Marxism and Science

In the traditional view, the exclusion of moral, social and political influences from the sphere of scientific discovery and debate was necessary to its objectivity. To a considerable extent this philosophical view of science was shared by the historians and sociologists of knowledge.

This critique of science as an expression of the alienated relationship between modern capitalism and nature was continued and developed by later social theorists, most especially by the ‘first generation' of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (see Chapter 7). These writers were associated with an institute of social research which was attached to Frankfurt University until the Nazi takeover in 1933, and was subsequently re-formed at Columbia University in the USA. Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, especially, retained the early Marx's vision of an unalienated relation to the rest of nature, and the associated critique of the existing natural sciences as a mere instrument of human domination of nature.

However, Marx's later work seemed to fit more easily with the orthodox nineteenth­century view of science as providing objective and useful knowledge of the world, in contrast to earlier superstitious and religious worldviews. The view of history advanced by Marx and Engels from the late 1840s onwards is one in which advances in human freedom and self-determination are to be won through a twofold struggle: against limits imposed by nature, and against class oppression. The former struggle was being progressively won by the application of scientific knowledge in agricultural and industrial technologies, so harnessing the forces of nature to human purposes, and vastly increasing the social wealth. Indeed, the great achievement of modern capitalism was its power to revolutionize the ‘forces of production' at a rate and on a scale never before seen.

The downside of capitalism, though, was that this vast, constantly advancing apparatus of technical mastery of nature was under the control of one class in society only, so that its direction and the benefits deriving from it served only the interests of this one, dominant class - the owners of capital. Increasingly, the scale of social coordination required by the new technologies of production pointed to the need for spreading control to the whole of society, and giving the benefits of ever-increasing wealth production to everyone.

In this approach, the objectivity of scientific knowledge is not questioned. Nor is the power of science to harness the forces of nature through technology. Science and technology have the potential to liberate all humanity from disease, poverty and external risk, but this potential is not being realized because of the class monopoly over the wealth needed to finance and apply scientific knowledge. On the contrary, under capitalism, science and technology is a massively powerful weapon through which the exploitation and control of the labour force is maintained.

Despite all this, Marx and Engels (especially the latter) were great enthusiasts for the scientific advances of their day, and declared their own view of history to be ‘scientific',

in contrast to the ‘ideologies' peddled by other economists and social theorists, which mostly presented a distorted account of the social world favourable to the dominant class.

These contrasts between ‘science, as objective and interest-free, and ‘ideology', or ‘common sense, as distorted, or false because of the influence on it of practical interests and values were carried forward by the later Marxist sociology of knowledge. The focus in this tradition was on explaining distorted or false beliefs in terms of the social position of the group whose beliefs they were, in terms of the misleading appearance presented by social relations, or in terms of the cultural power of the economically dominant class and its allies in educational institutions or the media.

So far as the natural sciences are concerned, Marxist approaches have tended to follow Marx himself in focusing on the role of science in the invention of technologies which enhance employer control over the labour force, and enable the replacement of workers by machines. In Britain during the 1930s there emerged a radical movement of scientists, part of which was greatly influenced by Marxist ideas. One focus of this movement was resistance to the eugenics movement and its proposals for forced sterilization of the ‘unfit'. This campaign won growing support as eugenics became increasingly identified with the Nazi regime in Germany and with the influential fascist movement in Britain. But the radical scientists were also concerned with the poor working conditions and ‘proletarianization' of technical and support workers in research institutions, and the exclusion of scientists from areas of public policy-making. As Werskey (1978) has argued, however, the movement was by no means united, and the shared concern for the ‘social relations' of science covered rather different political positions.

There remained ambiguity about what a socialist approach to science meant. Did it mean enabling the further development of science and technology in response to people's needs, as against priorities determined by profit and control, or would ‘socialist science' be different in content from existing ‘bourgeois' science? At the time, Soviet scientists and philosophers were arguing for this latter position, and the mainly pro-Soviet radical scientists in Britain tended to adopt it until the notorious Lysenko episode in Soviet biology (see Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the USSR 1949; Lewontin and Levins 1976; Lecourt 1977; Benton 1980). In the name of ‘proletarian science, Soviet geneticists were denounced as ‘bourgeois' and ‘idealist'. Many were arrested, some died, Soviet genetics was destroyed, and great damage was done to Soviet agriculture. This disaster divided the radical scientists in Britain, and took radical visions of an alternative science off the agenda until the resurgence of scientific radicalism in the context of the US war against Vietnam and the broad political radicalization of the late 1960s.

At the start of the 1970s, many scientists involved in the newly formed British Society for Social Responsibility in Science were concerned about abuses of science in the massive application of chemical weapons in Vietnam, in research on biological, chemical and nuclear weaponry, in the use of CS gas in maintaining public order, in hazardous conditions of work, in surveillance technologies, in pollution and so on. But, again, a radical wing of the movement, influenced by Marxism, but also by the New Left's critique of Soviet state socialism, by the women's movement and by anti-racist concerns, wanted to go further than denouncing individual abuses. For them, what was needed was an analysis of the institutional nexus of science, capitalist industry and the state, and an integration of the radical science movement with a wider struggle for socialist transformation (see Rose and Rose 1969, 1976a, 1976b). One legacy of that period was the Radical Science Journal (later Science as Culture) which was, arguably, influential in the academic development of the new sociology of science (see below).