Since the appearance of man on the surface of the earth, one can say that the essence of his history lies in the modifications he has gradually introduced into the landscape. Destruction, change and construction: these three elements showed themselves very early on in man's history and, with its development, have taken on an ever clearer and more marked character. If the action of a single man on the environment is already important, then that of a larger number can have modifying and absolutely determinative consequences.

Reports and discussions should be aimed at deciding whether the capitalist system still reigns—however much it may have modified itself—or whether industrial development has made the very concept of capitalism, the difference between capitalist and non-capitalist states, and the very critique of capitalism redundant. In other words, is the thesis that Marx is obsolete (a very widespread thesis in sociology) correct? According to this thesis, the world is so permeated by the previously undreamed-of development of technology that the social relation which once defined capitalism—the conversion of living work into goods, and the class separation which it brought about—has lost its relevance, if indeed it has not degenerated into a superstition. And here one may point to unmistakable signs of convergence between the most technically advanced countries, the United States and the Soviet Union. In the principal western countries class differences in living-standards and class consciousness are altogether far less in evidence than in the decades during and immediately after the industrial revolution. The prognoses of the class theory, such as the prediction of impoverishment and collapse, have not come true as drastically as they were meant to—as they must have been meant to, unless one is to deprive these predictions of most of their meaning. Even if Marx's by no means unambiguous law of falling profit rates had proved true, within the system, we should have had to concede that capitalism had discovered resources within itself which enabled the collapse to be relegated to the Greek kalends. There is no doubt that the immense increase in technological potential and the large amount of consumer goods available to all inhabitants of the highly industrialized countries are foremost among these resources. And at the same time the relations of production proved to be more elastic, in the face of this technological development, than Marx credited them with being.

The following reflections center round a current of thought and a way of action which an increasing number of our contemporaries recognise as the great conformity of our age, namely the cult of economic growth. Even thirty years ago this was a partial truth; today it seems to be the favorite anxiety of those political forces endeavoring to be modern regardless of the philosophies to which they refer. Focussed as it is on the acceleration of material progress, is this “productivist” anxiety not the unifying idea of a world in a state of fusion? A world that is becoming more and more indifferent because of its traditional divergences? And the pragmatism of this idea, when translated into equations, suits all those for whom man is equal to his technical strength and for whom progress corresponds to a quantum of accountable acquisitions…

Thirty years ago, if one were to speak about the “treatment of information, “ the best one could expect would be politely smiling indifference. It goes without saying that this expression, until recently meaningless, refers to the information of machines.

As for human information, it also arouses some interest, but for a very different end. Whereas machines are questioned as though they were oracles, in the majority of cases men are given information so as to be subjected to other men, either directly, or thanks to a kind of neutralization.

The concept of revolution in Marxian theory telescopes an entire historical period: the final stage of capitalism; the transitional period of proletarian dictatorship, and the initial stage of socialism. It is in a strict sense a historical concept, projecting actual tendencies in the society; and it is a dialectical concept, projecting the counter-tendencies within the respective historical period, in as much as they are inherent in this period. These tendencies and counter-tendencies are manifestations of which Marxian theory and practice themselves are essential elements. Marxian theory itself is a power in the historical struggle, and to the degree to which its concepts, “translated” into practice, become forces of resistance, change and reconstruction; they are subject to the vicissitudes of this struggle, which they reflect and comprehend, but do not dominate. “Re-examination” is therefore an element of the concept of revolution, part of its internal development.

Our predecessors Pott, Miklosich, Woolner, Grierson, Jules Bloch, Barannikov, Ralph Turner and others, have established from diachronic facts (comparison of the Romany with the old Indian) the Indian origin of the Tsiganes, or Gypsies. Their divergencies originate from the exact place of the primitive homeland of the Gypsies, the majority inclining to the north-west of India.

The question whether western civilization as a whole constitutes a structured and coherent unit poses insoluble problems for any pure historiography. It is, however, a real problem for history, and in our day and age when this civilization is constantly in contact with the civilization of other continents, this question becomes daily more important. In what does the essential structure of the European universe reside? What, in relation to oriental civilization, are its specific characteristics? By producing an insurmountable disproportion between this problem, produced by history, and empirical historiography, this question leads necessarily to a philosophy of history.

The status of the blacksmith in tribal societies poses one of the most puzzling problems of anthropology. By a strange paradox, this noted craftsman, whose bold and meritorious services are indispensable to his community, has been relegated to a position outside the pale of society, almost as an “untouchable.” Regarded as the possessor of great magical powers, held at the same time in veneration and contempt, entrusted with duties unrelated to his craft or to his inferior social status, that make of him performer of circumcision rites, healer, exorcist, peace-maker, arbiter, counsellor, or head of a cult, his figure in what may be called the “blacksmith complex,” presents a mass of contradictions. These contradictions are to be met with wherever, as in the case of barbarian societies and archaic civilisations, iron ore is smelted and iron is worked, even though it is in black Africa that the enigmatic character of the blacksmith is most clearly delineated.

It may be a temptation to build the science of letters upon the concept of individuality. In this case the researcher tries to isolate the qualities which distinguish one work from other works by the same author, and these works from those of his contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. This approach evokes objections of a logical and of an empirical kind.

It is the essence of a work such as Marx's to provoke new interpretations in the course of history. His work is, in fact, at once thought, and an action aimed at transforming the human and social world. The sudden appearance of a communist world, in historically unforeseen forms, its coexistence with a capitalist world—itself quite different from its 19th century version—and the relationship between developed countries and those developing countries which were once colonies; this present state on our planet leads to new inquiries about Marxism and to a return to Marx's fundamental writings and texts, which are inseparable from Lenin's interpretations. Any reading and interpretation of Marx in a contemporary historical context is due, today, to Louis Althusser and his pupils. We are not, however, going to dwell on this actual (still unforeseable) meaning, but on some of the major themes of this interpretation. What is the “scientific,” what is this new science, historical materialism, that Marx had begun to form? what, in this light, becomes of philosophy, that is, with Marx and Lenin, dialectical materialism? and lastly what sort of relation is there between the ideologies, in a sense of which Marx is the instigator, and science or philosophy?

Like most revolutions, the Protestant Revolution of the sixteenth century changed the existing socio-cultural realities far less than appears on the surface. To the Reformers themselves and most of their contemporaries the new ideas sounded startlingly novel, and their realization promised to alter the existing social and political structures to their very foundations. In fact, however, except for the overt changes in certain dogmatic and ritualistic postulates, specifically advocated by the new champions of Reform, life proceeded largely along accustomed lines.

Universal analogy as a principle which underlies a variety of intellectual sciences in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance has been a topic for students of this period for a long time and in a variety of ways. The doctrine of correspondences, the levels of allegory, the art of memory, Neo-Platonism, the metaphysical conceit, the political theology of king and state, alchemy, astrology, and hermeticism all, in one way or another, reveal the endemic characteristics of asserting and explaining a symbolic and harmonious relationship which prevails among many things. The consequences of this phenomenon seem to be limitless, both for the culture in question and for those who choose to give some account of it.

The 19th century, that age of bourgeois civilisation, has several major intellectual achievements to its credit, but the academic discipline of history which grew up in that period, is not one of them. Indeed, in all except the techniques of research, it marked a distinct step back from the often ill-documented, speculative and excessively general essays in which those who witnessed the most profoundly revolutionary era—the age of the French and Industrial Revolutions—attempted to comprehend the transformation of human societies. Academic history, as inspired by the teaching and example of Leopold von Ranke and published in the specialist journals which developed in the latter part of the century, was correct in opposing generalisation insufficiently supported by fact, or backed by unreliable fact. On the other hand it concentrated all its efforts on the task of establishing “the facts” and thus contributed little to history except a set of empirical criteria for evaluating certain kinds of documentary evidence (e.g. manuscript records of events involving the conscious decisions of influential individuals) and the ancillary techniques necessary for this purpose.

The idea of sign, σημα (sema), has been popular in philosophy and the history of the sciences. Hippocrates and the Stoics, Plato and Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Descartes, Leibniz and Locke, Hegel and Humboldt figure among those who have dealt penetratingly with it. It has engendered a wide variety of sciences and disciplines: semiology, semiotics, semasiology, semantics, sematology which changed their name and content with the influence of time and sometimes of fashion, becoming forgotten to reappear with the impetus of a great thinker. The history of the sciences of the sign deserves systematic study. We shall content ourselves to point out that, of the terms quoted above, semiotics and semiology (or semeiology) have had a longer and richer career than the others. Since Greek antiquity they were applied to two apparently distant fields: military art (the science of manoeuvring troops with the help of signals) and medicine, in which they showed a greater perseverance. In many countries, throughout the 19th century and even today, medical study of the symptoms of illnesses is called semiology.

Contemporary scientific research has reached such fundamental layers of laws to be discovered that questions of scientific methodology, of means and procedures of analysis, of creating (or of perfecting) a method of research can no longer be answered “along the line” in the course of a strictly scientific progression. It is necessary to consider them as a particular branch of research, to separate them as independent stages, although absolutely indispensable within the structure of contemporary science.

One of the more interesting theoretical problems is why history is being constantly re-written. After all it is a notorious fact that everything of historical consequence is not only variously viewed by those living at the time, depending on their social background, convictions, etc., but is also subject to different constructions in different ages. This applies to the vision and interpretation of events and people alike; and especially of great people.

There is only one bondage: that forbidding a person from seizing his creatives opportunities. On the contrary, when the person does put them to work he can recognise a primitive part and a destiny in the energies being used. Once in possession of his opportunities to create, he can master any servitude more surely than by an enfranchisement from his relevant social class. Furthermore, the classless society of the future will require possibly more compulsive and certainly more insidious conditions than those that have issued from capitalism, and these must be anticipated. And we are in any case committed to develop the infinite resources in the possession of the human being. Should this evidence not be apparent, it is enough to envisage the provocations of planetary civilisation to summon up a formation that is open to all possibilities: the contemporary world is calling for continuous creation; in a minor form this can be seen in the innovations under way, and in the daily adaptations that these entail.

The idea of this study stems from two considerations: on one hand Western civilization has brought the audio-visual recording and broadcasting media to such a level of technical perfection that it has become possible to collect and broadcast documents regarding primitive peoples even in the most difficult conditions; on the other hand ever-widening strata of the “civilized” world are interested in the products, attitudes and spiritual world of primitive peoples which these technical media are now able to make known to them.

We readily use the term Marxism. The assumption underlying the use of this term is that a whole coherent well-knit body of ideas exists forming a system whose guiding principles, at least, were discovered by Karl Marx. This system would embrace, by right if not in fact, the whole body of intellectual, moral and even aesthetic problems that beset mankind. It would introduce a method by which to resolve them, at least to a great extent. Marxist protestations of fidelity to an open concept, according to which much is still to be discovered and even revised, are often contradicted by their opposition in matters of fact to continuation and revision. Consequently, one cannot see what fundamental distinction exists between Marxism and the classic philosophical systems, despite anything Marx and the Marxists may have said against the pretentions of the previous systems of this kind.

Socialism was born in the West in the 19th century, be it the Utopian visions of Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier, or the system, at once theoretical and militant, founded by Marx and Engels. It was the heir not only of the philosophers and economists of the modern age, Diderot, Hegel and Ricardo, but also of a more ancient egalitarian and Utopian tradition, which constitutes its “prehistory” and its “proto-history”: social movements such as the Bohemian Taborites, the Münster anabaptists or the English diggers; and similarly the Utopian outlooks like those of Thomas Moore or Campanella or, still more ancient, Plato himself.