1. Scientific objectivity
2. Illustrations on some branches of science
A. Physics
B. Medicine
C. Dietetics
3. The contradictions of bourgeois science
4. Scientific obscurantism
5. The science of the proletariat

We do not intend, in this brief exposition, to develop the general theory of knowledge that is an integral part of our doctrine. This fundamental question will have to be treated by starting both from our classical texts, and especially Anti-Dühring, and the work that has already been done on that basis (Philosophical Notes, etc.). We will speak for now only of a particular, limited aspect of the ‘philosophical question’, namely the attitude of Marxism with regard to bourgeois science.

Obviously, to this end, we base ourselves on the fundamental view of dialectical materialism, which understands the world as a historical process, rejects all immutable and a priori categories, and seeks to grasp natural and human phenomena in their becoming. This method is radically opposed to that of classical philosophy, which claimed to discover through thought the ‘principles of Being’ and then apply them to the world both inorganic and organic, and human. Engels ruthlessly critiques this idealism, which considers Principles as absolute entities, categories of the spirit, while the principles we can actually find are in reality extracted, abstracted, from the material world. This is precisely why we can ‘apply’ them to it; even mathematics, which some regard as pure games of the spirit, are only applicable to the world because we have derived them from the world.

But there is more: not only are all our ‘principles’ abstracted from the world, but our very capacity for abstraction, our faculty for constructing abstract representations and studying their relations, in a word our ‘reason’, is not an ‘a priori given’ but is the product of that activity of abstraction. Therefore, it is absurd to ask whether the laws of the universe agree with those of ‘reason’: there are no a priori and immutable ‘laws of reason’; our reason and its ‘laws’ are a product of the world and of our activity in the world, they translate our effort to understand, represent, and master the phenomena of the world.

It follows from this that ‘reason’ has nothing stable about it; like man in general, it changes as the conditions of existence, needs, activities, and knowledge of the human species change. Things that yesterday were rational, are no longer so today, and vice versa; similarly, in a society divided into antagonistic classes, each possesses its own ‘rationality’.

Rejecting every a priori, God, Man, or Reason, denouncing the vanity of the search for the Principles of Being or the Laws of the Spirit, Engels proclaims the end of philosophy: what we need is positive knowledge of the world.

And behold, Science rises up, proud and haughty, to declare: ‘Did you not say that positive knowledge is needed? Well, I am this positive knowledge; therefore, bow before Me!’

Now we contest, against present-day science, this character of ‘science by definition’, of human knowledge in general; while it claims itself to be Truth, if not eternal, at least objective and above classes, we denounce its class character, we qualify it as bourgeois science. It is this aspect and its consequences that we wish to study.

The first question to clarify is precisely that of the objectivity of science: we must specify in what sense of the term we can recognise such objectivity, and how it can be a class science while nonetheless being ‘objective’.

It must first be remembered that all knowledge is knowledge of someone. To be of any value, it must certainly be knowledge of a real property of the world, but this in no way implies its ‘independence’ from the knowing subject. Thus Engels ridiculed Dühring who, postulating the sovereignty of Knowledge, claimed that ‘[t]he mathematics of the inhabitants of other celestial bodies can rest on no other axioms than our own!’; Dühring was ignorant of both the historical development of mathematics and the experimental origin of its axioms (serious mathematicians themselves are aware that such axioms do not fall from the sky; one of them amused himself one day by looking up what the geometrical axioms of fish should be, if these humble animals were capable of theoretical geometry). It is also necessary to get rid of the heritage of ideal entities – Knowledge, Cognition, Science – which the idealist places who-knows-where outside the world, and which he tries in vain to grasp. In reality, what we improperly designate with these nouns is merely the theoretical and abstract form of activity. It therefore presents the same characteristics as activity, which is a relation between the one who acts and that on which he acts, a relation that depends on their respective properties while also modifying them.

We are concerned here with human knowledge as opposed not to the science of the inhabitants of the other celestial bodies (which, as Engels puts it, we do not have the honour of knowing) but with the science of animals also endowed with activity and knowledge. Now, man’s fundamental activity is productive activity: we will therefore not be surprised to find in the science of capitalist society all the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production – a point we will return to later.

As an abstract aspect of activity, science seeks first to predict the natural phenomena that condition this activity; then, within the limits of the possible, to discover the possibilities and modalities of their conscious modification in view of determinate ends: the knowledge of the world we seek is not an ‘end in itself’, but a knowledge to act in conformity with our interests.

At this point we can address the question of scientific objectivity.

Science is objective in the sense that it translates real properties of the world, properties inherent to ‘objects’ independently of the (individual or collective) knowing subject. This objectivity is based on the scientific method, which includes:

1.    Systematic observation, aimed at discovering the relationships between one phenomenon and another. It is necessary to emphasise the importance of systematic observation, which, in the natural sciences, has been overshadowed by experimentation (with important exceptions, e.g. astrophysics); the fact is that, in our science of human society, systematic experimentation is impossible, we must rely on observation and analysis of ‘involuntary experiences’.
2.    Systematic experience: the systematic and fractional modification of the conditions under which given phenomena unfold, greatly facilitates the discovery and verification of the relationships or laws they obey: obviously only applicable to phenomena reproducible at will.
3.    Starting from these observations, an attempt is made to construct a theoretical schema that best represents as many phenomena as possible: such a synthesis then makes it possible to return to analysis, to refine or modify the observations, to foresee new relationships to be discovered, in short, to proceed further in the research.

However, this method is not enough to make science a thing in itself, hovering above society: and this is because the object and objective of science are not ‘objectives’ at all, but are functions of the conditions of existence and the needs of the species, society, or class that produces such science.

Of course, one could say that the object of science is the entire universe and everything that happens in it. But it is easy to say ‘the entire universe’!

No real science (i.e. leaving aside God, who is ‘by definition omniscient’) will ever be able to embrace the universe in its totality, including itself, since it forms a part of it! Engels insists on this point: if there is no a priori limit to human science, if we can claim to know everything, it is only potentially; science will never be ‘complete’, we will never know everything! Moreover, no science has ever attempted to know everything at once: each science proceeds by carving out fragments from the Great Whole, and searching for the relations that these fragments have with each other and with everything else. This ‘fragmentation’ of the universe, this determination of the ‘objects’ of research, derives neither from a ‘free choice’ nor still less from a ‘pre-established scientific plan’ (by whom?): it is the conditions of existence, natural and historical necessities, that impose them.

A science can therefore be both ‘objective’ and, at the same time, specific to a species, society, or class. Let us take a few ultra-simple examples. The science of the deer, which allows it to find a spring or a waterhole in the forest based on the nature of the terrain and vegetation, is a true objective science – otherwise the deer would die of thirst – but one that does not affect the whale at all. Similarly, the tiger has its own science of hunting, and doesn’t give a damn about the beaver’s hydraulic engineering science. On a qualitatively higher level, human science, although more general than that of animals, still remains, above all, human. We read in cookery books that ‘rabbit calls for two hours’ cooking’, and this is an experimental, objective truth, but it is a species truth: for the fox it is nonsense, and for the rabbit an obvious counter-truth; it does not call for two hours or two seconds cooking, but to hop around in the woods and make lots of bunnies!

But human science is not simply ‘human’: determined by social needs, it is inseparable from social history; moreover, in societies divided into antagonistic classes, one of which holds a monopoly over the social forces of production, the objects and objectives of science are imposed by the ruling class, by the demands of the mode of production it represents. In a society in which productive activity is determined not by human needs but by the laws of the expanded reproduction of capital, science meets the same fate: that is, the objects it deals with and the aims it pursues are determined by the capitalist relations of production and the social relations that derive from them. Not only that, but the scientific method itself does not escape social determination, insofar as the ideology of the ruling class intervenes in theoretical work or forces science to consider as irreducible, ‘natural’ objects the products of social activity.

Wanting to illustrate this with a few examples, we will choose them expressly from the field of the natural sciences. The class content of the purported ‘social sciences’ is all too apparent, and moreover what we show for physics is all the more true for sociology.

It is interesting to start precisely from physics in order to prove that not even the ‘most objective science’ escapes class determination. The object of physics, inorganic matter and its properties, is evidently independent of us, and the laws it discovers are objectively true insofar as they can be (subject to more in-depth or general investigation). But the areas physics deals with, the direction in which it develops, are clearly determined by the needs of social production. Today, it is almost a truism to say that all the development of physics, all its discoveries, respond to an exigency of production. And we are not just alluding to the ‘orders’ of industry: even the ‘disinterested’ interest that this or that question arouses, and the effort that is ‘spontaneously’ devoted to it, derive from this objective social call (by way of counter-example, one could cite the discoveries of magnetism or the principle of the steam engine made by the Greeks; but it is an example that actually confirms our thesis: discovered then by chance, the two phenomena remained a ‘curiosity’, and did not give rise to any scientific work simply because no one knew what to do with them, and had to be rediscovered in the 18th century).

One would like, on the other hand, to forget that production today is governed by the laws of capitalism, is production of capital, and that in the final analysis the evolution of science is oriented by the necessity of increasing the production of capital. But the ‘disinterested’ scientists themselves are forced to become aware of this, albeit in a mystified way: in order to obtain the necessary funds for their work, they explain to capital that it is a good investment, capable tomorrow of yielding substantial profits. In reality, the whole debate between ‘applied research’ and ‘fundamental research’ is nothing more than a debate between the immediate and future needs of capital, and all the ‘centres’ of researchers and academics situate themselves squarely on the plane of capitalist profitability: they believe themselves to be ‘socialists’ because, free from the hunt for immediate profit, they are concerned with future profit!

We will not study in detail this determination of the development of physics by capitalist production. But there is one important point to emphasise: Marx and Engels foresaw, if not the form of the development of physics, then at least the sense, the direction in which it had to unfold: and they foresaw it starting not from the laws of physics, but from the laws of capitalist production.

We will insist on this point, because one of the big arguments of all the ‘supersessors’ of Marxism is this: Marx analysed – they say – the British capitalism of the last century, that of the steam engine and the mechanical loom. Now we are in the age of atomic energy and electronic brains, which the poor fellow could not have foreseen, and so everything has changed...

Well, yes, Marx did indeed foresee them, these great conquests of modern science. He proved that the laws of capitalism dictated:

1.    the search for new sources of energy, less tied to local geological conditions, more easily transportable, and more powerful than coal, indeed, ever more powerful: steam engine, electricity, energy derived from petroleum, atomic energy: these are the keywords that punctuate the evolution of physics and technology in the last century;
2.    increasing automation of production: and what else does the development of mechanics and then electronics represent?

One might ask: and in what other direction would you have wanted physics to develop? This would be an absurd question, one that in reality has never been posed and never will be posed. The fact that we cannot imagine ‘arbitrary’ developments in physics demonstrates precisely that they are not the fruit of imagination or of free discovery.

Similarly, it can be shown that the dizzying growth of the means of communication, and related technology, stems from the need to accelerate the circulation of capital; that the chemistry of plastic materials stems from the tendency of capitalism to free itself from the natural limits (raw materials) that hinder its expansion, etc.

Of course, Marx and Engels were not ‘prophets’: they did not know how this quest for ever more powerful sources of energy and ever more advanced automation would come about, but they knew it had to come about because the capitalist economy demanded it. And their analysis of capitalism was not limited to what was happening before their eyes, but rather embraced the whole of possible capitalist development (not deriving from the will of the bourgeois but from the laws of their economy), including its violent end at the hands of the proletariat and the fundamental characteristics of the social form that must succeed it. In particular, Marx and Engels showed that this evolution of capitalism, far from modifying it, tends instead to bring it ever closer to ‘pure capitalism’, thus providing an early response to the ‘discoverers of new facts’, anxious as they are to proclaim as transient that which they do not know: the Marxist analysis of capitalism, with all its political implications, cannot be superseded, it can only become ever more true!

But let us return to physics. It also offers us the example of the scientific branch in which the weight of the dominant ideology is most clearly manifested: something that might seem paradoxical only because in physics the construction of grand general theories is relatively easy (thanks also to mathematical formalism) and advanced. Well, the last few decades have seen philosophical-physical theories sprout up that directly reflect bourgeois idealism. Without going into excessive detail let us recall:

1.    The tendency to subdivide physics (which is already only a small fragment of science) into autonomous sectors (cosmic, macro and microscopic, etc.) each governed by its own laws; the rejection of any attempt to connect the laws of the different sectors to each other (a comrade of ours heard this anti-theory expounded by a Polish physicist, which led him to say that it was a transposition into physics of the ‘national roads to socialism’).
2.    The growing theorisation of an empiricism that tends to reduce physics to a cookbook; a comparison that, it should be noted, does a disservice to the... Artusi and similar manuals, which are the result of the millennia-old gastronomic experience of humanity.
3.    A tendency that would like to demonstrate how nature itself sets limits to our investigation.
4.    In short (since this tendency contains all the others), the contradictory attempt to construct an indeterministic theory in order to justify the anti-determinism of bourgeois social philosophy.

It goes without saying that the introduction of bourgeois idealism into physics hampers the evolution of even bourgeois physics. Caught between the materialism demanded by its own object and the bourgeois mode of thought that is socially imposed on it, physics goes mad like a compass that has lost its north [This subject deserves to be studied in depth as in other Party texts, and it will be good to return to it].

If we take the case of medicine, we see that even its object is not a natural given. In reality, both man and his diseases are, to a large extent, determined by the whole complex of his living conditions. This is true even for infectious diseases, insofar as the way the organism reacts to this or that pathogenic agent (microbe, virus, etc.) depends on the whole of its state and its greater or lesser degree of equilibrium. Thus, the proliferation of new diseases can certainly originate from modifications of pathogenic microorganisms, but there is no doubt that it also derives from a modification of the organism’s own defences.

If there is a history of medicine, it is not only because medical knowledge expands, but above all because each social form has its own diseases and its own attitude to illness (think of the different ways of reacting to pain in different historical communities). What is more, within a society divided into classes, each class has its own characteristic illnesses: and we are not talking here about directly ‘occupational’ illnesses (miners’ silicosis, printers’ saturnism, etc.), but rather those that depend on the totality of living conditions both material in the proper sense (work, nutrition, housing, etc.) and ‘psychological’, i.e. dependent on the reciprocal relations between men in a given mode of production.

To stick to elementary examples here too, let us cite the decrease in the average height of conscripts in the last century in England, France, and Germany in direct dependence on the development of capitalism. At that time, the productivity of labour was still weak and the race for accumulation resulted in extensive exploitation: extremely long working days, child labour, miserable nutrition, etc., thus in premature physical wear and tear that not only lowered the average lifespan of proletarians, but made them a physically underdeveloped race (as Bukharin recalls in The ABC of Communism, ed Prometeo, p. 37).

But, something likewise foreseen by Marx, capital had to tend toward replacing extensive exploitation with intensive exploitation, absolute surplus value with relative surplus value: today, the ‘wear and tear’ on proletarians thus takes on less directly physical aspects, the lifespan is increasing again, the average height likewise, but at the same time circulatory, digestive, etc. disorders multiply, and above all nervous imbalances with all their after-effects, which are an effect of the nervous tension of work as much as of growing social anxiety.

This explains the increase in morbid states, in the face of which medicine ends up shrugging its shoulders because – even leaving aside its conditioning by the pharmaceutical industry – capitalism condemns it to impotence, or rather imposes on it an orientation and an objective that render its greatest achievements vain.

A medicine worthy of the name should set itself the goal of maintaining man in good health, of preserving or restoring him to a satisfactory equilibrium. This was the aim, for example, of ancient Chinese medicine; unlike today, the mandarin paid the doctor when he was well and cut his fees when he fell ill. This inversion, the fact that in our society it is in the doctor’s interest that we fall ill, shows the role dictated to medicine by capitalism: to mend the man who is broken down by the life he is forced to lead.

It would be a mistake to believe that what prevents medicine from preventing ills and reduces it to trying to cure them is a ‘scientific insufficiency’ or a ‘technical incapacity’. The problem is not scientific but social: medicine is incapable of prevention because workers’ living conditions are already determined by the demands of capitalist production, over which medicine has no hold whatsoever. Only when the rate of morbidity threatens the production of capital does capital itself orient medicine in the direction of prevention (the case of infectious diseases of an epidemic character). But in general, the ‘natural’ tendency of medicine (and of deluded young doctors) towards prevention shatters against the iron demands of capital. One does not need to be a professor to know that the atmosphere of cities is increasingly contaminated and poisons those who inhabit them: in Paris, already some years ago, at certain road junctions and during rush hours, the carbon monoxide level exceeded three per thousand, considered lethal, not to mention the lethal effect of noise on nervous equilibrium, and more besides.

Everyone knows that; but what is the use of knowing, if things remain what they are?

It is evident that the situation in which bourgeois medicine finds itself determines its entire development. (Even the by-definition curative branch of medicine, traumatology, sees its relative and absolute importance determined by the mode of production: workplace accidents and road accidents are products of the capitalist economy, not to mention war wounds!) In fact, capital says to medicine: I force men into an impossible life, I exploit them, I squeeze them, I give them no respite, I set them against one another to suck more surplus value out of them; that’s how it is and there is nothing you can do about it; they are nervous, restless, cardiopathic, they’re falling apart. Well then, see to it that you make them fit to serve: invent sleeping pills, digestives, narcotics; and, if their heart jams up, try the transplant, I will supply you with the spare parts.

The heart transplants that the press praises to the skies are a typical example of the orientation impressed upon science by bourgeois society: socially incapable of preventing heart disease, medicine is not even interested in the scientific problem of this prevention, but dedicates treasures of experience and ingenuity to a sinister operation: some fellow has to croak so that another can be patched up with the pieces, and behold our fine doctors (humanists and moralists if ever there were any) unleashed in search of a still-warm heart. And to think that these vile splendours are presented to the ecstatic admiration of potential heart patients!

It would be extremely easy to give a thousand other examples of the orientation imposed by capitalism on medical research, even in the therapeutic field. A great deal of effort is devoted to shortening the duration of illnesses so that the worker returns quickly to production (antibiotics, for instance) at the risk of leaving him badly healed or even broken down by a ‘horse remedy’, so that a second specific remedy will have to fight against the nefarious effects of the first. But without going into the particulars of the contradictions in which bourgeois medicine flounders, we can generally say this: capitalism needs workers who can be exploited, but this very exploitation ruins them. Here is the contradiction in which medicine is crushed under capitalism and which completely determines it.

We will dwell on this branch of medicine because of its special importance – matched by its almost non-existent current development. It is, however, universally acknowledged that we eat badly (we are speaking here of fully capitalist countries, not of those that the development of world capitalism with all its contradictions condemns to permanent starvation). Periodically, medical academies raise cries of alarm, while the quackery of ‘vitalistic’ nutrition, and the like, multiply; and doctors prescribe us all sorts of diets for all sorts of illnesses, fluctuating and often contradictory diets, which seem to be inspired by fashion rather than science.

That there is no real science of nutrition today, moreover, is not surprising; and not because once again, it is a ‘difficult’ science. It is true that it is difficult to find the optimal diet, i.e. the one that ensures for the species the best equilibrium and best development under given conditions (e.g. it is by no means certain that the yoghurts that, allegedly, procured longevity for Balkan peasants meet the needs of New York city-dwellers). But the real reason is not there. If there is no science of nutrition today, the fact is that it is not even sought because it would be of no use at all, insofar as what we must eat is already determined by the laws of capitalist production. Capitalism only asks science to know enough to prevent the ruinous excesses that would deprive it of labour: for the rest, it is the economy that decides!

Marx, for example, showed that the cultivation of the potato became generalised in Europe because this tuber allowed proletarians to be fed more cheaply than wheat, and thus lowered wages. But if cheap food remains one of the objectives of capital (and French peasants with excessively high production costs are learning this at their own expense) another is added, to the extent that agricultural production itself becomes capitalistic: the need to accelerate the turnover of capital in agriculture. Herein lies the cause of the phenomenon that accompanies all capitalist development and that is the increased consumption of animal products (meat, milk, fish) to the detriment of cereals, whose production cycles are longer and more difficult to change. Similarly, the cultivation of vegetables in greenhouses has developed enormously in recent times precisely in the countries with the most capitalistic agriculture: if in Paris one eats fresh lettuce from Holland in the dead of winter, it is in order to make the capital invested in this type of crop ‘turn over’ more quickly.

Is it a good thing to eat (tasteless) green salad all year round? To gorge on (gelatinous) chicken and (badly fermented) cheese? No one knows, and capital does not care: it is indeed a problem that bourgeois science cannot even pose to itself, because it is profit that determines food production and consumption.

This determination is so manifest that even the ‘scientists’ themselves end up noticing it: we have before our eyes an article by the honorary director of a major French veterinary school, who is alarmed by the changes being inflicted on animal species without anyone being able to properly weigh the consequences that will result from it for man:

•    Pigs are being produced with two extra ribs, huge legs (with defective tissue), hypertrophied liver, and (useless in... the delicatessen) atrophied stomachs;
•    Calves are being produced with buttocks (the escalopes!) so big that to get them out of the maternal womb, on certain farms, the cow has to be cut by caesarean section;
•    Growth is accelerated with all sorts of drugs, antibiotics, hormones, and so on.

Our veterinarian explains in no uncertain terms that this is all due to the race for profit, full stop. But what can he do about it, what can his illustrious colleagues do about it? Nothing, except to carry out the work required by capital, except for bursting into tears from time to time.

Let us be clear. We do not reproach capitalism for modifying natural species. Nothing is further from Marxism than sermons about a ‘return to nature’ or a ‘natural diet’; all meaningless formulas. The apple that Eve offered Adam was perhaps natural (or divine?!), but ever since mankind emerged from the stage of simple gathering, it has worked at the transformation of all natural givens. However, we must see in what sense man’s activity operates upon nature, and who directs it. For millennia, men have sought a good diet – blindly, under the conditions they found themselves in and with the means they had at their disposal; by dint of experience, they had arrived at results that were by no means definitive, but which presented a minimum guarantee of harmlessness. Bourgeois science throws all this heritage to the wind with a formidable capacity for intervention, but without knowing in the slightest where it is going: all its work on animal and plant species (and on the earth itself) is solely determined by the pursuit of profit.

Therefore, this science is but a science of profitability: socially, it cannot even seriously question whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for man to eat what he is made to eat. It is good for capital, and that is enough. Even if, hypothetically, a genius knew what the ‘ideal’ diet would consist of today, he too would be taken for a charlatan, since absolutely nothing at all would change as a result. Only when it masters its own forces, and produces according to its own needs and no longer according to the laws of capital, will humanity be able to embark on a true science of nutrition.

Since we do not intend to trace an exhaustive history of bourgeois science, we will stop at the few examples presented: what was important for us to show was how far removed from reality is the idea of a Science suspended above society, and how scientific development descends from social necessities and, in bourgeois society, from the inexorable need to increase capital more and more.

Of course, in order to respond effectively to the needs of capital, bourgeois science must be real, i.e. discover objective properties and laws of the world, it must actually increase our positive knowledge. But it happens to science as in general to the productive forces and the apparatus of production under the dominion of H.M. Capital: just as production that is driven by the production of capital presents, from the point of view of human needs, ever greater ‘parasitic excrescences’ (useless or harmful), so too science, oriented by capital, develops sectors that interest only capital, and neglects others that are essential for the species.

Although we know very well why bourgeois science pushes in this or that direction, in practice it is impossible for us to say today which knowledge will remain useful and which (while remaining ‘true’) will fall into disuse, as has often happened in history – at least as far as the natural sciences are concerned. We know, for example, why chemistry sought (and found) synthetic textile fibres: capitalism must try to free itself from ‘natural’ raw materials, the production of which is tied to climatic conditions, seasonal cycles, and also to socio-economic situations (colonial or semi-colonial countries with monoculture, etc.): it must seek ‘industrial’ raw materials produced no matter when and no matter where, at the rate required by the market and at low production costs. This is why we have to wear clothes made of nylon, terylene, etc., and why capital doesn’t give a damn whether or not these harm the skin (breathing, perspiration, etc.) and thus the entire biological equilibrium, at least as long as they do not have immediately catastrophic effects. But this does not necessarily prove that such products are ‘an evil’. Here too, one must beware of falling into ‘naturism’; after all, not even a woollen shirt is a ‘natural’ product, but rather a product of human activity, tested by a long experience. By dint of invoking nature, one would very soon arrive, in the words of Marx and Engels, to ‘idealise the stage when naked men scratched the ground with their nails in search of edible tubers’. In freeing itself, for reasons of its own, from certain natural limits, capitalism effectively frees man from them as well: whether it is then convenient for mankind to free itself from those natural limits, and where this may lead it, is a question that current science is socially incapable of resolving.

Likewise, we will not say that atomic energy is necessarily an evil. We know that the bourgeoisie is forced by the laws of capitalist economics to generalise the use of this energy source without taking into account the dangers it presents and stifling the doubts and anxieties of biologists. But the energy derived from nuclear fission is as (or as little) ‘natural’ as that drawn from the first brushwood fire: today its use is demanded by capital; only once freed from the laws of capitalism will humanity be able to seek to discover whether it is indeed, taking into account all its implications and consequences, socially useful.

On the other hand, there are areas in which we can make predictions: for example, it is very likely that almost all of dentistry, the ultra-refined science of dental operations and prosthetics, will eventually disappear to the extent that general equilibrium and proper prevention will prevent teeth from decaying.

All the more reason why the purported ‘sciences of man’, psychology, social psychology, sociology, etc., will disappear for the simple fact that their object, the man of capitalist society (homo capitalisticus) will have disappeared. Without dwelling on these ‘sciences’, let us nevertheless cite an example. Social psychology (which offers brilliant careers as personnel manager, advertising agent, market expert and ‘(in)human relations’, in the factory or in diplomacy) has scientifically turned to the problem of workers’ productivity (how to increase it without shelling out money!), and discovered that, for example, the output of a winding-machine department increases by such-and-such percent if the machines are painted a soft green instead of grey, if here and there there are flowers and pictures, and if the foreman (with his manly moustache) is courteous to all the female workers without giving preference to any (oh, holy emulation!) and this is a ‘scientific truth’ and an experimental truth, which we as of now scoff at, which we fight against if necessary, and which, in communist society, will become a monstrous absurdity!

But let us return to the somewhat more serious sciences, those that claim to increase man’s dominion over nature. We have seen that the most ‘objective’ of these only develop in the directions in which such dominion allows for extending the expanded reproduction of capital. But this very development, demanded by capital, is hindered by the capitalist mode of production, and for various reasons:

•    The very fact of this orientation alters the balance of scientific development, fragments it into antagonistic sectors, slows it down;
  
•    the (inevitable) struggle between immediate profit and future profit accentuates this imbalance;
  
•    bourgeois idealism impregnates the mentality of the ‘scientists’ and hinders their work: this fact, already noted by Engels, becomes ever more flagrant, as we have seen with physics;
  
•    finally, the social division of labour, which in the past allowed the flourishing of the sciences, now obstructs their further development.

This last point is interesting because it is one of the factors behind student unrest. Capitalism demands more and more science; now, the form in which the production of science is carried out lags far behind that of material production: until not so long ago, science was produced in a semi-artisanal and individual manner; only in the last few decades has associated labour been seriously introduced into this field, and it has caused a proletarianisation of professors and other scholars. These become proletarians to the extent that they are no longer masters of their means of production and their products, but must sell their own labour-power: of course, these workers, who cost a lot and are useful to it in many respects, capitalism does not degrade them to the rank of ordinary proletarians: it makes them ‘luxury proletarians’ (just as there are ‘battery chickens’).

But this ‘modernisation’ of teaching and research is, in reality, already coming too late: at the beginning of capitalism, the introduction of associated labour, the socialisation of production, allowed the impetuous development of the productive forces; today these forces suffocate in the grip of capitalist relations. Present-day science itself, bourgeois, no longer finds itself at ease within the capitalist form: its development demands the abolition of the division of labour, of individual or ‘corporate’ accounting, of competition, of the wage-earner.

One only has to think of the inextricable tangle that for the bourgeoisie represents the selection and formation of this elite: all the ingenious discoveries of psycho-pedagogy shatter against the reality of capitalist relations. Moreover, on closer inspection, these great discoveries are nothing more than pale mimicry of things we know inside out. For a long time the Party has practised the method of knowledge-transmission and developing work that the ‘educational scientists’ have been groping for in the darkness: ‘teaching’ is not distinct from activity; the training of young people takes place without ‘professors’, through their participation in collective work; no examinations or diplomas are needed to check or certify the abilities of individuals; each one gives a contribution proportional to their strengths and, if they make a mistake, comrades correct them without much fuss. But if the Party can conduct its activity in this way, which is at once the most effective and the one that allows each militant to develop their personal talents to the fullest, this is because the Party is a unitary collective organ: all fighting for the same cause, the militants know neither competition nor careerism; they seek neither fortune nor glory; the activity imposes itself on them as a historical necessity to which each one spontaneously gives the best of themselves.

The fact that this mode of operation besets (without their having a clear awareness of it) a good number of university reformers simply confirms the Marxist thesis that, from a certain degree of development, the productive forces rebel against the capitalist form and objectively demand the communist form. But, as it is impossible to introduce communism piecemeal into bourgeois society, the most ‘daring’ ideas of the reformers flow into utopia, and the only real result of their agitation is to cultivate the illusion of a reform of society without revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, while the actual reform of the university proceeds in the direction of an accentuation of competition [concorrenza] (modestly called ‘competition’ [competizione], as if it were a disinterested sport!): competition to enter the ‘luxury’ category, to stay there and climb in rank; competition between faculties, research units, etc. Capitalism knows no other means for making men work.

We have seen that bourgeois science, far from hovering in the ether of ‘pure knowledge’, is determined by capital and globally caught up in the contradictions of capitalist society: we shall now see that, in addition, it is a weapon of bourgeois conservation.

First of all, because ‘scientific progress’ is one of the bourgeoisie’s great alibis. The evils from which humanity suffers are evident; unable to deny their existence, the bourgeoisie tries to disguise their social causes by hiding behind ‘natural forces’. While, in reality, the productive forces of humanity are already too developed for the capitalist form, bourgeois propaganda gives proletarians the impression that their miseries are due to an insufficient mastery of nature.

In a speech by Waldeck Rochet (‘France Nouvelle’, 17 January 1968), we find a characteristic example of this mystification, which defers the improvement of proletarians’ fortunes to an unspecified future: ‘As the progress of science and technology makes it possible to increase production and labour productivity...’! Rejecting with horror the class struggle for the overthrow of bourgeois domination, these Messrs. preach the submission of ‘all classes’ to the imperatives of the progress of bourgeois science and technology, from which, however, proletarians have nothing to expect! One can see here that even the most serious achievements of bourgeois science play into the hands of capitalist conservatism, bringing water to the mill of the illusion of Progress. (Similarly, the scientific authority of an Einstein only validated the petty-bourgeois, democratic, and pacifist idealism that he could never rid himself of).

Moreover, the bourgeoisie takes its cue from the successes of the natural sciences in order to build a ‘social science’ allegedly above classes, in reality to justify its own social philosophy and its own form of society. Here the contradictions of bourgeois thought (reflections of social contradictions) explode:

•    in the science of nature, the bourgeoisie has de facto accepted materialism; otherwise, there would be neither science nor productive expansion;
•    in the science of society, it cannot accept it because it implies its death.

To disguise this contradiction, the bourgeoisie exploited the enormous confusion that, in language, results in the ambiguity of the term ‘reason’: when the bourgeoisie itself presented itself as the Light (‘the Enlightenment’) against obscurantism, as Reason against superstitions, the word ‘reason’ confused two different concepts: that of the rationality of the world and that of an immanent and transcendent Reason.

By ‘rationality of the world’ is meant the fact that the phenomena and events of the world are not independent and incoherent, but related to each other; that it is possible to find these relations and the laws that govern them and thus to ‘understand’ the world: it is, quite simply, the concept of determinism. Now, this is not an ‘innovation’ of the bourgeoisie, which has only given extreme expression to a tendency as old as man and not unknown even to animals. Neither is it an a priori principle, but a perennial conquest: to say that ‘everything is connected to everything’ is an empty phrase (which runs the risk of leading to absurdity: the link between the Crusaders’ conquest of the Holy City and, say, an earthquake in Sicily, is extremely tenuous and indirect!). What matters is to find out what is connected, in what way, to what else.

In what sense can we say that ‘superstitions’ are irrational? Not because they deny determinism, but because, unable to find the true causes of a phenomenon, they attempt to explain it with a false determinism, which is generally anthropocentric, attributes to man an exceptional Power, and serves social ends. Thus natural forces that eluded human comprehension were put at the service of a given social order: this is what the Bible did when it explained the geological cataclysm from which the Jordan Valley originated by the vices and turpitudes of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, or, in much more recent times, the Holy Inquisition when it blamed the Lisbon earthquake on the Jews and other heretics. The bourgeoisie, however, has gone too far in treating all the knowledge of the societies that preceded it as foolish superstition: talismans themselves were not, after all, such an idiotic thing; the warrior who believes himself invulnerable knows no fear; his behaviour in battle and the very outcome of the battle end up altered; the individual convinced that a ‘magic’ stone assures him a happy digestion actually digests better. Moreover, science has very often treated as ‘superstition’ what was the fruit of millennia-old observations, like, centuries ago, that ‘scientist’ who mocked the ‘naive Breton peasants who believe that the moon has something to do with the tides’. Even today, the most scientific weather forecast is no more reliable than that of the peasants, founded on long experience. Let us also recall the two cases of dam breaches, where old experience condensed into place names (Malpasset, in France) knew that the terrain was not safe: ignoring the meaning of place names, geologists and engineers built dams in precisely the wrong places.

Of course, this does not mean that all ancient beliefs should be taken back. But even when their scientific-rationalist critique was well-founded, it served the bourgeoisie to accredit the idea of an a priori Reason. Instead of understanding human rationality as the search for the true adaptation of means to given ends, the bourgeoisie has made it an Absolute: and not by mistake or by chance, but because such abstract reason, above societies, above classes, independent of men and equally accessible to all, is the theoretical foundation of its social philosophy: on it rests the Democratic Principle, the worst superstition of all time, the belief that it is the free expression of free opinions that determines social relations and social becoming. With ‘Reason’, the bourgeoisie has both eliminated a simplistic anthropocentrism (the one for which processions are held to get rain), while instituting and institutionalising a more refined one: the anthropocentrism that recognises the laws of nature but excludes man from them; that posits him as a Freedom.

This belief, which justifies the political form of bourgeois society, is, we repeat, a superstition worse than all ancient superstitions. If the Greeks explained the thunderbolt or tidal waves with the wrath of Zeus and Poseidon, it can be said in their defence that they were genuinely incapable of finding the true explanation for them. Now that the bourgeoisie claims to explain social phenomena, and in particular the catastrophes that strike humanity, with the democratic superstition, their real scientific explanation is perfectly accessible to man. But it is not given by an abstract Science, but by a science which openly proclaims itself a class science, and which can only be the science of the class objectively called upon to destroy capitalism, an action-science, the revolutionary science of the proletariat.

Against this science, the bourgeoisie mobilises all its forces, and in particular its own science. Science persecutes the petty Dulcamara who sells dried grass as the ‘secret remedy of the Aztecs’ against this or that ailment, and sure, the little trickster exploits human suffering and the impotence of bourgeois science to his advantage. But his is (sometimes more effective and) infinitely less harmful than the intrinsic charlatanism of this same science: positing itself as Science In Itself, claiming that an abstract science above classes must regulate social questions, science directly fights against the revolutionary consciousness-raising of the proletariat. This is why – not to satisfy petty vanities – the bourgeoisie raises science and scientists so high to the stars: as long as proletarians, kept by the division of labour in ignorance and brutalisation, admire science and scientists and await salvation from them, the bourgeoisie can sleep between two pillows!

Shall we say, then, that the proletariat owes nothing to bourgeois science? That would be absurd. The proletariat owes the bourgeoisie the destruction of sclerotised forms of production, the realisation – at its own expense – of that impetuous development of the productive forces which objectively confronts it with the necessity of its revolution; which makes communism possible and necessary. This historically revolutionary aspect of capitalism can, of course, also be found on a theoretical level: bourgeois science too has had its revolutionary phase, consisting in the demolition of the scheme of a universe frozen in immutable categories, and in the demonstration of the historicity of nature. This phase is marked by two great stages, (we mention names for ease of recall):

•    Galileo and Kant: from the denial of ‘absolute’ motion and the geocentric cosmos to the affirmation of the historicity of the solar system;
•    Lamarck and Darwin: demonstration of the evolution of living species and approach toward the laws that govern it; origin of the human species.

Here are the great achievements of bourgeois science. Having arrived in front of man, it steers clear: the third stage, Morgan’s demonstration of the historicity of socio-familial forms and the laws governing their evolution, already exits the framework of bourgeois science.

It, in fact, has never accepted the work of Morgan: today, it is not content to ignore it; all ethnological activity tends to conceal the great historical trunk brought to light by Morgan beneath diverging little twigs: the ‘deepening’ of particulars only aims to break or conceal the unity of the high street of historical development and its laws. This is because, while it can accept historicity and determinism in nature, the bourgeoisie cannot accept them in human society: for it, history is a slow march from darkness towards that Ideal of Reason that is bourgeois society. And the more this ‘ideal’ reveals its true essence, the more the bourgeoisie rejects with horror the determinism that announces its death, and takes refuge in superstition.

Morgan’s work marks the sunset of the revolutionary phase of bourgeois science; accomplished on the impetus of this science, it surpasses it and joins up with the proletarian science that has arisen in the meantime in Europe: it is perhaps the only scientific work, if not ‘above’ classes, at least ‘between two classes’: but it could not remain in this unstable position; bourgeois science, thereby marking its own limits, repudiated it, and Marx and Engels immediately realised that it fit perfectly into proletarian science, to which it brought a resounding historical confirmation.

As the revolutionary phase of the bourgeoisie was exhausted and victorious capitalism entered its expansion phase, then began to putrefy, bourgeois science had to follow a parallel evolution: it could only develop according to the demands of capital while retreating on the level of principles, it could only place its rationality above classes and claim to be the repository of humanity’s salvation. This abstract Science today is nothing more than an opium of the proletariat, and no wonder it cohabits in such good harmony with its enemy of yesterday, religion. The bourgeoisie no longer seeks coherence: in its terror of the proletariat, it uses indiscriminately God and Reason, Pope and Democracy.

Thus, bourgeois science, yesterday revolutionary, is today an obstacle on the path of the proletariat. It is not even anything more than this, because we are totally uninterested in the ‘progress’ it can still make; on the one hand because we know that it will not go very far, on the other hand because this does not matter at all today: The problems currently facing humanity are not due to insufficient mastery of natural forces, but to the fact that humanity does not master its own forces.

Its dominion over nature, its science, and its productive forces have escaped its control, have become ‘autonomous’ in the form of capital, dominate it, and multiply at its expense according to the laws of capital. And it is not a question here of the relationship between man and machine (which bourgeois superstition tends to ‘personalise’ as the ancients personalised the thunderbolt) and capital is not for us a metaphysical entity. What is at issue is the reciprocal relationship between men in productive activity.

Precisely because the relations of production are based on private appropriation, the market, and the wage-earner, they have transformed the social productive forces into ‘capital’, i.e. a social mechanism of production that can only function according to the laws of the capitalist economy.

The problem is therefore not one of quantitatively increasing the productive forces (among which is science): this increase, already achieved by capitalism, does nothing but render the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production more violent, causing social convulsions that bourgeois superstition interprets in a ‘scientifically’ fantastical key.

What is at issue is to revolutionise the productive forces qualitatively through the dictatorial overthrow of the social relations of production.

Therefore, the proletariat, a class objectively called upon to bring about this revolution, overturns the ‘logical’ order of science, which would like to build first a ‘complete’ physics, then a ‘complete’ biology, in order to arrive finally at a social science. The proletariat starts from the science of human society and subordinates all others to it. Only the knowledge of the laws of social development allows it to carry out this revolution imposed by history; only after having liquidated social contradictions will men, having become masters of their own force, be able to effectively resume the study of nature. Freed from the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, science, integrated into the whole of social activities, will then progress by leaps and bounds.

In summary, we could refer to a saying by Vallès. In an article intended (even then!) to rally scientists and intellectuals around the banner of the proletariat, he uses the formula: ‘The Revolution is nothing but the forward march of Science’. Now if it is true that, as we have seen, the development of science, and of the whole complex of human activities, necessarily passes through the communist revolution, Vallès’s formula reflects the bourgeois idealism that has all too much plagued the workers’ movement (French above all): by placing Science above society, it disarms the proletariat. The formula must be overturned and placed back on its two feet: Science today is the forward march of the revolution; it is the class science of the proletariat, revolutionary theory and praxis, the historical doctrine and experience of the struggles of the proletariat; it is the organisation of the proletariat into a revolutionary class; in a word, human science today is the PARTY. Only the class Party of the proletariat represents, defends, and puts into action the only science that counts, and which encompasses all others.