Today, the natural form of scientific knowledge appears to be concerned with the formulation of theories. But scientific theory itself has already arrived at the logically inescapable conclusion that it is impossible to demonstrate the truth or falsity of theories prior to the action. Therefore, scientific theories are only ways of interpreting the world and, as such, negate the conscious action that acknowledges its own necessity. Socialism is the conscious human process of scientifically regulated social metabolism. As much as scientific knowledge is doomed to interpretation, socialism is doomed to impossibility.
Today, the question of the development of scientific knowledge is really the question of the development of capitalism’s need to annihilate itself in a higher social form. In other words, the question is the development of capital into conscious revolutionary action and, therefore, the development of the very organicity of this action, the development of scientific knowledge as a necessary concrete form of radical political action.
Scientific knowledge has not arrived at the end of history: rather, scientific theory, as a historically specific form of this knowledge has reached its end/limit in capitalism. The critique of universally dominant science today does not require the construction of a new scientific theory, but rather the overcoming of scientific theory itself. It is not a matter of conceiving a new representation of reality, a response to a constructive need unrelated to real necessity, to a logic. Rather, it is a matter of virtually appropriating reality by reproducing its necessity through thought, of the ideal reproduction of reality. The development of properly scientific knowledge as the regulation of the transformation of the present society to the one of freely associated individuals is, therefore, at the same time the critique of scientific theory.
In the very form of its method, that is, as dialectical knowledge, the reproduction of real necessity through thought excludes all appearance of exteriority from itself. Dialectical knowledge is knowledge of the action of this regulation of the transformation of present society; it is a specific portion of this action and, consequently, is an inseparable moment of the action itself. Properly scientific research thus overcomes all appearance of being abstractly opposed to practice and instead asserts itself as practical criticism. The unfolding of the forms of properly scientific, specifically dialectical knowledge serves as a spearhead for the necessarily collective work in which the ideal reproduction of our real necessity takes shape – namely, the conscious regulation of the radical transformation of society.