Science and Marxism

quote of the issue

The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union two decades ago, combined with a low ebb in class struggle, has created a climate that provides a breeding ground for mysticism, superstition, social reaction and anti-scientific quackery. The new Spartacist Pamphlet, In Defense of Science and Marxism, containing seven articles reprinted from Workers Vanguard (newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S.), explains how Marxists passionately defend the acquisition of scientific knowledge and technological advances against such retrograde ideology.

In a 1925 speech before the Mendeleyev Congress, which took place amid celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky underlined the significance of scientific knowledge for mastering nature, differentiating between natural and social science in bourgeois society. As scientific socialists, our defense of science is ultimately linked to the fight for world proletarian revolution. Socialist society will accept with gratitude the heritage of scientific knowledge and build on it to achieve the communist goal of eliminating scarcity and want.

Science as a whole has been directed toward acquiring knowledge of reality, research into the laws of evolution, and discovery of the properties and qualities of matter, in order to gain greater mastery over it. But knowledge did not develop within the four walls of a laboratory or a lecture hall. No, it remained a function of human society and reflected the structure of human society. For its needs, society requires knowledge of nature. But at the same time, society demands an affirmation of its right to be what it is, a justification of its particular institutions—first and foremost, the institutions of class domination—just as in the past it demanded the justification of serfdom, class privileges, monarchical prerogatives, national exceptionalism, etc....

It can be said that the greater the trust of socialism in sciences devoted to direct study of nature, the greater is its critical distrust in approaching those sciences and pseudo-sciences which are linked closely to the structure of human society, its economic institutions, its state, laws, ethics, etc. Of course, these two spheres are not separated by an impenetrable wall. But at the same time, it is an indisputable fact that the heritage embodied in those sciences which deal not with human society but with “matter”—in natural sciences in the broad sense of the term, and consequently of course in chemistry—is of incomparably greater weight.

The need to know nature is imposed upon men by their need to subordinate nature to themselves. Any digressions in this sphere from objective relationships, which are determined by the properties of matter itself, are corrected by practical experience. This alone seriously guarantees natural sciences, chemical research in particular, from intentional, unintentional, or semideliberate distortions, misinterpretations, and falsifications. Social research primarily devoted its efforts toward justifying historically arisen society, so as to preserve it against the attacks of “destructive theories,” etc. Herein is rooted the apologetic role of the official social sciences of bourgeois society; and this is the reason why their accomplishments are of little value.

So long as science as a whole remained a “handmaiden of theology,” it could produce valuable results only surreptitiously. This was the case in the Middle Ages. It was during the bourgeois regime, as already pointed out, that the natural sciences gained the possibility of wide development. But social science remained the servant of capitalism….

It is self-evident that if there are no limits to knowledge and mastery of matter, then there is no unknowable “essence.”

Knowledge that arms us with the ability to forecast all possible changes in matter, and endows us with the necessary power of producing these changes—such knowledge does in fact exhaust the essence of matter. The so-called unknowable “essence” is only a generalization of our inadequate knowledge about matter. It is a pseudonym for our ignorance. Dualistic demarcation of unknown matter from its known properties reminds me of the jocular definition of a gold ring as a hole surrounded by precious metal. It is obvious that if we gain knowledge of the precious metal of phenomena and are able to shape it, then we can remain completely indifferent to the “hole” of the substance; and we gladly make a present of it to the archaic philosophers and theologians.

—Leon Trotsky, “Dialectical Materialism and Science” (1925)