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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2004Essay
Sham
neutrality of science born of capitalism
by
Raha ‘Castles
in the Air’ --Aristophanese,
THE BIRDS "To
have one basis for life and another for science is a priori a lie." --Marx,
THE 1844 HUMANIST MANUSCRIPTS What
has happened to the dream of the abolition of intellectual elites and of
participatory democracy as the offspring of technological progress envisioned by
John Dewey? Isn’t it time to finally dethrone the prophets of the
techno-scientific society and the presuppositions of an automatic age? We have
learned where the "technically sweet pursuit of nuclear science" a la
Oppenheimer has lead to and not just with regard to HIS fate under McCarthyism
but the whole genre of scientists in the first half of the 20th century. Once
the first Big Bomb exploded, it became obvious that the scientists were last to
be consulted about its use. The myth of neutrality, therefore, turned out to
have served only a POLITICAL CONCEPT. But when are we going to reach a universal
consensus that it isn’t just Hitler’s science or North Korean or Pakistani
Quadeer Khan’s science, but science AS SUCH that has gone to the devil? It
is one of the most peculiar characteristics of our time in which no deformity
ever vanishes. At a climactic stage in the technological conquest of nature, old
forms belonging to the previous epochs of human development live side by side
with the moderns. Thus we find the civilized horrors of overwork grafted onto
barbaric horrors of slavery and serfdom. Hunger and obesity, Malaria and AIDS,
absolute poverty and abstract wealth continue to coexist however unevenly
distributed among different individuals. We therefore suffer not only from the
present but also from the past. What
seems so astonishing is that even affluence and the absence of hard physical
labor among certain segments of the population has not generated health,
happiness or freedom. The life of "leisure," conceived as the opposite
of "toil," has led to depression, inactivity and alienation. We are,
therefore, oppressed by underdevelopment as well as by full technological
development. As Marx would say in Postface to CAPITAL: "The dead clutches
onto the living." There is a PRIMITIVE character to the MODERN
age--perpetuating the most ancient through the instrumentality of the
machine--the domination of man by man. Developed
as such instrumentality, the earlier era’s project of realizing technology’s
concrete purpose has now amounted to a sheer abstraction. What began as an
abstract concept, the machine at the service of human progress, has been
transformed into ITS progress. The "slaves of men," as Oscar Wilde had
dreamed, turned out to enslave men. But the tendency to regard "men"
as semi-idiots or dummies relative to the mind of the machine, while latent from
its very beginning, appears now to have achieved total dominance. It is now
apparent that the "republic of science" (Marx, "The Latest
Prussian Censorship," 1842) has crowned the "smart machine." No
longer content with a subsidiary role as the application of science, technology
is now behaving as if it is self-caused and possesses a mind of its own. It has
ceased to be bound by any external aim. Its end has become the pure
self-development of technology itself. The illusion of "technicity" as
an independent deity has even been likened by some to the myth of the
"Prometheus Unbound." But one must be fully true to the legend and
ask: If that ancient Titan stole fire from heaven and introduced it to
"man," if he sacrificed for humanity by getting chained to the
Caucasus with vultures constantly gnawing at his liver, what has this so-called
"Modern Prometheus" offered mankind? Humanity--always
subjugated as a TALKING INSTRUMENT--is now on the threshold of ultimate
self-instrumentation in the creation of bio-technological life forms that may
very well have the potential to threaten the survival of the human species.
Given the fact that under capitalism, life itself is but a mere means of living,
and in light of the experience of the atomic bomb, should we not pause a moment
to ponder the ramifications of this new venture? Is this then the next frontier
in Scientific Utopia? MARX'S
'REQUIEM' FOR SCIENCE "The
fear that there will one day be established a despotism based on science is a
ridiculous and absurd fantasy. Such a thing could only arise in minds wholly
alien to the positivist idea." --Claude
Henri Saint Simon, L'ORGANISATEUR "All
our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with
intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force." --Marx,
Anniversary speech for the PEOPLE'S PAPER In
his own time, Positivist circles of Comtist orientation had accused Marx of
having advanced metaphysical ideas that are anti-science. In fact, Marx himself
seems to have intimated the "end of science." In the face of the
growing conflicts within capitalism, Marx critiqued Ricardo--the best of
classical political economists--for "naively taking this antagonism for a
social law of nature. But with this contribution the bourgeois science of
economics reached the limits beyond which it could not pass," as Marx put
it in his Postface to CAPITAL. Social antagonisms in practice and in theory
revealed that the scientific claim to objectivity was a sham. "It was
thenceforth no longer a question whether this or that theorem was true, but
whether it was useful to capital," Marx argued in the Postface. This then
"sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economics." Furthermore,
declared Marx, "the whole of modern science of technology" is brought
into existence as a result of a process whose "principle" is
"production in and of itself" without regard for the human element, or
"without looking at the ability of the human hand to perform the new
process" (CAPITAL, Vol. 1, p. 616, Vintage edition). It is animated by
"the drive to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man, that
obstinate yet elastic natural barrier" (CAPITAL, p. 527). Thus in the face
of this science, the special skill of each individual "who has now been
deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity"
(CAPITAL, p. 549). It
was not just the young Marx who hailed the Silesian weavers’ destruction of
the machines in 1844. In his greatest theoretical work CAPITAL, he devotes an
entire section of the chapter on machinery to "The struggle between the
worker and the machine." Here, in a dramatic way, he makes a reference also
to "the Luddite movement" and states that with the introduction of
machinery, for the first time "the worker fought against the instrument of
labor itself" (CAPITAL, p. 554). Theoretically
Marx struck back at the bourgeois economists who defended the capitalist
employment of machines. Apologists such as MacCulloch who stated that "the
contemplation of machinery in itself" demonstrates that machinery "as
such" is free of internal contradictions, reproached their opponents for
being the "enemy of social progress." Machines, contended Marx, are no
longer "the tools of man," but are "the implements of a
mechanism, mechanical implements" (CAPITAL, p. 494). Machinery, wrote Marx,
"does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the
point of making him superfluous. It is a power inimical to him" (CAPITAL,
p. 562). "Stop the machines," Marx cited the cry of the workers,
"at least during mealtimes" (CAPITAL, p. 357). In
the collective working of the system of automatic machines which Marx called a
"mechanical monster" with "demonic power," the subjective
principle is transformed. It is "an organized system of machines to which
motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from an automatic
center" (CAPITAL, p. 503). In
handicraft and manufacture, the worker makes use of the machine; in the factory,
the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instruments of labor
proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow...
In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers,
who are incorporated into it as its living appendages (CAPITAL, p. 548). Like
the torture of Sisyphus, it "exhausts the nervous system," "does
away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of
freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity." In "The House of
Terror," which is Marx’s designation for the factory, the "constant
labor of one uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of man’s vital
forces, which find recreation and delight in the change of activity itself"
(CAPITAL, p. 460). The individual herself becomes "annexed for life by a
limited function" (CAPITAL, p. 469) and "divided up and transformed
into the automatic motor of a detailed operation" (CAPITAL, p. 481). This
then constitutes "the spirit of the factory" where "the mind is
least consulted." But
to make sure that this does not just include physical toil, Marx added that
"even the lightening of the labor becomes an instrument of torture since
the machine does not free the worker from work, but rather deprives the work
itself of all content" (CAPITAL, p. 469). He then quoted from G. de
Molinari’s ETUDES ECONOMIQUES on the "labor of surveillance":
"A man becomes exhausted more quickly when he watches over the uniform
motion of a mechanism." Therefore under the most developed form of
machinery--"a vast automaton"--the inversion of the subject/object
relationship grows into a "total antagonism." As
against the combined collective worker as "the dominant subject" with
machines as the mere objects, now "the automaton itself is the subject, and
the workers are merely the conscious organs, coordinated with the unconscious
organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the
central moving force" (CAPITAL, p. 544-45). Even "virtuosity" as
a totality of capacities, powers and abilities of the individual is now the sole
property of the Machine: "There appears nothing higher in itself, nothing
legitimate for itself." And "it is the machine which possesses skill
and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its
own in the mechanical laws acting through it" (GRUNDRISSE, p. 693). Labor
as a purposive, conscious activity, during which the producer enjoys the free
play of his/her physical and mental powers, also makes instruments into
"the body of its soul and thereby resurrects them from the dead" (GRUNDRISSE,
p. 364). The worker interposes the instrument of labor "between himself and
the object of his labor, and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity
to the object" (CAPITAL, p. 285). "Earth itself," explained Marx,
as the "original tool house," is an instrument of labor. Thus the
instrument, or nature, is posited as the MIDDLE LINK. He then singles out
paragraph 209 of Hegel’s LOGIC in the ENCYLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES,
where Hegel stated that "Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning
may be said to lie in the intermediative action." However
the METAMORPHOSES of the instrument of labor from a tool to a machine marks a
turning point in human history. Now the impulse departs entirely from labor.
Labor, as living, form-giving soul of this "syllogism," is subsumed
under the self-propelling life of an instrument. It is no longer the worker’s
activity that determines and regulates the movement of the instrument, but the
other way around. Here the self-activating teleology of inert matter takes the
place of purposiveness. Therefore "the technical subordination of the
worker to the uniform motion of the instruments of labor" gives rise to a
"barracks-like discipline." It alienates from him "the
INTELLECTUAL POTENTIALITIES of the labor process IN THE SAME PROPORTION AS
SCIENCE is incorporated in it as an independent power" (CAPITAL, p. 799, my
emphases). In this sense, then, science as a potentiality distinct from labor
and as the manifest will of an other becomes a power over against the producer. Now
"the science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their
construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the
worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an
alien power, as the power of the machine itself" (GRUNDRISSE, p. 693).
Science, natural forces and the system of machinery unite as the three forces
which constitute the power of the master. Specifically, then, the
"spirit" appearing in "the form of thing-hood" is
"another man" (GERMAN IDEOLOGY, in COLLECTED WORKS, vol. 5, p. 157).
Scientific detachment from and the opposition to the productive process of the
laborer are also the foundation for the instumentalization of knowledge itself.
"The KNOWLEDGE, JUDGEMENT and WILL...are faculties now required only from
the workshop as a whole. The possibility of an INTELLIGENT DIRECTION of
production expands in one direction because it vanishes in many others"
(CAPITAL p. 482, my emphases). Hence the purely "despotic form" of the
capitalist direction of production. Here
"the workshop as a whole" is the microcosm of society as a whole. Just
as in the workshop, where knowledge incorporated in the machinery appears as an
external power to the producer, the accumulation of knowledge, and of skill in
society, incorporated into capital, gives rise to an abstract "social
brain" above and beyond the individuals. Thus, wrote Marx, "The SOCIAL
SPIRIT of labor obtains an objective existence separate from the individual
workers" (GRUNDRISSE, p. 529, my emphasis). Consequently, "the thing,
which STANDS OPPOSITE him, has now become the true community" (GRUNDRISSE,
p. 496, Marx’s emphasis). *
* * This
essay is adapted for NEWS & LETTERS. Contact
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