SCIENCE IS SOCIAL RELATIONS
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school There Goes Rhymin Simon Gearing Up It is time to move on both in theory and in practice. It is time that our critiques of
authoritarian and hierarchical societies - both capitalist and nominally socialist - and
of their science, went on the offensive. It is time that our theories and our lives
expressed struggle towards socialism and prefigured that social order in the process. We
have had (or at least proclaimed) our counter-culture and our alternative technology. We
now need to embark on the construction of a counter-reality and an alternative cosmology.
Only socialist theory based on attempts to move toward socialist lives as a way to a
socialist society, can produce socialist science. A clearer, starker awareness of the full integration of science and technology - at all
levels - into capitalism, can help us to achieve real solidarity between scientific
and technological workers and the working class as traditionally conceived and to develop
strategies for struggle for the mediators of authority, expertise and power in industrial
societies. Scientific and technological staffs in teaching, research and industry are
becoming proletarianized, but they remain incompletely so. Unless we are to wait and cheer
and indulge in struggles which are unrelated to our mediating roles, we must look closely
at the theoretical and practical struggles which are integral to scientific settings but
arise from new left, student movement, feminist and life-style perspectives. But in order
to do this in a way which has promise for contributing to revolutionary struggle - in
order, that is, to avoid mere self-indulgent idealism - we must learn to see those
settings in a new light which owes almost everything to the critique of traditional
industrial struggles and settings. There are three themes in this exploratory argument for seeing science as social
relations. The first is the strategic exhortation that we move on, both in theory and in
practice. The second is the conception of an alternative cosmology or counter-hegemonic
world view, which I offer as a large step beyond recent preoccupations with questions
which still lie inside an ontology and an epistemology which contain and express our
alienated world view in modern science and society. We need to become much more aware of
the metaphysical assumptions underlying modern science and to transcend that metaphysics
and put meaning and value back into our conceptions of nature, science and society: to
revive life and to reinvest nature and comradeship with our values The third theme
concerns the lives of radical scientists and technologists and argues that those lives
should involve prefigurative struggle toward socialism by getting priorities right and
letting other activities find their own level. For some of us this means self-protection
from backsliding by means of burning some boats and/or biting some hands that have fed us
or might do. For all it means combining trades union work with other prefigurative
strategies in our lives and our institutional settings. For the most part these strategies
have yet to be developed, and this essay is an exploration towards a working programme for
radical scientists and technologists. It began life as a talk delivered to a British
Society for Social Responsibility in Science conference on 'Is There a Socialist
Science?', February 1975. Since then it has been much expanded and changed in the light of
discussions and criticisms. Its shortcomings reflect my own background, which has been
overwhelmingly more academic than industrial. I hope that comrades who are in solidarity
with the basic orientation of the argument will redress the balance. I know that the style of this essay is sometimes weird. I am trying to develop a way of
writing which treads a new path between the didactic and the evocative and which aims,
above all, to persuade. I know that in this essay I haven't got very far and am often most
assertive when I am trying out a new idea and most heavy and evangelical when I would
prefer to be gentler and more seductive. And there are repetitions as I try to win over
comrades by different ways of illuminating a point in an attempt to be moving. I am trying
to move on from earlier exploratory pieces in ways which reflect my own changing politics
and life situation (I'm thinking, in particular, of 'Evolutionary Biology and Ideology:
Then and Now', 'The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth Century
Debate on Man's Place in Nature', and 'The Human Limits of Nature'). At least I've managed
to get away from long discursive footnotes. The bibliography at the end of the article
only includes items quoted or alluded to in the text. An annotated resources list which
includes a wider range of intellectual means of production on issues raised by this and
other articles in the Radical Science Journal has been prepared by the RSJ
Collective and is available by post. Lots of people have helped me to revise and rethink the position and presentation. I
have managed to benefit from almost all comradely critics, though I still haven't got
right the interface between by argument and trades union and working class struggles. I
hope, though, that I've made it possible for others to move forward on that front by
raising the issue for scientific workers. Anyway, thanks especially to David Albury, Vic
Seidler, David Dickson, John Goodman, Karl Figlio, Jonathan Cooke, Michael Young, Brian
Hurwitz, Maureen McNeil, Luke Hodgkin, Charlie Clutterbuck, Les Levidow, Anne Cooke, Mike
and Pauleen Hales, Bob Eccleshall, Simon Pickvance, Dot Griffiths, Michael Green, Brian
Easlea, Jeremy Mulford, Loup Verlet, Gianna Pomata, Harvey Brown, Edward Yoxen, Gary
Werskey, Margot Waddell, Joseph Schwartz. If you ever feel lost in what I'm saying, it may help to note that my approach is to
describe science as much as possible in terms drawn from marxist political economy and
from the critique of industry and the division of labour. The economy and the factory are
known by socialists to be social relations, that is, they are manifestations of the
relations between social classes. I want to begin to familiarize us with talking about
science in that way. An additional advantage of this approach is that it may help the
radical science movement to bring into closer relations several tendencies which have
recently begun to drift apart: theoretical and agitational, university and industrial,
research and applied, trades union activities and life-style politics. I'm trying to
improve communication and comradeship among these tendencies. For too long it has seemed
that radicals who were also scientists were faced with two alternatives: separate their
science from their political work in solidarity with the working class (seeing the science
as relatively progressive) or abandon their science for full-time politics involving some
mixture of industrial agitation and political work and expression in other areas of their
lives. I am suggesting that there is much to do in our own labs and other institutions, in
our own research and teaching and in our own lives and that when we have got into this
radicalization our relations with the industrial working class in our own lives and labs
and other sectors will be less patronising, voluntaristic and artificial. Once again, the
project is to elaborate a strategy of revolutionary practice for people whose mediating
role is based on expertise in a way which brings some of the advantages of that position
to bear on struggle. In the period between writing the first and the second drafts of this essay I have been
attending a series of open meetings in London on aspects of 'Science and Socialism'. They
were well-attended, though it was very difficult for people working in industry or for
women with children to come at the set time. (A later time was agreed for a session by the
Women and Science collective on the politics of contraception.) The meetings were
deliberately held in a room over a pub in preference to an academic setting. The talks and
the orientation were biased in favour of industrial issues, thereby rightly counteracting
the theoretical and academic bias of many similar series. Yet it remained true that the
overwhelming majority of the participants were earning their livings and spending their
working lives in tertiary education and / or academic research. There is something faintly
ludicrous about a group of people who teach and do research talking largely about
industrial 'point of production' politics and not about struggles in their own places of
work and in their own lives. There are - as I argue below - important lessons for such
people to learn from and about industrial struggles in non-academic settings. But it is
also important not to pretend that there are no special issues for such people. It is
often stressed that more scientists work in industry than anywhere else. But many also
work in education and academic research. I haven't seen the figures for chemistry, though
I'd expect them to be biased toward industry. But there are 14,800 research biologists in
the United Kingdom; 10,800 work in universities; 1,000 for the Agricultural Research
Council; 900 for the Medical Research Council; 600 for the government; 1,500 in industry -
10%. Yet the discussions were not concerned with problems of union organising and struggle
in academic and research settings; the relations between research and teaching on the one
hand and industrial struggles on the other; the needs and problems of research assistants;
the exploitation of junior staff and students; the structure of teaching and laboratory
situations; the production, reproduction, socialisation and maintenance of labour power;
productive vs unproductive labour; direct vs indirect exploitation. I list
these themes because they seem to me to be among those which need to be explored under the
general strategy of where and how radical scientists can organise and struggle
effectively. But in putting the issues this way I am already assuming that the argument is finished
and that the title of the conference was rhetorical. I'm sure, however, that to most
scientists, the answer to the question ‘Is there a socialist science?' is either No,'
or at best, 'Maybe one day'. So let me briefly (because, as I said, it's time to move on)
review the argument. We have moved on to the extent that most radicals would no
longer wish to argue that science is neutral, value-free or exempt from ideology. There
are still many who have not systematically applied that conclusion to all science, to
their science, to their research or to their lives, but the conclusion is there - at least
in theory. (I'll deal later with those who may not care much about science but certainly
want to claim 'scientificity' for their brand of marxism.) We have also moved on in the
sense that many radical scientists are trying to develop practices which are in solidarity
with working class struggles, e.g., work on industrial health and safety and community
science and technology. But many are still hung up on the special claims and status of
science and experts. If science is not value-neutral, then what values does it reflect, reinforce and
reproduce? For a marxist there can be only one answer to that question: the ruling ideas
of any epoch are the ideas of its ruling class. (In case you are wondering what I'd say
about societies whose ruling class is not capitalist, I'd reply that I am talking about
all hierarchical and authoritarian societies, both capitalist and nominally socialist. I
know of societies which have begun to deviate from that norm but none which has got very
far.) If we say that science is not value-neutral, then we must mean that science thereby
gets included in the critique of values. In its radical form the critique of values is the
critique of ideologies. Then science - not some science or some sciences some of the time,
but science - is ideological. We live under capitalism, so we have
capitalist science. We want to bring a different set of values into being, to bring about
a new set of ruling ideas—ideas of a society without rulers, a part of a different
ideology or world-view. We want to bring about a socialist society. It will, if we are
vigilant, have a socialist science. I can imagine it, or some of it. So: Is there a socialist science? No; no more than there is a socialist society. But is
socialism possible? Yes, we are struggling to bring it into being. I can imagine it, or
some of it. To repeat: science is not value-neutral; it embodies capitalist and other
hierarchical values. Our values are aimed at bringing about a different world-view - an
alternative cosmology - that of socialism. Our scientific practice is therefore aimed at
becoming part of socialist science. If so, we'd better get on with it in that scientific
practice. (By the way, if you don't think that science is part of the world-view in which
it is practiced, then you think it's value-neutral and cannot believe in a specifically
socialist science, only in science under socialism. You don't really have to disturb
yourself at work until the industrial working class has produced the revolution. That's a
relief, isn't it?) The problem is to move from science which is capitalist to
science which is socialist. In practice, in our work and lives, the problem is to
place our work in science - our social relations at work and in other settings - inside
(not alongside) our socialism. That is the second sense in which it is time to move on: to
change our work and the rest of our lives so that our socialism comes first. Not many
self-styled radical scientists have got round to that. My title is meant to be provocative but not facetious. If we say that science is not
value-neutral, that it is value - laden or ideological, then we say it expresses in
complex ways - or mediates - how people treat each other. Ideology is not, on this
argument, mere distortion or false-consciousness. World-views are ideological, and an
ideology is a world-view. Science is ideological, though it is about the real world
we live in as well. But that needn't be puzzling: capitalism is ideological, and I find
that very real as well, don't you? Ideologies are based ultimately on conceptions of
social relations. Comrades who find my conception of ideology (in which both science and
marxism are ideological) strange may feel more at home with the Gramscian concepts of
ideological hegemony and counter-hegemony, in which the stark science/ideology split is
not so startling. On this view, hegemony is 'an order in which a certain way of life and
thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its
institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality,
customs, religious and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in
their intellectual and moral connotations.' (Williams, 'Gramsci's Concept of Egemonia, p.587.)
I realise that I am going to the limit in extending the anti-scientism of Marx and of
certain tendencies in the marxist tradition to include science itself. Much of the point
of what I am exploring is to see the political consequences of that extension. The struggle for socialist science prefigures how people should treat one another and
relate to nature in a non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian world. The structure and
practice of how people treat one another is called their social relations. So science
mediates — ultimately is — social relations. Our world-view includes
conceptions both of nature and society, with ‘society' as a category which is more
fundamental than, and more basic to, that of 'nature' (Lukács). It must follow that our
science, however unobtrusively, is an expression of our social relations. Let me put the
point another way. If we want to learn to talk about, and to bring into being, socialism
and socialist science, then we have two tasks at the theoretical level. The first is to
demystify capitalist society. Marxist writings (or at least the parts which are not
scientistic) have done a good job of demystifying capitalistic society. Now we must have
the imagination, the nerve and the will to do that for capitalist science. It is part of
the same task, but it is harder to see and to do. We are all successfully socialised into
the separation of fact and value, of science and society. Now we have to put our world
back together. Modern science and modern capitalism arose as a single cosmology in which
fact and value are separated and upon which modern society and its scientistic foundations
were erected as a single edifice. This will have to be dismantled, brick by brick,
including and especially those metaphysical foundations, since they, in turn generated the
ideas of truth, objectivity, progress, rationality and human nature with which we continue
to operate in science and technology. There are concepts in marxist theory which are central to this task: fetishism and
reification. Both are concerned with the representation of the relations between
people as though they were relations between things. It sounds a bit strange at first, but
socialist science means that we must learn to see that ultimately it is reification to
treat the relations between things as though they were relations between things. I don't
mean that as mere paradox: let me try to spell it out. If science is social relations,
then the demystification of science entails the demystification of its reifications. In
economics, the fetishism of commodities means that we see the thing the commodity-in a
mystified way and forget that it is human labour in a frozen form. Making a commodity
transparent means seeing it as social relations-seeing how it came to be from nature
(unqualified) by means of the process of human labour. Well, science reifies nature; it
treats nature as things without values. (In the language of technical philosophy, it
banishes final causes and seeks to explain all phenomenal experience in terms of primary
qualities. But it's time to move on from conducting the analysis in that language.) If we
are to make transparent the values in science and make explicit its ideological nature,
then we must stop treating things only as things and see them as social relations as well.
Different social relations - socialist ones - are inseparable from different science,
different facts, a different nature and society. A separate category of 'science' would
probably, it seems to me, become unthinkable once the reintegration of facts and values
was complete. But that's trying to look farther over the horizon than I can see at
present. We can take the point by easier stages (stages many of us have travelled), from the
demystification of capitalist economic relations by successive approximations, to nature
itself, i e., from the alienation at work to the alienation of reality. We have little
problem in understanding that commodities are fetishised social relations. As we tell that
story, we can start with raw materials and carry the analysis all the way to the factory
and the shop and the consumer. We can see the production, exchange and consumption. Marx,
Engels and Lukács have made transparent the formerly opaque expression of social
relations as economic ones, i.e., in the mystified form of inevitable and inescapable laws
of nature. Sets of human conventions are presented in bourgeois economic theory as
unalterable, natural determinations, and marxism demystifies these. Now we must apply that
same analysis to the laws of nature themselves and demystify the existing conceptions of
unalterable natural determinations and the attendant scientism, fatalism and deference to
powerfully authoritarian experts. (At this point I always have to make a ritual
reassurance: Newton's laws and the internal combustion engine 'work', and I don't think
the external world ceases to exist when I close my eyes.) As David Dickson and others have argued, the same analysis applies to technology, which
plays a central part in the construction of social reality. He and Edward Thompson and
Andre Gorz and Stephen Marglin and others have shown that the claims of technological
determinism in the development of the factory system and the division of labour, turn out
to have much more to do with work discipline and authority than with anything inherent in
the productive process, sources of power, access to raw materials and markets, or
efficiency. And Loren Baritz, Alex Carey, Mike Hales, Harry Braverman and I have tried to
generalise this critique to demystify scientific management and the management sciences.
Notice that the argument is moving outward from bourgeois economics to industrial society
and its products, which turn out to be social relations. At this point in the argument we move on to various tendencies in the social sciences,
from the avowedly bourgeois to the more symbolically marxist ones which concentrate on the
social and ideological and cosmological constructions of reality. The unifying theme in
these otherwise diverse tendencies is the perception that social worlds are negotiated and
constructed and are the products of interactions among contending interests, groups and
classes. The radical critique of science can thus draw support from such disparate
tendencies as phenomenology, cognitive sociology, symbolic interactionism, labelling
theory, ethnomethodology, the sociology of educational knowledge and its
institutionalisations (including scientific knowledge and institutions), the study of
socialisation, and the critique of everyday knowledge and everyday life. My theoretical understanding, my imagination and my morale are helped most in this way
by deviance theory - the study of those who are in some respects outside the prevailing
norms of the society - since it helps me to envisage (and to bring about in small ways)
the replacement of a vile norm with liberated deviations. I don't think I'm alone in this,
since the theme plays a large part in our popular culture and fantasies. In recent films
the theme of deviance has been pervasively appealing. Deviants who 'win' in a completely
individualistic way: The Graduate, M.A.S.H. Catch 22, Paperchase, Charlie Varrick,
Death Wish, Rollerball, most cowboys. Deviant losers with whom we identify strongly: Bonnie
and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, Hombre, Easy Rider, Steelyard Blues, Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid (including Alias), Thieves Like Us, California Split, Sugarland Express,
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Mean Machine, Spirit of the Beehive, Lacombe Lucien, The Man
Who Fell to Earth, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. These are
complemented by deviance films in which the power of the normative social forces is
ultimately crushing, in which reality (cops) is totally overwhelming (= robbers): Serpico,
Chinatown, Lenny. Then there is, finally, the appeal of helplessness films, in which
the natural or occult processes consume us or threaten to: Don 't Look Now, The
Exorcist, Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Jaws, The Incredible Shrinking Man and other
fatalistic Sci-fi. An analogous domain which invites analysis of its reconciling versus
its potentially liberating aspects is science fiction, in which science and technology are
at the centre of our ambivalent fantasies. Here we come to the borderlands between sociology and anthropology, where the critique
of the constructed conventions of social reality reach out to embrace all of
reality. Thus, the illuminating relativism of the anthropology of exotic peoples, when
shined on our own society, may make the academic epistemologists nervous, but it is
heartening for ideologues of the Left, Right and Centre because they can thereby imagine a
society based on their respective values. The anthropology of knowledge invites us to see
our educational and research institutions as social systems, our training as, e.g.,
doctors and scientists, as a process of socialisation, and our knowledge as a belief
system. Instead of thinking of research labs and teaching hospitals solely as relatively
congenial and efficient settings for discovering, propagating and applying natural
knowledge, we must also come to see them as social institutions in which apprentices,
manual workers, patients and other subjects are socialised into a belief system which we
have hitherto thought to be a neutral and relatively transparent body of methodology and
procedure, knowledge and therapy. The three elements - social system, socialisation, and
belief system - are congruent with, mediate and reinforce (both directly and indirectly)
the existing framework of order, power and ideology. In these factories for hierarchical
and authoritarian ideologies, manner, matter and structure inter penetrate at all levels
of theory and practice and training, including the definition and 'nature' of facts,
findings, diagnoses, theories and therapies. The social relations of such institutions are
the social relations of the society; so also are the things and therapies with which they
are concerned. Bourgeois social sciences fail to make explicit the ideological role of the
processes they interpret. The result of this perspective is that we can see science (I always mean to include
technology and medicine, but it's tedious to go on repeating them all) as part of the
ideology of class societies. We can also - if we are serious utopians—see an
alternative cosmology over the horizon: socialist science in a socialist society (if the
category of 'science' remains). If we are to move into that world, we must cease to
believe that inevitable historical processes will see us through or that one great push
will do so. 'The Crisis of Monopoly Capitalism' is not something to count on in political
struggle any more than 'the proletarianisation of scientists' is in our politics.
Similarly, 'the Student Movement' of the late 1960s marched round the walls of Jericho
seven times and even levitated the Pentagon, but both still stand. Instead of believing
that capitalism's crises or youthful voluntarism will do the revolutionary job for us, I
am suggesting that we take up those aspects of bourgeois social analyses and turn them to
our own purposes, what ever their authors may have intended, and use the widespread
perception that social and natural realities are negotiated, constructed, conventional and
historically alterable - to get on with it in our own lives and institutional settings.
(What we now know is how long and difficult and slow and shattering such struggles are and
how many will be pushed too far and leave the struggle, perhaps to return, perhaps not.)
The social sciences which offer us these perspectives tend to keep their consequences
safely in the realm of theory and interpretation and fail to confront the issue of power
(or do so in a way which has no agitational intent). Surely we can recontextualise them in
subversive ways in order to demystify and disrupt in the service of a human world. In so
doing, we can convert the so-called 'behavioural' and 'social' 'sciences' of psychology,
sociology, criminology and anthropology into human practices, thus transforming their
contemplative stances into constructive subversion in our own work and our own
institutions. Of course, once these changes begin the arbitrariness of the disciplinary
boundaries from the point of view of human use value, becomes apparent. The main bulwark against seeing these disciplines as freely available for radical
rip-offs is their own falsely conscious deference to the natural sciences as the locus of
the ideal of certainty, of hard facts and reliable methods and theories. Many people who
are convinced anti-positivists in the social sciences are, at a deeper level, positivistic
in their deference to the methods, assumptions and (at least potential) certainty of the
natural sciences. We need to reverse this perception, to remove the foundations from both
the superficial and the deeper versions of the positivists' separation of facts from
values and their naive belief in the 'empirically given'. In the sociology of knowledge an
exception was made of mathematics and portions of the natural sciences: their knowledge
was said to be on the whole exempt from relativism in terms of the social origins and
location of theories and findings. As to the question of whether or not an exception is to
be made of any portion of science, the very possibility of a specifically socialist
science or specifically socialist sciences is predicated in the assumption that the answer
must be: no exceptions. In the previous section, I was taking the argument by stages: from commodities to
technology and the division of labour; to the social sciences and the social construction
of social, and then natural, reality; to the anthropology of knowledge, including
scientific knowledge; and finally to alternative cosmologies. Or we can move on from these
pathways. When I said it is time to move on theoretically, I meant that we should stop
retracing all those steps every time. We know the path, but it is a long one, and we are
very tired when we get to the end, when what we really want to do all lies ahead of us,
and weariness too often overcomes us just there. A better way is to get straight to the
point - to miss out the bourgeois sociology and anthropology of knowledge and its setting
and go straight to marxism (always reserving the right to do a bit of review if it helps
in a particular argument). Thus: A scientific fact appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood.
Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical
subtleties and theological niceties .... A scientific fact is therefore a mysterious
thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an
objective character stamped upon the product of that labour, because the relation of the
producers to the sum total of their labour is presented to them as a social relation,
existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour, i.e., between
scientific findings. .... A definite social relation between people assumes the fantastic
form of a relation between things.... This fetishism of scientific facts has its origin in
the peculiar social character of the labour that produced them. (1:71-2) In that passage I merely quoted the famous section of Capital on `The Fetishism
of Commodities and the Secret There of,’ substituting 'scientific fact' or 'finding'
for 'commodity'. The whole section reads very well when conceptions from science are
slipped in place of ones from capitalist economic relations. For example, The recent ideological discovery that the products of labour, so far as they are
values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks,
indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means,
dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an
objective character of the products themselves. (1:74) These scientific formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that
they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over
men, instead of being controlled by him, such scientific formulae appear to the bourgeois
intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour
itself. (1:80-81) I hope that you will agree that the substitution is an illuminating way of alluding to
the growing marxist literature on fetishism and extending it to the natural sciences Here
is Marx looking back over his shoulder at bourgeois epistemology: 'To what extent some
radicals are misled by the fetishism inherent in scientific findings, or by the objective
appearance of the social character of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull
and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature on its own in the formation of
scientific theories' (1:82) Lest it be thought that only Marx invites this substitution of
the scientific for the economic fetish, here are a few (similarly modified) lines from J.
Friedman on 'The Place of Fetishism and the Problem of Materialist Interpretations' from
the first issue of Critique of Anthropology: 'Fetishism of scientific facts and
theories is defined, then, as the transformation of underlying social relations of
production into the form in which they appear as the subject of those relations ....
Social relations of production are primary and the fetishised facts and theories are the
only way in which these relations appear.' (31-2) For people in society, things are social
relations We do not encounter nature unfashioned and unmediated. Just as commodities are
social relations, facts are both commodities and social relations and science is an
integral part of the capitalist mode of production. The task of freeing ourselves from deference to hierarchical society and its science is
a unified one. At the theoretical level, that task will be complete when we see that the
following expressions are synonymous, when we grasp their inward meaning and realise that
they represent a set of eminently alterable conventions: fetishism, reification,
alienation, division of labour, private property, hypostatisation, misplaced concreteness.
In the paradigm of explanation of modern science, alienation is built into the fabric of
ultimate reality (or 'ontologised') by the substitution of a reified version of what we
consider to be real. In our socialisation into a scientised cosmology we learn to experience
this as the most concrete rendering of reality: this is misplaced concreteness, an
ontology of reification. As David Dickson and Michael Young have helped me to see, we are
socialised via the hidden curriculum of schools and in our later scientific education into
'a system for producing explanations in a particular form, one that can be linked
to the forms of technology (the means of production) on the one hand, and the forms
of social exploitation (the social relations of production) on the other' (Dickson).
The cosmology of modern science lays down the metaphysical assumptions in terms of which
scientists and other experts think, ask questions, evaluate answers, control nature and
other people and are controlled. David Dickson sometimes calls it the 'coding mechanism'
or 'generative structure'. It is very deep and abstract and not on the surface of everyday
life and science, at the same time that its forms define and generate the rules,
vocabulary and definitions of what we experience as the stuff of experience itself, of
facts, of theories, of sciences, of worlds, of the cosmology: the logos of our cosmos is
the scientific cosmology. We learn it by living it.* Once we begin to think of science as part of the problem of freeing ourselves from the
cosmology of hierarchical societies, we get two immediate benefits. The first is that
science no longer has a privileged place, inducing deference and fatalism, serving as a
spurious reservoir of authoritarian claims by experts. The fruits of that demystification
grow and deepen the roots of our socialism as the awareness penetrates through our
attitudes, beliefs and 'certainties'. The second benefit is that all sorts of alliances
between science and power get demystified, and radical critiques of them become apparent. This is, of course, not a new insight from the opposing point of view of the wielders
of power. In one of the earliest theoretical apologies for the vile system under which we
live, Andrew Ure's 1835 treatise on The Philosophy of Manufactures or an Exposition of
the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain, we
find the following conclusion to a long, rhapsodic exposition of automation in spinning:
'This innovation confirms the great doctrine already propounded, that when capital enlists
science in her service, the refactory hand of labour will always be taught docility.'
(368) The same expansive enthusiasm for using the reifications of science and technology
to produce the reification of people shines through the theoretical and autobiographical
writings of apologists for successive developments of industrial capitalism, for example,
Adam Smith, Josiah Wedgwood, W. Thompson, Charles Babbage, F. W. Taylor, Elton Mayo, Henry
Ford, Alfred P. Sloan Jnr. (GM), Thomas J. Watson (IBM), Harold Geneen (ITT), Eric Trist -
covering the two centuries from 1776 to the present. The opposite approach to the role of
science in industry lies at the heart of Marx's critique of the relations of *Lest it be thought that these claims can find no warrant in marxist exegetics and that
I make it up as I go along, have a look at Lucio Colletti's lucid 'Introduction' to the
Pelican edition of Marx's Early Writings, especially pp. 37-8, 47, 49, 50, 54; cf.
pp. 26, 33, 39 and, for a fuller development of a relational interpretation of Marx's
synonomy, see Ollman's Alienation, passim and his 'In Defence of "Internal
Relations" ', in which he points out that although Marx sometimes distinguishes
things from relations at another level he characteristically treats things as relations.
See also Arato, Telos 11, p. 25; Hernandez, NLR 72, p. 103; Eccleshall,
Radical Philosophy 11, p. 9. Finally, if my conceptions of ideology as a world view,
of alternative cosmology and of prefiguring seem weird and without precedent in marxist
writings, try thinking of them as developments from Gramsci's critique of scientism in
marxism in his conceptions of 'ideological hegemony', 'counter-hegemonic world-view' and
'prefigurative struggle'. See Boggs, G. Williams and Gramsci, among other writings in the
bibliography and resources list. production under capitalism. One statement of his conception of the role of science in
this system is: [In capitalist society] all means for the development of production transform
themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producer; they mutilate
the labourer into a fragment of a man degrade him to the level of an appendage of a
machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn into hated toil; they
estrange from him the intellectual potential of the labour-process in the same proportion
as science is incorporated into it as an independent power; they distort the conditions
under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more
hateful for its meanness. (Capital: 1:645; cf. p. 361) The common matrix of the social relations of production, including nature, science,
human nature and industry is already clear, as Colletti shows, in Marx's Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: In the section entitled "Private Property and Communism" Marx describes how
"man's relation to nature is directly his relation to man, and his relation to man is
directly his relation to nature", and this should be placed alongside his subsequent
remarks on industry: "Industry is the actual historical relationship of
nature, and thus of natural science, to man . . . the history of industry and
industry as it objectively exists is an open book of the human faculties and
human psychology which can be sensuously apprehended." That is, just as inter
human or social relationships are inconceivable apart from man's relationship to nature,
so his relationship to nature (and hence industrial production) is inconceivable apart
from men's social relationships among themselves. Introduction to Marx's Early Writings,
p.56) Our conceptions of these issues are, as well, part of a single problematic matrix. As
Murray Bookchin points out, both people and nature have always been the common victims of
hierarchical society; the concept of dominating nature emerged from the domination of some
people by others. (Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. l7). Once we transcend the
separation of science from society, we can see that having demystified commodities in the
economy as well as efficiency, authority and technology in the factory, we must move on to
demystify science in order to reunite nature and humanity. In some areas it is relatively easy to see that science is social relations. Once we
demystify the myth that in a lab 'We are all a team working together', we can see the
caste and class structure of the workbench and the tea room. We learn to notice the
structures of who can tell whom what to do, who makes decisions about appointments and
tenure (i.e., who has the power, however much 'consultation' may occur), whose names go on
papers (and in what order), who decides the direction and priorities of research, who gets
paid how much and on what length of contract. Science perfectly reflects the existing
division of labour in a class, hierarchical and authoritarian society. How many of us know
(much less alter) the spread of pay at their place of work; how many have an equal say
about appointments; how many take it in turns to scrub toilets or even wash glassware in a
lab or empty bedpans in a hospital, much less fix the tea and make and serve meals? These
may seem merely naive and utopian questions: I intend them to be both, but not merely so.
We may have become aware of and begun to change aspects of the division of labour in the
family as a result of the women's movement, but I think it's a rare scientist who has
applied the same attitudes and critique to his or her place of work, as are by now
becoming commonplace when thinking about the division of labour in the home and in
industrial factory settings. Something seems special, exempt from critique, about the
hierarchical division of labour in scientific and medical settings. At the cinema we can
laugh sympathetically with Charlie Chaplin tightening nuts at speed in Modern Times or
be moved by the woman in Family Life monotonously putting chocolates in a box. But
how many of us fully grasp that the production of scientific knowledge involves the same
hierarchical division of labour and proliferation of sub-specialities as the production of
any other commodity? Yet if you ask a scientist almost anything, the reply will be,
'That's not my field'. Specialisation and fragmentation of knowledge and research - and
journals - grow and grow. By 1967 there were 26,000 scientific and technological
periodicals; there were 4 in biochemistry in 1900 and 201 in 1960. Even the division of
labour among summarising and abstracting journals is getting out of hand. The power relations which we deplore in Beynon's Working for Ford exist closer
to home, as André Gorz has recently stressed: The subordination of the laboratory technician or anonymous researcher to his or her
boss, and of the latter to the head of the research department, is not very different, in
most cases, from the subordination of the assembly line worker to her or his foreman, and
of the foreman to the production engineer, etc.... The hierarchy in the production of
science is as oppressive as that in factory production. Science reflects, reinforces and, more over, is an integral part of the social division
of labour, the capitalist relations of production and capitalist power politics. ('The
Scientist as Worker', pp. l5-17) A central aspect and a pre requisite of solidarity
between scientists and other workers is that both come to see their involvement in a
common political and economic structure.- .the general one of a commodity society and the
specific one of a factory for producing commodities and their attendant social relations. Another area in which it is relatively easy to see science as social relations of the
same sort as in other parts of the economy, is in the funding and conduct of research, but
this can be done at very different levels. The arguments for seeing science as responding
to the needs of the people's rulers rather than to those of the people themselves, have
been well-illustrated in the critiques of the Rothschild 'customer-contract' government
proposals in Britain as well as in specific areas of research, for example, sickle-cell
anaemia in America and sensory deprivation in Britain and Ireland. Financial pressures on
research institutions from Science Research Councils and other funding agencies are
increasingly causing a shift to areas called 'fundamental applied science' where the
ideological/political component is becoming more explicit through direct attempts to cater
for the needs/demands of a market economy. Science cities oriented toward research-based
industry, e.g., in the Boston/Cambridge area and now being built in the other Cambridge as
a speculative college investment, are tangible signs of the growing integration of
formerly-ivory towers with high technology industry. No one should oppose research based
on use-values, but the emphasis seems to be on exchange-values in these cases. Bourgeois fashions and capital's requirements in research and the technology of
repression and of consumerism are familiar and important topics. So also is the
ideological nature of certain other areas of research, but here, as in work on the hazards
of work, it is often possible to stop at the level of use/abuse and fail to see that the
whole underlying rationale is ideological. Thus, in the British Flixborough disaster in
which 28 people were killed and 150 injured on a Saturday, the whole process for making
caprolactam was ideological. The official enquiry blamed a dogleg in a 20" temporary
bypass pipeline carrying cyclohexane past no. 5 storage tank There was said to be no
failure of management even up to the level of the board of directors of Nypro UK Ltd. The
'modifications were the real root of this' said the Chairman on BBC TV,. and the explosion
was explained as 'a series of errors unlikely ever to be repeated.' But this whale process
for making Nylon 6 was based on the need to get round a rival firm's patent, even though
the synthetic route was highly explosive. Not, therefore, a problem of careless
maintenance: the whole basis of the plant, its siting, its product, and its processes were
manifestations of capitalist ideology. An analogous critique of the Seveso disaster in
Northern Italy could be made. Analogous things can be said of the so-called 'scientific' research on IQ. As Les
Levidow is showing, the point is not merely that the concepts of race, heredity, and
environment and their relative proportions, are ideological and that the statistical
methods are dubious and the selection of tests and cases biased. The deeper issue is the
ideological basis of the whole set of assumptions projected onto (human) nature about
ordinal, meritocratic, quantitative and competitive intellectuality, whether seen as a
single factor 'g', whether 'convergent' or 'divergent', whether measured by culturally or
linguistically biased tests or not. 'Such assumptions reify a bourgeois social relation,
"intelligence", as a "thing", i.e., as a natural form of private
property possessed in varying quantifiable degrees by all human beings and produced
proportionately in relation to other "things": genetic endowment and
environmental conditioning,' (sez Les). In my utopia such traits are not experienced: the
collective works together with mutual aid until everyone is satisfied. In all these cases- in technology and in science - the ideology establishes not only
the details but the conceptual framework within which the work is conceived. In the previous sections on 'Science as Domination' and 'Science and the Division of
Labour' I have been discussing aspects of the social relations of science which are not
familiar to most scientists who are also radicals in their politics but which benefit from
being considered in the same framework as the critique of the factory. However, though
unfamiliar, they are not particularly novel or unpalatable for socialist scientists, even
though many have not as yet seen the need to act by joining trades unions and actively
struggling with other workers to overthrow capitalism. The deeper claim that the theories
and findings and world view of science should be seen as social relations is, of course,
much more unfamiliar and challenging. I don't know what other meaning to attach to the
conception of a socialist science, and it is intrinsic to that position that the
theoretical vision is inseparable from bringing it into being by prefiguring the end in
the means in the work and lives of radicals. That is the revolutionary meaning of saying
that real history is not about ideas or machines or people: it is about
where they meet, about practice. In the light of the unfamiliarity of the conception that
science is social relations it will be hard for many radicals to move to that position
from the one I have been reviewing, in which the social relations of science are like
other social relations in a capitalist society. How, then, can we make it more accessible?
It may help to connect it to a controversy which is more familiar: the philosophy of
nature of Herbert Marcuse and the criticisms of it. His conceptions of science, of nature
and of the necessity to change them in order to bring about liberation, are most
forcefully expressed in chapters 6, 7 and 9 of One Dimensional Man. Many of the
controversies about science and ideology in recent years are importantly related to the
issues which he discusses there, e.g., relevant work by Habermas, Schroyer, Schmidt,
Leiss, Cohen. Marcuse is certainly the fountainhead for many aspects of recent libertarian
views on science and ideology. It may therefore be useful to give a sharp criticism of his
position as away of helping sceptical comrades to find their critical bearings, and also
as an introduction to the theoretical tasks imposed by this perspective. It is a thesis which my argument shares with Marcuse's that 'the scientific undertaking
itself projects a specific set of ideological and societal assumptions.' In his essay on
'Natural Science and Human Theory: A Critique of Herbert Marcuse', Peter Sedgwick
complains that Marcuse draws his examples from easy prey: The only examples he quotes from actual scientific work come from the conformist wing
of applied sociology, a field where the social values of the researcher obviously have a
specifically determining role. Investigations from physics, chemistry, biology or
psychology are never instanced in the text. Without some such exemplification, Marcuse is
hardly justified in speaking of a general `shift in theoretical emphasis from the
metaphysical `What is . . . ?' to the functional 'How . . . ?'." If he had taken a
look at some general texts in physics or biochemistry, for example, he would have found
that the actual objective language in which sub-nuclear particles or protein molecules are
discussed suggests that the scientist’s continuing concern is, as ever, with a highly
non-metaphysical ``What is . . . ?" Until he can provide some harder detail
(similar to that, e.g. which links medieval scientific concepts with the total medieval
world-view), Marcuse’s intriguing suggestion that in a liberated society ``science
would arrive at essentially different concepts of nature and establish essentially
different facts" is utterly vacuous. (175) Here, then, is a trenchant challenge. In the decade since Sedgwick wrote, a lot has
been published to meet his call in the areas of psychology and biology, and some
suggestive work has been done in mathematics and physics by Bloor and Forman, though their
analyses are limited by their stopping a long way short of marxist analyses. Nevertheless,
Sedgwick's challenge still stands. It brings us to the holy of holies—to the point
where those who don't want to radicalise their science and their lives always go fastest.
'What about physics?' What about molecular biology?' One feels frog-marched up to a
fractionation column, an ultracentrifuge or a linear accelerator: 'OK, smartass, what's
ideological about that? Show me my science, my findings, are mediations of
social relations.' At the conference where an earlier version of this paper was first
presented, an old left communist professor of physics made a snide joke about
over-enthusiastic pioneers in new cities in Siberia claiming that revolutionary zeal could
change the second law of thermodynamics, while a liberal professor of molecular biology
claimed that there are still congenial labs in which one can work on relatively untainted
research problems. But at the same conference Luke Hodgkin on physics, Simon Pickvance on
molecular biology, Mike Cooley on trades union struggle and Althea Jones on scientific
imperialism, made contributions which begin to answer Sedgwick. In fact, Althea Jones even
taught us about colonialism and deference in scientific apparatuses. Even so, the demand
is fair and sets a hard task for analysis and struggle, though it is worth noting the
alacrity with which it is made, the framework for an acceptable answer, and the criteria
which are self-serving and positivist: 'Until you convince me, I'll go on cultivating my
garden, my status, my salary, my power and patronage and loving it.' We must ask, in a
hectoring way if necessary, 'Why spend so much time and energy attempting to exonerate
physics if special claims aren't (however implicitly) being based on it for ultimately
scientistic purposes?' In spite of all the questions we may want to ask in return, the challenge remains
important and brings us to another sense in which we have to move on. We need to conduct
the theoretical analyses—not because they require it and not via the traditional
history, philosophy and sociology of science and technology, but—for our own purposes
as marxist revolutionaries. We must analyse ideologically the scientific world-view,
particular sciences, particular traditions, particular theories and particular diseases,
showing how they mediate and come to reinforce the formations and socio-economic
structures of particular epochs and settings. In his criticism of Marcuse, Sedgwick grants
the link between medieval scientific concepts and the total medieval world-view. We must
analyse that same connection in the succeeding period, since it was the one in which the
metaphysical foundations of modern science were being laid. Radicals—and even radical
scientists—who are fairly well-up on what Lacan or Althusser or Mandel or Colletti
was thinking last Wednesday, who feel that they should know something about pre-capitalist
economic formations—still know little or nothing about the metaphysical assumptions
of the modern world-view and have no sense of needing to know anything about them or their
ideological role. In order to change this situation and meet the challenge about the
development and deepest assumptions of modern science and society, we must move on to make
more subtle and more political the existing marxist analyses of the so-called 'Scientific
Revolution'. For example, we should show the structural congruence between the political
theory of possessive individualism and the development of seventeenth century atomism; the
identity of the movements which enthroned the commodity form and exchange value at the
expense of use-value on the one hand and enthroned modern scientific explanations and
banished purposive explanations on the other; the ideological compromise inherent in
Cartesian mind-body dualism; the relations between the 'mechanical philosophy' and the
development of capitalism and the Protestant ethic; the relationship between forms of
analysis in science and the forms and stages of economic activity, e.g. in the histories
of mathematics and statistics. We must also look at the claims and the politics of the
alternative cosmologies of, e.g., the Hermeticists, the alchemists, the millenarians the
neo-Platonists and study the ideological struggles which were involved. These are not new topics for historians, even marxist ones. But they are new ones for
the second generation of the New Left, who look to history with a transcendent eye and
with a richer framework of interpretation than the 'vulgar marxist' theory of one-to-one
correspondence between the intellectual and cultural 'superstructure' and the
socio-economic 'base'. We are interested in history for the agitation we can get out of
it, for the knots it can untangle about the origins and structure of our present forms of
deference and mystification. For example, the critique of the banishment of final causes
in science helps us to understand and combat current bureaucracies; the critique of
Cartesian mind-body dualism helps us to struggle against medical hegemonies and to develop
our sense of being a person. We look to history for lessons and warnings and
morale-boosting precedents—all thoroughly disreputable motives for all but a few old
left scholars. And the warmth of those few shines through their work so that they can
speak directly to younger people; I am thinking particularly of E. P. Thompson, Raymond
Williams and Stuart Hall. Conversely, a new brittleness and desiccation radiates from some
of the certainties of their putatively ‘New' Left successors. Moving on into the eighteenth century, we need to examine the links between biological
and medical theory on the one hand and the development of social and political
institutions and philosophies, looking deeper and more overtly politically than, e.g.,
Michel Foucault. Looking at diseases in particular (in this and later periods) Karl Figlio
suggests examining the relationship between the 'recognition' of a disease and the social
niche for it—a convergence between role theory in illness behaviour and the socio
political construction of reality. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the
relations between biological and social and economic theories in the context of radical
and revolutionary movements, have begun to be investigated, as have later developments in
evolutionary, psychological, imperialist and entrepreneurial theory, e.g., from
Malthusianism to social evolutionism via Darwinian and Spencerian evolutionism, and from
the Idéologues and Lamarck to French biological, psychological and social theory and
clinical medicine. As we consider the ideological nature of science we shouldn't forget
that the concept of ideology itself is also historical. The original Ideologues were
people in France at the end of the eighteenth century who were posed psycho physiological
problems (via the 'mind-body interaction') when the blade of the guillotine fell. They saw
it as their general task to subject the ideas of science to their science of ideas— idéologie.
Successive layers of pejorative connotation were added by Napoleon's opposition to their
influence and then by Marx and Engels' analyses, which almost led to the equation of
ideology with false consciousness. Similarly, 'positivism' was originally a term and a
secular religion coined by Auguste Comte, who was greatly influenced by physiology and
phrenology. Emile Durkheim's classical treatise on The Division of Labour owed much
to Comte, to his master Saint-Simon and to Herbert Spencer's theories on the
'physiological division of labour'. American reactionary social theory, e.g., Talcott
Parsons, was inspired by an eminent physiologist, L. J. Henderson, who was able to lend
strength to his ultra conservative reaction to radicalism in the American depression by
serving up Pareto's fascistic social theories buttressed by physiological analogies. I
know that I'm sketching; all I want to convey is that at every level there are important
links between scientific traditions and the growth of urban industrialism and the division
of labour (in France, Germany, USA and Britain) which must be made more explicit and then
tied firmly to the development of modern sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology,
ethology, physiology, medicine and biology. After all, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to
the creator of pre-frontal leucotomy (Moniz), to a reactionary theorist of reactionary
theories of brain function (Eccles), and to an ex-apologist for Hitlerian racism who won
fame as an interpreter of nature's inevitable hierarchical ways and who applies the same
framework to the interpretation of young radicals and society's ills (Lorenz). Various
forms of biologism continue to thrive, the most recent being E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology,,
hailed in the London Sunday Times as 'a new branch of science' (6 June 1976)
and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. All of these manifestations of social
Darwinism seek to turn our gaze from human praxis toward biological determinants. Once we have removed our blinkers and looked deeper into the constitutive role of
social formations in science and the dialectical relations between science and social
formations at every level, we must also reconsider the alternative visions of, e.g.,
William Blake, William Morris, John Ruskin, A. R Wallace, Peter Kropotkin. It is as well
to remember that there have ever been alternative cosmologies and also unsung radicals
whose histories have been minimised or ignored. In Dallas I studied more Texas history at
school than the US. and the rest of the world put together, but it wasn't until recently
when I read my son’s copy of Harvey Wasserman's beautifully biased paperback History
of the United States that I learned that in my home town there had existed one of the
earliest and most effective radical newspapers and the earliest farmer’s revolt
against the marketing cartels. Similarly, the discovery in the wake of recent agitation
that real black history was lost or stolen and women's history hidden, should encourage us
to look both backwards and more broadly for solidarity. Analogous studies have been conducted in the bourgeois sociology of knowledge with
respect to the development of quantum mechanics and molecular biology. We must radicalise
them. Similarly, the gamut of disciplines in the second industrial revolution-scientific
management, operational research, cybernetics, computer science, systems theory-along with
attendant developments in mathematics, await ideological critique, just as do their
palliative expressions in industrial relations: job enrichment, workers' participation,
industrial sociology and psychology. Moving closer to home, their radical critiques which
are helping us to demystify the social relations of science and technology must not remain
unexamined. The study of the labour process is itself becoming a candidate for a
scientistic radical orthodoxy. As David Albury is showing, we must not consider our
sources of radical insight to be immune from political scrutiny-the work of Gorz, Marglin,
Braverman. When we learned from Gorz that scientific labs should be seen from the
perspective of the factory, we must return to discover the roots of the mediations which
give scientific workers their false consciousness. When we have learned from Marglin that
discipline was more basic than the needs of the mechanical processes of the new technology
in the industrial revolution, we must look again at the technology and convert it into
social relations. The history of technology is not a history of gears and mules and jennys
alone: it is the history of choices and of practice. When we have learned from Braverman
how pervasive the reification of the labour process has become, we must return and study
the history of struggle and generate strategies for subversion. Do we look at the past as though the present was not available for comment? No, we do
so because these conceptions are alive in the present, but their oppressive political
roles and ideological meaning are somewhat less difficult to discern if we analyse them by
way of the unravelling of historical study; moreover, epochs from which we have some of
the perspective of distance, help us to see more clearly where and how to attack in our
own. Finally, showing that ideas and institutions and structures of social relations in
other forms, have histories, helps us to recall that they are humanly created conventions
which can be un-made by other people. They were thought up, created or 'discovered' by
particular people in particular places at particular times. The weight of tradition can
be lifted, and analysis can help us take its measure. Failure to do so in the 1960s
produced the painful false euphoria which led radicals to believe that all bourgeois
institutions are paper tigers, and many of us are pretty chewed up as a result. I'll just mention one or two other examples of theoretical work which can help to
demystify the ruling ideology and to contribute towards confidence that once a set. of
conventions can be seen as such, another set can be fought for. We need to look much more
closely at the prevailing ideas of health, disease, adaptation and maladaptation and at
particular aspects of the medical model and particular diseases. We think it not very
controversial to consider Victorian fainting and Viennese hysteria as reflections of the
lot of women in those societies. We must vigorously pursue feminist analyses of a current
analogue-anorexia nervosa. Similarly, we must develop a medical sociology which looks at
the relations between medical knowledge and medical hierarchies. Now, who is to do all this? I know someone working on some aspect or other of very
topic I have mentioned. More importantly, perhaps, a growing number of them are not
experts or professionally employed in the history, philosophy or sociology of science but
are working scientists or people trying to live in non-conventional ways, who are
attempting to break out of their positivist careerism and see the political nature of
their work (or former work) and its setting. After I'd been doing this sort of thing for
over a year I returned to an academic seminar in a department where I'd worked for a
decade. I could feel the constraints closing in on what I felt able to say and even get
myself together to think. The conventions of the academic division of labour and the
pseudo-neutrality of discussion-astringently removing one's values from discourse to
remain as vapours in the atmosphere-reasserted themselves with no trouble. Non-specialist
are doing something to break down the existing division of intellectual labour., in which
it's no accident that science and its social and political relations are studied in
different departments and often in different institutions and in different ways, and this
occurs in a way hermetically sealed from the rest of everyday ('private’) life. In
looking at their own research and settings, those conducting such studies are not becoming
experts in a new meta-discipline. Rather, they are (often working collectively) learning
to theorise their own experience. This seems to me to be another important respect in
which the second generation of New Left radicals differ from their predecessors. What they
have to say has to do with their own struggles and ambitions, their own intellectual,
social, sexual, class and familial settings. They are breaking out of reading habits which
consisted of a few key, highly specialised journals, one or two abstracts, plus
‘cultural leavening’ with Nature, Science, New Scientist and perhaps Scientific
American, and are reading other things which aren’t escapes from their work but
attempts to integrate that context with their politics. That is, they are attempting to
make sense of their own experiences, to interpret them as part of a set of relations. As
Francois George has rightly pointed out, ‘The division of labour is, first of all,
the prohibition of access to the totality. (Telos 18, p.59) We have to face the experience that becoming aware of the contradictions in scientific
work is a painful process and that having embarked on a programme of theorising their
experience, many people slip away, dragged down, demoralised. discouraged. defeated,
dropping in. The problem of not pushing too far is very acute all along the front of the
left, and providing sufficient support and solidarity to sustain commitment is a large
task to which we have to devote more thought , caring and energy. At the personal level it
is the problem of keeping collective work going in a way which is sufficiently rewarding
and sustaining to compensate for the heightened contradictions in the rest of life. Complementing this problem at the theoretical level is the need to make widely
available a steady diet of counter-course materials for the sciences, technology and
medicine-annotated reading lists for use by working scientists to bring to bear on their
own work and settings. Historical, philosophical, politico-economical and other explicitly
marxist writings must be produced, reproduced and critically interpreted. This, of course,
is one of the main justifications for the existence in Britain of the Radical Science
Journal and other radical theory publications and for their listing one another's
contents and keeping in touch through the Radical Publications Group and disseminating
their work more widely through the Publications Distribution Co-op. The aim is not to
reproduce the existing division of labour and narrow distribution of publications. We want
to fight against isolated specialists producing and reading narrow, though nominally
radical, journals in each field. Once we move on from the use/abuse model, the bourgeois social sciences and the
sociology of knowledge and go beyond the social relations of science and social relations
in science, and seek to approach radical science as marxists, we discover that our
troubles are only beginning. Anyone who is still awake and is in rapport with the
spirit of my argument won't be surprised at this point, since it would only be a new
version of scientism to claim that there is a unique, correct answer to the question,
'Which marxism?' One's reading of Marx, like one's philosophies of nature, science,
individuals and society, depends on one's socialisation and class and hence one's
essentially political and ideological perspectives. Of course, to say that is to reject (notice that I don't say 'disprove' or 'show to be incorrect') those readings of Marx
which make a sharp distinction between science and ideology and replace the
authoritarianism of science allied with capital with the authoritarianism of science
allied with a vanguard party. There are a number of interpretations of marxism which seek
to base themselves on scientific certainty, beginning with Engels' more emphatic claims
for 'dialectical materialism' and extending through Stalinism and its current theoretical
scientism in the work of Althusser and his growing body of interpreters and followers. I
am not suggesting that we have nothing to learn from this tendency but am pointing out
that the separation of the early 'anthropological', 'humanistic' and 'ideological'
writings from ‘mature', 'objective' and 'scientific' writings cannot be squared with
the thesis that science is ideological. Put another way, if we could pay sufficient
attention to the role of the sciences in serving and providing conceptual support for what
Althusser calls 'Ideological State Apparatuses', we would find his distinction between
scientificity and the ideological, unravelling until it is clearly seen to be merely the
yarn that it is. There are, of course, other claims for 'scientific' support for different readings of
Marx. In the week during which I was preparing this, I turned to the AgitProp page in
London's Time Out and found the following notice for Friday: 'Marx Memorial Library
Spring programme starts with a lecture by Maurice Cornforth on "How Marxist
Philosophy has its Basis in the Sciences" Adm. Free'. Thus, the orthodox Communist
Party author of a three-volume treatise on Dialectical Materialism can quieten our
uncertainties. I would argue that for a socialist the problem is the reverse: how to bring
about a situation in which 'scientific' philosophy has its basis in marxism. I should also
like to mention that various revisionist tendencies leading to the 'democratic socialist'
position of parliamentary parties, also lay claim to a scientific basis for their
socialism. Indeed, the original marxist revisionist, Eduard Bernstein, claimed that his
doctrine of Evolutionary Socialism (1899) was based on biological evolutionism, and
it was on this foundation that the German Social Democratic Party was founded (1898). G.
B. Shaw and the British Fabians found the same arguments appealing, as did the first
Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. Biological evolutionism was claimed as the solid
foundation for quite a range of political positions-Kropotkin's Russian anarchism,
Hitler's National Socialism, Mussolini's Fascism, British Imperialism, American Robber
Barons, etc., etc. But, you will say, the point is to determine which of these claims is the basis for the
'correct line'? Behind this question lies the asserted need for a basis for imposed
discipline, and alongside that lies the fused metaphysical/ psychological need for
ontological security. Without theoretical unity and discipline with an authoritative
basis, how can we bring about socialism? My own answer to this cluster of closely-related
problems is that imposed authority cannot bring about what I intend by socialism, so the
development and propagation of a 'correct line' loses its hegemonic appeal. Ways to
achieve socialism and the range of acceptable values and priorities within a socialist
society require as permissive an atmosphere and framework as is consistent with the task
of destroying capitalism and constructing socialism. I find a close affinity between the
search for a 'correct line' on the one hand and the claims for 'scientific socialism' on
the other. These, in turn, go hand in hand with competitive, dismissive and manipulative
political processes on the Left which reproduce the very hierarchical and authoritarian
structures and attitudes which we are trying to transcend. So, I am arguing against those
versions of marxism which claim to be scientific, and I want to demystify what I take to
be their scientism-a scientism which provides as spurious a basis for experts and
authoritarians on the Left as it does in bourgeois societies and their nominally socialist
hierarchical counterparts. We are therefore left with the problem of generating our practice from experience
instead of from the guidance offered by a 'correct line'. If we could spend a fraction of
the energy gai ning and theorising that experience as we do in arguing about
'conjunctures' and the like, we'd be on our way. I have spelled out my conception
of the relationship between socialist science, the problem of ideology and the question of
'Which marxism?' as sharply as I can in the hope of making the debate on these issues an
explicit one. My experience has been that certain theoretical and other sectarian
advocates react to libertarian positions and discussions of science and ideology as though
there is nothing to discuss and much to dismiss as snidely and offhandedly as possible.
This, of course, can be seen to flow naturally from certainty. My point-which follows from
my position-is to attempt to get it granted that there is something to debate. If there is
nothing to debate on this front what follows below is pointless, since the conception of
an alternative cosmology and the importance of prefigurative struggle embodying the ends
in the means, become superfluous luxuries (an 'unscientific humanistic problematic', I
think it's called) which socialists, in their urgent need to 'seize power' as
'efficiently' as possible, cannot afford. The sort of exploration I have in mind is a lot
messier and is caught well in the matter and manner of the following passages from
Christopher Gray's anthology of Situationist writings, Leaving the Twentieth Century: All the main tactical and strategic debates between different groups of
revolutionaries, all the possibilities they neglected at the time, should be re-examined:
re-examined in the light of the failure of the whole traditional revolutionary movement.
Marx is obviously the first person whose thought must be rediscovered; nor should this
present much difficulty in view of the extent of the documentation and the enormity of the
lies that have been told about him. We must also reassess the attitude of the anarchists
in the First Internati onal, Blanquism, Luxembourgism, the Council movement in Germany and
Spain, Kronstadt, the Makhnovists, etc. etc. Nor should there be any mistake about the
practical importance of the utopian socialists. Nor, as should be obvious, is this just a
question of a whole lot more books to read. Its sole purpose is to help in the
construction of the new revolutionary movement-the new revolutionary movement of which we
have seen so many signs over the last few years, including last but not least ourselves.
It will be utterly different. We must understand these signs by reference to the classical
revolutionary project, and vice versa. We have to rediscover the history of the movement
of history itself, which has been so well concealed and distorted. Besides, when all is
said and done, it is only the revolutionary project-plus a few experimental artistic
groups which are, in any case, generally pretty closely linked to it-that offers any hope
of truly living at all today: which allows us to take an objective interest in modern
society and in the possibilities it contains. There is no other way to be faithful to, or even to understand, our comrades of the
past than to reinvent the problem of revolution. Why does this seem so difficult? Starting
from the experience of a free everyday life-it isn't so difficult as all that; and more
over it seems to us that a number of young people today are quite acutely aware of this.
And to feel it strongly enough enables us to rediscover, to redeem, our own lost
history. It is not difficult for the kind of thought which is prepared to question
everything that exists. It is not enough not to have abandoned philosophy, as
almost all philosophers have - or not to have abandoned art, as almost all artists have -
or not to have abandoned real opposition to contemporary reality, as almost all
political activists have. And those who have not abandoned philosophy, art and politics
will find that all three lead to the same transcendence. It is only specialists, whose
individual power depends on the power of a whole society of specialisation, who have
abandoned the critical truth of their various disciplines in order to enjoy the
more positive wages of their function. But all real forms of research flow together
into one totality, just as the people will get together one more time to try to escape
from their prehistory. (pp. 42-3) If we turn to the question of what needs doing in practice, I want to argue that we
must not only learn to make our lives and politics more coherent and attack the division
of labour by theorising our experience. We must also develop an alternative social and
natural cosmology which we strive to bring into being by experiencing our own theories.
Thus, another way of putting the dialectical relations between theory and practice so that
it embraces the essential notion of prefigurative struggle is to say: theorise our own
experience and experience our own theories. Among the experiences we must learn to
theorise are our theoretical experiences and their relations with our research and
teaching, our trades union, our social, sexual, familial and most intimate experiences. In
order to theorise those experiences, we must be in touch with them. That is, we must see
the role of a vision of a socialist totality or counter-hegemonic world-view and try to
implement aspects of its coherence as we attempt to dismantle the reifications,
fragmentations and alienations of the existing cosmology and the lives it imposes upon us.
The conception of a socialist science seems to me to lead directly to a call for this sort
of cunningly utopian behaviour. Once we move from the belief that science is
value-neutral, we must ask what values it involves. Once we move from the abstract
relativism of the bourgeois sociology of knowledge, we are in the realm of competing
ideologies which embrace all departments of knowledge, belief and living and are
mediations of class struggle. Philosophies of nature, human nature and society are sets of
conventions elaborated in the service of hegemonic sets of human values and social
relations. People conceived of and shaped nature and society in particular ways as a
result of their practical activities. 'As individuals express their life, so they are.
What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they
produce and how they produce.' (German Ideology, p.32) If we want nature and society to have a different shape, we must make different
productions and in different ways. Not only is science not neutral, but its role in
bolstering and mediating authority and deference also helps us to see the need to address
ourselves to cosmology itself. Once again, ideology is not-as is so often claimed by
various marxists and certainly by bourgeois apologists-distortion. It is a hegemonic
world-view embracing all of nature, life and society. The philosophy of nature of modern
science and society is not an exception to that claim but an example of it, and positivism
is its most potent social expression. Positivism claims to separate facts from their
network of relations, evaluations and meanings. People who separate facts from values,
science from society, and claim that their thinking is not ideological, are positivists.
As E. A. Burtt has pointed out, There is an exceedingly subtle and insidious danger in positivism. If you cannot avoid
metaphysics, what kind of metaphysics are you likely to cherish when you sturdily suppose
yourself to be free from the abomination? Of course, it goes without saying that in this
case your metaphysics will be held uncritically, because it is unconscious. Moreover, it
will be passed on to others far more readily than your other notions, inasmuch as
it will be propagated by insinuation rather than by direct argument.(p.225) Burtt was putting this point in his classical study of The Metaphysical Foundations
of Modern Physical Science. We learn capitalist metaphysics in the same way as we
learn all our other assumptions, and there is no point at which we will reach the 'end of
metaphysics' any more than we had reached the 'end of ideology' when the agents of the CIA
announced that we had in the early 1960s. Once we realise the inescapability of
metaphysics at every level of experience, including scientific experience, we should
relate it to the question of the evaluative and purposive dimension in science. Burtt
says, 'Now it may well be that science, despite its rejection of final causes, reveals the
presence and functioning of values in the fundamental categories it selects and the ways
it applies them. If so, then an adequate scientific metaphysics will not be able to manage
without teleology in some form, and it becomes a question of first-rate importance what
that form is to be.' (308) It may appear that I am carelessly and repetitiously drifting back into bourgeois
philosophy of science. My point in reverting to Burtt's analysis of the origins and
foundations of the modern scientific world-view, is to remind us that the critique of the
deepest assumptions of scientific metaphysics leads directly to the problem of values. Now
the next move is the big one. Once that problem is before marxists it can only be seen in
terms of ideology, and we are then faced with an urgent task. If nature does not exist for
us (in that we cannot relate to it) value-free, then we bring values to nature; we create
and discover them in our interactions with nature. This is a process which calls for us to
bring a world-view into being which competes with and replaces the existing cosmology of
science and society. The critique of the most abstract features of scientific metaphysics
here unites with the most concrete call for a liberating politics of everyday life at
work, in the home and in other social relations. In order to attack repressive structures,
we must learn to see them and to see how deep they go into the innermost recesses of our
most abstract theories and of our interpersonal and psychological being. I'm starting to lose my nerve, so I'd better try to stand back for a bit. I think that
what follows has real strengths on the side of demystification but profound weaknesses on
the side of specific practices which will bring into being an alternative cosmology or
counter-hegemonic world-view. Much more development of strategies and techniques to
generate and sustain prefigurative struggles is required, and I think I've only glimpsed
at the problems. But I still think I've seen enough to make a beginning. Since writing the
early drafts of this exploratory working programme, I've found that study of, and
struggles about, the labour process provide a very fruitful orienting perspective which
promises to unite industrial struggles and the New Left concentration on the politics of
process (see below and my review of Braverman in RSJ 4). This perspective
can avoid the extreme theoreticism of the history of ideas and the extreme
anti-theoretical activism of a purely workerist strategy. By this I mean that the special
claims made for science have led us to treat it and its history and its social relations
(both 'inside' the scientific community and in its history and its relations with the rest
of society-ultimately a false distinction since the deep structures of those sets of
relations are the same) as different from other human practices by virtue of its
scientificity. At the other extreme, the focus of many marxist groups and perspectives on
the exclusive revolutionary role of the industrial working class (and the growing
proletarianisation of scientific workers) has prevented us from seeing the need to develop
strategies for praxis for the mediators-the experts in education, in scientific research
and in science-based industry. (Time for another reminder that I always want to imply
technology and medicine when I say 'science'.) So on the one hand I want to move toward
the industrial model in saying that science isn't fundamentally different from industry
and should be subjected to the same political and ideological analyses, while on the other
hand I want to maintain that scientific politics need not be industrial proletarian
(‘point of production') politics alone. (This is a slightly misleading way of putting
the position, since I would also want to say some things about enriching traditional
models for industrial struggles.) Mediators of power and ideology have their own struggles
which should be closely integrated with-but still have distinct aspects from-those of
other workers. One of the main reasons I have had for developing these arguments is to begin to search
for a practice for these mediators. At the level of theory and related activities, some
of us have been trying to get scientists out of the atheoretical and sometimes
antitheoretical backwater in which it has operated, by working closer to other left groups
in the areas of greater solidarity and cooperation in theoretical work and distribution of
publications (e.g., Radical Publications Group and Publications Distribution Co-op). At
the same time, we are trying to say to the rest of the Left that there is nothing very
special about science deserving of the sort of deference it gets from radicals whose
education led them to hold science in awe. So, we've had to get going in teaching
ourselves some political theory, in working with other radical groups and in demystifying
science to others. This is a beginning within the Left, but it leaves open the question of
what expert mediators in science, education and science-based industry should be up to in
their own work and living settings. It's no accident that on the one hand there are many
highly-qualified people who have tried and failed to achieve some sort of voluntary
proletarianisation, on the other the attraction of life-style and community politics has
been very great often with painful results. What are they/we to do? How can we convert
these insights and energies into politically relevant struggle? I am arguing that our left perspectives after the collapse of the student movement,
efforts of voluntary proletarianisation and the counter-culture, still have something to
offer through analytical work and other aspects of prefigurative struggle to develop
towards a counter-hegemonic world view. This is to be done by confronting bourgeois
ideology and capitalist power in our homes, communities and institutions. Thus, sexual and
life-style politics are central to the task. Our programme is certainly to join and
work with whatever traditional trades union structures exist, but I think we have
something else to offer as well. The existing metaphysical assumptions of science (which
I've discussed at length in earlier writings) continue to play a central role in the
ideological hegemony of the existing social order via its provision of claims to certainty
and objectivity, underpinning and constituting hierarchical and authoritarian structures
and social relations. It is as true at the level of theory as it is at that of other areas
of life. As Marx says in a crucial passage in The German Ideology, The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly
interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of
real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as
the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as
expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a
people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.- real, active men, as they
are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the
intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be
anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-
process.(p.37) The union of the conceptions of metaphysics, including the metaphysics of science; the
'furthest forms', including the most esoteric and abstract science; and the rooting of
these in life process-makes the essential connections for which I am arguing. Thus scientific workers and other experts have a key task in beginning to demystify
science and its role in authoritarian societies, both in theory and in practice. This is
likely to be a relatively special task for them because of their mediating
role, their education, their reading and theoretical understanding. If they conduct this
work out of touch with trades union struggles, their own work will degenerate into
idealist self-indulgence. But if it is done in challenging and changing the labour process
in institutional settings in concert with working-class struggles, they may have an
important contribution to make to progressive politics and revolutionary struggle. Now,
having sketched some of the problems of the rest of this essay, what do I mean by New Left
and process politics? Once again, it's only a beginning-an invitation to others to
generate strategies and take the argument and the struggles further. What I want to say now is all jumbled up, and I haven't got the right style or
vocabulary to say it. But that doesn't mean that I think there are no stones for a solid
foundation in it. I want to give some meaning and content to the conception of
prefigurative struggle - to evoke a conception which I can't make properly explicit. I had
thought of expressing it in terms of differences between the Old Left and the New Left,
but it goes beyond that. Let me move backwards in time and try to creep up on it. What is
so exhilarating and moving about Marx-even at his driest - is that he takes the framework
which people experience as 'the way things are', the apparently unalterable laws of
society imbedded in laws of nature, and he shows that although experienced as real and
although historically necessary, they are part of a terrible, oppressive and exploitative
confidence trick which will change partly as a result of its own developmental processes
and partly as a result of people joining together in sustained revolt. Political economy
is shown to be amenable to critical evaluation (hence the subtitle of Capital) and
therefore to transcendence through struggle. What characterised the movement which was
called the New Left was that it broke out of the restricting framework of Stalinism,
preoccupation with the Soviet Union and official communist parties and laid great stress
on participatory democracy and spontaneous initiatives by interested groups nationally and
inter--nationally, involving direct action and confrontation with bureaucratic and police
powers. Some aspects: Hungary; Krushchev's denunciation of Stalin; Castro’s
revolution; civil rights struggles; Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; anti-Vietnam War
demonstrations; Free Speech Movement and a growing number of student protests and
occupations around the world but especially in America, Britain and Europe-as a
significant new experience for that generation and for most of their teachers; revival of
shop steward and related shop floor militancy; willingness to drop-out and experiment with
new ways of living and new experiences, e.g., drugs and the further reaches of rock and
progressive music; community struggles and particularly powerful interest-group
struggles-blacks, women, gays. All of these-in various combinations for different people-led to a revival of
transcending and transforming strategies which moved further and further away from
traditional revolutionary strategies with centralised organisations with hierarchical
structures. A lot of the main texts of the period were written by the young participants,
but there was also a significant revival and translation of authors such as Rosa
Luxemburg, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, along with the increasing
penetration of the early writings of Marx and exploration of other dimensions of culture
in the greater awareness of the Frankfurt School, especially Marcuse's efforts to draw
upon and radicalise Freud for a marxist social psychology. Much of the New Left goes on
with its theoretical work, its fashions in translation and its increasing rigour and
sophistication. But there were elements in the above list which seem to me not to be adequately
characterised by the label New Left, although they owe a great deal to the general
ambiance. If we emphasize the libertarian and situationist and life-style aspects at the
expense of the hyper-intellectual and formal ones, we get nearer to what I mean. The
tendency I want to evoke has origins and a manner which is less relentlessly theoretical
and priorities which are at once more immediate and more visionary. It involves a greater
fusion of the personal and the political-making political work and relations more personal
and personal relations more political. I recall someone once saying that he couldn't see
how the production of a publication-questions of some people doing only editorial work and
others doing only production-had anything to do with the significance of its contents.
That's the sort of point of view I'm not trying to evoke. Efforts towards socialism
should, as far as we can manage it, be examples of what we advocate. Above all, political
and personal work should be reflexive. This perspective owes much to the principled
naivety of the student movement and the struggles of the women's movement which had
important roots in the way women were treated in the early 60s student movement. Opposers
of oppression in one sphere, e.g., black Africans, Vietnamese peasants - should not
oppress in other spheres, e.g., women, children, shy people. Music and/or drugs and/ or
altered life-styles and sexual relations were important for many people who share these
reactions and use them as more important indices of others' politics than their supposed
theoretical positions. Anti-authoritarians should not be in positions of authority in our
own movement. Our conferences on self-management should be self-managed. Opponents of the
hierarchical division of labour should not be heads of departments or labs. The
hypocrisies of traditional parliamentary socialists and reformers produce endless examples
of the issues-a Labour Minister of Health who is phasing out private beds in hospitals is
found to have hired one recently. A Campaign for the Advancement of State Education
finally passes a rule that none of its officers can have children in private, fee-paying
schools, but only after protracted debate. Only socialist processes can produce socialist
results. Thus, competitive, individualist, sexist, patriarchical, authoritarian and hierarchical
attitudes, ways of behaving and structures should always be struggled against in ourselves
and throughout the movement. It may be very irritating and may break your train of
thought, but it's always relevant for a woman to correct you when you say 'he' when it
should be 'or she'. Discipline and work should come from commitment rather than from
authority and hectoring. No mental labour without manual labour. Criticism and
self-criticism are central to struggle. Those are some of the aspects of what I'm trying
to convey under the heading of prefigurative struggle in the politics of process. I wish I could think of a memorable phrase to put next to New Left. It’s a new
generation of consciousness and practice. 'Politics of process', `politics of intimacy',
'politics of everyday life', even 'permanent cultural revolution' express aspects of the
altered approach and commitment, but none of those phrases come trippingly off my tongue.
'Textures' versus structures', we called it in a commune I once tried to live in. If we
cast our minds back to the Red Scientists of the 1930s Gary Werskey has studied, we later
find them in charge of large labs with professorships and many other markers of
hierarchical status and power. Some became heads of Oxbridge colleges and other elitist
institutions. The same is true in the liberal arts. I recall one (who would not call
himself a socialist but sees himself as radical) who said that he was elitist but not
authoritarian. The approach I am trying to convey finds that claim absurd. Power is not to be seized but dissipated; knowledge is to be socialised. Different
aspects of one's life are to be considered in relation to the others: how and where one
lives; who does what at home and at work; what boundaries are there/should there be
between home and work? What characterises this approach is that it builds on Marx's
analysis of the conventional framework of bourgeois economic and social relations, the New
Left's analysis of the conventional framework of twentieth-century marxism, but it goes on
to consider what aspects of other frameworks and boundaries are to be altered in bringing
about socialism. And then it sets out to prefigure the ends in the means. This includes,
by the way, the sort of exploratory and tentative way I'm trying to write, knowing that
there are false starts and wrong trails and blunders. If we abandon the 'one right way'
search for the correct objective line, we see the search for paths as a much more loose
process. It's the antithesis of the hyper-clever and articulate philosophers who live off
scoring. I used to encounter them in Cambridge with a mixture of fear and despising. They
took great pride in stamping on tentative shoots, lest they turn out to be weeds. Never
mind nurturing them in the hope that they might flower: we have to police the garden. This is all an attempt to convey the second sense in which it's time to move on-the
need for our socialism to penetrate and transform our science. But it cannot do that
unless it is at the same time penetrating and trans- forming the rest of our lives. That, perhaps, is the chief difference between new left
intellectuals and prefigurative struggle. As Arlo Guthrie said of the inspecting sergeant
at his military recruitment, 'leaving no part untouched'. Another expression of the same
theme-relating theoretical work and the right to an opinion-is the Italian mother of ten's
observation on the Pope's latest ban on contraception: 'He no playa da game, he no makea
da rules'. I am still trying to find expressions which evoke the central reflexive or
self-referential feature of the development beyond New Left politics, attempting to
diminish the distance between theoretical work and practical struggles on the one hand and
one's own life on the other. André Breton captured part of it in his 1935 'Speech to the
Congress of Writers'. ‘"Transform the world,"’ Marx said; "Change
life," Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.' (Manifestos of
Surrealism, p.241) Nearly forty years later Jerry M. Cohen caught the central point in
a ‘Discussion' in Radical Philosophy: 'Many of us, especially those on the
libertarian left, believe that the character of the revolutionary movement must as far as
possible be made to reflect and display the character of the society we want to build,
that the character of that society will be largely determined by the character of the
struggles of which it is the outcome.' (RP 4, p.25) Perhaps, then, I'm talking
about what distinguishes libertarian socialists from other socialists: I'm not sure.
Another evocation of the impulse I'm after is from a Situationist article on 'The
Transformation of Everyday Life': In fact, everything depends on the intransigence with which one is prepared to ask
oneself. How am I living? ... In these circumstances, to evade the political
problem posed by the poverty of everyday life can only mean to evade the complete
boundlessness of one's own demands to live life to the full-demands which could not lead
to anything less than the reinvention of revolution itself. ... Alternatively, if we see
everyday life as the frontier between the dominated and the non-dominated sectors of life,
and therefore as its most problematic area, then it is vitally important we succeed in
replacing the present ghettos by a frontier constantly expanding in every direction,
ceaselessly creating new possibilities. (Gray, Leaving the 20th Century, p.36) Yet it is painfully obvious to those of us who have tried, that we cannot advance on
all fronts at once: we haven't got the resources and are too screwed up by our own
socialisation and the contradictions in the society in which we live. We need to leaven
our struggles with large reserves of compassion for ourselves and realise how crippled we
are by our own contradictions. On reading this, Brian Hurwitz wanted it stressed even more
and asked me to add a greater sense of the experience of struggle- 'perhaps nausea-the
hell and difficulty involved. One's depression and despair; feelings of fragility and
helplessness. The whole tone is exceedingly gentle but working with people who hold to
different aspirations and views of the world is an immensely lonely experience. A point of
disagreement spreads into ever-widening rings of different and supportive beliefs, every
one of which you want to stop at to sort out, but that just leads to more, and the
original point is lost. You walk around wondering what the hell you're doing spending your
life amongst such people.' He is a medical student, working in a hospital. The problem is to avoid using this anti-millenarian realism as an excuse for doing
nothing and to avoid the sort of violent reactiveness which leads one to take out all
one's frustrations with oneself and one's work situation on comrades, rejecting them
because it's the only outlet when one is stuck with oneself and can't see a way forward in
the job situation. Somehow we must combine relentless with forgiving struggle and to
decide which contradictions to confront and which to live with for now (knowing full well
what they are). The hope of transcending all at once is naive and romantic and denies that
the hierarchical, authoritarian capitalist system is a system and therefore
systematically expressed in the world in which we live, including our most intimate
relationships and our secret hopes and fears. So, we are caught between, trying to move
towards socialism by socialist means at the same time that we are constrained, squeezed
and fucked-up in all sorts of ways by our contexts and ourselves. Reiche has captured the
ghastliness as well as the promise of the situation: Though therefore it may be true that the qualitative difference between the existing
and a free society can only be established through a 'break in the historical continuum',
it is equally true, firstly, that this break can only be theorized about in advance in
categories, modes of thought and dreams bearing the hallmark of the existing society, and
the oppression, exploitation and deprivation of liberty practised in it. Secondly, that it
will have to be carried out by people who, though they suffer under this oppression,
exploitation and deprivation of liberty, recognize them for what they are, and want to do
away with them, are also marked, and maimed by them, in their most minute feelings and
habits. And thirdly, that the free society can only be built up on the basis of the
maimed and fettered capacities of unfree societies. Otherwise it would be meaningless to
say that we already have the intellectual forces necessary for the realisation of a free
society. (Sexuality and Class Struggle, pp. 165-6) So we're caught. But there really isn't any alternative to change except the
reproduction of existing ways and structures, and we're supposed to be against that. As it
is, radicals find themselves too often and in spite of their best efforts, reproducing
aspects of competitive, defeatist and hierarchical structures in their radical work, while
some groups even advocate such ways in the name of efficiency. It is very difficult
indeed to make progress toward the production of socialist ways of doing things and away
from the reproduction of existing social relations-even in our attempts to transcend them.
If we turn this insight into the question, 'Is there a socialist science?' we find that
there cannot be as long as we find it possible to separate our conception of socialist
science from that of the rest of life. We see the need for our socialism to become the
basis for our scientific practice (= social relations), but how can it possibly do that if
it isn't becoming the basis for the rest of our lives? Similarly, the struggles which we
undertake in our political work outside the narrowly scientific settings-in 'political
groups' and in our social relations at home and elsewhere - must penetrate into our
scientific work. Struggling against sexism, racism, ageism, division of mental from manual
work, hierarchical division of labour, and so on in political groups and the home must not
be sequestered, hobby-like, from the same issues 'at work'. Similarly, if we consider with
care what practice to undertake in our political work outside the 'work' setting, why not
inside it? What about careerism, what research, what status, what agitation? One begins to
see why the claims for value-neutrality of science and for the use/abuse model had great
appeal for scientists: they permitted the sequestration of scientific work and careers
from the political process, just as it did for so long in industrial settings under the
banners of 'production' and 'efficiency'. So, instead of walking the path of
value-neutrality and the parallel one of isolated theoretical work, we need to define
clearly and to pursue specific struggles, realising once again that one can't get on one's
horse and ride off in all directions at once. If we don't prefigure, we’ll reproduce
the existing society, with all its division of labour, theory/practice split,
sectarianism, careerist, and so on. How many radical activities have ground to a halt over
structures inside the heads of the participants, soon after the excitement of the first
wilful enthusiasm? So we must plan, always stretching ourselves but staying short of
pushing too hard and too fast, breaking off and losing comrades whose frailties are
different
It's a wonder I can think at all,
And my lack of education hasn't hurt me none:
I can read the writing on the wall.
Kodachrome — it gives the nice bright colours,
Gives us the green of summers,
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day
Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera.
I love to take photographs,
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away.
If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match my sweet imagination:
Everything looks worse in black and white.
Kodachrome. .. (chorus)
Mama don't take my Kodachrome
And leave your boy so far from home
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away.
CBS 569035 (1973)Socialist Science
No Relations Between Things
By Stages
Marxism
Science and the Division of Labour
What Needs Doing—Theoretically?
Theorising Our Experience
Which Marxism?
Experiencing Our Theories
Stock-Taking Interlude
The Old Left, The New Left and the Politics of Process
Stark Alternatives: Productive Change or Reproductive Stasis