A Critique Of Bourgeoisie Civilization And Thought

We manufacture guns and test it on our fellow humans, and we call it civilization! We spend so much fund to put up skyscrapers, and proceed to provoke our God given intellect to manufacture bombs whose efficiencies are tested on the buildings, this we christened scientific upliftment.

Bourgeoisie civilization devotes its main energies to the preparation of further holocausts. Regimes contending for world power have achieved the most advanced stages of barbarian, known to history.

History chronicles how we maimed and butchered each other in defense of non-existing religions. Sounds outrageous but there reality is not far fetched.

Millions in the world know that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia will have nothing to teach the American bourgeoisie when it finds itself threatened by the revolutionary Third World workers seeking the complete destruction of imperialism.

Men shrink with terror at the hint of scientific discoveries. If it were known tomorrow that the crown of human technical achievement, the processes of manufacturing nuclear energy, had been lost beyond recovery, this scientific disaster would be hailed as the greatest good fortune of decades.

The bankruptcy of bourgeoisie civilization is the bankruptcy of its thought. The method of thinking is rooted in society. Bourgeoisie thought is collapsing because bourgeoisie society is collapsing.

In all forms of society we have known, the increasing development of material wealth brings with it the increasing degradation of the large mass of humanity. Capitalism, being the greatest wealth-producing system so far known, has carried its contradictions to a pitch never known before. Thus the moment when the world system of capitalism has demonstrated the greatest productive powers in history is exactly the period when barbarism threatens to engulf the whole of humanity.

We stand absolutely dumbfounded before the spectacle of the mastery of nature for human advancement and the degradation of human nature by this very master. The greater the possibilities of living, the more men live in terror of mass annihilation. The bourgeoisie cannot admit this, for to admit its existence is to sanction the end of the bourgeoisie civilization.

If we recognize the bankruptcy of bourgeoisie democracy, if we accept the need for true civilization, if we recognize that barbarism is the only force that can suppress this need, then to refuse to accept the inevitability of a new humanism leaves only one of two choices. Either the inevitable barbarism which may spring humanity into an abyss of destruction, or the hope, the faith, the belief that history will offer some way out of the impasse.

It is precisely the character of our age and the maturity of humanity that obliterates the opposition between theory and practice, between the intellectual preoccupations of the "educated" and of the masses. All the great philosophical concepts, from the nature of the physical universe through the structure and function of productive systems, the nature of government, to the destiny of man, these are no longer functional in the rationalization of the human mind.

Today, the negative missiles of global civilization overwhelm the positive ones. The world must take note of this changing trend lest we suffer extinction. And to tell you the truth, Africa shall fell the pain most.