All right, you fools stemming from the rotten bourgeois culture, that is what we insist on! And we have the right to do so because our discovery, the first-time use of the great key that resolves the contradictions and riddles of humanity, has already contained the scientific and critical knowledge that reveals your teachings – especially with regard to the older positions of human thought that you bourgeois believe to have buried forever under the vanity of your enlightened rhetoric – as hollow and unfounded fairy tales. Since then, and through this sudden light, we know that the brain-masturbation of opinion is a way too yellow-livered way to penetrate to the core of the most credulous of all faiths, a faith proclaimed in brute words, but born from the living womb of history. From what in a certain sense was a revelation (no supernatural, but human, in the sense of the fertility of the social forms of consciousness that Marx speaks of), we learned that the progress of mankind and the knowledge of the tormented homo sapiens is not continuous, but progresses in leaps and bounds, interrupted by sinister and disastrous crashes in the form of decaying, even rotting societies. We use pages written down here around 1850 – not because this is what a God would have ordered, or because the hand that glided over the pages would have been that of a Superman, but because they were written in the fire of the turn of time that had reached the thermal “phase” of the theoretical revolution, that reverbation that not only accompanied the practical revolution, but also anticipated it at that particular moment – to reserve the fools’ diploma for those guys who 100 years later make such an abominable use of the repulsive adjective “progressive”.
Drawing on the same source, we revile every superstition today in the process of counting equal personal opinions, and call a charlatan who uses this process at the level of society, class and even party; for while such a miserable or deceiver speaks of the class and the party as forces that transform society, he can only imagine them as parodies of today’s democratic bourgeois society, from whose gloomy puddle one cannot escape.
If now our ordinary adversary […] tells us at a certain point that we would only fabricate our own mysticism, whereas the poor guy thinks that he himself has overcome all fideisms and mysticisms and mocks that we could just as well bow to the biblical or Islamic, Protestant or catechetical stone tablets of Moses or the Talmud, then we reply that this does not at all lead us to assume the role of a accused who defends himself. Nor do we have – notwithstanding the fact that it is quite meaningful to annoy the philistine, who appears again and again in the picture – any reason to take the statement as an insult, according to which mysticism, or if you prefer, a myth, is still present in our movement for as long as it has not won in reality (because its victory precedes any further appropriation of human knowledge).
The myth, which appeared in many different forms, was not a fantasy of spirits who closed their eyes to actuality (as with Marx: at the same time “naturalistic” and “humanistic”); rather, it was an irreplaceable step on the only way to the appropriation of knowledge which, in class societies, can break out of large and widely divergent revolutionary cracks and can only develop freely in a classless society.
On these long stretches of way, armies of advanced seers and prophets made their way in the darkness as they persistently fought their way up again after each setback; in their minds was not science, but a myth, and the impetus of their revolutionary will was not yet knowledge, but mysticism. Now, however, these myths and mysticisms were revolutions, and because it was fights that carried out the rare advances, separated from each other for centuries, which advanced society, our respect and admiration for these pioneers is not diminished by the fact that their words have become obsolete and those of our doctrine stand in a completely different context.
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