In a message dated 00-02-12 21:52:16 EST, you write:
<< > How much "progress" occurs
>because of science? Do we attribute science to capitalism or can we
>consider the scientific process to be "non-capitalist?"
Good and hard questions. I think that you would have to distinguish between
"science", "research", and "development" in order to answer them. And think
hard about the fact that it was not in producing the heavy industrial goods
of the second industrial revolution but in developing and producing
twentieth century technologies and the goods they made possible that really
existing socialism fell down.
And you have to think about Lysenko... >>
* * *
Lysenko was hardly "science" any more than the reserach by the Tobacco
Institute or Hernnstein & Murray is science.
I think the development of science and its application to industry has
largely been "capitalist." Capitalist markets provide a ruthless incentive
for firms to understand the natural world for purposes of manipulating it,
which means that it must be understoiod correctly. So, too, does
international military competition and imperialism. (Recall that Gailileo and
Leonardo workled for the arsenals of Florence and Milan respectivelly.)
Capitalism also provides more limited incentives for understanding the social
world, as long as this knowledge does not cut to the quick of class
domination. That is why there is real bourgeois social science and not mere
bourgeois ideology and vulgar apologetics.
But scientific knowledge and methods are not bound to capitalism and
imperialism. Once the sciertific approach, the emphasies on empirically
restible formulation of precise quantitative hypothesis about (mainly)
unobservable regularities has been created in the crucible of capitalism, it
can be cut free from that origin. There is no reason why science under
socialism should not be as good, and in the case of social science, better,
than under capitalism. We have some basis for thinking so in light of the
experience of the excellent natural science produced in nonmarket conditions
in the West in universities and in the ex-Bloc under planning.
If, however, the question was whether the progress in reducing human
suffering and expanding human possibilities that we have seen under
capitalism has been due to capitalist science, surely the answer is yes.
Apart from the science of the ex-Bloc countries, that is the main forma
natural science has taken--not, necesasrily, in direct work for corporations,
or capitalist firms, but under an ethos largely foremed ata high level by
the interests of the capitalsit class and its imperial servants in the state.
This isn't to say that we should say, in that case, let's leave well enough
alone. For one thing, what we have is not well enough. Capitalist science and
even more imperialist science has also produced immense suffering and
oppression. We have polio vaccine and computers and pastuerized milk but we
also have biological warfare, the "green revolution" and the Bomb. These
latter contributions give us reason to see whether we can abolsih the
incentives that create them as quickly as possible.
--jks
