is to serve the interests of the oppressor; no more, no less. There are no exceptions to the rule, no easy out...</em>
−	</quote>
−	In fact the question is not just one concerning armed resistance.[379] If non-violent action is actually effective (not merely symbolic) it too results in severe repression. At present a number of Animal Liberationists are in prison for waves of fire bombings that the ALF press office would correctly describe as non-violent. The repression that has followed each wave of action has been considerable. One could guarantee at least the same level of repression if ecological circles ever took the road of some solidarity movements in the past.	+	==== Annotation 221 ====
−	The guerrilla movements were crushed by state repression and internal dynamics. Jail and death was the fate of many of our forbears. I for one have no desire to join them but it is important that we look at their stories and think seriously about these issues. Sadly, it has to be said that in many ways the urban guerrillas never fully escaped the symbolic political terrain they had evolved in. Looking at their targets one sees again and again globally unimportant army bases, recruiting offices, and the like. Despite being very direct, their actions, with some notable exceptions, were rarely very targeted. Most of the armed action was relatively minor in scale and of course armies are designed to sustain and survive mass death and destruction. Attacks on key armaments factories for instance would have had considerably more on-the-ground effect in Vietnam.	+	Remember that the material world defines consciousness while consciousness allows us to impact the material world through conscious activity [see ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'', p. 88]. Consciousness itself arose from the physical needs of the material world [see ''The Source of Consciousness'', p. 64], and these physical needs continue to serve as the basis and driving force for all conscious activities, as we must act consciously to survive.
−	There are serious questions here about strategy, racism, symbolism, violence, the nature of sacrifice, and our position in the global slavery pyramid. These ideas have to be thought through, all the time rejecting both a cult of violence and an internalisation of passivity.	+	Our inherent need to explain the world and to transform it arises from our material needs to eat, seek shelter, cure and prevent disease, and so on. These physical needs, which stem from the material world, drive conscious activity and lead to the development of consciousness and knowledge.
−	***** Immigrant Communities Within Rome	+	Therefore, humans must necessarily impact things in the material world through our practical activities in order to survive. The impacts of our practical activities on the world cause things and phenomena to reveal their different properties, including their internal and external relationships [for example, hitting a rock will tell you properties about the rock; attempting to build something out of wood will provide data about the wood, etc.]. In this manner, praxis produces data for consciousness to process, and also helps consciousness to comprehend nature and the laws of movement and development which govern the world.
−	The Terrorism Act which passed into law in 2000 was seen by many as part of a clampdown on the direct action scene. It is likely that some of its powers will to be used against us in the future, but as targets of the new legislation we are peripheral. The main targets are undeniably Irish Republicans and immigrant communities. The newly proscribed organisations are almost all British wings of Majority World organisations-mostly Communists or Islamists. This should come as no surprisestates have aways worried about immigrant communities becoming enemies within.[380]	+	Scientific theories are formed on the basis of the dialectical relationship between practical activity and consciousness. For example: mathematics developed to allow us to count and measure things for practical activities such as agriculture, navigation, and building structures. Marxism also arose in the 1840’s from the practical activities of the struggles of the working class against the capitalist class at that time. Even recent scientific achievements arise from practical needs and activities. For example, the discovery and decoding of the human genome map was born from practical activities and needs, such as the need to develop treatments for incurable diseases. In the end, there is no field of knowledge that is not derived from reality. Ultimately, all knowledge arises from and serves practice. Therefore, if we were to break from reality or stop relying on reality, consciousness would break from the basis of reality that nurtures our growth, existence and development. Also, the cognitive subject cannot have true and profound knowledge about the world if it does not follow reality.
−	Until last century the individuals and institutions of Western power were largely out of reach to the far off peoples they massacred. With the growth of international travel and increased immigration into the core capitalist countries this is no longer the case. [This section was written before the attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC-1 deal with these in the box below. [see appendix 11.9.2001] Some of these organisations have been sending fighters to Majority World battles and carrying out attacks in the core. We may have sent footballers to Chiapas[381] but Islamists have been sending guerrillas to Yemen. No surprise who got proscribed.	+	Practice also serves as the basis, driving force, and purpose of consciousness because, thanks to practical activities, our human ability to measure and observe reality improves increasingly over time; our logical thinking ability is constantly strengthened and developed; cognitive means become increasingly developed. All of these developments “extend” the human senses in perceiving the world [for example, by developing new tools to measure, perceive, and sense the world such as telescopes, radar, microscopes, etc.].
−	Whether Islamic or Communist we should have no illusions about the authoritarian nature of many of these groups. It is hardly likely that anarcho-athiest types are likely to make common cause with religious nuts of any persuasion but there are often calls to build anti-imperialist unity with immigrant community commies.	+	Reality is not only the basis, the driving force, and the purpose of discovering truth but also serves as the ''standard of truth.'' Reality also serves as the basis for ''examining the truthfulness of the cognitive process'' [i.e., we can test whether our thoughts match material reality through experimentation and practice in the real world]. This means that practice is the measure of the value of the knowledge we gain through perception. At the same time, practice is constantly supplementing, adjusting, correcting, developing, and improving human consciousness. Marx said: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.”<ref>''Theses On Feuerbach'', Karl Marx, 1845.</ref>
−	The best example of a left-wing immigrant community is that of the Kurds. Kurdish groups here in Britain retain direct communication with their respective organisations both at home and throughout Europe. The demonstrations, occupations, and immolations in London-and throughout the Kurdish diaspora--that followed the trial of the leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) were highly co-ordinated. The Kurds have been very active in supporting struggles in Britain such as the Liverpool Dockers-taking part in marches and raising money. They have turned up en masse at two arms trade blockades and were some of the most up-for-it people on Mayday 2000 in London. In Germany there is a much larger Kurdish population and though the PKK has been proscribed for years, attacks on Turkish interests have continued. In fact the PKK remains one of the largest left-wing organisations in Germany.	+	Thus, practice is not only the starting point of consciousness and a decisive factor for the formation and development of consciousness, it is also a target where consciousness must always aim to test the truth. To emphasize this role which practice plays, Lenin said: “The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge.”<ref>''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1908.</ref>
−	Another good example is the Palestinians. The 1970s saw Palestinian organisations (chiefly the PFLP) carrying out attacks on targets in the core related to their struggle. While the level of at-tacks in the West by Palestinians has decreased, there are still reasonably regular outbreaks. As I write two Palestinians are serving time for bombings in London in 1994.[382]	+	The role of practice in consciousness requires that we always grasp the practical point of view. This point of view requires that we derive our ideas from practice, our ideas must be based on practice, and our ideas must deeply explore practice. In our conscious activities, we must attach a lot of importance to the summarization of practice [i.e., developing theoretical knowledge through theoretical consciousness which reflects practical experience]. Theoretical research must be related to practice, and learning must go hand in hand with practicing. If we diverge from practice, it will lead to mistakes of subjectivism, idealism, dogmatism, rigidity, and bureaucracy.
−	On the face of it there is a good argument for working with these communities, but the case of the Kurds throws up important questions which are widely applicable. The PKK and its various offshoots and rivals are largely Stalinist parties whose political aim is in total contradiction to liberty and ecology. This reality can result in serious problems-here as well as in Kurdistan.	+	-----
−	A few years ago members of the London 5<sup>th</sup> of May Group (Turkish/Kurdish anarchist exiles) were threatened by a Kurdish Stalinist sect. Back in Turkey the same sect has murdered two an-archists, one on the streets and one in prison. Ironically the British wing of the same sect was appealing for solidarity for the PKK prisoners in their struggle against control units.	+	==== Annotation 222 ====
−	Around the same time the flags of Turkish Stalinist parties were held aloft in Parliament Square on our Mayday 2000. If they had been held up by white English people I am sure our circles would have forced them down. The emblems of authoritarian socialism are the tombstones of libertarians past, present, and future. How would we feel if Turkish anarchists marched alongside the banners of a gang that had executed one of us?	+	''Subjectivism'' occurs when one centers one’s own self and conscious activities in perspective and worldview, failing to test one’s own perceptions against material and social reality. Subjectivists tend to believe that they can independently reason their way to truth in their own minds without practical experience and activity in the material world. Related to subjectivism is ''solipsism'', a form of idealism in which one believes that the self is the only basis for truth. As Marxist ethicist Howard Selsam wrote in ''Ethics and Progress: New Values in a Revolutionary World'': “If I believe that I alone exist and that you and all your arguments exist only in my mind and are my own creations then all possible arguments will not shake me one iota. No logic can possibly convince [the] solipsist.”
−	Anti-imperialist unity despite its seeming attractions can be worse than vacuous. It can mean unifying with priesthoods of new imperialisms. A true opposition to Empire requires us to choose those communities and organisations we organise with carefully.	+	''Idealism'' has a strong connection with a failure to incorporate practical activity into theoretical consciousness, since idealism holds that conscious activity is the sole basis of discovering truth.
−	This does not mean we should not practically engage in struggle alongside groups we are bitterly opposed to. During the march for the Liverpool Dockers it would have been ridiculous for us not to be part of the demo because it contained a contingent of Kurdish Stalinists-who were there in an inspiring show of genuine class solidarity. (As ridiculous as, say. refusing to take part in the Newbury Bypass protest because FoE is involved, with its pro-industrial stance.) However such unavoidable-contradictions arise largely within the realm of advancing (r)evolution at home (Task I). Here we are concerned with supporting rebellion beyond the core (Task IV).	+	''Dogmatism'' occurs when one only accounts for commonalities and considers theory itself as the sole basis of truth rather than practice [see Annotation 239, p. 235]. Dogmatists ignore practical experience and considering pre-established theory, alone, as unalterable truth. This results in a breakdown of the dialectical relationship between theoretical consciousness and empirical consciousness, which arrests the development process of knowledge and consciousness.
−	While the dynamics of (r)evolutionary struggle may decide our bedfellows for us, we can still decide who to actively support. Here I am talking about actions, money, resource sharing, and solidarity. Giving support to organisations here which stand in opposition to libertarian tendencies at home, (not to mention the interests of the people and planet!), is worse than nothing..	+	''Rigidity'' is an unwillingness to alter one’s thoughts, holding too stiffly to established consciousness and knowledge, and ignoring practical experience and observation, which leads to stagnation of both knowledge and consciousness.
−	Marxist authoritarian ideologies which are dying off throughout the core retain real power outside it. Radical immigrant communities reflect their political culture of origin, yet within many of these communities there will be libertarian and antiindustrial groups and individuals. It is our responsibility to seek them out and however we can help them aid their people and land.	+	''Bureaucracy'' arises when theory becomes overly codified and formalized, to the extent that practical considerations are ignored in favor of codified theory. Bureaucracy can be avoided by incorporating practical experience and observations continuously into the development of practical systems and methodologies so that theory and practice become increasingly aligned over time to continuously improve efficiency and effectiveness of practical activities in the material world.
−	***** Luddite Attacks on Evolving Elite Technology	+	On the contrary, if the role of practice is absolutized [to the exclusion of conscious activity], it will fall into pragmatism and empiricism.
−	Just as we should oppose the militarised arms of capital based here so to we must slow the evolution of new elite technologies (weaponry for the class war) being developed here. One of the major aims of genetic engineering is to purposefully destroy the social fabric that keeps the land community together and fully incorporate the peasantry into the global cash economy. The threat is neutralised and becomes fuel for the machine’s further expansion.	+	-----
−	GM sabotage throughout the world is growing. Here in Britain we can say that we have hindered the evolution of this technology considerably.	+	==== Annotation 223 ====
−	As the Luddites of today, we know that, given the continuation of this society, halting-forever-the development of new technological weaponry might not be possible. Even if we don’t succeed in stopping genetic engineering we have already slowed down the introduction of this technology. What this means in real terms is that we’ve succeeded in delaying the further degradation of the lives of millions of people. We have delayed for months, maybe years the ecological destruction, hunger, despair, and domestic abuse that social dislocation brings. If that is all we succeed in then we have achieved much.[383]	+	In this context, ''pragmatism'' refers to a form of subjectivism [see Annotation 222, above] in which one centers one’s own immediate material concerns over all other considerations. For example, workers may place their own immediate needs and desires above the concerns of their fellow workers as a whole. This may offer some temporary gains, but in the long run their lack of solidarity and class consciousness will be detrimental as workers collectively suffer from division, making all workers more vulnerable to exploitation and ill treatment by the capitalist class.
−	By slowing technologies of enclosure we are defending the ability of Majority World peasant communities to rebel. More will suffer as a result of these enclosures than ever do in overt global policing operations/ imperialist wars. Effective action against GM and other elite technologies are direct attacks on empire’s power of expansion. Let’s keep at it.	+	''Empiricism'' is a faulty form of materialism in which ''only'' sense experience and practical experience are considered sources of truth. This is opposed to the dialectical materialist position that the material ''determines'' consciousness, while consciousness ''impacts'' the material world through conscious labor activity. [See ''The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness'', p. 88]
−	***** Smashing Up the Spectacle, Spectacularly!	+	Thus, the principle of the ''unification'' of practice and theory must be the basic principle in practical and theoretical activities. Theory without practice as its basis and criterion for determining its truthfulness is useless. Vice versa, practice without scientific and revolutionary theory will inevitably turn into blind practice. [As Ho Chi Minh once said: “Study and practice must always go together. Study without practice is useless. Practice without study leads to folly.”]
−	The recent global resistance period has been hugely successful in building solidarity across borders and in supporting rebellions beyond the core. Radicals in every part of world have fought together on the PGA-called international days of action. This physical unity is immensely powerfol. Beyond direct communication the conflict on the streets has itself an important message, one that cannot be diluted by the forces of mediation.	+	== 2. Dialectical Path of Consciousness to Truth ==
−	<quote>	+	=== a. Opinions of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin about the Dialectical Path of Consciousness to Truth ===
−	This is one important thing to remember about Genoa-because it was the GS summit, all the world’s media were there, and <em>the news and the images of the rioting will have been carried back to almostevery country in the world. The value of this, especially in much of the Third World is inestimable. Many people in other countries in the world imagine that everyone in the West lives a life of indolent luxury. Remember that Baywatch is the most popular</em> TV <em>programme in the world. This is the image that many people across the world have of life in the West. It is very valuable for them to see images of things they are familiar with-poor people fighting the police-taking place in the ‘rich’ West, leading them to see that the image they have been fed of the Western lifestyle is not all it’s cracked up to be and that maybe there are people like them in the Westfightingfor the same things they are fighting for. The riots in Genoa will send a message of hope to</em> people all over the world that right inside the belly of the beast there are thousands ofpeople who are against the system and <em>are prepared to risk their own life and liberty to fight it.[384]</em>
−	</quote>
−	For a moment Genoa’s burning barricades effectively monkeywrenched the global image factory that aims to haemorrhage the self worth ofpeoples in the Majority World, to make more malleable fodder for the global economy.	+	==== Annotation 224 ====
−	The environment created by the street at global conferences has also helped open up cracks in empire. The collapse ofthe Seattle-era WTO negotiations a good example. Another is the increased bargaining power the protest has given Majority World elites. They, like all of their global class are scum, but any action that opens up divisions in the global ruling class while bridging gaps between the global multitude is great.	+	The section below outlines and explains ''the Universal Law of Consciousness'', which holds that consciousness is a process of dialectical development in which practical activity leads to conscious activity, which then leads back to practical activity, in a continuous and never-ending cycle, with a tendency to develop both practical and conscious activity to increasingly higher levels.
−	***** Task Conclusion: There is No Rosy Picture	+	In his ''Philosophical Notebook'', Lenin generalized the dialectical path towards the realization of truth as development from vivid visualization to abstract thinking, and then from abstraction back to practice. This process, according to Lenin, is the dialectical path towards the realization of truth, and the realization of objective reality.
−	While I tend towards believing libertarian social (r)evolution is extremely unlikely within the core, I don’t have a particularly rosy picture for the Majority World either.	+	According to this generalization, the dialectical path towards the realization of truth (“truth,” here, referring to a correct and accurate reflection of objective reality) is a process. It is a process that starts from “vivid visualization” (emotional consciousness) to “abstract thinking” (rational consciousness).
−	The combined factors of social dislocation, the spread of adolescent culture, the increasing dep-redation of the poor--especially of women, growing religious fundamentalism, bad health, agricultural crises, climate crises, the quickening internalisation of all into the global economy, the continuing survival of authoritarian ideologies-Marxism and nationalism in particular and most of all the unparalleled disparity in any capacity for force between the Core and its colonial multitudes; all these factors lead to a pretty horrific future for the majority of the worlds population.	+	-----
−	Presently the oppressed throughout the world are hamstrung, how long this will remain one cannot say. However there is no point in being absolutist. Just because the arrival of global freedom has been (maybe terminally) delayed does not mean that action is without purpose. By supporting ecological and libertarian rebellions and anti-enclosure struggles we aid the opening up of local freedoms and slow the devastation of the earth..	+	==== Annotation 225 ====
−	***** Conclusion: Fires in the Night	+	Given that consciousness has a material basis, and that practical activities are the driving force of consciousness [see Annotation 230, p. 226], it follows that we must strive to align our conscious thoughts and ideas with the material world. The more accurately we can reflect reality in our consciousness, the more effectively and efficiently our practical activities can become.
−	I hope the conclusion to this pre-history and future strategy will not be written in words-but in action.	+	For example, through learning more about the mechanical, material, and physical processes which take place inside of an automobile engine, the more we can improve engines to make them more efficient and effective for practical applications.
−	I went to a funeral. An ending, but it felt like a beginning. Old Mick was a veteran squatter, rebel and thief. His most successful heist was the reclaiming of his life from those bosses andjailers who think they own us. For decades he lived in the gaps. No one made him into a wageslave. No dropout, he fought. He was no saint, but if ever there was a temporary autonomous zone, Mick was it.	+	Lenin explained that consciousness develops from “emotional consciousness” to “rational consciousness.” Thought about a subject begins at a base level of consciousness that is rooted in emotional and sense-oriented conscious activity, i.e, “vivid visualization,” which then leads to rational, abstract reflection.
−	His funeral was one of the best actions I have ever been on. Mick wanted to burn in Lyminge Forest, a large part of which was saved from destruction by direct action. Funeral pyres are ille-gal, death rights have to be sanctioned by the state. Mick wasn’t going to take that, neither were his mates.	+	By “vivid visualization,” Lenin is referring to the active, real-time experience of seeing (and hearing, smelling, and otherwise sensing) things and phenomena in the world.
−	Thanks to a snitch the cops had got wind of the plan and a decoy was arranged to throw them off the scent. Meet up points were organised, phones rung. From all over the country vehicles arrived at the secret destination, appropriately marked Covert Woods on the OS map. Over a hundred were gathered. Ten foot the pyre of stolen wood rose, Mick’s coffin astride. Night came. Fireworks shot into the sky. Crackling fire, we saw Mick’s bones burn, back to the earth. For hours he burned. Some were lairy, some were silent. All of us knew that despite the petty daily bother, we were tribe and on the pyre was one of our elders.	+	When a person experiences something through practical activity, the first conscious activity will tend to occur at the emotional and sensory level — in other words, the conscious activities which occur simultaneously along with practical activities. Only after this initial period of emotional consciousness will one be able to reflect on the experience on a more rational and abstract level.
−	Away from the roads, fearful in the dark-authority crept. The cops knew they had no power here. In the woods, a short confrontation. We were many, they were few. Behind our line-a fire. They listed their petty rules. Illegal gathering. Illegal land occupation. Not to mention illegal funeral. But they could do nothing. Just then a track on the sound system announced with base certainty: Ihe day belongs to Ihe Man, but we shall control the night.	+	For example, if a zoologist in the field sees a species of bird they have never encountered before, their first conscious activity will be at the sensory-emotional level: they will observe the shape, coloration, and motion of the bird. They may feel excitement, happiness, and other emotions. This is emotional conscious activity.
−	***** Be the Spark	+	This emotional conscious activity will then develop into rational conscious activity, as the zoologist may begin to consider things more abstractly, attempting to interpret and understand this experience through reason and rational reflection, asking such questions as: “Where does this bird nest? What does it feed on? Is this a new discovery?” and so on.
−	When we step out of legality, when we are masked by the night, when we become the earth, we are unconquerable.	+	Such abstractions are not the end point of a cognitive cycle, because consciousness must then continue to develop through practice. It is through practice that perception tests and proves its own correctness so that it can then continue on to repeat the cycle.
−	These moments of collective power, of togetherness and tribe, are not limited to those times we mass together. In the dark in different places, different times, our sparks join together as one fire. Many of us will never meet each other; all the better, we’ll still be one-but those who want to extinguish our flames will find it all the more difl cult.	+	This is also the general rule of the human perception of objective reality.
−	Sun Tzu counselled that even under attack an enemy will only fall through its own mistakes and weakness. The key to victory is not so much to defeat one’s enemy, instead it is to make oneself undefeatable.	+	-----
−	lhis is true for our aim, objectives and form. In a sense it is the depth of our victory which is at stake; as victory, given our aim, is not in question. For we know one thing; civilisation is temporary, an aberration. lhe class war is vicious-but there can be only one winner, the wild. We aim to shorten civilisation’s rule, to hamstring its tyranny, to lessen its damage. How far we succeed will in large part depend on which objectives we set and which forms we grow.	+	==== Annotation 226 ====
−	Of course our networks have not come out of nowhere, but have evolved within struggle. Many of what others see as our weaknesses, are our greatest strengths-with us thanks to a rejection of past mistakes. Our tactics are pretty direct, our immediate objectives usually achievable, our forms relatively autonomous.	+	Thus there is a dialectical relationship between emotional consciousness (linked to practical activity) and rational consciousness (linked to purely conscious activity).
−	As the corporations and states grow ever more powerful they know they can win any ‘symmet-rical conflict’. What the strategists of authority view with horror is the potential ‘network power’ of increasingly direct, decentralised, oppositional movements. Their nightmare, our dream; but to reach our potential we must go far beyond ourselves.	+	This dialectical relationship is a cycle, in which one engages in practical activity, which leads to emotional consciousness, which leads to rational consciousness, which then leads back to practical activity to test the correctness of the conclusions of rational conscious activity.
−	Our strength is in our ability to take action and by doing so inspire olhers to take action. Nol mass growth but cellular growth.	+	We call this cycle of development of consciousness the cognitive process.
−	Rooting ourselves in the soil and the future, with keen strategy and an ever more tangible-but less visible-combative edge, we can get far stronger.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-84.png|''The cognitive process is a continuous cycle which describes the dialectical development of consciousness and practical activity.'']]
−	Our tribes, our counter cultures will grow. We’ll prepare for the fight. No prostituting ourselves to the media, we’ll grow in the shadows, but strike when needed. New technologies will attempt to track us, we’ll have to evolve to throw them off the scent. Some of the old techniques will have to be , abandoned, others picked up. No faces. No names. No Compromise.	+	The cognitive process is explained in more detail below.
−	For over a decade many on this island have fought for the earth. Yet if we are going to truly defect we will have to struggle harder, think quicker and live wilder. lhe long trek back to the earth and each other is only beginning. In writing this I merely hope to aid our navigation. Part One showed where we came from. Part Two pointed a few routes to the future. The four tasks are huge; yet with sensible objective-led thinking, luck and hard will, they are perfectly realisable.	+	-----
−	<br>Imagine the machines, the pylons, the factories, the labs, the tanks-broken by you.
−	<br>Imagine the wind, the sun, the beautiful moments-lived by you.
−	Down with the Empire! Up with the Spring!	+	'''- Development From Emotional Consciousness to Rational Consciousness'''
−	<quote>	+	''Emotional consciousness is the lower stage of the cognitive process.'' In this stage of cognitive development, humans use — through practical activity — use our senses to reflect objective things and phenomena (with all their perceived specific characteristics and rich manifestations) in human consciousness. During this period, consciousness only reflects the phenomena [i.e, ''phenomena'', as opposed to ''essence'' — see ''Essence and Phenomenon'', p. 156] — the external manifestations — of the perceived subject. At this stage, consciousness has not yet reflected the ''essence'' — the nature, and/or the regulating principles — of the subject. Therefore, this is the lowest stage of development of the cognitive process. In this stage, consciousness is carried out through three basic phases: ''sensation'', ''conception'', and ''symbolization''.
−	<em>Whatever you can do, or dream you can-begin it.</em>
−	<br><em>Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.</em>
−	<br><em>Begin it now.</em>
−	<right>	+	Human ''sensation'' of an objective thing or phenomenon is the simplest, most primitive phase of the emotional consciousness stage of the cognitive processes, but without it there would not be any perception of objective things or phenomena. Every human sensation of objective things and phenomena contains objective content [see Content and Form, p. 147], even though it arises as subjective human conscious reflection. Sensation is the subjective imagining of the objective world. It is the basis from which the next phase of emotional consciousness — ''conception'' — is formed.
−	--Goethe
−	</right>
−	</quote>
−	*** Appendix: Love’s Labours Lost	+	''Conception'' is a relatively complete reflection within human consciousness of objective things and phenomena. Conception is formed on the basis of linking and synthesizing sensational experiences of things and phenomena [i.e., ''sensation'']. Compared with sensation, conception is a higher, fuller, richer form of consciousness, but it is still a reflection of the outward manifestations of objects. Conception does not yet reflect the essence, nature, and regulating principles of the perceived subject.
−	In Britain-birth place of industry-the transitional class came much earlier than elsewhere. Defeated in a bitter class struggle Britain’s poor had internalised industrial logic and embraced social democratic ideas even in the midst of continuing struggle. The working class (under signif-icant influence from marxist socialists) created the hopelessly reformist Labour movement which in turn institutionalised the culture of working class mutual aid in the welfare state.	+	''Symbolization'' is the representation of an objective thing or phenomenon that has been reflected by sensation and conception. It is the most advanced and most complex phase of the stage of emotional consciousness. At the same time, it also serves as the transitional step between emotional consciousness and rational consciousness. The defining characteristic of symbolism is the ability to reproduce symbolic ideas of objective things and phenomena within human consciousness. Symbolization describes the act of recreating the outward appearances of material things and phenomena within human consciousness, which is the first step of abstraction, and thus the first step towards rational consciousness.
−	Thus whereas Spanish working class solidarity grew anarchist (r)cvolution and the CNT, British working class solidarity produced the welfare state and the Labour Party. The post war ‘triumph’ of the labour movement and the founding of the welfare state was the near total subsumption of the working class by the state, not the other way round as lefties choose to believe.	+	-----
−	The welfare state produced a security for capitalism which enabled it to set out on a period of expansion such as had not been seen since the exuberance of the early nineteenth century. An expansion which is bringing life to the brink.	+	==== Annotation 227 ====
−	The intergenerational culture of the British labour movement has now been destroyed over the last 20 years or so by Thatcherism/ Neoliberalism. With the decimation ofheavy industry and the restructuring of the economy most of the old strongholds of the British workers movement no longer exist-e.g. mining, shipbuilding, the docks, and the nationalised industries.	+	Here is an example of the three phases of the emotional consciousness stage of the cognitive process:
−	**** The Mediterranean Hotspot	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-85.png]]
−	This huge hotspot stretches from Portugal to Jordan and from the Canary Islands to Northern Italy. It encompasses all of Cyprus and over 903 of Greece, Lebanon, and Portugal. though less than 103 of France, Algeria, and Libya. In Spain, 6,000 of the country’s 7,500 plant species occur within the Mediterranean climate zone, in Israel 1,500 out of 2,200, and in Morocco 3,800 out of 4,200.	+	''1.'' ''Sensation'': Jessica ''senses'' a cake in the window of a bakery. She ''sees'' the frosting, the shape of the cake, and the decorations which adorn the cake. She ''smells'' the cake. During this phase, objective data about the cake is received into her consciousness, developing into an immediate and subjective sense perception of the cake. The beginnings of this cognitive activity will be purely sensory in nature; she may have been thinking of other things as she walked by the bakery, but the sight and smell of the cake, upon registering in her mind, will lead to the beginning of a new cognitive process cycle.
−	The flora of the Mediterranean Basin includes 25,000 species of vascular plants, 13,000 ofwhich are endemic. This figure is very high when compared to the 6,000 species of non-Mediterranean Europe in an area nearly four times as large. It is also the third highest of all the hotspots, being surpassed only by the Tropical Andes and Sundaland.	+	''2.'' ''Conception'': Jessica begins to ''conceive'' of the cake in her mind more fully. She will associate the immediate sense experiences of seeing and smelling the cake with other experiences she has had with cake, and a complete mental image and concept of the cake will form in her mind.
−	The Basin’s violent geographical history has produced an unusual geographical and topographical diversity, with high mountain ranges, peninsulas, and one of the largest archipelagos in the world. The Mediterranean Sea includes several hundred islands.	+	''3.'' ''Symbolization'': The word “cake” may now form in her mind, and she may begin thinking of the cake more abstractly, as “food,” as a “temptation,” and in other ways. This is the beginning of abstraction in Jessica’s mind, which will then lead to rational conscious activities.
−	In mammal and bird faunas endemism is moderate, at 253 and 143. The reptile and amphibian faunas on the other hand, have levels of endemism of 613 and 523.	+	Note that all of these phases of emotional consciousness activity may take place very quickly, perhaps in a fraction of a second, and may coincide with other conscious activity (i.e., Jessica may simultaneously be thinking of a meeting she’s running late to and any number of other things). At this point, Jessica will transition to the ''rational consciousness'' stage of the cognitive process'','' which is explained in more detail below.
−	The typical and most widespread vegetation type is a hard-leafed shrubland dominated by evergreens. Shrublands, including maquis and the aromatic, soft-leafed and drought deciduous phrygana, have persisted throughout the Q!,iaternary in the semiarid, lowland, and coastal regions of the Basin. However, prior to the onset of significant human impact, which started some 8,000 years ago, most of the Mediterranean Basin was covered by some form of forest, including evergreen oak forests, deciduous forests, and conifer forests.	+	-----
−	Endemics are concentrated on islands, peninsulas, rocky cliffs, and mountain peaks. The principal foci in the Mediterranean are 10 smaller “mini-hotspots within the larger hotspot:’ These 10 are areas in which unusual amounts of original vegetation still survive and where many of the endemic species hang on, albeit several threatened. These areas cover about 153 of the Basin’s total area, yet account for almost 4,800 endemics, or 373 of the total tally. Clearly, these are priority sites for conservation of these plant components of Mediterranean biodiversity.	+	By the end of the emotional stage of the cognitive process, consciousness has not yet reflected the essence — the nature, regulating principles, etc. — of the perceived subject. Therefore, at the emotional stage, consciousness is not yet able to properly ''interpret'' the reflected subject. That is to say, emotional conscious activity does not meet the cognitive requirements to serve practical activities, including the need to creatively transform the objective world. To meet these requirements, emotional consciousness must develop into ''rational consciousness''.
−	Diversity and endemism among Mediterranean Basin vertebrates is much lower than for plants. The present number ofland mammals in the region is about 184, of which 46 (253) are endemic. During the Holocene, but especially in the last few thousand years, many of the larger mammals became extinct because of aridification, habitat alteration, and persecution. ‘Ille earliest victims included some spectacular species like dwarf hippopotamuses and elephants on some islands. These were followed by other large mammals, including the African elephant, wild ass, scimitar-horned oryx, northern hartebeest, and lion. Still others are so severely depleted as to be on the verge of extinction, among them the brown bear, leopard, and Mediterranean monk seal.	+	''Rational consciousness is the higher stage of the cognitive process.'' It includes the indirect, abstract, and generalized reflection of the essential properties and characteristics of things and phenomena. This stage of consciousness performs the most important function of comprehending and interpreting the ''essence'' of the perceived subject. Rational consciousness is implemented through three basic phases: ''definition'', ''judgment'', and ''reasoning''.
−	The region’s avifauna includes about 345 breeding species of which only 47 (143) are endemic. A few small portions of the Mediterranean Basin also appear as priorities in BirdLife International’s recent global analysis of Endemic Bird Areas (EBAs). These are Cyprus, with two bird species confined to that EBA, and Madeira and the Canary Islands, with nine species, eight of them confined to the EBA, and one species, the Canary Islands oystercatcher already extinct.	+	''Definition'' is the first phase of rational consciousness. During this phase, the mind begins to interpret, organize, and process the basic properties of things and phenomena at a rational level into a conceptual whole. The formation of definition is the result of the summarization and synthesis of all the different characteristics and properties of the subject, and how the subject fits into the organized structure of knowledge which exists in the mind. Definition is the basis for forming judgments in the cognitive process.
−	Endemism is much better developed in reptiles, with 179 species, 110 (613) of which are endemic, and amphibians, with 62 species, 32 (523) ofwhich are endemic. Reptile diversity is highest in the drier, eastern and North African parts of the Basin, whereas the opposite is true of amphibians. For both groups, the Mediterranean Basin is an important centre of diversity and endemism for some families.	+	''Judgment'' is the next phase of rational consciousness, which arises from the definition of the subject — the linking of concepts and properties together — which leads to affirmative or negative ideation of certain characteristics or attributes of the perceived subject.
−	As is the case for the other hotspots, much less is known about the invertebrate fauna. One of the exceptions are the insect pollinators, which have been relatively well-studied as a group. The dominant pollinators are bees, with an estimated 3,000–4,000 species.	+	According to the level of development of consciousness, judgment may take one of three forms: unique judgment, general judgment, and universal judgment [see Annotation 105, p. 107]. Universal judgment is the form of judgement that expresses the broadest conception of objective reality.
−	**** Flagship Species	+	''Reasoning'' is the final phase of rational consciousness, formed on the basis of synthesizing judgments so as to extrapolate new knowledge about the perceived subject. Before reasoning can take place, judgments must be transformed into knowledge. A judgment can be transformed into knowledge through one of two logical mechanisms: deductive inference (which extrapolates the general from the specific), and inductive inference (which extrapolates the specific from the general).
−	The Mediterranean Basin is characterised more by its plants than its animals. Among the interest-ing plants are the cedars: one endemic to Cyprus and represented only by a very small relic popu-lation; another, fairly abundant in Morocco and Algeria but experiencing very rapid depletion by timber cutters; and a third. the famous Lebanon cedar, mentioned below, hangs on in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. Another interesting endemic flagship species is the only palm tree native to the Basin, found exclusively in a tiny corner of Crete and on the Datca peninsula in Turkey, where it is threatened by tourist development.	+	-----
−	A number of animals qualify as flagship species as well. Particularly noteworthy are the ‘Mediter-ranean’ tortoises, four in number. Among the endemic mammals, there are several standouts as well. The Barbary macaque is now found in relatively small and disjunct habitat pockets in the Rif, Loyen, and Haut Atlas mountain ranges of Morocco, and in the Chiffa, Petite, and Grande Kabylies mountain ranges ofAlgeria, with a small, well-known population on Gibraltar that lives in a free-ranging state but is provisioned. It is believed that the Gibraltar macaques were present since early times, but have been sporadically replenished by imports from Morocco. The Gibraltar macaques are now the only free-living nonhuman primates in Europe.	+	==== Annotation 228 ====
−	The Barbary deer is confined to a small area of cork oak and pine forest on the border between Algeria and Tunisia. The population is down to only a few hundred individuals, including those in captivity in both countries. The Corsican red deer is considered extinct in Corsica, and is now found only in three mountainous areas near the southern coast of Sardinia. The total population is only about 200.	+	Here is an example of the three phases of the rational consciousness stage of the cognitive process, continuing from our previous example of the emotional consciousness stage [see Annotation 227, p. 222].
−	The Mediterranean monk seal, though primarily a marine species, does use coastal beaches and has long been an important symbol. It was once distributed throughout the Mediterranean, the Northwest coast of Africa, and the Black Sea. Today, the approximate 400 animals that still survive have been pushed to isolated spots in Turkey, Greece, the Atlantic coast of Morocco, Mauritania, Sardinia, Algeria, and Madeira.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-86.png]]
−	Remnant populations of other once wide-ranging mamals include the brown bear, which still hangs on in the mountains of Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and some of the Balkan countries, and two subspecies ofthe leopard, the North African leopard and the Anatolian leopard, both of which are considered critically endangered.	+	''1.'' ''Definition'': Jessica’s conception of the cake will transition into the rational conscious activity of ''definition''. Jessica will begin to define the concept of the cake more wholly and concretely, summarizing and synthesizing all of the features and characteristics of the cake into a cohesive mental reflection of the cake. The word “cake” may become more pronounced and defined in Jessica’s consciousness, prompting her to think of the object which she defines as a “cake” more fully and rationally.
−	**** Threats	+	''2.'' ''Judgment'': Jessica will begin to form basic judgments about the cake. “That cake looks good,” “that cake smells good,” and so on. Next, these judgments will begin to transform into knowledge through inductive or deductive inferences. An inductive inference might be: “I generally enjoy eating cakes, therefore, I might enjoy eating this cake!” An example of a deductive inference might be: “This cake looks very delicious, therefore, there might be other delicious things in this bakery!”
−	The present human population of the Mediterranean Basin is some 300 million, although population pressures have existed for millennia. Indeed, there is no other region in the world where the development of ecosystems has been intimately associated with human social systems for so long. The region has been home to sizeable human settlements for well over two millennia and significant human activity for another six millennia (there was a large town in Turkey 8,400 years ago!). In Roman times, the more fertile parts of Tunisia and Algeria-Rome’s bread basket-were laid waste through agricultural overuse, and the historian Pliny warned the ancient Greeks of the damages of deforestation. In Lebanon, the uplands were once covered with stately cedars whose height, strength, and utility became legendary throughout the Old World. Felling of the trees started as early as 3,000 BC, when the Phoenicians began a lucrative trade in cedarwood with the Egyptian Pharaohs and King Solomon, among others. Now the Lebanon highlands have lost most of their trees, and the cedar is a threatened species.	+	''3.'' ''Reasoning'': Processes of inductive and/or deductive inference will begin to transform Jessica’s judgments into the form of knowledge. For instance, she may now possess such knowledge as: “This bakery has delicious looking cakes, this is a cake I would like to eat,” and so on. With this newly acquired knowledge, Jessica can begin reasoning; that is to say, she can begin making rational conclusions and decisions. She might conclude: “I will go into this bakery and buy that cake.”
−	The impact ofthis long history of human assault on Mediterranean ecosystems has been huge. Perhaps the most severe transformation has been the conversion of forests, especially primeval deciduous forests, to agricultural lands, evergreen woodlands, and maquis. The first significant deforestation began as early as 8,000 BC, and increased dramatically at the end of the Neolithic. Each wave of civilisation created new pressures on the forests, culminating in the rapid human population growth and widespread increase in mechanised agriculture of the present century.	+	Note that this is not the “end” of the cognitive process, because the final phase of the reasoning stage of the cognitive process (reasoning) will lead directly into a new cycle of the cognitive process. In this example, Jessica might engage in the practical activity of checking her watch to see the time, which will begin a new cycle of cognitive process, beginning with the ''sensation'' phase of the emotional stage as the visual sense data of her watch and carrying through to the final ''reasoning'' phase of the rational stage, and so on.
−	A crucial factor is fragmentation. The original vegetation has been reduced to only small patches today. This is hardly more than to be expected of a region that has been heavily settled for over 2,000 years, longer than any other hotspot. While some vegetation fragments still total several hundred square kilometres, many are less than 100 km<sup>2</sup>, a few are 10km<sup>2</sup> at most, and one or two are down to a final handful of hectares. Equally significant are many of the 13,000 endemic plant species, that are narrow endemic, confined to unusually small areas. This makes them exceptionally susceptible to threats such as expanding farming, overgrazing by domestic stock, and spread of urban communities. Indeed, probably more species have already been driven to extinction in this hotspot than virtually any other, some species having been eliminated many centuries ago, totalling probably hundreds of plant species alone. As for threatened species, the total for plants is put as high as one half of the entire flora.	+	It should also be noted that this is merely an abstraction of the cognitive process; in reality, the human mind is incredibly complex, capable of carrying out a variety of cognitive processes simultaneously. At any given moment, a person might be considering various different subjects, and each different subject might be at a different stage of the cognitive process. This abstract model of the cognitive process is presented to help us comprehend the component functions of consciousness more easily in the wider context of dialectical materialist philosophy.
−	lhe outlook is not propitious, if only by reason of the surge in human numbers and their de-mands. While one can readily point a finger at population growth in non-European countries it is Northern Europeans that generate most of the tourist influx to the shores of the Mediterranean as the biggest large-scale tourist attraction in the world. There are a:round 100 million visitors per year already, scheduled to become twice as many within another two decades. The tourism sector is flourishing and expanding its disruptive impact in Spain, France, Italy and Greece, and increasingly in Turkey, Cyprus, Tunisia, and Morocco. Through the spread of hotels and associated buildings, the construction of roads and other infrastructure-plus the impact of millions of feet trampling through fragile environments every day-tourism has caused exceptional damage. It is now the most serious threat to seminatural areas in Western and Southern Turkey, and in Cyprus, Tunisia, and Morocco, a list that may shortly be joined by Greece among several other countries, particularly as concerns the Mediterranean islands such as the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia, Crete, and the Canary and Madeira islands.	+	Specifically, this model of the cognitive process is intended to help us understand how human consciousness leads to “truth.” And “truth,” here, refers to the alignment of human consciousness with the material world, so that our perceptions and understanding of the world is accurate and representative of actual reality.
−	There are also growing threats from what has always been the number one competitor for natural environments, agriculture. More people generally means more farmland to support them. The main agricultural threat today lies within food demands from people in far-off lands. Consumers of Northern Europe are becoming accustomed to strawberries and carnations right around the year, and during October-March they turn to warmer climates for supplies. Thus the speedy expansion of horticulture in many parts of the Basin; the market is already huge.	+	''- The Relationship Between Emotional Consciousness, Rational Consciousness, and Reality''
−	As for population growth, the countries of the Southern and Eastern seaboards are projected to increase their numbers by 543 as early as the year 2025. Partly because of population pressures, environments are declining apace. Morocco, Tunisia and Libya each are losing around 1,000 km2 to desertification every year, and Algeria still more.	+	Emotional consciousness and rational consciousness are stages that make up the cognitive cycle. In reality, they are often intertwined within the cognitive process, but they have different functions. If ''emotional consciousness'' is associated with reality, and with the impact of sense data received from observing the material world, and is the basis for cognitive reason, then ''rational consciousness'', based on higher cognitive understanding and abstraction, allows us to understand the essence, nature, regulating principles, and development processes of things and phenomena. Rational consciousness helps direct emotional consciousness in a more efficient and effective direction and leads to more profound and accurate emotional consciousness.
−	All of these factors contribute to making the Mediterranean Basin one of the hottest of the hotspots; indeed in many ways it is hyper-hot, scoring very high in the fundamental criteria that we use to define hotspots. It is exceptionally rich in diversity, especially plants, and second in the world in plant endemism. In is also highly threatened, and in fact has the lowest percentage of natural vegetation remaining in pristine condition of any hotspot.	+	-----
−	**** The Mediterranean Red Alert Areas	+	==== Annotation 229 ====
−	1. Atlas Mountains	+	In other words, considering a subject at the level of rational consciousness allows us to then view the same subject, at an emotional consciousness level, with more depth and awareness.
−	2. Rif-Betique in Southern Spain and two coastal strips of Morocco and Algeria	+	For example, the more time we have spent rationally considering something like a bicycle, the more quickly and accurately we can examine a bicycle at the level of emotional consciousness. If someone is looking at a bicycle for the first time, they might not be able to distinguish its component parts or functions. On the other hand, if someone has spent more time considering bicycles at the level of rational consciousness, they may be able to immediately and rapidly understand and process a bicycle at the emotional conscious level, so that they can perceive and comprehend the different parts of a bicycle, as well as their functions, immediately and at the emotional-sensory level.
−	3. Maritime Alps of the French-Italian border	+	However, if we stop at rational consciousness, we will only have knowledge about the subjects we perceive, but we still won’t really know if that knowledge is truly accurate or not. In order to be useful in practical activity, we must consciously determine whether knowledge is ''truth'' [i.e., whether the knowledge accurately reflects reality]. In order to determine the truth of knowledge, consciousness must necessarily return to reality. Consciousness must use reality as a criterion — a measurement — of the authenticity of knowledge gained through purely cognitive processes. In other words, all consciousness is ultimately derived from practical needs, and must also return to serve practical activities.
−	4. Tyrrhenian Islands (Balerarics, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily) 5. Southern and Central Greece	+	-----
−	6. Crete	+	==== Annotation 230 ====
−	7. Southern Turkey/Cyprus	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-87.png|''The dialectical relationship between consciousness and practical activities means that conscious activities develop practical activities, and vice versa, in a continuous feedback loop.'']]
−	8. Israel and Lebanon	+	One of the fundamental principles of dialectical materialism is that the material determines the ideal, and the ideal impacts the material [see The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness]. The fact that the material determines consciousness is reflected in the fact that material needs led to the development of consciousness, and conscious activity stems from material needs [see Social Sources of Consciousness].
−	9. Cyrenaica (the Libyan ‘bump’)	+	The fact that the ideal impacts the material is reflected in the fact that consciousness must always return to the service of practical activities; as our consciousness develops (along with knowledge), our ability to impact and transform the material world becomes more efficient and effective.
−	10. Canaries/Madeira Islands	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-88.png|''The dialectical relationship between consciousness and practical activity is what drives the development of humanity. We imagine better ways of doing things, then test those ideas against reality through practical activity.'']]
−	**** Conservation	+	This dialectical relationship between consciousness and practical activity is thus cyclical. Conscious activity arises from practical activity, and returns to practical activity, in an endless process of developing both conscious ability as well as practical ability.
−	The Basin’s protected areas are of diverse sorts and cover 1.83 of the total area.	+	-----
−	Today, most countries of the Basin are planning substantial increases in their protected area systems. But due to the demands of agriculture and other activities that absorb large tracts of natural environment, many protected areas are too small to meet the imperatives of island biogeography. Moreover, many protected areas suffer some effects of pollution arising far outside their specific locations. Some of them are short of water after feeder rivers rising in distant watersheds have been diverted for industry, agriculture, and urban communities. All of these problems are likely to become more pronounced as human numbers and human demands keep on growing-and that is without counting the rigors of enhanced U-VB radiation through the depleted ozone layer and the onset of global warming with its many dislocations of plant communities. In a greenhouse-affected world, plant and animal communities will try to follow warm-temperature zones as these head northwards. Those in Northern Italy will have to try to migrate over the Alps and those in Eastern Spain over the Pyrenees, while those in Western Spain and Portugal will find themselves migrating into the Bay of Biscany.	+	Therefore, it can be seen that the general, cyclical nature of the process of movement and development of consciousness develops from practice to consciousness — from consciousness to practice — from practical activity to the continued process of cognitive development, and so on. This process is repeated continuously, without end. The development level of consciousness and practice in the next cycle are often higher than in the previous cycle, and the cognitive process gradually develops more and more accuracy, as well as fuller and deeper knowledge about objective reality.
−	**** Some (Don’t) Like it Hot(spot)	+	The universal law of consciousness [see Annotation 224, p. 219] is also a concrete and vivid manifestation of the universal laws of materialist dialectics, including: the law of negation of negation, the law of transformation between quantity and quality and the law of unity and contradiction between opposites. The process of cognitive motion and development, governed by these general laws, is the process of human progress towards absolute truth [see Annotation 232, p. 228].
−	While this section leans heavily on the hotspot theory, for good reasons, it is merely a system of global priority setting and thus should not become ideology. At base the very utility of such a project can be questioned-is global (rather than local) thinking possible or even desirable? Should our objectives be taken from cold, scientific number crunching? Unfortunately I think our time and geographic location force us to such analysis if we are to have an impact on biological meltdown. Other biological priority systems are out there but if we accept the need to go in this direction I reckon the hotspot theory offers the best route.	+	-----
−	On a similar tack we should not see species diversity as a measure of the value of specific ecologies. Te basic tenant of biocentric thought is after all that wild nature has value in and of itself. The kind of discourse that leads to telling phrases like species richness is poor substitute for a real connection with nature. In relation to Red Alert areas a true holistic/whole ecosystem approach is essential. There is after all little point protecting a habitat if, outside the protected area, the river that services it is dammed or redirected.	+	==== Annotation 231 ====
−	There is one deep worry I have about the hotspot theory--maybe it’s simply too hopeful.	+	The universal law of consciousness is governed by the three universal laws of materialist dialectics:
−	It concentrates on those highly diverse areas at imminent high risk of desolation. It’s global-->regional-->local priorities are Hottest of the Hot-->individual hotspots-->Red Alert areas within the Hotspots.	+	''The Law of Negation of Negation'' dictates that the new will arise from the old, but will carry forward characteristics from the old. This is reflected in the universal law of consciousness in that conscious activity arises from practical activity. This conscious activity then develops into improved practical activity, and so on, in a never-ending cycle of development. Throughout this development process, characteristics of previous cycles of cognitive and practical activities are carried forward and transferred on to newer cycles of cognitive and practical activities.
−	By concentrating on those precious areas most at threat we are possibly concentrating our energy in those areas in which we are most likely to lose.	+	''The Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality'' recognizes that quantity changes develop into changes in quality, and vice versa. This is reflected in the universal law of consciousness in the development of both conscious and practical activities. Conscious development also develops from quantitative changes to quality changes, and vice versa. For example, once a person accumulates a certain quantity of knowledge, the quality of their knowledge will change. For example, once a person has learned the function of every component part of a car engine, they will have a ''quality shift'' in their understanding of car engines — they will now have competency of the functioning of the engine as a whole. This is also true of practical activities. A quantity of practical experience will lead to quality shifts in practical ability. For example, once a person has practiced riding a bicycle enough that they can reliably ride the bicycle without falling, we would say that the person “knows how to ride a bicycle,” which represents a quality shift from the state of “learning how to ride a bicycle.”
−	This is a dilemma worth pointing to because other strategies are available-though ones with more depressing conclusions. Tis then swings on one’s calculation of the collective power that ecological direct action, conservation biology, enlightened bureaucrats (ha!) and popular movements can muster. I choose to believe that we can have some serious impact in the hotspots, but it would not be exactly illogical to think otherwise. Many of the Red Alert areas specifically and some of the hotspots in general are probably doomed. It might make more strategic sense to concentrate instead on the less devastated/domesticated areas (the big rainforest wildernesses not included in the hotspots) making links and preparing for battles to come. This Long War strategy of concentrating on the cold spots (Amazon, Congo, New Guinea) is attractive but it does take as a given that a vast 3 of global biodiversity is unsaveable. I choose more hope than that-for now. A reappraisal of the situation should happen in maybe 10–15 years. If our trouble-making and conservationist money hasn’t resulted in victory in at least some hotspots then a switch of strategy would seem in order.	+	''The Law of Unity and Contradiction Between Opposites'' states that all things, phenomena, and ideas are defined by internal and external contradictions. This is reflected in the universal law of consciousness by the fact that practical needs serve as the basis for conscious activity, and that cognitive processes serve, in essence, to negate contradictions between consciousness and material reality through practical experience. In other words, the cognitive process is defined by a never-ending process of contradiction between the material and the ideal, as human beings seek to negate contradictions between our conscious understanding of the world and our practical experiences in search of ''truth -'' the accurate alignment of consciousness with the material world.
−	**** (Counter) Revolutionary Rainy Day Reads	+	=== b. Truth, and the Relationship Between Truth and Reality ===
−	It’s raining outside and unusually you’re not feeling particularly passionate. Hell, why not read up on state counter-insurgency strategy? When it comes to insurrection and revolutionary strug-gle the state is highly efficient at assessing and learning from its successes and defeats. Sadly, radical movements rarely are. In times of relative social peace we have the space to learn from the past. If we ever need the lessons in the future we are unlikely to be able to do the reading. As well as studying our own histories it is highly useful lo read the other side’s view of things-not the propaganda it gives the people but the analyses it gives its own armies. Some ofthem are publicly available if you look for them and unlike the pie in the sky rubbish radicals can come out with, they are useful, relatively undogmatic analyses of confrontations of strategy.	+	''- Definition of Truth''
−	The first book worth reading is without a doubt the one from which this section’s front page quote is from Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping by Frank Kitson, ISBN 0571161812. Anyone who jokingly might think themselves a revolutionary should read this book-without doubt a .Machiavellian masterpiece. Kitson’s career culminated in being the top bod in the British land army and along the way he helped screw insurrections in Kenya, Malaysia, Oman, Cyprus, and most famously of all, Northern Ireland. Written at the beginning of the ‘70s, Low Intensity Operations has remained hugely influential, especially in the British and American military. In the words of the author’s 1991 Preface it was written: primarily to prepare the army to play a part in countering subversion and insurgency... While a tad dated, as a practical how-to book on snuffing out subversion it should be read by us all.	+	All cognitive processes lead to the creation of ''knowledge'', which is what we call human understanding of objective reality. But not all knowledge has content consistent with objective reality, because consciousness exists as the subjective reflection of objective reality in the human mind. The collective cognitive practice of all of humanity throughout history, as well as the cognitive practice of each individual human being, has demonstrated that the knowledge which people have gained and are gaining is not always consistent with objective reality. On the contrary, there are many cases of misalignment between consciousness and reality, and even complete contradiction between human thought and objective reality.
−	A good introductory (though non-specialist and therefore less useful) is Ragged War: The Story of Unconventional and Counter-Revolutionary Warfare by Leroy Thompson, ISBN 185409369X. Its author has a decent pedigree from a USAF Ranger-trained special missions unit and seems to have spent most of the last three decades training some real oppressive scumfucks. Being recently published this is by nature far more contemporary. The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War by Lt. Col. John]. McCuen, (ex-US Army General Staff) was published in 1972 and thus like Low Intensity Operations is heavily dated but well worth reading; not least for its vast and bi-partisan bibliographies.	+	Within the theoretical scope of Marxism-Leninism, the concept of ''truth'' is used to refer to knowledge which is aligned with objective reality. This alignment is tested and proven through practice. In this sense, the concept of truth is not identical with the concept of “knowledge,” nor with the concept of “hypothesis.” According to Lenin: “The coincidence of thought with the object is a '''process''': thought (= man) must not imagine truth in the form of dead repose, in the form of a bare picture (image), pale (matte), without impulse, without motion…”<ref>''Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic,'' Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.</ref>
−	While much of these books concentrate (understandably) on countering predominantly rural guerrilla warfare, to ignore urban counter insurgency strategy would be a serious mistake. Northern Ireland is the classic Western case and radicals should devour anything they can find about it. The best available I’d say is The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement by MLR Smith (Lecturer at Greenwich Military College), ISBN 0415091616.	+	-----
−	The only serious attempt to breach this subject by British anarchists is the wonderful-but now very dated-Towards A Citizens Militia by Cienfuegos Press, ISBN 0904564339. It’s a good introductory guide to principles of armed resistance, organisation and conduct of guerrilla warfare, the tactics of security forces, and the organisation and operation of civilian resistance movements. It’s written by Stuart Christie, an Orkneybased anarchist who put his money where his mouth was--among other things famously attempting to assassinate Franco. It’s practical, and at 28 A4 pages, quite concise. If you read any hook in this selection read this one. Beware though-state technologies have advanced a lot in the last 20 years!	+	==== Annotation 232 ====
−	After a rainy day in with that lot you should be able to join the swelling ranks of counter-insurgency warfare trainspotters.	+	Here, Lenin is dispelling Hegel’s conception of “absolute truth,” which is not to be confused with Lenin’s concept of “absolute truth” as “objective truth” which aligns consciousness with objective reality [see Annotation 58, p. 56]. For Hegel, “absolute truth” was the idea that there will eventually be some end point to the process of rational consciousness at which we will finally arrive at some final stage of knowledge and consciousness. This rational end point of consciousness, at which the dialectic ends and all contradictions are negated, is Hegel’s “absolute truth.”
−	**** 11.9.2001	+	Lenin is also pushing back against the metaphysical conception that all “truths” exist as static categories of information which do not change. Instead, Lenin points out that seeking truth — i.e., aligning consciousness with material reality — is a never-ending process, in particular because reality is constantly developing and changing. Thus, the alignment of consciousness with reality — the pursuit of truth — is a living and dynamic process which will never end, since the development of reality will never end.
−	I will say little about S 11. I found out about the attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC from an excited kid leaving school, having spent most of the glorious sunny day in a different world picking beans on an allotment. As is obvious from bin Ladens’ CIA history this was, to use Malcolm X’s statement on the Kennedy assassination, America’s chickens coming home to roost.	+	''- The Properties of Truth''
−	The world is class divided and filled to the brim with religious idiocy. As long as that remains the case, war and all its horrors will be visited on people everywhere. S 11 was pretty horrific but the 4,000+ deaths are small fry compared to those put in the gas chambers by industry, pollution, enclosure, etc. The hysterical reaction of many to the events-while understandable-seems rather sickening considering the lack of any similar response to the many thousands more deaths every day caused by profit and the dominant hierarchy.	+	All truths are ''objective, relative, absolute,'' and ''concrete.''
−	S11 has many ramifications but I will mention only a few. Firstly, radical US prisoners are getting a harder time of it. They need our support. Secondly, I stated above that militants from the Majority World will increase attacks in the core-thanks to the changing nature of global society. Rome was sacked by armies that invaded on roads Rome itself had built. When I wrote this section I wasn’t envisioning anything as dramatic as S11. The fact that it was carried out by religious nuts isn’t really surprising considering what I say later in “There is No Rosy Picture:’ S11 was the first attack by Majority World militants of its scale, and it is only the first. All over the world in shantytowns and slums teenagers with no future will be thinking about what can be done with a few box-cutters-not even knives for fuck’s sake! One of the Los Alamos Lab team that exploded the first nuclear bomb said that there was nothing hidden that had stopped others from doing what they did. The secret was that it could be done. S11 showed what can be done. The ringside slug fest of Leviathan’s slaves has only begun.	+	The ''objectivity'' of truth is the independence of its content from the subjective will of human beings. The content of knowledge must be aligned with objective reality, not vice versa. This means that the content of accurate knowledge is not a product of pure subjective reasoning. Truth is not an arbitrary human construct, nor is truth inherent in consciousness. On the contrary, truth belongs to the objective world, and is determined by the objective world. The affirmation of the objectivity of truth is one of the fundamental points that distinguishes the concept of absolute truth of dialectical materialism from the concept of absolute truth of idealism and skepticism — the doctrines that deny the objective existence of the physical world and deny the possibility that humans are able to perceive the world.
−	During the Second World War the RAF’s firestorm massacre of thousands of civilian Germans at Dresden was justified by saying that those who worked in the factories of the Nazi war machine were military targets as much as those who fought on the field. During the post-war anti-imperialist wave, Algerian guerrillas rejected this logic when they rejected a plan to crash a hijacked plane into Paris. The horrors of the unity-in-opposition of 50 years of communism and capitalism has resulted now in Arab anti-imperialists, lost in the Koran, accepting the logic of Bomber Harris.	+	-----
−	For a thought-provoking read check out Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens by American Indian Movement activist Ward Churchill	+	==== Annotation 233 ====
−	No War Between Nations.	+	The Dialectical Materialist conception of objective truth stands in contrast to ''idealism'', which states that conscious reasoning alone leads to truth, and that the subjective ideal determines material reality [see Annotation 7, p. 8].
−	No Peace Between Classes.	+	This objectivity of truth also refutes ''skepticism'', which states that truth is essentially undiscoverable, because human consciousness is ultimately unreliable and incapable of accurately reflecting material reality [see Annotation 32, p. 27].
−	**** Peasants and theTransitional Class	+	Distinction must also be drawn between the concept of absolute truth as it is understood in dialectical materialist philosophy and the conception of absolute truth in Hegel’s idealist dialectics. Dialectical materialism defines absolute truth as “objective truth;” that is to say: a complete alignment between objective reality and human consciousness (as compared to relative truth, which is a partial alignment between consciousness and objective reality).
−	Unsurprisingly, the majority of the resistance to the global empire arises where the majority of its subjects and slaves live-the hilariously named “Third World:’ To accept this is not to reject the reality of class struggle in the core capitalist countries but merely to accept the logic of maths and geography. The Third World is, after all, most of the world.	+	Hegel, on the other hand, views absolute truth as a final point at which human consciousness will have achieved absolute, complete, and final understanding of our universe (see Annotation 232, p. 228) with the ideal serving as the first basis and primary mechanism for bringing absolute truth to fruition.
−	In the Majority World the global elite are faced with class enemies they have long since vanquished within the industrialised West-the peasantry and the transitional class. ‘Ihese two classes are the main human block to the elite’s expansion and consolidation over the majority of the planet.	+	Truth is not only objective, but also ''absolute'' and ''relative''. Absolute truth [see Annotation 58, p. 56] refers to truth which reflects a full and complete alignment of consciousness and reality. Theoretically, we can reach absolute truth. This is because, in the objective world, there exists no thing nor phenomenon which human beings are completely incapable of accurately perceiving. The possibility of acquiring absolute truth in the process of the development of conscious understanding is theoretically limitless. However, in reality, our conscious ability to reflect reality is limited by the specific material conditions of each generation of humanity, of practical limitations, and by the spatial and temporal conditions of reflected subjects. Therefore, truth is also ''relative''.
−	Nearly half of the world’s population do not live in cities. Of these, hundreds of millions are hardly under the actual domination of capital at all. As peasants they retain relatively high levels of autonomy and have yet to be fully (or often even partially) enclosed by capital. For the actual domination of capital to expand that autonomy must be destroyed. ‘Ihey themselves and the land they live on must be commodified; their land turned into resources and they themselves into wage slaves.	+	-----
−	In localities all over the Majority World the continuing class struggle between loggers, agribusiness, oil corporations, local land autocracies, and the state on one side, and peasants and tribal people on the other is, in fact, the border war between the global economy and the land community. It is a border war that, despite heavy resistance from groups as diverse as farmers in India, river delta communities in Nigeria, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and tribes in Papua, is largely being won by the wealthy. Of course people do not immediately submit to power and accept their position as wage slaves. Throughout the <em>developing world</em> (a telling phrase) the new inhabitants of the cities fight back.	+	==== Annotation 234 ====
−	One would expect Western radicals to orient themselves towards <em>Third World</em> struggles according to their present class position, and the fact that our shared past is their shared present. Unfortunately the vision of many communists, liberals, greens, and anarchists is still hazy, blurred by the misleading mythologies of Marxism. There sometimes seems to be an unbridgeable split between those who think that social change can only arise out of the core capitalist countries and those who believe it will be fought out in the Majority World. This really is a false dichotomy and both sides take their ridiculous scripts from the Left.	+	Dialectical materialist philosophy recognizes that it must be theoretically possible to know everything there is to know about a given subject, since we are theoretically capable of accurately perceiving, sensing, and measuring all data which pertains to a subject. However, dialectical materialism also recognizes the practical limitations of human beings. As Engels writes in ''Anti-Dühring'':
−	On one hand ‘Ihird Worldists have supported all sorts of authoritarian murderous gangs and governments on stupid basis like the nationalism of the oppressed is different than the nationalism of the oppressor. (It should be almost banal now to point to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians or Ethiopia’s offensives against Eritrea, as just two examples of the nationalism of the oppressed becoming the nationalism of the oppressor.) Anyone saying anything like this cannot in any way be an anarchist and at this historical juncture should just be the cause of mirth. Lenin’s bizarrely inverted version of anti-imperialism has a lot to answer for. In a sickening twist the “What’s a few massacres between comrades” tendency are often the first to condemn even the most minimal revolutionary violence in the West-“It’s alright for niggers and chinks in far-away countries to go killing each other in the cause of revolution but don’t throw rocks at white english policemen-they’re human too!”	+	<blockquote>
		+	If mankind ever reached the stage at which it should work only with eternal truths, with results of thought which possess sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to truth, it would then have reached the point where the infinity of the intellectual world both in its actuality and in its potentiality had been exhausted, and thus the famous miracle of the counted uncountable would have been performed.
−	On the other hand the Marxist dogma ofthe fully developed industrial working class as the ‘revolutionary subject’ has led many to ignore the vast scale of struggle going on in the majority of the world. This is highly ironic considering that the European “proletarian glory days;’ starting with the French insurrection of 1848 and ending with the crushing of the Spanish Revolution, were pushed forward by a class that today can be found throughout the Majority World but only on the social margins in the West. For the second time in this pamphlet I’ll quote at length from Bookchin’s seminal work, The Spanish Anarchists:	+	But are there any truths which are so securely based that any doubt of them seems to us to be tantamount to insanity? That twice two makes four, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that Paris is in France, that a man who gets no food dies of hunger, and so forth? Are there then nevertheless eternal truths, final and ultimate truths.
−	<quote>	+	Certainly there are. We can divide the whole realm of knowledge in the traditional way into three great departments. The first includes all sciences that deal with inanimate nature and are to a greater or lesser degree susceptible of mathematical treatment: mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry. If it gives anyone any pleasure to use mighty words for very simple things, it can be asserted that certain results obtained by these sciences are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths; for which reason these sciences are known as the exact sciences. But very far from all their results have this validity. With the introduction of variable magnitudes and the extension of their variability to the infinitely small and infinitely large, mathematics, usually so strictly ethical, fell from grace; it ate of the tree of knowledge, which opened up to it a career of most colossal achievements, but at the same time a path of error. The virgin state of absolute validity and irrefutable proof of everything mathematical was gone forever; the realm of controversy was inaugurated, and we have reached the point where most people differentiate and integrate not because they understand what they are doing but from pure faith, because up to now it has always come out right. Things are even worse with astronomy and mechanics, and in physics and chemistry we are swamped by hypotheses as if attacked by a swarm of bees. And it must of necessity be so. In physics we are dealing with the motion of molecules, in chemistry with the formation of molecules out of atoms, and if the interference of light waves is not a myth, we have absolutely no prospect of ever seeing these interesting objects with our own eyes. As time goes on, final and ultimate truths become remarkably rare in this field.
−	The June barricades of 1848 had in fact been manned not by an industrial proletariat ‘Disciplined, united, and organised by the process of capitalist production, ‘[Marx] but by craftsman, home-workers, nondescript labourers of every sort, porters, unemployed urban and rural poor, even tavern keepers, waiters, and prostitutes-in short, the flotsam andjetsam of French society... These very same elements, nearly a quarter of a century later, were to man the barricades of the Paris Commune. It was precisely the industrialisation of France after the Commune-and with this process, the emergence of a ‘full-grown’ hereditary proletariat ‘disciplined, united, organised by the process of capitalist production’-thatfinally was to silence the ‘crowing’ of the French ‘Red Cock’ that had summoned Europe to revolution during the nineteenth century. Indeed, much the same could be said of the Russian proletariat <em>of 1917, so recently recruited from the countryside that it was nyting buta ‘full-grown’working class.</em>	+	</blockquote>
−	<em>The great proletarian insurrections that seemed to lend such compelling support to the concept ofproletarian socialism werefuelled primarily by social strata that livedwithin neither industrial nor village society but in the tense, almost electrifying force field of both. Proletarian socialism became a revolutionary force for nearly a century not because awell organised, consolidated, hereditary proletariat had emergedwith the factory system but because of the very process of proleterianisation. Dispossessed rural people and craftsmen were being removed from disintegrating preindustrialway of life and plunged into standardised, dehumanising, and mechanical urban and industrial surroundings. Neither the village and small shop as such nor the factory as such predisposed them to the boldest kind of social action; rather, they were moved by the disintegration of the former and the shock of the latter. Demoralised to the point of recklessness, declasse in spirit and often in fact, they became the adherents ofthe Paris Commune, the Petrograd soviets, and the Barcelona</em> <em>CNT.</em>
−	<em>The very ‘half grown’ quality of the early proletariat, formerly peasants and craftsmen or perhaps a generation removed from such status, produced a volatility, intractability, and boldness that the industrial system andfactory hierarchy were to attenuate in their descendants-the hereditary proletariat of the 1940s and 1 950s, a class that knew no other world but the industrial one. For this class, no tension was to exist between town and country, the anomie of the city and the sense of shared responsibility of the small community, the standardised rhythms of the factory and the physiological rhythms of the land. The premises of the proletariat in this later era were formed around the validity of the factory as an arena ofproductive activity, the industrial hierarchy as a system of technical authority, and the union bureaucracy as a structure of class command. The era</em> ofproletarian socialism came to an end in a step-by-step <em>process during which the ‘half grown,‘presumably ‘primitive’ proletariat became ‘fullgrown’, ‘mature’-in short, fully proletarianised.[385]</em>	+	-----
−	</quote>
−	Crammed into the growing Majority World metropolises, hundreds of millions today find themselves a part of this class in transition, caught in the electrifying force field between village and city. They face inhuman and desperate conditions as wage slaves within the city. They have memory of the communal experiences of the village that enable them to envision a different reality that they could create. They have vast potential collective power in the sheer numbers of young fellow shanty town/ghetto dwellers who share their class position. This is a potent revolutionary mix.	+	Relative truth is truth which has developed alignment with reality without yet having reached ''complete'' alignment between human knowledge and the reality which it reflects. To put it another way, relative truth represents knowledge which incompletely reflects material subjects without complete accuracy. In relative truth, there is only partial alignment — in some (but not all) aspects — between consciousness and the material world.
−	Many Majority World writers talk about this village in the city. Within the slums and shanties, old vil age system of kinship and communal decision making often continue to aid survival in a hostile capitalist environment. It is from these collectivities that mass organised squatter move-ments arise such as the Movement of the Landless (MST) in Brazil, which challenge the urban autocracy and the rural latifundi.	+	-----
−	It is this tension that propelled the insurrectionary hordes in 1997 to bring down Suharto and systematically burn out the mansions of the Indonesian elite. It should come as no surprise to hear the voice of Lucy Parsons echoing from Haymarket through a hundred years--<em>We shall devastate the avenues where the wealthy live!</em> The class that gave birth to Parsons today spawns innumerable children throughout the developing world.	+	==== Annotation 235 ====
−	I am <em>not</em> contending that rebellion and resistance do not and will not break out in the core capitalist countries. As long as society is based on class warfare normality will be punctuated by episodes of rebellion and day-to-day opposition. Widespread insurrection and anarchist revolution are however another thing entirely. It is in the majority of the planet that the most seismic struggles are happening. For most of last century the resistance and transcendence of the oppressed Third World global majority has faced two huge foes. The unity-in-opposition of two forms of capitalism: the Marxist National Liberation of native elites and the colonialism of Western elites has hamstrung the oppressed.	+	''False consciousness'' is consciousness which is incorrect and misaligned from reality. Discovering and rooting out false consciousness is one of the primary concerns of dialectical materialism, as false consciousness can be a serious impediment to human progress. The term “false consciousness” was first used by Friedrich Engels in a personal letter to Franz Mehring in 1893 (a decade after the death of Karl Marx), and in this letter Engels uses the term interchangeably with the word “ideology”* to describe conscious thought processes which do not align with reality:
−	With the death of the USSR and the final withering away of state socialism around the world, a growing unity is developing between movements of those who live on the land and those who live in the shanties. Increasingly libertarian and ecological new generations are taking the fore. It is this unity that, more than anything else, could reap the whirlwind, shaking capitalism to its foundations and maybe even replacing it with a more authentic world.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts.
		+	</blockquote>
−	**** The Panthers-Militants of a Transitional Class	+	Although the ''term'' “false consciousness” is not found in writing until after Marx’s death, the ''concept'' underlying the term “false consciousness” is found often in the works of Marx and Engels. For instance, in ''The Holy Family,'' Marx and Engels explain how communist, class conscious workers have been able to break free of false consciousness of capitalist society:
−	An interesting aside. Hugely influential to the radical wave that swept the west in the ‘60s and ‘70s was the Black Liberation struggle in America. Two examples stand above others. Germaine Greer says second wave feminism took its rallying standard-Women’s Liberation-in reflection of the concurrent Black Liberation struggles, (see her book <em>The Whole Woman).</em> The rebirth ofRepublicanism in Northern Ireland arose largely out of the Civil Rights Movement, which took its name and in large part inspiration from American Blacks.	+	<blockquote>
		+	They (the communist workers) are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labor and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement.
		+	</blockquote>
−	The Black Panther Party-itself deeply inspired by struggles in the Majority World-is often seen as being entirely urban in origin. In contradiction, David Hilliard, ex-chairman of the Panthers, cites the land-based culture of the Deep South which many Panthers or their parents were brought up in as highly influential:	+	This allusion to “the difference between being and thinking” recurs again and again in the works of Marx and Engels.
−	<quote>	+	<nowiki>*</nowiki> Lenin also discussed the concept of false consciousness extensively, and argued that dialectical materialism was the key to negating the false consciousness of the working class, writing in ''What the “Friends of the People” Are'':
−	<em>When I think about the influences that inspired the spirit and work of the Black Panther Party-many of which are still not understood-this culture figures large among them. Many of the most important members of the party-people like }ohn and Bobby Seale and Geronimo Pratt, Bobby Rush and Fred Hampton-were imbued with the moral and spiritual values of their parents; and the work that went into the party, our dignity as an independent people, the communal ideal andpractise that informed our programs, all stem in part from the civilisation of which my mother andfather were so representative a part.[386]</em>
−	</quote>
−	**** It’s Time to Defect!	+	<blockquote>
		+	It never has been the case, nor is it so now, that the members of society conceive the sum-total of the social relations in which they live as something definite, integral, pervaded by some principle; on the contrary, the mass of people adapt themselves to these relations unconsciously, and have so little conception of them as specific historical social relations that, for instance, an explanation of the exchange relations under which people have lived for centuries was found only in very recent times. Materialism removed this contradiction by carrying the analysis deeper, to the origin of man’s social ideas themselves; and its conclusion that the course of ideas depends on the course of things is the only one compatible with scientific psychology. Further, and from yet another aspect, this hypothesis was the first to elevate sociology to the level of a science.
		+	</blockquote>
−	At the beginning of the 21<sup>st</sup> century we all have to choose sides. Do we remain on the side of industrial civilisation or do we stand with struggling peoples in defence of our earth? Across the world the fight is on, fires are flickering, arrows flying. Look around you, see the targets.	+	Note that this convention of using the word “ideology” to mean “false consciousness” has never been common, and Marx and Engels both used the word “ideology” more often in its more usual sense of “a system of ideas,” but it is still occasionally encountered in socialist literature, as Joseph McCarney explains in ''Marx Myths and Legends'':
−	Pull up your mask, it’s time to defect.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Marx never calls ideology ‘false consciousness’. Indeed, he never calls anything ‘false consciousness’, a phrase that does not occur in his work... The noun is almost always accompanied by an epithet such as ‘German’, ‘republican’, ‘political’ or ‘Hegelian’, or by a qualifying phrase, as in ‘the ideology of the bourgeoisie’ or ‘the ideology of the political economist’. More typical in any case is the adjectival usage in which such varied items as ‘forms’, ‘expressions’, ‘phrases’, ’conceptions’, ‘deception’, and ‘distortion’ are said to have an ‘ideological’ character. Even more distinctive is the frequency, amounting to approximately half of all references in the relevant range, of invocations of the ‘ideologists’, the creators and purveyors of the ideological forms.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[240] <em>ECo</em> <em>Ecologist,</em> Vol. 2, #12, December 1972
−	[241] <em>Eco-Warriors</em> by Rik Scarce, p. 103	+	-----
−	[242] Green Rage, Christopher Manes, p. 65	+	“Relative truth” and “absolute truth” do not exist separately, but have dialectical unity with each other. On the one hand, “absolute truth” is the sum of all “relative truths.” On the other hand, in all relative truths there are always elements of absolute truth.
−	[243] Speech by Dave Foreman, Grand Canyon, 7/7/87	+	Lenin wrote that “absolute truth results from the sum-total of relative truths in the course of their development; [...] relative truths represent relatively faithful reflections of an object existing independently of man; [...] these reflections become more and more faithful; [...] every scientific truth, notwithstanding its relative nature, contains an element of absolute truth.”<ref>''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'', Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1908.</ref>
−	[244] FoE Newsletter #1, Jan 1972	+	Correct realization of the dialectical relationship between relative and absolute truth plays a very important role in criticizing and overcoming extremism and false consciousness in perception and in action. If we exaggerate the absoluteness of the truth of knowledge which we possess, or downplay its relativity, we will fall into the false consciousness of metaphysics, dogmatism, conservativism, and stagnation.
−	[245] While FoE and GP remain centrist, both groups increasingly try to engage their membership <em>as</em> activists not just as supporters. ‘Ihis, as many of their staff admit, is due to the influence of the ‘90s land struggles.	+	-----
−	[246] A ridiculous statement I admit-but true!	+	==== Annotation 236 ====
−	[247] EF! <em>Action Update,</em> #3	+	Intentional or unintentional exaggeration of the absoluteness of truth — i.e., considering our knowledge to be more complete and/or aligned with reality than it actually is — leads to incorrect viewpoints and mindsets, including:
−	[248] Ibid.	+	''Metaphysics'' is a philosophical system which seeks truth through the systematic categorization of knowledge [see Annotation 8, p. 8]. This is a flawed method of seeking knowledge because it considers truth to be essentially static and unchanging, and upholds the erroneous notion that truth can be systematically broken down into discrete, isolated categories. In addition to being fundamentally incorrect about the nature of truth and knowledge, it leads to the incorrect presumption that such static categorization of knowledge can lead to truth ''at all''. Metaphysics fails to see truth and consciousness as a ''process'', and instead sees truth as a static assembly of categorized facts and data.
−	[249] Noticibly South Somerset EF! who organised the early Whatley Quarry actions.	+	''Dogmatism'' occurs when one only accounts for commonalities and considers theory itself as the sole basis of truth. Dogmatism inherently overstates the absoluteness of knowledge, as dogmatic positions uphold certain theoretical principles as complete, inviolable, and completely developed. This explicitly denies the continuously developing process of advancing knowledge and consciousness.
−	[250] This description is no joke-one described herself on more than one occasion as “the queen of the tribe”!	+	''Conservativism'' includes any position that seeks to prevent change, or to undo change to return to an earlier state of development. Such positions deny the continuous development of consciousness, knowledge, and practice, and incorrectly assert incorrect positions; or mistake relative truth for absolute truth.
−	[251] Dept of Transport Affidavit concerning May 1<sup>st</sup> 1993	+	''Stagnation'' is an inability or unwillingness to change and adapt consciousness and practice in accordance with developing material conditions. Stagnation can stem from, or cause, overstatement of absolute truth in theory and forestall necessary development of both consciousness and practical ability.
−	[252] “Welcome Back Twyford Six;’ <em>Do or Die</em> #3, p. 45	+	On the contrary, if we exaggerate the relativity of the truth of knowledge which we possess, or downplay its absoluteness, we will fall into relativism, thereby leading to subjectivism, revisionism, sophistry, and skepticism.
−	[253] “Car Chases, Sabotage, and Arthur Dent: Twyford Diary;’ Pt. 2, <em>Do or Die,</em> #3, p. 21	+	-----
		+	==== Annotation 237 ====
−	[254] Ibid., p. 22	+	''Relativism'' is the belief that human consciousness can ''only'' achieve relative understanding of the world, and that truth can therefore never be objectively discovered. Relativism is, thus, the overstatement of the relative nature of truth and the denial of the existence of absolute truth. Relativism leads to such incorrect viewpoints and mindsets as:
−	[255] ‘Skye Campaign Soaked inSea ofAnger’, <em>Do orDie,</em> #3, p. 11	+	''Subjectivism'': which occurs when one centers one’s own self and one’s own conscious activities in perspective and worldview, failing to test their own perceptions against material and social reality [see Annotation 211, p. 205]. This position denies that truth can be discovered in the external material world, falsely believing that absolute truth stems only from conscious activity.
−	[256] EF! <em>Action Update,</em> #5	+	''Revisionism'': a failure to recognize and accept commonalities in conscious activity, focusing only on the private [see ''Private and Common'', p. 128]. Revisionism leads to constant and unnecessary reassessment and reevaluation of both knowledge and practice. Revisionism, thus, is a position which overstates the relativity of truth and ignores truths which are more fully developed towards absoluteness.
−	[257] ‘For Flapjack and Mother Earth: Earth Warriors At Jesmond Dene\ [[http://www.eco-action.org/][www.eco-action.org/]] dt/jesmond.html	+	''Sophistry:'' the use of falsehoods and fallacious arguments to deceive [see Annotation 116, p. 118]. Sophistry is, thus, the intentional denial of truth and the intentional mischaracterization of truths as either overly relative or as not truths at all.
−	[258] Ibid. ’	+	''Skepticism:'' the belief that truth is essentially undiscoverable, because human consciousness is ultimately unreliable and incapable of accurately reflecting material reality [see Annotation 200, p. 192]. By denying that truth is discoverable at all, skepticism explicitly rejects absolute truth and declares that all truth is relative and unreliable.
−	[259] ‘News From The Autonomous Zones’, <em>Do or Die</em> #4, p. 21	+	-----
−	[260] Ibid., p. 22	+	In addition to objectivity, absoluteness, and relativity, truth also has ''concreteness.'' The concreteness of truth refers to the degree to which a truth is attached to specific objects, in specific conditions, at a specific point in time. This means that all accurate knowledge always refers to a specific situation which involves specific subjects which exist in a specific place and time. The content of truth cannot be pure abstraction, disconnected from reality, but it is always associated with certain, specific objects and phenomena which exist in a specific space, time, and arrangement, with specific internal and external relationships. Therefore, truth is associated with specific historical conditions. This specificity to time, place, relations, etc., is what we call ''concreteness''.
−	[261] Ibid., p. 23	+	Knowledge, if detached from specific historical conditions, will fall into pure abstraction. Therefore, it will not be accurate — it will not align with reality — and such knowledge cannot be considered truth. When emphasizing this property, Lenin wrote: “Truth is always concrete, never abstract.”<ref>''Once Again On The Trade Unions,'' Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1921.</ref> Mastering the principle of the concreteness of truth has an important methodological significance in cognitive and practical activities. It is required that consideration and evaluation of all things and phenomena must be based on a historical viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116]. In developing and applying theory, we must be conscious of specific historical conditions. According to Lenin, Marxism’s nature, its essence, lies in the concrete analysis of specific situations; Marx’s method is, above all, to consider the objective content of the historical process in a specific time.
−	[262] These were not police smear stories. There was only a few sentences ever mentioning them and no tabloid ‘eco-terrorist’ horror stories. If anything the state probably enforced a ‘quieting strategy’ on the situation as they did to the ALF at its height of support.	+	-----
−	[263] Copse: The Cartoon Book ofTree Protesting by Kate Evans, (ISBN 0 9532674 07), p. 32	+	==== Annotation 238 ====
−	[264] EF! Action Update, #9	+	In other words, Marxism is rooted in seeking truth by examining reality from a historical and comprehensive viewpoint. For more information, see Annotation 114, p. 116.
−	[265] Copse, p. 20	+	''- The Role of Truth in Reality.''
−	[266] “‘Leadenham;’ Do or Die #4, p. 6	+	In order to survive and develop, humans must conduct practical activities. These activities involve transforming the environment, nature, and human society. At the same time, through these activities, humans perform — knowingly or unknowingly — the process of perfecting and developing our conscious and practical abilities. It is this process that helps human cognitive activities develop. Practical activities can only be successful and effective once humans apply accurate knowledge of objective reality to our practical activities. Therefore, truth is one of the prerequisites that ensure success and efficiency in practical activities.
−	[267] Fash threatened a number of sites through the ‘90s. At Jesmond they were chased off’, running for their lives (which is what they do best)--mostly they didn’t even turn up (with the one major exception of the Ml 1). Far more dangerous were random individual loonies. Arson attacks on camps happened right from the beginning-both at Twyford and the Ml l. Of course the police paid little notice. On one occasion when some posh student arsonists were nicked at Newbury (after they had put a petrol bomb through a truck window and into a sleeping child’s bedroom) they got off-the magistrates viewed them as drunken pranksters.	+	The relationship between truth and practical activities is a dialectical relationship which serves as the basis for the movement and development of both truth and practical activity: truth develops through practice, and practice develops through the correct application of truth which people have gained through practical activities.
−	[268] <em>Daily Post</em> (North Wales), 9/1/94	+	-----
−	[269] Green Ana?<em>whist</em> was undoubtedly a great influence on this period. One big gripe though-again and again one would read GA reports of actions which said the Earth Liberation Front had done this or that. Some may have been true but most of these claimed actions were often simply done by crowds or camp warparties. In fact on a number of occasions people have been arrested for criminal damage only to read later in <em>GA</em> that the ELF had carried out their action. This is both dishonest and dangerous.	+	==== Annotation 239 ====
−	[270] Jonathan Dimbelby at Solsbury Hill for instance.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-89.png|''Truth and Practical Activities have a dialectical relationship in which truth develops through practice, and practice develops through the correct application of truth.'']]
−	[271] <em>Construction News</em>	+	Practice only develops when truth about the universe is consciously applied to practical activities. For example, farm output increases as we learn more truth about the way crops grow and how land can be properly managed. Simultaneously, truth can only be developed through practical activity, as all ideas and knowledge must be tested through methodological observation, experimentation, and other forms of practical activity.
−	[272] ‘The Battle For Hyde Park: Ruffians, Radicals and Ravers, 1855–1994’, (Practical History)	+	A ''theory'' is an idea or system of ideas intended to explain an aspect, characteristic, or tendency of objective reality. Theories are not inherently truthful; holding incorrect theories constitutes ''false consciousness''. ''Practice'' (or ''praxis'') is purposeful conscious activity which improves our understanding of the world. Theory and practice have a dialectical relationship with one another which, if understood, helps us to discover truth.
−	[273] “CJB: Business As Usual;’ <em>AC Action Update,</em> #12	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-90.png|''Truth and practical activities mutually develop one another over time.'']]
−	[274] <em>Schnews</em><em>,</em> #3	+	This dialectical relationship between theory and practical activities means that we must never favor theory over practice, nor practice over theory, but that we must rather balance development of theoretical understanding as we engage in practical activities to test our knowledge against reality and to develop our practice with ever-advancing understanding of the world. As practice and theory develop one another, our understanding of objective reality comes closer and closer to truth.
−	[275] ‘London Regional Report’, <em>Do or Die,</em> #5, p. 23	+	In ''Theses on Feuerbach'', Marx summarizes the relationship between theory and practice, writing:
−	[276] Ibid., p. 25	+	<blockquote>
		+	The problem of the external world is here put as the problem of its transformation: the problem of the cognition of the external world as an integral part of the problem of transformation: the problem of theory as a practical problem.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[277] ‘Meanwhile Down in the West-Country’. Do or Die, #5, p. 18	+	Here, Marx explains that theory is concerned with solving the “problem” of transforming the external world through practice, and that “cognition of the external world” is required to solve the “problem of transformation. In other words, we must improve our theory in order to improve our practical ability to transform our world, and we learn about the world (thus improving our theory) through those practical activities.
−	[278] “It’s (Not Really That) Grim Up North!” <em>Do or Die,</em> #5, p. 12	+	Marx also writes in ''Theses on Feuerbach'' that:
−	[279] EF! <em>Action Update,</em> #23	+	<blockquote>
		+	The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but it is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power... of his thinking.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[280] Thames Valley Police Press Release 11/11/96	+	This point is key for understanding the dialectical relationship between practice and theory: in order to be useful, theory must be ''proven through practice''. Thus, we must seek to develop our practice through theory, and our theory through practice.
−	[281] <em>Copse</em><em>,</em> p. 105	+	Engels summarizes these ideas a bit more colorfully in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'':
−	[282] <em>There’s A Riot Going</em> 011 by Merrick (Godhaven Press)	+	<blockquote>
		+	Before there was argument there was action... In the beginning was the deed ... And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[283] ‘Direct Action, Six Years Down the Line’, <em>Do or Die,</em> #7, p. 1
−	[284] EF! <em>Action Update,</em> #40	+	-----
−	[285] Global Street Party—Birmingham and the G8, p. 3	+	Engels wrote in ''Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy'' of the uselessness of what might be called “pure theory,” divorced from practice, and the sort of radical skepticism which refutes that any practical knowledge can ever really be obtained by human beings:
−	[286] EF! Summer Gathering 2003 leaflet.	+	<blockquote>
		+	There is yet a set of different philosophers — those who question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition of the world... The most telling refutation of this (scepticism and agnosticism) as of all other philosophical crotchets, is praxis, namely experiment and industry.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[287] This reference to Mental Asylums is no joke-over a dozen people were sectioned from Newbury alone, prompting the setting up of the Head State Support Group. Land Struggles had been immensely therapeutic for many, but for some they became the catalyst for mental breakdown. On sites the intense connection to other people and the land was amazing. Feeling the land being ripped all around you and having your community broken up was unbearable for many. Some would have been broken by Industry either way, hut it was the movement’s duty to provide support for those who were asked to risk all. It mostly failed in that duty.	+	It is ''practice'', according to Engels, which proves the merit and utility of theory.
−	[288] It’s worth pointing out that EF! is a network of autonomous groups and individuals. Gatherings can he the place where people decide what they are going to do, but they cannot decide what others should or shouldn’t do. After a number of bad experiences with people representing the movement in outside publications and stating that ‘EF! has said the...’ it was decided that gatherings would mostly not distribute written reports—too often the writer’s own poiitical dogma misrepresented the consensus-or lack of one. Here, I am trying to sum up some of the points the ’97 gathering came up with in consensus. I have asked around to check that my memory is correct, but I may too have clouded the reality of the discussion with the fog of my own particular dogma. I apologise if this is so.	+	Through experiment and industry — through practical activities in the material world — we can test our ideas and dialectically develop both theory and practice. Lenin built upon these ideas in his own work, writing in ''Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'':
−	[289] “Autonomous Spaces:’ <em>Do or Die</em> #8. p. 130	+	<blockquote>
		+	The materialist theory, the theory of the reflection of objects by our mind, is here presented with absolute clarity: things exist outside us. Our perceptions and ideas are their images. Verification of these images, differentiation between true and false images, is given by practice.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[290] Ibid.	+	Here, Lenin explains how only a proper understanding and application of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice can lead to the negation of false consciousness [see Annotation 235, p. 231] and the dialectical development of both practice and theory. Simply arguing and debating about ideas without relating them directly to practice will never lead to truth, nor will such pure-theory argumentation develop theory or practice in any meaningful way.
−	[291] Fears that the giro checks would soon stop arriving, bringing an end to the dole autonomy that, along with student grants and crime, had been the main economic backbone of movements here for generations was also a major factor. Resistance to the introduction of the Jobseekers Allowance and the New Deal did occur-but with most claimants not joining in with collective efforts to repel the squeeze, the campaign was doomed. By individualising their problem people were collectively defeated.	+	This brings to mind another line from Marx’s ''Theses on Feuerbach'':
−	[292] <em>Sc/mews,</em> #1 56	+	<blockquote>
		+	The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[293] <em>Schnews</em><em>,</em> #167	+	The philosophy of dialectical materialism and the system of materialist dialectics are designed specifically to produce ''action'' and to avoid such “scholastic questions” and “pure-theory argumentation.”
−	[294] Police Review, quoted in “Surveillance Watch,” <em>Schnews</em> <em>Survival Handbook</em>	+	Ho Chi Minh summarized these ideas perhaps most clearly and precisely of all in the very title of his article: ''Practice Generates Knowledge, Understanding Advances Theory, Theory Leads to Practice:''
−	[295] <em>EF! Action Update,</em> #50	+	<blockquote>
		+	Knowledge comes from practice. And through practice, knowledge becomes theory. That theory, again, has to be put into practice. Knowledge advances not just from thought to theory, but, above all, from applying theory to revolutionary practice. Once the world’s law is fully grasped as theory, it is critical to put that theory into practice by changing the world, by increasing production, and by practicing class struggle and struggling for national self-determination. This is a continuous process of obtaining knowledge.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[296] Global Street Party: Birmingham and the G8 pamphlet.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-91.png|''“If Uncle Ho says we will win, we will win!” — Propaganda poster from the 30<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1984).'']]
−	[297] The reference-me and a mate on a glorious day!	+	= Afterword =
−	[298] EF! <em>Action Update,</em> #59	+	If it seems that this book has come to an end somewhat abruptly, it’s because this is really just the first of four major sections of the full volume from which this text is drawn. If you are reading this afterword after reading the entirety of the preceding contents, then congratulations, you have completed the equivalent to a full semester’s coursework for a class on dialectical materialist philosophy which all Vietnamese college students are required to take!
−	[299] “Friday June 18<sup>th</sup> 1999: Confronting Capital and Smashing the State;’ <em>Do or Die</em> #8, p. 20	+	The next sections in this curriculum, each covered in the original full volume, include:
−	[300] ‘Carry on Camping’. <em>Do or Die</em> #8, p. 148	+	=== Part 2: Historical Materialism ===
−	[301] <em>EF! Action</em> <em>Update,</em> #57	+	This section covers the definition and basic principles of historical materialism, which is the field of work dedicated to applying dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics to human history and human society. In the West, historical materialism and dialectical materialism are often conflated, but this is in error. Historical materialism is an ''applied field'' of dialectical materialist philosophy and materialist dialectical methodology which is used in the pursuit of understanding and interpreting human history.
−	[302] EF! <em>Action Update,</em> #48	+	=== Part 3: Political Economy ===
−	[303] For a short while it looked like The Land Is Ours might successfully set off a wave of action around the country. However the entrenched nature of the problem and the spectacular, media-centric style of some of the main occupations cut that possibility short.	+	This section condenses the three cardinal volumes of ''Capital'' by Karl Marx and covers three primary doctrines:
−	[304] There is always a danger here of merely becoming unpaid social workers. For too many in the past rnmmunity organising has been a way back into the mainstream. That this is a danger should not stop people doing these bread and butter activities-but should remind us to be ever vigilant against assimilation.	+	1. The doctrine of value.
−	[305] One argument put forward for community organising over ecological defence, is that only the working class can defeat capitalism so “real work” needs to be done in the working class to strengthen it and radicalise it. Apart from the obvious patronising missionary attitude this view ignores the fact that the Land Struggle Period saw large actions with and by working class communities across the country; a level ofjoint action most traditional class struggle anarchos could only dream of. While many of the places ‘90s land struggles happened in were Tory shires others were in the old ‘barracks of the labour movement’-the East End, South Wales, Glasgow, inner-city Manchester and the Yorkshire mining areas!	+	2. The doctrine of surplus value.
−	[306] For a good analysis of this debacle see--“May Day: Guerrilla? Gardening?;’ Do or Die #9, p. 69	+	3. The doctrines of monopolist capitalism and state monopolist capitalism.
−	[307] “Here Comes the Barmy Army!” Do or Die #9, p. 12	+	Political Economy, in this course, can be considered the application of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics to the analysis and understanding of the capitalist mode of production from the perspective of the socialist revolutionary movement.
−	[308] This year’s EU summit in Greece is likely tobe the last outside ofthe EU Fortress in Brussels.	+	=== Part 4: Scientific Socialism ===
−	[309] EF! Action Update, #55	+	This section relies on an established understanding of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and political economy as a foundation for developing socialist revolution. The three chapters of this section on Scientific Socialism are:
−	[310] Direct Action Video, Oxford EF!	+	1. The Historical Mission of the Working Class and the Socialist Revolution
−	[311] “Militancy,” FoE <em>Newsletter,</em> #10, Oct 1972	+	2. The Primary Social-Political Issues of the Process of Building a Socialist Revolution 3. Realistic Socialism and Potential Socialism
−	[312] Simply wishing this doesn’t make it a reality. It may be truer to say that we aspire to become ecological revolutionaries.	+	=== Moving Forward ===
−	[313] Civilisation needs us all to become increasingly isolated individuals that can only exist as part of a mass. Authoritarian revolutionaries and reformists alike often talk of the need for a mass movement to create change, yet libertarian change only happens in everyday life. Check out the pamphlet: <em>Anti-Mass-Methods of Organising for Collectives.</em>	+	We are already working on the translation of Part 2 of this curriculum, and we hope to complete it as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we believe this book provides the reader with enough of a foundation to continue studying and to begin applying the principles of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics in political struggle.
−	[314] “Making Punk A Threat Again” by <em>Profane Existence.</em>	+	We highly discourage readers from self-study in isolation, just as we discourage individual political action. The best way to study socialism is ''alongside other socialists''.
−	[315] <em>The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868–1936</em> by Murray Bookchin (AK Press), p. 288	+	Depending on where you live, you may be able to find political education resources provided by communist parties, socialist book clubs, or other organizations. If such resources aren’t available, it should be fairly easy to find study groups, workshops, and affinity groups online where you can study with like-minded comrades. Of course, socialist revolution requires more than just study, as we hope this book has thoroughly explained. Theory ''must'' be coupled with practice. As Ho Chi Minh wrote: “If you read a thousand books, but you fail to apply theory into practice, you are nothing but a bookshelf.”
−	[316] Ibid. p. 146	+	To avoid atrophying into the proverbial bookshelf, we encourage you to go out into the world and apply these ideas creatively and collectively with other socialists. Dialectical materialism is a philosophy that was developed from the ground up for ''application in the real world''. Dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics provide a functional model of reality, a way of looking at highly complicated systems, with all their dynamic internal and external relations. Dialectical materialist philosophy demands that we see human systems as processes in motion. In order to fully comprehend such dynamic processes, we must engage with them, which is why Ho Chi Minh taught that “we are not afraid to make mistakes; we would only be afraid of making mistakes if we were not determined to correct them.”<ref>''Revolutionary Ethics,'' Ho Chi Minh, December 1958.</ref>
−	[317] Ibid. p. 288	+	As we mentioned in the foreword, many socialists in the West suffer from a lack of practical ''engagement''. Far too many socialists fall into utopianism, idealism, and social chauvinism and we believe this largely stems from failures to test ideas against reality through ''praxis''. We hope that this book has impressed upon the reader that simply arguing about pure theory is a useless and futile pursuit. Indeed, sparring verbally over such “scholastic questions,” as Marx described them, is counter-productive. Marx and Engels defined such failure to engage in theory as “critical criticism” — that is to say, criticism for the sake of criticism. As Marx and Engels wrote in ''The Holy Family,'' such critical criticism is futile, as we will never ''think'' our way to revolution:
−	[318] “Peasants and the Transitional Class” at the end of Task IV explains this further.	+	<blockquote>
		+	According to Critical Criticism, the whole evil lies only in the workers’ “thinking”. It is true that the English and French workers have formed associations in which they exchange opinions not only on their immediate needs as workers, but on their needs as human beings. In their associations, moreover, they show a very thorough and comprehensive consciousness of the “enormous” and “immeasurable” power which arises from their co-operation. But these mass-minded, communist workers, employed, for instance, in the Manchester or Lyons workshops, do not believe that by “pure thinking” they will be able to argue away their industrial masters and their own practical debasement. They are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labour and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical, objective way for man to become man not only in thinking, in consciousness, but in mass being, in life. Critical Criticism, on the contrary, teaches them that they cease in reality to be wage-workers if in thinking they abolish the thought of wage-labour; if in thinking they cease to regard themselves as wage-workers and, in accordance with that extravagant notion, no longer let themselves be paid for their person. As absolute idealists, as ethereal beings, they will then naturally be able to live on the ether of pure thought.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[319] ‘It’s Good to Talk’, <em>Observer Magazine,</em> 09/06/02.	+	Engels expressed his frustration with such endless, utopian, idealist debates in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'':
−	[320] <em>The Revolt Against Change</em> by Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook, p. 3	+	<blockquote>
		+	Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[321] <em>Blood in My Eye</em> by George Jackson (Penguin Books, 1975) p. 50. Black Liberation fighter Jackson was killed by the screws inside San fentin prison only a few days after finishing this book.	+	Engels concludes by punctuating ''why'' he and Marx had developed dialectical materialism as a praxis-oriented philosophical foundation for scientific socialism: “To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.” We hope that the readers of this text will seek out real bases for your development in theory and praxis, and we trust that you will quickly discover that developing practice develops theory, and vice-versa.
−	[322] Enrages and the Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, Atay <em>’68</em> by Rene Vienet, ISBN 094606105X, p. 94	+	Remember that Marx and Engels, themselves, were not just theorists who scribbled down their thoughts in an “scholarly” vacuum. They were revolutionists themselves, highly engaged in political struggle and, in so struggling, they risked their lives and freedom over the course of many decades. This struggle is what led to the change and development of their ideas over time. The same can be said for every other successful socialist revolutionary in history.
−	[323] Towards a Citizens’ Militia (Cienfuegos Press, 1980).	+	Vo Nguyen Giap, the great general who led Vietnam’s military forces through resistance wars against fascist Japan, colonialist France, and the imperialist USA, describes how he applied such principles on the battlefield in his book ''People’s War, People’s Army'':
−	[324] “The Coup D”Etat” by Lt-Colonel DJ Goodspeed in the interesting but slightly weird <em>Civilian Resistance as a National Defence</em> ed. Adam Roberts (Pelican).	+	<blockquote>
		+	During the Resistance War, owing to constant fighting, the training of our troops could not be carried out continuously for a lengthy period but only between battles or campaigns. We actively implemented the guiding principles ‘To train and to learn while we fight.’ After the difficult years at the beginning of the Resistance War, we succeeded in giving good training to our army. The practical viewpoint in this training deserves to be highlighted. The content of training became most practical and rich. Training was in touch with practical fighting: the troops were trained in accordance with the next day’s fighting, and victory or defeat in the fighting was the best gauge for the control and assessment of the result of the training. On the basis of gradual unification of the organisation and its equipment, the content of training in the various units of the regular army was also systematised step by step.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[325] A good point from another <em>DoD</em> editor: <em>In some ways, I really don’t like the extrapolation of the ‘personal is political’ that some c’.fthese proposals represent. Tnstead of all social relations being subsumed/made subordinate to capital, they are subsumed to the task’ of building the counter culture/ revolution. Have you not considered that people drift apart because they realise that they simply don’t like each other any more-and that it might be unhealthy to stay togetherfor the sake of the revolution?</em>	+	Here, Vo Nguyen Giap has provided a concrete example of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, and their inseparability. This fundamental aspect of dialectical materialist philosophy demands that we think and act like ''scientists'' to change the world, rather than simply speculating and imagining ineffectually like armchair philosophers. As Marx wrote in ''Theses on Feuerbach'' “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” We encourage you to apply what you learn in this and other books to ''change the world.''
−	<br>
−	<br>A danger correctly spotted. This is why it important to grow substantive cultures made up of interlinked smal human sized groups. A good example was the Newbury Bypass Campaign. One of the factors that made it so good was that there were over 30 camps --each with a different atmosphere. Living in many different bands enabled us to be a strong temporary tribe. If we had all been part of one organisation we could never have held together at all. “Affinity groups structures” (read: groups of friends!) grow countercultural unity by separating people as much as bringing them together. Here lies another major difference with authoritarians. In large organisations personal clashes arc channelled into competitive scrambles for dominance over the mass membership.
−	[326] In the city’s isolation from the land can drive you mad, in the countryside isolation from other people can have the same affect. For this reason it is important that those moving onto the land do so collectively and/or stay in regular contact with those elsewhere. The takeover of land-legal or illegal--should be seen as an extension of the counter-culture not a flight from it. For more on allotment history, forest gardening and land struggle see ‘Farmageddon: Confronting Industrial Agriculture’, <em>Do or Die</em> #7, p. 40	+	=== Advice on Further Study ===
−	[327] Rioted by Stokely Carmichael (ex-prez of SNCC) in <em>Black Poets and Prophets: A Bold, Uncompromising Clear Blueprint for Black Liberation</em> edited by Woodie King and Earl Anthony, (New American Library, 1972).	+	As you advance in your studies of socialist literature and theory, we offer the following advice:
−	[328] “Or maybe a step closer to despair and the loony bin’-says another <em>DoD</em> editor.	+	First, you must recognize that the specific language used by revolutionary leaders and thinkers may vary widely across time and around the world. Fashions in language develop over time, and many contributions — like the text you’ve just read — come to us through translation from countless languages. This is why we believe it critical to develop an understanding of the ''spirit'' of the ideas of any particular text, and not to get bogged down in semantics and terminology. Liberal ideologists have done much to distract and divert intellectual energy with endless metaphysical altercation over the “proper” usage of this or that word. We caution strongly against this attitude, which makes us susceptible to sophistry, opportunism, and the sewing of undue conflict and division amidst the working class. We have pointed out various instances where Marx, Engels, and Lenin used different language to describe the same concepts. We also offer the reminder that Marx, Engels, and Lenin were writing in different languages at different times, just as socialists around the world have different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. As socialism is an international movement, we must stress the importance of avoiding linguistic barriers by engaging with one another in good faith and testing conflicting ideas and interpretations of theory against one another through practice instead of getting bogged down with “critical criticism.”
−	[329] From Harrison Ford’s (!) intro to: <em>Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecosystems</em> by Russel <em>A</em> Mittermeher, Norman Myers and Christina Goettsch, ISBN 9686397582	+	Next, we encourage students of socialist philosophy to always keep in mind that the doctrines and philosophies of revolutionary figures are products of the times and places in which they were conceived. It would be a mistake to view the works of any revolutionary figure as a road map or a set of instructions to follow by rote. Even Marx and Engels changed and developed their own ideas over the decades they were active, as they addressed in the 1872 preface to ''The Communist Manifesto'':
−	[330] <em>Conservation Biology</em> by ME Soule and Bruce A. Wilcox, Eds., p. 166	+	<blockquote>
		+	The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’ s Association, 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.”
		+	</blockquote>
−	[331] “The Chartist Anthem,” in <em>The Jolly Machine: Songs cfIndustrial Protest</em> and Social Discontent From the West Midlands by M. Raven.	+	Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Ho Chi Minh also frequently took pains to point out that their revolutionary theories were devised specifically to suit the particular objective conditions of their own respective times and places. For example, in ''What is to be Done'', Lenin discusses the question of secrecy in revolutionary activity. Lenin recognizes that secrecy is not always necessary, such as in the more liberal social democracies which existed in Europe in his era. In Russia, however — with its autocratic monarchy — material conditions called for more covert activity:
−	[332] *Hotspots*, p. 37	+	<blockquote>
		+	In countries where political liberty exists the distinction between a trade union and a political organisation is clear enough, as is the distinction between trade unions and Social-Democracy. The relations between the latter and the former will naturally vary in each country according to historical, legal, and other conditions; they may be more or less close, complex, etc. (in our opinion they should be as close and as little complicated as possible); but there can be no question in free countries of the organisation of trade unions coinciding with the organisation of the Social-Democratic Party. In Russia, however, the yoke of the autocracy appears at first glance to obliterate all distinctions between the Social-Democratic organisation and the workers’ associations, since all workers’ associations and all study circles are prohibited, and since the principal manifestation and weapon of the workers’ economic struggle — the strike — is regarded as a criminal (and sometimes even as a political!) offence.”
		+	</blockquote>
−	[333] Ibid. A number of the hugely important major tropical wildernesses are not presently included in the hotspot list They are Amazonia, the Congolian Forest Block of Central Africa, New Guinea (i.e. West Papua and PNG), the Melanesian Islands-New Britain. New Ireland, Northern Solomons (i.e. Bougainville and Buka), Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. These areas are all under some level of attack-some heavy-but they all retain over 253 of their original area untrashed. ‘Ihe team that wrote Hotspots are in the process of writing a report on these areas. While they need defence, from the perspective of global triage they are not presently areas of highest global priority. Of course if industrialism continues ‘for much longer these areas will almost definitely join the global habitat Red List.	+	Ho Chi Minh was even more explicit about the requirement to tailor theory to current and local material conditions in a speech to the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1950:
−	[334] While the Philippines does not appear in the overall Top 9 list; when looking at plant endemism alone it is ranked ninth highest of all the hotspots.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Studying Marxism-Leninism is not just a matter of repeating the slogan ‘workers of the world, unite’ like a parrot. We must unify Marxism-Leninism with the reality of Vietnam’s revolution. Talking about Marxism-Leninism in Vietnam is talking about the specific guidelines and policies of the Communist Party of Vietnam. For example, our priority now is: great solidarity!
		+	</blockquote>
−	[335] Caribbean Environment Watch produce a useful newsletter: CEW, 141 Coldershaw Road, Ealing, London, WI3 9DU.	+	In a 2001 document, the Communist Party of Vietnam explained how Ho Chi Minh tailored lessons learned from prior revolutionaries to the specific material conditions of revolutionary Vietnam:
−	[336] Cubans grew one of the largest anarcho-syndicalist movements in the world. Though its height was in the 1920s it was still a significant force when Castro rose to power. Armed resistance to the communist counterrevolution ended in jail for well over 100 anarchists. Many companeras were killed and hundreds more went into exile.	+	<blockquote>
		+	Ho Chi Minh’s thought is... the creative application and development of Marxism-Leninism to the specific conditions of our country. Ho Chi Minh learned profound lessons from Lenin and the Russian October Revolution, but he did not simply use those lessons as a template, nor did he just copy that foundation. Instead, he absorbed the spirit of Marxism-Leninism. Lenin’s thesis allowed Ho Chi Minh to see what was necessary for the Vietnamese people — the path of national liberation. Ho Chi Minh had creative arguments that contributed to enriching Marxism-Leninism in the issue of national liberation revolution, building a new democratic regime and the transitional path to socialism in an Eastern, semi-feudal colony which was still very backward: Vietnam.
		+	</blockquote>
−	[337] Important issues must be faced when supporting mainstream conservation programs in the Majority World which too often just shit on local people. Though conservation fiefdoms are in many ways just another form of colonialism they may still be the best hope for some species sur-vival through this century. A prickly reality. It matters little to a hear how oppressed its killer is and the sap still spurts whether the tree is cut with the axe of a peasant or the chainsaw of a company logger. In the war between humanity and nature, I side with the bears. Nevertheless multinational conservation organisations awash with money make questionable allies!	+	As you find your own revolutionary path, you must carefully examine the objective conditions of your own time and place, and work collectively and collaboratively with your fellow revolutionists to decide how theory and lessons gleaned from history apply to your own circumstances. And, of course, you must test the validity of your conclusions against reality through ''practice''.
−	[338] As well as mainstream conservationists some Turkish anarchists have recently done anti-GM actions-hopefully an indication of the greening of that scene.	+	=== Creative Application of Dialectical Materialism and Materialist Dialectics ===
−	[339] This is for many reasons-not least of which relates to language and Britain’s colonial past. It is no surprise that many of the majority world groups we Brits have linked up with have been in ex-British colonies and/ or Christianised countries. We need to go beyond this and forge links across these divides. So for some of the countries in the Med the kind of work needed for most other hotspots is called for. It is likely that groups in Spain, Italy etc. will be able to connect us up to groups in these areas better. For example, French anarchists, for reasons connected to their own country’s colonial past, are much more aware of the 2001 Berber uprising in Algeria than British activists.	+	Finally, we implore you to apply dialectical materialism ''creatively''. Don’t look at this (or any other) book as a set of static instructions. Dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics are living, breathing systems of thought which benefit from the ideas and imagination of comrades working and struggling together. Seek the ''spirit'' of these ideas, study revolutionary theory and history, then ''apply'' what you learn in your daily life. Combat dogmatism and avoid arguments over pure theory. Determine what works and what doesn’t through activity in the real world, and apply what you learn from practical experience to your theoretical development. Over time, you will begin to see how practice and theory impact and develop one another. When you are struggling with a particular problem in revolutionary practice, you will find yourself reading theory in a new light, discovering information and ideas which might be applicable to your immediate circumstances. And as you study theory, you will find that it also impacts your practice, giving you tools and perspective and methodologies for action which you might never have imagined on your own.
−	[340] The desire to escape the boredom of much of our present activism. The state repression of travellers. The squeezing of dole autonomy. High land prices and repressive planning law.	+	We have tried to make this book a useful companion for further study. We have also made the digital version available for free online. If you have found it useful, we hope you will share it freely and widely.
−	[341] *Hotspots*, p. 177	+	=== In Closing ===
−	[342] *Hotspots*, p. 182	+	One last time we would like to thank Dr. Vijay Prashad and Dr. Taimur Rahman for their wonderful insights on our translation, and to acknowledge the monumental work of the Vietnamese scholars who wrote and revised the original text from which this volume is drawn. We also want to recognize once more the donors and supporters who have given us the precious resource of time to translate and annotate this work. Finally, we want to thank the teams at the Iskra Books and The International Magazine, who have provided invaluable editing and peer review services, promotion, and guidance. You can find all their publications, respectively, at:
−	[343] See “Farmageddon: Confronting Industrial Agriculture;” Do or Die #7, p. 40	+	IskraBooks.org
−	[344] See ‘Victory at Offham’, Do or Die #6, p. 62	+	InternationalMagz.com
−	[345] See ‘South Downs Mass Trespasses ’98: Notes on Packed Lunches and Revolution’, Anon., South Downs EF!	+	If you would like to download the free digital version of this book, support future translation work, or if you would like to get in touch, you can visit our website:
−	[346] Ecological and strategical importance are fundamentally different. Strategical importance relates to us, our abilities, and what effect action at a specific site will have on our growth or col-lective power. Ecological importance relates to the intrinsic value of sites irrespective of our ability to defend them.	+	BanyanHouse.org
−	[347] At the Rio Earth Summit nonsense in 1992, governments said they would catalogue their countries’ biodiversity. The card-filers of the apocalypse have been busy and you can check out their handy work on the UK Biodiversity Website: [[http://www.ukbap.org.uk][www.ukbap.org.uk]]. Te website is being added to constantly and you can search it for particular habitat types nationally or locally, or look at biodiversity in your county generally. Some of the website is very useful, other parts blather.	+	We will leave you, now, with the immortal words of the Manifesto:
−	[348] The move into a cycle oflarge-scale daytime national mobilisations was a significant shift in strategy for animal libbers-catalysed by the unexpected mass explosion of the live export protests (See “Shoreham: Live Exports and Community Defence;’ Do or Die #5, p. 75). After the significant victories of the ‘80s against vivisection and fur farming animal libbers looked to escalate action against the largest cause of animal suffering in Britain. Their target-industrial agriculture. Their action against the meat/dairy industry-a vast target to say the least-though dramatic (just look at those meat trucks burn!), was a failure. Few animals were saved and the entirely covert nature of the activity seriously cut into recruitment and outreach. Industrial agriculture is just too big a target. Ironically the live export resistance opened a way out of this impasse.	+	'''Workers of the world, unite!'''
−	[349] Common Sense and Sustainability: A Partnership for the Cairngorms-Executive Summary, The Scottish Office, p. 4	+	You have nothing to lose but your chains.
−	[350] Biodiversity in Scotland, The Stationary Office, ISBN 0114958157	+	=== In Solidarity, ===
−	[351] Ibid. p. 287. Read: ‘No Evolution Without Revolution: The Political Ecology of Wolves, Beavers, Sheep and Deer’, Do or Die #6, p. 34	+	''-'' ''Luna Nguyen, Translator &amp; Annotations''
−	[352] While crofters are some ofthe best allies ofthe Highlands and Islands nothing is without its contradictions. The growth of hugely damaging salmon farms is one example. The Crofters Union has recently been in increased contact with Via Capensina!, the global peasant network which includes among others the Karnataka farmers and the Confederation Paysanne. For a good intro to reality for today’s crofters read: ‘Ihe Story of Crofting in Scotland by Douglas Willis, ISBN 0859763447	+	''-'' ''Emerican Johnson, Editor, Illustrator, &amp; Annotations''
−	[353] See: ‘Over Fishing: Causes and Consequences’, ‘Ihe Ecologist, March 1995.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-92.jpg|''“Marxism-Leninism — Long Live the Victories” — a demonstration to welcome the liberation army in the South of Vietnam on April 30, 1975.'']]
−	[354] “Though still globally minor in scale industrial ‘mariculture’ is set to grow massively over the next few decades. From the salmon farms of the Scottish Hebrides to the slaveing of Caribbean fisheries, civilisation is attempting to manage sealife as it does landlife. All over the world considerable struggles are being waged between traditional fishers and industrial sea farming. See: ‘Taking the Pisces: Struggles of the Fishworkers of inclia’, Do or Die #8, p. 251	+	<br />
−	[355] ‘Wildlife in Danger’, The Ecologist, March 1999.	+	= [Appendices] =
−	[356] The Galapagos Islands are one of the two exceptional mini-hotspots which Myers et al. see as global priorities on a par with the 25 conventional hotspots.	+	== Appendix A: Basic Pairs of Categories Used in Materialist Dialectics ==
−	[357] ‘Occurrences in the Ferocious Isles’, EF! Journal, September 1986.	+	This is a summary of the basic pairs of universal categories and their characteristics which are discussed in depth starting on p. 126.
−	[358] The 1974 seal cull ship sabotage at Sutton Bridge was one of the first acts of the Band of Mercy, predecessor of the ALF. See: Animal Warfare: The Story of the A11imal Liberation Front, David Henshaw, ISBN 0006373240, p. 15	+	{|
		+	| | '''Private'''
		+	| '''Common'''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | A specific item, event, or process.
		+	| The properties that are shared between Private things, phenomena, and ideas.
		+	|
		+	|}
−	[359] Notorious Vessel Meets Explosive Encl! : [[http://www.seashepherC.org/][www.seashepherC.org/]] research/international/villcluen.html-link broken [alternate link: http:// [[http://www.newsweek.com/so-much-saving-whales-158105][www.newsweek.com/so-much-saving-whales-158105]]]	+	''Private'' is commonly referred to in literature as ''Special/Specific'' while ''Common'' is commonly called ''General''. ''Note:'' When an aspect or characteristic is not held in common with anything else in existence, it is considered ''Unique''. The Unique can become Common, just as the Common can become Unique. Example: a Unique design for an object may be replicated, making it Common. A type of item that is Common may gradually disappear until there is only one example left, making it Unique. ''See p. 128.''
−	[360] “How to Sink Whalers, Driftnetters, and Other Environmentally Destructive Ships” by Sea Shepherd Agent #013, p. 343 in Ecodefence, Eel. Dave Foreman, ISBN 0963775103	+	{|
		+	| | '''Reason'''
		+	| '''Result'''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | Mutual impact between things, phenomena, or ideas which causes each to change.
		+	| The change caused by a Reason.
		+	|
		+	|}
−	[361] See: “Putting a Spanner in the Oil Industry’s Works:’ Do or Die No.7, p. 66	+	''Reason'' and ''Result'' may be referred to as ''Cause'' and ''Effect'', respectively, though this should lead to confusion with metaphysical conceptions of cause and effect. ''Note:'' Reasons can be Direct or Indirect. ''See p. 138''
−	[362] “Haclzabe: East Africa’s Last Hunting and Gathering Tribe,” Do or Die #8, p. 267	+	{|
		+	| | '''Obviousness'''
		+	| '''Randomness'''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | Refers to events that always and predictably happen due to factors of internal material structure.
		+	| Events caused by external impacts and interactions which are thus not completely predictable.
		+	|
		+	|}
−	[363] For more information see: [[http://www.eco-action.org][www.eco-action.org]] .	+	''Obvious'' may be referred to as ''Necessary,'' while ''Randomness'' may be referred to as ''Accidental. See p. 145.''
−	[364] “Haclzabe: East Africa’s Last Hunting and Gathering Tribe,” Do or <em>Die</em> #8, p. 267	+	{|
		+	| | '''Content'''
		+	| '''Form'''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | What something is made of.
		+	| The shape that contains content.
		+	|
		+	|}
−	[365] “Tribal Round-up,” <em>Do or Die</em> #8, p. 264	+	Ways in which Content and Form are discussed and perceived can can vary wildly depending on the subject being discussed and the viewpoint from which the subject is being considered. ''See p. 145.''
−	[366] The 1970s crisis and the secret state destabilisation of a succession of Labour governments is a rarely mentioned but extremely important part of recent British history: A <em>substantial section cf the British Secret state and its allies in the Conservative party, business and the media believed, orfound it useful to prete11d to believe-the distinctio11 is d(fficult to make--that British democracy, the state. and even the capitalist system itself was under threat from a resurgent left, spearhead by the trade unions and manipulated by the British Communist Party under instruction from Moscow</em>...-from Lobster Magazine #34, p.32.	+	{|
−	<br>	+	| | '''Essence'''
−	<br>Radical Right militias led by intelligence and military men were formed. Newspapers openly discussed the right circumstances for Army intervention in Britain while MlS orchestrated black propaganda against the Labour Cabinet and trade union leaders. joint military and police opera-lions were carried out at Heathrow Airport without government sanction. Plans were advanced to install an unelected government of National Unity lead by Lord Mountbatten. No unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, this was first exposed in an autobiography by an ex-Daily Mirror executive who was actually at a meeting with some of the conspirators and a long time MIS agent. Similar manoeuvres within the military continued through to the mid ‘70s.	+	| '''Phenomena'''
−	<br>	+	|
−	<br>The parapolitical background to the ‘70s crisis is essential to any understanding of the death of the post-war consensus and the triumph of the Thatcherite radical right. It’s amazing to realise how near to the brink Britain really was! See Who Framed Colin Wallace? by Paul Foot, (Macmillan, 1988) and, Smear: Wilson and the Secret State by Stephen Dorill and Robin Ramsay, (Fourth Estate). These are still the best and most fully documented accounts of the Wilson plot.	+	|-
		+	| | Features that make something develop a certain way.
		+	| The expression of the essence in certain conditions.
		+	|
		+	|}
−	[367] After the collapse of the state-backed pyramid scheme much of the Albanian population were left destitute. As a result in 1997, Albania experienced one of the most profound proletarian revolutions of the Twentieth Century. Virtually the entire armedforces mutinied whilst workers formed <em>revolutionary councils and seized 80% of the country... the Albanian Government was not going to extinguish the Albanian revolution because there was no longer a government. The revolution had extinguished the Albanian state. The world’s investors began to panic. It took the armies often countries to crush the Albanian revolution and it was a close call</em> ... “Kissing goodbye to their Koreas;’ <em>Black Flag</em> #213, p.22.	+	''See p. 156.''
−	[368] Blatantly crazy millenarian revolts and the pro-peasant social reorganisation following the Black Death, are examples of the positive effects of past social ruptures, themselves arising from mass explosions of personal physical and mental health problems. On a similar but more depressing note we can look at the global rise of the West, enabled in large part by the mass deaths that Western disease brought to indigenous peoples.	+	{|
		+	| | '''Possibility'''
		+	| '''Reality'''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | What may happen, or might exist, in the future, if certain developments take place.
		+	| What is happening, or what exists, at the present moment.
		+	|
		+	|}
−	[369] I’m talking here about crisis as opposed to counter-revolutions. Counter-revolutions are essentially attempts by elites to counter and destroy the self-organisation of peasants and the working class-Roll back (r)evolution. While counter-revolutions by their nature presume the existence oflarge movements of the politically aligned, crises can break out when the majority of people are ‘non-aligned’. I do <em>not</em> use the phrase non-aligned to mean apathetic. Most people today in Britain would not align themselves to any group of politicos for a whole host of very sensible reasons.	+	''See p. 160.''
−	[370] Here I am talking about those who really lived inside the activist cultures of squatting, animal liberation, ecological direct action etc. In fact the sum total of all those involved peripherally over this period would probably run to over 100,000. Anyone who doubts this should note that despite most people who went to anti-road protests not being arrested there were 1,000+ arrests at Newbury alone! Similarly J18 was just below 10,000, while smaller RTSs have happened all over Britain. In the same period every weekend in the season dozens of hunt sab groups were out in the field. At the turn of the ‘90s heyday of travelling tens of thousands were on the road at any given time. A high proportion of all those people would see themselves as anarchists.	+	== Appendix B: the Two Basic Principles of Dialectical Materialism ==
−	[371] The track Assassin by ADP concerns the payback one Indian revolutionary gave Sir Michael O’Dwyer, ex-governor of the Punjab. O’Dwyer had presided over the massacre of unarmed peasants and workers in Amiritsar in 1919. Nearly 20 years later Udham Singh shot him dead in London at a meeting of the East India Association. Singh was an electrician, trade unionist, and in 1938 in Coventry the initiator of the first Indian Workers Association. The action both harrowed the English, elite and lifted the spirit of many of his people. He was hung in Pentonville prison. ‘Ihe Indian Workers Association remains active today. For a good intro to Black resistance in Britain, see .4. <em>Different Hunger</em> by A. Sivanandan, ISBN 0861043715	+	'''The Principle of General Relationships''' This principle states that:
−	[372] <em>The Zapatistas: A Rough</em> <em>Guide,</em> (Chiapas Link) ISBN 0904367992	+	“Materialist dialectics upholds the position that all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in mutual relationships with each other, regulate each other, transform into each other, and that nothing exists in complete isolation.”
−	[373] Too often activists from other countries are pushed into reformist- and futile-trajectories by their liberal Western hosts. Indigenous groups especially are told to engage with the UN, etc. While this idiocy is unlikely in our circles, other problems arise. Sometimes radical groups’ normal ways of behaviour can lead them to push their guests into an endless round of solidarity talks, meetings, pamphlet and newsletter writing. Often these are aimed primarily at the domestic group’s own constituency and may be of more use to them than to the foreign group whose member they are hosting. ‘Ibis can waste time the guest could more constructively spend on studying and organising in their own community’s interest. However the above mentioned activities can be very useful ifthey build solidarity actions here and other forms of direct aid. If not, the relationship can descend to one of the foreign guest giving a bit of Third World political entertainment to the Western radicals.	+	From this Principle, we find the characteristics of ''Diversity in Unity'' and ''Unity in Diversity''; the basis of Diversity in Unity is the fact that every thing, phenomenon, and idea contains many different relationships; the basis of Unity in Diversity is that many different relationships exist — unified — within each and every thing, phenomenon, and idea.
−	[374] In fact the Indonesian state has used classic divide and rule strategy by using ethnically Papuan Indonesian soldiers to suppress revolt in East Timor and ethnically Timorese Indonesian soldiers to suppress revolt in West Papua.	+	'''''The Characteristic of Diversity in Unity''''' is derived from the fact that there exist an infinite number of diverse relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas, but all of these relationships share the same foundation in the material world.
−	[375] A lot can be learned from this action. See the article “Sabbing Shell” in Do or Die, No.8, p.125	+	'''''The Characteristic of Unity in Diversity''''' is derived from the fact that when we examine the universal relationships that exist within and between all different things, phenomena, and ideas, we will find that each individual manifestation of any universal relationship will have its own different manifestations, aspects, features, etc. Thus even the universal relationships which unite all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in infinite diversity.
−	[376] The struggle of the Vietnamese against America was unbelievably heroic, from which many lessons can be learned, but it should be underlined that Ho Chi Minh’s regime was an authoritarian state that mercilessly crushed all opposition. Our enemy’s enemy is not our friend!	+	'''The Principle of Development''' This principle states that:
−	[377] See <em>Pacifism as Pathology</em> by Ward Churchill, ISBN 18 940370 73, p.79. A brilliant <em>intervention into the delusion, aroma of racism, and sense of privilege which mark the coved self-defeatism of mainstream dissident politics.</em> Speaking as an ex-pacifist, I highly recommend it!	+	'''“'''Development is a process that comes from within the thing-in-itself; the process of solving the contradictions within things and phenomena. Therefore, development is inevitable, objective, and occurs without dependence on human will.”
−	[378] “A Strategy to Win” by Bill Ayers in <em>New Left Notes,</em> 12.9.1969.	+	'''''The Characteristic of Objectiveness of Development''''' stems from the origin of motion. Since motion originates from mutual impacts which occur between external things, objects, and relationships, the motions themselves also occur externally (relative to all other things, phenomena, and objects). This gives motion itself objective characteristics.
−	[379] The whole concept of armed struggle is rather nebulous in a similar way to its dualistic opposite non-violence. The fetishising of guns-basically just tools—is often carried out with equal abandon by those who advocate their use and those who vehemently oppose them. What is ‘armed struggle’? ls the destruction of a digger by explosives (as was the case in one action by the Welsh Mebion Glydowr) an act of armed struggle? If hand tools were used to the same effect (as say at Manchester Airport) is that not armed? Is tossing a mollie/petrol bomb at a cop in Genoa not armed struggle? Was the machine gunning of the Spanish Embassy by the Angry Brigade (in which no one was injured) armed struggle? If so, was the smashing up of the Nigerian Embassy with hammers not armed struggle? If the definition of armed struggle lies entirely on whether guns are used, the concept is of little use to us. We should not let tools define our activity, but our activity define which tools to use.	+	'''''The Characteristic of Generality of Development''''' stems from the fact that development occurs in every process that exists in every field of nature, society, and human thought; in every thing, every phenomenon, and every process and stage of these things and phenomena.
−	[380] It is not just in the realm of actions, bombings and the like that Immigrant communities become “an enemy within:’ Over the last few years immigrants have been at the forefront of work-place struggle. The combination in some immigrant communities of radicalism and low wages has resulted in prolonged strikes such as at Hilingdon Hospital and JJ Foods. Inner city riots by young Blacks and Asians are another example. However it is not within the scope of this task section to discuss rebellions within the core (Task I) whoever they are carried out by.	+	'''''The Characteristic of Diversity of Development''''' stems from the fact that every thing, phenomenon, and idea has its own process of development that is not totally identical to the process of development of any other thing, phenomenon, or idea.
−	[381] “Easton Cowboys Go West” in <em>Do or Die</em> #8, p.248	+	== Appendix C: the Three Universal Laws of Materialist Dialectics ==
−	[382] In the crackdown that followed the bombings of a Zionist office and the Israeli embassy many Palestinian activists were raided. Samar Alami and Jawd Botmeh were convicted of the attacks and given 20 years after which they face deportation to Israel. They maintain they have been framed. See “The Israeli Embassy Bombing and the Secret State” in <em>Do or Die</em> #8, p.224	+	=== The Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality ===
−	[383] “The New Luddite War” in <em>Do or Die,</em> #8, p.95	+	The law of transformation between quantity and quality is a universal law which concerns the universal mode of motion and development processes of nature, society, and human thought. The law was formulated by Friedrich Engels in ''Dialectics of Nature'', and states that:
−	[384] “Being Busy” by Anonymous (SDEF!), in <em>On Fire: Ihe Battle of Genoa and the Anti-capitalist Movement,</em> p.41	+	“In nature, in a manner exactly fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion.” ''See more on p. 163.''
−	[385] <em>The Spanish Anarchists: ‘The Heroic Years</em> by Murray Bookchin, p.281	+	=== The Law of Unification and Contradiction Between Opposites ===
−	[386] <em>This Side ofGlory</em> by David Hilliard, ISBN 0316364215, p.27	+	The law of unification and contradiction between opposites is the essence of dialectics. It states, as formulated by V. I. Lenin in ''Summary of Dialectics'':
−	<br>	+	“The fundamental, originating, and universal driving force of all motion and development processes is the inherent and objective contradiction which exists in all things, phenomena, and ideas.” ''See more on p. 175.''
−	* Afterword	+	=== The Law of Negation of Negation ===
−	** <em>Do or Die</em> Editors Interview	+	The law of negation of negation describes the fundamental and universal tendency of movement and development to occur through a cyclical form of development through what is termed “negation of negation.” Formulated by Friedrich Engels in ''Anti-Dühring,'' it states:
−	<em>This inteview was conducted at the end of 2006 for the American</em> Earth First’ Journal.	+	“The true, natural, historical, and dialectical negation is (formally) the moving source of all development--the division into opposites, their struggle and resolution, and what is more, on the basis of experience gained, the original point is achieved again (partly in history, fully in thought), but at a higher stage.” ''See more on p. 185.''
−	Describe the project: its inception/inspiration...	+	== Appendix D: Forms of Consciousness and Knowledge ==
−	None ofthe current ex-editors were involved at the beginning of the project. The editorial group has changed over time, with quite a few people passing through.	+	''Consciousness'' refers to the self-aware, productive, and creative motion and activity of the human brain. Practical activity is the most direct basis, motive, and purpose of consciousness, and is the criterion for testing truth. See: ''The Relationship Between Praxis and Consciousness'', p. 216.
−	Do or Die (DoD) started in 1992, within a year of EF! starting in Britain. It pushed a green anarchist, direct action perspective. At this time EF! was split and was half liberal and half radical.	+	''Knowledge'' is the content of consciousness. Knowledge includes data about the world, such as ideas, memories, and other thoughts which are derived by direct observation and practical activities in the material world, through scientific experiments, or through abstract reflection of practical and scientific activities which occur within consciousness.
−	DoD has never fulfilled the role of the EF! <em>Journal</em> in the States. The <em>Journal</em> is the official voice of EF! with the editors accountable to the gatherings. <em>DoD</em> was always a voice of Earth First! <em>DoD</em> explicitly gave publicity to sabotage and had a no compromise attitude. Some people in EF! didn’t like it at first and even tried to expel <em>DoD</em> from EF! The Ea<em>rt</em>h <em>First! Action Update</em> [EF!AU] has worked more like the <em>Journal-it</em> has had a rotating editorial collective and has been accountable to gatherings.	+	Consciousness and Knowledge have a dialectical relationship with one another: knowledge is developed within consciousness, and consciousness develops to higher levels as knowledge is accumulated and tested against reality (which also develops knowledge itself). In this manner, consciousness and knowledge develop into higher forms over time in individual consciousness and human society. Thus, consciousness and knowledge can be considered as existing in various forms which represent stages of development in dialectical processes of development.
−	Early on <em>DoD</em> was supposed to carry more news and was supposed to be more frequent-every three months or so. ft started out as a 24-page zinc photocopied at night at American Express by members of staff (the European headquarters of AMEX is a well-known and much-hated landmark in Brighton). It kind of mutated into a massive book over time.	+	Note that the development processes of knowledge and consciousness are dialectical in nature, not linear. For example, after empirical consciousness develops into theoretical consciousness, theoretical consciousness will then impact empirical consciousness, developing empirical consciousness into a higher stage of development. This is true for all development processes related to empirical and theoretical consciousness. These development processes and forms of consciousness and knowledge are explained in more detail in Chapter 3: Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism, starting on page 204.
−	It might be useful for American readers to point out the other ways in which DoD is different from the EF! <em>Journal. DoD</em> has always been all voluntary-no one has ever been paid to work for <em>DoD.</em> Also DoD has pretty much always been all anonymous-no writers, photographers, or artists were credited. This is something which is pretty much taken for granted in the EF! scene in the UK (the EF!AU was also pretty much anonymous after the first two or three years) but is more unusual in the USA. This has sometimes caused confusion amongst people who didn’t realise that DoD was written by lots of different people. Some of the articles in DoD were written by people from the editorial collective, but there were probably 50 or 60 contributors per issue. An article being in DoD didn’t necessarily mean it was written by us or that the editorial collective supported everything in it. Hence there was lots of stuff in DoD that contradicted lots of other stuff in <em>DoD.</em> Sometimes this was explicit-like when we had pro and anti articles on some subject—e.g. legal social centres in issue 10 or the issue of mental illness at the Newbury Bypass protest in issue 6.	+	=== Forms of Consciousness ===
−	Anonymity was a point of principle and mostly due to repression of known leaders and personalities in EF! in the USA (e.g. Judi Bari) and in the British animal lib movement (e.g. Arkangel) at around the time that EF! was getting going in the UK. It seemed sensible to avoid a cult of personality-there was an awareness of how EF! in the USA had been split by groupings forming around particular charismatic individuals-e.g. Dave Foreman and Judi Bari.	+	Consciousness is a process of the development of knowledge through a combination of human brain activity and human practical activity in the physical world (i.e., labor). The development of consciousness can be considered on the criteria of ''concrete/abstract'' and of ''passive/active''. For more information, see Annotation 216, p. 210.
−	It also needs saying that the people involved in putting together DoD were not writers or journalists. Pretty much everyone involved spent more time on actions than they did on DoD. We did not want to be journalists-reporting on other people’s struggles, we wanted to record the voices ofthe people involved in the struggles themselves. If we couldn’t bully them to write for us we would often interview them.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-99.png]]
−	DoD was produced by and largely aimed at a few hundred people in the UK eco scene. Although it had a wider circulation than this, it was largely produced with this audience in mind. But, DoD has also been really liked by all sorts of other people who often didn’t like each other at all. For example lots of more traditional anarchist communists really liked DoD, as did lots of conservationists-the magazine was big enough that very few people read all of it—-people just read the bits they liked and ignored the rest. We’d get comments from more traditional anarchists saying that they really liked it, but it was a shame about the articles about beaver restoration or Native American spirituality. And then we’d get almost exactly opposite comments from other people who liked the beavers but weren’t so into class struggle.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-100.png]]
−	<em>DoD</em> was at its strongest when it had the most contributors ndalsowhen the editorial collectivewas at its biggest (6-ish,as opposed to 2-ish at some other points). Personally I think issue 8 was a bit of a high point. But then again-it’s also what you’ve got to work with-there was a lot to write about in 1999. It also maybe depends what you like. For example DoD 9 was more anti-capitalist, summit protest oriented, and it’s some people’s favourite issue-more traditional anarchists liked it, but it had less eco stuff in it and was less of a mish-mash than some other issues. That was partly a reflection of what was going on at the time and of the people who were putting it together and of the fact that that issue had a very small editorial collective and so it just was not possible to have such a varied contents.	+	=== The Cognitive Process ===
−	Each ofthe people involved in the editorial collective brought their own interests and knowledge to it, so it was partly the make up of the editorial collective that ‘ made the magazine what it was-one person knew about conservation biology, one knew about counter-insurgency theory, one knew about ultra-left theory, one knew about European punk squats, etc. So we missed out on stuff when the editorial collective shrunk sometimes.	+	The Cognitive Process is a model developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin which represents the dialectical path of consciousness to truth. For more information, see ''Dialectical Path of Consciousness to Truth'' on page 219.
−	There was more of an international focus in recent issues--this was possibly due to a slow down of ecological resistance in the UK-there was less day-to-day stuff happening than there was in the mid-‘90s. However, there was still a lot of stuff going on. Also the movement as a whole gained a more international perspective and DoD reflected that as people started looking to the wider causes of what they were fighting-to globalisation and to the summit meetings of the global elite for example.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-101.png]]
−	Describe its role/influence in the UK’s eco-a11archist movement... Basically what happened within EF! was that we won. DoD and the political perspective it represented was relatively unpopular at the beginning. DoD was essentially trying to fulfil the same role that <em>Live Wild or Die!</em> did in the States-a radical anarchist fringe publication trying to ginger things up a bit. When we say that we won-in that the green anarchist perspective went from being the minority to the majority perspective within EF! in the UK over the course of the 1990s-that isn’t quite as arrogant as it sounds ... It may have been partly due to our efforts but is probably more due to people’s own experiences of resistance over time. This resulted in lots ofpeople dropping much of nonviolent pacifist ideology, moving more towards an anarchist position and supporting sabotage actions.	+	=== Forms of Knowledge ===
−	The reason maybe why our ideas reflected the way things were going a bit more than some other people’s was perhaps that the people involved in doing DoD had been influenced by other tendencies, mostly animal liberation, as opposed to others who had come to EF! from more liberal environmentalist organisations like Friends of the Earth.	+	''For more information see Annotation 218, p. 214.''
−	How long did it run for? Why did it cease production? DoD ran from 1992 to 2003-ish-over ten years. We stopped it because most of the people in the editorial collective did not personally want to be doing it anymore and wanted to move on to other things. The project was very time consuming and always seemed to end up with us spending the summer sitting in front of a computer in some sunless basement. We did not want to hand the project over to an entirely different group of people-that would have made it into something entirely different (this is kind of what happened to Fifth Estate-and maybe it would have been better to have just ended it). We didn’t stop producing <em>DoD</em> for financial reasons. Our “suicide note” in the last issue has led some people to assume this. Neither did we stop producing the magazine because of lack of popularity or distro problems or because we thought it had no point anymore-right up to the end there was no lack of submissions or sales or of things to write about. Ideally, in the abstract, <em>DoD</em> would have carried on, it’s just that personally there weren’t enough people who actually wanted to carry on with it. As one ex-collective member memorably said: “kill it while it’s good:’ It wasn’t that we felt it wasn’t relevant anymore, or wasn’t serving a useful purpose.	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-102.png]]
−	Another reason behind ending <em>DoD</em> was a desire to actually do some of things on the Four Tasks list [page 333], not just to produce the world’s biggest English-language anarchist journal.	+	== Appendix E: Properties of Truth ==
−	<quote>	+	Truth is the alignment of consciousness with objective reality. All truths are objective, relative, absolute, and concrete. Truths also have characteristics of concreteness and abstractness.
−	<em>I want to focus on the last issue a bit. What kind of response did you all get to “Down With ‘Ihe Empire, Up With the Spring”? Was it circulated independently of the book format in the UK?</em>
−	</quote>
−	Some of the ideas from “Down with the Empire, Up with the Spring” (DwtE) were originally circulated in a discussion document in ‘97/’98. But the real first appearance of it was about a year before DoD #10 came out. The second part of the article (“The Four Tasks”) was circulated as a little free pamphlet (that became known as “/he Little Grey Book) at the EF! Winter l\foot.	+	'''Objectivity:''' The content of truth is external to the subjective will of human beings. The content of knowledge must be aligned with objective reality, not vice versa. This means that the content of accurate knowledge is not a product of pure subjective reasoning but is objective in nature.
−	That stimulated things-people acting on what it said; some good criticism that was incorporated into the final version; and quite a common response-“good strategy, shame it’s too late--why didn’t you write this when we still had a movement?” The answer to this is probably that the author was too busy ‘being in the movement when it was in its heyday to be able to stop and think about it. He sat down afterwards to strategise. DwtE came out at a point when the movement was in downturn. This might be another thing perhaps not appreciated by Americans-the US and British EF! movements have had their peaks and troughs in different places-when one was on the up the other has been in decline... The starting point for DwtE was the need to change because of changing demographics-people getting older, having kids, getting jobs, the dole becoming harder and harder, it becoming harder and harder to live as a traveller.	+	'''Absoluteness:''' Absolute truth<ref>Note: Absolute Truth in dialectical materialist philosophy should not be confused with Hegel’s conception of Absolute Truth as a final point at which human consciousness will have achieved absolute, complete, and final understanding of our universe.</ref> is derived from the complete alignment between objective reality and human consciousness. The possibility of acquiring absolute truth in the process of the development of conscious understanding is theoretically limitless. However, in reality, our conscious ability to reflect reality is limited by the specific material conditions of each generation of humanity, of practical limitations, and by the spatial and temporal conditions of reflected subjects. Therefore, truth is also ''relative''.
−	Reactions to it over the past three years or so have been varied ... DwtE said that summit demonstrations were a good thing but the article found favour with those who opposed them. There was an emerging split-or perhaps rather a divergence--within the movement between those who were more into the anti-capitalist/anti-globalisation thing-summit demonstrations, no border camps, etc. and those who were more into the green anarchist/primitivist angle. New people came into the movement around summit demonstrations, etc. in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s with whom DoD was not such an influence. DwtE influenced one half of the movement more than the other, but even this wasn’t black and white-e.g. the section on social centres in DwtE fits very well into a lot of what the anti-globalisation folks have been doing. Various people have used DwtE to justify what they were doing anyway-people on both sides have quoted it-picking and choosing different bits to suit their purposes.	+	'''Relativity:''' Relative truth is truth which has developed alignment with reality without yet having reached ''complete'' alignment. To put it another way, relative truth represents knowledge which incompletely reflects material subjects without complete accuracy. In relative truth, there is only partial alignment — in some (but not all) aspects — between consciousness and the material world.
−	The British response to DwtE came earlier-many people in the movement read it in its early Little Grey Book version and by the time it appeared in DoD #10 and became more widely distributed, many people had already started acting on what it said. There have been a couple of DwtE reading groups.	+	'''Dialectical Relationship Between Absolute and Relative Truth:''' Relative truth and absolute truth do not exist separately, but have dialectical unity with each other. On the one hand, “absolute truth” is the sum of all “relative truths.” On the other hand, in all relative truths there are always elements of absolute truth.
−	An international response to DwtE came about two years later once it had appeared in DoD #10 and then been distributed around the world. DwtE has been translated into French (where there have been reading groups reading it) and Dutch (where it has been republished in a journal and then as a book, with added material about the Dutch radical eco movement). It has also been republished in the USA in two separate editions, again with added material making it more relevant to the local conditions. We are still hearing about translations and reactions-you get delayed reactions from around the world as it is translated into other languages, etc.	+	'''Concreteness:''' The concreteness of truth refers to the degree to which a truth is attached to specific objects, in specific conditions, at a specific point in time. This means that all accurate knowledge always refers to a specific situation which involves specific subjects which exist in a specific place and time. The content of truth cannot be pure abstraction, disconnected from reality, but it is always associated with certain, specific objects and phenomena which exist in a specific space, time, and arrangement, with specific internal and external relationships. Therefore, truth is associated with specific historical conditions. This specificity to time, place, relations, etc., is ''concreteness''.
−	A number of projects have been solely inspired by DwtE in the UK and Europe. Some of these have been successfol and saved bits of nature from destruction. On a wider level DwtE reflects what was going on anyway... the author was not the only person thinking these things-he was drawing on a shared pool of ideas.	+	'''Abstractness:''' Abstract knowledge is knowledge which is not attached (or less attached) to specific times, places, relations, etc. Some degree of abstraction is necessary to develop theoretical understanding of general laws and the nature of objective reality, but care should be taken knowledge does not become completely detached from specific historical conditions, as this will result in ''pure abstraction''. Knowledge which is purely abstract will not align with reality, and such knowledge cannot be considered truth.
−	What do you see occurring within the EF! Movement/network at the present?	+	== Appendix F: Common Deviations From Dialectical Materialism ==
−	Well, Part One ofDwtE gives you a pretty good background up to about 2002-ish and since then... well the ageing process has continued-the generational, cyclical nature of British radical politics. There has also been the sort of split that we mentioned above. But there is still stuff happening... In a way for ecological resistance, the situation now feels quite similar to about 1992-before the anti-roads movement took off and before the movement against the Criminal Justice Act brought lots of people together.	+	Throughout the history of the development of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics, there have been many philosophical and methodological deviations which have derived from incorrect analysis, interpretation, and a failure to properly link theory and practice. Below are descriptions of some of the more common deviations which the reader should be aware of.
−	It’s all relative-ecological resistance obviously had a heyday in the mid-‘90s. It was not obvious at the time that it was the heyday. This has only become clear in retrospect. So from the perspective of people who lived through that, the situation now must seem like a bit of a comedown but there’s still quite a lot going on-there are at least five active permanent protest sites; we just had all the G8 protests last year; two years running large numbers of people from the radical ecological movement in Britain have gone over to defend the wilderness in Iceland; we also just had the Camp for Climate Action this summer when several hundred people tried to shut down the biggest C02 producing power station in Britain... Just check the web and you can see there’s actually a lot of stuff going on. People’s it’s-not-like-the-good-old-days feeling probably says more about them getting older than what’s actually going on...	+	'''Bureaucracy:''' An expression of ''dogmatism'' which arises when theory becomes overly formalized, to the extent that practical considerations are ignored in favor of codified theory.
−	In some ways the movement has been a victim of its own success-we won quite a lot, against road building for example. ‘Ibey cut the road building programme almost to nothing and so then there were far fewer protest sites, but not for any bad reason, but because there wasn’t so much need for them. Likewise a few years ago you might have been hearing about lots of anti-GM sabotage actions and you might not be hearing about them so much anymore. That is attributable not to the decline of the movement but to the fact that we won and there have been as far as I’m aware NO GM test sites at all for the past few years (They are just now talking about trying some again next year).	+	'''Conservativism:''' A mindset which seeks to prevent and stifle development and to hold humanity in a static position. Not only is this detrimental to humanity, it is also ultimately a wasted effort, because development is inevitable in human society, as in all things, phenomena, and ideas.
−	In the mid-‘90s the radical eco movement was really the only game in town. In a very moribund political scene, it was the only thing going on with any life or vitality. Every other radical tendency was in decline. For a few years it was the social/political trend to which everything else had to orient itself-everyone wanted to jump on our bandwagon. The mainstream environmental movement had to reposition itself relative to us; the anarchist movement had to do the same; aspects of this movement were picked up in fashion, music, on radio and television, etc. (There was a point where it was de rigueur for every TV soap opera to have its own road protestor character.) This is different now-by comparison the radical eco movement seems not so significant now, but that may be partly because there’s more other stuff going on... the radical eco scene is now merely one thing among many-anti-capitalism/social centres/the anti-war movement, etc.	+	'''Dogmatism:''' A breakdown of the dialectical relationship between theoretical consciousness and empirical consciousness, which arrests the development process of knowledge and consciousness. Usually the result of: failure to seek commonalities; considering theory itself as the sole basis of truth rather than practice; ignoring practical experience and considering pre-established theory, alone, as unalterable truth.
−	Talking about the radical eco movement is one thing, talking about the EF! network is another-they are not the same thing, although I guess the radical eco movement is bigger than and encompasses EF! Earth First! existed before there was a big wave of eco-direct action and now it exists again after that wave has come and gone as a network of groups, individuals, and social centres etc. most of whom probably don’t actually call themselves Earth First! But in a way that’s not much different from how it has always been. There are still EF! gatherings every summer, attracting 200–300 people, occasionally Winter Moots, attracting fewer, the EF!AU on paper has kind of died at the moment, but there is now a website for Earth First! action reports. There are now fewer EF! groups, the network itself is less visible-you could say it barely exists, but then it has barely existed or existed in a very underground, invisible way for most of its existence! Many of the most famous EF! things were never done under that name. June 18<sup>th</sup> was organised by the ]18 Network, there was The Third Battle of Newbury, there was Road Alert, The Genetic Engineering Network... Even in the heyday of ecological resistance in the UK, Earth First! was often a largely invisible part of it-many Earth First!ers chose not to use that name and worked under a variety of “flags of convenience”-using different names for different actions.	+	'''Eclecticism:''' An approach to philosophical inquiry which attempts to draw from various different theories, frameworks, and ideas to attempt to understand a subject; the philosophical error of inconsistently applying different theories and principles in different situations. Empiricism: A broad philosophical position which holds that only experience (including internal experience) can be held as a source of knowledge or truth. Though nominally opposed to idealism, it is considered a faulty (or naive) form of materialism, since it sees the world as only unconnected, static appearances and ignores the reality of dialectical (changing) relationships between objects.
−	One reason EF! now might seem more non-existent than it is, is due to lack of infrastructure-the EF!AUhas stopped, DoD has stopped—pretty much the only thing that keeps Earth First! existing as a thing is the Summer Gathering. There’s actually a lot of stuff happening on a local level. There’s a lot of people out there being very busy, but half the time we don’t even know what we are doing, let alone anyone else. When there have been national campaigns like the anti-roads thing (especially in the heyday of the camps, because people were travelling from camp to eamp and hitch-hiking constantly back and forth across the country) or the genetics campaign there has been more of a sense of national unity (ooo-err!) and more of an awareness of what everyone else was doing. of what we were doing as a collective entity.	+	'''Idealism:''' A philosophical position which holds that the only reliable experience of reality occurs within human consciousness. Idealists believe that relying on human reason exclusively or as a first basis is the best way to seek truth. Various forms of idealism exist, broadly broken down into subjective idealism, which denies the existence of an external objective world, and objective idealism, which accepts that an external objective world exists, but denies that knowledge can be reliably gained about it through sense perception.
−	So maybe that’s a problem with the non-existence of <em>DoD—</em> it was one of the things giving us some national-level infrastructure, a channel of communication between us and us and between us and the rest of the world. Now though there is a new generation that watched the battles at Newbury on the television as they were growing up and has been reading DoD and DwtE because there hasn’t been so much going on recently.	+	'''Opportunism:''' A system of political opinions with no direction, no clear path, no coherent viewpoint, leaning on whatever is beneficial for the opportunist in the short term.
−	Do we need another Do or Die style publication? Is there still an existing movement that would make use of a publication for “voicesfrom the ecological resistance “?	+	'''Revisionism:''' A failure to recognize and accept commonalities in conscious activity, focusing only on the private. Revisionism leads to constant and unnecessary reassessment and reevaluation of both knowledge and practice. Revisionism, thus, is a position which overstates the relativity of truth and ignores truths which are more fully developed towards absoluteness.
−	One criticism of DoD that was expressed sometimes was that such a well-produced huge magazine was shading out other independent media publication that would otherwise exist. We can now see that this criticism is the rubbish that I always suspected it was. DoD died ages ago and nothing has sprung up to replace it-there is realy nothing filling that niche... lots of things, like the Iceland campaign or the Climate Camp will probably go pretty much un-analysed, un-recorded...	+	'''Rigidity:''' An unwillingness to alter one’s thoughts, holding too stiffly to established consciousness and knowledge, and ignoring practical experience and observation, which leads to stagnation of both knowledge and consciousness.
−	It’s hard to say what the influence of DoD will be. <em>DoD</em> will retain some influence for longer because it’s a book and therefore gets kept on people’s bookshelves when they clear out and throw away magazines. It survives better also in libraries and archives than zines or whatever. Newsprint decays. For us the change to a journal format was a very good thing. It survives longer...	+	'''Skepticism:''' The belief truth is essentially undiscoverable, because human consciousness is ultimately unreliable and incapable of accurately reflecting material reality. By denying that truth is discoverable at all, skepticism explicitly rejects absolute truth and declares that all truth is relative and unreliable. Solipsism: A form of idealism in which one believes that the self is the only basis for truth. As Marxist ethicist Howard Selsam wrote in ''Ethics and Progress: New Values in a Revolutionary World'': “If I believe that I alone exist and that you and all your arguments exist only in my mind and are my own creations then all possible arguments will not shake me one iota. No logic can possibly convince [the] solipsist.”
−	Generational info gets lost. Our underground history gets lost as people get older, drop out, clear out their old pamphlet collections ... DoD is endlessly referenced by academics whereas all zines disappear. What survives for posterity will be a view of history based largely on what academics write. When we’re all 70 and the actions of our youth have been totally rewritten and distorted by historians, DoD is going to be one of the only surviving sources for the actual voices of the people involved. Because of its format it has for some become the representation of a time period because it has survived better than other things.	+	'''Sophistry:''' The use of falsehoods and misleading arguments, usually with the intention of deception, and with a tendency of presenting non-critical aspects of a subject matter as critical, to serve a particular agenda. The word comes from the Sophists, a group of professional teachers in Ancient Greece, who were criticized by Socrates (in Plato’s dialogues) for being shrewd and deceptive rhetoricians. This kind of bad faith argument has no place in materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics must, instead, be rooted in a true and accurate understanding of the subject, material conditions, and reality in general.
−	DoD has also had quite an afterlife in academia. For people trying to write about the radical eco movement in the ‘90s, or about anti-globalisation or whatever, DoD makes very good source material. It’s all straight from the horse’s mouth as we have articles written by activists. It’s not academic so referencing it probably looks like you’ve done your research, but it’s also very easy to find as most of it is on the web and due to our clever webmaster we always get very high search results on search engines.	+	'''Subjectivism:''' The centering of one’s own self and conscious activities in perspective and worldview, failing to test one’s own perceptions against material and social reality. Subjectivists tend to believe that they can independently reason their way to truth in their own minds without practical experience and activity in the material world.
−	We never exploited it as much as we could have done. We could have pushed the distro loads more and done a lot more of getting it distributed all over the place. For example for sure we could have sold about 100 times more copies in the USA if we’d had some way ofsorting out the distribution. It’s just that that’s a boring bureaucratic job that no one really fancied doing very much, we wanted to have lives instead. Hence why we stopped doing it too.	+	'''Utilitarianism:''' An ethical philosophical theory founded by Jeremy Bentham which seeks to maximize “utility,” which is considered to be a metaphysical property embodying “benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness.” Karl Marx dismissed utilitarianism as overly abstract, in that it reduces all social relationships to the single characteristic of “utility.” He also viewed utilitarianism as metaphysically static and tied to the status quo of current society, since utilitarianism does not address class dynamics and views all relations in the current status quo of society, making utilitarianism an essentially conservative theory. Marx also pointed out that Utilitarianism essentially views individuals as private individuals, not as social individuals, and seeks to work out solutions to the practical problems of human society through reasoning alone without examining material conditions and processes, and without taking into consideration practice and development, writing:
−	What do you think of a proposal that the EF! journal in the US change format to be lessfrequent, but larger with more analysis and broader in scope, accompanied by a more regularly published EF!AU? Did that model seem effective for disseminating news and ideas in the UK?	+	<blockquote>
		+	“The whole criticism of the existing world by the utility theory was... restricted within a narrow range. Remaining within the confines of bourgeois conditions, it could criticise only those relations which had been handed down from a past epoch and were an obstacle to the development of the bourgeoisie... the economic content gradually turned the utility theory into a mere apologia for the existing state of affairs, an attempt to prove that under existing conditions the mutual relations of people today are the most advantageous and generally useful.”
		+	</blockquote>
−	We can’t really give advice to the US. Things don’t just simply transfer to the USA. But that said, the way it worked with the combination of the EF!AU and DoD wasn’t bad, it seemed to work pretty well for a while. The EFAUwas always written in a pretty neutral objective way because it had to keep everyone in the movement happy-it couldn’t too obviously take sides. The idea of something that is the official voice of a movement that also takes sides in ongoing arguments is pretty problematic. The <em>EF!AU</em> just did news and info and contacts. Also, it’s worth pointing out, that it wasn’t only the AUand DoD, various other publications did and still do come out of the radical eco scene and, more widely, the various overlapping direct action/anti-capitalist/anarchist scenes... The EF!AUwas the only thing that was ever officially EF! and that didn’t try and cover all the divergent opinions. Other publications covered all the divergent ideas-e.g. Cmporate Watch, DoD, Green Anarchist, and various other local ones...
−	Anything else you want to discuss or mention?	+	= [Back Matter] =
−	There should have been more about climate change in DwtE. It’s later than we thought when we published DwtE. There should have been more stuff on preparing for crisis in it. The Four Tasks of DwtE will be affected by climate change. Things are speeding up more than anyone thought. The Hotspots analysis is still useful but we’re further down the road than anyone thought. In DwtE we said give the Hotspots 10 years and then maybe swap to Coldspots. We probably haven’t got that long. But even then, the idea of switching to Coldspots is still assuming that habitat destruction is the main problem, but if the Amazon catches fire we’re in a different place altogether.	+	== Glossary &amp; Index ==
−	Things have happened since we published DoD #10, e.g. the stuff that James Lovelock has come out with and the realisation of the effects of global dimming. which puts us about 10 years further down the road than we thought we were. The increasing realisation of the severity of the climate crisis affects different people in different ways. Some people think it’s too late and have given up. Other people are inspired to take action now-e.g. the Climate Camp.	+	{|
		+	| | '''Absolute Truth'''
		+	| Absolute Truth can refer to:<br />
		+	<br />
		+	1. The recognition that objective and accurate truth can be drawn from sense perception of the material world along with labor and practice activities in the material world. The opposite of this position is Relativism. See p. 56, 94, 194, 228–229, 232–234.<br />
		+	<br />
		+	2. Hegel’s notion of Absolute Truth: that there will eventually be some end point of to the process of rational consciousness at which point humanity will arrive at a final stage of knowledge and consciousness. See p. 228.<br />
		+	<br />
		+	See also: Relative Truth, Relativism, Stagnation, Truth.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Absolutization'''
		+	| To hold a belief or supposition as always true in all situations and without exception. See p. 49.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Abstract Labor'''
		+	| The abstract conception of expenditure of human energy in the form of labor, without taking into account the value of labor output. When the value of labor output ''is'' taken into consideration, it is referred to as ''concrete labor''. See p. 15, 17.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Adam Smith'''
		+	| (1723–1790) British logic professor, moral philosophy professor, and economist. Along with David Ricardo, Adam Smith was one of the founders of ''political economy'', which Marx both drew from and critiqued in his analysis and critique of capitalism. See p. 14, 155.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Ahistoric Perspective'''
		+	| A perspective which considers aspects of human society without due consideration of historical processes of development. For example, Adam Smith and David Ricardo viewed political economy ahistorically, viewing capitalism as a static, universal, and eternal product of natural law rather than seeing capitalism as a product of historical processes of development which would change and develop over time. See p. 116.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Base'''
		+	| Also known as: Economic Base; Economic Basis. The material processes which humans undertake to survive and transform our environment to support our ways of living. In the dialectical relationship between base and ''superstructure'', the base refers to the relationship which humans have with the means of production, including the ownership of the means of production and the organization of labor. See p. 23. See also: Superstructure.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Biological Motion'''
		+	| One of the five basic forms of motion described by Engels in ''Dialectics of Nature''. Biological motion refers to changes and development within living objects and their genetic structure. See p. 61.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Biological Reflection'''
		+	| A complex form of reflection found within organic subjects in the natural world and expressed by ''excitation'', ''induction'', and ''reflexes''. See p. 65.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Bourgeoisie'''
		+	| The owners of the means of production and the ruling class under capitalism; also known as the capitalist class. See p. 3, 23, 30, 41, 50, 63, 96. See also:<br />
		+	<br />
		+	Proletariat, Petty Bourgeoisie.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Bureaucracy'''
		+	| An expression of dogmatism which arises when theory becomes overly formalized, to the extent that practical considerations are ignored in favor of codified theory. See p. 217–218.<br />
		+	C→→M→→C C = A Commodity<br />
		+	M = The Money Commodity<br />
		+	The mode of circulation described by Marx as occurring under pre-capitalist economies of simple exchange, in which the producers and consumers of commodities have a direct relationship to the commodities which are being bought and sold. The sellers have produced the commodities with their own labor, and they directly consume the commodities which they purchase. See also: M→C→M’<br />
		+	Marx called this mode of circulation “simple commodity production.” See p. 16.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Capitalism'''
		+	| The current stage of human political economy, defined by private ownership of the means of production. ''Referenced throughout.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Capitalist Class'''
		+	| See: Bourgeoisie
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Capitalist Commodity Production'''
		+	| The capitalist mode of production which utilizes the M→C→M’ mode of circulation, in which capitalists own the means of production and pay wages to workers in exchange for their labor, which is used to produce commodities. Capitalists then sell these commodities for profits which are not shared with the workers who provided the labor. See p. 15.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Category'''
		+	| The most general grouping of aspects, attributes, and relations of things, phenomena, and ideas. Different specific fields of inquiry may categorize things, phenomena, and/or ideas differently from one another. See p. 126.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Category Pair'''
		+	| A pair of philosophical categories within materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics tend to focus on ''universal category pairs'' which can be used to examine the characteristics, relations, and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas. Examples of category pairs include: private and common; content and form; reason and result; essence and phenomena. See p. 127.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Characteristics'''
		+	| The features and attributes that exist internally — within — a given thing, phenomena, or idea. See p. 115.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Chemical Motion'''
		+	| Changes of organic and inorganic substances in processes of combination and separation. See p. 61.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Chemical Reflection'''
		+	| The reflection of mechanical, physical, and chemical changes and reactions of inorganic matter (i.e., changes in structures, position, physical-chemical properties, and the processes of combining and dissolving substances). See p. 65–66.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Circulation'''
		+	| The way in which commodities and money are exchanged for one another. See p. 16.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Commodity'''
		+	| In Marxist political economy, commodities include anything which can be bought and sold, with both a use value (i.e. it satisfies a need of any kind) and a value-form (aka. ‘Exchange value’ and understood as the average socially necessary labour time needed to produce this object). Under capitalism, more and more human activity and production is ‘commodified’ (mediated through market exchange). See p. 15, 87, 133.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Common'''
		+	| See: Private and Common
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Common Laws'''
		+	| Laws (of nature and/or human society) that are applicable to a broader range of subjects than ''private laws'', and which impact many different subjects. For instance: the law of preservation of mass, the law of preservation of energy, etc. See p. 162.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Comprehensive Viewpoint'''
		+	| A ''viewpoint'' which seeks to consider the internal dialectical relationships between the component parts, factors, and aspects within a thing or phenomenon, and which considers external mutual interactions with with other things, phenomena, and ideas. Dialectical materialist philosophy demands a comprehensive basis in order to fully and properly understand things and phenomena in order to effectively solve problems in real life and develop humanity towards communism. See p. 115, 172, 235.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Conception'''
		+	| A relatively complete ''reflection'' within human consciousness of objective things and phenomena. See p. 221–22.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Concrete Labor'''
		+	| The production of a specific commodity with a specific value through labor. When labor is considered without the consideration of output value, it is referred to as ''abstract labor''. See p. 15, 17.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Conditioned Reflex'''
		+	| Conditioned reflexes are reactions which are learned by organisms. These responses are acquired as animals associate previously unrelated neural stimuli with a particular reaction. See p. 66, 68.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Consciousness'''
		+	| The dynamic and creative reflection of the objective world in human brains; the subjective image of the objective world which is produced by the human brain. See p. 68–69, 70.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Content'''
		+	| See: Content and Form.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Content and Form (Category Pair)'''
		+	| Content is the philosophical category which refers to the sum of all aspects, attributes, and processes that a thing, phenomenon, or idea is made from. The Form category refers to the mode of existence and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. Form thus describes the system of relatively stable relationships which exist internally within things, phenomena, and ideas.<br />
		+	<br />
		+	Content and Form have a dialectical relationship with one another, in which content determines form and form impacts back on content. See p. 115, 147155, 166.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Contradiction'''
		+	| A contradiction is a relationship in which two forces oppose one another, leading to mutual development. See p. 123, 159, 163, 169, 175–191.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Consciousness'''
		+	| The self-aware, productive, creative motion and activity of the human brain. See p. 216, 249.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Conservativism'''
		+	| Also referred to as Prejudice; a mindset which seeks to prevent and stifle development and to hold humanity in a static position. Not only is this detrimental to humanity, it is also ultimately a wasted effort, because development is inevitable in human society, as in all things, phenomena, and ideas. See p. 125, 233.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''David Hume'''
		+	| (1711 — 1776) Scottish philosopher who developed radical skepticism as a philosophy of empiricist rejection of human knowledge. See p. 11, 29, 56, 7273.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''David Ricardo'''
		+	| (1772 — 1823) British economist who, along with Adam Smith, was one of the key figures in the development of Political Economy which was a basis for much of the work of Marx and Engels. See p. 14, 18, 155.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Deductive Inference'''
		+	| Logical inference which extrapolates from the general to the specific. See p. 224.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Definition'''
		+	| The first phase of rational consciousness. During this phase, the mind begins to interpret, organize, and process the basic properties of things and phenomena at a rational level into a conceptual whole. See p. 224.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Development'''
		+	| The change and motion of things, phenomena, and ideas with a forward tendency: from less advanced to more advanced; and/or from a less complete to a more complete level. See p. 38, 45–46, 52, 55, 61, 65, 76–96, 105–107, 114118, 119–127, 131–132, 138–140, 143, 147, 154, 155–165, 169–175, 177–181, 183–207, 210, 213, 216–223, 225–229, 233, 235–237.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Development Viewpoint'''
		+	| A viewpoint which considers that, in order to perceive or solve any problem in real life, we must consider all things, phenomena, and ideas with their own forward tendency of development taken in mind.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Dialectic; Dialectical; Dialectics'''
		+	| In Marxism-Leninism, the term dialectic (adjective: dialectical) refers to regular and mutual relationships, interactions, transformations, motions, and developments of things, phenomena, and processes in nature, society and human thought. “Dialectics” refers to a dialectical system. See p. 3, 9–11, 47.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Dialectical Materialism'''
		+	| A universal philosophical and methodological system which forms the theoretical core of a scientific worldview. Dialectical Materialism was first developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with the express goal of achieving communism. Dialectical Materialism has since been defended and developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as well as many others. See: p. 3, 6, 1011, 19–21, 27–30, 33, 38, 45–47, 48–97, 101, 104, 204, 209, 226, 228, 230–232, 237.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Dialectical Negation'''
		+	| A stage of development in which a new subject arises from a contradiction between two previous subjects; dialectical negation is never an endpoint of development, as every dialectical negation creates conditions for further development and negation. See p. 123, 175–176, 183, 185–195, 197–202, 227.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Dialectical Relationship'''
		+	| A relationship in which two things, phenomena, or ideas mutually impact one another, leading to development and negation. See p. 47, 51, 62.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''(Characteristic of) Diversity'''
		+	| The characteristic which all things, phenomena, and ideas share, dictating that no two subjects (and no two relationships between any two subjects) are exactly the same, even if they exist between very similar things, phenomena, and ideas and/or in very similar situations. See p. 114–115, 125.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Diversity in Unity'''
		+	| The universal principle which states that even though all relationships are diverse and different from one another, they also exist in unity, because all relationships share a foundation in the material world. See p. 109–110, 125, 130.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Dogmatism'''
		+	| An inflexible adherence to ideals as incontrovertibly true while refusing to take any contradictory evidence into consideration. Dogmatism stands in direct opposition to materialist dialectics, which seeks to form opinions and conclusions only after careful consideration of all observable evidence. See p. 136–137, 174, 217–218, 233.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Duality of Labor'''
		+	| The Marxist economic concept which recognizes labor as having two intrinsic and inseparable aspects: abstract labor and concrete labor. See p. 15.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Dynamic and Creative Reflection'''
		+	| The most advanced form of reflection, which only occurs in matter that has the highest (known) level of structural complexity, such as the human brain. See p. 68–69, 79.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Eclecticism'''
		+	| An approach to philosophical inquiry which attempts to draw from various different theories, frameworks, and ideas to attempt to understand a subject; the philosophical error of inconsistently applying different theories and principles in different situations. See p. 32–33, 101, 118, 192, 194.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Economic Base'''
		+	| See: Base
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Economism'''
		+	| Economism is a style of political activism, typified by the ideas of German political theorist Eduard Bernstein, which stresses directing the struggle towards short-term political/economic goals (such as higher wages for workers) at the expense of the larger socialist revolutionary project. See p. 30.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Eduard Bernstein'''
		+	| (1850 — 1932) German political theorist who rejected many of Marx’s theories. See p. 30, 174.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Emotional Consciousness'''
		+	| The lower stage of the cognitive process. In this stage of cognitive development, humans, through practical activities, use our senses to reflect objective things and phenomena (with all their perceived specific characteristics and rich manifestations) in human consciousness. See p. 219224.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Empirical Consciousness'''
		+	| Empirical consciousness is the stage of development of consciousness in which perceptions are formed via direct observations of things and phenomena in the natural world, or of society, or through scientific experimentation and systematic observation. Empirical Consciousness results in Empirical Knowledge. See p. 210–214.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Empirical Knowledge'''
		+	| Knowledge which results from processes of empirical consciousness and which is characterised by rich and detailed, but still incomplete, understanding of phenomena. It can be utilized for practical ends, but still falls short of full theoretical analysis and comprehension. See p. 212–214.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Empiricism'''
		+	| A broad philosophical position which holds that only experience (including internal experience) can be held as a source of knowledge or truth. Though nominally opposed to idealism, it is considered a faulty (or naive) form of materialism, since it sees the world as only unconnected, static appearances and ignores the reality of dialectical (changing) relationships between objects. See p. 9–12, 29, 94, 96–97, 100, 218.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Empirio-criticism'''
		+	| A more developed form of empiricism, proposed by Ernst Mach, which holds that sense data and experience are the sole sources of knowledge and that no concrete knowledge of the external material world can ever be obtained due to the limitations of human senses. See p. 26–29, 32, 54, 55–57, 68.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Epistemology'''
		+	| The theoretical study of knowledge. It primarily deals with the philosophical question of: “how do we know what we know?” See p. 45, 98, 204.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Ernst Mach'''
		+	| (1838 — 1916) Austrian physicist who attempted to build a philosophy of natural science based on the works of German philosopher Richard Avenarius’ philosophical system of Empirio-Criticism. See p. 27–29, 32, 52, 72, 193.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Equilibrium'''
		+	| A state of motion in which one or more subjects are not undergoing changes in position, form, and/or structure. Equilibrium is only ever a temporary stasis of development which will eventually yield to motion, development, and/or negation. See p. 62–63, 122–123, 181.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Essence'''
		+	| See: Essence and Phenomena
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Essence and Phenomena (Category Pair)'''
		+	| The Essence category refers to the synthesis of all the internal aspects as well as the obvious and stable relations that define the existence, motion and development of things and ideas. The Phenomena category refers to the external manifestation of those internal aspects and relations in specific conditions. Essence always determines which phenomena appear, but phenomena do not always accurately reflect essence in human perception; in other words, it is possible to misinterpret phenomena, leading to a misunderstanding of essence, or to mistake phenomena for essence. See p. 156–160.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Exchange Value'''
		+	| A quantity relationship which describes the ratios of exchangeability between different commodities, with Marx’s famous example of 20 yards of linen being equivalent in exchange value to one coat. Through analysis Marx shows that in reality the thing being compared is the amount of socially necessary labour required to make the commodities being compared. See p. 15, 18.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Excitation'''
		+	| Reactions of simple plant and animal life-forms which occur when they change position or structure as a direct result of physical changes in their habitat. See p. 66, 68.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''External Contradictions'''
		+	| See: Internal and External Contradictions.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''False consciousness'''
		+	| Forms of consciousness (ideas, thoughts, concepts, etc.) which are incorrect and misaligned from reality. Equated with ‘ideology’ by Engels, it refers to an idealistic, dogmatic perspective which will inevitably result in errors of analysis and therefore practice. See p. 231–233, 237.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''First International'''
		+	| Also known as the International Workingmen’s Association; was founded in London and lasted from 1864–1876. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were key figures in the foundation and operation of this organization, which sought better conditions and the establishment of rights for workers. See p. 35
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''(Basic) Forms of Motion'''
		+	| Engels broke motion down into five basic forms which are dialectically linked; the different forms of motion differ from one another, but they are also unified with each other into one continuous system of motion. Understanding this dialectical relationship between different forms of motion helped to overcome misunderstandings and confusion about motion and development. See p. 61–62.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Form'''
		+	| See: Content and Form.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Form of existence of matter'''
		+	| The ways in which we perceive the existence of matter in our universe; specifically, matter in our universe has the form of existing in space and time. See p. 59.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Form of Value'''
		+	| See: Value-Form
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Forward Tendency of Motion'''
		+	| The tendency for things, phenomena, and ideas to move from less advanced to more advanced forms through processes of motion and development. See p. 197.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Friedrich Engels'''
		+	| (1820–1895) a German theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, leader of the international working class, &amp; co-founder of scientific socialism with Karl Marx. ''Referenced throughout.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Fundamental and Non-Fundamental Contradictions'''
		+	| A fundamental contradiction defines the essence of a relationship. Fundamental contradictions exist throughout the entire development process of a given thing, phenomenon, or idea. A non-fundamental contradiction exists in only one aspect or attribute of a thing, phenomenon, or idea. A nonfundamental contradiction can impact a subject, but it will not control or decide the essential development of the subject. See p. 178–179.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''(Characteristic of) Generality'''
		+	| A universal characteristic which holds that all things, phenomena, and ideas interact and mutually transform one another. See p. 108–109, 111, 114, 124125.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''General Relationship'''
		+	| Relationships which exist broadly across many things, phenomena, and ideas. General relationships can exist both internally, within things, phenomena, and ideas, and externally, between things, phenomena, and ideas. See p. 106–110, 114.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Generality (of relationships)'''
		+	| Relationships can exist with across a spectrum of generality; this spectrum ranges from the least general relationships (''unique relationships'' — which only occur between two specific things/phenomena/ideas) to the most general relationships (''universal relationships'' — which occur between or within all things/phenomena/ideas). See p. 109.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''George Berkeley'''
		+	| (1685 — 1753) An Anglo-Irish philosopher whose main philosophical achievement was the formulation of a doctrine which he called “immaterialism,” and which later came to be known as “Subjective Idealism.” This doctrine was summed up by Berkeley’s maxim: “''Esse est percipi''” — “To be is to be perceived.” See p. 11, 27, 29.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel'''
		+	| (1770 — 1831) German philosophy professor &amp; objective idealistic philosopher; developed the system of idealist dialectics which Marx and Engels used as a basis for developing materialist dialectics. See p. 8–11, 29, 69–71, 97, 98, 100–105, 132, 157, 165, 182, 192, 193–194, 209, 228.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Historical Materialism'''
		+	| The application of materialist dialectics and dialectical materialism to the study of human history. See p. 21–23, 27, 36, 38, 45, 80.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Historical Viewpoint'''
		+	| A viewpoint which demands that subjects be considered in their current stage of motion and development, while also taking into consideration the development and transformation of the subject over time. See p. 116–118, 125–126, 143, 185, 234.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Idealism'''
		+	| A philosophical position which holds that the only reliable experience of reality occurs within human consciousness. Idealists believe that human reason exclusively or as a first basis is the best way to seek truth. See p. 8–12, 26–29, 48–51, 53, 56–58, 69–70, 96, 101–102, 104, 157, 174, 209, 218, 228.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Immanuel Kant'''
		+	| (1724 — 1804) German philosopher who developed a system of idealist dialectics which were later completed by Hegel and whose metaphysical philosophies of epistemology and rationalism served as the basis for later empiricists such as Bacon and Hume. See p. 20, 29, 56, 72–74, 100–102, 205.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Induction'''
		+	| The reaction of animals with simple nervous systems which can sense or feel their environments. Induction occurs through unconditioned reflex mechanisms. See p. 66, 68.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Inductive Inference'''
		+	| Logical inference which extrapolates from specific observations to general conclusions. See p. 223–224.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Intelligibility'''
		+	| The human cognitive capacity to accurately perceive the external material world. See p. 48.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Internal Contradictions'''
		+	| See: Internal and External Contradictions.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Internal and External Contradictions'''
		+	| Internal contradictions are contradictions which exist within the internal relations of a subject, while external contradictions exist between two or more subjects as external relations. See p. 178–179.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Judgment'''
		+	| The phase of rational consciousness which arises from the definition of the subject — the linking of concepts and properties together — which leads to affirmative or negative ideation of certain characteristics or attributes of the perceived subject. See p. 223.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Karl Marx'''
		+	| (1818–1883) German theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, political economist, founder of scientific socialism, and leader of the international working class. ''Referenced throughout''.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Knowledge'''
		+	| The content of consciousness; data about the world, such as: ideas, memories, and other thoughts which are derived through direct observation and practical activities in the material world, through scientific experiments, or through abstract reflection of practical and scientific activities which occur within consciousness.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Labor Value'''
		+	| The amount of value which workers produce through labor. See p. 14, 17–18, 23.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Law of Negation of Negation'''
		+	| A universal law of materialist dialectics which states that the fundamental and universal tendency of motion and development occurs through a cycle of dialectical negation, wherein each and every negation is, in turn, negated once more. See p. 163, 185, 195, 198, 200, 201, 202, 227.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality'''
		+	| The universal law of dialectical materialism which concerns the universal mode of motion and development processes of nature, society, and human thought, which states that qualitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas arise from the inevitable basis of the quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and, ideas, and, vice versa, quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas arise from the inevitable basis of qualitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas. See p. 163–165, 172–173, 227.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Law of Unification Contradiction Between Opposites'''
		+	| and The universal law of dialectical materialism which states that the fundamental, originating, and universal driving force of all motion and development processes is the inherent and objective contradictions which exists in all things, phenomena, and ideas. See p. 163, 175, 181.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Law of Development of Capitalism'''
		+	| Also known as Theory of Accumulation and Theory of Surplus Value. The dynamic through which the capitalist class gains wealth by accumulating surplus value (i.e., profits) and then reinvesting it into more capital to gain even further wealth; thus the goal of the capitalist class is to accumulate more and more surplus value which leads to the development of capitalism. See p. 18.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Laws'''
		+	| In dialectical materialism, laws are the regular, common, obvious, natural, objective relations between internal aspects, factors, and attributes of a thing or phenomenon or between things and phenomena. See p. 162.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Laws of Nature'''
		+	| Laws that arise in the natural world, including within the human body (and are never products of human conscious activities). Such law includes the laws of physics, chemistry, and other natural phenomena which govern the material world. See p. 162, 213.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Laws of Society'''
		+	| Laws of human activity in social relations; such laws are unable to manifest beyond the conscious activities of humans, but they are still objective. See p. 162–163.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Laws of Human Thought'''
		+	| Laws which govern the intrinsic relationships between concepts, categories, judgments, inference, and the development process of human rational awareness. See p. 163.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Life-Process'''
		+	| Processes of motion and change which occur within organisms to sustain life. See p. 69–72, 79, 88.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Ludwig Feuerbach'''
		+	| (1804 — 1872) German philosophy professor, materialist philosopher; Marx and Engels drew many of their ideas from the works of Feuerbach (whom they also criticized). See p. 8, 11–13, 21, 55, 74, 80, 114, 205, 237.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''M→→C→→M’'''
		+	| The mode of circulation described by Marx as existing under capitalism, in which capitalists spend money to buy commodities (including the commodified labor of workers), with the intention of selling those commodities for ''more money'' than they began with. The capitalist has no direct relationship to the commodity being produced and sold, and the capitalist is solely interested in obtaining more money. See p. 16. See also: C→M→C
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Machism'''
		+	| See: Empirio-Criticism.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Manifestation'''
		+	| How a given thing, phenomenon, or idea is expressed externally in the material world. See p. 115.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Marxism-Leninism'''
		+	| A system of scientific opinions and theories focused on liberating the working class from capitalism and achieving a stateless, classless, communist society. The core ideas of this system were first developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then defended and further developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. See. p. 1.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Material Conditions'''
		+	| The material external environment in which humans live, including the natural environment, the means of production and the economic base of human society, objective social relations, and other externalities and systems which affect human life and human society. See p. 6, 22, 40–42, 70–72, 80–81, 87, 92–95, 116–118, 161, 174, 179, 181, 206–207, 210, 229.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Material Production Activity'''
		+	| Material production activity is the first and most basic form of ''praxis''. In this form of praxis activity, humans use tools through labor processes to influence the natural world in order to create wealth and material resources and to develop the conditions necessary to maintain our existence and development. See p. 206–208.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Materialism'''
		+	| A philosophical position that holds that the material world exists outside of the mind, and that human ideas and thoughts stem from observation and sense experience of this external world. Materialism rejects the idealist notion that truth can only be sought solely through reasoning and human consciousness. See p. 10–13, 48.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Materialist Dialectics'''
		+	| A scientific system of philosophy concerned with motion, development, and common relationships, and with the most common rules of motion and development of nature, society, and human thought. See p. 10, 21, 45–47, 98202, 227, 237.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Matter'''
		+	| A philosophical category denoting things and phenomena, existing in objective external reality, which human beings access through our sense perceptions. See p. 26, 27, 32, 48, 51–52, 53–69, 72, 88–95, 97, 103, 164–165.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Means of Production'''
		+	| Physical inputs and systems used in the production of goods and services, including: machinery, factory buildings, tools, equipment, and anything else used in producing goods and services. See p. 2–3, 7, 14–16.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Mechanical Motion'''
		+	| Changes in positions of objects in space. See p. 61.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Mechanical Philosophy'''
		+	| A scientific and philosophical movement popular in the 17<sup>th</sup> century which explored mechanical machines and compared natural phenomena to mechanical devices, resulting in a belief that all things — including living organisms — were built as (and could theoretically be built by humans as) mechanical devices.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Mental Reflection'''
		+	| Reactions which occur in animals with central nervous systems. Mental reflections occur through conditioned reflex mechanisms through learning. See p. 65, 68, 224.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Metaphysical Materialism'''
		+	| Metaphysical materialism was strongly influenced by the metaphysical, mechanical thinking of ''mechanical philosophy'', which was a scientific and philosophical movement which explored mechanical machines and compared natural phenomena to mechanical devices. Metaphysical materialists believed that all change can exist only as an increase or decrease in quantity, brought about by external causes.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Metaphysics'''
		+	| A branch of philosophy that attempts to explain the fundamental nature of reality. Metaphysical philosophy has taken many forms through the centuries, but one common shortcoming of metaphysical thought is a tendency to view things and ideas in a static, abstract manner. Generally speaking, metaphysics presents nature as a collection of objects and phenomena which are isolated from one another and fundamentally unchanging. See p. 52.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Methodology'''
		+	| A system of reasoning: the ideas and rules that guide humans to research, build, select, and apply the most suitable methods in both perception and practice. Methodologies can range from very specific to broadly general, with philosophical methodology being the most general scope of methodology. See p. 44.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Mode'''
		+	| The way or manner in which something occurs or exists. See p. 19–20.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Mode of Existence of Matter'''
		+	| Refers to how matter exists in our universe; specifically, matter exists in our motion in a mode of ''motion.'' See p. 59.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Motion'''
		+	| Also known as “change;” motion/change occurs as a result of the mutual impacts which occur between two things, phenomena, or ideas in relation with one another. See p. 23, 47, 59–63. 74, 106–107, 122–127, 145, 163–165, 169-173-186, 197, 201–202.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Motion in Equilibrium'''
		+	| Motion in equilibrium is motion that has not changed the positions, forms, and/or structures of things. Motion in Equlibrium is only ever temporary in nature; all motion will ''eventually'' lead to changes in position, form, and/or structure. See p. 62.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Narodnik'''
		+	| Agrarian socialist movement of the 1860s and 70s in the Russian Empire, composed of peasants who rose up in a failed campaign against the Czar. See p. 29–30.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Natural law'''
		+	| See: Laws of Nature.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Natural Science'''
		+	| Science which deals with the natural world, including chemistry, biology, physics, geology, etc. See p. 13, 19, 26, 103.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Negation'''
		+	| The development process through which two contradicting objects mutually develop one another until one is overtaken by the other. In dialectical materialism, negation takes the form of ''dialectical negation''. See p. 123, 175176, 183, 185–202.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''New Economic Policy'''
		+	| Also known as the NEP; this early Soviet policy was devised as Vladimir Illyich Lenin to be a temporary economic system that would allow a market economy and capitalism to exist within Russia, alongside state-owned business ventures, all firmly under the control of the working-classdominated state. See p. 33–34.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Objective Dialectics'''
		+	| The dialectical processes which occur in the material world, including all of the motion, relationships, and dynamic changes which occur in space and time. See p. 98, 102–103, 182.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Objective Existence'''
		+	| Existence which manifests outside of and independently of human consciousness, whether humans can perceive it or not. See p. 50, 58, 228.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Objective Idealism'''
		+	| A form of idealism which asserts that the ideal and consciousness are the primary existence, while also positing that the ideal and consciousness are objective, and that they exist independently of nature and humans. See p. 50.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Objectiveness'''
		+	| An abstract concept that refers to the relative externality of all things, phenomena, and ideas. Every thing, phenomena and idea exists externally to every other thing, phenomena, and idea. This means that to each individual subject, all other subjects exist as external objects. See p. 111–114, 124.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Obviousness'''
		+	| See: Obviousness and Randomness
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Obviousness and Randomness (Category Pair)'''
		+	| The philosophical category of Obviousness refers to events that occur because of the essential internal aspects of a subject which become reasons for certain results in certain conditions: the obvious has to happen in a certain way, it can’t happen any other way. The Randomness category refers to things that happen because of external reasons: things that happen, essentially, by chance, due to impacts from many external relations. A random outcome may occur or it may not occur, and may occur in many different ways. Obviousness and Randomness have a dialectical relationship with one another. See p. 144–146.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Opportunism'''
		+	| A system of political opinions with no direction, no clear path, and/or no coherent viewpoint, focusing on whatever actions or decisions might be beneficial for the opportunist in the short term. See p. 174.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Opposites'''
		+	| Such aspects, properties and tendencies of motion which oppose one another, yet are, simultaneously, conditions and premises of the existence of one another. See p. 61, 175–179, 181, 184, 190, 227.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Ordinary Consciousness'''
		+	| Perception that is formed passively, stemming from the daily activities of humans. See p. 210–216.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Period of Motion'''
		+	| Development which occurs between two quality shifts, including the quality shifts themselves. See p. 170.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Perspective'''
		+	| See: Viewpoint.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Petty Bourgeoisie'''
		+	| Semi-autonomous merchants, farmers, and so on who are self-employed, own small and limited means of production, or otherwise fall in between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Also called the petite bourgeoisie. See p. 3–6.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Petty Commodity Production'''
		+	| See: Simple Commodity Production.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Phenomena'''
		+	| Anything that is observable by the human senses. See p. 156. See also: Essence and Phenomena.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Physical Motion'''
		+	| Motion of molecules, electrons, fundamental particles, thermal processes, electricity, etc., in time and space. See p. 61.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Physical Reflection'''
		+	| Reflection which occurs any time two material objects interact and the features of the objects are transferred to one other. See p. 67–68.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Point of View'''
		+	| See: Viewpoint.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Populism'''
		+	| The political philosophy of the Narodnik movement; this political philosophy was focused on bringing about an agrarian peasant revolution led by intellectuals with the ambition of going directly from a feudal society to a socialist society built from rural communes. Populism overtly opposed Marxism and dialectical materialism and was based on subjective idealist utopianism. See p. 30.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Positivism'''
		+	| The belief that we can test scientific knowledge through scientific methods, and through logic, math, etc.; positivism tends to overlap significantly with ''empiricism'' in theory and practice. See p. 32, 209.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Possibility'''
		+	| See: Possibility and Reality.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Possibility and Reality (Category Pair)'''
		+	| The philosophical category of Possibility refers to things that have not happened nor existed in reality yet, but that would happen, or would exist given necessary conditions. The philosophical category of Reality refers to things that exist or have existed in reality and in human thought. See p. 160–162.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Practice'''
		+	| See: Praxis.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Pragmatism'''
		+	| Pragmatism refers to a form of subjectivism in which one centers one’s own immediate material concerns over all other considerations. See p. 218.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Praxis'''
		+	| Conscious activity which improves our understanding, and which has purpose and historical-social characteristics. Used interchangeably with the word “practice” in this text. See p. 205–206, 235.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Prejudice'''
		+	| See: Conservatism.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Primary and Secondary Contradictions'''
		+	| In the development of things, phenomena, and ideas, there are many development stages. In each stage of development, there will be one contradiction which drives the development process. This is what we call the primary contradiction. Secondary contradictions include all the other contradictions which exist during that stage of development. Determining whether a contradiction is primary or secondary is relative, and it depends heavily upon the material conditions and the situation being analyzed. See p. 178–179.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Primary Existence'''
		+	| Existence which precedes and determines other existences; materialists believe that the external material world is the primary existence which determines the ideal, while idealists believe that human consciousness (“the ideal”) is the primary existence from which truth is ultimately derived. See p. 50–51.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Primitive Materialism'''
		+	| An early form of materialism which recognizes that matter is the primary existence, and holds that the world is composed of certain elements, and that these were the first objects — the origin — of the world, and that these elements are the essence of reality. This was later developed into Metaphysical Materialism and, later, Dialectical Materialism. See p. 52.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Principle of General Relationships'''
		+	| A principle of dialectical materialism which states that all things, phenomena, and ideas are related to one another, and are defined by these internal and external relationships. See p. 106–107, 110, 114.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Private'''
		+	| See: Private and Common
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Private and Common (Category Pair)'''
		+	| The Private philosophical category encompasses specific things, phenomena, and ideas; the Common philosophical category defines the common aspects, attributes, factors, and relations that exist in many things and phenomena. Private and Common are relative in nature and have a dialectical relationship with one another. See p. 128–138.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Private Laws'''
		+	| Laws which apply only to a specific range of things and phenomena, i.e.: laws of mechanical motion, laws of chemical motion, laws of biological motion, etc. See p. 162.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Production Force'''
		+	| The combination of the means of production and workers within human society. See p. 6, 23, 36.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Proletariat'''
		+	| The people who provide labor under capitalism; the proletariat do not own their own means of production, and must therefore sell their labor to those who do own means of production; also called the Working Class. See also: Bourgeoisie, Petty Bourgeoisie. See p. 1–8, 22–23, 25–26, 29–31, 33–35, 40–41, 63, 231.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Quality'''
		+	| The unity of component parts, taken together, which defines a subject and distinguishes it from other subjects. See p. 119–121.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Quality Shift'''
		+	| A change in quality which takes place in the motion and development process of things, phenomena, and ideas, occurring when quantity change meets a certain perceived threshold. See p. 124, 153, 164, 168–174.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Quantity'''
		+	| The total amount of component parts that compose a subject. See p. 119–121.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Quantity range'''
		+	| The range of quantity changes which can accumulate without leading to change in quality related to any given thing, phenomenon, or idea. See p. 168–171.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Quintessence'''
		+	| Original Vietnamese word: ''tinh hoa''. Literally, it means “the best, highest, most beautiful, defining characteristics” of a concept, and, unlike the English word quintessence, it has an exclusively positive connotation. See p. 8, 21, 43, 45, 52.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Randomness'''
		+	| See: Obviousness and Randomness.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Rational Consciousness'''
		+	| The higher stage of the cognitive process, which includes the indirect, abstract, and generalized reflection of the essential properties and characteristics of things and phenomena. This stage of consciousness performs the most important function of comprehending and interpreting the essence of the perceived subject. See p. 219–225.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Reason'''
		+	| See: Reason and Result
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Reality'''
		+	| See: Possibility and Reality.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Reason and Result (Category Pair)'''
		+	| The Reason philosophical category is used to define the mutual impacts between internal aspects of a thing, phenomenon or idea, or between things, phenomena, or ideas, that bring about changes. The Result philosophical category defines the changes that were caused by mutual impacts which occur between aspects and factors within a thing, phenomenon, or idea, or externally between different things, phenomena, or ideas. Not to be confused with the metaphysical concept of “cause and effect,” which attributes a single cause to any given effect. See p. 138–144.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Reasoning'''
		+	| The final phase of rational consciousness, formed on the basis of synthesizing judgments so as to extrapolate new knowledge about the perceived subject. See p. 223–225, 228–229.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Reflection'''
		+	| The re-creation of the features of one form of matter in a different form of matter which occurs when they mutually impact each other through interaction. See p. 64–75, 79–80, 90–92, 103, 165, 208–211, 214–215, 219–224, 228, 232, 237.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Relative and Absolute'''
		+	| “Absolute” and “Relative” are philosophical classifications which refer to interdependence: That which is ''absolute'' exists independently and with permanence. That which is ''relative'' is temporary, and dependent on other conditions or circumstances in order to exist. See p. 56, 233. See also: Absolute Truth, Relative Truth, Relativism, Truth.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Relative Truth'''
		+	| Truth which has developed alignment with reality without yet having reached complete alignment between human knowledge and the reality which it reflects; knowledge which incompletely reflects material subjects without complete accuracy. See p. 230, 232. See also: Absolute Truth, Relative and Absolute, Relativism, Truth.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Relativism'''
		+	| A position that all truth is relative and that nothing can ever be absolutely, objectively known; that only Relative Truth can be found in our existence. See p. 56–58, 233–234. See also: Absolute Truth, Relative and Absolute, Relative Truth, Truth.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''René Descartes'''
		+	| (1596 — 1650) French metaphysical philosopher who developed early methods of scientific inquiry. See p. 20, 53.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Result'''
		+	| See: Reason and Result.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Richard Avenarius'''
		+	| (1843 — 1896) German-Swiss philosopher who developed a system of subjective idealism known as “Empirio-Criticism.” See p. 27–29.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Rigidity'''
		+	| An unwillingness to alter one’s thoughts, holding too stiffly to established consciousness and knowledge, and ignoring practical experience and observation, which leads to stagnation of both knowledge and consciousness. See p. 217–218.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Robert Owen'''
		+	| (1771 — 1858) Wealthy Welsh textile manufacturer who tried to build a better society for workers in New Hampshire, Indiana, in the USA by purchasing the town of New Harmony in 1825. Owen’s vision failed after two years, though many other wealthy capitalists in the early 19<sup>th</sup> century were inspired by Owen to try similar plans, which also failed.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Scientific'''
		+	| An adjective which describes methodologies, approaches, and practices of gaining knowledge and insight which are methodological and/or systematic in nature. See p. 1–2.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Scientific Consciousness'''
		+	| Conscious activities which actively gather information from the methodological and/or systematic observations of the characteristics, nature, and inherent relationships of research subjects. Scientific consciousness is considered ''indirect'' because it takes place outside of the course of ordinary daily activities. See p. 58, 210, 212, 215–216.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Scientific'''
		+	| Experimental Human activities that resemble or replicate states of nature and society
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Activity'''
		+	| in order to determine the laws of change and development of subjects of study. This form of activity plays an important role in the development of society, especially in the current historical period of modern science and technological revolution. See p. 206–208.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Scientific Materialist Viewpoint'''
		+	| A perspective which begins analysis of the world in a manner that is both scientifically systematic in pursuit of understanding and firmly rooted in a materialist conception of the world. See p. 105.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Scientific Socialism'''
		+	| A body of theory and knowledge (which must be constantly tested against reality) focused on the practical pursuit of changing the world to bring about socialism through the leadership of the proletariat. See p. 1–2, 21, 37–39.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Scientific Worldview'''
		+	| A worldview that is expressed by a systematic pursuit of knowledge that generally and correctly reflects the relationships of things, phenomena, and processes in the objective material world, including relationships between humans, as well as relationships between humans and the world. See p. 3839, 44–45, 48.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Second International'''
		+	| Founded in Paris in 1889 to continue the work of the First International; it fell apart in 1916 because members from different nations could not maintain solidarity through the outbreak of World War I. See p. 35, 174.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Self-motion'''
		+	| In the original Vietnamese, the word “''tự vận động''.” Literally meaning: “it moves itself.” See p. 59–60, 124.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Sensation'''
		+	| The subjective reflection of the objective world in human consciousness as perceived through human senses. See p. 27, 56–58, 68–69, 72, 85, 221–222.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Sensuous Human Activity; Sensuous Activity'''
		+	| A description of human activity developed by Marx which acknowledges that all human activity is simultaneously ''active'' in the sense that our conscious activity can transform the world, as well as ''passive'' in the sense in that all human thoughts fundamentally derive from observation and sense experience of the material world. See p. 13.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Simple Commodity Production'''
		+	| What Marx called the “C→M→C” mode of circulation. See p. 16–18.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Simple Exchange'''
		+	| When individual producers trade the products they have made directly, themselves, for other commodities. See p. 16–17.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Social Being'''
		+	| The material existence of human society, as opposed to ''social consciousness''. See also: Base. See p. 24, 54–55.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Social Consciousness'''
		+	| The collective experience of consciousness shared by members of a society, including ideological, cultural, spiritual, and legal beliefs and ideas which are shared within that society, as opposed to ''social being''. See p. 22, 24, 32, 54–55, 80. See also: Superstructure.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Social Motion'''
		+	| Changes in the economy, politics, culture, and social life of human beings. See p. 61–62.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Socialization'''
		+	| The idea that human society transforms labor and production from a solitary, individual act into a collective, social act. In other words, as human society progresses, people “socialize” labor into increasingly complex networks of social relations: from individuals making their own tools, to agricultural societies engaged in collective farming, to modern industrial societies with factories, logistical networks, etc. See p. 6, 36.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Socialized Production Force'''
		+	| A production force which has been socialized — that is to say, a production force which has been organized into collective social activity. See p. 6.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Socio-Political Activity'''
		+	| Praxis activity utilized by various communities and organizations in human society to transform political-social relations in order to promote social development. See p. 206–208.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Solipsism'''
		+	| A form of idealism in which one believes that the self is the only basis for truth. See p. 218.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Sophistry'''
		+	| The use of misleading arguments, usually with the intention of deception, with a tendency of presenting non-critical aspects of a subject matter as critical, to serve a particular agenda. The word comes from the Sophists, a group of professional teachers in Ancient Greece, who were criticized by Socrates (in Plato’s’ dialogues) for being shrewd and deceptive rhetoricians. See p. 32–33, 56, 118, 182, 194.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Stage of Development'''
		+	| The current quantity and quality characteristics which a thing, phenomenon, or object possesses. Every time a quality change occurs, a new stage of development is entered into. See p. 24, 39, 125, 173–174, 179, 190, 196–197, 200, 212, 221.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Stagnation'''
		+	| An inability or unwillingness to change and adapt consciousness and practice in accordance with developing material conditions. Stagnation can stem from, or cause, overstatement of absolute truth in theory and forestall necessary development of both consciousness and practical ability. See p. 125, 218, 233. See also: Rigidity.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Struggle of Opposites'''
		+	| The tendency of opposites to eliminate and negate each other. See p. 61, 181, 184.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Subjective Factors'''
		+	| Factors which, from the perspective of a given subject, that same subject is capable of impacting. See p. 162–163, 175, 202.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Subjective Dialectics; Dialectical Thought'''
		+	| A system of analysis and organized thinking which aims to reflect the objective dialectics of the material world within human consciousness. Dialectical thinking has two component forms: dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics. See: p. 98–99, 103.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Subjective Idealism'''
		+	| Subjective idealism asserts that consciousness is the primary existence and that truth can be obtained only or primarily through conscious activity and reasoning. Subjective idealism asserts that all things and phenomena can only be experienced as subjective sensory perceptions, with some forms of subjective idealism even explicitly denying the objective existence of material reality altogether. See also: Empirio-Criticism, Objective Idealism. See p. 26–27, 50.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Subjectivism'''
		+	| A philosophical position in which one centers one’s own self and conscious activities in perspective and worldview, failing to test their own perceptions against material and social reality. See p. 56, 182, 217–218, 233–234.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Suitability'''
		+	| The applicability of a subject for a specific application or role. See p. 154.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Superstructure'''
		+	| The ideal (non-material) components of human society, including: media institutions, music, and art, as well as other cultural elements like religion, customs, moral standards, and everything else which manifests primarily through conscious activity and social relations. See p. 23. See also: Base.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Surplus Value'''
		+	| The extra amount of value a capitalist is able to secure by exploiting wagelabourers (by paying workers less than the full value of their labour). Workers will spend part of their workday reproducing their own labourpower (through earning enough to eat, secure shelter and other cultural needs) and the rest of the time will be spent producing surplus value which is then appropriated by the capitalist as profit. See p. 18, 22–23, 39.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Symbolization'''
		+	| The representation of an objective thing or phenomenon in human consciousness which has been reflected by sensation and conception. See p. 221–222.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Systematic Structure'''
		+	| A structure which includes within itself a system of component parts and relationships. See p. 114.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Theoretical Consciousness'''
		+	| The indirect, abstract, systematic level of perception in which the nature and laws of things and phenomena are generalized and abstracted. See p. 210–214, 217–218.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Theoretical Knowledge'''
		+	| Knowledge which is abstract and generalized, resulting from theoretical conscious activities which include repeated and varied observations. See p. 214, 217.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Theory'''
		+	| An idea or system of ideas intended to explain an aspect, characteristic, or tendency of objective reality. See p. 235.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Theory of Accumulation/Surplus Value'''
		+	| See: Law of Development of Capitalism.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Thing-in-Itself'''
		+	| The actual material object which exists outside of our consciousness, ''as it exists outside of our consciousness''. See p. 72–74, 101, 158.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Third International'''
		+	| Also known as the Communist International (or the ComIntern for short); founded in Moscow in 1919, its goals were to overthrow capitalism, build socialism, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. It was dissolved in 1943 in the midst of the German invasion of Russia in World War II. See p. 35.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Three Component Parts'''
		+	| The three essential elements of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, first identified of Marxism-Leninism by Lenin in ''The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism''. 1. The Philosophy of Marxism. 2. The Political Economy of Marxism. 3. Scientific Socialism.See p. 21, 32, 34, 38.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Threshold'''
		+	| The amount, or degree, of quantity change at which quality change occurs. Truth is primarily discovered through labor and practice in the physical world. See p. 120, 168–169, 171, 173.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Truth'''
		+	| A correct and accurate conscious reflection of objective reality. See p. 9–10, 49, 56, 70, 75, 94–96, 194, 204, 209, 215–219, 225–237. See also: Labor, Practice.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Unconditioned Reflex'''
		+	| Reactions which are not learned, but simply occur automatically based on physiological mechanisms occurring within an organism, characterized by permanent connections between sensory perceptions and reactions. See p. 66, 68.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Unilateral Consideration'''
		+	| The consideration of a subject from one side only. See p. 49.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Unintelligibility'''
		+	| A philosophical position which denies the human cognitive capacity to accurately perceive the external material world. See p. 48.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Unique Relationship'''
		+	| The least general form of relationship, which only occur between two specific things/phenomena/ideas. See p. 109, 130.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Unity in Diversity'''
		+	| A concept in materialist dialectics which holds that within universal relationships exist within and between all different things, phenomena, and ideas, we will find that each individual manifestation of any universal relationship will have its own different manifestations, aspects, features, etc. Thus even the universal relationships which unite all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in infinite diversity. See p. 42, 110–111, 114, 125, 130.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Universal Law of Consciousness'''
		+	| A universal law which holds that consciousness is a process of dialectical development in which practical activity leads to conscious activity, which then leads back to practical activity, in a continuous and never-ending cycle, with a tendency to develop both practical and conscious activity to increasingly higher levels. See p. 219.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Universal Laws'''
		+	| Laws that impact every aspect of nature, society, and human thought. Materialist dialectics is the study of these universal laws. See p. 15, 162–163, 227.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Universal Relationship'''
		+	| The most general kind of relationship; relationships that exist between and within every thing and all phenomena; along with ''development'', universal relationships are one of the two primary subjects of study of materialist dialectics. See p. 80, 108, 109, 111, 165.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Use Value'''
		+	| A concept in classical political economy and Marxist economics which refers to tangible features of a commodity (a tradable object) that can fulfill some human requirement or desire, or which serve a useful purpose. See p. 15–18, 95.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Utopianism'''
		+	| 1. A political and philosophical movement which held the belief that “a New Moral World” of happiness, enlightenment, and prosperity could be created through education, science, technology, and communal living. See p. 18. 2. The idealist philosophical concept which mistakenly asserts that the ideal can determine the material, and that ideal forms of society can be brought about without regard for material conditions and development processes. See p. 8, 17–18, 30, 94.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Value-Form'''
		+	| Also known as “form of value;” the social form of a commodity. Under capitalism, through the exchange of qualitatively different commodities, the money form of value is established as the general equivalent which can functionally be exchanged for all other values; money is therefore the most universal value-form under capitalism. See p. 15, 17, 155.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Viewpoint'''
		+	| Also known as point of view or perspective; the starting point of analysis which determines the direction of thinking from which phenomena and problems are considered. See p. 12, 20–21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 32–33, 38–39, 5559, 62, 64, 89, 93–94, 105, 111, 114–120, 122, 125–126, 130, 143, 147, 150, 172, 185–188, 195, 200–201, 233–235. See also: Comprehensive Viewpoint, Historical Viewpoint.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Viewpoint Crisis'''
		+	| A situation in which a specific viewpoint can’t be settled on, found, or agreed upon. See p. 26, 32–33.
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Vladimir Ilyich Lenin'''
		+	| (1870 -1924) A Russian theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, defender and developer of Marxism in the era of imperialism, founder of the Bolsheviks, the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union, leader of Russia and the international working class. ''Referenced throughout.''
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Working Class'''
		+	| See: Proletariat
		+	|
		+	|-
		+	| | '''Worldview'''
		+	| The whole of an individual’s or society’s opinions and conceptions about the world, about humans ourselves, and about life and the position of human beings in the world. See p. 1, 11, 37–39, 44–45, 48, 52, 96, 138, 201, 208–209, 218, 234. See also: Scientific Worldview.
		+	|
		+	|}
−	Discussion of collapse is becoming increasingly mainstream (at least here in the UK). People now are thinking that they will live to see the collapse. This was not necessarily true of eco radicals in the early ‘90s. We were getting bigger and stronger and the problems didn’t seem quite so insurmountable... The default then was that you were involved in these politics because you thought that you could save the world. Now that’s not necessarily true. There’s no implicit assumption that we can save it. There’s less hope.	+	<br />
−	<br>	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-2.png]]
−	* [Back Cover]	+	''For centuries, the banyan tree has been the symbol of communal life in Vietnam.''
−	Describe the role/influence of Do or Die in the UK’s eco-anarchist movement...	+	''Traditionally, the entrance to a village is graced by a large and ancient banyan tree. It is in the shade of these trees that villagers gather to socialize, draw water from wells, and make collective decisions together. The drooping accessory trunks represent the longevity of villagers — and of the village itself — while the arching canopy represents the safety and protection of the village. The shape of the banyan tree is seen in the full moon, which casts peaceful light across the Earth to guide travelers in the dark of night.''
−	<quote>	+	''Vietnam’s revolution against Japanese fascism and French colonialism began in 1945 beneath the cover of the Tân Trào Banyan Tree, which still stands in the city of Tuyên Quang.''
−	<em>Basically what happened within EF! was that we won. DoD and the political perspective it represented was relatively unpopular at the beginning. DoD was essentially trying to fulfil the same role that Live Wild or Die! did in the States—a radical anarchist fringe publication trying to ginger things up a hit. When we say that we won—in that the green anarchist perspective went from being the minority to the majority perspective within EF! in the UK over the course of the 1990s—that isn’t quite as arrogant as it sounds... It may have been partly due to our efforts but is probably more due Io people’s own experiences of resistance over time. This resulted in lots of people dropping much of non-violent pacifist ideology, moving more towards an anarchist position and supporting sabotage actions.</em>
−	<em>The reason maybe why our ideas reflected the way things were going a bit more than some other peoples was perhaps that the people involved in doing DoD had been influenced by other tendencies, mostly animal liberation, as opposed to others who had come to EF! from more liberal environmentalist organisations like Friends of the Earth.</em>	+	''It is in this deep-rooted, humanistic spirit of collective action that we founded Banyan House Publishing. We hope to deliver volumes which will inspire action and change throughout the village that is our world.''
−	</quote>
−	from interview with the DoD Editors	+	''Visit us at:''<br />
		+	''BanyanHouse.org''
−	$15	+	<br />
−	<br>	+	[[File:t-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-103.png]]
−	[[v-c-various-cracks-in-a-grey-sky-an-anthology-of-d-2.jpg]]	+	<br />
−	<br>	+	<references />

---

Latest revision as of 01:19, 4 August 2025

CURRICULUM OF
THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF MARXISM-LENINISM
PART 1

THE WORLDVIEW AND PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY OF MARXISM-LENINISM

For University and College Students

Not Specializing in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought

FIRST ENGLISH EDITION

Translated and Annotated by Luna Nguyen

Foreword by Dr. Vijay Prashad

Introduction by Dr. Taimur Rahman

Edited, Annotated, and Illustrated by Emerican Johnson

Proofread by David Peat

Additional Contributions and Editorial Support by Iskra Books

Published in association with The International Magazine

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-2.png

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“Step by step, along the struggle, by studying Marxism-Leninism parallel with participation in practical activities, I gradually came upon the fact that only socialism and communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working people throughout the world from slavery.”

- Ho Chi Minh

Support for This Work

Translating, annotating, and typesetting this book has taken three years, which would not have been possible without the support of our supporters on GoFundMe. GoFundMe is also the reason we are able to make the digital version of this entire text available for free online. We would therefore like to recognize all of our supporters:

Zach L.	Jake B.	Katia S.	Jimi C.
Kathryn S.	Matthew S.	Manuel V.	Luiza S.
Timothy P.	Joshua E.	Sarah K.	Sarah F.
De’Vonte T.	Corey K.	Aidan M.	Danion S.
Douglas H.	Justin F.	Blake P.	Liam H.
Ayodele E.	Jesse T.	Patrick O.	Mendel A.
Stephanie P.	Christopher R.	Daniel H.	Marcos F. T.
Bryan D.	Helios A. C.	Ryan P.	Peter L.-D.
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Jake B.	Ashley C.	Karen N.	Robert D.
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Daniel A.	Aadil B.	Julianna D. P.	Audrey M.
Ville I.	Joshua R.	Kyle R.	Larry V. K. III
Ariel G.	Maximilian H.	Peter F.	Zero P.
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Jason T.	John M.	Kayla D.	Dmitri S.
Crescenzo P.	Matthew L.	Lindsay H.	Jeremy A. C.
Antonio R.	Glenn A.	Adam M.	Anthony M.
Roger W.	Edward C.	Dennis C.	Amiad H.
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Joseph Z. B.	Aaron W.	Nicholas H.	Pastor J.
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Roberto P.	Manuel G. F.	Jonis F.	Darsius ACAB
Gerard D.	Sam W.	John G.	Anna N.
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Kaylee C.	Kevin P.	Audrin T.	Joshua B.
Edil F.	Calum S.	Nam T.	Kyril W.
Zeke T.	Jesse R.	Orhan M.	Morgan H.
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Saumya I.	Siddharth P.	Sam P.	Dirk K.
Jason G. A., Jr.	Melinda K.	Jillian R.	Jacob N.
Richard H.	Shane F.	Derric A.	Robyn M.
Lachlainn H.	Marc G.	Blaine H.	The Slopstache

There is still plenty of work to be done to complete the translation of this entire curriculum. If you would like to financially support our efforts, you can support us at:

BanyanHouse.org

Dedication and Gratitude

This book is dedicated to all the backers of the GoFundMe campaign that raised the funds to allow me to translate this text. What I initially believed would be a straightforward three-month process of translating ended up taking over three years of not just translation but also research, study, review, annotation, editing, proofreading, peer review, and more — with the incredible support of a full team of talented comrades — in order to make sure that everything would be digestible and intelligible for audiences outside of Vietnam. So, sincerely, thank you to everyone who backed this project for your patience, support, and encouragement.

Thank you to my husband and comrade, Emerican Johnson, who helped me throughout the translation process, and who did such a fantastic job editing, annotating, and illustrating this text. He was my constant dialectical companion as we grappled together with the spirit and meaning of the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Engels that are the bedrock of this text.

Thank you, also, to Iskra Books for the absolutely vital work they have done in helping us to edit this book and hold it to a high standard. We literally could not have done it without you. In particular, thank you to Ben Stahnke for organizing and cheerleading us through to the end, and to David Peat, for the painstaking, meticulous, and no-doubt frustrating work of proofreading our very, very, very imperfect writing!

Thanks also to The International Magazine, who have provided guidance and suggestions throughout the process of developing this translation. I have had the opportunity to work with The International Magazine on various projects and I can recommend no better monthly periodical for internationalist communists to learn about socialist movements around the world.

We owe a great deal of gratitude to Dr. Vijay Prashad and Dr. Taimur Rahman for taking the time to read through our translation and, in addition to providing their feedback and encouragement, also taking the time to write the foreword and introduction to the text. I know that you are both extremely busy with your own important literary, academic, and political work, so this assistance is so very much appreciated.

Finally, I would like to thank the Vietnamese intellectuals and experts who have done such an amazing job at taking hundreds of texts and distilling them down into the original volume which I have translated here. The elegance and precision with which they have been able to capture the essence of Marxism-Leninism is a monumental contribution to the workers of the world, and I only hope my translation does their work justice.

March, 2023
Luna Nguyen

Foreword

In December 1998, Fidel Castro addressed the Young Communist League’s 7^th Congress in Havana, Cuba. The Soviet Union and the Communist state system in Eastern Europe had collapsed, which greatly weakened the cause of socialism. Not only was Cuba hit hard by the loss of its major trading partners and political ally, but socialists in general were penalised by the lethal argument made by the imperialist sections that “socialism had been defeated.” After 1991, Fidel revived the phrase “Battle of Ideas,” which was had been used in The German Ideology by Marx and Engels. To the Young Communists, Fidel said:

We must meet, in the heat of the battle, with the leading cadres to discuss, analyse, expand on, and draft plans and strategies to take up issues and elaborate ideas, as when an army’s general staff meets. We must use solid arguments to talk to members and non-members, to speak to those who may be confused or even to discuss and debate with those holding positions contrary to those of the Revolution or who are influenced by imperialist ideology in this great battle of ideas we have been waging for years now, precisely in order to carry out the heroic deed of resisting against the most politically, militarily, economically, technologically and culturally powerful empire that has ever existed. Young cadres must be well prepared for this task.

Bourgeois ideology had tried to sweep aside its most fundamental critique – namely Marxism – by saying that “socialism had been defeated” and that Marxism was now obsolete. Marxist criticisms of the “casino of capitalism” – as Fidel called it – were being set aside both inside and outside the academy, with neoliberal policy confident enough to ignore each and every criticism. Fidel argued that young communists must learn the fundamentals of Marxism – including both dialectical and historical materialism – and must learn this in a way that was not religious thinking but would allow them to become “new intellectuals” of the movement, not those who repeat dogma but who learn to understand the conjuncture and become “permanent persuaders” for socialism (the two phrases in quotations are from Gramsci’s prison notebooks). The general ideological confidence of the cadre was not clear, and that confidence and their clarity needed to be developed in a project that Fidel called the Battle of Ideas.

During this period, communists around the world conceded that the demise of the Soviet Union had created a serious dilemma for the left. Not only were we penalised by the argument that “socialism has been defeated,” but our own arguments to explain the turbo-charged drive toward globalisation and neoliberalism and to make the case for a socialist alternative were not strong enough. One indication of that weakness was the 2001 World Social Forum meeting held in Brazil, which promoted the slogan – Another World is Possible, a weak slogan in comparison to a more precise slogan, such as – Socialism is Necessary. Young people drifted into our ranks in this decade, angered by the wretched social conditions created by the permanent austerity of neoliberalism, but bewildered about how to transform the political environment. The lack of Marxist political education was felt by socialist forces across the world, which is why many parties around the world began to revive a conversation about internal political education for cadre and active engagement with other social forces regarding the pressing issues of our time. Fidel called these two processes – internal education for the Party and external engagement on the dilemmas of humanity – the Battle of Ideas.

In line with this broad direction, the government of Vietnam worked with the national publishing house Sự Thật (The Truth) to develop a curriculum for universities and colleges in the country. They developed this order of study along five subject areas: Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Marxist-Leninist Political Economy, Scientific Socialism, Vietnamese Communist Party History, and Ho Chi Minh Thought. This project worked to educate an entire population that would be able to understand the world in a rational and factual manner, outside the illusions of bourgeois ideology. Four years later, Communist Party of Vietnam adopted a resolution to take this work forward, and – under the leadership of Professor Nguyễn Viết Thông – produced this textbook that brought together the many themes of Marxism into focus for the introductory student and cadre. A book such as this is never easy to create, since it must introduce a form of thought that is critical of the foundations of bourgeois ideology – so it is a critique – but at the same time it provides a worldview to understand the actual world in which we live – so it is a science. The text must, therefore, show how bourgeois thought is partial and at the same time how socialist thought, creatively applied, will allow one to have a firmer grip of reality and be able to participate in fighting to transcend the obstinate facts of human indignity that are reproduced by capitalism. No manual such as this is without its flaws and without its limitations, but no education can start without a manual such as this one. The Vietnamese comrades have done a great service to the left movement by producing a text such as this, which can be used for study and then used as a model to develop similar texts in different parts of the world.

Ho Chi Minh, whose interpretation of Marxism and whose ideas about the Vietnamese Revolution, are all over this text once said: “Study and practice must always go together. Study without practice is useless. Practice without study leads to folly.” There can be no better injunction to get to work, to study and develop one’s theoretical armour and to use that theory as the guide to one’s work in the Battle of Ideas and in the battle for the streets, because this unity between theory and action is indeed praxis (thực tiễn), not just practice, but conscious human activity. That is what Fidel encouraged in his lectures on the Battle of Ideas.

Dr. Vijay Prashad.
5 March 2023
Caracas, Venezuela.

Preface to the First English Edition

The text of this book constitutes part one of a four-part curriculum on Marxism-Leninism developed and published by the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam. This curriculum is intended for students who are not specializing in the study of Marxism-Leninism, and is intended to give every Vietnamese student a firm grounding in the political philosophy of scientific socialism.

The entire curriculum consists of:

Part 1: Dialectical Materialism (this text)

Part 2: Historical Materialism

Part 3: Political Economy

Part 4: Scientific Socialism

In Vietnam, each part of the curriculum encompasses one full semester of mandatory study for all college students. Each part builds upon the previous, meaning that this text is the foundation for all political theory education for most college students in Vietnam.

However, it is important to note that this is not the first encounter with dialectical materialism which Vietnamese students wil have had with these ideas, because Vietnamese students also study dialectical materialism, historical materialism, political economy, and scientific socialism from primary school all the way through high school.

As such, the text of this book — in and of itself — would probably seem overwhelmingly condensed to most foreign readers who are new to studying dialectical materialism. Therefore, we have decided to extensively annotate and illustrate this text with the information which would have been previously obtained in a basic Vietnamese high school education and/or provided by college lecturers in the classroom.

It is our desire that these annotations will be helpful for students who hope to learn these principles for application in political activity, but we should also make it clear to academic researchers and the like that our annotations and illustrations are not present in the original Vietnamese work.

We hope that this book will be useful in at least three ways:

• As a comprehensive introductory textbook on dialectical materialism and for selfstudy, group study, classroom use, cadre training, etc.
• As a quick and easy to reference handbook for reviewing the basic concepts of dialectical materialism for students of theory who are already familiar with dialectical materialism.
• As a companion book for further reading of theory and political texts rooted in dialectical materialist philosophy.

Also, please note: because this book is intended to be used as a quick reference and handbook for further study, there are many instances where we duplicate references, quotations, and other such information. We hope that this repetition may be an aid for study by reinforcing important concepts and quotations.

This book — Part 1 of the curriculum, which focuses on the universal philosophical system of dialectical materialism — serves as the foundation of all political theory and practice in the Vietnamese educational system as well as in the Communist Party of Vietnam and other organizations such as the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union, the Women’s Union, the Farmer’s Union, the Worker’s Union, etc. Dialectical materialism is the framework for theory and practice as well as the common lens through which Vietnamese socialists relate, communicate, and work together.

This book focuses almost exclusively on the written works of three historical figures:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels... who initially developed the universal philosophy of dialectical materialism by synthesizing various pre-existing philosophical, political, economic, and historical tendencies including the idealist dialectical system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the political economics of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the materialist positions of Ludwig Feuerbach, and countless others.

...and Vladimir Illyich Lenin, who further developed and defended dialectical materialism, expanded the analysis of imperialism, demonstrated how to apply dialectical materialism to local material conditions specific to Russia at the turn of the 20^th century, and made many other important contributions to dialectical materialist theory and practice.

Obviously, there are countless other writers, revolutionaries, philosophers, and scientists who have contributed to dialectical materialism and scientific socialism. This book focuses primarily on Marx, Engels, and Lenin, because these figures laid the foundations and formulated the basic principles of the philosophy of dialectical materialism and the methodology of materialist dialectics which are most universally applicable in all endeavors.

It is our desire that translating this important work into English will lead to further study, understanding, and appreciation of dialectical materialism as an applied philosophy which socialists can find value in returning to periodically. At the end of the book, we offer a glossary of terms which doubles as an index, appendices with summaries of important concepts and principles, and an afterword, in which we offer advice for further study and application of dialectical materialism.

At the time of publication, we are already in the process of translating and annotating Part 2 of this curriculum, which focuses on historical materialism, with the hopes of eventually releasing the full curriculum. Once it is complete, it will also be made available at BanyanHouse.org — where we also invite questions, constructive feedback, and suggestions.

Introduction

Just a generation ago, Vietnam was the site of the most brutal war of the 20^th century. More tonnage of bombs were dropped on the Vietnamese people than were dropped by all sides combined throughout the Second World War. In addition, countless acts of cruelty were used to scorch the very soil of the nation. By the end of Vietnam’s Resistance War Against Imperialist USA (known to the world as “the Vietnam War”), Agent Orange, napalm, and unexploded munitions had left a land deeply scarred and a people traumatised by decades of death and murder. The impression one had was that although Vietnam had won the war, it was so badly devastated that it could not hope to win the peace. But, miraculously, Vietnam is winning this war today, as the Vietnamese economy has become one of the fastest growing in the world and quality of life for the people is improving at a pace which could scarcely have been predicted in 1975.

No one could have imagined that Vietnam would turn around so dynamically and rapidly. How did they achieve this economic miracle? How could this nation — so recently devastated by imperialism and war — possibly be able to reconstruct, revive, rejuvenate, and rebuild? That story is now unfolding before our eyes.

Vietnam’s development has not come without hardship, struggle, setbacks, and mistakes. The people of Vietnam have had to learn hard lessons through struggle and practice to develop and strengthen ideological and theoretical positions. In this manner, the philosophical development of Vietnam deserves study and attention from socialists around the world. To outsiders, Vietnam can appear to be rife with contradictions. As depicted by Western journalists, Vietnam is simultaneously a success story driven by capitalist markets and a failing socialist state. Every victory is chalked up to private enterprise, while every setback is attributed to socialism. In this sense, the media has failed to understand the essential character of the core contradictions which drive the development of Vietnam politically, socially, and economically.

Luna Nguyen has used social media and played an incredibly important role in helping the English speaking world understand the complexities of such contradictions that beguile so many academics and experts. She has helped to give an insider’s perspective on her own country’s path of development towards socialism.

Nguyen’s translation of Part 1 of this influential work, Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism, a textbook studied by university and college students across Vietnam, is yet another big step in the direction of making Vietnam’s understanding of their own country’s development available to the English reading world.

For me, as an outsider, it is fascinating not only to see how deeply Vietnamese society takes an interest in European philosophical development (referencing Hume, Hegel, Descartes, Marx, Engels, and so many other Europeans, almost as if they are figures seated in some ancient monastery in Fansipan), but, even more importantly, how they have assimilated that knowledge into the wider context of their own history, society, and culture. The textbook truly comes alive in all the parts where these ideas are shown to be relevant to Vietnam itself. For instance, the textbook stands out with discussions of Ho Chi Minh’s concept of “proletarian piety,” which artfully blends elements of Vietnamese culture with Marxist concepts of class consciousness, or the story of Chi Pheo, who stands as a sympathetic stand-in for the interpretation of the unique characteristics of the Vietnamese Lumpenproletariat. The book itself is an instance of the dialectic of the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete.

Just as importantly, it shows that, in Vietnam, Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought are not mere perfunctory rituals that are repeated like a learnt formula for this or that exam; but that although the Vietnamese political economy in its current form certainly contains contradictions which must be negated in the process of building the lower stage of socialism, the government remains seriously committed to the goals, theory, and practice of Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought.

Hence, I highly recommend this book, not merely because it is a well-illustrated and easy-to-read book on the principles of dialectical materialism, but more importantly because it offers an insight into how the Vietnamese government collects and synthesises the philosophical developments that are, on the one hand, the collective legacy of all of humanity, and, on the other hand, the concrete manifestations of a revolutionary theory of (and for the oppressed yearning for) freedom in every corner of the world.

March, 2023

Dr. Taimur Rahman

Editor’s Note

Working on this project has been one of the most illuminating experiences of my life. In translating this work, Luna has opened a door for English speakers into the wide world of Vietnamese scholarship and pedagogy as it relates to socialist theory and philosophy.

Luna and I have done our best to capture the original meaning and spirit of the text. Furthermore, as we have mentioned elsewhere, our annotations and illustrations are intended only to contextualize and expand on the core information of the original text similarly to the class/lecture setting for which the curriculum is intended.

In their lives, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were never able to finish clarifying and systematically describing the philosophy of dialectical materialism which their work was built upon. Engels attempted to structurally define the philosophy in Dialectics of Nature, but unfortunately that work was never completed since he decided to prioritize publishing the unfinished works of Marx after his untimely death.

I believe that this text is a great step forward in that work of systematically describing the philosophical system of dialectical materialism and the methodological system of materialist dialectics. I also believe it’s worth noting how the Vietnamese scholars who crafted this curriculum have embedded the urgent necessity of action — of creative application of these ideas — throughout the text in a way that I find refreshing and reflective of the works of Marx and Engels themselves.

As the text will explain, dialectical materialism is a universal system of philosophy which can be utilized to grapple with any and every conceivable problem which we humans might encounter in this universe. In Vietnam, dialectical materialism has been used to delve into matters of art, ethics, military science, and countless other fields of inquiry and endeavor. It is my hope that this book will, likewise, lead to a wider and fuller understanding and (more importantly) application of dialectical materialism in the Western world.

March, 2023

Emerican Johnson

A Message From The International Magazine

The International Magazine began in 2020 to connect international socialist movements and to strengthen the voice of oppressed people across the globe. We have been following the work of Vietnamese communists in their unique path towards peace, prosperity, and the construction of socialist values with a keen eye and much interest. It is with this spirit of international solidarity and a deep desire to learn from and share wisdom from our comrades around the world that we celebrate the release of this First English Edition of The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism Part 1: The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism.

Ho Chi Minh once said: “In order to build socialism, first and foremost, we need to have socialist people who understand socialist ideology and have socialist values.”

To this end, Vietnamese communists have expended tremendous resources building a curriculum on Marxist-Leninist philosophy and analysis which includes dialectical materialism, materialist dialectics, scientific socialism, historical materialism, and political economy. These topics are taught in primary and secondary schools and are mandatory subjects for all students attending public universities in Vietnam. Beyond that, Vietnam offers free degrees to students who wish to study Marxist theory and philosophy and Ho Chi Minh Thought (defined as the application of Marxist philosophy to the unique material conditions of Vietnam). In this manner, Vietnam has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to developing “socialist people” “with socialist values.”

We are, therefore, extremely excited to have worked with Luna Nguyen on the translation and annotation of Part 1 of the Vietnamese university curriculum on the worldview and philosophical methodology of Marxism-Leninism into English, which will make this unique perspective of socialist theory available to comrades around the world for the first time.

After having read through this volume, which outlines the fundamentals of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics, we find the most important lesson to be the relationship between theory and practice. According to the Vietnamese scholars who authored the original text, Marxist-Leninist philosophy must be considered a living, breathing philosophy which requires application in the real world — through practice — in order to be made fully manifest.

We hope that readers of this volume will carry forward this guidance through practice which suits your material conditions, wherever you are in the world.

If you would like to learn the perspective of socialists from other nations around the world, we invite you to visit our website at InternationalMagz.com — the home of The International Magazine online. There, you will find articles written by comrades from a wide variety of backgrounds and nationalities with a clear bias towards anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-imperialism!

In solidarity,

The Editorial Team of The International Magazine

Notes on Translation

Vietnamese is a very different language from English, which has presented many challenges in translating this book. Whenever possible, I have tried to let the “spirit” of the language guide me, without altering the structure, tone, and formatting of the book.

One thing you will likely notice right away: this book is highly condensed! This is because most Vietnamese students are already familiar with these concepts. We have added annotations to try to make the book more digestible for those of you who are new to Marxism-Leninism, and these annotations are explained on the next page.

I have worked hard to try to make the language in this book consistent with the language used in popular translations of works from Marx, Lenin, etc., that would be familiar to English-language students of Marxism-Leninism. That said, different translators have been translating these texts into English for over a century, such that different word choices have been used to relate the same concepts, and even Marx, Engels, and Lenin used different terms to describe the same concepts in many instances (not to mention the fact that Marx and Engels wrote primarily in German, whereas Lenin wrote primarily in Russian).

As such, I have made it my first priority to keep the language of this translation internally consistent to avoid confusion and, again, to match the spirit of the original text as much as possible. As a result, you may find differences between the translation choices made in this text and other translations, but it is my hope that the underlying meaning of each translation is properly conveyed.

March, 2023

Luna Nguyen

Guide to Annotations

This book was written as a textbook for Vietnamese students who are not specializing in Marxism-Leninism, and so it is meant to be a simple and condensed survey of the most fundamental principles of dialectical materialism to be used in a classroom environment with the guide of an experienced lecturer. That said, a typical Vietnamese college student will already have been exposed to many of the concepts presented herein throughout twelve years of primary and secondary education. As such, in translating and preparing this book for a foreign audience who are likely to be reading it without the benefit of a lecturer’s in-person instruction, we realized that we would need to add a significant amount of annotations to the text.

These annotations will take the following forms:

• Short annotations which we insert into the text itself [will be included in square brackets like these].

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Longer annotations which add further context and background information will be included in boxes like this.

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We have also added diagrams to our annotations, as well as a detailed glossary/index and appendices, which are located in the back of the book. We hope these will resources will also be of use in studying other texts which are rooted in dialectical materialist philosophy.

Original Vietnamese Publisher’s Note

In 2004, under the direction of the Central Government, the Ministry of Education and Training, in collaboration with Sự Thật [Vietnamese for “The Truth,” the name of a National Political Publishing House], published a [political science and philosophy] curriculum for universities and colleges in Vietnam. This curriculum includes 5 subjects: Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Marxist-Leninist Political Economy, Scientific Socialism, Vietnamese Communist Party History, and Ho Chi Minh Thought. This curriculum has been an important contribution towards educating our students — the young intellectuals of the country — in political reasoning, so that the next generation will be able to successfully conduct national innovation.

With the new practice of education and training, in order to thoroughly grasp the reform of the Party’s ideological work and theory, and to advocate for reform in both teaching and learning at universities and colleges in general, on September 18^th, 2008, the Minister of Education and Training, in collaboration with Sự Thật, have issued a new program and published a textbook of political theory subjects for university and college students who are not specialized in Marxism — Leninism with Associate Professor and Doctor of Philosophy Nguyen Viet Thong as chief editor. There are three subjects:

Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism

Curriculum of Ho Chi Minh Thought

Curriculum of the Revolutionary Path of the Communist Party of Vietnam.

Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism was compiled by a collective of scientists and experienced lecturers from a number of universities, with Pham Van Sinh, Ph.D and Pham Quang Phan, Ph.D as co-editors. This curriculum has been designed to meet the practical educational requirements of students.

We hope this book will be of use to you.

April, 2016

NATIONAL POLITICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE — SỰ THẬT

Original Vietnamese Preface

To implement the resolutions of the Communist Party of Vietnam, especially the 5^th

Central Resolution on ideological work, theory, and press, on September 18^th, 2008, The Ministry of Education and Training has issued Decision Number 52/2008/QD-BGDDT, issuing the subject program: The Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism for Students Non-Specialised in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought. In collaboration with Truth — the National Political Publishing House — we published the Curriculum of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism for Students Non-Specialised in MarxismLeninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought.

The authors of this text have drawn from the contents of the Central Council’s previous programs (Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Marxist-Leninist Political Economy, and Scientific Socialism) and compiled them into national textbooks for Marxist-Leninist science subjects and Ho Chi Minh Thought, as well as other curriculums for the Ministry of Education and Training. The authors have received comments from many collectives, such as the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics and Administration, the Central Propaganda Department, as well as individual scientists and lecturers at universities and colleges throughout the country. Notably:

Associate Professor To Huy Rua, Ph.D, Professor Phung Huu Phu, Ph.D, Professor Nguyen Duc Binh, Professor Le Huu Nghia, Ph.D, Professor Le Huu Tang, Ph.D,

Professor Vo Dai Luoc, Ph.D, Professor Tran Phuc Thang, Ph.D, Professor Hoang

Chi Bao, Ph.D, Professor Tran Ngoc Hien, Ph.D, Professor Ho Van Thong, Associate

Professor Duong Van Thinh, Ph.D, Associate Professor Nguyen Van Oanh, Ph.D,

Associate Professor Nguyen Van Hao, Ph.D, Associate Professor Nguyen Duc Bach, PhD. Pham Van Chin, Phung Thanh Thuy, M.A., and Nghiem Thi Chau Giang, M.A.

After a period of implementation, the contents of the textbooks have been supplemented and corrected on the basis of receiving appropriate suggestions from universities, colleges, the contingent of lecturers of political theory, and scientists. However, due to objective and subjective limitations, there are still contents that need to be added and modified, and we would love to receive more comments to make the next edition of the curriculum more complete.

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Table of Contents

Introduction to The Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism

I. Brief History of Marxism Leninism

1. Marxism and the Three Constituent Parts

2. Summary of the Birth and Development of Marxism-Leninism

II. Objects, Purposes, and Requirements for Studying the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism

1. Objects and Purposes of Study

2. Some Basic Requirements of the Studying Method

3. Excerpt from Modifying the Working Style

Chapter I: Dialectical Materialism

I. Materialism and Dialectical Materialism

1. The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues

2. Dialectical Materialism — the Most Advanced Form of Materialism

II. Dialectical Materialist Opinions About Matter, Consciousness, and the Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness

1. Matter

2. Consciousness

3. The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness

4. Meaning of the methodology

Chapter 2: Materialist Dialectics

I. Dialectics and Materialist Dialectics

1. Dialectics and Basic Forms of Dialectics

2. Materialist Dialectics

II. Basic Principles of Materialist Dialectics

1. The Principle of General Relationships

2. Principle of Development

III. Basic Pairs of Categories of Materialist Dialectics

1. Private and Common

2. Reason and Result

3. Obviousness and Randomness

4. Content and Form

5. Essence and Phenomenon

6. Possibility and Reality

IV. Basic Laws of Materialist Dialectics

1. Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality

2. Law of Unification and Contradiction Between Opposites

3. Law of Negation of Negation

Chapter 3: Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism

1. Praxis, Consciousness, and the Role of Praxis in Consciousness

2. Dialectical Path of Consciousness to Truth

Afterword

Appendices

Appendix A: Basic Pairs of Categories Used in Materialist Dialectics

Appendix B: The Two Basic Principles of Dialectical Materialism

Appendix C: The Three Universal Laws of Materialist Dialectics

Appendix D: Forms of Consciousness and Knowledge

Appendix E: Properties of Truth

Appendix F: Common Deviations from Dialectical Materialism

Glossary and Index

“Great Victory for the People and Army of South Vietnam!”

Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism

I. Brief History of Marxism-Leninism

1. Marxism and the Three Constituent Parts

Marxism-Leninism is a system of scientific opinions and theories which were built by Karl Marx^[1] and Friedrich Engels^[2], and defended and developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin^[3]. Marxism-Leninism was formed and developed by interpreting reality as well as building on preceding ideas. It provides the fundamental worldview* and methodology of scientific awareness and revolutionary practice. It is a science that concerns the work of liberating the proletariat from all exploitative regimes with the ambition of liberating all of humanity from all forms of oppression.

Marxism-Leninism is made up of three basic theories which have strong relationships with each other. They are: Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, Marxist-Leninist Political Economics, and Scientific Socialism.

Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism studies the basic principles of the movement and development of nature, society and human thought. It provides the fundamental worldview and methodology of scientific awareness and revolutionary practice.

Based on this philosophical worldview and methodology, Marxist-Leninist Political Economics studies the economic rules of society, especially the economic rules of the birth, development, and decay of the capitalist mode of production, as well as the birth and development of a new mode of production: the communist mode of production.

Scientific Socialism** is the inevitable result of applying the philosophical worldview and methodology of Marxism-Leninism, as well as Marxist-Leninist Political Economics, to reveal the objective rules of the socialist revolution process: the historical step from capitalism into socialism, and then communism.

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Annotation 1

* A worldview encompasses the whole of an individual’s or society’s opinions and conceptions about the world, about ourselves as human beings, and about life and the position of human beings in the world.

** The word “science,” and, by extension, “scientific” in Marxism-Leninism has specific meaning. Friedrich Engels was the first to describe the philosophy which he developed with Marx as “Scientific Socialism” in his book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

However, it should be noted that the English phrase “scientific socialism” comes from

Engels’ use of the German phrase “wissenschaftlich sozialismus.”

“Wissenschaft” is a word which can be directly translated as “knowledge craft” in German, and this word encompasses a much more broad and general concept than the word “science” as it’s usually used in English.

In common usage, the word “science” in English has a relatively narrow definition, referring to systematically acquired, objective knowledge pertaining to a particular subject. But “wissenschaft” refers to a systematic pursuit of knowledge, research, theory, and understanding. “Wissenschaft” is used in any study that involves systematic investigation. And so, “scientific socialism” is only an approximate translation of “wissenschaftlich sozialismus.” So, “scientific socialism” can be understood as a body of theory which analyzes and interprets the natural world to develop a body of knowledge, which must be constantly tested against reality, with the pursuit of changing the world to bring about socialism through the leadership of the proletariat.

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Even though these three basic theories of Marxism-Leninism deal with different subjects, they are all parts of a unified scientific theory system: the science of liberating the proletariat from exploitative regimes and moving toward human liberation.

2. Summary of the Birth and Development of Marxism-Leninism

There have been two main stages of the birth and development of Marxism-Leninism:

1. Stage of formation and development of Marxism, as developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

2. Stage of defense and developing Marxism into Marxism-Leninism, as developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

a. Conditions and Premises of the Birth of Marxism

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Annotation 2

The following sections will explain the conditions which led to the birth of Marxism. First, we will examine the Social-Economic conditions which lead to the birth of Marxism, and then we will examine the theoretical premises upon which Marxism was built. Later, we will also discuss the impact which 18^th and 19^th century advances in natural science had on the development of Marxism.

- Social-Economical Conditions

Marxism was born in the 1840s. This was a time when the capitalist mode of production was developing strongly in Western Europe on the foundation of the industrial revolution which succeeded first in England at the end of the 18^th century. Not only did this industrial revolution mark an important step forward in changing from handicraft cottage industry capitalism into a more greatly mechanized and industrialized capitalism, it also deeply changed society, and, above all, it caused the birth and development of the proletariat.

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Annotation 3

Marx saw human society under capitalism divided into classes based on their relation to the means of production.

Means of production are physical inputs and systems used in the production of goods and services, including machinery, factory buildings, tools, and anything else used in producing goods and services. Capitalism is a political economy defined by private ownership of the means of production.

Within the framework of Dialectical Materialism, all classes are defined by internal and external relationships [see The Principle of General Relationships, p. 107]; chiefly, classes are defined by their relations to the means of production and to one another.

The proletariat are the working class — the people who provide labor under capitalism, but who do not own their own means of production, and must therefore sell their labor to those who do own means of production: the bourgeoisie. As the owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie are the ruling class under capitalism.

According to Marx and Engels, there are other classes within the capitalist political economy. Specifically, Marx named the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. Marx defined the petty bourgeoisie as including semi-autonomous merchants, farmers, and so on who are self-employed, own small and limited means of production, or otherwise fall in between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx described the petty bourgeoisie as:

... fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society... The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.

Vietnam’s Textbook of History for High School Students gives this definition of the petty bourgeoisie in the specific context of Vietnamese history:

The petty bourgeois class includes: intellectuals, scientists, and small business owners, handicraftsmen, doctors, lawyers, and civil servants. The vast majority of contemporary intellectuals before the August Revolution of 1945, including students, belonged to the petty bourgeoisie. In general, they were also oppressed by imperialism and feudalism, often unemployed and uneducated.

The petty bourgeoisie were intellectually and politically sensitive. They did not directly exploit labor. Therefore, they easily absorbed revolutionary education and went along with the workers and peasants.

However, the intelligentsia and students often suffer from great weaknesses, such as: theory not being coupled with practice, contempt for labor, vague ideas, unstable stances, and erratic behavior in political action.

Some other petty bourgeoisie (scientists and small businessmen, freelancers, etc.) were also exploited by imperialism and feudalism. Their economic circumstances were precarious, and they often found themselves unemployed and bankrupt. Therefore, the majority also participated in and supported the resistance war and revolution. They are also important allies of the working class.

In general, these members of the petty bourgeoisie had a number of weaknesses: self-interest, fragmentation, and a lack of determination. Therefore, the working class has a duty to agitate and spread propaganda to such members of the petty bourgeoisie, organize them, and help them to develop their strong points while correcting their weaknesses. It is necessary to skillfully lead them, make them determined to serve the people, reform their ideology, and unite with the workers and peasants in order to become one cohesive movement. Then, they will become a great asset for the public in resistance war and revolution.

Marx defined the “lumpenproletariat” as another class which includes the segments of society with the least privilege — most exploited by capitalism — such as thieves, houseless people, etc.

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx defined the lumpenproletariat as: “The ‘dangerous class’ (lumpenproletariat), the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” Marx did not have much hope for the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, writing that they “may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

Political Theories, an official journal of the Ho Chi Minh National Institute of Politics, discussed the lumpenproletariat in the specific context of Vietnamese revolutionary history:

It should be noted that Marxism-Leninism has never held that the historical mission of the working class is rooted in poverty and impoverishment. Poverty and low standards of living make workers hate the regime of capitalism, and causes disaster for workers, but the basic driving force behind the revolutionary struggle of the working class lies in the very nature of capitalist production and from the irreconcilable contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie.

Moreover, it should not be conceived that a class is capable of leading the revolution because it is the poorest class. In the old societies, there were classes that were extremely poor and had to go through many struggles against the ruling class, but they could never win and keep power, and did not become the ruling class of society.

History has proven that the class that represents newly emerging productive forces which are able to build a more advanced mode of production than the old ones can lead the revolution and organize society into the regime they represent. Fetishizing poverty and misery is a corruption of Marxism-Leninism...

The very existence of the lumpenproletariat is strong evidence of the inhumane nature of capitalist society, which regularly recreates a large class of outcasts at the bottom of society.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, millions of Vietnamese people were forced to leave their homes in rural farmlands to work for plantations and factories which were owned by French colonialists. These workers were functionally enslaved, being regularly physically abused by colonial masters, barred from any education whatsoever, and receiving only the bare minimum to survive. As a result, under French colonial rule, about 90% of Vietnamese were illiterate and the French aimed to indoctrinate Vietnamese people into believing that they were inferior to the French.

The French colonialists also worked with Vietnamese landlords to exploit peasants in rural areas. Those peasants received barely enough to survive and, like the plantation slaves, were prohibited from receiving education. Because Vietnamese peasants and colonial slaves composed the majority of workers while being so severely oppressed and living in conditions of such abject poverty, it was difficult to fully distinguish between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat in Vietnam during the colonial era.

During this time, Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese communists developed the philosophy of “Proletarian Piety.” The word “piety,” here, is a translation of the Vietnamese word hiếu, which originally comes from the Confucianist philosophy of “filial piety.” Filial piety demanded children to deeply respect, honor, and obey their parents. Through the concept of Proletarian Piety, Ho Chi Minh adapted this concept to proletarian revolution, calling for communists to deeply love, respect, and tirelessly serve the oppressed masses. This philosophical concept sought to unite the proletariat, lumpenproletariat, and petty bourgeoisie into one united revolutionary class. Even some feudal landlords and capitalists — who were, themselves, oppressed by the colonizing French — were willing to fight for communist revolution and were welcomed into the revolutionary movement if they were willing to adhere to the principle of proletarian piety. The working class and peasantry would lead the revolution, the more privileged classes would follow, and all communist revolutionists would serve the oppressed masses through sacrifice and struggle.

During this period, many novels were written and circulated widely which featured main characters who were members of the lumpenproletariat or enslaved by the French, such as Bỉ Vỏ, a story about a beautiful peasant girl who was forced to become a thief in the city, and Chí Phèo, the story of a peasant who worked as a servant in a feudal landlord’s house who was sent to prison and became a destitute alcoholic after being released. The purpose of these stories was to show the cruelty of the colonialist-capitalist society of Vietnam in the 1930’s and to inspire proletarian piety, including empathy and respect for the extreme suffering and oppression of the lumpenproletariat, peasantry, and colonial slaves. These stories also presented sympathetic views of intellectuals and members of the petty bourgeoisie: for instance, in the novel Lão Hạc, the son of a peasant leaves to work for a French plantation and the father never sees him again. The aged peasant becomes extremely poor and sick without the support of his son, and the only person in the village who helps him is a teacher, representing the intellectual segment of the petty bourgeoisie.

The writers of these novels were communists who wanted to promote the principles of proletarian piety. Rather than looking down on the most oppressed members of society, and rather than sewing distrust and contempt for the petty bourgeoisie, Vietnamese communists inspired solidarity and collaboration between all of the oppressed peoples of Vietnam to overthrow French colonialism, feudalism, and capitalism. Proletarian piety was crucial for uniting the divided and conquered masses of Vietnam and successfully overthrowing colonialism. Note that these strategies were developed specifically for colonial Vietnam. Every revolutionary struggle will take place in unique material conditions^[4], and the composition and characteristics of each class will vary over time and from one place to another. It is important for revolutionists to carefully apply the principles of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics to accurately analyze class conditions in order to develop strategies and plans which will most suitably and efficiently lead to successful revolution.

The deep contradictions* between the socialized production force** and the capitalist relations of production*** were first revealed by the economic depression of 1825 and the series of struggles between workers and the capitalist class which followed.

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Annotation 4

* See: Definition of Contradiction and Common Characteristics of Contradiction, p. 175.

** In Marxism, “socialization” is simply the idea that human society transforms labor and production from a solitary, individual act into a collective, social act. In other words, as human society progresses, people “socialize” labor into increasingly complex networks of social relations: from individuals making their own tools, to agricultural societies engaged in collective farming, to modern industrial societies with factories, logistical networks, etc.

The production force is the combination of the means of production and workers within any society. The “Socialized Production Force,” therefore, is a production force which has been socialized — that is to say, a production force which has been organized into collective social activity. Under capitalism, the “Socialized Production Force” consists of the proletariat, or the working class, as well as means of production which are owned by capitalists.

*** Marx and Engels defined “relations of production” as the social relationships that human beings must accept in order to survive. Relations of production are, by definition, not voluntary, because human beings must enter into them in order to receive material needs in order to survive within a given society. Under capitalism, the relations of production require the working class to rent their labor to capitalists to receive wages which they need to procure material needs like food and shelter. This is an inherent contradiction because a small minority of society (the capitalist class) own the means of production while the vast majority of society (the working class) must submit to exploitation through wage servitude in order to survive.

Examples of such early struggles include: the resistance of workers in Lyon, France in 1831 and 1834; the Chartist movement in Britain from 1835 to 1848; the workers’ movement in Silesia (Germany) in 1844, etc. These events prove as historical evidence that the proletariat had become an independent political force which pioneered the fight for a democratic, equal, and progressive society.

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Annotation 5

Here are some brief descriptions of the early working class movements mentioned above:

Resistance of Workers in Lyon, France:

In 1831 in France, due to heavy exploitation and hardship, textile workers in Lyon revolted to demand higher wages and shorter working hours. The rebels took control of the city for ten days. Their determination to fight is reflected in the slogan: “Live working or die fighting!”

This resistance was brutally crushed by the government, which supported the factory owners. In 1834, silk mill workers in Lyon revolted again to demand the establishment of a republic. The fierce struggle went on for four days, but was extinguished in a bloody battle against the French army. About 10,000 insurgents were imprisoned or deported.

The Chartist Movement in Britain:

Chartism was a working class movement in the United Kingdom which rose up in response to anti-worker laws such as the Poor Law Amendment of 1834, which drove poor people into workhouses and removed other social programs for the working poor. Legislative failure to address the demands of the working poor led to a broadly popular mass movement which would go on to organize around the People’s Charter of 1838, which was a list of six demands which included extension of the vote and granting the working class the right to hold office in the House of Commons.

In 1845, Karl Marx visited Britain for the first time, along with Friedrich Engels, to meet with the leaders of the Chartist movement (with whom Engels had already established a close relationship). After various conflicts and struggles, Chartism ultimately began to decline in 1848 as more socialist-oriented movements rose up in prominence.

Workers’ Movement in Silesia, Germany:

In June, 1844, disturbances and riots occurred in the Prussian province of Silesia, a major center of textile manufacturing. In response, the Prussian army was called upon to restore order in the region. In a confrontation between the weavers and troops, shots were fired into the crowd, killing 11 protesters and wounding many others. The leaders of the disturbances were arrested, flogged, and imprisoned. This event has gained enormous significance in the history of the German labor movement.

In particular, Karl Marx regarded the uprising as evidence of the birth of a German workers’ movement. The weavers’ rebellion served as an important symbol for later generations concerned with poverty and oppression of the working class in German society.

It quickly became apparent that the revolutionary practice of the proletariat needed the guidance of scientific theories. The birth of Marxism was to meet that objective requirement; in the meantime, the revolutionary practice itself became the practical premise for Marxism to continuously develop.

- Theoretical Premises

The birth of Marxism not only resulted from the objective requirement of history, it was also the result of inheriting the quintessence* of various previously established frameworks of human philosophical theory such as German classical philosophy, British classical political economics, and utopianism in France and Britain.

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Annotation 6

* In the original Vietnamese, the word tinh hoa is used, which we roughly translate to the word quintessence throughout this book. Literally, it means “the best, highest, most beautiful, defining characteristics” of a concept, and, unlike the English word quintessence, it has an exclusively positive connotation. Quintessence should not be confused with the universal category of Essence, which is discussed on p. 156.

German classical philosophy, especially the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel^[5] and Ludwig Feuerbach^[6], had deeply influenced the formation of the Marxist worldview and philosophical methodology.

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Annotation 7

German classical philosophy was a movement of idealist philosophers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Idealism is a philosophical position that holds that the only reliable experience of reality occurs within the human consciousness. Idealists believe that human reason is the best way to seek truth, and that consciousness is thus the only reliable source of knowledge and information.

One of Hegel’s important achievements was his critique of the metaphysical method.

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Annotation 8

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that attempts to explain the fundamental nature of reality by classifying things, phenomena, and ideas into various categories. Metaphysical philosophy has taken many forms through the centuries, but one common shortcoming of metaphysical thought is a tendency to view things and ideas in a static, abstract manner. Metaphysical positions view nature as a collection of objects and phenomena which are isolated from one another and fundamentally unchanging. Engels explained the problems of metaphysics in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — hese were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years.

But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.

Francis Bacon (1561 — 1626) is considered the father of empiricism, which is the belief that knowledge can only be derived from human sensory experience [see Annotation 10, p. 10]. Bacon argued that scientific knowledge could only be derived through inductive reasoning in which specific observations are used to form general conclusions. John Locke (1632 — 1704) was another early empiricist, who was heavily influenced by Francis Bacon. Locke, too, was an empiricist, and is considered to be the “father of liberalism.”

Engels was highly critical of the application of metaphysical philosophy to natural science. As Engels continues in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes — ideas — are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses... For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.

At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees.

Dialectical Materialism stands in contrast to metaphysics in many ways. Rather than splitting the world into distinct, isolated categories, Dialectical Materialist philosophy seeks to view the world in terms of relationships, motion, and change. Dialectical Materialism also refutes the hard empiricism of Bacon and Locke by describing a dialectical relationship between the material world and consciousness [see: The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88].

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For the first time in the history of human philosophy, Hegel expressed the content of dialectics in strict arguments with a system of rules and categories.

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Annotation 9

Dialectics is a philosophical methodology which searches for truth by examining contradictions and relationships between things, objects, and ideas. Ancient dialecticians such as Aristotle and Socrates explored dialectics primarily through rhetorical discourse between two or more different points of view about a subject with the intention of finding truth.

In this classical form of dialectics, a thesis is presented. This thesis is an opening argument about the subject at hand. An antithesis, or counter-argument, is then presented. Finally, the thesis and antithesis are combined into a synthesis, which is an improvement on both the thesis and antithesis which brings us closer to truth.

Hegel resurrected dialectics to the forefront of philosophical inquiry for the German Idealists. As Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

Hegel’s work’s greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought.

Hegel’s great contribution to dialectics was to develop dialectics from a simple method of examining truth based on discourse into an organized, systematic model of nature and of history. Unfortunately, Hegel’s dialectics were idealist in nature. Hegel believed that the ideal served as the primary basis of reality. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels strongly rejected Hegel’s idealism, as well as the strong influences of Christian theology on Hegel’s work, but they also saw great potential in his system of dialectics, as Marx explained in Capital (Volume 1):

The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

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Starting with a critique of the mysterious idealism of Hegel’s philosophy, Marx and Engels inherited the “rational kernel” of Hegelian dialectics and successfully built materialist dialectics.

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Annotation 10

In order to understand the ways in which the critique of Hegel’s philosophy by Marx and Engels led to the development of dialectical materialism, some background information on materialism — and the conflicts between idealist and materialist philosophy in the era of Marx and Engels — is needed.

Materialism is a philosophical position that holds that the material world exists outside of the mind, and that human ideas and thoughts stem from observation and sensory experience of this external world. Materialism rejects the idealist notion that truth can only be sought through reasoning and human consciousness. The history and development of both idealism and materialism are discussed more in the section The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues on page 48.

In the era of Marx and Engels, the leading philosophical school of materialism was known as empiricism. Empiricism holds that we can only obtain knowledge through human sense perception. Marx and Engels were materialists, but they rejected empiricism (see Engels’ critique of empiricism in Annotation 8, p. 8).

One reason Marx and Engels opposed the strict empiricist view was that it made materialism vulnerable to attack from idealists, because it ignored objective relations and knowledge that went beyond sense data. The empiricist point of view also provided the basis for the subjective idealism of George Berkeley [see Annotation 32, p. 27] and the skepticism of David Hume. Berkeley’s Subjective Idealism is empiricist in that it supports the idea that humans can only discover knowledge through direct sense experience. Therefore, Berkeley argues, individuals are unable to obtain any real knowledge about abstract concepts such as “matter.”

Similarly, David Hume’s radical skepticism, which Engels called “agnosticism,” denied the possibility of possessing any concrete knowledge. As Hume wrote in A Treatise on Human Nature: “I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.” Hume’s radical skepticism lay in his empiricist belief that the only source of knowledge is sense experience; but Hume went a step further, doubting that even sense experience could be reliable, adding: “The essence and composition of external bodies are so obscure, that we mustnecessarily, in our reasonings, or rather conjectures concerning them, involveourselves in contradictions and absurdities.”

Later, in the appendix of the same text, Hume argues that conscious reasoning suffers from the same unreliability: “I had entertained some hopes (that) the intellectual world ... would be free from those contradictions, and absurdities, whichseem to attend every explication, that human reason can give of the material world.”

Engels dismissed radical skepticism as “scientifically a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world.” Engels directly refutes radical skepticism in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

... how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? ... whenever we speak of objects, or their qualities, of which (we) cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on (our) senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation, there was action... And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception.

This concept of determining the truth of knowledge and perception through practical experience is fundamental to dialectical materialist philosophy and the methodology of materialist dialectics, and is discussed in further detail in Chapter 3, p. 204.

Another weakness of empiricism is that it denies the objectiveness of social relations, which cannot be fully and properly analyzed through sensory experience and observation alone. Marx saw that social relations are, indeed, objective in nature and can be understood despite their lack of sensory observability, and that doing so is vital in comprehending subjects such as political economy, as he observes in Capital Volume I:

(The true) reality of the value of commodities contrasts with the gross material reality of these same commodities (the reality of which is perceived by our bodily senses) in that not an atom of matter enters into the reality of value. We may twist and turn a commodity this way and that — as a thing of value it still remains unappreciable by our bodily senses.

In other words, Marx pointed out that no amount of sense data about a commodity will fully explain its value. One can know the size, weight, hardness, etc., of a commodity, but without analyzing the social relations and other aspects of the commodity which can’t be directly observed with the senses, one can never know or understand the true value of the commodity. The materialism of Marx and Engels acknowledges the physical, material world as the first basis for reality, but Marx and Engels also understood that it was vital to account for other aspects of rational knowledge (such as social relations). Marx and Engels believed that empiricist materialism had roughly the same flaw as idealism: a lack of a connection between the material and consciousness. While the idealists completely dismissed sense data and relied exclusively on reasoning and consciousness, the empiricists dismissed conscious thought to focus solely on what could be sensed.

It is important to note that, while Marx and Engels rejected empiricism, they did not reject empirical knowledge nor empirical data which is collected from scientific observation [see Annotation 216, p. 210]. On the contrary, empirical data was key to the works of Marx and Engels in developing dialectical materialism. As Lenin explained: “(Marx) took one of the economic formations of society – the system of commodity production – and on the basis of a vast mass of data which he studied for not less than twenty-five years gave a most detailed analysis of the laws governing this formation and its development.” And so, the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels served to bridge the gap between idealism and materialism. They believed that our conscious thoughts are derived from material processes, but that consciousness can also influence the material world. This is discussed in more detail in the section “Materialism and Dialectical Materialism” on page 48.

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Marx and Engels also criticized many limitations of Feuerbach’s methodology and viewpoint* — especially Feuerbach’s prescriptions for how to deal with social problems — but they also highly appreciated the role of Feuerbach’s thought in the fight against idealism and religion to assert that nature comes first, and that nature is permanent and independent from human willpower.

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Annotation 11

* Viewpoint, point of view, or perspective, is the starting point of analysis which determines the direction of thinking from which problems are considered. Marx and Engels were critical of Feurbach’s hyper-focused humanist viewpoint.

Feuerbach’s atheism and materialism offered an important foundation for Marx and Engels to develop from an idealist worldview into a materialist worldview, which led them directly to developing the philosophical foundation of communism.

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Annotation 12

Ludwig Feuerbach was one of the “Young Hegelians” who adapted and developed the ideals of Hegel and other German Idealists. Feuerbach was a humanist materialist: he focused on humans and human nature and the role of humans in the material world. Like Marx and Engels, Feuerbach dismissed the religious mysticism of Hegel. Importantly, Feuerbach broke from Hegel’s religious-mystical belief that humans descended from supernatural origins, instead describing humans as originating from the natural, material world.

Feuerbach also distinguished between the objectivity of the material external world and the subjectivity of human conscious thought, and he drew a distinction between external reality as it really exists and external reality as humans perceive it. Feuerbach believed that human nature was rooted in specific, intrinsic human attributes and activities. As Feuerbach explains in The Essence of Christianity: “What, then, is the nature of man, of which he is conscious, or what constitutes the specific distinction, the proper humanity of man? Reason, Will, Affection.”

Feuerbach explained that the actions of “thinking, willing, and loving,” which correspond to the essential characteristics of “reason, will, and love,” are what define humanity, continuing: “Reason, Will, Love, are not powers which man possesses, for he is nothing without them, he is what he is only by them; they are the constituent elements of his nature, which he neither has nor makes, the animating, determining, governing powers — divine, absolute powers — to which he can oppose no resistance.”

In his Collected Works, Feuerbach further explains that materialism is supported by the fact that nature predates human consciousness:

Natural science, at least in its present state, necessarily leads us back to a point when the conditions for human existence were still absent, when nature, i.e., the earth, was not yet an object of the human eye and mind, when, consequently, nature was an absolutely non-human entity (absolut unmenschliches Wesen). Idealism may retort: but nature also is something thought of by you (von dir gedachte). Certainly, but from this it does not follow that this nature did not at one time actually exist, just as from the fact that Socrates and Plato do not exist for me if I do not think of them, it does not follow that Socrates and Plato did not actually at one time exist without me.

Marx and Engels were heavily influenced by Feuerbach’s materialism, but they took issue with Feuerbach’s sharp focus on human attributes and activities in isolation from the external material world. As Marx wrote in Theses on Feuerbach: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that... reality... is conceived only in the form of the object... but not as sensuous human activity.”

“Sensuous human activity” has a very specific meaning to Marx; it grew from two conflicting schools of thought:

The idealists believed the external world can only be understood through the active subjective thought processes of human beings, while the empiricist materialists believed that human beings are passive subjects of the material world. Marx synthesized these contradicting ideas into what he called “sensuous activity,” which balanced idealist and materialist philosophical concepts.

According to Marx, humans are simultaneously active in the world in the sense that our conscious activity can transform the world, and passive in the sense that all human thoughts fundamentally derive from observation and sense experience of the material world (see Chapter 2, p. 53). So, Marx and Engels believed that Feuerbach was misguided in defining human nature by our traits alone, portraying “the essence of man” as isolated from the material world and from social relations. In addition, Feuerbach’s humanism was based on an abstract, ideal version of human beings, whereas the humanism of Marx and Engels is firmly rooted in the reality of “real men living real lives.” As Engels wrote in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy:

He (Feuerbach) clings fiercely to nature and man; but nature and man remain mere words with him. He is incapable of telling us anything definite either about real nature or real men. But from the abstract man of Feuerbach, one arrives at real living men only when one considers them as participants in history... The cult of abstract man, which formed the kernel of Feuerbach’s new religion, had to be replaced by the science of real men and of their historical development. This further development of Feuerbach’s standpoint beyond Feuerbach was inaugurated by Marx in 1845 in The Holy Family.^[7]

Marx and Engels believed that human nature could only be understood by examining the reality of actual humans in the real world through our relationships with each other, with nature, and with the external material world. Importantly, it was Marx’s critique of Feuerbach which led him to define political action as the key pursuit of philosophy with these immortal words from Theses on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

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The British classical political economics, represented by such economists as Adam Smith^[8] and David Ricardo^[9], also contributed to the formation of Marxism’s historical materialist conception [see p. 23].

Smith and Ricardo were some of the first to form theories about labor value in the study of political economics. They made important conclusions about value and the origin of profit, and about the importance of material production and rules that govern economies. However, because there were still many limitations in the study methodology of Smith and Ricardo, these British classical political economists failed to recognise the historical characteristic of value*; the internal contradictions of commodity production**; and the duality of commodity production labor***.

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Annotation 13

* Historical Characteristic of Value

Marx generally admired the work of Smith and Ricardo, but saw major flaws which undermined the utility of their classical economic theories. Perhaps chief among these flaws, according to Marx, was a tendency for Smith and Ricardo to uphold an ahistoric view of society and capitalism. In other words, classical economists see capitalism as existing in harmony with the eternal and universal laws of nature, rather than seeing capitalism as a result of historical processes of development [see Annotation 114, p. 116]. Marx did not believe that the economic principles of capitalism resulted from nature, but rather, from historical conflict between different classes. He believed that the principles of political economies changed over time, and would continue to change into the future, whereas Smith and Ricardo saw economic principles as fixed, static concepts that were not subject to change over time. As Marx explains in The Poverty of Philosophy:

Economists express the relations of bourgeois production, the division of labour, credit, money, etc. as fixed, immutable, eternal categories... Economists explain how production takes place in the above mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement that gave them birth... these categories are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.

** Internal Contradictions of Commodity Production

In Marxist terms, a commodity is specifically something that has both a use value and a value-form (see Annotation 14, p. 16), but in simpler terms, a commodity is anything that can be bought or sold. Importantly, capitalism transforms human labor into a commodity, as workers must sell their labor to capitalists in exchange for wages. Marx pointed out that contradictions arise when commodities are produced under capitalism: because capitalists, who own the means of production, decide what to produce based solely on what they believe to be most profitable, the commodities that are being produced do not always meet the actual needs of society. Certain commodities are under-produced while others are over-produced, which leads to crisis and instability.

*** Duality of Commodity Production Labor

In Capital, Marx describes commodity production labor as existing in a duality — that is to say, it exists with two distinct aspects:

First, there is abstract labor, which Marx describes as “labor-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure.” This is simply the expenditure of human energy in the form of labor, without any regard to production or value of the labor output. Second, there is concrete labor, which is the aspect of labor that refers to the production of a specific commodity with a specific value through labor.

Marx argues that human labor, therefore, is simultaneously, an activity which will produce some specific kind of product, and also an activity that generates value in the abstract. Marx and Engels were the first economists to discuss the duality of labor, and their observations on the duality of labor were closely tied to their theories of the different aspects of value (use value, exchange value, etc.), which was key to their analysis of capitalism.

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Smith and Ricardo also failed to distinguish between simple commodity production and capitalist commodity production*, and could not accurately analyse the form of value** in capitalist commodity production.

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Annotation 14

* Commodity Production

Simple commodity production (also known as petty commodity production) is the production of commodities under the conditions which Marx called the “Simple Exchange” of commodities. Simple exchange occurs when individual producers trade the products they have made directly, themselves, for other commodities. Under simple exchange, workers directly own their own means of production and sell products which they have made with their own labor.

Simple commodity production and simple exchange use what Marx referred to as “C→M→C mode of circulation” [see Annotation 60, p. 59]. Circulation is simply the way in which commodities and money are exchanged for one another.

C→M→C stands for:

Commodity → Money → Commodity

So, with simple commodity production and simple exchange, workers produce commodities, which they then sell for money, which they use to buy other commodities which they need. For example, a brewer might make beer, which they sell for money, which they use to buy food, housing, and other commodities which they need to live.

In the C→M→C mode of circulation, the producers and consumers of commodities have a direct relationship to the commodities which are being bought and sold. The sellers have produced the commodities sold with their own labor, and they directly consume the commodities which they purchase with the money thus obtained.

Capitalist commodity production and capitalist exchange, on the other hand, are based on the M→C→M’ mode of circulation.

M→C→M’ stands for:

Money → Commodity → More Money

Under this mode of circulation, capitalists spend money to buy commodities (including the commodified labor of workers), with the intention of selling commodities for MORE MONEY than they began with. The capitalist has no direct relationship to the commodity being produced and sold, and the capitalist is solely interested in obtaining more money.

Capitalist commodity production, therefore, uses the M→C→M’ mode of circulation, in which capitalists own the means of production and pay wages to workers in exchange for their labor, which is used to produce commodities. The capitalists then sell these commodities for profits which are not shared with the workers who provided the labor which produced the commodities.

** Value-Form

This is one of the most important, and potentially most confusing, concepts in all of Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Marx explains these principles at length in Appendix of the 1^st German Edition of Capital, Volume 1, but here are some of the fundamentals:

One of Marx’s key breakthroughs was understanding that commodities have many different properties which have different effects in political economies.

Just as Commodity Production Labor exists in a duality of Concrete Labor and Abstract Labor (see Annotation 13, p. 15), commodities themselves also exist in duality according to Marx:

Commodities have both “use-value” and “value.”

Use-Value (which corresponds to Concrete Labor) is the commodity’s tangible form of existence; it is what we can physically sense when we observe a commodity. By extension, use-value encompasses how a commodity can be used in the material world.

Value, or the Value-Form, is the social form of a commodity, which is to say, it represents the stable relationships intrinsic to the commodity [see Content and Form, p. 147].

Note that this relates to the dialectical relationship between the material and the ideal [see The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88].

Value-forms represent relational equivalencies of commodities, i.e.: 20 yards of linen = 10 pounds of tea

These relational equivalencies are tied to the equivalent labor value (see Annotation 15 below, and Annotation 26, p. 23) used to produce these commodities. The value-form of a commodity is the social form because it embodies relational equivalencies:

1. The value-form represents the relationship between the commodity and the labor which was used to produce the commodity.

2. The value-form represents the relationship between a commodity and one or more other commodities.

As Marx explains in Appendix to the 1^st German Edition of Capital: “Hence by virtue of its value-form the (commodity) now stands also in a social relation no longer to only a single other type of commodity, but to the world of commodities. As a commodity it is a citizen of this world.”

Understanding the social form of commodities — the value-form — was crucial for Marx to develop a deeper understanding of money and capitalism. Marx argued that classical economists like Ricardo and Smith conflated economic categories such as “exchange value,” “value,” “price,” “money,” etc., which meant that they could not possibly fully understand or analyze capitalist economies.

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British classical political economists like Ricardo and Smith outlined the scientific factors of the theories of labor value* and contributed many progressive thoughts which Marx adapted and further developed.

Annotation 15

* Adam Smith and David Ricardo revolutionized the labor theory of value, which held that the value of a good or service is determined by the amount of human labor required to produce it.

Thus, Marx was able to solve the contradictions that these economists could not solve and he was able to establish the theory of surplus value*, scientific evidence for the exploitative nature of capitalism, and the economic factors which will lead to the eventual fall of capitalism and the birth of socialism.

Annotation 16

* David Ricardo developed the concept of surplus value. Surplus value is the difference between the amount of income made from selling a product and the amount it costs to produce it. Marx would go on to expand on the concept of surplus value considerably.

Utopianism' had been developing for a long time and reached its peak in the late 18^th century with famous thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon^[10], François Marie Charles Fourier^[11] and Robert Owen^[12]. Utopianism sought to elevate the humanitarian spirit and strongly criticised capitalism by calling attention to the misery of the working class under capitalism. It also offered many far-ranging opinions and analyses of the development of human history and laid out some basic foundational factors and principles for a new society. However, Utopianism could not scientifically address the nature of capitalism. It failed to detect the Law of Development of Capitalism^[13] and also failed to recognise the roles and missions of the working class as a social force that can eliminate capitalism to build an equal, non-exploitative society.

Annotation 17

The early industrial working class existed in miserable conditions, and the political movement of utopianism was developed by people who believed that a better world could be built. The utopianists believed they could create “a New Moral World” of happiness, enlightenment, and prosperity through education, science, technology, and communal living. For instance, Robert Owen was a wealthy textile manufacturer who tried to build a better society for workers in New Harmony, Indiana, in the USA. Owen purchased the entire town of New Harmony in 1825 as a place to build an ideal society. Owen’s vision failed after two years for a variety of reasons, and many other wealthy capitalists in the early 19^th century drew up similar plans which also failed.

Utopianism was one of the first political and industrial movements that criticized the conditions of capitalism by exposing the miserable situations of poor workers and offering a vision of a better society, and was one of the first movements to attempt to mitigate the faults of capitalism in practice.

Unfortunately, the utopianists were not ideologically prepared to replace capitalism, and all of their attempts to build a better alternative to capitalism failed. Marx and Engels admired the efforts of the utopianist movement, and studied their attempts and failures closely in developing their own political theories, concluding that the utopianists failed in large part because they did not understand how capitalism developed, nor the role of the working class in the revolution against capitalism.

As Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

(The) historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.

Engels is explaining, here, that — in a sense — the utopian socialists were victims of arriving too early. Capitalism had not yet developed enough for its opponents to formulate plans based on actual material conditions, since capitalism was only just emerging into a stable form. Without a significant objective, material basis, the utopians were forced to rely upon reasoning alone to confront capitalism.

In this sense, the early historical utopianists fell into philosophical utopianism in its broader sense — defined by the mistaken assertion that the ideal can determine the material [see Annotation 95, p. 94]. In believing that they could build a perfect society based on ideals and “pure fantasy” alone without a material basis for development, the utopians were, in essence, idealists. As Engels explained: “from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism.” Engels concluded that in order to successfully overthrow capitalism, revolution would need to be grounded in materialism: “To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.”

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The humanitarian spirit and compassionate analysis which the utopians embodied in their efforts to lay out concrete features of a better future society became important theory premises for the birth of the scientific theory of socialism in Marxism.

- Natural Science Premise:

Along with social-economic conditions and theory premises, the achievements of the natural sciences were also foundational to the development of arguments and evidence which assert the correctness of Marxism’s viewpoints and methodology.

Annotation 18

Natural science is science which deals with the natural world, including chemistry, biology, physics, geology, etc.

Three major scientific breakthroughs which were important to the development of Marxism include:

• The law of conservation and transformation of energy scientifically proved the inseparable relationships and the mutual transformation and conservation of all the forms of motion of matter in nature.

• The theory of evolution offered a scientific basis for the development of diverse forms of life through natural selection.

• Cell theory was a scientific basis proving unity in terms of origins, physical forms and material structures of living creatures. It also explained the development of life through those relationships.

These scientific discoveries led to the rejection of theological and metaphysical viewpoints which centered the role of the “creator” in the pursuit of truth.

Annotation 19

For centuries in Europe, natural science and philosophy had been heavily dominated by theological viewpoints which centered God in the pursuit of truth. Descartes, Kant, Spinoza, and many other metaphysical philosophers who developed the earliest theories of modern natural science centered their religious beliefs in their philosophies. These theological viewpoints varied in many ways, but all shared a characteristic of centering a “creator” in the pursuit of philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Together, the law of conservation and transformation of energy, the theory of evolution, and cell theory provided an alternative viewpoint which allowed scientists to remove the “creator” from the scientific equation. For the first time, natural scientists and philosophers had concrete theoretical explanations for the origin and development of the universe, life, and reality which did not rely on a supernatural creator.

Marx and Engels closely observed and studied the groundbreaking scientific progress of their era. They believed strongly in materialist scientific methods and the data which they produced, and based their analysis and philosophical doctrines on such observations. They recognized the importance and validity of the scientific achievements of their era, and they developed the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism into a system which would help humans study and understand the whole material world.

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels explained that ancient Greek dialecticians had correctly realized that the world is “an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away.”

Engels goes on to explain that it was understandable for early natural scientists to break their inquiries and analysis down into specialized fields and categories of science to focus on precise, specific, narrow subject matters so that they could build up a body of empirical data. However, as data accumulated, it became clear that all of these isolated, individual fields of study must somehow be unified back together coherently and cohesively in order to obtain a deeper and more useful understanding of reality.

As Engels wrote in On Dialectics:

Empirical natural science has accumulated such a tremendous mass of positive material for knowledge that the necessity of classifying it in each separate field of investigation systematically and in accordance with its inner inter-connection has become absolutely imperative. It is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not work, here only theoretical thinking can be of assistance.

As science grows increasingly complex, a necessity develops for a philosophical and cognitive framework which can be used to make sense of the influx of information from disparate fields. In Dialectics of Nature, Engels explains how dialectical materialism is the perfect philosophical foundation for unifying scientific fields into one cohesive framework:

Dialectics divested of mysticism becomes an absolute necessity for natural science, which has forsaken the field where rigid categories sufficed, which represent as it were the lower mathematics of logic, its everyday weapons.

So, Marx and Engels developed Dialectical Materialism not in opposition to science, but as a way to make better use of scientific data, and to analyze the complex, dynamic, constantly changing systems of the world in motion. While distinct scientific discoveries and empirical data are invaluable, each data point only provides a small amount of information within a single narrow, specific field of science. Dialectical Materialism allows humans to view reality — as a whole — in motion, and to examine the interconnections and mutual developments between different fields and categories of human knowledge.

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These scientific principles confirmed the correctness of the dialectical materialist view of the material world, with such features as: endlessness, self-existence, self-motivation, and self-transformation. They also confirmed the scientific nature of the dialectical materialist viewpoint in both material processes and thought processes.

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Annotation 20

Endlessness refers to the infinite span of space and time in our universe. Self-existence means that our universe exists irrespective of human consciousness; it existed before human consciousness evolved and it will continue to exist after human consciousness becomes extinct. Self-motivation and Self-transformation refer to the fact that motion and transformation exist within the universe independent of human consciousness.

Engels wrote of the scientific nature of the dialectical materialist viewpoint in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that... Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.

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In conclusion, the birth of Marxism is a phenomenon which is compatible with scientific principles; it is the product of the social-economic conditions of its time of origin, of the human knowledge expressed in science at that time, and it is also the result of its founders’ creative thinking and humanitarian spirit.

b. The Birth and Development Stage of Marxism

Marx and Engels initiated the birth and development stage of Marxism from around 1842~1843 through around 1847~1848. Later, from 1849 to 1895, Marxism was developed to be more thorough and comprehensive, but in this early period of birth and development, Marx and Engels engaged in practical activities [Marx and Engels were not just theorists, but also actively supported and participated with various revolutionary and working class organizations including the Chartists, the League of the Just, the Communist League, the International Workingmen’s Association, etc.] and studied a wide range of human thought from ancient times on through to their contemporaries in order to methodically reinforce, complement and improve their ideas.

Many famous works such as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx, 1844), The Holy Family (Marx and Engels, 1845), Thesis on Feuerbach (Marx, 1845), The German Ideology (Marx and Engels, 1845–1846), and so on, clearly showed that Marx and Engels inherited the quintessence [see Annotation 6, p. 8] of the dialectical and materialist methods which they received from many predecessors. This philosophical heritage led to the development of the dialectical materialist viewpoint and materialist dialectics.

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Annotation 21

There is a subtle, but important, distinction between Dialectical Materialism and Materialist Dialectics. This will be explained further in chapters I (p. 48) and II (p. 98).

With works such as The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx, 1847) and The Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels, 1848), Marxism was presented as a complete system of fundamental views with three theoretical component parts.

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Annotation 22

According to Lenin, the three component parts of Marxism (and, by extension, of Marxism-Leninism) are:

1. The Philosophy of Marxism: Including Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism

2. The Political Economy of Marxism: A system of knowledge and laws that define the production process and commodity exchange in human society.

3. Scientific Socialism: The system of thought pertaining to the establishment of the communist social economy form.

These are discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, p. 38.

In the book The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx proposed the basic principles of Dialectical Materialism and Scientific Socialism,* and gave some initial thoughts about surplus value. The Manifesto of the Communist Party laid the first doctrinal foundation of communism. In this book, the philosophical basis was expressed through the organic unity between the economical viewpoint and socio-political viewpoint.

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Annotation 23

* Scientific Socialism is a series of socio-political-economic theories intended to build socialism on a foundation of science within society’s current material conditions [see Annotation 79, p. 81]. Scientific Socialism is the topic of Part 3 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party outlined the laws of movement in history,* as well as the basic theory of socio-economic forms.

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Annotation 24

* The laws of movement in history are the core principles of historical materialism, which is the topic of Part 2 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.

The basic theory of socio-economic forms dictates that material production plays a decisive role in the existence and development of a society, and that the material production methods decide both the political and social consciousness of a society.

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Annotation 25

Social consciousness refers to the collective experience of consciousness shared by members of a society, including ideological, cultural, spiritual, and legal beliefs and ideas which are shared within that society. This is related to the concept of base and superstructure, which is discussed later in this chapter.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party also showed that for as long as classes have existed, the history of the development of human society is the history of class struggle. Through class struggle, the proletariat can liberate ourselves only if we simultaneously and forever liberate the whole of humanity. With these basic opinions, Marx and Engels founded Historical Materialism.

By applying Historical Materialism to the comprehensive study of the capitalist production method, Marx made an important discovery: separating workers from the ownership of the means of production through violence was the starting point of the establishment of the capitalist production method. Workers do not own the means of production to perform their labor activities for themselves, so, in order to make income and survive, workers have to sell their labor to capitalists. Labor thus becomes a special commodity, and the sellers of labor become workers for labor-buyers [the proletariat and capitalist class respectively]. The value that workers create through their labor is higher than their wage. And this is how surplus value* is formed. Importantly, this means that the surplus value belongs to people who own the means of production — the capitalists — instead of the workers who provide the labor.

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Annotation 26

* Surplus value is equal to labor value (the amount of value workers produce through labor) minus wages paid to workers. Under capitalism, this surplus value is appropriated as profit by capitalists after the products which workers created are sold.

So, in discovering the origin of surplus value, Marx pointed out the exploitative nature of capitalism [because capitalists essentially steal surplus labor value from workers which is then transformed into profits], though this exploitative nature is concealed by the money-commodity relationship.

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Annotation 27

Under capitalism, a worker’s labor is a commodity which capitalists pay for with money in the form of wages. Workers never know how much of their labor value is being withheld by employers, which conceals the nature of capitalist wage-theft.

The theory of surplus value was deeply and comprehensively researched and presented in Capital^[14] by Marx and Engels. This work not only paves the way to form a new political-economic theory system based on the working class’s viewpoint, it also firmly consolidates and develops the historical-materialist viewpoint through the theory of socio-economic forms.

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Annotation 28

Karl Marx explained that the goal of writing Capital was “to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society.” By “laws of motion,” Marx refers to the origins and motivations for change within human society. Historical materialism holds that human society develops based on internal and external relationships within and between aspects of society. Historical materialism is the topic of Part 2 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.

According to the theory of socio-economic forms [which is the basis of historical materialism], the movements and developments of human society are natural-historical processes based on dialectical interactions between forces of production and relations of production; between infrastructure basis [commonly referred to as “base” in English] and superstructure.

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Annotation 29

The forces of production consist of the combination of means of production and workers within society. Under capitalism, the production force consists of the proletariat (working class) and means of production which are owned by the bourgeoisie (capitalist class).

Marx viewed society as composed of an economic base and a social superstructure. The base of society includes the material relationships between humans and the means of productions and the material processes which humans undertake to survive and transform our environment. The superstructure of society includes all components of society not directly relating to production, such as media institutions, music, and art, as well as other cultural elements like religion, customs, moral standards, and everything else which manifests primarily through conscious activity and social relations.

In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explained:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

RELIGION GOVERNMENT EDUCATION

POLITICAL ECONOMY NATURE

The base of society includes material-based elements and relations including political economy, means of production, class relations, etc. The superstructure includes human-consciousness-based elements and relations including government, culture, religion, etc.

In other words, Marx argued that superstructure (which includes social consciousness) is shaped by the infrastructural basis, or base, of society. This reflects the more general dialectical relationship between matter and consciousness, in which the material, as the first basis of reality, determines consciousness, while consciousness mutually impacts the material [see The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88]. So, the base of society — being material in nature — determines the superstructure, while the superstructure impacts the base. It couldn’t possibly be the other way around, according to the dialectical materialist worldview, because the primary driving forces of conscious activity are rooted in material needs.

The theory of socio-economic forms proves that the materialist viewpoint of history is not just a hypothesis, but a scientifically-proven principle.

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Annotation 30

As Lenin explains in What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats:

Now — since the appearance of Capital — the materialist conception of history is no longer a hypothesis, but a scientifically proven proposition. And until we get some other attempt to give a scientific explanation of the functioning and development of some formation of society — formation of society, mind you, and not the way of life of some country or people, or even class, etc. — another attempt just as capable of introducing order into the “pertinent facts” as materialism is, that is just as capable of presenting a living picture of a definite formation, while giving it a strictly scientific explanation -until then the materialist conception of history will be a synonym for social science. Materialism is not ‘primarily a scientific conception of history’... but the only scientific conception of it.

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Capital is Marx’s main work which presents Marxism as a social science by illuminating the inevitable processes of birth, development, and decay of capitalism; the replacement of capitalism with socialism; and the historical mission of the working class — the social force that can implement this replacement. Marx’s materialist conception of history and proletarian revolution continued to be developed in Critique of Gotha Programme (Marx, 1875). This book discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transitional period from capitalism to socialism, and phases of the communism building process, and several other premises. Together, these premises formed the scientific basis for Marx’s theoretical guidance for the future revolutionary activity of the proletariat.

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Annotation 31

When Marx refers to a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” he does not mean “dictatorship” to mean “totalitarian” or “authoritarian.” Rather, here “dictatorship” simply refers to a situation in which political power is held by the working class (which constitutes the vast majority of society). “Dictatorship,” here, refers to full control of the means of production and government. This stands in contrast to capitalism, which is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, in which capitalists (a small minority of society) have full control of the means of production and government.

c. The Defending and Developing Stage of Marxism

- Historical Background and the Need for Defending and Developing Marxism

In the late 19^th century and early 20^th century, capitalism developed into a new stage, called imperialism. The dominant and exploitative nature of capitalism became increasingly obvious. Contradictions in capitalist societies became increasingly serious — especially the class struggles between the proletariat and capitalists. In many colonised countries, the resistance against imperialism created a unity between national liberation and proletarian revolution, uniting people in colonised countries with the working class in colonial countries. The core of such revolutionary struggles at this time was in Russia. The Russian proletariat and working class under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party became the leader of the whole international revolutionary movement.

During this time, both capitalist industry and natural sciences developed rapidly. Some natural scientists, especially physicists, lacked a grounding in materialist philosophical methodology and therefore fell into a viewpoint crisis. Idealist philosophers used this crisis to directly influence the perspective and activities of many revolutionary movements.

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Annotation 32

Imperialism

Lenin defined imperialism as “the monopoly stage of capitalism,” listing its essential characteristics as “finance capital (serving) a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists” and “a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.”

Subjective and Empiricist Idealism

In the late 19^th century, natural scientists were exploring various philosophical bases for scientific inquiry. One Austrian physicist, Ernst Mach, attempted to build a philosophy of natural science based on the works of German-Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius known as “Empirio-Criticism.” Empirio-Criticism, which also came to be known as Machism, has many parallels with the philosophy of George Berkeley. Berkeley (1685 — 1753) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose main philosophical achievement was the formulation of a doctrine which he called “immaterialism,” and which later came to be known as “Subjective Idealism.” This doctrine was summed up by Berkeley’s maxim: “Esse est percipi” — “To be is to be perceived.” Subjective Idealism holds that individuals can only directly perceive and know about physical objects through direct sense experience. Therefore, individuals are unable to obtain any real knowledge about abstract concepts such as “matter”.

The philosophy of Empirio-Criticism, which was developed by Avenarius and Mach, also holds that the only reliable human knowledge we can hold comes from our sensations and experiences. Mach argued that the only source of knowledge is sense data and “experience,” but that we can’t develop any actual knowledge of the actual external world. In other words, Mach’s conception of empirio-criticism holds all knowledge as essentially subjective in nature, and limited to (and by) human sense experience. Mach’s development of Empirio-Criticism (which can also be referred to as empirical idealism or Machism)' was therefore a continuation of Berkeley’s subjective idealism. Both Berkeley’s Immaterialism and Empirio-Criticism are considered to be subjective idealism because these philosophies deny that the external world exists — or otherwise assert that it is unknowable — and, as such, hold that all knowledge stems from experiences which are essentially subjective in nature.

Mach argued that reality can only be defined by our sensual experiences of reality, and that we can never concretely know anything about the objective external world due to the limitations of sense experience. This stands in direct contradiction to dialectical materialism, which holds that we can develop accurate knowledge of the material world through observation and practice. Whereas Berkeley developed subjective idealist theological arguments to defend the Christian faith, Mach employed subjective idealism for purely secular purposes as a basis for scientific inquiry.

Note: all quotations below come from Lenin’s book: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Vladimir Lenin strongly opposed Empirio-Criticism and, by extension, Machism, which was becoming popular among communist revolutionists in the late 19^th century, because it pushed forward idealist principles which directly opposed the core tenets of dialectical materialism.

Lenin believed that revolutionaries should be guided not by idealism, but by dialectical materialism. He believed that Empirio-Criticism and Machism consisted of mysticism which would mislead political revolutionaries.

Lenin outlined Machian arguments against materialism:

The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable — ’things-in-themselves’ — matter ‘outside of experience’ and outside of our knowledge [see: Annotation 72, p. 68]. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of ‘experience’... When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the ‘unknown,’ nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge?

Lenin argued that this new form of Machist subjective idealism was, in fact, simply a rehashing of “old errors of idealism,” disguised and dressed up with new terminology. As such, Lenin simply reiterated the longstanding, bedrock dialectical materialist arguments against idealism [see Annotation 10, p. 10]. He was especially upset that contemporary Marxists of his era were being swayed by Machist Empirio-Criticism because he found it to be in direct conflict with dialectical materialism, writing: “(These) would-be Marxists… try in every way to assure their readers that Machism is compatible with the historical materialism of Marx and Engels.”

Lenin goes on to describe the work of philosophers such as Franz Blei, who critiqued Marxism with Machist arguments, as “quasi-scientific tomfoolery decked out in the terminology of Avenarius.” He saw Empirio-Criticism as completely incompatible with communist revolution, since idealism had historically been used by the ruling class to deceive and control the lower classes. In particular, he believed that Machist idealism was being used by the capitalist class to preach bourgeois economics, writing that “the professors of economics are nothing but learned salesmen of the capitalist class.”

Lenin was deeply concerned that prominent Russian socialist philosophers were adopting Machist ideas and claiming them to be compatible with Marxism, writing:

The task of Marxists in both cases is to be able to master and adapt the achievements of these ‘salesmen’... and to be able to lop off their reactionary tendency, to pursue your own line and to combat the whole alignment of forces and classes hostile to us. And this is just what our Machians were unable to do, they slavishly follow the lead of the reactionary professorial philosophy.

Lenin further explains how Empirio-Criticism serves the interests of the capitalist class:

The empirio-criticists as a whole... claim to be non-partisan both in philosophy and in social science. They are neither for socialism nor for liberalism. They make no differentiation between the fundamental and irreconcilable trends of materialism and idealism in philosophy, but endeavor to rise above them. We have traced this tendency of Machism through a long series of problems of epistemology, and we ought not to be surprised when we encounter it in sociology.

In the conclusion of the same text, Lenin explains why communists should reject Empirio-Criticism and Machism with four “standpoints,” summarized here:

1. The theoretical foundations of Empirio-Criticism can’t withstand comparison with those of dialectical materialism. Empirio-Criticism differs little from older forms of idealism, and the tired old errors of idealism clash directly with Marxist dialectical materialism. As Lenin puts it: “only utter ignorance of the nature of philosophical materialism generally and of the nature of Marx’s and Engels’ dialectical method can lead one to speak of ‘combining’ empirio-criticism and Marxism.”

2. The philosophical foundations of Empirio-Criticism are flawed. “Both Mach and Avenarius started with Kant (see: Annotation 72, p. 68) and, leaving him, proceeded not towards materialism, but in the opposite direction, towards Hume and Berkeley (see: Annotation 10, p. 10)... The whole school of Mach and Avenarius is moving more and more definitely towards idealism.”

3. Machism is little more than a relatively obscure trend which has not been adopted by most scientists; a “reactionary (and) transitory infatuation.” As Lenin puts it: “the vast majority of scientists, both generally and in this special branch of science... are invariably on the side of materialism.”

4. Empirio-Criticism and Machism reflect the “tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society.” Idealism represents the interests of the ruling class in modern society, and is used to subjugate the majority of society. Idealist philosophy “stands fully armed, commands vast organizations and steadily continues to exercise influence on the masses, turning the slightest vacillation in philosophical thought to its own advantage.” In other words, idealism is used by the ruling class to manipulate our understanding of the world, as opposed to materialism (and especially dialectical materialism) which illuminates the true nature of reality which would lead to the liberation of the working class.

At this time, Marxism was widely disseminating throughout Russia, which challenged the social positions and benefits of capitalists. In reaction to Marxism, many ideological movements such as empiricism, utilitarianism, revisionism, etc. [see: Appendix F, p. 252] rose up and claimed to renew Marxism, while in fact they misrepresented and denied Marxism.

In this context, new achievements of natural science needed to be analyzed and summarized in order to continue the authentic development of Marxist viewpoints and methodologies. Theoretical principles to fight against the misrepresentation of Marxism needed to be developed in order to bring Marxism into the new era. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would fulfill this historical requirement with his theoretical developments.

- The Role of Lenin in Defending and Developing Marxism.

Lenin’s process of defending and developing Marxism can be separated into three periods: first, from 1893 to 1907; next, from 1907 to 1917; and finally from the success of the October socialist revolution in 1917 until Lenin’s death in 1924.

From 1893 to 1907, Lenin focused on fighting against populists^[15]. His book What the Friends of the People are and How They Fight Against the Social Democrats (1894) criticized the serious mistakes of this faction in regards to socio-historical issues and also exposed their scheme of distorting Marxism by erasing the boundaries between Marxism’s materialist dialectics and Hegel’s idealist dialectics. In the same book, Lenin also shared many thoughts about the important roles of theory, reality, and the relationship between the two.

Annotation 33

The populist philosophy was born in Russia in the 19^th century with roots going back to the Narodnik agrarian socialist movement of the 1860s and 70s, composed of peasants who rose up in a failed campaign against the Czar. In the late 19^th century, a new political movement emerged rooted in Narodnik ideas and a new party called the Socialist Revolutionary Party was formed. The political philosophy of this movement, now commonly translated into English as “populism,” focused on an agrarian peasant revolution led by intellectuals with the ambition of going directly from a feudal society to a socialist society built from rural communes. This movement overtly opposed Marxism and dialectical materialism and was based on subjective idealist utopianism (see Annotation 95, p. 94).

With the book What is to be Done? (1902), Lenin developed Marxist viewpoints on the methods for the proletariat to take power. He discussed economic, political, and ideological struggles. In particular, he emphasized the ideological formation process of the proletariat.

Annotation 34

In What is to be Done?, Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously attain class consciousness and push for political revolution simply due to economic conflict with employers and spontaneous actions like demonstrations and workers’ strikes. He instead insists that a political party of dedicated revolutionaries is needed to educate workers in Marxist principles and to organize and push forward revolutionary activity. He also pushed back strongly against the ideas of what he called “economism,” as typified by the ideas of Eduard Bernstein, a German political theorist who rejected many of Marx’s theories.

Bernstein opposed a working class revolution and instead focused on reform and compromise. He believed that socialism could be achieved within the capitalist economy and the system of bourgeois democracy. Lenin argued that Bernstein and his economist philosophy was opportunistic, and accused economists of seeking positions within bourgeois democracies to further their own personal interests and to quell revolutionary tendencies. As Lenin explained in A Talk With Defenders of Economism:

The Economists limited the tasks of the working class to an economic struggle for higher wages and better working conditions, etc., asserting that the political struggle was the business of the liberal bourgeoisie. They denied the leading role of the party of the working class, considering that the party should merely observe the spontaneous process of the movement and register events. In their deference to spontaneity in the working-class movement, the Economists belittled the significance of revolutionary theory and class-consciousness, asserted that socialist ideology could emerge from the spontaneous movement, denied the need for a Marxist party to instill socialist consciousness into the working-class movement, and thereby cleared the way for bourgeois ideology. The Economists, who opposed the need to create a centralized working-class party, stood for the sporadic and amateurish character of individual circles. Economism threatened to divert the working class from the class revolutionary path and turn it into a political appendage of the bourgeoisie.

The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Vietnam, published by the National Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, defines opportunism, in this context, as “a system of political opinions with no direction, no clear path, no coherent viewpoint, leaning on whatever is beneficial for the opportunist in the short term.”

Lenin critiques opportunist socialism — referring to it as a “critical” trend in socialism — in What is to be Done?:

He who does not deliberately close his eyes cannot fail to see that the new “critical” trend in socialism is nothing more nor less than a new variety of opportunism. And if we judge people... by their actions and by what they actually advocate, it will be clear that “freedom of criticism” means “freedom for an opportunist trend in Social-Democracy, freedom to convert Social-Democracy into a democratic party of reform, freedom to introduce bourgeois ideas and bourgeois elements into socialism.”

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The first revolution of the Russian working class, from 1905 to 1907, failed. Lenin summarized the reality of this revolution in the book Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905). In this book, Lenin explains that the capitalist class in Russia was actively engaged in its own revolution against Czarist feudalism. In this context of this ongoing bourgeois revolution, Lenin deeply developed Marxist concepts related to revolutionary methodologies, objective and subjective factors that will affect the working class revolution, the role of the people, the role of political parties etc.

Annotation 35

From 1905 to 1907, Russia was beset by political unrest and radical activity including workers’ strikes, military mutinies, and peasant uprisings. Russia had just suffered a humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese war which cost tens of thousands of Russian lives without any benefits to the Russian people. In addition, the economic and political systems of Czarist Russia placed a severe burden on industrial workers and peasant farmers.

In response, the Russian proletariat rose up in various uprisings, demonstrations, and clashes against government forces, landlords, and factory owners. In the end, this revolutionary activity failed to overthrow the Czar’s government, and the Czar remained firmly in power until the communist revolution of 1917.

Lenin wrote Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution in 1905 in

Geneva, Switzerland. In it, he argues forcefully against the political faction within the Russian socialist movement that came to be known as the “Mensheviks.” The Mensheviks, as well as the Bolsheviks (Lenin’s contemporary faction) emerged from a dispute within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which took place in 1903.

In the same text, Lenin argued that the Mensheviks misunderstood the forces that were driving revolutionary activity in Russia. While the Mensheviks believed that the situation in Russia would develop along similar lines to previous revolutionary activity in Western Europe, Lenin argued that Russia’s situation was unique and that Russian Marxists should therefore adopt different strategies and activities which reflected Russia’s unique circumstances and material conditions.

Specifically, the Mensheviks believed that the working class should ally with the bourgeoisie to overthrow the Czar’s feudalist regime, and then allow the bourgeoisie to build a fully functioning capitalist economy before workers should attempt their own revolution.

Lenin, on the other hand, presented a completely different analysis of class forces in Russia. He believed the bourgeoisie would seek a compromise with the Czar, as both feudal and bourgeois classes in Russia feared a proletarian revolution.

It’s important to note that Russia’s industrial workforce was very small at this time, and most Russians were peasant farmers. The Mensheviks believed Russian peasants would not be useful in a proletarian revolution, which is why they argued for allowing capitalism to be fully established in Russia before pushing for a working class revolution. They believed it was prudent to wait until the working class became larger and more dominant in Russia before attempting to overthrow capitalism. They believed that the peasant class would not be useful in any such revolution.

In contrast, Lenin believed that the peasants and industrial workers would have to work together to have any hope of a successful revolution. He further argued that an uprising of armed peasants and workers, fighting side by side, would be necessary for overthrowing the Czar.

From 1907 to 1917, there was a viewpoint crisis among many physicists. This strongly affected the birth of many idealist ideologies following Mach’s Positivism that attempted to negate Marxism [See: Annotation 32, p. 27]. Lenin summarized the achievements of natural science as well as historical events of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909). By giving the classical definitions of matter, proving the relationships between matter and consciousness and between social existence and social consciousness, and pointing out the basic rules of consciousness, etc., Lenin defended Marxism and carried it forward to a new level. Lenin clearly expressed his thoughts on the history, nature, and structure of Marxism in the book The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913). He also talked about dialectics in Philosophical Notebooks (1914–1916) and expressed his thoughts about the proletarian dictatorship, the role of the Communist Party, and the path to socialism in his book The State and Revolution (1919).

The success of the October revolution in Russia in 1917 brought about a new era: the transitional period from capitalism to socialism on an international scale. This event presented new theoretical requirements that had not existed in the time of Marx and Engels’ time.

In a series of works including: “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920),

Once Again on the Trade Unions, The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin (1921), The Tax in Kind (1921), etc., Lenin summarized the revolutionary practice of the people, continued defending Marxist dialectics, and uncompromisingly fought against eclecticism and sophistry.

Annotation 36

In Anti-Dühring, Engels identifies the historical missions of the working class as:

1. Becoming the ruling class by establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.

2. Seizing the means of production from the ruling class to end class society.

Eclecticism is an incoherent approach to philosophical inquiry which attempts to draw from various different theories, frameworks, and ideas to attempt to understand a subject, applying different theories in different situations without any consistency in analysis and thought. Eclectic arguments are typically composed of various pieces of evidence that are cherry picked and pieced together to form a perspective that lacks clarity. By definition, because they draw from different systems of thought without seeking a clear and cohesive understanding of the totality of the subject and its internal and external relations and its development over time, eclectic arguments run counter to the comprehensive and historical viewpoints [see p. 116]. Eclecticism bears superficial resemblance to dialectical materialism in that it attempts to consider a subject from many different perspectives, and analyzes relationships pertaining to a subject, but the major flaw of eclecticism is a lack of clear and coherent systems and principles, which leads to a chaotic viewpoint and an inability to grasp the true nature of the subject at hand.

Sophistry is the use of falsehoods and misleading arguments, usually with the intention of deception, and with a tendency of presenting non-critical aspects of a subject matter as critical, to serve a particular agenda. The word comes from the Sophists, a group of professional teachers in Ancient Greece, who were criticized by Socrates (in Plato’s dialogues) for being shrewd and deceptive rhetoricians. This kind of bad faith argument has no place in materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics must, instead, be rooted in a true and accurate understanding of the subject, material conditions, and reality in general.

Simultaneously, Lenin also developed his Marxist viewpoint of the factors deciding the victory of a social regime, about class, about the two basic missions of the proletariat, about the strategies and tactics of proletarian parties in new historical conditions, about the transitional period, and about the plans of building socialism following the New Economic Policy (NEP), etc.

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Annotation 37

The early 1920s were a period of great internal conflict in revolutionary Russia, with various figures and factions wanting to take the revolution in different directions. As such, Lenin wrote extensively on the direction he believed the revolution should be carried forth to ensure lasting victory against both feudalism and capitalism. He believed that the October, 1917 revolution represented the complete defeat of the Czar, however he believed the proletarian victory over the bourgeoisie would take more time. Russia was a poor, agrarian society. The vast majority of Russians under the Czar were poor peasants. Industry — and thus, the proletariat — was highly undeveloped compared to Western Europe. According to Lenin, a full and lasting proletarian victory over the bourgeoisie could only be won after the means of production were properly developed. In Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin wrote:

This first victory [the October, 1917 revolution] is not yet the final victory, and it was achieved by our October Revolution at the price of incredible difficulties and hardships... We have made the start... The important thing is that the ice has been broken; the road is open, the way has been shown.

So, Lenin knew that the victory over the Czar and feudalism was only a partial victory, and that more work needed to be done to defeat the bourgeoisie entirely. He believed the key to this victory over the capitalist class would be economic development, since Russia was still a largely agrarian society with very little industrial or economic development compared to Western Europe:

Our last, but most important and most difficult task, the one we have done least about, is economic development, the laying of economic foundations for the new, socialist edifice on the site of the demolished feudal edifice and the semi-demolished capitalist edifice.

Lenin’s plan for rapidly developing the means of production was his New Economic Policy, or the NEP. The New Economic Policy was proposed to be a temporary economic system that would allow a market economy and capitalism to exist within Russia, alongside state-owned business ventures, all firmly under the control of the working-class-dominated state. As Lenin explains in Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution:

At this very moment we are, by our New Economic Policy, correcting a number of our mistakes. We are learning how to continue erecting the socialist edifice in a small-peasant country.

He continues later in the text:

The proletarian state must become a cautious, assiduous and shrewd “businessman,” a punctilious wholesale merchant — otherwise it will never succeed in putting this small-peasant country economically on its feet. Under existing conditions, living as we are side by side with the capitalist (for the time being capitalist) West, there is no other way of progressing to communism. A wholesale merchant seems to be an economic type as remote from communism as heaven from earth. But that is one of the contradictions which, in actual life, lead from a small-peasant economy via state capitalism to socialism. Personal incentive will step up production; we must increase production first and foremost and at all costs. Wholesale trade economically unites millions of small peasants: it gives them a personal incentive, links them up and leads them to the next step, namely, to various forms of association and alliance in the process of production itself. We have already started the necessary changes in our economic policy and already have some successes to our credit; true, they are small and partial, but nonetheless they are successes. In this new field of “tuition” we are already finishing our preparatory class. By persistent and assiduous study, by making practical experience the test of every step we take, by not fearing to alter over and over again what we have already begun, by correcting our mistakes and most carefully analyzing their significance, we shall pass to the higher classes. We shall go through the whole “course,” although the present state of world economics and world politics has made that course much longer and much more difficult than we would have liked. No matter at what cost, no matter how severe the hardships of the transition period may be — despite disaster, famine and ruin — we shall not flinch; we shall triumphantly carry our cause to its goal.

With these great works dedicated to the three component parts of Marxism [see Annotation 42, p. 38], the name Vladimir Ilyich Lenin became an important part of Marxism. It marked a comprehensive developing step from Marxism to Marxism-Leninism.

d. Marxism-Leninism and the Reality of the International Revolutionary Movement

The birth of Marxism greatly affected both the international worker movements and communist movements. The revolution in March 1871 in France could be considered as a great experiment of Marxism in the real world. For the first time in human history, a new kind of state — the dictatorship of the proletariat state (Paris Commune) was established.

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Annotation 38

The Paris Commune was an important but short-lived revolutionary victory of the working class which saw a revolutionary socialist government controlling Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871.

During the brief existence of the Paris Commune, many important policies were set forth, including a separation of church and state, abolishment of rent, an end to child labor, and the right of employees to take over any business which had been abandoned by its owner. Unfortunately, the Paris Commune was brutally toppled by the French army, which killed between 6,000 and 7,000 revolutionaries in battle and by execution. The events of the Paris Commune heavily influenced many revolutionary thinkers and leaders, including Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and was referenced frequently in their works.

In August 1903, the very first Marxist proletariat party was established — the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. It was a true Marxist party that led the revolution in Russia in 1905. In October 1917, the victory of the socialist revolution of the proletariat in Russia opened a new era for human history.

In 1919, the Communist International* was held; in 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic was established. It marked the alliance of the proletariat of many countries. With the power of this alliance, the fight against Fascism not only protected the achievements of the proletariat’s revolution, but also spread socialism beyond the borders of Russia. Following the lead of the Soviet Union, a community of socialist countries was built, with revolutions leading to the establishment of socialism in the following countries [and years of establishment]: Mongolia [1921], Vietnam [1945], the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [1945], Yugoslavia [1945], Albania [1946], Romania [1947], Czechoslovakia [1948], East Germany [1949], China [1949], Hungary [1949], Poland [1956], and Cuba [1959].

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Annotation 39

* The First International, also known as the International Workingmen’s Association, was founded in London and lasted from 1864–1876. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were key figures in the foundation and operation of this organization, which sought better conditions and the establishment of rights for workers.

The Second International was founded in Paris in 1889 to continue the work of the First International. It fell apart in 1916 because the members from different nations could not maintain solidarity through the outbreak of World War I.

The Third International, also known as the Communist International (or the ComIntern for short), was founded in Moscow in 1919 (though many nations didn’t join until later in the 1920s). Its goals were to overthrow capitalism, build socialism, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. It was dissolved in 1943 in the midst of the German invasion of Russia in World War II.

These great historical events strongly enhanced the revolutionary movement of the working class all around the whole world. The people awakened and encouraged the liberation resistance of many colonised countries. The guiding role of Marxism-Leninism brought many great results for a world of peace, independence, democracy, and social progress.

However, because of many internal and external factors, in the late 1980s, the socialist alliance faced a crisis and fell into a recession period. Even though the socialist system fell into crisis and was weakened, the socialist ideology still survived internationally. The determination of successfully building socialism was still very strong in many countries and the desire to follow the socialist path still spread widely in South America.

Nowadays, the main feature of our modern society is fast and varied change in many social aspects caused by technology and scientific revolution. But, no matter how quickly and diversely our society changes, the nature of the capitalist production method never changes. So, in order to protect the socialist achievements earned by the flesh and blood of many previous generations; and in order to have a tremendous development step in the career of liberating human beings, it is very urgent to protect, inherit and develop Marxism-Leninism and also innovate the work of building socialism in both theory and practice.

The Communist Party of Vietnam declared: “Nowadays, capitalism still has potential for development, but in nature, it’s still an unjust, exploitative, and oppressive regime. The basic and inherent contradictions of capitalism, especially the contradictions between the increasing socialization of the production force and the capitalist private ownership regime, will never be solved and will even become increasingly serious. The feature of the current period of our modern society is: countries with different social regimes and different development levels co-exist, co-operate, struggle and compete fiercely for the interests of their own nations. The struggles for peace, independence, democracy, development, and social progress of many countries will still have to cope with hardship and challenges but we will achieve new progress. According to the principles of historical development, human beings will almost certainly go forward to socialism.”^[16]

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Annotation 40

Historical materialism is the application of dialectical materialist philosophy and materialist dialectical methodology to the analysis of human history, society, and development. The principles of historical materialism, as developed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, indicate that human society is moving towards socialism and will almost certainly — in time — develop into socialism, and then proceed towards a stateless, classless form of society (communism). These principles of historical materialism were initially formulated and discussed in several books by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, including:

• The German Ideology, by Marx and Engels

• Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, by Marx and Engels

• Karl Marx, by Lenin

The Communist Party of Vietnam has also declared:

“In the opinion of the Vietnam Communist Party, using Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought as the foundation for our ideology, the guideline for our actions is an important developmental step in cognition and logical thinking^[17]. Achievements that the Vietnamese people have gained in the war to gain our independence, in peace, and in the renovation era, are all rooted in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought. Therefore, we have to ‘creatively apply and develop Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought in the Party’s activities. We have to regularly summarise reality, complement and develop theory, and soundly solve the problems of our society.’”^[18]

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Annotation 41

Ho Chi Minh Thought refers to a system of ideas developed by Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese communists which relate to the application of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and methodology to the specific material conditions of Vietnam during the revolutionary period.

There is no universal road map for applying the principles of Marxism-Leninism. How the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism should be applied will vary widely from one time and place to another. This is why Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese communists had to develop Ho Chi Minh Thought: so that scientific socialism could be developed within the unique context of Vietnam’s particular historical development and material conditions.

It is the duty of every revolutionary to study Marxism-Leninism as well as specific applied forms of Marxism-Leninism developed by revolutionaries for their own specific times and places, such as: Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Mao Zedong (China), Fidel Castro and Che Guevera (Cuba), etc. However, it must be recognized that the ideas, strategies, methodologies, and philosophies developed in such particular circumstances can’t be applied in exactly the same way in other times and places, such as our own contemporary material conditions.

The Renovation Era refers to the period of time in Vietnam from the 1980s until the early 2000s during which the Đổi Mới (renovation) policies were implemented. These policies restructured the Vietnamese economy to end the previous subsidizing model (which was defined by state ownership of the entire economy). The goals of the Renovation Era were to open Vietnam economically and politically and to normalize relations with the rest of the world. The Đổi Mới policies were generally successful and paved the way to the Path to Socialism Era which Vietnam exists in today. The goals of the Path to Socialism Era are to develop Vietnam into a modern, developed country with a strong economy and wealthy people, which will allow us to transition towards the lower stage of communism, which Lenin called “socialism.”

And, finally: “We have to be consistent with Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought. We have to creatively apply and develop the ideology correspondingly with the reality in Vietnam. We have to firmly aim for national independence and socialism.”

II. Objects, Purposes, and Requirements for Studying the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism

1. Objects and Purposes of Study

The objects of study of this book, The Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism, are the fundamental viewpoints of Marxism-Leninism in its three component parts.

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Annotation 42

Remember that a viewpoint is the starting point of analysis which determines the direction of thinking and the perspective from which problems are considered. Also remember that Marxism-Leninism has three component parts:

1. The Philosophy of Marxism:

Including Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism

2. The Political Economy of Marxism:

A system of knowledge and laws that define the production process and commodity exchange in human society.

3. Scientific Socialism

The system of thought pertaining to the establishment of the communist social economy form.

These objects of study stand as the viewpoints — the starting points of analysis — of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and the three component parts of which it’s composed.

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In the scope of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy [the first component part of Marxism-Leninism], these objects of study are:

• Dialectical Materialism — the fundamental and most universal worldview and methodologies which form the theoretical core of a scientific worldview*. [See Part 1, p. 44]
• Materialist Dialectics — the science of development, of common relationships, and of the most common rules of motion and development of nature, society and human thought. [See Chapter 2, p. 98]
• Historical Materialism — the application and development of Materialism and Dialectics in studying social aspects. [Historical materialism is the topic of Part 2 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.]

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Annotation 43

* Remember that Scientific in Marxism-Leninism refers to a systematic pursuit of knowledge, research, theory, and understanding [see Annotation 1, p. 1]. Note, also, that Worldview refers to the whole of an individual’s or society’s opinions and conceptions about the world, about humans ourselves, and about life and the position of human beings in the world. This is discussed in more detail on page 44.

Thus, a scientific worldview is a worldview that is expressed by a systematic pursuit of knowledge of definitions and categories that generally and correctly reflect the relationships of things, phenomena, and processes in the objective material world, including relationships between humans, as well as relationships between humans and the world.

In the scope of Marxist-Leninist Political Economics [the second component part of Marxism-Leninism], the objects of study are:

• The theory of value and the theory of surplus value.
• Economic theory about monopolist capitalism and state monopolist capitalism.
• General economic rules about capitalist production methods, from the stage of formation, to the stage of development, to the stage of perishing, which will be followed by the birth of a new production method: the communist production method.

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Annotation 44

Marxist-Leninist political economics is the topic of Part 3 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.

In the scope of Scientific Socialism [the third component part of Marxism-Leninism], the objects of study are:

• The historical mission of the working class and the progression of a socialist revolution.
• Matters related to the future formation and development periods of the communist socio-economic form.
• Guidelines for the working class in implementing our historical mission.

The purposes of studying The Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism are:' to master Marxist-Leninist viewpoints of science, revolution, and humanism*; to thoroughly understand the most important theoretical foundation of Ho Chi Minh Thought, the revolutionary path, and the ideological foundation of the Vietnam Communist Party. Based on that basis, we can build a scientific worldview and methodology and a revolutionary worldview; build our trust in our revolutionary ideals; creatively apply them in our cognitive and practical activities and in practicing and cultivating morality to meet the requirements of Vietnamese people in the cause of building a socialist Vietnam.

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Annotation 45

* The humanism of Marxism-Leninism differs greatly from the humanism of Feuerbach discussed in Annotation 12, p. 13. Marxist-Leninist humanism concerns itself with the liberation of all humans. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

2. Some Basic Requirements of the Studying Method

There are some basic requirements for studying the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism:

First, Marxist-Leninist theses were conceptualized under many different circumstances in order to solve different problems, so the expressions of thought of Marxist-Leninists can vary. Therefore, students studying the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism must correctly understand its spirit and essence and avoid theoretical purism and dogmatism.

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Annotation 46

Marxism-Leninism should be understood as an applied science, and application of this science will vary based on material conditions. As Engels wrote in a personal letter in 1887, remarking on the socialist movement in the USA: “Our theory is a theory of evolution, not a dogma to be learned by heart and to be repeated mechanically. The less it is drilled into the Americans from outside and the more they test it with their own experience... the deeper will it pass into their flesh and blood.”

As an example, Lenin tailored his actions and ideas specifically to suit the material conditions of Russia under the Czar and in the early revolutionary period. Russia’s material conditions were somewhat unique during the time of Lenin’s revolutionary activity, since Russia was an agrarian monarchy with a large peasant population and a relatively undeveloped industrial sector. As such, Lenin had to develop strategies, tactics, and ideas which suited those specific material conditions, such as determining that the industrial working class and agricultural peasants should work together. As Lenin explained in The Proletariat and the Peasantry:

Thus the red banner of the class-conscious workers means, first, that we support with all our might, the peasants’ struggle for full freedom and all the land; secondly, it means that we do not stop at this, but go on further. We are waging, besides the struggle for freedom and land, a fight for socialism.

Obviously, this statement would not be specifically applicable to a society with highly developed industry and virtually no rural peasants (such as, for instance, the modern-day USA), just as Lenin’s remarks about the Czar would not be specifically applicable to any society that does not have an institution of monarchy.

As another example, take the works of Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh Thought is defined by the Communist Party of Vietnam as “a complete system of thought about the fundamental issues of the Vietnam revolution.” In other words, Ho Chi Minh Thought is a specific application of the principles of Marxism-Leninism to the material conditions of Vietnam.

One unique aspect of Vietnam’s revolution which Ho Chi Minh focused on was colonization. As a colonized country, Ho Chi Minh realized that Vietnam had unique challenges and circumstances that would need to be properly addressed through revolutionary struggle. Another unique aspect of Vietnam’s material conditions was the fact that the colonial administration of Vietnam changed hands throughout the revolution: from France, to Japan, back to France, then to the USA. Ho Chi Minh was able to dynamically and creatively apply Marxism-Leninism to these shifting material conditions. For instance, in Founding of the Indochinese Communist Party, written in 1930, Ho Chi Minh explains some of the unique problems faced by the colonized people of Indochina (modern day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and proposes solutions specific to these unique material conditions:

On the one hand, they (the French) use the feudalists and comprador bourgeoisie (of Vietnam) to oppress and exploit our people. On the other, they terrorize, arrest, jail, deport, and kill a great number of Vietnamese revolutionaries. If the French imperialists think that they can suppress the Vietnamese revolution by means of terror, they are grossly mistaken. For one thing, the Vietnamese revolution is not isolated but enjoys the assistance of the world proletariat in general and that of the French working class in particular. Secondly, it is precisely at the very time when the French imperialists are frenziedly carrying out terrorist acts that the Vietnamese Communists, formerly working separately, have united into a single party, the Indochinese Communist Party, to lead the revolutionary struggle of our entire people.

During this period, the nations of Indochina were predominantly agricultural, prompting Ho Chi Minh to suggest in the same text that it would be necessary “to establish a worker-peasant-soldier government” and “to confiscate all the plantations and property belonging to the imperialists and the Vietnamese reactionary bourgeoisie and distribute them to the poor peasants.” Obviously all of these considerations are specific to the material conditions of Indochina under French colonial rule in 1930.

By 1939, the situation was changing rapidly. Ho Chi Minh was operating from China, which was being invaded by fascist Japan. He knew that it was only a matter of time before the Japanese imperial army would come to threaten Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. As such, Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to the Indochinese Communist Party outlining recommendations, strategies, and goals pertaining to the precipitating material conditions. At that time, France had not yet been invaded by Germany, but Ho Chi Minh was very aware of the looming threat of fascism both in Europe and in Asia. He realized that rising up in revolutionary civil war against the French colonial administration would give fascist Japan the opportunity to quickly conquer all of Indochina, which is why he made the following recommendations in a letter to the Communist Party of Indochina in 1939:

Our party should not strive for demands which are too high, such as total independence, or establishing a house of representatives. If we do that, we will fall into the trap of fascist Japan. For now, we should only ask for democracy, freedom to organize, freedom to hold meetings, freedom of speech, and for the release of political prisoners. We should also fight for our party to be organized and to operate legally.

Once France fell to Germany in 1940, Indochina was immediately handed over to Japanese colonial rule. The Japanese army was brutal in its occupation of Vietnam, and the French colonial administrators surrendered entirely to the Japanese empire and helped the Japanese to administer all of Indochina. Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam in January of 1941 and participated directly with the resistance struggle against Japan until 1945, when the situation once again changed dramatically due to the Japanese military’s surrender to allied forces and withdrawal from Vietnam. He immediately took advantage of this situation and held a successful revolution against both the Japanese and French administrators. In the Declaration of Independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh wrote:

After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the homeland.

As France began to make their intentions clear that they would be resuming their colonialist claim to Indochina, Ho Chi Minh began preparing the country for a new chapter in revolutionary struggle. In his 1946 letter to the people of Vietnam, entitled A Nationwide Call for Resistance, Ho Chi Minh wrote:

We call everyone, man and woman, old and young, from every ethnic minority, from every religion, to stand up and fight to save our country. If you have guns, use guns. If you have swords, use swords. If you have nothing, use sticks. Everyone must stand up and fight.

As these historical developments illustrate, Ho Chi Minh was able to creatively and dynamically apply the principles of Marxism-Leninism to suit the shifting material conditions of Vietnam, just as Lenin had to creatively and dynamically apply these principles to the emerging situation in Russia in the early 20^th century. So is the task of every student of Marxism-Leninism: to learn to apply these principles creatively and dynamically to the material conditions at hand.

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Second, the birth and development of Marixst-Leninist theses is a process. In that process, all Marixst-Leninist theses have strong relationships with each other. They complement and support each other. Thus, students studying each Marxist-Leninist thesis need to put it in proper relation and context with other theses found within each different component part of Marxism-Leninism in order to understand the unity in diversity [see: Annotation 107, p. 110], the consistency of every thesis in particular, and the whole of Marxism-Leninism in general.

Third, an important goal of studying the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism is to understand clearly the most important theoretical basis of Ho Chi Minh Thought, of the Vietnam Communist Party and its revolutionary path. Therefore, we must attach Marxist-Leninist theses to Vietnam’s revolutionary practice and the world’s practice in order to see the creative application of Marxism-Leninism that President Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnam Communist Party implemented in each period of history.

Fourth, we must study the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism to meet the requirements for a new Vietnamese people in a new era. So, the process of studying is also the process of self-educating and practicing to improve ourselves step-by-step in both individual and social life.

Fifth, Marxism-Leninism is not a closed and immutable theoretical system. On the contrary, it is a theoretical system that continuously develops based on the development of reality. Therefore, the process of studying Marxism-Leninism is also a process of reflection: summarizing and reviewing your own practical experiences and sharing what you’ve learned from these experiences in order to contribute to the scientific and humanist development of Marxism-Leninism. In addition, when studying the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism, we need to consider these principles in the proper context of the history of the ideological development of humanity. Such context is important because Marxism-Leninism is quintessentially^[19] the product of that history.

These requirements have strong relationships with each other. They imbue the studying process with the quintessence of Marxism-Leninism. And more importantly, they help students apply that quintessence into cognitive and practical activities.

Part I: The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism — Leninism

Worldview refers to the whole of an individual’s or society’s opinions and conceptions about the world, about humans ourselves, and about life and the position of human beings in that world. Our worldview directs and orientates our life, including our cognitive and practical activities, as well as our self-awareness. Our worldview defines our ideals, our value system, and our lifestyle. So, a proper and scientific worldview serves as a foundation to establish a constructive approach to life. One of the basic criteria to evaluate the growth and maturity of an individual or a whole society is the degree to which worldview has been developed.

Methodology is a system of reasoning: the ideas and rules that guide humans to research, build, select, and apply the most suitable methods in both perception and practice. Methodologies can range from very specific to broadly general, with philosophical methodology being the most general scope of methodology.

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Annotation 47

Tran Thien Tu, the vice-dean of the Department of Marxist-Leninist Theoretical Studies at the Le Duan Political Science University in Quang Tri, Vietnam, defines three degrees of scopes of Methodology. They are, from most specific to most general:

1. Field Methodology

The most specific scope of methodology; a field methodology will apply only to a single specific scientific field.

2. General Methodology

A more general scope of methodology; a general methodology will be shared by various scientific fields.

3. Philosophical Methodology

The most general scope of methodology, encompassing the whole of the material world and human thought.

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Worldview and philosophical methodology are the fundamental knowledge-systems* of Marxism-Leninism.

Annotation 48

* In the original Vietnamese, the word lý luận is used, which we roughly translate to the phrase “knowledge-system” throughout this book. Literally, lý luận is a combination of the words lý lẽ, which means “argument,” and bàn luận, which means “to infer.”

The full meaning of lý luận is: a system of ideas that reflect reality expressed in a system of knowledge that allows for a complete view of the fundamental laws and relationships of objective reality.

The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism

Marxist-Leninist worldview and philosophical methodology emerge from the quintessence [see Annotation 6, p. 8] of dialectical materialism, which itself developed from other forms of dialectics, which in turn developed throughout the history of the ideological development of humanity.

Materialism is foundational to Marxism-Leninism in two important ways:

Dialectical Materialism is the ideological core of a scientific worldview.

Historical Materialism is a system of dialectical materialist opinions about the origin of, motivation of, and the most common rules that dominate the movement and development of human society.

Dialectics are also foundational to Marxism-Leninism, specifically in the form of Materialist Dialectics, which Lenin defined as “the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge.”^[20] Lenin also defined Materialist Dialectics as “what is now called theory of knowledge or epistemology.”^[21] [Note: Epistemology is the theoretical study of knowledge; for more information see Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism, p. 204.]

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Annotation 49

For beginning students of Marxism-Leninism, distinguishing between Dialectical Materialism and Materialist Dialectics may at first be confusing. Here is an explanation of each concept and how they relate to one another:

Dialectical Materialism and Materialist Dialectics.

Dialectical Materialism is a scientific understanding of matter, consciousness and the relationship between the two. Dialectical Materialism is used to understand the world by studying such relationships.

Materialist Dialectics is a science studying the general laws of the movement, change, and development of nature, society and human thought.

Relationship between Dialectical Materialism and Materialist Dialectics.

And so, we use Dialectical Materialism to understand the fundamental nature of reality. This understanding is used as a basis for changing the world, using Materialist Dialectics to guide our activities. We can then reflect on the results of our activities, using Dialectical Materialism, to further develop our understanding of the world.

As Marxist-Leninists, we utilize this continuous cycle between studying and understanding the world through Dialectical Materialism and affecting change in the world through Materialist Dialectics with the goal of bringing about socialism and freeing humanity.

It is also important to understand the nature of dialectical relationships.

A dialectical relationship is a relationship in which two things mutually impact one another. Dialectical materialism perceives all things in motion [see Mode and Forms of Existence of Matter, p. 59] and in a constant state of change, and this motion and change originates from relationships in which all things mutually move and change each other through interaction, leading to development over time.

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Thoroughly understanding the basic content of the worldview and methodology of Marxism-Leninism is the most important requirement in order to properly study the whole theory system of Marxism-Leninism and to creatively apply it into cognitive and practical activities in order to solve the problems that our society must cope with.

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3. Excerpt From Modifying the Working Style By Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh training cadres in 1959.

Training is a must. There is a proverb: “without a teacher, you can never do well;” and the expression: “learn to eat, learn to speak, learn to pack, learn to unpack.”

Even many simple subjects require study, let alone revolutionary work and resistance work. How can you perform such tasks without any training?

But training materials must be aimed at the needs of the masses. We must ask: after people receive their training, can they apply their knowledge immediately? Is it possible to practice right away?

If training is not immediately practical, then years of training would be useless.

Unfortunately, many of our trainers do not understand this simple logic. That’s why there are cadres who train rural people in the uplands in the field of “economics!”

In short, our way of working, organizing, talking, propagandizing, setting slogans, writing newspapers, etc., must all take this sentence as a model:

“From within the masses, back into the masses.”

No matter how big or small our tasks are, we must clearly examine and modify them to match the culture, living habits, level of education, struggling experiences, desire, will, and material conditions of the masses. On that basis we will form our ways of working and organizing. Only then can we have the masses on our side.

Otherwise, if you just do as you want, following your own thoughts, your subjectivity, and then force your personal thoughts upon the masses, it is just like “cutting your feet to fit your shoes.” Feet are the masses. Shoes are our ways of organizing and working.

Shoes are made to fit people’s feet, not the other way around.

Chapter 1: Dialectical Materialism

Dialectical Materialism, one of the materialist foundations of Marxism-Leninism, uses the materialist worldview and dialectical methods to study fundamental philosophical issues. Dialectical Materialism is the most advanced form of Materialism, and serves as the theoretical core of a scientific worldview. Therefore, thoroughly understanding the basic content of Dialectical Materialism is the essential prerequisite to study both the component principles of Marxism-Leninism in particular, and the whole of Marxism-Leninism in general.

I. Materialism and Dialectical Materialism

1. The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues

Philosophy is a system of the most general human theories and knowledge about our world, about ourselves, and our position in our world.

Philosophy has existed for thousands of years. Philosophy has different objects of study depending on different periods of time. Summarizing the whole history of philosophy, Engels said: “The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more modern philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being^[22].”

So, philosophy studies the relations between consciousness and matter, and between humans and nature.

In philosophy, there are two main questions:

Question 1: The question of consciousness and matter: which came first; or, to put it another way, which one determines which one?

In attempting to answer this first question, philosophy has separated into two main schools: Materialism, and Idealism.

Question 2: Do humans have the capacity to perceive the world as it truly exists?

In answer to this second question, two schools: Intelligibility — which admits the human cognitive capacity to truly perceive the world — and unintelligibility — which denies that capacity.

Materialism is the belief that the nature of the world is matter; that matter comes first; and that matter determines consciousness. People who uphold this belief are called materialists. Throughout human history, many different factions of materialists with various schools of materialist thought have evolved.

Idealism is the belief that the nature of the world is consciousness; consciousness precedes matter; consciousness decides matter. People who uphold this belief are called idealists. Like materialism, various factions of idealists with varying schools of idealist thought have also evolved throughout history.

Idealism has cognitive origins and social origins.

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Annotation 50

Cognitive origin refers to origination from the human consciousness of individuals.

Social origin refers to origination from social relations between human beings.

So, idealism originates from both the conscious activity of individual humans as well as social activity between human beings.

These origins are unilateral consideration and absolutization of only one aspect or one characteristic of the whole cognitive process.

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Annotation 51

Unilateral consideration is the consideration of a subject from one side only.

Absolutization occurs when one conceptualizes some belief or supposition as always true in all situations without exception.

Both unilateral consideration and absolutization fail to consider the dynamic, constantly changing, and interconnected relations of all things, phenomena, and ideas in our reality.

Idealism originates from unilateral consideration because idealists ignore the material world and consider reality only from the perspective of the human mind. It also originates from absolutism because idealists absolutize human reasoning as the only source of truth and knowledge about our world without exception.

As Lenin wrote in On the Question of Dialectics: “Philosophical idealism is a unilateral development, an overt development, of one out of many attributes, or one out of many aspects, of consciousness.”

Historically, idealism has typically benefitted the oppressive, exploitative class of society. Idealism and religions usually have a close relation with each other, and support each other to co-exist and co-develop.

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Annotation 52

Idealists, in absolutizing human consciousness, have a tendency to only give credence to the work of the mind and ignore the value of physical labor. This has been used to justify class structures in which religious and intellectual laborers are given authority and privilege over manual laborers.

This situation has also led to the idea that mental factors play a decisive role in the development of human society in particular and the whole world in general. This idealist view was supported by the ruling class and used to justify its own power and privilege in society. The dominant class has historically used such idealist philosophy as the justifying foundation for their political-social beliefs in order to maintain their ruling positions.

Marx discusses this tendency for rulers to idealistically justify their own rule in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an ‘eternal law.’

Marx goes on to explain how the idealist positions of the ruling class tend to get embedded in historical narratives:

Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true. This historical method which reigned in Germany, and especially the reason why, must be understood from its connection with the illusion of ideologists in general, e.g. the illusions of the jurist, politicians (of the practical statesmen among them, too), from the dogmatic dreamings and distortions of these fellows; this is explained perfectly easily from their practical position in life, their job, and the division of labour.

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In history, there are two main forms of idealism: subjective and objective.

Subjective idealism asserts that consciousness is the primary existence. It asserts that all things and phenomena can only be experienced as subjective sensory perceptions while denying the objective existence of material reality altogether.

Objective idealism also asserts the ideal and consciousness as the primary existence, but also posits that the ideal and consciousness are objective, and that they exist independently of nature and humans. This concept is given many names, such as “absolute concept”, “absolute spirit,” “rationality of the world,” etc.

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Annotation 53

Primary existence is existence which precedes and determines other existences.

Idealists believe that consciousness has primary existence over matter, that the nature of the world is ideal, and that the ideal defines existence.

Materialists believe the opposite: that matter has primary existence over the ideal, and that matter precedes and determines consciousness.

Dialectical Materialism holds that matter and consciousness have a dialectical relationship, in which matter has primary existence over the ideal, though consciousness can impact the material world through willful conscious activity.

The primary existence of matter within Dialectical Materialism is discussed further in The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88.

Willful activity (willpower) is discussed in Nature and Structure of Consciousness, p. 79.

The key difference between subjective and objective idealists is this:

Subjective idealists believe that there is no external material world whatsoever — that what we imagine as the material world is merely illusory — and that all reality is created by consciousness, whereas objective idealists believe that there is a material world outside of human consciousness, but it exists independently of human consciousness; therefore (according to objective idealists), since humans can only observe the world through conscious experience, the material world can never be truly known or observed by our consciousness.

In opposition to Idealism, Materialism originated through practical experience and the development of science. Through practical experience and systematic development of human knowledge, Materialism has come to serve as a universally applicable theoretical system which benefits progressive social forces and which also orients the activities of those forces in both perception and practice.

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Annotation 54

Materialism benefits progressive social forces by showing reality as it is, by dispelling the idealist positions of the ruling class, and by revealing that society and the world can be changed through willful activity.

Materialism guides progressive social forces by grounding thought and activity in material reality, enabling strategies and outcomes that line up with the realities of the material world. For instance, we must avoid utopianism [see Annotation 17, p. 18] in which emphasis is placed on working out ideal forms of society through debate, conjecture, and conscious activity alone. Revolution against capitalism must, instead, focus on affecting material relations and processes of development through willful activity.

As Engels pointed out in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: “The final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.”

2. Dialectical Materialism — the Most Advanced Form of Materialism

In human history, as human society and scientific understanding have developed, materialism has also developed through three forms: Primitive Materialism, Metaphysical Materialism, and Dialectical Materialism.

Primitive Materialism is the primitive form of materialism. Primitive materialism recognizes that matter comes first, and holds that the world is composed of certain elements, and that these were the first objects, the origin, of the world, and that these elements are the essence of reality. These Primitive Materialist concepts can be found in many ancient materialist theories in such places as China, India, and Greece. [These Primitive Materialist elemental philosophies are discussed more in Matter, p. 53] Although it has many shortcomings, Primitive Materialism is partially correct at the most fundamental level, because it uses the material of nature itself to explain nature.

Metaphysical Materialism is the second basic form of Materialism. This form of materialism was widely discussed and developed in Western Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. During this time, the metaphysical method of perceiving the world was applied to materialist philosophy. Although Metaphysical Materialism does not accurately reflect the world in terms of universal relations [see p. 108] and development, it was an important step forward in the fight against idealist and religious worldviews, especially during the transformational period from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in many Western European countries.

Annotation 55

Metaphysical materialism was strongly influenced by mechanical philosophy, a scientific and philosophical movement popular in the 17^th century which explored mechanical machines and compared natural phenomena to mechanical devices. Mechanical philosophy led to a belief that all things — including living organisms — were built as (and could theoretically be built by humans as) mechanical devices. Influenced by this philosophy, metaphysical materialists came to see the world as a giant mechanical machine composed of parts, each of which exists in an essentially isolated and static state.

Metaphysical materialists believed that all change can exist only as an increase or decrease in quantity, brought about by external causes Metaphysical materialism contributed significantly to the struggle against idealistic and religious worldviews, especially during the historical transition period from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in Western European countries. Metaphysical materialism also had severe limitations; especially in failing to understand many key aspects of reality, such as the nature of development through change/motion and relationships.

Dialectical Materialism is the third basic form of materialism. It was founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and defended and developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as well as many of his successors. By inheriting the quintessence of previous theories and thoroughly integrating contemporary scientific achievements, Dialectical Materialism immediately solved the shortcomings of the Primitive Materialism of ancient times as well as the Metaphysical Materialism of modern Western Europe. It reaches the highest development level of materialism so far in history.

By accurately reflecting objective reality with universal relations and development*, Dialectical Materialism offers humanity a great tool for scientific cognitive activities and revolutionary practice. The Dialectical Materialist system of thought was built on the basis of scientific explanations about matter, consciousness, and the relationship between the two.

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Annotation 56

* Materialist Dialectical methodology explains the world in terms of relationships and development. This is discussed in Basic Principles of Materialist Dialectics, p. 106.

II. Dialectical Materialist Opinions About Matter, Consciousness, and the Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness

1. Matter

a. Category of “Matter”

Matter is a philosophical subject which has been examined for more than 2,500 years. Since ancient times, there has been a relentless struggle between materialism and idealism around this subject. Idealism asserts that the world’s nature, the first basis of all existence, is consciousness, and that matter is only a product of that consciousness. Conversely, materialism asserts that nature, the entirety of the world, is composed of matter, that this material world exists indefinitely, and that all things and phenomena are composed of matter.

Before dialectical materialism was born, materialist philosophers generally believed that matter was composed of some self-contained element or elements; that is to say some underlying substance from which everything in the universe is ultimately derived. In ancient times, the five elements theory of Chinese philosophy held that those self-contained substances were metal — wood — water — fire — earth; in India, the Samkhya school believed that they were Pradhana or Prakriti^[23]; in Greece, the Milesian school believed they were water (Thales’s^[24] conception) or air (Anaximene’s^[25] conception); Heraclitus^[26] believed the ultimate element was fire; Democritus^[27] asserted that it was something called an “atom,”' etc. Even as recently as the 17^th-18^th centuries, conceptions about matter belonging to modern philosophers such as Francis Bacon^[28], Renes Descartes^[29], Thomas Hobbes^[30], Denis Diderot^[31], etc., still hadn’t changed much. They continued following the same philosophical tendency as ancient philosophers by focusing their studies of the material world through elemental phenomena.

These conceptions of matter which were developed by philosophers before Marx’s time laid a foundation for a tendency to use nature to explain nature itself, but that tendency still had many shortcomings, such as: oversimplification of matter into fictitious “elements;” failure to understand the nature of consciousness as well as the relationships between matter and consciousness; failure to recognize the significance of matter in human society, leading to a failure to solve social issues based on a materialist basis, etc.

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Annotation 57

Here are further explanations of these shortcomings of early materialists:

Oversimplification of matter into fictitious “elements”

Due to a lack of understanding and knowledge of matter, metaphysical materialists created erroneous conceptions of “elements” which do not accurately describe the nature of matter. By using such an erroneously conceived system of non-existing elements to describe nature, metaphysical materialists were prevented from gaining real insights into the material world which delayed and hindered scientific progress.

Failure to understand the nature of consciousness as well as the relationships between matter and consciousness

Many early materialists believed that consciousness was simply a mechanical byproduct of material processes, and that mental events (thoughts, consciousness) could not affect the material world, since these events were simply mechanically determined by the material world.

As a first principle, Dialectical Materialism does hold that consciousness is created by matter. However, Dialectical Materialism also holds that consciousness can influence the material world through conscious action. This constitutes a dialectical relationship.

As Lenin explains in Materialism and Empirio-criticism: “Consciousness in general reflects being—that is a general principle of all materialism... social consciousness reflects social being.”

Whereas early materialists erroneously held that consciousness is simply an “accidental” byproduct of matter, Dialectical Materialism holds that consciousness is a characteristic of the nature of matter. As Engels wrote in the notation of Dialectics of Nature:

That matter evolves out of itself the thinking human brain is for mechanism a pure accident, although necessarily determined, step by step, where it happens. But the truth is that it is the nature of matter to advance to the evolution of thinking beings, hence this always necessarily occurs wherever the conditions for it (not necessarily identical at all places and times) are present.

Dialectical materialism also breaks from early materialism by positing that consciousness has a dialectical relationship with matter. Consciousness arises from the material world, but can also influence the material world through conscious action. In other words, mental events can trigger physical actions which affect the material world.

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As Marx explains in Theses on Feuerbach:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice... Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Put more simply, we as humans are capable of “revolutionary practice” which can “change the world” because our consciousness allows us to “change circumstances.” This is discussed further in Nature and Structure of Consciousness, p. 79.

Failure to recognize the significance of matter in human society, leading to a failure to solve social issues based on a materialist basis

Dialectical materialists believe that matter exists in many forms, and that human society is a special form of existence of matter. Lenin referred to the material existence of human society as social being, which stood in contrast with human society’s social consciousness. Social being encompasses all of the material existence and processes of human society.

As Lenin wrote in Materialism and Empirio-criticism:

Social being is independent of the social consciousness of men. The fact that you live and conduct your business, beget children, produce products and exchange them, gives rise to an objectively necessary chain of events, a chain of development, which is independent of your social consciousness, and is never grasped by the latter completely. The highest task of humanity is to comprehend this objective logic of economic evolution (the evolution of social life) in its general and fundamental features, so that it may be possible to adapt to it one’s social consciousness and the consciousness of the advanced classes of all capitalist countries in as definite, clear and critical a fashion as possible.

Early materialists failed to recognise the relationship between matter and consciousness — as Lenin puts it, specifically, between social being and social consciousness. Thus in contemplating social issues, these early materialists were unable to find proper materialist solutions.

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These shortcomings resulted in a non-thorough materialist viewpoint: when dealing with questions about nature, the early materialists had a strong materialist viewpoint but when dealing with social issues, they “slipped” into an idealist viewpoint.

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Annotation 58

Lenin explains this concept of “slipping into” idealism through a non-thorough materialist viewpoint in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: “Once you deny objective reality, given us in sensation, you have already lost every one of your weapons against fideism, for you have slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism — and that is all fideism wants.”

Note: fideism is a form of idealism which holds that truth and knowledge are received through faith or revelation. Subjectivism is the centering of one’s own self in conscious activities and perspective; see Annotation 222, p. 218.

In the same work, Lenin upholds that objective reality can be known through sense perception:

We ask, is a man given objective reality when he sees something red or feels something hard, etc., or not? [...] If you hold that it is not given, you... inevitably sink to subjectivism... If you hold that it is given, a philosophical concept is needed for this objective reality, and this concept has been worked out long, long ago. This concept is matter. Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.

Lenin also explains that proper materialism must recognize objective/absolute truth:

To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs. To acknowledge objective truth, i.e., truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one way or another, to recognise absolute truth.

A failure to recognize the existence of such objective, absolute truth, according to Lenin, constitutes “relativism,” a position that all truth is relative and can never be absolutely, objectively knowable.

It is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology (as distinct, for instance, from religious ideology), there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature. You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: yes, it is sufficiently ‘indefinite’ to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but it is at the same time sufficiently ‘definite’ to enable us to dissociate ourselves in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner from fideism and agnosticism, from philosophical idealism and the sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant. Here is a boundary which you have not noticed, and not having noticed it, you have fallen into the swamp of reactionary philosophy. It is the boundary between dialectical materialism and relativism.

In other words, while proper materialism must contain a degree of relativistic thinking sufficient to challenge assumptions and reexamine perceived truth periodically, materialists must not fall into complete relativism (such as that espoused by Hume and Kant) lest they fall into idealist positions. Ultimately, Absolute Truth — according to Lenin — constitutes the alignment of conscious understanding with objective reality (not to be confused with Hegel’s notion of Absolute Truth; see Annotation 232, p. 228).

Lenin recognized the development of Marx and Engels as “modern materialism, which is immeasurably richer in content and in comparably more consistent than all preceding forms of materialism,” in large part because Marx and Engels were able to apply materialism properly to social sciences by taking the “direct materialist road as against idealism.” He goes on to describe would-be materialists who fall to idealist positions due to relativism and other philosophical inadequacies as “a contemptible middle party in philosophy, who confuse the materialist and idealist trends on every question.”

Lenin warned that a failure to hold a thoroughly materialist viewpoint leads philosophers to become “ensnared in idealism, that is, in a diluted and subtle fideism; they became ensnared from the moment they took ‘sensation’ not as an image of the external world but as a special ‘element.’ It is nobody’s sensation, nobody’s mind, nobody’s spirit, nobody’s will — this is what one inevitably comes to if one does not recognise the materialist theory that the human mind reflects an objectively real external world.”

In other words, idealist conceptions of sensation inject mysticism into philosophy by conceiving of sensation as otherworldly, supernatural, and detached from material human beings with material experiences in the material world.

The development of natural sciences in the late 19^th century and early 20^th centuries (especially the inventions of Roentgen^[32], Becquerel^[33], Thomson^[34] etc.), disproved the theories of “classical elements” such as fire, water, air, etc. [see Primitive Materialism, p. 52]. These innovations led to a viewpoint crisis in the field of physical science. Many idealists used this opportunity to affirm the non-material nature of the world, ascribing the roles of supernatural forces to the birth of the world.

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Annotation 59

Lenin discussed this viewpoint crisis extensively in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Here Lenin discusses relativist reactions to new breakthroughs in natural science, which led even scientists (who proclaimed to be materialists) to take idealist positions:

We are faced, says Poincaré [a French scientist], with the “ruins” of the old principles of physics, “a general debacle of principles.” It is true, he remarks, that all the mentioned departures from principles refer to infinitesimal magnitudes; it is possible that we are still ignorant of other infinitesimals counteracting the undermining of the old principles... But at any rate we have reached a “period of doubt.” We have already seen what epistemological deductions the author draws from this “period of doubt:” “it is not nature which imposes on [or dictates to] us the concepts of space and time, but we who impose them on nature;” “whatever is not thought, is pure nothing.” These deductions are idealist deductions. The breakdown of the most fundamental principles shows (such is Poincaré’s trend of thought) that these principles are not copies, photographs of nature, not images of something external in relation to man’s consciousness, but products of his consciousness. Poincaré does not develop these deductions consistently, nor is he essentially interested in the philosophical aspect of the question.

Lenin concludes by stating that the non-thorough materialist position has lead directly to these idealist positions of relativism:

The essence of the crisis in modern physics consists in the breakdown of the old laws and basic principles, in the rejection of an objective reality existing outside the mind, that is, in the replacement of materialism by idealism and agnosticism.

With this historical background, in order to fight against the distortions of many idealists and to protect the development of the materialist viewpoint, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin simultaneously summarized all the natural scientific achievements in late 19^th and early 20^th century and built upon Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ thought to develop this definition of matter:

“Matter is a philosophical category denoting objective reality which is given to man in his sensations, and which is copied, photographed, and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.”

Lenin’s definition of matter shows that:

First, we need to distinguish between the definition of “matter” as a philosophical category (the category that summarizes the most basic and common attributes of all material existence, and which was defined with the objective of solving the basic issues of philosophy) from the definition of “matter” that was used in specialized sciences (specific and sense-detectable substance).

Second, the most basic, common attribute of all kinds of matter [and under both definitions listed in the previous paragraph] is objective existence, meaning matter exists outside of human consciousness, independently of human consciousness, no matter whether humans can perceive it with our senses or not.

Third, matter, with its specific forms, can cause and affect mental events in humans when it directly or indirectly impacts the human senses; human consciousness is the reflection of matter; matter is the thing that is reflected by human consciousness.

Lenin’s definition of matter played an important role in the development of materialism and scientific consciousness.

First, by pointing out that the most basic, common attribute of matter is objective existence, Lenin successfully distinguished the basic difference between the definition of matter as a philosophical category and the definition of matter as a category of specialized sciences. It helped solve the problems of defining matter in the previous forms of materialism; it offered scientific evidence to define what can be considered matter; it layed out a theoretical foundation for building a materialist viewpoint of history, and overcame the shortcomings of idealist conceptions of society.

Second, by asserting that matter was “objective reality,” “given to man in his sensations,” and “copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations,” Lenin not only confirmed the primary existence of matter and the secondary existence of consciousness [see The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88] but he also affirmed that humans had the ability to be aware of objective reality through the “copying, photographing and reflection of our sensations” [in other words, sense perceptions].

b. Mode and Forms of Existence of Matter

According to the dialectical materialist viewpoint, motion is the mode of existence of matter; space and time are the forms of existence of matter.

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Annotation 60

Mode refers to the way or manner in which something occurs or exists. You can think of mode as pertaining to the “how,” as opposed to the “what.” For example, the mode of circulation refers to how commodities circulate within society [see Annotation 14, p. 16]; mode of production refers to how commodities are produced in society. So, mode of existence of matter refers to how matter exists in our universe.

Form comes from the category pair [see Basic Pairs of Categories of Materialist Dialectics, p. 126] of Content and Form [see p. 147]. Form refers to how we perceive objects, phenomena, and ideas. So, form of existence of matter refers to the ways in which we perceive the existence of matter [explained below] in our universe.

- Motion is the Mode of Existence of Matter

As Friedrich Engels explained: “Motion, in the most general sense, conceived as the mode of existence, the inherent attribute of matter, comprehends all changes and processes occurring in the universe, from mere change of place right up to thinking.”

According to Engels, motion encompasses more than just positional changes. Motion embodies “all the changes and processes happening in this universe;” matter is always associated with motion, and matter can only express its existence through motion.

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Annotation 61

In Dialectical Materialist philosophy, “motion” is also known as “change” and it refers to the changes which occur as a result of the mutual impacts which occur in or between subjects through the negation of contradictions. Motion is a constant attribute of all things, phenomena, and ideas (see Characteristics of Development, p. 124).

Because matter is inseparable from motion (and vice versa), Engels defined motion as the mode of matter — the way or manner in which matter exists. It is impossible for matter in our universe to exist in completely static and unchanging state, isolated from the rest of existence; thus matter exists in the mode of motion. Over time, motion leads to development as things, phenomena, and ideas transition through various stages of quality change [see Annotation 117, p. 119].

Matter exists objectively, therefore motion also exists objectively. The motion of matter is self-motion^[35].

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Annotation 62

It is important to note that “matter,” in the philosophical sense as used in dialectical materialist phlosophy, includes all that is “objective” (external) to individual human cosnciousness. This includes objective phenomena which human senses are unable to detect, such as objective social relations, objective economic values, etc. Objectiveness is discussed more in Annotation 108, p. 112; objective social relations are discussed more in Annotation 10, p. 10.

In Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels discussed the properties of motion and explained that motion can neither be created nor destroyed. Therefore, motion can only change form or transfer from one object to another. In this sense, all objects are dynamically linked together through motion:

The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies we understand here all material existence extending from stars to atoms... In the fact that these bodies are interconnected is already included that they react on one another, and it is precisely this mutual reaction that constitutes motion. It already becomes evident here that matter is unthinkable without motion. And if, in addition, matter confronts us as something given, equally uncreatable as indestructible, it follows that motion also is as uncreatable as indestructible. It became impossible to reject this conclusion as soon as it was recognised that the universe is a system, an interconnection of bodies.

In other words, every body of matter is in motion relative to other bodies of matter, and thus matter is inseparable from motion. Motion results from the interaction of bodies of matter. Because motion and matter define each other, and because motion can only exist in relation to matter and matter can only exist in relation to motion, the motion of matter can be described as “self-motion,” because the motion is not created externally but exists only within and in relation to matter itself. Engels further explains that if this were not true — if motion were external to matter — then motion itself would have had to have been created external to matter, which is impossible:

To say that matter during the whole unlimited time of its existence has only once, and for what is an infinitesimally short period in comparison to its eternity, found itself able to differentiate its motion and thereby to unfold the whole wealth of this motion, and that before and after this remains restricted for eternity to mere change of place — this is equivalent to maintaining that matter is mortal and motion transitory. The indestructibility of motion cannot be merely quantitative, it must also be conceived qualitatively; matter whose purely mechanical change of place includes indeed the possibility under favourable conditions of being transformed into heat, electricity, chemical action, or life, but which is not capable of producing these conditions from out of itself, such matter has forfeited motion; motion which has lost the capacity of being transformed into the various forms appropriate to it may indeed still have dynamis but no longer energeia, and so has become partially destroyed. Both, however, are unthinkable.

So, motion can change forms and can transfer from one material body to another, but it can never be created externally from matter, and neither motion nor matter can be created or destroyed in our universe. Thus, matter exists in a state of “self-motion;” motion can never externally be created nor externally applied to matter.

To put it another way, motion results from the fact that all things, phenomena, and ideas exist as assemblages of relationships [see The Principle of General Relationships, p. 107], and these relationships contain opposing forces. As Lenin explained in his Philosophical Notebooks:

The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the ‘struggle’ of opposites.

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Based on the scientific achievements which occurred in his lifetime, Engels classified motion into 5 basic forms: mechanical motion (changes in positions of objects in space); physical motion (movements of molecules, electrons, fundamental particles, thermal processes, electricity…); chemical motion (changes of organic and inorganic substances in combination and separation processes…); biological motion (changes of living objects, or genetic structure…); social motion (changes in economy, politics, culture, and social life).

These basic forms of motion are arranged into levels of advancement based on the level of complexity of matter that is affected.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-8.png

The basic forms of motion each affect different forms of matter, but these forms of motion do not exist independently from each other; they actually have strong relationships with each other, in which the more advanced forms of motion develop from lower forms of motion; the more advanced forms of motion also internally include lower forms of motion. [I.e., biological motion contains chemical motion; chemical motion contains physical motion; etc.]

Every object exists with many forms of motion, but any given object is defined by its most advanced form of motion. [I.e., living creatures are defined in terms of biological motion, societies are defined in terms of social motion, etc.]

By classifying the basic forms of motion, Engels laid out the foundation for classification and synthesization of science. The basic forms of motion differ from one another, but they are also unified with each other into one continuous system of motion. Understanding this dialectical relationship between different forms of motion helped to overcome misunderstandings and confusion about motion.

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Annotation 63

In Dialectics of Nature, Engels clears up a great deal of confusion and addresses many misconceptions about matter, motion, forces, energy, etc. which existed in both science and philosophy at the time by defining and explaining the dialectical nature of matter and motion.

When Dialectical Materialism affirmed that motion was the mode of existence — the natural attribute of matter — it also confirmed that motion is absolute and eternal. This does not mean that Dialectical Materialism denies that things can become frozen; however, according to the dialectical materialist viewpoint, freezing is a special form of motion, it is motion in equilibrium and freezing is relative and temporary.

Motion in equilibrium is motion that has not changed the positions, forms, and/or structures of things.

Freezing is a relative phenomenon because freezing only occurs in some forms of motion and in some specific relations, it does not occur in all forms of motion and all kinds of relations. Freezing is a temporary phenomenon because freezing only exists for a limited period of time, it cannot last forever.

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Annotation 64

Equilibrium can exist at any advancement of motion. Lenin discussed equilibrium as it pertains to the social form of motion in discussing an equilibrium of forces existing in Russia in 1905 in this article, An Equilibrium of Forces:

1) The result to date (Monday, October 30) is an equilibrium of forces, as we already pointed out in Proletary, No. 23.

2) Tsarism is no longer strong enough, the revolution not yet strong enough, to win.

3) Hence the tremendous amount of vacillation. The terrific and enormous increase of revolutionary happenings (strikes, meetings, barricades, committees of public safety, complete paralysis of the government, etc.), on the other hand, the absence of resolute repressive measures. The troops are wavering.

4) The Tsar’s Court is wavering (The Times and the Daily Telegraph) between dictatorship and a constitution.

The Court is wavering and biding its time. Strictly speaking, these are its correct tactics: the equilibrium of forces compels it to bide its time, for power is in its hands.

The revolution has reached a stage at which it is disadvantageous for the counter-revolution to attack, to assume the offensive.

For us, for the proletariat, for consistent revolutionary democrats, this is not enough. If we do not rise to a higher level, if we do not manage to launch an independent offensive, if we do not smash the forces of Tsarism, do not destroy its actual power, then the revolution will stop half way, then the bourgeoisie will fool the workers.

5) Rumour has it that a constitution has been decided upon. If that is so, then it follows that the Tsar is heeding the lessons of 1848 and other revolutions: he wants to grant a constitution without a constituent assembly, before a constituent assembly, apart from a constituent assembly. What kind of constitution? At best (for ’the Tsar) a Constitutional-Democratic constitution.

This implies: achievement of the Constitutional-Democrats’ ideal, skipping the revolution; deceiving the people, for all the same there will be no complete and actual freedom of elections.

Should not the revolution skip this granted constitution?

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- Space and Time are Forms of Existence of Matter

Every form of matter exists in a specific position, with specific space particularity (height, width, length, etc.), in specific relation (in front or behind, above or under, to the left or right, etc.) with other forms of matter. These positional relations exist in what we call space. [Space is defined by positional relations of matter.]

On the other hand, the existence of matter is also expressed in the speed of change and the order in which changes occur. These changes occur in what we call time. As Engels wrote: “For the basic forms of all existence are space and time, and a being outside of time is as absurd as an existence outside space.” Matter, space, and time are not separable; there is no matter that exists outside of space and time; there is also no space and time that exist outside of matter’s motion.

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Annotation 65

Space and time, as the forms of matter, i.e.: the ways in which we perceive the existence of matter. We are only able to perceive and understand material objects as they exist within space and time.

Space and time, as forms of existence of matter, exist objectively [see Annotation 108,

p. 112], and are defined by matter. [Space is defined by the positional relations between material objects; time is defined by the speed of change of material objects and the order in which these changes occur.] Space has three dimensions: height, width, length; time has one direction: from the past to the future.

c. The Material Unity of the World

Dialectical Materialism affirms that the nature of the world is matter, and the world is unified in its material properties. [In other words: the entire universe, in all its diversity, is made of matter, and the properties of matter are the same throughout the known universe.]

The material nature of the world is proven on the following basis:

First, there is only one world: the material world; the material world is the first existence [i.e., it existed before consciousness], it exists objectively, and independently, of human consciousness.

Second, the material world exists eternally, endlessly, infinitely; it has no known beginning point and there is no evidence that it will ever disappear.

Third, all known objects and phenomena of the material world have objective relations with each other and all objects and phenomena exist in unity with each other. All of them are specific forms and structures of matter, or have material origin which was born from matter, and all are governed by the objective rules of the material world. In the material world, there is nothing that exists outside of the changing and transforming processes of matter; all of these processes exist as causes and effects of each other.

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Annotation 66

The most important thing to understand here is that every object and phenomenon in the universe arises as matter, all material objects and phenomena are dynamically linked to one another in an infinite chain of causes and effects and changes and transformations, all governed by the material laws of our reality. This understanding is the material foundation of dialectical materialism.

2. Consciousness

a. The Source of Consciousness

According to the materialist viewpoint, consciousness has natural and social sources.

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Annotation 67

Consciousness arises from nature, and from social activities and relations.

Natural refers to the material world. Without the material world of matter, material processes, and the evolution of material systems — up to and including the human brain — consciousness would never have formed.

Social activities and relations also contributed to the development of consciousness. The social processes of labor and language were also prerequisites for the development of conscious activity in human beings.

- Natural Source of Consciousness

There are many factors that form the natural sources for consciousness, but the two most basic factors are human brains and the relationship between humans and the objective world which makes possible creative and dynamic reflection.

About human brains: consciousness is an attribute of a highly organized form of matter, which is the brain. Consciousness is the function and the result of the neurophysiological activities of human brains. As human brains evolved and developed over time, their neurophysiological activities became richer, and, as these activities progressed, consciousness developed further and further over time. This explains why the human evolution process is also a process of developing the capacity for perception and thinking. Whenever human neurophysiological activities don’t function normally because of damaged brains, our mental life is also disturbed.

About the relationship between humans and the objective world which made possible creative and dynamic reflection: The relationship between humans and the objective world has been essential for as long as humans have existed. In this relationship, the objective world is reflected through human senses which interact with human brains and then form our consciousness.

Consciousness exists as a dynamic set of relationships between the external material world, human sense perception, and the functions of the human brain.

Reflection is the re-creation of the features of one form of matter in a different form of matter which occurs when they mutually impact each other through interaction. Reflection is a characteristic of all forms of matter.

There are many forms and levels of reflection such as [from more simple to more complex]: physical and chemical reflection, biological reflection, mental reflection, creative and dynamic reflection, etc.

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Annotation 68

Change is driven by mutual impacts between or within things, phenomena, and/or ideas. Any time two such subjects impact one another, traces of some form or another are left on both interacting subjects. This characteristic of change is called reflection.

The concept of reflection, first proposed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, has been advanced through the work of various Soviet psychologists, philosophers, and scientists (including Ivan Pavlov, Todor Pavlov, Aleksei Leontiev, Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Voloshinov, and others), and is used as a basis for scientific inquiry up to this day by mainstream researchers in Cuba, Vietnam, China, and Laos. The information provided below is somewhat simplified and generalized to give the reader a basic familiarity with the theory of reflection and the development of reflection in nature.

Dialectical materialist scientists have developed a theory of the development of evolution of forms of reflection, positing that forms of reflection have become increasingly complex as organic processes and life have evolved and grown more complex over time.

The chart below gives an idea of how different forms of reaction have evolved over time:

This chart outlines the basic development tendency of Forms of Reflection in matter which lead from inorganic matter, to life, to human consciousness and society.

Obviously, not all subjects develop completely along the path outlined above. Thus far, to our knowledge, only human beings have developed entirely to the level of consciousness and society. It is also unknown whether, or how, human society may develop into some future, as-yet-unknown, form.

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Physical and chemical reflection is the simplest form of reflection, dealing with the ways in which inorganic matter is reflected in human consciousness. Physical and chemical reflection is the reflection of mechanical, physical, and chemical changes and reactions of inorganic matter (i.e., changes in structures, positions, physical-chemical properties, and the processes of combining and dissolving substances). Physical and chemical reactions are passive: when two objects interact with each other physically or chemically, they do not do so consciously.

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Annotation 69

Reflection occurs any time two material objects interact and the features of the object are transferred to each other. Below are some very simplified illustrations to relate the basic idea of the physical reflection of material objects.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-11.png

Reflection as Change in Position:

1. Round Object moves towards Square Object.

2. Round Object impacts Square Object.

3. Square Object changes position; Round Object “bounces” and reverses direction.

4.Thus, Square Object’s change in position reflects the motion of Round Object (and vice-versa). Traces of both contradicting objects are reflected in the respective motion and position of each object.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-12.png

Reflection as Change in Structure:

1. Round Object moves toward Square Object.

2. Round Object impacts Square Object.

3. Structural changes (traces) occur in both Round and Square Object as a result of impact.

4. These changes constitute structural, physical reflection.

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Chemical Reflection:

1. Atom C is attached to Atom B.

2. Atom C detaches from Atom B and transfers to attach to Atom A.

3. This is a process of chemical reflection, in which both molecules mutually reflect one another after A _CB a process of chemical reaction (one molecule loses Atom C while the other gains Atom C).

As dialectical materialists, we must strive to develop our understanding of the reflections of physical and chemical changes and reactions so that our conceptions reflect the material world as accurately as possible. For example: we must not ascribe consciousness to physical processes. Example: a gambler who comes to believe that a pair of dice is “spiteful” or “cursed” is attributing conscious motivation to unconscious physical processes, which is an inaccurate ideological reflection of reality.

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Biological reflection is a higher, more complex form of reflection [compared to physical reflection]. It deals with reflection of organic material in the natural world. As our observations of biological processes have become more sophisticated and complex [through developments in natural science, the development of better tools for observation such as microscopes and other technologies, and so on], our conscious reflections of the natural world have also become more complex.

Biological reflection is expressed through excitation, induction, and reflexes.

Excitation is the reaction of simple plant and animal life-forms which occurs when they change position or structure as a direct result of physical changes to their habitat [i.e., a plant which moves toward the sun throughout the day].

Induction is the reaction of animals with simple nerve systems which can sense or feel their environments. Induction occurs through unconditioned reflex mechanisms.

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Annotation 70

Unconditioned reflexes are characterized by permanent connections between sensory perceptions and reactions. Such reactions are not learned, but simply occur automatically based on physiological mechanisms occurring within the organism. An example of an unconditioned reflex response would be muscles in the leg twitching at the response of a tap on the knee. Such responses are purely physiological and are never learned (“conditioned” into us) — these reactions are simply induced physiologically.

Mental reflections are reactions which occur in animals with central nervous systems. Mental reflections occur through conditioned reflex mechanisms.

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Annotation 71

Conditioned reflexes are reactions which are learned by organisms. These responses are acquired as animals learn to associate previously unrelated neural stimuli to elicit a particular reaction. The Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov famously developed our understanding of conditioned responses by ringing a dinner bell shortly before giving dogs food. After a few repetitions, dogs would begin to salivate upon hearing the dinner bell being rung, even before any food was offered. Any dog which did not receive this conditioning would not salivate upon hearing a dinner bell. This is what makes it a learned, conditioned response — a type of mental reflection.

Dynamic and creative reflection is the most advanced form of reflection. It only occurs in matter that has the highest structural level, such as the human brain. Dynamic and creative reflection is done through the human brain’s nervous physiological activities whenever the objective world impacts human senses. This is a kind of reflection that actively selects and processes information to create new information and to understand the meaning of that information. This dynamic and creative reflection is called consciousness.

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Annotation 72

Remember Lenin’s definition of matter from Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: “Matter is a philosophical category denoting objective reality which is given to man in his sensations, and which is copied, photographed, and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.”

An intrinsic property of matter is that it can be sensed by human beings, and through this sensation, reflected in human consciousness. Thus, all forms of matter share the characteristic of being able to be reflected in the human mind.

Criticizing Karl Pearson, who said that it was not logical to maintain that all matter had the property of being conscious, Lenin wrote in brackets: “But it is logical to suppose that all matter possesses a property which is essentially kindred to sensation: the property to reflect.” Understanding the concept of dynamic and creative reflection is critical to understanding the role of consciousness and the ideal in Dialectical Materialism. In particular, reflection differentiates Dialectical Materialism from the idealist form of dialectics used by Hegel [see Annotation 9, p. 10]. As Marx famously wrote in Capital Volume I:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos [craftsman/artisan/creator] of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

In other words, Hegelian idealism saw human consciousness as defining the material world. Dialectical Materialism inverts this relationship to recognize that what we conceive in our minds is only a reflection of the material world. As Marx explains in The German Ideology, all conscious thought stems from life processes through reflection:

Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

Marx and Engels argued that consciousness arose from the life-processes of human beings. Life-processes are processes of motion and change which occur within organisms to sustain life, and these processes have a dialectical relationship with consciousness: the processes of life, therefore, reflect consciousness, just as consciousness reflects human life-processes. Conscious activities (such as being able to hunt, gather, and cook food, build shelter, and so on) improve the life-processes of human beings (by improving our health, extending our life-spans, etc.); and as our life-processes improved, our consciousness was able to develop more fully. As a concrete example of the dialectic between life processes and consciousness, it is now widely believed by scientists that the advent of cooking and preparing food (conscious activity) improved the functioning of the human brain^[36] (a life process) which, in turn, developed human consciousness, and so on. Life-processes thus determine how consciousness reflects reality, while consciousness impacts back on life-processes, reflecting the dialectical relationship between matter and consciousness [see p. 88] and between practical activities and consciousness [see Annotation 230, p. 226].

Because consciousness arose from life-processes of human beings in the material world, we know that the material world is reflected in our consciousness. However, these reflections do not determine the material world, and do not mirror the material world exactly [see Annotation 77, p. 79]. It is also important to understand that, since life-processes in the material world predate and determine consciousness, consciousness can never be a first basis of seeking truth about our world. As Marx further explains in The German Ideology:

Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation.

In other words, Hegelian idealism makes the critical mistake of believing that the ideal — consciousness — is the first basis of reality, and that anything and everything can be achieved through mere conscious activity. Marx, on the other hand, argues that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,” and that we must understand the ways in which reality is reflected in consciousness before we can hope to affect change in the material conditions of human beings:

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here [in the materialist perspective] we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.

So, the work of the Dialectical Materialist is not to try to develop Utopian conceptions of reality first, to then proceed to try and force such purely ideal conceptions onto reality (see Annotation 17, p. 18).

Rather, we must understand the material basis of reality, as well as the material processes of change and motion which govern reality, and only then can we search for ways in which human beings can influence material reality through conscious activity. As Marx explains, the revolutionary must not be fooled into believing we can simply conceive of an ideal world and then replicate it into reality through interpretation and conscious thought alone. Instead, we must start with a firm understanding of material conditions and, from that material basis, determine how to build our revolutionary movement through conscious impact of material relations and processes of development in the material world.

As Marx wrote in The German Ideology: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” This distinction may seem subtle at first, but it has massive implications for how Marx suggests we go about participating in revolutionary activity. For Marx, purely-idealist debates and criticisms are an unproductive waste of time:

The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly ‘world-shattering’ statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against ‘phrases.’ They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.

Marx also discusses the uselessness of idealist conjecture:

Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own: out of all such muck we get only the one inference that these three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another, because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact that intellectual and material activity — enjoyment and labour, production and consumption — devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labour. It is self-evident, moreover, that ‘spectres,’ ‘bonds,’ ‘the higher being,’ ‘concept,’ ‘scruple,’ [terms for idealist conceptions] are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move.

What Marx means by this is that we should focus on the material processes and conditions of society if we intend to change society, because idealist speculation, conjecture, critique, and thought alone, at the individual level, will never be capable of affecting revolutionary change in our material world.

Instead, we must focus on the material basis of reality, the material conditions of society, and seek revolutionary measures which are built upon materialist foundations. Only by understanding material processes of development, as well as the dialectical relationship between consciousness and matter, can we reliably and effectively begin to impact reality through conscious activity. This begins with the recognition that conscious thought itself is a reflection of material reality which developed and results from life-processes of material motion and processes of change within the human brain.

This concept of reflection, pioneered by Marx and Engels, was significantly developed by V. I. Lenin in his response to Machian positivists who posited that what we perceive is not truly reality [see Annotation 32, p. 27]. In his Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin wrote: “Life gives rise to the brain. Nature is reflected in the human brain.”

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin further defined the relationship between matter and consciousness through reflection.

LENIN’S PROOF OF THE THEORY OF REFLECTION

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin offered the following arguments to back up the theory of reflection.

1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin [a chemical substance which was newly discovered at time of writing] existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.

Lenin is saying that the material world must exist outside of and independent from our consciousness. He cites as evidence the discovery of a chemical substance which until recently we had no sensory perception of, noting that this substance must have existed long before we became aware of it through sensory observation.

2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the thing-in-itself is “beyond” phenomena (Kant) or that we can or must fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which exists outside us (Hume) — all this is the sheerest nonsense, [unfounded belief], trick, invention.

Lenin is referencing a centuries-old debate about whether or not human beings are capable of having real knowledge of a “thing-in-itself,” or if we can only perceive phenomena of things (characteristics observable to our senses). The “thing-in-itself” refers to the actual material object which exists outside of our consciousness. So the question being posed is: can we REALLY have knowledge of material objects outside of our consciousness, or does consciousness itself act as a barrier to ever REALLY knowing anything about material objects and the material world outside of our consciousness?

Immanuel Kant argued that we can never know the true nature of the material world, writing: “we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing-in-itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something.” This idea that the senses could not be trusted to deliver accurate knowledge — and thus, the “thing-in-itself” is essentially unknowable — was carried forward by later empiricists such as Bacon and Hume [see Annotation 10, p. 10]. In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Marx and Engels refute this notion, arguing that practice allows us to discover truth about “things-in-themselves:”

The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”.

Lenin expanded on this argument, explaining that the phenomena of objects which we observe with our senses do accurately reflect material objects, even though we might not know everything about these objects at once. Over time, as we learn more and more about material objects and the material world through practice and repeated observation, we more fully and accurately come to understand “things-in-themselves, as he writes in Empirio-Criticism and Materialism:

3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as readymade and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.

Here, Lenin further elaborates on the dialectical nature of knowledge: we must simultaneously accept that our knowledge is never perfect and unchanging, but we must also recognize that we are capable of making our knowledge more exact and complete over time. To further defend his ideas about reflection, Lenin cited Czech philosopher Karl Kautsky’s argument against Kant:

That I see green, red and white is grounded in my faculty of sight. But that green is something different from red testifies to something that lies outside of me, to real differences between the things... The relations and differences between the things themselves revealed to me by the individual space and time concepts are real relations and differences of the external world, not conditioned by the nature of my perceptive faculty... If this were really so [i.e., if Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of time and space were true], we could know nothing about the world outside us, not even that it exists.

Lenin followed from Marx and Engels that, in order to further develop our understanding and knowledge of the material world, it was necessary to engage in practice [see Annotation 211, p. 205]. Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we [use] these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is positive proof that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves.

Notice that Engels is careful to use the words so far: “its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves.” Engels does not argue that human understanding of the material world is infallible: mistakes are often made. But over time, as such mistakes are discovered and our understanding improves, our knowledge of the material world develops. This is only possible if the phenomena of objects which we observe — the reflections within our consciousness — do actually and accurately represent material reality. Lenin elaborated on this necessity to constantly update and improve dialectical materialist philosophy as new information and knowledge became available:

Engels, for instance, assimilated the, to him, new term, energy, and began to employ it in 1885 (Preface to the 2^nd ed. of Anti-Dühring) and in 1888 (Ludwig Feuerbach), but to employ it equally with the concepts of ‘force’ and ‘motion,’ and along with them. Engels was able to enrich his materialism by adopting a new terminology.

Engels provided further elaborations on how practical experience and mastery of the material world refutes the notion that it is impossible to have real knowledge of the material world in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy:

The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical fancies is practice, viz., experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and using it for our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end of the Kantian incomprehensible or ungraspable... The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such thingsin-themselves until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the thing-in-itself became a thing for us, as for instance, alizarin [a dye which was originally plant-based], which we no longer trouble to grow in in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar.

So, dialectical materialism holds that there is a material world external from our consciousness; that conscious thoughts are reflections of this material world; that we can have real knowledge of the material world through sensory observation; and that our knowledge and understanding of the material world is best advanced through practice in the material world.

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- Social Sources of Consciousness

There are many factors that constitute the social sources of consciousness. The most basic and direct factors are labor and language.

Labor is the process by which humans interact with the natural world in order to make products for our needs of existing and developing. Labor is also the process that changes the human body’s structure [i.e., muscles developing through exercise].

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Annotation 73

In Dialectics of Nature, Engels describes the dialectical relationship between labor and human development:

Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.

Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation.

Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.

But the hand did not exist alone, it was only one member of an integral, highly complex organism. And what benefited the hand, benefited also the whole body it served.

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Labor also allows us to discover the attributes, structures, motion laws, etc., of the natural world, via observable phenomena.

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Annotation 74

We discover truth about the natural world through labor — through physical practice in the material world. See the discussion of practice in Annotation 211, p. 205.

All of these phenomena, through our human senses, impact our human brains. And through brain activity, knowledge and consciousness of the objective world are formed and developed.

Language is a system of material signals that carries information with cognitive content. Without language, consciousness could not exist and develop.

The birth of language goes hand in hand with labor. From the beginning, labor was social. The relationships between people who perform labor processes require them to have means to communicate and exchange thoughts. This requirement caused language to arise and develop along with the working processes. With language, humans not only communicate, but also summarise reality and convey experience and thoughts from generation to generation.

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Annotation 75

From Dialectics of Nature:

It has already been noted that our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social of all animals, from non-gregarious immediate ancestors. Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour, and widened man’s horizon at every new advance. He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown properties in natural objects. On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other. Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another.

Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the origin of language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one. The little that even the most highly-developed animals need to communicate to each other does not require articulate speech. In its natural state, no animal feels handicapped by its inability to speak or to understand human speech. It is quite different when it has been tamed by man. The dog and the horse, by association with man, have developed such a good ear for articulate speech that they easily learn to understand any language within their range of concept. Moreover they have acquired the capacity for feelings such as affection for man, gratitude, etc., which were previously foreign to them. Anyone who has had much to do with such animals will hardly be able to escape the conviction that in many cases they now feel their inability to speak as a defect, although, unfortunately, it is one that can no longer be remedied because their vocal organs are too specialised in a definite direction. However, where vocal organs exist, within certain limits even this inability disappears. The buccal organs of birds are as different from those of man as they can be, yet birds are the only animals that can learn to speak; and it is the bird with the most hideous voice, the parrot, that speaks best of all. Let no one object that the parrot does not understand what it says. It is true that for the sheer pleasure of talking and associating with human beings, the parrot will chatter for hours at a stretch, continually repeating its whole vocabulary. But within the limits of its range of concepts it can also learn to understand what it is saying. Teach a parrot swear words in such a way that it gets an idea of their meaning (one of the great amusements of sailors returning from the tropics); tease it and you will soon discover that it knows how to use its swear words just as correctly as a Berlin costermonger. The same is true of begging for titbits.

First labour, after it and then with it speech — these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which, for all its similarity is far larger and more perfect. Hand in inevitably accompanied by a corresponding refinement of the organ of hearing, so the development of the brain as a whole is accompanied by a refinement of hand with the development of the brain went the development of its most immediate instruments — the senses. Just as the gradual development of speech is all the senses. The eagle sees much farther than man, but the human eye discerns considerably more in things than does the eye of the eagle. The dog has a far keener sense of smell than man, but it does not distinguish a hundredth part of the odours that for man are definite signs denoting different things. And the sense of touch, which the ape hardly possesses in its crudest initial form, has been developed only side by side with the development of the human hand itself, through the medium of labour.

So, the most basic, direct and important source that decides the birth and development of language is labor. Language appeared later than labor but always goes with labor. Language and labor were the two main stimulations affecting the brains of the primates which evolved into humans, slowly changing their brains into human brains and transforming animal psychology into human consciousness.

This diagram is based on work from an article titled “Evidence in Hand: Recent Discoveries and the Early Evolution of Human Manual Manipulation[37].”Modern research has discovered strong evidence[38] that the human hand evolved along with tool use, in line with Engels’ analysis in Dialectics of Nature.

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Annotation 76

It is also worth noting that, just as human consciousness derived from labor and language and social activity, so too did society itself arise from language and labor, as Engels explained in Dialectics of Nature:

The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both labour and speech an ever-renewed impulse to further development. This development did not reach its conclusion when man finally became distinct from the ape, but on the whole made further powerful progress, its degree and direction varying among different peoples and at different times, and here and there even being interrupted by local or temporary regression. This further development has been strongly urged forward, on the one hand, and guided along more definite directions, on the other, by a new element which came into play with the appearance of fully-fledged man, namely, society.

In other words, these factors of human’s physical nature and human society have a dialectical relationship with one another. Elements of human nature — in particular labor and language — led to the development of human society, which in turned played a key role in the development of human language and labor.

Human language and human labor mutually develop one another through a dialectical process to develop human nature. Simultaneously, human nature and human society mutually develop one another through a dialectical process.

Elements of human nature — in particular labor and language — led to the development of human society, which in turned played a key role in the development of human language and labor.

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b. Nature and Structure of Consciousness

- Nature of Consciousness

Consciousness is the dynamic and creative reflection of the objective world in human brains; it is the subjective image of the objective world. [See discussion of dynamic and creative reflection on p. 68]

The dynamic and creative nature of reflection is expressed in human psycho-physiological activities when we receive, select, process, and save data in our brains. Within the human brain, we are able to collect data from the external material world. Based on this information, our brain is capable of creating new information, and we are able to analyze, interpret, and understand all of this information collectively within our consciousness.

The dynamic and creative nature of reflection is also expressed in several human processes:

• The creation of ideas, hypotheses, stories, etc.
• The ability to summarize nature and to comprehend the objective laws of nature.
• The ability to construct models of ideas and systems of knowledge to guide our activities.

Consciousness is the subjective image of the objective world. Consciousness is defined by the objective world in both Content and Form [see Annotation 150, p. 147]. However, consciousness does not perfectly reflect the objective world. It modifies information through the subjective lenses (thoughts, feelings, aspirations, experiences, knowledge, needs, etc.) of humans. According to Marx and Engels, ideas are simply “sublimates [transformations] of [the human brain’s]... material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.”^[39]

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Annotation 77

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels refer to ideas somewhat poetically as “the phantoms formed in the human brain,” and explains that ideas arise directly from material human life processes [see Annotation 72, p. 68]. Lenin makes it very clear in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism that consciousness is not a mirror image, or exact reproduction of reality, quoting Engels:

The great basic question of all philosophy,” Engels says, “especially of modern philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being,” of “spirit and nature.” Having divided the philosophers into “two great camps” on this basic question, Engels shows that there is “yet another side” to this basic philosophical question, viz., “in what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality?” “The overwhelming majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question,” says Engels, “including under this head not only all materialists but also the most consistent idealists.

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Of extra importance is Lenin’s footnote to the above passage, regarding what he purports to be Viktor Chernov’s mistranslation of Engels:

Fr. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, etc., 4^th Germ. ed., S. 15. Russian translation, Geneva ed., 1905, p. 12–13. Mr. V. Chernov translates the word Spiegelbild literally (a mirror reflection) accusing Plekhanov of presenting the theory of Engels “in a very weakened form” by speaking in Russian simply of a “reflection” instead of a “mirror reflection”. This is mere cavilling. Spiegelbild [mirror reflection] in German is also used simply in the sense of Abbild [reflection, image].

Here, Lenin reaffirms and clarifies Engels’ idea that consciousness is not a perfect, exact duplicate of reality; not a “mirror image.” This, however, does not contradict the fact that we can obtain real knowledge of the real world in our consciousness, and that this knowledge improves over time through practice and observation. Indeed, Lenin’s passage on practice cited first in this annotation directly follows the above passage in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

See: Natural Source of Consciousness, p. 64, and Annotation 32, 27.

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Consciousness is a social phenomenon and has a social nature. Consciousness arose from real life activities. Consciousness is always ruled by natural law and by social law.

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Annotation 78

Natural law includes the laws of physics, chemistry, and other natural phenomena which govern the material world. Consciousness itself can never violate natural law as it arises from the natural processes of the natural world.

Social law includes the objective and universal relationships between social phenomena and social processes. Human society was created through labor, and this labor was performed in very specific material relations between humans and the natural world.

Note: social law is a key concept of historical materialism, which is the topic of Part 2 of the textbook from which this entire text has been translated, which we hope to translate in the future.

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explains how social existence and social laws govern the consciousness of individuals:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

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Consciousness is determined by the social communication needs of human beings as well as the material conditions of reality.

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Annotation 79

The term material conditions refers to the external environment which humans inhabit. Material conditions include the natural environment, the means of production and the economic base^[40] of human society, and other objective externalities and systems which affect human life and society. Note that material conditions don’t refer to physical matter alone, but also include objective social relations and phenomena. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx argues that “neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life.”

Consciousness is dynamic in nature, constantly learning and changing flexibly. Consciousness guides humans to transform the material world to suit our needs.

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Annotation 80

Consciousness and material conditions have a dialectical relationship with one other, just as the base of society and the superstructure have a dialectical relationship with one other [see Annotation 29, p. 24]. Consciousness arises from material conditions, though conscious activity can affect material conditions.

As Marx explains in Capital Volume I:

At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explains how the development of material conditions eventually leads to conscious activity which will in turn lead to changes in society:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

As Marx further explains, material conditions must first be met before such revolutionary social changes can be made through conscious activity:

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

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- Structure of Consciousness

Consciousness has a very complicated structure, including many factors which have strong relationships with each other. The most basic factors are knowledge, sentiment and willpower.

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Annotation 81

As with the concept of reflection (see Annotation 68, p. 65), the analysis of the structure of consciousness which follows is rooted in ideas first proposed by Marx, Engels and Lenin, and later developed through the work of various Soviet psychologists, philosophers, and scientists including Ivan Pavlov, Todor Pavlov, Aleksei Leontiev, Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Voloshinov, and others, and is used as a basis for scientific inquiry and development up to this day. According to Where is Marx in the Work and Thought of Vygotsky? by Lucien Sève (2018), much of this work, such as the groundbreaking work of Lev Vygotsky, has been heavily “de-Marxized,” stripped of all aspects of Marxism and, by extension, dialectical materialism, in translation to English.

Knowledge constitutes the understanding of human beings, and is the result of the cognitive process. Knowledge is the re-created image of perceived objects which takes the form of language. Knowledge is the mode of existence of consciousness and the condition for consciousness to develop.

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Annotation 82

Marx and Engels discussed the relationship between language and consciousness extensively in The German Ideology, explaining that language — the form of knowledge which exists in human consciousness — evolved dialectically with and through social activity, and that consciousness also developed along with and through the material processes that gave rise to speech:

From the start the ‘spirit’ is afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.”So, language, physical speech organs, and human society all developed in dialectic relations with one another. Since language is the form of knowledge in human consciousness, this means that knowledge arose directly from these dialectical processes:

Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious.

The fact that knowledge has a language-form in human consciousness is also important to understand because it shows that consciousness arose dialectically as, and through, social activity, and indeed, language and social activity gave rise to consciousness as a replacement for animal instinct in our relations with nature.

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Man’s consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. This beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere herd-consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one.

And, as language and social activity dialectically developed through one another, human society became complex enough to give rise to human societies and human economies:

This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops the division of labour…

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Knowledge can be separated into two broad categories: knowledge of nature, and knowledge of human society. Each of these categories of knowledge reflects its corresponding entity in the external world.

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Annotation 83

Each category of knowledge reflects a corresponding entity in the external world.

It’s also important to note that human society and nature have a dialectical relationship with each other and mutually impact one another, and, by extension, knowledge of nature and knowledge of human society also dialectically influence one another. So these categories of knowledge are not isolated from one another but rather dynamically shape and influence each other continuously through time.

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Based on levels of cognitive development, we can also classify knowledge into categories of: daily life knowledge and scientific knowledge, experience knowledge and theory knowledge, emotional knowledge and rational knowledge.

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Annotation 84

The following information is from the Marxism-Leninism Textbook of Students Who Specialize in Marxism-Leninism, released by Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training:

Daily Life and Scientific Knowledge

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-17.png

Daily Life Knowledge is the knowledge we acquire in our daily lives to deal with our daily tasks. From our interactions with nature and human society, we cultivate life experience and our understanding of every aspect of our daily lives in relation to human society and nature.

Scientific Knowledge arises from Daily Life Knowledge: as our daily lives become more complex, we develop a need to understand the material world and human society more deeply and comprehensively. Scientific Knowledge is thus a developed system of knowledge of nature and human society. Scientific Knowledge can be tested and can be applied to human life and activity in useful ways.

Experience and Theory Knowledge:

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-18.png

Experience Knowledge is cultivated from direct observation of nature and human society. This kind of knowledge is extremely diverse, and we can apply this kind of knowledge to guide our daily activities.

Theory Knowledge arises from Experience Knowledge. Theory Knowledge is composed of abstract generalizations of Experience Knowledge. Theory Knowledge is more profound, accurate, and systematically organized than Experience Knowledge and gives us an understanding of the laws and dynamics of nature and human society.

Emotional and Rational Knowledge:

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-19.png

Less Developed More Developed

Emotional Knowledge is the earlier stage of cognitive processing. Emotional Knowledge comes directly to us from our human senses. We obtain emotional knowledge when we use our human senses to directly learn things about nature and human society. Emotional Knowledge is usually manifested as immediate cognitive responses such as pleasure, pain, and other such impulses.

Rational Knowledge arises from Emotional Knowledge. It is a higher stage of cognitive processing, involving abstract thought and generalization of emotional knowledge.

Rational Knowledge is usually manifested as definitions, conjectures, judgments, etc.

See also: Principle of Development, p. 119; Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism, p. 204.

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Sentiment is the resonant manifestation of human emotions and feelings in our relationships. Sentiment is a special form of reality reflection [see Annotation 68, p. 65]. Whenever reality impacts human beings, we feel specific sensations and emotional reactions to those impacts. Over time, these specific sensations and emotions combine and dialectically develop into generalized human feelings, and we call these generalized feelings sentiment. Sentiment expresses and develops in every aspect of human life; it is a factor that improves and promotes cognitive and practical activities.

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Annotation 85

As Marx explains in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: “Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being — and because he feels that he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential power of man energetically bent on its object.” Marx further elaborates that sentimental emotion is essential to human nature: “The domination of the objective essence within me, the sensuous eruption of my essential activity, is emotion which thereby becomes the activity of my nature.”

Depending on the subjects that are perceived, as well as our human emotions about them, sentiments can be manifested in many different forms such as: moral emotion, aesthetic emotion, religious emotion, etc.

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Annotation 86

Moral Emotion is the basic manifestation of moral consciousness at an emotional level. For example: when we see people helping other people, we have positive emotional responses, yet when we see people harming other people, we have negative emotional responses. (Source: Nguyen Thi Khuyen of the National Institute of Administration of Vietnam)

Aesthetic Emotion refers to the the resonant feelings which arise from our interaction with beauty, sadness, comedy, etc., in life and in art. For example: when humans encounter beauty, we feel positive emotional responses. When humans encounter ugliness, we feel negative emotional responses. When we witness pain, we feel sympathetic feelings of pain and a desire to help. When we witness comedy, we feel humorous emotions ourselves. (Source: Textbook of General Aesthetic Studies from the Ministry of

Education and Training of Vietnam)

Religious Emotion is the human belief in supernatural or spiritual forces which can’t be tested or proved through material practice or observation. However, belief in these forces can give human beings emotional responses such as hope, love, etc. (Source: Pham Van Chuc, Doctor of Philosophy, Central Theoretical Council of the Communist Party of Vietnam)

These are just a few illustrative examples; there are many other ways in which human emotion and sentiment can manifest.

Willpower is the manifestation of one’s own strength used to overcome obstacles in the process of achieving goals. Willpower is a dynamic aspect of consciousness, a manifestation of human consciousness in the material world.

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Annotation 87

An unnamed poem by Ho Chi Minh, written in 1950 for the Revolutionary Youth Pioneers, addresses the phenomenon of willpower:

Nothing in this world must be difficult

The only thing that we should fear is having a waivering heart

We can dig up mountains and fill the sea

Once we’ve willfully made a firm decision

Today, this poem serves as the lyrics for anthem of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union (formerly the Revolutionary Youth Pioneers).

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Willpower arises from human self-awareness and awareness of the purposes of our actions. Through this awareness and through willpower, we are able to struggle against ourselves and externalities to successfully achieve our goals. We can consider willpower to be the power of conscious human activity; willpower controls and regulates human behaviors in order to allow humans to move towards our goals voluntarily; willpower also allows humans to exercise self-restraint and self-control, and to be assertive in our actions according to our views and beliefs.

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Annotation 88

In Dialectics of Nature, Engels explains how willpower developed in human beings as we separated from animals through the development of consciousness: “The further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards definite preconceived ends.”

In Capital Volume I, Marx explains how willpower uniquely allows humans to consciously change our own material conditions to suit our needs according to pre-conceived plans:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.

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The true value of willpower is not only manifested in strength or weakness, but is also expressed in the content and meaning of the goals that we try to achieve through our willpower. Lenin believed that willpower is one of the factors that will create revolutionary careers for millions of people in the fierce class struggles to liberate ourselves and mankind.

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Annotation 89

In “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, Lenin explains how revolutions are born from the collective willpower of thousands of people:

History as a whole, and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more multiform, more lively and ingenious than is imagined by even the best parties, the most class-conscious vanguards of the most advanced classes. This can readily be understood, because even the finest of vanguards express the class-consciousness, will, passion and imagination of tens of thousands, whereas at moments of great upsurge and the exertion of all human capacities, revolutions are made by the class-consciousness, will, passion and imagination of tens of millions, spurred on by a most acute struggle of classes. Two very important practical conclusions follow from this: first, that in order to accomplish its task the revolutionary class must be able to master all forms or aspects of social activity without exception (completing after the capture of political power — sometimes at great risk and with very great danger — what it did not complete before the capture of power); second, that the revolutionary class must be prepared for the most rapid and brusque replacement of one form by another.

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All of these factors [knowledge, sentiment, and willpower] which, together, create consciousness, have dialectical relationships with each other. Of these factors, knowledge is the most important, because it is the mode of existence of consciousness, and also the factor which guides the development of all the other factors, and it also determines how the other factors manifest.

3. The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness

The relationship between matter and consciousness is dialectical. In this relationship, matter comes first, and matter is the source of consciousness; it decides consciousness. However, consciousness is not totally passive, it can impact back to matter through the practical activities of human beings.

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Annotation 90

Engels explained in Dialectics of Nature that “matter evolves out of itself the thinking human brain,” which means that matter must necessarily come prior to consciousness.

As Marx explains in Capital Volume I, matter determines conscious activity:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

However, it’s important to remember that the relationship between matter and consciousness is dialectical, and that conscious activity — through the combination of willpower and labor — can also impact the material world; social change arises through the combined willpower of many human beings. See: Annotation 80, p. 81.

a. The Role of Matter in Consciousness

Dialectical Materialism affirms that:

• Matter is the first existence, and that consciousness comes after.

• Matter is the source of consciousness, it decides consciousness.

We know that matter determines consciousness because consciousness is the product of the high-level-structured matter such as the human brain. Consciousness itself can only exist after the development of the material structure of the human brain. Humans are the result of millions of years of development of the material world. We are, therefore, products of the material world. This conclusion has been firmly established through the development of natural science, which has given us great insight into the long history of the Earth and of the evolution of living organisms, including human beings.

All of this scientific evidence stands as the basis for the viewpoint: matter comes first, consciousness comes after [see Annotation 114, p. 116].

We have already discussed the factors which constitute the natural and social sources of consciousness:

• Human brains

• Impacts of the material world on human brains that cause reflections

• Labor

• Language

[See Annotation 72, p. 68 and Annotation 73, p. 75]

All of these factors also assert that matter is the origin of consciousness.

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Annotation 91

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-20.png

The material basis of consciousness is rooted in the following phenomena:

• 1. The material structure of the human brain.

• 2. Impacts from the material world cause reflections in human consciousness.

• 100. Human Labor — physical process which dialectically develops consciousness.

• 500. Human Speech — physical process which dialectically develops consciousness.

• 5. Evolution of human brains and consciousness through material processes of the material world.

For more information, see: Nature and Structure of Consciousness.

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Consciousness is composed of reflections and subjective images of the material world, therefore the content of consciousness is decided by matter [see Annotation 68, p. 65]. The development of consciousness is determined by natural laws and by social laws^[41] as well as the material environment which we inhabit. All of these factors which determine consciousness are material in nature. Therefore, matter determines not only the content but also the development of consciousness.

b. The Role of Consciousness in Matter

In relation to matter, consciousness can impact matter through human activities.

When we discuss consciousness we are discussing human consciousness. So, when we talk about the role of consciousness, we are talking about the role of human beings. Consciousness in and of itself cannot directly change anything in reality. In order to change reality, humans have to implement material activities. However, consciousness controls every human activity, so even though consciousness does not directly create or change the material world, it equips humans with knowledge about objective reality, and based on that foundation of knowledge, humans are able to identify goals, set directions, develop plans, and select methods, solutions, tools, and means to achieve our goals. So, consciousness manifests its ability to impact matter through human activities.

The impact of consciousness on matter can have positive or negative results.

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Annotation 92

“Positive” and “negative,” in this context, are subjective and relative terms which simply denote “moving towards a goal” and “moving away from a goal,” based on a specific perspective.

From the perspective of revolutionary communism, “positive” can be taken as moving towards the end goal of the liberation of the working class from capitalist oppression and the construction of a stateless, classless society. Likewise, “negative” can be taken as moving away from that goal. See: Annotation 114, p. 116.

Humans have the ability to overcome all challenges in the process of achieving our goals and improving our world, so long as our conscious activities meet the following criteria:

• We must perceive reality accurately.
• We must properly apply scientific knowledge, revolutionary sentiments, and directed willpower.
• We must avoid contradicting objective laws of nature and society.

Successfully achieving our goals and improving the world in this manner constitutes the positive outcome of human consciousness.

On the contrary, if human consciousness wrongly reflects objective reality, nature, and laws, then, right from the beginning, our actions will have negative results which will do harm to ourselves and our society.

Therefore, by directing the activities of humans, consciousness can determine whether the results of human activities are beneficial or harmful. Our consciousness thus determines whether our activities will succeed or fail and whether our efforts will be effective or ineffective.

By studying the matter, origin, and nature of consciousness, as well as the relationships between matter and consciousness, we can see that:

• Matter is the source of consciousness ^[42].
• Matter determines the content and creative capacity of consciousness ^[43].
• Matter is the prerequisite to form consciousness ^[44].
• Consciousness only has the ability to impact matter, and this impact is indirect, because it has to be done through human material activities within material reality ^[45].

Matter determines consciousness while consciousness impacts matter indirectly through human activity.

The strength with which consciousness can impact the material world depends on:

• The accuracy of reflection of the material world in consciousness ^[46].
• Strength of willpower which transmits consciousness to human activity ^[47].
• The degree of organization of social activity ^[48].
• Material conditions in which human activity occurs ^[49].

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Annotation 93

The importance of organization in determining the outcomes of human social activity is one of the most important concepts of Marxism-Leninism and is discussed frequently by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and nearly every other important communist revolutionary in history. Marx explains the connections between social organization and conscious human activity in Capital Volume I [see Annotation 80, p. 81].

4. Meaning of the methodology

Dialectical Materialism builds the most basic and common methodological^[50] principles for human cognitive and practical activities on the following bases:

• The viewpoint of the material nature of the world [matter comes first, consciousness comes after].
• The dynamic and creative nature of consciousness ^[51].
• The dialectical relationship between matter and consciousness ^[52].

All cognitive and practical activities of humans originate from material reality and must observe objective natural and social laws, however, our activities are capable of impacting the material world through dynamic and creative conscious activity. [See The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88].

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Annotation 94

The above paragraph summarizes an important methodological concept which is critical for undestanding the philosophical framework of Dialectical Materialism. Dialectical Materialism, as a philosophy, synthesizes earlier materialist and idealist positions by recognizing the fact that the material determines consciousness, while consciousness can impact the material world through willful activity.

From this philosophical basis, the methodology of Materialist Dialectics has been developed to provide a deeper understanding of dialectical development, which is rooted in contradiction and negation within and between subjects. Materialist Dialectics is the subject of Chapter 2, p. 98.

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According to this methodological principle [i.e., the Principle of the Dialectic Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness], if we hope to succeed in accomplishing our goals in the material world, then we must simultaneously meet two criteria:

1. We must ensure that our knowledge reflects the objective material world as much as possible, respecting the objective natural and social laws of the material world.

2. We must simultaneously recognize the dynamic and creative nature of our conscious activity.

When we say that human activities originate from material reality and must observe objective natural and social laws we' mean that human knowledge must originate from the material world. This means that if we hope to be successful in our activities, we should respect the natural and social laws of the material world.

This means that in our human perception and activities, we must determine goals, and set strategies, policies, and plans which are rooted firmly in objective material reality. Humans have to take objective material reality as the foundation of our activities and plans, and all of our activities must be carried out in the material world. Humans have to examine and understand our material conditions and transform them in ways that will help us to accomplish our goals.

When we talk about impacting the material world through dynamic and creative conscious activity, we mean we must recognize the positive, dynamic, and creative roles of consciousness. We must recognize the role human consciousness plays in dynamically and creatively manifesting our will in the material world through labor. Impacting the material world through conscious activity at a revolutionary scale requires humans to respect and understand the role of scientific knowledge; to study laboriously to master such knowledge; and then to propagate such knowledge so to the masses to develop public knowledge and belief so as to guide the people’s action.

Moreover, we also have to voluntarily study and practice^[53] in order to form and improve our revolutionary viewpoint^[54] and willpower^[55] in order to have both scientific and humanitarian activity guidelines.

To implement this principle [i.e., the Principle of the Dialectic Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness], we have to avoid, fight against, and overcome the diseases of subjectivism^[56] and idealism^[57] through such errors as:

• Attempting to impose idealist plans and principles [which are not rooted in material conditions] into reality.
• Considering fantasy, illusion, and imagination instead of reality.
• Basing policies and programs on subjective desires.
• Using sentiment as the starting point for developing policies, strategies, etc.

On the other hand, in cognitive and practical activities, we also have to fight against empiricism^[58], which disregards scientific knowledge and theories, and which is also very conservative, stagnant and passive.

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Annotation 95

Process of Developing Revolutionary Public Knowledge

Developing revolutionary public knowledge must be preceded by mastery of knowledge and a firm grounding in the role and nature of knowledge.

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels makes a scathing critique of idealist socialist revolutionary thought, writing:

To all these [idealist socialists], Socialism is the expression of absolute truth^[59], reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive of one another.

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Here, Engels points out the absurdity of the idea that some abstract, purely ideal “truth” could liberate workers in the material world. Engels continues on, explaining how such idealist socialism could never lead to meaningful revolutionary change:

Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

In other words, idealist revolutionary movements only tend to result in endless debate and meaningless theories which are divorced from objective reality and material conditions. Such theories and idealist constructions do not lead to effective action in the real world. Socialism must become real (i.e., based in objective material conditions and praxis^[60] in the real world) to affect change in the material world, as Engels explains elsewhere in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific [see Annotation 17, p. 18].

In Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx lays out an excellent case study of the failings of incoherent, idealist socialism. He begins by quoting the Gotha Program, which was an ideological program which the German Workers Party hoped to implement. In this text, Marx cites the Gotha Program line by line and offers his materialist critique of the idealist principles presented. In the following passage, Marx refutes some key errors caused by idealism and offers materialist correction:

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power... But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

Here, Marx points out the importance of having a firm understanding of the material reality of labor and its relation to the material, natural world. Marx points out that the idea that labor, alone, is the source of all wealth is an idealist notion of the bourgeoisie, a false consciousness [see Annotation 235, p. 231] which prevents proper material analysis and props up the capitalist viewpoint. A failure to grasp the truth of the material basis of reality weakens the socialist position, and any movement built on such weak idealist foundations will lead to failure in trying to bring about revolutionary change.

We have already discussed the shortcomings of empiricism in Annotation 10, p. 10, but it might be helpful to see another case study, this time from Engels, pointing out the flaws of empiricist analysis in his text Anti-Dühring. Engels begins by quoting the empiricist Eugen Dühring, who wrote:

Philosophy is the development of the highest form of consciousness of the world and of life, and in a wider sense embraces the principles of all knowledge and volition. Wherever a series of cognitions or stimuli or a group of forms of being come to be examined by human consciousness, the principles underlying these manifestations of necessity become an object of philosophy. These principles are the simple, or until now assumed to be simple, constituents of manifold knowledge and volition. Like the chemical composition of bodies, the general constitution of things can be reduced to basic forms and basic elements. These ultimate constituents or principles, once they have been discovered, are valid not only for what is immediately known and accessible, but also for the world which is unknown and inaccessible to us. Philosophical principles consequently provide the final supplement required by the sciences in order to become a uniform system by which nature and human life can be explained. Apart from the fundamental forms of all existence, philosophy has only two specific subjects of investigation — nature and the world of man. Accordingly, our material arranges itself quite naturally into three groups, namely, the general scheme of the universe, the science of the principles of nature, and finally the science of mankind. This succession at the same time contains an inner logical sequence, for the formal principles which are valid for all being take precedence, and the realms of the objects to which they are to be applied then follow in the degree of their subordination.

Engels then proceeds to critique this empiricist worldview, showing that it does not properly reflect the material world and amounts to idealism in its own right:

What [Dühring] is dealing with are therefore principles, formal tenets derived from thought and not from the external world, which are to be applied to nature and the realm of man, and to which therefore nature and man have to conform. But whence does thought obtain these principles? From itself?

No, for Herr Dühring himself says: the realm of pure thought is limited to logical schemata and mathematical forms (the latter, moreover, as we shall see, is wrong). Logical schemata can only relate to forms of thought; but what we are dealing with here is solely forms of being, of the external world, and these forms can never be created and derived by thought out of itself, but only from the external world. But with this the whole relationship is inverted: the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter, and Herr Dühring’s contrary conception is idealistic, makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of ideas, out of schemata, schemes or categories existing somewhere before the world, from eternity — just like a Hegel.

Lenin also heavily criticized empiricism in his work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which we discuss at length in Annotation 32, p. 27.

Chapter 2: Materialist Dialectics

Materialist dialectics is one of the basic theoretical parts that form the worldview and philosophical methodology of Marxism-Leninism. It is the “science of common relations” and also the “science of common rules of motion and development of nature, society, and human thoughts... Dialectics, as understood by Marx, and also in conformity with Hegel, includes what is now called the theory of knowledge, or epistemology.”^[61]

[Note: Epistemology is the theoretical study of knowledge; for more information see Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism, p. 204.]

I. Dialectics and Materialist Dialectics

1. Dialectics and Basic Forms of Dialectics

a. Definitions of Dialectics and the Subjective Dialectic

In Marxism-Leninism, the term dialectic refers to regular relationships, interactions, transformations, motions, and developments of things, phenomena, and processes in nature, society and human thought.^[62]

There are two forms of dialectic: the objective dialectic and the subjective dialectic. The objective dialectic is the dialectic of the material world, while the subjective dialectic is the reflection of objective dialectic in human consciousness. [See Annotation 68, p. 65].

According to Engels, “Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevail throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics (dialectical thought), is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature.”^[63]

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Annotation 96

Dialectics is an umbrella term which includes both forms of dialectical systems: subjective and objective dialectics.

Objective dialectics are the dialectical processes which occur in the material world, including all motion, relationships, and dynamic changes which occur in space and time.

Subjective dialectics, or dialectical thought, is a system of analysis and organized thinking which aims to reflect the objective dialectics of the material world within human consciousness. Dialectical thinking has two component forms: dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics [see Annotation 49, p. 45].

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Subjective dialectics is the theory that studies and summarises the [objective] dialectic of nature into a system with scientific principles and rules, in order to build a system of methodological principles of perception and practice. Dialectics is opposed to metaphysics — a system of thought which conceives of things and phenomena in the world in an isolated and unchanging state [See Annotation 8, p. 8].

b. Basic Forms of Dialectics

Dialectics has developed into three basic forms and levels: ancient primitive dialectics, German idealist dialectics, and the materialist dialectics of Marxism-Leninism.

Ancient primitive dialectics is the earliest form of dialectics. It has developed independently in many philosophical systems in ancient China, India and Greece.

Chinese philosophy has two major forms of ancient primitive dialectics:

• “Changing Theory” (a theory of common principles and rules pertaining to the changes in the universe)
• The “Five Elements Theory” (a theory of the principles of mutual impact and transformation of the five elements of the universe) of the School of Yin-Yang. [See: Primitive Materialism, p. 52]

In Indian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy is a quintessential [see Annotation 6, p. 8] form of ancient primitive dialectics, which includes such concepts as “selflessness,” “impermanence,” and “predestination.”

An ancient, primitive form of dialectics also developed in Ancient Greek philosophy.

Friedrich Engels wrote: “The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought… This primitive, naive, but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.”^[64]

Engels also wrote of Greek dialectics: “Here, dialectical thought still appears in its pristine simplicity, as yet undisturbed by the charming obstacles which the metaphysicists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — Bacon and Locke in England, Wolff in Germany — put in its own way... Among the Greeks — just because they were not yet advanced enough to dissect and analyse nature — nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particular; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation.”^[65]

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Annotation 97

Engels, here, is explaining how the ancient Greek dialecticians were correct to view nature as a cohesive system, a “whole, in general,” which they determined through direct observation of the natural world. The major shortcoming of this ancient Greek form of dialectics was a lack of inquiry into the specific processes and principles of nature. Engels laments that seventeenth and eighteenth century metaphysicists took us backwards by disregarding this view of nature as a cohesive, general whole.

Ancient, primitive dialectics had an accurate awareness of the dialectical characteristic of the world but with its primitive and naive perspective, it still lacked evidence-based forms of natural scientific achievements.

Jumping forward to the late 16^th century, natural sciences started developing rapidly in Europe. Scientists began deeply analysing and studying specific factors and phenomena of nature which led to the birth of modern European metaphysical analysis. In the 18^th century, metaphysics became the dominant methodology in philosophical thought and scientific study. However, when natural scientists moved from studying each subject separately to studying the unification of all those subjects in their relationships, the metaphysical method proved insufficient. Thus, European scientists and philosophers had to transition into a more advanced system of thought: dialectical thought.

The classical German idealist dialectics were founded by Kant and completed by Hegel. According to Engels: “The second form of dialectics, which is the form that comes closest to the German naturalists [natural scientists], is classical German philosophy, from Kant to Hegel.”^[66]

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Annotation 98

Engels discusses this history, and the shortcomings of the metaphysical philosophy of his era, in The Old Preface to Anti-Dühring. First, Engels explains why early modern natural scientists initially did not feel constrained by their adherence to metaphysics, since inquiries in the initial revolution of scientific study were limited to the narrow development of specific fields of inquiry by necessity:

Empirical natural science has accumulated such a tremendous mass of positive material for knowledge that the necessity of classifying it in each separate field of investigation systematically and in accordance with its inner inter-connection has become absolutely imperative.

Engels goes on to explain that at the time he was writing, enough knowledge had been accumulated within specific, distinct fields that it becomes necessary to begin studying the connections and overlaps between different fields, which called for theoretical and philosophical foundations:

It is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not work, here only theoretical thinking can be of assistance.

Unfortunately, natural scientists were held back by the existing metaphysical theoretical foundations which were dominant at the time as, according to Engels, “theoretical thinking is an innate quality only as regards natural capacity. This natural capacity must be developed, improved, and for its improvement there is as yet no other means than the study of previous philosophy.”

Metaphysical theory and formal logic were in common use by natural scientists at the time. As Engels explained in On Dialectics and Dialectics of Nature, metaphysics and formal logic could never be as useful as dialectical analysis for examining and unifying concepts from wide-ranging dynamic systems of overlapping fields of inquiry.

Unfortunately, dialectics had not yet been suitably developed for use in the natural sciences before the work of Marx and Engels in developing dialectical materialism, as Engels explained in On Dialectics:

Formal logic itself has been the arena of violent controversy from the time of Aristotle to the present day. And dialectics has so far been fairly closely investigated by only two thinkers, Aristotle and Hegel. But it is precisely dialectics that constitutes the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another.

The Idealist Dialectics of Hegel [see Annotation 9, p. 10] constituted a major development of dialectics, but the idealist nature of Hegelian dialectics made them unsuitable for natural scientists, who therefore discarded “Old-Hegelian” dialectics and were thus left without a suitable dialectical framework. Again, from On Dialectics:

The year 1848, which otherwise brought nothing to a conclusion in Germany, accomplished a complete revolution there only in the sphere of philosophy [and] the nation resolutely turned its back on classical German philosophy that had lost itself in the sands of Berlin old-Hegelianism... But a nation that wants to climb the pinnacles of science cannot possibly manage without theoretical thought. Not only Hegelianism but dialectics too was thrown overboard — and that just at the moment when the dialectical character of natural processes irresistibly forced itself upon the mind, when therefore only dialectics could be of assistance to natural science in negotiating the mountain of theory — and so there was a helpless relapse into the old metaphysics.

Engels goes on to explain that, having rejected Hegel’s dialectics, natural scientists were set adrift, cobbling together theoretical frameworks from the works of philosophers which were plagued by idealism and metaphysics, and which were therefore not suitable for the task of unifying the disparate fields of natural sciences together:

What prevailed among the public since then were, on the one hand, the vapid reflections of Schopenhauer, which were fashioned to fit the philistines, and later even those of Hartmann; and, on the other hand, the vulgar itinerant-preacher materialism of a Vogt and a Büchner. At the universities the most diverse varieties of eclecticism competed with one another and had only one thing in common, namely, that they were concocted from nothing but remnants of old philosophies and were all equally metaphysical. All that was saved from the remnants of classical philosophy was a certain neo-Kantianism, whose last word was the eternally unknowable thing-in-itself, that is, the bit of Kant [see Annotation 72, p. 68] that least merited preservation. The final result was the incoherence and confusion of theoretical thought now prevalent.

Engels explains that this lack of a proper dialectical materialist framework had frustrated natural scientists of his era:

One can scarcely pick up a theoretical book on natural science without getting the impression that natural scientists themselves feel how much they are dominated by this incoherence and confusion, and that the so-called philosophy now current offers them absolutely no way out. And here there really is no other way out, no possibility of achieving clarity, than by a return, in one form or another, from metaphysical to dialectical thinking.

After explaining that Hegel’s system of dialectics came closest to meeting the needs of contemporary science, Engels explains why Hegelian dialectics were ultimately rejected by the scientific community:

Just as little can it be a question of maintaining the dogmatic content of the Hegelian system as it was preached by the Berlin Hegelians of the older and younger line. Hence, with the fall of the idealist point of departure, the system built upon it, in particular Hegelian philosophy of nature, also falls. It must however be recalled that the natural scientists’ polemic against Hegel, in so far as they at all correctly understood him, was directed solely against these two points: viz., the idealist point of departure and the arbitrary, fact-defying construction of the system.”

In other words, it was the idealism and the unworkable structuring of Hegelian dialectics that prevented its adoption by natural scientists. Engels finally explains how Marx was able to modify Hegel’s idealist dialectics into a materialist form which is suitable for empirical scientific inquiry:

It is the merit of Marx that... he was the first to have brought to the fore again the forgotten dialectical method, its connection with Hegelian dialectics and its distinction from the latter, and at the same time to have applied this method in Capital to the facts of an empirical science, political economy.

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These Classical German philosophers [Kant, Hegel, etc.^[67]] systematically organized idealist dialectics into formal philosophies. Of particular note was Hegel’s belief that the dialectical process would eventually lead to an “absolute idea.” This foundational belief in an “absolute idea” is what chiefly defines Hegelian dialectics as idealist in nature [see Annotation 98, p. 100].

Hegel believed that the subjective dialectic is the basis of the objective dialectic. [In other words, Hegel believed that dialectical thought served as the objective dialectics of the material world.]

According to Hegel, the “absolute idea” was the starting point of all existence, and that this “absolute idea,” after creating the natural world, then came to exist within human consciousness.

Engels wrote that in Hegelian dialectics: “... spirit, mind, the idea, is primary and that the real world is only a copy of the idea.”^[68]

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Annotation 99

In the above quoted passage, Engels was explaining why Hegelian dialectics were unsuitable for use in natural sciences. Here is a longer excerpt:

First of all it must be established that here it is not at all a question of defending Hegel’s point of departure: that spirit, mind, the idea, is primary and that the real world is only a copy of the idea... We all agree that in every field of science, in natural as in historical science, one must proceed from the given facts, in natural science therefore from the various material forms and the various forms of motion of matter; that therefore in theoretical natural science, too, the inter-connections are not to be built into the facts, but to be discovered in them, and when discovered to be verified as far as possible by experiment.

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The German idealists (most notably Hegel) built an idealist system of dialectics organized into categories and common laws along with a strict logic of consciousness.

Lenin stated that: “Hegel brilliantly divined the dialectics of things (phenomena, the world, nature) in the dialectics of concepts.”^[69]

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Annotation 100

What Lenin means, here, is that Hegel inadvertently and unconsciously discovered the concept of reflection [see Annotation 68, p. 65]. Hegel intuitively understood that the material world was reflected in human consciousness, and, by extension, subjective dialectics (dialectical thought) reflected objective dialectics (of the material world). Hegel’s error was an inversion of the ideal and the material. As Marx later pointed out in the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital Volume I, it is the material which precedes the ideal, and not the other way around:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos [craftsman/artisan/creator] of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

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Engels also quoted and emphasized Marx’s thoughts [in the Old Preface to Anti-Dühring, citing another quote of Marx from the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital Volume I, further quoted in Annotation 100 above]: “The mystification which dialectics suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”^[70]

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Annotation 101

In the Old Preface to Anti-Dühring, Engels explains some of the contemporary currents of science and philosophy of his era. Engels explains that Hegelian philosophy had been dismissed by a newer current of natural scientists who dismissed “the idealist point of departure and the arbitrary, fact-defying construction of the system.” In other words, the natural scientists rejected Hegelianism because it was both idealist and was not built on a foundation of objective facts.

Engels points out, however, that Marx “was the first to have brought to the fore again the forgotten dialectical method” of Hegel.

The dialectical method was forgotten in the sense that the natural scientists ignored and dismissed dialectics along with the rest of Hegel’s philosophy. So, Engels is pointing out that one of the great contributions of Marx was salvaging the dialectical method from Hegel while rejecting the idealist and non-fact-based characteristics of Hegelian philosophy.

Marx, according to Engels, proved that the dialectical method could be separated from idealism by “[applying the dialectical method] in Capital to the facts of an empirical science, political economy.” This was the origin of dialectical materialism: the resurrection of the dialectical method and the development of a dialectical method in a materialist and scientific form.

The idealist characteristics of classical German dialectics and Hegelian philosophy was a limitation that needed to be overcome [so that it could be utilized for scientific inquiry]. Marx and Engels overcame that limitation and in so doing developed materialist dialectics. This system of dialectics is the most advanced form of dialectics in the history of philosophy to date. It is the successor of previous systems of dialectics, and it arose as a critique of the classical German dialectics.

Engels said: “Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics from German idealist philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and history.”^[71]

2. Materialist Dialectics

a. Definition of Materialist Dialectics

Materialist dialectics have been defined in various ways by many prominent Marxist-Leninist philosophers.

Engels defined materialist dialectics as: “nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought.”^[72]

Engels also emphasized the role of the principle of general relations.^[73] As John Burdon

Sanderson Haldane noted in the 1939 preface to Dialectics of Nature: “In dialectics they

[Marx and Engels] saw the science of the general laws of change.”^[74]

Lenin emphasized the important role of the principles of development^[75] (including the theory of cognitive development) in the dialectics that Marx inherited from Hegelian philosophy.

Lenin wrote: “The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest, and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter.”^[76]

b. Basic Features and Roles of Materialist Dialectics

There are two basic features of the materialist dialectics of Marxism-Leninism:

First, the materialist dialectics of Marxism-Leninism is a system of dialectics that is based on the foundation of the scientific materialist viewpoint.

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Annotation 102

Remember that scientific in Marxism-Leninism refers broadly to a systematic pursuit of knowledge, research, theory, and understanding [see Objects and Purposes of Study, p. 38]. Remember also that materialism in Marxism-Leninism has specific meaning as well, which differentiates it from other forms of materialism [see Dialectical Materialism — the Most Advanced Form of Materialism, p. 52]. Here, materialism includes an understanding that the material is the first basis of reality, meaning that the material determines the ideal (though human consciousness can impact the material world through willpower and labor [see Nature and Structure of Consciousness, p. 79]). Materialism is also built upon scientific explanations (rooted in empirical data and practice, i.e. systematic experimentation and observation) of the world. And finally, remember that viewpoint is the starting point of inquiry [see Annotation 11, p. 12].

Thus, a scientific materialist viewpoint is a perspective which begins analysis of the world in a manner that is both scientifically systematic in pursuit of understanding and firmly rooted in a materialist conception of the world.

Note: Materialist Dialectics contains Twelve Basic Pairs of Categories, Two Basic Principles and Three Universal Laws. These are summarized, respectively, in Appendix A (p. 246), Appendix B (p. 247), and Appendix C (p. 248), and explained in depth throughout the rest of this chapter.

In this way, materialist dialectics fundamentally differs from the classical German idealist dialectics, and especially differs from Hegelian dialectics^[77] (as these dialectics were founded on idealist viewpoints).

Moreover, it also has a higher level of development compared to other dialectical systems of thought found in the history of philosophy going back to ancient times. Such previous forms of dialectics were fundamentally based on materialist stances, however the materialism of those ancient times was still naive, primitive and surface-level.

Second, the materialist dialectics of Marxism-Leninism unifies dialectical materialist viewpoints and materialist dialectical methodology, so it not only explains the world, but is also a tool humans can use to perceive and improve the world.

Every principle and law of Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectics is both:

1. An accurate explanation of the dialectical characteristics of the world.

2. A scientific methodology for perceiving and improving the world.

By summarizing the general interconnections and development of all things — every phenomenon in nature, society and human thought — Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectics provides the most general methodological principles for the process of perceiving and improving the world. They are not just objective methodological principles; they are a comprehensive, constantly developing, and historical methodology.

This methodology can be used to analyze contradictions [see Annotation 119, p. 123] in order to find the basic origins and motivations of both motion and developmental processes. Therefore, materialist dialectics is a great scientific tool for the revolutionary class to perceive and improve the world.

With these basic features, materialist dialectics plays a very important role in the worldview and philosophical methodology of Marxism-Leninism. Materialist dialectics are the foundation of the scientific and revolutionary characteristics of Marxism-Leninism and also offer the most general worldview and methodology for creative activities in scientific study and practical activities.

II. Basic Principles of Materialist Dialectics

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Annotation 103

The Principle of General Relationships and the Principle of Development are the most basic principles of materialist dialectics. These two principles are dialectically related to one another.

The following sections will outline the Principle of General Relationships and the Principle of Development, which are the most fundamental principles of materialist dialectics. These two concepts are closely (and dialectically) related:

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1. The Principle of General Relationships

a. Definition of Relationship and Common Relationship

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Annotation 104

The Principle of General Relationships describes how all things, phenomena, and ideas are related to one another, and are defined by these internal and external relationships

The Principle of Development relates to the idea that motion, change, and development are driven by internal and external relationships.

These two principles are dialectically linked: any given subject is defined by its internal relationships, and these same relationships drive the development of every subject.

Note: The foundation of the principles of Materialist Dialectics were laid out by

Engels in Dialectics of Nature. Engels began working on Dialectics of Nature in February, 1870 and had to stop in 1876 to work on Anti-Dühring. He then restarted work on Dialectics of Nature in 1878 and continued working on it until 1883, when Karl Marx died. Engels felt that it was more important to try and put together Marx’s great unfinished works, Capital Volumes 2, 3, and 4, and so stopped working on Dialectics of Nature once again. So, unfortunately, Engels died before this seminal work on Materialist Dialectics could be completed, and what we have instead is an unfinished assemblage of notes.

What follows in the rest of this book is a cohesive system of Materialist Dialectics which was built upon the foundations laid out by Engels in Dialectics of Nature and many other works of political and scholarly writing from various sources. This is the system of Materialist Dialectics studied by Vietnamese students and applied by Vietnamese communists today.

Because this text comes from predominantly Vietnamese scholarship and ideological development, we have had to translate some terms into English which are not derived from the “canon” of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In some cases, various terms have been consolidated into one concept. For example: Engels used the term “interconnection” (German: innern Zusammenhang, literally: “inner connections”) in Dialectics of Nature, but Vietnamese political scientists use the term “relationship.” Where Engels uses the term “motion” (German: Bewegung) modern Vietnamese communists tend to use the word “development.” Wherever this is the case, we have chosen to use the words in English which most closely match the language used in the original Vietnamese of this text.

In materialist dialectics, the word relationship refers to the regulating principles, mutual interactions, and mutual transformations which exist between things, phenomena, and ideas, as well as those existing between aspects and factors within things, phenomena, and ideas.

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Annotation 105

Throughout this book, phenomenon/phenomena simply refers to anything that is observable by the human senses.

Materialist dialectics examines relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas and within things, phenomena, and ideas. A relationship which occurs between two separate things or phenomena is referred to as an external relationship. A relationship which occurs within a thing or phenomenon is referred to as an internal relationship.

These terms are relative; sometimes a relationship may be internal in one context but external in a different context. For example, consider a solar system:

When considering a solar system as a whole, the orbit of a moon around a planet may be considered as an internal relationship of the solar system. But when considering the moon as an isolated subject, its orbit around a planet may be seen as an external relationship which the moon has with the planet.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-24.png

The diagram above illustrates different types of relationships:

Object 1 has its own internal relationships (A), and, from its own perspective, it also has external relationships with Object 2 (B). From a wider perspective, the relationship between Object 1 and Object 2 (B) may be viewed as an internal relationship.

This system of relationships (between Object 1 and Object 2) will also have external relationships with other things, phenomena, and ideas (C).

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Relationships have a quality of generality, which refers to how frequently they occur between and within things, phenomena, and ideas. When we refer to general relationships, we are usually referring to relationships which exist broadly across many things, phenomena, and ideas. General relationships can exist both internally, within things, phenomena, and ideas, and externally, between things, phenomena, and ideas.

The most general relationships are universal relationships: these are relationships that exist between and within everything and all phenomena, and they are one of the two primary subjects of study of materialist dialectics. [The other primary subject of study is the Principle of Development; see page 119.]

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Annotation 106

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-25.png

The discussion of generality of relationships can seem confusing at first. What’s important to understand is that generality is a spectrum ranging from the least general relationships (unique relationships, which only occur between two specific things/phenomena/ideas) and the most general relationships (universal relationships, which occur between or within all things/phenomena/ideas).

Of particular importance in the study of materialist dialectics are universal relationships which exist within and between all things, phenomena, and ideas [see below].

Translation Note: In the original Vietnamese, the word “universal” is not used. Instead, the compound term “phổ biến nhất” is used, which literally means “most general.” In Vietnamese, this phrasing is commonly used to describe the concept of “universal” and it is thus not confusing to Vietnamese speakers. For this translation, we have opted to use the word “universal” because we feel it is less confusing and better explains the concept in English.

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The universal relationships include (but are not limited to):

• Relationships between basic philosophical category pairs (Private and Common, Essence and Phenomenon, etc.). ^[78]
• Relationships between quantity and quality. ^[79]
• Relationships between opposites. ^[80]

Together, in all forms of relationships in nature, society and human thought (special, general, and universal) there is unity in diversity and diversity in unity.

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Annotation 107

Principle of General Relationships

According to Curriculum of the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism For University and College Students Specializing in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought: “Materialist dialectics upholds the position that all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in mutual relationships with each other, regulate each other, transform into each other, and that nothing exists in complete isolation. That is the core idea of the Principle of General Relationships.”

From this Principle, we find the characteristics of Diversity in Unity and Unity in Diversity; the basis of Diversity in Unity is the fact that every thing, phenomenon, or idea, contains many different relationships; the basis of Unity in Diversity is that many different relationships exist — unified — within each and every thing, phenomenon, and idea.

Diversity in Unity

There exist an infinite number of diverse relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas, but all of these relationships share the same foundation in the material world.

An infinite diversity of relationships exist within the unity of the material world.

The material world is not a chaotic and random assortment of things, phenomena, and ideas. Rather, it is a system of relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas. Likewise, since the material world exists as the foundation of all things, phenomena, and ideas, the material world is thus the foundation for all relationships within and between things, phenomena, and ideas. Because all relationships share a foundation in the material world, they also exist in unity, even though all relationships are diversified and different from one another.

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Universal relationships which unite all things, phenomena, and ideas manifest in infinitely diverse ways.

Unity in Diversity

When we examine the universal relationships that exist within and between all different things, phenomena, and ideas, we will find that each individual manifestation of any universal relationship will have its own different manifestations, aspects, features, etc. Thus even the universal relationships which unite all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in infinite diversity.

Paraphrased From: Curriculum of the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism For University and College Students Specializing in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought

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b. Characteristics of Relationships

Objectiveness, generality, and diversity are the three basic characteristics of relationships.

- The Characteristic of Objectiveness of Relationships

According to the materialist dialectical viewpoint, relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas have objective characteristics.

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Annotation 108

In materialist dialectics, objectiveness is an abstract concept that refers to the relative externality of all things, phenomena, and ideas. Every thing, phenomena and idea exists externally to every other thing, phenomena, and idea. This means that to each individual subject (i.e., each individual thing/phenomena/idea), all other things, phenomena, and ideas are external objects

All things, phenomena, and ideas have the relative characteristic of objectiveness.

All together, the collection of all things, phenomena, and ideas in the universe create the external reality of any given subject. So, objectiveness is relative. In the case of human beings, every individual person exists as an individual subject to which all other things, phenomena, and ideas (including other human beings) have objective characteristics.

Alice and Bob are external to one another; each is objective from the other’s perspective.

Of course, objectiveness is always relative. Something might be external from a certain perspective but not from another perspective. For example, say there are two people: Bob and Alice. From Bob’s perspective, Alice has objective characteristics. But from Alice’s perspective, Bob would have objective characteristics.

The relationship between Alice and Bob has objective characteristics to both Alice and Bob.

As all relationships are inherently external to any given subject (even subjects which are party to the relationship), relationships also have objective characteristics.

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Whenever two things, phenomena, or ideas have a relationship with one another, they form a pair. The relationship is inherent to this pair and external to any subject which exists outside of the pair. The mutual interaction and mutual transformation which occurs to the things, phenomena, or objects within the pair as the result of the relationship are inherent and objective properties of the pair.

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Annotation 109 Translation note:

In the original Vietnamese text, the word for “objective” is “khách quan.” This is a compound word in which “khách” means “guest,” and “quan” means “point of view.” Therefore, “khách quan” literally means “the guest’s (or outsider’s) point of view.”

Thus we translate this to “objectiveness/objective,” the characteristic of being viewed from the outside.

The word “inherent” in the original Vietnamese is “vốn có.” This is another compound word: “vốn” is a shortened form of the word “vốn dĩ,” which means “by or through nature,” “naturally,” and “intrinsically.” “Có” means “to have” or “to exist.” “Vốn có” thus means “already existing naturally” or “already there, through nature.”

So we use the word “inherent” to mean “existing intrinsically or naturally within, without external influence.”

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Human beings can’t change or impact external things and phenomena — and the relationships between them — through human will alone. Humans are limited to perceiving relationships between things and phenomena and then impacting or changing them through our practical activities.

- The Characteristic of Generality of Relationships

According to the dialectical viewpoint, there is no thing, phenomenon, nor idea that exists in absolute isolation from other things, phenomena and ideas.

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Annotation 110

Although all things, phenomena, and ideas have the characteristic of externality and objectiveness to all other things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 108, p. 112], this does not mean that they exist in isolation. Isolation implies a complete lack of any relationships with other things, phenomena, and ideas. On the contrary, according to the Principle of General Relationships [see p. 107], all things, phenomena, and ideas have relationships with all other things, phenomena, and ideas.

Simultaneously, there is also no known thing, phenomenon, nor idea that does not have a systematic structure, including component parts which in turn have their own internal relationships. This means that every existence is a system, and, moreso, is an open system that exists in relation with other systems. All systems interact and mutually transform one another.

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Annotation 111

As explained above, a systematic structure is a structure which includes within itself a system of component parts and relationships. It has been postulated by some scientific models that there may be some “fundamental base particle” (quarks, preons, etc.), which, if true, would mean that there is a certain basic material component which cannot be further broken down. However, this would not contradict the Principle of Materialist Dialectics of General Relationships (which states that all things, phenomena, and ideas interact with and mutually transform one another — see Annotation 107, p. 110).

- The Characteristic of Diversity of Relationships

In addition to affirming the objectiveness^[81] and generality^[82] of relationships, the dialectical viewpoint of Marxism-Leninism also emphasizes the diversity of relationships. The characteristic of diversity is defined by the following features:

• All things, phenomena, and ideas have different relationships. Every relationship plays a distinct role in the existence and development of the things, phenomena, and ideas which are included within.
• Any given relationship between things, phenomena, and ideas will have different characteristics and manifestations under different conditions and/or during different periods of motion and/or at different stages of development.

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Annotation 112

One of Marx’s most critical observations was that things are defined by their internal and external relationships, including human beings. For example, in Theses on Feuerbach, Marx wrote that “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.” It is only through relationships — through mutual impacts and transformations — that things, phenomena, and ideas (including human beings and human societies) change and develop over time. All of these relationships — which both define and transform all things, phenomena, and ideas in existence — exist in infinite diversity [see Annotation 107, p. 110].

Just as things, phenomena, and ideas change and transform through the course of relations with one another, the nature of the relationships themselves also change and develop over time.

Characteristics refer to the features and attributes that exist internally within a given thing, phenomena, or idea.

Manifestation refers to how a given thing, phenomena, or idea is expressed externally in the material world.

For example, a ball may have the characteristics of being made of rubber, having a mass of 100 grams, and having a melting point of 260℃. It may manifest by bouncing on the ground, having a spherical shape, and having a red appearance to human observers.

If ten such balls exist, they will all be slightly different. Even if they have the same mass and material composition, they will have slightly different variations in size, shape, etc. Even if each ball will melt at 260℃, the melting will manifest differently for each ball — they will melt into slightly different shapes, at slightly different speeds, etc.

Relationships also have characteristics and manifestations. For example, the moon’s orbit around the Earth is a relationship. It has characteristics such as the masses of each related body, forces of gravity, and other factors which produce and influence the orbit. The same orbital relationship also has manifestations such as the duration of the moon’s orbit around the Earth, the size of its ellipse, the orbit’s effects on the tides of the Earth’s ocean, etc.

Characteristics and Manifestation correspond, respectively, to the philosophical category pair of Content and Form, which is discussed in section page 147.

Therefore, no two relationships are exactly the same, even if they exist between very similar things, phenomena, and ideas and/or in very similar situations.

It is also important to note that the characteristic of diversity also applies to things, phenomena, and ideas themselves. In other words, every individual thing, phenomenon, and idea in existence also manifests differently from every other thing, phenomenon, and idea in existence, even if they seem quite similar.

c. Meaning of the Methodology

Based on the objective and popular characteristics of relationships, we can see that in our cognitive and practical activities, we have to have a comprehensive viewpoint.

Having a comprehensive viewpoint requires that in the process of perceiving and handling real life situations, humans have to consider the internal dialectical relationships between the component parts, factors, and aspects within a thing or phenomenon. We also need to consider the external mutual interactions they have with other things, phenomena, and ideas. Only on such a comprehensive basis can we properly understand things and phenomena and then effectively handle problems in real life. So, the comprehensive viewpoint is the opposite of a unilateral and/or metaphysical viewpoint [see Annotation 51, p. 49] in both perception and practice.

Lenin said: “If we are to have true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all of its facets, its connections, and ‘mediacies [indirect relationships].’”^[83]

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Annotation 113

The comprehensive viewpoint sees the subject in terms of all of its internal and external relationships.

Consider a factory. A factory exists as a collection of internal relationships (between the workers, between machines, between the workers and the machines, etc.) and external relationships (between the factory and its suppliers, between the factory and its customers, between the factory and the city, etc.). In order to have a comprehensive viewpoint when examining the factory, one must consider and understand all of the internal and external relationships which define it.

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The diversified characteristic of relationships [see Annotation 107, p. 110] shows that in human cognitive and practical activities, we have to simultaneously use a comprehensive viewpoint and a historical viewpoint.

Having a historical viewpoint requires that, in perceiving and handling real life situations, we need to consider the specific properties of subjects, including their current stage of motion and development. We also need to consider that the exact same methods can’t be used to deal with different situations in reality — our methods must be tailored to suit the exact situation based on material conditions.

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Annotation 114

While the comprehensive viewpoint focuses on internal and external relationships of subjects, the historical viewpoint focuses on the specific properties of subjects — especially the current stage of motion and development. In order to have a proper historical viewpoint, we must study and understand the way a subject has developed and transformed over time. To do this, we must examine the history of the subject’s changes over time, hence the term “historical viewpoint.” In addition, it’s important to understand that no two situations which we might encounter will ever be exactly the same. This is because the component parts and relationships that make up any given situation will manifest differently.

So, in order to properly deal with situations, we have to understand the component parts and relationships of examined subjects as well as their histories of development so that we can develop plans and strategies that are suitable to the unique circumstances at hand.

For example, it would be disastrous if communists today tried to employ the exact same methods which were used by the Communist Party of Vietnam in the 20^th century to defeat Japan, France, and the USA. This is because the material conditions and relationships of Vietnam in the 20^th century were very different from any material conditions existing on Earth today. It is possible to learn lessons from studying the methods of the Vietnamese revolution and to adapt some such methods to our modern circumstances, but it would be extremely ineffective to try to copy those methods and strategies — exactly as they manifested then and there — to the here and now.

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In order to come up with suitable and effective solutions to deal with real life problems, we must clearly define the roles and positions of each specific relationship that comes into play, and the specific time, place, and material conditions in which they exist.

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Annotation 115

A historical viewpoint focuses on the roles and positions of relationships and properties of subjects as well as their development over time.

The role of a relationship has to do with how it functions within a system of relationships and the position refers to its placement amongst other subjects and relationships.

Consider once again the example of the factory [see Annotation 113]. In addition to its internal and external relationships, the factory also has various roles — it functions within various systems and from various perspectives. For instance, the factory may have the role of financial asset for the corporation that owns it, it may have the role of place of employment for the surrounding community, it may have the role of supplier for various customers, etc.

The factory is also positioned among other subjects and relations. If it’s the only employer in town then it would have a position of great importance to the people of the community. If, on the other hand, if it’s just one of hundreds of factories in a heavily industrialized area, it may have a position of much less importance. It may have a position of great importance to an individual factory worker who lives in poverty in an economy where there are very few available jobs, but of less importance to a freelance subcontractor for whom the factory is just one of many customers, and so on.

These positions and roles will change over time. For example, the factory may initially exist as a small workshop with a small handful of workers, but it may grow into a massive factory with hundreds of employees. It is vital to understand this Principle of Development, which is discussed in more detail on the next page.

In summary, proper dialectical materialist analysis requires a comprehensive and historical viewpoint — we must consider subjects both comprehensively in terms of the internal and external relationships of the subject itself as well as historically in terms of roles and positions of subjects, as well as their relationships, material conditions, and development over time.

So, in both perception and practice, we have to avoid and overcome sophistry and eclectic viewpoints.

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Annotation 116

Sophistry is the use of falsehoods and misleading arguments, usually with the intention of deception, and with a tendency of presenting non-critical aspects of a subject matter as critical, to serve a particular agenda. The word comes from the Sophists, a group of professional teachers in Ancient Greece, who were criticized by Socrates (in Plato’s dialogues) for being shrewd and deceptive rhetoricians. This kind of bad faith argument has no place in materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics must, instead, be rooted in a true and accurate understanding of the subject, material conditions, and reality in general.

Eclecticism is an incoherent approach to philosophical inquiry which attempts to draw from various different theories, frameworks, and ideas to attempt to understand a subject, applying different theories in different situations without any consistency in analysis and thought. Eclectic arguments are typically composed of various pieces of evidence that are cherry picked and pieced together to form a perspective that lacks clarity. By definition, because they draw from different systems of thought without seeking a clear and cohesive understanding of the totality of the subject and its internal and external relations and its development over time, eclectic arguments run counter to the comprehensive and historical viewpoints. Eclecticism is somewhat similar to dialectical materialism in that it attempts to consider a subject from many different perspectives, and analyzes relationships pertaining to a subject, but the major flaw of eclecticism is a lack of clear and coherent systems and principles, which leads to a chaotic viewpoint and an inability to grasp the true nature of the subject at hand.

2. Principle of Development

a. Definition of Development

According to the metaphysical viewpoint, development is simply a quantitative increase or decrease; the metaphysical viewpoint does not account for qualitative changes of things and phenomena. Simultaneously, the metaphysical viewpoint also views development as a process of continuous progressions which follow a linear and straightforward path.

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Annotation 117

In materialist dialectics, it is important to distinguish between quantity and quality.

Quantity describes the total amount of component parts that compose a subject.

Quality describes the unity of component parts, taken together, which defines the subject and distinguishes it from other subjects.

Both quantity and quality are dynamic attributes; over time, the quantity and quality of all things develop and change over time through the development of internal and external relationships. Quantity and quality itself form a dialectical relationship, and as quantity develops, quality will also develop. A given subject may be described by various quantity and quality relationships.

Example 1:

In the process of development, Quantity Change leads to Quality Change

A single football player, alone, has the quantity value of 1 football player and the quality of a football player. Eleven football players on a field would have the quantity value of 1 and will develop the quality of a football team. This subject, football team, is composed of the same component parts as the subject football player, but the quantity change and other properties (being on a field, playing a game or practicing, etc.) change the quality of the component parts into a different stable and unified form which we call a football team.

The relationship between quantity and quality is dynamic:

If one of the players doesn’t show up for practice, and there are only ten players on the field, it might still have the quality of football team, but in a live professional game there will be a certain threshold — a minimum number of players who must be present to officially be considered a team. If this number of players can’t be fielded then they will not be considered a full team and thus won’t be allowed to play.

Likewise, if there are only one or two players practicing together in a park, they would probably not be considered a football team (though they might be described in terms of having the quality of being on the same team).

Example 2:

Quantity: 1 O + 2 H atoms Quantity: Billions of H2O Molecules Quantity: ~5,000 Drops of Water Quality: Water Quality: Drop of Water Quality: Cup of Water

DEVELOPMENT: QUANTITY CHANGE LEADS TO QUALITY CHANGE

All of these have the quality of water because of the molecular quantities of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, however, from the perspective of volume, quantity changes still lead to quality changes.

The properties of quantity and quality are relative, depending on the viewpoint of analysis.

A single molecule of water has a quantity of one in terms of molecules, but it still retains the quality of “water” because of the quantities of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms per molecule which, in this stable form, give it the quality of water.

A drop of water might have a quantity of many billions of molecules, but it would still have the quality of “water.” It would also now assume the quality of a “drop.”

When you combine enough drops of water, you will eventually have a quality shift where the “drops” of water combine to form another quality — i.e., a “cup” of water. The quantity change leads to a change in quantity; we would no longer think of the water in terms of “drops” after the quantity rises to a certain level.

In terms of temperature and physical properties, if the water is heated to a certain point it will boil and the water will become steam. The quantity of water in terms of drops wouldn’t change, but the quantity-value of temperature would eventually lead to a quality value change from “water” to “steam.”

Example 3:

AS QUANTITY OF AGE INCREASES, QUALITY CHANGES

The same human being will undergo various quality changes as age quantity increases over time.

As humans age and the quantity of years we’ve lived builds up over time, our “quality” also changes, from baby, to child, to teenager, to young adult, to middle age, to old age, and eventually to death. The individual person is still the same human being, but the quality of the person will shift over time as the quantity-value of age increases.

Metaphysical vs. Dialectical Materialist Conceptions of Change

Metaphysics only consider linear properties of quantitychange; Materialist Dialectics takes quantity changes and quality shifts into consideration when considering change over time.

Because the metaphysical perspective tries to define the world in terms of static, isolated subjects, only quantity is considered and quality shifts are not taken into account. Thus, metaphysical logic sees development as linear, simple, and straightforward. Materialist dialectics, on the other hand, sees development as a more complicated, fluid, and dynamic process involving multiple internal and external relationships changing in quantity and quality over time.

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In contrast to the metaphysical viewpoint, in materialist dialectics, development refers to the motion of things and phenomena with a forward tendency: from less advanced to more advanced, from a less complete to a more complete level.

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Annotation 118

In materialist dialectics, motion (also known as change) is the result of mutual impacts between or within things, phenomena, and ideas, and all motion and change results from mutual impacts which themselves result from internal and external relationships with other things, phenomena, and ideas. Any given motion/change leads to quantity changes, and these quantity changes cumulatively lead to quality changes [see Annotation 117, p. 119]. Grasping this concept — that development is driven by relations — is critically important for understanding materialist dialectics.

The concept of “change” in materialist dialectics centers on internal and external relationships causing mutual impacts which lead to quantity changes which build into quality shifts.

This process, taken in total, is referred to as development. Development represents the entire process in which internal and external change/motion leads to changes in quantity which in turn lead to changes in quality over time. The process of development can be fast or slow, complex or simple, and can even move backwards, and all of these properties are relative. Development has a tendency to develop from less advanced to more advanced forms. The word tendency is used to denote phenomena, development, and motion which inclines in a particular direction. There may be exceptional cases which contradict such tendencies, but the general motion will incline towards one specific manner. Thus, it is important to note that “development” is not necessarily “good” nor “bad.” In some cases, “development” might well be considered “bad,” or unwanted. For example, rust developing on a car is typically not desired. So, the tendency of development from lower to higher levels of advancement implies a “forward motion,” though this motion can take an infinite number of forms, depending on the relative perspective. Development can also (temporarily) halt in a state of equilibrium [see Annotation 64, p. 62] or it can shift direction; though it can never “reverse,” just as time itself can never be “reversed.”

For example, during a flood, water may “develop” over the land, and as the floodwaters recede this may alternatively be viewed as another “forward” development process of recession — a development of the overall “flooding and receding” process. The flood is not actually “reversing” — the development is not being “undone.” Flood water may recede but it will leave behind many traces and impacts; thus it is not a true “reversal” of development.

Both flooding and flood recession are development processes with the same forward tendency. Flood recession may appear to be a “reversal,” but it is in fact forward development.

The false belief that development can be reversed is the root of conservative and reactionary positions [see Annotation 208].

Development can be considered positive or negative, depending on perspective. Some ecosystems have natural flood patterns which are vital for sustaining life. For a person living in a flood zone, however, the flood would most likely be considered an unwanted development, whereas flood recession would be a welcomed development.

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It is important to note that the definition of development is not identical to the concept of “motion” (change) in general. It is not merely a simple quantitative increase or decrease, nor a repetitive cyclic change in quantity. Instead, in materialist dialectics, development is defined in terms of qualitative changes with the direction of advancing towards higher and more advanced levels. [See diagram Relationship Between Motion,

Quantity/Quality Shifts, and Dialectical Development, Annotation 119, below]

Development is also the process of creating and solving objective contradictions within and between things and phenomena. Development is thus the unified process of negating negative factors while retaining and advancing positive factors from old things and phenomena as they transform into new things and phenomena.

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Annotation 119

A contradiction is a relationship in which two forces oppose one another. Although a contradiction might exist in equilibrium for some amount of time [see Annotation 64, p. 62], eventually, one force will overcome the other, resulting in a change of quality. This process of overcoming is called negation. In short, development is a process of change in a subject’s quantity as well as negation of contradictions within and between subjects, leading to quality shifts over time.

b. Characteristics of Development

Every development has the characteristics of objectiveness,^[84] generality,^[85] and diversity.^[86]The characteristic of objectiveness of development stems from the origin of motion.

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Annotation 120

Remember that, in materialist dialectics, objectiveness is the relative characteristic that every subject has of existing and developing externally to all other subjects [see Annotation 108, p. 112]. Since motion originates from mutual impacts which occur between external things, objects, and relationships, the motions themselves also occur externally (relative to all other things, phenomena, and objects). This gives motion itself objective characteristics.

Dialectical Development consists of Quantity and Quality Shifts, which in turn derive from motion.

Development is derived from motion as a process of quality shifting which arise from quantity changes which arise from motion [see Annotation 117, p. 119]. Since development is essentially an accumulation of motion, and motion is objective, development itself must also be objective.

The Principle of Development states that development is a process that comes from within the thing-in-itself; the process of solving the contradictions within things and phenomena. Therefore, development is inevitable, objective, and occurs without dependence on human will.

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Annotation 121

The “thing-in-itself” refers to the actual material object which exists outside of our consciousness [see Annotation 72, p. 68]. Development arises from motion and self-motion [see Annotation 62, p. 59] with objective characteristics. Although human will can impact motion and development through conscious activity in the material world [see The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88], motion and development can and does occur without being dependent on human will. Human will is neither a requirement nor prerequisite for motion and development to occur.

Development has the characteristic of generality because development occurs in every process that exists in every field of nature, society, and human thought; in every thing, every phenomenon, and every idea and at every stage* of all things, phenomena, and ideas. Every transformation process contains the possibility that it might lead to the birth of a new thing, phenomenon, or idea [through a change in quality, i.e. development].

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Annotation 122

* In materialist dialectics, “stage” (or “stage of development”) refers to the current quantity and quality characteristics which a thing, phenomenon, or object possesses. Every time a quality change occurs, a new stage of development is entered into.

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Development has the characteristic of diversity because every thing, phenomenon, and idea has its own process of development that is not totally identical to the process of development of any other thing, phenomenon, or idea. Things and phenomena will develop differently in different spaces and times. Simultaneously, within their own processes of development, things, phenomena, and ideas are impacted by other things, phenomena, and ideas, as well as by many other factors and historical conditions. Such impacts can change the direction of development of things, phenomena, and ideas. They can even temporarily set development back, and/or can lead to growth in one aspect but degeneration in another.

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Annotation 123

Because development has the characteristic of generality and the characteristic of diversity, the principle of diversity in unity and unity in diversity also applies to development [see: Annotation 107, p. 110].

c. Meaning of the Methodology

Materialist dialectics upholds that the principle of development is the scientific theoretical basis that we must use to guide our perception of the world and to improve the world. Therefore, in our perception and reality, we have to have a development viewpoint.

According to Lenin: “dialectical logic requires that an object should be considered in development, in change, in ‘self-movement.”^[87]

This development viewpoint [which holds that all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly developing, and that development is thus unavoidable] requires us to overcome conservatism, stagnation^[88], and prejudice, which are all opposed to development.

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Annotation 124

Conservatism and prejudice are mindsets which seek to prevent and stifle development and to hold humanity in a static position. Not only is this detrimental to humanity, it is also ultimately a wasted effort, because development is inevitable in human society, as in all things, phenomena, and ideas. Therefore, we must avoid and fight against such stagnant mindsets.

According to this development viewpoint, in order to perceive or solve any problem in real life, we must consider all things, phenomena, and ideas with their own forward tendency of development taken in mind. On the other hand, the path of development is a dialectical process that is reversible and full of contradictions. Therefore, we must be aware of this complexity in our analysis and planning. This means we need to have a historical viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116] which accounts for the diversity and complexity of development in perceiving and solving issues in reality.

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Annotation 125

Materialist dialectics requires us to consider the complexity and constant motion of reality. By comparison, the metaphysical viewpoint (which considers all things, phenomena, and ideas as static, isolated entities which have linear and simple processes of development) stands as a barrier to understanding this complexity and incorporating it into our worldview. Thus, it is vital that we develop comprehensive and historical viewpoints which acknowledge the diversity and complexity of reality.

In summary, as a science of common relations and development, Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectics serve a very important role in perception and practice. Engels affirmed the role of materialist dialectics in this passage:

“An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics, with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes.”

Lenin also said: “Dialectics requires an all-round consideration of relationships in their concrete development, but not a patchwork of bits and pieces.”^[89]

III. Basic Pairs of Categories of Materialist Dialectics

Category* is the most general grouping of aspects, attributes, and relations of things, phenomena, and ideas. Different specific fields of inquiry may categorize things, phenomena, and/or ideas differently from one another.

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Annotation 126

* Translation note: In Vietnamese, the word “phạm trù” is used here, which translates in this context more closely to the English philosophical term “category of being,” which means “the most general, fundamental, or broadest class of entities.” “Category of being” is sometimes simplified in English-language philosophical discourse to “category,” which we have chosen to do here for ease of reading and to better reflect the way it reads in the original Vietnamese.

Every science has its own systems of categories that reflect the aspects, attributes, and basic relations that fall within its scope of study. For example, mathematics contains the categories “arithmetic,” “geometry,” “point,” “plane,” and “constant.” Physics contains the categories of “mass,” “speed,” “acceleration,” and “force,” and so on. Economics includes “commodity,” “value,” “price,” “monetary,” and “profit” categories.

Every such category reflects only the common relations found within the specific fields that fall within the scope of study of a specific science.

Categories of materialist dialectics, on the other hand, such as “matter,” “consciousness,” “motion,” “contradiction,” “quality,” “quantity,” “reason,” and “result,” are different. Categories of materialist dialectics reflect the most general aspects and attributes, as well as the most basic and general relations, of not just some specific fields of study, but of the whole of reality, including all of nature, society and human thought.

Every thing, phenomenon, and idea has many properties, including: a reason for existing in its current form, a process of motion and change, contradictions, content, form, and so on. These properties are aspects, attributes, and relations that are reflected in the categories of materialist dialectics. Therefore, the relationship between the categories of specific sciences and categories of materialist dialectics is a dialectical relationship between the Private and the Common [see Private and Common, p. 128].

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Annotation 127

The categories of specific sciences are limited to the scope of study, while the categories of materialist dialectics encompass all things, phenomena, and ideas.

Unlike the categories contained within specific scientific fields, the philosophical categories of materialist dialectics can be used to analyze and define all things, phenomena, and ideas. The categories of specific scientific fields and the materialist dialectical categories have a Private/Common dialectical relationship [discussed on the next page].

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As a science of general relations and development, materialist dialectics summarizes the most general relations of every field of nature, society, and human thought into basic category pairs: Private and Common, Reason and Result, Obviousness and Randomness, Content and Form, Essence and Phenomenon, Possibility and Reality.

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Annotation 128

Every individual materialist dialectical category has a dialectical relationship with another materialist dialectical category. Thus, all categories in materialist dialectics are presented as category pairs. So, a category pair is simply a pair of categories within materialist dialectics which have a dialectical relationship with one another.

Note that the this formalized system of category pairs reflects many decades of work by Vietnamese philosophical and political scientists based on the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other socialist thinkers. Also note that these are not the only category pairs that can be discussed; there are potentially an infinite number of categories which can be used in materialist dialectical analysis. However, universal category pairs, which can be applied to analyze any and all things, phenomena, and ideas, are much fewer and farther between. That said, the universal category pairs discussed in this book are the ones which have most often been used by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other prominent materialist dialecticians.

1. Private and Common

a. Categories of Private and Common

The Private Category encompasses specific things, phenomena, and ideas; the Common Category defines the common aspects, attributes, factors, and relations that exist in many things and phenomena.

Within every Private thing, phenomenon, and idea, there exists the Common, and also the Unique. The Unique encompasses the attributes and characteristics that exist in only one specific thing, phenomenon, or idea, and does not repeat in any other things, phenomena, or ideas.

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Annotation 129

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-41.png

The Private category includes specific individual things, phenomena and ideas.

The Common category includes aspects, factors, and relations that exist in many things, phenomena, and ideas. For example, say there are two apples: Apple A and Apple B. Apple A is a specific individual object. Apple B is another distinct, separate object. In that sense, both apples are private apples, and fall within the Private category.

However, both Apple A and Apple B share common attributes. For instance, they are both fruits of the same type: “apple.” They may have other attributes in common: they may be the same color, they may have the same basic shape, they may be of similar size, etc. These are common attributes which they share. Thus, Apple A and Apple B will also fall within the common category, based on these common attributes.

Apple A and Apple B will also have unique attributes. Only Apple A has the exact molecules in the exact place and time which compose Apple A. There is no other object in the world which has those same molecules in that same place and time. This means that Apple A also has unique properties.

All private subjects have attributes in common with other private subjects.

The Common and Private categories have a dialectical relationship. The Common contains the Private, and the Private contains the Common. Every private subject has some attributes in common with other private subjects, and common attributes can only exist among private subjects. Thus every thing, phenomenon, and idea in existence contains internally within itself dialectical relationships between the Private and the Common, and has dialectical Private/Common relationships externally within other things, phenomena, and ideas.

All private subjects have attributes in common with other private subjects.

It is also true that every private subject contains within itself Unique attributes which it does not share with any other thing, phenomenon, or idea. For example, Mount Everest is unique in that it is 8,850 meters tall. No other mountain on Earth has that exact same height. Therefore, the private subject “Mount Everest” has unique properties which it does not share with any other subject, even though it has other attributes in common with countless other private entities.

All things, phenomena, and ideas contain the unique, the private, and the common.

Whenever two individual subjects have a relationship with one another, that relationship is a unique relationship in the sense that it is a relationship that is shared only by those two specific subjects; however, there will also be common attributes and properties which any such relationship will share with other relationships in existence. This recalls the principle of Unity in Diversity and Diversity in Unity [see Annotation 107, p. 110]. So, every thing, phenomenon, and idea contains the Common and the Unique and has unique and common relationships with other things, phenomena, and ideas.

This category pair is very useful in developing a comprehensive viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116]. Remember that a comprehensive viewpoint indicates an understanding of the internal and external relations of a given subject. This means that in order to develop a comprehensive viewpoint, you must know the private aspects of each individual relation, component, and aspect of the subject, and you must also study the commonalities of the subject as well. It’s also important to study a variety of private information sources or data points to look for commonalities between them. In other words, if you want to have a proper comprehensive viewpoint [see Annotation 113, p. 116] about any subject, you have to find and analyze as many private data points and pieces of evidence as possible.

For example: If a person only ever saw one apple, a green apple, then that person might believe that “all apples are green.” This conclusion would be premature: the person is attempting to make an assumption about the Common without examining enough Privates. This is a failure of mistaking mistaking the Private for the Common which stems from a lack of a comprehensive viewpoint.

Now, let’s take a look at an example of how the “Unique” can become “Common,” and vice-versa: 1947 TODAY

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-45.png

“Unique” things, phenomena, and ideas can become “common” through development processes (and vice-versa).

In 1941, a Soviet soldier named Mikhail Kalashnikov was in the hospital after being wounded in the Battle of Bryansk. Another soldier in the hospital said to Kalashnikov, “why do our soldiers only have one rifle for two or three of our men, while the Germans have automatics?” To solve this problem, Kalashnikov designed the AK-47 machine gun. When he finished making the first prototype, it was the only AK-47 in the world.

At this precise moment, the AK-47 was simultaneously Unique, Private, and Common.

It was Unique because it was the first and only AK-47 in the world, and no other object in the world had those properties. It was Private because it was a specific object with its own individual existence. It was Common — even though it was the only existing prototype — because it shared Common features with other rifles, and with other prototypes. It was the only AK-47 in existence.

Soon, however, the Soviet Union began manufacturing them, and they became very common. Now there are millions of AK-47s in the world. So, today, that prototype machine gun remains simultaneously Unique, Private, and Common, with some slight developments:

It remains Private because it is a specific object with its own individual existence. Even though it is no longer the only AK-47 in existence, it remains Unique because it is still the very first AK-47 that was ever made, and even though there are now many other AK-47s, there is no other rifle in the universe that shares that same unique property. It remains Common because it still shares common features with other rifles and other prototypes, but it now also shares commonality with many other AK-47 rifles. It is no longer Unique for having the properties of an AK-47 in and of itself.

If someone were to destroy Kalashnikov’s prototype AK-47, the Private of that object would no longer exist — it would remain only as an idea, and the Private would transform to whatever becomes of the material components of the rifle. The Unique would also no longer remain specifically as it was before being destroyed. However, there would still be many other AK-47s which would share common features related to that prototype; for instance, that they were all designed based on the prototype’s design.

Translator’s Note: The words “Private,” “Common,” and “Unique” may seem unusual because they are direct translations from the Vietnamese words used to describe these concepts in the original text. Various other words have been used by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other materialist dialecticians when discussing the underlying concepts of these philosophical categories. For instance, in most translations of Lenin, his discussion of such topics is typically translated into English using words such as “universal,” “general,” “special,” “particular,” etc.

Example (from Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks): “Language in essence expresses only the universal; what is meant, however, is the special, the particular. Hence what is meant cannot be said in speech.” Here, “universal” refers to that which is Common in all things, phenomena, and ideas, and “special/particular” refers to the Private — specific individual things, phenomena, and ideas — along with their Unique properties.

Here are excerpts from Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks discussing these concepts:

(‘It?’ The most universal word of all.) Who is it? I. Every person is an I.

Das Sinnliche? It is a universal, etc., etc. ‘This??’ Everyone is ‘this.’

Why can the particular not be named? One of the objects of a given kind (tables) is distinguished by something from the rest...

Leaves of a tree are green; John is a man; Fido is a dog, etc. Here already we have dialectics (as Hegel’s genius recognised): the individual is the universal... And a naïve confusion, a helplessly pitiful confusion in the dialectics of the universal and the particular — of the concept and the sensuously perceptible reality of individual objects, things, phenomena.

Further, the ‘subsumption’ under logical categories of ‘sensibility’ (Sensibilität), ‘irritability’ (irritabilität) — this is said to be the particular in contrast to the universal!! — and ‘reproduction’ is an idle game.

Marx, too, discussed these concepts using words which are commonly translated into English using different terms. For example, in Capital:

The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities, converts the single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part of equivalent – here the linen – into the universal equivalent.

Here, “general form” refers to the commonalities of form that exist between all commodities. The “single commodity” refers to a private commodity; a specific commodity that exists separately from all other commodities. And when referring to a “universal equivalent,” Marx is referring to equivalence which such a commodity has in common with every other commodity.

The rest of this passage continues as a materialist dialectical analysis of the Private, Common, and Unique features and aspects of commodities:

The bodily form of the linen is now the form assumed in common by the values of all commodities; it therefore becomes directly exchangeable with all and every of them. The substance linen becomes the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state of every kind of human labour. Weaving, which is the labour of certain private individuals producing a particular article, linen, acquires in consequence a social character, the character of equality with all other kinds of labour. The innumerable equations of which the general form of value is composed, equate in turn the labour embodied in the linen to that embodied in every other commodity, and they thus convert weaving into the general form of manifestation of undifferentiated human labour. In this manner the labour realised in the values of commodities is presented not only under its negative aspect, under which abstraction is made from every concrete form and useful property of actual work, but its own positive nature is made to reveal itself expressly. The general value form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour power. The general value form, which represents all products of labour as mere congelations of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social resumé of the world of commodities. That form consequently makes it indisputably evident that in the world of commodities the character possessed by all labour of being human labour constitutes its specific social character.

We have chosen to use the terms “Private,” “Common,” and “Unique” in the translation of this text because they most closely match the words used in the original Vietnamese. In summary, it is important to realize that you may encounter the underlying concepts which are related by these words using various phrasings in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc.

b. Dialectical Relationship Between Private and Common

According to the materialist dialectical viewpoint: the Private, the Common and the Unique exist objectively [see Annotation 108, p. 112]. The Common only exists within the Private. It expresses its existence through the Private.

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Annotation 130

The Common can’t exist as a specific thing, phenomenon, or idea. However, every specific thing, phenomenon, or idea exists as a private subject which has various features in common with other private things, phenomena, and ideas. We can therefore only understand the Common through observation and study of various private things, phenomena, and ideas. For example, a human can’t perceive with our senses alone the Common of apples. Only by observing many private apples can begin to derive an understanding of what all private apples have in common.

The Common does not exist in isolation from the Private. Therefore, commonality is inseparable from things, phenomena, and ideas. The Private only exists in relation to the Common. Likewise, there is no Private that exists in complete isolation from the Common.

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Annotation 131

No commonality can possibly exist outside of private things, phenomena, and ideas because commonality describes features which different things, phenomena, and ideas share. No private thing, phenomenon, or idea can possibly exist absolutely without commonality because there is no thing, phenomenon, or idea that shares absolutely no features with any other thing, phenomenon, or idea.

The Private category is more all-encompassing and diverse than the Common category; Common is a part of Private but it is more profound and more “essential” than the Private. This is because Private is the synthesis of the Common and the Unique; the Common expresses generality and the regular predictability of many Privates.

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Annotation 132

The Private encompasses all aspects of a specific, individual thing, phenomenon, or idea; thus it encompasses all aspects, features, and attributes of a given subject, including both the Common and the Unique. In this way, the Private is the synthesis of the Common and the Unique.

Common attributes require more consideration, effort, and study to properly determine, because multiple private subjects must be considered and analyzed before common attributes can be confidently discovered and understood. They offer us a more profound understanding of the essence [see Essence and Phenomenon, p. 156] and nature of things, phenomena, and ideas because they offer insights into the relationships between and within different things, phenomena, and ideas. As we discover more commonalities, and understand them more deeply, we begin to develop a more comprehensive perspective of reality. We begin to develop an understanding of the laws and principles which govern relations between and within things, phenomena, and ideas, and this gives us the power to more accurately predict how processes will develop and how things, phenomena, and ideas will change and mutually impact one another over time.

Under specific conditions, the Common and the Unique can transform into each other [See Annotation 129, p. 128].

The dialectical relationship between Private and Common was summarised by Lenin:

“Consequently, the opposites (the individual as opposed to the universal) are identical: the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, ideas) etc.”^[90] [Note: “individual and universal” here refer the same underlying concepts of “Private and Common” (respectively); see translator’s note on p. 132].

c. Meaning of the Methodology

We must acknowledge and recognize the Common in order to study the Private in our cognitive and practical activities. If we fail to acknowledge the Common, then whenever we attempt to understand and comprehend any Private thing, phenomenon or idea, we will make mistakes and become disoriented. To understand the Common we have to study and observe the Private because the Common does not exist abstractly outside of the Private.

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Annotation 133

Our understanding of Common attributes arise from the observation and study of private things, phenomena, and ideas. At the same time, developing our understanding of Commonalities between and within Private subjects deepens our understanding of their essential nature [see: Essence and Phenomenon].

Dialectical analysis of private and common characteristics involves observing private subjects to determine common attributes and considering common attributes to gain insights about private subjects.

It is impossible to know anything at all about the Common without observing Private subjects, and attempting to understand Private subjects without taking into consideration the attributes and features which they have in Common with other Private subjects will lead to incomplete and erroneous analysis.

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In addition, we must identify the Common features and attributes of every specific Private subject we study. We must avoid being dogmatic, metaphysical, and inflexible in applying our knowledge of commonalities to solve problems and interpret the world.

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Annotation 134

Dogmatism and Revisionism in Relation to the Private and Common

Dogmatism is the inflexible adherence to ideals as incontrovertibly true while refusing to take any contradictory evidence into consideration. Dogmatism stands in direct opposition to materialist dialectics, which seeks to form opinions and conclusions only after careful consideration of all observable evidence.

Dogmatism typically arises when the Common is overemphasized without due consideration of the Private. A dogmatic position is one which adheres to ideals about commonalities without taking Private subjects into consideration.

Dogmatism can be avoided by continuously studying and observing and analyzing

Private subjects and taking any evidence which contradicts erroneous perceptions of “false commonalities” into consideration. This will simultaneously deepen our understanding of the Private while improving our understanding of the Common. For example: Sally might observe a few red apples and arrive at the conclusion: “all apples are red.” If Sally is then presented with a green apple, yet refuses to acknowledge it by continuing to insist that “all apples are red,” then Sally is engaging in dogmatism.

According to Vietnam’s Curriculum of the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism For University and College Students Specializing in Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought, the opposite of Dogmatism is Revisionism. Revisionism occurs when we overestimate the Private and fail to recognize commonalities. In failing to recognize common attributes and features between and within things, phenomena, and ideas, the Revisionist faces confusion and disorientation whenever they encounter any new things, phenomena, and ideas, because they lack any insight into essential characteristics of the subject and its relations with other subjects.

For example: if Sally has spent a lot of time studying a red apple, she may start to become confident that she understands everything there is to know about apples. If she is then presented with a green apple, she might become confused and disoriented and draw the conclusion that she has to start all over again with her analysis, from scratch, thinking: “this can’t possibly be an apple because it’s not red. It must be something else entirely.” Sally can avoid this revisionist confusion by examining the other common features which the red and green apples share before making any conclusions.

Metaphysical Perception of the Private and Common

The metaphysical position attempts to categorize things, phenomena, and ideas into static categories which are isolated and distinct from one another [see Annotation 8,

p. 8]. In this way, the metaphysical perception ultimately fails to properly understand the role of both the Private and the Common. Categories may be arranged in taxonomic configurations based on shared features, but ultimately every category is seen as distinct and isolated from every other category. This perspective severs the dialectical relationship between the Private, the Common, and the Unique, and thus leads to a distorted perception of reality. As Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.”

In other words, Engels points out that separating and dividing Private subjects into distinct and isolated categories without acknowledging the dialectical nature of the Private and the Common leads to severe limitations on what we can learn about the world. Instead, we have to examine things, phenomena, and ideas in relation to one another, which must include the analysis of Commonalities.

Rather than divide subjects into distinct, separate categories, materialist dialectics seek to examine Private subjects as they really exist: as a synthesis of Unique and Common attributes; and simultaneously to examine commonalities as they really exist: as properties which emerge from the relations of Private objects.

In our cognitive and practical activities, we must be able to take advantage of suitable conditions that will enable transformations from the Unique and the Common (and vice versa) for our specific purposes.

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Annotation 135

In advancing the cause of socialism, revolutionaries must work to transform our Unique positions into common positions. For instance, the process of developing revolutionary public knowledge [see Annotation 94, p. 93] begins with studying and understanding revolutionary knowledge. Initially, this knowledge will be unique to the socialist movement. By disseminating the knowledge to the public, we hope to transform this knowledge into common knowledge.

Likewise, we hope to transform other common things, phenomena, and ideas back towards the Unique. For instance, the capitalist mode of production is currently the most common mode of production on Earth. In order to advance humanity towards communism, we must transition the capitalist mode of production from the Common towards the Unique, with the ambition of eventually eliminating this mode of production altogether.

2. Reason and Result

a. Categories of Reason and Result

The Reason category is used to define the mutual impacts between internal aspects of a thing, phenomenon or idea, or between things, phenomena, or ideas, that bring about changes.

The Result category defines the changes that were caused by mutual impacts which occur between aspects and factors within a thing, phenomenon, or idea, or externally between different things, phenomena, or ideas.

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Annotation 136

Translation note: the Vietnamese words for “reason and result” can also be translated as “cause and effect.” We have chosen to use the words “reason and result” to distinguish materialist dialectical categories from metaphysical conceptions of development.

In metaphysics [see Annotation 8, p. 8], any given effect is seen to have a single cause. In materialist dialectics, we instead examine the mutual impacts which occur within and between subjects through motion and development processes.

Metaphysical vs. Materialist Dialectical conceptions of development.

In the metaphysical conception of cause and effect, (A) causes effect (B), then effect (B) causes effect (C), and so on. Materialist dialectics, on the other hand, uses the model of development (see Annotation 117, p. 119), wherein objects (A) and (B) mutually impact one another, resulting in development (C). (C) will then have relations with other things, phenomena, and/or ideas, and the mutual impacts from these new relations will become the reasons for future results. Consider the following example:

Metaphysical vs. Materialist Dialectical conceptions of frying and eating an egg.

In the metaphysical “cause and effect” model, putting an egg in a hot pan is the cause which results in the effect of producing a fried egg. The egg being fried has the effect of the egg now being suitable for eating, which is the cause of the egg being eaten by a hungry person.

This is a simplification of the metaphysical conception of causes and effects, since metaphysics does recognize that one cause can have branches of multiple effects, but the essential characteristic of the metaphysical conception of causality is to break down all activity and change in the universe into static and distinct episodes of one distinct event causing one or more other distinct events.

In contrast, the materialist dialectical model of development holds that every result stems from mutual impacts which occur relationally between things, phenomena, and ideas, and that the resulting synthesis — the newly developed result of mutual impacts — will then have new relations with other things, phenomena, and ideas, and that these relations will become new reasons for new results through mutual impact.

In this example, the egg and the hot pan will mutually impact each other. The frying pan will become dirty and need to be washed (the result of putting an egg in the frying pan); meanwhile, the egg will become a fried egg, which is fit for human consumption (the result of being cooked in the frying pan). The fried egg will then have a relationship with a hungry human, and this relationship will be a new reason which will lead to further results (i.e., the human eating and digesting the egg).

So, the key difference between the classical metaphysical conception of causality and the materialist dialectical model of development is that metaphysics focus more on individual events in time whereas materialist dialectics focus on the relations and mutual impacts between things, phenomena, and ideas over time.

b. Dialectical relationship between Reason and Result

The relationship between Reason and Result is objective, and it contains inevitability: there is no Reason that does not lead to a Result; and likewise, there is no Result without any Reason.

Reasons cause Results, which is why Reason always comes before Result, and Result always comes after Reason.

A Reason can cause one or many Results and a Result can be caused by one or many Reasons.

When many Reasons lead to a single Result, the impacts which lead to the Result are mutual between all things, phenomena, and ideas at hand. These mutual impacts can have many relational positions or roles, including: direct reasons, indirect reasons, internal reasons, external reasons, etc.

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Annotation 137

As stated in the previous annotation, Reasons which lead to Results stem from mutually impacting relations between things, phenomena, and ideas. There is no way for one subject to affect another subject without also being affected itself in some way.

Reasons can take many forms, including (but not limited to):

Types of Reasons and Results

Direct Reasons stem from immediate relations.

Direct Reasons are Reasons which stem from immediate relations, with no intervening relations standing between the Reason and Result.

For example, dropping a coffee cup causes an immediate relationship between the cup and the ground, and that relation leads directly to the Result of the coffee cup breaking to pieces.

Indirect Reasons have an intervening relationship between the Reason and the Result.

Indirect Reasons are Reasons which have intervening relations between a Reason and a Result.

For example, the dropped coffee cup above may have smashed into pieces directly because it hit the ground, but it may also have indirect Reasons. The person holding the cup may have been frightened because she heard a loud noise, and the loud noise was caused by a car backfiring, and the car backfiring was caused by the driver not maintaining his car engine.

In materialist dialectical terms, the driver’s relationship with his car would be an indirect Reason for the car backfiring; the relationship between the car (which backfired) and the person holding the coffee cup would be the direct Reason for dropping the cup; and the cup’s relationship with the ground would be the direct reason for the cup smashing. At the same time, the driver’s relationship with his car would be an indirect Reason for the Result of the coffee cup smashing to pieces.

Internal Reasons stem from internal relationships.

Internal Reasons are Reasons which stem from internal relations that occur between aspects and factors within a subject.

For example, if a building collapses because the steel structure within the building rusts and fails, then that could be viewed as an internal Reason for the collapse.

External Reasons stem from external relations.

External Reasons are reasons which stem from external relations that occur between different things, phenomena, and ideas.

For example, if a building collapses because it is smashed by a wrecking ball, then that could be viewed as an external Reason for the collapse.

All of these roles and positions can be viewed relatively. From one viewpoint, a Reason may be seen as internal, but from another viewpoint, it might be viewed as external. For example, if a couple has a disagreement which leads to an argument, the disagreement may be seen as an external Reason from the perspective of each individual within the couple. But to a relationship counselor viewing the situation from the outside, the disagreement may be seen as an internal Reason which leads to the couple (a subject defined by the internal relationship between the husband and wife) arguing.

From one perspective, a government official ordering a building to be torn down may be seen as the direct Reason for the Result of the building being torn down. But from a different perspective, one can see many intervening relations: complaints from local residents may have led to the government official making the order, the order would be delivered to a demolition crew, the demolition crew would assign a crew member to operate a wrecking ball, the crew member would operate the wrecking ball, the wrecking ball would smash the building. All of these can be seen as intervening relations which constitute indirect reasons leading up to the direct Reason of the wrecking ball smashing the building. Choosing the right viewpoint during analysis is critical to make sure that Reason and Result relations are viewed properly and productively, and care must also be taken to ensure that the correct Reasons are attributed to Results (see Reason and Result, p. 138).

Likewise, a Reason can cause many Results, including primary and secondary Results.

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Annotation 138

Primary Results are Results which are more direct and predictable.

Secondary Results are Results which are indirect and less predictable.

For example, an earthquake may have primary Results such as the ground shaking, buildings being destroyed, etc. Secondary Results from the earthquake might include flights being rerouted from local airports, shortages at grocery stores, etc.

In the motion of the material world, there is no known “first Reason” or “final Result.”

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Annotation 139

With our current understanding of the universe, it is uncertain what might have caused the creation of all existence. Was it the Big Bang? If so, did the Big Bang have some underlying reason? There is also no way to know if there will ever be a “final Result.” Will the heat death of the universe occur, and if so, will that end all transpiring of relations which would end the cycle of development — of Reasons and Results?

As of now, we do not have solid answers to these questions. If and when answers arise, it is possible that the materialist dialectical framework will need to be updated to reflect new scientific knowledge, just as Marx, Engels, and Lenin have updated materialist dialectics in the past [see Annotation 72, p. 68]. What’s important to understand in the meantime is that within our realm of human experience and understanding, for all practical purposes, every Result which we live through and observe has some underlying Reason, and will itself lead to one or more Results.

Engels said: “we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis [see Annotation 200, p. 192], positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate [are mixed together]. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.”^[91]

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Annotation 140

In the above passage, Engels is simply explaining that since all things, phenomena, and ideas are relationally linked and inter-related [see Basic Principles of Materialist Dialectics, p. 106], the mutual impacts and processes of change which lead to development (the reasons and results which transpire between all things, phenomena, and ideas) are also all linked and inter-related. What might be viewed as a Reason is also a Result of one or more prior Reasons, just as every Result is also a Reason for future Results.

c. Meaning of the Methodology

Because the relationship between Reason and Result is objective and inevitable, we can’t ignore the relationship between Reason and Result in our perception and practice. In reality, there is no thing, phenomenon or idea that can exist without any underlying Reason or Reasons; and vice versa, there is no Reason that does not lead to any Result.

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Annotation 141

In political activity, it is important to remember that every interaction within every relationship will lead to mutual impacts which will cause change and development; in other words, everything we choose to do will be the Reason for one or more Results. We must be aware of unintended or unpredicted Results from our activities.

Reason-Result relationships are very complicated and diverse. Therefore, we must accurately identify the types of Reasons [direct, indirect, internal, external, etc.] so that we can come up with proper solutions which are suitable for the specific situation in both perception and practice. A Reason can lead to many results and, likewise, a Result can be caused by many Reasons, which is why we must have a comprehensive viewpoint and a historical viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116] in our perception of reality so we can properly analyse, solve and apply Reason-Result relationships.

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Annotation 142

It is critical to understand that there may be many events or relationships which might be falsely ascribed as Reasons for a given Result (and vice-versa).

For example: in 1965, the United States of America officially declared war on North Vietnam after the so-called “Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” in which Vietnamese forces supposedly fired on a United States Navy ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is often described as the “cause” or the “Reason” that the Vietnam War began.

However, the real “Reason” why the USA declared war on North Vietnam had to do with the underlying contradiction between capitalist imperialism and communism in Vietnam. This contradiction had to be resolved one way or another. The United States of America willfully decided to try to negate this contradiction by instigating war, and this was the true reason the war began. In fact, the so-called “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” never even occurred as described — the attack on the USA’s ship never really occurred. A document released by the Pentagon in 2005 revealed that the incident was completely fabricated. So, saying that the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” was the Reason for the war is nonsensical, since it’s an event which never even occurred in reality.

Understanding the true nature of Reason and Result is very important for making decisions and choosing a path forward in political action. Attributing the wrong Reason to a Result, or misunderstanding the Results which stem from a Reason, can lead to serious setbacks and failures. Therefore, it is vital for revolutionaries to properly identify and understand the actual Reasons and Results which drive development.

3. Obviousness and Randomness

a. Categories of Obviousness and Randomness

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Annotation 143

In Vietnamese, the words for these categories are “tất nhiên” and “ngẫu nhiên,” which respectively translate to “obvious” and “random.” In socialist literature, various words have been used by different authors to convey the underlying meaning of these categories (Engels, for instance, used the terms “necessary” and “accidental” to mean “obvious” and “random,” respectively). We have chosen to use words which closely match the Vietnamese used in the original text, but the reader should be aware that these same concepts may be described using many different words in various English translations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, etc.

The Obviousness category refers to events that occur because of the essential [see Essence and Phenomenon, p. 156] internal aspects of the material structure of a subject. These essential internal characteristics become reasons for certain results under certain conditions: the Obvious has to happen in a certain way, it can’t happen any other way.

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Annotation 144

Obviousness can only apply to material subjects in the material world and results which are certain to happen based on the material laws of nature. Obviousness arises from the internal aspects, features, and relations of physical objects. Paper will burn under certain specific conditions, due its internal material structure. If those conditions (i.e., temperature, the presence of oxygen, etc.) exist, then paper will catch fire predictably. In other words, paper will obviously burn under certain circumstances due to its internal composition,.

The Randomness category refers to things that happen because of external reasons: things that happen, essentially, by chance, due to impacts from many external relations. A Random outcome may occur or it may not occur; a Random outcome could happen this way or it could happen that way.

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Annotation 145

As we discussed above, paper will burn if it reaches a certain temperature — that much is obvious. If your friend holds paper over the flame of the lighter, the paper will burn — that’s obvious. But you can’t be certain whether your friend will actually hold the paper to the flame or not. This demonstrates Randomness. Whether your friend will ultimately hold the paper to the flame or not depends on an external relation which is not defined by the internal structure of the paper, and which can’t be predicted with the same predictability as obvious events which are rooted in internal material aspects.

b. Dialectical relationship between Obviousness and Randomness

Obviousness and Randomness both exist objectively and play an important role in the motion and development of things and phenomena. Obviousness plays the decisive role.

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Annotation 146

Obviousness plays the decisive role simply because Obviousness is far more predictable and the laws which govern material phenomena are essentially fixed. We can’t change the laws of physics, the nature of chemical reactions, etc.

Obviousness and Randomness exist in dialectical unity; there is no pure Obviousness, nor pure Randomness. It is obvious that Randomness shall occur in our universe, however Obviousness clears a path through this Randomness.

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Annotation 147

Our universe is incredibly complex and there are many different potential external relations which could impact any given situation, such that some degree of Randomness is always present in any situation; in other words, the presence of Randomness can be seen as Obvious.

In 1922, Ho Chi Minh identified objective internal characteristics of the working class of France and its colonies. He wrote: “The mutual ignorance of the two proletariats gives rise to prejudices. The French workers look upon the native as an inferior and negligible human being, incapable of understanding and still less of taking action. The natives regard all the French as wicked exploiters. Imperialism and capitalism do not fail to take advantage of this mutual suspicion and this artificial racial hierarchy to frustrate propaganda and divide forces which ought to unite.”

In this example, Ho Chi Minh identifies prejudice as an obvious outcome of mutual ignorance. The prejudice arises as a matter of course from internal objective aspects of the two proletarian groups. As long as French and native workers remain ignorant of one another, prejudice will arise. The specific forms which this prejudice will take, however, and their resulting impacts and developments, will be more or less Random because there are many external factors (including the external impacts of the capitalist class, which seeks to take advantage of these prejudices) which can’t be predicted. Therefore, it is necessary for political revolutionaries to account for both random and obvious factors in confronting such prejudice. Ho Chi Minh’s suggestion for overcoming these difficulties was concise and to-the-point: “Intensify propaganda to overcome them.” Only by negating the internal aspects of mutual ignorance through education and propaganda could communists hope to negate the resulting prejudice.

As Engels said: “One knows that what is maintained to be necessary [obvious] is composed of sheer accidents, and that the so-called accidental [random] is the form behind which necessity hides itself — and so on.”^[92]

Obviousness and Randomness are not static properties: Randomness and Obviousness continuously change and develop over time. Under specific conditions, Obviousness and Randomness can transform into each other: Obviousness can become Random and Randomness can become obvious.

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Annotation 148

Randomness can be introduced to an obvious situation: it may be obvious that a mineshaft will collapse, until human beings come along and intervene by repairing the structural integrity of the mineshaft. It may seem Random whether a city’s economy will grow or shrink, until a volcano erupts and buries the city in lava and ash, making it obvious that the economy will not grow because the city no longer exists.

Most situations are in a flux, as Obviousness and Randomness dialectically develop and change over time, with outcomes becoming more or less obvious or Random over time. It is vital that we, as political revolutionaries, are able to distinguish between Obviousness and Randomness and to leverage this understanding to our advantage.

c. Meaning of the Methodology

Basically, in our perception and reality, we have to base our plans, strategies, and actions as much as possible on the Obvious, not the Random. However, we must not ignore Randomness, nor try to separate the Obvious from the Random. When faced with situations which seem very Random, we must find ways to develop Obviousness. When faced with what seems obvious, we must keep an eye out for Randomness. Obviousness and Randomness can mutually transform, so we need to create suitable conditions to hinder or promote such transformation to suit our purposes.

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Annotation 149

We must always remember that no situation is purely obvious, nor purely Random, and to take this into account in all of our planning and activity.

A skyscraper made from heavy steel beams may seem quite sturdy and stable; it may appear obvious that the structure will remain stable and sound for decades. However, it is still important for engineers to periodically confirm that the steel is still sound through testing and observation. Engineers must also be prepared for Random events like lightning, earthquakes, storms, etc., which may affect the seemingly obvious structural integrity of the building.

Likewise, when faced with extremely complex situations which seem completely Random, we must seek out (or bring about) the obvious. Wildfires are extremely chaotic and difficult to predict. However, firefighters can rely on certain obvious patterns and natural laws which govern the spread of fire. By digging trenches, lighting counter-fires, spraying water, and other such actions, firefighters can bring wildfires under control. This illustrates how humans are able to make situations less Random by bringing about an increasing amount of Obviousness over time through practical activity.

4. Content and Form

a. Categories of Content and Form

The Content category refers to the sum of all aspects, attributes, and processes that a thing, phenomenon, or idea is made from.

The Form category refers to the mode of existence and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. Form thus describes the system of relatively stable relationships which exist internally within things, phenomena, and ideas.

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Annotation 150

Content and Form can be difficult to comprehend at first because the ways in which Content and Form manifest and interact can vary wildly depending on the subject being discussed and the viewpoint from which the subject is being considered.

Content represents the component things, materials, attributes, features, etc., which, together, make up a thing, phenomenon, or idea. You can think of it as the “ingredients” from which a subject is made.

Form refers to a stable system of internal relationships which compose a thing, phenomenon, or idea, as well as the mode of existence and development [see Annotation 60, p. 59] of those relations.

Remember that from a dialectical materialist perspective, everything in our universe is defined by internal and external relations. If a thing, phenomenon, or idea has internal relations which are relatively stable, then it has a Form.

We would not call all of the assorted ingredients which are used to make a cake “a cake” unless they have been assembled together and baked into the stable form which we interpret as “a cake.” Once a portion is removed from the cake, the portion itself assumes a new stable form which we call “a slice of cake.” The slice of cake will maintain its relatively stable form until being eaten, discarded, or otherwise transitioning into some other form. It is only considered a “slice of cake” for as long as it maintains its own specific stable form.

Stability itself is also relative: a “spray” of water may only last for a few seconds but we can still conceive of it as having Form. On the other hand, a mountain has a set of stable internal relations (a Form) which might last for millions of years.

We can think of Form as having two aspects: inner Form and outer Form.

Inner form refers to the internal stable relations which we have already discussed.

Outer form is how an object “appears” to human senses.

In this book, we are primarily concerned with the inner Form of subjects, however, in other contexts (such as art and design), the outer Form plays a more prominent role.

Now, let’s identify some of the common viewpoints from which Content and Form might be considered.

Material vs. Ideal

When discussing the material — i.e., objective systems and objects^[93] — discussion of Content and Form is more straightforward.

Material

With material things and phenomena, the Content is what the thing is made out of: the physical parts, aspects, attributes, and processes that compose the subject. For example, the Content of a wooden chair might be the wood, nails, paint, and other materials which are used to create the chair.

A material object can be described in terms of content, inner form, and outer form.

The inner Form of a material object refers to stable internal relations which compose the object. The stable relationship between the wood and the nails — the nails bind the wood together, the wood is cut in certain patterns, the paint adheres to the wood through physical and chemical bonds, etc. Stability is, again, relative — over time, the paint will chip and flake, the wood will rot, the nails will rust, etc. Dialectical processes of change will eventually reduce the chair into something other than a chair (i.e., through rotting, burning, disassembly, etc.), but as long as the internal relations maintain the Form of a chair we conceive of it as a chair.

The outer Form of a material object refers to the way it appears to human consciousness. Its shape, aesthetics, etc.

Ideal

With the ideal — i.e., abstract ideas and concepts — discussion of Content and Form becomes more complicated. As Vietnam’s Marxism-Leninism Textbook for Students Who Specialize in Marxism-Leninism explains:

Many times, human consciousness has difficulty in trying to clearly define the Content of a subject — especially when the subject is an abstract idea. We often mistake Content with inner Form. Usually, in this situation, there is a strong combination and intertwining between both Content and Form. In such a situation, the Form can be referred to as the “inner Form,” or the “Content-Form.”

With physical things and phenomena, this type of Form usually belongs to a very specific Private, it doesn’t exist in any other Private, it is the Unique [see Annotation 129, p. 128].

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The reason the inner Form of physical objects usually exists in Private as the Unique is because the stable internal relations of any given physical object are equivalent to the specific material components which distinguish one physical object from all other physical objects. In other words, if you have two chairs which are exact copies of each other, made from the same kind of wood, cut into the same shape, using the same type and configuration of fasteners, etc., they are still not the exact same object. The internal relations of one chair are what make it that chair and distinguish it from all other objects in the universe. The outer Form of these chairs may have many commonalities (they look similar, they have the same color, etc.), but the inner Form is what distinguishes one chair from the other.

However, within the realm of abstract ideas, there are also Forms which many abstract Privates share. In the context of abstract ideas, we call this kind of Form the “outer Form,” the “form-Form,” or the “common Form.”

When we try to define the Content of a subject which is an abstract idea, our consciousness usually tries to answer the question: “what is the subject?”

This is usually a simple matter. Take, for example, the abstract idea of “freedom.” When we try to think of the Content of freedom we can answer it pretty easily. What is the subject of freedom? It is the condition which allows humans to follow their own will, it is the absence of external coercion, etc., etc.

But, when we try to define the Form of an abstract idea, our consciousness tries to answer the question: “how is the subject?” — this is when we have to define the mode of existence (the Form) of that subject.

This is where things get more complicated. The mode of existence of an abstract idea can usually be considered to be language, since our ideas are usually expressed through language, but it can take on other modes of existence as well, such as visual media (paintings, photographs), physical motions of the human body (body language, dance), etc. This is how the field of art studies is concerned with the philosophical categories of Content and Form.

Content and Form in Art

Many readers may already be familiar with the subject of Content and Form from studying art, design, communications, and related fields. At first glance, the definitions of Content and Form may seem different from what we’ve been discussing so far.

This is because art concerns itself with abstract ideas expressed through various Forms of physical representations.

These physical representations may include physical objects (photographs, paintings, sculptures), performed and/or recorded physical activities (dance, music, theater, film), human language recorded in stable physical Forms of written language (novels, poems, stories) or spontaneously performed oral language (storytelling, impromptu spoken-word poetry).

Because the study of art is primarily concerned with interpreting and understanding ideas expressed through these physical manifestations, art is concerned with the stable inner relations of the ideas which artists imbue within their works of art — much more than the stable inner relations of the physical components of the object.

According to the Vietnamese art textbook Curriculum of General Aesthetics:

What is the Form of a work of art? Form is the way to express the Content of an artwork. Form and Content within a work of art have a strong unity with each other and they regulate each other. Form is the organization, the inner structure of the Content of an artwork. Therefore, Form is the way that the Content expresses itself, and that way is described by two features. We must ask:

First: what expresses the Content of a work of art?

Second: how is it expressed?

Art exists when two conditions are met: first, there must be a subject with an outer Form. Second, an artist must convey aesthetic meaning, or humanization, of that subject. This aesthetic meaning is the Content.

So, in studying works of art, we are less concerned with the physical content of the artwork (the canvas, paint, etc.) than we are with the abstract content of the artwork (the ideas which the artist imbues within the artwork).

As for Form, the inner Form of art represents the stable internal relations which compose the art (both ideal, i.e., the stable internal relations of the abstract ideas imbued within the art by the artist, as well as physical, i.e., the stable internal relations of the physical media of the art).

The outer Form of art represents how our human senses perceive the art, such as composition techniques, the use of color, etc.

The chart below breaks down the differences in a general, non-artistic viewpoint of physical objects and processes in materialist dialectical terms (i.e., the viewpoint an engineer might have), as compared with the artistic viewpoint of physical objects and processes (which an art critic might have). Some fields, such as designing products for human use, might draw from both viewpoints.

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Content and Form in Specific Artistic Media

Every medium of art will interpret Content and Form in its own way. For example:

Literature is a specific art discipline which deals with recorded human language in the Form of writing. In written literature, the Content would be the ideas expressed in a piece of writing; what the words say. The inner Form would be the way the ideas relate to each other — i.e., story structure, pacing, character development, etc. The outer form would be the physical format of the writing — i.e., manuscript, magazine article, paperback book, ebook, etc.

Painting is a specific art discipline in which pigments are applied to objects to create images which convey ideas and emotions. In painting, the Content would be the meaning which an artist embodies in a work of art. The inner Form would include the stable internal relations within the artwork (i.e., the bonds and mixtures between the pigments, the canvas, etc.), while the outer Form would be how the artwork appears to human senses (composition, aesthetics, etc.). Generally speaking, the creator of the art will have to make decisions about the inner Form (i.e., selection of oil vs. acrylic vs. watercolor, selection of shade, tint, and hue, physical brush strokes, etc.) so as to produce the desired outer Form (the way the finished artwork will appear to viewers).

Theater is a specific art discipline in which human beings perform physical actions and use their voices to convey ideas to an audience. In theater, the Content includes the ideas which are being presented, such as the script, the musical score, the story, the performance choices of actors, costumes, props, etc. The inner Form would include the stable relations between the members of the cast, the director, the physical stage, the lighting, etc., and the outer Form would be the way the play appears to the audience.

These are just some examples. Each medium of expression will have its own variations in how Content and Form are considered.

Engels described the manifestation of Content and Form in Dialectics of Nature:

The whole of organic nature is one continuous proof of the identity or inseparability of form and content. Morphological and physiological phenomena, form and function, mutually determine one another. The differentiation of form (the cell) determines differentiation of substance into muscle, skin, bone, epithelium, etc., and the differentiation of substance in turn determines difference of form.

Content and Form are discussed frequently in analysis of human social systems and objective relations which occur within society. For example, Marx made many criticial insights into economics by analyzing and explaining the form of value [see Annotation 14, p. 16] under capitalism.

Indeed, the entire capitalist system can be viewed in terms of content and form. The current form of human civilization is capitalism. That is to say, capitalism is the stable set of relations and characteristis of the current political economy which dominates the planet. The content of capitalism includes all the components of the base and superstructure, including the various classes (capitalists, working class, etc.), the means of production, government institutions, corporate institutions, etc. All of these elements are configured together into the relatively stable form which we call “capitalism.”

Other Viewpoints of Content and Form

Of course, there are many other viewpoints for discussing Content and Form of abstract ideas. Every philosophical field will have its own unique ways of utilizing Content and Form analysis. One example is the concept of Content and Form in legal philosophy. Vietnamese legal expert Dinh Thuy Dung writes:

The law has internal and external forms:

The inner Form is the internal structure of the law, the relationships and the connections between the elements constituting the law. The inner Form of the law is called the legal structure, which includes the constituent parts of the legal system such as the branch of law, legal institutions, and legal norms.

The outer Form is the manifestation, or mode of existence, of the law. In other words, the outer Form of the law is how we view and understand the law [i.e., who enforces the law and what repercussions will occur if we violate the law]. Based on the outer Form of the law, one can know how it exists in reality, and where and to whom it applies. The external Form of the law is also approached in relation to its Content.

According to this understanding, the Content of the law includes all the elements that make up the law, while the Form of the law is understood as the elements which contain or express the Content.

If you understand that the Content of the law is the will of the state, then the legal Form is the way of expressing the will of the state.

There are countless other ways in which Content and Form can be used to analyze and understand things, phenomena, and ideas. We hope that these examples have given you a better idea of the various ways in which Content and Form can be used to understand the world. In general, socialist texts deal with the inner Form of things, phenomena, and ideas. That is to say, the inner relations which compose the subject being considered. The outer form — how things appear to our senses — tends to be less relevant in analysis of human social systems, though it is often important in consideration of specialized fields of revolutionary activity such as aesthetics, propaganda, etc.

b. Dialectical relationship between Content and Form

Content and Form have a strong dialectical relationship with one other. There is no Form that does not contain any Content. Simultaneously, there is no Content that does not exist in a specific Form. The same Content can manifest in many Forms and a Form can contain many Contents.

The relationship between Content and Form is a dialectical relationship in which Content decides Form and Form can impact Content.

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Annotation 151

For example, if you want to make a table, and all you have available are wood and nails, then that Content (the wood and the nails) will determine the Form the table ends up taking. You are going to end up with a wooden table, and it will therefore have to have certain characteristics of Form.

When Content changes, the Form must change accordingly. If, instead of wood, you have iron, then the table you end up building will have a much different Form. Form can also influence the Content, but not nearly as much as Content determines Form. For instance, if you have wood and nails, but you develop a technique for building a table that doesn’t need any nails, then the result (a wooden table without any nails) would be an example of a development in Form reflecting as a change in Content.

The main tendency of Content is change. On the other hand, Form is relatively stable in every thing and phenomenon. As Content changes, Form must change accordingly. However, Content and Form are not always perfectly aligned.

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Annotation 152

Since all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly changing, it stands to reason that the internal components (things, phenomena, and ideas, and their relations) which compose the Content of a subject will constantly be undergoing processes of change and development. Thus, we say that the tendency of Content is change. Since the Form is based on the internal relations of the components of Content, it stands to reason that a change in Content will lead to change in Form. These kinds of changes in Content and Form also occur through the dialectical process: changes in quantity lead to changes in quality [see Annotation 117, p. 119].

Quantity changes in Content lead to quality shifts in Form.

As soon as a wooden chair is finished being built, the paint is already beginning to degrade. The wood is already beginning to rot. The iron nails are already beginning to rust. These changes may be imperceptibly slow — they may even take centuries to occur, if the chair is kept in a hospitable environment — but the changes are occurring, quantitatively, over time, none-the-less.

Eventually, changes in quantity will lead to changes in quality. At some point, the chair might weaken and begin to wobble whenever it’s sat in. Human beings might recognize this quality and begin to think of it as a “wobbly chair.” The chair might degrade to the point where it can’t be safely used at all, in which case it will have quality shifted into a “broken chair.” If the chair is repaired, that would represent another quality shift. If it is used for firewood, that would be another quality shift.

Keep in mind that changes in Form do not directly cause changes in Content. If you disassemble a wooden chair into the constituent wood and nails, the wood and nails remain more or less unchanged. But if you burn a wooden chair, it’s the change in Content which leads to the change in Form from “chair” to “pile of ash.”

Form simply represents the stable relationships between the component parts of the subject’s Content. The only way to change Form is to change those inner relations, or to change the components which are relating. There is no way to change Form without changing the Content, and changing the Content changes the Form by definition.

Content determines Form, but Form is not fully decided by Content, and Form can impact back on Content. If a Form is suitable with its Content, it can improve the development of its Content. If a Form is not suitable with its Content, it can constrain the development of its Content.

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Annotation 153

The dialectical relationship between Content and Form is somewhat similar to the dialectical relationship between the material and the ideal (see Matter and Consciousness,

p. 88). Just as the material world determines consciousness while consciousness impacts the material world, the Content of a subject determines the Form while the Form impacts the Content.

Suitability describes the applicability of a subject for a specific application or role. Whether or not something is “suitable” or not can be highly subjective (i.e., which music would be “suitable” to play at a party), or it can be more objective (i.e., what kind of batteries to use with an electronic device).

We might say that hardwood is “suitable” Content for the Form of a chair because it is durable, strong, relatively inexpensive, and long-lasting. It might be “unsuitable” to have a chair made of hardwood if it is to be used as an office chair, because the hard surfaces might cause strain and discomfort. However, we can utilize conscious activity to adjust and develop suitability between Content and Form. Changing the Content by adding cushioning or padding might make the Content and Form more suitable with each other. Similarly, changing the Form by designing contours and adding adjustability to the chair might make the Content and Form more suitable with each other for their intended application as an office chair.

If a Form is not suitable with the Content, it restrains the development of the Content. Just think of a shovel (Form) made of wood (Content), which will degrade very rapidly over time, vs. a shovel (Form) made of steel (Content) which will last much longer. This works in both directions. Consider the Content of drinking cups: a porcelain cup might last for a long time and even develop positively over time (by acquiring a desirable patina), while a cup made out of mild steel would not be desirable, as it would be highly prone to rust from extended use containing liquids.

c. Meaning of the Methodology

Content and Form always have a dialectical relationship with each other. Therefore, in our perception and practice, we must not try to separate Content and Form, nor should we solely focus on one and ignore the other.

Because Content determines Form, whenever we are considering a thing, phenomenon, or idea, we must base our consideration first on its Content. If we want to change a thing or phenomenon, we have to change its Content first.

In reality, we must promote the positive impact of Form on Content by making the Form fit the Content. Likewise, we must also change the Form that is no longer suitable with its Content and therefore constrains the development of its Content.

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Annotation 154

In any analysis, it is very important that we carefully consider whether or not Content and Form are suitable with each other in our own projects and activities. We can learn a lot about suitability from observation and practice (see Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism, p. 204) and improve suitability through conscious activity.

Marx believed that it is vital to consider Content and Form when analyzing human society and political economy. One of his core critiques of political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo was a failure to consider Content and Form when it comes to value, commodities, and money. He discusses this extensively in Capital Volume 1, as in this excerpt:

The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.

Marx, here, is saying that studying the economy is more difficult than studying the human body because it can’t be physically observed and dissected. Rather, we have to rely on abstraction, which leaves us prone to making many more mistakes in analyzing Content and Form.

But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour – or value-form of the commodity – is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.

Marx’s analysis of capitalism relies to great extent upon recognizing the commodity-form of the product (Content) of labor. Labor existed long before capitalism. Labor has existed for as long as humans have worked to change our own material conditions. But under capitalism, labor specifically takes on the Form of a commodity which is bought by capitalists. This becomes the basis for Marx’s entire critique of capitalism.

Obviously, there is much more to Marx’s use of Content and Form in analyzing capitalism and human society, but this should hopefully give you some idea of the importance of Content and Form in analysis of human society and revolutionary activity.

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5. Essence and Phenomenon

a. Categories of Essence and Phenomenon

The Essence category refers to the synthesis of all the internal aspects as well as the obvious and stable relations that define the existence, motion and development of things, phenomena, and ideas.

The Phenomenon category refers to the external manifestation of those internal aspects and relations in specific conditions.

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Annotation 155

Understanding Essence and Phenomena can be challenging at first, but it is very important for materialist dialectical analysis.

Essence should not be confused with Form. Form represents the stable internal relations of the component content of a subject, whereas Essence represents the synthesis of all internal aspects as well as all obvious and stable attributes which define the existence, motion, and development of a subject.

Phenomena are simply external manifestations of a subject which occur in specific conditions.

The Essence of a subject is not dependent on conditions, whereas in different conditions, the same subject will exhibit different Phenomena. For example, COVID-19 is, essentially, a specific virus strain. That is to say, all of the internal aspects and stable relations that define the existence, motion, and development of COVID-19 are synthesized as a virus which we call COVID-19.

The Phenomena of COVID-19 which we can observe in patients would include symptoms such as fever, coughing, trouble breathing, etc.

The Essence of a cloud is water vapor in the atmosphere: that is the synthesis, the coming-together, of all the internal stable relations and aspects which will determine how a cloud exists, moves, and develops over time.

The Phenomena of clouds are all the things we can sense: the appearance of big fluffy white things in the air, shadows on the ground, and, sometimes, rain.

Essence defines Phenomenon: the internal attributes and stable relations will produce the Phenomena which we can observe. A cloud is not essentially defined as a fluffy white thing in the air; that is just the appearance a cloud has to our human senses in certain specific conditions.

b. Dialectical relationship between Essence and Phenomenon

Essence and Phenomenon both exist objectively as two unified but opposing sides.

The unity between Essence and Phenomenon: Essence always manifests through Phenomena, and every Phenomenon is always the manifestation of a specific Essence. There is no pure Essence that exists separately from Phenomena and there is no Phenomenon that does not manifest from any kind of Essence.

When Essence changes, Phenomena also change accordingly. When Essence appears, Phenomena also appear, and when Essence disappears, Phenomena also disappear. Therefore, Lenin said: “The Essence appears. The appearance is essential.”^[94]

The Opposition of Essence and Phenomenon: Essence is that which defines a thing, Phenomenon, or idea, while Phenomena are diversified and conditional. Essence is internal, while Phenomena are external. Essence is relatively stable, while Phenomena continuously change.

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Annotation 156

Essence and Phenomenon are simultaneously unified and opposite because neither can exist without the other, yet they have completely opposite features from one another.

Discussing the Essence and Phenomena of physical objects is relatively straight-forward. The Essence will typically encompass the physical object or system itself. For example, a car engine is essentially a machine; that is to say, the synthesis of all the internal aspects (the engine parts) as well as the obvious and stable relations (the relations between the parts of the engine; how they are assembled and work together in the engine system) that define the existence, motion and development of the engine (the way it works) are what essentially make it a car engine. All of these essential characteristics are internal, relatively stable, and remain the same regardless of the condition of the engine (i.e., they continue to exist whether the engine is turned on, turned off, inoperable, etc.).

The Phenomena of the car engine are all the things that we can sense from it, but this can vary a great deal depending on conditions. When the car engine is turned off, it will be silent. It may be cool to the touch. It will be at rest. If the engine is turned on, the parts will move, it will become hot, it will make noise. In some situations it might smoke or even catch on fire. All of these Phenomena are conditional, unstable, and external to the engine itself.

With ideas and abstract thought, Essence and Phenomenon becomes more difficult to determine and analyze. Lenin discussed this in his Philosophical Notebooks, beginning with a quote from Hegel:

Dialectics in general is “the pure movement of thought in Notions“ (i.e., putting it without the mysticism of idealism: human concepts are not fixed but are eternally in movement, they pass into one another, they flow into one another, otherwise they do not reflect living life.

Knowing that Hegel was an idealist, Lenin wanted to strip all idealism from his conception of dialectics, and thus made it clear that “the pure movement of thought” simply refers to the fact that human thoughts are constantly changing, always in motion, within the living human mind, writing:

The analysis of concepts, the study of them, the “art of operating with them” (Engels) always demands study of the movement of concepts, of their interconnection, of their mutual transitions).

This is a description of materialist dialectical analysis of human thought. We must understand that human thoughts are always in motion, always developing, and always mutually impacting other thoughts.

In particular, dialectics is the study of the opposition of the Thing-in-itself, of the essence, substratum, substance — from the appearance, from “Being-for-Others.” (Here, too, we see a transition, a flow from the one to the other: the essence appears. The appearance is essential.) Human thought goes endlessly deeper from appearance to essence, from essence of the first order, as it were, to essence of the second order, and so on without end.

This is where Lenin introduces the concept of Essence and Phenomenon (or “appearance,” as Lenin puts it) as simultaneously oppositional and in unity. Essence refers to the qualities and nature of the “thing-in-itself” (its internal components, relations, etc.) while Phenomena represents “being-for-others” (that which external observers can sense or witness of a subject). However, as Lenin notes, Essence and Phenomena have a dialectical relationship with each other — a “flow from the one to the other.” The Essence “appears” by exuding Phenomena which we can sense.

Conscious thoughts also have Essence and Phenomena of their own. With thought, the development from Essence to Phenomena is constant and inevitable. The Essence of each thought leads to thought-Phenomena which develop in turn into the Essence of new thoughts in a constant flow.

In this sense, Essence and Phenomenon of abstract thought is somewhat different from Essence and Phenomenon of physical objects, but physical objects can have this same dialectical pattern of development. For example, the emissions from the engine of a car can be considered Phenomena of the engine, but as these Phenomena build up in the air (along with the emissions from many other cars), they can develop into a physical subject with a new Essence of its own, which we call “air pollution.”

We can also think of the light which comes from the sun. The light itself can be thought of as Phenomena of the sun, but the light energy can be captured by a solar panel and converted into energy, creating a new subject with its own Essence which we would describe as “solar energy.” In this sense, it is possible for Phenomena to have Phenomena. If you witness light waves in the desert which cause an optical illusion, then the illusion is a Phenomenon of the light waves (the light waves being the Essence which exuded the Phenomenon of illusion), and the light waves are the Phenomena of the sun (the essential subject which exudes the Phenomena of the light waves).

Essence and Phenomena can also be contextual. In some contexts, physical objects which have their own Essence (and Phenomena) may be the Phenomena of some other entity. For example, archaeologists can’t observe prehistoric civilizations directly. They can only study the things which are left behind. In this sense, we can think of an archaeological artifact, like a stone tool, as a Phenomenon of a prehistoric civilization. The tool has its own Essence and Phenomena, but it is also itself a Phenomenon. A single stone tool can’t tell archaeologists much about an ancient civilization, however, archaeologists can gather many Phenomena (tools, structural ruins, nearby animal bones and seeds, human remains, etc.) to look for patterns which reveal more insights about the Essence of the prehistoric civilization which exuded those Phenomena.

Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects: not only are appearances transitory, mobile, fluid, demarcated only by conventional boundaries, but the essence of things is so as well.

Lenin, here, points out that proper analysis hinges on understanding the Essence of a subject, since the Phenomena are fleeting and subject to change. Most notably, we should look for contradictions within the subject (see Definition of Contradiction and Common Characteristics of Contradiction, p. 175), because contradictions are what drive dialectical development of a subject over time.

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c. Meaning of the Methodology

If we want to be accurately aware of things, phenomena, and ideas, we must not just stop at studying their Phenomena, we have to study their Essence. Only through examining many Phenomena of a subject can we fully and correctly understand the Essence of said subject.

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Annotation 157

With physical objects, we must study the Phenomena to know anything about a subject, since Phenomena is, by definition, that which we can observe. Only through systematic, repeated observations can we come to understand the Essence of the object which exudes the Phenomena. Because Phenomena can change based on conditions, we must observe Phenomena under various conditions in a systematic way. This is the basis of all scientific inquiry.

This is also true for analyzing aspects of human society. To understand a social system, we must observe its Phenomena systematically over time and look for patterns which form under various conditions. We must also keep in mind that social systems develop and change over time, and so the Essence might develop with or without changes in certain Phenomena. For example, the phenomena of the United States of America have changed significantly over the years. The national flag, military uniforms, seals, and other iconography have changed throughout the history of the USA. Similarly, there have been many presidents, and the government and constitution have also been through many changes. That said, the essential nature of the USA’s political economy has not changed significantly since its foundation; the USA has been a capitalist bourgeois democracy since the beginning and remains so to this day. Regardless of which bourgeois-dominated political party holds power in the white house and congress — Whig, Republican, Democrat, or otherwise — the essential nature of the USA as a capitalist bourgeois democracy has remained the same.

According to Lenin: “Human thought goes endlessly deeper from appearance to essence, from essence of the first order, as it were, to essence of the second order, and so on, without end.”^[95] On the other hand, Essence is what defines a thing, phenomenon, or idea. Therefore, in our perception and practice, we must recognize a thing, phenomenon, or idea based on its Essence, not its Phenomena, to evaluate it correctly, and after that, we can make fundamental improvements.

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Annotation 158

For example: Thousands of years ago, people observed that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west everyday. Based on these Phenomena, many human civilizations developed the belief that the Essence of our solar system was that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun rotated around it. Today, thanks to scientific observation and practice, we have proven that the sun is the center of the solar system and that the earth is rotating around it, which is totally opposite to what many believed hundreds of years ago. In this case, the initially observed Phenomena were misleading, and it was only by getting a better grasp of the essential nature of the solar system that we could better comprehend its functioning.

It is usually easy to observe Phenomena (since they are defined by being observable) but it’s also easy to misunderstand relationships between Essence and Phenomena. Sometimes people get a false perception of Essence from real Phenomena, such as believing the Sun revolves around the Earth. Sometimes people attribute the wrong Phenomena to Essences as well, such as believing that all poor people are lazy.

Phenomena can easily be mistaken for essence. For example, bourgeois liberal political parties often portray themselves as being pro-worker and therefore exhibit phenomena such as rhetoric, slogans, propaganda, and even platform positions which appeal to workers. These phenomena may confuse many into believing that they are workers’ parties when, in reality, they are essentially dominated by the capitalist class. The reverse can also occur. For example, workers may be fooled into believing that a ruthless capitalist politician or celebrity is “working class at heart,” falsely believing that the capitalist’s class position is merely a phenomenon when in fact it is essential.

Understanding true Essence based on real Phenomena is one of the most important aspects of analysis. It is the primary realm of science. In politics, misunderstanding or mischaracterizing Essence and Phenomena can reinforce false beliefs about the way society works which can lead to promulgation of dangerous and reactionary ideologies like neoliberalism and fascism amidst the working class. For this reason, we must avoid examining Phenomena alone. We have to dive deep to discover and understand the essential nature of things, phenomena, and ideas in our analysis.

6. Possibility and Reality

a. Categories of Possibility and Reality

The Possibility category refers to things that have not happened nor existed in reality yet, but that would happen, or would exist given necessary conditions.

The Reality category refers to things that exist or have existed in reality and in human thought.

b. Dialectical Relationship Between Possibility and Reality

Possibility and Reality have a unified and inseparable relationship: Possibility can transform into Reality and Reality contains new Possibility; any given Possibility, under specific conditions, can transform into Reality.

Given specific conditions, there could be one or many possibilities for the development of any given thing, phenomenon, or idea: practical Possibility, random Possibility, obvious Possibility, abstract Possibility, near Possibility, far Possibility, etc.

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Annotation 159

Excerpt From Marxism-Leninism Textbook of Students Who Specialize in Marxism-Leninism

Editor’s notes in [brackets]

Reality has many aspects. It also has many tendencies of development. These aspects and tendencies of Reality have different roles and positions in the development process of Reality. For example, manifesting any given Possibility into Reality requires us to change a specific subject from one status to a different status. Some subjects are easier to transform and others are more difficult to transform. Some require us to change quality, others only require quantity changes [see Annotation 117, p. 119].

Because Reality has many aspects and tendencies of development, it is useful to classify Possibility. There are at least four types of Possibility, in two separate categories.

[The categorization below draws a distinction between the obvious and the practical.

The obvious is that which will certainly occur. If you drop an object, it will obviously fall. The practical is that which we certainly could make occur through human will. If you are holding an object, you could practically drop it.]

Obvious Possibility and Random Possibility [see: Obviousness and Randomness, p. 144].

Obvious Possibility refers to Possibility that will happen, because conditions to make it happen are set in place so that the Possibility developing into Reality is unavoidable.

[If the conditions arise for a hurricane to form, it eventually becomes obvious that a hurricane will form.]

Random Possibility is Possibility which may or may not happen depending on how external factors develop, our actions, the actions of others, etc. [Whether or not a hurricane may develop on any given day is, from our human perspective, random, since we do not have any technology to cause or prevent the development of hurricanes. Other events may be more or less random. We can, for instance, prepare for an incoming hurricane to minimize the risk of harm to human communities.]

Second, based on the practical relationships between subjects, we have:

Practical Possibility vs. Abstract Possibility:

Practical Possibility means that conditions in Reality which could make something happen are already in place. [If you have all the ingredients, knowledge, and equipment needed to make a pie, you could make a pie. The material conditions are in place.]

Abstract Possibility is Possibility which may become Reality in the future but the conditions which would make this Possibility become Reality have not yet developed.

[It is an abstract Possibility that you could make a pie, even if you don’t have the tools, ingredients, or knowledge. It is possible, in the abstract, that you could buy the ingredients and equipment and learn the necessary skills to make a pie. Near Possibility simply refers to Possibility which may become Reality in the shorter term, far Possibility refers to things which may happen in a more distant future, relative to the subject being discussed.]

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In social life, in order to transform a Possibility into Reality, there must be objective conditions and subjective factors. Subjective factors include the ability of humans to change Possibility into Reality. Objective conditions refer to the situations needed to make such a change occur. [In other words, humans are able to subjectively change possibility into reality, but only when the objective circumstances exist in the external world.]

c. Meaning of the Methodology

We must base our perception and practice on Reality.

Lenin said: “Marxism takes its stand on the facts, and not on possibilities. A Marxist must, as the foundation of his policy, put [forth] only precisely and unquestionably demonstrated facts.”^[96]

However, in our perception and practice, we also need to comprehensively recognize possibilities which could arise from Reality. This will allow us to develop methods of practical operation which are suitable to changes and developments which might occur. We must actively make use of subjective factors in perception and practice to turn Possibility into Reality whenever it would serve our purposes.

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Annotation 160

This idea is perhaps best exemplified in the traditional Vietnamese proverb: “you can’t just open your mouth and wait for fruit to drop into your mouth.” We have to actively apply our will, through practice and labor, to develop the best possibilities into manifested Reality. See more about subjective factors in Annotation 207, p. 202.

IV. Basic Laws of Materialist Dialectics

Laws are the regular, common, obvious, natural, and objective relations between internal aspects, factors, and attributes of a thing or phenomenon or between things and phenomena.

There are many types of laws in this world and they all have different prevalence, reach, characteristics, and roles in regard to the motion and development processes of things and phenomena in nature, society, and human thought. So, it is necessary to classify different laws for humans to understand and apply them effectively into practical activities. Classifying laws based on prevalence, we have: private laws, common laws, and universal laws [see: Private and Common, p. 128].

Private laws are laws that only apply to a specific range of things and phenomena. For example: laws of mechanical motion, laws of chemical motion, laws of biological motion, etc.

Common laws are laws that apply to a broader range of subjects than private laws, and they impact many different subjects. For instance: the law of preservation of mass, the law of preservation of energy, etc.

Universal laws are laws that impact every aspect of nature, society, and human thought. Materialist dialectics is the study of these universal laws.

If we classify laws based on the reach of impact, we will have three main groups: laws of nature, laws of society, and laws of human thought.

Laws of nature are laws that arise in the natural world, including within the human body. They are not products of human conscious activities.

Laws of society are the laws of human activity in social relations; these laws only apply to the conscious activities of humans, yet they are still objective.

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Annotation 161

We have already discussed how relations between human beings are objective [see Annotation 108, p. 112]. By extension, the human relations which compose human societies are objective, and thus, any laws which govern objective human relations must also be objective.

Marx’s assertion that human social relations are objective is critical to understanding his work. Marx pointed out that social relations may not be “physical,” in the sense that they can’t be observed directly with human senses, but that they still have an objective character — they exist externally to a given subject, and they have objective impacts on reality. For instance, the class relations between the capitalist class and the working class result in objective manifestations in reality, such as wealth accumulation, modes of circulation, etc.

Laws of human thought are laws of the intrinsic relationships between concepts, categories, judgments, inference, and the development process of human rational awareness.

As the science of common relations and development, materialist dialectics studies the universal laws that influence the entire natural world, human society, and human thought, all together as a whole.

These universal laws are:

• The law of transformation between quantity and quality.
• The law of unification and contradiction between opposites.
• The law of negation of negation.

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Annotation 162

Each of these laws is considered universal because they apply to all things, phenomena, and ideas, and all the internal and external relations thereof, in human perception and practice. All things, phenomena, and ideas change and develop as a result of mutual impacts and relationships in accordance with these universal laws. On a fundamental level, materialist dialectics is the study of these universal laws and their utility.

1. Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality

The law of transformation between quantity and quality is a universal law which concerns the universal mode of motion and development processes of nature, society, and human thought.

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Annotation 163

Remember that mode refers to how something exists, functions, and develops [see Annotation 60, p. 59]. The universal mode of motion and development processes thus refers to how all things, ideas, and phenomena move, change, and develop.

Friedrich Engels defined the law of transformation between quantity and quality in Dialectics of Nature:

The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa. For our purpose, we could express this by saying that in nature, in a manner exactly fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion (so-called energy).

In other words, quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas lead to quality shifts.

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The universal mode of motion and development processes follows the law of transformation between quantity and quality, which states:

Qualitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas arise from the inevitable basis of the quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and, ideas; and, vice versa: quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas arise from the inevitable basis of qualitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas.

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Annotation 164

Put simply: quantity changes develop into quality changes, and quality changes lead to quantity changes [see Annotation 117, p. 119]. We say that these changes to quantity and quality occur on the “inevitable basis” of one another because quality changes always, invariably, arise from quantity changes, and, likewise, quantity changes always, invariably, arise from quality changes.

Just as quantity shifts lead to quality shifts, it is also true that quality shifts lead to quantity shifts. For example, if you have 11 donuts, then add 1 donut, you now have 1 dozen donuts. If you add 12 more donuts, you would then have 2 dozen.

Another example of quality shift leading to quantity shift would be a pond filling with rain water. Once enough drops of water collect and the pond is considered full — that is to say, once it is considered to be “a pond” of water — we will no longer think of the pond in terms of “drops.” We would think of the pond as “filled,” “overfilled,” “underfilled,” etc.

Note that both of these examples are related to our human perceptions and understanding of the material world. The material world does not change based on our perceptions, nor how we classify the quantity or quality of a given subject. There are also objective aspects related to quality shifts leading to quantity shifts. For example, if we adjust the quantity of the temperature of a sheet of paper to the point of burning, and the paper burns, then the quantity of paper would be reduced from one sheet to zero sheets. In other words, the quality shift arising from temperature quantity increase (i.e., the paper burning into ash) results in a quantity shift in how many pieces of paper exist (from one sheet to zero sheets). However, even this is ultimately a subjective assessment rooted in human consciousness, since we subjectively think in terms of “sheets of paper,” and the concept of a “sheet of paper” is essentially a classification rooted in human consciousness. It is merely an abstract way of perceiving and considering the quantity and quality of the material subject which we think of as “paper.”

The law of transformation between quantity and quality is an inevitable, objective, and universal relationship that repeats in every motion and development process of all things, phenomena, and ideas in nature, human society, and human thought.

a. Definitions of Quality and Quantity

- Definition of Quality

Quality refers to the organic unity which exists amongst the component parts of a thing, phenomenon, or idea that distinguishes it from other things, phenomena, and ideas.

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Annotation 165

Note: we have already given basic definitions of quantity and quality in Annotation 117, p. 119. What follows are more comprehensive philosophical definitions of quality and quantity. Our world exists as one continuity of matter. All things and phenomena in our universe exist essentially as one unified system — namely, the entity which we call “the universe.” This unified nature of existence is extremely difficult for human beings to comprehend. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pointed out that, in this sense, the unity of “pure being” is indistinguishable from “nothingness.” In Science of Logic, Hegel noted that if we try to comprehend pure material existence, as a whole, without distinguishing any component thing or phenomenon from any other, then all is incomprehensible. Human consciousness needs to delineate and distinguish the component parts of this unified system from each other in order to make sense of it all.

Pure light and pure darkness are two voids which are the same thing. Something can be distinguished only in determinate light or darkness... [F]or this reason, it is only darkened light and illuminated darkness which have within themselves the moment of difference and are, therefore, determinate being.

The human mind has evolved to perceive various things, phenomena, and ideas as differentiated. Quality is the basis on which we perceive subjects as distinct from one another. Every thing, phenomenon, and idea is composed of internal components and relations. The unity of these internal components and relations is what we refer to as quality. For example, a human being’s quality refers to the unity of all the internal components and relationships of which the human being is composed (i.e., the cells, organs, blood, etc., as well as the thoughts, memories, etc., which make the human) in unity. Quality is also a subjective phenomenon: a reflection of the material world in human consciousness [see Annotation 68, p. 65]. Therefore we may conceive of various qualities for the same subject. We can think of 12 donuts as “a box of donuts,” “a dozen donuts,” or as 12 individual donuts. We could consider a building as “one apartment building” or “forty apartments,” depending on the viewpoint of analysis.

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So, objective and inherent attributes form the quality of things, phenomena, and ideas, but we must not confuse quality and attribute with one another. Every thing, phenomenon, and idea has both fundamental and non-fundamental attributes. Only fundamental attributes constitute the quality of things, phenomena and ideas. When the fundamental attributes change, the quality also changes. The distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental attributes of things, phenomena, and ideas must depend on the purpose of the analysis; the same attribute may be fundamental when analyzing with one purpose but non-fundamental when analyzing with another purpose.

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Annotation 166

Whether or not an attribute is considered “fundamental” depends entirely on conscious perspective. For example, one baker may consider chocolate chips to be “fundamental” for baking cookies while another baker may not. This subjective characteristic of what might be considered “fundamental” or not is reflected in how we consider quality. If you are trying to determine how much water you need to fill a swimming pool, you may think of a pool in terms of size (i.e., “this is an Olympic sized pool”), but if you just want to go for a swim, you are likely to just think in terms of the water level (i.e., “the pool is empty, we can’t swim”).

If you are planning the construction of a school and want to know how many classrooms it will need, you might think in terms of “classrooms of students.” But if you are considering funding for a school year, you might consider the total number of students.

The quality of a thing, phenomenon, or idea is determined by the qualities of its component parts.

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Annotation 167

Qualities are composed of qualities, combined, in unity. “A swimming pool” may consist of a certain amount of concrete in a specific configuration combined with 5,000 gallons of water. A car may be composed of a body, an engine, four tires, etc. Each individual component exists as a quality — a unity of component attributes — in and of itself.

Quality is also determined by the structures and connections between component parts which manifest in specific relations. Therefore, distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental attributes is also relative.

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Annotation 168

It’s not just the component parts of a subject which define its quality, but also the relations of those component parts. For instance, a quantity of wood and nails configured in one set of structural relations may have the quality of a chair, whereas the same component parts arranged with different structures and relations may have the quality of a table. In this sense, quality can be thought of as a synthesis of the Content and Form [see Content and Form, p. 147] of a thing, phenomenon, or idea from a certain perspective.

For example, if we see two shoes, we may think of each shoe as an individual qualitative object (two shoes). On the other hand, we may think of the shoes, together, as a single qualitative “object” in terms of its utility and in terms of synthesis of content and form (“a pair of shoes”), so much so that if one shoe is lost then the remaining shoe is considered useless and discarded as trash.

Because there are countless ways in which quality — the configuration and relations and composition of constituent parts of any given subject — can manifest, we must recognize that quality itself, based on the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental attributes, is a relative and subjective phenomenon of human consciousness.

Any given subject will have multiple qualities, depending on the relations which exist between and within that subject and other subjects.

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Annotation 169

Any thing, phenomenon, or idea may be perceived from various different perspectives which would cause us to consider it as having different qualities. A single shoe may be considered as: a shoe, 3 pounds of leather, half of a pair, etc., depending on its internal and external relations and the perspective of the person considering the shoe.

We can’t consider things, phenomena, and ideas apart from quality. Quality exhibits a subject’s relative stability.

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Annotation 170

Remember that quality is the way in which the human mind conceives of the world as a collection of distinct things, phenomena, and ideas. These perceptions of quality are purely relative, but they are important, because they are what allow us to develop an understanding of the complicated system of things, phenomena, and ideas which make up our universe. In our perception, quality represents the relative stability of a thing, phenomenon, or idea which makes it a subject that we can consider and analyze in and of itself. Understanding how we distinguish between different subjects is crucial in developing a scientific understanding of the world which is rooted in observation and practice.

- Definition of Quantity

Quantity refers to the amount or extent of specific attributes of a thing, phenomenon, or idea, including but not limited to:

• The amount of component parts.
• Scale or size.
• Speed or rhythm of motion.

A thing, phenomenon, or idea can have many quantities, with each quantity determined by different criteria. [i.e., a car may be measured by many criteria of quantity, such as: length in meters, weight in kilograms, speed in kilometers per hour, etc.]

Quality and quantity embody two different aspects of the same subject. Both quality and quantity exist objectively [see Annotation 108, p. 112]. However, the distinction between “quality” and “quantity” in the process of perceiving things, phenomena, and ideas has only relative significance: an attribute may be considered “quantity” from one perspective but “quality” from another perspective.

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Annotation 171

If you are filling a box with a dozen donuts, then once you add the 12^th donut, one “dozen” may represent the quality which you seek. From the perspective of a customer buying donuts for a party, “dozen” may represent the “quantity.” In other words, you need to make an order (quality) of three dozen donuts (quantity). And the manager of the store, at the end of the day, may tally twenty orders (quantity) as the day’s sales goal (quality). Quantity and quality, therefore, are both considered relatively, based on perspective and the purpose of analysis at hand.

b. Dialectical Relationship Between Quantity and Quality

Every thing, phenomenon, and idea exists as a unity of two aspects: quality and quantity. Quantity and quality do not exist separate from one another. Quantity and quality dialectically and mutually impact one other. Changes in quantity lead to changes in quality. However, not every change in quantity will cause a change in quality.

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Annotation 172

In order for quantity change to lead to quality change, a certain amount must be met.

This amount is called the threshold, which is explained further below in this section. A threshold may be exact and known (i.e., it takes exactly 12 donuts to make a dozen donuts) or it may be relative and unknown (i.e., a certain quantity of air inflated into a balloon may cause it to burst, but the exact, specific quantity of air may be relative to other factors such as air temperature and may be unknown to the observer until the balloon actually bursts).

With any given subject, there will be a range of quantity changes which can accumulate without leading to change in quality. This range is called the quantity range.

Quantity range is defined as a relationship between quantity and quality: the range of intervals in which the change in quantity does not substantially change the quality of a given subject. Within the limits of a quantity range, the subject retains the same quality.

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Annotation 173

The quantity range is a range of quantities between quality shifts.

Quantity range can be thought of as the range of quantities which exists between thresholds. For instance, between the qualities of “one donut” and “one dozen donuts,” there is a quantity range of 10 donuts (2 donuts through 11 donuts) which can be added before the quality shifts to “one dozen donuts.” You can keep adding additional donuts, up to the quantity of 11 donuts, without reaching the threshold of quality shift to “one dozen donuts.” This is the quantity range between the qualities of donut and one dozen donuts. Again, the quantity range is relative to the perspective and the nature of analysis. One person may only be concerned with “dozens of donuts,” while another may consider the quality of “half dozens,” which would consider a quality shift to “one half-dozen donuts” to occur once the sixth donut (quantity) is added.

Motion and change usually begins with a change in quantity. When changes in quantity reach a certain amount, quality will also change. The amount, or degree, of quantity change at which quality change occurs is called the threshold.

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Annotation 174

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-57.png

Note that the threshold is an approximate range. At a certain quantity, a glass may be considered “half full” and at another certain quantity, after passing the threshold, the glass will be considered “full,” though there may be a wide range of quantities at which the glass would be considered to have the quality of being “full,” depending on perspective and purpose of analysis.

When quantity change meets a threshold, within necessary and specific conditions, quality will change. This change in quality, which takes place in the motion and development process of things, phenomena, and ideas, is called a quality shift.

A quality shift occurs when a quantity changes beyond a threshold, leading to a change in quality.

Quality shifts inevitably occur as transformations in the development processes of things, phenomena, and ideas. Qualitative changes can be expressed or manifested through many forms of quality shifts which are determined by the contradictions, characteristics and conditions of a given subject, including such characteristics as: fast or slow, big or small, partial or entire, spontaneous or intentional.

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Annotation 175

Quality shifts are inevitable because there is no thing, phenomenon, nor idea which can exist statically, forever, without ever undergoing change. Eventually, any given subject will undergo quality shifts, even if such transformation may take millions of years to occur.

Quality shifts can take various forms, depending on the nature of internal and external relationships, contradictions, and mutual impacts. For instance, a river may dry up or it may flood depending on internal and external relations and characteristics, but it will not simply flow at the same level forever without ever undergoing any quality shifts.

The rate and degree of quality shifts can vary considerably based on such internal and external factors, and may be “spontaneous,” that is to say, without human intervention, or may be the result of the intentional, conscious action of human beings.

Quality shifts mark the end of one motion period and the start of a new motion period.

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Annotation 176

The Quantity Range (A) refers to the range of quantities between two qualities in the process of development. The Quality Shift (B) refers to the point at which quantity accumulates to the point of changing the Quality of the developing subject. The Period of Motion (C) includes both the quantity range and the quality shifts themselves.

Period of motion refers to the development which occurs between two quality shifts, including the quality shifts themselves.

Period of motion differs from quantity range because quantity range only includes the range of quantity change which can occur between quality shifts, without including the quality shifts themselves.

For example, a period of motion for a cup filling with water from a half cup would include all of the change which occurs from the cup being half full to the cup becoming entirely full. The quantity range of this same process would only include the quantities of water that stand between half-full and full, where the cup is neither considered to be “half full” or “full” but somewhere in between, i.e., between quality shifts.

Quality shift represents discontinuity within the continuous development process of things and phenomena. In the material world, all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly undergoing continuous sequences of quantitative changes leading to quality shifts, creating an endless line of nodes, showing how all things, phenomena, and ideas move and develop to increasingly advanced degrees [see illustration on p. 121 for a visualization of this “endless line of nodes”].

As Friedrich Engels summarised: “merely quantitative changes beyond a certain point pass into qualitative differences.”^[97]

Annotation 177

Processes of change and development in our universe are continuously ongoing. Whenever a quality shift occurs, it represents a brief discontinuity in the sense that we perceive a definite and distinct transformation from one thing, phenomenon, or idea into another; in other words, we can distinguish between the mode of existence of the thing, phenomenon, or idea before and after the quality shift.

Take, for example, the “lifespan” of a house. A human being could easily distinguish between the empty land which exists before the house is built, the construction site which exists as it’s being built, and the house itself once construction is completed. In reality, this process of change is continuous, but to our human perception, each quality shift represents a definite and distinct period of change and discontinuity in terms of our perception of the “thing” which is the house.

This is related to the historic perspective of things, phenomena, and ideas, in which we recognize the continuity of existence between different stages of development of things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 201, p. 195].

When a quality shift occurs, there is an impact on the quantity. Quality impacts quantity in a number of ways, including [but not limited to]:

• Changing the structure, scale, or level of the subject.
• Changing the rhythm or speed of the motion and development of the subject.

In summary, dialectical unity between quantity and quality exists in every thing, phenomenon, and idea. A gradual quantitative change [through the quantity range] will eventually meet the threshold, which will inevitably lead to a qualitative change through quality shift. Simultaneously, the new quality will mutually impact the quantity, causing new quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas. This process takes place continuously, forming the fundamental and universal mode of movement and development processes of all things, phenomena, and ideas.

Annotation 178

Transformation between quantity and quality is the mode of movement and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas, because it reflects the way in which human consciousness perceives movement and development.

So, it is important to understand that there is no material manifestation of quantity and quality. They are simply mental constructs which reflect the ways in which we observe and understand change, motion, and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. Transformation processes in the material world are fully fluid and continuous, but our consciousness perceives change in stages of development. Quality simply reflects how we distinguish one subject from another subject, as well as how we recognize the transformation process (and stages of development) of a single subject over time.

There is no specific point, metaphysically distinct point at which a “puppy” becomes an “adult dog,” but human beings will distinguish between a puppy and an adult dog, or recognize at a certain point that a puppy has “become” an adult dog, based on observation of quality.

Quality refers to the differences which are distinguished in human consciousness between one subject and another, or changes in a subject’s form over time.

There is no metaphysically distinct point at which a “puppy” becomes an “adult dog,” but human beings will distinguish between a puppy and an adult dog, or recognize at a certain point that a puppy has “become” an adult dog, based on observation of quality. We create categories which reflect quality to organize and systematically understand the world around us, and to distinguish between different subjects, and to distinguish between different stages of development of a given subject.

We can also distinguish differences of quality between different subjects: we can distinguish a cat from a dog, and we can distinguish one dog from another dog. These distinguishing attributes constitute differences in quality. Note that this conception of differentiation of things, phenomena, and ideas into qualities which constantly change and develop over time is fundamentally distinct from metaphysical categorization, which seeks to divide all things, phenomena, and ideas into static, perpetually unchanging categories (see Annotation 8, p. 8).

Distinction within the human mind is reflected in the concept of quantity and quality. If we do not observe quality differences between subjects, then we would not be able to distinguish between different subjects at all. If we could not recognize the quality shifts of any given subject, then we would not be aware of change or motion at all.

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c. Meaning of the Methodology

Every thing, phenomenon and idea has characteristics of quality and quantity which mutually impact and transform one another. Therefore, in perception and practice, we need to understand and take into account the law of transformation between quantity and quality in order to have a comprehensive viewpoint of things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 114, p. 116].

Quantitative changes of things, phenomena and ideas inevitably lead to qualitative changes in all things, phenomena, and ideas. Therefore, in our perception and practice, as we plan and enact change in our world and in human society, it is necessary to gradually accumulate changes in quantity in order to make changes in quality. At the same time, we must recognize and make use of the fact that quality shifts also lead to changes in quantity.

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Annotation 179

We have to understand and utilize the law of transformation between quantity and quality in our activities. For instance, if a group of activists hopes to address hunger in their community, they have to realize that they can’t immediately enact a quality shift which solves the entire problem of hunger across the city instantaneously. Instead, the activists must recognize that quantity shifts lead to quality shifts through stages of development. In planning and acting, they may need to set certain development targets, predict thresholds at which quality shifts will occur, etc.

For instance, the first goal for these activists may be to provide free lunches to houseless people in a particular park every weekend. If they can accomplish this, then they will not have completely eliminated hunger in the city, but they will have reached a threshold — a quality shift — in that nobody in that specific park will be hungry at lunch time on weekends. From there, they can continue to build quality shifts through accumulation of changes in quantity, one stage of development at a time.

Quality shifts leading to quantity shifts must also be recognized and utilized in our planning and activities. For example, once an effective strategy is developed for eliminating hunger in one park through quantity changes leading to quality shifts, this strategy can then be implemented in other parks. Thus the quality shift of “eliminating hunger in one park” can lead to a quantity shift: “eliminating hunger in two parks, three parks, etc.,” until the quantity shift of “eliminating hunger in parks” leads to the quality shift of “eliminating hunger in all the parks in the city.” This entire process of enacting quantity changes to lead to quality shifts, and accumulating quality shifts to change quantity, are all focused toward the ultimate goal of achieving the quality shift of “eliminating hunger in the entire city.”

In short, it’s vital for us to understand the ways in which quantity and quality mutually impact each other so that we can formulate plans and activities which will lead to motion and development which accomplish our goals, step by step, through one stage of development at a time.

Changes in quantity can only lead to changes in quality provided the quantity accumulates to a certain threshold. Therefore, in practice, we need to overcome impatient, left-sided thought. Left-sided thinking refers to thinking which is overly subjective, idealistic, ignorant of the laws which govern material reality. Left-sided thinking neglects to acknowledge the necessity of quantity accumulation which precedes shifts in quality, focusing instead on attempting to perform continuous shifts in quality.

On the other hand, we must also recognize that once change in quantity has reached a threshold, it is inevitable that a quality shift will take place. Therefore, we need to overcome conservative and right-sided thought in practical work. Right-sided thinking is the expression of conservative, stagnant thought that resists or refuses to recognize quality shifts even as changes in quantity come to meet the threshold of quality shift.

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Annotation 180

“Right-sided thinking” and “left-sided thinking” are Vietnamese political concepts which are rooted in the ideas of Lenin’s book: Leftwing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. In Vietnamese political philosophy, “left-sided thinking” is a form of dogmatic idealism which upholds unrealistic conceptions of change and development. Left-sided thinkers don’t have the patience for quantity accumulation which are prerequisite to quality shifts, or expect to skip entire stages of development which are necessary to precipitate change in the real world. An example of left-sided thinking would be believing that a capitalist society can instantly transition into a stateless, classless, communist society, skipping over the transitions in quantity and quality which are required to bring such a massive transformation in human society to fruition.

“Right-sided thinking,” on the other hand, is conservate resistance to change. Right-sided thinkers resist quality changes to human society; they either want to preserve society as it exists right now, or reverse development to some previous (real or imagined) stage of development. Right-sided thinkers also refuse to acknowledge quality shifts once they’ve occurred, idealistically pretending that changes in material conditions have not occurred. For example, right-sided thinkers may refuse to recognize advances which have been made in the liberation of women, or even attempt to reverse those advances in hopes of returning to previous stages of development when women had fewer freedoms. Here is a practical example of these concepts in use, from the Vietnam Encyclopedia, published by the Ministry of Culture and Information of Vietnam:

Opportunism is a system of political views that do not follow a clear direction nor a clear line, do not have a definite stance, and are inclined toward the immediate personal gain of the opportunist. In the proletarian revolutionary movement, opportunism is a politics of compromise, reform, and unprincipled collaboration with the enemy which run contrary to the basic interests of the working class and the working people. In practice, opportunism has two main trends, stemming from right-sided thinking and from left-sided thinking, respectively:

Right-wing opportunism is reformist, favors undue compromise, and aims to peacefully “convert” capitalism into socialism while abandoning the struggle for meaningful victory of the working class. Right-wing opportunism, typified by Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, has its origins in the Workers’ Parties of the Second International era and exists to this day.

Left-wing opportunism is a mixture of extremism and adventurism, dogmatism, arrogance, subjectivity, cults of violence, and disregard for the objective situation.

Both “right” and “left” opportunism push the workers’ movement to futile sacrifice and failure.

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Quality shifts are diverse and plentiful, so we need to promote and apply quality shifts creatively and flexibly to suit the specific material conditions we face in a given situation. This is especially true in changing human society, as social development processes depend not only on objective conditions but also on subjective human factors. Therefore, we need to be active and take the initiative to promote the process of converting between quantity and quality in the most effective way.

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Annotation 181

Put simply, we have to use our human will and labor to actively promote quantity changes which lead to quality changes, and quality changes which lead to quantity changes, which move us towards our goal of ending all forms of oppression in human society. This will involve not just objective factors^[98] (i.e., material conditions which are necessary to accomplish something), but subjective factors^[99] as well (factors which we, as a subject, are capable of impacting directly).

2. Law of Unification and Contradiction Between Opposites

The law of unification and contradiction between opposites is the Essence of dialectics [see: Essence and Phenomenon, p. 156]. According to Lenin: “In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This embodies the Essence of dialectics, but it requires explanations and development.”^[100] According to the law of unification and contradiction between opposites, the fundamental, originating, and universal driving force of all motion and development processes is the inherent and objective contradiction which exists in all things, phenomena, and ideas.

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Annotation 182

In other words, contradiction (defined further in the next section) is the force which serves as the fundamental, originating, and universal force which drives all motion and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas.

Contradiction is a fundamental driving force because it is the most basic driving force which all other forms of motion and development are based upon.

Contradiction is the originating driving force because all motion and development arises from contradiction.

Contradiction is the universal driving force because all things, phenomena, and ideas — without exception — are driven to motion and development by contradiction.

a. Definition of Contradiction and Common Characteristics of Contradiction

- Definition of Contradiction

In dialectics, the concept of contradiction is used to refer to the relationship, opposition, and transformation between opposites which takes place within all things, phenomena, and ideas, as well as between all things, phenomena, and ideas. This dialectical concept of contradiction is fundamentally different from the metaphysical concept of contradiction. The metaphysical concept of contradiction is an illogical conception of opposition without unity and without dialectical transformation between opposites.

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Annotation 183

A contradiction is, fundamentally, just a type of relationship. In a contradictory relationship, two things, phenomena, and/or ideas mutually impact one another, resulting in the eventual negation of one subject and the synthesis of the negator and the negated into some new form.

The metaphysical concept of contradiction is considered illogical because it establishes no connection between that which is negated and the resulting synthesis.

In the metaphysical conception of contradiction, the negated “disappears” and is not represented in the resulting synthesis.

Metaphysical contradiction presents contradicting subjects as isolated from one another and completely distinct, when in reality the relationship between the negated and the negator essentially defines the contradiction. The negated subject is seen as completely negated; that is to say, it is conceived of as essentially “disappearing” into the synthesized result of the contradiction. In this sense, this metaphysical conception of negation is inaccurate in that it is represented as a complete, terminating process.

In the above example, once the fox eats the rabbit, the rabbit is considered “gone” after a terminal negation process (see Annotation 196, p. 188) ends the contradiction.

The materialist dialectical conception of contradiction recognizes that contradicting subjects are defined by their relationship and that the synthesis of the contradiction carries forward attributes and characteristics from both the negator and the negated.

Materialist dialectical contradiction recognizes that every contradiction is defined by the relationship between the negated and the negator. Materialist dialectics also recognizes that attributes and characteristics of the negated subject are carried forward into the synthesized subject [see Annotation 203, p. 198]. Materialist dialectics also recognizes that contradiction continues indefinitely, as the negated becomes negated again, and so on, continuously, forever [see Negation of Negation, p. 185].

In the example on the previous page, the fox consuming the rabbit constitutes a negation process in which the fox takes on characteristics from the rabbit (i.e., nutritional and energy content, any diseases which may be carried forward to the fox, etc.).

Contradiction arises from opposition which exists within or between things, phenomena, and ideas. The concept of opposing “sides” refers to such aspects, properties, and tendencies of motion which oppose one another, yet are, simultaneously, conditions and premises of the existence of one another. Examples include:

• Negative charge and positive charge within atoms.
• Anabolism and catabolism within living organisms [anabolism refers to the growth and building up of molecules within an organism, while catabolism refers to the digestion and breaking down of molecules within an organism].
• Production and consumption as socioeconomic activities.
• Trial and error which leads to cognitive development.

Annotation 184

All of the above forms of contradiction drive motion and development. These processes exist in unity and opposition. For example, in political economics, production is driven by consumption and consumption is facilitated by production. Even though these are fundamentally opposite forces (production adds to the total quantity of products, while consumption reduces the total quantity of products), they can’t exist without one another, and they drive each other forward. This is the dialectical nature of contradiction as the driving force of all motion and development as defined in materialist dialectics.

- The General Properties of Contradictions

Contradiction is objective and universal. According to Friedrich Engels: “If simple mechanical change of position contains a contradiction, this is even more true of the higher forms of motion of matter, and especially of organic life and its development. We saw above that life consists precisely and primarily in this — that a being is at each moment itself and yet something else. Life is therefore also a contradiction which is present in things and processes themselves, and which constantly originates and resolves itself; and as soon as the contradiction ceases, life, too, comes to an end, and death steps in. We likewise saw that also, in the sphere of thought, we could not escape contradictions, and that, for example, the contradiction between man’s inherently unlimited capacity for knowledge and its actual presence only in men who are externally limited and possess limited cognition finds its solution in what is — at least practically, for us — an endless succession of generations, in infinite progress.”^[101]

Annotation 185

Here, Engels is explaining how contradiction is the driving force in both material and conscious processes of motion and development. The process of life is a process of contradiction — all organic life forms must consume organic matter so that they can produce growth and offspring, must produce certain molecules and metabolic processes so that they can consume nutrients, and so on. Once these contradictory processes stop, as Engels says, “death steps in” (though even death is a transition forward).

Conscious motion and development are also rooted in contradictory forces. Engels points out the contradiction between humanity’s seemingly infinite capacity for learning with the seemingly infinite amount of knowledge which can be obtained in the world. This great contradiction drives a seemingly endless process of expanding human knowledge, collectively, over countless generations.

Contradictions are not only objective and universal, but also diverse and plentiful. The diverse nature of contradictions is evident in the fact that every subject can include many different contradictions and that contradictions manifest differently depending upon specific conditions. Contradictions can hold different positions and roles in the existence, motion, and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. These positions and roles include [but are not limited to]:

• Internal and external contradictions
• Fundamental and non-fundamental contradictions
• Primary and secondary contradictions

Annotation 186

Internal contradictions are contradictions which exist in the internal relations of a subject, while external contradictions exist between two or more subjects as external relations.

For example: a sports team might have internal contradictions between players, between the players and the coach, between the coach and management, etc. External contradictions might exist between the team and other teams, between the team and league officials, between the team and the landlords who own the team’s practice space, etc.

A fundamental contradiction is a contradiction which defines the Essence of a relationship [see Essence and Phenomenon, p. 156]. Fundamental contradictions exist throughout the entire development process of a given thing, phenomenon, or idea. A non-fundamental contradiction exists in only one aspect or attribute of a thing, phenomenon, or idea. A non-fundamental contradiction can impact a subject, but it will not control or decide the essential development of the subject. Whether or not a contradiction is fundamental is relative to the point of view.

For example: the fundamental contradiction of one nation engaged in war against one another might be the war itself. There will exist many other contradictions; one nation at war might have a trade dispute with a third nation which is not participating in the war. From the “war perspective,” this contradiction is non-fundamental, as it does not define the essential characteristic of the nation at war (though from the perspective of a diplomat charged with ending the trade dispute, the war may be seen as a non-fundamental contradiction while the dispute would be seen as fundamental).

In the development of things, phenomena, and ideas, there are many development stages. In each stage of development, there will be one contradiction which drives the development process. This is what we call the primary contradiction. Secondary contradictions include all the other contradictions which exist during that stage of development. Determining whether a contradiction is primary or secondary is relative: it depends heavily upon the material conditions and the situation.

For example: when restoring an old car that doesn’t run any more, a mechanic may consider the primary contradiction to be the non-functioning engine. There may be many secondary contradictions which contribute to the problems with the car’s engine problems. The battery may be dead, the spark plugs may need to be bad, the tires may need replacement, the timing belt may be loose, etc. Those are all secondary contradictions which do not define the stage of development which is “repairing the engine.” Some of these secondary contradictions may need to be resolved (such as replacing the spark plugs) before the primary contradiction can be fully addressed; others, such as a cracked windshield, may not need to be addressed before the primary contradiction can be dealt with.

On the other hand, a secondary contradiction may become the primary contradiction: if a mechanic resolves every problem with the engine except for one bad spark plug, then the bad spark plug will shift from being a secondary contradiction to being the primary contradiction: the bad spark plug is now the primary reason the car won’t start and this stage of development can’t be completed.

Within all the various fields of inquiry, there exist contradictions which have a diverse range of different properties and characteristics.

Annotation 187

Different fields of study will focus on different forms of contradictions, and any given thing, phenomenon, or idea may contain countless contradictions which can be analyzed and considered for different purposes. For example, consider a large city, which might contain far too many contradictions to count. Civil engineers may focus primarily on contradictions in traffic patterns, the structural integrity of bridges and roads, ensuring that buildings are safe and healthy for inhabitants, etc. Utilities departments will focus on contradictions related to sewage, electrical, and sanitation systems. The education system will focus on contradictions which prevent students from achieving success in schools.

All of these various methods of analysis may focus on specific forms of contradictions, though there will also be overlap. For instance, designing a school bus system will require the education system and civil engineers to discover and grapple with contradictions which might be hindrances for transporting students safely to school.

b. Motion Process of Contradictions

In every contradiction, the opposing sides are united with each other and opposed to each other at the same time. The concept of “unity between opposites” refers to the fact that a contradiction is a binding, inseparable, and mutually impacting relationship which exists between opposites.

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Annotation 188

Contradictions are binding and inseparable because they hold a relationship together. If two opposing things, phenomena, or ideas simply separate, then contradiction, by definition, no longer exists. For example, an economy is bound together by the contradiction of production and consumption; if production exists without consumption (or vice-versa), it can’t be considered to be an economy.

Contradictions are said to be mutually impacting because any time a contradiction exists between two opposing sides, both sides are mutually impacted for as long as the contradiction exists and develops. Of course, it is possible for two opposing sides to separate from one another; for example, a factory which produced buggy whips may have failed to find consumers after the invention of the car. Thus, there would exist a situation in which production exists without consumption. In this situation, the termination of the contradiction between production and consumption leads to a new contradiction: the factory will now be in the midst of a crisis which will require it to either provide a different product or go out of business.

Thus we see that production and consumption can’t be separated from one another without leading to a change in the essential nature of the relationship and the opposing subjects, and we see that the opposing sides mutually impact one another (a change in consumption will affect production, and vice-versa).

In any given contradictory relationship, each oppositional side is the premise for the other’s existence. Unity among opposites also defines the identity of each opposing side. Lenin wrote: “The identity of opposites (it would be more correct, perhaps, to say their ‘unity,’—although the difference between the terms identity and unity is not particularly important here. In a certain sense, both are correct) is the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society).”^[102]

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Annotation 189

Here, Lenin is explaining that identity and unity are (more or less) the same concept when it comes to understanding the nature of contradiction between opposites. In material processes of nature, social processes, and processes of consciousness, we perceive and define oppositional forces by recognizing mutually exclusive and contradictory tendencies within and between things, phenomena, and ideas. In other words, whenever we think of an oppositional relationship, we define it in terms of the opposition.

War, disease, and economy are all examples of unity in contradiction.

When we think of a war, we think of the contradictions which exist between the opposing nations. When we think of a disease, we define it by the oppositional forces between the ailment and the human body. When we think of an economy, we think of the oppositional forces of production and consumption within the economy.

In other words, the identity of contradictory relationships is defined by the unity of the opposing sides with one another.

The concept struggle of opposites refers to the tendency of opposites to eliminate and negate each other. There exist many diverse forms of struggle between opposites. Struggle can manifest in various forms based on:

• The nature of a given thing, phenomenon, or idea.
• Relationships within a thing, phenomenon, or idea (or between things, phenomena, and ideas).
• Specific material conditions [see Annotation 10, p. 10].

The process of unity and struggle of opposites inevitably leads to a transformation between them. The transformation between opposites takes place with rich diversity, and such transformations can vary depending on the properties of the opposite sides as well as specific material conditions.

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Annotation 190

Opposing sides, by definition, oppose one another. If forces or characteristics which exist within or between things, phenomena, or ideas do not oppose one another, then they are not, by definition, opposites. Thus, it can be understood that opposing sides have a tendency to struggle against one another. It is this very struggle which defines two sides as opposites, and as contradictory.

Lenin explained that some contradicting opposite sides can exist in what he described as equilibrium, but that this is only ever a temporary state of affairs, as exemplified in his article An Equilibrium of Forces.

[See Annotation 64, p. 62 for relevant text and more info on equilibrium.]

Clearly, Lenin sees that this equilibrium of contradictory forces is not permanently sustainable. Indeed, no equilibrium of contradictory forces can be permanent. Eventually, one opposing side will overtake the other, and eventually, any given contradiction will result in one opposing side overcoming the other.

According to the law of unification and contradiction between opposites, the struggle between two opposing sides is absolute, while the unity between them is relative, conditional, and temporary; in unity there is a struggle: a struggle in unity. According to Lenin: “The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.”^[103]

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Annotation 191

“Absolute” and “Relative” are philosophical classifications which refer to interdependence. That which is absolute exists independently and with permanence. That which is relative is temporary, and dependent on other conditions or circumstances in order to exist.

So Lenin’s point is that unity exists temporarily in any given pair of opposing sides, as the unity only exists as long as the opposing sides are opposing one another. As soon as one side eliminates or negates the other, the unity subsides. However, opposition is considered absolute, because it is opposition which drives motion and change in all things, phenomena, and ideas through contradictory processes of opposing sides.

In the same text quoted in the passage above, On the Questions of Dialectics, Lenin notes:

The distinction between subjectivism (skepticism, sophistry, etc.) and dialectics, incidentally, is that in (objective) dialectics the difference between the relative and the absolute is itself relative. For objective dialectics there is an absolute within the relative. For subjectivism and sophistry the relative is only relative and excludes the absolute...

Such must also be the method of exposition (i.e., study) of dialectics in general... To begin with what is the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., with any proposition: the leaves of a tree are green; John is a man: Fido is a dog, etc. Here already we have dialectics (as Hegel’s genius recognised): the individual is the universal.

The individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes) etc. Here already we have the elements, the germs, the concepts of necessity, of objective connection in nature, etc. Here already we have the contingent and the necessary, the phenomenon and the essence; for when we say: John is a man, Fido is a dog, this is a leaf of a tree, etc., we disregard a number of attributes as contingent; we separate the essence from the appearance, and counterpose the one to the other.

In other words, we must understand that in materialist dialectics, the absolute and the relative exist within one another; in other words, the absolute and the relative have a dialectical relationship with one another in all things, phenomena, and ideas.

Relative unity refers to the nature of unity between contradictory subjects. Contradictory subjects are unified in the sense that any given contradiction is essentially defined by the contradiction between two subjects. Thus, the two subjects are unified in contradiction. However, this unity is relative in the sense that this unification is temporary (the unity will end upon negation and synthesis) and relative (i.e., defined by the relationship between the two contradicting subjects).

Absolute struggle refers to the fact that contradiction, negation, and synthesis will go on forever; in this sense, contradictory processes are absolute because such struggle exists permanently; struggle has no set beginning or end point, and exists independently of any specific thing, phenomenon, or idea.

Relative Unity refers to the temporary and relative nature of specific relationships which define and unify specific contradictions; Absolute Struggle refers to the permanent, constant nature of development through contradiction.

The relationship between relative unity and absolute struggle defines and drives change, motion, and development through contradiction.

This applies to contradictions. The relative unity and the absolute struggle between opposing sides have a dialectical relationship with one another. The permanent absoluteness of struggle — the fact that all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly undergoing processes of change through contradictory forces — can only manifest in the relative unity of opposing sides, which can only exist through the temporary existence of conditional relations between opposing sides.

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The interaction that leads to the transformation between opposites is a process. At the beginning, contradictions manifest as differences and then develop into two opposing sides. When the two contradictions are fiercely matched and when the conditions are ripe, they will transform each other, and finally, the conflict will be resolved. As old contradictions disappear, new contradictions are formed and the process of mutual impact and transformation between opposites continues, which drives the motion and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas. The relationship, impact and transformation between opposites are the source and driving force of all movement and development in the world. Lenin affirmed: “Development is the ‘struggle’ of opposites.”^[104]

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Annotation 192

Any given process of development — that is to say, of transformation or motion — can be seen as a struggle between opposites. Various forms of struggle can exist simultaneously for any given subject, and the way we interpret struggle can depend on our point of view.

For an engineer, a car moving along a road might be seen as a struggle between the power generated by the engine against the mass of the car itself and the friction of the tires on the ground. The driver of the car might see the process in terms of the struggle between the driver and the environment as they navigate across town avoiding accidents and following traffic laws.

An organism’s life can be seen as a struggle between the organism’s life processes and its environment, or it might be seen as a struggle of contradictory forces within the organism itself (i.e., forces of consumption of nutrition vs. forces of expending energy to survive, forces of disease vs. forces of the organism’s immune system, etc.).

Materialist dialectics requires us to identify, examine, and understand the opposing forces which drive all development in our universe. Only through understanding such contradictions can we intercede and affect changes in the world which suit our purposes.

For example, in order to fight against capitalism and other forms of oppression, we must first understand the contradictory forces which exist within and between those oppressive social structures. Only then can we determine how we might best apply our will, through labor processes, to dismantle such oppressive structures. We might do this by exacerbating existing contradictions within oppressive structures, by introducing new contradictions, by negating contradictions which inhibit our own progress, etc.

c. Meaning of the Methodology

Given that contradictions are objective and universal, and that they are the source and driving force of movement and development, it is therefore necessary to detect, recognize, and understand contradictions, to fully analyze opposing sides, and to grasp the nature, origin and tendencies of motion and development in our awareness and practice.

Lenin said: “The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts… is the essence… of dialectics.”^[105]

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Annotation 193

In other words, materialist dialectics is simply a system of understanding the world around us by viewing all things, phenomena, and ideas as collections of relationships and contradictions which exist within and between all things, phenomena, and ideas.

Since contradictions exist with such rich diversity, it is necessary to have a historical point of view [see Annotation 114, p. 116] — that is, to know how to analyze each specific type of contradiction and have appropriate methods for resolving them. In our perception and practice, it is necessary to properly distinguish the roles and positions of different types of contradictions in each situation and condition; we must also distinguish between different characteristics which contradictions might have in order to find the best method of resolving them.

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Annotation 194

The historical viewpoint is vital because in order to fully understand any given contradiction, we must understand the process of development which led to its formation.

For example, before a car engine can be repaired, we must first find out what caused the engine to stop working to begin with. If the car is out of fuel, we must determine what caused it to run out of fuel. Did the driver simply drive until the fuel tank was empty, or is there a hole or leak in a fuel line, in the tank, etc.?

It is vital to know the history of development of a given pair of opposing sides, as well as the characteristics and other properties of both opposing sides, to fully understand the contradiction. Since all conscious activity (like all processes of motion and change) ultimately derives from the driving force of contradiction, it is vital for us to develop a historical and comprehensive perspective of any contradictions we hope to affect through our conscious activities.

3. Law of Negation of Negation

The law of negation of negation describes the fundamental and universal tendency of movement and development to occur through dialectical negation, forming a cyclical form of development through what is termed “negation of negation.”

a. Definition of Negation and Dialectical Negation

The world continuously and endlessly changes and develops. Things, phenomena, and ideas that arise, exist, develop and perish, are replaced by other things, phenomena, and ideas; one form of existence is replaced with another form of existence, again and again, continuously, through this development process. This procedure is called negation.

All processes of movement and development take place through negation. From certain perspectives, negations can be seen as end points to the development (and thus, existence) of a given thing, phenomenon, or idea [which we can think of as “terminal negations;” see Annotation below]. But from other perspectives, negations can also create the conditions and premises for new developments. Such negations, which create such conditions and premises for the development of things and phenomena, are called dialectical negation.

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Annotation 195

Negation refers to any act of motion or transformation which arises from contradiction. Specifically, negation is what occurs when one opposing side completely overcomes the other. Nothing in our universe can transform or move all by itself, without any contradiction. Thus, negation drives all development and motion of all things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 119, p. 123]. There are various forms of negation, and the same negation process may be seen to take different forms depending on viewpoint of analysis [see Annotation 11, p. 12, and Annotation 114, p. 116], as depicted in the diagram below.

An overview of various forms of negation as they relate to dialectical development.

Dialectical negation occurs when the end of development leads directly to some new development process. Dialectical negation occurs through quality shifts [see Annotation 117, p. 119], which, themselves, occur through negation of opposite sides.

Replacement negation refers to the replacement of one thing, phenomenon, or idea with another through dialectical negation.

Translation Note: The terms “terminal negation” and “replacement negation” do not appear in the original Vietnamese text. We chose to assign terms to these concepts for clarity.

Replacement negation occurs when one thing, phenomenon, or idea takes the place of another. Replacement negation is always a dialectical process, where one subject is replaced gradually by another. Replacement may be relatively fast or slow, but it is never instantaneous — nothing can pop in and out of existence instantaneously. For example: swords were gradually replaced by firearms as the primary weapons of war over the course of many centuries. Today, swords have been completely replaced by firearms on the battlefield. This was a process of replacement negation — weapons are still used in war, but the type of weapon used has been completely replaced. Development continues, even though development of swords as battle weapons has essentially ended.

Terminal negation refers to the end of a specific cycle of development.

Terminal negation is what happens when development completely ends for a given thing, phenomenon, or idea. For example, from one viewpoint, the development of swords as weapons of war can be seen as having ended — having been terminally negated — due to the innovation of firearms. In essence, swords are no longer developed, nor implemented, in modern warfare.

Replacement negation and terminal negation must be considered in relative terms. From one viewpoint, we can see the rise of firearms as the underlying reason for the terminal negation of military use of swords. Today, no army on Earth uses swords as primary battlefield weapons and militaries no longer develop sword technology for battlefield use. However, from another viewpoint, the development of battlefield weapons has continued on long after the end of the primacy of swords, and it could be said that firearms have replaced swords as the primary battlefield weapon.

Consider the death of a human being. From one perspective, death is a terminal negation — the person’s consciousness has ended, and no further development of consciousness will occur for that individual. From other perspectives, development continues. The individual may have had children who will continue their familial lineage, they may have contributed ideas which will continue to impact other people for centuries to come, and so on. In that sense, replacement negation may be viewed as dialectical negation. For example, someone studying modes of transportation in the history of the USA may see the process of steam locomotives replacing horses, and then cars replacing steam locomotives, as processes of dialectical negation from the overarching perspective of the transportation system.

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Materialist dialectics is concerned with all forms of negation, but focuses primarily on dialectical negation. Therefore, materialist dialectics is not just a theory of transformation in general, but fundamentally a theory of development

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Annotation 196

All transformation is driven by negation. Development is a process, specifically, of dialectical negation, which is a specific form of transformation in which an end of development creates the conditions for new development, either through internal quality shifts or through replacement by some external subject.

Materialist dialectics is primarily concerned with dialectical negation (which drives development) because it is development which brings forth continuous change in our world. Terminal negations and other forms of transformation which do not drive further development are of limited utility, and can only represent certain limited viewpoints [i.e., the viewpoint of that which is terminated].

From a broader perspective, nearly all “terminations” are replaced in some way or another by some other form of development. For instance, even when a person dies, although the consciousness of that person may terminate, there will be continuous impacts which will be carried forward from the deceased person’s lifetime of consciousness, as well as from the developments which arise from the death itself.

This dialectical definition of negation differs greatly from metaphysical conceptions of development [see Annotation 201, p. 195], which are essentially viewed as terminal. From the metaphysical perspective, all things, phenomena, and ideas are viewed as separate from one another; therefore negations are viewed as terminal processes which bring development processes to their ends.

The metaphysical perspective of terminal negation views negation as an essentially terminal process representing the end point of the existence of a static and isolated thing, phenomenon, or idea.

In the above example, the metaphysical framework would present smashing a vase with a hammer as a terminal negation from the perspective of the observer. Once the vase is smashed, the vase is considered to no longer exist, and the broken shards are not considered to be “a vase” any more. Materialist dialectics, on the other hand, view “the shards” as merely a developed form of the vase; a transition to a new stage of development; the negation was only terminal from the perspective of the vase itself.

Excerpt From Vietnam’s High School Freshman Civic Education textbook:

Metaphysical and dialectical negation share one commonality: they both see development as the replacement of an old subject with a new subject. However, metaphysical negation happens when outside forces impact on a subject, deleting completely the existence of the old subject. According to this metaphysical perspective, the old subject and the new subject which replaces it do not have any connection.

Dialectical negation fundamentally differs from metaphysical negation because it views development as a process of internal development. Dialectical negation does not view complete erasure or deletion of any former subject; instead, dialectical development sees the older subject, which is replaced (negated), as the premise or basis of existence for the new subject.

Comparison Examples:

Metaphysical Negation	Dialectical Negation
The earthquake destroyed the house.	The house was impacted by the external force of an earthquake, which caused it to collapse, due to internal characteristics of the house itself (which could not withstand the forces of the earthquake). The debris from the collapsed house will be cleared away, and will continue to develop. The space where the house stood will also continue to develop in some way, with the earthquake and the resulting collapse serving as the basis for this further development.
Water eroded the mountain.	The external force of water caused erosion by transferring material away from the mountain, due to the internal characteristics of the mountain’s composite material. The water, the material which was washed away, and the mountain will all continue to develop. The erosion process will be the basis for this further development.
The car has a new tire because it ran over a nail.	The external force of the nail caused the tire to permanently deflate, due to the internal characteristics of the tire, which could not withstand running over a nail. This served as the basis for further development: the old tire was removed and will be disposed of, which will serve as the basis for further development (i.e., the tire may be recycled or sent to a landfill); the removal of the tire serves as the basis for the further development of a new tire being installed.
When you add water, sunlight, and nutrition to a seed, it will grow into a plant.	The seed went through a process of negation as a sprout grew, through various stages of development, into a plant, facilitated by outside forces (such as water, nutrition, sunlight, etc. — the seed would not grow in isolation) as well as the internal characteristics of the seed itself; the seed served as the basis of the sprout’s development. The sprout then served as the basis for the growth of a seedling, and the seedling served as the basis for the growth of a fully grown plant. All of this development was driven by negation processes as quantity shifts gradually led to quality shifts through those various stages of development.

As you can see from the examples above, the metaphysical perspective focuses on external forces affecting a given subject and views every development process as terminal, with a beginning, middle, and end. The metaphysical perspective thus views negation as a termination of the subject (and, by extension, of development).

Materialist dialectics, on the other hand, views development as a continuous and never-ending process of mutual impact, negation, and further negation of each negation. A comprehensive and historical viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116] must thus be sought to fully comprehend development and negation processeses.

Dialectical negation has two basic characteristics: objectivity and inheritance.

Dialectical negation is objective because negation arises from contradictions which exist between two opposite sides. These opposing sides may exist within a thing, phenomenon, or idea, but the opposing sides are still, by definition, externally opposed to one another from the perspective of either side.

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Annotation 197

Though any given negation may be viewed as terminal from a certain perspective, materialist dialectics is most concerned with processes of development wherein the end of one stage of development creates the conditions for further development [see Annotation 117, p. 119].

Therefore, every development is simultaneously an internal and an external process, depending on perspective. Development processes may, from certain perspectives, be seen to take place within a subject or between two subjects, but they are always external (and, therefore, objective — see Annotation 108, p. 112) from the perspective of either opposing side while simultaneously internal to the relationship.

For example: The relationship between a husband and wife may be seen as an internal process of development of “the marriage” from the perspective of a marriage counselor. However, from their own perspectives, each “opposing side” (i.e., the husband and the wife) see one another as external to each other.

Therefore, the development of a marriage may be seen as an internal process, but the mutual impacts and negations which occur within the relationship are objective and external forces from the perspective of either opposing side.

This is important because it means that all development and all negation are essentially objective processes; therefore no entity has complete, omniscient control over any development process. We must, therefore, understand the nature of development and negation in order to be able to properly plan and affect change in our world.

Dialectical negation is, therefore, the result of the process of resolving inevitable contradictions within a subject [i.e., a relationship] itself. Dialectical negation allows for the old to be replaced by the new, thereby creating trends of development. Therefore, dialectical negation is also self-negation.

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Annotation 198

To reiterate: from the perspective of either opposing side, development is an external, objective process. From the perspective of the contradictory relationship, processes of development are internal processes of self-negation. Thus, dialectical negation is both an objective process which no entity can completely control, while, simultaneously, an internal process of self-negation and self-development.

If two nations go to war, either nation may view the war as an objective, external development process, but from a wider perspective, the war is an internal development process of the diplomatic relationship between the two warring nations. This is drastically different from the metaphysical perspective, which views any negation process as a purely external process of development wherein one subject is permanently deleted from existence, then replaced by another subject [see Annotation 196, p. 188]. From the metaphysical perspective, a war is simply a conflict between two distinct and separate nations, and the conclusion of the war is a terminal negation which ends development of the war. From the materialist dialectical perspective, on the other hand, the end of the war would be seen as the basis of future development of the relationship between the two formerly warring nations.

Dialectical negation also has an inheritance characteristic: when one opposing side negates another, the remaining side inherits factors from the negated side which are suitable with present conditions.

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Annotation 199

Every negation process arises from contradictions between two opposing sides. Within any such negation process, we can think of one side as the “negator” and the other side as the “negated.” Negation, like all relational processes, leads to mutual impact between both sides [see Annotation 136, p. 138]. Therefore, the negated will impact the negator; in other words, the negated side will be somehow reflected in the negator [see Annotation 68, p. 65]. This means that the negator will inherit and carry forward certain attributes, factors, and characteristics which it receives from the negated side.

Again, consider a war between two nations. Even if one nation completely conquers and subjugates the other in total victory, the victorious nation will still inherit certain factors from the defeated nation. Which factors are inherited will depend on the conditions. The victorious nation may pick up some cultural aspects from the defeated nation, such as cuisine, fashion, etc., they may incorporate tactics and strategies which they observed the defeated enemy using on the battlefield, and so on. The point is that the victorious nation will be impacted in some way by the defeated nation.

The factors which are adopted will be suitable with the present conditions. Take, for example, a car breaking down due to engine failure. This can be seen as an opposing relationship between the car itself and the car’s owner. If the present conditions are suitable [i.e., the owner has the funds and resources available, and the desire to repair the car], then the car may be repaired and continue operating for years to come. If, on the other hand, conditions aren’t suitable [i.e., the owner does not have the funds or resources or the owner no longer wants the car], then the car may be sent to the scrapyard.

As another example, if a fox eats a rabbit, it will inherit certain characteristics from the rabbit. It will inherit nutrition from the rabbit’s body. It may also inherit other characteristics, such as a disease the rabbit was carrying, if the conditions of the fox’s biological composition are suitable [i.e., if the disease can be transferred from the rabbit to the fox].

Dialectical negation is not a complete negation [i.e., deletion] of the old. Rather, dialectical negation is a continuity of growth in which the old develops into the new. In processes of dialectical negation, “the new” forms and develops on its own [see Annotation 62, p. 59], through the process of filtering out unsuitable factors, while retaining suitable content. Vladimir Lenin described dialectical negation as:

“Not empty negation, not futile negation, not skeptical negation, vacillation and doubt is characteristic and essential in dialectics — which undoubtedly contains the element of negation and indeed as its most important element — no, but negation as a moment of connection, as a moment of development, retaining the positive, i.e., without any vacillations, without any eclecticism.”^[106]

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Annotation 200

The passage from Lenin above comes from Clemence Dutt’s popular English translation of one of Lenin’s notebooks. Below is our translation from the Vietnamese version of this text from the original text of this book, which we hope might be somewhat easier to understand:

Dialectical negation is not empty negation, it’s not negation without any thoughts, it’s not skeptical negation, it’s not hesitation. Skepticism is not a feature of the essence of the dialectic — of course, dialectics include the negative, it even plays as one of the important factors of a given subject — no, it is negation as the moment of development. Dialectical negation retains the positive, meaning there is no hesitation, there is no eclecticism.

In order to understand what Lenin is saying here, we should first understand what Lenin is responding to. The above notes are referring to the chapter titled “The Absolute Ideal” within Hegel’s Science of Logic [see note at the end of this Annotation]. In this chapter, Hegel recounts various critiques of dialectics and counters them.

Skepticism, here, refers to the tendency to address all human knowledge with doubt.

Philosophical skepticism never moves past two questions: 1. “Is this knowledge true?” 2. “Will human beings ever obtain true knowledge?” Skeptics of this nature engage in a sort of metaphysical inquisition in which every thesis that is ever encountered is immediately and utterly refuted and thus “negated” in the metaphysical sense of termination [see Annotation 196, p. 188].

Eclecticism refers to philosophical and ideological conceptions which draw from a variety of theories, styles, and ideas in an unsystematic manner. Lenin contends that dialectical negation is non-eclecticist because it rises above mere rhetorical combativeness and “total negation.” [This concept is explained more below within this annotation.]

With all this in mind, we see that Lenin is refuting the notion that dialectics are and can only be negative in nature. The metaphysical-skeptic conception of dialectics holds that negation takes the form of rhetorical arguing and refutation, in which one idea is presented, and a second idea is offered to counter the first idea, which completely and totally negates the first idea. According to this argument, dialectics is, therefore, a totally negative process.

A common misperception of dialectical development is that it is “fully negative,” insomuch as the initial thesis (initial subject) is completely negated by the antithesis (impacting subject). In fact, characteristics from both the thesis and antithesis are carried forward into the synthesis.

In the chapter from Science of Logic which Lenin is responding to in the referenced text, Hegel is arguing that the conception of dialectics as only negative — i.e., a system of thinking in which counter-arguments are presented to completely negate initial arguments — is inaccurate. Hegel explains that when one opposing side negates another, it thereafter “contains in general the determination of the first [opposing side] within itself.” In other words, after one opposing side negates another, it retains features and aspects from the opposing side which was negated. Lenin found this particular point to be so important that he wrote “this is very important for understanding dialectics” in the margin of his notebook.

The reason both Hegel and Lenin found this idea, that the “negator” contains elements of the “negated” after negation [see Annotation 231, p. 227], is that this counters the accusation that dialectics are “only negative.” This is why Lenin’s notes highlight the importance of the negator “retaining the positive” after negation. Lenin is pointing out the importance of the retention of features of the negated in the negator because it is this retention which prevents dialectical development from becoming a purely negative process.

In materialist dialectics, it is understood that negation is a process of retention: characteristics from both the thesis (initial subject) and antithesis (impacting subject) are retained in the resulting synthesis

We must also understand what Lenin means when he refers to “skepticism” in his notes. Lenin, here, is referring to the philosophical view that we can never know whether or not our beliefs are true. This belief was popularly known as Machism, or Empirio-Criticism, in Lenin’s time (see Annotation 32, p. 27).

A common critique of dialectics is that it is an inherently skeptical system of thought, since dialectics is seen as a process of presenting counter-arguments to suppositional arguments. Lenin, in his notes, presents the idea that such skepticism is “not a feature of dialectics” precisely because nothing is ever completely, totally, and entirely negated. In other words, the accusation that dialectical analysis is essentially skeptical is rooted in the mistaken notion that one opposing side (i.e., a counter-argument) completely negates the original supposition. In fact, according to materialist dialectics, the negator always retains features and aspects from the negated side, which counters this critique. Thus, dialectical development, which occurs through dialectical negation, is a process of forward motion — not a process of “vacillating” back and forth from one position to another — and there is no skeptical “hesitation” preventing forward progress.

This same idea (that the negator retains features from the negated) also counters another common critique of materialist dialectics: that dialectical analysis is simply a system of rhetorical sophistry [see Annotation 36, p. 33] and eclecticism.

Eclecticism is a conceptual approach that is completely unsystematic, drawing from a variety of theories, styles, and ideas without any cohesive and all-encompassing philosophical framework.

Some critics claim that dialectics must be eclecticist and sophistic in nature. These critics claim that dialectics is simply rhetorical disputation in which any given supposition is counter-argued, and that this counter-argument is negation. But materialist dialectics defines negation as one contradicting side overtaking the other while retaining traces and characteristics from the negated side — it is in no way simply an act of rhetorical dispute or refutation.

In summary, materialist dialectics upholds that nothing is ever completely and utterly deleted or erased from existence through negation. Instead, any time one opposing side negates another, aspects of the negated side are inherited by the negating side.

Note: For reference, here is Hegel’s passage which Lenin is referring to from Science and Logic in the cited notes above:

...a universal first, considered in and for itself, shows itself to be the other of itself. Taken quite generally, this determination can be taken to mean that what is at first immediate now appears as mediated, related to an other, or that the universal appears as a particular. Hence the second term that has thereby come into being is the negative of the first, and if we anticipate the subsequent progress, the first negative. The immediate, from this negative side, has been extinguished in the other, but the other is essentially not the empty negative, the nothing, that is taken to be the usual result of dialectic; rather is it the other of the first, the negative of the immediate; it is therefore determined as the mediated — contains in general the determination of the first within itself. Consequently the first is essentially preserved and retained even in the other. To hold fast the positive in its negative, and the content of the presupposition in the result, is the most important part of rational cognition; also only the simplest reflection is needed to furnish conviction of the absolute truth and necessity of this requirement, while with regard to the examples of proofs, the whole of Logic consists of these.

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Therefore, dialectical negation is the inevitable tendency of progression of the inner relationship between the old and the new. It is the self-driving assertive force of all motion and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas.

b. Negation of Negation

In the perpetual movement of the material world, dialectical negation is an inexhaustible process. It creates a development tendency of things from lower level to higher level, taking place in a cyclical manner in the form of a “spiral.”

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Annotation 201

The concept of the “spiral” form of development in dialectical materialist philosophy stands in contrast to the metaphysical conception of “linear” development.

Metaphysical Conception of Linear Development

The metaphysical viewpoint holds that development is more or less a straight line: as one subject is negated, it is replaced by another. This subject will then be negated by another, and so on, in what is essentially conceived of as a straight line of development [see Annotation 196, p. 188].

The metaphysical “line development” model sees an initial form as being “replaced” or entirely negated into a completely distinct entity.

In the above example, metaphysical line development simply sees raw aluminum as being negated and “replaced” in the real world. Once the aluminum can is created, the “raw aluminum” as a metaphysical entity is considered no longer to exist. Likewise, when the soda can is transformed into recycled aluminum, the can is considered “replaced,” and is no longer considered to have a metaphysical existence.

This conception of metaphysical line development directly contradicts the materialist dialectical concept of historical viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116].

Dialectical Materialist Conception of Development

The dialectical materialist conception of cyclical development stems from essential attributes of dialectical negation processes:

1. In every dialectical negation, the negating side inherits features and characteristics from the negated side.

2. When the negating side is, itself, negated (i.e., negation of the negation), the new negating side will retain features and aspects of the old negator.

3. This development process will continue indefinitely, so that negation is not simply a straight line of complete negation, but rather takes the shape of a “spiral” of negations of negations which always inherit features from previous forms.

Note that this conception of development as a spiral is simply an abstraction to help understand the essential characteristics of dialectical development and to distinguish this form of development from metaphysical conceptions of “linear development.”

In the example below, we see a depiction of the spiral development of aluminum through various stages of development. After raw aluminum is mined from the Earth, it begins a repeating spiral development process of being refined into usable goods, then recycled into raw material.

The “Spiral Development” model of materialist dialectics sees every stage of development as a higher form of the previous stage which carries forward characteristics from previous stages.

The illustrated example on the previous page plots the spiral development of aluminum as it cycles between stages defined as raw materials and refined products. Another perspective might depict development differently. For example, if we are examining development in terms of external relations between aluminum other elements, the development pattern would look different. In reality, all subjects have countless internal and external relations and development processes which can be examined.

The “raw aluminum” stage of development pictured in the illustration is not truly the beginning of this development process; there were millions of years of development which occurred before it was first discovered by humans. Similarly, the landfill will not be the end of this development process; there will be continued development forever for as long as motion in the universe continues.

This is a simplified and abstract model of development of aluminum. A more accurate representation might show any number of interim steps between each step depicted in the graphic above. For example: it must also be recognized that in reality the molecules of aluminum which the development process began with will be scattered and mixed with other subjects throughout the development process, and various other complexities exist in terms of the mutual impacts of internal and external relationships.

Determining the amount of detail to include or exclude in materialist dialectical analysis is crucial: too much detail and analysis might become unwieldy; too little detail and analysis might become too abstract and idealized to be useful in the real world. So, the idea of development as a spiral should not be taken literally; it is simply a way of conceptualizing the differences between dialectical negation and development as opposed to “straight-line” development upheld by metaphysical conceptions of negation and development, always carrying forward traces of previous stages of development.

In the chain of negations that make up the development processes of things, phenomena, and ideas, each dialectical negation creates the conditions and premises for subsequent developments. Through many iterations of negation, i.e., “negations of negations,” dialectical negation will inevitably lead to a forward tendency of motion.

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Annotation 202

The forward tendency of motion describes the tendency for things, phenomena, and ideas to move from less advanced to more advanced forms through processes of motion and development.

As a reminder, “lower level” and “higher level,” i.e., “less advanced” and “more advanced,” should not be taken to have any connotations of “good” and “bad,” nor of “desirable” and “undesirable,” nor even of “less complex” and “more complex.”

Development from “lower levels” to “higher levels” is simply a shorthand for understanding the fact that development processes always move “forward,” that is to say, development can never happen in reverse, just as time itself can never be reversed. For example, society in Italy will never go back to the civilization of the Roman empire. It is conceivable that Italian society could develop to be more similar to Ancient Rome, but it would be impossible for Roman society to ever take on the exact characteristics of the Roman Empire ever again.

Cyclicality of development processes usually takes place in the form of a spiral, which is another result of “negation of negation.” Negations of negations lead to a development cycle in which things, phenomena, and ideas often undergo two fundamental negations carried through three basic forms. Through this negation pattern, basic features of the initial form are ultimately inherited by the “third form,” but at a higher level of development.

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Annotation 203

Dialectical development tends to take place through a cyclical pattern in which development is carried through a triad of forms which develop through a pair of dialectical negation processes:

The cyclical pattern of development is an abstract pattern of dialectical change over time.

The graphic above illustrates this cyclical pattern, in which:

1. The initial form (the Assertion) begins the pattern. Contradiction within the initial subject or between it and another subject leads to the first negation.

2. The first negation leads to a second form (the Negation). This second form inherits some features or characteristics from the initial form.

3. The second form then encounters opposition, which leads to a second negation.

4. The second negation leads to a third form (Unity), which retains the features or characteristics of the second form, but now more closely resembles the first, initial form, only at a higher level of development.

Imagine a new car (initial form) crashes into another car (contradicting subject). The new car is dialectically developed (negated) into a second form: a wrecked car. This second form is now contradicted by a new subject — a recycling center — and negated into a third form: new steel. The third form possesses characteristics of the first form, but in a more developed form: after being recycled, the resulting steel it is newly made, in good condition for sale, etc., similarly to the first form of the new car.

In this example, a new car goes through a cyclical pattern of development in which the third form (new steel) possesses characteristics of the first form (a new car).

Keep in mind that this is relative to one’s perspective. If you consider the wrecked car to be the first form, then the steel would be the second form. The new steel will then need to be developed in some way (melted, hammered, cut, etc.) in order to be processed into some new product. From this perspective, the third form (i.e., molten steel) will have characteristics of the first form (i.e.: “unrefined”).

According to Marx and Engels, the development of capitalism from feudalism assumed this cyclical pattern:

The development of class structure is a dialectical process in which different classes synthesize to form the next era of class society. For example, the capitalist class emerged primarily as a synthesis of the feudal lords and peasants of the medieval era.

Note that this is only an abstract description of a tendency of dialectical development; exceptions can and do occur. Presumably, the development of communism as a stateless, classless society would constitute the negation of the “Class Society” form of human civilization. The Post-Class stage of development which follows would, itself, be a higher form — a unity — of pre-class human civilization, carrying forward traces from the Class Society stage of development.

Also note that determining which form is the “first” or “initial” pattern is entirely relative. Using the example of the development of class society: from one perspective, the Patricians may be seen as the initial form, but from another perspective the Plebeians might be considered the initial form. This depends entirely on the viewpoint and purpose of analysis. These conceptions of “spirals of development” and the pattern of “three forms through two negations” are, in essence, models which describe general tendencies and patterns of development and which help us understand the basic characteristics of dialectical negation and development.

Lenin describes this cycle of dialectical development as going “[f]rom assertion to negation — from negation to ‘unity’ with the asserted — without this, dialectics becomes empty negation, a game, skepsis [examination, observation, consideration].”^[107]

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Annotation 204

Here, “assertion” simply refers to the initial form of a dialectical development cycle. The negation is the second form, and the “unity” is the third form, which resembles the first form (the assertion) at a higher stage of development. So, in this quotation, Lenin is simply recounting the “three steps” of a typical dialectical development cycle, and indicating that it is necessary to recognize this process, which is rooted in the inheritance of properties of prior forms through development into ever-higher forms, to prevent dialectics from becoming “empty negation,” or otherwise falling prey to the critiques that dialectics are purely negative, skeptical, and eclectic in nature [see Annotation 200, p. 192 and Annotation 36, p. 33].

The law of negation of negation generalizes the pervasive nature of development: dialectical development does not take the form of a straight path, but rather in the form of a spiral path. Lenin summarised that this path is “[a] development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (‘the negation of the negation’), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line…”^[108] The tendency to develop in a spiral curve demonstrates the dialectical nature of development; i.e., the cycle of inheritance, repetition, and progression. Each new round of the spiral appears to be repeating, but at a higher level. The continuation of the loops in a spiral reflects an endless progression from lower levels to higher levels of things, phenomena, and ideas.

In short, the law of negation of negation in materialist dialectics reflects the dialectical relationship between the negative and the assertion [i.e., the second and first forms of a dialectical development cycle; see Annotation 203, p. 198] in the development process of things, phenomena and ideas. Dialectical development is driven by dialectical negation; in the development of all things, phenomena, and ideas, the new is the result of inheriting characteristics from prior forms. This process of inheritance, repetition, and progression through negation leads to cyclical development. Engels wrote: “what is the negation of the negation? An extremely general — and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important — law of development of nature, history, and thought.”^[109]

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Annotation 205

In the same text quoted above, Engels elaborates that dialectical development is composed of “processes which in their nature are antagonistic, contain a contradiction; transformation of one extreme into its opposite; and finally, as the kernel of the whole thing, the negation of the negation.”

c. Meaning of the Methodology

The law of negation of negation is the basis for correct perception of the tendency of motion and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. Development and motion processes do not take place in a straight line; rather, it is a winding, complex road, consisting of many stages, and each process can be broken down into many different sub-processes. However, it must be understood that this complexity of development is only the manifestation of the general tendency to move forward [see Annotation 118, p. 122]. It is important to understand the nature of motion and development so that we can systematically change the world according to our revolutionary viewpoint. In order to consciously impact the development of things, phenomena, and ideas, we need to know their characteristics, nature, and relationships so that we can influence their motion and development in the direction that suits our purposes. We must comprehend and leverage the tendency of forward movement — in accordance with a scientific and revolutionary worldview — in order to effectively and systematically change the world.

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Annotation 206

Understanding the forward tendency of motion is vital for cultivating a worldview which is both scientific and revolutionary. Such a worldview is scientific because it recognizes the material reality that all things, phenomena, and ideas are constantly undergoing change and development. Nothing in our universe is static, and all things are connected and defined by internal and external relationships (which are also constantly developing). Furthermore, this development progresses with a forward tendency, meaning that no process can be completely “reversed.” For example, you can clean rust from a car [which would be forward progress], but you can’t reverse the temporal process of rust.

Once we understand that all things, phenomena, and ideas in our universe are constantly developing and moving forward, we can then begin to find ways to impact motion and development systematically to consciously change the world around us. This is the foundation of a revolutionary worldview, since revolutionary change requires us to leverage and influence development processes to suit our needs and revolutionary ambitions. Thus, materialist dialectics are an applied system of observation and practice through which we seek to understand development processes and consciously impact them to suit our needs.

According to the rule of negation of negation, in the objective world, the new must inevitably come to replace the old. In nature, the new develops according to objective laws. In social life, new things arise from the purposeful, self-conscious, and creative actions of human beings. Therefore, it is necessary to leverage subjective factors as we seek to consciously impact the development of things, phenomena, and ideas.

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Annotation 207

Subjective factors are factors which we, as a subject, are capable of impacting. This may seem confusing, since we have previously established that all external things, phenomena, and ideas have objective relationships with all other things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 108, p. 112], meaning that any given subject is external to every other subject, and thus no subject can directly and completely control the motion and development of any other subject.

However, from the perspective of any given individual, there are certain things, phenomena, and ideas [as well as processes of motion and development] which we can impact. For example, if I see an apple on a table, the apple is objective to me. I can’t simply will the apple to move with my consciousness alone. However, I can impact the apple through conscious activity — I can consciously will my hand to pick up the apple and move it to another location.

Thus, factors which an individual can consciously impact are subjective factors. As revolutionists, we must focus on subjective factors. In other words, we must concentrate on that which we are capable of changing, since our purpose is to change the world. Focusing on factors which we can’t impact is a waste of time; we must simply determine what can be changed and then determine the most efficient and effective ways of impacting development processes and changing the world.

As revolutionists, we must have faith that we can introduce the “new,” faith in the success of the “new,” we must support the “new,” and fight for the victory of the “new.” Therefore, it is necessary to overcome conservative, stagnant, and dogmatic thoughts which restrain the development of the “new” and resist the law of negation of negation.

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Annotation 208

Change is inevitable. All things, phenomena, and ideas undergo processes of motion and development. Any philosophy, ideology, or strategy which attempts to restrain motion and development is doomed to failure because change can neither be halted nor restrained. Thus, our strategies and actions must align with the material reality that change is inevitable, and we must seek to change the world by impacting processes of development and motion rather than attempting to reverse, restrain, or halt such processes.

Ideologies which erroneously strive to restrict change and development include rigidity (see Annotation 222, p. 218) and conservativism (see Annotation 236, p. 233).

In the process of negating the old we must leverage the principle of inheritance with discretion: we must encourage the inheritance of factors that are beneficial to our goals as we simultaneously attempt to filter out, overcome, and reform factors which would negatively impact our goals.

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Annotation 209

If we understand the principle of inheritance, we can impact inheritance processes which derive from negation. For example, when repairing a car, we can seek out parts of the car which do not function properly or which do not suit the use-case of the car and add or replace parts which are more suitable.

In the same way, we can impact inheritence processes in our revolutionary political activities. We can seek to inherit characteristics from previous stages of development of our political organizations, social institutions, culture, etc., while simultaneously seeking to prevent the inheritence of traits and characteristics which are unsuitable for our revolutionary purposes. Over time, we can attempt to impact the inheritance of traits and aspects which are more conducive to our purposes while limiting and filtering out traits and aspects which are hindrances.

In an article titled “New Life” written in 1947, Ho Chi Minh wrote about the dialectical relationship between the new and the old in building a new society, writing:

Not everything old must be abandoned. We do not have to reinvent everything. What is old but bad must be abandoned. What is old but troublesome must be corrected appropriately. What is old but good must be further developed. What is new but good must be done.

... Growing up in the old society, we all carry within us more-or-less bad traces of the old society in terms of our ideas and habits... Habits are hard to change. That which is good and new is likely to be considered bad by the people because it is strange to them. On the contrary, that which is evil yet familiar is easily mistaken as normal and acceptable.

Ho Chi Minh understood the principles of development very well, as well as the difficulties we will face as revolutionaries as we try to change ourselves and our society. We must strive to develop a similar understanding as we move forward and attempt to affect the development of our world through practice and struggle.

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Chapter 3: Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism

In Marxism, epistemological reasoning (or epistemology) is the foundation of dialectics. Dialectical materialist epistemology is a theory of applying human cognitive ability to the objective world through practical activities. It explains the nature, path and general laws of the human process of perceiving truth and objective reality to serve human practical activities.

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Annotation 210

Epistemology is the theoretical study of knowledge. It also deals with the philosophical question of: “how do we know what is true?”

Throughout history, philosophers have tried to determine the nature of truth and knowledge. In the era of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, there was an ongoing dispute between the materialists, who believed that truth could only be sought through sense experience of the material world, and the idealists, who believed that truth could only be sought through reasoning within the human mind.

Marx and Engels developed the philosophical system of dialectical materialism to resolve this dispute. Dialectical materialism upholds that the material and the ideal have a dialectical relationship with one another: the material determines the ideal, while the ideal impacts the material [see The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88].

However, it’s important to understand that Marx and Engels didn’t develop the system of dialectical materialism simply to understand the world. As Marx wrote in Theses on Feuerbach:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

So, Marxist dialectical materialist epistemology is developed specifically to enable human beings to not only perceive truth and objective reality, but to then be able to apply our conscious thought, through practical activity, in order to bring about change in the world.

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1. Praxis, Consciousness, and the Role of Praxis in Consciousness

a. Praxis and Basic Forms of Praxis

Praxis includes all human material activities which have purpose and historical-social characteristics and which transform nature and society. Unlike other activities, praxis is activity in which humans attempt to materially impact the world to suit our purposes. Praxis activities define the nature of human beings and distinguish human beings from other animals. Praxis is objective activity, and praxis has been constantly developed by humans through the ages.

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Annotation 211

In English, the words “practice” and “praxis” are often distinguished from one another. “Practice” is often used to refer to human activity which provides more information about the world around us and improves our knowledge and understanding, whereas “praxis” often refers to conscious human activity which is intended to change the world in some manner. In their original German, Marx and Engels used the same German word — Praxis — to refer to both concepts. Similarly, in the original Vietnamese text of this book, the same word — thực tiễn — is used for both “practice” and “praxis.”

One reason that these concepts are so closely related is that all conscious activity serves both rolls by simultaneously telling us more about reality and consciously changing reality in some way. For example, by pushing a heavy stone, you may be able to move the stone a small amount — constituting praxis — while simultaneously learning how heavy the stone is and how difficult it is to move — constituting practice. The main point of distinction, therefore, is intention. Virtually all conscious activity is practice, but only activity which has purpose and historical-social characteristics might be considered praxis:

Purpose simply describes a goal or desired outcome; specifically: a desired change in nature or human society. Activities with historical-social characteristics are activities which contribute in some way to the development of human society.

In this translation, we use “practice” and “praxis” interchangably to mean “conscious activity which improves our understanding, and which has purpose and historical-social characteristics.” You are likely to find these words used differently (as described above, or in other ways) in other texts. Engels explains the importance of practice/praxis in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we [use] these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is positive proof that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves.

Marx wrote in Theses on Feuerbach that “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice [German: revolutionäre Praxis].” Engels further expounds upon this concept in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, writing:

The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical fancies is practice [original German: Praxis], viz., experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and using it for our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end of the Kantian incomprehensible or ungraspable.

Praxis defines the nature of human beings because human beings are (to our present knowledge) the only beings which undertake actions with conscious awareness of our desired outcomes and comprehension of the historical development of our own society, which distinguishes human beings from all other animals. Praxis is objective activity, meaning that all praxis activities are performed in relation to external things, phenomena, and ideas [see Annotation 108, p. 112].

Praxis has been constantly developed by humans through the ages, meaning that as we learn more about the nature of reality, of human society, and the laws of nature, we are able to develop our praxis to become more efficient and effective.

Praxis activities are very diverse, manifesting with ever-increasing variety, but there are only three basic forms: material production activities, socio-political activities, and scientific experimental activities.

Material production activity is the first and most basic form of praxis. In this form of praxis activity, humans use tools through labor processes to influence the natural world in order to create wealth and material resources and to develop the conditions necessary to maintain our existence and development.

Socio-political activity includes praxis activity utilized by various communities and organizations in human society to transform political-social relations in order to promote social development.

Scientific experimental activity is a special form of praxis activity. This includes human activities that resemble or replicate states of nature and society in order to determine the laws of change and development of subjects of study. This form of activity plays an important role in the development of society, especially in the current historical period of modern science and technological revolution.

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Annotation 212

The three basic forms of praxis activities listed above obviously do not include all forms of human activity, as praxis only includes activities which have purpose and historical-social characteristics.

Material production activity has a very clear purpose: to improve the material conditions of an individual human being or a group of human beings. Material production activity has historical-social characteristics because developing material conditions for human beings leads directly to the development of human society. For example, as food production increases in terms of yield and efficiency, society can support a larger number of human beings and a wider range of human activities, which leads to the development of human society.

Socio-political activity has the purpose of promoting social development, which is obviously inherently historical-social in nature. An example of socio-political activity would include any sort of political campaign, liberation struggle, political revolutionary activity, etc.

Scientific experimental activity has the purpose of expanding our understanding of nature and human society, which leads directly to historical-social development in a variety of ways. For example, improving our scientific understanding of medicine through scientific experimental activity leads to longer lives and improved quality of life. Improving our scientific understanding of chemistry through scientific experimental activity leads to all sorts of materials which improve the quality of life and enable human beings to solve a variety of social problems.

In order to qualify as praxis activity, a given human activity must have a purpose and it must have historical-social characteristics. For instance, drawing is not always praxis in the sense of the word used in this text, but it would be praxis if it would qualify as material production activity (i.e., making art in order to sell, so as to make a living) or if the art is made with the intention of invoking social change.

Every basic praxis activity form has an important function, and these functions are not interchangeable with each other. However, they have close relationships with each other and different praxis activity forms often interact with each other. In these relationships, material production is the most important form of praxis activity, playing a decisive role in determining other praxis activities because material production is the most primitive activity and exists most commonly in human life. Material production creates the most essential, decisive material conditions for human survival and development. Without material production there cannot be other praxis activities. After all, all other praxis activities arise from material production praxis and all praxis activities ultimately aim to serve material production praxis.

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Annotation 213

Without material production activity, human beings would not be able to live at all.

Thus, material production activities make all other forms of human activities possible. In addition, the primary reason we participate in socio-political activity is to ensure material security (food, water, shelter, etc.) for members of society, which ultimately relies on material production activity. Therefore, the primary reason we engage in scientific experimental activity is to improve material production activities in terms of efficiency, yield, effectiveness, etc

Of course, we engage in scientific experimental activity and material production activity for other reasons (art, entertainment, recreation, etc.), but these activities require that material security be secured first for those participating in the production and consumption of such products. In other words, material production activity is a prerequisite for all other forms of activity, since without some measure of material security humans cannot survive.

Material production activity has a dialectical relationship with all other praxis activity, with material production activity determining, while being impacted by, all other forms of praxis activity.

Thus, material production activity has a dialectical relationship with other forms of praxis activities, in which material production activity determines both socio-political and scientific experimental activity while socio-political and scientific experimental activity impact material production activity.

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b. Consciousness and Levels of Consciousness

The dialectical materialist perspective sees consciousness as a process of reflecting the objective world within the human brain on a practical basis to create knowledge about the objective world. Consciousness is a self-aware process that is productive and creative.

This view stems from the following basic principles:

• The dialectical materialist worldview acknowledges that the material world exists objectively and independently of human consciousness.
• The dialectical materialist worldview recognizes the following human abilities:
  • To perceive the objective world.
  • To reflect the objective world into the human mind, which enables human subjects to learn about external objects. [see Annotation 66, p. 64]
  • To admit that there are no material things nor phenomena which are unrecognizable, but only material things and phenomena that humans have not yet recognised. [see The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues, p. 48]

The dialectical materialist worldview affirms that conscious reflection [see Annotation 67, p. 64] of the objective world is a dialectical, productive, self-aware, and creative process. This reflection process develops from the unknown to the known, from knowing less to knowing more, from knowing less profoundly and less comprehensively to knowing more profoundly and more comprehensively.

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Annotation 214

The above principle (that human knowledge develops from less, and less comprehensive, to more, and more comprehensive states) stands in contrast to various other philosophical systems of belief, including:

Hegel’s Absolute Idealism upholds a belief in an “absolute ideal” which constitutes an ultimate limit or “end point” of knowledge which humanity is moving towards. Dialectical materialism upholds that there is no such absolute ideal and thus no such terminal end point of human understanding. [See Annotation 234, p. 230] As Engels wrote in Anti-Dühring:

If mankind ever reached the stage at which it should work only with eternal truths, with results of thought which possess sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to truth, it would then have reached the point where the infinity of the intellectual world both in its actuality and in its potentiality had been exhausted, and thus the famous miracle of the counted uncountable would have been performed.

Fideism, which is the belief that knowledge is received from some higher power [i.e., God]. Fideism upholds that all knowledge is pre-existing, and that humanity simply receives it from on high. Dialectical materialism, on the other hand, argues that knowledge is developed over time through dialectical processes of consciousness and human activity.

Positivism, or empiricist materialism, which holds that there are hard limits to human knowledge, or that human knowledge — which can only be obtained from sense data — can’t be trusted. Dialectical materialism upholds that all things and phenomena can be known and understood, and that sense data can be trusted as an objective reflection of reality. For more information about skepticism about human sense data as well as positive and empiricist materialism, see Annotation 10, p. 10, and Annotation 58, p. 56].

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The dialectical materialist worldview considers praxis as the primary and most direct basis of consciousness, and as the motive and the purpose of consciousness, and as the criterion for testing truth. [See: The Relationship Between Praxis and Consciousness, p. 216]

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Annotation 215

Given the above principles — that human consciousness exists independently from the material world yet is capable of accurately perceiving and reflecting the material world, and that knowledge develops over time through a synthesis of consciousness and practical activity — we can conclude that consciousness is a self-aware process which is productive and creative.

Consciousness is productive and creative in the sense that conscious processes, in conjunction with practical experience and activity in the material world, leads to the development of knowledge and practical experience which allows humans to develop our understanding of the world as well as our own material conditions through the application of knowledge to our own labor activities.

Next, we will examine different ways of categorizing conscious activities as they pertain to developing knowledge and practical understanding of our world.

From the dialectical materialist point of view, consciousness is a process of development. Consciousness develops from empirical consciousness to theoretical consciousness; and from ordinary consciousness to scientific consciousness.

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Annotation 216

In dialectical materialist philosophy, all systems of relation exist as processes of development in motion [see Annotation 120, p. 124]. Thus, consciousness can be defined as a system of relations between human brain activity and two forms of data input:

• Sense experience: observations of the external world detected by our senses.

• Knowledge: information which exists in the human mind as memories and ideas.

Consciousness is thus a process of the development of knowledge through a combination of human brain activity and human practical activity in the physical world (i.e., labor).

In the section below, we will explore different forms of consciousness, the development of consciousness, and the relationship between consciousness and knowledge. Note that these are abstractions of consciousness and knowledge, meant to help us understand how knowledge and consciousness develop over time. Thought processes are extremely complex, so we seek to develop a fundamental understanding of how consciousness develops and how knowledge develops because these processes are fundamental to the development of human beings and human societies.

Just as consciousness is a process of developing knowledge through brain activity, consciousness itself also develops over time. The development of consciousness can be considered based on the criteria of concrete/abstract and of passive/active.

Consciousness develops from a state of direct and immediate observation of the world which results in concrete knowledge to a higher stage which constitutes a more abstract and general understanding of the world. We call consciousness which is focused on direct, immediate, concrete, empirical observation of the world empirical consciousness, and we call consciousness which is focused on forming abstract generalizations about the world theoretical consciousness.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-79.png

Empirical consciousness is a process of collecting data about the world, which we call knowledge. We can gather two forms of knowledge through empirical consciousness: ordinary knowledge, and scientific knowledge.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-80.png

Ordinary knowledge is the knowledge we accumulate through our everyday experiences in the world. Scientific knowledge is gathered through more systematic scientific observations and experiments. Scientific knowledge usually develops from ordinary knowledge, as we begin to seek a more formal and systematic understanding of the things we witness in our daily lives.

According to Themes in Soviet Marxist Philosophy, edited by T. J. Blakely:

Ordinary knowledge notes what lies on the very surface, what happens during a certain event. Scientific knowledge wants to know why it happens in just this way. The essence of scientific knowledge lies in the confirmed generalization of facts, where it becomes necessary rather than contingent, universal instead of particular, law-bound, and can serve as a basis for predicting various phenomena, events and objects...

The whole progress of scientific knowledge is bound up with growth in the force and volume of scientific prediction. Prediction makes it possible to control processes and to direct them. Scientific knowledge opens up the possibility not only of predicting the future but also of consciously forming it. The vital meaning of every science can be expressed as follows: to know in order to predict and to predict in order to act.

An essential characteristic of scientific knowledge is that it is systematic, i.e., it is a set of information which is ordered according to certain theoretical principles. A collection of unsystematized knowledge is not yet science. Certain basic premises are fundamental to scientific knowledge, i.e., the laws which make it possible to systematize the knowledge. Knowledge becomes scientific when the collection of facts and their descriptions reach the level where they are included in a theory.

Theoretical consciousness arises from conscious reflection on accumulated knowledge, as human beings seek to develop general and abstract understanding of the underlying principles of processes we experience in the world. Once general principles of natural and social law are established, human beings then test those general conclusions against empirical reality through further observation (i.e., through empirical consciousness).

Thus, there is a dialectical relationship between empirical consciousness and theoretical consciousness, as one form leads to another, back and forth, again and again, continuously.

Empirical and theoretical consciousness have a dialectical relationship in which empirical consciousness and theoretical consciousness lead to and mutually develop one another.

Consciousness also develops from passive and surface-level observation and understanding of the world (i.e., simply considering what, where, and when things happen) to more active pursuit of the underlying meaning of the world (i.e., trying to understand how and why things happen).

Consciousness which passively observes the world, directly, in daily life is referred to as ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness often develops into more active consciousness. This active pursuit of understanding through systematic observation and indirect experiences (i.e., experiences that do not occur in daily activity — such as scientific experimentation) is referred to as scientific consciousness.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-82.png

These concepts will be discussed in further detail below.

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Empirical consciousness is the stage of development of consciousness in which perceptions are formed via direct observations of things and phenomena in the natural world, or of society, or through scientific experimentation and systematic observation. Empirical consciousness results in empirical knowledge.

Empirical knowledge has two types: ordinary empirical knowledge (knowledge obtained through direct observation and in productive labor) and scientific empirical knowledge (knowledge obtained by conducting scientific experiments). These two types of knowledge can be complementary, and can enrich one other.

Theoretical consciousness is the indirect, abstract, systematic level of perception in which the nature and laws of things and phenomena are generalized and abstracted.

Empirical consciousness and Theoretical consciousness are two different cognitive stages but they have a dialectical relationship with each other. In this dialectical relationship, empirical consciousness is the basis of theoretical consciousness; it provides theoretical consciousness with specific, rich material [i.e., knowledge]. Empirical consciousness is linked closely to practical activities [since practical activity in the material world is the chief method of gathering knowledge through empirical consciousness], and forms the basis for checking, correcting, and supplementing existing theories and summarizing, and generalizing them into new theories. However, empirical consciousness is still limited in that empirical consciousness stops at the description and classification of data obtained from direct observation and experimentation. Therefore, empirical consciousness only brings understanding about the separate, superficial, discrete aspects of observed subjects, without yet reflecting the essence of those subjects nor the underlying principles or laws which regulate those subjects.

Therefore, empirical consciousness, alone, is not sufficient for determining the scientific laws of nature and society. To determine such laws and abstractions, theoretical consciousness must be applied. So, theoretical consciousness does not form spontaneously, nor directly from experience, although it is formed from the summation of experiences.

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Annotation 217

The knowledge we gain from our daily activity often inspires scientific inquiry and more systematic observation, which can yield scientific knowledge which will enrich and improve our daily practice and allow us to experience daily life with a deeper understanding of what we’re experiencing. Thus, the ordinary knowledge we gain through daily practice can enrich and yield scientific knowledge (and vice versa).

Empirical consciousness and theoretical consciousness have a dialectical relationship with each other in which empirical consciousness provides the basis for theoretical consciousness. Theoretical consciousness attempts to derive general abstractions and governing principles from empirical knowledge which is gained through empirical consciousness. Once theoretical principles, generalities, and abstractions are determined, they are then tested against reality through empirical consciousness (i.e., practical observation and systematic experimentation) to determine if the theory is sound.

Empirical consciousness and theoretical consciousness have a dialectical relationship with one another. Our observations of the material world lead to conscious activity which we then test in reality through conscious activity, and so on, in a never-ending cycle of dialectical development.

For example, a farmer may notice that plants grow better in locations where manure has been discarded — an act of empirical consciousness. The farmer might then form the theory that adding manure to the soil will help plants grow — an act of theoretical consciousness. This theory could then be tested against reality by mixing manure into the soil and observing the results, which would be another act of empirical consciousness. The farmer may then theorize that more manure will help plants grow even more — another act of theoretical consciousness — continuing the cycle of testing and observing.

This dialectical relationship between ordinary and theoretical consciousness is what allows human beings to develop and improve knowledge through practical experience, observation, and theoretical abstraction and generalization of knowledge.

Theoretical consciousness is relatively independent from empirical consciousness. Therefore, theories can precede expectations and guide the formation of valuable empirical knowledge. Theoretical consciousness is what allows human beings to sort and filter knowledge so as to best serve practical activities and contribute to the transformation of human life. Through this process, knowledge is organized and therefore enhanced, and develops from the level of specific, individual, and solitary knowledge to a higher form of generalized and abstract knowledge [what we might call theoretical knowledge].

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Annotation 218

Knowledge which comes from empirical observations (empirical consciousness) is empirical knowledge. Theoretical knowledge is a product of theoretical consciousness. Over time, as repeated and varied observations are made through theoretical consciousness activities, knowledge becomes more generalized and abstract; this general and abstract knowledge is what we call theoretical knowledge.

Note that empirical and theoretical knowledge can be ordinary or scientific in nature; if the knowledge arises passively from daily life activities, it will be ordinary knowledge, regardless of whether or not it is empirical or theoretical in nature. If, on the other hand, the knowledge arises from methodological measurement and/or systematic observation, then it is scientific knowledge.vSo far, we have discussed ways of understanding consciousness based on the criteria of directness vs. abstractness. Next, we will discuss another way of looking at consciousness, based on the criteria of passiveness vs. activeness.

Ordinary consciousness refers to perception that is formed passively and directly from the daily activities of humans. Ordinary consciousness is a reflection of things, phenomena, and ideas, with all their observed characteristics, specific details, and nuances. Therefore, ordinary consciousness is rich, multifaceted, and associated with daily life. Therefore, ordinary consciousness has a regular and pervasive role in governing the activities of each person in society.

Scientific consciousness refers to perception formed actively and indirectly from the reflection of the characteristics, nature, and inherent relationships of research subjects. This reflection takes place in the form of logical abstraction. These logical abstractions include scientific concepts, categories, and laws. Scientific consciousness is objective, abstract, general, and systematic, and must be grounded in evidence.

Scientific consciousness utilizes systematic methodologies to profoundly describe the nature of studied subjects as well as the principles which govern them. Therefore, scientific consciousness plays an increasingly important role in practical activities, especially in the modern age of science and technology.

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Annotation 219

Logical abstraction refers to an understanding of the underlying rules which govern things, phenomena, and ideas which underly objective processes, relationships, and characteristics. Logical abstraction is the result of scientific inquiry. Over time, our understanding of the rules which govern the things, phenomena, and ideas in our lives become more reliable and applicable in practical activities. This attainment of understanding and practical ability through scientific practice is scientific consciousness.

Ordinary and scientific consciousness are two different qualitative steps of cognitive processes which, together, allow humans to discover truth about our world. Ordinary and scientific consciousness have a strong dialectical relationship with each other. In this relationship, ordinary consciousness precedes scientific consciousness, as ordinary consciousness is a source of material for the development of scientific consciousness.

Although it contains the seeds of scientific knowledge, ordinary consciousness mainly stops at the reflection of superficial details, seemingly random events, and non-essential phenomena [see Essence and Phenomenon, p. 156]. Ordinary consciousness, therefore, cannot transform effortlessly into scientific consciousness. To develop ordinary consciousness into scientific consciousness, we must go through the process of accurate summarizing, abstracting, and generalization using scientific methods. Likewise, once scientific consciousness has been developed, it impacts and pervades ordinary consciousness, and therefore develops ordinary consciousness. Scientific consciousness therefore enhances our everyday passive perception of the world.

Ordinary consciousness refers to the passive observation of reality which takes place in our daily lives. Scientific consciousness refers to the systematic application of consciousness to solve specific problems in a methodological manner.

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Annotation 220

For example, before developing scientific consciousness of farming, a farmer might go through daily life having no idea what makes plants grow to be larger and more healthy and might have no idea how to avoid common problems such as pests. After developing scientific consciousness of farming through scientific experimentation and other systematic methodologies, the farmer will look at things differently in daily life activities. They may see signs of pest infestation and immediately recognize it for what it is, and they may see other indications that plants are unhealthy and know exactly what to do to remedy the situation.

In this way, scientific consciousness enhances ordinary consciousness. Meanwhile, ordinary consciousness — passive observation of the world during daily activities — will lead to scientific consciousness by inspiring us to actively seek understanding of the world through scientific consciousness.

c. The Relationship Between Praxis and Consciousness

Praxis serves as the basis, driving force, and purpose of consciousness. Praxis serves as the criterion of truth by testing the truthfulness of our thoughts. [See Annotation 230, p. 226]

Praxis is able to serve these roles because reality is the direct starting point of consciousness; it sets out the requirements, tasks, and modes of consciousness, as well as the movement and development tendencies of consciousness. Humans have an objective and inherent need to explain the world and to transform it.

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Annotation 221

Remember that the material world defines consciousness while consciousness allows us to impact the material world through conscious activity [see The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88]. Consciousness itself arose from the physical needs of the material world [see The Source of Consciousness, p. 64], and these physical needs continue to serve as the basis and driving force for all conscious activities, as we must act consciously to survive.

Our inherent need to explain the world and to transform it arises from our material needs to eat, seek shelter, cure and prevent disease, and so on. These physical needs, which stem from the material world, drive conscious activity and lead to the development of consciousness and knowledge.

Therefore, humans must necessarily impact things in the material world through our practical activities in order to survive. The impacts of our practical activities on the world cause things and phenomena to reveal their different properties, including their internal and external relationships [for example, hitting a rock will tell you properties about the rock; attempting to build something out of wood will provide data about the wood, etc.]. In this manner, praxis produces data for consciousness to process, and also helps consciousness to comprehend nature and the laws of movement and development which govern the world.

Scientific theories are formed on the basis of the dialectical relationship between practical activity and consciousness. For example: mathematics developed to allow us to count and measure things for practical activities such as agriculture, navigation, and building structures. Marxism also arose in the 1840’s from the practical activities of the struggles of the working class against the capitalist class at that time. Even recent scientific achievements arise from practical needs and activities. For example, the discovery and decoding of the human genome map was born from practical activities and needs, such as the need to develop treatments for incurable diseases. In the end, there is no field of knowledge that is not derived from reality. Ultimately, all knowledge arises from and serves practice. Therefore, if we were to break from reality or stop relying on reality, consciousness would break from the basis of reality that nurtures our growth, existence and development. Also, the cognitive subject cannot have true and profound knowledge about the world if it does not follow reality.

Practice also serves as the basis, driving force, and purpose of consciousness because, thanks to practical activities, our human ability to measure and observe reality improves increasingly over time; our logical thinking ability is constantly strengthened and developed; cognitive means become increasingly developed. All of these developments “extend” the human senses in perceiving the world [for example, by developing new tools to measure, perceive, and sense the world such as telescopes, radar, microscopes, etc.].

Reality is not only the basis, the driving force, and the purpose of discovering truth but also serves as the standard of truth. Reality also serves as the basis for examining the truthfulness of the cognitive process [i.e., we can test whether our thoughts match material reality through experimentation and practice in the real world]. This means that practice is the measure of the value of the knowledge we gain through perception. At the same time, practice is constantly supplementing, adjusting, correcting, developing, and improving human consciousness. Marx said: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.”^[110]

Thus, practice is not only the starting point of consciousness and a decisive factor for the formation and development of consciousness, it is also a target where consciousness must always aim to test the truth. To emphasize this role which practice plays, Lenin said: “The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge.”^[111]

The role of practice in consciousness requires that we always grasp the practical point of view. This point of view requires that we derive our ideas from practice, our ideas must be based on practice, and our ideas must deeply explore practice. In our conscious activities, we must attach a lot of importance to the summarization of practice [i.e., developing theoretical knowledge through theoretical consciousness which reflects practical experience]. Theoretical research must be related to practice, and learning must go hand in hand with practicing. If we diverge from practice, it will lead to mistakes of subjectivism, idealism, dogmatism, rigidity, and bureaucracy.

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Annotation 222

Subjectivism occurs when one centers one’s own self and conscious activities in perspective and worldview, failing to test one’s own perceptions against material and social reality. Subjectivists tend to believe that they can independently reason their way to truth in their own minds without practical experience and activity in the material world. Related to subjectivism is solipsism, a form of idealism in which one believes that the self is the only basis for truth. As Marxist ethicist Howard Selsam wrote in Ethics and Progress: New Values in a Revolutionary World: “If I believe that I alone exist and that you and all your arguments exist only in my mind and are my own creations then all possible arguments will not shake me one iota. No logic can possibly convince [the] solipsist.”

Idealism has a strong connection with a failure to incorporate practical activity into theoretical consciousness, since idealism holds that conscious activity is the sole basis of discovering truth.

Dogmatism occurs when one only accounts for commonalities and considers theory itself as the sole basis of truth rather than practice [see Annotation 239, p. 235]. Dogmatists ignore practical experience and considering pre-established theory, alone, as unalterable truth. This results in a breakdown of the dialectical relationship between theoretical consciousness and empirical consciousness, which arrests the development process of knowledge and consciousness.

Rigidity is an unwillingness to alter one’s thoughts, holding too stiffly to established consciousness and knowledge, and ignoring practical experience and observation, which leads to stagnation of both knowledge and consciousness.

Bureaucracy arises when theory becomes overly codified and formalized, to the extent that practical considerations are ignored in favor of codified theory. Bureaucracy can be avoided by incorporating practical experience and observations continuously into the development of practical systems and methodologies so that theory and practice become increasingly aligned over time to continuously improve efficiency and effectiveness of practical activities in the material world.

On the contrary, if the role of practice is absolutized [to the exclusion of conscious activity], it will fall into pragmatism and empiricism.

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Annotation 223

In this context, pragmatism refers to a form of subjectivism [see Annotation 222, above] in which one centers one’s own immediate material concerns over all other considerations. For example, workers may place their own immediate needs and desires above the concerns of their fellow workers as a whole. This may offer some temporary gains, but in the long run their lack of solidarity and class consciousness will be detrimental as workers collectively suffer from division, making all workers more vulnerable to exploitation and ill treatment by the capitalist class.

Empiricism is a faulty form of materialism in which only sense experience and practical experience are considered sources of truth. This is opposed to the dialectical materialist position that the material determines consciousness, while consciousness impacts the material world through conscious labor activity. [See The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88]

Thus, the principle of the unification of practice and theory must be the basic principle in practical and theoretical activities. Theory without practice as its basis and criterion for determining its truthfulness is useless. Vice versa, practice without scientific and revolutionary theory will inevitably turn into blind practice. [As Ho Chi Minh once said: “Study and practice must always go together. Study without practice is useless. Practice without study leads to folly.”]

2. Dialectical Path of Consciousness to Truth

a. Opinions of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin about the Dialectical Path of Consciousness to Truth

Annotation 224

The section below outlines and explains the Universal Law of Consciousness, which holds that consciousness is a process of dialectical development in which practical activity leads to conscious activity, which then leads back to practical activity, in a continuous and never-ending cycle, with a tendency to develop both practical and conscious activity to increasingly higher levels.

In his Philosophical Notebook, Lenin generalized the dialectical path towards the realization of truth as development from vivid visualization to abstract thinking, and then from abstraction back to practice. This process, according to Lenin, is the dialectical path towards the realization of truth, and the realization of objective reality.

According to this generalization, the dialectical path towards the realization of truth (“truth,” here, referring to a correct and accurate reflection of objective reality) is a process. It is a process that starts from “vivid visualization” (emotional consciousness) to “abstract thinking” (rational consciousness).

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Annotation 225

Given that consciousness has a material basis, and that practical activities are the driving force of consciousness [see Annotation 230, p. 226], it follows that we must strive to align our conscious thoughts and ideas with the material world. The more accurately we can reflect reality in our consciousness, the more effectively and efficiently our practical activities can become.

For example, through learning more about the mechanical, material, and physical processes which take place inside of an automobile engine, the more we can improve engines to make them more efficient and effective for practical applications.

Lenin explained that consciousness develops from “emotional consciousness” to “rational consciousness.” Thought about a subject begins at a base level of consciousness that is rooted in emotional and sense-oriented conscious activity, i.e, “vivid visualization,” which then leads to rational, abstract reflection.

By “vivid visualization,” Lenin is referring to the active, real-time experience of seeing (and hearing, smelling, and otherwise sensing) things and phenomena in the world.

When a person experiences something through practical activity, the first conscious activity will tend to occur at the emotional and sensory level — in other words, the conscious activities which occur simultaneously along with practical activities. Only after this initial period of emotional consciousness will one be able to reflect on the experience on a more rational and abstract level.

For example, if a zoologist in the field sees a species of bird they have never encountered before, their first conscious activity will be at the sensory-emotional level: they will observe the shape, coloration, and motion of the bird. They may feel excitement, happiness, and other emotions. This is emotional conscious activity.

This emotional conscious activity will then develop into rational conscious activity, as the zoologist may begin to consider things more abstractly, attempting to interpret and understand this experience through reason and rational reflection, asking such questions as: “Where does this bird nest? What does it feed on? Is this a new discovery?” and so on.

Such abstractions are not the end point of a cognitive cycle, because consciousness must then continue to develop through practice. It is through practice that perception tests and proves its own correctness so that it can then continue on to repeat the cycle.

This is also the general rule of the human perception of objective reality.

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Annotation 226

Thus there is a dialectical relationship between emotional consciousness (linked to practical activity) and rational consciousness (linked to purely conscious activity).

This dialectical relationship is a cycle, in which one engages in practical activity, which leads to emotional consciousness, which leads to rational consciousness, which then leads back to practical activity to test the correctness of the conclusions of rational conscious activity.

We call this cycle of development of consciousness the cognitive process.

The cognitive process is a continuous cycle which describes the dialectical development of consciousness and practical activity.

The cognitive process is explained in more detail below.

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- Development From Emotional Consciousness to Rational Consciousness

Emotional consciousness is the lower stage of the cognitive process. In this stage of cognitive development, humans use — through practical activity — use our senses to reflect objective things and phenomena (with all their perceived specific characteristics and rich manifestations) in human consciousness. During this period, consciousness only reflects the phenomena [i.e, phenomena, as opposed to essence — see Essence and Phenomenon, p. 156] — the external manifestations — of the perceived subject. At this stage, consciousness has not yet reflected the essence — the nature, and/or the regulating principles — of the subject. Therefore, this is the lowest stage of development of the cognitive process. In this stage, consciousness is carried out through three basic phases: sensation, conception, and symbolization.

Human sensation of an objective thing or phenomenon is the simplest, most primitive phase of the emotional consciousness stage of the cognitive processes, but without it there would not be any perception of objective things or phenomena. Every human sensation of objective things and phenomena contains objective content [see Content and Form, p. 147], even though it arises as subjective human conscious reflection. Sensation is the subjective imagining of the objective world. It is the basis from which the next phase of emotional consciousness — conception — is formed.

Conception is a relatively complete reflection within human consciousness of objective things and phenomena. Conception is formed on the basis of linking and synthesizing sensational experiences of things and phenomena [i.e., sensation]. Compared with sensation, conception is a higher, fuller, richer form of consciousness, but it is still a reflection of the outward manifestations of objects. Conception does not yet reflect the essence, nature, and regulating principles of the perceived subject.

Symbolization is the representation of an objective thing or phenomenon that has been reflected by sensation and conception. It is the most advanced and most complex phase of the stage of emotional consciousness. At the same time, it also serves as the transitional step between emotional consciousness and rational consciousness. The defining characteristic of symbolism is the ability to reproduce symbolic ideas of objective things and phenomena within human consciousness. Symbolization describes the act of recreating the outward appearances of material things and phenomena within human consciousness, which is the first step of abstraction, and thus the first step towards rational consciousness.

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Annotation 227

Here is an example of the three phases of the emotional consciousness stage of the cognitive process:

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1. Sensation: Jessica senses a cake in the window of a bakery. She sees the frosting, the shape of the cake, and the decorations which adorn the cake. She smells the cake. During this phase, objective data about the cake is received into her consciousness, developing into an immediate and subjective sense perception of the cake. The beginnings of this cognitive activity will be purely sensory in nature; she may have been thinking of other things as she walked by the bakery, but the sight and smell of the cake, upon registering in her mind, will lead to the beginning of a new cognitive process cycle.

2. Conception: Jessica begins to conceive of the cake in her mind more fully. She will associate the immediate sense experiences of seeing and smelling the cake with other experiences she has had with cake, and a complete mental image and concept of the cake will form in her mind.

3. Symbolization: The word “cake” may now form in her mind, and she may begin thinking of the cake more abstractly, as “food,” as a “temptation,” and in other ways. This is the beginning of abstraction in Jessica’s mind, which will then lead to rational conscious activities.

Note that all of these phases of emotional consciousness activity may take place very quickly, perhaps in a fraction of a second, and may coincide with other conscious activity (i.e., Jessica may simultaneously be thinking of a meeting she’s running late to and any number of other things). At this point, Jessica will transition to the rational consciousness stage of the cognitive process, which is explained in more detail below.

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By the end of the emotional stage of the cognitive process, consciousness has not yet reflected the essence — the nature, regulating principles, etc. — of the perceived subject. Therefore, at the emotional stage, consciousness is not yet able to properly interpret the reflected subject. That is to say, emotional conscious activity does not meet the cognitive requirements to serve practical activities, including the need to creatively transform the objective world. To meet these requirements, emotional consciousness must develop into rational consciousness.

Rational consciousness is the higher stage of the cognitive process. It includes the indirect, abstract, and generalized reflection of the essential properties and characteristics of things and phenomena. This stage of consciousness performs the most important function of comprehending and interpreting the essence of the perceived subject. Rational consciousness is implemented through three basic phases: definition, judgment, and reasoning.

Definition is the first phase of rational consciousness. During this phase, the mind begins to interpret, organize, and process the basic properties of things and phenomena at a rational level into a conceptual whole. The formation of definition is the result of the summarization and synthesis of all the different characteristics and properties of the subject, and how the subject fits into the organized structure of knowledge which exists in the mind. Definition is the basis for forming judgments in the cognitive process.

Judgment is the next phase of rational consciousness, which arises from the definition of the subject — the linking of concepts and properties together — which leads to affirmative or negative ideation of certain characteristics or attributes of the perceived subject.

According to the level of development of consciousness, judgment may take one of three forms: unique judgment, general judgment, and universal judgment [see Annotation 105, p. 107]. Universal judgment is the form of judgement that expresses the broadest conception of objective reality.

Reasoning is the final phase of rational consciousness, formed on the basis of synthesizing judgments so as to extrapolate new knowledge about the perceived subject. Before reasoning can take place, judgments must be transformed into knowledge. A judgment can be transformed into knowledge through one of two logical mechanisms: deductive inference (which extrapolates the general from the specific), and inductive inference (which extrapolates the specific from the general).

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Annotation 228

Here is an example of the three phases of the rational consciousness stage of the cognitive process, continuing from our previous example of the emotional consciousness stage [see Annotation 227, p. 222].

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1. Definition: Jessica’s conception of the cake will transition into the rational conscious activity of definition. Jessica will begin to define the concept of the cake more wholly and concretely, summarizing and synthesizing all of the features and characteristics of the cake into a cohesive mental reflection of the cake. The word “cake” may become more pronounced and defined in Jessica’s consciousness, prompting her to think of the object which she defines as a “cake” more fully and rationally.

2. Judgment: Jessica will begin to form basic judgments about the cake. “That cake looks good,” “that cake smells good,” and so on. Next, these judgments will begin to transform into knowledge through inductive or deductive inferences. An inductive inference might be: “I generally enjoy eating cakes, therefore, I might enjoy eating this cake!” An example of a deductive inference might be: “This cake looks very delicious, therefore, there might be other delicious things in this bakery!”

3. Reasoning: Processes of inductive and/or deductive inference will begin to transform Jessica’s judgments into the form of knowledge. For instance, she may now possess such knowledge as: “This bakery has delicious looking cakes, this is a cake I would like to eat,” and so on. With this newly acquired knowledge, Jessica can begin reasoning; that is to say, she can begin making rational conclusions and decisions. She might conclude: “I will go into this bakery and buy that cake.”

Note that this is not the “end” of the cognitive process, because the final phase of the reasoning stage of the cognitive process (reasoning) will lead directly into a new cycle of the cognitive process. In this example, Jessica might engage in the practical activity of checking her watch to see the time, which will begin a new cycle of cognitive process, beginning with the sensation phase of the emotional stage as the visual sense data of her watch and carrying through to the final reasoning phase of the rational stage, and so on.

It should also be noted that this is merely an abstraction of the cognitive process; in reality, the human mind is incredibly complex, capable of carrying out a variety of cognitive processes simultaneously. At any given moment, a person might be considering various different subjects, and each different subject might be at a different stage of the cognitive process. This abstract model of the cognitive process is presented to help us comprehend the component functions of consciousness more easily in the wider context of dialectical materialist philosophy.

Specifically, this model of the cognitive process is intended to help us understand how human consciousness leads to “truth.” And “truth,” here, refers to the alignment of human consciousness with the material world, so that our perceptions and understanding of the world is accurate and representative of actual reality.

- The Relationship Between Emotional Consciousness, Rational Consciousness, and Reality

Emotional consciousness and rational consciousness are stages that make up the cognitive cycle. In reality, they are often intertwined within the cognitive process, but they have different functions. If emotional consciousness is associated with reality, and with the impact of sense data received from observing the material world, and is the basis for cognitive reason, then rational consciousness, based on higher cognitive understanding and abstraction, allows us to understand the essence, nature, regulating principles, and development processes of things and phenomena. Rational consciousness helps direct emotional consciousness in a more efficient and effective direction and leads to more profound and accurate emotional consciousness.

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Annotation 229

In other words, considering a subject at the level of rational consciousness allows us to then view the same subject, at an emotional consciousness level, with more depth and awareness.

For example, the more time we have spent rationally considering something like a bicycle, the more quickly and accurately we can examine a bicycle at the level of emotional consciousness. If someone is looking at a bicycle for the first time, they might not be able to distinguish its component parts or functions. On the other hand, if someone has spent more time considering bicycles at the level of rational consciousness, they may be able to immediately and rapidly understand and process a bicycle at the emotional conscious level, so that they can perceive and comprehend the different parts of a bicycle, as well as their functions, immediately and at the emotional-sensory level.

However, if we stop at rational consciousness, we will only have knowledge about the subjects we perceive, but we still won’t really know if that knowledge is truly accurate or not. In order to be useful in practical activity, we must consciously determine whether knowledge is truth [i.e., whether the knowledge accurately reflects reality]. In order to determine the truth of knowledge, consciousness must necessarily return to reality. Consciousness must use reality as a criterion — a measurement — of the authenticity of knowledge gained through purely cognitive processes. In other words, all consciousness is ultimately derived from practical needs, and must also return to serve practical activities.

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Annotation 230

The dialectical relationship between consciousness and practical activities means that conscious activities develop practical activities, and vice versa, in a continuous feedback loop.

One of the fundamental principles of dialectical materialism is that the material determines the ideal, and the ideal impacts the material [see The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness]. The fact that the material determines consciousness is reflected in the fact that material needs led to the development of consciousness, and conscious activity stems from material needs [see Social Sources of Consciousness].

The fact that the ideal impacts the material is reflected in the fact that consciousness must always return to the service of practical activities; as our consciousness develops (along with knowledge), our ability to impact and transform the material world becomes more efficient and effective.

The dialectical relationship between consciousness and practical activity is what drives the development of humanity. We imagine better ways of doing things, then test those ideas against reality through practical activity.

This dialectical relationship between consciousness and practical activity is thus cyclical. Conscious activity arises from practical activity, and returns to practical activity, in an endless process of developing both conscious ability as well as practical ability.

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Therefore, it can be seen that the general, cyclical nature of the process of movement and development of consciousness develops from practice to consciousness — from consciousness to practice — from practical activity to the continued process of cognitive development, and so on. This process is repeated continuously, without end. The development level of consciousness and practice in the next cycle are often higher than in the previous cycle, and the cognitive process gradually develops more and more accuracy, as well as fuller and deeper knowledge about objective reality.

The universal law of consciousness [see Annotation 224, p. 219] is also a concrete and vivid manifestation of the universal laws of materialist dialectics, including: the law of negation of negation, the law of transformation between quantity and quality and the law of unity and contradiction between opposites. The process of cognitive motion and development, governed by these general laws, is the process of human progress towards absolute truth [see Annotation 232, p. 228].

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Annotation 231

The universal law of consciousness is governed by the three universal laws of materialist dialectics:

The Law of Negation of Negation dictates that the new will arise from the old, but will carry forward characteristics from the old. This is reflected in the universal law of consciousness in that conscious activity arises from practical activity. This conscious activity then develops into improved practical activity, and so on, in a never-ending cycle of development. Throughout this development process, characteristics of previous cycles of cognitive and practical activities are carried forward and transferred on to newer cycles of cognitive and practical activities.

The Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality recognizes that quantity changes develop into changes in quality, and vice versa. This is reflected in the universal law of consciousness in the development of both conscious and practical activities. Conscious development also develops from quantitative changes to quality changes, and vice versa. For example, once a person accumulates a certain quantity of knowledge, the quality of their knowledge will change. For example, once a person has learned the function of every component part of a car engine, they will have a quality shift in their understanding of car engines — they will now have competency of the functioning of the engine as a whole. This is also true of practical activities. A quantity of practical experience will lead to quality shifts in practical ability. For example, once a person has practiced riding a bicycle enough that they can reliably ride the bicycle without falling, we would say that the person “knows how to ride a bicycle,” which represents a quality shift from the state of “learning how to ride a bicycle.”

The Law of Unity and Contradiction Between Opposites states that all things, phenomena, and ideas are defined by internal and external contradictions. This is reflected in the universal law of consciousness by the fact that practical needs serve as the basis for conscious activity, and that cognitive processes serve, in essence, to negate contradictions between consciousness and material reality through practical experience. In other words, the cognitive process is defined by a never-ending process of contradiction between the material and the ideal, as human beings seek to negate contradictions between our conscious understanding of the world and our practical experiences in search of truth - the accurate alignment of consciousness with the material world.

b. Truth, and the Relationship Between Truth and Reality

- Definition of Truth

All cognitive processes lead to the creation of knowledge, which is what we call human understanding of objective reality. But not all knowledge has content consistent with objective reality, because consciousness exists as the subjective reflection of objective reality in the human mind. The collective cognitive practice of all of humanity throughout history, as well as the cognitive practice of each individual human being, has demonstrated that the knowledge which people have gained and are gaining is not always consistent with objective reality. On the contrary, there are many cases of misalignment between consciousness and reality, and even complete contradiction between human thought and objective reality.

Within the theoretical scope of Marxism-Leninism, the concept of truth is used to refer to knowledge which is aligned with objective reality. This alignment is tested and proven through practice. In this sense, the concept of truth is not identical with the concept of “knowledge,” nor with the concept of “hypothesis.” According to Lenin: “The coincidence of thought with the object is a process: thought (= man) must not imagine truth in the form of dead repose, in the form of a bare picture (image), pale (matte), without impulse, without motion…”^[112]

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Annotation 232

Here, Lenin is dispelling Hegel’s conception of “absolute truth,” which is not to be confused with Lenin’s concept of “absolute truth” as “objective truth” which aligns consciousness with objective reality [see Annotation 58, p. 56]. For Hegel, “absolute truth” was the idea that there will eventually be some end point to the process of rational consciousness at which we will finally arrive at some final stage of knowledge and consciousness. This rational end point of consciousness, at which the dialectic ends and all contradictions are negated, is Hegel’s “absolute truth.”

Lenin is also pushing back against the metaphysical conception that all “truths” exist as static categories of information which do not change. Instead, Lenin points out that seeking truth — i.e., aligning consciousness with material reality — is a never-ending process, in particular because reality is constantly developing and changing. Thus, the alignment of consciousness with reality — the pursuit of truth — is a living and dynamic process which will never end, since the development of reality will never end.

- The Properties of Truth

All truths are objective, relative, absolute, and concrete.

The objectivity of truth is the independence of its content from the subjective will of human beings. The content of knowledge must be aligned with objective reality, not vice versa. This means that the content of accurate knowledge is not a product of pure subjective reasoning. Truth is not an arbitrary human construct, nor is truth inherent in consciousness. On the contrary, truth belongs to the objective world, and is determined by the objective world. The affirmation of the objectivity of truth is one of the fundamental points that distinguishes the concept of absolute truth of dialectical materialism from the concept of absolute truth of idealism and skepticism — the doctrines that deny the objective existence of the physical world and deny the possibility that humans are able to perceive the world.

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Annotation 233

The Dialectical Materialist conception of objective truth stands in contrast to idealism, which states that conscious reasoning alone leads to truth, and that the subjective ideal determines material reality [see Annotation 7, p. 8].

This objectivity of truth also refutes skepticism, which states that truth is essentially undiscoverable, because human consciousness is ultimately unreliable and incapable of accurately reflecting material reality [see Annotation 32, p. 27].

Distinction must also be drawn between the concept of absolute truth as it is understood in dialectical materialist philosophy and the conception of absolute truth in Hegel’s idealist dialectics. Dialectical materialism defines absolute truth as “objective truth;” that is to say: a complete alignment between objective reality and human consciousness (as compared to relative truth, which is a partial alignment between consciousness and objective reality).

Hegel, on the other hand, views absolute truth as a final point at which human consciousness will have achieved absolute, complete, and final understanding of our universe (see Annotation 232, p. 228) with the ideal serving as the first basis and primary mechanism for bringing absolute truth to fruition.

Truth is not only objective, but also absolute and relative. Absolute truth [see Annotation 58, p. 56] refers to truth which reflects a full and complete alignment of consciousness and reality. Theoretically, we can reach absolute truth. This is because, in the objective world, there exists no thing nor phenomenon which human beings are completely incapable of accurately perceiving. The possibility of acquiring absolute truth in the process of the development of conscious understanding is theoretically limitless. However, in reality, our conscious ability to reflect reality is limited by the specific material conditions of each generation of humanity, of practical limitations, and by the spatial and temporal conditions of reflected subjects. Therefore, truth is also relative.

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Annotation 234

Dialectical materialist philosophy recognizes that it must be theoretically possible to know everything there is to know about a given subject, since we are theoretically capable of accurately perceiving, sensing, and measuring all data which pertains to a subject. However, dialectical materialism also recognizes the practical limitations of human beings. As Engels writes in Anti-Dühring:

If mankind ever reached the stage at which it should work only with eternal truths, with results of thought which possess sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to truth, it would then have reached the point where the infinity of the intellectual world both in its actuality and in its potentiality had been exhausted, and thus the famous miracle of the counted uncountable would have been performed.

But are there any truths which are so securely based that any doubt of them seems to us to be tantamount to insanity? That twice two makes four, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that Paris is in France, that a man who gets no food dies of hunger, and so forth? Are there then nevertheless eternal truths, final and ultimate truths.

Certainly there are. We can divide the whole realm of knowledge in the traditional way into three great departments. The first includes all sciences that deal with inanimate nature and are to a greater or lesser degree susceptible of mathematical treatment: mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry. If it gives anyone any pleasure to use mighty words for very simple things, it can be asserted that certain results obtained by these sciences are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths; for which reason these sciences are known as the exact sciences. But very far from all their results have this validity. With the introduction of variable magnitudes and the extension of their variability to the infinitely small and infinitely large, mathematics, usually so strictly ethical, fell from grace; it ate of the tree of knowledge, which opened up to it a career of most colossal achievements, but at the same time a path of error. The virgin state of absolute validity and irrefutable proof of everything mathematical was gone forever; the realm of controversy was inaugurated, and we have reached the point where most people differentiate and integrate not because they understand what they are doing but from pure faith, because up to now it has always come out right. Things are even worse with astronomy and mechanics, and in physics and chemistry we are swamped by hypotheses as if attacked by a swarm of bees. And it must of necessity be so. In physics we are dealing with the motion of molecules, in chemistry with the formation of molecules out of atoms, and if the interference of light waves is not a myth, we have absolutely no prospect of ever seeing these interesting objects with our own eyes. As time goes on, final and ultimate truths become remarkably rare in this field.

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Relative truth is truth which has developed alignment with reality without yet having reached complete alignment between human knowledge and the reality which it reflects. To put it another way, relative truth represents knowledge which incompletely reflects material subjects without complete accuracy. In relative truth, there is only partial alignment — in some (but not all) aspects — between consciousness and the material world.

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Annotation 235

False consciousness is consciousness which is incorrect and misaligned from reality. Discovering and rooting out false consciousness is one of the primary concerns of dialectical materialism, as false consciousness can be a serious impediment to human progress. The term “false consciousness” was first used by Friedrich Engels in a personal letter to Franz Mehring in 1893 (a decade after the death of Karl Marx), and in this letter Engels uses the term interchangeably with the word “ideology”* to describe conscious thought processes which do not align with reality:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts.

Although the term “false consciousness” is not found in writing until after Marx’s death, the concept underlying the term “false consciousness” is found often in the works of Marx and Engels. For instance, in The Holy Family, Marx and Engels explain how communist, class conscious workers have been able to break free of false consciousness of capitalist society:

They (the communist workers) are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labor and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement.

This allusion to “the difference between being and thinking” recurs again and again in the works of Marx and Engels.

* Lenin also discussed the concept of false consciousness extensively, and argued that dialectical materialism was the key to negating the false consciousness of the working class, writing in What the “Friends of the People” Are:

It never has been the case, nor is it so now, that the members of society conceive the sum-total of the social relations in which they live as something definite, integral, pervaded by some principle; on the contrary, the mass of people adapt themselves to these relations unconsciously, and have so little conception of them as specific historical social relations that, for instance, an explanation of the exchange relations under which people have lived for centuries was found only in very recent times. Materialism removed this contradiction by carrying the analysis deeper, to the origin of man’s social ideas themselves; and its conclusion that the course of ideas depends on the course of things is the only one compatible with scientific psychology. Further, and from yet another aspect, this hypothesis was the first to elevate sociology to the level of a science.

Note that this convention of using the word “ideology” to mean “false consciousness” has never been common, and Marx and Engels both used the word “ideology” more often in its more usual sense of “a system of ideas,” but it is still occasionally encountered in socialist literature, as Joseph McCarney explains in Marx Myths and Legends:

Marx never calls ideology ‘false consciousness’. Indeed, he never calls anything ‘false consciousness’, a phrase that does not occur in his work... The noun is almost always accompanied by an epithet such as ‘German’, ‘republican’, ‘political’ or ‘Hegelian’, or by a qualifying phrase, as in ‘the ideology of the bourgeoisie’ or ‘the ideology of the political economist’. More typical in any case is the adjectival usage in which such varied items as ‘forms’, ‘expressions’, ‘phrases’, ’conceptions’, ‘deception’, and ‘distortion’ are said to have an ‘ideological’ character. Even more distinctive is the frequency, amounting to approximately half of all references in the relevant range, of invocations of the ‘ideologists’, the creators and purveyors of the ideological forms.

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“Relative truth” and “absolute truth” do not exist separately, but have dialectical unity with each other. On the one hand, “absolute truth” is the sum of all “relative truths.” On the other hand, in all relative truths there are always elements of absolute truth.

Lenin wrote that “absolute truth results from the sum-total of relative truths in the course of their development; [...] relative truths represent relatively faithful reflections of an object existing independently of man; [...] these reflections become more and more faithful; [...] every scientific truth, notwithstanding its relative nature, contains an element of absolute truth.”^[113]

Correct realization of the dialectical relationship between relative and absolute truth plays a very important role in criticizing and overcoming extremism and false consciousness in perception and in action. If we exaggerate the absoluteness of the truth of knowledge which we possess, or downplay its relativity, we will fall into the false consciousness of metaphysics, dogmatism, conservativism, and stagnation.

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Annotation 236

Intentional or unintentional exaggeration of the absoluteness of truth — i.e., considering our knowledge to be more complete and/or aligned with reality than it actually is — leads to incorrect viewpoints and mindsets, including:

Metaphysics is a philosophical system which seeks truth through the systematic categorization of knowledge [see Annotation 8, p. 8]. This is a flawed method of seeking knowledge because it considers truth to be essentially static and unchanging, and upholds the erroneous notion that truth can be systematically broken down into discrete, isolated categories. In addition to being fundamentally incorrect about the nature of truth and knowledge, it leads to the incorrect presumption that such static categorization of knowledge can lead to truth at all. Metaphysics fails to see truth and consciousness as a process, and instead sees truth as a static assembly of categorized facts and data.

Dogmatism occurs when one only accounts for commonalities and considers theory itself as the sole basis of truth. Dogmatism inherently overstates the absoluteness of knowledge, as dogmatic positions uphold certain theoretical principles as complete, inviolable, and completely developed. This explicitly denies the continuously developing process of advancing knowledge and consciousness.

Conservativism includes any position that seeks to prevent change, or to undo change to return to an earlier state of development. Such positions deny the continuous development of consciousness, knowledge, and practice, and incorrectly assert incorrect positions; or mistake relative truth for absolute truth.

Stagnation is an inability or unwillingness to change and adapt consciousness and practice in accordance with developing material conditions. Stagnation can stem from, or cause, overstatement of absolute truth in theory and forestall necessary development of both consciousness and practical ability.

On the contrary, if we exaggerate the relativity of the truth of knowledge which we possess, or downplay its absoluteness, we will fall into relativism, thereby leading to subjectivism, revisionism, sophistry, and skepticism.

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Annotation 237

Relativism is the belief that human consciousness can only achieve relative understanding of the world, and that truth can therefore never be objectively discovered. Relativism is, thus, the overstatement of the relative nature of truth and the denial of the existence of absolute truth. Relativism leads to such incorrect viewpoints and mindsets as:

Subjectivism: which occurs when one centers one’s own self and one’s own conscious activities in perspective and worldview, failing to test their own perceptions against material and social reality [see Annotation 211, p. 205]. This position denies that truth can be discovered in the external material world, falsely believing that absolute truth stems only from conscious activity.

Revisionism: a failure to recognize and accept commonalities in conscious activity, focusing only on the private [see Private and Common, p. 128]. Revisionism leads to constant and unnecessary reassessment and reevaluation of both knowledge and practice. Revisionism, thus, is a position which overstates the relativity of truth and ignores truths which are more fully developed towards absoluteness.

Sophistry: the use of falsehoods and fallacious arguments to deceive [see Annotation 116, p. 118]. Sophistry is, thus, the intentional denial of truth and the intentional mischaracterization of truths as either overly relative or as not truths at all.

Skepticism: the belief that truth is essentially undiscoverable, because human consciousness is ultimately unreliable and incapable of accurately reflecting material reality [see Annotation 200, p. 192]. By denying that truth is discoverable at all, skepticism explicitly rejects absolute truth and declares that all truth is relative and unreliable.

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In addition to objectivity, absoluteness, and relativity, truth also has concreteness. The concreteness of truth refers to the degree to which a truth is attached to specific objects, in specific conditions, at a specific point in time. This means that all accurate knowledge always refers to a specific situation which involves specific subjects which exist in a specific place and time. The content of truth cannot be pure abstraction, disconnected from reality, but it is always associated with certain, specific objects and phenomena which exist in a specific space, time, and arrangement, with specific internal and external relationships. Therefore, truth is associated with specific historical conditions. This specificity to time, place, relations, etc., is what we call concreteness.

Knowledge, if detached from specific historical conditions, will fall into pure abstraction. Therefore, it will not be accurate — it will not align with reality — and such knowledge cannot be considered truth. When emphasizing this property, Lenin wrote: “Truth is always concrete, never abstract.”^[114] Mastering the principle of the concreteness of truth has an important methodological significance in cognitive and practical activities. It is required that consideration and evaluation of all things and phenomena must be based on a historical viewpoint [see Annotation 114, p. 116]. In developing and applying theory, we must be conscious of specific historical conditions. According to Lenin, Marxism’s nature, its essence, lies in the concrete analysis of specific situations; Marx’s method is, above all, to consider the objective content of the historical process in a specific time.

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Annotation 238

In other words, Marxism is rooted in seeking truth by examining reality from a historical and comprehensive viewpoint. For more information, see Annotation 114, p. 116.

- The Role of Truth in Reality.

In order to survive and develop, humans must conduct practical activities. These activities involve transforming the environment, nature, and human society. At the same time, through these activities, humans perform — knowingly or unknowingly — the process of perfecting and developing our conscious and practical abilities. It is this process that helps human cognitive activities develop. Practical activities can only be successful and effective once humans apply accurate knowledge of objective reality to our practical activities. Therefore, truth is one of the prerequisites that ensure success and efficiency in practical activities.

The relationship between truth and practical activities is a dialectical relationship which serves as the basis for the movement and development of both truth and practical activity: truth develops through practice, and practice develops through the correct application of truth which people have gained through practical activities.

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Annotation 239

Truth and Practical Activities have a dialectical relationship in which truth develops through practice, and practice develops through the correct application of truth.

Practice only develops when truth about the universe is consciously applied to practical activities. For example, farm output increases as we learn more truth about the way crops grow and how land can be properly managed. Simultaneously, truth can only be developed through practical activity, as all ideas and knowledge must be tested through methodological observation, experimentation, and other forms of practical activity.

A theory is an idea or system of ideas intended to explain an aspect, characteristic, or tendency of objective reality. Theories are not inherently truthful; holding incorrect theories constitutes false consciousness. Practice (or praxis) is purposeful conscious activity which improves our understanding of the world. Theory and practice have a dialectical relationship with one another which, if understood, helps us to discover truth.

Truth and practical activities mutually develop one another over time.

This dialectical relationship between theory and practical activities means that we must never favor theory over practice, nor practice over theory, but that we must rather balance development of theoretical understanding as we engage in practical activities to test our knowledge against reality and to develop our practice with ever-advancing understanding of the world. As practice and theory develop one another, our understanding of objective reality comes closer and closer to truth.

In Theses on Feuerbach, Marx summarizes the relationship between theory and practice, writing:

The problem of the external world is here put as the problem of its transformation: the problem of the cognition of the external world as an integral part of the problem of transformation: the problem of theory as a practical problem.

Here, Marx explains that theory is concerned with solving the “problem” of transforming the external world through practice, and that “cognition of the external world” is required to solve the “problem of transformation. In other words, we must improve our theory in order to improve our practical ability to transform our world, and we learn about the world (thus improving our theory) through those practical activities.

Marx also writes in Theses on Feuerbach that:

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but it is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power... of his thinking.

This point is key for understanding the dialectical relationship between practice and theory: in order to be useful, theory must be proven through practice. Thus, we must seek to develop our practice through theory, and our theory through practice.

Engels summarizes these ideas a bit more colorfully in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

Before there was argument there was action... In the beginning was the deed ... And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

---

Engels wrote in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy of the uselessness of what might be called “pure theory,” divorced from practice, and the sort of radical skepticism which refutes that any practical knowledge can ever really be obtained by human beings:

There is yet a set of different philosophers — those who question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition of the world... The most telling refutation of this (scepticism and agnosticism) as of all other philosophical crotchets, is praxis, namely experiment and industry.

It is practice, according to Engels, which proves the merit and utility of theory.

Through experiment and industry — through practical activities in the material world — we can test our ideas and dialectically develop both theory and practice. Lenin built upon these ideas in his own work, writing in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:

The materialist theory, the theory of the reflection of objects by our mind, is here presented with absolute clarity: things exist outside us. Our perceptions and ideas are their images. Verification of these images, differentiation between true and false images, is given by practice.

Here, Lenin explains how only a proper understanding and application of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice can lead to the negation of false consciousness [see Annotation 235, p. 231] and the dialectical development of both practice and theory. Simply arguing and debating about ideas without relating them directly to practice will never lead to truth, nor will such pure-theory argumentation develop theory or practice in any meaningful way.

This brings to mind another line from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach:

The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

The philosophy of dialectical materialism and the system of materialist dialectics are designed specifically to produce action and to avoid such “scholastic questions” and “pure-theory argumentation.”

Ho Chi Minh summarized these ideas perhaps most clearly and precisely of all in the very title of his article: Practice Generates Knowledge, Understanding Advances Theory, Theory Leads to Practice:

Knowledge comes from practice. And through practice, knowledge becomes theory. That theory, again, has to be put into practice. Knowledge advances not just from thought to theory, but, above all, from applying theory to revolutionary practice. Once the world’s law is fully grasped as theory, it is critical to put that theory into practice by changing the world, by increasing production, and by practicing class struggle and struggling for national self-determination. This is a continuous process of obtaining knowledge.

“If Uncle Ho says we will win, we will win!” — Propaganda poster from the 30th anniversary of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1984).

Afterword

If it seems that this book has come to an end somewhat abruptly, it’s because this is really just the first of four major sections of the full volume from which this text is drawn. If you are reading this afterword after reading the entirety of the preceding contents, then congratulations, you have completed the equivalent to a full semester’s coursework for a class on dialectical materialist philosophy which all Vietnamese college students are required to take!

The next sections in this curriculum, each covered in the original full volume, include:

Part 2: Historical Materialism

This section covers the definition and basic principles of historical materialism, which is the field of work dedicated to applying dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics to human history and human society. In the West, historical materialism and dialectical materialism are often conflated, but this is in error. Historical materialism is an applied field of dialectical materialist philosophy and materialist dialectical methodology which is used in the pursuit of understanding and interpreting human history.

Part 3: Political Economy

This section condenses the three cardinal volumes of Capital by Karl Marx and covers three primary doctrines:

1. The doctrine of value.

2. The doctrine of surplus value.

3. The doctrines of monopolist capitalism and state monopolist capitalism.

Political Economy, in this course, can be considered the application of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics to the analysis and understanding of the capitalist mode of production from the perspective of the socialist revolutionary movement.

Part 4: Scientific Socialism

This section relies on an established understanding of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and political economy as a foundation for developing socialist revolution. The three chapters of this section on Scientific Socialism are:

1. The Historical Mission of the Working Class and the Socialist Revolution

2. The Primary Social-Political Issues of the Process of Building a Socialist Revolution 3. Realistic Socialism and Potential Socialism

Moving Forward

We are already working on the translation of Part 2 of this curriculum, and we hope to complete it as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we believe this book provides the reader with enough of a foundation to continue studying and to begin applying the principles of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics in political struggle.

We highly discourage readers from self-study in isolation, just as we discourage individual political action. The best way to study socialism is alongside other socialists.

Depending on where you live, you may be able to find political education resources provided by communist parties, socialist book clubs, or other organizations. If such resources aren’t available, it should be fairly easy to find study groups, workshops, and affinity groups online where you can study with like-minded comrades. Of course, socialist revolution requires more than just study, as we hope this book has thoroughly explained. Theory must be coupled with practice. As Ho Chi Minh wrote: “If you read a thousand books, but you fail to apply theory into practice, you are nothing but a bookshelf.”

To avoid atrophying into the proverbial bookshelf, we encourage you to go out into the world and apply these ideas creatively and collectively with other socialists. Dialectical materialism is a philosophy that was developed from the ground up for application in the real world. Dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics provide a functional model of reality, a way of looking at highly complicated systems, with all their dynamic internal and external relations. Dialectical materialist philosophy demands that we see human systems as processes in motion. In order to fully comprehend such dynamic processes, we must engage with them, which is why Ho Chi Minh taught that “we are not afraid to make mistakes; we would only be afraid of making mistakes if we were not determined to correct them.”^[115]

As we mentioned in the foreword, many socialists in the West suffer from a lack of practical engagement. Far too many socialists fall into utopianism, idealism, and social chauvinism and we believe this largely stems from failures to test ideas against reality through praxis. We hope that this book has impressed upon the reader that simply arguing about pure theory is a useless and futile pursuit. Indeed, sparring verbally over such “scholastic questions,” as Marx described them, is counter-productive. Marx and Engels defined such failure to engage in theory as “critical criticism” — that is to say, criticism for the sake of criticism. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Holy Family, such critical criticism is futile, as we will never think our way to revolution:

According to Critical Criticism, the whole evil lies only in the workers’ “thinking”. It is true that the English and French workers have formed associations in which they exchange opinions not only on their immediate needs as workers, but on their needs as human beings. In their associations, moreover, they show a very thorough and comprehensive consciousness of the “enormous” and “immeasurable” power which arises from their co-operation. But these mass-minded, communist workers, employed, for instance, in the Manchester or Lyons workshops, do not believe that by “pure thinking” they will be able to argue away their industrial masters and their own practical debasement. They are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labour and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical, objective way for man to become man not only in thinking, in consciousness, but in mass being, in life. Critical Criticism, on the contrary, teaches them that they cease in reality to be wage-workers if in thinking they abolish the thought of wage-labour; if in thinking they cease to regard themselves as wage-workers and, in accordance with that extravagant notion, no longer let themselves be paid for their person. As absolute idealists, as ethereal beings, they will then naturally be able to live on the ether of pure thought.

Engels expressed his frustration with such endless, utopian, idealist debates in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

Engels concludes by punctuating why he and Marx had developed dialectical materialism as a praxis-oriented philosophical foundation for scientific socialism: “To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.” We hope that the readers of this text will seek out real bases for your development in theory and praxis, and we trust that you will quickly discover that developing practice develops theory, and vice-versa.

Remember that Marx and Engels, themselves, were not just theorists who scribbled down their thoughts in an “scholarly” vacuum. They were revolutionists themselves, highly engaged in political struggle and, in so struggling, they risked their lives and freedom over the course of many decades. This struggle is what led to the change and development of their ideas over time. The same can be said for every other successful socialist revolutionary in history.

Vo Nguyen Giap, the great general who led Vietnam’s military forces through resistance wars against fascist Japan, colonialist France, and the imperialist USA, describes how he applied such principles on the battlefield in his book People’s War, People’s Army:

During the Resistance War, owing to constant fighting, the training of our troops could not be carried out continuously for a lengthy period but only between battles or campaigns. We actively implemented the guiding principles ‘To train and to learn while we fight.’ After the difficult years at the beginning of the Resistance War, we succeeded in giving good training to our army. The practical viewpoint in this training deserves to be highlighted. The content of training became most practical and rich. Training was in touch with practical fighting: the troops were trained in accordance with the next day’s fighting, and victory or defeat in the fighting was the best gauge for the control and assessment of the result of the training. On the basis of gradual unification of the organisation and its equipment, the content of training in the various units of the regular army was also systematised step by step.

Here, Vo Nguyen Giap has provided a concrete example of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, and their inseparability. This fundamental aspect of dialectical materialist philosophy demands that we think and act like scientists to change the world, rather than simply speculating and imagining ineffectually like armchair philosophers. As Marx wrote in Theses on Feuerbach “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” We encourage you to apply what you learn in this and other books to change the world.

Advice on Further Study

As you advance in your studies of socialist literature and theory, we offer the following advice:

First, you must recognize that the specific language used by revolutionary leaders and thinkers may vary widely across time and around the world. Fashions in language develop over time, and many contributions — like the text you’ve just read — come to us through translation from countless languages. This is why we believe it critical to develop an understanding of the spirit of the ideas of any particular text, and not to get bogged down in semantics and terminology. Liberal ideologists have done much to distract and divert intellectual energy with endless metaphysical altercation over the “proper” usage of this or that word. We caution strongly against this attitude, which makes us susceptible to sophistry, opportunism, and the sewing of undue conflict and division amidst the working class. We have pointed out various instances where Marx, Engels, and Lenin used different language to describe the same concepts. We also offer the reminder that Marx, Engels, and Lenin were writing in different languages at different times, just as socialists around the world have different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. As socialism is an international movement, we must stress the importance of avoiding linguistic barriers by engaging with one another in good faith and testing conflicting ideas and interpretations of theory against one another through practice instead of getting bogged down with “critical criticism.”

Next, we encourage students of socialist philosophy to always keep in mind that the doctrines and philosophies of revolutionary figures are products of the times and places in which they were conceived. It would be a mistake to view the works of any revolutionary figure as a road map or a set of instructions to follow by rote. Even Marx and Engels changed and developed their own ideas over the decades they were active, as they addressed in the 1872 preface to The Communist Manifesto:

The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’ s Association, 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Ho Chi Minh also frequently took pains to point out that their revolutionary theories were devised specifically to suit the particular objective conditions of their own respective times and places. For example, in What is to be Done, Lenin discusses the question of secrecy in revolutionary activity. Lenin recognizes that secrecy is not always necessary, such as in the more liberal social democracies which existed in Europe in his era. In Russia, however — with its autocratic monarchy — material conditions called for more covert activity:

In countries where political liberty exists the distinction between a trade union and a political organisation is clear enough, as is the distinction between trade unions and Social-Democracy. The relations between the latter and the former will naturally vary in each country according to historical, legal, and other conditions; they may be more or less close, complex, etc. (in our opinion they should be as close and as little complicated as possible); but there can be no question in free countries of the organisation of trade unions coinciding with the organisation of the Social-Democratic Party. In Russia, however, the yoke of the autocracy appears at first glance to obliterate all distinctions between the Social-Democratic organisation and the workers’ associations, since all workers’ associations and all study circles are prohibited, and since the principal manifestation and weapon of the workers’ economic struggle — the strike — is regarded as a criminal (and sometimes even as a political!) offence.”

Ho Chi Minh was even more explicit about the requirement to tailor theory to current and local material conditions in a speech to the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1950:

Studying Marxism-Leninism is not just a matter of repeating the slogan ‘workers of the world, unite’ like a parrot. We must unify Marxism-Leninism with the reality of Vietnam’s revolution. Talking about Marxism-Leninism in Vietnam is talking about the specific guidelines and policies of the Communist Party of Vietnam. For example, our priority now is: great solidarity!

In a 2001 document, the Communist Party of Vietnam explained how Ho Chi Minh tailored lessons learned from prior revolutionaries to the specific material conditions of revolutionary Vietnam:

Ho Chi Minh’s thought is... the creative application and development of Marxism-Leninism to the specific conditions of our country. Ho Chi Minh learned profound lessons from Lenin and the Russian October Revolution, but he did not simply use those lessons as a template, nor did he just copy that foundation. Instead, he absorbed the spirit of Marxism-Leninism. Lenin’s thesis allowed Ho Chi Minh to see what was necessary for the Vietnamese people — the path of national liberation. Ho Chi Minh had creative arguments that contributed to enriching Marxism-Leninism in the issue of national liberation revolution, building a new democratic regime and the transitional path to socialism in an Eastern, semi-feudal colony which was still very backward: Vietnam.

As you find your own revolutionary path, you must carefully examine the objective conditions of your own time and place, and work collectively and collaboratively with your fellow revolutionists to decide how theory and lessons gleaned from history apply to your own circumstances. And, of course, you must test the validity of your conclusions against reality through practice.

Creative Application of Dialectical Materialism and Materialist Dialectics

Finally, we implore you to apply dialectical materialism creatively. Don’t look at this (or any other) book as a set of static instructions. Dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics are living, breathing systems of thought which benefit from the ideas and imagination of comrades working and struggling together. Seek the spirit of these ideas, study revolutionary theory and history, then apply what you learn in your daily life. Combat dogmatism and avoid arguments over pure theory. Determine what works and what doesn’t through activity in the real world, and apply what you learn from practical experience to your theoretical development. Over time, you will begin to see how practice and theory impact and develop one another. When you are struggling with a particular problem in revolutionary practice, you will find yourself reading theory in a new light, discovering information and ideas which might be applicable to your immediate circumstances. And as you study theory, you will find that it also impacts your practice, giving you tools and perspective and methodologies for action which you might never have imagined on your own.

We have tried to make this book a useful companion for further study. We have also made the digital version available for free online. If you have found it useful, we hope you will share it freely and widely.

In Closing

One last time we would like to thank Dr. Vijay Prashad and Dr. Taimur Rahman for their wonderful insights on our translation, and to acknowledge the monumental work of the Vietnamese scholars who wrote and revised the original text from which this volume is drawn. We also want to recognize once more the donors and supporters who have given us the precious resource of time to translate and annotate this work. Finally, we want to thank the teams at the Iskra Books and The International Magazine, who have provided invaluable editing and peer review services, promotion, and guidance. You can find all their publications, respectively, at:

IskraBooks.org

InternationalMagz.com

If you would like to download the free digital version of this book, support future translation work, or if you would like to get in touch, you can visit our website:

BanyanHouse.org

We will leave you, now, with the immortal words of the Manifesto:

Workers of the world, unite!

You have nothing to lose but your chains.

In Solidarity,

- Luna Nguyen, Translator & Annotations

- Emerican Johnson, Editor, Illustrator, & Annotations

“Marxism-Leninism — Long Live the Victories” — a demonstration to welcome the liberation army in the South of Vietnam on April 30, 1975.

[Appendices]

Appendix A: Basic Pairs of Categories Used in Materialist Dialectics

This is a summary of the basic pairs of universal categories and their characteristics which are discussed in depth starting on p. 126.

Private	Common
A specific item, event, or process.	The properties that are shared between Private things, phenomena, and ideas.

Private is commonly referred to in literature as Special/Specific while Common is commonly called General. Note: When an aspect or characteristic is not held in common with anything else in existence, it is considered Unique. The Unique can become Common, just as the Common can become Unique. Example: a Unique design for an object may be replicated, making it Common. A type of item that is Common may gradually disappear until there is only one example left, making it Unique. See p. 128.

Reason	Result
Mutual impact between things, phenomena, or ideas which causes each to change.	The change caused by a Reason.

Reason and Result may be referred to as Cause and Effect, respectively, though this should lead to confusion with metaphysical conceptions of cause and effect. Note: Reasons can be Direct or Indirect. See p. 138

Obviousness	Randomness
Refers to events that always and predictably happen due to factors of internal material structure.	Events caused by external impacts and interactions which are thus not completely predictable.

Obvious may be referred to as Necessary, while Randomness may be referred to as Accidental. See p. 145.

Content	Form
What something is made of.	The shape that contains content.

Ways in which Content and Form are discussed and perceived can can vary wildly depending on the subject being discussed and the viewpoint from which the subject is being considered. See p. 145.

Essence	Phenomena
Features that make something develop a certain way.	The expression of the essence in certain conditions.

See p. 156.

Possibility	Reality
What may happen, or might exist, in the future, if certain developments take place.	What is happening, or what exists, at the present moment.

See p. 160.

Appendix B: the Two Basic Principles of Dialectical Materialism

The Principle of General Relationships This principle states that:

“Materialist dialectics upholds the position that all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in mutual relationships with each other, regulate each other, transform into each other, and that nothing exists in complete isolation.”

From this Principle, we find the characteristics of Diversity in Unity and Unity in Diversity; the basis of Diversity in Unity is the fact that every thing, phenomenon, and idea contains many different relationships; the basis of Unity in Diversity is that many different relationships exist — unified — within each and every thing, phenomenon, and idea.

The Characteristic of Diversity in Unity is derived from the fact that there exist an infinite number of diverse relationships between things, phenomena, and ideas, but all of these relationships share the same foundation in the material world.

The Characteristic of Unity in Diversity is derived from the fact that when we examine the universal relationships that exist within and between all different things, phenomena, and ideas, we will find that each individual manifestation of any universal relationship will have its own different manifestations, aspects, features, etc. Thus even the universal relationships which unite all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in infinite diversity.

The Principle of Development This principle states that:

“Development is a process that comes from within the thing-in-itself; the process of solving the contradictions within things and phenomena. Therefore, development is inevitable, objective, and occurs without dependence on human will.”

The Characteristic of Objectiveness of Development stems from the origin of motion. Since motion originates from mutual impacts which occur between external things, objects, and relationships, the motions themselves also occur externally (relative to all other things, phenomena, and objects). This gives motion itself objective characteristics.

The Characteristic of Generality of Development stems from the fact that development occurs in every process that exists in every field of nature, society, and human thought; in every thing, every phenomenon, and every process and stage of these things and phenomena.

The Characteristic of Diversity of Development stems from the fact that every thing, phenomenon, and idea has its own process of development that is not totally identical to the process of development of any other thing, phenomenon, or idea.

Appendix C: the Three Universal Laws of Materialist Dialectics

The Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality

The law of transformation between quantity and quality is a universal law which concerns the universal mode of motion and development processes of nature, society, and human thought. The law was formulated by Friedrich Engels in Dialectics of Nature, and states that:

“In nature, in a manner exactly fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion.” See more on p. 163.

The Law of Unification and Contradiction Between Opposites

The law of unification and contradiction between opposites is the essence of dialectics. It states, as formulated by V. I. Lenin in Summary of Dialectics:

“The fundamental, originating, and universal driving force of all motion and development processes is the inherent and objective contradiction which exists in all things, phenomena, and ideas.” See more on p. 175.

The Law of Negation of Negation

The law of negation of negation describes the fundamental and universal tendency of movement and development to occur through a cyclical form of development through what is termed “negation of negation.” Formulated by Friedrich Engels in Anti-Dühring, it states:

“The true, natural, historical, and dialectical negation is (formally) the moving source of all development--the division into opposites, their struggle and resolution, and what is more, on the basis of experience gained, the original point is achieved again (partly in history, fully in thought), but at a higher stage.” See more on p. 185.

Appendix D: Forms of Consciousness and Knowledge

Consciousness refers to the self-aware, productive, and creative motion and activity of the human brain. Practical activity is the most direct basis, motive, and purpose of consciousness, and is the criterion for testing truth. See: The Relationship Between Praxis and Consciousness, p. 216.

Knowledge is the content of consciousness. Knowledge includes data about the world, such as ideas, memories, and other thoughts which are derived by direct observation and practical activities in the material world, through scientific experiments, or through abstract reflection of practical and scientific activities which occur within consciousness.

Consciousness and Knowledge have a dialectical relationship with one another: knowledge is developed within consciousness, and consciousness develops to higher levels as knowledge is accumulated and tested against reality (which also develops knowledge itself). In this manner, consciousness and knowledge develop into higher forms over time in individual consciousness and human society. Thus, consciousness and knowledge can be considered as existing in various forms which represent stages of development in dialectical processes of development.

Note that the development processes of knowledge and consciousness are dialectical in nature, not linear. For example, after empirical consciousness develops into theoretical consciousness, theoretical consciousness will then impact empirical consciousness, developing empirical consciousness into a higher stage of development. This is true for all development processes related to empirical and theoretical consciousness. These development processes and forms of consciousness and knowledge are explained in more detail in Chapter 3: Cognitive Theory of Dialectical Materialism, starting on page 204.

Forms of Consciousness

Consciousness is a process of the development of knowledge through a combination of human brain activity and human practical activity in the physical world (i.e., labor). The development of consciousness can be considered on the criteria of concrete/abstract and of passive/active. For more information, see Annotation 216, p. 210.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-99.png

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-100.png

The Cognitive Process

The Cognitive Process is a model developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin which represents the dialectical path of consciousness to truth. For more information, see Dialectical Path of Consciousness to Truth on page 219.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-101.png

Forms of Knowledge

For more information see Annotation 218, p. 214.

File:T-w-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-102.png

Appendix E: Properties of Truth

Truth is the alignment of consciousness with objective reality. All truths are objective, relative, absolute, and concrete. Truths also have characteristics of concreteness and abstractness.

Objectivity: The content of truth is external to the subjective will of human beings. The content of knowledge must be aligned with objective reality, not vice versa. This means that the content of accurate knowledge is not a product of pure subjective reasoning but is objective in nature.

Absoluteness: Absolute truth^[116] is derived from the complete alignment between objective reality and human consciousness. The possibility of acquiring absolute truth in the process of the development of conscious understanding is theoretically limitless. However, in reality, our conscious ability to reflect reality is limited by the specific material conditions of each generation of humanity, of practical limitations, and by the spatial and temporal conditions of reflected subjects. Therefore, truth is also relative.

Relativity: Relative truth is truth which has developed alignment with reality without yet having reached complete alignment. To put it another way, relative truth represents knowledge which incompletely reflects material subjects without complete accuracy. In relative truth, there is only partial alignment — in some (but not all) aspects — between consciousness and the material world.

Dialectical Relationship Between Absolute and Relative Truth: Relative truth and absolute truth do not exist separately, but have dialectical unity with each other. On the one hand, “absolute truth” is the sum of all “relative truths.” On the other hand, in all relative truths there are always elements of absolute truth.

Concreteness: The concreteness of truth refers to the degree to which a truth is attached to specific objects, in specific conditions, at a specific point in time. This means that all accurate knowledge always refers to a specific situation which involves specific subjects which exist in a specific place and time. The content of truth cannot be pure abstraction, disconnected from reality, but it is always associated with certain, specific objects and phenomena which exist in a specific space, time, and arrangement, with specific internal and external relationships. Therefore, truth is associated with specific historical conditions. This specificity to time, place, relations, etc., is concreteness.

Abstractness: Abstract knowledge is knowledge which is not attached (or less attached) to specific times, places, relations, etc. Some degree of abstraction is necessary to develop theoretical understanding of general laws and the nature of objective reality, but care should be taken knowledge does not become completely detached from specific historical conditions, as this will result in pure abstraction. Knowledge which is purely abstract will not align with reality, and such knowledge cannot be considered truth.

Appendix F: Common Deviations From Dialectical Materialism

Throughout the history of the development of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics, there have been many philosophical and methodological deviations which have derived from incorrect analysis, interpretation, and a failure to properly link theory and practice. Below are descriptions of some of the more common deviations which the reader should be aware of.

Bureaucracy: An expression of dogmatism which arises when theory becomes overly formalized, to the extent that practical considerations are ignored in favor of codified theory.

Conservativism: A mindset which seeks to prevent and stifle development and to hold humanity in a static position. Not only is this detrimental to humanity, it is also ultimately a wasted effort, because development is inevitable in human society, as in all things, phenomena, and ideas.

Dogmatism: A breakdown of the dialectical relationship between theoretical consciousness and empirical consciousness, which arrests the development process of knowledge and consciousness. Usually the result of: failure to seek commonalities; considering theory itself as the sole basis of truth rather than practice; ignoring practical experience and considering pre-established theory, alone, as unalterable truth.

Eclecticism: An approach to philosophical inquiry which attempts to draw from various different theories, frameworks, and ideas to attempt to understand a subject; the philosophical error of inconsistently applying different theories and principles in different situations. Empiricism: A broad philosophical position which holds that only experience (including internal experience) can be held as a source of knowledge or truth. Though nominally opposed to idealism, it is considered a faulty (or naive) form of materialism, since it sees the world as only unconnected, static appearances and ignores the reality of dialectical (changing) relationships between objects.

Idealism: A philosophical position which holds that the only reliable experience of reality occurs within human consciousness. Idealists believe that relying on human reason exclusively or as a first basis is the best way to seek truth. Various forms of idealism exist, broadly broken down into subjective idealism, which denies the existence of an external objective world, and objective idealism, which accepts that an external objective world exists, but denies that knowledge can be reliably gained about it through sense perception.

Opportunism: A system of political opinions with no direction, no clear path, no coherent viewpoint, leaning on whatever is beneficial for the opportunist in the short term.

Revisionism: A failure to recognize and accept commonalities in conscious activity, focusing only on the private. Revisionism leads to constant and unnecessary reassessment and reevaluation of both knowledge and practice. Revisionism, thus, is a position which overstates the relativity of truth and ignores truths which are more fully developed towards absoluteness.

Rigidity: An unwillingness to alter one’s thoughts, holding too stiffly to established consciousness and knowledge, and ignoring practical experience and observation, which leads to stagnation of both knowledge and consciousness.

Skepticism: The belief truth is essentially undiscoverable, because human consciousness is ultimately unreliable and incapable of accurately reflecting material reality. By denying that truth is discoverable at all, skepticism explicitly rejects absolute truth and declares that all truth is relative and unreliable. Solipsism: A form of idealism in which one believes that the self is the only basis for truth. As Marxist ethicist Howard Selsam wrote in Ethics and Progress: New Values in a Revolutionary World: “If I believe that I alone exist and that you and all your arguments exist only in my mind and are my own creations then all possible arguments will not shake me one iota. No logic can possibly convince [the] solipsist.”

Sophistry: The use of falsehoods and misleading arguments, usually with the intention of deception, and with a tendency of presenting non-critical aspects of a subject matter as critical, to serve a particular agenda. The word comes from the Sophists, a group of professional teachers in Ancient Greece, who were criticized by Socrates (in Plato’s dialogues) for being shrewd and deceptive rhetoricians. This kind of bad faith argument has no place in materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics must, instead, be rooted in a true and accurate understanding of the subject, material conditions, and reality in general.

Subjectivism: The centering of one’s own self and conscious activities in perspective and worldview, failing to test one’s own perceptions against material and social reality. Subjectivists tend to believe that they can independently reason their way to truth in their own minds without practical experience and activity in the material world.

Utilitarianism: An ethical philosophical theory founded by Jeremy Bentham which seeks to maximize “utility,” which is considered to be a metaphysical property embodying “benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness.” Karl Marx dismissed utilitarianism as overly abstract, in that it reduces all social relationships to the single characteristic of “utility.” He also viewed utilitarianism as metaphysically static and tied to the status quo of current society, since utilitarianism does not address class dynamics and views all relations in the current status quo of society, making utilitarianism an essentially conservative theory. Marx also pointed out that Utilitarianism essentially views individuals as private individuals, not as social individuals, and seeks to work out solutions to the practical problems of human society through reasoning alone without examining material conditions and processes, and without taking into consideration practice and development, writing:

“The whole criticism of the existing world by the utility theory was... restricted within a narrow range. Remaining within the confines of bourgeois conditions, it could criticise only those relations which had been handed down from a past epoch and were an obstacle to the development of the bourgeoisie... the economic content gradually turned the utility theory into a mere apologia for the existing state of affairs, an attempt to prove that under existing conditions the mutual relations of people today are the most advantageous and generally useful.”

[Back Matter]

Glossary & Index

Absolute Truth	Absolute Truth can refer to: 1. The recognition that objective and accurate truth can be drawn from sense perception of the material world along with labor and practice activities in the material world. The opposite of this position is Relativism. See p. 56, 94, 194, 228–229, 232–234. 2. Hegel’s notion of Absolute Truth: that there will eventually be some end point of to the process of rational consciousness at which point humanity will arrive at a final stage of knowledge and consciousness. See p. 228. See also: Relative Truth, Relativism, Stagnation, Truth.
Absolutization	To hold a belief or supposition as always true in all situations and without exception. See p. 49.
Abstract Labor	The abstract conception of expenditure of human energy in the form of labor, without taking into account the value of labor output. When the value of labor output is taken into consideration, it is referred to as concrete labor. See p. 15, 17.
Adam Smith	(1723–1790) British logic professor, moral philosophy professor, and economist. Along with David Ricardo, Adam Smith was one of the founders of political economy, which Marx both drew from and critiqued in his analysis and critique of capitalism. See p. 14, 155.
Ahistoric Perspective	A perspective which considers aspects of human society without due consideration of historical processes of development. For example, Adam Smith and David Ricardo viewed political economy ahistorically, viewing capitalism as a static, universal, and eternal product of natural law rather than seeing capitalism as a product of historical processes of development which would change and develop over time. See p. 116.
Base	Also known as: Economic Base; Economic Basis. The material processes which humans undertake to survive and transform our environment to support our ways of living. In the dialectical relationship between base and superstructure, the base refers to the relationship which humans have with the means of production, including the ownership of the means of production and the organization of labor. See p. 23. See also: Superstructure.
Biological Motion	One of the five basic forms of motion described by Engels in Dialectics of Nature. Biological motion refers to changes and development within living objects and their genetic structure. See p. 61.
Biological Reflection	A complex form of reflection found within organic subjects in the natural world and expressed by excitation, induction, and reflexes. See p. 65.
Bourgeoisie	The owners of the means of production and the ruling class under capitalism; also known as the capitalist class. See p. 3, 23, 30, 41, 50, 63, 96. See also: Proletariat, Petty Bourgeoisie.
Bureaucracy	An expression of dogmatism which arises when theory becomes overly formalized, to the extent that practical considerations are ignored in favor of codified theory. See p. 217–218. C→→M→→C C = A Commodity M = The Money Commodity The mode of circulation described by Marx as occurring under pre-capitalist economies of simple exchange, in which the producers and consumers of commodities have a direct relationship to the commodities which are being bought and sold. The sellers have produced the commodities with their own labor, and they directly consume the commodities which they purchase. See also: M→C→M’ Marx called this mode of circulation “simple commodity production.” See p. 16.
Capitalism	The current stage of human political economy, defined by private ownership of the means of production. Referenced throughout.
Capitalist Class	See: Bourgeoisie
Capitalist Commodity Production	The capitalist mode of production which utilizes the M→C→M’ mode of circulation, in which capitalists own the means of production and pay wages to workers in exchange for their labor, which is used to produce commodities. Capitalists then sell these commodities for profits which are not shared with the workers who provided the labor. See p. 15.
Category	The most general grouping of aspects, attributes, and relations of things, phenomena, and ideas. Different specific fields of inquiry may categorize things, phenomena, and/or ideas differently from one another. See p. 126.
Category Pair	A pair of philosophical categories within materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics tend to focus on universal category pairs which can be used to examine the characteristics, relations, and development of all things, phenomena, and ideas. Examples of category pairs include: private and common; content and form; reason and result; essence and phenomena. See p. 127.
Characteristics	The features and attributes that exist internally — within — a given thing, phenomena, or idea. See p. 115.
Chemical Motion	Changes of organic and inorganic substances in processes of combination and separation. See p. 61.
Chemical Reflection	The reflection of mechanical, physical, and chemical changes and reactions of inorganic matter (i.e., changes in structures, position, physical-chemical properties, and the processes of combining and dissolving substances). See p. 65–66.
Circulation	The way in which commodities and money are exchanged for one another. See p. 16.
Commodity	In Marxist political economy, commodities include anything which can be bought and sold, with both a use value (i.e. it satisfies a need of any kind) and a value-form (aka. ‘Exchange value’ and understood as the average socially necessary labour time needed to produce this object). Under capitalism, more and more human activity and production is ‘commodified’ (mediated through market exchange). See p. 15, 87, 133.
Common	See: Private and Common
Common Laws	Laws (of nature and/or human society) that are applicable to a broader range of subjects than private laws, and which impact many different subjects. For instance: the law of preservation of mass, the law of preservation of energy, etc. See p. 162.
Comprehensive Viewpoint	A viewpoint which seeks to consider the internal dialectical relationships between the component parts, factors, and aspects within a thing or phenomenon, and which considers external mutual interactions with with other things, phenomena, and ideas. Dialectical materialist philosophy demands a comprehensive basis in order to fully and properly understand things and phenomena in order to effectively solve problems in real life and develop humanity towards communism. See p. 115, 172, 235.
Conception	A relatively complete reflection within human consciousness of objective things and phenomena. See p. 221–22.
Concrete Labor	The production of a specific commodity with a specific value through labor. When labor is considered without the consideration of output value, it is referred to as abstract labor. See p. 15, 17.
Conditioned Reflex	Conditioned reflexes are reactions which are learned by organisms. These responses are acquired as animals associate previously unrelated neural stimuli with a particular reaction. See p. 66, 68.
Consciousness	The dynamic and creative reflection of the objective world in human brains; the subjective image of the objective world which is produced by the human brain. See p. 68–69, 70.
Content	See: Content and Form.
Content and Form (Category Pair)	Content is the philosophical category which refers to the sum of all aspects, attributes, and processes that a thing, phenomenon, or idea is made from. The Form category refers to the mode of existence and development of things, phenomena, and ideas. Form thus describes the system of relatively stable relationships which exist internally within things, phenomena, and ideas. Content and Form have a dialectical relationship with one another, in which content determines form and form impacts back on content. See p. 115, 147155, 166.
Contradiction	A contradiction is a relationship in which two forces oppose one another, leading to mutual development. See p. 123, 159, 163, 169, 175–191.
Consciousness	The self-aware, productive, creative motion and activity of the human brain. See p. 216, 249.
Conservativism	Also referred to as Prejudice; a mindset which seeks to prevent and stifle development and to hold humanity in a static position. Not only is this detrimental to humanity, it is also ultimately a wasted effort, because development is inevitable in human society, as in all things, phenomena, and ideas. See p. 125, 233.
David Hume	(1711 — 1776) Scottish philosopher who developed radical skepticism as a philosophy of empiricist rejection of human knowledge. See p. 11, 29, 56, 7273.
David Ricardo	(1772 — 1823) British economist who, along with Adam Smith, was one of the key figures in the development of Political Economy which was a basis for much of the work of Marx and Engels. See p. 14, 18, 155.
Deductive Inference	Logical inference which extrapolates from the general to the specific. See p. 224.
Definition	The first phase of rational consciousness. During this phase, the mind begins to interpret, organize, and process the basic properties of things and phenomena at a rational level into a conceptual whole. See p. 224.
Development	The change and motion of things, phenomena, and ideas with a forward tendency: from less advanced to more advanced; and/or from a less complete to a more complete level. See p. 38, 45–46, 52, 55, 61, 65, 76–96, 105–107, 114118, 119–127, 131–132, 138–140, 143, 147, 154, 155–165, 169–175, 177–181, 183–207, 210, 213, 216–223, 225–229, 233, 235–237.
Development Viewpoint	A viewpoint which considers that, in order to perceive or solve any problem in real life, we must consider all things, phenomena, and ideas with their own forward tendency of development taken in mind.
Dialectic; Dialectical; Dialectics	In Marxism-Leninism, the term dialectic (adjective: dialectical) refers to regular and mutual relationships, interactions, transformations, motions, and developments of things, phenomena, and processes in nature, society and human thought. “Dialectics” refers to a dialectical system. See p. 3, 9–11, 47.
Dialectical Materialism	A universal philosophical and methodological system which forms the theoretical core of a scientific worldview. Dialectical Materialism was first developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with the express goal of achieving communism. Dialectical Materialism has since been defended and developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as well as many others. See: p. 3, 6, 1011, 19–21, 27–30, 33, 38, 45–47, 48–97, 101, 104, 204, 209, 226, 228, 230–232, 237.
Dialectical Negation	A stage of development in which a new subject arises from a contradiction between two previous subjects; dialectical negation is never an endpoint of development, as every dialectical negation creates conditions for further development and negation. See p. 123, 175–176, 183, 185–195, 197–202, 227.
Dialectical Relationship	A relationship in which two things, phenomena, or ideas mutually impact one another, leading to development and negation. See p. 47, 51, 62.
(Characteristic of) Diversity	The characteristic which all things, phenomena, and ideas share, dictating that no two subjects (and no two relationships between any two subjects) are exactly the same, even if they exist between very similar things, phenomena, and ideas and/or in very similar situations. See p. 114–115, 125.
Diversity in Unity	The universal principle which states that even though all relationships are diverse and different from one another, they also exist in unity, because all relationships share a foundation in the material world. See p. 109–110, 125, 130.
Dogmatism	An inflexible adherence to ideals as incontrovertibly true while refusing to take any contradictory evidence into consideration. Dogmatism stands in direct opposition to materialist dialectics, which seeks to form opinions and conclusions only after careful consideration of all observable evidence. See p. 136–137, 174, 217–218, 233.
Duality of Labor	The Marxist economic concept which recognizes labor as having two intrinsic and inseparable aspects: abstract labor and concrete labor. See p. 15.
Dynamic and Creative Reflection	The most advanced form of reflection, which only occurs in matter that has the highest (known) level of structural complexity, such as the human brain. See p. 68–69, 79.
Eclecticism	An approach to philosophical inquiry which attempts to draw from various different theories, frameworks, and ideas to attempt to understand a subject; the philosophical error of inconsistently applying different theories and principles in different situations. See p. 32–33, 101, 118, 192, 194.
Economic Base	See: Base
Economism	Economism is a style of political activism, typified by the ideas of German political theorist Eduard Bernstein, which stresses directing the struggle towards short-term political/economic goals (such as higher wages for workers) at the expense of the larger socialist revolutionary project. See p. 30.
Eduard Bernstein	(1850 — 1932) German political theorist who rejected many of Marx’s theories. See p. 30, 174.
Emotional Consciousness	The lower stage of the cognitive process. In this stage of cognitive development, humans, through practical activities, use our senses to reflect objective things and phenomena (with all their perceived specific characteristics and rich manifestations) in human consciousness. See p. 219224.
Empirical Consciousness	Empirical consciousness is the stage of development of consciousness in which perceptions are formed via direct observations of things and phenomena in the natural world, or of society, or through scientific experimentation and systematic observation. Empirical Consciousness results in Empirical Knowledge. See p. 210–214.
Empirical Knowledge	Knowledge which results from processes of empirical consciousness and which is characterised by rich and detailed, but still incomplete, understanding of phenomena. It can be utilized for practical ends, but still falls short of full theoretical analysis and comprehension. See p. 212–214.
Empiricism	A broad philosophical position which holds that only experience (including internal experience) can be held as a source of knowledge or truth. Though nominally opposed to idealism, it is considered a faulty (or naive) form of materialism, since it sees the world as only unconnected, static appearances and ignores the reality of dialectical (changing) relationships between objects. See p. 9–12, 29, 94, 96–97, 100, 218.
Empirio-criticism	A more developed form of empiricism, proposed by Ernst Mach, which holds that sense data and experience are the sole sources of knowledge and that no concrete knowledge of the external material world can ever be obtained due to the limitations of human senses. See p. 26–29, 32, 54, 55–57, 68.
Epistemology	The theoretical study of knowledge. It primarily deals with the philosophical question of: “how do we know what we know?” See p. 45, 98, 204.
Ernst Mach	(1838 — 1916) Austrian physicist who attempted to build a philosophy of natural science based on the works of German philosopher Richard Avenarius’ philosophical system of Empirio-Criticism. See p. 27–29, 32, 52, 72, 193.
Equilibrium	A state of motion in which one or more subjects are not undergoing changes in position, form, and/or structure. Equilibrium is only ever a temporary stasis of development which will eventually yield to motion, development, and/or negation. See p. 62–63, 122–123, 181.
Essence	See: Essence and Phenomena
Essence and Phenomena (Category Pair)	The Essence category refers to the synthesis of all the internal aspects as well as the obvious and stable relations that define the existence, motion and development of things and ideas. The Phenomena category refers to the external manifestation of those internal aspects and relations in specific conditions. Essence always determines which phenomena appear, but phenomena do not always accurately reflect essence in human perception; in other words, it is possible to misinterpret phenomena, leading to a misunderstanding of essence, or to mistake phenomena for essence. See p. 156–160.
Exchange Value	A quantity relationship which describes the ratios of exchangeability between different commodities, with Marx’s famous example of 20 yards of linen being equivalent in exchange value to one coat. Through analysis Marx shows that in reality the thing being compared is the amount of socially necessary labour required to make the commodities being compared. See p. 15, 18.
Excitation	Reactions of simple plant and animal life-forms which occur when they change position or structure as a direct result of physical changes in their habitat. See p. 66, 68.
External Contradictions	See: Internal and External Contradictions.
False consciousness	Forms of consciousness (ideas, thoughts, concepts, etc.) which are incorrect and misaligned from reality. Equated with ‘ideology’ by Engels, it refers to an idealistic, dogmatic perspective which will inevitably result in errors of analysis and therefore practice. See p. 231–233, 237.
First International	Also known as the International Workingmen’s Association; was founded in London and lasted from 1864–1876. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were key figures in the foundation and operation of this organization, which sought better conditions and the establishment of rights for workers. See p. 35
(Basic) Forms of Motion	Engels broke motion down into five basic forms which are dialectically linked; the different forms of motion differ from one another, but they are also unified with each other into one continuous system of motion. Understanding this dialectical relationship between different forms of motion helped to overcome misunderstandings and confusion about motion and development. See p. 61–62.
Form	See: Content and Form.
Form of existence of matter	The ways in which we perceive the existence of matter in our universe; specifically, matter in our universe has the form of existing in space and time. See p. 59.
Form of Value	See: Value-Form
Forward Tendency of Motion	The tendency for things, phenomena, and ideas to move from less advanced to more advanced forms through processes of motion and development. See p. 197.
Friedrich Engels	(1820–1895) a German theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, leader of the international working class, & co-founder of scientific socialism with Karl Marx. Referenced throughout.
Fundamental and Non-Fundamental Contradictions	A fundamental contradiction defines the essence of a relationship. Fundamental contradictions exist throughout the entire development process of a given thing, phenomenon, or idea. A non-fundamental contradiction exists in only one aspect or attribute of a thing, phenomenon, or idea. A nonfundamental contradiction can impact a subject, but it will not control or decide the essential development of the subject. See p. 178–179.
(Characteristic of) Generality	A universal characteristic which holds that all things, phenomena, and ideas interact and mutually transform one another. See p. 108–109, 111, 114, 124125.
General Relationship	Relationships which exist broadly across many things, phenomena, and ideas. General relationships can exist both internally, within things, phenomena, and ideas, and externally, between things, phenomena, and ideas. See p. 106–110, 114.
Generality (of relationships)	Relationships can exist with across a spectrum of generality; this spectrum ranges from the least general relationships (unique relationships — which only occur between two specific things/phenomena/ideas) to the most general relationships (universal relationships — which occur between or within all things/phenomena/ideas). See p. 109.
George Berkeley	(1685 — 1753) An Anglo-Irish philosopher whose main philosophical achievement was the formulation of a doctrine which he called “immaterialism,” and which later came to be known as “Subjective Idealism.” This doctrine was summed up by Berkeley’s maxim: “Esse est percipi” — “To be is to be perceived.” See p. 11, 27, 29.
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel	(1770 — 1831) German philosophy professor & objective idealistic philosopher; developed the system of idealist dialectics which Marx and Engels used as a basis for developing materialist dialectics. See p. 8–11, 29, 69–71, 97, 98, 100–105, 132, 157, 165, 182, 192, 193–194, 209, 228.
Historical Materialism	The application of materialist dialectics and dialectical materialism to the study of human history. See p. 21–23, 27, 36, 38, 45, 80.
Historical Viewpoint	A viewpoint which demands that subjects be considered in their current stage of motion and development, while also taking into consideration the development and transformation of the subject over time. See p. 116–118, 125–126, 143, 185, 234.
Idealism	A philosophical position which holds that the only reliable experience of reality occurs within human consciousness. Idealists believe that human reason exclusively or as a first basis is the best way to seek truth. See p. 8–12, 26–29, 48–51, 53, 56–58, 69–70, 96, 101–102, 104, 157, 174, 209, 218, 228.
Immanuel Kant	(1724 — 1804) German philosopher who developed a system of idealist dialectics which were later completed by Hegel and whose metaphysical philosophies of epistemology and rationalism served as the basis for later empiricists such as Bacon and Hume. See p. 20, 29, 56, 72–74, 100–102, 205.
Induction	The reaction of animals with simple nervous systems which can sense or feel their environments. Induction occurs through unconditioned reflex mechanisms. See p. 66, 68.
Inductive Inference	Logical inference which extrapolates from specific observations to general conclusions. See p. 223–224.
Intelligibility	The human cognitive capacity to accurately perceive the external material world. See p. 48.
Internal Contradictions	See: Internal and External Contradictions.
Internal and External Contradictions	Internal contradictions are contradictions which exist within the internal relations of a subject, while external contradictions exist between two or more subjects as external relations. See p. 178–179.
Judgment	The phase of rational consciousness which arises from the definition of the subject — the linking of concepts and properties together — which leads to affirmative or negative ideation of certain characteristics or attributes of the perceived subject. See p. 223.
Karl Marx	(1818–1883) German theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, political economist, founder of scientific socialism, and leader of the international working class. Referenced throughout.
Knowledge	The content of consciousness; data about the world, such as: ideas, memories, and other thoughts which are derived through direct observation and practical activities in the material world, through scientific experiments, or through abstract reflection of practical and scientific activities which occur within consciousness.
Labor Value	The amount of value which workers produce through labor. See p. 14, 17–18, 23.
Law of Negation of Negation	A universal law of materialist dialectics which states that the fundamental and universal tendency of motion and development occurs through a cycle of dialectical negation, wherein each and every negation is, in turn, negated once more. See p. 163, 185, 195, 198, 200, 201, 202, 227.
Law of Transformation Between Quantity and Quality	The universal law of dialectical materialism which concerns the universal mode of motion and development processes of nature, society, and human thought, which states that qualitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas arise from the inevitable basis of the quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and, ideas, and, vice versa, quantitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas arise from the inevitable basis of qualitative changes of things, phenomena, and ideas. See p. 163–165, 172–173, 227.
Law of Unification Contradiction Between Opposites	and The universal law of dialectical materialism which states that the fundamental, originating, and universal driving force of all motion and development processes is the inherent and objective contradictions which exists in all things, phenomena, and ideas. See p. 163, 175, 181.
Law of Development of Capitalism	Also known as Theory of Accumulation and Theory of Surplus Value. The dynamic through which the capitalist class gains wealth by accumulating surplus value (i.e., profits) and then reinvesting it into more capital to gain even further wealth; thus the goal of the capitalist class is to accumulate more and more surplus value which leads to the development of capitalism. See p. 18.
Laws	In dialectical materialism, laws are the regular, common, obvious, natural, objective relations between internal aspects, factors, and attributes of a thing or phenomenon or between things and phenomena. See p. 162.
Laws of Nature	Laws that arise in the natural world, including within the human body (and are never products of human conscious activities). Such law includes the laws of physics, chemistry, and other natural phenomena which govern the material world. See p. 162, 213.
Laws of Society	Laws of human activity in social relations; such laws are unable to manifest beyond the conscious activities of humans, but they are still objective. See p. 162–163.
Laws of Human Thought	Laws which govern the intrinsic relationships between concepts, categories, judgments, inference, and the development process of human rational awareness. See p. 163.
Life-Process	Processes of motion and change which occur within organisms to sustain life. See p. 69–72, 79, 88.
Ludwig Feuerbach	(1804 — 1872) German philosophy professor, materialist philosopher; Marx and Engels drew many of their ideas from the works of Feuerbach (whom they also criticized). See p. 8, 11–13, 21, 55, 74, 80, 114, 205, 237.
M→→C→→M’	The mode of circulation described by Marx as existing under capitalism, in which capitalists spend money to buy commodities (including the commodified labor of workers), with the intention of selling those commodities for more money than they began with. The capitalist has no direct relationship to the commodity being produced and sold, and the capitalist is solely interested in obtaining more money. See p. 16. See also: C→M→C
Machism	See: Empirio-Criticism.
Manifestation	How a given thing, phenomenon, or idea is expressed externally in the material world. See p. 115.
Marxism-Leninism	A system of scientific opinions and theories focused on liberating the working class from capitalism and achieving a stateless, classless, communist society. The core ideas of this system were first developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then defended and further developed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. See. p. 1.
Material Conditions	The material external environment in which humans live, including the natural environment, the means of production and the economic base of human society, objective social relations, and other externalities and systems which affect human life and human society. See p. 6, 22, 40–42, 70–72, 80–81, 87, 92–95, 116–118, 161, 174, 179, 181, 206–207, 210, 229.
Material Production Activity	Material production activity is the first and most basic form of praxis. In this form of praxis activity, humans use tools through labor processes to influence the natural world in order to create wealth and material resources and to develop the conditions necessary to maintain our existence and development. See p. 206–208.
Materialism	A philosophical position that holds that the material world exists outside of the mind, and that human ideas and thoughts stem from observation and sense experience of this external world. Materialism rejects the idealist notion that truth can only be sought solely through reasoning and human consciousness. See p. 10–13, 48.
Materialist Dialectics	A scientific system of philosophy concerned with motion, development, and common relationships, and with the most common rules of motion and development of nature, society, and human thought. See p. 10, 21, 45–47, 98202, 227, 237.
Matter	A philosophical category denoting things and phenomena, existing in objective external reality, which human beings access through our sense perceptions. See p. 26, 27, 32, 48, 51–52, 53–69, 72, 88–95, 97, 103, 164–165.
Means of Production	Physical inputs and systems used in the production of goods and services, including: machinery, factory buildings, tools, equipment, and anything else used in producing goods and services. See p. 2–3, 7, 14–16.
Mechanical Motion	Changes in positions of objects in space. See p. 61.
Mechanical Philosophy	A scientific and philosophical movement popular in the 17th century which explored mechanical machines and compared natural phenomena to mechanical devices, resulting in a belief that all things — including living organisms — were built as (and could theoretically be built by humans as) mechanical devices.
Mental Reflection	Reactions which occur in animals with central nervous systems. Mental reflections occur through conditioned reflex mechanisms through learning. See p. 65, 68, 224.
Metaphysical Materialism	Metaphysical materialism was strongly influenced by the metaphysical, mechanical thinking of mechanical philosophy, which was a scientific and philosophical movement which explored mechanical machines and compared natural phenomena to mechanical devices. Metaphysical materialists believed that all change can exist only as an increase or decrease in quantity, brought about by external causes.
Metaphysics	A branch of philosophy that attempts to explain the fundamental nature of reality. Metaphysical philosophy has taken many forms through the centuries, but one common shortcoming of metaphysical thought is a tendency to view things and ideas in a static, abstract manner. Generally speaking, metaphysics presents nature as a collection of objects and phenomena which are isolated from one another and fundamentally unchanging. See p. 52.
Methodology	A system of reasoning: the ideas and rules that guide humans to research, build, select, and apply the most suitable methods in both perception and practice. Methodologies can range from very specific to broadly general, with philosophical methodology being the most general scope of methodology. See p. 44.
Mode	The way or manner in which something occurs or exists. See p. 19–20.
Mode of Existence of Matter	Refers to how matter exists in our universe; specifically, matter exists in our motion in a mode of motion. See p. 59.
Motion	Also known as “change;” motion/change occurs as a result of the mutual impacts which occur between two things, phenomena, or ideas in relation with one another. See p. 23, 47, 59–63. 74, 106–107, 122–127, 145, 163–165, 169-173-186, 197, 201–202.
Motion in Equilibrium	Motion in equilibrium is motion that has not changed the positions, forms, and/or structures of things. Motion in Equlibrium is only ever temporary in nature; all motion will eventually lead to changes in position, form, and/or structure. See p. 62.
Narodnik	Agrarian socialist movement of the 1860s and 70s in the Russian Empire, composed of peasants who rose up in a failed campaign against the Czar. See p. 29–30.
Natural law	See: Laws of Nature.
Natural Science	Science which deals with the natural world, including chemistry, biology, physics, geology, etc. See p. 13, 19, 26, 103.
Negation	The development process through which two contradicting objects mutually develop one another until one is overtaken by the other. In dialectical materialism, negation takes the form of dialectical negation. See p. 123, 175176, 183, 185–202.
New Economic Policy	Also known as the NEP; this early Soviet policy was devised as Vladimir Illyich Lenin to be a temporary economic system that would allow a market economy and capitalism to exist within Russia, alongside state-owned business ventures, all firmly under the control of the working-classdominated state. See p. 33–34.
Objective Dialectics	The dialectical processes which occur in the material world, including all of the motion, relationships, and dynamic changes which occur in space and time. See p. 98, 102–103, 182.
Objective Existence	Existence which manifests outside of and independently of human consciousness, whether humans can perceive it or not. See p. 50, 58, 228.
Objective Idealism	A form of idealism which asserts that the ideal and consciousness are the primary existence, while also positing that the ideal and consciousness are objective, and that they exist independently of nature and humans. See p. 50.
Objectiveness	An abstract concept that refers to the relative externality of all things, phenomena, and ideas. Every thing, phenomena and idea exists externally to every other thing, phenomena, and idea. This means that to each individual subject, all other subjects exist as external objects. See p. 111–114, 124.
Obviousness	See: Obviousness and Randomness
Obviousness and Randomness (Category Pair)	The philosophical category of Obviousness refers to events that occur because of the essential internal aspects of a subject which become reasons for certain results in certain conditions: the obvious has to happen in a certain way, it can’t happen any other way. The Randomness category refers to things that happen because of external reasons: things that happen, essentially, by chance, due to impacts from many external relations. A random outcome may occur or it may not occur, and may occur in many different ways. Obviousness and Randomness have a dialectical relationship with one another. See p. 144–146.
Opportunism	A system of political opinions with no direction, no clear path, and/or no coherent viewpoint, focusing on whatever actions or decisions might be beneficial for the opportunist in the short term. See p. 174.
Opposites	Such aspects, properties and tendencies of motion which oppose one another, yet are, simultaneously, conditions and premises of the existence of one another. See p. 61, 175–179, 181, 184, 190, 227.
Ordinary Consciousness	Perception that is formed passively, stemming from the daily activities of humans. See p. 210–216.
Period of Motion	Development which occurs between two quality shifts, including the quality shifts themselves. See p. 170.
Perspective	See: Viewpoint.
Petty Bourgeoisie	Semi-autonomous merchants, farmers, and so on who are self-employed, own small and limited means of production, or otherwise fall in between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Also called the petite bourgeoisie. See p. 3–6.
Petty Commodity Production	See: Simple Commodity Production.
Phenomena	Anything that is observable by the human senses. See p. 156. See also: Essence and Phenomena.
Physical Motion	Motion of molecules, electrons, fundamental particles, thermal processes, electricity, etc., in time and space. See p. 61.
Physical Reflection	Reflection which occurs any time two material objects interact and the features of the objects are transferred to one other. See p. 67–68.
Point of View	See: Viewpoint.
Populism	The political philosophy of the Narodnik movement; this political philosophy was focused on bringing about an agrarian peasant revolution led by intellectuals with the ambition of going directly from a feudal society to a socialist society built from rural communes. Populism overtly opposed Marxism and dialectical materialism and was based on subjective idealist utopianism. See p. 30.
Positivism	The belief that we can test scientific knowledge through scientific methods, and through logic, math, etc.; positivism tends to overlap significantly with empiricism in theory and practice. See p. 32, 209.
Possibility	See: Possibility and Reality.
Possibility and Reality (Category Pair)	The philosophical category of Possibility refers to things that have not happened nor existed in reality yet, but that would happen, or would exist given necessary conditions. The philosophical category of Reality refers to things that exist or have existed in reality and in human thought. See p. 160–162.
Practice	See: Praxis.
Pragmatism	Pragmatism refers to a form of subjectivism in which one centers one’s own immediate material concerns over all other considerations. See p. 218.
Praxis	Conscious activity which improves our understanding, and which has purpose and historical-social characteristics. Used interchangeably with the word “practice” in this text. See p. 205–206, 235.
Prejudice	See: Conservatism.
Primary and Secondary Contradictions	In the development of things, phenomena, and ideas, there are many development stages. In each stage of development, there will be one contradiction which drives the development process. This is what we call the primary contradiction. Secondary contradictions include all the other contradictions which exist during that stage of development. Determining whether a contradiction is primary or secondary is relative, and it depends heavily upon the material conditions and the situation being analyzed. See p. 178–179.
Primary Existence	Existence which precedes and determines other existences; materialists believe that the external material world is the primary existence which determines the ideal, while idealists believe that human consciousness (“the ideal”) is the primary existence from which truth is ultimately derived. See p. 50–51.
Primitive Materialism	An early form of materialism which recognizes that matter is the primary existence, and holds that the world is composed of certain elements, and that these were the first objects — the origin — of the world, and that these elements are the essence of reality. This was later developed into Metaphysical Materialism and, later, Dialectical Materialism. See p. 52.
Principle of General Relationships	A principle of dialectical materialism which states that all things, phenomena, and ideas are related to one another, and are defined by these internal and external relationships. See p. 106–107, 110, 114.
Private	See: Private and Common
Private and Common (Category Pair)	The Private philosophical category encompasses specific things, phenomena, and ideas; the Common philosophical category defines the common aspects, attributes, factors, and relations that exist in many things and phenomena. Private and Common are relative in nature and have a dialectical relationship with one another. See p. 128–138.
Private Laws	Laws which apply only to a specific range of things and phenomena, i.e.: laws of mechanical motion, laws of chemical motion, laws of biological motion, etc. See p. 162.
Production Force	The combination of the means of production and workers within human society. See p. 6, 23, 36.
Proletariat	The people who provide labor under capitalism; the proletariat do not own their own means of production, and must therefore sell their labor to those who do own means of production; also called the Working Class. See also: Bourgeoisie, Petty Bourgeoisie. See p. 1–8, 22–23, 25–26, 29–31, 33–35, 40–41, 63, 231.
Quality	The unity of component parts, taken together, which defines a subject and distinguishes it from other subjects. See p. 119–121.
Quality Shift	A change in quality which takes place in the motion and development process of things, phenomena, and ideas, occurring when quantity change meets a certain perceived threshold. See p. 124, 153, 164, 168–174.
Quantity	The total amount of component parts that compose a subject. See p. 119–121.
Quantity range	The range of quantity changes which can accumulate without leading to change in quality related to any given thing, phenomenon, or idea. See p. 168–171.
Quintessence	Original Vietnamese word: tinh hoa. Literally, it means “the best, highest, most beautiful, defining characteristics” of a concept, and, unlike the English word quintessence, it has an exclusively positive connotation. See p. 8, 21, 43, 45, 52.
Randomness	See: Obviousness and Randomness.
Rational Consciousness	The higher stage of the cognitive process, which includes the indirect, abstract, and generalized reflection of the essential properties and characteristics of things and phenomena. This stage of consciousness performs the most important function of comprehending and interpreting the essence of the perceived subject. See p. 219–225.
Reason	See: Reason and Result
Reality	See: Possibility and Reality.
Reason and Result (Category Pair)	The Reason philosophical category is used to define the mutual impacts between internal aspects of a thing, phenomenon or idea, or between things, phenomena, or ideas, that bring about changes. The Result philosophical category defines the changes that were caused by mutual impacts which occur between aspects and factors within a thing, phenomenon, or idea, or externally between different things, phenomena, or ideas. Not to be confused with the metaphysical concept of “cause and effect,” which attributes a single cause to any given effect. See p. 138–144.
Reasoning	The final phase of rational consciousness, formed on the basis of synthesizing judgments so as to extrapolate new knowledge about the perceived subject. See p. 223–225, 228–229.
Reflection	The re-creation of the features of one form of matter in a different form of matter which occurs when they mutually impact each other through interaction. See p. 64–75, 79–80, 90–92, 103, 165, 208–211, 214–215, 219–224, 228, 232, 237.
Relative and Absolute	“Absolute” and “Relative” are philosophical classifications which refer to interdependence: That which is absolute exists independently and with permanence. That which is relative is temporary, and dependent on other conditions or circumstances in order to exist. See p. 56, 233. See also: Absolute Truth, Relative Truth, Relativism, Truth.
Relative Truth	Truth which has developed alignment with reality without yet having reached complete alignment between human knowledge and the reality which it reflects; knowledge which incompletely reflects material subjects without complete accuracy. See p. 230, 232. See also: Absolute Truth, Relative and Absolute, Relativism, Truth.
Relativism	A position that all truth is relative and that nothing can ever be absolutely, objectively known; that only Relative Truth can be found in our existence. See p. 56–58, 233–234. See also: Absolute Truth, Relative and Absolute, Relative Truth, Truth.
René Descartes	(1596 — 1650) French metaphysical philosopher who developed early methods of scientific inquiry. See p. 20, 53.
Result	See: Reason and Result.
Richard Avenarius	(1843 — 1896) German-Swiss philosopher who developed a system of subjective idealism known as “Empirio-Criticism.” See p. 27–29.
Rigidity	An unwillingness to alter one’s thoughts, holding too stiffly to established consciousness and knowledge, and ignoring practical experience and observation, which leads to stagnation of both knowledge and consciousness. See p. 217–218.
Robert Owen	(1771 — 1858) Wealthy Welsh textile manufacturer who tried to build a better society for workers in New Hampshire, Indiana, in the USA by purchasing the town of New Harmony in 1825. Owen’s vision failed after two years, though many other wealthy capitalists in the early 19th century were inspired by Owen to try similar plans, which also failed.
Scientific	An adjective which describes methodologies, approaches, and practices of gaining knowledge and insight which are methodological and/or systematic in nature. See p. 1–2.
Scientific Consciousness	Conscious activities which actively gather information from the methodological and/or systematic observations of the characteristics, nature, and inherent relationships of research subjects. Scientific consciousness is considered indirect because it takes place outside of the course of ordinary daily activities. See p. 58, 210, 212, 215–216.
Scientific	Experimental Human activities that resemble or replicate states of nature and society
Activity	in order to determine the laws of change and development of subjects of study. This form of activity plays an important role in the development of society, especially in the current historical period of modern science and technological revolution. See p. 206–208.
Scientific Materialist Viewpoint	A perspective which begins analysis of the world in a manner that is both scientifically systematic in pursuit of understanding and firmly rooted in a materialist conception of the world. See p. 105.
Scientific Socialism	A body of theory and knowledge (which must be constantly tested against reality) focused on the practical pursuit of changing the world to bring about socialism through the leadership of the proletariat. See p. 1–2, 21, 37–39.
Scientific Worldview	A worldview that is expressed by a systematic pursuit of knowledge that generally and correctly reflects the relationships of things, phenomena, and processes in the objective material world, including relationships between humans, as well as relationships between humans and the world. See p. 3839, 44–45, 48.
Second International	Founded in Paris in 1889 to continue the work of the First International; it fell apart in 1916 because members from different nations could not maintain solidarity through the outbreak of World War I. See p. 35, 174.
Self-motion	In the original Vietnamese, the word “tự vận động.” Literally meaning: “it moves itself.” See p. 59–60, 124.
Sensation	The subjective reflection of the objective world in human consciousness as perceived through human senses. See p. 27, 56–58, 68–69, 72, 85, 221–222.
Sensuous Human Activity; Sensuous Activity	A description of human activity developed by Marx which acknowledges that all human activity is simultaneously active in the sense that our conscious activity can transform the world, as well as passive in the sense in that all human thoughts fundamentally derive from observation and sense experience of the material world. See p. 13.
Simple Commodity Production	What Marx called the “C→M→C” mode of circulation. See p. 16–18.
Simple Exchange	When individual producers trade the products they have made directly, themselves, for other commodities. See p. 16–17.
Social Being	The material existence of human society, as opposed to social consciousness. See also: Base. See p. 24, 54–55.
Social Consciousness	The collective experience of consciousness shared by members of a society, including ideological, cultural, spiritual, and legal beliefs and ideas which are shared within that society, as opposed to social being. See p. 22, 24, 32, 54–55, 80. See also: Superstructure.
Social Motion	Changes in the economy, politics, culture, and social life of human beings. See p. 61–62.
Socialization	The idea that human society transforms labor and production from a solitary, individual act into a collective, social act. In other words, as human society progresses, people “socialize” labor into increasingly complex networks of social relations: from individuals making their own tools, to agricultural societies engaged in collective farming, to modern industrial societies with factories, logistical networks, etc. See p. 6, 36.
Socialized Production Force	A production force which has been socialized — that is to say, a production force which has been organized into collective social activity. See p. 6.
Socio-Political Activity	Praxis activity utilized by various communities and organizations in human society to transform political-social relations in order to promote social development. See p. 206–208.
Solipsism	A form of idealism in which one believes that the self is the only basis for truth. See p. 218.
Sophistry	The use of misleading arguments, usually with the intention of deception, with a tendency of presenting non-critical aspects of a subject matter as critical, to serve a particular agenda. The word comes from the Sophists, a group of professional teachers in Ancient Greece, who were criticized by Socrates (in Plato’s’ dialogues) for being shrewd and deceptive rhetoricians. See p. 32–33, 56, 118, 182, 194.
Stage of Development	The current quantity and quality characteristics which a thing, phenomenon, or object possesses. Every time a quality change occurs, a new stage of development is entered into. See p. 24, 39, 125, 173–174, 179, 190, 196–197, 200, 212, 221.
Stagnation	An inability or unwillingness to change and adapt consciousness and practice in accordance with developing material conditions. Stagnation can stem from, or cause, overstatement of absolute truth in theory and forestall necessary development of both consciousness and practical ability. See p. 125, 218, 233. See also: Rigidity.
Struggle of Opposites	The tendency of opposites to eliminate and negate each other. See p. 61, 181, 184.
Subjective Factors	Factors which, from the perspective of a given subject, that same subject is capable of impacting. See p. 162–163, 175, 202.
Subjective Dialectics; Dialectical Thought	A system of analysis and organized thinking which aims to reflect the objective dialectics of the material world within human consciousness. Dialectical thinking has two component forms: dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics. See: p. 98–99, 103.
Subjective Idealism	Subjective idealism asserts that consciousness is the primary existence and that truth can be obtained only or primarily through conscious activity and reasoning. Subjective idealism asserts that all things and phenomena can only be experienced as subjective sensory perceptions, with some forms of subjective idealism even explicitly denying the objective existence of material reality altogether. See also: Empirio-Criticism, Objective Idealism. See p. 26–27, 50.
Subjectivism	A philosophical position in which one centers one’s own self and conscious activities in perspective and worldview, failing to test their own perceptions against material and social reality. See p. 56, 182, 217–218, 233–234.
Suitability	The applicability of a subject for a specific application or role. See p. 154.
Superstructure	The ideal (non-material) components of human society, including: media institutions, music, and art, as well as other cultural elements like religion, customs, moral standards, and everything else which manifests primarily through conscious activity and social relations. See p. 23. See also: Base.
Surplus Value	The extra amount of value a capitalist is able to secure by exploiting wagelabourers (by paying workers less than the full value of their labour). Workers will spend part of their workday reproducing their own labourpower (through earning enough to eat, secure shelter and other cultural needs) and the rest of the time will be spent producing surplus value which is then appropriated by the capitalist as profit. See p. 18, 22–23, 39.
Symbolization	The representation of an objective thing or phenomenon in human consciousness which has been reflected by sensation and conception. See p. 221–222.
Systematic Structure	A structure which includes within itself a system of component parts and relationships. See p. 114.
Theoretical Consciousness	The indirect, abstract, systematic level of perception in which the nature and laws of things and phenomena are generalized and abstracted. See p. 210–214, 217–218.
Theoretical Knowledge	Knowledge which is abstract and generalized, resulting from theoretical conscious activities which include repeated and varied observations. See p. 214, 217.
Theory	An idea or system of ideas intended to explain an aspect, characteristic, or tendency of objective reality. See p. 235.
Theory of Accumulation/Surplus Value	See: Law of Development of Capitalism.
Thing-in-Itself	The actual material object which exists outside of our consciousness, as it exists outside of our consciousness. See p. 72–74, 101, 158.
Third International	Also known as the Communist International (or the ComIntern for short); founded in Moscow in 1919, its goals were to overthrow capitalism, build socialism, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. It was dissolved in 1943 in the midst of the German invasion of Russia in World War II. See p. 35.
Three Component Parts	The three essential elements of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, first identified of Marxism-Leninism by Lenin in The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism. 1. The Philosophy of Marxism. 2. The Political Economy of Marxism. 3. Scientific Socialism.See p. 21, 32, 34, 38.
Threshold	The amount, or degree, of quantity change at which quality change occurs. Truth is primarily discovered through labor and practice in the physical world. See p. 120, 168–169, 171, 173.
Truth	A correct and accurate conscious reflection of objective reality. See p. 9–10, 49, 56, 70, 75, 94–96, 194, 204, 209, 215–219, 225–237. See also: Labor, Practice.
Unconditioned Reflex	Reactions which are not learned, but simply occur automatically based on physiological mechanisms occurring within an organism, characterized by permanent connections between sensory perceptions and reactions. See p. 66, 68.
Unilateral Consideration	The consideration of a subject from one side only. See p. 49.
Unintelligibility	A philosophical position which denies the human cognitive capacity to accurately perceive the external material world. See p. 48.
Unique Relationship	The least general form of relationship, which only occur between two specific things/phenomena/ideas. See p. 109, 130.
Unity in Diversity	A concept in materialist dialectics which holds that within universal relationships exist within and between all different things, phenomena, and ideas, we will find that each individual manifestation of any universal relationship will have its own different manifestations, aspects, features, etc. Thus even the universal relationships which unite all things, phenomena, and ideas exist in infinite diversity. See p. 42, 110–111, 114, 125, 130.
Universal Law of Consciousness	A universal law which holds that consciousness is a process of dialectical development in which practical activity leads to conscious activity, which then leads back to practical activity, in a continuous and never-ending cycle, with a tendency to develop both practical and conscious activity to increasingly higher levels. See p. 219.
Universal Laws	Laws that impact every aspect of nature, society, and human thought. Materialist dialectics is the study of these universal laws. See p. 15, 162–163, 227.
Universal Relationship	The most general kind of relationship; relationships that exist between and within every thing and all phenomena; along with development, universal relationships are one of the two primary subjects of study of materialist dialectics. See p. 80, 108, 109, 111, 165.
Use Value	A concept in classical political economy and Marxist economics which refers to tangible features of a commodity (a tradable object) that can fulfill some human requirement or desire, or which serve a useful purpose. See p. 15–18, 95.
Utopianism	1. A political and philosophical movement which held the belief that “a New Moral World” of happiness, enlightenment, and prosperity could be created through education, science, technology, and communal living. See p. 18. 2. The idealist philosophical concept which mistakenly asserts that the ideal can determine the material, and that ideal forms of society can be brought about without regard for material conditions and development processes. See p. 8, 17–18, 30, 94.
Value-Form	Also known as “form of value;” the social form of a commodity. Under capitalism, through the exchange of qualitatively different commodities, the money form of value is established as the general equivalent which can functionally be exchanged for all other values; money is therefore the most universal value-form under capitalism. See p. 15, 17, 155.
Viewpoint	Also known as point of view or perspective; the starting point of analysis which determines the direction of thinking from which phenomena and problems are considered. See p. 12, 20–21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 32–33, 38–39, 5559, 62, 64, 89, 93–94, 105, 111, 114–120, 122, 125–126, 130, 143, 147, 150, 172, 185–188, 195, 200–201, 233–235. See also: Comprehensive Viewpoint, Historical Viewpoint.
Viewpoint Crisis	A situation in which a specific viewpoint can’t be settled on, found, or agreed upon. See p. 26, 32–33.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin	(1870 -1924) A Russian theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, defender and developer of Marxism in the era of imperialism, founder of the Bolsheviks, the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union, leader of Russia and the international working class. Referenced throughout.
Working Class	See: Proletariat
Worldview	The whole of an individual’s or society’s opinions and conceptions about the world, about humans ourselves, and about life and the position of human beings in the world. See p. 1, 11, 37–39, 44–45, 48, 52, 96, 138, 201, 208–209, 218, 234. See also: Scientific Worldview.

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1. ↑ Karl Marx, 1818–1883 (German): Theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, political economist, founder of scientific socialism, leader of the international working class.
2. ↑ Friedrich Engels, 1820–1895 (German): Theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, leader of the international working class, co-founder of scientific socialism with Karl Marx.
3. ↑ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1870–1924 (Russian): Theorist, politician, dialectical materialist philosopher, defender and developer of Marxism in the era of imperialism, founder of the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union, leader of Russia and the international working class.
4. ↑ Material conditions include the natural environment, the means of production and the economic base of human society, objective social relations, and other externalities and systems which affect human life and human society. See Annotation 79, p. 81.
5. ↑ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 — 1831 (German): Philosophy professor, an objective idealistic philosopher — representative of German classical philosophy.
6. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804 — 1872 (German): Philosophy professor, materialist philosopher.
7. ↑ The Holy Family is a book co-written by Marx and Engels which critiqued the Young Hegelians, including Feuerbach.
8. ↑ Adam Smith, 1723 — 1790 (British): Logic professor, moral philosophy professor, economist.
9. ↑ David Ricardo, 1772 — 1823 (British): Economist.
10. ↑ Claude Henri de Rouvroy Saint Simon, 1760 — 1825 (French): Philosopher, economist, utopianist activist.
11. ↑ Charles Fourier, 1772 — 1837 (French): Philosopher, economist, utopianist activist.
12. ↑ Robert Owen, 1771 — 1858 (British): Utopianist activist, owner of a cotton factory.
13. ↑ The Law of Development of Capitalism referenced here is the Theory of Accumulation/Surplus Value, which holds that the capitalist class gains wealth by accumulating surplus value (i.e., profits) and then reinvesting it into more capital to gain even further wealth; thus the goal of the capitalist class is to accumulate more and more surplus value which leads to the development of capitalism. Over time, this deepens the contradictions of capitalism. This concept is related to the M→C→M mode of circulation, discussed in Annotation 14, p. 16, and is discussed in detail in Part 3 of the book this text is drawn from (Political Economy) which we hope to translate in the future.
14. ↑ Das Kapital: Karl Marx’s most important contribution to political economy. It is composed of four volumes. It is the work of Marx’s whole career and an important part of Engels’ career, as well. Marx started writing Das Kapital in the 1840s and continued writing until he died (1883). Das Kapital I was published in 1867. After Marx’s death, Engels edited and published the second volume in 1885 and the third volume in 1894. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the USSR edited and published Das Kapital IV, also known as Theories of Surplus-Value, in the 1950s, long after the death of Marx and Engels.
15. ↑ Populist faction: A faction within the Russian revolution which upheld an idealist capitalist ideology with many representatives such as Mikhailovsky, Bakunin, and Plekhanov. Populists failed to recognise the important roles of the people, of the farmers and workers alliance, and of the proletariat. Instead, they completely centered the role of the individual in society. They considered the rural communes as the nucleus of “socialism.” They saw farmers under the leadership of intellectuals as the main force of the revolution. The populists advocated individual terrorism as the primary method of revolutionary struggle.
16. ↑ Delegate Document of the 11^th National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
17. ↑ Delegate document of the 9^th national congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
18. ↑ Delegate document of the 10^th national congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
19. ↑ See Annotation 6, p. 8.
20. ↑ The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1913.
21. ↑ Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.
22. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels, 1886.
23. ↑ According to the Samkhya school, Pradhana is the original form of matter in an unmanifested,indifferentiated state; Prakriti is manifested matter, differentiated in form, which contains potential for motion.
24. ↑ Thales, ~642 — ~547 B.C. (Greek): Philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, politician.
25. ↑ Anaximene, ~585 — ~525 B.C. (Greek): Philosopher.
26. ↑ Heraclitus, ~540 — ~480 B.C. (Greek): Philosopher, founder of ancient dialectics.
27. ↑ Democritus, ~460 — ~370 B.C. (Greek): Philosopher, naturalist, a founder of atom theory.
28. ↑ Francis Bacon, 1561 — 1626 (British): Philosopher, novelist, mathematician, political activist.
29. ↑ Rene Descartes, 1596 — 1650 (Fench): Philosopher, mathematician, physicist.
30. ↑ Thomas Hobbes, 1588 — 1679 (British): Political philosopher, political activist.
31. ↑ Denis Diderot, 1713 — 1784 (French): Philosopher, novelist.
32. ↑ Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, 1845–1923 (German): Physicist.
33. ↑ Henri Becquerel, 1852–1908 (French): Physicist.
34. ↑ Sir Joseph John Thomson, 1856–1940 (British): Physicist, professor at London Royal Institute.
35. ↑ In the original Vietnamese, the word tự vận động is used here, which we roughly translate to the word self-motion throughout this book. Literally, tự vận động means: “it moves itself.”
36. ↑ Source: “Food for Thought: Was Cooking a Pivotal Step in Human Evolution?” by Alexandra Rosati, Scientific American, February 26, 2018.
37. ↑ Written by Professor Tracy L. Kivell and published in The Royal Society.
38. ↑ Stone Tools Helped Shape Human Hands by Sara Reardon, published in New Scientist Magazine.
39. ↑ The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1846.
40. ↑ See Annotation 3, p. 2 and Annotation 29, p. 24.
41. ↑ For a discussion of the material basis of social laws, see Annotation 10, p. 10, Annotation 78, p. 80, and Annotation 79, p. 81.
42. ↑ See: Annotation 72, p. 68.
43. ↑ See: Annotation 90, p. 88.
44. ↑ See: The Role of Matter in Consciousness, p. 89.
45. ↑ See: The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88.
46. ↑ See:Annotation 68, p. 65.
47. ↑ See: Nature and Structure of Consciousness, p. 79.
48. ↑ See: Annotation 93, below.
49. ↑ See: Annotation 10, p. 10.
50. ↑ For discussion of the meaning of methodology, see Methodology, p. 44.
51. ↑ See: Nature of Consciousness, p. 79.
52. ↑ See: The Relationship Between Matter and Consciousness, p. 88.
53. ↑ See: Annotation 211, p. 205.
54. ↑ See: Annotation 114, p. 116.
55. ↑ See: Nature and Structure of Consciousness, p. 79.
56. ↑ See: Annotation 222, p. 218.
57. ↑ See: The Opposition of Materialism and Idealism in Solving Basic Philosophical Issues, p. 48.
58. ↑ See: Annotation 10, p. 10.
59. ↑ See: Annotation 232 and The Properties of Truth, on p. 228.
60. ↑ See: Praxis, Consciousness, and the Role of Praxis in Consciousness, p. 204.
61. ↑ Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.
62. ↑ See Annotation 9, p. 10.
63. ↑ Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels, 1883.
64. ↑ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels, 1880.
65. ↑ The Old Preface to Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels, 1878.
66. ↑ The Old Preface to Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels, 1878.
67. ↑ Kant’s “transcendental dialectic” was used to critique rationalism and pure reason, but was not a fully developed dialectical system of thought. Hegel’s idealist dialectics were more universal in nature. See Annotation 9, p. 10.
68. ↑ The Old Preface to Anti-Dühring, On Dialectics, Friedrich Engels, 1878.
69. ↑ Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic, Vladimir Ilyich. Lenin, 1914.
70. ↑ Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital Volume I, Karl Marx, 1873.
71. ↑ Anti-Dühring, The 1885 Preface, Friedrich Engels, 1878.
72. ↑ Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels, 1878.
73. ↑ See p. 107.
74. ↑ Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels, 1883.
75. ↑ See Annotation 117, p. 119.
76. ↑ The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1913.
77. ↑ See Annotation 98, p. 100.
78. ↑ See Private and Common, p. 128; Essence and Phenomenon, p. 156.
79. ↑ See Annotation 117, p. 119.
80. ↑ See Annotation 190, p. 181.
81. ↑ See Annotation 108, p. 112.
82. ↑ See p. 108.
83. ↑ Once Again On The Trade Unions, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1921.
84. ↑ See: Annotation 108, p. 112.
85. ↑ See: Annotation 106, p. 109.
86. ↑ See: Annotation 107, p. 110.
87. ↑ Once Again On The Trade Unions, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1921. See also: Mode and Forms of Matter, p. 59.
88. ↑ See Annotation 62, p. 59.
89. ↑ Once Again On The Trade Unions, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1921.
90. ↑ On the Question of Dialectics, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.
91. ↑ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels, 1880.
92. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels, 1886.
93. ↑ See Annotation 10, p. 10 and Annotation 108, p. 112.
94. ↑ Philosophical Notebooks, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914–16.
95. ↑ Philosophical Notebooks, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914–16.
96. ↑ To N. D. Kiknadze, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, written after November 5, 1916.
97. ↑ Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels, 1878.
98. ↑ See Annotation 108, p. 112.
99. ↑ See Annotation 207, p. 202.
100. ↑ Summary of Dialectics, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.
101. ↑ Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels, 1877.
102. ↑ On the Questions of Dialectics, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.
103. ↑ On the Questions of Dialectics, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.
104. ↑ On the Questions of Dialectics, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.
105. ↑ On the Questions of Dialectics, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915.
106. ↑ Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.
107. ↑ Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.
108. ↑ Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.
109. ↑ Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels, 1878.
110. ↑ Theses On Feuerbach, Karl Marx, 1845.
111. ↑ Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1908.
112. ↑ Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914.
113. ↑ Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1908.
114. ↑ Once Again On The Trade Unions, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1921.
115. ↑ Revolutionary Ethics, Ho Chi Minh, December 1958.
116. ↑ Note: Absolute Truth in dialectical materialist philosophy should not be confused with Hegel’s conception of Absolute Truth as a final point at which human consciousness will have achieved absolute, complete, and final understanding of our universe.