It is easy to guess from the title of this article that its content will deal with the current changes in the foundations of physical sciences—the changes which are far-reaching enough to be called revolutionary. But the full significance of this intellectual upheaval will become clear only if we compare it to another scientific revolution which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The significance of this first scientific revolution is fully recognized by the historians of science and historians in general; if I shall recall its main features, it will be only to provide us with a contrasting backdrop against which the salient features of the contemporary transformation of physics will stand out more vividly and more suggestively. The comparison between what is going on now and what went on three centuries ago will clearly show that the distance along which physical science moved in the last fifty years is not only greater than that covered in the last three centuries, but also—and this is far more significant— greater than the distance separating the science of Newton from that of Aristotle. In other words, the twentieth century revolution is far more profound than what was rather inappropriately called “the Copernican revolution;” the intellectual distance between Aristotle and Newton is far smaller than the distance separating the world of Newton and Laplace from that of Einstein, Planck, de Broglie, and Heisenberg.

Violence pervades the mainstreams of human culture; indeed one could try to write the whole history of mankind as a history of violence. Traditional political histories, chronicles thick with wars, civil wars, conquests, struggles for nation and empire, seizures of state power, assassinations, insurrections, only begin to tell the story. Consider, for example: The plunder of India, the enslavement and exportation of Africans, the extortion of monopolies in the world's minerals, the exploitation and degradation of starving populations menaced by police and armies—all perfectly legal by the Thrasymachean laws of Europe and America—translates itself (congeals) finally into wealth, which bargains against poverty from positions of financial and technological power; which proclaims then a morality of peace, proposes to wipe the moral slate clean, but wishes to perpetuate a balance of power progressively more unfavorable to the powerless; and which is prepared for new violence (executes new violence) in order to preserve its disproportionate wealth, its privileged status, its authority. Now we have before us fuller principles for writing the history of mankind as the history of violence; for none of this is new under the sun, and a similar pattern has been repeated, former victims of colonialism not excepted, in the internal history of nation after nation.

The rapid rhythm of material and psychic evolution that the non-industrialized (or insufficiently industrialized) societies of the African continent follow in this day and age inevitably outdates the writings of ethnologists at a similar tempo.

Nevertheless, the correctives that can be brought to bear on a vertical section often appear less considerable than the spectacular surface changes would have us presume. This is due, quite simply, to the remarkable resistance of the deep layers of the soul which conceal the obscure dynamic forces that model mentality or, if one prefers the expression, the ethnic personality.

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx takes place in a setting which differs fundamentally from that in which his critical theses were worked out. These theses, from his “juvenilia” to Das Kapital—in turn celebrating its centenary—and the foundation of the International, changed the destiny of the world, of its peoples, States and nations. One is readily aware of the modifications in historical, economic, and political conditions, buffeted by revolutions and confrontation. But it is with difficulty that specialists—whether of theory or practice—take cognizance of other dimensions of this difference, which we consider to be fundamental to, and constitutive of, the very formulation of the theoretical problem which forms the subject of our study. Finally, however, the nationalitarian phenomenon asserts itself, day after day, as an objectively central factor in the multiform dialectics of revolutions, of evolutions, of counter-revolutions, and of apparent stagnation. Here a geographical thread is added to the historical one. But this new element is not, as some would wish it, a topographical one. The aim of the geographical dimension, or rather that of historical geography, is not to accommodate the geopolitical analysis of the contemporary world, but to serve as a framework for the emergence on the sociological level of a key concept, that of civilization, which seems to us to be necessary in order to determine the general theoretical pattern of the evolutionary process of human societies in this time of ours, the second half of the twentieth century.

The trouble about discussing religion is that most of us are against it. Since Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo bullied into saying that the world was flat, rational and scientific thought about man and the world has known its enemy: God and the priests and all their works, the whole black cloud of canting obscurantists who have clogged understanding and persecuted knowledge for the sake of kings, popes, proprietors or other baleful fatherfigures clinging to their privilege and comfort at other mens'expense. If the liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century did not go as far as Marx and Engels in affirming that “law, morality, religion are to (the proletarian) so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk just so many bourgeois interests,” they said much the same in their own context. They saw Christianity as a deplorable mystification, at best a mere vestige of primitive awe in face of the unknown, at worst an ingenious racket. Wrestling with it, they called for aid to “primitive religion.” There they found “a weapon which could, they thought, be used with deadly effect against Christianity,” since “if primitive religion could be explained away as an intellectual aberration, as a mirage induced by emotional stress, or by its social function,” so too could “higher religion” and the path thereby cleared to that extent of historical lumber.

What is Marx for an intellectual of the Third World? The author of some pages on pre-capitalist societies, the critic of Western society, or simply a name under whose authority it is sometimes convenient to take shelter? One could, of course, quote cases where considerations of tactics, or of erudition, were manifest; but it is not these cases that will be analysed here. It will be the cases where the intellectual of the Third World, conscious of his singularity, his culture and his past, finds himself one day forced, willy-nilly, to take Marx seriously and to define his own position by reference to Marx; and this day must come, theoretically speaking, if the intellectual in question is not an ideologist, in the worst sense of the word.

“Between the capitalist society and the communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the former into the latter. To this there corresponds a period of political transition in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” (19, 28).

The hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Marx's birth is a more propitious occasion for commemoration of him than the hundredth would have been. In May, 1918, the world was at war, and not much concerned with such ceremonies. A party of Marxist revolutionaries had just taken power in Russia, but the future of that revolution, and others like it, was still unclear. And some early philosophical writings of Marx, knowledge of which was destined greatly to deepen our understanding of the genesis and meaning of Marxism, were still lying in archives and unknown to all but a very few. It was still too soon to assess the historical significance of Marx. Now we are better situated in time to make the assessment.