Chris Knight: Marxism and Science - Part One

This is an important piece. It will be very interesting to see where Dr. Knight takes the investigation in future articles. However, there seems to be an underlying assumption in this whole enterprise of examining Marxism and Science that is left unquestioned. Should we assume that what we take as "science" is always fundamentally "progressive"?The tone of all this seems to be that science is inherently beneficial, all we need is the proletariat to uncover its rational core underneath the torrent of bourgeois ideological distortion.

I won't rehash the arguments completely here, but there has been a long tradition in the 20th century of questioning the relationshio of science and humanity, in the face of--among other things--an unprecedented ecological crisis and the massive growth of various forms of social repression carried out in the name of science ("social" or "natural"). Not even modern medicine is immune from these criticisms, witness the backlash against psychiatry and the medical-pharmaceutical complex, from various points in the culture. There is a growing sense of despair in the culture that taken too far, science has a boomerang effect that ends up making man its slave rather than liberating him, or at the very least there are certain problems which are in the end genuine antinomies that cannot be solved, i.e. mind vs. body problems in medicine, etc.

Do these trends reflect the continued dominace of science by ideological influences from bourgeois society or is there something more sinsiter about science itself that inevitably tends to "objectify" humanity (i.e., Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Englightenment). It would seem to me that Marxists need to confront and examine these ideas, especially as they have often been advanced by figures who claim at least some tendential lineage to the Marxist tradition.

Looking forward to the next installment.

Surely any text which claims to present a Marxist view on 'science' should examine the connection between Hegel's view that what makes philosophy a science is it's comprehension of the self-movement of the categories, his summary critique of political utopianism, Marx's utilisation of the critique of political utopianism in the critique of utopian socialism and the connection of his view of communism as the real movement unfolding before our very eyes with Hegel's views?