Communism Will Create Science for the Masses, Not for Profits
April 19 — Thousands in the US and elsewhere will “March for Science” on April 22. They will march for the joy of exploring the natural world and our place in it. They will march for the creation of new technologies that can potentially extend and improve our lives. But wait! Why do they think they have to march for this?
They are marching because of “an alarming trend toward discrediting scientific consensus and restricting scientific discovery” in the US. The march will support the 99% of scientists around the world who say that human activity—really capitalism—is responsible for global warming.
The Trump-Pence administration and Republicans in Congress are threatening major cuts in funding to scientific research, including climate science and medical research. Their stated belief in “alternate facts” (convenient lies) contradicts basic principles of scientific inquiry. It serves powerful capitalist interests that profit mightily from hiding the truth. Big corporations use their money and political power to suppress or attack research that hurts their profits. The oil companies don’t want limitations on fossil fuels. Cigarette companies want to keep killing people with tobacco. The National Football League attacks researchers that show that football leads to brain injury.
Religious groups try to prevent teaching biological evolution, and preventing research on stem cells, as the G. W. Bush administration did. Religion is not the only threat to scientific materialism, which is opposed by idealism in many forms. Religions insist on the absolute truth of texts they hold sacred. Science, in contrast, recognizes that the world is always changing and our knowledge is always partial. The knowledge we have is always based on practical experiment and observation, not on divine revelation.
But many liberal secular academic theories are also idealist and anti-science. College students are often instructed in “interpreting texts” with no reference to social or material reality. The capitalist model of “division of labor,” applied to human knowledge, creates this contradiction between the “humanities” and the “sciences.”
The assault on science is not simply the product of greedy capitalists and religious reactionaries. It is a general feature of the crisis of world capitalism, of fascism, of a stinking carcass that needs to be buried – and soon!
Science and Class Society
Humans have learned from our interactions with the rest of the natural world as long as we have walked the earth. But with the rise of class society came a division between “folk” knowledge and “priestly” or elite knowledge that separated practice from theory. Theory was dominated by religious ideology that served the rulers. Practical knowledge of things like agriculture and midwifery became “traditional” rather than innovative.
This began to change with the rise of trade in the Islamic world (from Africa to east Asia) between the 8th and the 13th centuries. The Abbasid caliphs used their growing wealth to support scholars who conducted real-world studies of medicine, light and optics, geography and more.
As merchant capitalism spread to Europe, these early-scientific seeds began to sprout. Lens grinders invented telescopes, for example, to provide a competitive advantage in spotting cargo ships. Galileo turned his toward the sky. He revolutionized our understanding of our place in the cosmos.
When industrial capitalism rose to dominance over merchant capitalism in the 19th century, science as we know it really took off. Capitalist competition placed a premium on innovation and therefore on research. Physics and chemistry grew to serve capitalist interests, as medicine and biology do now.
Much of that knowledge could be useful to the masses once we have power. In capitalist society, however, it has always been the working class that suffered most from industrial pollution, workplace illnesses and injuries, and the de-skilling of work. Capitalism has excluded masses around the world from whatever benefits flow from its science.
And capitalist science is fundamentally incapable of helping us understand society. Mainstream sociology, economics, “political science” and the rest are committed to stability, not to change. We can only understand history – social change – through the lens of communist dialectical materialism.
We understand the enthusiasm that many feel for science. But communism will remove the chains placed on science in the service of profits. It will enlist the working masses in the reconnection of theory and practice in the context of industrial production and beyond. It will unleash the imagination and creative potential of billions, who will take science far beyond what we see today.
And so we say: to March for science…. March for communism! March on May Day with the International Communist Workers’ Party.
