Kennewick man, science and Marxism

The Marxism list has just spent several days debating out the issues
surrounding the discovery of a 9000 year old skeleton with "non-Indian"
features on the Columbia River in Washington State. One on side you have
what I basically would call a "Sokal-esque" defense of the scientists'
prerogatives. It argues that science is somehow untainted by the class
struggle unless you are talking about Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany.
In a free society, the more science the better. In totalitarian societies,
science is abused in order to promote the goals of the dictatorship. If
there are occasional abuses in bourgeois democracies, as Alan Sokal put it
to me, the antidote is more science. This kind of "free marketplace of
ideas" approach to the question has little to do with Marxist views on
science. During the height of the Social Text controversy, there was a very
poor understanding of this. 

This would explain more than anything the willingness of Pluto Press to
publish "Science and the Retreat from Reason" by John Gillot and Manjit
Kumar, and MR's ready acceptance of the book as "a kind of Alan Sokal book"
(as former editor Ethan Young once put it to me). Gillot and Kumar were
cult-followers of Frank Furedi, who was in the process of breaking with
socialism when the book was written. He and his followers are now in a
loose alliance with the Cato Institute, Wise Use activists and other
ultrarights across the globe. Sokal himself agreed with the right of the
forensic anthropologists to examine Kennewick man in his debate with Andrew
Ross at NYU, stating that in a fight between American Indian "creationists"
and scientists, he backed the latter.  What he neglected to mention is that
one of the chief forensic experts working with the grave-diggers was
infamous for his belief in and expeditions to find Yeti, or "Bigfoot".

What was virtually missing during the entire Sokal debate was a Marxist
analysis, which differs radically from his own perspective and that of
people like Gillot and Kumar. In the course of answering the other side in
the debate on the Marxism list, I re-read some material in my home library
on anthropology and racism, as well as chapter 8 of Lewins-Lewontin's "The
Dialectical Biologist" which contains the following pointed observation:

"The specialization of scientific labor and of command functions from
research creates a model of scientific organization that is easily seen as
the model for the organization of the world. Nature is perceived as
following the organization chart of our company or university, with similar
phenomena united under a single chairman, distinct but related phenomena
under a common dean, and unconnected events belonging to different schools
or divisions. Thus specialization in practice joins with atomistic
individualism to reinforce the reductionism that still predominates in the
implicit philosophy of scientists." 

In addition, during the course of a web search on "Haldane", I stumbled
across a remarkably useful website belonging to Prof. Helena Sheehan, who
has written for Monthly Review.
(http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/sheehan.htm) It contains excerpts from
her book "Marxism and the Philosophy of Science", including the following.
It stands in stark contrast to the kind of methodological individualism,
class neutralism and crude empiricism that marks the work of Gillot-Kumar,
Alan Sokal, or his collaborator Norman Levitt who hosted a conference on
the "Science Wars" at NYU with funding from the ultraright Olin Foundation.

(http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/Soviet1.htm)

>>The Bolsheviks, the scientists and the philosophers 

Because of his concern for winning over the existing intelligentsia and
because of his special interest in the philosophy of science, Lenin was
particularly interested in gaining the support of natural scientists. When
the distinguished biologist K.A. Timiriazev announced his fervent loyalty
to the new regime, Lenin was overjoyed. The Bolsheviks received him with
open arms and named a research center after him: the State Timiriazev
Scientific Research Institute for the Study and Propaganda of Natural
Science from Point of View of Dialectical Materialism (mercifully reduced
to Timiriazev Institute in all but the most formal references to it). 

Another success was the N.I. Vavilov, who was put in charge of a whole
network of biological institutions. The physicist A.F. Joffe had actually
joined the anti-Bolshevik exodus of scholars to the Crimea in 1917, but
returned to Petrograd, resolved to connect his fate with that of the land
of the Soviets, although it was by any means clear that the civil war would
be won. He became a member of the Leningrad Soviet and doyen of Soviet
physicists, although it was not until 1942 that he joined the party.

There was a concerted campaign to win working natural scientists over to a
materialist position in the philosophy of science. Through such agencies as
Union of Scientific Workers, the All-Union Association of Workers Science
and Technology for Assistance to the Construction of Socialism (VARNITSO),
and the Central Commission for Improving the Condition of Scholars, various
societies for materialist natural scientists corresponding to various
scientific disciplines, the Bolsheviks fought to win their hearts and minds. 

(There were, for example, the Society of Materialist Biologists, the
Society of Materialist Physicians, and the Society of Materialist
Physicists and Mathematicians, organised under the Section for the Natural
and Exact Sciences of the Communist Academy.   It was far from the only
occasion in which Lenin turned his mind to questions of philosophy. In
"Once Again On The Trade Unions," in the context of a criticism of the
current political thinking of Trotsky and Bukharin, he put great emphasis
on the difference between dialectical thinking and eclectic thinking. He
called upon such comrades to put aside one-track thinking, compulsiveness,
exaggeration, obstinancy, and rigidity and to learn to examine all facets
of a thing, all its connections and mediacies. Dialectics, he insisted,
required an all-round consideration of relationships in their concrete
development, but not a patchwork of bits and pieces. He asked them to look
beyond formal logic that dealt with formal definitions of the sort that
drew on what was most common or glaring about a thing and stopped there.)

Lenin took the occasion of the second issue of 'Pod znamenem marksizma'
(Under the Banner of Marxism), the new journal of Soviet Marxism launched
in 1922 to call for an alliance between communists and natural scientists
inclined to materialism. The first issue had not mentioned the philosophy
of science in its editorial declaration of its aims and purposes, nor had
Trotsky in letter welcoming the new publication. Lenin felt it was
necessary to draw attention to the importance of this field. In his article
entitled "On the significance of militant materialism," he urged the
journal to attend to the philosophical problems raised by the sharp
upheaval in the natural sciences and to enlist natural scientists in the
work of the philosophy journal in order to decide these problems most
effectively.

He called attention to the latest episode the ongoing attempt to undermine
the foundations of materialism by appeals modern science by those who were
seizing on Einstein's theory of relativity for such purposes. Unlike A.K.
Timiriazev, the physicist and son of the prominent biologist, who wrote a
review of a Russian translation of Einstein in first issue, Lenin suggested
that they should take care to distinguish between Einstein's physical
theories and the philosophical speculation sparked by them. Lenin believed
that the natural sciences could not hold their own against the "onslaught
of bourgeois ideas" unless they stood on solid philosophical ground. As to
where they should turn for such a grounding:

"Modern natural scientists (if they know how to seek, and if we learn how
to help them) will find in Hegelian dialectics, materialistically
interpreted, a series of answers to the philosophical problems which are
being raised by the revolution in natural science. . . , Without this,
eminent natural scientists will as often as hitherto be helpless in ntaking
their pliilosophical deductions and generalizations. For natural science is
progressing so fast and is undergoing such a profound revolutionary
upheaval in all spheres that it cannot possibly dispense with philosophical
deductions. In his opinion, the editors and contributors to Pod znamenem
marksizma should constitute a sort of 'Society of Materialist Friends of
Hegelian Dialectics.'"

The point was that a really full definition of anything "must include the
whole of human experience." In the same article, Lenin exhorted communists
to engage in a serious study of Plekhanov's philosophical works and
insisted that the workers state should demand of professors of philosophy
in particular that they have a thorough knowledge of Plekhanov's exposition
of Marxism. By this time, Plekhanov was gone, having died in 1918, an
unregenerate opponent of Soviet power. Nevertheless, Lenin was magnanimous
enough to ensure that his contribution to the development of Russian
Marxism be duly recognised. <<



Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org