Letter: Engels (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engels

Hello

There’s a certain irony in being accused (Pathfinders, February) of not having read Engels when my point (very much a side point) was that Engels’ arguments were based on no evidence of how people organised themselves in prehistory. My main point was that no, prehistory was not a feminist utopia, but there was a huge diversity of relations between men and women of which, until recently, we were completely ignorant. My reason for not including Engels in Further Reading was not that it was old hat, though perhaps even the author of this piece would agree that Engels’ ideas have been around a while, but that the rule for that particular section of The Guardian’s books pages is that it should be inspired by recent thinking and recent books – which are then cited in Further Reading. If this author were himself better read, he would know that I’ve written on this subject in greater depth, with a less restrictive word count, for New Scientist – written and he would, I hope, feel a little ashamed of his groundless (rather like Engels’) statements.

Best wishes,

Laura Spinney

Reply from the writer

As a New Scientist subscriber for twenty years I’ve appreciated many of your interesting articles, but I must have missed the one you wrote on Engels. You say there’s no evidence for his hypothesis on the subjection of women (actually derived from pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan), even calling it ‘groundless’. This seems a little harsh given that whole theoretical edifices are sometimes constructed based on one finger bone. The evidence of patriarchy is all around you and everywhere in history. Is the alternative origin story simply that ‘it’s complicated?’ To discuss Engels’ argument while omitting the crucial role of emerging property relations is a bit like discussing gravity without mentioning mass, or Newton, or relativity. That’s why your representation of Engels came across as woolly, hence the speculation that you might not have gone to the source. Angela Saini, as the article points out, instead takes the argument and runs with it in a way that sheds further light rather than confusion on the subject.

PJS

Is anybody up there? (1982)

From the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year the American government published the proceedings of a conference in California in June 1979 whose ostensible purpose was to explore the prospects for research into the nature and distribution of life in the universe (Life in the Universe, NASA Conference Publication 2156. US Government Printing Office). While the case for the establishment of a sane and harmonious society here on earth is obviously not dependent on such findings, the papers do contain much of interest to socialists.

The conference considered the origin of life, life supporting environments, the evolution of complex life, the detectability of technically advanced civilisations and the problem of locating extraterrestrial intelligence. Two different though complementary approaches are encompassed here. The first seeks to develop an understanding of life and the environments necessary to support it. Such research cannot, of course, uniquely determine the existence of life outside the planet earth, but will enable attention to be focused on the more promising candidates among the heavenly bodies. The second approach has already been christened SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and involves listening for potential radio transmissions from intelligent life, and an examination of suitable stars for target. A research programme has been established to pursue these aims.

The advance in thinking in this branch of science since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species is as immense as that made in the same period in the design of weapons of war. The two are in fact linked, as illustrated by the development of nuclear bombs and the use of space-craft for reconnaissance and, potentially at least, for other military purposes. It is a mistake to think of this advance of science in terms of increasing the number of solved problems (with a corresponding reduction of those unsolved), although there is a sense in which this is a valid viewpoint. Attempts to attack one particular problem often lead to unexpected results which themselves cause new questions to be posed and fresh problems identified as requiring solutions. An example of this was the bringing back to earth for analysis of samples from the moon. The results have been somewhat misleadingly reported as having caused confusion among scientists. In fact the longterm result is an enlargement of horizons and an enrichment of understanding.

Certainly this aspect of scientific research can be irritating. It requires the modification of theories in the face of new evidence, often the abandonment of what had appeared to be promising lines of enquiry. Thus the appearance can easily be given that no progress is being made. It is here that the sniping movement calling itself Creation Science has found its opportunity. There have surely been few organisations to which the word reactionary can be more appropriately applied. Claiming that science has failed to provide the answers, it advocates a return to the old creation theories of religion. Its adherents focus on biological evolution and Darwin's work and pose the question, “Was Darwin right?”, as though they were continuing the famous debate between Bishop Wilberforce and T.H. Huxley. Their claim that the fossil record does not support Darwin is technically correct although rather impertinent. Darwin as was understandable in his time, saw evolution as proceeding at a much more constant rate than present-day evidence will support. In fact, as presented by Valentine [1], what now appears to have happened is lengthy periods of relative stability with small changes (microevolution) interspersed with intervals where more revolutionary events happened (macroevolution). Valentine writes: "A large mutation can produce a descendant which is infertile with members of its parental species, including its parents. If it can fertilise itself, however, it may propagate and thrive”. In the human species mutations are produced which differ considerably from their parents. This occurred with much greater frequency immediately following the atomic bombardment of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Like most mutations these were tragic, one-off cases and where they survived they did so only because human society can now prevent natural selection operating. The point is, however, that it was the normal human reproductive process which brought forth these ‘children’, and to claim that a ‘creator’ is at work here is worse than ridiculous.

The concept of concurrent micro and macroevolution appears to be well supported by the fossil record. Indeed in the last 20 years one of the main arguments used by “creationists' has disappeared. As reported by Margolis and Havelock [2], it used to be thought that the Precambrian rocks of the Ediacaran period (700 million to 570 million years ago approximately) did not contain a fossil record. The pioneering work of Elso Barghoorn and Stanley Tyler of Harvard University has shown that this is not the case, the difficulty having been related to detection techniques and scientific expectation. Margolis and Havelock put it thus: “These investigators realised that the conspicuous fossil record of large organisms must have been preceded by something smaller. Such ideas led them to microscopic studies of thin sections of unaltered sedimentary rocks”. Far from supporting biblical or neo-biblical viewpoint, modern science is dealing it ever more crushing blows. This message is forcefully conveyed in nearly all the papers presented at the conference. ‘Creation science', incorporating as it does a complete misunderstanding of modern scientific method, must be largely motivated by its own deadly fear of the consequences of driving God out of the heavens. The complexity of the universe, as it is now understood, shows more clearly than ever before that the idea that we can ‘know all the answers' is a religious and not a scientific one. How could the inert matter which preceded life on earth have left sign-points to show us how it came to be where it was?

When talking about the possibility of detecting the existence of life outside our own planet, we of course mean life as we know it’; that is. life that has evolved in much the same way from much the same material conditions and resources as has life here on earth. We cannot, of course, even begin to discuss any other possible method of life evolution as it would be totally outside our experience and knowledge. All that can be said is that while this possibility cannot be entirely ruled out, the chances do seem to be extremely small. The phrase ‘conditions which will support life’ must also be taken to mean ‘conditions similar to those on earth’.

The space exploration which has already taken place certainly appears to have ruled out any chance of life at the present time anywhere else in the solar system. No attempt was made by sensate beings to intercept or communicate with the spacecraft, and nowhere was a life supporting environment detected. However Chang [3] suggests that Venus and Mars may have supported some form of life in the past. As for the chances of life further afield, this appears to boil down to which is the greater of two very large numbers. The odds against all the requirements of organic life appearing on another plant, or perhaps a satellite, in much the same proportions as on earth, are obviously very great. Equally vast however is the number of heavenly bodies in the universe. The biblical writer who compared their abundance to that of sand on the seashore was considerably more right than he knew. He probably did not believe what he wrote, but he has proved not to be far out. There has even been speculation that the planet earth may not be unique — that is to say. there may be another bloke called Edge writing at this instant about life in the universe for another journal called Socialist Standard on an identical planet many light years away! Opinion at the conference was divided on this issue. Drake [4] states: “The current consensus concerning extraterrestrial life is that it exists in abundance in the universe". However in the present state of knowledge the opinion of Lovejoy [5] seems more realistic: “I think it quite reasonable to suppose that despite the immensity of the known universe, the specificity in the physiostructure of any organism is so great and its immensely complex pathway of progression so ancient that the probability of re-expression is simply infinitesimal". This, needless to say. has nothing in common with the religious view of man as the special creation of God. Lovejoy’s comments are the product of more than a century of dedicated scientific observation.

What is the real purpose of this conference? In his introductory remarks Frosch [6] said: "The ‘golden fleece' idea that searches, gropings for knowledge whose purpose we do not understand are silly and some kind of rip off, results from sheer lack of understanding, lack of imagination and lack of perception of the meaning of the history of the human race". As far as it went, this was very well said. However, it would be naive indeed to accept that the gathering was concerned with pure research for the long-term benefit of humanity. Under the present social system funds are not provided for such studies. Certain capitalist interests, of course, stand to benefit in the short term from the construction of the high technology instruments required to scan the universe for life. Spacecraft travelling up to the speed of light have been envisaged. Generally speaking, however, such interests, despite all their lobbying, are unlikely by themselves to generate enough pressure to force governments, considering the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, to provide them with the necessary finance. Not surprisingly, “earth politics" is ignored in all of the papers. This is an indication, however, that the participants implicitly accepted not only that there is no feasible alternative to the capitalist system here on earth, but that the advanced civilisations which they hope to find elsewhere will be capitalist in character also.

In discussing how such advanced civilisations may be detected, Braccwell [7] unwittingly and grimly admits this when he says, "incidental signals offer more interesting grounds for speculation. There is of course the possibility of emission from bomb explosions. Sustained nuclear reactions for the purpose of power generation do not seem a likely source because leakage would represent waste”. Unlike CND, it would appear that this author holds justifiably pessimistic views of the possibility of removing the threat of nuclear war while retaining the system that causes it. It can reasonably be assumed that the conference would have been no more optimistic about the prospect of tackling the problems of pollution and depletion of natural resources. These are also insoluble within capitalism, and are seriously worrying the more thinking among our rulers.

There are perhaps two obvious ways in which such people may see communication with other life-supporting planets as offering a way out. First, there is the hope that some "super intelligence” may be contacted who could point to solutions which have escaped dumb earthlings. However socialists see this as another form of the "great man" idea, and thus doomed to failure. Secondly, and perhaps the speculation on long-distance space travel is indicative, there is the possibility of transplanting earth capitalism to another site (and eventually wrecking this place in the way the earth is now being wrecked). This may prove to be a more practical proposition than trying to establish life support systems on other members of the solar system which are at present inimical to life. Such a migration could involve war. not only with existing inhabitants, but fierce conflict between the rival capitalist groups on earth as they try to extend their space colonies at each other's expense, just as happened here. This scepticism over motives however does not detract from the value of this publication as an abundant source of information and valuable insight into current scientific thinking.

E. C. Edge

References

(All references are taken from NASA Conference Publication 2156)

1. Emergence and Radiation of Multicellular Organisms; James W. Valentine (University of California)

2. Atmosphere and Evolution; Lynn Margolis (Boston University) and James E. Lovelock (Reading University, UK)

3. Organic Chemical Evolution; Sherwood Chang (Ames Research Centre. NASA)

4. Comments by Frank D. Drake (Professor of Astronomy. Cornell University) as session chairman for session 5.

5. Evolution of Man and its Implications for General Principles of the Evolution of Intelligent Life; C. Owen Lovejoy (Kent State University, Ohio)

6. Introductory remarks by Robert A. Frosch (President of the American Association of Engineering Societies)

7. Manifestations of Advanced Civilisations; Ronald N. Braccwell (Stanford University, California)

Engels on Human Evolution (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Links to Part 1 and Part 2.

Engels followed the impact of Darwin’s ideas more closely than Marx. He may even have read Darwin's “The Descent of Man”.

Unlike Marx, Engels continued his interest in Darwin and things Darwinian beyond the initial general public furore created by the publication of Origin. Apart from references to Darwin in his correspondence with Marx and others, the first major piece of work Engels produced was the notes for the unfinished The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, written between May and June 1876, over five years after the publication of the Descent.

This speculative, but interesting, work which includes a strong element of Lamarckism (but even Darwin had to resort to a version of Lamarck), can be seen as a Marxian response to the “Man’s place in nature” debate in at least two important ways. First of all, it attempts to show in what way humans are different from other animals. Unlike Darwin, who was eager to point to the similarities across species, to indicate the origins of typical human behaviour in a simpler form in other species, and that humans were only quantitatively different from animals, Engels was adamant in showing both the difference and similarities between humans and other animals. Whilst speculating in how human labour activity had evolved from earlier forms along with the evolution of physical organisation, and therefore within the Darwinian explanatory framework, he was also wanted to show how human labour differed from that of lower animals. Following the same line of argument he and Marx had arrived at thirty years previously in The German Ideology, he wrote:

“Animals…change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them…But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally. The further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards preconceived ends” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, volume 25, p.459).

“In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction” (ibid., p.460).

In addition to this evolutionary explanation of the difference between human and animal labour, Engels’s argument can also be seen as a materialist response to Wallace’s “unseen spirit” explanation of the difference between humans and animal. Furthermore, Engels also opposed the mental materialism of Darwin, who based the difference between humans and other animals in the more developed and complex mentality of humans; a form of idealism that had dominated Western philosophy since the rise of Christianity:

“All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the brain. Man became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognize the part that has been played therein by labour.”

Did Engels Read The Descent?

Engels seems to have kept up with the Darwinian literature on human evolution, making reference to T.H. Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, John Lubbock Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, although it is not always clear which of their works he is referring to. So it is somewhat surprising that there is no explicit reference to The Descent or to what Darwin wrote on the matter. But seeing that he had read all these other authors, who had made their contribution before 1871, and that Darwin was the most important figure in this group, it would seem unusual that Engels would not read The Descent. Also, he had five years to read him before he started work on The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man in May 1876.

There is, however, some textual evidence that Engels did read The Descent. In the second paragraph of his pamphlet, Engels writes:

“Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors of ours. They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in trees.”

This description attributed to Darwin comes in part from The Descent. In Chapter 6, “On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man,” Darwin writes:

“The early progenitors of man must have been once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were probably pointed, and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having proper muscles”

(Darwin The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871; Penguin edition 2004, p.188).

The reference to “they lived in bands in trees“ too seems to have come from The Descent, as Darwin writes:    

“We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.” (p. 678)

Therefore, unless Engels got these from another author, these two separate references provide adequate justification for thinking that Engels did read The Descent.

From Darwin to Marx: From Biology to History

Human beings possess a dual character, as both biological and historical beings, in a radically different way from any other animal.

For non-human animals, the biological, structural determination of their activity is dominant. As they get more biologically complex, they acquire the capacity for their activity to be modified by previous interactions with the world, but they live in the “now”; their activity is concerned with adjusting to the immediate circumstances they are interacting with. They have a blind past, as a species and as individual organism, but not a history.

Only humans have history. Through their linguistic ability and social co-operation, human beings have over centuries achieved (it is not nature-given) a greater degree of purpose and agency than any other species. As a result, they not only have a history, but can make history. But making history requires that the impersonal, law-like relations of the capital relationship, of production for profit, be destroyed and replaced by a free association of producers who create a world in their own interests and their own purpose. Only then will humanity shift from a determined pre-history to a determining history.

Ed Blewitt

(concluded)

The Genesis of the “Great Man”. (1917)

From the June 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the most commonly held of the many erroneous, and therefore misleading, theories regarding history and the movements of human society is that which frequently goes by the name of the “Great Man Theory.” From its point of view those individuals who achieve prominence in any event or movement are the prime factors and forces behind it, and the real social forces which underlie them are entirely unappreciated. Thus the personality of Napoleon is looked upon as the cause of the wars associated with his name, Wat Tyler is regarded as the author of the Peasants’ Revolt, the evolution theory is thought to be due to the genius of men like Spencer and Darwin, Karl Marx is credited with being the generator of modern Socialism, and to Cecil Rhodes is attributed the Cape to Cairo Railway.

The influence of this theory upon the working class is baneful because under it many are deluded into looking to “leaders” and “intellectuals,” instead of to themselves, for their salvation, while some are led to embrace the vagaries and absurdities of Anarchism. It is quite easy to see that political assasination must appear a really sound and sensible procedure to those who, holding this point of view, wish to abolish social evils. Experience, however, shows that such action rarely, if ever, has the desired effect. And why ? Because the social conditions obtaining at any time are not dependent upon the existence of any individual, however prominent, but are decreed by the material conditions under which men live. So long as these remain unchanged, so long will the resultant social forms remain, and they will not be appreciably affected by the removal of any individual whatever.

To say this is not, of course, to deny the existence of great men, for to do so would be just as foolish as going to the other extreme. Every “great man” is the outcome of two main factors. One is biological and internal. No one will deny that the mental or physical capacity of an Alexander or an Aristotle, a Marx, a Darwin or a Napoleon, is vastly superior to that of the majority of men. The case is one of variations like unto those which occur in all living creatures. But this capacity alone is not sufficient to make a “great man.” Charles Peace would never be included among such, yet his genius was probably as pronounced as that of many who would be so designated.

This brings us to the second factor: the historical and external one. Every person is born into surroundings or environment conditions which have grown out of different preceding conditions, this movement itself being part of a continuous process of change and growth.

We may broadly classify the changing forms of environment into three mutually pervading and interdependent divisions or phases, material, social, and intellectual. That these are interlinked is easily shown when it is remembered that societies are forms of group relationships between material things, e.g., human beings ; that all ideas are based upon the perception of material phenomena and the relations between them, through the medium of the sense organs and the nervous system, themselves material in structure ; that the mind perceives among other things social conditions, and that ideas can aid in bringing about both social changes and fresh material things into existence.

But that the above classification is justifiable and useful enough can be shown by contrasting two different environments in their several phases. In England about the twelfth century the face of the country presented an aspect very different in many respects to its present one. Great belts of virgin forest and open fen remained of the great primaeval wild. There existed nothing of the network of hedges which to-day cuts up the country like a monster chess board. Wild animals were much more varied and plentiful. The towns were small and few and far between. There were no railways, few roads, and few brick buildings.

Social relations were just as different. There were practically no wage-workers. A large serf population existed—men unable to leave the village of their birth ; conditionally holding land and rendering compulsory service to a lord. The prices of merchandise were regulated largely by Guild associations and not by competition as to-day. In the intellectual field the contrast is just as marked. The majority of the population were then unable to read or write. Everyone, aristocrat or peasant, was deeply superstitious, believing in personal gods, devils, saints, and witches. Little or nothing was known of natural laws. There was no geology, no biology, nothing of the modern conception of universal evolution, and no social science. Religion dominated men’s theories, science was embryonic.

Returning now, after this digression, to “great men,” it is evident that everyone’s activities are moulded by the conditions of the age. No one, however clever, can transcend the possibilities of his time. Even the most profound thinkers and men of action must use the material to hand and must build upon the past labours of others. It is this inheritance of the accumulated experience of mankind’s past, in each generation, which makes all cultural and social progress possible. Were it possible for a child of highly civilised parents to develop in isolation amid natural surroundings, it would grow up not only illiterate but almost speechless, and with intelligence woefully stunted from lack of opportunity to develop it.

Real greatness consists of making the most of the material available, in reaching to the very outposts of the possible, in seeing things only just perceptible and hidden from the commonality of men.

The conditions for Darwin’s “Origin of Species” were laid before a line of it was penned. Darwin was obviously dependent upon the developed arts of writing and printing, on tho orderly classification of living things such as had been performed by Linnaeus. In his dedication to the “Voyage of the Beagle” Darwin pays a tribute to Lyell’s “Principles of Geology” as forming an essential preliminary to all his works. The point is clinched when it is remembered how many minds independently approached the theory of natural selection about the same time (see the historical note to the “Origin”), and it is well known how tho eminent naturalist, A. Russel Wallace, came to identical conclusions on his own accord.

The same phenomenon is apparent right through the history of science. Marius, Jansen, and Lippershey simultaneously invented the telescope. Both Adams and Leverrier discovered Neptune. Marx, Engels, and Morgan, by different routes, reached “Historical Materialism.” After decades of failures, Peary, Amundsen, and Scott reached the earth’s poles within a very brief period of each other. The recent development of aviation is equally instructive.

In political or social movements generally, conditions are somewhat different, for the action once taken, it cannot as a rule be repeated, and verification such as that possible in intellectual evolution is here impossible. But a little examination will always reveal the conditions prepared before any movement is realised. Alexander’s empire was made possible by the weakened and disorganised state of the older Greek powers, due to internal corruption and the ravages of the Peloponnesian War, together with the rotten organisation of the Persian empire already revealed by the notorious retreat of “the ten thousand.” The Macedonian spear and the efficient phalanx military formation were the deciding forces and Alexander the pinnacle of a whole system of favourable conditions. In like manner Napoleon as Emperor without the French Revolution as a preparation is quite unthinkable.

In conclusion it may be mentioned that there are always sufficient men of genius to satisfy all requirements. A “great man” never fails to sprout when the environment is favourable. Scores of men with the internal potentialities of greatness must be “wasted” by their labours being suffocated in unfruitful channels. In a sentence, we find that the greatest of men are the creatures and not the creators of their age.

H.

Voice From The Back: House hunting (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

House hunting

As young working class couples contemplate marriage and start looking for a house or flat that they can afford to buy or rent, it might be worth them considering how members of the capitalist class deal with their “housing problem”:

“This mansion in Surrey cost £70m. It has 30 bedrooms, five swimming pools and its own cinema . . . By American standards, of course, the Surrey mansion is at the mean end of the scale. This is a country where Larry Ellison takes on Bill Gates for the title of top cheese by building a bigger house than him. (Gates recently announced that he was extending his lavish $100m home near Seattle, to which Ellison replied with a $150m Japanese style mansion in California, twice the size of the White House and complete with artificial lakes, waterfalls and 3,750 tons of hand-chiselled Chinese granite for the retaining walls.) The world’s largest private house is believed to be the New York industrialist R.A.Rennert’s mansion Fair Field, which is 100 miles east of Manhattan and boasts 29 bedrooms, 42 bathrooms, a 164 seat theatre, two bowling alleys and an English-style pub.” (Guardian, 15 June.)

A cancerous system

Commenting on an article in a previous issue two letters to the editor in Time magazine (25 June) show that workers as far apart as Istanbul and Massachusetts have a pretty good idea about how capitalism operates :

“If there really is a war against cancer, as you contend then why not attack this disease on the battlefield? Why not go after its supply lines of tobacco, food additives and pollution? The drive for corporate profits generates many of the products that can cause this illness, and even more profits are made in treating it. Meanwhile, cancer victims fall by the wayside as collateral damage. Chris Glover (Istanbul)”. “Finally, the breakthrough in cancer drugs that we have long been searching for! Too bad that few of us will be able to afford them. David Chesterton (Massachusetts)”.

Touchy, feely socialists

We are often accused of class bias, of being nasty individuals who are only concerned about the working class, with never a thought for the plight of the capitalist class. Not so, we were almost moved to tears when we read the following :

“Ronit Lami, a London psychologist who treats people suffering from affluenza or ‘sudden wealth syndrome’, says her patients are highly motivated perfectionists who will do anything to achieve their ends. She says: ‘It doesn’t matter how much money there is in the bank, there is never enough. There is a huge fear of failure. If they suddenly lose their money, they suffer deep depression. Many identify themselves through their possessions, so their whole identity collapses’“ (Sunday Times, 24 June).

This “affluenza” is an awful disorder, one that we fortunate members of the working class will never suffer; so we think it only right to comfort these sufferers with the news that there will be no money or banks inside socialism. Another good reason to organise for socialism, you can relieve these poor souls from their insecurity fears and leave Ronit Lami free to get a real job.

Mao’s afterthought

Chinese state capitalism is desperate for foreign investment; so much so, that at its 80th anniversary celebrations the Communist Party revealed its long held admiration of capitalism :

“Liu Jingfeng, a history professor at the party school, told an on-line forum run by the official People’s Daily newspaper: ‘Mao Zedong did not oppose capitalism all the time. At the Seventh Party Congress, Mao Zedong fully endorsed the idea that China should develop capitalism.’” (Times, 5 July)

Science in fetters

Capitalism was once a progressive force in the field of science. The discoveries of chemistry and physics were essential for the advance of the new society. But now capitalism has entered its restrictive phase, where, because of copyright and information ownership, scientific investigation is being restricted. Immense publishing firms like Reed Elsevier zealously guard the copyrights that earned them profits of £231 million last year :

“More than 800 British researchers have joined 22,000 others from 161 countries in a campaign to boycott publishers of scientific journals who refuse to make research papers freely available on the internet after six months. ‘Science depends on knowledge and technology being in the public domain’, said Michael Ashburner, professor of Biology at Cambridge University and one of the leading signatories of the campaign, the Public Library of Sciences. ‘In that sense, science belongs to the people, and the fruits of science shouldn’t be owned or even transferred by publishers for huge profits’“ (Guardian, 26 May).

It seems that science is now being restricted by the ownership relationships of capitalism. Karl Marx wrote in January 1859 in his introduction to The Critique of Political Economy something that foresaw such a development:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters.”

Gould v. Dawkins (1999)

Book Review from the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Darwin Wars by Andrew Brown. Simon and Schuster. £12.99.

This is a journalistic account of the arguments that have gone on recently amongst biologists in the Darwinian tradition, between those Brown calls the “Dawkinsians” and the “Gouldians”, so-called after Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976) and Stephen Jay Gould, author of The Mismeasure of Man (1981) and of a series of collected essays on various aspects of evolution.

Although both sides have done original work in the field of biology and evolution, the argument is not really about the facts but about their interpretation. It is in fact a continuation of the old argument between the “Social Darwinists” and their opponents. The so-called Social Darwinists argued that the laws of biological evolution applied to humans in society and that in the social struggle for existence those who came out on top—the rich and the powerful—were entitled to their privileged social position as by achieving it they had proved to be “the fittest”.

Socialists were amongst those who opposed this apology for capitalist rule, arguing that Darwinian natural selection only applied in nature not to human society; because humans had acquired (as a result of course of their evolved biological make-up) the capacity to use tools their social development was driven not by biology but by technology, with social struggles not being a struggle of individuals against each other to survive but a struggle of classes over the control of the tools humans had developed.

Social Darwinism was revived in the 1970s under the name of “Sociobiology” which claimed, once again, that the laws of biological evolution applied to human society and that the behaviour of humans in society was governed by their biological nature; this, they said, was aggressive and anti-social as such traits had been necessary for human survival and so had evolved as part of the human biological make-up.

This was an attack on the up-to-then fairly widespread view amongst social anthropologists that there was no such thing as human nature in the sense of no such thing as biologically-determined human social behaviour since human behaviour in society was socially determined by the culture of the society they lived in. The findings of these anthropologists still stand but times had changed. The post-war boom had come to an end and, with states no longer able to sustain “altruistic” social reforms at previous levels, rugged individualism and no pity for the poor were back on the agenda.

Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene appeared in 1976. It was a brilliant title to capture the spirit of the coming period. His basic argument was that Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” takes place not between individual organisms but between their individual genes (a controversial proposition in itself) and that genes could therefore be metaphorically described as “selfish” in struggling to survive. The title, however, left itself to being interpreted as saying that humans were genetically selfish and that there was in fact a human gene for selfishness. As a biologist Dawkins knew this to be nonsense but he nevertheless let the title stand.

In the dispute between the “Dawkinsians” and the “Gouldians” it is clear on whose side Socialists don’t stand. Although Dawkins is a militant atheist who makes mince-meat of religion, he is wrong in so far as he lets it be suggested that human social behaviour is genetically determined. This argument has been refuted years ago and has only been revived recently for non-scientific, ideological reasons. This, however, does not make us uncritical “Gouldians”. Gould’s books contain valuable material, but we are not obliged to follow his view that evolution does not mean “progress”, nor his view that there is no inherent incompatibility between science and religion.

Adam Buick

Science and You (1939)

Book Review from the April 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Science and You," by Prof. J. B. S. Haldane. Fore Publications, Ltd., 35, Gt. James Street, W.C.l. 64 pp. 2d.

This book, by a well-known scientist, whose speciality is biology, is one which all workers can usefully read.

The book, very well written, in simple English, presents some of the latest scientific discoveries in an easily assimilable form, but what makes the book specially interesting is the uncompromising way in which the bearing of scientific facts on social conditions is brought out.

Concluding an article on bees, for example, he writes: "And although the worker is worn out after five or six weeks' work in summer, it has had a varied life, including many different kinds of work, and a good deal of leisure." Wage and salary workers who toil monotonously at the same task, year after year, with no prospect of changing the nature of their work, will readily appreciate the comparison.

Another article on population decrease shows that he clearly recognises that a system of “family allowances" is likely to cause a fall in the general wage level, for he says : "And if some system of family allowances is recommended" (i.e., by the Government) "it will be for the Labour movement to see that it is not used to depress the wage of childless workers and to break the unity of the workers." Readers of the Socialist Standard will be aware that we have always maintained that any system of family allowances is likely to depress the general wage level. Haldane quotes the director of a French family allowance fund to the effect that ; “From the social point of view, the allowances have prevented the subversive trade: unions from using for their revolutionary purpose workers who are fathers of families. The great majority of these have remained outside the class struggle." In other words, their economic conditions have been more bearable, whereas the conditions of those not receiving family allowances have been less bearable.

—The reason for the interest of governments in the size of the population is explained thus: —

“Until recently, reactionary writers deplored the increase of population and thought that it caused unemployment; though it obviously could not account for unemployment in Canada or Australia. As lately as 1936, Professor Macbride said that the unemployed should be punished by sterilisation for producing unwanted children.

“Now their tone has suddenly changed. It is realised that soldiers may be needed for new wars, and that increasing population offers a good excuse for wars of conquest. In fact, as the experience of Abyssinia has shown, conquests do not afford an outlet for 'surplus' population. But they do supply labour power at starvation rates for predatory capitalists." 

Haldane makes a number of references to Russia, but one gathers that he has no first-hand experience of conditions in that country. He states that: "In the Soviet Union, where women enjoy a greater equality with men than anywhere else, the birth rate is not falling." Apparently he has not seen the reports published a few years ago, to the effect that abortion in Russia, previously legal, is now illegal, and a punishable offence. The reason here is that Russia, like other modern powers, needs soldiers to protect her frontiers. We would recommend Haldane to read the books, by Yvon and Gide.

There is a chapter showing how scientific research is impeded under present conditions, and other chapters on sanitation and vitamins, making the whole book a good twopennyworth. 

R. M.

Pathfinders: The Price of Everything (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year, you will not be astonished to learn, a great many peer-reviewed research papers on Covid-19 were published. Upwards of 75,000, to be exact, with another 10,000 or so available on pre-print servers, i.e. awaiting peer review (New Scientist, 16 December). Great, you might think. The brainiacs of the world rolling up their sleeves and getting down to business on a somewhat pressing matter. The world of science should be delighted.

Er, not exactly. Papers are being shunted out at the rate of 4,000 a week, and who can possibly read all that? Scientists say they’re not reading but drowning, and they want new smart tools to wade through it all (bit.ly/3bNJIGD).

But still, it’s been an unusual year, so you’d expect a tsunami of research papers, wouldn’t you? Actually, this is no different from any other year. Scientists have for a long time been decrying their ‘attention decay’ in the midst of an ever-increasing flood of academic studies (Independent, 11 March 2015). And their libraries need a lot of magazine subscriptions too. No one knows how many scientific journals there are, but several estimates point to around 30,000, with close to two million articles published each year (bit.ly/2OrH4h4).

Alright, but presumably all this stuff must get read eventually?

Again no. A 2007 study estimated that half of all academic papers are read by only three people, their author, and two journal editors (Smithsonian Magazine, 25 March 2014 ).

Yes, but all the same, it’s all worthwhile research, isn’t it?

You’d presume so. But a recent discussion with a friendly in-house editor in the field of epidemiology sheds a somewhat different light on things. It seems that much of what gets sent to high-impact journals is, basically, pretty low grade. An editor’s job is to decide which papers are worth sending out for peer review, but this editor says that 85-90% of the papers she receives effectively ‘go in the bin’, with only around 10-15% going out to peer review. Some journals save money by not bothering with an in-house sifting process, and send everything straight out to review, but this inevitably creates a bottleneck. And reviewers, it needs to be borne in mind, don’t get paid, their motivation being assumed to be keeping abreast of new developments in the field. If they have to provide detailed recommendations on papers that should have been ‘binned’ by the journal’s editor, that’s less overall incentive for the reviewer and more useful research time wasted.

That might just be one overworked and jaded view though?

Not according to psychologist Stuart Ritchie: ‘We think of science as being this objective thing that […] produces all these scientific papers, which are almost sacred things. But a lot of people don’t see how the sausage is made. […] In a lot of cases, the science is useless, not worth the paper it is written on’ (New Scientist, 19 August 2020). In his view, the review system isn’t up to much either. Even if reviewers try to check, they usually can’t get access to the raw data, so they can’t really verify what they’re reading. And on top of that, they can often guess where a paper has come from, despite the supposed anonymity, so bias can creep in.

But even so, it can’t be right that people are writing useless papers, surely? What incentive is there to do that? Are they simply incompetent? Here the in-house editor becomes especially illuminating. To paraphrase the conversation: ‘You have to understand how the system works. The way academics are judged is in terms of publications. These days, most staff in university departments don’t have tenure, they have to write funding bids to cover their wages. If they are managing research projects, they have to write even more extravagant funding bids to cover their workers’ wages as well as their own. Funding agencies get their money ultimately from the government, and they are also under the cosh to justify what they have funded. How do they do that? By promising the government ‘deliverables’. What are these deliverables? Generally, academic papers. Government bean-counters aren’t best placed to tell good papers from bad, so it becomes a matter of ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’. The upshot is that researchers pay the rent by writing vast numbers of papers, many of which will never be read. The whole thing is a funding merry-go-round, driven not by the needs of science so much as the needs of people to chase their next pay cheque.’

To make matters worse, there’s ‘a growing trend in doctoral education […] to dispense with the traditional PhD dissertation and replace it with the requirement for doctoral students to publish several articles based on their research in academic journals, in effect moving responsibility for evaluating doctoral research from university committees to journal editors and reviewers’ (bit.ly/2OwkAv6). So much for the appliance of science.

Well ok, but papers are at least reliable because they’re full of citations of other work, right? Right, but 90 percent of papers are never cited at all (Smithsonian, above), so citations tend to come disproportionately from a very few papers. Then these citations in turn spawn further citations, in an ever lengthening and uncritical chain, until the original paper can end up all but forgotten.

To give one example, low-fat diets have been a nutritional shibboleth for decades, yet when the lo-carb craze kicked off a few years ago and sent seismic shocks through the weight loss industry, some researchers actually looked again at the published research on dietary fat. It turned out that all the established ‘knowledge’ about fats in diets, and the official advice given by the US and UK for decades, stemmed from just 6 studies in the 1970s. Even those studies were heavily qualified by the researchers at the time, with some saying dietary advice based on them should never have been issued (bit.ly/2NilfzI). What everyone assumed was rock-solid science in reality stood on very shaky foundations.

Wasted effort is bad enough at the best of times, but when humans are faced with a crisis on the scale of the Covid pandemic, capitalism’s cash-fixated approach to science reveals itself as hopelessly inept. It’s a no-brainer to say that researchers should not write bad papers in the first place. But for that to happen, the pressure for funding would have to come off, so that they could stop chasing their own tails. Could capitalism do this? Unlikely. It hates unquantifiable returns. As they say about cynics, it knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. But socialism, by making everything free, would do it at a stroke, scrap the entire byzantine funding hierarchy, from government down, and scrap the capitalist money system that engenders the whole ludicrous business. Then researchers would be able to focus on the real work of expanding our knowledge, instead of churning out sops to fulfil the next funding bid.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Chimps, Chumps and Cheetahs (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

As evolved and unintelligently-designed bald chimps everywhere must surely know, this year is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. However they may be less aware that it is also claimed to be the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the 300th anniversary of the start of the industrial revolution and, perhaps less debatably, the 50th birthday for the Mini automobile (Link).

Crowning all these trivial achievements this month is of course the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. What can one say of this historic event? At the time it was hard to overhype. One small step for a man, one giant poke in the eye for the Russians, it supposedly gave us velcro, teflon and digital watches, but more to the point, it promised to launch the bone-throwing chimp species, Kubrick-like, into the galaxy.

And, er, that was it. Apollo the space overture was not followed by the opera. Since then the veterans who knew how to get to the moon have all died or retired, and now the tyro NASA chimps are back where they started, arguing about rockets and facing Obama funding cuts instead of Kennedy largesse.

What did it all mean? Not much, except to show that in science, as in share prices, optimism can overrun the cliff-edge of experience, a fact which often escapes young chimps who imagine that scientific progress is secure, inevitable and limitless. Perhaps this is because, in the non-scientific world, we don’t tend to hear about the null results, the blind alleys or the dead-ends, we only hear the success-stories. This may mean, argues NASA climatologist Peter Dizikes, that we foster unrealistic expectations of science in practice: “The way we teach science is that Newton said “X” and it’s correct, so learn this formula. This promotes the idea that science knows all the answers. Whereas when you look at any actual working scientist, whether it’s in climate change or medicine or building a nuclear power plant, the stock in trade of science is uncertainty; it’s not certainty” (www.salon.com, 19 June).

It doesn’t help that capitalism is all about hard sells not hard truths, a blizzard of con rackets, snake oil cures, kwik-fixes and pseudo-solutions that all too easily make us into chumps who forget to ask the right questions. Too often the media will breathlessly report anything scientists offer them, without any provisos or qualifications, just to grab a slice of reader attention. Grey areas require grey matter, but who’s got the time? To take a random sample of the latest news items, we learn, ‘according to new studies’, that boys who have a ‘warrior gene’ are more likely to end up in violent gangs (Yahoo News, 5 June), that squeamish people are more likely to be conservative (Yahoo News, 5 June) and that engineers are more likely to become terrorists (New Scientist, 13 June). There is not space here to detail all the ways in which these studies may be misleading, misguided or plain wrong, but sample size, experimenter expectation and the possible existence of conflicting studies would be three avenues to explore for starters.

A possible fourth is fraud. When politicians or bankers turn out to be corrupt nobody raises an eyebrow. When catholic priests turn out to be kiddy-fiddlers the world reacts with weary resignation. But when scientists fiddle data everyone throws up their hands in shocked amazement, because scientists are for some reason expected to be above that sort of thing.

Yet there are some legendary cases of scientific fraud, and it turns out that the latest and as yet unnamed addition to the periodic table, element 112, was held back from recognition by years because one member of the team was sabotaging the results by falsifying data (New Scientist, 20 June). Worse, scientific fraud may not be rare but commonplace. A recent survey involving over 11,000 academics found a third of scientists admitting to ‘massaging’ research data and one in fifty indulging in outright fakery: “When scientists were asked about colleagues’ behaviour, 14 percent said they had witnessed research fraud and almost three-quarters said they had seen questionable behaviour”. Socialists won’t be surprised to learn that “misconduct was most common in clinical, medical and pharmacological research, where large grants are often at stake” (TimesOnline, 7 June). Naughty chimps! Me Tarzan, you Cheetah.

Or should that be naughty orang-utans? A new paper that flies boldly in the face of the genetic evidence suggests that humans are biologically closer to the red apes than to chimps or bonobos, an idea which is causing widespread splutterings of derision in the scientific community. Nevertheless New Scientist (20 June) sees fit to lead with a lofty editorial on why we should welcome scientific heresy, even if it’s wrong: “Alternative hypotheses should be given an airing … science that pulls up the drawbridge on new ideas risks becoming sterile.” How true, even if it does sound a little defensive from a journal which is drawing fire for being too sensational and populist.

But heresy is risky, and scientists can be as conservative and risk-averse as anyone else. Privately many scientists could put together the same ‘heresy’ socialists propose, which is that capitalism, once the friend and sponsor of good science, now is more its enemy than its ally. It controls the funds and the fundamentals, it calls the tunes, it forms the corrupting context in which science does its work. In a capitalist world where politicians are vile, bankers are venal and priests are paedophiles, it can hardly be a revelation to find that science is as bent as everything else. But will they speak out against the system which holds them in check? Not while they have a vested interest in not doing so. That’s why we have to do it for them.

Paddy Shannon

What is the Future of Civilisation? (1925)

Book Reviews from the May 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Study of “Daedalus” and “Tantalus.”

These are the names of two mythological beings who flourished in the ripe imagination of the Greeks. They are also the respective names of two stimulating little essays, the one by Prof. J. B. S. Haldane and the other by Prof. F. C. S. Schiller. It is impossible adequately to review and attempt to answer the two sets of views in a paper this size, but it may not be unprofitable to consider them a little.

Daedalus is sub-titled “Science and the Future,” and though only cautiously optimistic is by far the more stimulating. The rate at which science is progressing is emphasised by the mention that H. G. Wells in 1902 (“Anticipations”) thought it possible that by 1950 there would be heavier than air flying machines capable of practical use in war. Prof. Haldane undertakes to make no prophecies in his paper “rasher than the above.” In that spirit then, he predicts that future developments in transport and communication are only limited by the velocity of light. Progress of this kind is limited by supplies of human and mechanical power. He considers it possible that capitalism itself may demand that the control of certain key industries be handed over completely to the workers therein, so that sporadic strikes may be eliminated. This argument is interestingly developed, and he turns to mechanical power. What will replace coal and oil? Prof. Haldane’s opinion is that four hundred years hence England will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors. During windy weather the surplus power will be conserved by using it for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. The gases would be liquefied and stored in vacuum jacketed reservoirs. In times of calm the re-combination of these gases in explosion motors would furnish electrical energy once more. So much for power.

He next foresees that immense possibilities await the chemist. At present we rely upon plants for our food, even when we take it at second or third hand from animals or their products. Prof. Haldane considers that less than 120 years will see a completely satisfactory diet, produced by chemistry alone. Agriculture will thus cease as an industry. “Synthetic food will substitute the flower garden and the factory for the dunghill and the slaughterhouse, and make the city at last self-sufficient.”

Prof. Haldane gives the eugenist but short shrift. The eugenic official he describes as a compound of the policeman, the priest and the procurer, and his prophecy as proceeding from a type of mind as lacking in originality as in knowledge of human nature. His own prophecy certainly lacks nothing of originality and consists in what he describes as “ectogenesis.” The first ectogenetic child is to be born in 1951, and apart from the stage of an ovum will dispense with the necessity of a mother. The period of gestation will be spent in a serum or medium, but the more intimate details are left, perhaps wisely and necessarily, to the future. In 1968 France is producing 60,000 children a year by this method, and 150 years hence less than 30 per cent. of children are to be born of woman. Mother Nature must look to her laurels.

One must read in the book how the sands of the desert, instead of growing cold as the ballad singer has assumed, are to be made fruitful, and the deep blue sea to become a permanent beautiful purple. It is not as nonsensical as it may appear. We think it probable Prof. Haldane would not disclaim the label of Socialist, but fear he would not feel at home in the S.P.G.B. The reason will appear presently. It is refreshing to note that he includes Marx with the great figures in world history. He warns the conservative that he has little to fear from the man whose passions play second fiddle to his reason. He is to beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest of his passions. These, the doubters, are the wreckers of effete civilisation. It may take another world-war or two to convert the majority, but the next world-war has at least one satisfactory element. In the last one the most rabid patriots were well behind the front line. In the next, no one will be behind the front line.

He sums up by saying, science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe. He reiterates that not one of the practical advances he has predicted is not already foreshadowed by recent scientific work. 

Briefly the outlook appears gloomy and threatening in the immediate future whilst the dull majority is learning its lesson, but the first gleams of a scientific dawn are discernible about 25 years hence.

Prof. Schiller pooh-poohs the gloom. Mankind has always known enough to wreck itself, but chance or providence has enabled it to avoid destruction. What is needed is just a little clear thinking and plain speaking. His first fact is that mankind ceased to evolve biologically about 30,000 years ago. This raises two further questions; how did it happen and what caused it? And secondly why has he progressed in other respects ; knowledge, power and culture. His answer to the first is that man ceased to develop biologically when he developed social habits. Singly nature weeded out all but the giants. Socially the herd protected its weaklings. His answer to the second is that social institutions like language and writing, have dictated social progress by preserving experience and knowledge independent of the death of the individual. Prof. Schiller develops his thesis very cogently, and opines that modern man (with a slight reservation) is slightly inferior to his own ancestors and markedly inferior to the great races of antiquity (like the Greeks) in their hey-day. Morally, we learn, modern man is substantially identical with his palaeolithic ancestors. This is not the end of our tale of woe. In one particular he is in agreement with Prof. Haldane. The latter says that ectogenesis will save civilisation from collapsing from the greater fertility of its less desirable members (page 66). Prof. Schiller occupies about nine pages in developing the same line of thought, i.e., that the “best” elements in civilisation are sterilising themselves through restricting their families whilst the continued growth of population is mainly due to the unrestrained breeding of casual labourers and the feeble-minded. Dean Inge has said something similar, but then he is only a follower of the Casual Labourer of Nazareth. (Capital letters make a difference, don’t they?). All men, professors, or otherwise, have their blind spot, and it is curious though understandable that these two should be so similarly afflicted. It is still more curious and less understandable that men whose obvious pride is clear-cut English and lucid thought should commit themselves to such tawdry, fustian expressions as “desirable,” or “best” as scientific descriptions of definite categories. Desirable for what? Best for what? What a begging of questions ! What rubbish ! Pardon this unprofessorlike language, but we have a shrewd suspicion that we are classed with the undesirables. The Freudians would say we suffer from an “inferiority complex.” We are not of the “best.” The felicity of attending Oxford or Cambridge has been denied us. We have been too busy working for the men whose sons the learned professors are teaching. It is only too obvious that their “desirables” and “bests” are those who have achieved wealth and position in our modern capitalist civilisation ; those who have attained “success,” those who have specialised in the exploitation of their fellows. Whom is it otherwise? Who are the “best”? Who are the “desirables”? And who are the “worst” and the “undesirables?” Professor Schiller permits himself the “shrewd suspicion that certain types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly, the insane, are undesirable, and that …. certain other types, say the intelligent, healthy and energetic, are inherently superior to the former.” This occurs so late in the book as to look like an afterthought. He has therefore no time to inquire whether the causes of the first three conditions are discoverable or remediable. When he says, “no good can come of coddling and cultivating them,” we can almost visualise him idly planning a lethal chamber on the margin of his manuscript. Prof. Schiller is a eugenist and eugenics implies the sterilisation or extinction of those below a certain standard. And who is to set the standard and who enforce it? Would it be universally enforced? We mean, would the Duke of Northumberland, or Westminster, or Lord Banbury, be subject to the same impartial treatment as the village idiot? We venture to doubt it.

We welcome the excursions of thinkers such as Professors Haldane and Schiller into the world of real men but they often seem to have one objectionable quality. Their cloistered seclusion among the sons of the rich seems to have imparted an air of aloofness to their views. They appear to overlook the fact that the little world in which they live, move and have their being is not the real world at all. Their pupils and their friends are by no means the “best” or the “desirable.” Numerically a handful, they are in the strictly scientific sense parasitic. If they were to vanish from the planet, production would go on unperturbed. Those destined for industrial pursuits as they might term them are solely concerned with acquiring skill in the intensive exploitation of labour. The ladders by which they or their fathers climbed to eminence are carefully withdrawn, lest a better man follow and push them down. The real world consists of the toiling millions who compose the vast bulk of human society. Without them there would be no society in a civilised sense at all. They are human society. They may be inarticulate, slow of thought and unimaginative, but we are of them. They are bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh. We can see undesirables being created every day. We can see our best being starved, stunted, exploited, and robbed always. We can see our geniuses denied opportunity or swindled out of their reward constantly. And we can discern the causes of it all. Society, a social product, is being run for the benefit of a select few. They safeguard their hold on the powers of production by also controlling the armed forces. Society, however, is greater than they, and their perpetual problem is how to get rid of the enormous wealth produced by modern machinery without stopping the machine. The body politic is increasingly liable to the illness called slump, and the slump is increasingly due to over-production. And now, more and more are coming to see that there is something wrong with a society that condemns the bulk of its members to poverty, a poverty which is intensified with every increase in the production of wealth.

Of course there is something wrong. The wealth producing machinery of society is owned and controlled by a few. Their sole concern is not the benefit of society as such but their own individual benefit. The productive forces have outgrown this petty, personal restriction, and the Socialist says the time has come when they should be owned, by society as a corporate organism. Humanly speaking we cannot expect the capitalists to view this prospect with any enthusiasm or to co-operate in its achievement. Fortunately they are numerically negligible and solely depend upon the workers consistently and persistently handing them the keys of power every election day. Their trust has been justified so far, but we propose a change. We propose that at a future election the workers send to Parliament delegates pledged and instructed to take control of the armed forces of the nation, and to then legislatively convert the whole productive machinery of society from private to social ownership. This requires organisation. The beginnings of that organisation exist in the Socialist Party of Great Britain.  Join it.

W. T. Hopley

Pathfinders: How scientific are scientists? (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is Andrew Marr, a well-known political commentator, doing presenting a BBC2 science programme about Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’? Evidently, having  used up their stock of one biologist the previous month when they trundled  David Attenborough out of retirement, the BBC are now reduced to pilfering  from the politics office. The first thing our ex-Presbyterian Andy does in  his new role of science correspondent is issue a dire warning that we  shouldn’t treat Darwin as a deity or Darwinism as a religion (The Danger of  Worshipping Darwin, BBC Online, 5 March).

Socialists have heard this sort of criticism before, from people who equate any system of organised thought with religion, in wilful disregard of the difference between organised thought and organised fantasy. Scientists do have their heroes, but they don’t worship them as infallible gurus because it is recognised that argument from authority is inferior to argument from evidence. Socialists take the same view of Marx and other revolutionary  thinkers.

It’s a pity Marr couldn’t direct his uncalled-for advice where it might do some good – at real rather than imaginary religious folly. Someone who does  think he’s an infallible guru has just lately been going round Africa telling the locals that wearing condoms will make their AIDS problem worse, not better (BBC Online, 18 March). Yes folks, the Pope pulls another blinder, advocating ‘fidelity and abstinence’, straight after criticising  his own US division for last year’s record-busting 800 sex-abuse cases, which cost the Catholic Church $436m in 2008 (BBC Online, 14 March). Mind  you, this is the guru who told us recently that Darwinian evolution is consistent with the book of Genesis.

Socialists are opposed to all religious superstitions but don’t often  trouble to condemn them because their advocates seem to do that better themselves. In Tanzania, the latest get-rich-quick scheme is to round up albino humans, murder them, cut them up, and sell their body parts as magic potions promising to make the owner wealthy. Meanwhile in South Africa there is an epidemic of what is called ‘corrective rape’, where lesbian women are gang-raped in order to make them ‘girls’ again. The fact that the women are often murdered afterwards suggests the rapists are not too interested in the ‘corrective’ aspect of it all. Unless they’re thinking of the afterlife.

Someone else keen to send women to an early afterlife is Samira Jassim, aka ‘the Mother of Believers’, who tells us how she recruited 80 female Iraqi suicide-bombers. Her clever trick was to have the women raped by her pious and devout male assistants and then tell the victims they would never get into heaven unless they committed a ‘purifying act’ to expunge their  ‘shame’. What this shows is not only the folly of ignorant belief and the despicable manipulation that ‘gurus’ can exercise, but also that these ‘gurus’ don’t believe this hokum themselves. It has often been observed that the higher one goes in any religious organisation, the less belief there is.

Perhaps, at bottom, religious people don’t really believe, but they force themselves to pretend to. There are signs that this is the case. One piece of evidence was the huge outpouring of obviously genuine grief among Catholics when the last pope shuffled off his mortal coil. Since, according to doctrine, he had gone off to sit on the right hand of God and enjoy perfect bliss, one might have expected them to celebrate. But they don’t, and in fact new research suggests they fight against death harder than  non-believers, demanding every treatment and medication in the book, even when prolonging the agony actually increases their misery (Pious ‘fight  death the hardest’, BBC Online, 17 March). Again, this is the opposite of  what you’d expect if religion was giving these people any real comfort. It seems that the Pope and his ilk aren’t very keen to check out themselves, although they’re often happy enough to speed other people on their way, through murder or murderously bad advice.

So how does Andrew Marr have the effrontery to equate science with religion? It seems utterly daft. But does that mean science is a noble endeavour and a  paragon of value-free rationality?

One man who doesn’t think so is the physicist Lee Smolin. He is scathing about the ‘sociology’ of the science community, which he invokes to explain why physics has languished for the last thirty years in the doldrums of unverifiable string theory rather than investigating any more promising avenues of thought: ‘Good ideas are not taken seriously enough when they come from people of low status in the academic world; conversely, the ideas of high-status people are often taken too seriously’ (The Trouble With Physics, Allen Lane, 2006). For Smolin, the old-boy culture of risk-averse conservatism is so strong that it has brought physics to a crisis where one must ask fundamental questions about what science is.

It is a shame that Smolin, following Popper, carelessly brackets ‘Marxism’ with witchcraft and Intelligent Design. He would be surprised to know that  socialist theory (rather than the state-capitalist parodies of North Korea etc that he has in mind) actually accords very well with the principles of scientific enquiry he himself sets out, and that socialists could help to contextualise the problems besetting physics.

Smolin points out that there are more scientists working today than in the whole history of science, however he doesn’t consider that many of them are doing things which are utterly useless or downright destructive because science, like any industry, has to operate within the priorities and limitations dictated by the capitalist system. He recognises that the scientific method suffers because science is organised hierarchically, but doesn’t see that the same criticism can be applied to all branches of human  activity. He demands democratisation and diversity in physics as if physics alone is the problem and these things are already established in other fields.

What sets science apart from religion is not that it works perfectly, but that it has the capability to be self-correcting. This is also the crucial distinction between capitalism, which is unable to correct its own suicidal blunders because it is in thrall to uncontrollable economic laws serving a powerful elite, and non-market, non-hierarchical socialism, which has no such agenda and which can therefore collectively determine the best course of action based on the available evidence.

Paddy Shannon

Intellectual Impostures (1999)

Book Review from the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Profile Books, £9.99 1998

The late Nineteenth Century witnessed the rise of Irrationalism. Philosophers rebelled against what they saw as the rigidities of positivist determinism and retreated into subjective idealism. Henri Bergson personified this movement; Hans Vaihinger’s book, The Philosophy of As If, reflected its Humpty-Dumpty logic: the world, according to this book, might be anything that one imagines it to be; one scientific hypothesis is just as good as any other. This rebellion against the scientific outlook of the Enlightenment culminated in more than an academic fad. The Fascists and Nazis of the 1930s rejoiced in their contempt for rational explanations. It was a crude contempt: books were burned; scientists who failed to conform to the mythology of the tyrant state were dismissed from their posts; to be an honest scientist became a reason for exile. It is a lesson of this century’s madness that we forget at our extreme cost. 

These days the scientific outlook is again being exiled, perhaps more by economic than political pressures. Increasingly, scientists are required to prostitute themselves to the commercial activities of germ warfare, genetically adulterated foods and apologism for ecological vandalism. Theoretical science has been slowly driven from the universities by the new crusaders of Postmodernism. But to call them crusaders is to attribute an energy to a listless and intellectually indolent movement of academics who, far from advocating something, are mainly concerned to deride commitment to anything. At their most risible the “philosophers” of the new Irrationalism are transparently bogus producers of mumbo-jumbo, able to convince only the dumbest of Americans of their wisdom by pronouncing their follies in strong French accents, using made-up words. Derrida’s book on Marx was the epitome of such utter nonsense.

It is high time that the fakes were exposed. Sokal and Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures is a work of meticulous, relentless destruction of the charlatanism of postmodernist writers who have sought to pepper their ramblings with pseudo-scientific formulae. Sokal and Bricmont are physicists and materialists. With detailed references to the works of writers ranging from Lacan and Kristeva to Latour and Baudrillard they demonstrate the ways in which these theorists have used scientific language—specifically, mathematics—without understanding it. Indeed, in several cases they may not have read the works they cite. This is in keeping with the postmodern outlook, which holds in contempt a relationship between the text and its meaning. Althusser, an earlier prophet of the nouveaux charlatans, wrote a book telling people how to read Marx’s Capital; writing years later, after being certified as a lunatic, he confessed that he had not actually read much of Marx.

Sokal and Bricmont’s impressive volume needs to be read to be appreciated. It is a valuable work of scholarship—for, sometimes the task of scholars is to expose intellectual sloppiness and fraud. There is a particularly stimulating chapter on the relationship between so-called postmodernism (a hopelessly ill-defined term) and chaos theory. There is scope, perhaps, for future writers to produce a book explaining the connection between chaos theory and the economic anarchy of late twentieth-century capitalism.

The best books on postmodernism so far have been David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity and Terry Eagleton’s Postmodernism. This is a welcome addition to the literature in defence of the materialist conception in the face of the anti-humanist philistinism of our age.

Steve Coleman