https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/20/pers-a20.html
The issues posed by the worldwide March for Science
Science and Socialism
20 April 2017
Hundreds of thousands of scientists and other professionals, together
with students and working people who support them, will take part this
Saturday in the worldwide March for Science. The demonstration has
evoked a significant response, in large measure because it is seen as a
way to protest the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific
knowledge and investigation.
The Socialist Equality Party welcomes this demonstration. We call for
the mobilization of working people throughout the world against the
destruction of the environment by giant chemical and energy
corporations; attacks on public education that threaten access to all
aspects of human culture for an entire generation of young people; the
subordination of science to the profit requirements of the ruling class
and the military; and all censorship and restrictions on research and
teaching.
The call for the March for Science refers to these issues, but it has
definite limitations, summed up in its declaration that the attacks on
science “are not a partisan issue.” This question must be understood
correctly. The defense of science is only “nonpartisan” in the sense
that both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for the attack on
public education, the deteriorating environment, the growth of
militarism and the effort to censor and suppress scientific research.
The defense of science is, however, profoundly political, as it has been
throughout history, as far back as Galileo Galilei’s trial by the Roman
Catholic Inquisition. Every reactionary government and class persecutes
scientists and seeks to suppress and subordinate science to its own
ends. The progress of science and reason has always depended upon the
progress of society and social relations—and this is a political question.
The challenge today is to recognize the source of the attack on science,
which did not suddenly arise from the limited brain of Donald Trump. He
is only the crudest and most backward representative of a social system
in which all human activity, including science, is subordinated to
private profit. While science and technology have immensely developed
the power of social production, this production remains trapped within
the increasingly irrational forms of private capitalist ownership.
The defense of science is therefore inseparable from the revolutionary
struggle of the main progressive force in modern society, the working
class, against the corporate ruling elite.
Science and technology have made it possible to abolish hunger, cure
disease, banish ignorance and secure a decent standard of living for
every person on this planet. But under the profit system, vast wealth is
monopolized by a tiny handful of the super-rich. Just eight
mega-billionaires possess greater wealth than the poorest half of
humanity, while hundreds of millions go hungry; millions die of
preventable diseases; and schools, roads, water systems and other public
infrastructure are crumbling.
Modern technology, from revolutionary developments in transportation to
the creation of the Internet, has shattered the barriers to human
interaction and made possible the integration of all humanity. Science
itself is the most international of human enterprises, developing
through global collaboration.
However, because of the division of the world into rival nation-states,
technology is made the instrument of repression and persecution: the
hounding of refugees and immigrants throughout the world; the building
of walls against immigrants on the US-Mexico border; China’s “great
firewall,” separating one billion people from the rest of the world; and
the development of the NSA’s vast apparatus of global spying directed
against the population of the entire world.
Most ominously, in the hands of the rival nation-states, with US
imperialism taking the lead, science and technology have been perverted
into means of mass destruction. The April 22 demonstration takes place
under conditions of a growing threat of world war, with the Trump
administration, backed by the US media and Democratic Party, firing
missiles at Syria, dropping the largest bomb since Hiroshima and
Nagasaki on Afghanistan, and threatening a preemptive military strike
against North Korea.
The danger of a direct military conflict involving nuclear-armed powers
is very real. More than anyone else, scientists know that this would
mean the extinction of civilization, if not life on planet Earth.
What is the way forward? Those who wish to defend and advance the work
of science must confront a contradiction in their own ways of thinking.
They are accustomed to applying scientific methods to the processes of
nature, but not to the workings of society, still less to politics.
In part, this derives from the greater complexity of social life, where
the number of variables—including human beings—makes scientific analysis
more complicated. More importantly, it reflects the ideological
domination of the corporate ruling elite, which opposes efforts to apply
rational standards to the operations of a social system that affords
them unparalleled wealth and privilege. Within academia, the attack on
objective truth and reason spearheaded by postmodernism and other forms
of irrationalism is directed at all forms of scientific knowledge, above
all at the science of society and history.
Scientists must find their way back to insights of their greatest
predecessors like Albert Einstein, who were drawn to socialism as the
application of reason to the development of modern society—and as the
only means of ending war and dictatorship. This means taking up a study
of Marxism, which bases its revolutionary politics on an analysis of
objective reality and class interests.
The working class is the revolutionary force that has the capability to
put an end to capitalism and establish a socialist society based on
equality, democracy and social ownership of the wealth created by
collective labor. In the Russian Revolution, whose centenary we mark
this year, this scientific understanding was vindicated in practice,
with the working class coming to power under the leadership of a Marxist
party.
The working class cannot advance without the aid of science. But science
itself requires the advance of the working class, which will provide
science with the necessary mass base in society. In the final analysis,
the progress of science—and the progress of humanity as a whole—depends
on the resurgence of a new revolutionary movement of the working class.
The socialist movement unites under its banner both the pursuit of
scientific truth in all its forms and the struggle for human equality.
Statement of the Socialist Equality Party
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